At the outset of the 1990s, rape, sexual assault, and even pedophilia disappeared into discourse, replaced by a more complex, theoretical, and some would argue depoliticized approach to the traditional feminist opposition between events that were called sex and events that were called violence. Reacting strongly to the pornography debates of the 1980s, thinkers as diverse as Wendy Brown, Camille Paglia, and Katie Roiphe argued in both intellectual and popular contexts that feminist thinking about sexual assault, in reality and representation, had actually consolidated and reinforced narratives of female victimization and male brutality, situating rape at the center of heterosexual experience and simultaneously dismissing or diminishing the also feminist appetite for experiences and accounts of female desire, agency, and power.Footnote ¹ Inspired by Foucault, a variety of poststructuralist feminists, in particular, argued that to talk about rape itself, in reality or representation, was to bring a violent but highly equivocal event into garish visibility, to stage it as theater, to participate in “a way of interpreting, a way of seeing” rooted in political correctness rather than in any exposure of a hidden “epidemic” on college campuses, or even of an actual “physical phenomenon” that may impact women, individually or collectively.Footnote ² To see rape in public was actually to have bad vision: what you were really seeing was the shifting terrain of other ideologies that were far more compelling to unmask in their quick movement and replication than any single or even systemic act of violence.

In truth, rape has been difficult for academic feminists to discuss even before the hard advent of the New Historicism in literary studies. Between Richardson's Clarissa (1748) and Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), there was hardly an example of sexual assault on record, and even those rapes were more a matter of speculation than spectacle. “Problematic,” for example, is how Frances Ferguson in 1987 described the rape of an unconscious Clarissa: an “act that cannot really be understood in public” except in that it allowed Richardson to invent the psychological novel.Footnote ³ Although Tess is attacked while asleep, Ellen Rooney similarly decided in 1983 that the question of rape was too “equivocal” and “inconclusive,” and finally too close to “seduction” to be classified as any more than a recognition of “the violence within sexuality in our culture.”Footnote ⁴ Foucault did not believe rape could be addressed or adjudicated as a sexual crime, so it makes sense that his four-volume History of Sexuality would not do much to sharpen the methodological tools for addressing sexual assault in literature, or to whet any academic appetite for new conversations about gendered violence against women and girls.Footnote ⁵ In Victorian studies, rape's disappearance as a category of direct representation was especially pronounced. Once Foucault had undone the repressive hypothesis about the Victorian middle class, it was possible for critics to uncover sexuality everywhere and sexual assault almost nowhere. Sexuality was always about power for Foucault, and power was not hierarchical nor unilateral; it was instead diffuse, “omnipresent,” and “produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in relation from one point to another.”Footnote ⁶ Rape, in this methodological cabaret, was a moving target. It could only be seen in fragments, through ambiguity or absence, as a submerged trope, a recursive metaphor, an archaic mythology.

This prelude to my central argument about child sexual assault in Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain (1856) is meant to underscore the critical history of some controversial terminology, and to recognize that any insistence on the representational visibility of rape, the rape of children, or even children in a mid-Victorian novel may still be complicated by Foucauldian interrogations of sexuality and power, and also by a conflict in feminist studies that is only now beginning to be readdressed. Recently, feminist theorists like Carine Mardorossian have begun to argue that it's high time to pay more attention to the way poststructuralist critiques of gender and sexuality have turned the “spotlight from victims of rape to the operations of feminist epistemology,” and have nurtured a sophisticated form of farsightedness that perpetually insists there is nothing in particular to see.Footnote ⁷ This cultivated perspective has created devastating blind spots that the academy has been complicit in maintaining. Both Foucault and Jeffrey Epstein argued that sex with children should be destigmatized, and both were protected from scrutiny by academics who elevated the philosophical discourse of powerful men over the gendered experiences of girls and women for whom exploitation and abuse is ongoing and real.Footnote ⁸ The #MeToo movement didn't just reveal that acts of rape and sexual violence are private events endured by individual women, isolated stories whispered to friends and therapists after years of internalized suffering and self-blame. Instead, #MeToo exposed the fact that sexual assault has a robust and long-standing public existence, and that it needs to be recognized as part of the “heterosexual life narrative,” as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner termed it, where the price of social membership is a tacit acceptance of the idea that people, especially women, “are individually responsible for the rages, instabilities, ambivalence and failures they experience in their intimate lives” (557).Footnote ⁹

Until very recently, conversations about rape in Victorian literature have reflected what Erin A. Spampinato would call an “adjudicative” style of criticism, where narratives of sexual assault have been subjected to legal standards of evidence that transform rape into “a vexing interpretive problem” rather than a legible category of heteronormative experience that fiction often explores: “We barely recognize rape's presence before we begin to dispute not just the meaning of the represented rape, but the represented act's qualifications as rape and the definition of rape itself.”Footnote ¹⁰ For Spampinato and other literary critics working in the groundbreaking field of “New Rape Studies,” rape must be reclaimed by feminist theory as a more “capacious” category of representation that includes “any behavior that employs sexual violence to control women and vulnerable others.”Footnote ¹¹ This redefinition of rape could mean that a wider range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary texts, like, for example, The Daisy Chain, become available to rape studies perspectives, and it could also mean that canonical texts in the rape studies canon, like Richardson's “problematic” and “inconclusive” Clarissa, could be seen to represent rape as a normalized ritual that needs no disambiguation. “The novel instructs readers to find compelled sex everywhere in Clarissa's world,” argues Kathleen Lubey, “as a set of exploitations of women's bodies in social practices—like rape, but also courtship and marriage—that disregard their volition.”Footnote ¹² Doreen Thierauf makes a similar argument about the historical contexts of another “problematic” Victorian text, Daniel Deronda (1876), arguing that by 1876, Victorians broadly understood conjugal rape to be a medically regrettable but otherwise regular and inevitable feature of marriage, one that Eliot makes legible to “authorized interpretation” through Gwendolen's various bodily symptoms, her psychological breakdown, her failure to reproduce, and her eventual “imperfect reconstitution as a moral subject” (263, 247).Footnote ¹³ “Rape occurs in plain sight because elite respectability and its attendant legal fictions are revealed to be a sham,” Thierauf concludes, underscoring the way that the New Rape Studies asks not that we dig deeply for sexual violence that is hidden or obscured in any given text, but that we recognize its widely overlooked dispersal throughout the literary canon.Footnote ¹⁴ Even the cozy genre of realist literature known as the Victorian “family story,” as I am arguing here, may well include sexual assault as a normative ritual of heterosexual belonging that is commonplace and, within the discourse of spectacle and visibility, often hidden in plain sight.

