The Angel out of the House

Elliott, Dorice Williams

Published by University of Virginia Press

Elliott, D. W..
The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/15980

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Conclusion

As I was finishing the manuscript for this book, our universitys the-
ater department staged a production of the English playwright Sarah
Danielss The Gut Girls (1989).1 This play, which is set in turn-of-the-
century Deptford, indicates the continuing relevance of my investiga-
tion of representations of women philanthropists. The protagonists are
four working-class girls employed in the gutting sheds of a large meat-
processing operation who are rescued by a woman philanthropist who
nds them jobs as domestic servants when the sheds are shut down. Lit-
erally mired in blood and guts, the gut girls work in the worst imag-
inable conditions and fulll all the nineteenth-century stereotypes about
mill girls: they are loud, vulgar, and aggressive; they wear ludicrous hats
but no underwear; they swear and drink; and even men are afraid of
them. This late-twentieth-century feminist play makes heroines out of
these unlikely characters. Their independence, individuality, streetwise
intelligence, and bawdy sexuality are what make them appealing, rather
than appalling, to a twentieth-century audience. The end of the play,
which shows all the girls reintegrated into more proper and passive
domestic roles, is meant to provoke a sense of loss and sadness, if not
outrage, from the audience.
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Conclusion 217

In Danielss hands, the philanthropist Lady Helena, unlike the sym-

pathetically portrayed gut girls, becomes almost villainous.2 Although she
is made to appear well-intentioned, Lady Helena is mocked for her naive,
snobbish, and self-interested attempts to help the working-class hero-
ines. While she does visit them in their horrifying workplace and tries to
see them as individuals, her goal is to remake them into a version of
respectable middle-class womanhood by teaching them to be ladylike
and tting them for the role of domestic servants. The audience, of
course, immediately recognizes that to remove the girls from the gutting
sheds, however horrible the conditions, is to take from them their au-
tonomy and place them in a subordinate position where their every
movement is subject to surveillance. Not only their individuality but also
their lively working-class cultural rituals and relationships must be sup-
pressed as they learn to conform to genteel middle-class values.
Danielss view of the woman philanthropist is, of course, different
from the perspective of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women
writers I have been discussing. Her play does, however, show how phi-
lanthropy offered a sense of usefulness and power to middle- and upper-
class women. For Lady Helena, one result of her efforts to retrain and
mold working- class women is to enhance her own sense of accomplish-
ment and importance. The play does acknowledge her altruistic inten-
tions and her oppression at the hands of men of her own class, but it
portrays the woman philanthropist as (unwittingly) abusing the power she
holds over other women by virtue of her class position. Daniels is right
that the personal gains of women philanthropists were in some ways
achieved at the expense of working-class womenand men. My point
is, however, that despite the power dynamics of such relationships be-
tween charitable women and the less fortunate people they aided and
patronized, philanthropy did accomplish something for women even of
the working classes. Aside from its specic effectsmonetary or material
aid or providing jobs (and historically these were often more appreciated
than in Danielss play) for working-class people and affording a sense of
power and fulllment for the female philanthropistswomens philan-
thropy contributed to British culture a new sense of what women of all
classes, cultures, and races desired and were capable of attaining. The
sadness one feels at the end of a play such as Gut Girls is for the potential
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218 Conclusion

missed in the women of all classes. This is a regret generated by the un-
derlying belief that most contemporary viewers, both women and men,
have that women do want and need and can achieve success and happiness
outside a narrowly dened domestic existence. This assumption, which
has come to be self-evident at least among most late-twentieth- and
early-twenty-rst-century viewers and readers, was in large part created
and naturalized by representations of women philanthropists acting in
socially useful capacities outside their homes. While Danielss play makes
a different point, its subject matter indicates how current the discussion
of womens philanthropy still is; I argue that it is also crucial for a histori-
cal understanding of our cultures denitions of and attitudes toward gen-
der and gender roles.
This study has been concerned with questioning what seemed in the
nineteenth century a natural connection between the activities of the
domestic sphere and volunteer philanthropic work. Examining some of
the cultural representations and negotiations that made this connection
seem natural has made it possible to account, at least in part, for certain
important changes in the way women and their roles wereand are
perceived. Specically, representations of womens philanthropy helped
to naturalize womens ambitious desires and to contest the notion that
women could be dened only by their sexuality. Thus, while the domes-
tic ideology of separate spheres for men and women has had enormous
force over the past three centuries, these representations of women per-
forming philanthropic work reveal one of the contradictions within this
ideology that changed the way it organizes human relations.
Understanding how change occursand how literary works con-
tribute to ithas been one of my central concerns in this project. Al-
though feminists for some time now have borne witness to the limitations
domestic discourse has imposed on women, the overwhelming majority
of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not resist or
even question its prescriptionsand many still do not. Yet assumptions
about what women can and should do have changed over the past three
hundred years, despite womens general lack of resistance, partly because
cultural representations of womens philanthropy enabled even nonresist-
ing women to imagine possibilities for themselves that transcended the
limitations their connement within a narrow domestic sphere caused.
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Conclusion 219

