1. Lucilla as Flat Character

Lucilla bears all the marks of a flat character. In his seminal definition of the term, E. M. Forster defines flat characters by three key traits: (1) they “are constructed round a single idea or quality,” (2) they fail to change or develop, and (3) they speak in catchphrases.Footnote ⁹ Lucilla ticks all of these boxes. Oliphant consistently defines her by her unwavering self-satisfaction and good sense. As numerous critics have remarked, she never changes, emerging from her novel without learning a single lesson, and without even experiencing a crisis of doubt and soul-searching.Footnote ¹⁰ And Lucilla constantly spouts catchphrases, most notably, “The object of my life is to be a comfort to poor papa” (31). Her stability of character perplexes because flatness typically aligns with minorness in the nineteenth-century novel. Alex Woloch, in his key study of the minor character, defines minor characters by the way they are flattened by their limited character space.Footnote ¹¹ To be minor is to be flat, and vice versa, so it follows that major characters like Lucilla should be round. But this dichotomy is beginning to be challenged in character criticism. In a recent article, Elizabeth Brogden discusses Henry James's heroine Isabel Archer as a protagonist who is round but minor in terms of plot.Footnote ¹² Meanwhile, Lucilla is major but flat, similarly turning Woloch's character-system on its head. She dominates the character-space of Miss Marjoribanks but lacks depth even in comparison with the other characters in the novel, who are baffled by her flatness. In particular, Lucilla confounds us because her defining traits of rationality and self-satisfaction fly in the face of two key experiences of most protagonists: complex emotions and self-doubt. The inner life of the typical nineteenth-century heroine is troubled, rocked by mixed feelings, indecision, and uncertainty. Lucilla, meanwhile, sails through her novel undisturbed by internal complications.

To clearly remark this contrast, compare Lucilla's reaction with her literary forebear Emma's response in the aftermath of a romantic reversal. After discovering that Mr. Elton has been interested in her, not Harriet, Emma sits “down to think and be miserable”: “It was a wretched business indeed!—Such an overthrow of every thing she had been wishing for!—Such a development of every thing most unwelcome!—Such a blow for Harriet!—that was the worst of all. Every part of it brought pain and humiliation.”Footnote ¹³ Of course, one cannot get a full sense of Emma's roundness from such a short passage, which only showcases a small part of Emma's emotional range. In the full scene, she also experiences defensiveness, pride, scorn, and imagination, and she even laughs at herself. But my point is that, although we may be able to sum Emma up with descriptors like clever and confident, her inner life can sharply deviate from those characteristics. Her emotional reactions surprise readers and herself, allowing for self-critique and development. In contrast, here are Lucilla's ruminations after her suitor has publicly left her for her social inferior, Barbara:

“Meditative but undaunted”: whereas Emma's emotional range can surprise, Lucilla's reactions are limited to her trademarks of good sense and self-satisfaction. She rationally thinks things over and is unperturbed, an outcome Oliphant—hammering the point home—attributes to her “perfect health and entire satisfaction with herself” (121). Free indirect discourse, rather than marking emotional intensity as it does in the Emma passage, instead tags only the imagined feeling of humiliation, a feeling that Lucilla never actually experiences in the novel. Indeed, far from Emma's complex feelings that make her verisimilar to a real person, Lucilla's mental processing pushes her characterization toward idealized allegory: her “sacred sense of duty and high aims of genius” befit a “well-regulated mind,” even representing “the highest gratification of which the mind is capable.” Lucilla's flatness thus distinguishes her not just from typical protagonists but also from the human.

Lucilla topples critical commonplaces about character. Woloch and a host of other scholars assume that protagonists must display psychological depth. Even critics interested in the complexities of flatness, such as Woloch, Deidre Lynch, and Sandra Macpherson, still assume the eventual rise of the character with an inner life.Footnote ¹⁵ Woloch, for instance, assumes that all characters have mimetic potential that is lost in the flattening process, that all characters, given enough narrative space, could be round, an assumption John Frow critiques as “imagin[ing] the quasi-persons of narrative to be somehow extricable from the texts in which they fully exist.”Footnote ¹⁶ Only Marta Figlerowicz, in Flat Protagonists, bucks this trend by focusing, as her title suggests, on flat protagonists, but her work differs from mine in three ways. First, she defines flat protagonists as “characters whose represented self-expression and ties to others contract and simplify over the course of a novel.”Footnote ¹⁷ Her flat protagonists start off with some degree of depth, and, as Figlerowicz notes, many critics consider them deep. In contrast, Lucilla begins her novel as a flat character and remains so throughout. Second, Figlerowicz's analysis posits a “flat realism” that aims to “reduce our expectations about how much any particular person's self-expression interests or affects anybody else.”Footnote ¹⁸ She argues that these characters reflect the limitations of the complexity and interest of real people's inner lives. They are realistically shallow. My analysis of Lucilla as a flat protagonist instead focuses on how Lucilla is unlike a real human. She is not merely shallow; she's flat, totally determined by her ruling qualities in a way real humans are not. Third, Figlerowicz argues that the flatness of her protagonists points to how people are less interesting than they think, but Oliphant asserts the opposite:

Lucilla is just as interesting as she thinks she is, and her belief in her fascinations—powered by her characteristic self-satisfaction—actually creates them. This effect is compounded, for readers, by her unfailing success: we like to watch her win over the crowd. Far from making her boring, then, Lucilla's flatness is what makes her interesting.Footnote ¹⁹

