Eliot's Coquettes

I want to draw attention to Gwendolen's characterization and attendant moral transgression – richly enfolded within Daniel Deronda’s complex symbolic domain – before analyzing such typification as rooted in contemporary medical discourse. Unabashedly vain, self-interested, and desiring admiration by men of rank, Gwendolen embodies her milieu's morally impaired condition.Footnote ⁴ Her narcissism, reflective of English upper-class narcissism as a whole, has been nurtured by the unchecked reading of popular novels and their attendance of “showy” finishing schools (17; ch. 3). Similar to Rosamond Vincy's education at Mrs. Lemon's in Middlemarch, Gwendolen's two-year stay at a questionable établissement rounds off her so-called accomplishments and trains her in the mercenary art of self-display. Throughout the novel, Eliot's narrator censures women's self-commodification and employs conventional Biblical or pagan imagery to critique public spectacles of female social ambition, unequivocally tied to female eros. Daniel Deronda’s first pages include four instances of Gwendolen's association with a green-and-silver serpent; two with a “sylph,” albeit a “problematic” one; and one with “Lamia,” fatally bent on seducing men (5, 7; ch. 1).Footnote ⁵ The problem Gwendolen represents to the reader regards the relationship between form and content, the interactions between female body and mind. Does Gwendolen adhere to a pre-formulated type – has her story been heard before?Footnote ⁶ Gwendolen's ambitions and motivations revolve pathologically around herself; she appears all but “exceptional,” and, despite her self-absorption, she lacks introspection. Her inner state – the question whether she can be morally redeemed – is as foreclosed to herself as it is to others, including the reader (Ender 236). Eliot orchestrates a plot in which Gwendolen, Deronda, and the reader engage in analyzing Gwendolen together in an attempt to solve the riddle posed by the relationship of female bodily performance and psychological configuration, mediated by the often-ambivalent narrator.

Cryptic remarks about Gwendolen's “undefinable stinging quality” caused by “a trace of demon ancestry” (55; ch. 7) suggest that the girl challenges Christian-patriarchal norms because, literally and symbolically, she operates without a father.Footnote ⁷ This quality poisons her attractiveness in Deronda's eyes – and, for the implied male reader, it adds a titillating element to an otherwise clichéd body. When Eliot introduces Gwendolen at the seedy Leubronn gambling table, onlookers, including Deronda, inspect every feature of her face – complexion, nose, mouth – for its sexual appeal with an invasive, fragmenting gaze that borders on the pornographic. Eliot's hackneyed, fetishizing rhetoric suggests a devaluation of Gwendolen's erotically saturated self-staging and contains Gwendolen's transgressions within the realm of stereotype. Because her bodily performance is inherently predictable, Gwendolen likely won't go on grand adventures. The novel's setup as a moral tale promises that she will either fall or ascend. As if to contain the potential for movement upwards or downwards, Gwendolen looks too pale, too aware of her own beauty, and is too intent on rendering her features statuesque, “immovable” (7–8; ch. 1). Quite logically, her one effort at semi-public acting – the famous tableau scene in which she fails to perform Hermione's release from statuesque imprisonment – ends in disaster: Gwendolen must decide, and, when accepting Grandcourt's proposal of marriage, she falls.

As the novel's first paragraph suggests, Gwendolen's beauty coerces her observers to look again. She is aggressive in her demand for attention and admiration which allows her to run “a domestic empire” composed of her mother and four younger step-sisters, all of them in awe of the “princess in exile” (32; ch. 4). Gwendolen, with her flock of subservient females and her distaste for the “insipidly feminine” (24; ch. 3), plays at being patriarch herself, a pursuit unmistakably tied to her masterful horsewomanship. Similar to Rosamond Vincy, she perceives her connections to men of rank and the personal advantages potentially deriving from such ties as an “odour” that rules her choices (115; ch. 13).Footnote ⁸ Again like Rosamond, Gwendolen has a penchant for erotically charged tableaus and has cultivated an “almost miraculous power of self-control” to avoid possible public humiliation (503; ch. 48).Footnote ⁹ Being of “very common” provenance, morally at least, Gwendolen – predictably – is compelled to put her “majestic figure” to use after her mother's financial ruin, and, once married to Grandcourt, who is next in line for a baronetcy, Deronda's friend Hans Meyrick half-admiringly, half-deridingly takes to calling the usually loftily poised Gwendolen “the Vandyke duchess” (246; ch. 26). Gwendolen thus glides from one typification into another, never quite stabilizing an identity independent of spectacular performance. It is this “iridescence” (33; ch. 4), Gwendolen's restless inability to take her allotted place within the heterosexual reproductive circuit, the novel presents as pathological.

Tending to Old Stories

Much recent scholarship explains Gwendolen's mysterious “fits of spiritual dread” in terms of childhood abuse by her stepfather – the event that led to her being “spoiled” – and traces the incest's burdening of Gwendolen's marriage and her relationship to Deronda.Footnote ¹⁰ A parallel “symptom school” resists the incest narrative, and investigates Gwendolen's symptoms using contemporary medical writings.Footnote ¹¹ Most recently, Jill Matus has refuted the well-honed Freudian narrative of Gwendolen's psychic development. Although she concedes that Gwendolen's symptoms – i.e., her nightmares, unreliable memory, and temporal confusion – constitute “textbook symptoms of trauma or PTSD” (70), Matus cautions that the use of the word ‘traumata’ as signifying psychic wounds was not used until the turn of the century. She shows that Eliot helps create a discourse around psychological damage that renders memory and consciousness unreliable. For Matus, Gwendolen's “hidden wound is most obviously the effect of terror in response to external events” confounded by Gwendolen's interior “hauntings” (70).

Jane Wood provides the most thorough analysis of Gwendolen's hysteria in light of contemporary nineteenth-century science to date. Drawing from neurological theory, such as Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79) and Henry Maudsley's Body and Mind (1871), Wood sees Gwendolen's “iridescen[t]” self-division as “a burden of inheritance” (145). Gwendolen, caught in Darwin's deterministic headlights, is “pathologically self-obsessed,” Wood suggests, and lacks the “nervous equipment” to make rational choices, because her will is disproportionate to her physiological make-up (138–39, 142). I build on Wood's suggestive reading by honing in on symptoms related to Gwendolen's psychosexual development and Eliot's conception of them as “hysterical.”Footnote ¹²

David Trotter, in an essay that links Gwendolen's characterization to an emerging discourse surrounding agoraphobia, seeks to bypass discussions of hysteria and remarks that “the only symptom of hysteria [Gwendolen] ever exhibits is the choking sensation brought about by the thought of what her husband might do to her . . . Unlike the hysteric, she suffers in mind rather than in body, and is able, to a large extent, to keep her fits under control” (467). Although Trotter acknowledges that Gwendolen does exhibit “fits” – she has three of them over the course of the novel – he focuses on Gwendolen's “spiritual dread” as an agoraphobic, rather than a hysterical, presentation of nervous disease.

