“A Society of Picked Individuals” and The Destruction of Relationships By Heteroerotic Desire in Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop and Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did
In the Victorian period patriarchal family structures and rigid class hierarchies defined the relationships, and communities people–especially women– were able to form. Approaching the fin de siecle as women began to gain more autonomy and class structures began to break down there were opportunities for forming new communities based on mutual affability and interest. The period also began to explore social relationships between men and women outside of marriage, and outside the erotic. Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop and Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did both explore relationships, community and friendship. While both novels make strides toward accepting platonic friendships between men and women these novels ultimately demonstrate a Victorian belief that all relationships between men and women will be infringed upon by heteroerotic desire.
In Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop the most significant relationship bonds explored are the familial bonds between women, specifically the relationship between the four Lorimer sisters. As other critics have pointed out part of Levy’s exploration of the New Woman is intrinsically connected with the story’s setting in the urban city. Critics Cameron and Bird point out that “through sisterly kinship, the Lorimer women redefine the domestic sphere into a new and permeable space where they can move fluidly between domestic and public spheres. As such, the female bond represents something of a liminal space itself” (78). The Lorimer sisters take the space of 20B Upper Baker Street and make it a liminal space fit for their liminal needs: the apartment serves as a place of business and a home, the Lorimers are both photographers (business woman) and sisters (family), and finally the apartment serves as a place where the sisters can look out at the world (Phyllis and the window), and where the world can come in and observe them (their many male guests). These male guests too exist in an undetermined liminal state in regards to their relationships with the sisters, which will be discussed later on in this essay. The fluid and changing nature of 20B Upper Baker street comes from the control the Lorimer sisters are allowed to have in owning their own space. The sisters have control of the business and of their own family. There is no patriarch of the Lorimers, and no owner of the business except for themselves thereby freeing the sisters from the two usual bonds of subservience for people, especially women, in the nineteenth century: fathers and bosses.
The Lorimers form a community of women, and as unusual as their endeavour is this community allows them to stand on their own for a time in the city. Writing in the nineteenth century in the urban space “the metropolis offered anonymity, community, and distance from provincial and familial expectations, but it also proved a tremendously difficult and threatening place to be a woman alone” (Nord 734). Much like her protagonist’s Levy was trying to make a living and forge a name for herself as a woman in a time and place when that was difficult. Also like her protagonists Levy did not do this alone. Though not with blood-sisters critic Deborah Epstein Nord writes about how Levy was part of a community of female writers in the nineteenth century stating that “what distinguishes this group in the 1880s is their dependence on one another, on an unstructured but, for them, powerfully real female community and on the possibility of singleness without oddness” (Nord 754). Levy’s own artistic belonging to a female community that helped her navigate the perils of womanhood, and the expedition of New Womanhood in the city contributes to the power of community given to Lorimer sisters in 20B Upper Baker Street in the novel.
The Romance of a Shop does not only focus on the sisterly bond, but it also focuses on the familial female bond through the relationship of Aunt Caroline and the sisters. Specifically the novel focuses on the generational problem of the new woman and the family. As critics Cameron and Bird state, “Levy suggests there was not an immediate transition from the "Old" to "New" Woman and also that forces opposed to the New Woman existed even within the female family” (84). Aunt Caroline is unsupportive of the photography studio from the beginning, and the narrator asserts that “Aunt Caroline, shifting her ground, ceased to talk about the scheme as beneath contempt, but denounced it as dangerous and unwomanly” (emphasis added 72). Aunt Caroline’s opinions on womanhood differ from that of Gertrude and her sisters. In this difference the novel demonstrates how the liminal safe space of 20B Upper Baker Street differs from a familial or ancestral home with solid immovable walls and values. Though the Lorimers are related by blood, and the desire to stick together it is their ideals not their heritage that makes them New Women as Aunt Caroline is related to them as well but does not share their ideals. This generational gap of ideals is not something coded purely as feminine. In Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did there is an example of a New Man receiving generational resistance of New ideas from his father. According to scholars Warne and Colligan the New Man “term was coined by Punch as early as October 1894 to refer to a masculine type constructed around the New Woman phenomenon” (27). When Alan Merrick tells his father “I will not counsel the woman I most love and admire to purchase her own ease by proving false to her convictions,” his father's response is to ban him from the house and cut him off from the family (Allen 100). Allen suggests that the disapproval of New ideas toward women effects not only familial relationships between women, but also those relationships between the men who support them and the Old men who do not.