Lucilla's flatness is not a mistake on Oliphant's part. Oliphant is perfectly capable of creating round characters. Other characters in Miss Marjoribanks are not flat like Lucilla, and Oliphant plays up the contrast by repeatedly juxtaposing Lucilla's consistent lack of emotional distress with their complicated feelings. For instance, after Lucilla's suitor Cavendish fails to propose, Oliphant writes: “Thus it was with a serene conviction that ‘whatever is, is best,’ that Miss Marjoribanks betook herself to her peaceful slumbers. … Very different were the sentiments of Mr Cavendish, who could not sleep for the ghosts that kept tugging at him on every side” (188–89). She sleeps soundly, free from and indeed incapable of negative feelings, while his doubts about his decision not to pop the question possess such strength that they escape his body to haunt him, pulling him in different directions.Footnote ²⁰ Furthermore, Oliphant was far from having a simplistic understanding of the personalities of real people; her view of character in real life markedly contrasts with her portrayal of Lucilla. As Laurie Langbauer argues in her discussion of Oliphant's autobiography, Oliphant had a subtle and complex conception of selfhood that is far from stable or easily defined: since the everyday is “ephemeral, meaningless, unplumbable,” “[t]he self that emerges in recognition of its construction out of such a record is one that must ultimately give up claim to privilege, sense, to our usual notion of self at all.”Footnote ²¹ That is, as Langbauer shrewdly puts it, the self's “triteness … creates its very unfathomableness.”Footnote ²² Though Lucilla's flatness makes her inner self unfathomable—because possibly nonexistent—she has well-defined character traits, unlike the everyday, indefinable self that Oliphant describes in her autobiography. This contrast suggests an intentional exploration of the possibilities offered by the flat character in Miss Marjoribanks.

Furthermore, Lucilla is flat but not minor. Her flatness clearly differs from the distortions that Woloch argues surround minor characters due to the limited character-space they are given. The distinction is easy to see because Miss Marjoribanks first appears as a minor character in Oliphant's novella The Doctor's Family (1863).Footnote ²³ The titular doctor briefly woos Miss Marjoribanks to spite his love interest. In the novella, Miss Marjoribanks is scrunched into a few sentences so that we get only a blurred view of her, as Woloch predicts. She only faintly resembles Lucilla of the later novel. In her first appearance, Miss Marjoribanks has the potential to be “a not unagreeable, rather clever, middle-aged wife” to the doctor.Footnote ²⁴ This picture, of course, does not do justice to the confident, capable heroine of the later novel. Nonetheless, it represents the sum of the narrative attention spared to her in the doctor's story. In Miss Marjoribanks, Oliphant comments on the warped view of Lucilla that arose during her short-lived flirtation with the doctor, attributing it to the misperceptions of the other people in her community: “the general public, having had Lucilla for a long time before their eyes, naturally added on seven or eight years to her age, and concluded her to be a great deal older than the young doctor, though everybody allowed that it would have been a most advantageous match for him in every possible point of view” (335). Oliphant describes the distorted representation of Lucilla in the earlier text as the result of skewed public perceptions rather than a lack of narrative attention, an equation that points to the similarly limited knowledge produced by relational distance and by restricted character-space. More importantly, however, the comparison between the differing portrayals of Lucilla in the two texts confirms that in the latter Oliphant is deliberately exploring a new kind of flatness. Lucilla is not merely a minor character thrown into prominence. She stands out not for her relationship to others, as Miss Marjoribanks does in The Doctor's Family, but for her own unique qualities: not complex qualities, but sharply defined ones with the substance and force to compel readerly interest for six hundred pages. Lucilla is a new, experimental kind of character, both flat and major, overturning assumptions of what protagonists are like.

2. Flatness and Agency

Oliphant uses Lucilla's particular form of flatness—her nigh-emotionless thinking, combined with her ruling qualities of good sense and self-satisfaction—to heighten her agency. As I am using the term, agency involves the ability to determine what you want, to make choices accordingly, and then to act upon those choices. Lucilla's lack of complexity means that her goals are always straightforward, and her self-satisfaction ensures that she never feels self-doubt or ambivalence about them. Further, her good sense enables her to think strategically, making the best possible decisions about how to get what she wants. Finally, as I will discuss below, Lucilla displays the functionality of a helper character: she's great at getting things done.

The success of Lucilla's agency hinges on her unique combination of protagonicity and flatness. To explain how this combination works, I turn to the scholarship of Andrew Escobedo, who describes the different kinds of agency possessed by literary characters and allegorical personifications. Literary characters, he argues, possess agency in that they can demonstrate their free will through deliberation, which “permit[s] us to understand why a character chooses as she does in terms of reasons (which leave the will free) rather than causes (which compel the will). It also creates the impression of multiple options,” that the character's choice is free because she could have chosen otherwise.Footnote ²⁵ The agency of characters conforms to the pattern that I have described of determining one's interest, choosing accordingly, and then acting. In contrast, allegorical personifications typically do not deliberate, since their inner essence compels their actions: they necessarily do what they are (to use Escobedo's example, Vanity must behave vainly).Footnote ²⁶ They do not have agency as I have been using the term. But, Escobedo asserts, “allegorical figures are agents in the sense that their single-minded activity is unconstrained by external circumstances or mental distraction. They are, in a deep sense, free to do what they are. Nothing can stop Vanity from behaving vainly—not persuasion, not hard times, not regret.”Footnote ²⁷ Allegorical personifications are agents because they are perfectly able to act according to their nature.

Lucilla combines these two forms of agency. She is, of course, a literary character, and, like most protagonists, she does a lot of deliberating. At the same time, her flatness makes her like an allegorical personification: she is defined and governed by the qualities of good sense and self-satisfaction, so that her behavior necessarily reflects these qualities.Footnote ²⁸ This combination allows her to deploy both the agency of a character and the agency of a personification (or, in my terms, the agency of a round character and the agency of a flat character), exceeding the agency of either alone. She is capable of exercising her will through deliberation, and nothing can stop her from acting according to her ruling qualities. Furthermore, the latter form of agency increases the former. Lucilla's unstoppable good sense and self-satisfaction aid her as she considers her goals, makes choices, and acts. The compatibility of these two forms of agency interestingly suggests a solution to a problem Escobedo raises, which he calls “the personification effect”: the troubling possibility that “an inner essence simply compels the character's actions” and thus negates their free will.Footnote ²⁹ Yet Lucilla is capable of imagining different alternatives for how to act with good sense and self-satisfaction, just as, we might imagine, Vanity has options for how to behave vainly in any particular scenario. Submitting to a general imperative or principle does not have to eliminate choice.

