The fin de siècle period had witnessed a phenomenal increase in women working in the public space. The middle-class women of this period had started to seek works outside the home environment, availing themselves of resources such as
29 See Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1997) 150-76.
education and vocational training to achieve that goal. For women of the middle-class, going outside the domestic space and earning their own bread was simply considered unnecessary and indecent before the first half of the nineteenth century. Marriage, motherhood, and housekeeping had been regarded as the only proper vocations and the domestic as the only appropriate space to women of this class. For various reasons, however, gentlewomen since the 1880s had been driven to enter the conventionally male-dominated, urban working spaces. First, the government developing as a modern bureaucracy, the prospering business sectors including the emerging banks and
insurance companies, and the growing retail industry with department stores as its associates all contributed to the escalating need for white-collar female workers like clerks, bookkeepers, typists, secretaries, and shop girls. Second, the increasing financial pressures or difficulties felt by many middle-class families which could no longer keep a self-sustained life often forced their daughters, young and unmarried, to earn a living of their own. Third, positive attitudes toward paid work advocated by feminists and many emancipated women around the turn of the century helped the middle-class women, whose work had long been devotional and non-remunerative, to justify their career-pursuing as seeking financial independence and self-fulfillment.30
As the 1890s developed, the professional working woman was increasingly presented as an attractive role model in new women’s journals, social investigatory accounts, and contemporary novels by writers of both sexes, who often took
contrasting views on the female independence she embodied. One of the early editions of the new feminist weekly Woman, established in 1890, argued that through
30 See Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, eds, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact:
Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (New York: Palgrave, 2002) 5.
committing herself to work, “woman of today” has gradually waken up to their possibilities in life:
With the spread of education, and the stern necessity which compels an ever-changing army of women to provide for themselves and fight their own battles in life, we find . . . women are every day more distinguishing themselves in various callings which the necessities of the time, primarily, have compelled them to adopt . . . . Women are gradually getting alive to their possibilities in life, and are so surely—with many abortive efforts, maybe—evolving to a higher ideal from that of our grandmothers.31 As modern women increasingly take up the role of breadwinner, their new-found independence and self-sufficiency demonstrates the enlarged possibilities for future womanhood.
Social investigators of this period revealed also that in broad terms women’s large-scale employment in the new white-collar professions like clerical work, the retail industry, and the civil service, granted them respectability, creditability, and social status. As Lee Holcombe has argued, by the early years of the twentieth century
“middle-class working women, a respected and self-respecting force, were an essential part of the country’s labor force,” rather than a self-pitying and pitied
“surplus and depressed minority” (20). Clara Collet, a social investigator, in her 1892 statistical appendix to the Royal Commission Labor noted a remarkable increase in women’s employment between 1881 and 1891. Women increasingly take occupations in the tertiary sector, including teachers, nurses, clerks, librarians, heads of certain
31 Harriette Raphael, “Women of Today,” Woman, 1 February 1890, 2, qtd. in Emma Liggins, George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 101.
business departments. This growing army of female workers testifies to “the entrance into the wages market of women in the middle-class, counting numerically but a small section of the community, and in many cases taking up new employments.”32 This is even more obviously perceived in female employment in the last years of the
nineteenth century, when educated, middle-class women increasingly practice a self-supporting life style. According to a 1901 census, the number of educated women employed as clerks in government agencies like the Post Office rose from 6,000 in 1881 to nearly 25,000 in 1901. With the booming of commodity economy, women clerks finding employment in private companies also rose to 60,000 by the same year.
Although women working to support themselves increasingly emblematize fin de siècle female independence, contemporary writings by male authors nevertheless tend to portray them as deviating from traditional womanhood. The appearance of the female white-collar worker in the male-penned novels of the 1880s and 1890s both testifies to the increasing acceptance of her place in the labor market and to the fears surrounding her entry into urban commodity culture. Fin de siècle narratives about the shop girl, for instance, often employ a naturalistic, male-dominated perspective upon women working in the city, highlighting that female worker needs to struggle against all the odds their independence entails and that ultimately she would be forced into marriage to escape an exploitive, unbearable work environment.33
Representations of the shop-girl as a streetwise urbanite, a knowing city
32 “Report by Miss Collet on the Statistics of Employment of Women and Girls,” Parliamentary Papers 1894, vols. 91-92, c.7564, 7 qtd. in Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992) 65.
