Content area
Full Text
That very childishness had a charm which few could resist. The innocence and candour of an infant beamed in Lady Audley's fair face, and shone out of her large and liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of fair ringlets, all contributed to preserve to her beauty the character of extreme youth and freshness.1
It has long been recognized that Victorian women were infantilized in a variety of ways. Practices such as the doctrine of coverture, the withholding of female suffrage, and laws preventing married women from owning property, meant that in legal terms the mid-nineteenth century woman's position was synonymous with that of a child. Restrictions on women's social mobility, the cult of female dependency, and the lack of higher educational opportunities through which women might develop their intellectual capacities, all contributed to this infantilization process. Each of these areas of women's lives became the focus of feminist campaigns from the midcentury; but perhaps most invidious was the cultural dissemination of powerful stereotypes of femininity, which could not be redressed through legal reform or challenged formally in any straightforward way. Though there were multiple competing prescriptions of femininity during the period, the image of the innocent childlike woman continued to exert a potent hold over the Victorian cultural imagination.
In this essay, I want to trace Braddon's literary engagement with the stereotype of the infantilized woman and argue that female maturation is a persistent and important theme of her early fiction. Moreover, in their recurrent interest in female maturation and development, these novels inevitably echo the central concerns of the Bildungsroman, a genre which has generated a great deal of feminist critical interest over the past three decades.2 Much of this criticism has largely agreed on the impossibility of a true Victorian female Bildungsroman. Annis Pratt, for example, argues that a novel of female development is a contradiction in terms, and that "growing up female" in the nineteenth century was actually a "growing down", "a choice between auxiliary or secondary personhood, sacrificial victimization, madness and death".3 Other critics, who accept a tradition of female Bildungsromane before the twentieth century, nevertheless maintain its essential difference from the typical male form, primarily in terms of the heroine's inability to develop meaningfully and...