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Chartism, Melodrama and The Rights of Woman
From: Science Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
Sally Ledger |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Modern feminists have regarded with some sceptism the commitments of the early nineteenth-century Chartist movement to the rights of woman. Additionally, they have considered its use of melodramatic language a threat to any potential feminist agenda, as this mode reinforces domesticity and helplessness as the inevitable determinants of the female condition. Sally Ledger of Birkbeck College, London, speaking at "Locating the Victorians" contests these assertions by arguing that the language of melodrama, with its roots in the French revolution, is indeed radical, and its use during the period had serious feminist underpinnings, however imperfect. |
 ught women to interfere in the political affairs of the country? [...] I do most distinctly and unequivocally say - YES! And for the following reasons:
First: Because she has a natural right.
Second: Because she has a civil right.
Third: Because she has a political right. [...]
[...] I ask those who tyrannically withhold from woman her political rights, on what assumption do they do so? I challenge them to sustain their opinions. I invite them to discussion, and will appear to maintain my proud position as the vindicator of the rights of woman against any one who may be so lost to a sense of shame as to oppose helpless woman [my emphases] in pursuit of her just rights." (R.J. Richardson, 'The Rights of Woman', in D. Thompson (ed.), The Early Chartists (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1071), pp. 115-16.) |
So wrote Reginald J. Richardson, Chartist, whilst a de facto political prisoner in Lancaster Castle in 1840. |
Two quite distinct political and cultural vocabularies can be traced in Richardson's pamphlet. The first is the Liberal Reformist vocabulary of individual rights, a vocabulary popularly derived from Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century, and which became the driving rhetorical force in the campaigns in support of the 1832 Reform Bill. The language of individual civil and political rights was one that the early Chartists would come to share with mainstream nineteenth -century feminists. The first feminist appropriation of the vocabulary of individual rights was of course Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which Richardson repeatedly refers to in his pamphlet: the title of Richardson's tract is The Rights of Woman, and in the extract above he characterises himself as 'the vindicator of the rights of woman'. The Chartist press frequently turned its attention to the twin questions of woman's rights and woman's wrongs, and did quite a lot to keep Wollstonecraft's feminist tract in print. |
Entangled with, but ultimately quite distinct from, the language of individual rights in Richardson's pamphlet is a melodramatic vocabulary of domestic pain and distress, which equally influenced and was given expression by the Chartist press. In the extract above the melodramatic rhetoric favoured by the Chartists can be tracked in Richardson's pitying cry on behalf of helpless woman. And, whilst in the early part of his pamphlet Richardson seems to be explicitly supportive of the enfranchisement of women, further on he advocates that women should wherever possible 'return to [their] domestic circles and cultivate [their] finer feelings for the benefit of their offspring.' (Quoted by Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1995), p. 230.) Ultimately, he only supports the franchise for single and widowed women, with married women to be represented by their husbands. Only the Owenite socialists, in fact, consistently supported female suffrage. |
The fallibility of the Chartists' stance on the Enfranchisement of Women was not lost on first-wave feminists such as Harriet Taylor Mill who, in an 1851 essay for the Westminster Review complained bitterly that: |
"The Chartist who denies the suffrage to women is a Chartist only because he is not a lord; he is one of those levellers who would level down only to his own level." (Harriet Taylor Mill, 'Enfranchisement of Women', Westminster Review 55 (1851), pp. 289-311.) |
A real commitment to the rights of woman?
