Kabi Hartman

"An Artist in her Way":
Representations of the Woman Artist in Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen

Kabi Hartman

     Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) was a prolific writer. She published almost 100 novels as well as biographies, art criticism, travel writing, historical sketches, and over two hundred articlesfor periodicals like Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine andThe Cornhill Magazine, yet her ambivalence about representing herself as a serious artist in her Autobiography provides Oliphant aficionados with grist for speculation and conjecture: did Oliphant even think of herself as an artist? While I will answer this question with are sounding yes, still there is enough equivocation in the Autobiography to give scholars room to play. And although Oliphant herself once wrote that "scholarship is a sort of poison tree, and kills everything" (279), the recent scholarship on Oliphant's Autobiography has enlivened rather than killed debate by calling attention to Oliphant's struggle with self-representation. When it came to writing about her particular experience as both mother and writer, Oliphant found the contemporary discourse, with its rigidly discrete ideologies of motherhood and authorhood, stifling. Thus the Autobiography can be read as Oliphant's poignant effort to extend the meaning of the term `artist' to one flexible enough to include a woman who wrote not only because it came as naturally to her as "talking or breathing" (4), but also because her children needed to eat.

     In this paper I will argue that Oliphant's preoccupation with what it means to be or call herself an artist can be mapped in her novel, Kirsteen, which was written in 1890--roughly the same period as the Autobiography--and chronicles the life of a Scottish woman in the early part of the 19th century. Although Kirsteen Douglas is a dressmaker rather than a writer, Oliphant takes care early in the novel to encourage the idea (through theScottish dressmaker Miss Macnab) "that a dressmaker `is an artist in her way' and that ... dressmaking is `just like a' the airts'"(Jay 260). I will thus read dressmaking as a trope for writing, Kirsteen as an artist figure, and the novel as Oliphant's portrait of the artist as a young dressmaker. Reading dressmaking as a metaphor for writing, I hope to demonstrate that this late novel presents a self-consciousness and humor about artistic production the analysis of which will clarify what Oliphant means by the term`artist.'

     First to contextualize Oliphant's portrayal of Kirsteen. Here I will argue that not merely personal but also larger cultural associations with needlework made dressmaking Oliphant's inevitable choice of metaphor for writing. Toward this end, I will discuss the comments about needlework in her Autobiography, and then summarize the wide complex of associations surrounding needlework and the needlewoman at the time she wrote Kirsteen.

     Oliphant often associates sewing with writing in her Autobiography. Recalling how she substituted writing for needlework once when she attended her mother through a "badillness," she comments that since she "had no liking ... for needlework," she "took to writing" (16). In another passageOliphant describes how her mother allowed her to write so long as she sat "at the corner of the family table with ... [her] writing-book, ... as if ... [she] had been making a shirt instead of writing a book" (23). Working at her mother's table, Oliphant practiced writing as other Victorian women sewed, taking her "share in the conversation" (24), and picking up her work throughout the day when she had a moment. "I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed [for writing]" (24) she claimed in 1885. Even when writing became the sole means of supporting her family, Oliphant never deviated from the pattern instilled in her by her mother: writing was allowed so long as it was undertaken as woman's work, something that could be set aside as easily as domestic sewing.

     However, despite Oliphant's professed substitution of writing for needlework, her Autobiography records that she did her share of sewing, too—primarily because her children needed clothes. Accordingly, she associates it with good mothering—the ground for this association having been laid by her own mother, who was dedicated to making her daughter's clothing by hand. Oliphant re-created, and perhaps in a sense vindicated her mother's labor by sewing for her own children. One of her happiest memories, she claims, is of checking on them in the nursery before taking her needlework downstairs with her. Writing and sewing, then, served similar functions in Oliphant's life: they were both ways of mothering her family by providing for them.

     Beyond these personal or autobiographical factors, there were practical considerations at work in Oliphant's decision to make Kirsteen a dressmaker. Dressmaking was one of the few genteel professions open to a lady like Kirsteen, who ran away from home and was obliged to make her own living. Furthermore, it is likely that in selecting that profession for Kirsteen, Oliphant simply followed the path of many Victorian authors who chose dressmaking as the trade for their heroines because they identified with the dressmaker as being similar to them in class and temperament (Neff148). Finally, Oliphant could bank on the fact that her female readers would sympathize with a dressmaker--for virtually all Victorian women sewed, knit, and embroidered in some fashion.

