Genre Fusion and the Origins of the Female Political Bildungsroman

British political fiction was a satirical genre until Benjamin Disraeli married it to the bildungsroman in Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845). Through the 1880s, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, Mark Rutherford, and others followed Disraeli's formula, mixing narratives of male self-development and political careerism. But the female political bildungsroman did not find its feet until the century's end—at a time, ironically, when the bureaucratization of politics made it less promising ground for male narratives of Bildung.¹ These staggered historical origins for male and female political bildungsromans might seem easily explicable, since mid-Victorian women could not even vote, much less have parliamentary careers. By this logic, a robust tradition of novels about female political self-development should have emerged exactly when it did, as turn-of-the-century suffragism thrust women onto the political stage.²

But throughout the nineteenth century, women did, in fact, devote themselves to long-term, even lifelong political activism. Recently, scholars have demonstrated that women had a significant impact on electoral politics itself—canvassing, organizing fund-raising events, lobbying for votes, even orchestrating electoral chicanery.³ Putting parliamentary politics aside, women had other highly visible activist careers: in antislavery campaigns; the Anti-Corn Law League; factory, divorce, and marriage law reform; and Catholic emancipation. They also led the way in “softer” agitations, such as the antivivisection and vegetarian movements, which gave them a taste for activism and prepared succeeding generations for more explicitly political engagement.⁴ Sustained devotion to politics was not confined to upper-class women, either. Women of all classes might be political activists.⁵Margaret Oliphant, born on the margins of the middle class, canvassed with a mixed group of women for the Anti-Corn Law League: “I was a tremendous politician in those days,” she recalled in her Autobiography (16).

So why did female political self-development take so long to become a fit subject for fiction? The case of upper-class activists is especially striking: Caroline Norton, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Josephine Butler, and others preferred to express themselves politically through life-writing or prose polemics—not novels. When they did write fiction, they created unflattering or at best ambivalent representations of upper-class “political hostesses” like themselves—Norton in Woman's Reward (1835); Emily Eden in The Semi-attached Couple (1860)—possibly because mainstream fiction stigmatized such figures as symptoms of pre-Reform, antidemocratic corruption.⁶ More predictably, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna—a prolific pamphleteer, polemicist for women's rights, and factory reformer—refused to let working-class heroines share her own activist profile. In Helen Fleetwood: A Tale of the Factories (1841), she martyrs her female protagonist rather than make her a spokesperson for oppressed workers.

Stories about women's political careers may have gone missing in mainstream fiction for another, equally simple reason. After all, some scholars dispute that a genuine female bildungsroman of any kind was possible in Victorian Britain, claiming that narratives of female development often track a process of deformation—or “unbecoming,” in Susan Fraiman's terminology (ix)—and that when they do celebrate a heroine's development, they confine it to the private sphere. That explanation fits well with a longstanding complaint about heroines in social problem fiction: that their political engagements are checked by late-flowering courtship plots and domestic resolutions.⁷ In Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1839), Mary Brotherton stops campaigning for factory reform and retreats to Germany to run an informal, private orphanage, where she shelters Michael and marries his brother Edward; in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849), both heroines give up lecturing the men in their lives about politics and end up subordinated to them in conventional marriages; in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Margaret Hale sublimates her political voice by marrying John Thornton and providing capital for his factory improvements; in George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Esther Lyon's initiation to electoral politics yields to courtship by Harold Transome and marriage to Felix. The presence of female political Bildung in these novels suggests that such character trajectories were not exclusively gendered male in Victorian fiction. But successful political vocations—and the developmental skills necessary to achieve them—certainly were. In this largely middle-class body of fiction, separate-sphere ideology demanded that the conventional resolutions of domestic fiction ultimately displace stories of women's political development. For that reason, the genre lagged behind social reality. Historians of the 1980s and 1990s argued that domestic fiction's ideology of separate spheres elided Victorian women's actual access to public life.⁸ But it is time we recognize fiction's particular obliviousness to female political self-development, in order to understand how the form of the novel itself had to change for women's political careers to figure in it.

I argue in this essay that some Victorian and Edwardian women writers experimented with genre hybridizations meant to break the stranglehold domestic ideology held on narratives of female political Bildung. A divergence in the way theorists think about the heterogeneity of genre, however, might explain why some of these experiments have themselves been obscured. Many theorists view genre hybridity, essentially, as a battle for preeminence, in which a primary genre attempts to control secondary genres. John Frow, for example, defines this struggle as a “general logic” (49) of genre, in which secondary genres are relegated to the status of “citations”: “shifting texts to another generic context,” he claims, “suspends the primary generic force of the text, but not its generic structure” (50). Whatever Frow might mean by “force,” he clearly conceives hybridity as one genre's subordination of another—which is a fair description of what domestic fiction does to female political Bildung in the social problem novels mentioned above. Other theorists subscribe to similarly agonistic models of hybridity in various ways, by describing the relationship among genres as a conflict, an instability, a tension, a play of competing differences, or an interpretive choice readers must resolve in favor of one genre or another. Prominent examples include Fredric Jameson's “antinomies” of realism (6), Franco Moretti's notion of generational struggle among genres, and Thomas Beebee's systematic analysis of generic hybridity as a “battle” (19).⁹ If, as Tzvetan Todorov tells us, new genres emerge out of old ones “by inversion, by displacement, by combination” (161), theorists have found forms of generic struggle (like “inversion” and “displacement”) much more interesting than forms of “combination.” But I will argue that in certain women's novels the conventions of female political Bildung and those of other genres (including domestic fiction itself) were strategically fused—or as nearly so as possible—in order to preserve the “force” of one genre within the protective shield of the other. Such fusion aligns with the “fluid continuum” of genre described by recent theorists such as Wai Chee Dimock, who tend to focus on how genres “commingle” (187) rather than how they displace, invert, or suspend one another.

The novel may be an omnibus form, in which numerous genres circulate. But novels mix genres in a limited number of highly particular ways; the forms of those mixtures can be defined and at least loosely codified. In the women's novels I will discuss, distinctive plot structures and codes of character development are fully embedded in two different genres at once, causing each genre to reinforce the other rather than to jostle for sequential or hierarchical preeminence. Nonagonistic thinking about genre hybridity in such novels can help produce a more accurate account of the female political bildungsroman's emergence by enabling us to see generic continuities between novels usually classified as belonging to different traditions.

