| Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1861), Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1865--6), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871--2) trouble the premises of Victorian domestic ideology and the discursive artifacts that represent that ideology, Victorian advice manuals and etiquette guides. Judith Butler's notion of performativity helps to identify how these novels resist the contradictory foundations of domestic ideology through the enactment of how domesticity can be dangerous to women. In turn, the novels demonstrate ways that performative femininity can challenge the conservative norms it enacts.;Victorian advice and conduct guides codified the ideology of "separate spheres," emphasizing women's selfless domestic service to family and therefore indirectly to society. Paradoxically, they both empowered women by showing how to serve England productively within the home and simultaneously curtailed the range of women's opportunities. Wood, Oliphant, and Eliot challenge such normative advice by echoing, mimicking and enacting the contradictory standards of womanly behavior in their novels. The heroines of East Lynne, Miss Marjoribanks and Middlemarch embody domestic subject positions of daughter, wife, and mistress of the house, and yet, despite the pressure of domestic ideals in each novel, each protagonist is drawn to challenge the ideal of selflessness while performing within those subject positions. These texts thus resist the distinction between the domestic and the political by depicting performative demonstrations of womanly conduct in nontraditional ways. |
