The rhetoric of feminists, anti-feminists, misogynists and the proponents of the womanly woman coincided in its identification of woman with feeling. This equation of feeling and the feminine should hardly be surprising to readers of the novel, since throughout the nineteenth century (and, arguably, from its inception), the novel was preoccupied with women and feeling. Indeed it could be argued that the novel has always tended to represent woman as feeling. The fiction of the 1890s, whether written by men or by women, was both produced by and engaged with a complex and contradictory discourse on woman’s supposedly affective nature, a discourse which, by equating woman with feeling, assigned her either to the domain of the irrational, or to that of the supra-rational.

In the first case woman was represented as a pre-logical being, existing outside of rationality in a state of nature; she was like a child, and hence dependent and in need of nurturing and guidance. This was precisely the view that had been rejected by the earliest feminist campaigners. ³ When sexual feeling was included in this particular equation, woman became the embodiment of a danger which had to be controlled. (Both of these versions of feminine ‘affectability’ were central to the strategies of containment of the domestic ideology.)

On the other hand, when associated with the supra-rational, woman was represented as being above, rather than beyond, rationality. She was associated with the order of nature, but was held to transcend both nature and rationality by means of her spirituality and intuitive powers. This latter view is clearly an important component in the construction of both

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