I propose that genre fusion was the basis for two exemplary female political bildungsromans, Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866) and Elizabeth Robins's The Convert (1907), and that together they demonstrate why stories of female political Bildung required such fusion. These two novels—an unlikely pair, since Oliphant's novel is usually considered domestic fiction—both legitimate female political Bildung by combining genres. Miss Marjoribanks tries to overcome domestic fiction's constraints on women by fully merging it with political Bildung, splicing the two genres together without displacing the latter. The Convert, by contrast, turns away from domestic fiction altogether and fuses political Bildung with a quite different genre, the Puritan conversion narrative. I do not claim that one of these novels is the forerunner of the other or that these two examples exhaust the female political bildungsroman's multigeneric possibilities. I place them beside one another only to demonstrate that, for all their differences, both stage a form of genre hybridity that is fusional rather than agonistic—an integration rather than a displacement, inversion, or subordination. These novels combine genres—they do not just “cite” them. Doing so enabled them to legitimate female political Bildung by fusing it with more traditionally acceptable forms of narrative. I also seek to show the extraordinarily different consequences—debilitating in Oliphant's case, generative in Robins's—that the choice of one genre fusion or another had on the sustainability of a female political bildungsroman tradition.

A novel's genre, whether hybridized or not, never reifies its political valence once and for all, nor does a writer's politics make particular genre choices inevitable. But the nature of a text's participation in genre systems does delimit its capacities for political expression. Genres create certain epistemic possibilities and close others down; as some theorists have argued, all knowledge and understanding—and therefore all political discourse—is genre-bound.¹⁰ I will contend that Oliphant's fusion of domestic fiction with female Bildung, however seamless it may have been, ultimately constrained her ability to work through contradictions in gender ideology, making her novel a unique genre experiment, a literary dead-end. The fin-de-siècle turn toward conversion narratives as vehicles for genre fusion, by contrast, made the take-off of the female political bildungsroman possible. Real women may have had political careers in mid-Victorian Britain, but novelists had to develop an adequate form of genre fusion before they could make such careers the material for a popular literary tradition.

In historical terms, the conditions of possibility for female political bildungsromans matter a great deal because the genre introduces women's ideological perspectives into narratives of both individual and national development. As Christopher Harvie suggests, the culture of the political novel was extremely important in Britain given the nation's unwritten constitution; political process was more dependent on the norms of fiction-reading elites than would have been the case had it been safely inscribed in institutions.¹¹ In that context, the female political bildungsroman performed a critical cultural function in asking both what it might mean if a woman's self-interest—not just her moral duty—were identical with that of the nation, and what it might mean if the national destiny were guided by values culturally gendered as feminine. The female political bildungsroman's implications for gender politics are more obvious, since novelists were at the forefront of turn-of-the-century feminist and suffragist movements, often serving as their spokespersons. For most of the Victorian period, though, narratives of female political Bildung were either truncated, as in social problem fiction, or, worse, constructed as cautionary tales. Anthony Trollope's Mrs. Proudie, after all, is a figure of female political Bildung; so is his Glencora Palliser. But the petty cruelties of the former and the latter's personal—rather than principled—interventions in politics (as well as their ineptitude) are meant to signal the dangers of petticoat government. Cautionary accounts of female political Bildung were still circulated late in the century by Mary Augusta Ward, in Marcella (1894) and Sir George Tressady (1896), and Caroline Norton had her political career redefined as a vehicle for money-grubbing and sexual adventurism in Meredith's Diana of the Crossways (1885). These stunted fictionalized versions of female political Bildung could only blunt readers' ability to imagine how a woman's political self-development might benefit not just herself but the nation as a whole.

Miss Marjoribanks: Political Bildung Fused with Domestic Fiction

Given Oliphant's vocal opposition to female suffrage, it may seem counterintuitive to imagine she would have wanted to write a female political bildungsroman, even if she had had models to imitate in the 1860s. In Miss Marjoribanks, however, she plays with what the genre might look like if it were to exist. Before going further, I will risk an outcry from many of those familiar with the novel's ironic tone by claiming that Oliphant strongly endorses Lucilla Marjoribanks's career, which she invites us to conceive in explicitly political terms: Lucilla seeks “the reorganization of society” (18); the cook is her “prime minister” (14); she possesses a “faculty of government” (123) and a “legislative soul” (204); and so on. Many see Lucilla's campaign, which mixes lofty ambitions for power with schemes for carpets that complement her complexion, simply as a satire of female vanity.¹² Others, more generously, regard the satire as directed against confining, traditional female roles that victimize Lucilla—whether she knows it or not.¹³ The few who believe Oliphant actually endorses Lucilla's ambitions usually fault her for doing so, accusing her of reinforcing conservative ideas about middle-class female power.¹⁴ I will argue instead that Oliphant uses Lucilla to imagine an entirely new fictional genre, one in which a woman's domestic fulfillments merge with her political career.

Fusing conventions of domestic fiction with those of the political bildungsroman was the key to creating such a provocative, progressive genre. But before exploring the novel's genre fusion, I need to justify my claim that Oliphant's sly approval of Lucilla's ambitions cuts through the novel's self-protective irony. Oliphant tips her hand in several ways. One is simply Lucilla's astonishing success: her ingenious victories even convert the novel's skeptics into admirers. The shifting views of her father, Mr. Beverley, Mr. Ashburton, and others help disarm whatever reservations about Lucilla readers may initially share with such figures. Another is that, professedly by design, Lucilla's ambitions really do benefit the community; the narrator tells us that “with the sovereignty of true genius, Miss Marjoribanks managed to please everybody by having her own way” (113). Moreover, as a metafictional warning for those tempted to read the novel as entirely satirical, Oliphant has Lucilla turn “the chaotic elements of society in Carlingford into one grand unity” (157) by defying Mrs. Woodburn, the novel's compulsive satirist. Lucilla gives Woodburn's satirical gifts free play when her gatherings need entertainment (she realizes that “the amusement of the community” [141] depends on such satire, even when she is herself the target), but Lucilla quarantines the satirist whenever she threatens communal harmony. It is “her duty . . . to put Mrs. Woodburn down” (90) for the sake of social order, whereas it was “quite impossible that [Mrs. Woodburn] should ever do anything in the way of knitting people together, and making a harmonious whole out of the scraps and fragments of society” (21). Lucilla herself declares: “I hate people that laugh at everything” (41)—a clear caution to readers.

