Bessies Fortune A Novel (TREDITION CLASSICS)

Adventurous Girls of the British Empire: The Pre-War Novels of Bessie Marchant Michelle Smith Historically, the genre of adventure fiction most readily recalls books for boys and male heroes rather than girl readers and protagonists. These include enduringly well-known works such as H. Ballantyne and the late-Victorian G. The works Bristow refers to were, of course, written by male authors about masculine adventurers.

From until her death in , Marchant wrote more than a novels, many of which celebrated the capacity of British or colonial girls to rise to any challenge set before them in rugged environments. They regulate appropriate moments where work that would ordinarily be a marker of unfeminine traits is not only acceptable, but is in fact admirable. Adventurous acts are performed to ensure survival in rough environments, save lives, and prevent crime. The task of empire is depicted as inherently arduous and outdoor work is often inescapable for girls.

Firstly, they do not, in most instances, present the heroines engaging in any meaning- ful contact with indigenous inhabitants. While her works are not instructive, short quo- tations from reviews for a number of her novels included at the front of her books, and also on an advertising flyer from Blackie and Sons that I found inserted in one of them, point to her novels being regarded as of- fering admirable characterizations of girlhood [Fig. Outlook praises the heroines of Sisters of Silver Creek: Somewhat contradictorily, Cadogan and Craig also argue that Marchant was unable to break with tradition in a revolutionary manner by virtue of the fact that her stories were written for girls, yet they also regard her heroines as inspiring real world change: I shall nevertheless foreground the variety of outcomes for her heroines.

The novels considered in this essay depict physically and mentally strong pro- tagonists with various degrees of independence, from those who use their own property to become self-sufficient to those who take up employment to support themselves or accept a proposal of marriage. Calamity befalls the girl protagonists frequently such that acts of physicality and resourceful capability are performed out of necessity rather than to challenge gender norms. While many heroines already show an independent or tomboyish streak, they are also usually hard working, intent on self-improvement, and selfless.

The outdoor work or dangerous journeys undertaken by the heroines are presented as inescapable because of location or situation and therefore they do not function as challenges to female domestic responsibilities. They are not undertaken—and significantly, are not willingly chosen—at the expense of household and familial duties but often to ensure that the family unit and household remains intact.

While courage and strength in times of necessity are celebrated quali- ties, women who take up rough work with no need to do so are critiqued. The concerns about these gold prospecting women stand in contrast to the survival of girls through a long period stranded in the wild with a broken leg No Ordinary Girl [] , confinement to an area where smallpox sufferers are sent to die The Girl Captives [] , and riding a horse across a rugged mountain range at night in a storm to prevent a murder A Courageous Girl [].

The isolation of colonial and exotic locations coupled with sickness and misadventure often leaves the heroine alone with no choice but to take on tasks to ensure her survival and the survival of others, as well as the maintenance of property or livestock. Civilizing through Nursing Two strands of activity celebrated when practiced by girls within the adventure context are the maintenance of settlements in the colonies and nursing the sick and injured. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, imperialism became a media preoccupation.

The desire to maintain the expanse of the British Empire and protect the mother country itself from attack, in addition to anxieties about national degeneration, lead to fears about being unprepared for conflict.

This created a cultural climate that encouraged preparation for catastrophe, which was exempli- fied in relation to youth by the Scouting and Guiding movements initiated in and respectively. In the early part of the twentieth century, nursing became an important occupation in both domestic and military senses.

The work of nursing fell within the bounds of acceptable femininity for its association with care- giving, despite the way in which it enabled female travel, mobility, and outdoor work. Her influential Notes on Nursing: Intriguingly, in order to truly be able to care for others, women were called upon to demonstrate strength. Poovey assigns two faces to the mythic figure of Nightingale: Aside from its applications in the family home, nursing was a public occupation that could be conducted in the far reaches of the empire.

The association of nursing with the domestic, even when conducted overseas, situated it not as a challenge to appropriate spheres of work for men and women, but as task ideally suited to women accustomed to household tasks and instructing servants. Professional nursing, especially as constructed by Nightingale, played upon Victorian gender norms, yet the possibility of working overseas did offer the potential for adventure and distinction, as Anne Summers observes: Nursing also serves to partially contain fears about disease and the deleterious effects of harsh climates when English bodies are located in the empire.

In The Girl Captives, the Indian environment is presented as physically taxing, encouraging cholera and smallpox outbreaks, and its searing sun induces blindness. An epidemic of malarial fever, in fact, serves as a crucial factor in enabling the hostile Kajids to mount an attack on the town. When the fever begins to claim victims, the post shuts down and in the confusion the Kajids enact their plan to kidnap wealthy residents and hold them to ransom. Chrissie, the children of the upper class Boyd family Gwen, Jessie, baby Wyn , and their Aunt Juliet are taken captive. During their imprisonment, Gwen falls ill and Chrissie must nurse her without a fire or medication and little food.

