The Female Mind

Chapter 1
The Female Mind
[A]t no time has any woman enriched the world with a new idea, a new
truth, a new discovery, a new invention.
— Walter Besant, The Revolt of Man (142–3)
The literary expression of female identity and character in twentieth-cen-

tury English culture of fers an insight into a social, economic and political
interpretation of Western womanhood that is nearly as old as human his-
Copyright © 2014. Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. All rights reserved.
tory itself. Drawing on the English literary tradition, one can trace how
recurring theories about female character through centuries of Western
cultural inquiry – those either originating in England or arriving from
the Continent – were absorbed into a particular configuration of English
womanhood.
The representation of women as intelligent beings particularly lends
itself to such analysis. A brief and simplified overview of how female mental
activity has often been treated in English literature could be expressed in
the following way: initially intelligence was largely restricted to the spite-
ful cunning of the medieval harridan. This impression was tempered in
the eighteenth century, partly through the inf luence of the Bluestockings,
to one in which women were seen to be possessed of an ‘elegant mind’, a
rather turgid expression that lacks any indication of intellectual rigour.
Soon, however, this weak notion of female mental independence was
exceeded in the nineteenth century by the domestic image of the ‘angel
in the house’. The overriding emphasis in England firmly came to be on
the ‘sweet nature’ rather than the intellectual capabilities of women. The
generalised references to female mental meekness and weakness were then
supplanted in the twentieth by dominant scientific assumptions about a
Rosenhan, Claudia. All Her Faculties : The Representation of the Female Mind in the Twentieth-Century English Novel,
Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/state/detail.action?docI
Created from state on 2017-08-14 09:18:38.
2 Chapter 1
woman’s mental state that separates the normal from the pathological.
Hence, even after significant changes in the actual realisation of women’s
legal and economic status in Britain, the literary conventions governing the
representation of the female character in the English novel have remained
curiously conservative, especially with regards to their mental capabilities
– a testimony to the prevailing stereotype of women as physical rather
than intellectual beings.
This conservative tendency is particularly strident in those novels
that portray the female protagonist in a setting that invites expectations
of intellectual enterprise, namely the tertiary education sector. By 1900,
middle-class English women had, in theory, almost unrestricted access to
university education, and writers used this new context to good ef fect.
They exploited sex and money for potent plot devices, as progress in the
educational provision for women was not only accompanied by progress
in their economic independence but also by a certain loosening of sexual
morals. Hence one preponderant critical image of the turn of the century
educated female character in England was that of unrestrained womanhood.

Yet instead of celebrating their character and agency, literary portrayals of
the independent existence of intellectually inclined women retained their
customary negative slant. The aim of this study, therefore, is to retrace the
evolution of the female character in the novel against the progress of ter-
tiary education in the twentieth century in England, and far from being
content with a mere cursory glance at the mental activities of women, it
intends to make them the focal point of the examination.
The term ‘intellectual’ or ‘scholarly’ here pertains to female characters
that are, in some way, depicted in the English university context, either
as students or lecturers, sometimes exhibiting a desire to pursue institu-
tionalised, formal learning, at other times merely existing within this con-
text. The term ‘mental activity’ is used in a specific sense to refer to events
when women show ‘character’ or ethos, that is, mental processes of deci-
sion making and growth depicted through voice and agency, referencing
Aristotle’s treatise on rhetoric, in which he stipulated that a person can
only be known by her utterances (1.2.3–4). These factors of intellectual
exploration correlate with the academic context, in that it enables more
cogently the intellectual engagement of character. Combined as the notion
The Female Mind 3
of the ‘female mind’, they are understood as giving evidence of a woman’s
individual subjectivity that operates independently to that of men.
The novels under discussion have been selected first of all with a par-
ticular attention to chronology and locale, secondly for their fit under the
umbrella term of academic fiction and thirdly for their explicit treatment
of women in academia as scholars. These restrictions serve as a means of
providing a tight analytical framework that allows for a meaningful inves-
tigation of the novels within a specific historical and social context. Hence,
a focus on English novels of the twentieth century means the necessary
exclusion of the American tradition, for example, Mary McCarthy’s Groves
of Academe (1951). Also, whilst the latter half of the nineteenth century
was a period of academic reform and widening participation in England,
it was arguably only after the turn of the century when writers themselves
had personal experience of academia, which was then used to mediate
more universal themes in more rewarding fictional forms. The direct focus
on the university setting also excludes explicit study of those fictions after
1900 that were located in the school context, such as Clemence Dane’s
Regiment of Women (1917). My specific exploration of female identity
within academia also necessitates the exclusion of such novels that show
no explicit consideration of the role of intellectual women, such as E. M.
Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907), Max Beerbaum’s Zuleika Dobson
(1911) or C. P. Snow’s The Masters (1951).
Of the remaining possible twentieth-century English university fic-
tions, I have selected those for close analysis that seem to me to of fer an
explicit ideological awareness of the educated woman at a particular point in
time. Another aspect for consideration was the inter-relationship between
the texts, which allows for cross-references that may deepen our under-
standing of the cultural anxieties about the female mind exhibited in these
novels. They include some of the commonly acknowledged examples of that
genre as, for example, investigated in Elaine Showalter’s Faculty Towers, but
the final selection was based on the specific treatment of women within a
historico-philosophical paradigm. Hence David Lodge’s trilogy was chosen
over Malcolm Bradbury’s academic novels because Lodge provides a more
direct inroad into the postmodern stance. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim was
included not only as the classic example of the post-World War II university
4 Chapter 1
novel, but also to highlight how his male protagonist usurps some of the
qualities female characters have previously displayed, thereby reversing some
of the progress that has been made in considering women as intellectual
equals to men. Possession was chosen over other possible fictions by A. S.
Byatt, since this novel arguably presents a more universal and historical
treatment of women in academia than her previous novels of sisterly rivalry
or her historical exploration of women, art and education in Edwardian
England in The Children’s Book (2009). Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night
was chosen over Vera Brittain’s Dark Tide because the former added a new
dimension to the trope of academia and marriage. Finally, Ann Veronica and
The Rainbow were chosen as ostensibly the only examples of their time of
a proto-academic novel with a female protagonist. The novels under dis-
cussion thus represent the limited range of narratives that explicitly focus
on scholarly women, either as protagonists, or as crucial supporting char-
acters, but they are also presented in dialogue with their contemporaries
and antecedents to provide depth and breadth of investigation, widening
the point of entry into understanding what appears at first glance to be a

new kind of conceptualisation of womanhood.
The novelty lies in the fact that whilst English women were arguably
kept in an intellectually redundant position for centuries, by the turn of
the century they seem to have found a place in the cultural consciousness
as the ‘New Woman’. Recent scholarship supports an image of the New
Woman as rather formidable but prone to a tragic denouement.1 Her mind
becomes in ef fect only narratively significant when its presence exemplifies
its limitations for women. In fact, even though the novels chosen for this
study foreground academic and scholarly women, it soon becomes clear
that their intellect is not celebrated but dismissed. With the dawning of a
new era of women’s emancipation in the twentieth century, this continued
disregard for the female mind in fiction constitutes a damning verdict that
has a reciprocal ef fect on community. This study, therefore, arises out of an
1 Cf. Angélique Richardson and Chris Willis, eds. The New Woman in Fiction and
in Fact: Fin-de-siècle Feminisms (2001) or Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies:
Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, and Mona Caird (2004).
The Female Mind 5
intellectual urgency and political expediency to map this apparent ongoing

neglect of female intellectual capabilities in the twentieth-century English
novel. It locates the origins for this neglect in the ideological backdrop
to the ‘woman question’ in England, in which female mental ability first
materialised as an important issue over 150 years ago, and which condensed
the dominant paradigms of the era to one in which women and intellect
simply do not seem to match. In order to explore this further, I consider
three frameworks that may serve as a philosophical, scientific and aesthetic
foundation for the suggested pervasiveness of the anti-intellectual bias
against women in English narrative.
One such framework is the perceived genderedness of genius. Genius,
as a term, is in itself contested, and many dif ferent meanings have emerged
over the history of human achievement. Julia Kristeva’s recent construction
of a new definition of genius located in the uniqueness of the individual,
for which she adopts Duns Scotus’s term ecceitas, indicates a path forwards
for women that releases them from the ‘constraints of history, biology, and
destiny’ and goes beyond the dichotomy of the sexes (Feminine Genius,
496, 503–4). For Kristeva, genius lies in the creativity that allows each
individual to invent her sex anew. Whilst she thereby suggests a way to
transcend the anxieties of the feminine entrenched in binary oppositions
of sex, the discourse on genius is nevertheless traditionally rooted in such
dichotomies. However, it is notable that many of these conceptions have
perceived ‘female’ origins that, in Christine Battersby’s words, underwent a
misogynistic ‘reorientation of female qualities’. Thus, in terms of genius as
procreativity, as classical sources denoted, woman is understood as bound
by her womb, while only the male seed is an expression of its free genius.
In terms of a Romantic sense of genius as spirit, women are perceived to
be passive in their spiritual adoration, while the male genius is actively
responsive to nature’s sublime magic. Modern psychology, finally, distin-
guishes between the madly brilliant male genius, while the female mind
is only ref lective of its sterile disintegration.2 Genius, therefore, may still
2 Bénédict-Augustine Morel was one of the first medical professionals to link (male)
nervous illness with genius in 1857. Comparable hypotheses are found in John
6 Chapter 1
be interpreted as a gendered concept that serves the ‘rationalisations of

male supremacy’ inherent in it (Battersby, Gender, 103). As Lucy Delap
points out, ‘feminine genius seemed to be entirely ruled out by biologi-
cal and historical evidence’ (115). This does not necessarily erase women
completely from the discourse on genius, but it frequently re-interprets
male strengths as female frailties.
In contemplating the overall rank and importance of the rational fac-
ulty in Western culture, of which genius can be considered a heightened
state, one may begin with the Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth
century, who arguably first championed the power of the mind in modern
times. Immanuel Kant’s summons to humanity to have the courage to use
their own mind, a summons to think freely,3 for example, indicates his con-
cern with the authority of reason to make moral decisions – a key concept
that inf luences many interpretations of character. Whilst one should not
amalgamate Kant’s pure and practical philosophy, feminist engagement with
his thoughts has shown that his gendered view of male and female character
reinforces nevertheless the ‘maleness of reason’ as a steering force towards