After sampling some standard nineteenth-century texts on nervous disease in Eliot's possession, it is possible to revise the notion that “Eliot wanted to try out rhetorics other than that of hysteria in designing her novel” (Trotter 467).Footnote ¹³ Eliot's depiction of Gwendolen's pathology owes much to an older tradition of medical writing about hysteria that was revitalized in the 1870s before being absorbed by Freudian practice at the end of the century. It understood hysteria to encompass a set of morally questionable behaviors and personality traits, along with diffuse physiological symptoms, whose diagnosis occurred with an implicit “healthy,” well-adjusted type in mind – and whose characteristics, in turn, differed from author to author. As this tradition increasingly located hysteria and related pathologies, such as hypochondria and nervousness, in bourgeois or aristocratic female bodies, the unacknowledged ideal began to correspond to an ever-narrower type of Victorian femininity (Micale 155). According to authors of this school, hysterics displayed morally questionable traits like “eccentricity, impulsiveness, emotionality, coquettishness, deceitfulness, and hypersexuality” (Micale 24), but these criteria were flexible enough to allow diagnosis of conduct that seemed politically impermissible. Among its most eminent advocates were Wilhelm Griesinger in Germany as well as Robert Brudenell Carter and Henry Maudsley in England – all of whose works were extant, and some of them partially marked-up, in Lewes and Eliot's library (Baker 26, 62, 81, 115, 132).Footnote ¹⁴ It is fair to say that these nineteenth-century descriptions of hysterical symptomology read like Gwendolen's blueprint, even on the lexical level.Footnote ¹⁵

Earlier representatives of hysteria's moral schoolFootnote ¹⁶ posited a connection between dysfunctions of the female genital tract and psychological disruptions, although later authors questioned this facile chain of causation. Still, it can be assumed that, for many of these authors, femaleness itself constituted a pathological condition.Footnote ¹⁷ Moritz Heinrich Romberg postulates with magisterial concision in 1853: “The condition for the origin of hysteria is the sexual maturity of the female” – “the source of the disease is permanent” (Romberg 86, 99). Although the range of hysterical symptoms described in my limited sample is enormous, authors agree that the necessary ingredient of the disease is the “hysterical paroxysm,”Footnote ¹⁸ a spasm produced by an underlying environmental trigger and resulting in emotional disturbance, as opposed to the epileptic fit. The paroxysm was said to be marked by paleness, dream-like states of distraction, sudden panic attacks, laughing or sobbing fits, and dizziness, less often hallucinations, swoons, convulsions, and even catalepsy and coma (Griesinger, Abhandlungen 174–76; Carter 2–3; Laycock 174; Paget 175). Often, patients are “stunned by the shock of a calamity, or . . . stupefied by terror” (Carter 4); they lose control over their thoughts and become fixated on the origin of the unusual excitement. Causes of the paroxysm include “sudden fright, disappointment, or anger”; when the trigger is removed, recovery is instant (Carter 3). Aftershock can occur, accompanied by pains of the nerves, and by an overall estrangement from the own body, from others, or from reality itself (Griesinger, Abhandlungen 173).Footnote ¹⁹

The hysterical patient is usually a woman, although Griesinger and Romberg also allow for male hysterics; Griesinger sees uterine dysfunctions as symptoms rather than triggers of hysteria.Footnote ²⁰ Hysterics are often virgins and their symptoms begin at the onset of puberty; the disease breaks out fully in one's twenties.Footnote ²¹ Patients generally have relatives suffering from nervous disorders, and experience their disease as highly embarrassing “psycho-sensitive” interruptions at unpredictable intervals. Yet a continuous disease progression usually reveals itself (Griesinger, Abhandlungen 171).Footnote ²² Many patients have very good self-command and appear “fresh and blooming” (Griesinger, Abhandlungen 172), despite bouts of exhaustion, anxiety, and trepidation temporarily colonizing their consciousness.Footnote ²³ Carter writes that suppression of excess emotion causes the outbreak of hysteria. Because women are “more prone to emotions” than men and simultaneously more sharply required to conceal them, they are most affected (Carter 26). Maudsley postulates that women's “nerve-centres” suffer from “a state of greater instability” (“Sex in Mind” 473). Their passion seeks to “discharge itself through the muscular . . . system,” hence producing spasms (Carter 15).Footnote ²⁴

All writers agree that hysterics are “too alert, or too highly charged with nerve-force” (Paget 175). They display “immoderate sensitiveness” and are usually possessed of “lively intellects” (Griesinger, Mental Pathology 179). Despite such seemingly sympathetic description, a morally deficient type of hysteric crystallizes. Laycock's patient starts out as “a spoiled child”Footnote ²⁵ (140); thirty-five years later, Paget offhandedly associates hysteria with “the silly, selfish girls among whom it is commonly supposed that hysteria is rife or an almost natural state” (179). When they were children, hysterical women often manifested “maniacal attacks” with “singing, cursing, . . . nymphomaniacal excitement . . . [of a] demoniacal character,” says Griesinger, although these episodes are not well recalled in adulthood (180). Writers habitually warn of girls’ miseducation at schools whose curriculum appears to include lectures on hysterical performance: “the young female returns . . . a hysterical, wayward, capricious girl . . . prone to hysteric paroxysms upon any unusual mental excitement” (Laycock 141). Education at home is equally unsafe if it is “lax and frivolous, allowing an uncontrolled play of every impression” (Romberg 87). Moral training is necessary for the girl to control her temper. Whatever a girl's inherited disposition might be, “The example of an hysterical mother developes [sic] the disease in the daughters” (Romberg 87). Thomas Laycock, in breathless crescendo, tells the story of the coquette's formation:

Finally, unmarried young women who indulge in “strong passions, indolence, and luxury” (Laycock 142) or in the vices of “sentimental love, jealousy, and disappointed vanity” (Romberg 87) will witness the effects of an unproductive and high-strung existence on their system that becomes increasingly prone to fits. In wonderful tautology, feminine vices both cause and are aggravated by hysteria. Thus Maudsley, in one of the first essays aimed at a wider, non-specialist audience, argued for the physiological – and sexed – materiality of the psyche: “There is sex in mind as distinctly as there is sex in body” (“Sex in Mind” 468).Footnote ²⁶

Gwendolen's Inheritance

Gwendolen's display of self-assurance and will corresponds to Carter's indictment of hysterical girls’ “ill-regulated minds and ungoverned tempers” (78). Three early vignettes provide insight into the history of her hysteria. They suggest that Gwendolen inherited her symptoms from her mother, that these symptoms burden the mother-daughter relationship, and that they are ultimately linked to women's sexuality and marriage. The narrator, in a casual aside, acknowledges young Gwendolen's “having strangled her sister's canary-bird in a final fit of exasperation at its shrill singing which had . . . jarringly interrupted her own” because Gwendolen had not yet learned to assume her aristocratic bearing (18; ch. 3). That “infelonious murder” – it is one of Griesinger's “maniacal attacks” – is never again mentioned in the family, although it arose from Gwendolen's competition with the bird and, by extension, her sisters. Secondly, one cold night, Gwendolen, “that healthy young lady, snug and warm as a rosy infant in her little couch” refuses to leave her bed and fetch her mother's medicine (18; ch. 3). Mrs. Davilow never receives it, suffers her “attack of pain” (18; ch. 3) in silence, and abstains from referring to the incident again. Thirdly, Mrs. Davilow, with “a violence quite unusual,” silences twelve-year old Gwendolen's inquiry about her mother's reasons for remarrying, betraying “a slight convulsive movement” on her flushed face (18; ch. 3). Mrs. Davilow's repeated concealment of mortification and its eruption as a facial tic suggest that she is one of Romberg's “hysterical mother[s]” who feed their daughters cues about hysterical performance (87). In the Davilow household intense emotions are buried, yet they release themselves through the facial muscles and through young Gwendolen's “passionate acts” (18; ch. 3) which evolve into the unnatural statuesque poise she assumes as an adult, her “frozen internality of suppression” (Wood 13). Gwendolen kills her sister's canary in defiance of the obligation to repress aggressiveness, an obligation that rules her home and, as Carter notes, feminine conduct in general.

The narrator indicates that Mrs. Davilow's second marriage, a source of perpetual guilt and shame, is one of the topics that cannot be discussed, a stricture leaving Gwendolen in a nervous flutter. On the day of the family's arrival at Offendene, Gwendolen observes the outcome of her mother's two marriages, that is “being dull and not minding anything,” and clairvoyantly determines that, in case her own marriage should turn out to be “not a happy state,” she “will not put up with it” (22; ch. 3). Mrs. Davilow adheres to doctrine and gloomily affirms, against all evidence, that “Marriage is the only happy state for a woman” (22; ch. 3). Gwendolen exclaims, “I don't see why it is hard to call things by their right names, and put them in their proper places” (22; ch. 3). A critique of marriage's truth – it does not accommodate women's wishes, it ravages their bodies, and it sometimes ends catastrophically – cannot be articulated in Mrs. Davilow's home, although the novel's symbolic domain garrulously tells a story that supplements the incomplete literal one. For instance, in Offendene's master bedroom, Mrs. Davoliw's grotesque “black and yellow catafalque” sits next to Gwendolen's “pretty little white couch” (22; ch. 3). The catafalque, where a continually morose, twice-widowed woman's body, afflicted by recurring painful attacks, lies in state at night, symbolizes the ghastly future of Gwendolen's virginal bed. A passage from Henry Maudsley helps cut through the prohibited narrative:

Eliot's portrait of Fanny Davilow offers a rendition of Maudsley's darkly pessimistic evolutionary tale; women “cannot disregard [their reproductive function] in the labour of life without injury to their health” (Physiology of Mind 468). Feeble and brooding Mrs. Davilow regrets her “indiscreet” second marriage to a man of a class lower than her own, a “sad blunder” occasioned by blind sexual appetite that yields nothing but abandonment, painful chastity, and excess girls (23, 27; ch. 3).Footnote ²⁸ Eliot's narrator appears keenly aware of the symptomatology of female hysteria caused by sexual frustration. The discussion of Fanny Davilow's body is complemented by Gothic tropes to avoid censorship and to make visible the nightmarish quality of Maudsley's teleological view of reproduction: for androcentric clinicians like Maudsley, women's hysteria is a necessary outcome of their constitution's adaptation to the pressures of their culture. They must breed, no matter with whom, or go insane. More sharply, Eliot – who simultaneously replicates and undercuts Maudsley's androcentrism – says that widowed women like Fanny are, in fact, already dead.

Within Daniel Deronda’s deterministic world, enervated women, ideologically functioning “as vessels of continuity” (Beer 205),Footnote ²⁹ bear superfluous girls without a sufficient number of morally sound men available. Useless daughters pile up everywhere in Daniel Deronda: Lady Mallinger has produced three girls (but no heir to Sir Hugo's estate), as do Mrs. Meyrick and Lydia Glasher. If women “represent[] what men in a specific culture most desire” (Beer 205), Daniel Deronda’s inflationary creation of redundant women represents a critique of a culture that wishes to maintain a morbid state of greater supply over demand. W. R. Greg, in 1862, censured the “unwholesome social state” caused by superabundant genteel women, and he famously suggested the emigration of 500,000 women to remedy this “wretchedness and wrong” (436). Unable to channel their “honourable energies” into venues other than reproductive ones, single and widowed women live in a degenerate state as perpetual “involuntary celibates” (Maudsley, Physiology and Pathology 203; Greg 445). This unfulfilled state produces hysterics addled by painful episodes and tics, and prohibited to explain their unhappiness to their daughters. The narrator's public prose cannot describe Mrs. Davilow's nervous enervation in Carter's medical terms, but the woman's hysterical symptoms and their underlying cause are made clear through recourse to the Gothic. But what about Gwendolen's?

