| Ellen Price, who became
'Mrs Henry Wood' for the purposes of her fiction, was
born in 1814 in the cathedral city of Worcester. Her use
of her full married title in her publications gives a
valuable initial clue to her literary stance, in an age
when serious women novelists often took male-sounding
pseudonyms (George Eliot, Currer Bell). The male pseudonym
is almost always a cloak for radicalism or conscious originality
in an author who thinks it likely that she will be judged
prejudicially under the lethal double standard which condemned
in a female author qualities likely to be praised in a
male. Behind 'Currer Bell', Charlotte Brontë lies
in hiding, anonymous, not desiring to be seen in person.
But equally, 'Mrs Henry Wood', like 'Mrs Gaskell' or 'Mrs
Craik', may be read as a kind of pseudonym. For behind
'Mrs Henry Wood' lies Ellen Price, in a bid for anonymity
more absolute than George Eliot's, or than Mrs Gaskell's
when she first appeared in print under the blustering
northern masculine label of 'Cotton Mather Mills'. To
declare oneself as 'Mrs Wood' is to say to the reading
world that one is a safe, harmless, respectable, God-fearing,
middle-class Englishwoman, probably endowed with children.
It is to advertise one's novel as safe moral reading for
the family circle, and as a sound acquisition for the
circulating libraries. To add one's husband's Christian
name for good measure, as 'Mrs Henry Wood' and 'Mrs Humphry
Ward' did, is to emphasize the point doubly. Such a pseudonym
declares the author's active and militant conservative
bias, her willed acknowledgement of the binding power
of patriarchal norms: it may even suggest a potentially
interesting tendency to extremism in this direction. Ellen
Price had come into the world with a curious and wide-ranging
mind, in an ailing body which made her a virtual invalid
in her teens but encouraged her to read widely and live
imaginatively in the liberating world of books. Behind
the pseudonym, 'Mrs Henry Wood', Ellen Price claims to
be deleted. She claims to be writing a 'safe' book.
But Ellen Price was not deleted; her book is not safe
reading. Mrs Henry Wood had it both ways, in all her literary
transactions. East Lynne, which came out in 1861,
was circulated by Mudie's, and eventually sold over 500,000
copies. By 1900, sales of her novels totalled over two
and a half million copies. 'Safe' novels do not bring
in so much money. The mask of female orthodoxy allowed
Mrs Wood to get away with murder – and with adultery,
lust, hauntings, sadism and masochism. Her novels belong
to the 'sensational' class which Victorian womanhood,
bored to death in the suffocating, leisurely world of
middle-class domesticity, was eager to pay for. The motive
for her writing was the need for money, Mr Henry
Wood's business life having collapsed, so that his wife,
whilst refusing the cover of a male pseudonym, paradoxically
adopted the allegedly 'male' role of breadwinner to her
household. In 1867 she took over and prodigiously contributed
to the Argosy Magazine, having worked so diligently
at her business of writing sensation-novels as to have
produced fifteen novels in seven years. Accounts of her
personality reveal an astonishingly commonplace woman
whose huge business acumen and taste for hair-raising
subject-matter were unguessable behind a conversation
devoted to the theme of the common cold and the servant-problem.
Mrs Henry Wood both in her social life and within the
world of her fiction thus hides and protects the Ellen
Price whose joy in the profane, the lewd and the extraordinary
is let loose in her lucrative fiction, and simultaneously
with great propriety condemned there by the disciplinarian
voice of one consciously writing as the authoress, rather
than the author.
Her own generation loved East Lynne, and greedily
read all the novels that followed – including The Channings
and The Shadow of Ashlydyat – because of her
brilliant story-telling ability. Both The Observer
and The Times praised East Lynne's
narrative skill, with its crafty plot-construction and
its capacity to generate and hold suspense. For all the
narrator's mannerisms and bad taste, there is a sense
of a pure joy in tale-telling in Mrs Wood's writing, which
can overpower the objections of even a jaundiced reader.
Discriminating, or highbrow, contemporary readers condemned
her faults of artistic conception and execution; the public
showed no such qualms, consenting to be enthralled by
her flair for melodrama and labyrinthine plotting. She
fell out of fashion, heavily, in the present century.
