'A large and passionate humanity plays about her' : women and moral agency in the late Victorian social problem novel

• Main Author: Murdoch, Christina
• Published: University of Glasgow 2012
• Subjects: PR English literature
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.566434

This thesis examines responses to the idea of a specific female moral agency in depictions of women’s philanthropic work by late nineteenthcentury female novelists. Focusing on depictions of romantic and sexual female experience in the late nineteenth-century campaign against poverty, I explore the role of gender and sexuality in the making of the female moral self in novels by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Iota, Margaret Harkness, Jane Hume Clapperton, Gertrude Dix. I demonstrate the manner in which altruism was linked to romantic love and sexual desire, and show how this idea surfaced in the love-plot in novels by late nineteenth-century women. I argue that the novel was regarded as a valuable instrument to further the process of social reform, owing to its perceived unique ability to arouse the reader’s sympathies; therefore, these novelists used the novel as a tool for constructing the altruistic self. Reading the novels alongside contemporary non-fiction discourse, I undertake an analysis of different romance plots and show how they relate to the debates of the social reform movement of the late nineteenth century. Finally, I suggest that by using the novel, and especially the romance plot, which was regarded as a feminine form of expression, these novelists are defending the idea of a feminine ethic, and a feminine conception of morality that was defined by emotion, feeling, and sympathy, as opposed to the more masculine scientific and sociological ideas behind the late nineteenth century social reform movement.