An Artist in her Way: Representations of the Woman Artist in Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen

Representations of the Woman Artist in Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen

Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) was a prolific writer. She published almost 100 novels as well as biographies, art criticism, travel writing, historical sketches, and over two hundred articlesfor periodicals like Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine andThe Cornhill Magazine, yet her ambivalence about representing herself as a serious artist in her Autobiography provides Oliphant aficionados with grist for speculation and conjecture: did Oliphant even think of herself as an artist? While I will answer this question with are sounding yes, still there is enough equivocation in the Autobiography to give scholars room to play. And although Oliphant herself once wrote that "scholarship is a sort of poison tree, and kills everything" (279), the recent scholarship on Oliphant's Autobiography has enlivened rather than killed debate by calling attention to Oliphant's struggle with self-representation. When it came to writing about her particular experience as both mother and writer, Oliphant found the contemporary discourse, with its rigidly discrete ideologies of motherhood and authorhood, stifling. Thus the Autobiography can be read as Oliphant's poignant effort to extend the meaning of the term `artist' to one flexible enough to include a woman who wrote not only because it came as naturally to her as "talking or breathing" (4), but also because her children needed to eat.

In this paper I will argue that Oliphant's preoccupation with what it means to be or call herself an artist can be mapped in her novel, Kirsteen, which was written in 1890--roughly the same period as the Autobiography--and chronicles the life of a Scottish woman in the early part of the 19th century. Although Kirsteen Douglas is a dressmaker rather than a writer, Oliphant takes care early in the novel to encourage the idea (through theScottish dressmaker Miss Macnab) "that a dressmaker `is an artist in her way' and that ... dressmaking is `just like a' the airts'"(Jay 260). I will thus read dressmaking as a trope for writing, Kirsteen as an artist figure, and the novel as Oliphant's portrait of the artist as a young dressmaker. Reading dressmaking as a metaphor for writing, I hope to demonstrate that this late novel presents a self-consciousness and humor about artistic production the analysis of which will clarify what Oliphant means by the term`artist.'

First to contextualize Oliphant's portrayal of Kirsteen. Here I will argue that not merely personal but also larger cultural associations with needlework made dressmaking Oliphant's inevitable choice of metaphor for writing.