Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of To-Day (1894)

Idealism and Realism: An International Affair

I have already laid out the relationship between different cultural interpretations of notions of realism in art.  What do you remember? What do you understand the position of the various players to be?

• France
• Britain
• USA
• Russia
• Canada

Following the literary school of “social realism”—established by French authors such as Blazac, Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, and Maupassant, and perpetuated in America by Duncan’s admitted mentors William Dean Howells and Henry James—Duncan expresses the emotional reality of the woman artist’s position best in her two novels A Daughter of Today (1894) and The Path of a Star (1898).  To the trials of the artist’s life —illustrated so powerfully in Zola’s The Masterpiece, for example—Duncan adds the trial’s of a woman’s life in a “man’s world.”  She illustrates well the complexities involved in attempting to mix the marginality of the avant garde artist with that of women within patriarchal Victorian society.
 
Duncan observed in 1886 that fiction can no longer centre around the traditional romantic heroine, who now:
 
“bears a translatable relation to the world.  …  The novel of to-day is a reflection of our present social state.  The women who enter into its composition are but intelligent agents in this reflection and show themselves as they are, not as a false ideal would have them.” (“Heroine”)
 
In this article, as in A Daughter of Today and The Path of a Star, Duncan lays “The Heroine of Old-Time” to rest without a qualm: stereotypic romanticism has no place in the realist—or even the good—novel.  But that is not to say that romance has no place, or that heroines are obsolete.  What Duncan’s realism does not permit her to expound is the unequivocally “happy” romantic ending.  Her literary corpus includes happy endings, for some characters, in some situations; but, being an “intelligent agent” in the “reflection of our present social status,” Duncan could not manipulate her texts to provide a happy ending when the reality she depicted did not permit of such felicitudes.  She strives—successfully, I believe—to show women “as they are, not as a false [romantic] ideal would have them.”
 
While marriage is outside the scope of Bohemian existence, for the artist-heroine, death remains an option. I contend that although the majority of fictional women artists are inextricably bound by patriarchal literary convention, Duncan offers a third fictional location of female autonomy in her portrayal of Hilda Howe in The Path of a Star.  Where Pearl Watson marries, and Elfrida Bell commits suicide, Hilda ultimately remains faithful to her art, although tempted by the lure of love and marriage.  Her success lies in her ability to express herself as an artist and a woman: in effect, to construct her own reality through articulation and action.  In A Daughter of Today, Elfrida cannot articulate her own sexuality—to Jack Kendal, whom she loves, she remains “an incarnate idea” rather than a woman (Daughter 271). Her lofty artistic ideals silence her more fundamental human needs; her inability to establish a dialogue between the psychological factions within her results in her final self-destruction.  Hilda, faced with a similar conflict between a passion for art and a passionate love, gives voice to the dilemma she faces and, confronting it, overcomes it.  Through her ability to objectify her position, she is able to clearly assess her situation and actively control her response to it.
 
While Duncan was unquestionably indebted to realism for her stylistic technique, her literary philosophy incorporated a greater degree of idealism than pure realism allows.  Misao Dean argues that this blending of idealism and realism is a particularly Canadian literary trait (influenced perhaps by Turgenev and the “Russian realists”) (Dean 42-45), and presents Duncan not only as an inheritor of European and American literary ideologies, but as “one of the first significant advocates of literary realism in Canada” (Dean 41).
 
As Charles G. D. Roberts, a fellow Canadian expat in London commented,
 
“If we had never been forced to make acquaintance with any other realism than this of the Russian Masters, there would have been no question at issue between realism and idealism. It would have been a patent truth that the two are inseparable in all work of the highest, and that the sanity, the symmetry, the applicability, of ideal creations are secured by the dependence upon a selective realism.” (qtd. in Dean 44)
 
This was Duncan’s creed, more than that of the French or the American realists.
Although Duncan agreed with the need for faithful representation of reality, she did not accede to the French and American realists’ “everlasting glorification of the commonplace” (“Algonquin” 82). Where Henry James and William Dean Howells tended towards the French materialist realism, Duncan “puts equal weight on the real and the ideal.”  Like the Russian realists, she “support[s] the principle of the ideal as  a selective tool in realistic fiction” (Dean 48). In a biographical essay in which she communicated her voyage on a barge, containing “some half-dozen bags of an agricultural product, the lumpy and uninteresting nature of which will never be made public through the medium of [her] pen,” Duncan reveals how representation of the mundane, while part of the reality of life, “must not exist in and for itself but must point to the larger ideal” (Dean 48).
 