universal knowledge and integral truth, whereas he perceived women as
intrinsically bound to their nature and thus incapable of rising above it into
the realm of intellectual freedom.4 His (in)famous remark that a woman
with learning might as well also have a beard (Observations 37),5 indicates
that the call to throw of f the dogmatic state of ignorance and improve the
mind was directed, implicitly at least, solely towards the male population.
Fergusson Nisbet’s The Insanity of Genius and Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius,
both published in London in 1891.
3 ‘Habe Mut dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen’ (‘Auf klärung’ 1784).
4 See e.g. Jean Rumsey, ‘Re-Visions of Agency in Kant’s Moral Theory,’ in Feminist
Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (2007). See also Charlotte Witt, ‘Feminist
Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon’ (2006).
5 ‘Ein Frauenzimmer, das den Kopf voll Griechisch hat […] mag nur immerhin noch
einen Bart dazu haben; denn dieser würde vielleicht die Miene des Tiefsinns noch
kenntlicher ausdrücken, um welchen sie sich bewerben.’ This view is replicated in
the literary stereotype of the mannish spinster. Cf. Wilkie Collins, who portrays his
thinking heroine Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White with ‘almost a mous-
tache’ (58).
The Female Mind 7
Even though Enlightenment philosophy, due to its universalising ambi-

tion, naturally spoke of ‘man’ more than ‘woman’, the elemental duality
in which women’s mental capacity and aptitude was habitually devalued
rightly provoked accusations of androcentricity. These do not automati-
cally degrade these thinkers for the feminist project but necessarily qualify
some of their pronouncements.6
This thread of an androcentric philosophy is spun by rare but relevant
comments made by thinkers on women’s mental abilities. Whilst one could
use this single thread to knit a whole framework of reference, we should
perhaps look at Western philosophy more as a weaving together of mul-
tiple threads, thus locating misogynistic remarks about women’s minds
as a single knot in a multi-patterned fabric. For example, in contrast to
Kant, whose interest in women’s minds was perhaps not very central to his
overarching critique, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s anthropology in Émile was
explicitly formulated upon the notion that abstraction and speculation
is not the natural domain of the female and that she is thus disqualified
from producing ‘works of genius’, because these demand a combination of

precision, attention and knowledge that can only be exercised by the sex
whose strengths they are, i.e. men (473–4).7
Rousseau himself did not attribute a hierarchy to the gendered mental
qualities of men and women – this is necessarily a matter of feminist-
inf lected interpretation8 – but a new generation of philosophers were less
dif fident in embedding the prejudice against female ratiocination in a
strand of their philosophy that explicitly lessens the value of female judge-
ment, thus indicating that their opinion was more than personal bias but
a key note in their systematic thought. For example, in a verbal addenda
to his lecture on marriage in Philosophy of Right, G. W. F. Hegel proposed
6 Iddo Landau aims to refute criticisms of androcentricity by arguing, weakly, that the
feminist critique itself has constructed androcentric perspectives on philosophy.
7 ‘La recherche des vérités abstraites et spéculatives, des principes, des axiomes dans
les sciences, tout ce qui tend à généraliser les idées n’est point du ressort des femmes,
leurs études doivent se rapporter toutes à la pratique’.
8 See e.g. Helena Rosenblatt, ‘On the “Misogyny” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The
Letter to d’Alembert in Historical Context’ (2002).
8 Chapter 1
that women are naturally excluded from the higher functions of thought
(319–20).9 On the Kantian side of the divide, Arthur Schopenhauer con-
siders a woman’s mental abilities as so narrow and short-sighted that she
lacks a sense of justice or aesthetic feeling, both of which demand resolve
of opinion and the faculty of abstract thought (§ 369). The ethical impor-
tance he af fords aesthetic experience in his system only highlights his
disapproval of the female mind.10
The common denominator for these unlikely ontological bedfellows
is the belief that womanhood is merely a biological state of being, whereas
maleness is an aspiration and attains to ‘psychic maturity’ (Battersby,
Singularity, 128). Feminist synoptic interpretations of the Western philo-
sophical canon have configured the way reason and objectivity is habitually
gendered male. Geneviève Lloyd, for example, argues that eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century philosophy ‘defined ideals of reason through exclusions
of the feminine’ and proposes that most philosophical discourse essentially
centres on how to attain manhood through transcending the feminine
f leshiness, i.e. the realm of sensuality and materialism, to reach the summit
of uncorrupted reason (16, 109).11 To attain genius, i.e. maleness, by an act
of will, therefore, is impossible for women.
It is, however, important to note that many researchers are challenging
a simplistic, dualistic thinking about the Enlightenment and its successors,
especially in the English context, and a plethora of studies have shown that
women were themselves agents and contributors to discourses on the mind,
rationality and genius.12 Prominent amongst female thinkers of the late
9 ‘Frauen können wohl gebildet sein, aber für die höheren Wissenschaften, die
Philosophie und für gewisse Produktionen der Kunst, die ein Allgemeines fordern,
sind sie nicht gemacht.’
10 In fact, his position that women are the ‘unaesthetic sex’ that corrupts modern society
through derivative tastes and ill-conceived judgements anticipates Sigmund Freud’s
declaration that women are natural philistines who are inimical to culture, because
they cannot sublimate their sexual nature (68).
11 Cf. ‘il n’y a nulle parité entre les deux sexes quant à la conséquence du sexe. Le mâle
n’est mâle qu’en certains instants, la femelle est femelle toute sa vie’ (Rousseau 437).
12 Gordon and Walker, for example, highlight that women intellectuals are not just
products of Enlightenment optimism, but their ‘feminist dialectic’ formed one
The Female Mind 9
eighteenth century is Mary Wollstonecraft, whose seminal exposition in

The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) fashioned the arguments for
a common humanity of men and women, and, importantly, for an equal
propensity in both sexes for reason, virtue and judgement. Wollstonecraft
reiterates this point throughout her thesis: ‘all the noble train of virtues,
on which social virtue and happiness are built, should be understood and
cultivated by all mankind, or they will be cultivated to little ef fect’ (318).
She reminds women that their ‘first duty is to themselves as rational crea-
tures’ (331). Wollstonecraft herself is, of course, an eminent example of
the female mind shining brightly in a crepuscular intellectual sky, though
commentators, not least her husband, imbued her own intrinsic genius
with the term ‘masculine’ rather than allow it to be a generic human trait.13
Hence, gynocritical research has unearthed a multitude of intellectual
women in England who seem to disprove the notion of a uniquely ‘male’
genius, but accolades to these women were frequently expressed in terms
of their ‘male’ mind.14 Whilst this study does not aim to ignore the impres-
sive range of female intellectual labour that f lourished in the eighteenth
century and beyond, it is more concerned with the cultural positioning
of the female mind in relation to the concept of genius. In this respect,
the disparate ‘triumvirate of philosophical misogyny’ – Kant, Hegel and
of the discourses that created the Enlightenment in the first place (10). A small
selection of studies that endorse this view includes Margaret R. Hunt, Women and
the Enlightenment (1984), Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French
Women became Modern (2003), Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knoll, Gender and the
Enlightenment (2005), Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-
Century Bluestockings (2008) and Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age
of Letters (2009).
13 See e.g. Andrew Elfenbein, who uses Godwin’s comments as a way to develop a sexual
discourse focused on ‘female masculinity’.
14 William Wraxham, for example, complemented Elizabeth Montagu on her ‘mascu-
line understanding’ (quoted in Gordon and Walker 10). Even Mary Wollstonecraft
herself began her review of Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education with the
opening ‘This masculine and fervid writer’ (in Gordon and Walker 303). Judith P.
Zinsser notes how Emilie du Châtelet was acknowledged in her lifetime as a genius
‘worthy of Horace and Newton’ (79).
10 Chapter 1
Schopenhauer – used bivalent logic to tie an innate quality of judgement

and discrimination to a distinctly male faculty of reason. Yet the backlash of
nature against nurture was even more ef fectively advanced by an alternative
English discourse at the end of the nineteenth century that added to this
epistemology one of positivist certainty, namely the discourse of evolution.
In 1792 Wollstonecraft argued that the evident faults in women’s char-
acter are not innate but a natural consequence of their current education
and station in society. It is, put bluntly, ‘from the tyranny of man [that] the
greater number of female follies proceed’ (449). In 1869, John Stuart Mill
in The Subjection of Women furthered this proto-feminist argument that
repressive social factors are the main cause for women’s perceived mental
inferiority. He noted that ‘in the case of women, a hot-house and stove culti-
vation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature,
for the benefit and pleasure of their masters’ (39). In the same year, Francis
Galton’s Hereditary Genius, however, dismissed environmental factors and
clearly stated that, as far as intellectual genius is concerned, ‘the highest
order of reputation is independent of external aids’ (169).15 In 1889 Patrick

Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson plotted a divergent evolutionary path for
the sexes: a conservative (anabolic) one for the female, and an active, even
destructive (katabolic) one for the male, in which mental vigour is firmly
on the male side. This static opposition, so Geddes and Thomson say, was
written in at cellular level and what ‘was decided among the prehistoric
Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament’ (267).16
Whilst not unchallenged, evolution thus acquired the quality of a
‘root metaphor’ (Duf fin 57) in terms of an explanatory paradigm of f lawed
15 Galton’s methodology, to collect ‘the common judgement of the leaders of opinion’
from biographical directories, is, of course, seriously f lawed. Flavia Alaya states: ‘While
he never expressed an outright bias against women, Galton was clearly so attracted
to virile achievement that women were denigrated by his de facto selection’ (266).
16 That ‘men should have greater cerebral variability and therefore more originality,
while women have greater stability and therefore more “common sense,” are facts
both consistent with the general theory of sex and verifiable in common experience’
(ibid. 271).
The Female Mind 11
female genius.17 It assumed that the more primitive, and hence inferior,
biological form was judged to be ‘whichever applies to women’ (Ellis,
Man and Woman, 51). Charles Darwin and his supporters believed that
the more vigorous nature of men – a result of the fight for survival – is
directly responsible for their superior contributions in philosophy, science
and art. Darwin, in fact, claimed that the supremacy of male ratiocination is
‘proven’ by the ‘fact’ of existing male genius and the absence of a correspond-
ing female genius. He unconditionally stated that ‘the average standard of
mental power in man must be above that of woman’ and that the so-called
female faculties of intuition, rapid perception and imitation belong to a
lower evolutionary stage (858–9; my emphasis). It seemed thus that women
could never actively overtake men in their mental abilities, because they
would forever remain one rung lower on the evolutionary ladder.
As a paradigm, evolution thus promulgated mental dif ference as a
factor of biological dif ference, a conception that was considered inimical
to challenge.18 Katharina Rowold, however, draws attention to the fact
that scientific conceptions of sexual dif ference were ‘never monolithic or