Deploying her own satirical tone with more nuance, Oliphant drops it at key moments of Lucilla's career. When her father's bankruptcy curtails Lucilla's reign, for example, she observes—without contradiction from the narrator—that people will revert to their old ways, “break up into little cliques,” and “freeze one another to death” (483). That prediction echoes the narrator's sense that, before Lucilla's arrival, Carlingford had consisted of “that chaos which was then called society” (19)—a remark relatively free of irony, since it refers to no one's judgment but the narrator's. Besides noting Lucilla's talent for constituting social order and harmony, the narrator acknowledges her attempts at inclusivity, claiming that she takes “the first bold step out of the limits of Grange Lane for the good of society” (33) by including artisans, dissenting ministers, and unfashionable lawyers in her evening gatherings. The daughter of a clerk and wife of an artisan, with an absurdist view of status hierarchies, Oliphant would have regarded Lucilla's leveling tendencies with at least qualified sympathy.¹⁵ She dispels any lingering irony about those tendencies most pointedly through Lucilla's legitimation of Mr. Cavendish, the parvenu who fears expulsion if his lower-class roots were to be exposed. It may be true that Lucilla saves Cavendish from ostracism partly to protect herself, since she helped admit him to respectable society in the first place. But she authorizes his inclusion by defying old-fashioned social rules, not by skirting them: she declares to the censorious Beverley that she knows “everything” about Cavendish's social background and the origins of his wealth, and that, nonetheless, he remains one of her “very particular friends” (297). Altogether, Lucilla's cross-class gatherings, her inclusion of Cavendish, and her social rehabilitation of Mrs. Mortimer and the Lake family (some of these projects turn out more successfully than others, of course) define her as a benefactor of marginalized individuals and thus as a social reformer—not simply a social climber.

Oliphant heightens these marks of Lucilla's social virtue when she ventures into electoral politics itself. Lucilla successfully anoints Ashburton's candidacy for Parliament, manipulates her social circle to back him, and gives him moral and organizational support. Her reasons for championing Ashburton might seem more fodder for satire: she declares that she has no interest in opinions, policies, or parties and that he is simply “the right man” (353) for Carlingford, a notion she divines by pure inspiration. But her rationale is perfectly Carlylean—a thinker Oliphant embraced.¹⁶ Thomas Carlyle, too, put his faith in character rather than party and in the intuitive collective winnowing of national leaders rather than in electoral machinery—ideas expressed throughout his work but most clearly, perhaps, in the rise of Abbot Samson in Past and Present (1843).¹⁷ No wonder Oliphant's narrator frequently refers to Ashburton as Lucilla's “hero” (338); he wins, in part, too, thanks to his gospel of work: “[H]e went at it like a man night and day” (437), whereas his opponent's idleness leads to a scandalous dalliance ensuring his defeat. The narrator suspends her customary irony by declaring that “it was in reality a quite ideal sort of contest—a contest for the best man, such as would have pleased the purest-minded philosopher” (452). In the spring of 1866, while composing the novel, Oliphant echoed this narratorial affirmation by calling Carlyle “the only virtuous philosopher we had” (Autobiography 178). Lucilla's career is thus more than an instance of individual political Bildung; it exemplifies a serious tradition of political thought, modeled for us by a woman.

In these ways, Lucilla's virtues as a political figure come through despite Oliphant's mock-epic tone. And yet: the novel's frequently indeterminate comic ironies force a recuperative reading like mine to speculate about why so much narratorial distancing seemed necessary. It would be ham-fisted, perhaps, to claim that Oliphant needed to camouflage the dangerous feminist potentials of her novel with comic disavowals. But, without having to pin down her motives too precisely, we might remember Nancy Armstrong's broad claim that certain novels written by women “offered a way of indulging in fantasies of political power with a kind of impunity, so long as these were played out within a domestic frame of reference” (133). Miss Marjoribanks, I suggest, is best viewed in these terms: as a fantasy of political power, a thought experiment. But even as a carefully veiled fantasy, it paints an impressively systematic portrait of what serious female political Bildung would look like.

Lucilla's development throughout the novel initiates her to an extraordinary range of values and life skills routinely associated with the male heroes of political bildungsromans. Most importantly, perhaps, male political Bildung conventionally generates a dialectic of worldly compromise and self-realization by asking whether its heroes can put career ambitions and party loyalty above romance. In Trollope's Phineas Finn (1869), for example, Phineas accepts the incompatibility of political success with his marriage to his Irish first love, his flirtation with Lady Laura Standish, and even, for almost the entirety of his two eponymous novels, his relationship with Madame Max Goesler. Conversely, Nevil Beauchamp's political failure, in Meredith's Beauchamp's Career (1875), stems from his inability to learn that lesson: his infatuation with a married Frenchwoman loses him an election and spoils his career. Appropriately, then, Lucilla's political sovereignty depends on her willingness to renounce not just one but four suitors: “[L]ike other conquerors,” the narrator observes, she “was destined to build her victory upon sacrifice” (88). Dropping the comic veil a bit further, the narrator notes that Lucilla “proved herself capable of preferring her great work to her personal sentiments, which is generally considered next to impossible for a woman” (100).

Lucilla's prioritizing of public success over romance is one of many codes of conduct her trajectory of development comes to share with male heroes of political bildungsromans. She also learns to dispense with several emotional virtues characteristic of domestic heroines—sympathy and compassion, most importantly—when her political will to power demands it. Flagrantly transgressing gender codes, for example, she discovers how to sacrifice others to her own self-interest. At one point, she realizes it was “necessary to have a victim” (65), and she turns the Rector's anger on Mrs. Mortimer by suggesting that the former is angling to marry the latter to Lucilla's father. Having “not hesitated to sacrifice this poor woman,” Lucilla tells Mrs. Mortimer: “I knew it would hurt your feelings . . . but I could not do anything else” (68). Lucilla does not restrain herself “as a weaker woman might have done, out of consideration for anybody's feelings” (65). Quite the contrary, she exploits her insight into others' feelings—the kind of insight usually coded as feminine—for political gain.

To become a successful political tactician, Lucilla must also dispense with a moral principle routinely associated with domestic heroines: honesty. Being forced to lie causes women like Margaret Hale in Gaskell's North and South and Lucy Robarts in Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage (1861) to suffer angst bordering on psychological breakdown. But Lucilla happily tells “pious prevarications” (316). More importantly, her capacity for performativity is so deeply ingrained that at times characters (and readers) cannot distinguish her sincerity from duplicity. Often, other characters assume she must be joking (when she declares that a good party requires men who can flirt, for example), but the narrator tells us coyly that “it is needless to explain that these were persons quite unable to understand her genius” (84). Lucilla's strategic artificiality is so deeply ingrained that she is sincerely performative and performatively sincere—formidable and unwomanly political skills. Such skills routinely distinguish fictional male politicians: Disraeli's Charles Egremont, for example, who cultivates Sybil and her Radical circle by disguising himself as a journalist, or James Harthouse, the aspiring politician of Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), who shamelessly professes his “honesty in dishonesty” (123).

