Laura Fasick
Vessels of Meaning:
Women’s Bodies, Gender Norms, and Class Bias from Richardson to Lawrence
DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997. Pp. 231. $32.00
Reviewed by Jane Campbell
In Vessels of Meaning, Laura Fasick undertakes to study the “ambiguities, differentiations, fusions, and nuances” (11) of woman’s body as a sign in fiction from Pamela to Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The first two chapters, “Sentimental Authority: The Female Body in the Novels of Samuel Richardson” and “Frances Burney and the Embodiment of Delicacy,” explore the problematic cult of sensibility. Fasick shows how Richardson uses the concept to reinforce both class and gender hierarchy. Clarissa’s death, she argues against considerable critical opposition, is not capitulation to patriarchy but an expression of an autonomous self. Yet Richardson cannot imagine female virtue providing its possessor with power in the material world: in contrast to Clarissa, both Mr. B. and Sir Charles Grandison, in their respective novels, achieve and maintain worldly power which is only enhanced by their masculine sensibility. Burney, on the other hand, understands the trap which sensibility and the prohibitions on female speech laid for women; vulnerable to the misreading of their ambiguous and open-ended bodily signs, her heroines are also denied adequate speech. More realistic than Richardson, Burney creates admirable women, not paragons of virtue, and aspires to commonality between the sexes.
In the next three chapters, Fasick examines women as providers and consumers (or non-consumers) of food, and women as workers. She challenges the assumption that Victorian writers idealized women who were debilitated, even anorexic. Chapter Three demonstrates how the hyperbolic rhetoric of Dickens and Thackeray reveals the anxieties and tensions surrounding the concept of the “good” woman, so that the female monster is the one who withholds food and sex and/or who values financial over gustatory and sexual satisfaction. Their nurturing, good women (far less numerous than their monsters) are not delicate or overly sensitive but enjoy cooking and (admittedly to a lesser extent) eating food. Thackeray’s pessimism, especially in Pendennis, is well demonstrated; even his “good” women are often hypocritical providers and false nurturers. In Chapter Four, the hunger-both physical and emotional-of spinsters in Cranford and Villette is examined. Gaskell ironically represents men who have power to provide nourishment but lack the ability to do so adequately, while her women struggle to reconcile the demands of appearing ladylike with the stringent economies they must practice. For Brontë’s Lucy Snowe, the ideological requirement that the spinster offer herself altruistically for others’ use conflicts with her naturally selfish hunger for love. At the book’s open ending, she seems to be left without relationships and also without any assurance that she can provide for her own emotional needs. For Fasick, the most striking characteristic of Gaskell’s and Brontë’s women is fear-not, as in the earlier period, of sexual exploitation, but of being overlooked and unregarded by men. Envisioning the possibility for reciprocal exchange between the sexes, both authors show that this was rarely achieved in practice. In her fifth chapter, Fasick highlights examples of the treatment of female invalidism (especially by Dickens and Gaskell) as a failure of femininity, and finds that these novelists, while advocating “service” for working women and “ladies” alike, remained anxious to preserve the power structure. These novelists represent women of all classes, like working-class people of both sexes, as necessarily subordinate to bourgeois and upper-class males.
Chapter Six returns to Richardson and contrasts him with Gissing and Lawrence. For the two later novelists (Fasick’s examples are The Emancipated and Lady Chatterley’s Lover), anxiety about hierarchy shifts from class to gender. Whereas Mr. B.’s learning of virtue validates his status and authority in the world, Mellors’s sensitivity and sexual power are inseparable from his class, and the class structure does not reward his masculine success. Conversely, the impotent Clifford Chatterley, Mellors’s social superior, has the coarseness and insensitivity attributed by Richardson to the servant class. The culture’s expectations about class are overturned-Mellors is the nobler man-but assumptions about gender are left untouched. Connie Chatterley gratefully accepts her subservience in the gender hierarchy; her identity as a woman and even her knowledge of her own body depend on submission to Mellors’s expertise.
Vessels of Meaning is carefully argued and copiously footnoted; it amply fulfills its intention of doing justice to the multiple meanings assigned to woman’s body in the texts it considers. There are, inevitably, gaps. Austen and Hardy receive only brief passing references, and George Eliot is omitted; a note acknowledges that Eliot requires a book of her own on this topic. I found the text itself virtually error-free, although the Index is unsatisfactory at several points, attributing The Adventures of Philip to both Dickens and Thackeray, and Little Dorrit to both Dickens and Gaskell, misspelling both Margaret Homans’s name and title-which appears, perhaps forgivably, as Baring (rather than Bearing) the World-and offering references, such as “Symbol: Suckling women as” (the only entry under “Symbol”), which are too selective and not helpful at all. In a book that has so much to say about power, it is odd to find only two pages referred to under that word.
It is interesting to compare Fasick’s book with Patricia Ingham’s The Language of Gender and Class, published a year earlier (and reviewed in Vol. 24 of the IFR). The two explore many of the same issues-most notably the sentimental idealization of women and workers which kept both firmly in their place-but Ingham is able to reach more optimistic conclusions. Ingham sees the association between class and gender beginning to unravel in Hardy’s Jude, where both women and working-class men gain voices and the narrator’s implied sympathies are no longer with the upper classes. Partly, no doubt, because it ends with Lawrence rather than with Hardy, Fasick’s narrative is a bleak one for women. A cogent warning against essentialism, her book traces fiction’s persistent naturalizing of a society’s norms of female behavior. Why, she asks, do these authors “assign the excitement of aspiration to male and the monotony of achieved selfhood-whether virtuous or not-to female characters?” (168). And in her concluding paragraph she neatly sums up the dilemma: whether demonized or idealized, in these novels both women and the working classes remain “other”; the reward of their virtue is “to be allowed to keep on giving” (173).