'Mrs Henry Wood' could not hope to survive under the pressure
of the intellectual high-seriousness of Modernism, with
its avant-garde positives for artistic taste: almost a
new kind of Victorianism in its prescriptive certainties.
But East Lynne has surfaced for a new generation,
under the liberating awareness generated partly by the
medium of television that the magic of the mere story-teller's
art is not something to be scorned as menial, even if
it does not come freighted with the philosophic wisdom
of the ages. Perhaps it is now possible to perceive the
figure of 'Ellen Price' in the persona of 'Mrs Henry Wood'.
The main plot of East Lynne (underscored by a
linked sub-plot concerned with murder) is concerned with
love and marriage. It turns upon the axis of the sexual
fall of its heroine, Lady Isabel Vane, to one of the most
superbly malevolent and caddish villains in all Victorian
literature, Francis Levison. Its morality is retributive
and unforgiving. The divorced Lady Isabel returns as unrecognized
governess to her own children, living on through the second
half of the novel with the status of a wraith, or spectre,
as if fetched from her grave. At the very moment of her
sexual 'sin' she morally dies: is to be considered as
a walking, watching corpse of womanhood, her features
scarred by the train-accident, her eyes mere optic nerves
peering through the disfiguring green lens of disguising
spectacles, seeing but unseen, her bastard child dead,
her husband lost to Another, her legitimate son dying
under her eyes. No one can see her. When she is recognized,
the servant faints with terror, thinking her a ghost.
She ought to be, and would definitely be happier, in the
grave. For her existence is cancelled. This is demonstrable,
for she is replaced. Her vacated place is taken, the wronged
husband taking to his bosom a replacement wife, who assumes
the attributes and most of the habits of her predecessor:
sings her songs at her piano, bears the good man's children,
hangs on his every word.
Personality is dangerous in Mrs Henry Wood's world,
if you are a woman, and want to remain safely within orthodox
society. Your nature is assimilated to your wifehood,
and the duties of a wife are universal. Mrs Henry Wood's
novel makes a classic statement of the Victorian sexual
code for women. The wages of sin is death. For women,
this means sexual 'sin', the sin against the Holy Ghost
being adultery, since the good man is God in his own household.
The code is barbaric and primitive. Mrs Henry Wood shows
no overt desire to criticize it. On the contrary she seems
to relish it. She endorses its unforgiving judgment in
a ringing authorial voice which urges the female reader
to profit by the horrific fate of the gentle and aristocratic
Lady Isabel, by sticking close to her own husband, putting
up with her lot and avoiding jealousy, which, rather than
lust, seems to be defined as woman's original sin.
In Archibald Carlyle's second wife, Barbara Hare (who
spent the whole of the first half of the novel being jealous,
and may be supposed to have got it out of her system prior
to matrimony) Mrs Wood offers a dark-haired 'twin' to
the fair Lady Isabel, and an exemplum of the model wife,
a stereotype which is set forth in fascinating detail.
Her role embodies for the young reader all sorts of useful
guidelines for marital behaviour. Do not insist on staying
in to breast-feed your baby if your husband wishes to
take you out to dinner. Do not see too much of your children
during the day for they will ruin your temper; you will
inevitably shout at them, thus making it impossible for
them to benefit from regular short doses of maternal serenity.
(There is a great deal of practical reality involved in
the valid observations of domestic chaos which inform
the dubious conclusions the author preaches.) The greatest
'Thou Shalt Not' in the book is the prohibition on female
sexual desire, reinforcing the property-basis of Victorian
marriage. The wife and her children belong to the husband
as his property, and the wife can justly be cast aside
from him, if she offends. The lawyer Blackstone had expressed
in his eighteenth-century Commentaries the legal
fact that 'Man and wife are one person under the law,
and that person is the man.' Lady Isabel falls from Grace:
she is cast aside in a gesture which echoes the violent
expulsion of the angels from Jahweh's tender care in the
Old Testament myth. Lady Isabel is explicitly presented
as an 'angel' who becomes a fallen angel on her elopement,
and is ruthlessly wiped out for one mistake. A sexual
mistake, for a woman, is contaminating, according to this
code. The penetration of Isabel by the stock villain,
the lewd Captain Levison, results in an incurable moral
disease, and disease is the dominating image in the second
half of the novel. It is not accidental that Lady Isabel
dies of an inherited disease (her father is a dissipated
rake, and dies a nasty death on the serve-him-right principle),
suggesting original sin passed genetically from generation
to generation, transmitted from Eve. Both Lady Isabel
and her legitimate son die of tuberculosis, supposedly
congenital.