     However, although all women of the time sewed, not all sewed for the same reasons or under the same circumstances. The gentlewoman who embroidered beautiful creations to embellish her home inhabited a different world from the needlewoman who took in work at home for pay, or the seamstress who rose early to sew in a dressmaker's workroom, often remaining there for fourteen or even sixteen hours at a stretch. Thus Nineteenth century discourse about needlework and the needlewoman spanned a wide spectrum ranging from discussions of the needle as the symbol of idealized "femininity as domesticity" (Wilson 168), to the topos of the needle as an instrument of oppression and degradation. By the time Oliphant wrote Kirsteen in 1890, the figure of the impoverished dressmaker's assistant, stooped and broken in health,had "galvanized the public imagination" and had even prompted government investigation into the general working conditions of seamstresses. In this context, Oliphant's portrayal of Miss Jean Brown's workroom in Mayfair where Kirsteen assists and all seamstresses are treated well, presents a model of how women can help one another survive economically and professionally, but is also undeniably prettified and idealized.

     In creating Kirsteen as a self-supporting, professional, genteel and artistic dressmaker who works in a well-run and fashionable Mayfair establishment, Oliphant blends images of the domestic with the industrial seamstress. Kirsteen is a pastiche, alternately evoking the lady embroidering at home for aesthetic reasons, and the impoverished seamstress earning her living in aworkroom. While it is easy to understand how, often laboring until two in the morning at her writing, Oliphant identified with the exhausted seamstress bent over her needle, her portrait of the dressmaker is somewhat unrealistic and generally incompatible withother contemporary fictional representations of dressmakers and seamstresses (such as Ruth Hilton or Little Emily, to name onlytwo.) She is more interested in exploring the particular problem of the bourgeois gentlewoman forced to earn her living than in addressing the problems of working women in general. Thus the anomalous character of her representation results from the fact that Oliphant makes use of only such cultural associations with needlework as dovetail nicely with her own ambivalent thinkingabout writing. No wonder then that the dressmaker is presented in much the same vein as the artist in Oliphant's Autobiography. Dressmaking in Kirsteen is therefore depicted variously as chore, financial necessity, solace, and source of creative pleasure.

     A close reading of Kirsteen reveals that Oliphant's discussion of dressmaking and sewing functions on many levels. On the first and simplest level, Kirsteen's life as a dressmaker approximately parallels Oliphant's own trajectory as a writer; and Kirsteen's thinking about her profession recalls to us Oliphant's musings--and conflicts--about her own. Kirsteen, having secretly promised her neighbor, Ronald Drummond, to wait to marry him until he returns from service in India, must flee to London in order to avoid marrying an older man to whom her father subsequently promises her. Dressmaking, which Kirsteen takes up in London, is therefore necessary to escape economic distress, and is depicted by the narrator as a hardship. As in her Autobiography, where Oliphant explains how she was forced to whip out articles to feed her children after her husband died, so too in Kirsteen Oliphant's portrait of the artist emphasizes financial need over creative inspiration as the driving incentive of the artist. Kirsteen's primary motive for dressmaking is economic: "`I've come away ... to make my fortune,'" she informs Miss Jean (157). Like Oliphant's writing, Kirsteen's dressmakingultimately becomes her means of mothering her family. After Kirsteen's mother dies, Kirsteen proudly assumes the title"stand-by of the family," thereby taking her place. The money she earns from dressmaking is used to buy back some of the old Douglas family land.

     However, after her fiance dies in battle in India, Kirsteen consciously decides to remain an independent dressmaker rather than return home and/or marry someone else (the older man to whom her father wished to marry her has by this time happily married Kirsteen's sister). Therefore, despite the emphasis on economics as primary in Kirsteen's life, we see that dressmaking actually fulfills Kirsteen's thirst for independence and productivity. The narrator often alludes to the joy felt by her heroine in unhindered moments of invention. Like Oliphant, who confesses in her Autobiography that she "always took pleasure in a little bit of fine writing" (86), Kirsteen, we are told, takes "pleasure in heaping together and contrasting with each other the soft silken"materials of her trade (165), thus plainly enjoying the craft of composition and selection. "It is certain," the narrator assures us, "that ... [Kirsteen] applied herself to the invention of pretty confections and modifications of the fashions with much of the genuine enjoyment which attends an artist" (165). Thriving at Miss Jean's, Kirsteen is described as "independent and original" (164); and her natural genius at bringing old fashions to new life quickly renders her as indispensable in the workroom as her creator was at Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Nevertheless, Oliphant's representation of the artist/dressmaker is characteristically ambivalent; while she portrays the woman artist/dressmaker as having little to do with original creation (Kirsteen modifies the old fashions), she also maintains that Kirsteen is "independent and original." Oliphant consequently propounds the view--often stated as a fear about her own writing in her Autobiography--that those who create out of economic exigency are necessarily unimaginative and derivative, while simultaneously resisting such a view, which romanticizes the artist as one fueled solely by inspiration.