Before making such choices, Lucilla weighs her clear, simple goals. For instance, when Lucilla sends Barbara away with Mr. Cavendish to curtail her excessive singing, Oliphant writes:

Here, we see Lucilla with two competing desires: advancing her relationship with Cavendish and making her “Evening” a success. However, in coming to Carlingford, she has made her intentions clear: she plans to be a comfort to her father and to fulfill her own potential or “genius” (which Lucilla fully recognizes) by gaining social authority in the town. Having declared these objectives, she acts accordingly. Here, she sacrifices the lesser desire to be with Cavendish to what she views as her mission, becoming queen of Carlingford through her evenings. Though onlookers view Lucilla's action as an instance of heroic self-control, Lucilla's flatness makes sacrificing Cavendish an easy decision. She is incapable of deeply conflicted emotions and ruled by her good sense. It is clear to her what she should do, so she promptly acts accordingly.

Before considering the next step of agency, choice, I want to pause to consider what Lucilla does not want: to subvert gender roles. Oliphant as author launches a trenchant critique of gender in the novel, using Lucilla to explode facile assumptions about women. Lucilla herself, however—contra many critics—devotes no attention to gender as a concept and, as her accomplishments prove, does not need to subvert gender to succeed. Consider several scenes in which Lucilla feigns naïveté, which critics have read as instances of Lucilla performing femininity and specifically the role of ingénue.Footnote ³⁰ When Mr. Bury attempts to saddle her with a female chaperone, she pretends to believe he is offering the woman as a new wife for her father, sending the woman into a faint and foiling his efforts. Similarly, when Tom first tries to propose, she stubbornly refuses to understand his meaning, avoiding the question she does not want to answer, and she likewise affects an ignorance of politics while campaigning for Mr. Ashburton, enabling herself to control the election on her own terms rather than running aground on masculine controversies. In all these cases, Lucilla pretends to understand less than she does to get her way. She is not performing femininity but simply feigning ignorance. Regardless of Lucilla's ideas about gender, she obviously knows what she knows and thus understands that she is only playing dumb. To be sure, ignorance and naïveté are often ascribed to women, so Lucilla is invoking a conventionally feminine characteristic. But in all these scenes the other characters at least initially assume that Lucilla does understand what is going on: no one believes Lucilla to be ignorant or naïve. Instead, the primary convention Lucilla manipulates is simply a conversational one: since no one can know what she thinks or knows, she can simulate misunderstandings, avoiding topics she does not wish to discuss. Rather than tackling thorny issues like gender, Lucilla's aims are straightforward: comfort her father and rule Carlingford. Untrammeled by mixed feelings, self-doubt, or other complex emotions, she has nothing to do but calculate how best to promote those goals: to make choices.Footnote ³¹

In describing how Lucilla makes those choices, Oliphant departs from norms of free indirect discourse, which normally transcribes the troubled or doubting reflections of more typical nineteenth-century protagonists, as we saw it used to portray Emma's emotions. By contrast, Oliphant extensively records Lucilla's thoughts about the novel's events but rarely documents the heroine's emotions, which are limited by her characteristic self-satisfaction. Instead, Oliphant depicts a woman constantly analyzing how best to achieve her goals. Her thoughtfulness never includes indecision. Once Lucilla considers her options, she promptly acts, undisturbed by second thoughts. Consider this (significantly abridged) sample:

Here we see Lucilla weighing her goals: keep Tom from pining over her, employ Barbara's musical talents to make her “Evening” a success, and, more generally, create social order in Carlingford. Oliphant gives this minute description of Lucilla's mental processes in a mix of indirect discourse and free indirect discourse, which Oliphant uses liberally throughout the text. By marking the account with phrases like “she felt doubtful,” “Miss Marjoribanks smiled at the idea,” and “Lucilla reflected,” Oliphant makes clear that these calculations emanate not from the narrator but from Lucilla herself. Though such records are a matter of course in the novel, they mark a highly unusual use of free indirect discourse, which typically highlights the personal, emotional resonance of events being recorded. Lucilla's flatness, however, eschews such complex emotionality and therefore pulls the narration in novel directions. Indeed, Oliphant's mixing of indirect and free indirect discourse is necessary precisely because there is so little of the personal or emotional to mark the thoughts as Lucilla's. Far from bringing readers close to a character's inner emotional life, free indirect discourse has been repurposed to remind us that there is a character thinking at all, that these are an individual's reflections and not impersonal analysis.

We have mostly seen Lucilla strategizing thus far, but action is her specialty. In fact, she embodies one of the main traits of flat characters: functionality. Woloch asserts that a major part of the flattening process that creates minor characters is “the reduction of a human being to a function.”Footnote ³² Though flat characters can perform numerous functions, Lucilla specifically resembles the helper, a term Woloch pulls from Greimas for a character who helps advance the plot, often by aiding the protagonist.Footnote ³³ Lucilla wants nothing more than to help others. As Oliphant writes, “If there was one thing in the world more than another which contented Lucilla, it was to be appealed to and called upon for active service. It did her heart good to take the management of incapable people, and arrange all their affairs for them, and solve all their difficulties. Such an office was more in her way than all the Archdeacons in the world” (207). Lucilla has just been disappointed in her expectation that the archdeacon will propose to her, but her ability to help him overcome his romantic difficulties with the woman who has supplanted her more than compensates for that loss. Her desire to be doing is stronger than her desire to marry. In fact, Lucilla frequently delights in her own disinterestedness: because she primarily wants to be useful, she can do so while directly serving others’ interests.Footnote ³⁴ In a more traditional version of Oliphant's novel, Lucilla would not be the protagonist at all but merely a helper in the archdeacon's marriage plot and the other plots she helps resolve, most notably Barbara's love story, Cavendish's near-exposure as a fraud, and Mr. Ashburton's election. In Miss Marjoribanks, however, Lucilla is functional but not a mere function (à la Woloch). In fact, because she acts so intentionally and takes front and center, Lucilla blurs the line between a helper character and a puppet-master, between helping those around her and controlling them. But because she disinterestedly acts on others’ behalf and really does help them (unlike her counterpart Emma, who plays matchmaker for her own amusement and frequently blunders), Lucilla dodges the accusation of selfishness that plagues Emma's and other nineteenth-century heroines’ attempts at agency.