Yonge's best-selling mid-Victorian novel The Daisy Chain is not a text that has been discussed in terms of sexual violence, or even in terms of violence. A family story that apparently inspired Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1869), The Daisy Chain has been most often considered a novel about the conflict between female vocation and religious duty, written by a conservative evangelical author who opted, unsatisfactorily, to channel her spinster heroine's bold ambition and intellectual prowess into local missionary work and church fundraising. But if The Daisy Chain is like Little Women in terms of its general family themes, it also resembles Little Women in terms of its brutal treatment of women and girls. According to Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant, Little Women should actually be read as a horror story, a terrifying tale of “murder,” “psychological rape,” “captivity,” “corpse switching,” and “zombielike” heroines that only passes for a domestic novel because the domestic novel is a genre that naturalizes and normalizes domestic abuse.Footnote ¹⁵ When Beth March dies, they argue, Alcott replaces her with a “lobotomized” Jo, forcing her outspoken, feminist heroine to learn that becoming a perfect “little woman” means becoming “passive, acquiescent” and finally “dead.”Footnote ¹⁶ Violence against women and girls like Beth and Jo March, they conclude, is often a “secret crime” of the domestic novel, easily “ignored, overlooked, or dismissed” by the reader as “irrelevant” to the institutions and intimacies of family life.Footnote ¹⁷

“Overlooked” is a word that is frequently used in both academic writing and journalism to describe patterns of sexual abuse that are ongoing and regular, and somehow also perpetually unseen.Footnote ¹⁸ But the mechanics of “overlooking” rape in a domestic novel or a family story, in Little Women or The Daisy Chain, may be a technology of vision that is as complicated as the word itself. To overlook is to miss a detail or an event, to not see something that is perhaps worth seeing, but it is also to have a commanding view of the entire picture, a broad perspective that uses the softening effects of distance to sentimentalize and even aestheticize the landscape and scenery available to the eye. While metaphors of vision and visuality are well steeped in Foucauldian notions of surveillance and psychoanalytic theories of the gaze, I would like to resist these methodological abstractions, instead toggling back and forth between the oppositional meanings of the word “overlook” and engaging the only protocol of vision that The Daisy Chain actively exploits: the near or “short” sightedness of heroine Ethel May, a condition she shares by necessity with her disabled sister Margaret. Certainly, I would argue, there is violence against women and girls that The Daisy Chain overlooks from a distance: incidents that are displaced in heroic mythology or projected upon an expendable working class. But the novel also actively grapples with the problem of child sexual assault, a problem that is so close to home it can only be seen by characters with bad vision, disabled girls who have “a way of seeing, of interpreting,” that is shallow, local, and transparent. From afar, these patterns of exploitation and abuse pass for the heteronormative conventions of Victorian family life rather than myopically revealing the troubling sexual vulnerability of little girls.

From the opening pages of The Daisy Chain, murder is more than a metaphor: with the narrative efficiency of Quentin Tarantino or Walt Disney, Yonge manages to begin her didactic family tale with a grisly carriage accident that kills off the mother, injures the father, and permanently disables eldest sister Margaret, the only suitable figure of maternal replacement for the ten remaining May children. Lying flat on her dead mother's bed, and later partially propped on the sitting room couch, Margaret continues to hear lessons, keep the accounts, direct servants, plan meals, comfort papa, and give inspired advice for seven long years, enduring a “slow decay” until she is rewarded with a “tardy, painful death agony” near the close of the novel.Footnote ¹⁹ It is an accepted fact of The Daisy Chain that both mother and daughter end up dead because Dr. May is temperamentally “heedless” and immature: he chooses the “new black kicking horse” to lead the carriage containing his three “Daisies” (his wife, Margaret, his daughter, Margaret, and the new, still unbaptized baby, Gertrude Margaret), despite common agreement that the horse is “unsteady” and “not fit to drive” (13, 34). In fact, “the whole town was so used to Dr. May's headlong driving. . . . There needed little to account for the disaster—the only wonder was, that it had not happened sooner” (34).

