Handbook of the English Novel, 1830-1900 [1 ed.] 3110376415, 9783110376418, 9783110376715

Table of contents :
Editors’ Preface
Contents
0. Metamorphoses in English Culture and the Novel, 1830–1900: An Introduction
Part I: Systematic Questions
1. Science and the Victorian Novel
2. Remediating Nineteenth-Century Narrative
3. God on the Wane? The Victorian Novel and Religion
4. Genres and Poetology: The Novel and the Way towards Aesthetic Self-Consciousness
5. The Art of Novel Writing: Victorian Theories
6. Victorian Gender Relations and the Novel
7. Empire – Economy – Materiality
Part II: Close Readings
8. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)
9. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845)
10. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
11. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
12. Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (1847)
13. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–1848)
14. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)
15. Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem (1851)
16. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
17. Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne (1858)
18. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
19. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
20. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)
21. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)
22. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–1872; 1874)
23. George Meredith, The Egoist (1879)
24. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885)
25. Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
26. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
27. Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (1893)
28. George Moore, Esther Waters (1894)
29. Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus (1894)
30. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
31. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
32. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
33. Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897)
34. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
35. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1900–1901)
36. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Index of Subjects
Index of Names
List of Contributors

Citation preview

Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900

Handbooks of English and American Studies

Edited by Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner, Oliver Scheiding

Volume 9

Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900 Edited by Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger

ISBN 978-3-11-037641-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-037671-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039421-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930398 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Editors’ Preface This De Gruyter handbook series has been designed to offer students and researchers a compact means of orientation in their study of Anglophone literary texts. Each volume – involving a particular historical or theoretical focus – introduces readers to current concepts and methodologies, as well as academic debates by combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring. It is this bridging between abstract survey and concrete analysis which is the central aim and defining feature of this series, bringing together general literary history and concrete interpretation, theory and text. At a time when students of English and American literary studies have to deal with an overwhelming amount of highly specialized research literature, as well as cope with the demands of the new BA and MA programs, such a handbook series is indispensable. Nevertheless, this series is not exclusively targeted to the needs of BA and MA students, but also caters to the requirements of scholars who wish to keep up with the current state of various fields within their discipline. Individual volumes in the De Gruyter Handbook series will typically provide: – knowledge of relevant literary periods, genres, and historical developments; – knowledge of representative authors and works of those periods; – knowledge of cultural and historical contexts; – knowledge about the adaptation of literary texts through other media; – knowledge of relevant literary and cultural theories; – examples of how historical and theoretical information weaves fruitfully into interpretations of literary texts. Internationally renowned colleagues have agreed to collaborate on this series and take on the editorship of individual volumes. Thanks to the expertise of the volume editors responsible for the concept and structure of their volumes, as well as for the selection of suitable authors, HEAS not only summarizes the current state of knowledge in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, but also offers new insights and recent research results on the most current topics, thus launching new academic debates. We would like to thank all colleagues collaborating in this project as well as Dr. Ulrike Krauss at De Gruyter without whose unflagging support this series would not have taken off. Martin Middeke Gabriele Rippl Hubert Zapf May 2020

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-202

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Editors’ Preface

Already published VOL 1 VOL 2 VOL 3 VOL 4 VOL 5 VOL 6 VOL 7 VOL 10

Gabriele Rippl (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality Hubert Zapf (ed.): Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology Julia Straub (ed.): Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies Timo Müller (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Christoph Reinfandt (ed.): Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Ralf Haekel (ed.): Handbook of British Romanticism Christine Gerhardt (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century Ingo Berensmeyer (ed.): Handbook of English Renaissance Literature

Forthcoming volumes Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl (eds.): Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures Barbara Schaff (ed.): Handbook of British Travel Writing Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter (eds.): Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War Sebastian Domsch, Dan Hassler-Forest and Dirk Vanderbeke (eds.): Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives Erik Redling and Oliver Scheiding (eds.): Handbook of the American Short Story Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr and Jan Stievermann (eds.): Handbook of American Romanticism Sabine Sielke (ed.): Handbook of American Poetry Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns (eds.): Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century

Contents Editors’ Preface

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Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger 0 Metamorphoses in English Culture and the Novel, 1830–1900: An Introduction 1

Part I: Systematic Questions Phillip Mallett 1 Science and the Victorian Novel

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Dianne F. Sadoff 2 Remediating Nineteenth-Century Narrative

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Miriam Elizabeth Burstein 3 God on the Wane? The Victorian Novel and Religion

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Saverio Tomaiuolo 4 Genres and Poetology: The Novel and the Way towards Aesthetic SelfConsciousness 87 Anna Maria Jones 5 The Art of Novel Writing: Victorian Theories Monika Pietrzak-Franger 6 Victorian Gender Relations and the Novel Nora Pleßke 7 Empire – Economy – Materiality

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Part II: Close Readings Natalie Roxburgh and Felix Sprang 8 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

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Contents

Nils Clausson 9 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) Adina Sorian 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

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Simon Marsden 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) Joanna Rostek 12 Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (1847)

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Linda M. Shires 13 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–1848) Ellen Grünkemeier 14 Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848) Timothy L. Carens 15 Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem (1851) Norbert Lennartz 16 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853) J. Hillis Miller 17 Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne (1858)

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Silvia Mergenthal 18 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) Carolyn Sigler 19 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Nadine Böhm-Schnitker 20 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)

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David Seed 21 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)

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Contents

Ute Berns 22 George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–1872; 1874) Rebecca N. Mitchell 23 George Meredith, The Egoist (1879)

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Julia Straub 24 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885)

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Doris Feldmann 25 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) 445 Susanne Bach 26 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Monika Pietrzak-Franger 27 Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (1893) Stephan Karschay 28 George Moore, Esther Waters (1894)

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Anne-Julia Zwierlein 29 Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus (1894) Martin Middeke 30 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895) Eckart Voigts 31 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) Susanne Scholz 32 Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Jakob Lothe 34 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

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Timo Müller 33 Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897)

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Contents

U. C. Knoepflmacher 35 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1900–1901)

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Ruth Parkin-Gounelas 36 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903) Index of Subjects Index of Names List of Contributors

645 659 675

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0 Metamorphoses in English Culture and the Novel, 1830–1900: An Introduction 1 Changes and Transformations Historical as well as aesthetic developments, contexts, and events ask for multiperspectival interpretations. Historical evolution and its conditions as well as its phenomena are results of processes that such fixed demarcations as neat year dates, as precise and well-reasoned as they may be, can never entirely capture. Analysing the historical and aesthetic contextual factors of an epoch, therefore, always implies both narration and choice. We have chosen not to pursue Eric Hobsbawm’s idea of the ‘long nineteenth century’, which covers the time from the French Revolution to the beginning of the First World War and centres round such major epistemic coordinates as ‘revolution’, ‘capital’, and ‘empire’, but, instead, dedicate this handbook to the history, poetology, and theory of the English novel and its major representatives in between 1830 and 1900. Along with the Edwardian age, we therefore systematically exclude the age and literature of British Romanticism, which separate volumes in the present series of handbooks are addressed to (see Reinfandt 2017 and Haekel 2017). We shall thus focus on the period which nearly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). The ‘Victorian’ period has often been termed the era of ‘unprecedented progresses’ and the ‘age of contradictions’. Both perspectives seem to simplify the transformations characteristic of the time whilst also offering contradictory value judgements: the former continues the era’s own self-glorification, the latter spotlights the incongruences that became visible at the time. Instead, it may be worth considering the period as an age of metamorphosis. These seventy years continued, tightened, aggravated, and made self-reflexive the Romantic idea of the modern human being who, for the first time in their history, found themselves, their surroundings, their living conditions, and their place in history not only changing, but also changeable. Every aspect of human life was to be transformed: daily routines, social structuring, international standing but also, if not especially, people’s self-perception vis-à-vis the (natural) world. While industrialisation, along with globalisation and urbanisation, brought changes to the perception of space and time, it also literally transformed the face of the earth and, retrospectively, marked the onset of the ‘Anthropocene’, or even the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2016). The advent of modernity, especially, the shifting conditions of industrial capitalism, had a great impact on individuals so that the actual bodies and psyches – and the traces they have left – became tangible indicators of Victorian metamorphoses. Metamorphosis implies two processes: that of shape-shifting and re-formation and that of maturation. Both signal certain continuity as well as drawing attention https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-001

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to the ripeness of time that is needed for a crystallisation of extant tendencies. In order to take these complex processes into consideration, it may be helpful to think of the period with the image of mirror anamorphosis in mind. If anamorphosis stands for all the unknown and unknowable forces that became manifest in the nineteenth century, then mirror cones, cylinders, and other devices that help the viewer ‘recognise’ the actual shapes in anamorphic images can indicate the instruments, media, types of evidence, technologies, etc. that make it possible to make these forces graspable to Victorian philosophers, scientists, and the public. It was with the help of novel technologies and practices that the yet unfathomed developments could be made visible and thus comprehensible. One of the major transformations of the Victorian era occurred in the make-up, (self-)perception, and political representation of social classes, and, with that, in the slow but inevitable transformation in the distribution of economic and cultural capital. In a more generic denotation of the term ‘Victorian Age’ or ‘Victorianism’, the First Reform Bill in 1832 meant the beginning of a new age predominated by the power of middle-class economic interests as it vitalised the British political landscape in the period of the Industrial Revolution, which started in the mid-eighteenth century and reached its climax in nineteenth-century England and then spread all over Europe, the United States, and Japan. The bill made the number of citizens entitled to vote rise from 400.000 to 650.000, many, though not all, of the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ (small boroughs with so few inhabitants that they were felt overrepresented in parliament) were disenfranchised, while the new big industrial cities of the north (i.e. Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds) were granted boroughs and the right to vote for representatives in parliament. With the benefit of hindsight, the bill constitutes the beginning of a modern democracy in Britain, although it falls far short of solving all the problems inherent in the Industrial Revolution and the change from an agricultural to an industrial society. Even though a first attempt at universal suffrage was made, ninety-five percent of the population (including all women) still had no right to vote. Thus, clearly, in the early phase of the Victorian age social grievances and inequality were blatant (↗ 7 Empire – Economy – Materiality). The industrial labourers had to face a dramatically increasing pauperisation, which lead to the Chartist uprisings of 1839 and 1849, the introduction of the ten-hours working-day in 1847, and – after more than ten Factory Acts – the restriction of child labour to the minimum age of twelve in 1901. In the course of the century, the First, Second, and Third Reform Bills (1867 and 1884) marked up steps towards emancipation, with the last one bestowing voting rights to all adult males. It seems remarkable that in the seven decades of the Victorian age the will to democratic reform pervaded all political parties, conservatives (‘Tories’) as well as liberals (‘Whigs’, later ‘Liberals’). The mid- or high-Victorian years can be seen as years of consolidation, prosperity, and flourishing agriculture, trade, and industry. If Victorian times ever had the connotation of an optimist look towards the future, such optimism would

