The characterization of Maud Enderby connects art to the third preoccupation of literary critics - gender. By presenting the case of a young woman torn between the attractions of art and of ascetic Christianity, Gissing can interrogate both conventional gendered associations and one of the two consolations he offered in "The Hope of Pessimism." Maud embodies a challenge to Waymark's aesthetic and a problematization of any "religion of art." For the key to Maud's nature is not that she is too conventional or too Christian, but that "her soul in reality was that of an artist" (150). 53 We are given several indications that her gift is genuine, perhaps more genuine than Waymark's talent. When she tells him her life story, he is struck not only by her "natural command of impressive language," but by a sincerity of narration that he recognizes he would be unable to match (222). Gissing legitimizes her aesthetic impulses in the first edition by drawing an analogy between her response to the music of a distant organ and Wordsworth's to the music of humanity in "Tintern Abbey" (2:161-62). In this particular passage Maud uses the impressions of solitary pleasure to reach beyond the momentary sensation to a realm of transcendent meaning - that "something far more deeply interfused" to which Wordsworth refers in the lines Gissing quotes. There is a sense here that Maud employs Waymark's artistic principle of excavating the moment for the purposes of rising above it.
However, Maud's experience makes a mockery of Waymark's assertion that "The artist is the only sane man" (117). Her sensibility is repeatedly figured as a type of mental pathology: witnessing scenes of emotion or beauty brings her to the verge of a swoon. In the first edition, the excitement of being called home mysteriously by her aunt confines her to bed for several days (2:132) - a reaction explicable in Schopenhauerian terms.
Knowledge of the second [will-less, artistic] kind . . . is an abnormal activity, unnatural to the intellect; accordingly, it is conditioned by a decidedly abnormal and thus very rare excess of intellect and of its objective phenomenon, the brain, over the rest of the organism and beyond the measure required by the aims of the will. Just because this excess of intellect is abnormal, the phenomena springing therefrom sometimes remind one of madness.54
Her violent reactions are always conditioned by their relationship to some individual need of her own. At one point we get some indication of the nature of her "irrepressible delight and interest in the active life of the world":
The sight of a mother fondling her child would often cause her to all but faint, a terrible tumult in her blood blinded her, and made her stagger for a moment. It was the same when one of Waymark's letters arrived. The touch of the paper was like fire; it was minutes before she could distinguish the words when she endeavoured to read. (2:13 1) 55
Maud for the most part lacks the detachment Waymark advocates; even when she approaches a level of perception detached from material reality she does not achieve the state of joyful knowledge his theory would predict. Instead she feels a "dark melancholy" at the sense that in becoming alienated from the world of will she has entered into some "fantastic unreality," a dream "out of which she would presently awake" (215). For a time she achieves a sort of physical and spiritual equilibrium by embracing Rossetti's art of beauty and romantic love: "Her spirit and flesh became one and indivisible; the old antagonism seemed at an end for ever" (217). However, Maud's experience demonstrates that she is fundamentally a physical organism at the mercy of the physical world; art can effect only a temporary rapprochement between body and soul. Maud's reliance on romantic love as a transcendent ground for her philosophy undergoes a series of shocks. For the Religion of Art fails to still the "tumult . . . in her blood" that compels her to visit Waymark's lower-class haunts (218-19). During this visit she witnesses a vicious fight between mother and daughter that makes her faint, not so much from shock at this barbarity as from the recognition of a corresponding capacity for violence within herself. The other two moments of horrified recognition similarly come as moments of mother-daughter connection. In a very fine scene, Maud's frustration at Waymark's sexual unresponsiveness gives way to self-disgust when she sees her mother kissing Mr. Rudge.
It was as though some ghastly vision of the night had shaken her soul. The habit of her mind overwhelmed her with the conviction that she knew at last the meaning of that mystery of horror which had of late been strengthening its* hold upon her imagination. ... Her eyes fell upon the pages she had written [her impassioned love letter to Waymark]. These now came before her as a proof of contagion which had seized upon her own nature. (266-67)
Since Maud inherits her aesthetic nature from her mother, it is appropriate that an artistic "vision" discloses to her the inexorability of that maternal legacy. Maud's final moment of recognition comes in the fulfilment of a precognitive vision: as she had foreseen, Mrs. Enderby commits suicide by cutting her throat. After asking her aunt if madness is hereditary, Maud decides not to go through with her marriage to Waymark, despite the struggle of feeling this renunciation costs her. She has come to see that heredity rather than the free choice of a transcendent philosophy is the determinant of her nature. The playing out of the artistic personality does not, as "The Hope of Pessimism" would suggest, lead to any detached perception that good predominates in the world; instead, it leads to a fuller, almost purely naturalistic appreciation of the evil power of material pressures.