When they are banished outside the city walls— where jackals and hyenas roam— the other girls panic in the frightening conditions, but Chrissie sets about meeting obvious practical needs such as drawing water. Chrissie also transfers her nursing skills to a native woman whose husband has fallen ill, showing her how to massage his limbs and make a shelter for him within their home.

She demonstrates the way in which proper attention to domestic hygiene can serve as a preventative for potentially fatal disease or stem its effect. The centrality of nursing to the maintenance of empire is evinced here through its minimization of the risk of death for colonists, and the depiction of disease itself as posing a military risk.

Eventually the children are determined to join their father and they set out from Juneau with an American couple, the Perrys, along the rough trail to Dawson City. Perry also falls ill along the trail and Mrs. Perry proves worthless in situations requiring a strong constitution. Isolated from help, Jenny chops firewood, but the situation becomes dire when her brother falls ill and rain sets in. Despite the impossibility of such a disease in Canada, his condition is pronounced to be malarial fever by a passing doctor and Jenny must also nurse him until the doctor can return with provisions.

The Perrys selfishly abandon the children, leaving Jenny to care for her brother alone in the wild. The eponymous heroine of The Adventures of Phyllis: A Story of the Argentine demonstrates a similar degree of bravery and shows the need for English girls to be capable of performing new, physical tasks when living far from the comforts of home. Phyllis Talbot has had no previous nursing experience, but calls on first-aid lessons when she discovers a delirious elderly man in an isolated area in need of nursing care.

Nursing also proves to be a path to independence for Phyllis. The bread of idleness which she was now eating was surely bitter enough; if only she had been a boy, and able to take her life in her own hands, like Horace and Fred [her brothers], how much happier she would have been! The options for an occupation for Phyllis are limited, but nursing permits Phyllis to remain unmarried and satisfied by the pleasures of her work.

The Maurice family has an invalid child, Freda, who provides the possibility of long-term employment for Phyllis, and her independence along with it: Nell, the heroine of Daughters of the Dominion: A Story of the Canadian Frontier, also has aspirations to be a nurse and, in a show of her desire to be proficient in the domestic sphere, laments that she cannot keep house properly because of poverty. As an orphan, Nell lacks guidance from a parental figure. However, she displays both the expected norms of a cul- tivated British girl and the strength necessary for life in the empire.

Her assertive qualities are nevertheless balanced by her desire to care for others. Nell is marked as less genteel than a British girl, notably when she has difficulty sewing, but she works to become proficient in delicate tasks as well as arduous ones: But sewing is a distinctly feminine accomplishment; and as Nell yearned to excel in all womanly occupations, she persevered with needles and cotton until she became an adept at the gentle art.

Her real voca- tion, however, is one that draws on traditional feminine skills: With a lack of women settlers, many miners lose their health and even die without female care, particularly because of inadequate hygiene during food preparation and storage: After Nell sustains an injury when attempt- ing to foil a robbery, she can no longer work as a telegraph operator and considers channeling her desire to help the sick into a medical career.

The acceptability of the caring aspects of nursing allows the heroines to perform heroic tasks and undertake danger- ous adventures without compromising their representation as admirable protagonists. In most of her adventures, the heroines do not engage with the indigenous inhabitants at all and rarely with any significant interaction. Kutzer discusses the moral agency of the Victorian woman and its significance in impe- rial locations: Nevertheless, while these girls primarily assume a different imperial task than that which may have been idealized for British women, their minimal interaction with native inhabitants does provide further opportunity for the demonstration of bravery.

Her men now fight for the English and her concern for her own people increases: The anxieties about the maintenance of empire in the first decade of the twentieth century may serve as an explanation for why these novels focus on nursing with is relationship to preparedness for war and main- tenance of British homes in imperial locations rather than transformation of indigenous peoples. The heroine, fourteen-year-old Chrissie Felton, is closely aligned with her father, a captain stationed at Rampoostan. Her mother is delicate and fragile; constantly ill throughout the novel, her mother remains cosseted in her room.

She attempts to learn to fire a gun when there is fear of attack from the Kajids, purportedly so that she can at least shoot herself. She provides shooting lessons to two other girls, but can no longer bear to do so after the accidental death of a chicken: The other girls call her cowardly and ask how she would kill a Kajid, and Chrissie concedes that she could not do so if her victim were to scream and then refuses to touch a gun again.

Her bravery and willingness to teach herself how to use a weapon is balanced by her demonstration of an inability to intentionally kill and exaggerated emotional response to the death of a chicken, serving as a reinforcement of the notion that she has not drifted into masculine ways.