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be grounded in this middle period. London saw the Great Exhibition in 1851, compulsory education was introduced in 1870, standard literacy was almost universal by 1900, women’s legal status and public perception had partly changed (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations), Britain was the world’s most powerful banker, had the biggest merchant fleet in the world, and, by the end of the century, the British empire had also taken hold of much of Africa reaching out from the Cape to Cairo (↗ 7 Empire – Economy – Materiality). London replaced Paris as the centre of European civilisation, and its population grew from two to six and a half million inhabitants within Victoria’s reign. The society changed from largely rural landownership to an urban economy based on trade and manufacturing (see Abrams and Greenblatt 2000). On the one hand, these developments entailed such ‘wonders’ of science, technology, and urbanisation as the interconnection of the globe with telegraph and railway and were further fuelled by ground-breaking discoveries/inventions which changed the path of economic and historical civilisation and progress (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel). By the end of the century, steam power had been put to full exploit, electricity had been introduced, the railways had changed the face of the British landscape, and steam-ships had conquered the ocean, and a second phase industrial revolution based on innovation in chemistry and electrical engineering started. All this further fostered the Victorian self-narrative of ‘progress’ as human life was doubtlessly changed for the better. Likewise, the professionalisation of medicine, a growing specialisation of hospitals, and an increasing importance of the laboratory in the practice of diagnosis also ameliorated the popular image and social function of doctors and allowed them to exert influence on new social policies (Hardy 2001, 14), whereby medicine became more closely entwined with the nation state. At the same time, with public health legislation (1860) and national public health reform (1872), the British state started moving towards a centralised organisation of public health (Hardy 2001, 29 and Pietrzak-Franger 2017). In this context, new inventions and procedures led to a better care provision (e.g. the repercussions of germ theory and the subsequent change in sanitary conditions along with the introduction of anaesthetics, antiseptic procedures, and sterilisation). On the other hand, however, the severe social and economic problems due to the unregulated nature of the development became obvious to everyone. The late Victorian phase from 1880 onwards changed the prevailing optimism into a more sceptical, pessimistic, and often almost despairing world-view which permeated the economy, politics, and especially the arts and literature. The Victorians could no longer hide the fact that the social, technological, and economic progress, firstly, could not do away with the widening gap between rich and poor and that, secondly, the human psyche was not able to bear up against this rapid change of society and experience. As early as 1852, Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) describes a feeling of

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Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride – I come to shed them at their side. (1950, 299)

When further on the poem speaks of a “gloom profound,” a “holy pain,” an “exploded dream” and “melancholy,” it gives expression to a thorough sense of spiritual crisis which permeated Victorian sensibilities and which bled out profusely in late Victorian times – a feeling of utter displacement, alienation, and indeed melancholy, an uneasy sense that something was irretrievably lost on the way of progress. This sense of crisis concerned Victorian psychology, economy, and foreign affairs, where Britain had to face major drawbacks. Germany, for instance, began to threaten Britain’s predominant position in trade and industry. The United States of America after the Civil War developed and spread railways from the east to the west coast, unlocking new ways of transportation of products from there, and hence put pressure on industrial markets; likewise, the United States and Canada were able to participate in the grain market worldwide, which meant lower prices and a new scale of productivity in agriculture which Britain could not even dream to match. Severe economic depressions followed in Britain in the 1870s, which led many people to emigrate. Britain also had to pay the high price of rebellions and ill-fated wars for being the world’s most powerful imperial power: The ‘Irish Question’, for instance, remained unresolved. England had shamefully neglected its imperial duties during the Great Famine (1845–1848) and hence further instigated the Irish desire for Home Rule, which lead to the Easter Rising in 1916, the Anglo-Irish War (1919–1921), and the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the partition of Ireland in 1923. Furthermore, the disasters of the Indian Mutiny (1857), the Jamaica Rebellion (1865), the massacre of Karthoum in the Sudan, and the Boer Wars (1880–1881, 1899–1902), bitter guerrilla wars in which the British sought to annex two colonies in the south of Africa, were very much unlikely to generate much confidence in the omnipotence of the ‘age of the first capitalist globalisation’ and the ‘prime time of the capital’ (see Osterhammel 2009, 44). Industrialisation, urbanisation, and globalisation had the undeniable effect of literally transforming the face of the earth. In fact, Britain was the first country to bring the rational use of resources to perfection (Osterhammel 2009, 102–116). Since the 1830s, the age of fossil fuels had begun, and man- as well as animal-power was successively replaced by organic energy (coal). Looms, spindles, pumps, ships, and railways were powered by steam-engines, which allowed for mass production and turned Victorian times into an age of speed, acceleration, interconnectedness, national integration, and imperial control. Indeed, industrialisation has been identified as marking the onset of the Anthropocene – characterised by an unprecedented impact of humans on Earth’s ecosystems. If we adhere to this timeline, the extent of the metamorphoses

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that the Victorian era has brought about becomes more than evident. The exploration of (colonial) natural resources and human (and animal) labour that began at the time lay ground for the practices of exploitation that we participate in today: from the appropriation of local resources and wilful ignorance of the effects of industrialisation on the environment (especially the way that factories and mills transformed local landscape, from the changing shapes of cities to air and water pollution) to the on-going exploitation of human labour. In view of this, it is not surprising that Victorians have also been credited with the ‘invention of pollution’ (cf. Thorsheim 2006) and with experiencing and recording the strain that modernity had brought on the human psyche and body.

2 Anxieties Indeed, these were, “anxious times” (Bonea et al. 2019). The spirit of the Victorian age can best be characterised as a period of transition, of unresolved tensions, frictions, anxieties, irreconcilable differences, and contradictions. These can be accounted for in every area of public and private life, and they also are reflected in Victorian literature and culture. Pessimism stands besides optimism, the harking back to the past alongside positive and negative views of the future, fatalism next to activism and social criticism, utter conservatism next to innovation and experiment, enthusiasm towards the imperial mission adjacent to criticism of it. Even with regard to ethics, the Victorian prescriptive insistence on middle-class values such as the sacrosanct family, rigid gender relations, moral earnestness and duty, involving a severe denial of treating sexuality openly, found their (hypocritical) counterparts and flipsides in a discrimination and even pathologising of a self-conscious female identity that would deviate from the gender norm. By the end of the century, the allegedly domesticated subconscious had fully struck back when a new, modernist late Victorian attitude towards life and sex had paved its way into the twentieth century while it was at the same time stigmatised as ‘decadence’ or, in the words of the notorious Austrian critic Max Nordau, as ‘degeneration’ even. The reasons for this contradictory attitude are manifold and can be traced further by looking at the major intellectual trends of the time. As regards Victorian ethics, concepts of Utilitarianism are widespread in nineteenth-century social philosophy, law, and economics. Though traces of utilitarian thought can be found in eighteenth-century philosophy (de Mandeville, Hobbes, Adam Smith, and others), its systematic conceptualisation hearkens back to the English philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and James Mill (1773–1836). It was further developed by the latter’s son, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1833), Bentham claims that the penultimate aim of utility is a purely instrumental one – the best possible maximising of benefit and pleasure for both individual and communal interests.

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In utilitarian ethics, actions are not measured by inner motives, but exclusively by their consequences. What is more, the outcome of such actions must be rationally calculable and empirically verifiable. This is to guarantee the maximum of happiness for all humanity. It cannot come as a surprise that the utilitarian principle of utility that any arbitrary action is approved of or dismissed (‘sanctioned’) by its tendency to increase the happiness of the party whose interests are at issue would seem cold-hearted and materialistic and that it could easily be considered a ‘carte blanche’ justifying ethical egotism. The entrepreneurs and factory-owners of the Industrial Revolution could readily use utilitarian principles to legitimate a laissezfaire capitalism relying on the power of unregulated markets for the ‘common’ good of secure economic growth and international competitiveness while utterly neglecting the individual conditions of work and health of their labourers. In one of the most influential and ground-breaking publications of the Victorian age, Karl Marx argued that capitalism ultimately was tantamount to the exploitation of labour: the less you paid your worker the higher your profit and a potential surplus value would turn out. Marx, quite consistently, severely attacked both Bentham and Mill for their utilitarian ethics and ridiculed the former as a ‘genius of middle-class stupidity’ (1983, 492). Characteristically too, there is no single renowned Victorian literary work of art that would opt for utilitarian ethics. Certainly the most acrimonious reckoning of utilitarianism is Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel Hard Times, which portrays the industrial workers as mere ‘hands’ in the eyes of their employers and which satirically castigates the utilitarian understanding of education of schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind and teacher Mr M’Choakumchild and their absurd insisting on the instrumental measurability of educational success as the mindless rehashing of positivist facts and the, indeed, utilitarian ‘choaking’ of all creative fancy and imagination. The tension between liberal and conservative utilitarian thinking and its manifold critique creates an unstable equilibrium pervading the Victorian age. It explains the coexistence of modernisation, technological progress, capitalist interest, successful efforts for reform (i.e. Reform Bills, New Poor Law, Custody of Infant Act, trade-unions), and also (late-)Victorian, post-Industrial Revolution pessimism. It should not be concealed, however, that this conflict lasts and that Utilitarian ethics have influenced philosophical, political, and economic thinking until today. Another reason for anxiety came from the realm of science: Building on earlier research done by Carl von Linné (1707–1778), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829), and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830), Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) constitutes a culmination point of historicism, a world view which had begun in the eighteenth century, was celebrated by the French Revolution and Romanticism, and then truly spread with the systematic rise of the humanities and sciences in the nineteenth century (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel). When Darwin returned from his five-year journey on the HMS Beagle (1831–1836) and started analysing the observations he had made of flora, fauna, and geology, he realised how far his findings had taken him away from