The example of Maud not only demolishes the pieties of Waymark's theory of art, but challenges the sort of gendered interpretations in which George Moore and Arthur Waugh dealt. In a time of rapidly expanding roles for women, the threatening feminine becomes demonized and used as a generic term of abuse. Depending on the situation, different features of society become identified as female: for instance, Andreas Huyssen has traced the figuration of mass culture as a woman, while Bowlby has noted that the arena of culture was "associated with femininity." 56 George Moore and Arthur Waugh anathematize as female their respective opponents: those moralizing censors who would hold back literature's search for the truth, and those Swinburnians who wallow in sensation. Waugh, interestingly enough, deals with precisely the same categories as Gissing: women, sensation, madness, art.
The man lives by ideas; the woman by sensations; and while the man remains an artist so long as he holds true to his own view of life, the woman becomes one as soon as she throws off the habit of her sex, and learns to rely upon her judgment, and not upon her senses.
When creative literature satisfies these three requirements - when it is sane, equable, and well spoken, then it is safe to say it conforms to the moral idea, and is consonant with art. By its sanity it eludes the risk of effeminate demonstration. 57
But Gissing, unlike Moore and Waugh, does not define art as an agonistic process: art is not achieved by suppressing unruly femininity. Instead art is an innate propensity that blossoms or decays in response to stimulus from an individual's environment. In Maud, a combination of heredity and upbringing, rather than anything in the essential nature of women, is responsible for the form of her aesthetic impulses. Self-consciousness is a great good in the world of The Unclassed, and it is precisely the lack of this that inhibits Maud's artistic development: "She could not understand herself, seeing that her opportunities had never allowed her to obtain an idea of the artistic character" (150). Those conventional categories that Waugh so self-assuredly wields can only limit the individual development of someone like Maud: they are the equivalent of that puritanical religious upbringing that so distorts her consciousness. So Gissing's worldview reveals a pat generalization like Moore's about "those two irreconcilable things - art and young girls" as simply a reshuffling of those harmful categories that have restricted art in the past.
Most of The Unclassed reveals the untenability of contemporary constructions of art and the difficulty of self-knowledge when the self is subject to continual flux. However, in both editions, as the end of the narrative approaches, the need for a fictional resolution drives the novel into inconsistently rigid subject positions for its characters. The clearest example of this comes with the sudden reconception of the Ida-Wavmark-Maud triangle. Waymark is like other Gissing heroes in that the choice of a romantic partner is crucial in the definition of the self. But Waymark is unusual in the extremity of his swings between of the two women, so that his very indecision becomes a subject of the novel and undermines both the apparent cohesiveness of his personal philosophy and his status as the dominant intelligence of the novel. Critical appraisals of The Unclassed, reading in light of the novel's conclusion, tend to take Waymark's choice of Ida for granted as the natural outcome of the narrative. But one of the interesting features of the book is that for most of its course the suitable partner for the hero remains indecipherable. Certainly Waymark's true feelings provide no guidance, for it is unclear what these are or even whether they exist. However, this indeterminacy comes to an end in chapter 28, "Slimy's Day" (in the first edition entitled "Bondage"). In this chapter Waymark is kept from meeting Ida on her release from prison when Slimy robs him of the collected rent money and ties him up. Slimy's action proves to have consequences both for Waymark's self-conception and the novel's narrative. At first Waymark views his predicament with typical detachment, even observing that "to lie gagged and bound on a garret- floor for some few hours. . . might well be suggestive of useful hints" to an artist (234). Yet as time passes Waymark can no longer aestheticize his physical condition: pain drives away his nonchalance, and he begins to fear that he will be unable to make his appointment with Ida.
Significantly, Waymark begins to know his own mind only in this situation of extreme constraint. In his state of imagined freedom he oscillated between Maud and Ida, convinced that each in turn was his favorite but unable to develop a consistent attitude towards them. In the previous chapter he has become engaged to Maud, and has felt certain that Ida means nothing to him. But now, stripped of the semblance of freedom he has enjoyed since the abandonment of his teaching post, he is forced into self-confrontation:
He recognised now, for the first time fully, how much it meant to him, that meeting with Ida. . . . He had come to regard the event [her imprisonment] as finally severing him from Ida and a certain calm ensuing hereupon led to the phase which ultimately brought him to Maud once more. But Waymark's introspection was at fault; he understood himself less in proportion as he felt that the ground was growing firmer under his feet. . . . It needed a chance such as the present to open his eyes. (235)
In one sense Waymark's acknowledgment, while bound, that he is also bound by his feelings for Ida follows logically from the novel's insistence on the inescapability of experience and personal needs. It begins to give him that "sincerity" he lacks but which both Ida and Maud possess. However, this recognition poses certain problems for the narrative, since up to this time there has been no indication that there is a stable, centered self for Waymark to know. This scene represents a step towards the resolution necessary in a conventional nineteenth-century novel, but this resolution can be achieved only by the complete reformulation of the central character.
