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.

Back in Time: The Bildungsroman and the Source of Moral Agency

This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.

The Flat Heroine: Flat Character and Agency in Miss Marjoribanks

Critics of Miss Marjoribanks are divided about whether Margaret Oliphant's eponymous heroine's performance of social conventions, particularly those pertaining to gender roles, is consciously subversive or an unreflective embodiment of those conventions. This scholarship implicitly equates agency with critical detachment: if Lucilla does not critique the conventions she uses and the constructions of gender they reflect, she must lack the capacity to think strategically about her desires, a capacity necessary for agency. It's true that Lucilla is neither critical nor detached. Oliphant characterizes her as fully invested in social norms and as lacking the psychological depth that typically marks agential characters. In fact, I argue that Lucilla is a flat character and that Lucilla's flatness is precisely what makes her excel as an agent. Lucilla's nigh-emotionless thinking, combined with her ruling qualities of good sense and self-satisfaction, promotes agency. Untrammeled by mixed feelings or self-doubt, she has nothing to do but rationally calculate how best to achieve her interests. Reconsidering Lucilla's agency in light of her flatness thus allows us both to value that agency as Oliphant portrays it and to understand how characters can have agency at all.

REDESIGNING FEMININITY: MISS MARJORIBANKS'S DRAWING-ROOM OF OPPORTUNITY

Margaret Oliphant's work has of late received renewed attention for her portrayal of heroines who struggle against the confines of proper middle-class femininity – who are at once sympathetic and yet do not fit the model of the submissive Victorian domestic angel – and Miss Marjoribanks (1866) is no exception. Without fully discounting the Victorian notion that there is a proper place women ought to occupy, Miss Marjoribanks raises complex questions about how that place is defined and limited. Recent scholarly attention to the novel highlights Oliphant's sustained engagement with the issue of how far propriety and custom circumscribe a woman's place. Such examinations, however, fail to address the extent to which Oliphant demonstrates the flexibility of cultural notions of a woman's place by focusing the action of Miss Marjoribanks almost entirely on the heroine's creation of a very specific physical place for herself – her drawing-room. Examining Miss Marjoribanks's portrayal of how a Victorian woman might capitalize on the centrality of the drawing-room in shaping cultural notions of feminine identity, this essay argues that once Lucilla Marjoribanks has established the drawing-room as a physical and ideological space that will contain her actions, she uses this space and all it represents to expand the boundaries of her cultural place. By focusing specifically on the work its heroine undertakes within her drawing-room and by asserting that a woman's power lies in the possibility for feminine taste to accomplish action, Oliphant's novel, like her heroine, operates within the “prejudices of society” while simultaneously offering a means to exploit those prejudices. This architecturally-motivated re-reading of Oliphant's novel in turn suggests a re-reading of Oliphant's own career. For I would argue that novels operated for Oliphant the way that drawing-rooms do for Lucilla: they provided a culturally-sanctioned place in which to locate herself, and thereby reaffirm her respectable feminine position, even while she undertook projects that challenged Victorian assumptions about gendered identity.