Encountering Female Figures: The Domestic, the Economic and the Material in the Victorian Novel

This project takes insights gained from literary economic criticism and feminist economics as a springboard to investigate the function of female figures in Victorian middle-class novels. In doing so, I am particularly interested in how and to what result these figures move in, through, and across the domestic, the economic, and the material spheres. Victorian ideology tends to frame the political economy of the marketplace (the public) in direct opposition to the domestic economy of the home (the private). This dualistic system is concomitant with gendered associations that are ascribed to the private and the public, respectively. The marketplace is characterized by a (male) drive for self-interest and competition, while the domestic is regarded as the space of (female) morality, love, and self-denial. More commonly, this is referred to as the middle-class ideology of separate spheres. However, although such a set of beliefs may govern conduct, there exists variation even within a strictly dualistic ideology. By depicting female figures who straddle the public and the private, the novels examined precisely highlight the elasticity that is inherent in the separate spheres ideology. In doing so, they respond to what late 20^th century and early 21^th century scholars in feminist economics and the feminist branch of literary economic criticism call the broadening of terms like ‘economy’ and ‘economic’ to encompass both spheres in order to account for the full range of women’s activity in  the economic realm. The feminist branch of literary and cultural economic criticism can be broadly divided into two categories: analyses that a) reinsert women’s narratives into political economy proper, usually construed as men’s prerogative, or b) re-evaluate and re-value the domestic, with its close ties to care and affect, as economic. Both of these approaches rest on an a priori assumption of a strictly enforced ideology of separate spheres, which is precisely what the novels do not do. Instead, they emphasise temporary encounters, which are formed and reformed, between humans, but also between humans and objects. What is foregrounded is the co- production of ever-changing subject and object relations, which spans the domestic, the political economic and the material spheres. These novels evoke gendered associations aligned with the separate spheres ideology, notably affect, strategically to explore women’s relations to the social and the material. Hence, reading these texts’ engagements with women through the lens of affect theory and new materialism offers a fruitful challenge to the well-trodden path of dualistic thinking that an adherence to the separate spheres ideology necessitates.