No Touching: Gwendolen's Autoerotics

Carter explains that “when sexual desire is taken into the account, it will add immensely to the forces bearing upon the female, who is often much under its dominion; and who, if unmarried and chaste, is compelled to restrain every manifestation of its sway” (33). Gwendolen's “miraculous power of self-control,” itself a hysterical symptom and developed as a barricade against public humiliation, covers up something beyond what the novel can represent. However, unlike her mother, Gwendolen is not tormented by “sexual desire” for men per se. From the novel's outset, Gwendolen's motivation is purely and emptily tautological, although her mother and uncle navigate “that border-territory of rank where annexation is a burning topic” (17; ch. 3). In contrast to Middlemarch’s Rosamond Vincy, Gwendolen contentedly assumes that she will marry upward; “her favorite key of life” is “doing as she liked” rather than pursuing baronets (114; ch. 13). Gwendolen's social rank is not quite as low as Rosamond's as her late father descended from a titled family that refuses to recognize her mother's upstart, plantation-owning clan. Gwendolen's class affiliation and her schooling provide her with the liberties “to do . . . whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in that reflected way a more ardent sense of living” (31; ch. 4). Middlemarch’s narrator famously over-uses “ardent” to signify Dorothea's passionate character and wish for intellectual transcendence. Gwendolen, on the other hand, is “a Dorothea without the idealism” (Weisser 4), aspiring to transcendent sensation by creating continuous, heightened feedback between her own body and mind.

I would argue that Eliot amends medical writers’ theory of hysteria as sexual repression by imagining a different kind of psychic condition for her misguided heroine. Rather than suffering from unfulfilled heterosexual desire driving her into the arms of any one suitor (her mother's ailment), Gwendolen gains psychic and physical gratification from being the object of her own and others’ admiring gaze. Speaking with Maudsley, who, in pre-Freudian fashion, traces all human impulses back to two “fundamental instincts . . . self-preservation . . . [and] propagation” (Physiology of Mind 470), Gwendolen's object is “self-preservation” elevated to such a pathological degree that it forecloses that of “propagation.” Her “inborn energy of egoistic desire” (33; ch. 4), a hunger for feeling herself intensely, structures all interactions between herself and others. Admiration by Gwendolen's (preferably male) audience enhances her sense of self with feelings of power and exultation,Footnote ³⁰ a set of signifiers continuously tied to the proud display of her physical attractions and horseback riding. Although Gwendolen usually requires male spectators to produce erotic sensation – her “vanity is ill at ease under indifference” (90; ch. 10) and, as I show below, she panics when left alone for too long – she remains stubbornly inaccessible, physically and spiritually, to her suitors and tends to ride off without them. Her often-noted “iridescence of . . . character – the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies” (33; ch. 4) results from the mismatch between her self-love and the cultural mandate to communicate through physical performance her sexual availability to the highest male bidder, a requirement to which she fully commits only when faced with the specter of having to earn her money as a governess.Footnote ³¹

As Patricia Wood notes, female willfulness had long been imagined in terms of equestrianism, the horse epitomizing the animal body and its nervous system, the rider rational consciousness, the latter considered woefully underdeveloped in women (143).Footnote ³² Throughout the nineteenth century, women were prescribed horseback riding to reduce hysterical symptoms, although some doctors were wary that riding, in fact, caused dangerous friction, overstimulated women's abdominal muscles, and led to masturbation.Footnote ³³ Daniel Deronda is rife with explicit associations between Gwendolen's autoeroticism, her will to transcend class and gender boundaries, and equestrianism, suggesting that her self-centered eros manifests as intense physical sensation: “the beautiful creatures . . . sent a thrill of exultation through Gwendolen . . . [because they] were the symbols of command and luxury” (258; ch. 27). Moments like this are plentiful, as most of Gwendolen's erotic maneuvering with Rex, Grandcourt, and even Deronda occurs on horseback: “I never like my life so well as when I am on horseback . . . I only feel myself strong and happy,” Gwendolen tells Grandcourt (92–93; ch. 11); when on horseback, she deems herself “secure as an immortal goddess” and “her blood stir[s] . . . with the intoxication of youth” (58–59; ch. 7, 265; ch. 28). During the scene in which Rex's horse breaks its knees and throws him off, Eliot borrows conventionally masculine-coded signifiers for Gwendolen's sprint away from him and toward heightened self-sensation. The description combines rapid visual and auditory information, Gwendolen's erotic display before elite men chasing (with) her, abandonment of rational thought through collapsing equine and canine imagery, and the overwhelming feeling of embodied, galloping power. The narrator puts Gwendolen's autoerotics on narrative display, providing an arousing fantasy of the virgin's ecstasy:

Despite, or perhaps because of, many suggestive scenes like this, scholarship has made much of Gwendolen's “dread of adult sexuality” (David 193). As has been well documented, Gwendolen rebuffs Rex's gentlemanly advances and later freezes when Grandcourt initiates physical contact. The narrator's sharp-sighted analysis of Gwendolen's distaste for men's touch is coherently mentioned until it disappears under Grandcourt's sexual coverture: “she objected, with a sort of physical repulsion, to being directly made love to . . . there was a certain fierceness of maidenhood in her” (57; ch. 7). The reader may infer that Gwendolen has no knowledge of the sexual act; her erotic riding is instinctual, inarticulate, self-enclosed. Similarly, her distaste for male advances is all private sensation unmediated by speech: “Gwendolen herself could not have foreseen that she should feel in this way . . . But now the life of passion had begun negatively in her. She felt passionately averse to this volunteered love” (67; ch. 7). Scholars have read this passage as proof that Gwendolen is sexually “frigid.”Footnote ³⁴ They thereby miss Eliot's systematic depiction of Gwendolen's acts of hysterical self-love. For example, at Leubronn, Gwendolen has a nightly habit of “look[ing] lingeringly at herself for pleasure,” a routine Eliot's wry narrator deems to be “surely an allowable indulgence” (11; ch. 2). In the novel's most explicit instance of erotic self-gratification, Gwendolen basks in “a naïve delight in her fortunate self” and kisses her image in the “cold glass which had looked so warm” (13; ch. 2; emphasis original). Eliot reminds her readers that Gwendolen's autoerotics are productive of neither social warmth nor happiness.

