"The Bacilli at Flor and Fingleman's"

Juliet Appleton, upon accepting her post as a typewriter (female), comments on the copious amounts of dust that saturate every nook and cranny of the small office at Flor and Fingleman's.  "The bacilli," she says, "flew about me visibly whenever I lifted a book; they settled in myriads on my poor black dress; they invaded my hair and required to be daily dislodged by violent hostilities."

Appleton leaves, and after negotiating "complicated topography," she achieves her temporary end at the anarchist colony in Sussex.  That colony, in contrast with the London offices, could be best figured by the "bald, bare dining hall" that stood at its center.  Here, the influence of women is nearly totally absent.  Families exist, but the women and children blindly follow the doxy of the men.

Somehow, simplicity has become foreign (hence the anarchist "furriers,") and complexity has become familiar.

With Austen, we read the austerity of the countryside as a feature that symbolizes and culminates the 19th century nationalist spirit of England.  With Allen's novella, however, this austerity typifies the opposite: now, national character is linked with the complex and the accumulated, and the austerities of anarchy and futurism--male dominated phenomena--are marginalized.  To borrow a trope from Moretti: In its (moral) emptiness, the simple countryside is inverted as the site of complication in the unfolding plot.

The mechanics of inversion shine yet brighter in the case of narrative voice.  A man, Grant Allen, has assumed the first person limited omniscient point of view of a woman, albeit a somewhat independent (masculine) one.  Where Austen took a neutered and highly distant position, Allen works the opposite angle by getting moving the narrative voice so close to his character that it moves across the gendered divide.  This intense closeness is accentuated time and time again in the novella when Appleton describes moments of "penetration": we feel the dust in her nostrils, the stares upon her figure, the dirt on her dress, the cuts in her hands.

Finally, to tie all this together, the inversion of narrative voice and the inversion of national character simultaneously signify the new-mystical experience of urban modernity.   In London, "the phantom-crowded Strand, [the] streaming street full of those hurrying, scurrying men with black bags, bound as ever for the Unknown," offers a brilliant after-image of the "vagueness, the elusiveness, the melting, hazy charm of feminine craft" found in The Odyssey.  For wherein the country, peoples and structures lie far from one another, in London experience is condensed.  And given the new socialized structure, whereby Woman is to compete with the men, the city re-emerges as the site of nationalism.  With its condensation of personalities, ideas, and genders, like bacilli heaped upon old books, London can replace the countryside as the space of mystery and possibility.  As Allen looks through new eyes with Juliet Appleton, so we are to understand the urban space as the best place to look mystically through the eyes of others.