This early manslaughter and mutilation are impossible to overlook in The Daisy Chain, as central as they are to the family saga that follows and as deftly as they introduce two themes that are fundamental to Yonge's fiction in general: the tragic effects of parental neglect, as detailed by scholars such as Tamara Wagner, and the necessity of sacrifice, especially self-sacrifice, as explored by critics including Talia Schaffer.Footnote ²⁰ Suffering and self-punishment are usually equal-opportunity motifs for Yonge, and she liberally bestows both male and female characters in her canon with a range of physical disabilities and psychological troubles designed to curb or even trample their personal desires and aspirations. But in The Daisy Chain, female suffering is the partisan lifeblood of the family story; the ritualized sacrifice of girls and women—the novel's “daisies”—are prerequisite immolations for the absolution and transformation of the characters who are left standing. Mrs. May's sudden death at the exposition of the novel gradually cures her husband's infantile “heedlessness” and allows feminine Richard, the underachieving eldest son, to assume her active maternal role in the family. In turn, Margaret's slow demise encourages our heroine Ethel to learn that household labor is more important than the intellectual pursuits she naturally prefers. But the female body count also constantly rises in the background of the novel, ticking through a Gorey alphabet of illness and injury: B is for the “little burnt girl” who slipped into the fire (409); C is for Cherry who fell out the window (264); L is for Leonora, overdosed with opium (480); and U is for Una, undone by typhus fever (321). While a few male deaths do occur in the novel, only female bodies permanently suffer from patterns of family carelessness, abuse, trauma, and neglect. Only female deaths function here as iterative forms of violent sacrifice necessary for the salvation of other characters.

The ethic of female sacrifice well suits the Christian tradition Yonge's novel exemplifies, but The Daisy Chain also reminds its readers that violence against women is embedded in customs and traditions that predate Christianity, rituals of abuse that the May family has been avidly practicing since childhood. When toddler Daisy receives the gift of a new, huge doll, it must be hidden away in Margaret's wardrobe because the moment she arrived, the youngest boy “Aubrey tied her hands behind her, and was going to offer her up on the nursery grate” (326). Their neighbor, Meta Rivers, tries to protest against this cruelty, insisting that her own dolls have always been like living sisters to her, but the May children have so internalized intellectual traditions of assault and abuse against girls that female immolation is just part of the fun. “She was Iphigenia,” insists Aubrey, “going to be sacrificed” (326). Yonge's use of the Iphigenia myth is a way of embedding what Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver would call “prior violence” in The Daisy Chain's family story. It is a “foundling tale” that naturalizes erotic violence and rape, a myth that will “simultaneously articulate and hide the socially constructed story of male and female sexuality, difference, and power that makes women ‘essentially’ vulnerable and mute.”Footnote ²¹ As a ritual of prior violence that will allow present violence to hide in plain sight, the Iphigenia myth is almost too on the nose for The Daisy Chain: Iphigenia is condemned to sacrifice because King Agamemnon, another careless father, has killed a sacred deer. The ritual immolation is demanded by a female goddess, Artemis/Diana, and enabled by Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, underscoring the way that classical mythology models only two pathways for girls and women: they must authorize and participate in male rituals of abuse, or they will be kidnapped, raped, and murdered to further the larger plot of the story, in this case, the interminable Trojan War. It turns out that all the May children have their classical roles bespoke: Little Daisy, mother to the big, new doll, is a “willing Clytemnestra,” and “Mary unconsciously enacted Diana, and bore the victim away” (326). Ethel herself remembers that her only childhood doll had been reduced to a torso “like a heraldic lion, couped in all her parts,” victim of a “general execution” carried out by brothers Harry and Tom. “There was a doll hanging to every baluster,” Flora recollects, the full slate of stairwell victims “made up with rag” (326). “I never could get proper respect paid to dolls,” Margaret muses sadly from her couch. There were always too many live dolls demanding her attention in the May family, she explains, admitting also to an obvious truth: “we deal too much in their natural enemies” (326).

As Harry and Tom's playful assault is described in a sitting room mostly filled with family members, the two interlopers have the strongest reactions: Meta Rivers acts and looks “as if she had heard of so many murders,” while her brother George “burst out laughing, his first sign of life” since being brought into intimacy with the May family on account of his sister's status as a preferred guest (326). “I could as soon throw away my sister—” Meta begins, only to be interrupted by her brother's loud “Ha!” as he grabs hold of the youngest May daughter and tries to lift her into his arms, crooning “here little Daisy, will you give your doll to Meta?” (327). The family is surprised by this awakening of George's usually torpid personality, and also relieved by the rebuff he immediately receives from their exceedingly well-trained toddler: “‘My name is Gertrude Margaret May,’” retorts “the little round mouth, with all a baby's dignity, and the rosy face was hidden in Dr. May's breast at the sound of George Rivers's broad laugh” (327). The incident is brief, but it is clearly viewed as inappropriate by the family. Dr. May immediately reclaims his feisty three-year-old and turns away from George, but later, when the guests have departed, Margaret opens a conversation about the actions of Meta's “stupid” brother, who the little girls have already dubbed “the detestable” (328). While Dr. May proudly declares his Daisy “a thorough lady” who “allows no liberties,” Margaret wants to institute a new rule that might help protect the little girls from further “liberties.” She requests that the family stop referring to Gertrude as “Daisy” in company: “fondling names,” as she calls them, “should be kept for our innermost selves, not spread abroad and made common” (328).

It seems late in the day for the May family to begin to privatize the name “Daisy”; after all, the “daisy chain” is the organizing motif of the family in this family story, where all of Dr. May's reproducible and redundant girls are his daisies. In one notorious passage, Dr. May describes a recurring dream he has after the carriage accident, where he is a heroic knight fighting a bloody, losing battle, and the only comfort for his “pains and wounds and . . . misery” is his “Daisy Chain hung from the sky, and drawing me upwards” (54, 55). Heroic narratives like Dr. May's self-aggrandizing dream prioritize the struggles of men and normalize the sacrifice of girls and women; domestic narratives like The Daisy Chain demonstrate the fact that such gendered sacrifice is the systemic, iterative condition of everyday family life. Moreover, as the above scene with George Rivers illustrates, systemic violence will inevitably be overlooked and blamed instead on individual girls, who “allow liberties” to their dignity rather than suffer assault to their bodies. Dr. May spiritedly agrees with Margaret's dictum about fondling names, unable to see that his own favorite family institutions make his daughters more vulnerable to violence: “baby names never ought to go beyond home. It is the fashion to use them now; and besides the folly, it seems to me to be an absolute injury to a girl to let her grow up with a nick-name attached to her . . . if girls won't keep up their own dignity, their friends’ duty is to do it for them. The mischief is in intimate friends, who blazon the words to everyone” (328).