3. Lucilla's Catchphrases

Seeing how Lucilla's flatness enables her agency in turn helps us understand Lucilla's management of conventions.Footnote ³⁵ Lucilla gets her own way by using the catchphrases that mark her as a flat character, but critics have misunderstood how those catchphrases work for her. For example, Linda Peterson offers the most detailed description of Lucilla's linguistic machinations:

Peterson divides Lucilla's catchphrases into conventional statements (“My one object in life is to be a comfort to dear papa”) and bon mots (“It is always an advantage to have a man who flirts”).Footnote ³⁷ This division has two problems. First, Peterson assumes that Lucilla does not mean what she says. But the narrator, with her characteristic disdain for those who just don't get Lucilla, clearly asserts that Lucilla's apparent bon mots are straightforward statements of her beliefs: “it is needless to inform the more intelligent persons who understand Miss Marjoribanks, that it was by no means a bon mot, but expressed Lucilla's convictions with the utmost sincerity” (99). The narrator always characterizes Lucilla's catchphrases as perfectly sincere. Oliphant is not, as many critics suggest,Footnote ³⁸ making general claims about the sincerity of Lucilla's behavior. Sometimes Lucilla purposefully deceives others. Rather, Oliphant takes pains to explain that Lucilla is not dissembling specifically when she utters her catchphrases. They are so real to Lucilla that some, such as “fortunately her affections had not been engaged,” appear in her private thoughts (157). No (intentional) performance there. Lucilla's catchphrases, like those deployed by other flat characters, reflect her flattened subjectivity as it expresses itself in her straightforward goals. We may think Lucilla's object in life is to gain power, but she honestly believes that it is to be a comfort to her father. And as I've already discussed, because Lucilla likes to gain power by being useful—“to take the management of incapable people, and arrange all their affairs for them, and solve all their difficulties”—there is no contradiction between these aims (207). She gains power through the promotion of her father's well-being.

The bigger problem with Peterson's analysis is her division of the catchphrases into conventional and unconventional. Although a few catchphrases are mere clichés (“everything is for the best” [75]), the conventionality of most is debatable. For example, “the object of my life is to be a comfort to dear papa” is not necessarily conventional. Though filial devotion is certainly expected of young women, Lucilla's devotion supersedes other traditional aims, most notably marriage. Other characters do not accept the catchphrases as conventional sentiments. Lucilla's father certainly does not expect the object of his daughter's life to be his comfort. He wrongly thinks the phrase is a witticism or evasion, much like her apparent bon mots. Even Lucilla's greatest supporter, Mrs. Chiley, who fully believes in Lucilla's sincerity, repeatedly reminds Lucilla to think of marriage when she declares her sole devotion to her father (128, 291). Lucilla's catchphrases, then, are a feature of her flatness and are met with skepticism from those around her. But that is not to say that they are ineffective.

On the contrary, the catchphrases’ repeatability gives them the status of memes, cultural units that can spread through the community. They subtly infect others with Lucilla's ways of thinking.Footnote ³⁹ Take, for instance, the way she secures her authority in the house by conquering Nancy, her father's cook, who has managed the household during Lucilla's absence at school. She begins their conversation by introducing her catchphrase: “I want to tell you my object in life. It is to be a comfort to papa” (30). Nancy tries to argue about the specifics of food preparation, but Lucilla doggedly returns to the theme of her father's comfort. Eventually Nancy herself takes up the theme: “‘I ain't one as thinks of anything but the comfort of the family,’ said Nancy, yielding in spite of herself to follow the leadings of the higher will in presence of which she found herself.” At this point, Lucilla is ready with her final blow, to which Nancy helplessly capitulates: “I want you to know that the object of my life is to be a comfort to poor papa; and now let us think what we had better have for dinner” (31). What has happened here? Nancy starts out ready to argue about the minutiae of dinners. Her terms are concrete: “gravy-beef,” “bacon,” “butter.” Lucilla, however, repeatedly returns to the abstract concept encapsulated in her catchphrase: “my object in life is to be a comfort to poor papa.” Despite other characters’ doubts, the phrase is unassailable: it expresses a virtuous sentiment that cannot be proven untrue or resisted. By persistently bringing it into the conversation about dinners, Lucilla changes the grounds of the debate. The aim she is propounding is no longer control over dinners (something Nancy can contest) but comforting her father (an objective that, especially for a member of the household staff, is unassailable). As soon as Nancy begins to echo Lucilla's catchphrase in the conversation, she has no choice but to accede to the proposition that dinners are about comfort and thus cannot dispute that Lucilla has a legitimate interest in making decisions about food.

As Nancy demonstrates, Lucilla's catchphrases are infectiously repeatable. They spread throughout the text, picked up by other characters and by the narrator herself. To repeat them, even ironically, as we see Mrs. Woodburn, the town mimic, do when she imitates Lucilla, is both to enter into Lucilla's thought processes and to reinforce the strength of the catchphrases themselves. The more they are repeated, the more force they gain, for they become unchangeable and thus unchallengeable, finally achieving the status of conventions. For instance, when Lucilla's invocation of her “comfort to papa” catchphrase seems to contradict an earlier explanation of her feelings, the narrator comments, “The sentiment was perhaps a little different from that which she had conveyed to her delighted auditors in the dining-room, but at the same time it was equally true; for everybody in Carlingford was aware of the grand object of Miss Marjoribanks's existence” (133). It is veracious because everyone knows it. Repetition has produced truth. This process culminates in the election. Lucilla coins two catchphrases for the campaign: Mr. Ashburton is “the man for Carlingford” and “What did it matter about opinions, if it was a good man?” (362, 373). With these words, Lucilla carries her chosen candidate into Parliament. It is not merely her logic but her succinct, repeatable formulations that spread through the community and sway public opinion. Indeed, their memelike quality is so strong that she convinces multiple characters that they are the originators of the phrases, thus forcing them to accede to her logic (363, 373). For instance, she tells Colonel Chiley, “I have always heard you say, as long as I can remember, that it was not opinions, you know, but a good man that people wanted.” When he accedes to her words, the narrator comments, “Perhaps he did not recollect at what moment of his life he had originated that sentiment, but he thought he could recollect having said it” (363). Lucilla's words have wormed their way into his brain. They take the lofty form of the universal and thus become appropriable. Thus the catchphrases, initially produced by Lucilla's flatness, play a key role in advancing her agenda. Through their unceasing repetition, they infect other characters, ultimately bringing them around to her ways of thinking and making them act as she wishes.