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biblical genesis. He felt that his theories came close to confessing the murder of God, and conscience had taken him away from publishing his findings for more than twenty years. Darwin knew that ‘natural selection’ and ‘struggle for existence’ were complex metaphors, which denoted abstract processes completely cut off from human influence and teleological action. Darwin’s work unsettled the Victorian society to its core, as the Victorians all of a sudden peered into the abyss of a godless universe, in which human beings are only minor characters, barely more than an obscure accident in an evolutionary process beyond their control. Darwin himself always believed that by using their intelligence human beings were able to face the conditions of their biotope and thus reach for ultimate perfection. The biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), by contrast and in a much more pessimist fashion, even took a retrograde evolution of mankind into consideration. The lateVictorian winged words of ‘degeneration’, ‘decadence’, and ‘depression’, among other things, reflected this regressive, uncertain awareness of life generated by the theory of evolution. In a much different and, from today’s perspective, altogether pejorative way, the term ‘Social Darwinism’ transferred Darwin’s ideas of natural selection of species to the realms of sociology, economics, and politics. Indeed, it was the eminent sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who coined the phrase of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) had argued earlier in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that distress in a society (and especially in the working classes) was due to overpopulation and that the benefit of a whole society was dependent upon holding the increase of a population within resource limits. Social Darwinism, then, took Darwin’s metaphor of the ‘struggle for existence’ literally as a justification for social inequalities: Some individuals (groups, nations, races) are able to support themselves, others are not, and this is merely considered a matter of being ‘fitter’ (i.e. better adapting to the circumstances) and finding the right survival tactics. It goes without saying that laissez-faire capitalism, imperialism, or racism would unhesitatingly luxuriate in social Darwinist settings. Not only have Darwinism and Evolution Theory (generally in unison with the proceeding secularisation brought about by the Industrial Revolution and capitalism) cast severest doubt on the existence of God in that they literally contradicted the belief in a biblical genesis of the world and of human beings, they also made God disappear (see Miller 1963) in a figurative sense. Since Darwinist thought, just like historicism in general, assumed “the relativity of any particular life and culture” (Miller 1963, 9), stable world views were all of a sudden replaced by a multitude of perspectives, belief systems which gradually corroded a social and moral consensus and threatening to plunge individuals into an abyss of psychological nothingness and existential isolation. The historicist understanding of the world ultimately amounts to the doubting of the validity of any world view or philosophy, the interrogation of institutions, beliefs, laws, morals and customs, and the awareness that the articles of faith could no longer be brought to a satisfactory proof (see, for example,

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Houghton 1957, 95–180; Miller 1963; Buckley 1966; Wheeler 1990; Gilmour 1993). Secularisation and modernisation, and with them a growing indifference towards religious matters and agnosticism, were evidentially hollowing out the Anglican Church. At the same time, however, the Victorian Age witnessed powerful attempts at religious renewal (↗ 3 God on the Wane?). The Church of England in the midnineteenth century consisted of three major branches: Low Church, Broad Church, and High Church. Religious life also saw protestant groups outside the Church of England, known as Nonconformists or Dissenters, such as Methodists, Baptists, or Congregationalists. The Low Church movement of the Evangelicals, for instance, was responsible for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and very influentially advocated a strict Christian life following severe Puritan standards demonising all wordliness. Dogmatism, rigidity, duty, and earnestness (see Houghton 1957) were the keywords of the era, intentionally set against the alienating forces of religious and social crisis, rigidly tabooing human sexuality and, consequently, accounting for what is today almost proverbially called ‘Victorian prudery’ – however much it is a discursive construct and not necessarily a cultural practice. Though human passion is hardly to be controlled by either concealment or censorship, the Evangelical movement was the primary source of the revival of the ethic of purity. Furthermore, since the mid-1830s religious life in the Victorian age also witnessed High Church reform, which accentuated the Catholic principles within the Anglican Church and opted for a rehabilitation of tradition and authority. The most important movement in the context is known as the Oxford Movement or Tractarianism. Following the tenets of their major representatives John Keble (1792–1866), Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), and John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–1890), who all taught at Oxford University, the tractarians argued against liberal tendencies and attempted to renew the Church by, for example, strengthening medieval elements of religious and Church ritual. Both Evangelicalism and the Oxford Movement embodied a counterculture to the prevailing sense of doubt in the Victorian age – sheet anchors, as it were, in a stormy “Sea of Faith,” as Arnold put it in “Dover Beach”. In order not to confuse these anxieties with the relativism of a, for instance, postmodernist bend, it must be noted that the alleged sense of doubt which characterised the Victorian age only gradually changed to downright scepticism. The feeling of arbitrariness, relativity, and historical contingency grew from the 1830s to the Fin de Siècle. The early- and mid-Victorian sentiment of doubt was felt by people who were uneasy and truly baffled about what to believe in, or how to cope with a world which was – in breath-taking speed – bringing about a vast increase of scientific and historical knowledge. Some lost their belief in God, others did not; some lamented the loss of faith, others, like Tennyson, quietly acquiesced: “So be it. It is God’s will. I still believe, though I cannot see. And I have faith that God will be waiting for me when I have crossed the bar” (qtd. in Miller 1963, 13). But up to

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1870, doubts never reached that epistemological vantage point when the mind was no longer regarded as a valid instrument of finding the truth. The loss of faith and manifold attempts at its renewal constituted a characteristically unstable equilibrium. Victorians were uncertain about their position in society, they were uncertain about the new theories they were confronted with, but, then, their principal capacity to arrive at truth rationally was not fundamentally questioned – in fact the consensus that truth is attainable somehow is the one Victorian certainty left, politically, sociologically, economically, and, as we shall see later, aesthetically. John Ruskin (1815–1900) argued against the utilitarian spirit of the age by turning to art history, and Matthew Arnold, otherwise thoroughly pessimistic about the signs of the times, adhered to the redeeming value of culture and pointed out in 1869, at a time when high-Victorianism was well upon the wane: Now, then, is the moment for culture to be of service, culture which believes in making reason and the will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas, simply because they are new. The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is regarded not solely as the endeavour to see things as they are, to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the world, and which it is a man’s happiness to go along with or his misery to go counter to, – to learn, in short, the will of God, – the moment, I say, culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn this, but as the endeavour, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest. (Arnold 1994, 32; emphasis added)

It was not until about 1870 when this belief in “things as they are” and in the existence of a “universal order of things” was more and more shattered quite in proportion to how the relativity of knowledge and the subjective character of thought were likewise enhanced. It no longer seemed a question of what unmistakably and immutably is, but in what particular light a situation, a character, a culture, or the world appear. Gradually, the autonomy of consciousness was established, which decidedly contradicted the notion that what people saw happening around them was causally connected and, rather than that, produced broken images of countless perspectives in which ultimate truths were by degrees dissolving. Graphic examples of this process are Vincent van Gogh’s (1853–1890) famous impressionist sunflower paintings produced in between 1888 and 1889. The meticulous differences making each painting a singular object reveal that there is potentially a myriad of perspectives of looking at a sunflower, reflecting upon multiple attitudes towards life. In 1866, the British poet Charles Algernon Swinburne published the poem “The Triumph of Time”, which must be considered one of the most important catchphrases summarising the unresolved tensions and the gradual change of the Victorian spirit oscillating between optimism, enthusiasm, and anxious pessimism. On the one hand, in the Victorian era the ‘triumph of time’ is tantamount to a veritable triumph of man

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over time because, in a socio-cultural and -historical sense, no other epoch in human history has seen a similar standardisation of time (see Buckley 1966, Goetsch 1967, Wendorff 1980, Kern 1983, Middeke 2004, Seeber 2004, Osterhammel 2009). The beginning of the nineteenth century still featured a vast array of different local times and time cultures. Every place or at least every region set their clocks commensurate with their estimation of the culmination point of the sun. A hundred years later, this plethora of times had taken the level, order, but also the pace of a coordinated World Time. The standardisation of clock-time meant a challenge absorbing governments, rulers, and engineers alike and was detachable only after the invention and introduction of transmitting electric impulses over vast distances via telegraph. Since the eighteenth century, nautical standards amongst seamen had already come to an agreement as regards a ‘normal time’ based on the longitude of the zero meridian at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. By 1855, ninety-eight percent of public clocks in Britain were set according to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which became official in 1880. In 1884 finally, an international conference in Washington agreed upon a Standard Time by subdividing the globe in twenty-four consistent time zones comprising of fifteen degrees of longitude each, made necessary by the temporal coordination needed for reliable and efficient railway travel. The idea of standard time was proposed by the Scottish-born Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming (1827–1915), who may well be called “one of the most influential globalisers of the nineteenth century” (Osterhammel 2009, 90). These developments were possible only in those societies used to measuring time by the clock. Victorian times witnessed a pervasive ‘chronometerisation’, that is, in effect, the democratisation of time as the industrial mass production of clocks and watches set in. The city of Geneva, for example, had exported 54.000 pocket watches in 1790; by 1818, the number of clocks produced in the whole canton of Neuchatêl amounted to almost a million. Close to another hundred years later, by 1908, the German watch and clock manufacturer Junghans was the biggest of its kind in the world, producing three million clocks and watches in a year (Wendorff 1980, 387–429). The fact that in the 1890s the American manufacturer Ingersoll lowered the price of a pocket watch to one Dollar was almost symbolic of the fact that the social difference between people with or without watches was levelled once and for all. On the other hand, however, the ‘triumph of time’ and the distribution and omnipresence of clocks and watches not only had positive implications. It accounted for the quantification and perpetuation of working processes, which back in preindustrial circumstances had proceeded in irregular and erratic rhythms. As the division of labour and the organisation of production was increasing and the general rhythm of everyday life was accelerated and had to be more coordinated (in adjusting to railway time-tables, for instance), workers had to face a much stricter time regiment forced upon them both by their employers and by the requirements of the market itself. Longer and more efficient working hours meant useful effects, but at the same time the subordination under a concept of abstract time entailed time

