I first studied The Portrait of a Lady in that freshman English course in college. I revisited Tess in a semester-long graduate seminar on Hardy, in which I made a presentation on his array of vibrant heroines. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but by reading these books, I was becoming the person Freddie would say he was proud of: a person whose outlook, aspirations, and stamina were honed in the study of English literature.
It was the early 1980s, with graduate school a decade behind me and the adventure of discovering a new father still ahead, that Hardy and James came to figure most vitally in my teaching and academic writing. Second-wave feminism was at its crest, and I, in my thirties, could embrace it as my generation’s movement. Noting the ways more feminist heroines emerge in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English fiction, women who resist, and even reject, marriage and men, I developed a new course to teach that I called “The Heroine’s Progress: Studies in the Novel, 1880-1910.” James and Hardy were both on the syllabus.
The course examined a group of novels of this period—texts that coincided with the first wave of British and American feminism—in terms of their options for female characters that depart from the traditional plot in which the heroine either marries as a happy culmination of her quest for selfhood or fails to marry and dies. The feminist critic Nancy Miller, my colleague at Barnard College, where I first taught this course, named these the euphoric and dysphoric marriage plot endings in her book The Heroine’s Text. These trajectories get established in the eighteenth-century novel and extend into the nineteenth. But as the status of women began to shift in the society, with philosophers such as John Stuart Mill questioning women’s “subjugation,” laws being passed to protect married women’s property, marriage as an institution coming under critical scrutiny, women’s colleges being founded (think what George Eliot might have been like if she had gone to Girton!), and the suffrage movement gaining momentum, to name just a few of the heated questions and causes of the day, the established narratives in fiction could hardly remain unchanged. While Jane Eyre can sum up her married life as ten years of unadulterated bliss with the “bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh,” George Eliot, even in her earliest stories, dating from 1858, is drawn to exploring marriage as a suffocating trap. Still, she never turns completely from the marriage plot ending. Remember Dorothea gets, if not greatness, at least ordinary happiness in her second chance with Will Ladislaw, and Daniel Deronda weds small-voiced Mirah without a shred of the author’s potent irony. But in 1879 when Nora of her own volition leaves the “doll’s house” at the end of Ibsen’s play to seek some yet undefined fulfillment beyond the scope of marriage, it seemed to me an important step had been taken to expand narrative possibilities for women characters. I thought of this as the heroine’s progress.
In my own life I was doing my best to expand possibilities as well. My marriage had stabilized after the turmoil of Donald’s affair in Hawaii, at least well enough for us to hold together and go along, and it was also becoming evident that I might build a good career. From 1976 to 1980 we had lived in Maine, where Donald got a job organizing hospital workers and I taught at Bowdoin College. After a year there I was asked also to serve as Dean of Students, and suddenly from lowly assistant professor, I was elevated to one of the college’s top administrators, a member of the “President’s Council.” In 1980 I applied for a position as Associate Dean of Faculty at Barnard back in New York, and I got the job. Donald was able to transfer to his union’s New York headquarters. We seemed off and running.
“And how many people applied for your job?” my eight-year-old son would ask as his requested bedtime story.
“Over three hundred.”
“And you got it!”
“Yes,” I would answer, pleased at his pride in me and happy myself to think about the meaning of this long-shot chance.
My duties were chiefly administrative, but I also had the option each term to teach a course. “The Heroine’s Progress,” co-listed by Barnard’s English department and the new Women’s Studies Program, centered on the figure of the “new woman”—that creature of the 1880s and 1890s who was eager to defy convention: Lyndall in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, who voices an ideal of women’s liberation even though she then dies in childbirth; Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, who lives and breathes a new kind of equality between the sexes, though she, too, finds the conflicts within her own nature and the tyranny of convention too strong for her; Rhoda in George Gissing’s The Odd Women, hardier than the others, who turns down marriage to continue running her typing school for women. It went forward as far as Helen and Margaret Schlegel in Forster’s Howards End (1910), who find different ways of challenging Victorian patrimony. And it began it with The Portrait of a Lady. Isabel Archer shares with other of these heroines a dissatisfaction with the idea of marriage as her female destiny and also a certain sexual skittishness that leapt out for me as something I, too, had struggled with. I had been wary, always, when men I had dated pressed me too hard, quick to feel trapped and quick to bolt to regain my freedom of choice. So I appreciated such conflict in Isabel as well as in Eliot’s Gwendolyn Harleth and in Hardy’s brilliant portrayal of Sue Bridehead. In later renditions of the course I have begun with Daniel Deronda and gone forward as far as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).
Isabel Archer seemed to me a bridge figure between nineteenth- and twentieth-century protagonists.