Nineteenth-century medicine conceptualized the existence of erotic arousal in girls and adolescent women as a blockage that would have to be removed before normative heterosexual coition would take place. Its continued presence announced itself as hysteria (Foucault 153). As I show below, Eliot similarly suggests that Gwendolen's self-centered erotics were formed in childhood and prevent her from participating enthusiastically in heterosexual reproduction. As Eve Sedgwick has argued, medical practitioners’ anxiety around women's independent erotic excitement sparked institutional formations such as gynecology and, later in the century, psychoanalysis. According to Sedgwick, before the distinction between the hetero- and homosexual individual was fully institutionalized in the 1890s, as described by Foucault, the masturbator, “as one of the very earliest embodiments of ‘sexual identity’ in the period of the progressive epistemological overloading of sexuality, . . . may have been at the cynosureal center of a remapping of individual identity . . . along modern lines” (826). That is, the masturbator, particularly the masturbating child, was “uniquely formative” in the nineteenth-century creation of the modern sexual individual (826). While Foucault never explicitly conceives of this sexual type, the masturbating child, as anything but male, he links professional anxiety around young boys’ onanism with medical discourses about hysteria in women (153–54, 28–30, 42). We can locate the complementary type to Foucault's “schoolboy” in the sexualized girl-child and adolescent woman, as described by the medical practitioners in my sample. This clinical type of the young female masturbator gained currency among gynecologists after 1830, “taking on almost sinister connotations as the archetypical sex deviant” and prompting much anxious research into the function of the clitoris (Moscucci 60). Gwendolen, who does not know her own desires and whose sensations are caused by psychic, rather than manual stimulation, nevertheless embodies a female version of the precursor to the modern sexual individual. The novel's teleology attempts to suffuse this individual with conscience, to domesticate it for an unknowable future.

As historians of hysteria have shown, masturbation, like femininity itself, was seen as a self-reinforcing cause and result of hysteria (Finn 85).Footnote ³⁵ Romberg warns that “Debilitating influences are the most fertile sources of hysteria; among these we must mention over-excitement . . . of the sexual organs, [and] self-indulgence” (86). Henry Maudsley tells the terrifying story of how even the most innocent woman, if the life of passion begins negatively in her, like Gwendolen's, can stumble onto the path of vice:

Maudsley argues that temperaments such as Gwendolen's can be easily “infected” with onanism, a habit leading to eventual insanity and death: Girls “who do silly and eccentric things . . . out of a morbid craving to attract notice . . . are often masturbators” (Physiology and Pathology 414).Footnote ³⁶ Thomas Low Nichols, in 1873, provides advice about how to spot a masturbating girl, “this practice” being “fully as common – perhaps more common – with girls than boys” (280):

Isaac Baker Brown, in his infamous work,Footnote ³⁷ On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity (1866), suggests that masturbators are “indifferent to . . . domestic life” and, once married, had “a distaste for marital intercourse” (14, 16). Medical writers’ catalogues of the horrors resulting from masturbation are too long to reproduce here, but a few of their examples will suffice to illustrate Gwendolen's association with the conventional medical type of the masturbating girl. Baker Brown warns that “There will be quivering of the eyelids, and an inability to look one straight in the eye” (15). When Deronda first scrutinizes her at Leubronn, Gwendolen wishes to avert her gaze before meeting his eyes reluctantly (5; ch. 1). Similarly, Nichols posits that the “young girl who gives way to [onanism], loses her colour” (282). During the same introductory scene at Leubronn, observers discuss the quality of her paleness at length (7; ch. 1). Nichols also warns that “solitudinarians have nervous affections,” such as “tremors and apprehensions of future misery”; “her eyes, mouth, her walk, her mode of speaking, all her features, all her carriage, in fact, bespeak languor and indifference” (281–82). Whenever Gwendolen walks out alone, helpless apprehension and tremors overcome her (52; ch. 6); while engaged in trivial conversation at Leubronn, however, her voice takes on a studied “languor of utterance” and she exclaims repeatedly that she is “bored to death” (8, 9; ch. 1). Her family is fully aware of her frequent “fits of timidity and terror” (52; ch. 6). Carter recommends co-sleeping if parents’ suspicions are aroused and, if appropriate, discussing the habit and ensure the hysteric understands that her habit is a “crime” (149). While it seems unlikely that such conversation would occur in Mrs. Davilow's household, Gwendolen and her mother share a bedroom, perhaps to prevent Gwendolen's nightly “fits of . . . terror” (52; ch. 11). Fanny remarks at one point that Gwendolen is “afraid to be alone in the night” (44; ch. 6).

Although she is unprepared for the reality of men's sexual egoism and excess (and sexual intercourse in general), Gwendolen plays at being a man with her archery, hunting, and gambling, always aspiring to be “daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers” (51; ch. 6).Footnote ³⁸ Baker Brown warns that the hysterical masturbating girl displays “a great disposition for novelties . . . desiring to escape from home” (15). Thus, in idle schoolboy fashion, Gwendolen tells Rex that she would like to “go to the North Pole, or ride steeple-chases”; later, when Grandcourt's proposal seems unavoidable, she mentions to him improbable alternatives, such as “find[ing] out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East” (57; ch. 7, 113; ch. 13). The closest thing to adventure within Gwendolen's reach is intrepid horseback riding, for Eliot the quintessential symbol of female sexual power, as Rosamond's example makes clear.Footnote ³⁹

Gwendolen, already “inwardly rebellious against the restraints of family conditions” (43; ch. 6), confronts a new challenge to her pursuit of heightened narcissistic affect when she agrees to submit herself to the erotic obligations imposed by Grandcourt. Symbolically and figuratively, her performance of masculine will prevents her development of sexual interest in other men. Gwendolen rejects Rex Gascoigne's polite attempts at courtship because her “young self-exultation” requires the redirection of male desire (borrowed from Rex) onto ideal feminine surface, herself (31; ch. 4). With the help of admiring spectators, Gwendolen's nervous system energizes its own feedback loop of desire and exultation. When she moves through the long rooms at Quetcham Hall under the gaze of male guests, she feels “exultingly that [the grand promenade] befitted her” (34; ch. 5). Gwendolen's pleasurable vanity, fueled by men's attraction to her, constitutes a form of self-sufficient, embodied erotics that contemporary medical writers linked to hysteria.

