Disaffected men are seen in a group as animals ‘with the faces of boundless stupidity, faces degraded into something less than human’. They replace articulate speech with ‘a good wild-beast roar’ and long for ‘a taste of bloodshed’.7 And in The Unclassed (1884) an individual example of working-class sub-humanity is described by the narrator. ‘Slimy’ is said to be

something an anthropologist might perhaps have had the courage to describe as a human being; to all appearances it represented some loathsome monstrosity all the more fearful from its resemblance to a man. A very tall creature, with bent shoulders and a head seemingly growing straight out of its chest; thick grizzled hair hiding almost every vestige of feature with the exception of one dreadful red eye, its fellow being dead and sightless.8

To an extent, The Odd Women subscribes to the discourse which constructs the working classes as lower, inferior, a different species, but unlike Gissing’s earlier novels it captures tellingly the ambivalence of contemporary society towards social class in a period of transition. It goes along with a paradoxical sympathy for the privations of the poor already described. It is also much modified by this later narrative. In spite of the sympathy, the idea of different categories of human beings persists. This is evidenced by Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn’s discussion with Mrs Smallbrook when she argues for a second chance for a ‘fallen’ girl. Urging ‘the solidarity of women’, she adds ‘Surely you don’t limit your humanity, Miss Barfoot, by the artificial divisions of society?’ Mary replies ‘good humouredly’

I think these divisions are anything but artificial … In the uneducated classes I have no interest whatever … I choose my sphere, that’s all. Let those work for the lower classes (I must call them lower, for they are, in every sense), let those work for them who have a call to do so. I have none. I must keep to my own class. (p. 62)

Rhoda Nunn agrees that separate spheres are needed for what she and Mary now both refer to as ‘the uneducated classes’. ‘Uneducated’ appears to be merely a euphemism for ‘lower’ or inferior. Both the women who run the training school operate with a notion of class dependent on the intangible criteria that Marshall formulates. These allow of the corollary that one middle-class person can identify another of the same species so that the Madden sisters are so recognized even though one is an alcoholic and the other an overworked shop assistant. The Madden sisters claim never to have worked for ‘really nice people’. The narrator says this phrase is ‘anything but meaningless’ and glosses it in a way that endorses the women’s attitude: ‘They had lived with more or less well-to-do families in the lower middle class, people who could not have inherited refinement, and had not acquired any, neither proletarians nor gentlefolk, consumed with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of democracy’ (p. 20). In addition, Mrs Smallbrook with her preference for ‘the solidarity of women’ is described as ‘a bore’ because of her ‘ceaseless philanthropy’. Presumably it should have ceased at a point which allowed its application to those who were not ‘really nice’ people.

At the same time there is a suggestion with the male figures in the narrative that middle-class identity—‘gentlemanliness’—is an observable fact. So from an unreflecting point of view Widdowson and Barfoot are similar. Both can afford to live in comfortable idleness. Widdowson even lives in a more expensive though discreet style. But Monica (distinguished by Rhoda as middle class as though by scent) has doubts about his class status, despite his gentlemanly clothes. Barfoot’s refinement appears by contrast to be inbuilt, not into his dress but into his physique. He has ‘a tall, muscular frame’, ‘a head of striking outline’, small ears ‘of the ideal contour’, and a hand which is ‘a fine example of blended strength and elegance’ (pp. 88, 89). The difference between the two men, like that between lifestyles of poor and rich, is suggestive.