So the creed of the French Naturalists, then, “Art for art’s sake,” is not something to which Duncan ascribed.  In employing “the idealist view of the world” as the “principle for selecting artistic detail” (Dean 46), Duncan as an artist assumes a greater responsibility than either the American or French realists assume.  But Duncan was not averse to accepting such accountability for her representations, in fact, as a woman as well as an artist, she considered personal responsibility to be the inevitable result of maturity as a human being.
In an article in 1886, Duncan demands of women that if they want to be taken seriously and given the vote, they must accept that they have a responsibility to educate themselves politically:
 
“If women desire the homage of intellect as well as of heart, if they resent eternal flippancy, and prefer to take life … au serieux, there is only one thing for it, and there is nothing startlingly original about that—they must deepen and broaden their sympathies, brighten their intellectual activities, energize themselves by occasionally bathing in the great tide of human affairs that flows resistlessly past every door-step of every home.  It is useless to protest against an ignominy, and neglect to remove the cause.”  (“How To Talk” 9)
 
Duncan felt literature should be faithful to both art and nature, melding idealism and realism (Dean 51). Idealism is, after all, part of human nature; it is not “unrealistic,” Duncan’s journalism and novels assert, for humanity to aspire to exalted moral and aesthetic ideals.
But this is not what the character of Elfrida suggests… as Misao Dean points out, the crucial moment in the text is when Elfrida and Janet are discussing the process of artist creation and artistic integrity (114).
 
In considering A Daughter of Today, Cloutier agrees with Henry James that “the artist hero [or heroine] can only be the failed artist whose misfortunes lend themselves to dramatization more readily than the largely intractable process of outstanding artistic creation” (32).
 
Is Elfrida a “failed artist,” martyr to artistic idealism, an egoist who demands the “last word on existence” (Cloutier 35)? Or does she, in death, escape the “reabsorption” into the dominant social structure that Cloutier agrees is the inevitable result of artistic success?
Gerald Jay Goldberg notes, in his PhD dissertation on “The Artist Hero in British Fiction, that “[r]esidence in bohemia, in spite of its extravagance, … is often but a phase in the artist’s development, and in the instances in which success is achieved, the Bohemian is reabsorbed into the social structure” (qtd. in Cloutier 31).
 
But as is suggested by John Kendall and Janet, the reabsorption of the bohemian artist signifies to Duncan not a “phase in the artist’s development” so much as the failure to maintain artistic ideals in the face of the philistine pressures of society.
 
The relationship between the true artist and the “artist bourgeois … who must remain outside” Bohemia (DT 268) is addressed in both A Daughter of Today and The Path of a Star. In 1898, Florence Donaldson considered A Daughter of Today to be Duncan’s “first attempt at serious fiction.”  Other than that, she was not impressed, considering it (as Janet would have done):
 
“a study of a temperament warped by the intensity of feminine egotism, and placed among what must be considered mainly as the unattractive Bohemian surroundings of struggling artistic and journalistic aspirants to fame.” (67)
 
Tausky later echoes this opinion, and considers Elfrida a “misguided feminist” (99) (as did Lawrence Cardiff: “fin de siècle” [DT 118]).  These reviews, while indicative of critical response to A Daughter of Today, miss the point.  What Duncan was positing in this novel was not the glory of a life such as Elfrida’s, but the despair of unrealised aspirations, and the idealistic conflicts between realism and more common—and mundane—artistic production.  Elfrida and Janet’s discussion of literary realism is central to an understanding of the text, and illuminates Duncan’s own position unequivocally, especially in light of Elfrida’s ultimate demise.
 