univocal’ (Educated Woman 7) and she shows how English women actively
engaged with the contemporary scientific discourses on complex levels.
Science, in fact, accommodated a range of opposing interpretations with
regards to women’s mental capabilities and the question of higher educa-
tion. Thus the notion of evolution was by no means uncontested. Whilst
the received understanding was that of a linear progress that has fixed
sexual dif ference and that, therefore, cannot be modified by environmen-
tal change, some feminists argued that the mutability that underpins the
evolutionary process must also be applied to the possibility that women
can progress mentally.19 An argument based on the interaction between
17 See e.g. Jean Finot, who dismisses findings about the passivity of the ovum as ‘wholly
arbitrary’ and ‘erroneous’ (196).
18 Henry Maudsley, of example, noted that it ‘would be necessary to undo the life-
history of mankind’ were the status of women challenged (38).
19 Edith Simcox, for example, stated that ‘nature is eminently mutable’ and can thus
act on the ‘social life of the intellect’ (194, 198). Also Millicent Garret Fawcett, The
Education of Women, 1871 (Rowold, Educated Woman, 37).
12 Chapter 1
nature and culture was thus used to endorse women’s entrance into educa-
tion and the professions as a means to acquire mental aptitudes that can
then be passed on to the next generation.
Another point of contention was the normative view that women’s
biological dif ference meant that intellectual work comes at the cost of their
procreative function. The idea that ‘the amount of vital energy which the
body at any moment possesses is limited’ (Spencer, Education, 162) was
used ostensibly to express anxiety over women’s physical and mental health.
Herbert Spencer’s declaration of the ‘cost of mental achievement’ implies
that the female reproductive system consumes too much of the available
energy and leaves not enough stores for higher brain activities, such as
abstract thought. Similarly, James McGrigor Allan agrees that ‘great physical
and mental exertion cannot go on at the same time in the same organisa-
tion’ (cc).20 Hence it was thought that most of a woman’s vital energy is
used up in the periodic discharge of menstruation, during pregnancy and
by breast feeding. The writer Mona Caird concurred that the menstrual
cycle was physically debilitating and mentally limiting (Educated Woman,

60, 62), but feminist anxieties about women’s reproductive health were
more often concerned with ‘excessive motherhood’ and eugenics rather
than thermodynamics.21 Other women, especially those newly appointed
in the medical professions, brought their own experience as well as their
professional knowledge to bear on the debate, and they frequently dismissed
conceptions of a fragile female body that must use its limited energy solely
for procreative functions.22
20 Proof is again simply an unerring conviction: ‘My position is that there must be radical,
natural, permanent distinctions in the mental and moral conformation, corresponding
with those in the physical organisation of the sexes’ (ibid. cxcvi; emphasis in the text).
21 These concerns began to build at the beginning of the twentieth century, as is evident
e.g. in Vera Brittain’s contribution to Ogden’s To-day and To-morrow series, ‘Halcyon’
(1929). See also Naomi Mitchison’s utopian fictions.
22 See e.g. Emily Pfeif fer in Women and Work, 1888 (Rowold, Educated Woman, 39)
and Eleanor Sidgwick’s health survey of 1890 that disproves a link between educa-
tion and illness in women (Rowold, Educated Woman, 46).
The Female Mind 13
Despite these lively debates, the prevailing fin de siècle consensus

seemed to be that the ‘tyranny of her organisation’, her ‘f leshiness’, sets
woman apart from a male mind that ‘merely inhabits the f lesh’ (Battersby,
Singularity, 128). This view could be regarded as lending credence to accu-
sations of a ‘somatic bias’ (Russett 48) of English science against female
physiology. However, rather than simply being victims of male discourse,
English women contributed to the conceptualisations of womanhood in
the emerging journal culture, often modifying or reformulating normative
ideas about the female mind, yet also failing to disrupt significantly the
perceived Cartesian legacy of the eminence of the mind over the body
that had, according to Susan Bordo in The Flight to Objectivity, marked a
decisive break with a cultural tradition that may have previously been more
accommodating to the rational powers of women.23
As Patricia Murphy points out, popular journals as well as serious
scientific publications in turn of the century England abounded with con-
jectures on the mental abilities of women (22). Specifically, brain size was
considered to be an indication of intelligence, and because a woman’s brain

was predicted to be smaller and lighter than that of a man, she was per-
ceived to be less intelligent. George Romanes remarked that on anatomi-
cal grounds alone ‘a marked inferiority of intellectual power’ in women is
expected (385). William Distant concluded that ‘it is generally allowed that
material growth of brain is correlative to mental capacity, and these facts
therefore go to prove that at present the aptitude for mental achievement
is decidedly possessed by males’ (79). Such views were not uncontested.
Ellis, for example, warned that the science of craniology is full of prejudices,
assumptions, fallacies and over-hasty generalisations (Man and Woman
102). Alice Lee, a statistician in Karl Pearson’s laboratory, famously refuted
the ‘automatic corollary of male superiority’ and indeed found that there
was no link between the size of the skull cavity and the scientific eminence
of the persons measured (Love 150–1).
Continental research nevertheless had a significant impact on the
English debate at that time, and Gustave Le Bon’s conclusion that women
23 She talks specifically about the ‘decisive rupture’ of modern philosophy (3).
14 Chapter 1
are incapable of ref lection and deep reasoning because of their smaller brains
was widely welcomed by English commentators.24 Hence, with similar cir-
cular logic, Allan implied that a woman is a creature of instinct because her
‘organs of sense are proportionally larger’ than men’s, who are intellectual
beings (ccii). To sustain such views, scientists were continuously shifting
the goalposts when it came to ascribing male intellectual eminence. In
the words of a contemporary commentator, science ‘must for ever tend
against the possibility of women as a rule arriving at an equal, much less
acquiring a superior, position to men in the mental struggle’ (Distant
84). Yet even the fashion for psychometric testing at the beginning of the
twentieth century could not provide irrefutable evidence for women’s
lesser intelligence. Helen B. Thompson’s experiments failed to unveil any
noticeable dif ferences in mental functions between men and women and
she concluded that the ‘question of the future development of the intel-
lectual life of women is one of social necessities and ideals, rather than of
the inborn psychological characteristics of sex’ (182). Edward Thorndike
in Sex in Education (1906) similarly stipulated: ‘The dif ferences in sheer

intellectual capacity are too small to be of any great practical importance
to educational theory or practice’ (in Albisetti 193). Albisetti wraps it up:
‘Within less than a decade of Binet’s and Thompson’s original publications,
long-standing assumptions about the intellectual inferiority of women had
been powerfully refuted’ (195).
This did not, however, stop the perpetuation of the ‘Victorian ortho-
doxy’ of an unequal intellectual capacity between the sexes and endow
these minor dif ferences with important social implications. In fact, the
perceived threat of degeneration, which had high currency in England at
the turn of the century, frequently bypassed any arguments about mental
emancipation by emphasising the importance of the ‘true’ female function:
her reproductive role. William and Catherine Whetham, for example,
24 Women ‘ont des premiers la mobilité, et l’inconstance, l’absence de réf lexion et de

logique, l’incapacité à raisonner’ (61). They ‘représentent les formes les plus inférieures
de l’évolution humaine et sont beaucoup plus près des enfants et des sauvages que de
l’homme adulte civilisé’ (60–1).
The Female Mind 15
implied in 1909 that ‘exceptionally capable women attracted by the intel-

lectual life of the Universities, are thereby rendered unfit or unwilling to
discharge their natural functions’ (144). The Whethams endorsed the
eugenicist argument that ‘to bring forth, nourish, and educate children
is, for the future of the race, more important work than any that falls to
the lot of man’ (198). The positivist Frederic Harrison similarly declared
in 1908 a woman’s ‘true function’ to be the ‘spiritual force in the vanguard
of human evolution’, the ‘intellectual, moral and spiritual genius of man’s
life’ (73, 75, 104). Zoologist W. K. Brooks earlier in 1883 stipulated women
as (literally) embodying human civilisation and he highlighted the female
mind as ‘a storehouse filled with the instincts, habits, intuitions, and laws of
conduct which have been gained by past experience’ (275). Hence if women
were to abandon such conservation for the progressive excitement of male
cogitation, Henry Maudsley argued as early as 1874, this would end in a
eugenic doomsday scenario ‘at the price of a puny, enfeebled, and sickly
race’ (39). The widespread opinion, therefore, seemed to be that thinking
women are eugenically undesirable.

However, one must also acknowledge the large numbers of women
who participated in this debate and who, as Rowold indicates, rechan-
neled the persistent eugenic theme of women’s education as damaging
to the race into a positive paradigm. They highlighted, for example, how
educated women are the ‘fittest’ mothers to pass on positive acquired traits.
Also, referencing women’s perceived heightened moral nature, the pioneer-
ing physician Elizabeth Blackwell noted that education has the ability
to broaden women’s moral inf luence in the home. She declared that an
enhanced civilisation is dependent on widening the intellectual horizons
of women (Educated Woman 43).
Despite the need to be aware of these competing definitions of a
woman’s ‘natural function’, English culture frequently displayed a con-
tinuously strong bias against female reason and intellect curiously devoid
of true evidence and driven by fears of humanity’s downfall, should change
occur. This was underpinned by continental inf luences that, at the turn
of the century, became widespread in England. The excitement of pure
opinion was, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, the key indicator of the
16 Chapter 1
modern normative debate on women (Menschliches §653).25 As the apostle