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pressure and, thus, a psychologically precarious drifting apart of private (‘subjective time’), social and public rhythms (‘social time’), the clash of which turned out a matter of social discipline as well as of cultural and psychic alienation (see Buckley 1966; Middeke 2004 and also Foucault 1977 for the aspect of temporal disciplining). Seen from this angle, the ‘triumph of time’ shapes up as a triumph of time over man, and this impression of time felt as oppressive and overwhelming is borne out in an even more general way by the relation between Victorian consciousness, individual man, and the cosmic long-term perspective of life and nature embodied, for instance, by Darwin’s theory. Losing an ultimate meaning and a metaphysical stability in reality and social life quite congruously involved for the individual that the temporal dimension of life came to the fore. In Swinburne’s poem, “the loves and hours of the life of a man” are “swift and sad, being born of the sea.” We “rejoice” and “regret” only “for a span,” we are “born with a man’s breath,” and we are unable to “save” anything “on the sands of life, in the straits of time” (Swinburne, “The Triumph of Time”, l. 72–82). Swinburne’s poem, though originally depicting the lyrical I’s mourning for a lost love, is indicative of time felt as being the opponent of mankind in a situation when the Victorian consciousness had lost bearing upon the hitherto safe metaphysical laws of existence. Revealing a heartfelt grieving for the loss of such metaphysical security and fixed moral and ethical standards of conduct, the conflict with time was both the symptom and the cause of a widespread feeling of insignificance and transitoriness amongst the Victorians. The deep melancholy inherent in the loss of time is a central motif in Victorian life and literature. Such a mid- and late Victorian view that looks upon time as a force disrupting individual self and social consensus is clearly opposed to the much more optimist stance of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), who was, besides Thomas Carlyle, the most eminent Victorian historian. Macaulay’s The History of England (1848–1861) can be considered one of the intellectual mouthpieces of a middle-class, common sense point of view that is derived from a confident belief in progress and the continuity of past traditions, personalities, and democracy into an open and rather sanguine future. The effect of the modifications in the experience of time and space, as part of the shifting material conditions of industrial capitalism, lead to an appearance of a plethora of diseases. Benjamin Ward Richardson’s Diseases of Modern Life (1876), for instance, registered the various strains that modernity had had on the human mind. Diseases “from worry and mental strain” were accompanied by various physical conditions, e.g. resultant from “poisoned air,” various “lifestyle diseases” like sleeplessness, overuse of alcohol and drugs, not to mention suffering from unprecedented levels of mental stress” and “‘overpressure’ in education” (Bonea et al. 2019, 4). Indeed, many medical, sociological, and literary works show the extent to which “the structures of the nineteenth-century mercantile and industrial economy could be imprinted on the mind and body” (4). These works not only “register the social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global

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communication, but also the problems generated for the minds and bodies caught up in these transformations” (5). In this context then, Victorian metamorphosis denotes the tangible changes that the new modern ways of life had on human beings, with individual corporealities and psyches as the material signifiers of those transformations, and with literature and a larger literary sphere as one of the sites which made these changes visible.

3 Literary Spheres The expansion of the reading public, which had begun in the eighteenth century, continued and intensified in the Victorian Age. Readership numbers increased rapidly both among the lower middle-class as well as among industrial workers and were brought forward by social reform and various socio-cultural developments (see Altick 1957, Abrams and Greenblatt 2000, Seeber 2004, Nünning 2000). The circulating libraries, the repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, and the resultant rise of periodical press improved the access to the written word and contributed to the rise of popular literary culture. While the history of public libraries went back into the fifteenth century, circulating libraries first appeared in the eighteenth century and further flourished in Victorian times. The most commercially successful one was founded by Charles Edward Mudie (1818–1890) in 1840 in London, which developed into a chain and quickly acquired branches in other British cities. In 1848, W. H. Smith opened the first railway station bookshop where inexpensive books could be bought or borrowed. The economic demands of commercial circulating libraries like Mudie’s made it a typically nineteenth-century publishing practice that novels originally appeared as so-called ‘three-decker-novels’, the first volume virtually whetting the readership’s appetite for the next two. The price of each volume was half a guinea (10s 6d), which equals about £20 today and made buying the volumes unattainable even for many middle-class readers. Cheaper one-volume editions of successful novels for 6s were indeed published, yet with much delay (see Seeber 2004). Hence the power and influence of people the likes of Mudie were big, as they were not only able to buy large quantities of a first edition of a novel, but were also able to promote and channel the career of a writer (see Nünning 2000, 21–22). As newspapers were still quite expensive until 1855 when the tax on newspapers (‘Stamp Duty’) was abolished, members of the lower classes could turn to broadsides (tabloid types of street literature) and chapbooks for information and entertainment. By and by, hundreds of magazines covering all the fields of contemporary life ranging from politics, science, medicine, to culture, art, and literature sprang up like mushrooms. Victorian periodicals came in all shapes and sizes and catered to the needs of many types of audiences: from The Illustrated London News, which included engravings and correspondence from the whole world, and Dickens’s Household

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Words that promised to “be the comrade and friend to many thousands of people, of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions” (Dickens 1850, 1), to Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World, aiming to articulate women’s stance on matters ranging from literature and art to modern life practices, to numerous penny dreadfuls addressed at the working classes. Serialised texts, Lina K. Hughes and Michael Lund argue, were particularly suited to capture the Victorian “expansive vision of life” (2012, 53), highlighted the idea of (individual) progress, and “harmonised in several respects with capitalist ideology” (56). “We need to see that the serial form,” they continue, “was more than an economic strategy. It was also a literary form attuned to fundamental tendencies in the age at large” (60). The serial offered what life did: “a continuing story over an extended time with enforced interruptions” (53). Home to a plethora of advertising strategies, illustration practices, reporting styles, as well as factual and fictive pieces, periodicals were also central to the shaping of Victorian literary culture. They influenced the way stories were told. Writers from Dickens to Hardy also chose to have their novels published in form of instalments in magazines such as Household Words (1850), The Saturday Review (1855) or The Cornhill Magazine (1860). For them, the three-decker-novel or publishing in magazines meant possible financial success but also required adherence to specific literary conventions, most prominently the happy ending or poetic justice as well as the strict avoidance of reference to all matters sexual. That serialised novels necessitated certain formal structuring was plainly clear not only to the likes of Charles Dickens who wrote but also edited manuscripts for serial publication. Quick introduction of the plot, rapid movement of the story, the unity of action in each instalment were just some of his strategies. Needless to say, the serial also required particular types of reading and spurred a series of social rituals and cultural practices: from regular gatherings to read and listen to chosen stories, to magazine days on which the life of (almost exclusively) middle and upper classes feverishly revolved around the new issue, to calls for establishing reading clubs. These developments certainly made for one central thing besides an increased accessibility of literary products: Whereas the Romantic era clearly had its aesthetic highlights in the form of poetry, Victorian literature witnessed the triumphal procession of the novel, which – though still disdained at the beginning of the century – became the most representative and productive literary genre by its end. What is striking to observe across the entire Victorian era is the change that takes place with regard to which parts of the readership were (meant to be) reached by the novel. Novels by Dickens and poems by Tennyson were read by almost all ages and all social classes. Since the last decades of the Victorian age, however, a much more liberal treatment of moral issues and literary conventions in connection with much more complex aesthetic structures in novels by, for instance, Walter Pater, Henry James, or Joseph Conrad have procured an enduring split in the readership, disconnecting the aesthetics of the novel from the taste and understanding of the masses.

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It must, of course, be kept in mind that the development of the novel went hand in hand with the changes brought about by industrial revolution and various technological developments (e.g. the railway, telegraphy, but also new forms of printing). It was also certainly influenced by the “frenzy of the visible” that the era witnessed (Comolli 1980, 122). If the early 1800s mark the time when hardly anybody had access to images, the last decades of the century bask in the glorious spectacle of visibility afforded by the kinetoscope and the cinematograph but also by photography as well as dioramas, panoramas, advertising, etc. (cf. Crary 1990, Flint 2000; ↗ 2 Remediating Nineteenth-Century Narrative). The novel was not immune to these changes. Like any other medium, it participated in multiple processes of remediation and both thematically and aesthetically reacted to most of the new technologies of representation. In this context, critics were quick to point out the novelistic preoccupation with new forms of information and information spread (for instance telegraphy, see Menke 2008), the intertwining of literary imagination and photography (Green-Lewis 1996, Armstrong 2002, Novak 2008), as well as new sound technologies and the concomitant forms of orality/aurality (Picker 2003, Kreilkamp 2005, Leary 2010). New media-archeological and Neo-Victorian perspectives are inclined to delve deeper into the Victorian mediascapes and highlight some of other continuities we may as yet not be aware of.