Modern feminist historians have generally followed Taylor Mill in regarding the Chartist commitment to the rights of woman with some degree of scepticism. In one of the more recent studies, Anna Clark has argued interestingly that the Chartists' favouring of domestic melodrama as a rhetorical mode had its roots in a desire to refute Malthusian claims that working people were immoral and feckless, undeserving of either family life or of political rights. In their desire for respectability, according to Clark, Chartists became locked into a restrictive language of domesticity that was supported by the conventions of domestic melodrama in which 'helpless woman', threatened from without by an upper class villain, is ultimately rescued and settled into blissful artisan domesticity by virtuous Chartist manhood. In the most recent account of women and Chartism Helen Rogers has interestingly tracked the ways in which female Chartists themselves often framed their experience within the generic conventions of melodrama, drawing on the emotive appeal of the suffering of the poor; just as anti-poor law campaigners had done before them. |
There is a general critical-historical tendency to regard the Chartist deployment of a melodramatic vocabulary as its political Achilles Heel. But to regret the infiltration of melodrama into Chartist discourse is to misjudge the political force and significance of the melodramatic mode. One might argue, for example, that Reginald Richardson's pamphlet on The Rights of Woman, admirable though it be in terms of its apparent inclusion of women in its Liberal reformist language of individual rights, is ultimately compromised by its entanglement with a melodramatic rhetoric of domestic suffering which places woman firmly in the home, protected by her soon-to-be enfranchised man. The problem with this, though, is that it valorises what was actually, in the economically distressed 1830s and 40s, quite a limited political language. For whilst the campaign for individual political rights was radical before 1832, by the late 1830s it was in competition with a political rhetoric of class conflict that emphasised economic inequalities as much as political wrongs. |
And it is here that melodrama--and my defence of it--enters the fray, for melodrama, its language and its conventions, was forged by the French Revolution. |
Characteristic of the genre is Sylvain Maréchal's Final Judgment of the Kings, first performed to great acclaim at Paris in October 1793, two days after the execution of Marie Antoinette. The play's melodramatic denouement involves the swallowing up of a whole crowd of European monarchs by a volcano. |
Melodramatic writing of the nineteenth century was strongly associated with a culture of resistance, with political activism, and with the poor. In the 1830s and 1840s the legislature coded melodrama as a problematic, disruptive genre: the British government was sufficiently troubled by the ascendancy of melodrama in English culture to address it as an issue of public concern. The House of Commons 1832 Select Committee on Dramatic Literature centrally addressed the "decline of the drama" as an urgent issue, hauling in witnesses such as Douglas Jerrold to help them identify the precise nature of the melodramatic beast. As late as 1919 melodrama was still accused of "employ[ing] the methods of the mob orator." (William Dye, A Study of Melodrama in England From 1800 to 1840 (State College, PA: Nittany Printing, 1919), p. 12.) |
Late twentieth-century critics, however, were less convinced of melodrama's status as a politically disruptive genre. While I agree with Elaine Hadley's claim that melodrama is a politically adaptable, rather than a politically inflected genre, I reject her account of anti-Poor Law melodrama of the 1830s and 1840s as a reactionary mode, one too imbricated with a politics of deference to be a radical cultural force. Although early Victorian melodrama could well be regarded at the level of plot as a conservative genre (individuals are miraculously rescued from misfortune without any political or structural changes taking place in society), it remained strongly coded--and instantaneously recognizable--as a politically disruptive force. The circulation of melodrama within the lower, oppressed echelons of society meant that it had a built-in "radical" cachet. And inasmuch as that it consistently urged the need for radical change in the lives of the powerless and the oppressed, early Victorian melodrama maintained a politically radical profile. |
But even if one is persuaded that nineteenth century melodrama was a politically subversive cultural force in class terms, where does that leave it in relation to the rights and wrongs of woman? Judith Walkowitz has commented that one of the benefits of melodrama for a feminist perspective is that in the nineteenth century it inserted gender into the discussion of class politics. Both Martha Vicinus and Ann Kaplan have remarked that melodrama particularly appealed to female audiences, writers and performers precisely because it fore grounded issues of gender and power, and highlighted the role of the heroine, however passive and suffering she may be. In order briefly to illustrate both the political power and the pitfalls of melodrama as a political form in both class and gendered terms, I want to gesture towards one of the most striking melodramatic productions of the Chartist press. |
The radical code of melodrama
Woman's Wrongs, A Novel. In Four Parts, by Ernest Jones, one of Chartism's late, great leaders, is self-consciously written within an established proto-feminist tradition. The title of Jones's novel pays homage to Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. A Fragment (1798), while also echoing Charlotte Tonna's elaboration of The Wrongs of Woman in 1843-44. Jones clearly took an interest in the "Woman Question": later in his career he was invited to women's suffrage meetings in Manchester and availed himself of a copy of the prospectus of the Manchester Ladies' College in 1868. In his introduction to Woman's Wrongs, Jones establishes a domestic setting and describes the misery inflicted upon 'the household hearth' by 'the vile mechanism' of an unrepresentative political system. The particular object of his indignation is 'woman': |