of Untergangsdenken, he was perhaps singular in his admiration for the
animal cunning of women’s minds, yet he also warned that their clumsy
experiments in scientific thinking would lead to degeneration and catas-
trophe.26 He cautioned against an impending future in which the female
folly of locating herself outside tradition will result in the swamping of
the arts and sciences with dilettantism, the death of philosophy through
confounding prattle and the general dissolution of society (Menschliches
§425). Nietzsche, as well as Schopenhauer’s previously mentioned cultural
pessimism, points the way to Otto Weininger, whose hostile estimation
of female ratiocination may be regarded as the pinnacle of fin de siècle
misogynist thinking. He was well-known and widely discussed amongst
the Anglo-American literary intelligentsia, male and female, at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, and his inf luence was deeply felt in debates
on the moral character of women.27
How pervasively these continental philosophical and home-grown sci-
entific paradigms of genius acted on literary minds is, for example, already
evident in George Eliot’s assessment of womanly intellect in France from
1854, in which she mingles expressions such as ‘voltaic-pile’ and ‘crystalli-
sations’ with ‘phantasms’ and ‘spell’ – confirmation of the mixed scientific
25 ‘Namentlich ist den Frauen dieser Rath zu geben; als welche jetzt rettungslos die
Opfer aller Hypothesen sind, zumal wenn diese den Eindruck des Geistreichen,
Hinreissenden, Belebenden, Kräftigenden machen.’
26 Like his mentor Schopenhauer, he regarded Enlightenment as a male undertaking.
‘Bisher war glücklicher Weise das Auf klären Männer-Sache, Männer-Gabe – man
blieb damit “unter sich”’ (Jenseits §232). But he also praised the female mentality in
its ‘Unerziehbarkeit und innerliche Wildheit’ (Jenseits §239). Nietzsche’s Anglo-
American populariser H. L. Mencken replicated this in his ironic 1922 paean to
the ‘feminine intelligence’ that ruled over the ‘general imbecility’ of men (2–4). In
contrast, Francis Nesbitt Oppel interprets Nietzsche’s misogyny as ironic (146).
27 Suzanne Raitt states that Vita Sackville-West owned a ‘heavily annotated copy’ (152).
David Garnett claimed that ‘all had read Weininger’ (in Delavenay 137). Roy Porter
and Lesley Hall called it a succès de scandale (164). Ford Madox Ford described the
English translation of the work in 1906 as ‘the most singular, of contributions to the
modern literature on the sex question’ (40–1).
The Female Mind 17
and metaphysical discourse on intellect (56). Whilst narrative should not be

assumed to refer directly to the life world from which it springs, it implies,
nevertheless, a metonymic relationship between the existing paradigms of
female mental inferiority and narrative purpose. As English writers took the
contemporary intellectual temperature of this debate, they absorbed some
of its heat and in exchange added to the ferment of ideas. Degeneration
theories, for example, are ref lected in the literary trope of the ‘New Woman’,
whose ‘masculine’ behaviour spelled unmitigated disaster. The Nietzschean
predatory woman is evident, according to Susan David Bernstein, especially
in the heroines of the sensation novel (213). The novel, therefore, may be
regarded as a crucible for the systemic disparagement of the female mind.
Vice versa, it was common practice of theorists to look towards literature for
‘evidence’ of their gendered understanding, as Weininger did, for example
in his references to Goethe’s Elective Af finities.
This brief overview of the subject of female genius in English culture
indicates that the logical, ethical and aesthetic aspects of philosophical
and scientific discourse seemingly endorse the perception that the ability
to reason lay congenitally outside the competence of the female. She was
considered to be unable to form coherent thoughts or conduct a thorough
analysis of reality in order to make authoritative pronouncements thereon
because of an essential lack in her physiological make-up. In contrast to
the male, the female lacked brain matter, nervous energy and basic evo-
lutionary maturity. In an ‘ideological resolution to the woman question’
(Schiebinger 137), it was stipulated that men and women are not equals
but instead complementary opposites rooted in biological dimorphism.
The evolutionary dif ferentiation of the sexes had relegated the woman to
a realm in which rationality and conceptual thought was sacrificed for a
feminine emotional and intuitive nature that easily tipped into mental
disarray. This realm, the so-called ‘domestic sphere’, constitutes the second
explanatory framework underpinning the bias against women’s intellectu-
ality in English culture, not least because it often acted as an escape-clause
for contractual theorists who debated ‘Man’ as a self-directed agent in
charge of ‘his’ own destiny. In contrast to male agency, women were seen
as subject to forces outside their control, notably their own bodies, which
meant they needed the extra protection af forded e.g. by the institution of
18 Chapter 1
marriage. In this context, agency and self-determination were considered

an impediment to their security. Should a woman against all odds manage
to break down gendered barriers and enter the public sphere, her life was
frequently considered at odds with the domestic roles she was expected to
fulfil and she was subsequently depicted as embittered and lonely.
The domestic scene is, however, also a well-explored literary battle-
ground of the sexes in which, stereotypically, womanhood embodies eve-
rything that is reprehensible in human nature – i.e. lust, sin, deception and
irrationality – and manhood what fought such iniquity. This struggle could
be considered the core of a tradition of literary misogyny that spanned the
breadth of Western culture. Countless defaming pamphlets, poems and
plays as well as sermons, satires, stories and treatises devoted to the char-
acter assassination of the female had been penned from classical antiquity
onwards. It was on account of these that women eventually took up the
baton in late medieval times and started a polemical counterattack that
became, in the fifteenth century, the querelle des femmes. The contributors,
in particular Christine de Pisan, ostensibly reacted to a cultural misogyny

in which the female literary character seemed to be created solely as a pro-
jection of male fears, interests and concerns.28 Their predominant reaction
to male vitriol was mystification as to why men would go to such lengths
to reiterate women’s intellectual inferiority. Faced by attacks on women’s
mental and moral nature, Pisan was not alone in wondering why men cast
about such outrageous lies.29
These ‘lies’ endured well into the eighteenth century, when an ef fusion
of Enlightenment misogyny in England revived the woman-baiting ritual
that had grown trite over time. Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle II, To a Lady’
(1735) is a set piece of contemporary sentiment about women’s mindful-
ness, whose satirical barbs pricked all the established places. He famously
28 Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), translated into English in 1521, was,
according to Gerda Lerner, the first enduring account of woman as a noble, rational
being (192–4).
29 ‘que tant de divers hommes, […] a dire de bouche et en leur traittiez et escripts tant
de diableries et de vituperes de femmes et de leurs condicions’ (617–18) […] ‘si sont
meçonges trop mal coulourees’ (625) [sic].
The Female Mind 19
described woman as ‘matter too soft a lasting mark to bear’. Her impotent
mind is energised by ‘A spark too fickle’ and he concludes: ‘No thought
advances, but her eddy brain/ Whisks it about, and down it goes again’
(ll. 93–4, 121–2). Responding to such contemporary assaults on women’s
character, a well-known thinker such as Catherine Macaulay was not so
much alarmed by its ribaldry as by attempts to argue a rational founda-
tion for the sexual dif ference in character, an argument she sees frequently
invalidated by the ‘the love of paradox’ that consistently overwhelmed men’s
logical reasoning (128).30 Whilst men claimed that women’s domestic posi-
tion was predetermined, unchangeable and natural, what in fact emerged
from their rhetoric was solely a justification of their own socially elevated
position. Sophia, A Person of Quality, states in Women not Inferior to
Man (1739) that men ‘are not satisfied with engrossing all authority into
their own hands, but are confident enough to assert that they possess it by
right’ (28). In Woman’s Superior Excellence over Man (1740) she similarly
posits: ‘Unable to justify their subjecting us from any laws of nature, [man]
has recourse to divine laws’ (13). Revisiting this debate at the end of the
eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft concludes that most beliefs men
held, even universal beliefs about truth, had ‘no other foundation than
utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to
their own convenience’ (106).
The battle metaphors that accompanied these representations of a
gendered world dissected into domestic and public seemed to highlight the
anxious tendency by men to justify their position and repress any freedoms
for women, and the concept of ‘separate spheres’ could be regarded, at least
in part, as an attempt to avoid the confrontation between men and women
on an equal plane.31 But the evident willed ignorance in male reasoning, as
underpinned, for example, by Wollstonecraft’s comment above, seems to
30 Macaulay speaks specifically about Rousseau, but her views may here be generalised.
31 See e.g. Vern L. Bullough, who regarded the relationship between men and women
as one of constant anxiety, and this anxiety drove men to use initially their superior
strength, and then later social pressures, to keep women under their control (passim).
Previously, Katherine Rogers claimed that men’s insistence on women’s inferiority
reveals the anxiety of the usurper rather than the confidence of the rightful heir (37,
20 Chapter 1
ref lect once again the common preference for the invigorating power of
conviction over truth, especially where views on women were concerned.
Male (mental) superiority seemed to be a universal ‘fact’ that needed no
explanation, only acknowledgement. Emily Davies gracefully summed
up the female point of view in this debate: ‘[w]hen broad assertions are
made as to natural fitness and unfitness, and a course of action is founded
upon them, it becomes necessary, at least, to ask for proof ’ (159).32 Her
call for proof is pertinent, as gender arguments were still frequently used
as a weapon of political, economic and clerical interest at a time when
middle-class women demanded equal rights and access to the public sphere
of work and education.
With the ascendancy of the social sciences in the late nineteenth
century, it soon became evident that the anthropological and sociologi-
cal inquiry into the ‘separate spheres’ was predominantly defined by an
ingrained functionalism that highlighted a woman’s domestic experience to
the exclusion of the public and intellectual domain. These interpretations,
originating in the principle of the division of labour, were seen to f lounder,
like the hard physical sciences before them, in an empirical soup of half-
truths and contradictions. In fact, one of the core grievances of feminist
criticism in the 1980s was that science in general upheld the institutionalised
habits and traditional prejudices of the male establishment under the cloak
of critical observation, measurement and taxonomy.33 The social sciences
275). Olive Schreiner famously used the metaphor of bound feet for the doctrine of
the separate spheres (189).
32 ‘When proof is wanting, it is not unnatural to fall back upon feeling; and prejudices,
dignified by the name of instincts, are appealed to as decisive when rational argument
fails’ (ibid. 169).
33 Ruth Bleier labels science a cultural product that creates a truth that ‘becomes con-
tingent on being male’ (196). Cynthia Eagle Russett also criticises Victorian science
for failing badly at the rules of open-minded, non-dogmatic and objective inquiry
(186). Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser point out that scientists stopped being
scientific when it came to women: ‘With the authority of their “objective,” “rational”
inquiry they restated ancient premises and arrived at the same traditional conclusions:
the innate superiority of the male and the justifiable subordination of the female’
(96).
The Female Mind 21
in particular were attacked as a thoroughly reactionary mode of inquiry,