What the May family sees in this first incident with George may not actually be sexual assault, but it causes anxiety about the ongoing possibility of sexual assault: the “injury” inevitably done to girls who can be insulted by intimate friends if they don't work hard enough to “keep up their own dignity” (328). It is not overlooked by couch-bound Margaret, but Margaret is unfortunately unavailable when George Rivers usually takes his liberties with the smallest girls in Dr. May's daisy chain. Where is eight-year-old Blanche during this particular visit? She was blowing bubbles with the rest of the family until “Miss Rivers and her brother were ushered into the drawing room,” at which point “Blanche instantly fled away, with her basin, to hide herself in the school-room” (326). While ceasing the use of fondling names in public may decrease the chance of unwanted public fondling, it can have no effect on the assaults beyond Margaret's limited field of vision: like Ethel she is shortsighted and is only capable of seeing things that happen right in front of her, things that can only be ameliorated by weak decree, in order to limit the injuries that will inevitably be caused by a doll's “natural enemies” (326).

Ethel's myopia seems like a minor disability compared with sister Margaret's debilitating spinal injury, and it may simply function, as Melissa Schaub convincingly argues, as a direct bodily manifestation of women's restricted roles in The Daisy Chain.Footnote ²² As a child, Ethel often begs to borrow her father's spectacles, feeling unjustly deprived, as she walks to church and to Cocksmoor village, of the distant scenery and views that the rest of her family is able to enjoy (15). She rarely gets her hands on the glasses, however: Mrs. May, while alive, claims they will make Ethel's sight even shorter “if you accustom your eyes to them” (15), and her brothers refuse to walk with Ethel if she wears them, claiming they turn her into an “object” of community scorn and ridicule. But as Ethel grows older in the second volume, it appears that her disability has worked to curate rather than corrupt her visual field. As Karen Bourrier points out, disabilities that limit vision and movement in Yonge's fiction often function to give invalids a privileged perspective on family events. Bourrier cites The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) as novels where protagonists with “circumscribed views” often gain a form of local vision characterized by clarity and “distinctness.”Footnote ²³ Similarly, while Ethel's myopia denies her a particular form of aesthetic vision and prevents her from accessing a picturesque appreciation of nature and landscape, it also grants her an enhanced view of nearby people and objects that resembles her own description of Margaret's couch-bound perspective: incidents of family mise-en-scène can only appear in Margaret's field of vision in a less lofty aesthetic mode, like “the slides of a magic lantern” (74). The picturesque, famously, is an aesthetic perspective that softens the disruptive details of a landscape for the sake of harmony; Yonge herself uses this perspective in The Daisy Chain, as Schaffer argues, to describe colonial life in the Loyalty Islands, resorting to picturesque description in order to repress the “political struggles, cultural conflicts, daily work, religious practices and local traditions” that would necessarily sully a pleasurable European perspective.Footnote ²⁴ By denying Ethel this capacity for distanciation, Yonge ensures that her protagonist cannot overlook sites of conflict or scenes of abuse, and her myopia eventually becomes a talent for accurately reading people's faces, as her eldest brother Richard denotes (66), and a Cassandra-like ability to see danger to the family, especially in the faces of strangers who present themselves as “intimate friends.”

Ethel “takes an aversion” to George Rivers “on the spot”; while he is not without “a certain comeliness,” he has “deep, lusterless eyes, and a heavy straight bush of black moustache, veiling rather thick lips” (305). Ethel first sees George during a Charity Bazaar that Flora May has helped organize for the benefit of Cocksmoor; while Cocksmoor is Ethel's pet project, and she would like nothing more than the money to fund a church and school in this impoverished district, the bazaar is an event Ethel resisted and even attempted to stop. “The essence of Vanity Fair!” Ethel complains, resenting Flora's hint that overlooking the behavior of rich women and men is a necessary part of middle-class philanthropy: “You won't get on without humoring your neighbor's follies,” says Flora (299), a broad perspective that disregards the details of who those neighbors might be and what kind of behavior might pass as folly. As Yonge scholars like Leslie Thorne-Murphy have noted, these “female sales” brought men and women, boys and girls, together in a “carnivalesque” atmosphere of buying and selling that “allowed the rules of polite society to fluctuate.”Footnote ²⁵ All the May girls have brought handmade items to sell to the highest bidder: Ethel has made useful sunbonnets, Mary pincushions, and even little Blanche has made a single watch guard that she hopes will be purchased only by her childish love interest, Hector Ernescliffe. There is chaos from the bazaar's opening, however, and Blanche cannot keep track of her precious commodity. She runs from booth to booth in a panic until George Rivers asks her the matter: “The guards! The guards!” she cries, provoking in him another fit of laughter and an offer of help that includes him lifting her high off the ground to scan for her items from above (305). Mortified that George has taken her for a “little girl,” eight-year-old Blanche senses immediately she is in danger; she knows she should be “flattered” by George's repeated offer to buy her guards for an outrageous price, but shakes out “her crumpled muslin” and remains fully alert to his whereabouts: her “eyes followed him everywhere in fear, lest he should come her way” (306). Although George is currently courting Flora May, he seems far more taken with her miniature, teasing Blanche about the price of her guards until she desperately asserts that he “has no business to ask,” forcing her to spend the rest of her time at the bazaar “in dread of the dark moustache, which was often visible near the tent, searching, she thought, for her” (307).

