Abstracts

Sarah Bilston
Oxford University

Coming of age through "coming out":
a female rite of passage in Victorian popular culture

"Coming out" is an expression often used for leaving school, and the regular hours and routine of school-room life, and many a girl when she reaches this stage of her existence asks herself the question, "How can I best employ my time and the talents which God has given me?" The Girl's Own Paper, 1881.

With the "hey presto" of "coming out," all changes . . . Atalanta, 1890.

My paper will evaluate representations of the transition to womanhood in mid to late Victorian popular culture. Specifically, I will argue that popular literature aimed at an adolescent female readership used a series of paradigms to represent and articulate girls' passage to adulthood in a period before the full theorization of adolescence. I will concentrate on one of the most suggestive of these paradigms; namely, the girl's experience of "coming out." It may seem odd to describe "coming out" as a paradigm, since this term literally denoted a debut into society, and was therefore an actual and specific experience for many middle- and upper-class girls. However, I shall argue that "coming out" increasingly formed a locus for a more general examination of girls' experiences of maturation. For example, my first opening quotation encourages a reading of the phrase which is both specific and symbolic: here, "coming out" portrays the experience of leaving school followed by the psychological problems incumbent in confronting the role of Victorian womanhood. The second quotation emphasises that the experience is exceptional: in this article, the writer describes "coming out" as a moment of metamorphosis, "a transformation scene on the stage." I will suggest in my paper that this accretion of meaning is suggestive; that texts use "coming out" as a figurative pattern to communicate a sense of girls' maturation as both a period of psychological development and as a peculiar hiatus, a profound, extraordinary transformation.

These accounts, from magazines aimed at middle- and upper-class girls, stand in place of a theory of adolescence and fulfil a similar role: they explain the process by which children develop into adults, and they help to explain the experience to the youthful reader. In the body of the paper I will investigate how two popular novels, centrally concerned with girls' experiences of "coming out," use the range of meanings encompassed in the paradigm in more detailed representations of the process of female maturation. Holme Lee's The Beautiful Miss Barrington (1871) recounts eighteen-year-old Felicia's experiences of a "First Season." Bertha Buxton's heroine, also eighteen, in Nell - On and Off the Stage (1879) is embarking upon a different kind of first season -- in the theatre. There is a marked exchange of terms between the two texts: Nell is explicitly described as a "debutante" who is "coming out at the Sphere," while Felicia's pre-Season experiences are "just a pretty overture before the curtain drew up, and the lights were turned full upon the stage . . ."

Yet the theatricality of these terms does not provoke a rejection of the girls' "coming out" into society as shallow and showy, as one might expect. In fact, both texts combine the pattern of a progress to knowledge with the unfolding drama of the girls' first season: in both, the heroine's "womanhood" is finally shaped by a process of interrogating her "role," negotiating family tensions and gaining a wider experience of society through her time on/in this "stage." "Coming out," then, is represented as a period of relative opportunity for the girl, between the "routine" of school-life and the duties of wife- and mother-hood. Shaping the notion of "coming out" into a chance for personal development, resistance and even performance, these popular texts explore behaviour at the "coming of age" which would not be mandated for female adolescents by the dominant culture until well into the twentieth century.