Furthermore, the shared nature of the catchphrases helps create the community Lucilla seeks to rule. We have already seen this community formation at work in Lucilla's campaign for Mr. Ashburton, in which her catchphrases unite people from disparate political parties into a cohesive group of supporters. This potentiality of the catchphrases is key to Lucilla's important goal of revolutionizing Carlingford. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator writes that Carlingford is sadly in need of “organisation,” and specifically someone capable of “knitting people together, and making a harmonious whole out of the scraps and fragments of society” (20, 21). Lucilla, of course, is that person. She effects this reorganization by setting herself up as a model to be imitated by the rest of the town, not only through the repetition of her catchphrases, but in all aspects of her life: “she was at the height of her success, and full in the eye of the world, and knew that everybody was remarking her, and that from the sauces for which the Doctor's table was once so famed, but which even Colonel Chiley no longer thought of identifying as Dr Marjoribanks's, to the fashion of the high white frock in which Lucilla had taught the young ladies of Carlingford to appear of an evening, she was being imitated on every hand” (114). Carlingford is organized and united in its imitation of Lucilla, from her sauce to her style—note the way the narrator takes up Lucilla's characteristic way of describing her evening apparel, which is earlier mimicked by Mrs. Woodburn. That imitability stems from Lucilla's flatness: from her simple, well-defined traits, practices, and catchphrases.

4. Flatness and Emotion

We have now seen how Lucilla's flatness facilitates her agency, but I want to turn to an issue that has come up throughout this article: the disbelief in Lucilla's flatness displayed by characters and critics alike. In particular, people are incredulous that Lucilla's emotions are strictly circumscribed by her strategic good sense and self-satisfaction and are determined to find hidden emotional depths. Oliphant herself repeatedly teases readers with the idea that Lucilla could be driven by feelings rather than reason. In scenes where we might expect such feelings to be in evidence, Oliphant does not directly portray Lucilla as experiencing emotion but instead resorts to two strategies—ironic distance and alternative justifications—to make the issue ambiguous. In the first strategy, Oliphant denies readers their usual access into Lucilla's thought processes, moving to a limited perspective that either details only physical appearances or aligns with the external viewpoints of other characters. For instance, after her romantic interest Cavendish publicly chooses Barbara over her, we watch with other characters to see if Lucilla will give signs of her anger and disappointment. She does not. As the narrator says, “If she was affronted, or if she was wounded, nobody found it out” (115). At times, the distance seems to suggest ironically that Lucilla might in fact feel, as when Lucilla is described as “giving a nervous pressure to her old friend's hand; at least a pressure that would have betokened the existence of nerves in any one else but Miss Marjoribanks, whose magnificent organisation was beyond any suspicion of such weakness” (98). But elsewhere, the assertions of hidden depths of feeling meet with the narrator's irony.Footnote ⁴⁰ When Lady Richmond claims that she can detect Lucilla's wounded feelings in the wake of Cavendish's rejection, Lucilla's confidante, Mrs. Chiley, responds doubtfully, “for she had been shaken in her convictions by the universal laughter … and then she had never been gifted with eyes like Lady Richmond's, which looked people through and through” (134). Mrs. Chiley's skepticism is reasonable, since she, unlike Lady Richmond, has witnessed Lucilla joking about the whole affair, and the narrator's added commentary that she lacks Lady Richmond's eyes “which looked people through and through” seems to mock such pretensions to special insight. Oliphant's distanced presentations of emotion are clearly ironic, but the point she is making about Lucilla's feelings or lack thereof is unclear.

Oliphant's second strategy of offering justifications for possible expressions of emotion creates similar ambiguity. In this case, she explains away apparently emotional responses with logical rationales. For example, to elucidate why Lucilla snubs General Travers, Oliphant writes,

Oliphant's suggestion that Lucilla has been rude to the general because he admired Rose and not her is sandwiched between two versions of the impersonal rationale that he has grown too self-important and needs to be cut down to size. At first glance, Oliphant's presentation seems to point to the emotional explanation as the genuine one: Lucilla seems more convincing as someone who is “only human” than someone who operates “on strictly philosophical principles.” It is easy to see the latter logic as an after-the-fact, ironic justification, or perhaps a self-deluding rationalization on the part of Lucilla herself. However, the rational explanation is actually presented first, and it is equally plausible. Lucilla is not “only human.” As Oliphant's emphasis on her flatness reminds us, she is not human at all but a character. People may seem flat if we don't know them well.Footnote ⁴¹ But up close, we expect to find the complex personalities and emotions that Lucilla so conspicuously lacks. That lack points to her inhumanity. So why is it more likely that she is expressing personal pique rather than her perpetual good sense? It's not. The point of the justifications, then, is also unclear.

