{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.035437430786267994, 'fraction_numerical': 0.016611295681063124, 'mean_word_length': 5.594890510948905, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Forms of Suffering in Charlotte Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family

As Kim Wheatley points out in a 1996 article, The Clever Woman ofthe Family (1865) is a difficult text for the feminist critic, at least for those of us who believe that the oppressed don't enjoy their oppression. CharlotteYonge (1 823-1901), loyal mouthpiece ofthe Oxford movement and devoted pupil ofJohn Keble, set out to write an explicitly antifeminist novel. The unconventional heroine, Rachel Curtis, is a zealous social reformer and women's rights advocate whose long process of re-education through humiliation is represented as the triumph ofher true nature; marriage and motherhood decisively cure her insubordination. In "Death and Domestication in The Clever Woman" Wheatley notes that although one reviewer protested the "excessiveness of Rachel's punishment" (898), no reviewer doubted that she needed to be cured (898-900). If one ofthe pleasures of a feminist hermeneutic involves discovering defiance and subversion in those classics ofwomen's literature one has been taught to see as decorously submissive (think of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's TheMadwoman in theAttic), then the failure offeminists to reclaim The Clever Woman is understandable. Moreover, although it is tempting to believe, asTerry Lovell phrases it, that "behind every submissive, feminine woman" there is "an angry, raging feminist struggling to come out" (70), such readings rarely do justice to the complexity ofnineteenth-century women's lives. Wheatley claims that Yonge's anti-feminism makes her "a tempting target for feminist recuperation" (895), but recent criticism has instead stressed Yonge's historical context: Barbara Dennis and June Sturrock demonstrate, respectively, the coherence ofYonge's support forTractarianism and her