Almost as if
in recognition of the problems he has created for himself, Gissing follows
this chapter with several in which he drastically reduces access to Waymark's
consciousness. Whereas The Unclassed has largely focused on Waymark's
sensibility since his introduction, it now switches its emphasis to the
inner lives of Maud and especially Ida. Since Ida has now been clearly
identified as the heroine of the piece, the suitable partner for the hero,
Gissing proceeds to reshape her character in order to give the close of
the book an adequate center. Central to this endeavor is the transformation
of Ida's social status when Woodstock takes her in. Gissing's fiction is
full of such magical boons, which poor but deserving characters can receive
without becoming involved in the compromising world of the marketplace.
Now a fine lady, Ida can
turn to the
business of social reform, which she initiates by holding tea parties for
scruffy but lovable urchins. Ida has always been guided by feelings of
affiliation - to her mother, to another prostitute - but now she emerges
clearly as a participant in that fellow-feeling that Gissing identified
as the second hope of pessimism.
With Ida's emergence as heroine, we enter a realm more typical of mid-Victorian sentimentalism than of a fin-de-siecle artistic sensibility. Ida insists that Waymark be true to his engagement with Maud in the language of melodrama: "There is such a thing as duty; it speaks in your heart and in mine, and tells us that we must part" (298). More disturbingly, discussion of Ida's past life in this part of the novel continually threatens to embrace the commonplaces of Victorian thinking about the fallen woman. Ida now indicates that Waymark's earlier insensitive wish that he could buy her prompted her reform, and asserts, "It is no arrogance to say that I am become a pure woman; not my own merits, but love of you has made me so" (292). Now, redeemed by love, she has entered into the state of purity the narrative had earlier problematized. Unlike other expressions of conventional thought in The Unclassed, these are not undercut by the simultaneous presence of elements that challenge this view.
The end of the novel balances the apotheosis of Ida with the increased representation of Maud as pathological. By the eve of her planned marriage to Waymark, she has attained an eerily inhuman state, in which aesthetic visions have been reduced to indications of incipient madness: "To Maud's eyes the intruding fog shaped itself into ghostly visages, which looked upon her with weird and woeful compassion" (299). Indeed, through Maud the artistic has become merely a psychological category, a state conditioned by heredity and escapable only by a religious asceticism. Maud's resolution of her personal dilemma involves breaking off her engagement and joining her aunt in Christian devotion. But what this resolution does for the novel is eliminate the aesthetic sensibility as a player in the world of human suffering. In the first edition Waymark proclaims his continuing devotion to art, though now combined with social combat; however, in the second edition Gissing (I think more consistently) removes explicit suggestions of Waymark's ongoing interest in art. Of the two consolations in "The Hope of Pessimism," only fellow-feeling has survived. Art has proved to be a dangerous method of engaging with one's own physical constitution rather than a means of escape.
But even that fellow-feeling survives only by becoming a sentimentalized commitment to social reform. John Goode has perceptively remarked that "Gissing poses unanswerable questions and tries to answer them with an ending which is part of the stock-in-trade of the romantic novelist." 58 By the end of The Unclassed, all its characters have become classed: Maud is a nun; Waymark and Ida are leisured social reformers; and Woodstock, Julian, and Harriet are dead (and thus surely in a class of their own). I would argue that the unanswerable questions Gissing has posed have concerned the possibilities of human freedom in a deterministic universe, and the extent to which art can explore and embody those possibilities. His fictional resolution seems to indicate in its very conventionality that escape from determination is only delusory: you can't ever really be unclassed, and to the extent you are you're unstable or insane. His characters retreat to those very categories that the narrative has revealed to be intellectually inadequate and personally oppressive. And the novel itself returns to romantic cliches: it too cannot be unclassed. Of the three terms that troubled contemporary critics, Gissing has eliminated sensism by classing his characters, and gender by turning Ida into a conventional benefactress and Maud a desexualized nun. Art seems to vanish in the pathologization of Maud and in Waymark's loss of artistic vocation. But in a sense it too has only been moved into a conventional category, not simply eliminated. For by the end of the novel the only art that remains is the "artfulness"' of the conventional happy ending, in which the sexual rival disappears and hero and heroine come together.
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