Consequently, Oliphant's use of the two strategies of ironic distance and alternative justifications, through which she refuses to either confirm or deny that Lucilla has deeper feelings, has baffled the efforts of scholars to explain her presentation of emotion. Critic Elsie B. Michie discusses Lucilla as a “quasi-allegorical” depiction of “the detached stance that Mill argued was necessary for the extraordinary individual to rise above the pull of personal passion.”Footnote ⁴² She highlights Lucilla's rationality but ignores Oliphant's complicating hints at deeper emotions. On the other side of the question, Valerie Sanders argues that the novel is about a search for real feeling as opposed to its superficial manifestations.Footnote ⁴³ This argument too is dubious; Lucilla may never really feel. The key to the mystery, I argue, is the nature of the emotions presented this way. Oliphant openly depicts Lucilla experiencing a range of emotions: contentment, happiness, surprise, pity. Let us call these “shallow feelings.” Only two feelings repeatedly call for indirect representations: anxiety and woundedness. These are the feelings I have been referring to as deep or complex feelings. These deep feelings are anomalous because they go directly counter to Lucilla's ruling quality of self-satisfaction. To experience them, Lucilla would have to cease to “be Lucilla,” in the sense of Lucilla as a flat character defined by her self-satisfaction. By contrast, shallow feelings like happiness are shallow precisely because they are compatible with Lucilla's flatness. Oliphant makes this ontological issue explicit in the scene where Lucilla is disappointed in her expectation that the archdeacon will propose. As Lucilla recovers from her negative feelings, here presented with unusual directness, Oliphant writes, “She regained bit by bit that serene self-consciousness which places the spirit above the passing vexations of the world. What did it matter what other people might be doing or saying? Was not she still Lucilla Marjoribanks? and when one had said that, one had said all. … With every step that she took, Miss Marjoribanks became more and more herself” (201–2). Of course, saying someone “is not herself today” is a common expression, simply indicating that they are not acting as usual. But for a flat character like Lucilla, defined by a limited number of qualities, deviating from those qualities destroys the foundation of her being. “To be Lucilla” is to be self-satisfied, and thus if she ceases to be self-satisfied, she ceases to be herself.Footnote ⁴⁴

Succumbing to deep feelings is presented as the effacement of her subjectivity altogether. Many critics discuss Lucilla's reactions to her father's death and her loss of fortune as the achievement of a new level of depth and emotion.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, the death itself actually produces little change in Lucilla. She quickly concludes that there is nothing she could have done and is frustrated only with her inability to stop thinking: that is, with her continued rationality in a situation that calls for emotion. But as the situation becomes more dire, Oliphant again invokes the idea of Lucilla ceasing to be herself, as her flat personhood is overwhelmed by her circumstances and the un-Lucilla-like experiences that accompany them: “She did not feel as if she were Lucilla; so discouraged and depressed and pale, and tired with her walk as she was, with all sorts of projects and plans so quenched out of her; almost if she had been charged with being somebody else, the imputation was one which she could not have denied” (421). When her aunt tells her that she is destitute, Oliphant emphasizes not her thoughts but physical symptoms:

Though she does experience a moment of unusual empathy with her father, that is “the only clear thought” she has during this episode (407). All else is the thought-negating physicality of giddiness, singing in her ears, and her blood racing. Oliphant attributes her inability to deal with the crisis not to its emotional force but to her bodily weakness. When faced with a situation that demands deep feelings that preclude strategic thought and self-satisfaction, Lucilla's interiority seems to shut down, replaced with purely physical sensations.

To make it clear how unique Lucilla's purely physical reaction is, let us look to Daniel Deronda (1876) and compare it with Gwendolen Harleth's response in a moment of crisis. In this scene, she has just read Lydia Glasher's letter cursing her for breaking her promise and marrying Grandcourt: “It seemed at first as if Gwendolen's eyes were spell-bound in reading the horrible words of the letter over and over again as a doom of penance; but suddenly a new spasm of terror made her lean forward and stretch out the paper toward the fire, lest accusation and proof at once should meet all eyes.” Gwendolen then falls back into her chair, helpless and trembling. “She sat so for a long while,” Eliot writes, “knowing little more than that she was feeling ill, and that those written words kept repeating themselves to her.”Footnote ⁴⁶ At first glance, Gwendolen's response might seem similar to Lucilla's. Her strength deserts her, leaving her pale and shaking. Eliot, however, relentlessly psychologizes these physical symptoms. Gwendolen's involuntary rereading of the letter is an act of penance, and her spasm is one of terror and prompts her emotional destruction of the letter. Even as she sits motionless, almost incapable of thought, she cannot stop hearing Lydia's damning words. Deep feelings permeate Gwendolen's physical breakdown. In Miss Marjoribanks, in contrast, though Oliphant toys with the idea that Lucilla could have such deep feelings, Lucilla as a character seems to lack the capacity to experience them as anything more than physical symptoms.

Ultimately, then, Lucilla is a flat character with a limited emotional range, and, as we have already seen, that flatness is precisely what enables her agency. Lucilla's verisimilitude is limited, and critics’ attempts to ascribe greater depth to her must depart from the explicit content of the text.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such attempts also make Lucilla's life far sadder, as they typically depict Lucilla as unhappy or deeply discontented with her circumstances.Footnote ⁴⁸ These negative attributions undermine her agency by suggesting that Lucilla is incapable of acting to fulfill her real desires, thus marring the triumphant effect that Oliphant so carefully cultivates. Nevertheless, the hints at emotion that Oliphant offers point to the doubleness of literary characters: they simultaneously are mere narrative structures and referentially resemble human beings.Footnote ⁴⁹ Lucilla's agency is increased by the ways she is not like a human, but she could not be represented as having agency without her referentiality. And even though her flatness impedes attempts to highlight her likeness to a real person, Oliphant doesn't let us forget that aspect of Lucilla's character.

