by Jeremy R. Strong

            Katherine Kearns argues in her book Nineteenth Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass, that: “realism proceeds as if there are common terms; it attaches human significance to materialities in such a way as to suggest that social and political and economic reforms are inextricably tied to spiritual well-being” (16-17). In Gissing’s The Odd Women, we see the spiritual well being of both Monica and Virginia Madden threatened due to their material dependence and desire. Monica marries Widdowson but her desire seems to be for the “two little villas, built together, with stone facings, porches at the doors, and ornamented gables” (96). She has to exercise self control and does not “allow herself to look back” (96) at the house, then proceeds to introduce the subject several times as she and Widdowson finish their carriage ride. Mildred Vesper detects this materialism in Monica and tries to warn her that she will marry Widdowson for the wrong reason, to gain “a comfortable home” (131). Monica also tells her sister Virginia about the marriage and the immediacy with which the subject of the house is raised demonstrates Monica’s focus on materiality:

   “Married?” She at length gasped. “Who — who is it?”

   “Someone you have never heard of. His name is Mr. Edmund Widdowson. He is very well off, and has a house at Herne Hill.” (132)

Monica first sees the house at Herne Hill and her marriage as a sort of “liberation” from “work” and has high hopes regarding Mrs. Luke’s property that “more than a glimpse of that gorgeous world might some day be vouchsafed to her” (139). Ultimately however, the house at Herne hill quickly becomes a trap. Widdowson is constantly insisting on confining Monica there: “shall we go home again?” he asks when they are out for a walk, and then insists “we had better go home” when Monica doesn’t agree (165). Later Widdowson proclaims “woman’s sphere is the home” (168) and his language indicates the shrinking of Monica’s freedom from the public to private spheres. Widdowson potentially threatens this earlier in the novel when he tells Monica “if I am so unhappy as to fail, how would you be anything but quite free?” (97).

            Monica’s sister Virginia’s dependence on alcohol represents materialism taken to an extreme; she is able to continually acquire and possess gin. Her focus on keeping the bottle filled is the only representation of material wealth available to her in her poverty; she is fascinated by the “convenient” fact that the alcohol can be “purchased at the grocer’s” (302). The fact that Virginia feels that “to sit comfortably at home, the bottle beside her” is the “avoidance of the worst shame attaching to [the] vice” is an acknowledgement of the precarious state of her spiritual well being in the novel (302). Her addiction is a careful balance between reality and fiction; she admits “the morning [brings] its punishment” but deludes herself into believing that “to-night’s indulgence was her very last” (302). Once the full extent of Virginia’s addiction is revealed, her earlier trepidation about Alice’s proposal that they can live on “fourteen shillings and twopence a week” takes on new relevance. Virginia’s response, that this plan will leave only “seven and twopence a week for everything — everything” could indicate a concern that alcohol may no longer be sustainable under the new budget (43). This kind of reformation of her personal economic situation causes Virginia a degree of spiritual discomfort that can be traced to her addiction, which can in turn be seen, as outlined above, as a form of extreme materialism that resonates with Kearns claims about the nature of nineteenth century realism’s connection to materiality. The description of Virginia’s features at the approach to the railway indicate her addiction to alcohol is already firmly entrenched in her simultaneous desire and trepidation: “in her eyes was an eager, yet frightened look; her lips stood apart” (46).

            Reading Virginia’s character for when her dependence on alcohol may have begun is crucial in understanding how she relates and contrasts, as an “unhealthy” looking woman, to Rhoda Nunn (39). Just before she reveals miss Nunn’s correspondence to Monica, Virginia simultaneously displays the hopeful effect a social reformer has on her while at the same time betraying again her vice: “[she] moved about with the recovered step of girlhood, held herself upright, and could not steady her hands” (56). Virginia claims Rhoda Nunn “is full of practical expedients. The most wonderful person! She is quite like a man in energy and resources. I never imagined that one of our sex could resolve and plan and act as she does!” (57). These qualities all come from internal strength of character and align Rhoda with spiritual health, something Virginia, a slave to materiality, can admire only from a distance. Virginia’s desire to attain spiritual health is also suggested by her purchasing John Keble’s The Christian Year, a tract deeply concerned with the spiritual over the material. However, the fact that she selects the book as a gift for Monica, reveals her weakness; she values the ideals but is not willing to put them into practice for herself. She is also focused chiefly on the fact that the book is “presentable” and “cost less than she had imagined” (46), revealing again her focus on materiality.

