Gissing's moral mischief: prostitutes and narrative resolution.(George Gissing)

The figure of the prostitute certainly has a significant place in the Victorian novel, but conventionally it is a peripheral one. George Gissing, however, not only positions prostitutes at the center of Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884), but brings them in from the streets and places them at the center of the household, the Victorian bastion of feminine purity and virtue. Modern critics have been quick to attribute Gissing's interest in fictional streetwalkers to the fact that his first wife, Nell Harrison, was herself a prostitute. (1) But the prominence of these strikingly different characters in two of Gissing's most overtly political novels calls for a more serious look at the way they function within these narratives, and the ideological work that they perform. (2)

In Workers in the Dawn, Gissing deploys the figure of the prostitute to enact a critique of rigid boundaries of class and gender, while in The Unclassed he exploits the adaptability of the literary prostitute by using Ida Start to break down those very boundaries. By positing a new feminine ideal in Ida, Gissing creates the conditions for a conclusion that proposes, in contrast to Workers, a world where class boundaries are not impermeable and where art and social justice might co-exist. Thus, while Carrie Mitchell enforces social stasis in Workers, Ida, in The Unclassed, is a force for change. The difference has to do with the way in which gender is constructed and deployed in the two novels. While the conventional constructs of gender in Workers enforce class boundaries and stifle social reform, thereby implicating gender ideology in the injustice of the class system in the late nineteenth century, Gissing's reconfiguration of gender in The Unclassed--particularly in the figure of the prostitute--operates within a plot that ultimately enables both social mobility and social reform. For my purposes, then, the question that emerges most pressingly is this: why does Gissing situate the figure of a prostitute at the center of these concerns? How do fictional prostitutes negotiate questions of gender, realism, morality, and social justice?

Workers in the Dawn: Connection, Class, and Gender

In a sense, I wish to reconfigure the question Ruth Bernard Yeazell poses in her important article "Why Political Novels Have Heroines." Yeazell argues

    that the  conventional heroine provides ... a stabilizing presence    all the more  attractive in a culture confronted with rapid and    threatening change.  To substitute the narrative of the conventional heroine for one    of  political violence is thus to engage in a double maneuver of  containment--to shift from the public history of class conflict to  the private story of an individual courtship, and from the  representation of dangerous aggression to that of modest evasion    and  restraint. (143) 

If the conventional heroine tends to exert a "stabilizing" influence, what about the unconventional heroine--the prostitute, not characterized by "modest evasion and restraint," a public figure, on whose very body class conflict is inscribed? Undoubtedly the fictional prostitute complicates the simple displacement from public history to private story that Yeazell describes, and yet the conventional role of the prostitute in the Victorian realist novel is often a conservative one: even if her presence in the novel raises disturbing social questions, her eventual expulsion or death--like the modest heroine's marriage--performs a policing function, ultimately serving to stabilize precarious social structures. (3)

But Gissing's first two published novels veer from this model; they test and explore the power of the fictional prostitute to enact social critique, rather than shore up social boundaries. In Workers in the Dawn, the off-and-on prostitute Carrie Mitchell is the main force promoting the novel's tragic ending: she prevents the inter-class marriage of the two main characters, an aspiring working-class artist who makes the mistake of marrying Carrie, and a wealthy young woman philanthropist. (4) In doing so, she closes down possibilities not only for social mobility--that is, Arthur Golding's chance to escape the working class to which the circumstances of his birth have constrained him (5)--but for both art and reform in the novel. In a sense, then, she certainly does operate as a conservative force. But the "stability" she enforces not only dooms the other main characters to unhappiness, but appears to come at the expense of the two forms of human endeavor elevated throughout the novel. In this sense the novel does not ultimately promote stability, but condemns it. It is true that Carrie dies in the end, like most fictional prostitutes--but in Workers in the Dawn, so does everyone else, and the symbolic resonance of her death is thereby diffused. More important than her death is the role she plays in the lives of the two main characters, Arthur Golding and Helen Norman.

Workers in the Dawn opens with an invitation from the narrator: "Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street" (1: 3). In the following pages, the narrator leads the reader through scenes of street life and into the dim, filthy alleys where these Londoners dwell, attempting through accumulation of detail to impress upon us the horrors and degradation of poverty. The purpose of this tour is explicit: "We suffer them to become brutes in our midst" (1: 8), the narrator charges. Immediately "we" are implicated in the plight of the poor, introducing at the novel's outset the idea that the miserable lot of one segment of the population can only be understood in terms of the actions and beliefs of others, rather than in isolation: here Gissing establishes the theme of connection that dominates the novel, and implies that "class" is a relation, rather than a condition that exists in isolation. (6) It is curious, then, that Deborah Epstein Nord groups Gissing with several other "social realist" and "naturalist" writers of the late nineteenth century whose fictions, she argues, "are almost without exception apolitical. Many focus on the demoralization of the urban poor by representing them in isolation.... Not only is there no way out of 'the nether world,' as Gissing termed it, but in these works, there is also no explanation for its existence" (194). But Gissing's insistence upon the connection between the rich and the poor clearly implies that the former are responsible for the condition of the latter--an overtly political position. Helen Norman makes this critique explicit when she says of the poor among whom she works: "I firmly believe that this misery is in the greatest degree the result of the criminal indifference and the actual cruelty and oppression of the higher ranks of society, those ranks out of which come the leaders of popular fashion and the actual governors of the country" (2: 259).

In fact, Helen's speech closely echoes Gissing's own description of the book in a June 8, 1880 letter to his brother: "First and foremost, I attack the criminal negligence of governments which spend their time over matters of relatively no importance, to the neglect of the terrible social evils which should have been long since sternly grappled with" (A. and E. Gissing 73). Gissing's language, like Helen's, hints at one of the two central versions of social progress with which Gissing concerns himself in these early novels: that is, the kind of "reform" aimed at improving the actual living conditions of the poor and correcting the "terrible social evils" responsible for that misery. (7) This is the kind of work to which both Helen Norman and Ida Starr devote themselves. The other version of social "progress" Gissing envisions involves the permeability of apparently rigid class boundaries, or social mobility; while Nord's claim that Gissing sees "no way out of 'the nether world'" holds true for Workers, it certainly does not apply to The Unclassed.