4 The Victorian Novel Matters The seventy years in between 1830 and 1900 brought fundamental changes to the aesthetic conception and perception of reality. These transformations have been so efficacious that they are indispensable for a contextual understanding of both the topical as well as the formal innovations in the aesthetics of fiction in the twentieth and even twenty-first centuries. No matter how much the novel had already borne the signatures of alienation and disenchantment and no matter how close it came to what George Eliot called “one prison house and court” (1959, 541), the concept of Victorian realism was to a large extent still grounded in the firm (Evangelical) belief in a moral order and intersubjective responsibility that transcends subjective ‘egos’. Examples of this Victorian compromise are the numerous conversions in Eliot and Dickens, or, at least, Dorothea Brooke’s active charity amongst her set of acquaintances in Middlemarch. By the end of the nineteenth century, that Victorian compromise came undone – world and transcendence grew so much apart that human life seemed devoid of a ‘higher’ meaning. In the novels from the Nineties, e.g. by Hardy or Conrad, ‘God’ became a mere cipher for an absence and an altogether enigmatic, abstract, indifferent, and inhuman principle of world and nature that no longer differentiated between meaningful and meaningless, just and unjust, tragic or un-tragic incidents, fates, or evolutions.

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That “transcendental homelessness” (Lukács 1971, 32 and 52) which Georg Lukács in his theory of the novel (1916) saw as epitomising modern fiction and which has become a catchphrase in the discourse of modernist aesthetics ever since is already inherent in much of the writing from this transitional period. It marks the starting point for the modernist and even postmodernist writer, whose melancholies (caused by the loss of an objective connection to the world) as well as high hopes (brought about by the playful potential of the unrestrained dealings with free-floating signifiers and self-reflexivity) become more lucid when juxtaposed with all the failures, suicides, or resignation so distinctive of the late nineteenth century. Like nineteenth-century painting and music that were characterised by the decisive move from realist to impressionist techniques, the English novel 1830–1900 testifies to an immense and unprecedented subjectivisation of its ‘realities’ which gradually paved the way to the stream of consciousness novel. More and more, subjective perception in the nineteenth-century novel no longer exhausts itself in thwarted illusions, in the sole sharing in the obscurity of life itself, or, simply, as the feeling of powerlessness in the face of an oppressive outer reality. Increasingly, both the value of subjective claims themselves and the meaning of inwardness and introspection for the individual encountering of reality will become the actual subject matter of the novels, if one looks at, for instance, characters of the same batch as Pater’s Marius, James’s Maisie, Conrad’s Lord Jim, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, or Hardy’s Jude. Likewise, the inner worlds of these characters become more and more private, obscure, and esoteric and, consequently, depart more and more from the worlds experienced and lived by the average reader. To avoid misunderstanding: of course, none of these writers makes subjective and objective matters dissolve in a stream of consciousness; none of these writers has individual character and world match and find a (liberating) unity in fluxus; none of these writers has impressions and private memories materialise in linguistic chains of associations as yet. In fact, the novelists’ immediate knowledge of the dire objective (read: social) circumstances prevented all too radical experiments with subjectivity and introspection in the novel that were, formally, for the most part limited to experiments with narrative perspective or an emphasis of time and temporality. However, writers begin to understand what later becomes a commonplace for the twentieth century: that the inner life, perceptions, and introspections of characters successively replace the old teleological plotlines and, in this, highlight the importance (and the epiphanies) of the moment (as distinct from temporal development and cognition via consecutive reasoning), when subjective awareness of life – if only momentarily – can coincide with life’s objective materialities and predicaments. The narrator in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure compares human knowledge and insight to “the light of a falling lamp” when “one might momentarily see an inscription on a wall before being enshrouded in darkness” (Hardy 1978, 36). This not only harkens back to the epistemological paradigm shift taking place

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within Romanticist imagination which, as M. H. Abrams famously pointed out, no longer resembled a mirror, but a lamp (Abrams 1971). It also foreshadows Pozzo’s scathing words on human existence and our existential position and epistemological potentials in a godless universe from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “the light gleams an instant and then it’s night once more” (Beckett 1981, 89). As such intertextual cross-referencing amply shows, not only are the Victorians embedded into their cultural contexts of their own past and future, the knowledge of historical and aesthetic circumstances of the English novel 1830–1900 will forever be vitally productive for the revisionist understanding of ourselves and therefore keep mattering for us. In the last couple of decades, it has even become fashionable to entrust Victorians with unprecedented powers: across scientific and popular discourses, they could be credited with and blamed for almost anything from computerisation to climate change. It is, however, undeniable that our contemporary epoch sees itself as rooted in the nineteenth century. In this context, Cora Kaplan famously relates to the contemporary “desire to know and to ‘own’ the Victorian past through its remains: the physical and written forms that are its material history” (2007, 1). At the same time, she also acknowledges individual emotional and ideological investment as central to this process: “My relationship to things Victorian [. . .] redefined my sense of national identity, influenced my politics and changed my academic signature” (5). One tangible effect of this entanglement is the birth of Neo-Victorian studies, which investigates the continuities and ruptures between our and the Victorian times. The rhetoric in which these investigations are enveloped positions the Victorian era as the spectre of our times: a spirit we continue to conjure up; our double. We talk about Victorian ‘afterlife’, ‘hauntings’, ‘traces’, ‘spectrality’, ‘trauma’ (cf. Arias and Pulham 2010, Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, Kucich and Sadoff 2000). While less ideologically invested in the Victorian era, Adaptation Studies also perpetuates the popularity of the nineteenth century today. Of course, neither would thrive if our (popular) culture had little interest in the era. As it is, Victorians have colonised our contemporary imagination: from their ongoing presence in new (e-)book editions or digitalisation projects that span online appearance of rare materials along with various mappings of Victorian social and literary practices. One hardly has to mention ongoing televisual, filmic, theatrical, and transmedia adaptations and appropriations, or heritage industries that capitalise on the Victorian tourist experience. Indeed, Victorians are everywhere. Their cultural hegemony continues, propelled by our compulsive return to and obsession with the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, critics have raised concerns that many contemporary preoccupations with the Victorian era are selfcongratulatory in that they attempt to establish our superiority. Victorian culture is being harvested as a repository of “sexsationist” narratives that enable us to engage in “(Neo-)Victorian slumming,” irrespective of its problematic ethics (cf. Kohlke 2008, 2018).

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In this atmosphere, the Victorian novel continues to maintain its hegemony. “Victorian literature,” Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn argue in the introduction to their now classic Neo-Victorianism, “still matters, greatly, and the reading of Victorian texts, the re-reading and re-writing of them, and the (neo-)Victorian experience they represent is something that defines our culture as much as it did theirs” (2010, 4). What to some is the sense of ‘belatedness’ and stagnation, as represented by the persistence of Victorian forms, genres, and tropes, they see as “a revitalized, even pyrotechnic response to the ‘tradition’ still so much represented by the Victorians and the possibilities nineteenth-century fiction always continued within itself for subversion” (4). With this in mind, this handbook aims to equip the reader with a stereoscopic perspective on Victorian literature and how it matters today. Part I is devoted to most urgent critical questions of the day: from the intertwining of Victorian literature and science to various processes of literary remediation, to the questions of genre, worldview, gender, and economy. Part II encompasses twenty-nine chapters devoted to individual novels (and their authors) as representative of larger tendencies in nineteenth-century fiction. Next to historical contextualisation, these individual chapters trace the major thematic, aesthetic, and theoretical tendencies and provide a repository of critical responses to the novels, thus opening necessary vistas and theoretical/methodological avenues for their further exploration both in scholarly discourse as well as in and outside the university classroom. Whilst, as Anna Maria Jones summarises the field of nineteenth-century literary criticism, “the Victorians’ theory seems ‘simple’” (Jones 2010, 236) if compared to twentieth- and twenty-first century theoretical approaches to literature and culture, it seems both reasonable and necessary that each chapter dealing with individual writers and novels maps out their theoretical potentials for interpretation. These chapters reveal a wide range of approaches that reach from New Criticism, (post-)structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, gender and queer studies, new historicist and cultural studies, reader response, postcolonial and race studies to recent developments within the field of cognitive and environmental/ecocritical studies. As we are writing it, new media-archeological perspectives, just like thriving periodical studies, are beginning to look back at nineteenth-century literature as part of a larger multi- and transmedia landscape. Like other theoretical responses, they are prone to change the way we see the Victorian literary sphere and the way we conceive of its metamorphoses. *** The editors wish to express their sincere thanks to all contributors to the present volume for their dedication to this project. Furthermore, we would like to extend these thanks to our research staff at the universities of Augsburg and Hamburg/ Vienna, without whom the editorial preparation of this volume would have been impossible: Dr. Korbinian Stöckl, Dr. Martin Riedelsheimer, Lotte Albrecht, Sarah Auer,

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Lisa Bittner, Nicole Held, Leonie Müller, Victoria Müller, Carolin Steinke, Katharina Ungar (Augsburg); PD Dr. Stefan Schenk-Haupt, Dr. Tamara Radak, Alina Lange, Tim Peetz, and Marlene Schurig (Hamburg/Vienna). On a final note, we should like to express our sadness about the death of Professor Karen Scherzinger (University of Johannesburg, South Africa), who was one of our contributors until her illness made it impossible for her to continue with her work. She was a dear friend, a wonderful colleague, and an eminent Henry James scholar. She will be greatly missed.

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Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. “Introducing the Serial.” Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. 53–70. Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. Jones, Anna Maria. “Victorian Literary Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture. Ed. Francis O’Gorman (Cambridge: CUP, 2010). 236–254. Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben, eds. Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 2010. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction.” Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance. Ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 53–77. Kreilkamp, Ivan. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. Kucich, John, and Diane F. Sadoff, eds. Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Leary, Patrick. The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in mid-Victorian London. London: The British Library, 2010. Lukács, Georg. Theorie des Romans. Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Vol. II/5 of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Dietz, 1983. Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2008. Middeke, Martin. Die Kunst der gelebten Zeit: Zur Phänomenologie literarischer Subjektivität im englischen Roman des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963. Moore, Jason W. “Introduction: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Ed. Jason W. Moore. Oakland: PM Press, 2016. 1–14. Novak, Daniel A. Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Nünning, Vera. Der englische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Klett, 2000. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: Beck, 2009. Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: OUP. 2003. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika. Syphilis in Victorian Culture and Literature: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017. Reinfandt, Christoph, ed. Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Seeber, Hans Ulrich. Englische Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler: 2004. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “The Triumph of Time.” Poems and Prose. Ed. Richard Church. London: Dent, 1940. 12–26. Thorsheim, Peter. Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800. Athens: Ohio UP, 2006. Wendorff, Rudolf. Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewußtseins in Europa. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1980. Wheeler, Michael. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.