Critics have casually noted that Lucilla sometimes acts like a male politician.¹⁸ But they have not recognized how systematically she masters the repertoire of conventionally masculine political skills or how, in the aggregate, those skills locate the novel in the political bildungsroman tradition. In addition to her preference for success over romance, her ruthlessness, her duplicity, and her deep-rooted performativity, Lucilla both forges and breaks tactical alliances—with her cook Nancy, Mrs. Chiley, Cavendish, and others. She freely exploits “auxiliaries” (129), like Barbara and Rose Lake. She rewards good behavior to buy loyalty: when Mrs. Centum produces officers for Lucilla's gatherings, Lucilla repays her by sharing a secret recipe for pâté. But she's also capable of “[administering] punishment of the most annihilating kind” (132) when allies defect from her. Moreover, she conceives long-game strategies, having what the narrator calls a talent for “throwing herself into the future,” which is characteristic of (presumably male) “leaders of mankind” (38). She also has what nineteenth-century fiction often defines as a manly freedom from grudges: she treats defeated enemies with conciliatory grace. Conversely, she resists other female characters' attempts to share intimacies in moments of triumph—“she knew it was best not to enter upon confidences” (313).

Above all, like the male protagonist of a political bildungsroman, Lucilla learns to transform her accommodations with the world into new occasions for self-realization—one of the keys to all successful Bildung.¹⁹ In Disraeli's Coningsby, for example, Harry Coningsby's father disinherits him, blighting his political ambitions, but that misfortune forces him to buckle down to a career in the law—a proof of character that wins him the patronage of the industrialist Millbank, who helps elect him to Parliament. In Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65), Anthony Trollope's Plantagenet Palliser gives up a coveted chancellorship to save his marriage, but this setback, by enabling him to settle his domestic affairs, becomes crucial to his being made prime minister. Like these male figures, Lucilla repeatedly snatches “a triumph out of . . . a defeat” (113). When Cavendish deserts her for Barbara, Lucilla heroically displays her composure rather than act the jilted lover; when Beverley deserts her for Mrs. Mortimer, Lucilla seizes the occasion to squelch his opposition to Cavendish. She looks on these setbacks “as a superior mind, trained in sound principles of political economy, might be expected to look upon the possible vicissitudes of fortune, with an enlightened regard to the uses of all things” (93).

Some critics have aligned Lucilla's social authority with the domestic moral power popularly associated with Queen Victoria, which seems correct to a point—as I will explain below.²⁰ But she also exemplifies the full repertoire of political skills routinely wielded by male heroes of political bildungsromans. Collectively, these skills suggest what the heroine of a female political bildungsroman would have to look like, even while they hold up certain codes of political Bildung conventionally aligned with men for possible interrogation and critique.

To make this particular fantasy of female political power palatable in a mid-Victorian novel, however, Oliphant had to perform a complex, hybridizing dance with domestic fiction. Her fantasy of female Bildung had to take place “within a domestic frame of reference,” as Armstrong puts it. Indeed, her unique narrative experiment ultimately fuses the two genres. But it initially appears simply to reverse the generic formula of social problem fiction by displacing a domestic plot with political Bildung rather than the other way around. At first, Lucilla exercises her ambitions for power wholly within the conventions of the domestic novels she read at school. Oliphant makes all the trappings of that genre available: a professional middle-class setting, narratorial attention to everyday life and objects, rivalries between companionate and romantic suitors. Fittingly, when her mother dies, Lucilla throws herself into the role of the self-sacrificing domestic heroine, sentimentally devoted to her father. By doing so, she hopes to exploit the domestic heroine's moral and emotional resources in order to control the household and her own romantic future—the twin domains in which domestic fiction routinely compensates heroines for their lack of political power. But this plan comes unspooled when her father rejects the domestic foundations of female authority. Dr. Marjoribanks discovers “how small an actual loss” (6) was his wife's death, finds his profession more gratifying than marriage, runs his household perfectly well by himself, and offers dinners that leave Carlingford wives envying his recipes and Carlingford men finding “they never were properly content with a good family dinner [afterwards]” (20). He orders Lucilla to dry her eyes and go back to school. The genre of domestic fiction, it turns out, depends too heavily on patriarchal cooperation.

That may be just as well, since the novel looks askance at domestic fiction's conventional outcomes.²¹ Mrs. Marjoribanks, we're told, was a melancholy soul, her existence not “of much account in this world” (3); in dying, she simply “faded out of her useless life” (46). Throughout the novel, women complain about their married lives: envying Lucilla's independence and fearful of her husband, Mrs. Woodburn acknowledges that “marriage had its drawbacks” (368); Miss Brown, regretting her newly married sister's seclusion, laments that “marriage makes such a difference” (382). Mrs. Mortimer does not complain of her husband, but only because she “never contradicted him in . . . anything” (311). Oliphant famously declared to John Blackwood that she refused to diminish Lucilla with a conventional marriage plot: “I have a weakness for Lucilla, and to bring a sudden change upon her character and break her down into tenderness would be like one of Dickens's maudlin repentances” (Autobiography 174).²²

When Lucilla comes home from school a second time, she displaces domestic strategies with political Bildung. Prepared for this second foray by a course on political economy, she no longer settles for control of a household; her goal becomes the conquest of society. But to provide cover for this fantasy of power, Oliphant wholly fuses Lucilla's political career with key conventions of domestic fiction, nesting one genre tightly within the other. For one thing, all of Lucilla's political skills are deployed in conventionally feminine behaviors. That conjunction is both the primary source of the novel's comedy and the basis of its radical experiment with genre. Lucilla's refusal of romance, her ruthlessness, her duplicity, her performativity, her manipulation of alliances, her long-game tactics, her transformation of defeats into triumphs, and even her electoral campaigning—all these political skills are exercised through the conventional means domestic women use to acquire power: matchmaking, charming men in conversation, performing music, flirting, controlling servants, and maximizing the benefits of dress and interior design. When Lucilla legitimates Cavendish's social respectability, for example, she does so not in the public square but at a dinner table, with domestic codes of conduct as her weapons. Rising to denounce Cavendish, Beverley almost upsets the soup and has to sit back down, repressing his own rage and cursing “the restraints of society” (302) used by “the women” (303) to disempower him. Lucilla's fusion of political skills coded as male with modes of behavior coded as female extends even to her electoral campaign: she occupies herself with her candidate's colors; she canvasses by stroking men's egos, flattering them into thinking it was their idea to select Ashburton; and she motivates her candidate, in part, by flirting with him. Lucilla uses the tools of the angel in the house to become a political player; she hybridizes Queen Victoria with Harry Coningsby or Phineas Finn, fusing “masculine” and “feminine” modes of political praxis.²³

