ABSTRACT
Because George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) incorporates many issues discussed in 1860s and 1870s texts regarding the nature of domestic female musicians, I use it to pull together my previous arguments and also to open them out. So far, I have considered many factors regarding domestic music-making and the representation of musical women as angels and demons. In Trilby, these discourses are applied to a professional diva and include notions of gender, class and nationality that formed the basis of perceptions of music-making in Victorian Britain. This is particularly interesting because Trilby could be discussed in terms of the professional elements in the text (especially Jewishness, working-class characters, and Irishness or the "Celt") 1 , but it also partakes of domestic music-making, both in Trilby's repertoire and in how she is represented. It is these domestic aspects that I will primarily concentrate on. As I discussed in Chapter I, music practitioners in England were generally industrial or rural workers, women, or foreign professionals. The latter two are especially important in novels about domestic musicians. In this fiction, a woman's music-making might be idealized and labelled as "angelic," but it also had an element of danger attached to it since she might equally be represented as a seductive siren or she might endanger herself by taking lessons from a lustful, criminal music master. Yet female musicians were far from passive victims in British fiction: heroines like Rosa Budd resisted the threat of mesmeric Jasper, and Lady Audley enchanted through her singing and piano-playing. While sensation fiction represented the danger of powerful, musical women, George Eliot's novels make music itself the agency of power as it instigates physiological and psychological responses in Maggie Tulliver, is used 246for sexual selection in Middlemarch, and is a practical means of initiating individual and racial evolution in Daniel Deronda.