33 For instance, Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), George Gissing’s The Old Women (1893) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). See Deborah L Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 43-81.
character of questionable respectability, are particularly predominant in these
male-authored naturalistic novels of the 1880s and 1890s, which tend to portray their heroines as sexually attractive shop girls who work in fashionable West End shops or department stores. As Deborah Parsons indicates, male authors like Zola, Dreiser, and Gissing portray women working in the world cities of London, Paris, and Chicago respectively with the voyeuristic perspective of the naturalistic flâneur. As well as Gissing, fin de siècle British male writers like Meredith, Grant Allen, and H. G. Wells all take up the subject of the working woman and her exploration of the public world, yet underlying their interest in her emancipation is “a voyeuristic fascination with her sexuality” (Parsons 83). These unmarried, emancipated women depicted by the male authors are thus often judged as sexually threatening to masculinity of the fin de siècle.
While sharing with naturalistic writings of this period an intention to lay bare the dire aspects of lives led by the lower-class, these narratives nevertheless represent the male and often anti-feminist views on female autonomy and independence that the shop girl embodies through transgressing prescribed femininity. In these narratives, the shop girl is often a woman from the working or the lower-middle class, the latter a déclassé not uncommon in fin de siècle England, and is driven to work out of
economic necessity. The spaces she works, including shops of all kinds and the department stores emerging since the later half of the nineteenth century, are represented more often than not as improper, dangerous, and unwholesome to the female worker, who might be subject to low payment, long working hours, and even sexual harassment if her work requires frequent contacts with customers of the other
sex.34 The shop work therefore is usually described as transitional for especially girls from the lower middle-class, whose aspiration or career-making, if any, would
eventually have to give way to their hasty marriages, a textual arrangement made in compliance with Victorian standards of womanhood.
As male authors dominated the image of the New Woman in the fin de siècle, accounts of women’s urban experience from their own perspective have tended to be overlooked. While these male-authored narratives represent a grim picture of how fin de siècle capitalism and consumer culture exploit the female laboring body through a largely patriarchal lens, feminist scholars nowadays have started to read against the grain of these narratives by pointing out that the shop girl might embody female independence and transgression of separate spheres through simply working and occupying public spaces of the city at the turn of the century.35 Arlene Young has noted the liberating effect of white-collar work on women in fin de siècle narratives, showing how the self-supporting shop girls “provide spirited and adventurous heroines for many novels of the 1890s and early 1900s” (1999: 128). Sally Ledger indicates that rather than representing merely the female spectacle or the exploited female body subject to male, capitalistic and voyeuristic forces, the shop girl is “a
34 In her interdisciplinary study of labor, leisure, and the shopgirl in fin de siècle London, Lise Shapiro Sanders indicates that contemporary British male writers like George Gissing and W. Somerset Maugham portray shop labor as a degrading activity for women, particularly threatening to the performance of the gentility associated with proper femininity. In addition to its “sweated” aspects, shop labor is viewed as degrading in its production of boredom, an experience imagined as
characteristic of the shopgirl’s everyday life. See Lise Shapiro Sanders, Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006) 97-100. See also Emma Liggins, George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 101-16.
35 See Sally Ledger, “Gissing, the Shopgirl, and the New Woman,” Woman: A Cultural Review (1995) 265-74; Lise Shapiro Sanders, Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006); Emma Liggins, George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 50-56.
figure inhabiting the metropolis in a more self-confident and disruptive way than the shopgirl-as-victim-of-capitalism narrative puts forward” (268). Or Judith Walkowitz writes, manifesting female visibility in and negotiation of the fin de siècle city’s gendered space, these shop assistants, or girls in business “were neither ladies nor streetwalkers but a new category of working women in the third tertiary sector of the economy” (1992: 24). The shop girl is thus redeemed from her passivity and
vulnerability, and rendered a sexually and socially disruptive, imposing figure at the fin de siècle city.