The collapse of feminine personality into the male will
is terrifyingly dramatized in East Lynne. Only
one or two more minor characters are allowed to escape
from this bondage: Miss Carlyle, a stock comic virago;
Afy, or Aphrodite, the low-born and flighty source of
the sub-plot (murder and intrigue), impersonating –
again comically, in the author's sole concession to classical
learning – the goddess of love, Venus/Aphrodite,
who is rather indulged by the author. But then, as a member
of the lower classes, she cannot really be held responsible
for her actions in the same way as the patrician Lady
Isabel, who should have known better. The novel is fascinated
by the upper classes. But true stable English virtue is
seen to reside in the solid professional middle classes,
the lawyer Archibald Carlyle, with his good sense, correct
manners and fidelity to the patriarchal norm.
Yet this novel, sensational, melodramatic, sometimes
ludicrous and often morally objectionable, is a genuine
classic of Victorianism. In its weaknesses are rooted
its strengths. It is written not with power but with immense
gusto and relish; its hectic and most improbable plot
is a triumph of the active enjoyment of story-telling.
The fallen heroine, who returns as governess to her own
children so implausibly, and is judged with such a heathen
lack of compassion by the authorial voice, is also treated
with a covert and subversive sympathy generated by the
close examination of her motives and feelings. In order
to show that 'This could happen to you', the author succeeds
in making us say 'Of course it could', and abstain from
casting stones. East Lynne in fact defies the stern
code of morality which it claims to preach. By making
such a pandemonium about the wickedness of her characters'
behaviour, Mrs Henry Wood covers her tracks adroitly.
Those tracks lead into the forbidden areas of Victorian
society where normally the novel may not trespass. We
stealthily penetrate behind the bedroom doors of the respectable
classes and find that all is not well there; we overhear
the conversation of bankrupts, accused murderers and lady-killers;
perceive the joyless making of bastards, and the flight
of the abject to the Continent, where bad behaviour, both
sexual and economic, is to be expected. The literary taboos
on sex and violence, those forbidden areas to the Victorian
novelist, are thus side-stepped by the constant irruption
of the author into scandalized outbursts of 'Disgraceful!',
in assenting to which we are able to extract the utmost
voyeuristic pleasure and simultaneously be absolved from
any guilt at collusion.
Throughout, there is a dominating image of beady eyes
watching. Lady Isabel jealously observes and misinterprets
her husband's behaviour; Richard Hare, the wanted 'criminal',
watches his house at dead of night; his sister Barbara
watches out for the true criminal; Levison watches Isabel
with lewd, predatory eyes; finally Isabel in disguise
watches her own household go on without her, tormented
by sexual jealousy and with maternal longings as her son
William dies in a protracted and lugubrious exercise of
the art of literary tear-jerking. The novelist watches
too, with her censorious but always bright and entertained
eyes, and opens the window for us to participate as voyeurs
of the whole. In many ways, her vision of the fate of
fallen women must seem to us as to enlightened Victorians
an inferno, whose retributive ire is equally appalling
and absurd: so much punishment for a lapse so brief and
so deeply regretted; so great a latitude allowed to the
rather questionable dealings of the 'innocent' husband,
Archibald Carlyle, a lawyer who shelters a bankrupt, exposes
his wife to a known philanderer and protects a wanted
criminal from the law over a period of years. In addition
to his exemplification of this double standard for men
and women, no hero can ever have been more boring than
Archibald. The villain's coarse and brutal idiom, brilliantly
caught by Mrs Henry Wood, with her precise ear for repartee
and the unpleasant nuance of male callousness, is far
more interesting than the discourses of the priggish hero.