Most important, Lucilla injects conventionally feminine values into the very nature of her political reign. In achieving her own ambitions, she also preserves peace and builds community; she's a “protectress” with a “liberal heart” (478). Oliphant's fusion of domestic and political codes thus seeks to modify the norms of British political culture. Lucilla injects a feminized form of civility into politics by renouncing vindictiveness; she refuses to punish Barbara, for example, for hijacking Cavendish's affections, or to punish Cavendish himself, or to avenge herself on Mrs. Woodburn. Lucilla also strengthens the ideal of public service as a political norm by lending it the moral authority of female self-sacrifice. Most importantly, though, Lucilla's political style is civil and orderly—she refuses even to allow dancing at her gatherings—which would have been perceived in the 1860s as an antidote to the rising “male politics of disruption” (Lawrence 202). Political culture grew distinctly rowdier on the eve of extending the franchise to the skilled working classes, and during this decade, suffragists began to argue for the first time that women's political participation would temper “the excesses of ‘male democracy’” (Lawrence 216). Miss Marjoribanks's election scene is not particularly violent, but the “field of battle” (454), which the novel compares to a “volcano” (452) and describes as full of “noise and shouting” (422), is clearly no place for a woman. Barbara's appearance there costs her lover the election. Lucilla's equanimity, by contrast, suggests a feminine wish to transcend partisan rancor: “I suppose you did not want them both to win,” her aunt Jemima asks; Lucilla replies: “Yes, I think that was what I wanted” (457).

Oliphant's most seamless genre splice of all, however, is her climactic fusion of politics with courtship. Lucilla ultimately adheres to conventions of domestic fiction not simply by marrying but by passing over romantically and socially advantageous suitors in favor of a companionate marriage with her cousin Tom. But she also bends this conventional marriage into alignment with her lifelong political ambitions. She enlists Tom to help her become the ruler of Marchbank village, where she determines to “set everything . . . on a sound foundation.” The narrator defends Lucilla's new project by weaving political Bildung and marriage together: “It justified her to herself for her choice of Tom, which, but for this chance of doing good, might perhaps have had the air of a merely selfish personal preference” (486). The novel's climax thus fuses marriage and political careerism, legitimating one with the other. Critics who see the conclusion as a capitulation to marriage-plot conventions overlook this grafting of political objectives onto Lucilla's marriage, which negates Tom's hope that, as his wife, she “shall do nothing but enjoy [herself]” (481).²⁴ “I have always tried to be of some use to my fellow-creatures,” she counters, “and I don't mean, whatever you may say, to give it up now” (482).

Oliphant's fusion of female political Bildung with domestic fiction could not help but enforce debilitating contradictions, however—of which she seems well aware. Domestic conventions may not displace, invert, or subordinate political Bildung in Miss Marjoribanks, but they limit where the plot can go. The novel tries out a number of plotlines for female Bildung, all of which reach dead ends familiar to readers of domestic fiction. At the end of the second volume, for example, Lucilla's “kingdom” (26) comes crashing down when her father dies bankrupt: though she had preserved her emotional independence by not marrying, she remains dependent economically on a man. In the third volume, Lucilla tries another kind of domestic plot trajectory: exercising her feminine power of influence in Ashburton's campaign, she submits to being the woman behind the male politician. But the roadblock in this plotline quickly emerges, too: having set Ashburton's campaign in motion, Lucilla can do little else but watch: “the election which had been so interesting to her was now about, as may be said, to take place without her” (450). Finally, her fusion of political Bildung with a marriage plot at the end remains untested: Tom may as well be speaking for the reader when he appears “confused by some slightly unintelligible conditions about doing good to one's fellow-creatures” (484). Her career prospects unsure, Lucilla hedges her bets by hoping to exercise political will through Tom should he become an MP—something it is not at all clear he can do.

Oliphant's fictional thought experiment may, however, have helped her work through her own attitudes toward female political power. While writing the novel, she published “The Great Unrepresented” (1866), an essay rejecting suffrage on the grounds that it would deprive women of their disinterested moral authority. But as early as 1869 she reversed course and supported enfranchisement.²⁵ In Hester (1883), written nearly twenty years later, the eponymous heroine declares: “Do you really think . . . that the charm of inspiring, as you call it, is what any reasonable creature would prefer to doing? To make somebody else a hero rather than be a hero yourself? Women would need to be disinterested indeed if they like that best” (307). Miss Marjoribanks thus gives us a window onto a writer's attempt to create discursive conditions unavailable within existing fictional genres, as an aid to her own political evolution. For that reason, I dispute Talia Schaffer's claim that, although novels like Miss Marjoribanks “helped people imagine what might be possible,” they “did not help them achieve it” (200). If “imagining” means creating a new genre of fictional discourse, that is a priceless achievement. New political thought cannot find expression outside the medium of new genres. Nevertheless, domestic conventions did constrain Miss Marjoribanks to veil female political Bildung in comic ironies and to confine its plotlines to dead ends and unrealized dreams. The novel thus left the female political bildungsroman an unfinished project. Oliphant's dependence on the conventions of domestic fiction, however tightly fused with political Bildung, helps explain why.

The Convert: Political Bildung Fused with the Conversion Narrative

Robins's suffragette novel The Convert also invokes conventions of domestic fiction but solely to reject them. The novel opens with Vida Levering visiting a friend's children, who adore her as a second mother; it then glimpses a glamorous upper-class dinner party presided over by the congenially married Tunbridges. But subsequent chapters strip away happy domestic facades: Vida's housemaid marries a man she does not love as her best chance to raise children; Vida's sister endures a loveless relationship with a lecherous, imperious older man whom she married to avoid impoverishment; and the suave Lord Borrodaile, who seems half in love with Vida, travels solo in society—his wife “never missed” (61). In most of these lives, unhappiness stems from patriarchal power, as the novel's scandalous back-story makes clear: Vida's hopes for marriage and motherhood were ruined ten years earlier by two powerful men, the slightly older MP Geoffrey Stonor, who forced her to abort their love child, and his wealthy father, who would not have condoned his son's marriage with a fallen woman.