This is particularly relevant because of the lack of imminent danger during which such temporary drifting might be justified. This incident also identifies the enemy with an animal that is generally regarded as dispensable, as if grieving over the death of a Kajid would be a similarly ludicrous response to that of grieving for the chicken.

In The Girl Captives, adults maintain established imperial ideals. Older girls are afforded more freedom than a child to act, but also have the ca- pacity to think and act in ways that may need to be curtailed in adulthood. When the baby takes ill, its parents approach the Felton home to ask for help.

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Chrissie takes the baby in, calls for a doctor, and ensures that he is cared for. One of the three sisters, Pattie, is petrified of the Native Americans to the point of having nightmares about them, but her sister Kitty remarks that her fear is irrational: This was a stolid-looking Indian, clad in civilized garments, but with his hair hanging in a wild matted mass, stuck through with quills, an iron skewer or two, and some rusty screws and nails, which he evidently regarded as a valuable treasure-trove.

The convergence of race and class is a subject considered by Anne McClintock in her study of empire, Imperial Leather Jews, prostitutes, the working- class, domestic workers and so on, where skin color as a marker of power was imprecise and inadequate. Her uncle Sandy drives the natives to do the housework, noting that laziness is an inborn feature of their race: But, poor things, what can you expect of people who are descended from generations of loungers? The presentation of laziness as a long-standing racial character flaw rather than something easily corrected also reinforces the neglect of civilizing actions by the heroines.

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The Girl Captives, which I discussed earlier, depicts the native Kajids, who reside in the hills, as cruel, opportunistic, and lacking compassion. He also speaks formally, yet with comic mistakes. If, in fact, this first play in the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles has provided such a dominant paradigm for tragedy, it is difficult to resist asking the following central question: Is it the content or the form of Oedipus Rex that has made the play so central to our understanding of tragedy?

In other words, is it tragedy as a dramatic construct i. Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.

Aristophanic comedy thus reflects a moment of social and psychic development which precedes the constitution of the family as a homogeneous unit, a moment in which libidinal impulses still valorize the larger collective structures of the city or the tribe as a whole. The principal distinction [between the manifestation of the Oedipal problem in Senegalese and European society] lies in the form taken by guilt. Guilt does not appear as such; in other words, as the absence of depression and of any delirium of self-denunciation testifies, it does not appear as a splitting of the ego, but rather under the form of an anxiety of being abandoned by the group.

From the outset traditional Senegalese society announces that the place of each individual in the community is marked by reference to an ancestor, the father of the lineage. In effect the death fantasies of the young Oedipal subject are deflected onto his collaterals, his brothers or his contemporaries.

Voyage Description

As she has reminded her interviewers, her material is Botswanan; indeed, in some of these tales she functions as a village griot, recording the often tragic histories of her adopted homeland. Life is welcomed back by the village seventeen years after she moved with her parents to Johannesburg at the age of ten.

At the same time, they are uneasy because they assume that a young woman cannot be both well off and good in the big city. Life, however, is used to other options offered to black women in Johannesburg. The narrative presents us with further analysis of female output in the village economy: The structure of tragedy is grounded in reduced economic options and increasingly narrowed choices for Life to earn a living.

Instead, Life offers a reproduction of relationships between men and women forced upon the more traditional village culture by larger political forces outside their small community. Life is no longer willing to abide by the mores of the community, as she might have continued to do had she not come of age in Johannesburg.

Like everything else, unfortunately, this individuality is two-edged: Once again, as the passage cited above makes clear, men and women had been enjoying sex as an everyday appetite before Life returned.

The village may be no Johannesburg, but there is no mistaking the effects of Western culture that have been accruing for some time. These women have already taken the first steps down the road toward liberation. Husbands, uh, uh, no. Tragedy, the other side of that coin of individuality, approaches with an ominous hush of death, as one further site of Western culture gets duplicated in the community: Life parts company with the beer-brewing women in whose adulation she has basked when she alone sets foot in the bar. If tragedy seems imminent, it is in part because Life begins to perform one of the attributes of the tragic subject: Alternatively perhaps, Life has discovered what others have before her: Much as we may be drawn to Life, we sense this tragedy is moving into its final acts when the narrative introduces a new character, Lesego, with dramatic abruptness: In some ways, the love of Lesego and Life with its tragic consequences seems to be replaying the Liebestod implicit in countless Western tragedies from classic duos like Othello and Desdemona to contemporary lovers like Frankie and Johnny.

Similarly, the cattleman confounds his buddies by proposing to marry a prostitute; they do their best to dissuade him: Life has chosen an even more constricted position: The tragic movement of Life toward her death is performed with such a sense of inevitability that it seems impossible to imagine any other outcome. Lesego must leave to tend his cattle.

He must remind Life of her vows of fidelity. Life must turn him into the instrument of her tragic release. Life, who has returned to her old ways, offers him tea, then tells him he must wait while she shops for the sugar.