ABSTRACT
The question of what was to become of middle-class women who did not marry was understood as an economic concern of the period, but Victorian novels also showed that such “redundant” women were also very much a domestic problem with potential or actual scandals of incest. Novels featuring unmarried adult daughters who bore the burden of caring for their family often portrayed a crossing of the line of morality when they turned into wives to their fathers and/or brothers. This situation appeared so regularly in fiction that they arguably form their own genre. To support this theory, Dotson identifies the incestual taboo in three novels: the reluctant “angel of comfort” Margaret Hale in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), Charles Dickens’ questionably related housekeeper/wife Esther Summerson in Bleak House (1853), and Ellen Wood’s bed-hopping Jane Oakburn in Lord Oakburn’s Daughters (1864). These daughters were pushed by a csuriously vague set of cultural expectations for adult daughters to take on what were often inappropriate responsibilities from sharing confidences, disciplining other family members, and providing the labor and love of a wife or mother. Without a mother to support or set needed boundaries on her care, nothing was ever physically and emotionally enough, leading to a deeply troubling blurring of the lines that separated daughter from wife.