Besides subverting domestic fiction's myth of harmonious separate spheres, Robins also critiques the compensations domestic ideology affords women. For example, Vida ridicules her sister's philanthropic projects (partly a refuge from her irritable husband), seeing them merely as opportunities to flaunt the privileges and assuage the consciences of wealthy women. The novel also demystifies female political influence over men. Mrs. Townley, “one of those old-fashioned women who take what used to be called ‘an intelligent interest in politics,’” does not see that “politicians shun her like the plague” (38). Mrs. Freddy Tunbridge, a committed suffragist, realizes more clearly that her “influence over Mr. Freddy is maintained by the strictest silence on matters he isn't keen about” (58). Moreover, the novel mocks Ruskinian idealizations of women; it exposes chivalry as a mask of oppression, and its suffragettes repeatedly point out that separate spheres have, in reality, collapsed: some claim that eighty-two percent of women now work outside the home. Conversely, one of the cockney suffragettes declares that politics itself is “just ’ousekeepin’ on a big scyle” (229).

The Convert strenuously turns away from domestic fiction and fuses political Bildung with Puritan conversion narratives instead. A form of spiritual autobiography that flourished in the late seventeenth century, booming again during the evangelical revival, conversion narratives recounted a progress from sinfulness and doubt toward an acceptance of Christ as the center of one's life. They took the form of diaries, letters, journals, and pamphlets, and were often collected together for publication. They were meant to inspire imitation of the process of conversion as well as to boost the morale of those already converted. They were particularly important among marginalized religious communities, both because they tightened communal bonds and because they allegorized conversion as a model for revolutionary national change—change that would legitimate the moral and political authority of the converted community. As D. Bruce Hindmarsh observes, conversion narratives functioned “as part of an ideal to transform the church and nation, and complete the Reformation” (53).²⁶ They were also a natural match for narratives of female political Bildung because, historically, evangelical discourse often drew women into politics.²⁷

Robins's novel, like much suffragette writing, explicitly invokes this tradition—as critics are well aware, although they have not appreciated how fundamentally this genre fusion reshaped the narrative possibilities for female political Bildung.²⁸Votes for Women! (1907), the play from which the novel was adapted, is subtitled “A Dramatic Tract in Three Acts,” and Robins initially named Vida “Christian.” Conversion rhetoric permeates the novel: Vida goes “on a pilgrimage” (210) to investigate the plight of homeless women; Ernestine Blunt, a suffragette speechmaker, seems a “hot-gospeller” (233) and a “young Daniel” (179); at the novel's climax, Vida demands that Stonor “give me back . . . my old faith” (268) and tells him that women's suffrage embodies the “New Spirit” (272). Evangelical outdoor meetings, a key recruiting tool in many conversion narratives, are replaced by suffragette speechmaking in public squares and parks. Fittingly, over the course of the novel, at least three of the main characters undergo political conversions. The novel thus adapts thematic, formal, and rhetorical features of conversion narratives systematically to secular political goals. As Vida says: “Why do we pretend that all conversion is to some religious dogma—why not to a view of life?” (142). But like the genre on which it models itself, The Convert seeks to inspire readerly conversion and boost community morale; it also conceives the suffrage movement as a momentous national political transformation.

Fusing female political Bildung with the conversion genre lent suffrage a moral justification fully outside domestic ideology. Suffragettes, The Convert demonstrates, leave their homes on a quasi-spiritual mission—not to strive selfishly for individual power. This moral legitimacy was a critical benefit of combining political Bildung with conversion plots. Infamously, most heroines of New Woman fiction in the 1880s and 1890s shied away from political activism, largely so the genre could dodge late-century caricatures of feminists as self-seeking harridans.²⁹ Refusing to retreat from political engagement, however, The Convert borrows the conversion narrative's device of presenting its protagonist's development as one of moral self-purification. It thus finds a way to politicize New Woman critiques of gender oppression and to legitimate female political careerism. Vida's conversion to the suffragette cause makes tacit reparation for her abortion; moreover, it redeems several sins for which she indicts herself: the “loathing . . . of myself” (41) she feels for her complicity in patriarchal culture; her lack of social conscience (“I'm a perfect monster!” she tells her philanthropic sister [57]); and her class exclusiveness, which had previously kept her from joining a “mixed crowd” (88). Robins herself declared that The Convert was “the first thing I shall have written under the pressure of strong moral convictions” (qtd. in John 147).

Robins's critics scoffed at her saintly suffragettes.³⁰ But Robins made the conversion plot an especially powerful means of legitimation by replacing the spiritual centrality of Christ in conversion narrative with the centrality of maternal moral authority. New Woman fictional heroines had often preserved their autonomy by rejecting maternity, which played into the hands of those who stigmatized feminists as unwomanly and frigid.³¹ But The Convert affirms maternal feeling as the spiritual center of suffragism while at the same time splitting it off from domesticity.³² Although suffragette speechmakers often cite their credentials as good mothers, they consistently cast maternity as a political issue, not a domestic identity. One speaker declares, for example: “The question of statecraft, rightly considered, always reaches back to the mother. That State is most prosperous that most considers her. No State that forgets her can survive. The future is rooted in the well-being of women” (127). Another redefines maternal responsibility in political terms: “Every child is our child. We know in our ’earts we oughtn't to rest till we've mothered ’em every one” (231). Vida herself calls maternity “service to the State” (41). When she addresses a crowd in Trafalgar Square, she also politicizes outrages to maternity—a working-class child forced to steal milk; a servant girl imprisoned for the death of a love child her master disavows—as justifications for female action: they prove “we women must organize” (249). Redirecting motherly feeling in more immediate political directions, she takes a “half-maternal pride” (180) in Ernestine, the suffragette she protects from male mobs, as well as in her feminist protégé Jean Dunbarton. These various conflations of maternity with politics echo the “civic maternalism” historians have attributed to early twentieth-century feminism.³³ But The Convert politicizes maternity specifically through the thematics of conversion: Vida, deprived of a child, converts to the political project of mothering the nation. The novel goes out of its way to demonstrate her love of children and her mourning for the loss of her own child, but it turns that loss into a fortunate fall from domesticity into politics: for the sake of suffrage, “it's as well some of us are childless” (277), she says. Nevertheless, Vida clearly summarizes her conversion as an act of politicized maternity: she becomes a suffragette because “men have tried, and failed to make a decent world for the little children to live in” (277).

