By the early years of this new century, though, at a point when my parents were some fifteen years dead and I, their daughter, had turned sixty, the story for me was a tired one. I had dissected it with friends and been asked to recount it at dinner parties. I had written about it, too, perhaps the most satisfying means of understanding. My 1992 memoir One of the Family had brought my separately renowned parents together, been critically well received, secured my promotion at Brooklyn College to the rank of Full Professor, and then failed to be the “sleeper” my publisher hoped for. In commercial terms it never quite awakened. Venturing into a different genre, I next published a collection of linked stories that centered on a group of middle-aged women playing poker. My mother still lurked in these, but I could explore her influence without the distraction of naming her. Writing the stories was exhilarating, but it also persuaded me I was basically a non-fiction writer, someone for whom the desire to capture in narrative what actually happens is the stimulus to imagination. The stories were, and more importantly seemed, too close to my own life. Even when I made things up, they did not really pass as fiction.
But now I was determined to turn away from autobiographical writing. Above all, I didn’t want to be like my mother who kept rewriting her own life: three books on Fitzgerald, two on her childhood, one on her sex life (granted, in part embellished), and three on her years as a columnist added up to nine books devoted to the myth of her self-creation. To write as a scholar and critic, to plot my new book in terms of the language and conventions of my profession gave me a welcome sense of impersonality. Art must be impersonal, says T. S. Eliot. I wanted to become impersonal, to vanish from the pages of my text, to be in it only as “the reader” and as the architect of my construct.
So I mapped out my new book. Its starting point would be the Victorian orphan, that figure poised always just outside the circle of desired safety, identity and inclusion, mirroring both the vitality and the anxieties of mid-nineteenth-century England. Science and industrialism had disrupted place, faith, and home. The orphan is the uprooted self, experiencing loss and disorientation, on the one hand, and the excitement of uncharted opportunity, on the other. Ultimately to survive, the orphan must reattach to society. Even if what readers remember, and thrill to, are the perils of endangered but resistant orphanhood, the happy ending of the orphan narrative is one in which life sustaining connections are affirmed (David Copperfield finding his aunt, his profession, his angel in the house). In its unhappy ending, connections fail; characters remain dismally orphaned and literally die of disconnection (poor Jo, the crossing sweeper in Bleak House who knows “nothink”; poor Jude, the unlucky stonemason in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure cursing the day he was born).
The 1985 year of Jude the Obscure’s publication is a late date for an orphan hero. As interesting to me as the mid-nineteenth-century dominance of the orphan narrative was its end-of-the-century disappearance. Sue Bridehead in Jude is yet another orphan, but that’s not how most readers remember her. Sue is a “new woman,” that heroine of fiction of the 1890s who has a startling new agenda: perhaps not to marry. Her search for new freedoms reflects urgent issues of the day: the championing of causes such as women’s higher education and married women property rights; the impassioned debates about everything from marriage and free love to women riding bicycles and wearing bloomers. I had long been fascinated by the way the English novel shifts in the late nineteenth century from reifying marriage as the heroine’s end to probing its inadequacies as a way to resolve the heroine’s selfhood. To continue her growth, the heroine must, if she can, move beyond its entrapments, and we see her first tentative steps to do so. She makes her attempts despairingly (Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda, 1876), ambiguously (Isabel Archer in A Portrait of a Lady, 1881), confusedly (Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, 1895). More boldly, in 1879, not in English fiction but on the Norwegian stage, a new narrative declared itself. Ibsen’s Nora walks out of her “doll’s house” to search for an alternative to confinement within the marriage plot. Her quest for a kind of freedom and personal integrity is in some ways comparable to Stephan Dedalus’s, when a few decades later, at the end of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he chooses “silence, exile, and cunning.” Nora does not seek isolation, but to become herself she must go out the door into the world, unencumbered.
Stephan Dedalus is not an orphan. Nor is D. H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel or Ursula Brangwen. By the early twentieth century the figure of the orphan had lost its focal place in English fiction. I saw the orphan fading as the “everyman” of fiction when the marriage plot failed for “everywoman.” Modernist writers, disillusioned with bourgeois society, turn away from the plot that moves towards the protagonist’s social integration. A new fictional icon emerges:
