from Victorian Studies Volume 41, Number 2''Marks of Race'': Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing
Deborah Epstein Nord
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If English literature of the nineteenth century contains within it a constant, ubiquitous marker of otherness, of non-Englishness or foreignness, it is the gypsy. A figure of literary origins and anthropological interest, the gypsy could signify social marginality, nomadism, alienation, and lawlessness. Unlike the colonial subject, who remained a remote and wholly foreign figure, or the Jew, who, though outsider, functioned within English society, the gypsy hovered on the outskirts of the English world, unassimilable, a domestic and visible but socially peripheral character. Indeed, much of the literary and folkloric power of the gypsy was derived from the notion that, through error or kidnapping (a crime with which gypsies were commonly thought to be associated), an English child might end up in the gypsy world or a gypsy child in the English.1 The two realms were imagined as contiguous but separate, making possible dramas of mistaken and transformed identity. In Walter Scott's Guy Mannering (1815), gypsies help to kidnap and then to rescue from obscurity a Scottish laird's son; in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), in a reversal of Scott's plot, a gypsy princess is raised by Spanish Christians and then reclaimed by her people (Semmel 104-06). Even Matthew Arnold's ''Scholar-Gipsy'' (1853) depends upon the notion that an Oxford student could disappear and be absorbed into ''that wild brotherhood'' (line 38) to be glimpsed only occasionally by passersby.
In nineteenth-century lore, gypsies were considered not merely a distinct group with specific social practices and means of subsistence but a separate race. Many who romanticized gypsies and many who regarded them as pariahs shared the belief that the Romany ''race,'' however mixed with other races it might have become, was a breed apart, possessed of ''black blood,'' swarthy complexion, and curling dark hair (Mayall 75). The gypsy kidnapping or switching of babies served as a literary trope for representing--and indeed accounting for--anomalous types within a homogeneous and insular middle-class English world. A writer for the Illustrated London News in 1856 described the appeal of a wayside gypsy camp as ''racy in [its] savour of wood smoke and open air, . . . suggesting of escape from the mill-horse round of daily life.'' By contrast, ordinary English life seemed ''formal, hedge-clipped, much-inclosed, well-farmed, law-respecting'' (qtd. in Mayall 72). The gypsy character could figure in a physiological and ostensibly racial form the human version of this contrast in landscape: into the midst of English reserve, decorousness, and control, the gypsy--or suspected gypsy--could inject impetuousness, brooding, and passion. To use the language of the Illustrated London News writer, gypsydom could function imaginatively as an ''escape'' from English conventionality at the borders of English society itself.
In a cluster of works written by women in the middle decades of the nineteenth century--Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) and The Spanish Gypsy (1868)--gypsy figures mark not only cultural difference but a deep sense of unconventional, indeed aberrant, femininity. The strictures of conventional femininity, experienced by these women writers as perhaps more limiting and stifling than a generic ''hedge-clipped'' Englishness, impressed upon them their own anomalousness and their deviance from acceptable modes of feminine thought, behavior, and appearance. They felt this difference, I want to suggest, not just in a spiritual or intellectual but in a physical sense, and they found in the gypsy an image that would express in a self-consciously literary way their feelings of an almost racial separateness. For George Eliot this was most clearly the case, for Emily and particularly Charlotte Brontë more ambiguously so. But all associated the gypsy figure with an unconventional femininity located in blood and bone, and with a bodily and temperamental difference figured as the result of accident or heredity.
When George Eliot was planning her narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy, she noted the image that had inspired its plot and helped to explain her thinking about the relationship between tragedy and the origins of individual destiny. In Venice, viewing a painting of the Annunciation attributed to Titian, she thought of the Virgin as a figure of tragedy, as a woman precluded from sharing in ''the ordinary lot of womanhood'' because it is ''suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to fulfill a great destiny'' (Cross 3: 32). Mary, like Eliot's gypsy princess Fedalma, cannot choose her own fate but is herself a chosen one, ''not by any momentary arbitrariness, but as a result of foregoing hereditary conditions'' (3: 32). In order to tell a tale about the power of biological inheritance to overcome the individual will, Eliot wrote that she ''required the opposition of race'' (3: 32). Although the next Eliot protagonist to be shaped by ''race''--Daniel Deronda--was male, at this point she imagines the stigmas of heredity through the example of femininity:
Now, what is the fact about our individual lots? A woman, say, finds herself on earth with an inherited organisation [by this Eliot appears to mean a physiological ''organisation'']: she may be lame, she may inherit a disease, or what is tantamount to a disease: she may be a negress, or have other marks of race repulsive to the community where she is born, etc, etc. (Cross 3: 35)While late-twentieth century readers of this extraordinary statement might be inclined to focus on Eliot's equation of disease with the fact of being a ''negress,'' I want for the moment to focus on the degree to which she equates unconventional--indeed heroic--femininity with physical deformity and racial otherness. The woman who is different, chosen, destined for a fate beyond ''the ordinary lot of womanhood'' (3: 32), inherits this destiny as she would a bodily stigma. She must resign herself to what Eliot wants to call the ''general'' and the ''inevitable,'' which in the case of woman amounts paradoxically to a physical fact--whether pregnancy, lameness, or race (Cross 3: 33, 35).
The gypsy motifs and figures of Eliot and the Brontës partake of a larger novelistic tradition of foundling or bastard plots, in which the hero of indeterminate or questionable origins discovers himself to be the (usually illegitimate) child of a well-born or aristocratic parent. In these plots the fantasy of what Sigmund Freud called the ''family romance'' is made real, actualized. According to Freud's schema the male child's feelings of resentment or sexual rivalry lead him to imagine that he is adopted, in reality the offspring of parents of higher social standing, whose superiority elevates the child's image of himself and simultaneously diminishes the ''adoptive'' parents, primarily the father (Freud 237-41). In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction the child's fantasy becomes the novelist's plot: Tom Jones discovers that his mother is not a maid but the sister of his prosperous and kindly surrogate father, Squire Allworthy; Oliver Twist, though born and raised in a workhouse, learns that his father has willed him a fortune and that his mother is of genteel birth. The child-stealing stories associated in folklore and fiction with the gypsies (invented, perhaps, to explain the existence of fair-haired, blue-eyed gypsy children) lend themselves to the imaginary plot of family romance and the literary plot of the foundling (Mayall 87). Scott's Guy Mannering follows this paradigm: the kidnapped child is a laird's son, and his return from the gypsies to his true family also returns him to his inheritance.
In the texts I examine here, however, two significant variations on the family romance inform these women writers' gypsy plots and bear investigation. To begin with, as other critics have observed, the fantasy of the family romance as Freud describes it belongs to the male child and to his oedipal struggles (Hirsch 162-85). ''Here the influence of sex is already in evidence,'' Freud writes, ''for a boy is far more inclined to feel hostile impulses towards his father than towards his mother and has a far more intense desire to get free from him than from her. In this respect the imagination of girls is apt to show itself much weaker'' (238). Freud seems to be suggesting that there is, for the most part, no analogous fantasy for female children and, in any case, he does not suggest what form it might take. We need to ask, then, how the female imagination translates the girl's experience of oedipal conflict into fictional structures and how the female version of family romance differs from the male.
The second variation involves the fantasy of social aggrandizement and aspiration. If we take Freud's paradigm and the novelistic tradition as exemplified by Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens as our basis for understanding family romance, we also have to ask what the fantasy of lowly or stigmatized birth (to go back to George Eliot) might mean in the woman writer's narrative. As Eliot's meditation on The Spanish Gypsy suggests, a stigmatized birth not only destines the woman for a higher calling, it frees her from the cultural and literary requirements of the marriage plot. To imagine oneself a gypsy is to escape, in some sense, from conventional femininity; it is also to claim kinship with those who mirror and explain one's anomalousness. The gypsy's habitual swarthiness becomes a marker not simply of foreignness, of non-Englishness, but of heterodox femininity as well. In the fantasy of social superiority, the male child takes revenge on the father in imagination. In the fantasy of social stigmatization, perhaps, the girl child rebels against--or erases--the mother as the model and reproducer of femininity and imagines a bond with an alien and exotic people that enables her to reinvent feminine identity.
* * * When, at the urging of George Henry Lewes, Charlotte Brontë finally read a novel by Jane Austen, she found it difficult to understand what he saw in this merely ''shrewd and observant'' novelist (Symington and Wise 2: 180). Brontë, comparing Austen to the expansive, extravagant, but truly ''sagacious'' George Sand, represented Austen's fiction in terms of landscape: ''a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no . . . open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck'' (2: 179). Brontë accuses Austen of creating an excessively ordered and domesticated world into which the unexpected and untamed might never intrude. It could be argued, I think, that Austen's own acute awareness of the cultural, emotional, and geographical limits within which she staged her fiction is marked comically in Emma (1816) when Harriet Smith encounters a group of gypsies on the outskirts of Highbury. I begin with Austen, then, by way of introduction. She uses the gypsy scene in Emma to suggest the cultural borders not only of provincial community but of femininity as well.
Harriet, the fair, blue-eyed ingenue Emma has chosen as a suitable lover for Frank Churchill, returns from her ordeal leaning on Churchill's arm, looking pale and shaken, and faints. Her subsequent account of meeting with a party of ''clamorous'' gypsies (in reality a group of children) while walking with a friend on the Richmond Road soon circulates throughout the town as a drama of terror to be savored and retold. For Emma, of course, this appears as a drama of romance and chivalry: ''[A] fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. . . . How much more must an imaginist like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight! . . . Nothing of the sort had ever occurred before to any young ladies in the place, within her memory; no rencontre, no alarm of the kind'' (331). Emma's misreading of the event is consistent with her misperception of romantic attachments throughout the novel and, in this case, she fails to understand that Frank Churchill was in fact fortunately placed to rescue Harriet because he had just come from visiting Jane Fairfax, the woman he secretly loves.
Austen seems to be commenting on the insularity of Emma's world, a world in which stories of danger and romance result from the mildest contact with figures whose meanings themselves derive from story and myth. Emma is not, of course, alone in inventing ''imaginist'' readings of Harriet's brush with thievery and worse. The community of Highbury, shuddering with a frisson of ''happiness'' in contemplating the ''frightful news,'' is both geographically and imaginatively defined by the incident and its response to it (332).2 But the episode also touches obliquely on the triangle of Harriet, Frank, and Jane because of the gypsy's literary associations with the plot of murky origins and the rivalry between fair and dark heroines.
Harriet's parentage itself is uncertain; and Jane Fairfax's history of unfortunate birth, orphanhood, and penury calls her future into question as it casts a shadow over her past (Johnson 134). In the drama of Emma's mind Jane appears as the dark-browed, artistic, taciturn, and mysterious orphan marked for celibacy, while Harriet qualifies for the blond, blue-eyed heroine destined to be the wife of a man of fortune and position. Jane Fairfax's pairing with Harriet recalls in a muted version the juxtaposition of dark and light heroines that Madame de Staël had famously launched with Corinne, published just nine years before Emma. (It was a juxtaposition that also animated the fictions of Walter Scott and, as we shall see, was later so important to Eliot's Maggie Tulliver.3) Claudia Johnson has remarked that Jane Fairfax's story would fit well in the gallery of ''wrongs of woman'' in Mary Wollstonecraft's 1798 Maria (134). But Jane Fairfax can also be imagined as a sketch for a Victorian heroine (a Jane Eyre perhaps), the subject of her own plot of economic dependence and clandestine romance rather than a peripheral actor in another heroine's psychic drama. By juxtaposing Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax, and by connecting their imagined rivalry for Frank Churchill with the episode of the gypsies, Austen's fiction hints at the dramas of birth, race, sexual passion, and anomalous femininity that would take center stage in later women's fiction.4
* * * In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the gypsy figure is a man. Edward Rochester masquerades as an old gypsy woman in order to interrogate Jane about her feelings for him; and Heathcliff enters Wuthering Heights as a nameless, parentless street urchin who, in Nelly Dean's account, is a ''gipsy brat,'' ''as dark almost as . . . the devil'' (77). The temporary and ambiguous gypsy identities of these male characters work in multiple ways in these texts, but here I want to focus on how they help to establish the heroine's exoticism and unorthodox femininity. By asserting the heroine's profound kinship with--and not merely her love for--a man of mysterious origin or untamed passion, the narratives loosen her own social and familial ties and provide her with an identity that breaks with convention, and especially with conventions of femininity.
When Rochester dresses as a gypsy fortune-teller and enters a house filled with guests, including his brother-in-law Mr. Mason, newly-arrived from Jamaica, and his presumed fiancée Blanche Ingram, his disguise disturbs hierarchies of sex, race, and rank. But, unlike the inhabitants of Highbury who dread contact with the gypsies nearby, the Thornfield party has already contemplated an outing to Hay Common to visit the gypsy camp there and, in their ignorance of the old lady's true identity, regard her visit as a lark. Her knowledge of their secrets proves discomforting, of course, and it is only Jane who withstands the gypsy's scrutiny and can uncover the masquerade (Gilbert and Gubar 353).
During their interview, the gypsy woman's ''black and brown'' face marks her connection to Rochester, to whom the gypsy refers as Blanche's ''blackaviced [dark-complexioned] suitor'' (176). But Jane also associates the gypsy with Grace Poole, ''that living enigma, that mystery of mysteries,'' whose ostensibly obscure identity links her to the gypsy's legendary indeterminate origins and makes Jane suspect that Poole holds the secret to the masquerade. In as much as Grace Poole is, from Jane's point of view at this stage of the narrative, inseparable from the woman who is Bertha Rochester, the fortune-teller is also linked with Bertha. Bertha, as Jane will discover when Rochester's wife enters her room and tears her wedding veil, is herself ''blackaviced,'' dark-haired and dark-browed, a large and powerfully built woman, who reminds Jane of a vampire (247-48). Ugly, masculine in form, and almost hideously swarthy (''purple,'' Jane calls Bertha), the gypsy and Bertha resemble one another, and both resemble Rochester himself.
It is something of a paradox, then, that in the end it is the gypsy's kinship to herself that impresses Jane and leads her to recognize Rochester beneath the disguise. Toward the end of their encounter the gypsy's voice changes, and Jane reacts in this way: ''Where was I? Did I wake or sleep? Had I been dreaming? Did I dream still? The old woman's voice had changed: her accent, her gesture, and all were familiar to me as my own face in a glass--as the speech of my own tongue'' (emphasis added, 177). And again, a few lines later, Jane uses an equally strange locution to describe the woman's hand: ''It was no more the withered limb of eld than my own.'' Jane might be saying that Rochester's face and speech are as familiar to her as her own (which, in itself, makes no real sense), or she might be suggesting that looking at the gypsy is like looking in the mirror (which, on a literal level, makes even less). Similarly, she might be calling attention to the fact that the gypsy's hands are those of a young person, like hers, or asserting that her hands and the gypsies'--Rochester's--look alike. The ambiguous and strange words seem to suggest that Jane recognizes Rochester because he resembles her, and not simply because he is familiar. Rochester will take up this theme later on during his proposal to Jane by claiming her as his ''equal'' but also as his ''likeness'' (223). As many have noted before, theirs is a bond of kinship, not only of love.
Finally, the gypsy scene also signals Jane's resemblance to Bertha. If the old woman and the monstrous wife are linked, then so, too, are the governess and her future husband's double, his monstrous wife. Furthermore, it is Bertha's ''face in a glass'' Jane will see on the night Bertha rends the veil: ''I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass'' (249). The free-floating identity of the gypsy and her place in the cluster of mysterious and outsized characters in the narrative make her a flamboyant but potent marker of what is alien in the text and, ultimately, in Jane.
Jane is kin to the foreign Bertha, as critics beginning with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have told us, and kin as well to Rochester, the would-be bigamist with a checkered past, far more than she is kin to her aunt, her Reed cousins, and even her Rivers cousins. In her fascinating reading of Jane Eyre as a heroine's family romance, Marianne Hirsch describes the chastened Edward Rochester at the end of the novel as the nurturing ''male mother,'' to whom Jane can hand over her infant so that she can take up her writing (183). According to Hirsch, Jane's motherlessness, her bond with a paternal (or maternal) man, and her at least partial escape from the liabilities of maternity qualify her as a paradigmatic female version of Freud's essentially masculine model. I would add to this that the child's powerful desire to recast its own parentage in Freud's scheme is expressed in this text as a longing for otherness, foreignness, and escape from femininity, all signified by the figure of the gypsy woman. To be related to this gypsy, to Bertha, and to Rochester is to be released, if only partially and by association, from the strictures of female destiny and the female plot.
* * * When the young Heathcliff confesses to Nelly Dean that he wishes for light hair and fair skin, for Edgar Linton's ''great blue eyes, and even forehead,'' so that Cathy will continue to love him, Nelly invents a story of kidnapping and noble birth--a family romance--to comfort him. Assuring him that he will be ''bonny'' someday if he has a good heart, she also speculates that he might be ''a prince in disguise'': ''Who knows,'' she muses, ''but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week's income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England?'' (98).5 Nelly attempts to reconcile Heathcliff to his swarthiness by imagining that he might be the offspring of foreign--not English--royalty, inhabitants of a land where it might be possible to be both dark and rich. Her story proves more revealing about Heathcliff's future than about his past for, as we know, he does ultimately become rich enough to buy both the Heights and the Grange. Never, however, does he gain the respectability or the veneer of gentility of a foreign prince. Indeed, I want to suggest that the family romance of this novel works in a direction diametrically opposite to that of Nelly's tale: it is, after all, the ''gipsy'' street urchin Heathcliff who provides the two central families of the novel with a lineage that invigorates them and lifts them out of commonness.
The ''dirty, ragged, black-haired child'' (77) that Mr. Earnshaw brings back from the streets of Liverpool functions in Wuthering Heights as a mutant gene that, once let loose in the line of Earnshaws and Lintons who follow him, changes everything. The language of light and dark the novel deploys to distinguish between physical and temperamental types is not just metaphorical but also, apparently, biological or racial. The narrative insistently delineates in striking detail the characters' physical traits and the ancestors from whom they are inherited. The reader is encouraged to construct a family tree of light and dark hair, skin, and eyes. As we know, however, qualities of light and dark and affinities between characters in this novel are not strictly determined by biological inheritance. The most striking example of this is, of course, Hareton Earnshaw's resemblance to Heathcliff, to whom he is not related. Other characters resemble not parents but parents' siblings, making the line of inheritance oblique rather than direct and underscoring likenesses of temperament. Heathcliff and Isabella Linton's pale and sickly son Linton takes after his uncle, Edgar Linton, while Hareton resembles not his father, Hindley, but Heathcliff and his aunt, Catherine (235, 334).
Complicating and determining lines of descent in the novel is its first, essential affinity: that between Heathcliff and Catherine. They share dark eyes, an Earnshaw trait that is reflected and intensified in the street urchin. But their likeness goes beyond the physical to a form of resemblance--indeed sameness--that is impossible to define. In a more intense and desperate version of Jane Eyre's kinship with Rochester, Catherine declares famously that she is Heathcliff: ''Nelly, I am Heathcliff--he's always in my mind . . . as my own being.'' Claiming that she cannot marry Heathcliff but loves him passionately nonetheless, she tells Nelly that ''he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same'' (121-22). Catherine's resemblance to Heathcliff, to the ''gipsy brat'' (77), marks her difference from others of her sex, as well as others of her rank. Although she will be married conventionally, to a man of genteel birth, the link with Heathcliff will ensure her ''immortality,'' her escape from the mundane and stultifying confines of her union with Linton. To identify the bond between Catherine and Heathcliff as incestuous seems inadequate, despite hints that Heathcliff might be Earnshaw's bastard son and despite the fact that they are raised as brother and sister; and yet their connection to one another transcends the level of spiritual and erotic affinity.6
The innate, visceral nature of their likeness is borne out by and replicated in the relationship between Cathy, Catherine's daughter, and Hareton, Catherine's nephew and Heathcliff's spiritual (not biological) son. Cathy and Hareton share a resemblance to Catherine--they both have her dark eyes--and Hareton strikes Heathcliff as a ''personification of my youth,'' the ''ghost of my immortal love,'' and the image of Catherine (353-54). Hareton occupies the position of Catherine and Heathcliff's mutual descendant and the embodiment of their love. With the union of Hareton and Cathy the integration of the ''gipsy brat's'' being into an Earnshaw-Linton lineage is finally fully secured. Although Heathcliff leaves no biological progeny behind and Catherine and Heathcliff remain unmarried and uncoupled, at least on earth, this originary pair are the true matriarch and patriarch of a line which, without the arrival of the alien, racially marked orphan, would never have been possible. Hareton and Cathy move down to the Grange, the home for which Catherine Earnshaw had abandoned Heathcliff and the Heights, but in it they establish a new order that their elders could barely even imagine. The split between light and dark, the gap between civilized and untamed, the hierarchies of gender and race are dissolved. Like marries like, but the intensity of absolute identity--perhaps of incestuous desire--is gentled, diminished. The ''gipsy brat'' exits the world but has enabled its remaking through his passionate bond with Catherine and his perverse but indelible nurturing of Hareton.
* * * When Philip Wakem recommends to George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver that she read Madame de Staël's Corinne, Maggie rebels and refuses to finish the book. ''As soon as I came to the blond-haired young lady reading in the park,'' she declares, ''I shut it up. . . . I foresaw that the light-complexioned girl would win away all the love from Corinne and make her miserable'' (332). Maggie understands her own painful place in the Romantic tradition of light and dark heroines: like de Staël's Corinne, like Scott's ''Rebecca and Flora McIvor, and Minna,'' she is a ''dark, unhappy one,'' with skin so brown as a child that her mother thinks her ''like a mulatter'' (332, 13). Like the other dark heroines, Maggie has a blond, fair-skinned rival, in this case her cousin Lucy (named for de Staël's Lucile), who seems to Mrs. Tulliver more like herself than her own daughter (Moers 175). Indeed, in the early chapters of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie's status in her family, and especially in the clan of Dodson women, resembles that of a foundling. Maggie's mother cannot imagine how she ended up with such a child and, in the parental version of family romance, she and her sisters think of Maggie as having come from the gypsies.
Like de Staël, the Brontës, and, in a very muted way, Jane Austen, George Eliot conceives of her heroine's unconventionality and rebelliousness as a spiritual and bodily difference that separates her from the family of her birth and connects her potentially to unlikely kin. In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot dramatizes the fantasy of family romance by having Maggie run away to join the gypsies she is meant to resemble and, at the same time, exposes the heroine's fantasy as misguided and egotistical. Like Maggie's elopement with Stephen Guest much later in the novel, this adventure chastens her even as it gives expression to her desires. As we shall see, Maggie's escape from St. Ogg's, whether to London or to Dunlow Common where the gypsies camp, remains forever forbidden and blocked.
The scene that directly precedes and precipitates Maggie's gypsy adventure underscores the drama of dark and light that dominates her relations with her cousin Lucy. After an outing with Maggie and her brother Tom, Lucy returns to the Tulliver home with ''blackened hands'' and the entire side of her body ''discoloured with mud'' (98). We learn that Tom had tried to protect Lucy from tromping where the cows had walked and that Maggie, jealous of her brother's attention to the preservation of Lucy's cleanliness, had pushed ''poor little pink-and-white Lucy into the cow-trodden mud'' with ''a fierce thrust of her small brown arm'' (101). Wanting to punish Lucy for her much praised femininity and decorousness, Maggie decides to make her pastel-colored cousin as brown as she is by coating her with cow dung. Because Maggie's rage and jealousy are not yet dispelled by this act and because she anticipates punishment at her mother's hands, she runs straight off to the gypsies to seek her own brown kind.
The narrative of Maggie's brief escape to Dunlow Common combines the poignant evocation of her ''discovery'' of another family (in particular, another mother) with gentle mockery of her arrogance and naivete. Maggie's misguided expectations and selfish desires are exposed throughout the scene, beginning with her disappointment that the gypsy band had camped in a lane rather than on a common, ''where there were sand-pits to hide in, and one was out of everyone's reach.'' This, after all, was to be ''her refuge from all the blighting obloquy that had pursued her in civilized life'' (107). Like Emma Woodhouse's nephews, who make Harriet Smith's chance encounter with the beggar children into the ''story of Harriet and the gipsies'' (333), Maggie at first responds to her experience as if it were a fairy tale. ''It was just like a story,'' she thinks to herself, delighting in being addressed as ''pretty lady'' and treated, she imagines, like a queen (108). The narrator's language undercuts Maggie's childish delusions, here as elsewhere in the early parts of the novel, and the common, naive idealization of gypsy life provides a context for yet another of Maggie's mistaken notions about life.
Still, there is another strain here that, at least initially, competes with the ironic edge of the narrative. The urgency of Maggie's desire to find ''unknown kindred'' ceases to remain merely comic when she glimpses the tall figure she takes to be ''the gypsy-mother'' (107). The daughter of a woman to whom she bears no physical or temperamental resemblance, Maggie is in search of a maternal face that mirrors her own, and that is precisely what she finds:
Maggie looked up in the new face rather tremblingly as it approached, and was reassured by the thought that her aunt Pullet and the rest were right when they called her a gypsy, for this face, with the bright dark eyes and the long hair, was really something like what she used to see in the glass before she cut her hair off. (107)Like the male child of Freud's family romance, who dreams of a fantasy father who might help him in his psychic battles against his real father, Maggie imagines--and suddenly sees--a mother who reflects back at her and thereby affirms what her own mother rejects.7 This salient moment in the experience of a girl whose childhood is dominated by discussion of her physical oddities is strangely fleeting, supplanted by the narrator's realistic and ultimately debunking tone. Maggie's desire to rule the gypsies, to be their queen and instruct them in the history of the world and the ways of personal hygiene, overwhelms her need for kin, and finally her hunger and fear win out over all. At first oblivious as they try on her bonnet and inquire about her wealth, Maggie's romanticization of the gypsies gradually reverses itself, and she begins to wonder if they plan to murder and cook her. Her suspicions are, of course, no more reasonable than had been her adulation. As one of the gypsy men agrees to return her to her family on the back of a donkey, she thinks that ''no nightmare had ever seemed to her more horrible'' (113). It is only as she reaches home that she realizes that he means her no harm and aspires only to earn half-a-crown. Greeted tenderly by her father, the parent who does love her, Maggie is happily restored to her family, disabused of her gypsy fantasies.
This gypsy episode in The Mill on the Floss differs little from the classic running-away story: a child feels unloved and unappreciated, runs away to seek a surrogate family that will love him or her far better, discovers the harsh realities of the wide world, and returns home chastened. I would argue, however, that Maggie's identification with the gypsy mother and her moment of self-recognition while looking in the woman's face distinguish Maggie's experience from other exemplary tales. Something about Maggie remains unaccounted for and unabsorbed by her life with her own tribe, and there is something in her that is honestly reflected in the gypsy's mien. The gypsies cannot be her tribe and Maggie is no foundling and yet, as her resemblance to the dark-haired woman and her failure to reproduce her mother's brand of femininity suggest, neither is she wholly of the family into which she has been born.