Both philanthropy and novels were thus essential to the process of

changing domestic ideologys denition of women and of social relations
generally.
Literary critics in recent years have paid a great deal of attention
to the novels role in establishing the hegemony of the middle-class val-
ues that underwrite a capitalist economy. Alongside novelistic discourse,
however, grew up a philanthropic discourse that both contributed to and
challenged novelistic conventions. Philanthropy, therefore, is important
not only as an aspect of social history but as a powerful discourse that
helped to shape eighteenth- and nineteenth-century subjectivity as well
as literary forms. Philanthropic discourse, which borrowed some of its
terms from literature, particularly the novel of sentiment, helped to de-
termine the shape of novelistic plots, the attributes of virtuous charac-
ters, and the conguration of relations among people of different social
classes. Philanthropic discourse, as we have seen, also provided the terms
for representing desires that were in tension with the novels insistence on
marriage as the guarantor of both social and aesthetic resolution.
Although contemporary writers such as Daniels still occasionally nd
the representation of women philanthropists useful, philanthropic dis-
course was especially important for women writers in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century England. By the middle of the eighteenth century,
writing novels that focused on domestic concerns had come to seem an
acceptable and natural occupation for respectable women. Because phil-
anthropic discourse encompassed aspects of the privatized domestic
sphere and the public spheres of politics, economics, and social theory,
using its terms provided women writers a way of participating in these
more public discourses, which in turn contributed to their being taken
more seriously as artists and professionals. By retaining the domestic focus
of both novelistic and philanthropic discourse, women writers were often
able to envision and represent alternative models for society that ensured
womens participation. Hannah Mores refashioned version of traditional
paternalism, for instance, replaced political economy with a woman-
driven philanthropic gift economy, while Elizabeth Gaskell imagined a
social sphere in which womens personal contacts across classes super-
seded theoretical abstractions about social organization. Both women
were taken seriously as writers and social commentators. However, as my
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220 Conclusion

closing chapter on Middlemarch indicates, by the latter part of the nine-

teenth century women writers began to outgrow their need to rely ex-
plicitly on philanthropic discourse as a way to represent womens ambi-
tious desires to participate in public activity. This happened because by
then womens connement to a narrowly dened domestic sphere was
being challenged not only in the language of philanthropic discourse but
also in the terms of legal, professional, and political discourses. Nonethe-
less, the vocabulary and analogies the conjunction of domestic and phil-
anthropic discourse provided continued to be used in these other cultural
debates even after specic representations of women performing philan-
thropic acts ceased to convey the same cultural challenge.
At the same time that philanthropic discourse began to lose some of
its force as a method of challenging the tenets of domestic ideology,
women writers began to rely less on the novel as their primary means of
contributing to public discourse. As the nineteenth century continued,
more women participated in public and platform speaking, in congresses
such as the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, in
local government, and especially in the periodical press. Women such as
Beatrice Webb and Annie Besant, for instance, became known as impor-
tant social commentators through their professional writings and public
speaking. While women writers continued to write and publish novels in
large numbers, the novel also underwent changes in form and content.
New Woman and suffrage novels, for instance, addressed head on the
issues of womens desires, without relying on the traditional romantic
heroine or resorting to the contradictory gure of the philanthropic
heroine. Modernist challenges to realist form in the novel also in some
ways lessened the genres focus on overt social criticism.
Throughout the nineteenth century, however, the interpenetration
and interaction of novelistic and philanthropic discourses were signi-
cant, widespread, and complex. While I have considered the impact of
the conjunction of these discourses on domestic ideologys descriptions
of and prescriptions for women and, to some extent, on representations
of relations among classes (both the relation of the middle to the upper
classes and the relation of each to the lower classes), the subject deserves
even more attention. Both discourses, for instance, were signicantly in-
volved in representing slavery and colonial relations to the English public,
and they also had an important impact on changing views of education
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Conclusion 221

and political reform. What I am calling for is not merely an explora-

tion of philanthropy as a theme in novels but rather for further analysis
of the way philanthropic and novelistic discourses rewrote each other and
helped to dictate the terms by which English-speaking audiences per-
ceived and experienced social realities.
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