‘Nobody’s child must sleep under somebody’s roof - and why not yours?’ Adventures of the female ego in Dickens, George Meredith’s The Egoist and Wilkie Collins’s No Name

Abstract

When Matilda Pullan writes her Maternal Counsels to a Daughter in 1855, she figures the launch of a young girl’s ‘career’ of marriage and motherhood as the beginning of a bright, if perilous, adventure on the ‘ocean of life’. Over fifty years later, travel writer, Gertrude Bell, will open her first book on the Middle East with the image of a new woman escaping the house, embarking on ‘wild travel’. Yet the earlier journey of Pullan’s domestic angel also has the ‘immeasurable world’ in view. Forming the ‘bulwark’ of her society, so very like her nation’s ships of imperial conquest, her venture is attendant with ‘misgivings’ about whether or not she will founder. Pullan’s metaphor exposes the deep anxiety about modernity that fuelled the Victorian quest to understand who women were and where they were going. With their ability to civilize savage aspects of modern life, to stave off encroaching cultural degeneration, and to breed the next generation of empire-builders, married women were imagined as cultural saviours both at home and abroad. The angel’s face disguised an ambitious ego. These not so secret agents of empire were invented to help map out England’s claims to be the moral centre of the world (Ellis 1839: 13; Poovey 1989: 189), radiating influence to a periphery understood as racially inferior (Cotsell 1990: 15; Emerson 1856: 62), in need of Christian conversion, and ripe for conquest (Stodart 1844: 146-70).