            Concern for the material world is closely related to a propensity for vice in Gissing’s The Netherworld as well. Bob Hewett is described in the text as “not a man of evil propensities” but instead as a man “guilty of weaknesses, not of crimes” (218). His weaknesses include “vanity” and “selfishness” and he maintains the attitude that he does not receive “satisfactions proportionate to his desert”; these weaknesses are described as directly related to his “attempt to profit by criminality” through the manipulation of “medals and moulds” (218). Mrs. Candy’s “rage for drink” is reaching “the final mania” and if anything is “bestow[ed] upon her; straightaway it or its value [pass] over the counter of the beershop” (248). This very much embodies the idea put forward by Kearns that a social system badly in need of reform has a detrimental affect on one’s spiritual well being. Arlene Young argues that: “the middle class achieves moral dominance in Victorian Culture” through the influence of common values (3). Two of those values include “individualism” and “industry” (3); certainly the lower or even underclass Mrs. Candy displays the propensity for both of these values, albeit severely misallocated. She is exercising the only representation of economic participation in society that is available for her to control and in doing so is destroying herself. Christine DeVine writes in a chapter devoted to The Netherworld in her book Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells that Gissing engages with “literary, sociological and philanthropic misrepresentation” (14). So if the functioning of the class system on individual characters in Gissing’s novels are attempts to battle this “misrepresentation”, it seems fair to conclude that examining novels other than The Netherworld might yield some evidence in support of this. DeVine notes “Gissing also exposes the middle-class, self serving ideology behind the sociological climate of his day that brought classification” (14); an ideology that is more manifest in the middle-class and lower-middle-class characters that inhabit The Odd Women and Will Warburton. These ideologies often seem to be revealed by characters provoked to commentary by their encounters with vice and its aftermath.

            Virginia represents a much less dire version of Mrs. Candy and the fact that her class position is higher than Mrs. Candy’s could be directly correlated with the degree to which the characters are consumed by alcohol. While Mrs. Candy is distinctively lower class and therefore unlikely to suffer what Patricia Alden calls a “psychological double bind” (10), Virginia occupies a position only slightly higher in the lower-middle-class and may be more susceptible to this conceptual phenomenon. Alden claims that writers including Gissing were “unclassed men who remained uncomfortably homeless, “wandering between two worlds” (10) and even though her discussion focusses mostly on the Bildungsroman, particular aspects of her argument may illuminate the potential psychological states of Gissing’s minor characters. For example, Virginia’s living vicariously through hope for her younger sister and self medicating with Gin, not least of all her admiration for the intellectual capacity of Rhoda Nunn, all seem to echo Alden’s claims about the psychological state even the possibility of upward mobility could bring about:

not to move up, not to escape the material limitations of a petty-bourgeois environment, not to find a way to cultivate one’s intellect and sensibility—this too amounted to a betrayal of one’s potential. In either rising or failing to rise, the individual was compromised. (10-11)

Virginia is certainly compromised in The Odd Women by her failure to rise, something that seems connected to her unsuitability for marriage and in turn seems to trigger her alcoholism. When her sisters discover she has succumbed to a vice primarily associated with the lower class, they are horrified. Alice cries out “What is the matter? What does it mean?” and Monica, slightly less charitable says to her sister “Sit down, at once. You are disgusting!” (303). When Alice again repeats her question, “what does it mean?” (304), Gissing’s emphasis invites us to question what beyond the obvious Virginia’s vice might indicate. Monica’s claiming “we’re ashamed of you” (304) could be used to direct us back to Alden’s idea of betrayal. The sisters have all been deluding themselves in some fashion as to their opportunities for different sorts of social, economic or intellectual mobility; Alice and Virginia with the ethereal school plan and Monica with the delusions of grandeur associated with Mrs. Luke (as outlined above). The betrayal here then is really the dissolution of the ideal through the abject horror of reality, which Virginia forces them all to face; the shame then, is shared by the three sisters. Monica asks Alice if she could “have imagined anything so disgraceful?” (304) and Alice’s response may be both an attempt at empathy but also an attempt to recover what dignity she can after this shared shaming: “you must remember what her life has been dear. I’m afraid loneliness is very often a cause” (304). Arlene Young identifies in her introduction to The Odd Women that: “the class position of odd women [was] precarious” and that the Madden sisters “existed in a form of domestic limbo” (14). This could perhaps help us to see that Virginia’s loneliness could be a direct result of her uncertain and “precarious” class position. Her vice in that case, the cause of disgrace and shame, can be traced through loneliness to its primary influence; the class system.