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Further Reading Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. Brosch, Renate, and Rebecca Pohl, eds. Victorian Visual Culture. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. David, Deirdre, ed. The Cambridge Companion to The Victorian Novel. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Dawson, Gowan. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. Feldmann, Doris, and Christian Krug, eds. Viktorianismus: Eine literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Einführung. Berlin: Schmidt, 2013. Flint, Kate. The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature. Cambridge: CUP, 2016. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985. Lightman, Bernard, ed. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1997. Moran, Maureen. Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Continuum, 2006. O’Gorman, Francis, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Victorian Culture. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. Patten, Robert L., ed. Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: CUP, 1984. Schwartz, Vanessa, and Jeannene Przybylski, eds. The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2004. Steinbach, Susie. Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture, and Society in NineteenthCentury Britain. London: Routledge, 2012. Wheeler, Michael. English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1900. London: Longman, 1994. Wilson, Andrew. N. The Victorians. London: Arrow, 2003.

Part I: Systematic Questions

Phillip Mallett

1 Science and the Victorian Novel Abstract: Scientific concepts and discoveries permeated Victorian culture at every level, and readers of fiction grew accustomed to finding ideas derived from geology, astronomy and physics, about time, space, and entropy, jostling against others drawn from biology, psychology, or physiology. For the most part, scientists and novelists shared a common language and common convictions, including the regularity of law, the unity of the self, and the belief that observation and reason, aided by the imagination, could provide a plausible account of the world, and of humanity’s place in it. This commonality was particularly evident in evolutionary theory, which like the novel was concerned with time and change, but it was also apparent in mental science, both in older but still influential theories such as physiognomy and phrenology, and in later developments in the study of borderland states such as trance or fever, and of the split or multiple personality. Over the century, however, confidence in the power of science to interpret the world was chastened by an increasing awareness that humanity was not so much master of what it surveyed, as itself subject to the laws science was seeking to discover. Keywords: Evolution, entropy, mental science, freewill, heredity

1 Case Studies: Eliot and Dickens A discussion of the relation between science and the novel in Victorian England might begin with the first paragraphs of two major pieces of fiction written in the period. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) opens with a series of questions: Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents? (Eliot 2003, 7)

This seems to promise a courtship plot, but we are told the identity neither of the questioner (Daniel), nor of “she” who is being observed (Gwendolen), nor the setting (the gaming tables at Leubronn); these are disclosed only gradually in the following paragraphs. Instead, we are confronted with the glance of an unnamed woman, and the fear that it might possess a secret and dangerous power, evidently erotic in nature. Victorian fiction typically subordinated the urgency of sexual desire to the more decorous pleasures of romantic choice; both are present here, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-002

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lightly coded as “unrest” and “charm,” but in suggesting that beauty is itself a form of coercion the text undermines the distinction between them. As Eliot and her readers were uneasily aware, this was territory Charles Darwin had recently explored in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), when he proposed that rather than unique to humankind, and a mark of species superiority, both beauty and the aesthetic sense that responded to it were sexually selected adaptations, shared across the entire animal kingdom.1 Evolutionary science thus suggested a new and less flattering context for stories of love and marriage: the reproduction of the species was “strikingly the same in all mammals,” from “the first act of courtship by the male” to “the birth and nurturing of the young” (Darwin 2003, 8). Eliot’s opening paragraph similarly threatens to root human attraction in biology, and beauty in reproductive fitness. That the protagonists observe each other in a casino, a world in which selfdetermination yields to the rule of chance, only adds to the reader’s disquiet. Eliot’s readers were also troubled by the phrase “dynamic quality,” which they found “too scientific,” and accordingly a failure of artistic “tact” (James 1894, 84). As her publisher William Blackwood had already cautioned her, “dynamic” was “still a dictionary word to many people” (Eliot 1956, 183): the first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1827, where it pertains to the study of forces at work in the physical world. Eliot herself uses it only once elsewhere in her fiction, when Will Ladislaw is surprised to find the hitherto “humdrum” world of Middlemarch “in a terribly dynamic condition” (Eliot 1997, 788) after the disgrace of the banker Nicholas Bulstrode. In both instances, the context is provided by the positivism of Auguste Comte. In developing the discipline of sociology in the 1840s Comte had borrowed from physics to distinguish between the static and the dynamic: statics had to do with equilibrium, or the order of things at any given time, while dynamics addressed the energies making for change. The latter proved the more compelling topic: throughout the century, and across the range of Victorian science from astronomy to zoology, theories oriented towards questions of origin, process, and function superseded earlier attempts to observe and classify the assumed stasis of a divinely ordered creation. This is the basis of the distinction made in Middlemarch between the Rev. Farebrother’s delight in specimens and taxonomy, and Lydgate’s research into “the intimate relations of living structure” (Eliot 1997, 147). In that novel Eliot is concerned with provincial society on the cusp of change, but in the opening pages of Daniel Deronda the unsettling effect of the “dynamic” is experienced at a personal rather than the social level. In keeping with the epigraph to the chapter, which warns that both “Science” and “Poetry” necessarily resort to “make-believe” in trying to establish a beginning (Eliot 2003, 3), Gwendolen’s unorthodox beauty disallows the secure point of view on which inductive certitude depends (Shuttleworth 1984, 176).

1 The science devoted to sexual difference, and the response of novelists to it, has not been considered in this essay.

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Daniel and the narrator are confronted by the limits to what observation can reveal, and the consequent need for new frames of reference; and, by implication, so too is the reader. If Eliot’s readers regretted that her work was “permeated” by science (James 1894, 84), they were not surprised by it. It was less expected of Dickens, but scientific ideas and images are equally evident on the first page of Bleak House (↗ 16 Charles Dickens, Bleak House), which began publication in March 1852: LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. (Dickens 2003, 13)

The verve of the writing makes it easy to overlook the scientific freight carried here, most notably in the evocation of the beginning and end of time. The first is implicit in the reference to the cessation of the biblical deluge, immediately recalibrated by the image of a megalosaurus emerging from a swamp. This owes more to geology than to biblical tradition: Genesis had nothing to say about the megalosaurus. The official name, Megalosaurus bucklandii, had been assigned by William Buckland in 1824, on the basis of the few bones so far discovered; “dinosaur” was still more recent, introduced by the palaeontologist Richard Owen in 1842, but the ‘terrible lizards’ were already the subject of public fascination. This intensified in 1852–1853, as Bleak House was appearing in serial form, when the Crystal Palace was relocated at Sydenham and purportedly life-size and lifelike dinosaur models, designed and sculpted by Benjamin Hawkins under Owen’s direction, were set up in the grounds. In 1853, with an eye to publicity, and his own reputation, Owen presided over a New Year’s Eve dinner for twenty literary and scientific guests inside the mould of a giant iguanodon, an event duly commemorated in the Illustrated London News of 7 January 1854. Over the next few decades, the Sydenham dinosaurs attracted more than a million visitors a year. By the 1850s both geologists and the majority of the clergy had agreed on the need to separate their respective fields, but the megalosaurus already featured in controversy. In Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1836), his contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises, Buckland had abandoned his former belief in the universal effects of the Noachian deluge, and accepted what has come to be known as ‘deep time’. But the Treatises were explicitly

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intended to demonstrate “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation,” and in honouring that aim Buckland had responded to concerns about a giant carnivorous lizard stalking the earth with the argument that the creature’s teeth and jaws, “adapted to effect the work of death most speedily,” meant that its victims died swiftly: its ferocity was in fact a mark of divine mercy (Buckland 1836, 201). That reassurance, however, could not remove a more radical anxiety: the fossil evidence, as Buckland admitted in a controversial sermon in 1839, showed that biological death had existed in the world before the arrival of humankind, and therefore could not be interpreted as divine punishment for the Fall (Buckland 1839). Dickens’s Megalosaurus, waddling through the streets of Holborn, belongs simultaneously to the worlds of fiction, science, popular entertainment, and theology. It is disquieting as well as comic. The comparison of falling soot to snowflakes mourning the death of the sun is equally topical. Other writers as well as Dickens had remarked on the soot pollution of the London skies, and by the close of the century it had become a familiar trope: William Delisle Hay’s dystopian novella, The Doom of the Great City (1880), an early experiment in science fiction, recounts the destruction of all life in London by prolonged fog (Corton 2015, 93). But the reference is also to contemporary debate about the projected end of the solar system, and the coming heat death of the universe. This was an issue bearing on interpretations of the past as well as the remote future. Entering the dispute in 1862, in a paper “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat,” William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) argued that the light and heat essential to life on earth would fail within a few million years, “unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation” (Thomson 393). Thomson’s study of the dissipation of the sun’s energy had convinced him that if the earth were indeed as old as Charles Lyell had claimed in his Principles of Geology (1830–1833), and as was required by naturalistic theories of evolution, including Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it would long ago have become too cold to sustain life; such theories must therefore be, as Thomson devoutly believed, in error. His objections serve as a reminder that the agnostic science of Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and John Tyndall did not instantly sweep all before it; there remained a significant minority, like Thomson or James Clerk Maxwell, for whom modern science confirmed rather than challenged Christian teaching about divine providence and the immortality of the soul. But while Thomson trusted in a benevolent creator, others were as fearful about physics as they were about geology. Although the word entropy was not in use in English until the 1860s, the concept had already taken hold. In his 1959 lecture on “The Two Cultures,” C. P. Snow adduced popular ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics to support his claim that there existed a “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between the literary and scientific worlds (Snow 2012, 4). He might better have argued that this was the one law of physics of which most writers and readers had at least some knowledge. From Dickens in the 1850s to H. G. Wells

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and Joseph Conrad at the end of the century, Victorian novelists were haunted by the thought that all closed systems necessarily run down, or tend towards maximum entropy: more precisely, that as energy changes from one form to another, temperature, density, and pressure move towards equilibrium, at which point no further work can be done. The sense of crisis in Bleak House – the fear that the “moving age” will be brought to a halt, whether by spontaneous combustion, sudden collapse, or irreversible decline towards “perpetual stoppage” (Dickens 2003, 189) – is structured partly by geological arguments about catastrophism and uniformitarianism, but it also reflects new and disturbing theories in mid-Victorian physics (Jones 2013).