This scene seems almost too legible: Blanche May struggling to find and to keep her own guard while a vista of “brisk trade” surrounds her, distracting her many brothers and sisters from her obvious mortification and fear. But Blanche's distress and excitement are hardly unnoticed. Her experience at the bazaar is a legible erotic drama easily read by other shoppers who pause for a moment to watch Blanche's commerce unfold.Footnote ²⁶ “[T]here was an attraction in the pretty little eager girl, glowing and smiling,” the narrator explains, and many men were interested in her “range of goods,” including “one old gentleman” who, after he “handled her guards and asked their price,” leads his wife to a corner to enjoy Blanche as he would enjoy a little heroine in a play that he has seen enacted many times:

This old gentleman and his wife wander away and are seen no more in The Daisy Chain. But they function here as a ready-made chorus for Blanche's “little drama,” showcasing the fact that the sexual vulnerability of children satisfies a kind of public scopophilia and exists as a highly attractive peep show always perceptible to the naked eye. Unseen by most of the May family, the performance is overlooked only in the sense that it is curated as comedy rather than tragedy, punctuated by laughter and joy instead of tears and terror, and granted the closure of a happy ending, for customer and commodity alike. The preferred interpretive framework for scenes of sexual vulnerability is usually seduction instead of assault, but George is not playing at comedy when he continues to “torment” Blanche “to know what had become of the guard, telling her that if she would not say, he should be furiously jealous” (310). Blanche is not playing at comedy either when she hides her face on Ethel's arm in the carriage ride home, “and almost cried with indignant ‘shamefastedness’” (310). When Meta and George call the next day, Blanche is trapped in a corner of the family drawing room where George continues to harass the child about his desire for her guards, until finally “her refusal came out at last, in an almost passionate key, in the midst of other conversation—‘No! I say no!!’” Blanche declares, “I don't like you well enough!” “Another no,” replies George ominously, “and that will be yes” (315).

Nobody laughs at this particular outburst. Margaret “gravely” sends Blanche away to play with the other children, subtly trying, from her couch, to recategorize Blanche as a “little” girl of the family; Flora more carelessly does the same thing a few moments later when she insists that “detestable” George just “doesn't know how to talk to little girls” (316). But the problem with Blanche is that she has always revealed the contradictions inherent in the role of the little girl, and Yonge has spent considerable time both sexualizing the child and underscoring the dangers inherent in the sexualization of children. From the beginning of the novel, with the complicity of her family, Blanche has acted as a sexual proxy for her older sisters. When Mrs. May initially fears Alan Ernescliffe's courtship of Margaret might result in “awkward situations, which papa was not likely to see or guard against,” Blanche, at age five, “did all the coquetry with him from which Margaret abstained” (11). After Margaret's spinal injury displaces her from her own marriage plot, Blanche claims Alan as “her lawful property, dancing round him, chattering, and looking injured if he addressed a word to anyone else” (256). Though Dr. May notes that Blanche is a “dangerous young lady,” he only laughs at her ongoing lisping flirtations and the way she perches on the clergyman's lap when he comes for tea (120). Dr. May is perhaps forgetting his wife's last letter to her sister, in which she conveniently summarized all of the strengths and weaknesses of her eleven children: Blanche is like “Flora over again,” wrote Mrs. May just hours before her death, “perhaps prettier and more fairy-like . . . none of them has ever been so winning as this little maid, who even attracts Dr. Hoxton himself, and obtains sugar-plums and kisses . . . notice is notice to the white Mayflower, and there is my anxiety—I am afraid it is not wholesome to be too engaging ever to get a rebuff” (43). Indeed, Blanche's unwholesome “flirtations” with older men are so well established in the novel by the time George Rivers appears on the scene that they are overlooked only in the sense that they entertain everyone; everybody in the family sees and notices the way “the affected little pussycat,” as Ethel terms her at one point, bridles and talks in a mincing voice when male strangers are present, everybody bears witness to and is somewhat relieved by the fact that little Blanche takes the sexual burden of attraction away from her older sisters, making men like visiting doctor Sir Matthew Fleet “take a great deal of notice of her” instead of transferring their attention to the bigger girls (111).

To be perceived as a “little” girl is to be seen most clearly as a victim; as Carolyn Steedman and Louise Jackson have noted, midcentury rescue societies for abused girls used the language of littleness and babyhood to stress the essential innocence of injured children, calling on a Romantic notion of childhood to discount the notion that fallen girls of any age were wanton seductresses, permanently tainted by early sexual experience.Footnote ²⁷ While the term “victim” all but disappeared from postmodern feminist conversations about sexual assault, the abstraction of such terminology did nothing to eradicate “the threat of violence in women's lives.”Footnote ²⁸ If anything, its avoidance may continue a long-standing—even Victorian—unease about the limitations of oppositional thinking, about needing to choose between infantilization or agency, rape or seduction, even in stories of sexual assault where children are concerned. In The Daisy Chain, Blanche May isn't called a victim; instead, she is recognized by her whole family as a “baby coquette,” the paradoxical term italicizing the fact that her precocious flirtations are an entrenched form of family role-playing and a haunting reminder of prior violence doubly displaced in recent childhood and the ancient past (419). Early scenes of her attentions to Alan are saturated with both sexuality and family rituals of female sacrifice: “over the balusters peeped a little rough curly head, a face glowing with carnation deepened by sleep, and a round, plump, bare arm and shoulder; and down at Alan's feet there fell a construction of white and pink paper, while a voice lisped out, ‘Mr. Ernthcliffe, there's a white rothe for you’” (41). Blanche's sexual “forwardness” here is hilarious to her father and to most of the family; “even Ethel gave way to a paroxysm of laughter, joined in, more or less, by all the rest” (42). But what the glowing, blushing, lisping child sacrifices for her sisters in drawing precocious sexual attention to herself is her own visibility as a vulnerable little girl and the legibility of her status as a victim of present violence. Most of the May family will end up overlooking Blanche's encounters with George Rivers in the sense that they will both see and not see what is happening: while Iphigenia's legacy animates The Daisy Chain, it obscures Blanche's own story, imperfectly erasing the signs that Rivers is a sexual predator.