            In Masculine identity in Hardy and Gissing, Annette Federico presents a compelling case that male characters in Gissing’s (and Hardy’s) work are constantly “struggling with an identity crisis as acute as women’s in turn-of-the-century England” (28). Though she does not discuss Will Warburton at all, one of her central theories is that: “in Gissing, male egoism is examined from the inside out, and the core is discovered to be not ignorance, but anxiety” (29). I have shown elsewhere, in my article “‘Grocerdom Lay Heavily Upon His Soul’: Masculinity, Misogyny and Gender Exile in Will Warburton” that anxiety motivated by class and gender uncertainty leads to erratic and disturbing behaviour. What I will now do here is nuance that argument to incorporate a brief discussion of vice and character that can be contrasted to The Odd Women and The Netherworld to further illuminate the relationship of vice to materialism under Gissing’s distinct brand of realism.

            That Sherwood Godfrey and Will Warburton are uneasy about the financial security of continuing in the sugar trade is apparent. Will confesses to Franks: “Sugar spells ruin. We must get out of it whilst we can do so with a whole skin” (7). The industry itself is described as being plagued by “perturbation” (10) and Will suffers a “good deal of uneasiness” while Godfrey becomes “despondent and [begins] to talk of surrender to hopeless circumstance” (12). If this anxiety is as Federico claims often the core of male egoism in Gissing’s novels, then it is useful to examine Godfrey Sherwood’s materialistic impulses in the novel and how they seem to drive him to participate in the drastic vice of gambling away his own and Will’s fortunes. Godfrey bring’s Will a sheet of “foolscap, one side almost covered with figures” that proves he went through over “twenty-five thousand pounds” in only three months (54). Godfrey’s speculation is described as an “irresistible impulse” (55) and in that way resembles both Virginia and Mrs. Candy’s alcoholism. What is it that drives Godfrey to go through his entire fortune of “nearly forty thousand” pounds including Will’s contribution (54)? Godfrey is consumed by materiality, an obsession partially fostered by his own class instability; a merger of Kearns idea that realism “attaches human significance to materiality” (16) and DeVine’s claiming “middle-class, self serving ideology” (14) created classification in the first place. Godfrey’s focus on the Applegarth business is not on the long term stability of the venture, but rather almost entirely on possibilities for material gain. He tells Will excitedly that Applegarth “has built himself a little observatory—magnificent telescope” (22) and admits his desire to have the same: “one might have a little observatory of one’s own” (24).

            At this stage it would be fatal to this argument to neglect Godfrey’s seeming idealism. Though it may not at first seem logical to connect the two opposing philosophies, Aaron Matz, in his book Satire in the Age of Realism, gives a nuanced discussion of Gissing’s own place between the idealist and the realist, drawing attention to the Atlantic Monthly which:

published an unsigned homage to Gissing entitled “An Idealistic Realist,” which opened by complaining that “in the vocabulary of criticism the word ‘realism’ has been soiled with all ignoble use” but specified that “Gissing was a realist controlled by an ideal.” (98)

Matz gives further examples to support a more complex understanding of Gissing’s unique form, coming to a conclusion of sorts that resonates with my reading of Will Warburton: “In Gissing’s fiction, and in the criticism it has inspired, the ancient philosophical division between realism and idealism seems rather like a porous border, a blurred and outdated margin” (99). To read Godfrey Sherwood as an idealist in the novel may seem more logical than my previous focus on his material obsession. After all, Godfrey tries to convince Will that if they take over Applegarth’s business “we might found a village for our workpeople—the ideal village, perfectly healthy, every cottage beautiful” (12). Further along in the novel, Godfrey explains his new scheme to Will:

“‘If I were a landowner on that scale,’ I said, ‘do you know what I should do—I should make a vegetarian colony; a self-supporting settlement of people who ate no meat, drank no alcohol, smoked no tobacco; a community which, as years went on, might prove to the world that there was the true ideal of civilised life—health of mind and of body, true culture, true humanity!'” (112)

This new scheme focuses in very closely on the elimination of the vices of “alcohol” and “tobacco” and presumably, a self sustaining colony such as this would also eliminate the need for money and therefore make moot Godfrey’s own vice of gambling. Here Godfrey specifically mentions alcohol in relation to an ideal that would “prove to the world” what “true culture” and “true humanity” really are, implying that the world’s then ideas of culture and humanity are misguided or unfair. Godfrey is essentially railing against the class system here but may be self delusional as he does not refer to his own vice specifically. Godfrey’s idealism is tempered when Milligan writes from Ireland that the vegetarian colony must “remain a glorious dream” (168). Godfrey then promptly confesses he cannot survive on an ideal: “to tell you the truth, the vegetarian diet won’t do. I feel as weak as a cat” and promptly invites Will out on the town to imbibe red meat and wine (168). This marks Godfrey’s return to materiality after straining upwardly against the constraints of his class and in this sense makes him a parallel of both Virginia and Mrs. Candy.

