NOSTALGIA FOR SUBPLOT

Persuasion, Villette and Great Expectations allow us to see domesticity as a narrative discourse that uses a professionally charged vocabulary that, in referring, for example, to the British navy or to the Protestant ministry, conveys a sense of institutional affiliation. Domesticity's professionally charged vocabulary makes the nonpersonal sociability characteristic of home life look like work that is meaningful because it is done in service to some collective body, a household of often biologically unrelated others. In conveying a sense of institutionality, these novels generate what I would call “home effects,” formal devices that take shape in a passage's stylistics or in a relationship between plotted episodes.

Certainly, the communal imperative represented in this fiction often correlated to the realities many Victorian women faced: whether they married and constructed a career around a labor-intensive household, or stayed single and, with greater difficulty, chiseled a career with the tools provided by a burgeoning number of single-sex institutions, Victorian women seem to have invariably relied more consciously on a collective body in the shaping of a personally fulfilling career. This is why Martha Vicinus, in a history concerned with recreating what constituted a middle-class Victorian woman's relationship to work, focuses on a host of developing residential institutions designed for women: Anglican and Nonconformist sisterhoods and deaconesses societies, hospitals and nursing schools, boarding-schools and deaconesses societies, hospitals and nursing schools, boarding-schools and women's colleges (especially Oxford's Royal Holloway College and Cambridge's Westfield College) and settlement houses.