Miss Marjoribanks is a novel published in 1866 by a writer named Margaret Oliphant. Most of her works were published under the idiosyncratic name, Mrs. Oliphant. That strong sense of self-identity is illustrated in her writing. Reading this novel is a reminder of—or an introduction to—how the narrative voices in the novels of the past used to adopt a personality all their own.
After a lengthy sentence outlining the basic overview of the circumstances of her heroine, Oliphant immediately demonstrates the significant downshifting of the role of the third-person narrator in novels. The narrator observes, "Words are sometimes very poor exponents of such an event: but it happens now and then, on the other hand, that a plain intimation expresses too much, and suggests emotion and suffering which, in reality, have but little, if any, existence.."
At some not clearly defined point in the literary history of the novel, it became fashionable to make the third-person narrator disappear into the background. They are even today still capable of offering insight into the psychology of characters and even possession of knowledge that the participants don't know. The example above, however, exemplifies the stark divergence between narrative voice of the past and narrative voice since the early decades of the 20th century.
The disappearance into almost invisibility of modern narrators rarely allows for descriptive prose that is not actually an expression of a character's unspoken thoughts. For this reason, a sentence like "Besides, as is not uncommon with women who are clever women, and aware of the fact, Miss Marjoribanks preferred the society of men, and rather liked to say so," would far more likely show up as dialogue in a modern novel. Of course, such a sentence is unlikely to show up at all in a modern novel because it is too clunkily coherent to work as dialogue.
This focus on the strength of the intrusion of the narrative voice is significant to an analysis of the novel due simply to the time in which it was written. Oliphant was a female novelist writing in the U.K. at the height of the ironically patriarchal Victorian Era. Oliphant is typically categorized as a writer of realist novels that stand in direct contrast to the popular sentimental novels characterizing the first half of the Victorian period. Realism in this sense does not mean the gritty, naturalism of the latter 1800s. It simply describes how Lucilla Marjoribanks is realistically portrayed as a young woman trying to gain agency in a stifling misogynistic milieu. What all this historical context means is that it is in the reading of Miss Marjoribanks that feminist subversion can be found, not in the action.
Lucilla Marjoribanks starts out having lost her mother as a teenager. This immediately stimulates her maternal urge to take care of her widowed father. As might well be expected, the first half or so of the novel is directed toward expectations placed upon Lucilla to get married. Somewhat remarkably, she rejects this idea outright until she has "gone off" around age thirty. "Gone off" being a metaphor for losing the good looks of her youth and expanding outward physically. The second half of the book takes her to that border of her timeline. And yet, surprisingly, it is not about her having made good on her promise to marry at last.
This secondary section of Miss Marjoribanks actually tells a story about her attempts to get one Mr. Ashburton elected as a member of Parliament. Despite the fact that a woman sits on the throne, Lucilla herself cannot even vote, let alone consider running for Parliament herself. At the same time, since this is a novel by a writer looking to remain successful, Lucilla cannot also become a rebel with a cause. The patriarchy remains firmly intact, and Lucilla contributes to its standing through her efforts to get Ashburton elected.
It is only through the narrative voice intruding into the story that feminism manages to remain intact among such dialogue as "`Oh, I don't pretend to know anything about politics,' said Lucilla. `I hear you gentlemen talk, but I never pretend to understand.'" Left without the context of the surrounding narrative voice, Lucilla Marjoribanks' story would hardly be worth reading. It is only with the full understanding of the character offered through the old-fashioned narrative voice that one gets the irony.