Rachel Maines argues that hysteria and its long roster of associated sexual ailments can be interpreted in light of what medical discourse considers “the normal functioning of female sexuality” today (2). The hysterical paroxysm, understood by many nineteenth-century medical professionals to be evoked by terror, could often have constituted orgasmic sensation (Maines 3).Footnote ⁴⁰ Since Eliot's narrative often replicates clinicians’ androcentric view – although its sympathies are more ambivalent than medical writers’ – it is possible to interpret at least some instances of Gwendolen's “fits of spiritual dread” as symptoms of female sexual arousal. Thus far, critics have agreed that during such moments, something intensely private, unknown to Gwendolen herself – a repressed memory, a psychological pathology – erupts and becomes public spectacle, laying bare Gwendolen's self-division that expresses itself in violent outbursts (Vrettos 570–71). Yet, Gwendolen's spasms have not been examined in light of Nichols's wonder at girls’ “convulsions which almost always accompany the acts of solitary indulgence” (283), and Carter's suggestion that “the sexual passion is more concerned than any other single emotion, and, perhaps, as much as all others put together, in the production of the hysteric paroxysm” (36).

Gwendolen's Fits

On the day Gwendolen and her female entourage arrive at Offendene, Gwendolen's sister Isabel opens a hidden wainscot panel and reveals “a picture of an upturned dead face, from which an obscure figure seemed to be fleeing with open arms” (20; ch. 3). Upon entering the salon, Gwendolen strikes a pose by the organ as Saint Cecilia, martyred patron saint of music, loosens her hair, and “laughs with delight,” before everyone's attention is directed at the picture of the dead face. Isabel ominously remarks that Gwendolen “will never stay in this room by [her]self” (20; ch. 3). Gwendolen “shudder[s] silently,” scolds Isabel for “open[ing] things which were meant to be shut up” and, going upstairs with her mother, continues to express her idée fixe of making “a tolerable Saint Cecilia” (20–21; ch. 3). A series of Gothic motifs structures this scene; as critics have suggested, its images of violent struggle and death are meant to be locked up in the panel, in the Gothic space that is Offendene, or the mind. Nancy Henry notes that Daniel Deronda appears to rehearse Gothic horror stories as “domesticated . . . family drama” (229). Yet, what tends to be overlooked is that Gwendolen's “delight” breaks through the horror because, as hysteria discourse postulates, terror and ecstasy often co-mingle.

As the unbending Klesmer reveals later,Footnote ⁴¹ Gwendolen's self-fashioning as Saint Cecilia is preposterous, because her artistic talents are mediocre at best. Since “no one had disputed . . . her general superiority” (32; ch. 4), Gwendolen is unaware that her performances are not only unconvincing; they are in bad taste. Gwendolen's penchant for self-display risks exacerbation of her social precariousness and might propel her away from cultured wealth towards the vulgar life of struggling actresses. Fraser's, in 1869, condemns genteel ladies’ proclivity to act in tableau vivants and provides useful commentary on Gwendolen's class-less show. The magazine calls them “instances of frivolity illustrative of the extreme childishness of a certain class of educated women,” and insists that spectators do not receive “a high idea of the dignity and simplicity of ladies of rank” who use such performances mainly to display their finery (“Women's Education” 539). On the day of the fateful tableau vivant, Gwendolen's wish to show off her “Greek dress” while in “statuesque pose” drives the gestation of the project and causes much delay and dispute (47; ch. 6). However, the tableau produces something else in Gwendolen, that is, “that exalted susceptibility to the effects of emotion, and that insatiable desire for the notice of others” that Carter considers necessary for the occurrence of the hysteric fit (76–77). Social debasement and erotic stimulus entwine in this scene to produce transgressive affect as public spectacle.

As the family and guests assemble for a tableau vivant depicting the scene of Hermione's release from confinement as a statue in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale,Footnote ⁴² the narrator comments on the dilettantish execution of the scene – it is an absurd “imitation of acting” (48; ch. 6). Nevertheless, anticipation fills Gwendolen with “special exultation” (49; ch. 6). Again, as during the previous scene that functions as a rehearsal for this more public tableau, Gwendolen's attempt to turn herself into a statue is accompanied by an ecstatically heightened sense of self. She wants to embody perfectly controlled, beautiful surface – surface that she, with her limited and vulgar education, perceives to constitute art. By thus transcending her “distasteful petty empire” (378; ch. 36), Gwendolen turns herself into pure spectacle. During her brief tableau as Saint Cecilia, Gwendolen presented a “charming picture” to her family and the housekeeper, with her waist-length hair suggestively let down. Now, owing to the many onlookers (some of whom she suspects to be her admirers), her sensation turns into “special exultation,” “an unforeseen phase of emotion” (49; ch. 6). Any reader of neurological theory will be able to predict what happens next:

Gwendolen's spectators are witnessing the “immediate effects of extreme fear or terror on women” (Laycock 174). Thomas Laycock had long warned of the erotically “excitant” influence of music on the nerves and, although Carter dismisses Laycock's concerns regarding young girls’ exposure to music, he also anticipates that moments such as the tableau could lead to hysterical outbursts.Footnote ⁴³ In felicitous contrast to Shakespeare's Hermione, who awakens into vitality, Gwendolen instead freezes into marble, accomplishing a transformation into plastik, as Klesmer generously calls it. This is spectacular hysterical performance to the second power; it occurs as and within narrative.

Gwendolen experiences a textbook case of the hysterical paroxysm. With her eyes appearing fixed upon the terrifying object, she undergoes one of Griesinger's “psycho-sensitive” interruptions. Once her mother touches her, Gwendolen's body begins to tremble in the aftershock of nervous energy's muscular discharge.Footnote ⁴⁴ Carter states that the violence of the hysterical attack is directly proportional to the duration of the responsible emotion's concealment – in this case, the moments of Gwendolen's “special exultation.” He continues that, in women, “the most common of these feelings is terror; and the most violent is the sexual passion” (Carter 31–32).Footnote ⁴⁵ Eliot stages a perfect storm of “fear and fondness” (33; ch. 4), leading to Gwendolen's frozen awe when confronted with the Gothic interruption of her exultation.

The important conjunction of terror and eroticism in this scene is produced by the Gothic element of the “dead face” and its sudden disruption of Gwendolen's selfish passion. Because the dead face belongs to Gwendolen's future husband, Jill Matus understands Eliot's slippage into Gothic mode as enabling Gwendolen to become “clairvoyant about her own disastrous fate with Grandcourt” (67). Carter had already speculated in 1855 about nervous disease's overlap with “mesmeric phenomena” (230).Footnote ⁴⁶ In this scene, Gwendolen's heightened sensation cannot be contained by the narrator's realism and produces the supernatural event. More precisely, sexual coverture in marriage, represented in Daniel Deronda through Gothic tropes, delimits the realm of possibility – and foreshadows the horrible future manifestation – of Gwendolen's maidenly arousal.Footnote ⁴⁷ If Maines is correct in her assertion that hysterical fits would today be interpreted as manifestation of “normal” female sexuality, Gwendolen's “perfect climax,” a phrase used by Klesmer, indicates that Gwendolen experienced something akin to a terrifying orgasm.