which, according to Shulamith Firestone, operated only ‘within the given
value system, thus promoting acceptance of the status quo’ of inequality
(69). Kate Millet similarly argued that they provided a ‘new formulation
of old attitudes’, i.e. attitudes that promote discrimination (177–8). Ruth
Bleier even claimed that sociology was exclusively ‘invented’ to preserve
this status quo (15).34 Whilst this criticism is clearly partisan, there seems to
be no doubt that gender beliefs habitually shaped research agendas in the
natural and social sciences.35 Hence the new social investigation promoted
gender as a divisive and hierarchical concept.
In addition, in the mid-nineteenth century separate spheres were
widely perceived to be the necessary outcome of an evolutionary advance
of societies from an undif ferentiated state to a current complex system of
social hierarchies.36 The mythico-historical concept of matriarchy, for exam-
ple, in which women actually ruled the public domain, was largely depicted
as a primitive and primordial state of human social organisation that had to
be overcome. Johan Bachofen’s Mutterrecht und Urreligion (1861) – com-

monly regarded as the Urtext on this concept – connected such thinking
with women’s lack of intellectual prowess. For him, this gynocrasy, as he
called it, represented a finite stage of human mental development that
embodied the material rather than the intellectual life (98–100, 119).37 The
34 She criticises especially E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) for its deterministic assess-
ment of gender relations.
35 This critique of science as an inherently gender-biased discipline has recently been
reinforced in Sarah Richardson’s investigation Sex Itself: The Search for Male and
Female in the Human Genome (2013).
36 Herbert Spencer, for example, indicated that progress entails the transition from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, simplicity to complexity and an ‘advance from
confusion to order’ (First Principles 293).
37 Bachofen called matriarchy ‘eine in sich abgeschlossene Entwicklungsstufe des men-
schlichen Geistes’ serving the ‘Gesetz des stof f lich-leiblichen’ but ‘nicht des geistigen
höhern Lebens’. Although Bachofen was not translated into English until the 1960s,
the writings of Friedrich Engels and Jane Harrison ensured that his name and theory
were widely acknowledged in the English speaking world. Yasmine Ergas calls ‘matri-
archy’ one of the ‘founding myths’ of a gender-specific memory (542).
22 Chapter 1
subsequent ‘defeat’ of material matriarchy initiated the return of women

to the private domain as mothers and nurturers, and the simultaneous
elevation of male public roles, such as ceremonial, political and military
functions (Bachofen 166).38 This historical conquest of the female sex was
deemed absolute, and should women ever rebel against it, this would lead
to an almost immediate unravelling of human progress.39 Walter Besant’s
The Revolt of Man (1897) provides an interesting literary interpretation of
just such a ‘monstrous regiment’. In his moral tale, women, having somehow
wrangled authority from men, ef fectively buried progress, science and intel-
lectual advancement and regressed England into a feudal and theocratic
state. He shows ‘female governance’ at its worst, namely as an example of
small-minded gossip and sexual intrigue. His central character, Professor
Dorothy Ingleby, stresses ‘the natural order has been reversed; […] we, who
have usurped the power, have created nothing, improved nothing, carried
on nothing’ (136–7).40 Hence the noblest aim of the rebels is to contain
women once more in the domestic sphere.
Historically, the ‘separate spheres’ do clearly not represent an equita-

ble solution in English culture. Whatever attributes are given to women
are frequently placed in a hierarchical relationship to those given to men.
Whatever is ‘feminine’ is often by definition less economically valuable,
socially prestigious or culturally enriching than what is deemed ‘masculine’.
The female lesser than the male, this customary classification has ensured
that the gendered nature of social life time and again led to an exclusive
38 Bleier, for example, argues that there is no evidence that the of fices of priest, leader
or soldier were necessarily gendered (145).
39 Engels references Bachofen: ‘Der Umsturz des Mutterrechts war die weltgeschichtli-
che Niederlage des weiblichen Geschlechts’ (61; emphasis in the text). In Geneviève
Fraisse’s words, ‘the very foundation of the civic community depended on the posi-
tive repression of femininity’ (52).
40 I am undecided whether Besant, who was Annie Besant’s brother-in-law, wrote this
book as an honest denunciation of the Cause or as a Swiftian satire on the situation of
women in Victorian England. The cruel fate of the men depicted in this novel strikes
the reader as unreasonable, yet Besant describes an accurately inverted image of the
general situation of women, who at that time were kept in total legal and economic
dependence and who were venerated mainly for their physical qualities.
The Female Mind 23
and elevated male space, a public realm of reason, ethics and active citi-
zenship. This, as argued earlier, was regularly closed to women because of
their inherently defective brains, which were deemed unsuited for civic
tasks that demanded the faculty of abstract reasoning to make ethical
decisions. Instead, doctrine repeatedly decreed that women’s so-called
primitive and unconscious ethics needed the advanced public morality of
men to guide them.41
It should, however, be noted that whilst the private and the public are
traditionally formulated in terms of biological dif ference, relational femi-
nists wanted to renegotiate dif ference between the genders by reclaiming
the private as a repository of moral values linked to the received moral
superiority of women, and by denouncing ‘public’ women as ‘scandalous’
women (Gordon and Walker 9). Commentators who supported this agenda
often highlighted that women had an active part to play in the civilising
process of a nation as moral educators in the home. During the ‘era of
women’s apotheosis’ (Rogers, Troublesome Helpmate, 189) in England in
the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the politically subordinate sex

became the morally superior one. Harrison claimed a woman’s tact, sub-
tlety and refinement works best in a domestic environment, as she cannot
match the ‘prolonged tension’ and ‘intense abstraction’ of a man’s public
work. In his eyes it was ‘no glory to woman to forsake all this and to read
for honours with towelled head in a college study’ (82). Nevertheless, the
supposed moral authority of women was significantly mute when it came
to matters outside the domestic sphere. Even when women attended to
public duties, such as nursing or social work, such ‘feminising’ of the public
sphere did not help to breakdown gender barriers. Instead, it was argued,
it helped to uphold them (Steinbach 61).42
41 Kant stipulates in his Metaphysic that women are not eligible for active citizenship
due to their dependent state (§46). Hegel argues similarly in Phänomenologie des
Geistes that only men find their ‘selbstbewusstes Wesen’ in the ‘Gemeinwesen’, the
public sphere (248).
42 Julia Bush illustrates that the separatist argument, which champions women’s com-
plementary qualities to men, fails to address such issues of public ethics and the
agency of choice (passim).
24 Chapter 1
The widespread sequestering of able women away from the scientific,

political and artistic ferment of the nineteenth century into the domestic
sphere nevertheless meant that many would only ever achieve amateur status
in public discourse, because they were largely unable to test their minds in
open discussion with professionals. Their visual absence in turn seemed to
confirm that women have nothing worthwhile to contribute to the public
sphere. Also, as their situation was clearly very comfortable in comparison
to the large ‘residuum’ of the labouring poor in England, the consensus
was that there was no urgent need for any improvements in the situation
of (middle-class) women. In fact, it was believed that they had achieved
their ultimate place in society as cosseted mothers and ‘angels in the house’.
These concepts resonated strongly with the novel as a social genre and the
portrayal of women as heavily dependent on men for voice and action. Not
for them the worry of income, status and achievement that Walter Besant
so bitingly described in Revolt of Man. In fact, literature may be seen to
readily embrace and ref lect aspects of social role theory since its own narra-
tive theory of characterisation is based on fundamentally related precepts.

It has, on the other hand, been argued that women, and women writ-
ers in particular, have, in fact, carved out a ‘third space’, a f luid boundary
between the private and the public (Spence et al. 7). This hybrid space
signals the interdependence of the two systems that cannot exist with-
out the other, although it does not signify that both spaces are equally
valued. Virginia Woolf, for example, could be considered as much a public
intellectual as a woman interested in the private and domestic lives of
her characters. Yet, whilst she created in 1906 in Rosamunde Merridew a
confident scholar and researcher who unashamedly proclaims her public
fame (Journal 240), Gilbert and Gubar acknowledge that this is, in fact, a
‘feminist fantasy’ that is not replicated in her novels (No Man’s Land 3 10).
As illustrated by Katherine Hilbery in Night and Day (1919), academically
inclined women characters found respite only in furtive reading if and
when their circumstances allowed the exercise of their mind. Yet Woolf ’s
bridging of the private and the public raises the necessary question why
the accepted binaries with which we are dealing have endured.
In fact, the essentialist argument, as exemplified by Ellis’s 1927 notion
that procreation and domesticity are ‘in women too preponderant to be
The Female Mind 25
easily conciliated with the claims of a [public] life of intellectual labour’

(British Genius 141–2) was already questioned by relativist arguments.
Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting, for example, argued in 1923 that ‘mono-
sexual dominance’ responsible for the ‘artificial creation of contrasts and
dif ferences between men and women’ was arbitrarily skewed toward men
only for the moment (114, 138; emphasis in the text). Others argued that
individuals are naturally prone to adapt to social expectation.43 In particular,
psycho-analytical commentators in the 1940s suspect that ‘the subjection
of the feminine sex, which recurred over and over again in human history,
stems from a characteristic feminine tendency to submit to the stand-
ards and demands of the prevailing morality’ (Deutsch 292). The German
sociologist Georg Simmel stipulated already in 1919 that a relative power
relationship between the genders is ef fortlessly being transformed into an
absolute one, because women acknowledge the public objective sphere as
inherently male (Relative 60).44 Hence, even though the concept of strati-
fied gender roles was literally ‘man-made’, the myth of female intellectual
inferiority was seen to be perpetuated not only by the male establishment,

but also by female acquiescence in their established social role. This acqui-
escence extended to the field in which English women were increasingly
active publicly, namely the field of artistic creation.45
Culture, the third explanatory framework used to underpin artistic
representation of female scholars, was historically perceived to be pre-
dominantly a ‘male undertaking’ (Ardis 152), based on the principle of
accomplished male creativity and plain female procreativity (Collin 252).
Thomas Laqueur locates the origin of this concept in the Aristotelian belief
43 ‘Feminine’ traits (e.g. passivity, obedience, chastity, tenderness, love of finery etc.) are
in reality merely attributes of a subordinate social position, whichever sex inhabits
this position at a time. The Vaertings believed the waning of the male hegemony is
inevitable and reveals the scientific errors and false popular beliefs underpinning it.
44 ‘Dies of fenbart sich in der unendlich häufigen Erscheinung, dass Frauen gewisse
Urteile, Institutionen, Bestrebungen, Interessen als durchaus und charakteristisch
männlich empfinden, die die Männer sozusagen naiv für einfach sachlich halten’.
45 Gordon and Walker look at how women writers in particular ref lected a ‘scholar’s
situation, between public exposure and private decorum’ (9).
26 Chapter 1
in male creative energy, as even biological conception ‘can be understood

