Brief note: Miss Miles
Mary Taylor's Miss Miles: A Tale of Yorkshire Life Sixty Years Ago (1890) sounds firmly Walter Scott-ish in its subtitle, but Taylor had in fact been working on it since at least the early 1850s, and its claim to be in the classic mode of nineteenth-century historical fiction is therefore the ironic result of the extraordinarily long stretch between initial drafting and eventual publication. If anything, to a reader in 1890 Miss Miles would appear to slot into the "New Woman" subgenre (although the novel's skepticism about the false pieties associated with genteel womanhood overlaps with some of Geraldine Jewsbury's work, like the short story "Agnes Lee"). The novel's religious history, meanwhile, is a sort of reverse Robert Elsmere situation: whereas Mrs. Humphry Ward projects a number of past religious controversies forward into the novel's present, Miss Miles retrojects the late-Victorian "Nonconformist conscience" into the 1830s. Miss Miles' unidentified Dissenters (who appear to be some sort of Independent) divide into the parents' generation, who are devout believers, and the new generation, who even when apparently devout seem to think little about salvation and damnation. (One of the novel's running minor conflicts is about a new chapel, which some of the younger characters want specifically for the singing, not so much the preaching.) The title character, Sarah Miles, has inherited what the narrator repeatedly calls her family's "Puritan" sensibilities, but in practice this Puritanism (as well as that of her eventual husband, Sam Sykes) is articulated in secular terms: seeking after honest speech and action, self-improvement, and independence rooted in working-class community. But the novel's best Anglicanism, too, is largely a matter of moral culture rather than godliness. Maria Bell, a clergyman's daughter, shapes her life not around her father's preaching, but rather his call to think beyond personal sufferings: "'When your own affairs seem past mending, where there seems no hope of gladness in your life, try to help someone else, and light will come'" (32). This call to think about the self in relation, rather than in staunchly individualist terms, is one of the novel's rare examples of functional didacticism, in the sense that it is not only shown to be true within the narrative (rather than simply being a truism), but also that it can be done.
Miss Miles has didactic things to say, but much of the novel is pitched against "the didactic" as an incompetent educational strategy. Its most tragic victim is the agonizingly earnest Amelia Turner, youngest daughter of a family whose fortunes go fatally off the rails over the course of the novel. Sarah, who yearns to understand the undefinable knowledge purportedly possessed by "ladies," is initiated early on into Amelia's sayings: "She earnestly informed Sarah that one ought always to speak the truth, to be industrious and frugal, etc., etc. Sarah listened approvingly, having all these commonplaces bred in the bone, and looked anxiously for something more" (201). Amelia believes in the one-to-one application of commonplaces to both everyday and extraordinary circumstances; she engages with other characters as though all of their speech is entirely expressive of their interiority. She inverts Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester, who repeatedly authorizes his moral choices by their purely local "circumstances." By contrast, Amelia cannot register situational complications, whether class prejudices or gendered expectations--something that puts her at a distinct disadvantage in conversation with the creepy Mr. Thelwal, her father's primary creditor, who listens to her with a "covert sneer" (204) and always changes course when she firmly informs him that something "'would not be right'" (205). Amelia is, to a very great extent, precisely what she says, which is why of all the novel's characters she is the only one who cannot rebound once her worldview shatters. (Such shattering characterizes the narrative arcs of all four major female characters, and--except for Amelia--abruptly forces them to revalue their emotions, choices, and futures.) Her rejection of her mother's authority near the novel's end ("'I will never again do what you tell me, or believe a word you say'" [416]) heralds her death, not her independence. Whereas Maria Bell, who has a bad habit of resorting to platitudes early on, can nevertheless reflect and build on moments where the platitudes conspicuously fail to yield results, Amelia has developed no mental resources to rewrite her commonplaces in a new key.
Miss Miles has didactic things to say, but much of the novel is pitched against "the didactic" as an incompetent educational strategy. Its most tragic victim is the agonizingly earnest Amelia Turner, youngest daughter of a family whose fortunes go fatally off the rails over the course of the novel. Sarah, who yearns to understand the undefinable knowledge purportedly possessed by "ladies," is initiated early on into Amelia's sayings: "She earnestly informed Sarah that one ought always to speak the truth, to be industrious and frugal, etc., etc. Sarah listened approvingly, having all these commonplaces bred in the bone, and looked anxiously for something more" (201). Amelia believes in the one-to-one application of commonplaces to both everyday and extraordinary circumstances; she engages with other characters as though all of their speech is entirely expressive of their interiority. She inverts Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester, who repeatedly authorizes his moral choices by their purely local "circumstances." By contrast, Amelia cannot register situational complications, whether class prejudices or gendered expectations--something that puts her at a distinct disadvantage in conversation with the creepy Mr. Thelwal, her father's primary creditor, who listens to her with a "covert sneer" (204) and always changes course when she firmly informs him that something "'would not be right'" (205). Amelia is, to a very great extent, precisely what she says, which is why of all the novel's characters she is the only one who cannot rebound once her worldview shatters. (Such shattering characterizes the narrative arcs of all four major female characters, and--except for Amelia--abruptly forces them to revalue their emotions, choices, and futures.) Her rejection of her mother's authority near the novel's end ("'I will never again do what you tell me, or believe a word you say'" [416]) heralds her death, not her independence. Whereas Maria Bell, who has a bad habit of resorting to platitudes early on, can nevertheless reflect and build on moments where the platitudes conspicuously fail to yield results, Amelia has developed no mental resources to rewrite her commonplaces in a new key.