Spinsters, Widows and Mothers: Fictional Responses

Abstract

In spite of plentiful evidence of the achievements of older women, popular fiction by Victorian women writers continued to reproduce the dominant stereotypes. By 1872, the critic W. G. Hamley could write, ‘The unamiable old maid is too stock a character in satire and fiction to need analysis here.’¹ In the bestseller East Lynne (1861),² for example, Ellen Wood’s Cornelia Carlyle perfectly exemplifies the Old Maid constructed by nineteenth-century medical discourse. As a non-reproductive post-menopausal woman, ‘Corny’ is endowed with all the markers of masculinity, both physical and psychological. Although ‘a fine woman in her day’, she is unusually tall for a woman, and ‘angular and bony now’, lacking any feminine curves. Her ‘hard, decisive expression’ (p. 85) is indicative of a character closer to masculine stereotypes. She shows a ‘sound judgment in legal matters’, and an interest in business not expected of women, and her ‘quick penetration’ is reflected in her ‘penetrating eyes’ (pp. 88, 180). Her ‘eye’ is also described as ‘sharp’, as is her tongue (p. 103), so that the image presented is both rebarbative and disturbingly phallic.