The full significance of the episode is underscored by its repetition in Maggie's elopement with Stephen Guest. Once again, Maggie's conscious or unconscious desire to supplant her cousin Lucy in a man's affections precipitates an escape from duty and an impulsive gesture toward self-fulfillment. As Philip Wakem had hinted when Maggie rejected the idea of reading Corinne, she does try to ''avenge the dark women in [her] own person, and carry away all the love from [her] cousin Lucy'' (332). But, like her failed escape to the gypsies, Maggie's idyll with Stephen is aborted: finally there can be no avenging the dark heroine and no fulfillment of a yearning that, like Maggie's fleeting connection with the gypsy mother, is authentic though doomed. In the fantasy of family romance the motives of revenge and desire are inseparably mingled, and here that potent mixture seems to poison Maggie's every bid for gratification. Her stalled existence after the unconsummated elopement and her premature death by drowning complete the pattern of futility. To use the language of familial affinity that haunts the novels I have been discussing, Maggie is always denied discovery of her true kin.
* * * By contrast, the heroine of Eliot's narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy not only discovers her kin and her ''race'' but encounters them as her unavoidable destiny. In a plot that reverses the conventional foundling story, the myth of gypsy kidnapping, and the self-aggrandizing fantasy of family romance, Fedalma, raised by a Spanish duchess and about to become the wife of a Castilian knight, Duke Silva, finds that the gypsy chieftain imprisoned in her fiancé's castle is her father. Eliot sets her story in fifteenth-century Spain during the Inquisition, and her fascination with the contingencies of race--or what we would now call ethnicity--is borne out in the mixture of Moors, Jews, Gypsies, and Christians that fill her narrative. She chose an historical stage upon which she could mount the drama of a woman whose fate would be determined by ''the opposition of race'' (Cross 3: 32). The tension that Eliot never does completely resolve in [The] Spanish Gypsy pits the desires of ordinary, individual womanhood against the demands of ''the general'' (Cross 3: 33)--a higher calling, ordained in this case by what Eliot called ''foregoing hereditary conditions.'' At stake for Fedalma, I would argue, is the very nature of her femininity: what kind of woman will she be allowed, or forced, to be?
Even before Fedalma knows who she is and what her role as her father's heir is fated to be, the poem makes clear through analogy that she is to be a leader of her people and is, beneath her princess's demeanor, an unconventional woman. Early in the poem she wanders out into the Plaça Santiago, where the common people are gathered to watch jugglers, dancers, and singers perform. Excited by the spectacle, Fedalma begins to dance, tambourine in hand, in a manner that may owe something to Corinne's tarantella in the early pages of de Staël's novel and almost certainly to the dancing and spinning of the ''sibyl'' of Walter Scott's Guy Mannering, the ''Harlot, thief, witch, and gypsy,'' Meg Merrilies (Scott 22, 35).8 The lines of the poem compare Fedalma to the biblical Miriam, sister of Moses, who danced before the Jews as they made their exodus from slavery in Egypt: ''Moved as, in dance religious, Miriam, / When on the Red Sea shore she raised her voice / And led the chorus of the people's joy'' (64). The dance foretells Fedalma's own role in the exodus of her people from bondage and helps to conflate Jews and gypsies in a manner that is crucial both to the poem and to the direction Eliot's interest in nationalism and identity will later take (Semmel 108).9
At this very moment, as Fedalma dances, the gypsy prisoners are led through the square, making their first appearance in the poem. Her glance meets that of one of the gypsy men (her father, of course, unbeknownst to her), and his eyes seem to her to carry ''the sadness of the world / Rebuking her, . . . unveiling the sorrows unredeemed / of races outcast, scorned, and wandering'' (71). Later, when her fiancé Silva questions her in bewilderment about her participation in the spectacle and about her failure to ''shrink'' before ''gazing men,'' she explains both her pleasure in the crowd and her new sense of connection to the world:
. . . I seemed new-wakedWith Fedalma's dance Eliot embodies the crucial and, for her, necessary link between an unconventional and uninhibited femininity and the possibility of woman's dedication to a good beyond and larger than herself. Dancing before the gaze of the crowd signifies no lack of sexual modesty but an inborn impulse to dedicate herself to ''life in unison with a multitude,'' to suppress her individuality--and her personal desires--and to submerge herself in a collective identity.
To life in unison with a multitude--
Feeling my soul upbourne by all their souls,
. . . Soon I lost
All sense of separateness: Fedalma died
As a star dies, and melts into the light. (93)
When Fedalma's father Zarca reveals himself to her, he prescribes for his daughter a destiny that precludes marriage to her lover and casts her definitively as the Miriam of her people. She will help him in the cause of exodus from the diaspora and return to homeland, leading their ''brethren forth to their new land.''10 When Fedalma argues that she might indeed help their cause by marriage to the powerful Duke, Zarca makes clear the choice she faces between ordinary and heroic femininity. A woman must help her tribe not through love but through work, a ''work as pregnant as the act of men / Who set their ships aflame and spring to land'' (151). In Zarca's terms, ''pregnant'' shifts to become an attribute of masculine labor, signaling that his daughter will occupy some middle ground between the sexes: fecund but not reproductive in her heroism. As the pitch of his rhetoric intensifies, Zarca makes even clearer the need for his daughter to separate herself from common, debased femininity, from the ''petty round of circumstance / That makes a woman's lot'' (156). If she chooses to marry Duke Silva, she must cease to be his child and a gypsy:
Remarkable here is Zarca's conflation of mission, race, religion, and types of femininity: to be true to her real nature and destiny Fedalma must eschew both conversion and coquetry. Remaining a gypsy must preclude mimicry--parroting--of the white-skinned, round-eyed, exaggeratedly feminine woman. Called upon to be Zarca's ''younger self'' as leader of her people, Fedalma will abandon the example of the Spanish duchess who raised her and adopt instead the masculine purposefulness of her father.11
Take holy water, cross your dark skin white;
Round your proud eyes to foolish kitten looks;
Walk mincingly, and smirk, and twitch your robe;
Unmake yourself--doff all the eagle plumes
And be a parrot. . . . (157)
As a counterpoint to Zarca's creed of inheritance, Duke Silva (Fedalma's lover) offers ''Love . . . to cancel all ancestral hate, / Subdue all heritage'' (288). The poem represents love and allegiance to one's people as irreconcilable, even though Silva's decision to join the gypsies emerges briefly--and inadequately--as a resolution. Loss is inevitable, as is what Eliot conceived of as tragedy in her notes on The Spanish Gypsy. Driving the wedge even further between desire and mission is Silva's impulsive murder of Zarca, which necessitates Fedalma's absolute rejection of her lover and formal inheritance of her father's mantle. The poem-drama ends in a mood of deflation and enervation. Fedalma sails to Africa in search of a homeland, conscious of the futility of her quest and yet pledging herself the ''temple'' of her father's trust, ready to die alone, a ''hoary woman on the altar-step'' (370). She declares her love for Silva to have been ''subdued . . . [by] the larger life.''