Something is very wrong with “horrid” George, as everyone but Flora and brother Norman will admit, and when George proposes for Flora's hand, Dr. May is completely repulsed by his daughter's ready acquiescence: “Surely . . . you do not mean that you like this man?” he asks incredulously; “have you considered what it would be like to spend your life with a man that has not three ideas; not a resource for occupying himself—a regular prey to ennui—one whom you could never respect!” (333). Dr. May next makes a great show of formally inquiring about George's military conduct and moral character, adding that he will “watch him well myself” to see if anything seems “amiss” (335). Nothing “outrageous” appears in George's official record, however: “though he was not a subject for high praise there was no vice in him—no more than in an old donkey—as Dr. May declared, in his concluding paroxysm of despair” (339). Still, George is considered by most of the family to be deficient in moral principle and below average intelligence, a lazy spendthrift who just doesn't have enough “energy,” as Dr. May remarks, to be guilty of serious crime (335). These characteristics alone might not peg George as a pedophile, but they certainly fall far short of Victorian codes of evangelically inspired middle-class masculinity, which, as Jackson describes, “emphasized social and moral purity” and “robust stoicism” (32). Jackson's groundbreaking study, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England, even argues that the virtues of the “chivalric hero” of Victorian evangelical imagination were enhanced in the second half of the nineteenth century by an emerging cultural recognition of child sexual abuse, and constructed in deliberate opposition to the “savage child abuser” lurking at the seedy fringes of civilized, middle-class life.Footnote ²⁹

While Yonge bestows a strong evangelical morality on most of her male characters, George's status as a “detestable man” (310) is an inscription of otherness that at the very least resembles what John Tosh terms “subordinate masculinity”: he is an “unmanly” actor who somehow “undermine[s] patriarchy from within.”Footnote ³⁰ If George was working class, his disruptive traits and actions would be better recognized as vice, but his wealth and political status distract the May family's attention, ensuring his ongoing, intimate access to Blanche and her little sister; after her engagement, Flora even tries to regularize this access, deciding that “Blanche and Daisy should come and stay with her, to be formed by the best society” once she is married to George (334). Even so, Yonge broadcasts that George's inherent wrongness is indeed based on a subtle class difference that separates him definitively from dainty, vivacious Meta. George is the only child of Mr. Rivers's first marriage; his mother, who “could not have been much of a lady,” died when he was a baby, and he was “spoilt” by a group of “odd old aunts” who brought him up in “their own way” (340). Pity for George ultimately inspires Dr. May to rein in much of the family repulsion, “saying he believed there was no great harm in the youth, but that he was shallow-brained, and extravagant, and having been born in the days when Mr. Rivers had been working himself up in the world, had not had so good of an education as his sister” (310). By seeding George's backstory with economic disadvantage and a disreputable maternal bloodline, Yonge manages to intensify suspicions about his intrinsic “detestability” while also demonstrating that wealth, status, and the ritualized hegemony of marital customs so often encourage witnesses and even victims to overlook obvious signs of depravity. Once the engagement is announced, George is “regarded as a belonging—a necessity, not a choice,” and the customs of heteronormative family-making even finally persuade the children to overlook their own prior dislike: “Mary and Blanche no sooner heard a whisper about bridesmaids than all of their opposition faded away, in a manner that quite scandalized Ethel” (341).

Shortsighted Ethel and her also myopic but “heedless” father do see the depravity; Ethel, in particular, tries, Cassandra-like, to warn her siblings against “this terrible man that makes papa so unhappy” (336). Brother Norman, dazzled by Meta, only sees the problem of intellectual dullness in George and disregards Ethel's attempt to refine her initial critique of George's stupidity as a lack of “honest goodness” (337):

Norman claims he has had “a good deal of talk with him” and that there is more to George “under the surface,” but the narrator points out that it would be truer to say Norman has had “a good deal of talk to him” (338). The solid qualities Norman feels Ethel and Dr. May overlook are merely “sounds of assent” to all his own conservative political views, sounds that continue to shield George through his courtship of Flora and beyond, even as he threatens to take Gertrude with them on his honeymoon, “whereupon Daisy kicked and screamed, and was taken back in haste” (348). When George's new, ambitious wife decides to devote her own considerable intellect to propping up her husband as a conservative candidate for Parliament, Norman is eager to help: “men of principle” are especially wanted at the current moment to devote themselves to the “right side” of Stoneborough politics (414). “‘Exactly so,’ said Flora. ‘I should feel it a crime to say one word to deter George at a time when every effort must be made to support the right causes. One must make sacrifices when the highest interests are at stake’” (414). According to the narrator, Flora seems “to thrive upon her sacrifice,” and Norman proudly recognizes in her “a Roman matron” who would “never repent urging her husband to take on himself the duties incumbent on all who had the power” (414). But the patriotic sacrifice Flora so relishes masks the specifically gendered form of sacrifice that all heroic narratives eventually demand of women and girls. Flora has just given birth to a baby daughter, who is, forebodingly, “so like Blanche” (415), and godmother-to-be Ethel is already afraid that the election is siphoning too much of Flora's energy and attention from the child (413), training little Leonora early for a fashionable life and the “vain pomp and glory of the world” (421). “Keep her from the evil,” Ethel fervently prays for Leonora, comforting herself with the baby's upcoming baptism, when she will finally “be a child of a Father who guards His own” (421).