as having an idea’ (59, 61). In contrast, a woman’s mind and uterus were
construed as passive receptacles of the male vital spark.46 The shift from
an Aristotelian perspective of male generation to one of female reproduc-
tion initially served to demystify women’s sexual power, but ultimately
helped to disqualify them from intellectual feats of creativity. In fact, re-
assigning the dominant reproductive role to women highlighted the hiatus
between nature and culture even further. One could argue that even a
positive assessment of women’s reproductive powers does not change their
subordinate position as cultural creators, due to the fact that both activi-
ties were now considered mutually exclusive. For example, the Freudian
principle of sublimation that attributed culture to be ‘men’s work’ feeds on
such exclusivity, as does Karen Horney’s idea of ‘womb envy’, in which she
claims men were driven to compensate for their inability to bear children
by ‘giving birth’ to ideas (passim). Despite their oppositional quality, both
theories foreground culture as an exclusively male vocation, and women as
unable to escape their biological destiny. As argued above, many English

commentators thought the vagaries of her womb would take up so much
of a woman’s being that she would have little energy left for other inter-
ests, particularly of an intellectual or creative nature. Should she, against
all sense, engage in intellectual and creative activity, the result would be
pathological and dysgenic.47
Nevertheless, as many anthologists demonstrate, English women’s
writing of the formative late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
fashioned an ‘exceptionally rich intellectual and aesthetic milieu’ at a time
of ‘intense intellectual vitality’ (Robertson xix; Ferguson 1), which fed into
the Victorian and late Victorian explosion in published women writers.
46 Mary Ellmann finds that this classical principle endured well into the Victorian age
when a woman’s mind was likened to her womb, a confined interior space that was
immobile and merely used for storage (15).
47 Walter Heape, for example, claims that women are liable to pathological conditions
‘as a consequence of disturbance of generative function’ due to uncongenital work
(210). McGrigor Allan comments: ‘as a general rule, natural sterility is accompanied
with literary fertility’ (ccvii).
The Female Mind 27
Indeed, as mentioned above, the current state of inquiry into the female
contribution to the public debate in the eighteenth century and beyond
insists on women’s visibility rather than concealment. Yet I would argue
that Eileen O’Neill’s assertion in Disappearing Ink of a methodical eras-
ure of women’s intellectual contributions from public history still holds
largely true. It is indicated by such opinions declaring that the ‘inventing,
discovering, creating, cogitating mind is pre-eminently masculine; the
history of humanity is conclusive as to the mental supremacy of the male
sex’ (Allan ccx). The notion that a public character of intellectual standing
‘was the very antithesis of dominant ideas of femininity’ (Bellamy et al. 8)
has further crippled women’s advance as public intellectuals.
The contribution women made to the intellectual scene in England
should, nevertheless, not be underestimated, and many women were
involved in the growing literary marketplace at the end of the nineteenth
century that ensured their financial and intellectual independence. Yet,
at the same time they found themselves still vying with male networks of
patronage that were only fully eroded in the early twentieth century in
Britain through the energies of female publishers and magazine editors,
such as Dora Marsden. Hence, in contrast to the ‘man of letters’ whose intel-
lectual rank arose directly from his gender, early nineteenth-century and
Victorian women writers, especially in the sciences, habitually presented
themselves judiciously without any intellectual ambitions if they wanted
to be published, as they were aware that they could lose their reputation
as intellectuals ‘if they overstepped social decorum’ (Gordon and Walker
14).48 Women were not usually considered Arnoldian legislators of a deeper
truth and beauty but merely didacticists and disseminators. Hence female
48 Many women, as Marina Benjamin notes, worked as translators or editors and were
quick to denounce their ‘score of originality’ (43). Lerner lists three obstacles that
women writers had to remove ‘before their voices could be heard at all: 1) that
indeed they were the authors of their own work; 2) that they had a right to their
own thought; 3) that their thought might be rooted in a dif ferent experience and a
dif ferent knowledge from that of their patriarchal mentors and predecessors. Once
these obstacles were removed, writing women still faced the problem of finding or
treating audiences appropriate to their work’ (47–8).
28 Chapter 1
writers justified their profession in terms of moral improvement of children

and other women, and by the nineteenth century, the didactic nature of
their writing was seen to merge into novel writing as a mainly ‘domestic
genre’ (Gordon and Walker 10–11), in which a perceived predilection for
‘fiction’ was soon downgraded to ‘fancy’. Pertinently, Havelock Ellis’s post
hoc assessment of the ‘lesser art’ of narrative literature as being especially
suited to women’s modest mental abilities was once again unburdened by
the need for ‘exact research’ (Man and Woman 373).49
From the start, therefore, English women could be seen to battle against
conceptions that their femininity itself was what precluded their intellec-
tual authority as writers, a situation that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
christened ‘anxiety of authorship’ (Madwoman 51), and which, according
to Tillie Olsen, was implicated by extensive ‘silences’ and subterfuges that
kept the public voice of women at best anonymous, at worst inaudible. The
price early women writers had to pay for being amongst ‘the first of a new
genus’, as Wollstonecraft exclaimed, was strict social and moral scrutiny by
their public, hence many could be considered to have colluded with the
received opinion through their own disparagement of their ‘poor ef forts’.
Also, the perceived ‘feminisation of literary taste’ (Figes 14) in England via
the novel genre redirected the previously robust narrations of writers such
as Fielding and Smollett to a more refined representation of the female
point of view.50 Attempts by modern commentators to elevate the novel
as an exquisite expression of the female mind – Ellen Moers, for example,
calls the novel a woman’s ‘pulpit, tribune, academy, commission, and parlia-
ment all in one’ (20)51 – cannot detract from the overall conclusion that it
was not deemed an intellectual genre, but full of frothy fancies about love
and marriage. Such a ‘feminine’ conception of literature became later the
49 Hence ‘it cannot be said that women have reached the summits of literature, although
literature is of all methods of expression that which has been most easily within their
reach’ (ibid.).
50 She understands by it ‘sentiment and sensibility’ as well as ‘an explicit reaf firmation
of Christian values and a new didacticism’ (ibid.).
51 She furthermore iterates that literature is ‘the only intellectual field to which women,
over a long stretch of time, have made an indispensable contribution’ (ibid. xi).
The Female Mind 29
centre of attack by an egregious strand of ‘phallic criticism’ in the 1890s

and insidiously connected to the Nietzschean doomsday scenario of dilet-
tantism and cultural degeneration.52 Fin de siècle pessimism in England was
essentially organised around the idea that culture was degenerate, ef femi-
nate and feeble, and contemporary critics repeatedly warned against the
morbid and fatal inf luence of women on culture.
Another ef fect of the dominant image of English culture as an ‘expres-
sion of masculinity’ was that women had to find their own voices first
before they could act, think and speak for themselves, i.e. show character,
ethos. The widespread notion of women writing in a ‘plagiarised’ masculine
style (Husserl-Kapit citing Marguerite Duras 423) was seen to disinherit
women of their own authoritative and self-ref lecting voice of ‘knowing
and doing’, a concept Jacques Derrida termed ‘phallogocentrism’. Hence,
whilst early twentieth-century critics elevated the male ‘untrammelled
view of the impartial spectator’ (Waugh, Reticence, 14), feminist critics of
the 1970s and ’80s championed a specifically female mode of perception
to distinguish an authentic female voice from the plagiarised male one.53

Especially Hélène Cixous’s ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) calls on women
to trump the dominant male discourse of mastery with their specifically
female speech that is not simple or linear, or objectified and generalised, but
instead a ‘song’ (46).54 Patricia Meyer Spacks points out that such explicit
female self-awareness leads to a psychological rather than political mode
of expression (7). Gilbert and Gubar, however, find that the earlier identi-
fied ‘anxiety of authorship’ potentially harmed the writing style of women,
52 The symposium ‘Candour in English Fiction’ in New Review 2 (1890) made the basic
point that the inf luence of women writers on art was detrimental to cultural values.
Battersby calls this the ‘virility school of creativity’ (Gender 57).
53 Mary Ellman states: ‘a genuine dif ference seemed discernible between the ways in
which men think and write, and the ways in which women think and write, namely
the dominant and masculine mode possessing the properties of reason and knowledge
[and] the subsidiary and feminine mode possessing feelings and intuitions’ (158).
54 See also ‘Au long assourdi de leur histoire, elles ont vécu en rêves, en corps mais tus,
en silences, en révoltes aphones’ (56). ‘Un texte féminin ne peut pas ne pas être plus
que subversif ’ (59).
30 Chapter 1
‘infecting their sentence’, as they put it, with an imprecision of expression,

lack of artistic judgement and ef fusive emotionality (Madwoman 51). Carol
Dyhouse sums up the unholy bind of unique female expression and male
cultural tradition: ‘To speak with authority can sound unfeminine’ (No
Distinction 154).
The critical tradition is thus split between those who accord the female
voice psychological but not intellectual substance, and those who want to
f lip these hierarchies from male rigour to female plasticity. Figes, for exam-
ple, considers the novel improved by a female reshaping of ‘male’ linear,
episodic and picaresque plots to one of aesthetic integrity with a new ‘unity
of intention’ (1–2). Jacqueline McLeod Rogers, on the other hand, wants
to free the novel not only from male standards but also from the political
limits of radical feminist criticism. She believes that women’s writing is
generically ‘non-eventful, non-sequential, non-suspenseful’, which she bases
on the concept of the ‘drifting’, barely conscious heroine who engenders a
timeless and unchanging tale of self-discovery that centres on union rather
than autonomy (13–14).55 Her assessment mirrors Ellis’s definition of the
‘carelessness of form, a very personal and intimate frankness’ of women’s
writing (Man and Woman 373). However, such emphasis on indirection
and dreamlike visions seems to continue an essential female heritage handed
down from the forebears of modern women writers – women like Julian
of Norwich or Hildegard of Bingen. Their tradition of mystic rapture and
heightened visionary insight elevates passivity, hysteria and impotence as
typical women’s mental experiences, which can only heighten the lack of
public confidence in a female authoritative voice. It seems women are too
emotionally involved to display the reticence and objectivity of judgement
that is generally valued in ‘serious’ literature.
By the twentieth century, the novel was widely regarded as a medium
that, as Walter Heape remarked, dealt with ‘women’s impulses and their
ef fects on her actions […] and something may thereby be learnt’ (7).56 Yet,
Rosalind Miles states that as ‘literary creation is itself a masculine act’, men
55 Her use of the prefix ‘non’ nevertheless retains the male as the absolute referent.
56 Allan claims Balzac or Thackeray as the best authorities on the female mind (ccxix).
The Female Mind 31
were responsible for ‘reproducing’ images of women that were considered