Finally, Eliot's heroine appears bereft of father, lover, and passion for that larger life born in the moment of her dance. Indeed, her gypsy identity had first come to Fedalma as a form of revelation, a confirmation of those impulses to transcend the mundane destiny of women and merge with the multitude; but it ends as a burden, an inexorable law of blood and duty. This shift dims the aura of heroism surrounding Fedalma, and it appears to narrow rather than widen her world, to ensure her separateness rather than to extirpate it.12
This tension in the poem, between celebration of unconventional femininity and unhappy obedience to an exigent inheritance, reflects Eliot's fundamental anxiety about imagining female election or female exceptionalism. Eliot's formulations in her notes on the poem seem to convey this anxiety: her heroine would be ''chosen [for distinction], not by any momentary arbitrariness, but as a result of foregoing hereditary conditions''; she needed the ''opposition of race to give the need for renouncing the expectation of marriage'' (Cross 3: 32). Why, in Eliot's scheme, are the contingencies of race or of some congenital marking necessary to make the argument for an unorthodox life? And why, even when these are present, do they turn out to be insufficient to ensure a singular and satisfying destiny for the heroine? Indeed, in Fedalma's case, those characteristics that mark her for distinction turn into a weighty burden.
Eliot's final and fully realized family romance, Daniel Deronda (1876), in which the stigma of birth does redeem the hero, would appear to suggest that the model Eliot imagined but failed to achieve in The Spanish Gypsy could work successfully only for a male protagonist. Daniel Deronda finds his tribe--not gypsy, of course, but Jewish--and, in so doing, finds his vocation. Maggie Tulliver never discovers her tribe or nation: she grows out of her gypsy looks and demeanor, and her life reaches impasse and ends in premature death. Fedalma's discovery of kin ultimately means exile from love and home and casts her life in shadow. But Deronda's paternal inheritance and his ''mark of race'' (Cross 3: 35) elevate him, if not in caste then in spirit: for him, stigmatized birth also results in separation from the community of his upbringing but it offers him, as it does not offer Fedalma, a truly redemptive identity. For the daughter, it seems, a heroism grounded in ''foregoing hereditary conditions'' (Cross 3: 32) brings with it the complexities and contradictions inherent in paternal emulation: what kind of femininity--even if heroic or anomalous--can be based upon the model of the father?
* * * While we cannot see the line from Austen through Charlotte and Emily Brontë to George Eliot as a teleology of any absolute kind, we can, I think, trace an interesting progression in the deployment of the gypsy figure from Emma to The Spanish Gypsy. Clustered around the real or imagined gypsies in all of these texts are themes of obscure birth, exotic lineage, racial difference, and unconventional femininity. Each text uses this partly literary, partly anthropological figure to suggest that heroines who depart from the expected trajectory of femininity might be marked both bodily and temperamentally by filiation with a socially peripheral and racially distinct tribe. In these female variants of the foundling plot and the psychological drama of family romance, alien rather than elevated origins loosen the heroine's ties to conventionality and license the enactment of an eccentric femininity. In Emma, of course, this unorthodox counterplot unfolds only in the realm of suggestion: Jane Fairfax is a counter-heroine left on the margins of the novel, and multiple stories of murky origins are alluded to but never fully told. Like the gypsies on the outskirts of Highbury, the possibility of Jane's--and even of Emma's--deviation from the conventional marriage plot is left incompletely examined on the edges of the text. The exotic--in either ethnic or literary form--will be glimpsed and noted with a shudder but will not penetrate the imagined world of Highbury.
In Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, the heroine's access to unconventionality, to a gypsy self, comes through marriage or romantic attachment, through kinship with a man of questionable origin or unorthodox past. The exoticism and unlicensed passions represented by Rochester and Bertha in one instance and by Heathcliff in the other infuse the lives of Jane and Catherine but never overwhelm them. Because the source of deviance remains masculine--or monstrous, in the case of Bertha--the heroine's femininity is released from stricture but not radically compromised. In Eliot's Mill on the Floss and Spanish Gypsy, however, the heroine herself bears the ''marks of race,'' and this fatally complicates her destiny. Maggie Tulliver is a spiritual foundling, Fedalma a true one. Maggie's kinship with the gypsies, her rebelliousness as a child, and her transgressiveness as an adult make her recovery of an acceptable feminine course impossible in the context of Eliot's plot. The novel imagines an unbridgeable chasm between such unconventionality as Maggie's and either a traditionally feminine or a heroic fate. Fedalma is trapped in a similar structure of dichotomies, but in her case the mutually exclusive choices are vividly literalized in Duke Silva on the one hand and gypsy identity on the other. The heroism that was never even imagined for Maggie is presented to Fedalma as her unavoidable destiny, and yet even the heroic mission of gypsy nationalism is left tarnished by Fedalma's enforced celibacy. Eliot wrote that she needed the ''opposition of race'' to tell the story of a great female destiny, but she suggests at the same time that such an inheritance is tantamount to deformity. Maggie and Fedalma, elected and yet tainted by their origins, are trapped in a stigmatized femininity that finds its own reflection in no credible image save a gypsy woman glimpsed near Dunlow Common and a gypsy father bent on fanatic devotion to a nationalist cause. The deformity Eliot describes is thus imagined in these texts as an impossible identification with masculinity or with an alien, proscribed, even outlaw group. Marriage to a chastened gypsy figure, albeit an emblematic one, is allowable and even fruitful in Jane Eyre, as is spiritual union with the ''gipsy brat'' of Wuthering Heights. But for the heroines of all of these texts, sustained identification with the gypsy is problematic, if not impossible. Like a father to his daughter, the gypsy is a visible, charismatic, and, indeed, necessary presence that remains always just beyond the limits of respectable and satisfying emulation.
Princeton University
NOTES
1 I am indebted to historians David Mayall and George Behlmer, who have begun to reconstruct the history of attitudes toward and treatment of British gypsies in this period. Mayall elaborates on the idea of gypsies as a race (71-76) and claims that an overtly racist attitude toward gypsies did not surface until the last decades of the nineteenth century, when ''foreign'' gypsies arrived in Britain from Eastern Europe (91). Katie Trumpener has recently offered a powerful reading of Western narratives that either center on gypsy figures or include crucial encounters with gypsies. Trumpener touches upon many of the same texts that I consider here, although her scope is much wider (she treats a number of national literatures and ends her discussion with a novel of the 1970s). She traces the evolution of ''an overtly political account'' of gypsies in British texts to ''a literally autonomous literary one'' (344).
2 Trumpener refers to the gypsy encounter in Emma as a ''violent incident'' and emphasizes the way in which it is transformed by repetition into narrative itself. I would argue that narrative--or myth--determine from the outset the way Harriet (and Emma) experience this incident and that it is not, in fact, violent at all.
3 Ellen Moers notes that Jane Austen was recommending Corinne to a gentleman friend as early as 1808 and remarks that Walter Scott also knew de Staël's novel (175-76).
4 Writing of George Eliot's debt to Austen, Ellen Moers remarks of Adam Bede (1859) that it turned Emma ''inside out'': ''[Eliot] put at the center of her novel all that Jane Austen had relegated to the boundaries of her own'' (49).
5 For a related but slightly different and more extensive reading of this passage, see chapter 3 of Susan Meyer's Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction. Meyer's emphasis on the colonial subtexts of Victorian narratives prompts her to read Heathcliff as ''of a race subject to European imperialism,'' perhaps the child of an Indian seaman or a black slave (98). The source of Heathcliff's darkness seems more indeterminate to me and his identity as domestic ''other''--as gypsy--an important part of the story.
6 For the ''siblinglike affinity'' between Catherine and Heathcliff, see Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (153-54). Boone points out in a footnote that speculation about Catherine and Heathcliff's incestuous love for one another hinges on the notion that Heathcliff may be Earnshaw's bastard son: Earnshaw does name the foundling after a child who had died as a baby (350n18).
7 Jane Eyre's vision of Bertha Rochester's reflection in the mirror, when Bertha enters her room at night and tries on Jane's wedding veil, makes for a telling contrast with Maggie's glimpse at her own reflection in the gypsy mother's face. Jane sees not a creature who resembles her in any way but a ''fearful and ghastly . . . savage face'' (249).
8 For the possible connection between Fedalma's dance and Corinne's tarantella, see Moers (185). It could be argued that Scott's Meg Merrilies is the model for gypsies and other demonic/heroic women throughout nineteenth-century fiction.
9 In his recent Figures of Conversion: ''The Jewish Question'' and English National Identity, Michael Ragussis looks at the Jewish characters in Eliot's poem and writes of fifteenth-century Spain as a ''kind of historical laboratory in which experiments on the question of race could be performed'' (153). Ragussis treats Jewish and gypsy nationalism in Eliot as indistinguishable. For the explorer Richard Burton's interest in parallels between gypsies and Jews, see Behlmer 242.
10 It is altogether likely that the idea of return to a gypsy homeland was Eliot's own, a notion she derived from the current interest in nationalism and from the plot of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Leila (1837), in which a concealed Jew in fifteenth-century Granada envisions a return to Palestine as the salvation of persecuted Jews. Both Semmel and Ragussis discuss the influence of Leila on The Spanish Gypsy as well as both novels' debt to Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) (Semmel 105-07, Ragussis 136ff).
11 Ragussis centers his analysis of three texts, Bulwer-Lytton's Leila, Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars; or the Martyr (1850), and Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy, around the idea of the father-daughter bond. In these texts, he argues, a widowed father is paired with a daughter who can and must continue the race, and the marriage plot is rewritten as a ''racial plot'' (137). His analysis is consistent with a reading of the female family romance. While I find his discussion extremely compelling, I think he leaves out the possibility that the daughter is not merely oppressed by the father's desires but embraces them--at least for a time--as emancipatory.
12 Critics tend to read the poem as the ultimate victory of paternal will and as a tale of the daughter's sacrifice. My emphasis is slightly different: while the poem concludes on a melancholy note, a full account of Fedalma's story would acknowledge that what ends as painful duty had at first meant exultation and a welcome calling (Ragussis 153, Karl 407).
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------. The Spanish Gypsy. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1868.
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