Eliot faithfully adheres to medical script. Klesmer intuits Gwendolen's “mortification” about her “betrayal into a passion of fear” (50; ch. 6); likewise, Griesinger observes that his patients evince embarrassment after experiencing paroxysmal fits. The touch of Mrs. Davilow, the assiduous co-sleeper, ends Gwendolen's paralysis and rescues her for the time being from the future specter of Grandcourt's total claim on her body. In order to re-stabilize the novel's adherence to realism, the narrator explains that, before the scene in question, “inconvenient” Isabel had stolen the panel's key from Gwendolen's drawer and caught a glimpse of the painting, albeit without re-locking the panel. It must have burst open because of the piano's “vibration,” that is, Laycock's erotic stimulus (50–51; ch. 6). In medically correct terms, the narrator attributes Gwendolen's fit of terror and passion to her being a “sensitive creature,” having remarked earlier that Gwendolen takes her “peculiar sensitiveness” to be “a mark of her general superiority” (50; ch. 6, 18; ch. 3).

Only after staging Gwendolen's fit for public consumption (and readerly titillation), does the narrator reveal Gwendolen's anamnesis. She has a defined “susceptibility to terror,” a “liability . . . to fits of spiritual dread,” and an interior “fountain of awe” with a tendency to flow over at inopportune moments (51, 52; ch. 6). Gwendolen's shameful outburst of objectless passion is, in fact, a regular occurrence – which explains her mother's lack of surprise during the Hermione tableau:

Gwendolen's performance of masculine will is syncopated by irregular bouts of “madness,” occurring when the girl is without the audience necessary to channel her exultation safely into vanity, although her nervous system continues to operate in its habitually overexcited state. Carter warns that the first fit lowers the threshold for subsequent ones; increasingly strong self-control is necessary to curtail overwhelming emotion (Carter 41, 54).Footnote ⁴⁸ Gwendolen is not a solitary masturbator because the burden of half-remembered terror and its effects upon her body are too heavy:

As David Trotter suggests, “Limitlessness, the absence of boundaries, is Gwendolen's problem” (467). I would add that, in absence of paternal boundaries guiding her moral and sensual education, Gwendolen is allowed to play the dandy, a “petty” patriarch who rules over her mother and sisters (378; ch. 36) and who yet shivers when confronted with spheres of knowledge that are as far removed from her own existence as the stars – or actual men. Without sufficient development of moral conscience to relieve the strain of nervous exultation upon her nerves, Gwendolen is too receptive, too unbounded an individual, unable to perceive among the flood of sensations upon her body the systems of power and knowledge that determine her existence.Footnote ⁴⁹ Whenever she is without “that reflected way” of self-assurance provided by others, Gwendolen experiences the world's incomprehensible horizons, male sexuality included, as unarticulated (and – for various reasons – unrepresentable) feelings of helpless, trembling abandon. Although Gwendolen's “young self-exultation,” in her eyes, distinguishes her from others “who allow themselves to be made slaves of” (31; ch. 4), her will falters completely when it is opposed by scenes of erotic terror; scenes that will be, in fact, produced by Grandcourt later on. If Gwendolen is to be one of “these delicate vessels” in which “the treasure of human affection” is “borne onward through the ages” (103; ch. 11), she must face heterosexual coition and have children. Yet, Gwendolen's erotic terror signals that she fears sex as a form of self-annihilation (Beer 204). Once she hands the reins to Grandcourt, her dread erupts spasmodically, before the narrator politely excises Gwendolen's married body from the narrative. It only reappears on an empty ship in the bay of Genoa, more thoroughly hysterical than ever. In the last sections, I examine the politics of this incomplete representational excision as well as the causes of Gwendolen's exacerbated hysterical symptoms. After all, as Griesinger notes, there is “great frequency” of hysteria “amongst married women” (Mental Pathology 181).

The Story of a Cure

Eliot's novel replicates – and critiques – standard medical plots in which hysterical upper middle-class women are broken in and systematically turned acquiescent in order to function within a social system that primarily requires their sexual and reproductive service. Although Eliot withholds Gwendolen's reentrance into the reproductive economy at the end of Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen eventually achieves frictionless conduct, the price of which is barrenness, melancholy, and a glaring absence of purpose.

Deronda's probing and censorious gaze in Leubronn begins Gwendolen's moral education because it reveals to her that her performance is somehow lacking to win his approval. His subsequent retrieval of her father's Etruscan turquoise necklace signals the starting point of Gwendolen's instruction in benevolent patriarchy. By “finding” her father for her, Deronda incurs the onerous responsibility of confidante and moral doctor. His assumption of specular and moral control over the girl is analogous to Carter's prescriptive moral gaze: “we must look for a degree of perversion of the moral sense, which is . . . most embarrassing to encounter . . . to induce the abandonment of vicious habits” (106). Scholars have made much of Deronda and Gwendolen's proto-therapeutic relationship that, for long stretches of the novel, looks like the foreplay to courtship.Footnote ⁵⁰ The narrator, who calls Deronda Gwendolen's “conscience,” “priest,” and “terrible browed-angel” (355, 369; ch. 35, 577; ch. 54), explores with these terms traditional categories of moral mentorship and discards them all because they do not quite match the professional, non-erotic relationship Deronda himself has in mind (and wants to discharge as quickly as possible) and that Carter had theorized in 1853. While the novel imagines the formation of the psychiatric patient-doctor relationship, it maintains that romantic, even sexual, investment – something beyond empathy and symbolically linked to women's jewelry – is necessary for the cure (Beer 208). Gwendolen must be touched by “Mighty Love” because her affinity to Deronda counterbalances Grandcourt's violent conditioning in marital subordination (660; ch. 65). Carter himself anticipated such balancing.