The author makes her stock bad characters live fascinatingly
and sensationally; her stock situations are recounted
with extraordinary verve and conviction, salted by realism
bred of close observation of people's mannerisms and habits
of speech.
East Lynne has been laughed at as a vulgar and
uncritical book. But if this is vulgarity, it manifests
itself here as a virtue. For it means that Mrs Henry Wood
includes a great deal which a more reticent author might
have left unsaid, and thus reveals a panorama of moral
reality larger than that provided by most contemporaries.
Against East Lynne's conservative statement of
the moral norm we may focus the radical and feminist moralities
of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and the compassionate
discriminating perspective of George Eliot, in their treatment
of comparable material. But even here we may get some
uncomfortable shocks. For George Eliot, upholder of a
liberal creed which is supposed to stand against the barbarities
of Victorian sexual codes, cannot think any more than
Mrs Wood what to do with a bastard when it is born, and
has Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede commit infanticide
on hers, as Mrs Wood has to consign hers to a train accident.
Likewise Mrs Craik commits a sort of authorial euthanasia
in The Head of the Family. Only Mrs Gaskell in
Ruth struggled with the problem with any degree
of courage, allowing her heroine's illegitimate child
to survive and be integrated in society, and vehemently
denying the horrible doctrine that an illegitimate child
is a 'disgrace' and a 'badge of her shame'. Against East
Lynne's sense of the delicious and lucrative possibilities
of forbidden fruit in the tale of the rake's progress
and society's manic joy in the punishment of female unchastity,
we may gain insight into the opened-eyed, austere and
compassionate attitude taken by Anne Brontë to similar
material in her painful Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
We may compare Mrs Wood's scene of the protracted death
of William with Dickens' treatment of similar popular
topics in Little Nell and find East Lynne
not losing in comparison, when it comes to a sense of
reality and an awareness of childish thought-patterns.
The material exploited by Mrs Wood is germane to her age,
and to an understanding of its conflicts and preoccupations,
as well as to its moral and aesthetic commitments. Additionally,
there is a unique use of the interesting theme of the
'twinning' of individual identities, familiar in the period.
The two wives of Archibald Carlyle move against one another
throughout the novel, polarized from the beginning so
as to form the basic element of the novel's structure
and the major conflict of interests. Their fortunes are
mutually dependent, though founded on mutual animosity.
Lady Isabel in the first half, glittering with jewels
which she does not quite own, and gifted with a husband
she cannot quite trust, looks on Barbara as a potential
rival: it is through this unfounded jealousy that she
begins to slide towards her fall. Barbara symmetrically
looks toward the apparently idyllic marriage of the Carlyles
with baleful and hopeless jealousy. The rancour at the
heart of jealousy, and the destructive power of female
jealousy in a world where your only real property is your
investment in marriage, are convincingly and uniquely
examined by Mrs Henry Wood. In the second half, Barbara's
rise is dependent on Isabel's fall: from Isabel's divorce
stems Barbara's wedding. Isabel scrutinizes her rival's
triumph, which she has made possible. It is a moral triumph
too, which Isabel has ironically made possible by disgracing
herself, for Barbara can learn by example to emancipate
herself from the corrosive bitterness of jealousy. Isabel's
torment in her role as unrecognized 'double' is that she
must continue to burn with suppressed envy and gall. Dante
never thought up a torment half as convincing as Mrs Wood
makes this of eternal jealousy seem.
At the heart of its melodrama and its romantic view
of marriage, there lies a curiously robust realism in
East Lynne. The author does not pretend that love's
first hectic raptures last. Woman's lot is likely –
she gives it about two years at the most – to be
less than idyllic, for your husband is in the course of
things through familiarity liable to cool in ardour and
set his mind on external matters, like business. The message
is that you aim for a sensible and steady affection from
your husband, fuelling this as far as possible by a stoic
maintenance of his comforts and precedence, and aim for
security and respectability rather than excitement. Presumably,
the allowable excitements of heady fiction like East
Lynne would compensate as the flame of matrimonial
passion dims down to a homely glow.
Dr Stevie Davies. University of Manchester, 1984 |
