Ingham Language of Gender and Class

1. Auflage 1996
ISBN: 978-0-203-72693-8
Verlag: Routledge
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

In this lucid and cogently argued work, Patricia Ingham examines in detail the widely accepted critical cliché, ‘Examining the representation of gender always involves investigating the representation of class.’ Using historical material about ‘class’, she re-examines six major Victorian novels. Focusing upon language, she explores how stereotypes of gender and class encode cultural myths that reinforce the social status quo. She shows how, in the standard plot, class conflict is displaced onto romantic conflict between individual men and women which can be happily resolved. 

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ingham, Patricia

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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Leseproben

THE UNCLASSED (p. 137-138)
UNCLASSING AND UNGENDERING THE NARRATOR

The author—or rather authoress, for the work plainly shows a female hand—of The Unclassed has written a tale of lower middle class life in London.
(Contemporary reviewer)

As this quotation shows, Arthur R.Barker, reviewing the first edition of George Gissing’s The Unclassed in 1884 (Coustillas and Partridge 1972:69), had problems with gendering the text rather like those of the early reviewers of Jane Eyre. This is surprising since the novel deals in great detail with the prostitute Ida Starr, who is hardly a likely subject for a woman writer at the time. Pointedly, another contemporary calls his review ‘A Novel for Men’ (Coustillas and Partridge 1972:66), suggesting by his title a novel too salacious for a woman to read, let alone write. Possibly Barker is disregarding much of the text and assuming that sympathy with a woman’s point of view is possible only in another woman. But most probably the comment is yet another reflection of what Walkowitz (1992:39) calls a ‘crisis of gender and class identity’ in the latter part of the nineteenth century. And perhaps Barker’s failure to recognise a ‘masculine’ voice in the text lies in the class with which the narrator identifies. His is clearly not the voice of an authoritative middle-class man, deploying the register of political economy or of legal discourse, as do the narrators of Hard Times and Felix Holt respectively. It is significant that the narrative is seen by Barker as dealing with lower-middle-class urban life. He is referring only to the two central male figures, Osmond Waymark and Julian Casti, whereas the text deals extensively with the urban working class: Lotty and Ida Starr and other unnamed prostitutes; the reformed prostitute turned shopgirl Sally Fisher; the degenerate shop-assistant Harriet Smales and her depraved crony, Mrs Sprowl; the violent, alcoholic Slimy; the property shark, Abraham Woodstock, and others. Barker’s myopic perception of the class involved must rest on the persistent identification of the narrator with Waymark effected by the recurrent adoption of his viewpoint.
Waymark is aptly described in Gibbon Wakefield’s phrase as one of the young men of ‘the uneasy class’ (Neale 1983:153). He is mainly self-educated, having left school at 14, though he claims to have picked up Greek and Latin. He is sometimes employed as a teacher. However, he sees himself as belonging essentially to an intellectual caste. He, Casti and Ida are obviously the characters Gissing had in mind when he wrote in the Preface to the second edition of 1895:

With regard to the title, which has sometimes been misunderstood, I should like to say that by ‘unclassed’ I meant, not, of course, déclassé, nor yet a condition technically represented by the heroine. Male and female, all the prominent persons of the story dwell in a limbo external to society. They refuse the statistic badge—will not, like Bishop Blougram’s [sic] respectabilities be ‘classed and done with’.
(Coustillas and Partridge 1972:74–5)