Elfrida, described as a “female Zola” (DT 101), champions realism à la francaise, that is, the depiction of the world in all its sordid reality for truth’s sake.  She criticises Howells for being “too much afraid of soiling his hands … his bêtes humaines are always conventionalized, and generally come out at the end wearing the halo of the redeemed” (DT 114).  Janet, on the other hand, defends Howells for dealing “honestly with his material” (DT 114).  Howells himself considered the American reality to be unsuited to sordid representation, writing in a critical essay that
 
“We invite our novelists, …to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American.” (qtd. in Dean, Introduction viii )
 
Janet echoes this position in her argument against Elfrida, asserting, “I don’t think the English or American people are exactly calculated to offer the sort of material you mean. …pure unrelieved filth can’t be transmuted into literature…We’re a conventional people, I assure you, Miss Bell,.  And so are you, how could you change your spots in a hundred years?”  (DT 114-5)
 
When Janet’s novel achieves popular success, Elfrida accuses her of catering to public taste.  In Elfrida’s estimation, Janet was “not artistic enough to fail” (DT 213), and her novel belonged “to the class of academic studies from the nude which were always draped, just a little” (DT 213).  Duncan, in her journalism, did not condone the draping of reality, but nonetheless posited selective representation over Elfrida’s demand for “art as it expresses itself in the nudity of things” (DT 242).  Although Janet survives artistically, through her denunciation of realism for a more common humanity, she in no way illustrates the conjunction of idealism and reality which Duncan posits, and later illustrates through Hilda in The Path of a Star.
 
In some senses, we are left admiring the purity of Elfrida’s devotion while we cannot help but condemn it as untenably naïve.  Elfrida is thwarted by society’s inability to accept her view that the “ugly and dirty” can also be powerfully beautiful.  (Despite some critics’ opinion that her suicide is motivated by her unsuccessful relationship with Kendal, the perceived failure of her novel is the emotional catalyst in her final self-assertion.)  Cloutier questions Duncan’s manipulation of Elfrida, asking whether the novel itself is “merely derivative” of other “failed artist” tales, a thoughtless subscription to what he considers “the martyrology of the mediocre” (36). He fails to see that Duncan’s work does proclaim strongly both artistic idealism and the maxim that “art, however great, must be subordinate to the greater art of living.”  A Daughter of Today illuminates Duncan’s belief that neither Janet nor Elfrida ultimately succeeds.
 
In 1980, Lorraine McMullen suggested that one distinctive characteristic of the female literary voice is women’s representation of women not as dichotomous “other” (the madonna and the whore) but as dichotomous representations of self (in a Freudian sense), through which women “authors give voice to their divided selves, caught between acceptance of the conventions of the patriarchal society in which they have been brought up, and rebellion against it” (54). McMullen’s approach facilitates an understanding of Janet, Elfrida, and Hilda, for they are representations of the woman artist (as Duncan saw herself) which span the spectrum from Janet’s capitulation to conservatism to Elfrida’s fatal adherence to artistic realism.  In the middle, Hilda blends artistic devotion with a recognition of the powerful drive of physical and emotional love.  Hilda neither capitulates nor succumbs.  Although she becomes romantically entwined with the celibate cleric, Stephen Arnold, she responds to her love as she does her art, articulating and controlling it, raising it above the mundane through her very idealism.  Here Duncan has created her strongest female rôle model; in some senses, Hilda embodies the possibilities of Duncan’s own desire to forge a link between realism and idealism, society and the artist.
 
The debate between society and the artist is central to Alicia and Hilda’s relationship, just as the debate between realism and idealism is central to Elfrida and Janet’s; in both cases, the female relationship is background against which the woman artist’s perception of her art and her idealism is expressed.
 
The most emotionally charged exchange in A Daughter of Today is Elfrida’s congratulation of Janet on the success of her novel.  The unpleasant scene is pregnant with silences of doubt and suspicion, of words unuttered and meanings circumnavigated.  It is highly effective descriptive dialogue, illustrating the chasm that yawns between Elfrida and Janet, between sordid realism and the “artist bourgeois.”
 