            In the three novels discussed, there are varying degrees with which the characters are able to exercise class mobility. Mrs. Candy seems rather hopelessly trapped in The Netherworld; Virginia seems both more frustratingly close to rising above her lower-middle class position and dangerously close to losing it; finally, Sherwood Godfrey seems comfortable in his middle class position and even when he loses it, retains perhaps not completely hopeless convictions that he will regain it. The most logical method of connecting an analysis of these three supporting characters has been through examining their distinct relationships with vice. I hope to have demonstrated above, the “human significance” that is tied up with “materialities” in these three novels, and that this is exemplary of, as Kearns argues, one of the primary truths unveiled by literary realism (16). She mentions “reforms” being tied up with spiritual well being, particularly “social” and “economic” (17) and though this paper demonstrates a lack of reform in these supporting characters, that is in essence the point; that there is a correlation between wider class system reform and personal reform. After all, Virginia seems rather envious of the position of Rhoda Nunn and seems to idealize her as “full of practical expedients. The most wonderful person” (57) without really having access to those benefits herself. Her and Alice can only send Monica to be reformed, and are themselves quite distanced from the project. Virginia’s insistence that they should “first of all put [Monica] in comfort and security” as well as her “unintentional exaggeration” (57) could indicate her own lack of faith in this type of social reform. And in Arlene Young’s sustained discussion of Rhoda Nunn as a woman in fiction who “finally triumphs over the conventions” (146) and also “rejects not only the role of wife, but also the most obvious of traditional ‘feminine’ employments, teaching”, we clearly see the distance Virginia, as an aspiring school teacher and advocate of marriage for Monica, has from this type of reform.

            Through examining vice as a type of extreme materialism and therefore available to characters who live even in abject poverty, such as Mrs. Candy, I hope to have confirmed the realism of George Gissing to be what Aaron Matz describes as sharing a rather “porous” (99) border with idealism. This allows examining characters such as Sherwood Godfrey, Edmund Widdowson and perhaps Bob Hewett more closely for how their particular ideologies are not easily defined and justifies reading all three of these novels and others of Gissing’s work for depictions of spiritual well being in crisis. These crises of spiritual well being, as I have shown, are a direct result of characters inability to change their position within their class or to directly participate in idyllic social or economic reforms. The result of this inability seems to have a gradation that bears directly on class and is represented through the degree to which these characters succumb to their various vices.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Alden, Patricia. Social Mobility in the English Bildungsroman: Gissing, Hardy, Bennett,    and Lawrence. Univ. Microfilms Inc. Research Press, 1986.

Coustillas, Pierre. George Gissing at Alderley Edge. London: Enitharmon Press, 1969.

DeVine, Christine. Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and     Wells. Ashgate, 2005.

Federico, Annette Rose. “‘I must have Drink’: Addiction, Angst, and Victorian Realism.”   Dionysos: The Literature and Addiction TriQuarterly 2.2 (1990): 11-25.

—. Masculine Identity in Hardy and Gissing. London: Associated University Presses,       1991.

Gagnier, Regenia. “Freedom, Determinism, and Hope in Little Dorrit: A Literary     Anthropology.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 9.2     (2011): 331-46.

Gissing, George. The Odd Women. Ed. Arlene Young. Peterborough: Broadview Press,             2002. Print.

—. Will Warburton. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006. Print.

—. The Netherworld. Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

Kearns, Katherine. Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass.     New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Projection and the Female Other: Romanticism, Browning, and    the Victorian Dramatic Monologue.” Victorian Poetry 22.2 (1984): 139-59.

Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Cornell UP, 1994.

Liggins, Emma. “Writing Against the ‘Husband-Fiend’: Syphilis and Male Sexual Vice in the New Woman Novel.” Women’s Writing 7.2 (2000): 175-95.

Mason, Diane. The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture.   New York: Manchester UP, 2008.

Matz, Aaron. Satire in an Age of Realism. New York: Cambridge UP, 2010.

Moore, Lewis D. The Fiction of George Gissing: A Critical Analysis. McFarland, 2008.

Warhol, Robyn R. “The Rhetoric of Addiction: From Victorian Novels to AA.” Eds. Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield. U of California P, 2002. 97-108.

Young, Arlene. Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and           Working Women. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.