As in Miss Marjoribanks, the moral resonance of female political Bildung highlights the violence of male political culture, which the novel contrasts with the “feminine” decorum of even the most militant suffragettes. Vida scorns the “ugliness” of “men's meetings,” which “we'd like to eliminate from women's quite on the old angel theory” (173). Historians have, in fact, argued that the suffragette movement played a part in “curtailing the politics of disruption” by ending male domination of electoral politics (Lawrence 225). The Convert champions the moral feminization of politics by acknowledging but downplaying suffragette guerrilla tactics; speaker after speaker insists that such tactics pale compared with the violent means used by working-class men to win the vote. Robins emphasizes this point by contrasting the calm rectitude of suffragette speakers to the verbal brutality of their male hecklers as well as to the cynical corruption of upper-class male politicians like Stonor, Sir William Haycroft, and St. John Greatorex. Female suffrage, the novel plainly suggests, can morally redeem national politics.³⁴

The Convert borrows other conventions of conversion narratives to help facilitate female political Bildung. Conversion narratives, for example, often dramatize the gradual, halting nature of their protagonists' progress. Plagued by reversals and false starts, converts sin, repent, sin again, recover their faith, doubt, lapse back, and finally gain a permanent state of grace.³⁵ Vida's progress compresses these moral vacillations, but similarly abrupt shifts point to the spiritual struggle underlying her political development. Initially, she faults herself for her own concessions to feminine roles, yet she laughs at “Suffrage nonsense” (68); she is inspired by suffragette speakers into “an unconscious public confession” (95), yet she is then “frightened away” (102); she enters what she calls the “inquiry stage” (151) only to swear she “shall never believe” (155) suffragette claims about male sexual assault, relishing her “unbelief” (157); she doubts her own ability to speak and then condemns her own doubt; she is “fascinated almost as much as she [is] repelled” (164); she is “stirred” and “thrilled” (171), then “ashamed” (184) of her inability to testify. These vacillations energize political Bildung as a conversion experience and strengthen its association with spiritual soul-searching.

Conversion narratives use such vacillations to dramatize an unfolding of self that leads dialectically to union with a community: conversion crowns an intense exploration of subjectivity, in which a public, collectivized faith is revealed to have been already seeded in the self, waiting to germinate within a collective ethos.³⁶The Convert shows Vida's conversion to be precisely this kind of development of deep-seated skills and inclinations, brought to fruition through communion with others. At the novel's opening, Vida already has within herself the kernel of a political career: she bristles at male abuse of suffragettes before she knows anything about them; she scorns the “fatuity” of idealizing domestic virtues (77); she possesses an organizational genius that will be of political use (“Vida could administer a state,” her sister claims [57]); and, most importantly, she swears off marriage. But Vida develops these various personal potentials and choices over the course of the novel by locating them in a collective quest: “What general significance has my secret pain? Does it ‘join on’ to anything. And I find it does” (276). Most dramatically, protagonists in conversion narratives often recount their experiences at outdoor meetings as pivotal to their spiritual communion with others.³⁷ Vida's initiation through The Convert's outdoor suffragette meetings similarly emphasizes her self-development toward fulfillment within a community.

All these generic convergences make the narrative trajectory of Vida's political Bildung indistinguishable from that of conversion. The novel makes this genre fusion explicit at the scale of national allegory: what the narrator calls “the Pilgrimage of Man” Vida likens to a history of “slow and painful building,” with “successive clutches at civilization” (147). At the scale of the individual, Jean Dunbarton is not alone in thinking of her conversion to the suffragette community as “an important chapter of my education” (228). Several suffragettes, in fact, refer in their speeches to their conversions as a “political education” (182). Indeed, it would be easy to cast The Convert as an instance of either genre: Vida spends the early chapters surveying the upper-class political landscape—or her eyes are opened to the sinful shallowness and complacency of her rank; Vida debates within herself her political affinities with the suffragettes—or she is converted by those who welcome her to a spiritual community; Vida learns political lessons by modeling herself on the suffragette speakers—or she converts by penitential example and imitation; Vida ultimately wins a political game with Stonor to gain his support for the cause—or once converted, she converts others; the suffragettes fight for political rights—or they seek the nation's moral redemption. The novel splices conventions of the two genres tightly together to produce the female political bildungsroman as a fusional hybrid, which serves to protect it from reactionary critique.

The Convert's adaptation from Robins's play also foregrounds both genres equally. The action of the play takes place in a single day, which limits its ability to dramatize both Bildung and conversion. Vida is already a suffragette at the opening of the play; she's scheduled to speak at Trafalgar Square that same afternoon. Although the dating of events is inexact in the novel, it begins in early May 1906 and ends in midsummer of 1907; it includes four extended scenes of suffragette speechmaking. The longer timeline in the novel makes possible both Vida's extended political education and the developmental vacillations crucial to tales of spiritual conversion. Likewise, Jean Dunbarton is already engaged to Stonor when the play begins and already curious about suffragettes. In the novel, she is more naive when introduced and more mocking of activist women; hence her courtship by Stonor, her education at Vida's feet, and her embrace of the suffragettes come as dramatic episodes of conversion to political enlightenment. Complex revisions of genre paradigms like these should put to rest the notion that suffragette fiction was “not . . . self-consciously literary” (Joannou 106).

Through genre fusion, The Convert traces the development of a heroine who acquires skills and makes choices typically associated with male political Bildung, many of them strikingly similar to those of Lucilla Marjoribanks. Most importantly, Vida, like Lucilla, foregoes romantic opportunities for a wider sphere of action. She turns down Stonor's belated, halfhearted proposal and a heartfelt one from Dick Farnborough; she dismisses Allen Trent as a suitor and fends off Greatorex's advances. Vida may not initially reject marriage for the sake of a career—by contrast, the novel's key male politician, Stonor, does prioritize his “brilliant political future” (271) over his love for Vida, which only hardens her celibacy thereafter. But Vida's celibacy facilitates her devotion to the suffragettes. Her experience has taught her that “there's a value in women apart from the value men see in them” (273). More importantly, being unmarried and childless creates what she feels to be a political imperative: “[W]e are the ones who have no excuse for standing aloof from the fight” (277).

Like Lucilla, Vida dispenses with the conventional emotional and moral virtues of domestic womanhood. She too is willing to have a victim—or, in the rhetoric of The Convert, a “sacrifice” (273): shockingly, she makes Jean Dunbarton a pawn in her manipulation of Stonor's public support for suffrage. Vida demands from him “a ransom if I give her up to you” (271), or else Vida will take “her life, and all she has” for “this new Service.” Stonor refers to Jean as Vida's “tool” (272). But Vida's seeming callousness—which is more performative than actual—signals her choice of realpolitik over domestic femininity.