Through Flora's indirect intellectual labor and Norman's dedicated speechwriting, shiftless George wins his conservative seat. At “nomination day” in Stoneborough, the gentlemen are in the “highest spirits,” screaming themselves hoarse, their hurrahs masking all of the obvious “deficiencies” of George's speech (419). Only Ethel resents this second carnivalesque scene of folly sufficiently enough to notice, in her myopic way, that Blanche is missing. After a search of the riotous Town Hall, Ethel finally

This incident is not overlooked by Ethel: she “privately begged Flora to hint to George to alter his style of wit” (420). Neither is it submerged in metaphor or hidden by mythologies of prior violence: the narrator both shows readers a crying child and tells us that a susceptible little girl has been “incalculably” injured by an intimate male friend. But the confession is too dangerous for daylight; it can only be shared in a dark closet with a shortsighted sister, who cautions her to hide her tears and tells her that it's better not to notice this particular style of notice. Yonge doesn't hide any of the violence in The Daisy Chain; instead, she repeatedly shows us a form of violence that passes as play, where male laughter works to reclassify sexual assault and rape as a facetious form of fun.

During this political phase of the novel, it becomes increasingly clear that predators like George Rivers will be protected by an entire ecosystem of misogyny comprised of the family, the church, and the state. Flora is too invested in her husband's larger political conquests to take much notice of his more local campaigns. To preserve, or conserve, the smooth operations of political power, Flora negotiates a comprehensive payoff: “Ethel she did not attempt to patronize, but she promised all the sights in London to the children, and masters to Mary and Blanche,” and even overwhelms the poor governess, Miss Bracy, with an offer of “orphan asylums for her sisters” (420). Flora's unprecedented enthusiasm about orphan asylums bewilders both Miss Bracy and the reader, but it works to remind us that legions of vulnerable girls haunt the pages of The Daisy Chain; as Schaffer has noted, the impoverished village of Cocksmoor, where Ethel devotes so much of her emotional and actual labor, is primarily populated by women and girls, as if to provide a deep enough bench for scenes of female suffering and a wider array of doppelgängers for the daisies at the center of Yonge's narrative.Footnote ³¹ Iterative patterns of abuse and assault are simply an expected part of the “heterosexual life narrative” for legions of overlooked women and children, Yonge seems to insist.Footnote ³² Both careless fathers and “willing Clytemnestras” are needed to enable the cycle, or circle, of abuse and subsequent misprision of abuse. Flora will eventually pay the price for her own carelessness and betrayal; the corpse of her own “model baby” daughter, a “perfect doll for quietness,” frighteningly “inanimate and like a pretty waxen toy,” will soon hang from the novel's balusters with the other female victims, overdosed with “Godfrey's Cordial” by the nurse Flora hires to mother her child during the excitement of election season (461). While sorrow at the death of the baby finally kills Margaret (497), the infant's painful withdrawal from opium and subsequent demise is primarily framed by Dr. May as a form of redemption for Flora: “the greatest blessing . . . sent to open your eyes and raise your thoughts upwards” (487).

Is this a feminist perspective on normalized patterns of abuse and sexual assault that Yonge is advancing, or is it just a perspective? One of the most fascinating and maddening elements of the Yonge canon has always been its contradictory impulses and ideologies. Her contemporary critics grappled with the social and cultural meanings of her novels, in which characters, including ambitious and intellectual female characters, “start as delightfully rebellious youths who must be painfully, painstakingly trained to adhere to the law.”Footnote ³³ What Gavin Budge identified as a conflict between realism and typology has often meant that readers of Yonge usually read with one eye shut; if you follow the realism, you might overlook the larger typological reflex that conditions Yonge's narratives around Christian traditions of sacrifice, and if you follow the typology you might overlook Yonge's unruly realism, her scenes of disruption that take place at church charity bazaars or at the town hall on the eve of a parliamentary election.Footnote ³⁴ But the typology of sacrifice in The Daisy Chain is less Christian than classical, perhaps because archaic rituals better spotlight the specific forms of female suffering required by the heteronormative conventions of family life. True, Ethel's painful relinquishment of personal ambition is initiated by the family decision that she must stop serious study in Greek and Latin: it distracts her from family duties and will be permanently degrading to “neatness and orderly habits” (152). “She may not feel any ill-effects at present,” insists the May family's pedantic first governess, Miss Winter, “but you may depend upon it, it will tell on her by-and-by” (152). Over time, this form of broad, transcendent vision could become a dangerous perspective, one that challenges Christian models of female silence and resignation, and demonstrates the severe limitations of a faith that quietly waits for another “Father who guards his own.” Studying the classics could have encouraged Ethel to see herself or her sisters as links in a chain that reaches well beyond the May garden of daisies, and to confront the fact that systemic and regularized sacrifice of women and girls has always been the currency of every family story.