2 Science and the Wider Culture: The Contest for Authority By the 1850s, as these two passages suggest, science had become an integral part of Victorian culture at numerous levels. Scientific concepts and discoveries were encountered daily in non-textual as well as textual forms, most obviously in the emergence of new technologies such as the telegraph or the use of anaesthetics – James Young Simpson first used chloroform in childbirth in 1847, Reuter’s news agency began its telegram service in 1851 – but also in popular entertainments such as panoramas, museum displays, public lectures, demonstrations of mesmerism, or visits to a phrenologist. Dickens studied mesmerism with Dr John Elliotson, its leading practitioner (Connor 2010); Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy all had their skulls “read,” the latter being advised that his would “lead him to no good” (Hardy 1985a, 43). Formal scientific education was rudimentary, but the Victorians were impassioned amateurs. They bought telescopes and studied the stars, filled Wardian cases with ferns, explored rock pools or collected fossils, and took advantage of the introduction of the penny post in 1840 to send their observations, and even their specimens, to a host of newly formed or revitalised scientific societies. Philip Gosse’s The Aquarium: an Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (1854) launched a craze: Henry Knight, in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), is not only enough of a geologist to identify a trilobite as he clings for his life on the Cliff without a Name, but has an aquarium in his rooms in the Inns of Court. Books on natural science, many beautifully illustrated, sold tens of thousands of copies: among others, Gideon Mantell’s The Wonders of Geology (1838), Edward Forbes and Sylvester Hanley’s four volume History of British Mollusca (1848–1852), Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore (1855), J. G. Wood’s Common Objects of the Country (1858), G. H. Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies (1860), and Robert Ball’s The Story of the Heavens (1885). The first issue of Nature, described on its title page as “a weekly illustrated journal of science,” came out in 1869; generalist

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magazines like Macmillan’s and Blackwood’s carried reports, book reviews and articles on scientific developments, often side by side with serial fiction. Hardy owned a copy of Richard Proctor’s Essays on Astronomy (1872), and drew on it for Two on a Tower (1882), but he and Proctor had already appeared in the same issue of the Cornhill Magazine on at least six occasions; it was Hardy, in Chapter twentyseven of Far from the Madding Crowd (Cornhill, June 1874), who compared the settling of a swarm of bees to the formation of stars within nebulae, but it might equally have been Proctor. For readers and writers alike, there was a constant traffic between scientific discussion and imaginative literature. No popular writer on science was more influential than Robert Chambers, though he chose to issue his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) anonymously. He had good reason to be cautious: he was a publisher and encyclopaedist with many enthusiasms, including phrenology, spontaneous generation, and the transmutation of species, but he had no scientific training. Undeterred, he set out to unite current theories of astronomy, geology, natural history, and moral philosophy within an epic narrative of development. In the event, Vestiges jarred with scientists because of its numerous errors, and scandalised the religious because of what Adam Sedgwick, an Anglican priest as well as Professor of Geology at Cambridge, termed its “rank, unbending, and degrading materialism” (Sedgwick 1845, 3). Others were content to mock: in Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred (1847), Vestiges appears as The Revelations of Chaos. Yet what Chambers described was not a godless or chaotic universe but one subject to regular laws, in which everything in existence – the solar system, plants, reptiles, mammals, and humanity – had evolved under divine guidance from earlier forms; the “natural history of creation” was a story of universal progress, from inorganic nebulae to the arrival of sentient life on earth. Tennyson was an early and admiring reader, and the optimistic teleology of In Memoriam (1850) owes much to Chambers (Secord 2000, 530–532); for all the criticism levelled against it, Vestiges, like Tennyson’s poem, resonated with the public mood, requiring ten editions in as many years. Of still wider significance was its narrative form, in which complexity and conflict were revealed as constituent elements of a precedent design, working itself out in time and space. It thus provided not only the template for much subsequent science writing (Lightman 2007, 500), but also an analogue for the Victorian multi-plot novel. The trajectory of such works as Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), in which seemingly disconnected events are resolved into rational order, was seen in Vestiges as part of the fundamental structure of reality. In the one case the process was directed by a benevolent Creator, in the other by an author responding to the hopes and fears of the reader, but in both the pattern was the same. It would not have occurred to Chambers to debate the relation between science and literature. In part this was a matter of vocabulary. It was only in the eighteenth century that ‘science’ ceased to be a synonym for the state of knowing, and came

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instead to denote any body of knowledge structured around defined terms, coherent proofs, and demonstrable laws, irrespective of what was being studied (Ross 1962); it is in this sense that Matthew Arnold could claim Homeric scholarship as “scientific” (Arnold 1974, 57), and Hardy write an essay in 1891 on “The Science of Fiction” (Hardy 2001). The now familiar use of science as a generic term for the separate disciplines of chemistry, physics, and so forth was signalled by the foundation in 1831 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science – or as Dickens renamed it, the Mudfog Society for the Advancement of Everything (Dickens 1837). In their prospectus, the founders of the BAAS described themselves as “cultivators of science” (Harcourt 1832, 10), but the question of what to call those engaged in scientific work was not easily decided. Professor Waldman, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), urges the protagonist not to remain “a petty experimentalist” but to become a true “man of science,” versed in “every branch of natural philosophy” (Shelley 1996, 28). In differing forms, that distinction retained its force through the nineteenth century. When in 1834 the Cambridge polymath William Whewell proposed the term “scientist,” formed by analogy with “artist” or “economist” (Ross 1962, 71–72), it was resisted partly as a neologism, but also because it was felt to reduce the man of science to a mere technician, concerned only with immediate practical outcomes, and in doing so to set both an intellectual and a class boundary between scientific research and the higher aspirations of philosophy (Secord 2014, 104–106). Faraday, John Herschel, and Huxley rejected any such barrier, and continued to style themselves ‘men of science’, or ‘natural philosophers’. The dispute over status and title reflected the emergence of a new cadre of men whose scientific training had been carried on in fieldwork, industry, or the laboratory, rather than the traditions of natural theology still current at Oxford and Cambridge. This process, variously described as professionalisation (Heyck 1982) or identity formation (Golinski 1998), brought to the fore a group of writers determined to assert their cultural relevance as well as their authority as specialists in their chosen domain – a point underlined by the ease with which they quoted from Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, or Carlyle. Science, as men like Huxley, Tyndall, and W. K. Clifford construed it, was a confessedly secular project, which set out to provide an account of the natural world based on inquiry and expertise rather than received opinion or religious orthodoxy, but it was at the same time a profoundly ethical one. Good science, they insisted, began in the moral integrity of the scientist. As Tyndall wrote in 1854 of “The Study of Physics”: The first condition of success is patient industry, an honest receptivity, and a willingness to abandon all preconceived notions, however cherished, if they contradict the truth. Believe me, a self-renunciation which has something lofty in it, and of which the world never hears, is often enacted in the private experience of the true votary of science. And if a man be not capable of this self-renunciation – this loyal surrender of himself to Nature and to fact, he lacks, in my opinion, the first mark of the true philosopher. (Tyndall 1879, 343)

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Such statements were designed to extend the narrow claim that the scientific practitioner had skills and knowledge beyond the reach of the amateur into the wider one that the promotion of science, through education, new journals and institutions, and better career opportunities for scientific workers, would conduce to the moral and spiritual health of society (DeWitt 2013, 22–23). The heroic self-image of the “votary of science” carried considerable weight; it was in keeping with this ideal that Hardy admired Huxley “as a man who united a fearless mind with the warmest of hearts” (Hardy 1985a, 125). But this image was also open to inspection. As a number of novelists were to suggest, the scientist’s “lofty” investment in his work, and his commitment to a particular notion of “fact,” could limit his capacity for human sympathy. In Wilkie Collins’s anti-vivisection novel Heart and Science (1883), prompted by the trial for cruelty to animals of the neurologist David Ferrier two years earlier (Otis 2007), Dr Nathan Benjulia dismisses humanity as a mere “mob” which refuses to accept that “Knowledge sanctifies cruelty” (Collins 1996a, 190); later, realising his life’s work has been a failure, he burns down his laboratory, and commits suicide. As with Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll (↗ 25 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and H. G. Wells’s Dr Moreau, even George Eliot’s Dr Lydgate, the exclusive pursuit of knowledge brings with it the danger of self-exclusion. In the main, however, the nineteenth-century contest for cultural authority, between an Anglican-inflected humanism and the new scientific naturalism, was one in which both sides sought common ground (Turner 1993). Edward Dowden’s essay on “The ‘Scientific Movement’ and Literature” (1877) begins by contrasting the two: the task of science is to “ascertain and communicate facts,” that of literature “to quicken our life into a higher consciousness through the feelings;” science seeks to explain an objective, public reality, literature to explore our personal interaction with that reality. But the simple opposition of science and feeling is soon qualified: “our emotions rest on and are controlled by our knowledge. Whatever modifies our intellectual conceptions powerfully, in due time affects art powerfully” (Dowden 1878, 85). Dowden wrote as Professor of Literature at Trinity College Dublin, but in 1880 Huxley, the leading advocate for scientific education, came to a similar conclusion in a speech on “Science and Culture.” Taking issue with those who viewed the study of ancient literature as “the sole avenue to culture” (a claim he ascribes to Arnold), Huxley insisted that the distinctive character of the age was the increasing part played by scientific knowledge: “our whole theory of life has long been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the general conceptions of the universe, which have been forced upon us by physical science” (Huxley 1888, 14–15). Neither science nor the humanities had a monopoly on wisdom: intellectual culture required the study of both. For Huxley as for Dowden, science and literature occupied a “permeable borderland,” rather than separate and hostile territories (Smith 2013, 444).