Oliphant brings the issue to a crux in Lucilla's unstrategic choice to marry her bumbling cousin Tom. Critics frequently debate the significance of this decision, typically either deriding it as a capitulation to the conservative norms of the marriage plot or explaining it away by pointing out that Lucilla's character remains unchanged after the marriage.Footnote ⁵⁰ In fact, her choice of Tom plays out the logic of Oliphant's presentation of emotion throughout the novel. Lucilla's irrational desire for him is presented as a weakness, a deviation from her real character: “Miss Marjoribanks had been the very soul of good sense all her days, but now her ruling quality seemed to forsake her” (466). This language recalls Oliphant's earlier suggestion that to experience emotion is to cease to “be Lucilla.” Her ruling quality is abandoning her, leaving her unstable and vulnerable. The passage continues: “She fought manfully, womanfully against the weakness which hitherto must have been lying hidden in some out-of-the-way corner in her heart” (466). In the midst of Lucilla's struggle, the narrator affirms Lucilla's usual strength by self-correcting “manfully” to “womanfully,” a change that points to how Lucilla possesses the courage and resolution associated with the masculine term without compromising her femininity.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, the latter term's supersession of its more common alternative suggests that women hold those qualities more deeply and more truly than men. However, Oliphant locates the weakness of feeling in Lucilla's own heart. For the first time, she suggests that deep feeling could be intrinsic to who Lucilla is. Meanwhile, strategic options have stopped looking so good. The smart choice of her other suitor, Mr. Ashburton, is notably unsatisfactory, not worth fighting for. Lucilla herself reflects, “What if there might be some one in the world who was ready, not to offer her his hand and fortune in a reasonable way, as Mr Ashburton no doubt would, but to throw himself all in a heap at her feet, and make the greatest fool of himself possible for her sake?” (466). The logical option is no longer so appealing to Lucilla.

Through Lucilla's choice of Tom, Oliphant posits that emotion, and not just strategic thinking, plays a key role in agency. The crux of the issue is that “For the first time in her life she not only did not know what she would do, but she did not know what she wanted to do” (462). Lucilla can use her good sense to figure out what to do but not what she wants. Only her feelings can tell her that: she needs them to be the driving force of her agency. Oliphant highlights the enormity of this tentative new integration of feeling into her character, writing, “If there ever could be said to be a time when she temporarily lost the entire sway and control of herself and her feelings, it would be at this crisis” (462). This crisis of feeling is greater even than the catastrophic death of her father, for it challenges her very selfhood, the definition of what it means to be Lucilla. Emotion begins to escape the realm of the physical: when she hears Tom coming, her heart begins to leap, a purely physical response, but then, “Her heart gave another jump, and, if such a thing were possible to a heart, went off from its mistress altogether, and rushed downstairs bodily to see who was coming” (467). Lucilla's heart suddenly ceases to be an anatomical heart, transforming into the seat of feeling. At last, she can experience emotion and still be Lucilla Marjoribanks, as proves literally true, since her name will not change when she marries her cousin.

Well, sort of. Oliphant carefully qualifies the transformation. First, Lucilla's heart, not Lucilla herself, rushes downstairs, a distinction that dissociates the experience of emotion and transfers agency away from Lucilla. Second, the narrator humorously questions the possibility of the move with her comment “if such a thing were possible to a heart.” The subjunctive mood here implies that the statement is counterfactual. An actual heart cannot leave its mistress and run away, and Oliphant bolsters this more literal take on the situation by using the word “bodily,” which could denote “as a whole,” according to the OED, but more obviously suggests a return to the corporeal. This climactic moment of feeling, then, is half a joke. Lucilla and deep feeling can come together only tentatively and uneasily.

Furthermore, the change is brief. Lucilla quickly resumes her self-command and strategic thinking: “she felt that her involuntary abdication had lasted long enough, and that it was full time to take the management of affairs back into her own hands” (475). She promptly begins managing not only her own affairs but also Tom's, instructing him to buy the estate of Marchbank, where she can improve the village and eventually make him an MP. Later, Lucilla's assertion to her confidante Mrs. Chiley that she has always been in love with Tom elicits skepticism. When Lucilla claims that her love for Tom is the reason she has never married, Mrs. Chiley doubts her explanation: “Up to this moment she had been under the impression that it was the blindness, and folly, and stupidity of the gentlemen which had kept it from ever coming to anything” (490). Circumstantial rather than emotional causes appear more probable. Unlike Emma, who we really believe has been in love with Mr. Knightley all along, Lucilla comes across as someone who has discovered emotion quite recently, and perhaps only temporarily. Nevertheless, her brief experience of emotion is not merely a capitulation to the form of the marriage plot, for as Oliphant proves in Phoebe Junior (1876), she is perfectly capable of having a heroine marry for pragmatic reasons rather than love.

Lucilla's choice of Tom is the culmination of the hints of emotion that Oliphant has scattered throughout the text. Yet Oliphant discounts Lucilla's emotional breakthrough even as it happens and then vanishes it, reproducing the same old Lucilla. It's anticlimactic and disappointing, as the negative critical reaction to the marriage confirms. Why? I argue that it's the exception that proves the rule. The rule, in this case, is Lucilla's flatness, especially the lack of emotional depth produced by her ruling qualities. As I've discussed, critics don't like that flatness, chalking it up to deception or repression. Oliphant's editor, John Blackwood, didn't like it either, criticizing the novel for its “hardness of tone.” Oliphant's response to him is telling: “I have a weakness for Lucilla, and to bring a sudden change upon her character and break her down into tenderness would be like one of Dickens's maudlin repentances. … Miss M. must be one and indivisible, and I feel pretty sure that my plan is right.”Footnote ⁵² By breaking Lucilla down into tenderness but making that tenderness feel forced, dissatisfying, and untrue to Lucilla's character, Oliphant proves that her plan is indeed right. Lucilla is a character incapable of depth, and she doesn't need it. She doesn't need it to be a protagonist, nor does she need it to have agency. Lucilla is flat, one and indivisible, and that is her, and Oliphant's, triumph.

5. Alternative Feminisms

Finally, Lucilla is not flat merely as a character study or formal experiment. Oliphant uses her flatness to showcase certain qualities that were being denied to women without implying that real women possessed such qualities to perfection. She thus charts a middle ground between contemporary liberal views that disempowered women by disparaging them and conservative views that disempowered women by idealizing them.