To return again to the fate of the female artist, or even the successful artist in a capitalist world, note that both Kendall and Janet ultimately suffer for their artistic choices, or fate, or rather, for refusing, as Elfrida does, to be faithful to art over all personal and emotional considerations:
“Mr. and Mrs. John Kendal’s delightful circle of friends say that they live an idyllic life in Devonshire.  But even in the height of some domestic joy a silence sometimes falls between them still.  Then, I fancy, he is thinking of an art that has slipped away from him, and she of a loyalty she could not hold.”  (DT 281)
 
Tausky considers that “A Daughter of Today is therefore a novel in which neither the bohemian artist nor the bourgeois artist really wins in the end” (100), which is close to the truth.  Closer, I believe, is the knowledge Duncan was trying to impart that true artistic dedication can not coincide with familial devotion; those people who deny themselves romantic and familial commitments have more emotional energy to devote to their chosen art.  The true artist, it appears, is by necessity a selfish creature. Ultimately, while in The Path of a Star Duncan was able to create a strong woman devoted to her art, and able within her own psyche to reconcile her artistry with her passionate love, Duncan herself was unable to imagine a tenable existence incorporating both: Hilda is saved from her artistic sacrifice by her lover’s timely, if authorial manipulative, death.  In A Daughter of To-day, Elfrida’ suicide is more narratively sound, but equally inhibiting of the portrayal of artistic ability to coexist with familial devotion.
 
But this was the fin de siècle; Duncan must, in her fiction, “place truth to human nature above fidelity to private conviction” (Bissell vii); while her feminism proclaimed that such an existence as Hilda’s should be possible, social reality was still such as to deny the artistic possibilities latent in many women.
 
One of Duncan’s strongest opinions concerning women’s rights was her belief in women’s right to choose their own lifestyles.  In her journalism as in her novels, she demands that women do not sacrifice their own integrity and autonomy on the altar of patriarchal social ideals.  But if her fiction suggests that such an unbending stance can be difficult to maintain—even to the point of demanding Elfrida’s ultimate sacrifice of self to ideal—it also suggests that there is a middle ground on which the woman artist can remain autonomous and strong.  Where Elfrida Bell does not offer “inspiration for future feminists,”—to return to my beginning—dying through her perceived inability to articulate herself, Hilda Howe is strong and vocal, carefully constructing her position as a free woman on the margin of Victorian society.  Hilda, in a book you all must really read, ultimately follows the path of a star, becoming a vision of female independence based upon artistic expression: an inspiration for the feminist’s of Duncan’s future.
 

Works Consulted

Bissell, Claude. Introduction. The Imperialist. By Sara Jeannette Duncan. 1904. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986. v-ix.  Print.

Cloutier, Pierre. “The First Exile.” Canadian Literature 58 (1973): 30-37. Print.

Dean, Misao. A Different Point of View: Sara Jeannette Duncan. Montreal, QB: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1991. Print.

Dean, Misao. Introduction. A Daughter of Today. By Sara Jeannette Duncan. 1894. Ottawa, ON: Tecumseh, 1988. vii-xxvi.  Print.

Donaldson, Florence. “Mrs. Everard Cotes (Sara Jeannette Duncan).” Bookman 14 June 1898. 65-67. Print.

Duncan Sara Jeannette. A Daughter of Today. 1894. Ottawa, ON: Tecumseh, 1988. Print.

—. “[An Algonquin Maiden: Romance and Realism].” 1887. Canadian Novelists and the Novel. Ed. Douglas Daymond, and Leslie Monkman. Ottawa, ON: Borealis, 1981. 80-86. Print.

—. “[The Heroine of Old-Time].” 1886. Canadian Novelists and the Novel. Ed. Douglas Raymond, and Leslie Monkman. Ottawa, ON: Borealis, 1981. 78-80. Print.

—. “How to Talk to a Man.”  Sara Jeannette Duncan: Selected Journalism.  Ed. Thomas Tausky.  Ottawa, ON: Tecumseh, 1978.  18-19.  Print.

McMullen, Lorraine. “The Divided Self.” Atlantis 5.2 (1980): 53-67. Print.

—.  An Introduction to the Æsthetic Movement in English Literature.  Ottawa, ON: Tecumseh, 1971.  Print.

Tausky, Thomas E. “Sara Jeannette Duncan: 22 December 1861-22 July 1922.” Dictionary of National Biography: Canadian Writers 1890-1920. Ed. W. H. New. Vol. 92. London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1990. 97-104. Print.

Tausky, Thomas E. Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire.  1^st ed. Port Credit, ON: Meany, 1980. Print.