Levy’s Romance of a Shop portrays the shop girl as embodying such female independence practiced against the backdrop of the fin de siècle city’s increasingly commodified culture. In the opening pages of the novel, Gertrude Lorimer and her single sisters are forced by the sudden death of their father to choose between traditional marriage and a life on their own, the latter a more challenging and unconventional choice in the eyes of their comparatively conservative relatives or friends. Rather than going into the marriage market or the conventionally feminine, domestic work fields like teaching or nursing, which is of “the dull little ways by which women, ladies, are generally reduced to earn their own living” (55), the Lorimer sisters choose to work as self-employed photographers, opening a shop of their own in London’s Upper Baker Street. Their choice of shop work is, of course, not without opposition. The proposal of working for their own meal tickets is strongly opposed by the sisters’ rich aunt, who is scandalized by the fact that her dead sister’s daughters should go into business as single women, a choice deemed by her as
unbecoming to women of the respectable class and inviting moral and sexual dangers.
To the aunt, to go into business is “dangerous and unwomanly,” for it entails not just the “loss of caste, damage to prospects—vague and delicate possession of the female sex,” but most importantly “complicated evils which must necessarily arise from an undertaking so completely devoid of chaperones” (72). In her outright condemnation of female independence attempted by her nieces working as self-employed
photographers, the aunt represents exactly the often reactionary view of women’s work by Victorian traditionalists who tend to associate work, women, female publicity, and the resultant disruption of the middle-class gender boundary of the separate
spheres.
In stark contrast with her aunt’s conventional sense of womanhood, Gertrude, who takes the initiative in persuading her sisters to opt for a life of independence, finds that shop work allows greater opportunities and freedom than jobs like nursing or teaching that most women of her class are supposed to take when work is needed.
As the novel demonstrates, opening a shop of their own means to Gertrude and her sisters also opening up to new social possibilities, wider inter-personal contacts, and not the least, the city’s richly public life, all of these being new social experiences inaccessible to traditionally feminine, domestic works. The shop business is thus described by Gertrude as beneficial to the future of women’s work, because it is
“progressive” and “a creature capable of growth,” the “very qualities conventional women’s work is dreadfully lacking” (55). Departing from the more traditional views of female work presented by her aunt and even her elder sister Fanny, who are
“behind the age” in thinking that decent women should never work, Gertrude’s is a view adopted by a woman “intensely modern,” “a free woman, ready for action”
(54-59).
Yet Levy does not simply turn up a rosy picture of young ladies making success as working women in Romance of a Shop. The Lorimer sisters opening a shop are presented as subject to the ups and downs of the market, which pose threat as well as opportunity to these fledglings managing to stand on their own in London’s
competitive business ambience. Gertrude, for instance, often has to worry about the prospects of the shop business before they eventually come across promising owing to the diligence and hard work practiced by the female photographers. The pressing needs to make both ends meet on a daily basis, to cater for the public taste so as not to lose business, are particularly felt by Gertrude as shopkeeper, who realizes that for anyone wanting to achieve success in the business world, “only a plank” lies
“between them and the pitiless, fathomless ocean,” “into whose boiling depth hundreds sank daily and disappeared, never to rise again” (95). To Fanny, the most delicate of the Lorimer sisters, this harsh reality even drives her to fits of hysteria and constant crying. Still another grim picture of the shop girl working for her survival in the city is discernible in Miss Stéphanie, who earns her livelihood as dressmaker below the very floors the Lorimer sisters occupy. Facing stringently financial difficulties resulting probably from slack business, Miss Stéphanie attempts suicide and is ultimately forced to move out of her lodging place. A contrast with the Lorimer sisters as paradigms of established women workers, the female dressmaker falling down from her pursuit of independence thus signifies to Gertrude, who finds the story of Miss Stéphanie “made her sick at heart,” (95) what might become of women failing to secure for themselves a foothold in the city’s exacting and still gendered working
ambience.