Yonge invites her readers to share in this broad vision while denying it to her still myopic and newly domesticated heroine. The vision Yonge finally recommends for women like Ethel and Flora is foreshortened and shallow, a couchbound perspective that will make them watchful of the vulnerable dolls in their own family circle and wary of the natural enemies of girls and women that may likewise be found at home. Flora takes Margaret's place on the sofa, sitting in the dark thanks to Dr. May's special prescription, which also includes that she adopt and adapt to Ethel's visual field. “I can't see you,” says Ethel when she first visits her bereaved sister. “Why, Flora, you look like a little white shadow!” she exclaims. “‘I have had such weak eyes,’ said Flora, ‘and this dim light is comfortable now. I see your old sharp face quite plain. . . . Papa says I have three years’ rest to make up’” (554). The myopic gaze is, indeed, the price of female ambition in The Daisy Chain, as Schaub argues. But it is also a violent reckoning with the only role women can play in the heroic narrative: their bodies are offered to flame and to fever, and to public rituals of assault and abuse that sometimes just masquerade as normal family life. Iterative and irrepressible, the daisy chain soon reboots. Sickly Flora gives birth to a second daughter, directing her father to “Name her Margaret—make her a Daisy of your own” (548), and greedy Dr. May opens his arms wide to receive an unhealthy and misshapen child, who lives on in The Trial: More Links of the Daisy Chain (1864), the sequel to The Daisy Chain, as the apotheosis of a family system of neglect, abuse, and sacrifice: “a child whose aspect was always a shock to those who connected her with the two Margarets whose name she bore.”Footnote ³⁵ Flora's Margaret is stamped with her father's “look of deformity and deficiency”; although she “has more wit than George,” she also has “more cunning” and inherits her father's “heavy mould of feature and dark complexion, and the black eyes had neither sparkle not relief from the color of the sallow cheek.”Footnote ³⁶ Ominously, this fretful, sickly iteration of George Rivers has also inherited his cheerful predilection for violence, only coming to life when returned sailor Harry May entertains her with stories of war, and completely wins her over by taking her to visit the rifle grounds.Footnote ³⁷

At the close of The Daisy Chain, Dr. May is better satisfied with “his newest Daisy,” when Meta (yet another Margaret) becomes engaged to Norman (520), although he must stoically prepare to part with his “little humming-bird” when Norman's new heroic vocation demands that the couple relocate to New Zealand as missionaries among the Maori (293). Youngest brother Tom grumbles about the regularized system of immolation and self-immolation that compels this removal, pointing out despairingly that in the May family, “Everybody goes and sacrifices somebody else” (506). But Meta is by now well steeped in the culture and customs of the daisy chain: “I expect much that will be very disagreeable and not at all heroic, but if I can only make Norman think it fun, that will be one purpose answered” (522). Meta takes Tom's protest that she will be eaten by cannibals “most merrily, talking of herself so resignedly, as bound upon a spit, and calling out to be roasted slower and faster, that she safely conducted off their opposition by way of standing joke” (523).

Self-framed as comedy, Meta's description of her own sacrifice underscores the rituals of violence that shape gender relations while hiding that violence in plain sight. Good fun is often the public genre of violence against women and girls, a genre that victims are expected to embrace and reflect even while their own bodies break and burn, or dissolve into tears under a pile of coats in a musty cloakroom. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Christine Blasey Ford testified at the Supreme Court hearing for conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh, when she described her high school assault at the hands of drunken teenage boys who thought it was good fun to abuse and to traumatize girls: “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”Footnote ³⁸ Thanks to professional hecklers like Camille Paglia, there is support for the idea that stories like this one should always be read as comedies: “Feminism, with its solemn . . . repressiveness does not see that what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.”Footnote ³⁹ Reclassifying comedy as tragedy means tampering with the heroic narrative, perhaps derailing the ambitious vocations of so many playful men as they attempt to ascend up the corporate ladder or the judicial system. Brett Kavanaugh was given a “hero's welcome” by the Federalist Society when he emerged victorious from his Senate confirmation, despite Ford's compelling public testimony, and was “hailed as a hero” back at his elite high school, Georgetown Prep.Footnote ⁴⁰ Rather than see these journalistic constructions of heroism as offensive to notions of true valor or honor or morality (which they certainly are), maybe it would be instructive to take the heroic narrative at face value and recognize that the hero's journey is a mythology that only advances through the sacrifice of vulnerable bodies, especially the bodies of women and girls. For some, it might be better to not see or say rape, to disappear the aggressors and victims into what Berlant and Warner otherwise term the “amnesia archive,”Footnote ⁴¹ with a merry acknowledgment that boys will be boys who will be senators and Supreme Court justices, real estate moguls and philosophers, captains of industry and hedge fund managers and academics and conservative candidates for Parliament. The heroic narrative and the heterosexual life narrative are often identical and treat women to protracted sieges and sudden assaults and to a sense of their own redundancy as vulnerable links in a chain that's always pushing daisies.

Even though the adjudicative process for addressing rape has failed so many times and in so many contexts, it has become clear in recent courtroom proceedings and congressional hearings that rape quite often happens in public; it is an ongoing experience permitted by heteronormative customs of dating, grooming, employing, educating, mentoring, managing, and patronizing. The smooth continuity between these activities and experiences and the activities and experiences called rape or sexual assault belies our customary belief that misogyny is an inconsequential aberration in gender relations, accounted for as immature locker-room talk or low comedy, rather than the very ecosystem of “official national culture.”Footnote ⁴² Harry May can finally make it home from war with all the delay and dramatic glory of a nineteenth-century Ulysses, so steeped in heroic role-playing that little Gertrude asks if he “really poked out the giant's eye with the end of a fir tree” (448). Even Yonge's modest Victorian epic requires the constant, iterative patter of violence against women and girls. Readers can overlook the violence by witnessing it with shortsighted Ethel or dismiss it as a “style of wit,” enjoyed by “men of principle,” that traumatized girls are encouraged not to notice. But it's finally hard to ignore the fact that the “process of becoming a Daisy . . . is no fun,” as Schaffer reminds us, and that novels like Yonge's might be asking us to keep both eyes open when it comes to representations of rape and sexual assault.Footnote ⁴³ Grab your spectacles and take a look.