Alma Whittaker’s milkshake does not bring all the boys to the yard. Gawky, intelligent, and unapologetic, she’s a Victorian heroine who speaks five languages fluently and values a magnificent microscope far higher than any gown. She’s the strange and powerful heroine at the heart of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new historical novel, The Signature of All Things.
This is Gilbert’s first novel after the success of her travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love—and though in many ways the two books couldn’t be more different, in others the memoir and the novel mirror each other in their portrayal of the ways women seek empowerment and fulfillment in their lives. Alma’s life strongly echoes Gilbert’s: both revolve around their work, and romantic love doesn’t enter the picture until the final third of both stories. The idea of women whose lives revolve around a career isn’t surprising now, but it was inconceivable in the Victorian era. A woman’s success was measured by love — whether she was able to attract a husband. In Alma Whittaker’s story, the Victorian obsession with love and marriage takes a back seat to the life of a self-fulfilled and self-determining single female scientist.
Alma is born at the dawn of the 19th century to a self-made millionaire and highly educated mother. As soon as she can talk, she is submerged in an intense classical education, the kind normally reserved for the sons of wealthy gentlemen. Alma comes of age in a world of endless intellectual delight. She studies calculus and spherical geometry for fun. She chows through languages and books, systemically reading everything she can get her hands on. And when evening comes, she’s urged on by her father to argue with the greatest scientific and artistic minds that gather around his dining table.
It’s important to remember that this was Jane Austen’s time, when books were expensive and owning a cupboard of them was a signal of wealth and privilege. Only the Mr. Darcys of world would be expected to own a library of the sort Alma enjoyed. Women’s education was minimal at best (as Lizzie Bennet could attest), emphasizing sewing skills and the ability to attract a suitable mate.
Alma Whittaker’s opportunities are rare for women today, and were unheard of in the 1800s. Freed from household cares, she enjoys a lifestyle usually reserved for wealthy men. She creates a room of her own in an unused carriage chamber, sets up her microscope and herbariums, and begins to churn out article after article on obscure plants. Her homely looks are disregarded, and no pressure is put upon her to marry. Instead, she is encouraged to challenge others, assert herself and use her mind to its fullest capacity. Freed from the fears of poverty, abuse or loss of sexual viability, she decides that botany is her life’s work, and proceeds to study mosses for the next forty years.
“Praise be the labors that lie before me,” she said. “Let us begin.”
That intellectual pursuit isn’t the only thing that sets Alma apart from the womanly narratives of the era; the same library that gave her access to so much learning is also the key to her sexual awakening. At age sixteen, she comes across an innocuously titled book that contains the accounts of “a gentleman’s erotic adventures.” The same ravenous mind that grappled with language, biology, math, and literature is turned to sensual physical pleasures. Refreshingly, the intense sexual curiosity that’s awakened in Alma doesn’t derail her research or detract from the brilliance of her thought. In the tradition of great intellectual men, her sexual energy becomes fuel for a life of intense botanical study.
When she does chose a husband, she’s in her later forties – he’s a younger man, an artist and mystic, who brings to mind a low-rent William Blake. The conflicts in their marriage set off a series of catastrophes that culminate in a soul searching crisis. As in Eat, Pray, Love, she embarks on a journey to an exotic locale to find a resolution. However, in true Alma fashion, the “search for answers and find romance” pattern is inverted; the quest to unlock her troubled marriage results in an epiphany that synthesizes her work as a botanist.
That realization – triggered by a near-drowning in the Pacific ocean – gives birth to a theory on the fight for life in the natural world.
“…the struggle for existence—when played out over vast periods of time—did not merely define life on earth; it had created life on earth. It had certainly created the staggering variety of life on earth. Struggle was the mechanism.”
Alma claims her own existence, fighting till she is free and rising up out of the water. “She came striding out of the sea as if she was born from it” and spends the following months crafting her magnum opus, “The Theory of Competitive Alteration.”
Alma stands out as a new kind of heroine amongst her 19th century sisterhood. She is not Lizzie Bennett, setting a cold rich man’s heart ablaze though her quick wit and sexual attractiveness. Nor is she “the angel in the house” — a wife and mother who gives her life to raising children and aiding a husband. And last of all, she is no Edna Pontellier, a wife who awakens to her own sexual and artistic desires only to commit suicide in Chopin’s Victorian novel, The Awakening. Stories of women that center on vocation rather than procreation are rare, and stories of women’s sexuality fueling life rather than destroying it are even rarer.
Gilbert’s novel offers one answer to a profound question: what would women do if they, too, were freed from fear of poverty and abuse? What would they become if freed from the demands of attracting a man that so often determine a woman’s fate?
No book is perfect, of course, and The Signature of All Things isn’t without its flaws. While it’s set in the Regency and Victorian eras, historical context plays second fiddle to Alma’s relatively insular life. Readers will hear more about her mosses than the politics of the 1800s, and the story’s romance occasionally feels like a contrived way to pull her out of that isolation. Alma is a quirky and compelling character, though, and her charms are enough to keep the pages turning. In the constellation of Victorian heroines, Alma Whittaker is a bright new star.
Catherine Eaton is a contributor to The Stake. Catherine is a writer living in a western suburb of Chicago. She blogs over at sparrowpost.com and enjoys foraging around the neighborhood in her spare time.