'What gross injustice! For society counts woman as nothing in its institutions, and yet makes her bear the greatest share of sufferings inflicted by a system in which she has no voice!' (Ernest Jones, 'Introduction' to Woman's Wrongs, in Notes to the People, vol. 2 (1852), p. 515.) |
Ostensibly a political critique (the emphasis in his introduction is on woman having no political voice) the melodramatic narratives of the stories in Woman's Wrongs actually identify capitalist society, rather than an unrepresentative parliament, as the source of suffering and deprivation; and the main villains are the male economic actors in that society. In the first of the stories in Woman's Wrongs, "The Working Man's Wife," the main female protagonist and her daughters are archetypal figures from melodrama; Margaret Haspen, whose husband is unemployed, is a helpless, hapless, economically dependent figure. Her older daughter is seduced by her father's ex-employer, the evil industrialist, Barrowson, and turns to prostitution. The main contours of the story are as follows: John Haspen, a factory hand, is thrown out of work; his wife gives birth in utter penury. Consumed by rage and a sense of injustice, Haspen eventually murders his ex-employer. His wife attempts to conceal evidence of the murder, is discovered in this and hung for her part as an accomplice to the murder. Jones resolutely refutes the typically ameliorative characteristics of melodrama: there is no stroke of good fortune to rescue the Haspens, and even the younger of the two daughters, it seems, will be forced into prostitution at the story's close. |
The main villain of the piece is not the aristocratic seducer whom one finds in other Chartist tales, such as Thomas Frost's The Secret, or Reynolds's Mysteries of London, but is one Barrowson, a workingman turned industrialist, rather in the style of Dickens's Josiah Bounderby. In this regard, Jones's political melodrama is thoroughly modernized, apprehending the rising bourgeoisie, rather than the aristocratic landowners, as the bearers of social and economic power in mid-Victorian industrial society. Within the parameters of the melodramatic narrative, Jones insists on a brutal realism, emphasizing the domestic squalor endured by the working classes. There is none of the domestic felicity found among the poor in many of Dickens's novels (the Toodles in Nicholas Nickleby, the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol, the Tetterbys in The Haunted Man). |
Jones, then, as a writer of radical melodrama, manipulates and reformulates its codes so that his fictions reveal the deprivation that the more affirmative, and more conventional, political melodramas tended to efface. I ought to acknowledge, I think, that Jones was one of the most sophisticated writers of Chartist melodramas, highly alert to its political ramifications, and often subverting even as he performed its conventions. He appears, though, to succumb to the gender stereotypes of nineteenth century melodrama in his configuration of Margaret Haspen as a passively suffering figure, her only utterance as she is about to be hung being the cry of the pitying mother for her child. |
Jones appears happy to bless Margaret with conventional angelic maternal status, but her baldly described dangling corpse acts as a sharp corrective to the saccharine affects of the previous sequence. Margaret has no agency, but then her husband, the brutalized John Haspen, has little more. Thrown out of work his only recourse is crime, and he dies in police custody. |
Again and again in Woman's Wrongs, Jones presents conventional melodramatic and sensational tableaux only to undermine them. In 'The Young Milliner', Anna, the seamstress at the center of the narrative, falls in love with a young medical student, and goes to live with him. Jones complicates the usual seduction trope by making it clear that in different social circumstances this is a cross-class relationship between a man and a woman that need not have turned out to be the exploitative one that it does in fact become. At the very least, the medical student, Charles Trelawney, is a far cry from the villainous aristocratic seducers of conventional melodrama. Threatened by friends and family to social ostracism and financial penury, he does eventually abandon Anna, who then goes the way of many a seduced seamstress in nineteenth -century fiction: she gives birth to a sickly child, and they both die. Dying in hospital, Anna's body is appropriated by the authorities for scientific purposes. When young Trelawney, the medical student, attends an anatomy lecture at London University, the body on the slab is revealed as Anna's: he screams and faints with shock. The Burke and Hare-like close resonates interestingly with the many other critical references in radical literature to the 1832 Anatomy Act, the recurrent fear being expressed that the dead bodies of workhouse victims would be sold for medical dissection. While dead paupers were not automatically handed over to the medical authorities for dissection, the Act did allow workhouses to sell unclaimed bodies to the medical schools. In other words, while the final tableau of Jones's tale is sensationalist, it none the less draws on very real working-class fears that even their bodies were not their own property. More important in terms of the narrative contours of the tale is the fact that the final violation of Anna's body on the dissection slab properly completes a process of objectification in a narrative in which the female protagonist begins as a desiring subject--she is not seduced by Charles Trelawney, but has a relationship with him--and ends as a prostituted commodity. It is only when Trelawney is forced to "see" (anew) Anna's violated body--now on the dissecting slab--that he is able to register his own role in that process. |
Chartist literature and melodrama made a considerable contribution to the debates that would crystallize in the public consciousness as 'The Woman Question' as the mid-century approached. If the Chartists did not have a consistent or fully worked-through political line on woman's individual political and civil rights and on woman's role in the domestic sphere, then they were far from unique in this. They were, in addressing the 'Woman Question', confronting a thoroughly modern concern which is still, after all, being negotiated in the twenty-first century. |
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