faithful representations of the female condition (49). It is partly due to
such sentiments that in 1949 Simone de Beauvoir famously maintained that
woman is not born but made, and thus ‘woman’ has been constructed as the
‘other’, what she is not nor cannot be (16). Shulamith Firestone goes as far
as saying that women have lost the ability to see themselves authentically,
as they were historically perceived through the eyes of men (154). Men have
written about women for centuries, but their literary paternity of female
character was now challenged by the increasing number of women who,
since obstacles in education, social expectation and publishing conditions
had become permeable to them, increasingly engaged in public literary
and intellectual production. Yet Battersby indicates that this ‘fiction of the
patriarchal language system’ means that women characters can exist only
as male constructs, even if authored by women (Gender 195). Literature
could therefore be charged with creating, perpetuating and reinforcing a
stereotype of the female character that is anti-intellectual and anti-Bildung,
and which highlights the interdependence of literary representation and

social gender stereotyping as a matter of male discourse.
Lacan’s famous statement in 1972 that ‘la femme n’existe pas’ (68)
and can only be represented or defined as a distinct essence in relation
to an ‘other’, has thus widespread implications for the representation of
the female mind. Since ‘otherness’ is most easily understood in terms of
sexual physiology, the ultimate contrast is sex itself. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, Heape stipulated it is ‘not only the Feminine mind
which is dif ferent from the Male mind; it is the whole Female organisation,
her inclinations, feelings, and intuitions which are dif ferent’ (27). But, as
Laqueur has shown, sex was as much a product of politics than anatomical
science (171), and Foucault added in 1976 to the debate the transformation
of sex into discourse, transmitting and producing power. Nevertheless, even
today the biological attribution of sex automatically evokes a particular
social image of womanhood, a ‘semantic matrix of thought’ (Nye 187), that
speaks to the asymmetrically skewed understanding of the paired terms
of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ traits in narrative. It pitches the rational
understanding and deliberate sobriety of the male hero against the coarse
vulgarity of female materialism and the feminine caprice of irrationality.
32 Chapter 1
Women are frequently exploited principally as a contrast, a foil or a com-

plement to the male character. A proclaimed absence of female sexual pas-
sion – her modesty and virtue – is the negative expression of the earlier
assertion that women represent the primitive force of sexuality. In short,
literature ‘gave birth’ to Woman as we know her, the angel or the monster
of male imagination riveted between two horrendous myths: between the
Medusa and the abyss (Cixous 54). The representation of female character
in twentieth-century English literature thus swings back and forth between
these extremes of the ‘angel in the house’ and the ‘New Woman’.
What the three paradigms have shown is that the divisions of the
female and the male, the domestic and the public, the body and the mind,
the emotions and the intellect, which runs as a theme through Western
thought, are accompanied by an asymmetry of values in which mind reigns
over body in the same way the public dominates the private. These values
are embedded in literature as a cultural practice that mediates questions
of identity, and I argue that it has had a detrimental ef fect on women’s
fictional representations that labour from an inherent conservatism that

is anti-intellectual and anti-autonomous. The collusion between the rep-
resentation of female characters and a misogynist worldview frequently
shifted slightly according to the social realities, the psychological specific-
ity and the linguistic proclivities of the era in which authors operated, but
not significantly enough to elevate thoughtfulness as a constant positive
female trait. In fact, the concepts of the ‘other’, alterity and dialogue, show
that sexual dif ference is often actually located in mental performance, not
merely biology. Authentic female identity is frequently nothing other than
the glorification of a female mythos – of altruism and duty – rather than
ethos, so the representation of the female mind has no literary tradition to
speak of, even though there are of course individual characters that have
occasionally been portrayed in their ‘non-conformity through commitment
to the mind’ (Spacks 279). Spacks’ assessment of intellectuality in women
provides a valuable benchmark for further analysis of literary character:
The intellectual can be a sphere of freedom. […] Functioning as a mind rather than
body, she avoids the problems that often determine female destiny. She solves the
conf lict of thought and feeling […] by associating her strongest feeling with thought,
a unification of sensibility in which intellect precedes and dominates emotion. (282)
The Female Mind 33
Nevertheless the tension between the alleged female domain of imagi-

nation and the realism of their social situation has customarily retarded
advances in the conditions of women. Even the intellectual force of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication in 1792 did not immediately impinge on the
zeitgeist. Yet her thesis that proper education is central to female intellectual
endeavour slowly permeated the conservative barriers of this restless age,
so that fifty years later the first steps towards an improved education for
women were made and the groundwork for a noticeable cohort of intel-
lectual and scholarly women in society was laid.
As indicated above, the woman as scholar or intellectual commentator
had, for a long time, been of no literary interest for English writers because
she presented no believable role model for author and reader alike. However,
the advances in educational provisions in England at the end of the nine-
teenth century elicited a changed response in the literary representation
of women. The ephemeral ‘angel in the house’ of conservative Victorian
fiction, as well as the fin de siècle woman of the femme fatale variety, was
now joined by a third type, the emancipated ‘New Woman’, who actively
strove to conquer the public sphere with her mind and her ideas. In what
follows, however, it will become clear that freedom and emancipation
through intellectual attainment was in fact rarely achieved. Middle-class
women in England at the onset of the twentieth century enjoyed a newly
established legal status as an individual. They could go to university and
enter a select range of professions. Many female characters in fiction could
now combine a professional and a family life, and they did not have to
marry if they wanted to participate in society. Yet female knowledges and
concerns were and still are commonly reduced to the ‘unscholarly’ aspect
of a woman’s life, her romantic interests and failures. In fact, even late
twentieth-century novels dealing with women and learning are often so
conservatively plotted that they frequently ref lect issues of the female mind
that have their origin in the educational reforms of the nineteenth century.
In the next chapters, the literary representation of the female mind
is therefore placed within the context of educational reforms following
women’s initial access to formal Higher Education in Britain after 1848.
The six novels examined in this study ref lect in dif ferent but analogous
ways the typical attitudes towards the female mind that originated in many
34 Chapter 1
of the historical misogynistic paradigms outlined above, but also suggest
a continuing narrative of defamation of women’s intellect.
A woman’s claim to an intellectual as well as a moral being was, for
example, regarded as an immodest aspiration during the nineteenth cen-
tury, and arguments against educating girls focused as much on questions
of decency as on practicalities, such as finance. Because women were widely
considered incapable of sustained analytical thought and dominated by
their emotions, they were deemed in need of the steadying hand of male
authority. Their notional lack of self-control ef fectively disqualified them
from scholarly discipline and justified male control over their bodies and
minds. The next chapter explores how control became central to any edu-
cational provision for girls once tertiary education opened up at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century. While the tragic eruptions of uncontrolled
femininity have been a widespread focus of the New Woman novel of
the 1880s and ’90s, it is arguably the nubile undergraduate, exemplified
by H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, who provides one of the first twentieth-
century examples of the essentially unscholarly nature of the female mind
and the af firmation of her sexual role. Ann’s studies have turned her head
and she aspires to become an equal partner to the man, yet the new tenta-
tive permissiveness in sexual matters comes without reciprocal intellectual
autonomy. The Edwardian f lapper ef fectively replicates the ‘lewd and for-
ward’ woman of medieval imagination, whose explicit sexuality serves to
nullify aspirations of equal intellectual companionship between men and
women. Limits and restraints are therefore imposed on the female sex by
the patriarchal institutions of marriage and motherhood, simultaneously
curbing the ‘male’ dimension of her personality, her mind.
Yet whereas female scholarship was for a long time regarded an extrava-
gance rather than a social necessity, middle-class women in the nineteenth
century increasingly fell destitute when familial provision failed, because
they had no education that enabled them to earn a living. It was thus an
emphasis on vocational rather than liberal education that spurred on the
providers of the first colleges for women in the 1840s, and a new class of
upwardly mobile women now had a chance of paid employment and some
independence as qualified school teachers and governesses. Chapter 3 con-
siders how education brought these freedoms to women, but at the cost
The Female Mind 35
of their perceived natural being. As the moderns killed the ‘angel in the
house’, female Bildung was increasingly blamed for a debasing of modern
civilisation through increased materialism and pragmatism. Whilst late
nineteenth-century novels, e.g. The Odd Women by George Gissing, may
be regarded as primary literary sources for this development, it must be
acknowledged that D. H. Lawrence’s treatment in The Rainbow provides
an explicitly modern twist in its defamation of rational civilisation, exem-
plified innovatively by the figure of the educated woman.
Nevertheless, as medieval universities were reformed into modern
research institutions around the middle of the nineteenth century, women
claimed the right to attend these new bastions of learning on the same
grounds as men. They also wanted to experience the collegiate atmosphere
men have enjoyed for centuries, yet at that point it seemed they still had
to overcome as many prejudices as women had to in medieval times. Like
her forbears, the luminous anchoresses and mystics of the Middle Ages,
the female scholar was once more forced to return to the cell, chaste and
cloistered, which made the academic atmosphere at female colleges at the