     The question of whether Kirsteen creates art from economic necessity or for pleasure reaches a pitch of uncertainty in the impressively melodramatic denouement. Here Kirsteen wanders weeping on her family property in Scotland as day breaks, resolutely making up her mind to become the main support of her family by undertaking a bleak life of incessant dressmaking:

There was a long, long weary road stretching before her, years that seemed endless going on and on, through which she must walk, weeping only in the dark, smiling and busy through the day.... In a day or two she would have left [home], probably forever, and gone back to a manifold and many-coloured life. The stand-by of the family! She had always intended this, and now there was consecration on her head (274).

The repeated "long" and "on," serving as onomatopoeic groans and punctuated by such adjectives as "weary" and "endless," stand in sharp contrast to the vision of the "manifold and many-coloured life," which brings to mind more the image of a full palette than an empty canvas. Furthermore, the word "consecration" evokes Kirsteen's religious solemnity and pride in committing herself tosupport her family through her art. Thus we see a conflicted representation of Kirsteen's life as dressmaker: it is exhausting and difficult, varied and dynamic, and religiously solemn.

     It is at this juncture that I will propose that Oliphant puts dressmaking to a second and more complicated use in Kirsteen: namely, as a trope for narrative itself, and thus a means to comment on the technical and formal problems of writing. Through this trope, Oliphant performs the complex operation of writing her portrait of the artist while simultaneously writing about the difficulties involved in composing her life of an artist.

     Sewing is closely associated with language in Kirsteen. As the novel opens, Kirsteen embroiders her brother's initials onto a set of white handkerchiefs for him to take to India. However, Kirsteen also intends Ronald Drummond—whose initials are coincidentally the same as her brother's, and who is also bound for India the next day--to notice her needlework, and this is exactly what happens. Ronald, impressed by the fact that Kirsteen employs strands of her "abundant" (3) red hair in place of thread, removes "one of the handkerchiefs from the pile," places it "in the breast pocket of his coat" (7), and asks Kirsteen to wait for him until he returns from India. Sewing, then, is the means by which Kirsteen writes Ronald Drummond into her life, initiating both her own story and the novel. This association of sewing with language is elaborated when Kirsteen figures Ronald's spoken proposal as the "golden thread that should run through all ...[her] years" (19), an image which echoes Oliphant's oft-quoted statement that "writing ran through everything" (23). Kirsteen uses sewing to actively construct and shape her life, and figures her transformation of life experience into narrative as a type of needlework.

     Through Miss Macnab, the provincial dressmaker called in early in the novel to create ball gowns for Kirsteen and her sister, Oliphant further explores the formal problems of the writer. It is in describing Miss Macnab that the narrator first establishes the fact that a dressmaker is an artist. We are told that Miss Macnab has the "mind of the artist" (53), is "an artist in her way" (54), a "domestic professor... of the most primitive yet everlasting of arts" (54), is "devot[ed] to her art" (54), and molds the white gowns upon Kirsteen and Mary "with something like a sculptor's art" (54). And if all this insistence is not enough to convince us of Miss Macnab's status, then Miss Macnab's own words surely should. Admonishing Kirsteen that in "ainy airt" "`the maist difficult is aye the maist particular" (55), Miss Macnab expresses herself most freely about the formal aspects and ultimate meaning of dressmaking.

