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BOOK REVIEW

Ouida, The Massarenes. Vol. 7 of New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899. Ed. by Andrew King. London: Pickering & Chatto 2011. 449 pp. ISBN: 978-1851966431, cloth.

Reviewed by Catherine Pope.

As it was Ouida who popularized the term “New Woman,” it seems fitting that The Massarenes (1897) should form part of the New Woman Fiction series. Of course, Ouida was hardly an unquestioning advocate of women’s rights, but it is partly this complexity that makes her such an interesting writer, and her apparently opaque views are helpfully elucidated in this edition.

In his introduction, Andrew King seeks to recover Ouida’s tarnished reputation, arguing against the usual reductive interpretation of her views as unsisterly eccentricity. Instead, he presents a complex libertarian whose opposition to the concept of the New Woman was prompted by a commitment to freedom, rather than by a reactionary demeanour. King cites The Massarenes as a showcase of Ouida’s broader political opinions, with its incisive commentary on society and women’s place within it.

Like Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, The Masserenes depicts a world that is almost grotesquely exaggerated, yet instantly recognizable as our own. The novel features a dazzling cast of despicable but beguiling characters who struggle with the protean nature of fin-de-siècle society, formed of “an impoverished nobility, with unpaid rents and ruinous death-duties, and a new-born plutocracy creeping upward” (90). Mouse (aka Lady Kenilworth) exists to consume, firmly believing that, “If she could not live in the way she liked, she did not care to live at all” (210). The lifestyle to which she aspires is thwarted by her father-in-law’s stubborn refusal to die. Her husband, Cocky, is the antithesis of the Victorian family man, preferring instead to carouse with the lower orders. He is described as “the most wretched little scamp in creation” with “sodden but sharp little brains” (172). Lacking in any obvious redeeming features, his unswerving commitment to hedonism is secretly admired by his acquaintances, and his aversion to cant renders him likable to the reader.

Left to her own devices, Mouse pursues a symbiotic relationship with the (in both senses) newly arrived Massarenes, an American couple who made their vast fortune by exploiting others. William Massarene is an “unspeakable rascal,” yet the likes of Mouse “crowd around him as poultry around a feeding-pan” (110). Although the Massarenes possess unimaginable wealth, they are shunned by polite society, who find them vulgar. Their daughter Katharine is placed in an invidious position - although educated and refined, her unfortunate provenance makes her a pariah. Although parents are supposed to embarrass their children, the Massarenes’ social ineptitude is particularly excruciating. They need the suavity of Mouse, while she, in turn, is desperate for their patronage. Initially, this uneasy alliance is successful, but it soon crumbles under the weight of their collective solipsism. Mouse imagines she can touch pitch without being defiled, but discovers that prostituting herself metaphorically has more literal consequences. As one character comments, “When we make peers of the tradesmen, my dear, we know what we are about; we are soldering our own leaking pot” (99).”

Although ostensibly a sexually liberated and urbane New Woman, Mouse is not emancipated from an ultimately conservative society, and she remains pathetically dependent on the men around her. For King, this character embodies Ouida’s skepticism of the New Woman. Mouse craves freedom, but is not prepared to eschew the societal structures that support her notions of innate superiority. She has absorbed modern concepts of liberation, but fails to recognize that she is on a path to self-destruction. She finds Katharine Massarene utterly objectionable, unable to fathom someone who privileges integrity over greed. She dismisses the young heiress (in Ouida’s inimitable idiom) as “hedgehoggy and impenetrable” (303), thinking “pumpkins of herself” (127). But it is Katharine who ultimately looks set to flourish by pursuing her own moral framework and assuming responsibility for her actions. Like Marie Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, she is a worthless commodity, but exploits her near-invisibility as means to achieving autonomy, pursuing her own “steep and giddy path” (xii). She is a modern, rather than a new, woman. The New Woman, Ouida argued, placed herself in greater chains than ever, but the modern woman was truly liberated.

It is this equivocal portrayal of the New Woman, King argues, that has hindered Ouida’s rehabilitation as part of the ongoing recovery of neglected women writers (vii). Whereas Sarah Grand has enjoyed near apotheosis, Ouida’s oblique approach to feminism has made some scholars uncomfortable. In The Massarenes, King contends, Ouida sees the debates over women’s rights as an unhelpful distraction from some of the broader issues of the day, making little distinction between downtrodden wives and the workers cheated by William Massarene. By offering an unflinching view of the detrimental effects of unfettered capitalism on society, she is a more radical writer than many of her peers. In the juxtaposition of Mouse and Katharine Massarene, Ouida esteems individualism above adherence to a creed of collective identity, championing this fin-de-siècle version of laissez-faire philosophy over an idea that tells women “what to do each day at sunrise, at noon, and at sun-setting” (xii). Her version of the late-Victorian woman is too complex to be accommodated easily within the twenty-first century reassessment of this period, but through examining her politics in detail, King is convincing in his argument that she was not anti-feminist. As he writes, “the ‘New Woman’ was overall an unstable and ambiguous figure,” so monovalent interpretations should be avoided. She was “one who was able to make up her own mind irrespective of what society and all other collective bodies told her to do” (xii). Ouida reserves her sympathy for Margaret Massarene, Katharine’s mother, who has a face like a “crumpled whitey-brown paper bag” (5) and has had any confidence destroyed by her overbearing husband. Transplanted from the plains of North Dakota to fashionable London society, she flounders in the absence of any sense of self. Katharine and Mouse, however, have the opportunity to forge their own identity.

The introduction also includes a survey of contemporary reviews, many of which deplored the novel, believing the author to have made a misplaced attempt at realism. Although certainly an embellished view of society, the novel makes frequent allusions to contemporary events, as the extensive endnotes attest. King identifies the curious failure of the press to detect an obvious parallel with the notorious “Kitty O’Shea” affair, which saw the Irish nationalist MP Charles Parnell cited as co-respondent in a divorce case. As with the Kenilworths, a sham marriage, complete with illegitimate children, was maintained in order to secure a handsome inheritance. As King writes, “It is surely Ouida’s allusion…to a flagrant example of New Journalism’s favourite mix of sex and politics contributed to the frisson of the real that many seem to have enjoyed.”

Critical disdain notwithstanding, The Massarenes went through seven known editions in the 1890s. Its subsequent disappearance is a mystery, given it is one of Ouida’s best novels. Tightly plotted, it combines biting wit with exquisite schadenfreude in a style that is almost timeless. Ouida’s complex political arguments are also a useful reminder that the Woman Question was no more straightforward than any other issue that dominated the nineteenth century. This edition with its comprehensive explanatory notes and insightful introduction means that Ouida’s provocative novel will receive some of the attention it richly deserves.

Catherine Pope is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Sussex and the owner of Victorian Secrets, an independent publisher.