beginning of the twentieth century distinctly nunnish. In fact, this tradition
of an enclosed womanhood by which, in Steinbach’s words, ‘faculty and
staf f tried to counter the radical nature of their work by living exemplary
lives of feminine self lessness and service’ (181), has a long English tradi-
tion.57 Chapter 4 explores how the professed disabilities of womanhood,
her body and her instincts, must first be overcome if woman wants to attain
the ultimate accolade of being able to reason ‘like a man’. The merging of
passion and intellect is exemplified by the new vogue of detective fiction
within the academic setting in the 1930s (Proctor 177–8), and Dorothy L.
Sayers’s Gaudy Night is arguably the story in which this conf lict is made
most explicit within the confines of a university college. Her female scholar-
detective literally detects her true vocation in life – marriage.
57 Cf. Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of the True and
Greatest Interest 1694 / 97 which advocated the establishment of celibate women’s
colleges.
36 Chapter 1
Yet as more and more women enrolled at university during the early
twentieth century, the establishment would ever more desperately scram-
ble to find reasons for curbing their access.58 One earlier argument was the
perceived physical inadequacy of women for learning. It was thought that,
instead of the healthy vigour, sustained creative vision and bold audacity
of the male intellect, women could allegedly produce only a kind of nerv-
ous energy that quickly ran out of fuel. Chapter 5 analyses how neurosis
is portrayed as the inevitable consequence of female learning, which is
explored in relation to other social events, such as the democratisation of
university access that has brought with it the rise of a new type of literary
working-class hero, who is sometimes called the ‘Angry Young Man’. This
character overtakes women, who had by then found a relatively comfortable
place in the university hierarchy, as academic protagonist and pushes them
back into the margins from which their debased moral sense and mental
illness cannot free them. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is a key novel for this
development within the university setting, and he unambiguously depicts
how the female academic descends into mental breakdown because of the
unnatural character of her occupation. The male protagonist, in contrast,
escapes academia unscathed with a ‘nice’ girl on his arm.
The implication is that the question of a ‘proper woman’s occupation’,
which had to be answered in the light of an increasing female workforce,
hinged on the issue of authority and professionalism. Many thought that
a truly ‘womanly’ profession does not require intellectual authority but
merely a kind of diligence and industry that allegedly fitted the limitations
of the female mind. Most male professions remained closed to women
well into the twentieth century, and university lecturers continually had
to fight an institutionalised misogyny that further delayed the acquisition
of a female authoritative intellectual position in the public eye. Chapter 6
considers the notion that a tradition of female scholarship was languish-
ing in view of a political climate in the 1970s and 1980s that devalued
58 Janet Howarth reports how the increase in female undergraduates after World War I
raised alarm bells at Oxford, which introduced a quota system that aimed to sustain
a comfortable 1:4 male majority (350).
The Female Mind 37
disinterested learning with a philistine fervour. Within this anti-intellectual

climate, the female mind was once more the victim of circumstance. In the
fight for tenure and reputation, men wielded pen and penis freely, whilst
women largely remained passive in sexual and intellectual matters. Novels
by Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge captured this sentiment acutely,
but Lodge’s trilogy in particular may be regarded as the key to a postmod-
ern ref lection on female scholarship and intellect.
While women thus endured the misogyny that regarded them as some
kind of poison to the hallowed atmosphere of the male academic sphere,
the impact of feminism and the newly established discipline of Women’s
Studies in the 1970s had an explosive impact on women’s consciousness.
As a discipline it focused on (re-)creating a tradition of female culture and
ideas, and Chapter 7 explores the importance of rediscovering previously
lost women’s voices. It responds to Hélène Cixous’s critique of literature as
a place where the repression of women has been adorned with ‘des charmes
mystifiants de la fiction’ [the mystifying allure of fiction (my translation)]
(43). The rediscovery of past women’s lives is nevertheless frequently infused

with a critique of current women’s lives. A. S. Byatt’s Possession, in which a
modern independent and intellectual woman yearns for the romantic life
of a Victorian poetess, re-enacts most explicitly how the exploration of the
female mind in literature has in fact now turned full circle.
Female characters may thus be considered trapped in ‘female plots’,
stories created for them by authorities hostile to their mental being. The
spiritualised heroine is clearly too good for life and consequently often
fades away. In contrast, the wilful and deliberate female who inherits a
spark of genius needs to be immediately contained or subdued. Instead of
underlining the intellectual ambition of their heroine, writers – male and
female – often only highlight her failures. The brief overview above sug-
gests that women’s minds are frequently considered inferior to men because
their amateur interests, their giddy natures and their obvious lack of mental
achievements were all considered observable facts. Pope’s ‘Whatever Is, Is
right’ dominated cultural thinking about gender relations for centuries and
underpinned the tradition that defines the female mind as womanhood
gone wrong. As a literary character, the female scholar takes on a wider
prominence in the twentieth century, but only in terms of an increasingly
38 Chapter 1
aberrant specimen. With the ascendancy of the English campus novel in
the 1950s, university lecturers suddenly became literary heroes, yet the
female academic slowly regressed back into the old fictional stereotype of
the sex-starved spinster and neurotic. The life of women characters in fic-
tion remains one of the heart and the body rather than the mind – just as
women in real life are consistently disregarded as public authorities and
shapers of opinion.
In fact, ‘every thing conspires to render the cultivation of the under-
standing more dif ficult in the female than the male world’ (Wollstonecraft
114). The subtle but persistent sighs, shrugs and smiles of those who were
ready to deride, disparage and defame any intellectual or creative attempt
by women helped keep the female intellect down in the common under-
standings of scholarship. The prevailing conviction in the inequality of the
sexes was, however, the most essential obstacle in the path of women’s intel-
lectual ascendancy, as it informed all debates about the female mind and
female education. And, as Gordon and Walker note, ‘education became the
lynchpin of change’ (20). Detractors firmly believed that, should women

acquire full access to all types of educational provisions, their erratic and
shallow minds may only on rare (and irregular) occasions admit the birth
of an authoritative female voice, which, more often than not, must then
be firmly distrusted. Thus, while men must suf fer the ‘greater variabil-
ity’ of genius and folly, women were entrusted with keeping humanity in
pragmatic check (Ellis, Man and Woman, 411).59 However, they were not
trusted enough to legislate their perceived moral power in public but were
confined to the ‘separate’ realm of domesticity.
This book is about these preconceived myths of female intellectuality
and its clandestine life. The path of the female intellectual and scholar was
shadowed through the centuries. Even extraordinary women had to struggle
against the infamy that divested them of authenticity and authority, and
59 Ellis is responsible for articulating the theory of greater variability in which there is
‘more genius and more idiocy, more virtue and more vice’ amongst men than women.
This theory is, however, based on nothing else than his unassailable conviction with
which he declares genius ‘undeniably, of more frequent occurrence among men than
among women’ (Man and Woman 420).
The Female Mind 39
looking over the history of female intellectual endeavour one is struck again
and again by the tenacity of those who struggled against the odds to find
their authoritative voice and by the refusal of the social order to credit them
with anything other than a freakish constitution. Analysing the literary
representation of the female mind is at times an exercise in deconstructing
what is staged in the margins rather than at the centre of the plot, yet this
marginality serves to heighten and expose the contradictory formulations
of a culture that advocates equality but practices discrimination.
My overall approach to the issue is structuralist in principle, as I am
not interested in dissolving the binaries between the male and female, but
in interrogating the ways in which femaleness and mindfulness are depicted
as incompatible and as belonging to opposing poles of the gendered system.
The disparate characters that form the basis of this study indicate the wide-
ranging manifestation of this incompatibility of the female mind, from the
privileged female students at the beginning of the twentieth century to
the emancipated researcher at the end of the century. Yet they commonly
testify again and again to the idea that female intellect must be subdued
in favour of female emotion. From Wells’s f lapper in search of a life to
Byatt’s ‘helpmeet’ in search of love, women characters, who in one way or
another sought education, mental stimulus or academic gratification, are
failing in ways only a woman can fail. There is no other word to describe it:
the female scholar is a chimera, a man’s mind trapped in a woman’s body,
two distinct and utterly dif ferent tissues spliced together in what can only
be described as an aberration of nature. The literary representation of the
female mind engaged in pursuits of choice, growth and ratiocination thus
ref lects the uneasy outsider position of learned women in an ever-increasing
philistine culture.

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Chapter 1

The Female Mind

The literary expression of female identity and character in twentieth-cen-

educated female character in England was that of unrestrained womanhood.

the point of entry into understanding what appears at first glance to be a

intellectual urgency and political expediency to map this apparent ongoing

be interpreted as a gendered concept that serves the ‘rationalisations of

reinforces nevertheless the ‘maleness of reason’ as a steering force towards

Even though Enlightenment philosophy, due to its universalising ambi-

from producing ‘works of genius’, because these demand a combination of

eighteenth century is Mary Wollstonecraft, whose seminal exposition in

Schopenhauer – used bivalent logic to tie an innate quality of judgement

order of reputation is independent of external aids’ (169).15 In 1889 Patrick

that scientific conceptions of sexual dif ference were ‘never monolithic or

cycle was physically debilitating and mentally limiting (Educated Woman,

Despite these lively debates, the prevailing fin de siècle consensus

considered to be an indication of intelligence, and because a woman’s brain

in Sex in Education (1906) similarly stipulated: ‘The dif ferences in sheer

24 Women ‘ont des premiers la mobilité, et l’inconstance, l’absence de réf lexion et de

implied in 1909 that ‘exceptionally capable women attracted by the intel-

women are eugenically undesirable.

modern normative debate on women (Menschliches §653).25 As the apostle

and metaphysical discourse on intellect (56). Whilst narrative should not be

marriage. In this context, agency and self-determination were considered

in particular Christine de Pisan, ostensibly reacted to a cultural misogyny

in particular were attacked as a thoroughly reactionary mode of inquiry,

be overcome. Johan Bachofen’s Mutterrecht und Urreligion (1861) – com-

subsequent ‘defeat’ of material matriarchy initiated the return of women

Historically, the ‘separate spheres’ do clearly not represent an equita-

the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the politically subordinate sex

The widespread sequestering of able women away from the scientific,

tive theory of characterisation is based on fundamentally related precepts.

easily conciliated with the claims of a [public] life of intellectual labour’

inferiority was seen to be perpetuated not only by the male establishment,

in male creative energy, as even biological conception ‘can be understood

unable to escape their biological destiny. As argued above, many English

writers justified their profession in terms of moral improvement of children

centre of attack by an egregious strand of ‘phallic criticism’ in the 1890s

to distinguish an authentic female voice from the plagiarised male one.53

‘infecting their sentence’, as they put it, with an imprecision of expression,

were responsible for ‘reproducing’ images of women that were considered

and which highlights the interdependence of literary representation and

Women are frequently exploited principally as a contrast, a foil or a com-

fictional representations that labour from an inherent conservatism that

Nevertheless the tension between the alleged female domain of imagi-

cloistered, which made the academic atmosphere at female colleges at the

disinterested learning with a philistine fervour. Within this anti-intellectual

(43). The rediscovery of past women’s lives is nevertheless frequently infused

lynchpin of change’ (20). Detractors firmly believed that, should women

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