     Although we are certainly meant to smile at Miss Macnab's well-meaning pretensions, her impromptu lecture on form must nonetheless be read seriously. By calling attention to the difficulty of particulars, Miss Macnab directs us to the fact that Kirsteen itself is a work of art, the details of which are significant and selected rather than arbitrary and haphazard. Moreover, by flagging the particular as being always the most challenging, Miss Macnab identifies the task of the artist as finding the right clothes--or words--to fit the particular case. Perhaps the fact that Miss Macnab has greater difficulty fitting the impatient Kirsteen with a gown than her compliant sister (54) should be read as Oliphant's indirect admission that Kirsteen is a more difficult character to `dress' than the stock figure of Mary. Kirsteen, as one who puts such emphasis on writing her own narrative, might seem to her creator to struggle against the author who attempts to write her! Finally, just as Miss Macnab molds Kirsteen's gown like a sculptor, so too, it is implied, Oliphant fashions the language we read, assuring us that each word is indeed particular and important. As the most self-conscious and philosophical dressmaker in the novel, I think Miss Macnab functions as a stand-in for Oliphant herself, albeit a comical and caricatured one. Indeed, by decking herself out in the role of provincial dressmaker dispensing wisdom, Oliphant pokes fun at the idea of herself as artist and at what she sees as the pretensionsof artists in general, while simultaneously managing to discuss the artist's responsibility. (Yes, Margaret Oliphant did have a senseof humor, a fact we sometimes forget.)

     In 1878 Oliphant wrote: "we shall have a wide audience indeed, if we may hope to include among our readers all those whose hearts have sunk with dismay or beat with pleasure ... with the sensation, painful or exhilarating, of being ill or well dressed."(Dress 7). Struggling to fit her self-representation into the restricting discourse of her time, Margaret Oliphant was keenly aware of the dictates of fashion and the sensation of being "ill or well dressed" when she wrote Kirsteen in 1890. By this time, she had come to the conclusion that she was "very small, very obscure, beside [such women writers as George Eliot and CharlotteBronte], rather a failure all round" (A., 8) and distinctly out of fashion as a writer. (In this context it is significant that Kirsteen's looks are described as being "quite out of accordance with the canons of the day" (3)). Musings on the importance of fashion fill the pages of the novel; and by using the metaphor of dressmaking to discuss the fraught topic of writing, Oliphant explores how fashions in language and discourse confine us and make the task of self-representation both more difficult and also more urgent. Depicting Kirsteen's genius as the ability to innovate and improve on the old fashions, Oliphant's portrait of the artist as dressmaker emphasizes originality and re-vision as the woman artist's primary responsibility—for finally, it is the particular struggle of the female artist with which Oliphant concerns herself. If the cut of contemporary discourse was restraining, then Oliphant deliberately pictured herself as a seamstress, letting out a hem or seam here and there to expand the idea of artist into a multiplicity of different associations: mother; bread-winner; skilled technician; passionate innovator; writer whose writing shapes her life; and yet woman who self-consciously makes her own story. Thus Oliphant directs us to the fact that the `I' of an author is inevitably mediated by a specific socially-referentialform of language--clothed in the latest fashions, so to speak. This self-consciousness about what it means to be an artist is the golden thread that runs through Kirsteen, and defines Margaret Oliphant as an artist in her particular way.

Works cited

• Coghill, Mrs Harry, ed. Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. Oliphant. New York: Dodd, 1899
• "The Dressmaker’s Life" in The English Woman’s Journal.vol 1. (July 1, 1858).
• Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs. Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
• Neff, Wanda. Victorian Working Women: An Historical and Literary Study of Women in British Industries and Professions, 1832-1850. London: Cass, 1966.
• Oliphant, Margaret. Dress. London: MacMillan, 1878.
• --- Kirsteen. London: Dent, 1984.
• Peterson, Linda H. "Audience and the Autobiographer's Art: An Approach to the Autobiography of M.O.W. Oliphan." In Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, George P. Landow, ed. Athens: Ohio UP, 1979.
• Reimer, Gail Twersky. "Revisions of Labor in Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography" in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, eds. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
• Walkley, Christina. The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress. London: Peter Owen, 1981.
• Wilson, Carol Shiner. "Lost Needles, Tangled Threads: Stitchery, Domesticity, and the Artistic Enterprise in Barbauld, Edgeworth, Taylor, and Lamb." In Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, eds. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994.

 

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Kabi Hartman is a doctoral student in the English department at Temple. Although she's worked behind the scenes at Schuylkill, this is her debut as a Schuylkill author.

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