The Stepmother and the Victorian Novel

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of the stepmother in Victorian culture and in the Victorian novel. It argues that novelists used the stepmother to represent and interrogate experiences of motherhood, and to respond to Victorian fantasies and anxieties about marriage, kinship, religion and national identity. I suggest that the stepmother was a generative figure for novelists because, she reveals aspects of every family that Victorian culture usually repressed or ignored. One strand of this dissertation is literary historical, showing how the stepmother allowed novelists to reimagine the domestic novel and problematise, reframe or reject the marriage plot. Other strands consider the Victorian legal, scholarly and demographic contexts to which, I argue, the fictional stepmother speaks. Chapter 1 demonstrates that Charlotte Yonge and Dinah Craik used the figure of the stepmother to portray the experience of biological motherhood, while still conforming to the conventions of the novel that otherwise prohibited such a portrayal. Chapter 2 looks at novels by Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to show how the stepmother-stepchild relationship serves as an index to other, more common relationships within the fictional family, revealing the conflict and competition that exists between husbands and wives, and fathers and daughters. In Chapter 3, I show how changes to divorce and custody laws in the mid-nineteenth century enabled novelists such as Ellen Wood to separate the roles of wife and mother. This chapter also reads Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady alongside nineteenth-century anthropology to understand the novel as an investigation of the possibility of alternative kinship structures. The final chapter of this dissertation shows that the Protestant stepmother was a reparative figure for anti-Catholic novelists including Emma Jane Worboise, allowing a usable reading of Britain’s troubled religious history.