The terms “New” and “Old” woman can create the impression that the ideals of these women are purely generational. However, this idea of linear progress in the ideal of New Womanhood is explored and problematized in Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did. Allen’s novel also focuses on the familial female bond, in this case that between mother (Herminia) and daughter (Dolly). Herminia sees herself as a martyr giving birth to a christ-like saviour describing Dolly as“the child who was born to be the apostle of freedom to her sisters in darkness”(emphasis added 145). Dolly is the child of a New Man and a New Woman and yet “in time Herminia began to perceive with a still profounder sorrow that Dolly had no spontaneous care or regard for righteousness” (145). Dolly is not genetically coded with the strength and ideals of a New woman, nor does she inherit the principles of her mother. The disconnect between Herminia and Dolly shows that the relationship between familial women is more complicated than a matter of Old generation equals Old Women, and New generation equals New Women. Herminia is the older figure, and yet unlike Aunt Caroline she embodies New ideas. Dolly is the younger figure and yet unlike Gertrude or her sisters she embodies the ideals of the Older generation and society. According to critic Cameron “as part of its effort to emphasize the virtues of the maternal New Woman, the novel pits Herminia against an ignorant and undeserving society, a category that includes Herminia’s own daughter, Dolly” ( 294). Using Cameron’s reading Allen’s depiction of the difference in ideals between Herminia and Dolly is a literary tool to make Herminia’s ideals of the New more appealing and sympathetic to the audience.
Other than family the factor that most determined community in the nineteenth century was class. A difference in class, or more specifically, a difference in the importance/desire for the high class is the main rift between Dolly and Herminia. When Dolly goes to the country with school friends she compares the (higher class) men she meets with the ones she knows from home, with the narrator asserting, “her mother’s friends wore soft felt hats and limp wollen collars; these real men were richly clad in tweed suits and fine linen” (151). Dolly’s focus on clothes is a material focus, and it should be noted that clothing is one of the most obvious determining factors of class. Dolly’s focus on the clothing of the men she observes reveals her temperament and priorities as one who is occupied with and longs for the higher class. That Dolly calls the men she meets in the country “real men” reflects her thoughts on masculinity being tied to the Old ideas and not the New ideas of her mother’s artist and socialist friends.
The Lorimer sisters also experience a drop in class after the death of their father. Levy’s novel shows that class does not have to be the determining factor in relationships, nor does it have to break them down the way class wedges between Herminia and Dolly. The Lorimer’s closest friends and allies are their high class friends the Devonshires. The Devonshire siblings Conny and Fred remain stalwart and true to the Lorimers after the death of their father. Gertrude herself asserts in a conversation with Lord Watergate that class is not the be all end all of relationships. She says her ideal society is “a society not of caste, class or family but of picked individuals” (115). Like the Devonshires sticking by the Lorimer sisters despite their drop in status this line references a movement in the nineteenth century away from communities built on family and class, and toward relationships chosen with mutual affection and interest.
Levy’s The Romance of a Shop and Allen’s The Woman Who Did both portray the formation of communities with mutual interest as opposed to circumstances of birth. In The Woman Who Did Herminia is cast off from her former society for the apparent shame of having a child out of wedlock. Eventually Herminia is able to form a social bond again as the narrator describes, “among the men of whom Herminia saw most in these later days were the little group of advanced London Socialists who called themselves the Fabians” (134). Herminia is able to find society again through the connection of shared ideals and intellectual interest with the Fabians. Likewise the Lorimer sisters are able to form relationships outside their haven in 20B Upper Baker Street through a community of artists. The novel describes the sisters going to various viewing parties. At one such party the narrator describes an interaction between Constance Devonshire and Gertrude: ““What a dreary thing the London crowd is,” grumbled Conny, “Oh but this is fun. So different from the parties one used to go to,” said Gertrude smiling”” (129). This statement from Gertrude echoes her earlier statement about a society of “picked individuals”. The viewing parties the sisters attend host the likes of up-and-comer artists like Frank, famous artists like Sidney Darrell, and nobility like Lord Watergate. This mix of people connected not by blood or birth, but by interest and skill draws Gertrude’s favour over the former society parities connecting people by birth.
Levy and Allen’s novels once they deconstruct familial relationships and friendships built on class illustrate burgeoning communities built on interest and mutual affinity. These relationships or friendships are not defined by the blood of family or lineage, but they remain tied down to one factor that these communities can not break through: gender. The Romance of a Shop and The Woman Who Did both attempt to show new social connections between men and women, but inevitably heteroerotic desire destroys these friendships and as collateral damage destroys surrounding samesex friendships as well.
In The Romance of a Shop one of the main relationships established and explored beyond the sisterly bond is that between the sisters themselves and Frank Jermyn. As critics Bird and Cameron point out “freed from the restrictions of the family circle, women are able to form relationships based on affinity rather than family” (80). The first person the sisters gain affinity with as the first of their new community of artists is Frank. The scandal of this relationship is acknowledged by Gertrude when the narrator states “yet even her own unconventional sense of fitness was a little shocked at seeing her sister walk out of the house with an unknown young man” (97). Despite the initial scandal of the friendship the relationship continues to grow so that “there is nothing like the salt of healthy objective interests for keeping the moral nature sound. Before the sense of mutual honestly, the little barrier which both sides had thought fit in the first interest to rise, fell silently between the young people never again to be lifted up” (99). These New young people become bound by their genuine interest and like of each other so that regardless of the Old propriety they become friends. Though the sisters are all fond of Frank, and the friendship between him and them is genuine the platonic nature of the relationship between him and all four sisters can not be allowed to last.
