“Losing a Leg to Gain a Wife”: Marriage, Gender, and the Prosthetic Body Part

This chapter traces representations of male and female prosthesis users in the marriage plot, the nineteenth-century narrative form most heavily populated by users of prosthetic devices. Building on the work of scholars such as Martha Stoddard Holmes and Talia Schaffer, who expose the important roles that disabled characters perform in Victorian marriage plots, this chapter identifies the prosthesis-marriage plot as a related yet separately identifiable formulaic plot structure. As the chapter argues, when viewed collectively, and at times also individually, prosthesis-marriage plots present unstable affective and imaginative treatments of prosthesis users. These representations shed light on the complex ways in which discourses of gender, class, and ableism intersect and how, in particular instances, the bodily status quo is challenged, brought into question, or even outright rejected.

Environmental Desire in: The Mill on the Floss

Jayne Hildebrand, “Environmental Desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss” (pp. 192–222) This essay argues that George Eliot’s expansive use of landscape description in The Mill on the Floss (1860) represents an engagement with the emerging concept of a biological “medium” or “environment” in the nineteenth-century sciences. In the 1850s, scientific writers including Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes redefined biological life as dependent on an abstraction called a “medium” or “environment”—a term that united all the objects, substances, and forces in an organism’s physical surroundings into a singular entity. Eliot in The Mill on the Floss draws out the ecological potential of this new biological concept by imbuing the described backgrounds of her novel with a lyrical affect I call “environmental desire,” a diffuse longing for ambient contact with one’s formative medium that offers an ethical alternative to the possessive and object-driven forms of desire that drive the plot of a traditional Bildungsroman. Maggie Tulliver’s marriage plot is structured by a tension between environmental desire and possessive desire, in which her erotic desire for Stephen Guest competes with a more diffuse environmental desire that attaches to the novel’s described backgrounds. Ultimately, the new environment concept enables Eliot to reconceive the Bildungsroman’s usual opposition between self and world as a relationship of nourishment and dependency rather than struggle, and invites a reconsideration of the ecological role of description in the Bildungsroman genre.

Miss Marjoribanks’s Pronouns; or, the General, the Particular, and the Novel

Erik Gray, “Miss Marjoribanks’s Pronouns; or, the General, the Particular, and the Novel” (pp. 223–252) The novel as a genre is always concerned with questions of the general and the particular: it details the particulars of everyday lives as representatives of general truths and characteristics. Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866) not only reflects on this familiar binary but also reveals how easily the distinction between its two terms collapses. The tendency of the heroine, Lucilla Marjoribanks, to refer to all men as “They” illustrates this phenomenon. She uses the pronoun, with no antecedent, to refer either to a particular group of men or to men in general; her doing so both demeans men, by grouping them into an indiscriminate mass, and exalts them, by treating them as so significant as to need no introduction. By the same token, Lucilla’s various suitors are at the same time generalized—they appear as nearly interchangeable functions of the marriage plot—and particularized, since marriage itself involves a form of “particular” (Oliphant’s word) attention. And in the election plot that dominates the final volume of the novel, Lucilla’s chosen candidate, Mr. Ashburton, is singled out precisely for being so typical. Miss Marjoribanks thus demonstrates how the very building blocks of narrative, like those of language, effectively confound the distinction between general and particular. In its elucidation of this tendency of the novel genre, and of art in general, lies the genius and importance of Oliphant’s novel.

The Political Picaresque

At the end of the 1840s, authored by Chartist Thomas Martin Wheeler, a new form of fiction—the ‘political picaresque’—deliberately eschewed the conventions of the bourgeois novel, especially the marriage plot, and its linking of marriage and inheritance with the appropriation of land. Wheeler’s formal innovations responded to the conditions of a time in which emigration, land reform, globalization, and the rise of nationalisms across Europe stirred people’s feelings in contrary ways. For Chartists, land ownership was tied to a history of encroachment which had impoverished working people since medieval times. In the 1840s, these long-standing concerns were exacerbated by colonial emigration schemes that targeted working-class people for removal abroad. As it aimed to rehouse thousands of working-class people in new colonies in Britain rather than overseas, the Chartist Land Plan was a radical response to these conditions. Beset with problems, the Land Plan collapsed at the same moment at which the Chartist movement failed to achieve its political aims. In this context, Wheeler uses the novel as a fictional form in which to reimagine a democratic future. He narrativizes the transitory relationships between people and places that exist in situations of profound precarity, and creates a distinctive kinetic and spatial ecology within his text, central to which is a distinctive use of the term ‘occupation’ to encapsulate the inhabitation, rather than appropriation, of land. Although Wheeler’s new genre was short-lived, it represents a significant attempt to recast the novel as a mode in which to imagine alternative futures.

Squaring the Triangle: Queer Futures in Centlivre’s The Wonder

Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) presents a model of female relations invested in queer futurity and queer temporality, disrupting the patriarchal geometry of courtship in order to provide the play’s heroines access to an alternate future grounded in their relationship with one another. Though the play ends with both women married, their relationship is central and is cemented by Violante’s marriage to Isabella’s brother, which transforms the friends into sisters. Their dedication opens up the possibility that a relationship between women might be more important than the marriages they strive for, illustrating an important intervention into the construction of plot in comedy from the early eighteenth century. The Wonder’s queer potential is developed in the language that both women use to describe their devotion and the actions that embody it. Violante and Isabella are able to expand the triangle of homosocial exchange into a more equitable square that not only allows for happy marriages but visible, loving relationships between the play’s heroines. As such, they manage to create a queer future where their relationship can remain at the forefront of their lives and rewrite the marriage plot as a means to an end.