Vida's performative gifts also echo Lucilla's. While critics and historians have amply discussed suffragette forms of public performativity, The Convert is at pains, as is Miss Marjoribanks, to demonstrate the continuity between domestic female performativity and that of female politicians.³⁸ In the early dinner-party scene, Vida and other women are expected to perform social caretaking for the male guests—many of them, ironically, politicians who lack such performative skills themselves. The “well-trained female” (32), we're told, possesses both great “conversational powers” and the “art of being silent without being dull” (33). But it is also her “passion for making speeches” (37) that makes a woman like Mrs. Tunbridge such an effective upper-class hostess. In The Convert, these skills render women subordinate in domestic settings; Vida scorns them as enabling “a Geisha view of life” (42). But the novel transforms such skills into powerful weapons in political settings. The suffragette meetings feature female speakers who employ various theatrical devices to sway the crowd. Ernestine is a “beguiler” (170) who makes good use of her “peculiarly amusing and provocative personality” (117); she strives to “stir these people up,” and “it could not be denied that she knew how to do it.” Other speakers use their cockney plainspokenness and facility with repartee, or their ability to dramatize their personal stories to score political points. Vida herself channels her personal feelings about infanticide into the compelling story she tells of the servant arraigned for murdering her love child, using that cover-narrative to channel her own intense emotional history into a vignette calculated to win the crowd's sympathy—a common performative device in suffragette speechmaking and fiction.³⁹

Echoing male models of political Bildung, Vida, like Lucilla, also turns failure into an opportunity for growth. Most dramatically, she turns the great tragedy of her life—her dead child—into the motivating force for her activism as well as the instrument for converting Stonor to the cause. As she tells him: “I'm no longer simply a woman who has stumbled on the way” (276); rather, she becomes a woman who moves “a stone of stumbling to many . . . out of other women's way.” In The Convert, the suffragettes as a whole bravely endure setbacks for the sake of the movement's growth. Their open-air meetings mostly fail to elicit anything but ridicule, for example—aside from a few rare converts, like Vida and Jean. More importantly, the suffragettes declare they have learned their lessons from the failed tactics of earlier generations of women: in particular, not to trust the promises of Liberal politicians and not to depend on male cooperation. The evolution of female solidarity out of failed attempts to win men over is the developmental trajectory taken by women's education in this novel. Failing to persuade the men in her Trafalgar Square audience, Vida exultantly turns that defeat into a new kind of political vision, declaring: “[T]hen it is to the women I appeal!” (249). In all these ways, however ironically, Vida develops traits closely patterned on the codes of male political Bildung.

Conclusion: The Emergence of a Tradition

The Convert's version of the female political bildungsroman, formed by fusing female Bildung with the conversion narrative, had a much more extensive life than the version crafted by Miss Marjoribanks—despite the parallel developmental and characterological profiles their heroines exemplify. Robins's genre fusion served as the foundation for many other suffragette novels, including Gertrude Colmore's Suffragette Sally (1911), Constance Maud's No Surrender (1911), and Edith Zangwill's The Call (1924). More broadly, the fusion of female Bildung and conversion narrative appears in many turn-of the-century feminist novels about women's initiation to political activism: Olive Schreiner's Bunyanesque feminist allegories in Dreams (1890); Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1897) and the Angelica Hamilton-Wells subplot in her The Heavenly Twins (1893); and Emma Frances Brooke's Transition (1895), which traces a young woman's conversion to socialist activism. Many critics have faulted the conversion genre as “a patriarchal form of self-writing that stifles the voices of female subjectivity” (Dorsey 6).⁴⁰ But it seems more accurate to say that the genre foregrounds the dialectical engagement of female subjectivity with the political sphere, even if it endorses only those women who align their interiority with feminist dogma. A greater disadvantage is that the kind of zeal intrinsic to the conversion paradigm excludes political pragmatism: conversion is an all-or-nothing affair. Part of the awkwardness of The Convert's conclusion lies in the all-consuming, melodramatic choices forced on its three central figures. Fittingly, the novel registers the fact that many upper-class women who support suffrage recoil from suffragette extremism.

Nevertheless, Robins's fusion of female political Bildung with conversion saves her heroine from having to surrender activism for domesticity, synthesizing moral authority with political self-development instead. As Linda Peterson observes, the conversion genre at its origins was indifferent to “domestic themes” (Traditions 8).⁴¹ That suited it for modern stories of female political Bildung. But there were other advantages as well. Conversion narratives end, in a sense, with a beginning, launching the protagonist on a new life. They thus escape any pressure to produce a triumphalist political conclusion—a problem suffered by nineteenth-century political fiction across the partisan spectrum, from the unsatisfying, melancholy endings of Chartist novels to Disraeli's sensationalistic Tory victories—since permanent political success is antithetical to realist narrative. The genre is also designed to preempt readerly resistance: its heroines begin in much the same skeptical state as many of its presumptive readers, and they lead such readers along with them through a shared process of development.

Most importantly, though, the fusion of political Bildung with conversion narrative breaks absolutely from domestic conventions that, throughout the nineteenth century, had made it impossible for novelists to tell women's political life-stories without bowing to genre pressures that made narrative resolution contingent on marriage. When Stonor suggests to Vida that she may yet find “happiness” because she retains her beauty (276), she replies: “The gods saw it was so little effectual, it wasn't worth taking away.” The female political bildungsroman took longer than the male version of the genre to formulate this rejection of domestic fiction's conventional resolutions. But when it did, it became a powerful new vehicle of political expression.

Fusion with other genres was pivotal to legitimating these narratives of female political Bildung. Of course, genre fusion alone did not create the female political bildungsroman. Ideological shifts of many kinds, in both political and domestic culture, were essential for the tradition to emerge. But genre fusion, if not sufficient, was nonetheless necessary to incarnate these shifts in the pages of a novel. Even in the early twentieth century, domestic ideology was powerful enough to force stories of women's political ambitions to “commingle” with other genres, to invoke Dimock's nonagonistic model of hybridity. Only in that way could the female political bildungsroman acquire a moral legitimacy it could not claim in purely political narratives of Bildung. More generally, this evolution of narrative form suggests that certain genre hybridizations enabled women writers to generate new discursive possibilities—possibilities unavailable to them either through unmediated historical or ideological conditions or through the realist novel's existing repertoire of generic hybridizations. The realist novel, as we know, always blends genres. But hybridizing them in new, innovative ways—fusionally, in the case of the female political bildungsroman—enabled novelists to construct new kinds of stories with the potential to create new political realities.

Notes

Works Cited