Frank is in love with Lucy though he is not the only one as life-long and true friend to the Lorimer sisters Fred Devonshire is also in love with her. Though the friendship with Fred survives the sisters change in class and status it does not survive heteroerotic desire. When Fred finally proposes to Lucy he is rejected, and his relationship with the sisters afterward is awkward and distant. Gertrude reflects after Lucy’s rejects Fred, feeling that her sister rejected him at least in part because of her feelings for Frank Jermyn, and that “one thing was clear enough; the old pleasant relationship between themselves and Frank was at an end; if renewed at all on a different basis. A disturbing element, an element of self-consciousness had crept into it, the delicate charm, the first bloom of simplicity, had departed for ever” (144). In this quote the “barriers” that had fallen away through “objective interest” earlier in the novel are being raised up again because of heteroerotic desire. Frank’s presence in the Lorimer sisters lives does not vanish completely like Fred’s, but that is only because he and Lucy get married, and therefore affirm their hetererotic desire. The sisters friendship with Fred is not the only one damaged by this heteroerotic desire. Constance Devonshire, who is in love with Frank Jermyn is brought to agony by her unrequited love for him. Conny laments to Gertrude “How can I bear my life? How can I bear it?” about her unrequited feelings and stops showing up to the Lorimer sisters womanly haven because it hurts her to be around them (132). Again it is not class, a separation which Conny had no problem barring, but heteroerotic desire that splits these platonic friendships and damages these relationships.
Heterotic desire breaks down friendships in Allen’s novel as well. The plot turns on the fact that Herminia decides to engage in a free love–sexual–relationship with Alan without marrying him. Herminia refers to Alan throughout the novel as her “friend” and the narrator describes that “to her the friendship she proposed with Alan Merrick was no social revolution, it was but the due fulfillment of her natural functions” (emphasis added 87). The use of the word friendship by Allen is interesting, especially when considering the friendships being explored in The Romance of a Shop. Gertrude talks of relationships formed of “picked individuals” and the community of artists the Lorimers form are relationships of equaliity not hierarchy and class. Considering Herminia’s principles hold marriage as the ultimate form of slavery for women the framing of her relationship with Alan as one of equal friendship is significant. The relationship between the two leads to a trip to Italy for Herminia’s confinement where Alan is exposed to typhoid and dies. If Herminia had not been pregnant this exposure would never have happened. It was indisputably the sexual nature of their “friendship” that leads to the circumstances of Alan’s death. Years after his death the narrator tells the story of Herminia being asked to marry again. The narrator states that “with Harvey Kynaston it was different. She admired him as a thinker; she liked him as a man; and she felt from the first moment that no friend, since Alan died, had stirred her pulse so deeply as he did” (135). For a second time a friendship of Herminia’s is interrupted by heteroerotic desire. The desire for Kynaston is deliberately compared to Alan, and Kynaston is given the title “friend” like Alan had. Though the platonic friendship is interrupted Herminia ultimately gets to keep her friendship with Kynaston when they both agree to forgo a sexual relationship and remain friends as they were. As a final example of this Herminia commits suicide so that her daughter can marry the man she wants to. The mother/daughter relationship is permanently severed by the hands of death because of the heteroerotic desire between Dolly and her fiance.
Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop is a novel that demonstrates the importance and freedom that can be given to women in forming their own community. It is a novel that explores relationships outside of family and class for relationships of “picked individuals.” Despite this progress the novel falls short of demonstrating lasting friendship between men and women. Gender, and the hetererotic desire that comes with it interrupts and destroys friendships in the novel that other forces had been unable to touch. Similarly Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did explores the female bond of the mother daughter relationship, and the possibilities of communities built on mutual interest as opposed to class. Ultimately relationships and lives are destroyed in the novel when they are interrupted by heteroerotic desire. The depiction of destructive desire in these novels reflects unease, and a lack of faith in the Victorian period for sustainable platonic friendships between men and women.
Works Cited
Allen, Grant. The Woman Who Did. Edited by Nicholas Ruddick, Broadview, 2004.
Cameron, Brooke. “Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did: Spencerian Individualism and Teaching New Women to Be Mothers.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 51, no. 3, Aug. 2008, pp. 281–301. Project MUSE, doi:10.2487/elt.51.3(2008)0025.
Cameron, S. Brooke, and Danielle Bird. “Sisterly Bonds and Rewriting Urban Gendered Spheres in Amy Levy’s ‘The Romance of a Shop.’” Victorian Review, vol. 40, no. 1, 2014, pp. 77–96. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24497039
Levy, Amy. The Romance of a Shop. Edited by Susan David Bernstein, Broadview, 2006.
Nord, Deborah Epstein. “‘Neither Pairs nor Odd’: Female Community in Late Nineteenth-Century London.” Signs, vol. 15, no. 4, 1990, pp. 733–54. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174640
Warne, Vanessa, and Colette Colligan. “The Man Who Wrote a New Woman Novel: Grant Allen’s ‘The Woman Who Did’ and the Gendering of New Woman Authorship.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005, pp. 21–46. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25058694