As a flat character, Lucilla is defined by a small number of qualities: good sense, self-satisfaction, and constant success. By highlighting these particular characteristics, Oliphant debates the ideas of the Langham Place group, an organization of liberal feminists who advocated for women's work. As Talia Schaffer has described, to expand women's opportunities, Langhamite reformers paradoxically emphasized their lack of happiness and agency under current structures. Schaffer writes that Langhamite publications

By emphasizing female suffering and failure, liberal feminism rejected the conservative figure of the married woman empowered within the domestic sphere, though this ideology, as Schaffer notes, originated in late eighteenth-century feminism and had made real gains for women.Footnote ⁵⁴ “The move to liberal feminism,” Schaffer concludes, “instituted its powerful rhetorical campaign by insisting that happy, successful, working married women could not exist. To some extent, suffrage, coeducation, marriage reform, and employment law came to depend on the constitution of women as suffering, suppressive victim[s].”Footnote ⁵⁵

Lucilla's defining traits are the very characteristics that liberal feminists were denying. In her brief discussion of Miss Marjoribanks and Oliphant's later novel Phoebe Junior, Schaffer comments, “Ironically, it was perhaps Oliphant's hostility toward the Langham Place writers that enabled her to formulate a narrative of female vocational success … to show a woman triumphing and finding a robust career—and valuing her career more than her love life—was, oddly, a sign of one's non-allegiance to the feminist narrative of female suppression.”Footnote ⁵⁶ By crafting Lucilla as a flat character who does not and indeed cannot suffer and who overcomes every obstacle she faces, Oliphant repudiates the woman-as-victim schema offered by her liberal feminist contemporaries. Unlike the later Dorothea, Lucilla is not doomed to be “foundress of nothing.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Furthermore, through Lucilla's marriage to her cousin Tom, Oliphant affirms that marriage can coexist with vocational success. She thus again contradicts the gloomy view of the Langhamites, whose writings made romantic love and vocation mutually exclusive.Footnote ⁵⁸ Oliphant's position, though certainly conservative, is not antifeminist. Instead, Oliphant propounds an alternative model that celebrates the possibility of female agency and success under contemporary sociopolitical conditions, a possibility that was increasingly unacknowledged in the 1860s.

Moreover, by insisting on Lucilla's rationality and disinterestedness, Oliphant rejected some of liberal feminism's more troubling assertions in support of its suffering woman hypothesis. For instance, in The Subjection of Women (1869), which was published only three years after Miss Marjoribanks and was deeply engaged with Langhamite ideas, John Stuart Mill bolstered his claims of female powerlessness by repeatedly disparaging the influence women currently had: “I am afraid it must be said, that disinterestedness in the general conduct of life—the devotion of the energies to purposes which hold out no promise of private advantages to the family—is very seldom encouraged or supported by women's influence.”Footnote ⁵⁹ According to Mill, women's lack of both education and public-spirited disinterestedness tainted any influence they might gain over the men in their lives. Lucilla, meanwhile, always thinks clearly and acts disinterestedly, rebutting Mill's claims. The passage in which Lucilla sacrifices her romantic interest Cavendish to a rival woman to save her evening gathering contains a prescient rebuke to Mill, making the underlying sexism of his argument clear. Oliphant writes, “Thus Miss Marjoribanks proved herself capable of preferring her great work to her personal sentiments, which is generally considered next to impossible for a woman” (100). The irony of the subordinate clause, which modern readers could easily mistake as directed at conservative misogyny, also hits its mark in Mill's liberalism. More broadly, Lucilla's effective and well-used influence, particularly as expressed in her control of the election in the novel's second half, similarly rebukes the assertions of liberal feminists like Mill. Though critics have typically remarked Oliphant's championing of the doctrine of influence with embarrassment or distaste,Footnote ⁶⁰ Lucilla's influence can also be read as a reclamation of women's agency after its dismissal by such thinkers as Mill. Given that critics like Barbara Caine have argued that the liberal individual was specifically male, excluding women, Elsie B. Michie's insightful argument that Oliphant casts Lucilla as Mill's exceptional individual from On Liberty (1859) garners new force.Footnote ⁶¹ Mill associates women with conformity to public opinion,Footnote ⁶² but Oliphant reimagines his work so that Lucilla becomes his person of genius whose originality can push society forward. Not merely reactionary, Oliphant critiques liberal feminism's flaws and offers compelling correctives.

At the same time, Lucilla's flatness facilitates Oliphant's continued commitment to anti-idealism, which combats conservative glamorizing, essentializing views of women, such as those offered by Ruskin in Sesame and Lilies (1865). Critic Melissa Schaub persuasively argues that although Oliphant's ironic anti-idealism does not negate her representation of meaningful female power, “to destroy an idealized vision of women … requires that she emphasize Lucilla's flaws as much as Lucilla's power. This potential for a critical reading of the heroine has made the otherwise clear gender politics of the novel seem ambiguous, even though the novel itself thoroughly undermines domestic ideology.”Footnote ⁶³ Lucilla's flatness makes her a hyperbolic, comic figure and works alongside the irony with which she is treated to prevent readers from viewing her as a feminine paragon. It thus enables Oliphant to highlight how women exercise agency without suggesting that real women are perfectly agentive, rational, or disinterested. Through her flat protagonist, she avoids the pitfalls of both downplaying women's abilities (as liberal feminists did) and exaggerating them (as conservatives did).

Finally, Oliphant's avoidance of extremes in her depiction of female agency offers a potent corrective to modern feminist scholarship. As Amanda Anderson has written, feminist critics writing about the Victorians frequently produce problematic all-or-nothing formulations of female agency, in which agency is either magnified as exemplary in terms of both impact and ideology or dismissed entirely.Footnote ⁶⁴ Miss Marjoribanks teaches us to recognize agency in women whose choices align with social pressures and conventions. Such choices—like Lucilla's—can allow women to achieve their goals and resist oppressive restrictions. Acknowledging that, we understand and believe when Lucilla, speaking for herself and her nineteenth-century sisters, asserts “that all was for the best, and she had not lived in vain” (495).