Deronda's treatment of Gwendolen has apparently unhealthy results: his retrieval of the necklace initiates a series of events that culminates in Gwendolen's marriage and subsequent abuse.Footnote ⁵¹ In fact, Gwendolen's route through suffering is intentional; the hysterical girl cannot be treated in the maternal household because her home caused her miseducation in the first place (Carter 105). Eliot traces in splendid detail Carter's treatment plan “to exorcise the demon” of female willfulness: “to obtain this end, there must be a constructive, as well as a destructive system, and the two must advance together, the endeavour being made to plant right principles and feelings, as fast as the rooting up of evil ones makes room for them” (132). Whereas Deronda is Carter's agent of moral construction, Grandcourt is hired to destroy Gwendolen's claims to psychic and physical independence. Gwendolen soon becomes “conscious of an uneasy, transforming process – all the old nature shaken to its depths” (362; ch. 35). The many almost identical scenes of therapeutic encouragement and punitive disciplining inject Gwendolen with the required dosage of reasonableness and knowledge of her own insignificance, just as Carter prescribed (114). Carter further writes that the hysteric should find a healthy pursuit (“music, reading, or chess”) to occupy her thoughts (133). Accordingly, Deronda suggests to Gwendolen that she find a purpose in training her voice. Right away, Grandcourt forbids Gwendolen to sing because he “doesn't want to hear squalling in private” (502; ch. 48). Construction and destruction pull Gwendolen away from aberrant willfulness. Next, Carter writes that the patient must be shamed for betraying hysterical symptoms; the goal should be “to make them appear ridiculous” (118). The narrative repeats the two-pronged system: Deronda tells Gwendolen to “Turn your fear into a safeguard” so that she may achieve a clearer moral vision (388; ch. 36). Soon thereafter, Gwendolen loses her nerves in Grandcourt's presence and is promptly reprimanded: “What the devil women can see in this kind of thing, I don't know” (581; ch. 54). When Gwendolen confides that she is unhappy in her marriage, Deronda wants her to “confess” her unhappiness and moral struggle to her husband. By thus “appl[ying] precept to soothe pain” (Tromp 457), Deronda assumes that the structure that causes Gwendolen's misery will be its antidote, that reasonable patriarchal law is capable of soothing wifely misery. Grandcourt, in turn, proves this not to be the case and imprisons her on his yacht.

In a final step, the novel exorcizes the evil manifestation of patriarchy embodied by Grandcourt. For Carter's system to work, the plot requires the coincidence of Grandcourt's inability to swim: Gwendolen can never “be good” while Grandcourt is alive (657; ch. 65). Deronda rewards her frantic, conscience-stricken acceptance of guilt for Grandcourt's death with release from any responsibility for the boating accident and discharges her into loneliness, “a new existence” (659; ch. 65). What's left for Gwendolen – who has now given up on erotic self-transcendence – is a hysterical body, “reduced to a mere speck” (689; ch. 69), that returns to quiet country life and, perhaps, marriage to Rex Gascoigne who still has a weakness for her. Purified Gwendolen is readied for an uncertain, but most likely utterly conventional, future in which kindness to her family, “that penitential, loving purpose” (658; ch. 65), overrides all claims to selfishness. Crucially, Gwendolen still does not consent to her conversion into Dorothea-style idealism. When Deronda and the narrator leave her in the penultimate chapter, she submits to endless “fits of shrieking” (692; ch. 69), interrupted by rational assurances to her mother that she will survive and become better. This spectacle of hysteria gives voice to otherwise unpronounceable feelings of betrayal by patriarchal structures – Deronda's therapeutic and Grandcourt's legal kind. Men continue to betray and desert Gwendolen, and her hysteria keeps erupting as “private counter-narrative that challenges the cultural and ideological presuppositions of the novel's dominant narrative voice” (Vrettos 553). Gwendolen's nervous body cannot realistically become an agent of moral rejuvenation.

Scholars rightly deplore that Gwendolen loses her spunk and ambition as the novel closes. In contrast to most recent criticism, however, the novel is not as attentive to the politics of Gwendolen's re-containment – both by the social order and by her debilitating hysteria's continuation – as it is invested in endowing Gwendolen with the ability to comprehend and atone for her struggle against domestication (Matus 72). After all, Carter assures readers, “with good conduct on her [a woman's] part, there is every prospect of her complete moral restoration” (112). Gwendolen still has work to do – but whether she will continue the reproduction of her class is a future to which Eliot's novel does not commit. As the novel ends, Gwendolen's chances for such restoration are unclear. Gwendolen is received back into the care of her uncle and mother, and, although she shows signs that her moral maturity surpasses that of her previous guardians, she might not be able to evade her uncle's continued upward social ambition. Deronda, whose morals again overlap with those dominant in the narrator, suggests to Hans Meyrick that it would be better if Gwendolen did not marry again, thereby yanking away conventional narrative closure from the reader (685; ch. 69). If scholars today are interested in holding the narrator and men like Deronda and Grandcourt accountable for Gwendolen's future existence as hysterical penitent, Eliot herself seems to have been more interested in the operations of conscience that allow one to transgress and then repent (Matus 73). In light of the narrator's (and Deronda's) scruples regarding Gwendolen's chances for rehabilitation, she might not marry again because she simply has not earned it – and never might. Her body is too stubborn.

As the novel ends, Gwendolen's body's hysterical interruption of the dominant narrative voice is politically defused. Marlene Tromp writes that Gwendolen's “sensationalized, performative madness” constitutes a significant “interrogation of the discourse of ‘reason’ as a means for Gwendolen to understand her world” (Tromp 452). Here, Tromp echoes Beer's judgment that Eliot “presents [Gwendolen's] ‘large discourse of imaginative fears’ not simply as curtailing action but as liberating experience” (Beer 206). Beer remarks further, “Gwendolen's predicament is that she has will without authority, rebellion without speculation. She enters the feminist challenge to her prescribed lot without any sort of theoretical or practical consciousness. She is eventually liberated by her frantic unconscious” (211; emphasis original). I am less optimistic than Beer and Tromp about the liberating possibilities of Daniel Deronda’s assimilation of hysteria discourse. Critics’ celebration of Gwendolen's irrational, bodily interruptions of patriarchal reason might cover up another taboo unspeakable for feminist critics: Eliot's fiction suggests that women do not necessarily possess the capacity for reason that would enable them to become political subjects. Eliot was very well aware that women's citizenship had been denied on the basis of non-male embodiment. It is precisely her body that prevents Gwendolen from attaining social, political, and physiological maturity.