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3 The Language of Victorian Science A century on from Huxley’s lecture, that borderland became the subject of renewed academic interest (Mallett 2012). Gillian Beer’s seminal Darwin’s Plots (1983) took a poststructuralist approach to Victorian scientific discourse, in particular to writing on evolution, highlighting its fictive and imaginative elements. Beer made two key claims. First, in its preoccupation with time and change, evolutionary theory has close affinities with narrative: like the novel, it concerns itself with the quest for origins, transformations, and hidden lines of kinship and descent, with the interplay of chance and order, and with competition, mating and adaptation. Darwin’s Origin of Species thus offered novelists like Eliot and Hardy “a determining fiction by which to read the world” (Beer 1983, 4). Second, Victorian men of science shared a common language with their nonscientific readers; a language primarily literary rather than mathematical, and drawing on rhetorical strategies and a vocabulary already in play within the wider culture. As Beer points out, it is when a theory is new that it most resembles a work of the imagination, and explanations of it necessarily rely on analogy and metaphor (1; see also Otis 2009, xxi). Inevitably, then, despite Darwin’s best efforts, the meaning of such phrases as ‘natural selection’ or ‘the struggle for existence’ could not be fixed or contained: his theory was “essentially multivalent” (Beer 1983, 9). Much of the imaginative power of evolutionism derived from precisely this openness to contradictory readings. In Hardy’s fiction, for example, the abundance of the natural world, essential to Darwinian theory, is equally a sign of nature’s indifference to the aims of the individual life, and evidence of the countervailing “appetite for joy” which drives life on (Hardy 2003, 190): either emphasis can be seen as ‘Darwinian’. At the same time, Darwin was open to influence by the Victorian novel. Both the Origin and Dickens’s novels seek to resolve an “immense assemblage” of apparently contingent details into defined relations (Beer 1983, 47–48); like the plants, birds, worms, and insects of Darwin’s “tangled bank” in the final paragraph of Origin, the various persons, groups and classes in a novel like Bleak House have multiple if at first unseen connections. The “traffic” between literature and science is “two-way,” each informing the other: “not only ideas but metaphors, myths, and narrative patterns could move rapidly to and fro between scientists and non-scientists: though not without frequent creative misprision” (Beer 1983, 7). George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists (1988) also read Darwin as an imaginative writer, the creator of a story rather than a strict empiricist. Despite the mass of facts presented in Origin of Species, the observable evidence was fragmentary; evolutionary theory could not be verified by empirical testing, and it was through an effort of the imagination, as much as Baconian induction, that Darwin was able to trace back the line of biological succession from the present state of nature to an

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otherwise irretrievable past – as indeed John Tyndall had also observed in 1870, in a lecture on “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” (Tyndall 31). Where Beer traced the movement of ideas between science and literature, Levine proposed a “one culture” model embracing both, “a gestalt of the Darwinian imagination, a gestalt detectable in novels as well as in science” (Levine 1988, 13). Rather than lines of influence, Levine explored the intellectual and sociocultural formation in which both scientists and novelists were embedded, and which at the same time they helped to shape. Trollope’s (↗ 17 Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne) fiction provides an illustration. The first of his Barsetshire chronicles, The Warden, was published in 1855, four years before the Origin. Trollope professed no interest in science, and while Darwin read The Warden he left no comment on it; neither writer directly influenced the other. Yet an essay written in 1882, the year of Trollope’s death (and of Darwin’s, some months earlier), by the Spectator critic Richard Holt Hutton, suggests that both, in Levine’s terms, belonged to the same cultural matrix. Despite his admiration for Trollope, and hostility towards what he saw as the materialism underlying Darwinian theory, Hutton’s reading of the novels employs the ideas and language of the Origin. In Trollope’s work, he noted, as not in Jane Austen’s, the clergy are faced with “the aggressiveness of the outer world,” and the threat from “all sorts of crowding interests:” “everywhere someone’s room is more wanted than his company.” Hutton’s description of the “conflict for existence” among the fictional farms and parsonages of Barsetshire inescapably evokes Darwin’s analysis of the ‘struggle for existence’ in nature (Hutton 1882, 1573–1574). Trollope himself defined his subject matter as the “state of progressive change” in personal and social life (Trollope 1980, 319); Darwin might have described his work as a naturalist in much the same terms. Trollope’s study of the forces in society making for continuity or change has affinities with Darwin’s interest in reproduction with variation; Darwin’s account of the processes of “structure and coadaptation” in the natural world (Darwin 1996, 4) finds an echo in Trollope’s attention in his novels to the formation of groups and classes, whether among the rural clergy or London politicians. Trollope’s self-confessed indifference to the “perfected plot” (Trollope 1980, 232) is analogous to Darwin’s refusal of teleology: for both, the observable state of affairs, whether in Barchester or the Galapagos islands, is the outcome of numerous local struggles and adaptive acts over long periods of time, not a necessary stage in a providential design. When in Barchester Towers (1857) the narrator intervenes to assure the reader that “It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr Slope or Bertie Stanhope” (Trollope 1994, 126), though many of her neighbours expect her to do one or the other, he implicitly concedes that events might have worked out differently, and been no less convincing. Like the world of the Origin, the busy, swarming universe of Trollope’s fiction is replete with possibilities, but chance and conflict will ensure that only a few come to fruition. No outcome is truly “destined,” except as part of the rhetorical compact by which the novelist promises to please the reader.

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4 The Science of Mind: Physiognomy, Phrenology, Monomania At the core of what Levine identifies as the Darwinian ‘gestalt’ was a cluster of interlocking ideas, including the regularity of law, the continual but gradual process of change, the unity of the self, and the belief that observation and reason, aided as necessary by the imagination, could provide a plausible if not definitive account of the world, and of humanity’s place in it. As many critics have noted, these are also the assumptions underpinning most Victorian realist fiction (Rauch 2001, 57), but as with realism itself their hold was never complete, and from around the midcentury they were increasingly challenged by developments in mental science. This was an untidy and contested field, drawing from moral philosophy, physiology and medicine, as well as reforms in the institutional treatment of the insane (Rylance 2000, 7). The questions it raised were correspondingly diverse, but fell broadly into two groups, one focused primarily on human subjectivity, including remembering and forgetting, dreams, mania, and the power and limits of the will, and the other on the relation between mind and body – more analytically, the interplay of sensory experience, the nervous system, and consciousness (Dames 2005). All these questions, but especially those to do with subjectivity, make themselves felt in the novels of Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë, and again in the sensation fiction of the 1860s and 1870s, where order and regularity are frequently disrupted by violence, madness, or delirium, and the self appears less a unified entity than the site of conflicting energies (Shuttleworth 1996, 181). The Brontës had good reason to ponder issues of mental pathology. They all suffered from depression, then known as hypochondria; their brother Branwell was addicted to both alcohol and opiates, and Emily was probably anorexic, though the condition was not named until 1873 (Silver 2002, 93–94). Notably, their fiction treats depression as an illness afflicting men as often as women; Lucy Snowe in Villette (1853) recognises the King of Labassecour as a fellow-sufferer from “that darkest foe of humanity – constitutional melancholy” (C. Brontë 1979, 290), and even Heathcliff endures “disordered” nerves (E. Brontë 2003, 333). All three sisters kept up with contemporary ideas in neurophysiology: the description in Agnes Grey (1847, ↗ 12 Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey) of the cycle of “action, and reaction” by which the mind preys upon the body, disturbing “the system of the nerves,” which in turn increases “the troubles of the mind,” closely echoes medical theory (A. Brontë 2004, 7). But they also drew freely on older and less rigorous accounts of the relation between mind and body, including physiognomy and phrenology. Neither of these could long withstand serious analysis, but both were widely influential. The central tenet of physiognomy was that moral and intellectual character determined facial features. Given systematic form by the Swiss poet and pastor Johann

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Lavater in the 1770s, and endorsed in 1824 by Charles Bell in his Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, physiognomy held that by a wise decision of the deity the human face was essentially legible. The “moral life of man,” wrote Lavater, “reveals itself in the lines, marks, and transitions of the countenance” (Lavater 1789, 9). The interest of such claims to the novelist can be traced in the increasingly precise attention to facial contour and expression in nineteenth-century fiction: Austen’s Emma (1815) and Mansfield Park (1814), for example, have between them a single reference to the brow or forehead, regarded by Lavater as a key indicator, while Jane Eyre (1847, ↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) alone has more than forty. To read the character from the face was, however, an acquired skill. In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Helen Graham declares herself “an excellent physiognomist,” but is sadly mistaken in her estimate of Arthur Huntington, whose “laughing blue eyes” ought, following Lavater’s taxonomy, to have warned her of his moral weakness (A. Brontë 1996, 136). Lockwood in the opening chapters of Wuthering Heights (1847, ↗ 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights) comically misreads Heathcliff and Catherine. Charlotte Brontë’s protagonists are more successful. The “mould of the brow and mouth” in a portrait is evidence enough for Mrs Pryor, in Shirley (1849), to identify Mr Helstone as “a man of principle” (C. Brontë 2000, 222); William Crimsworth in The Professor (1857) confidently judges both individual character and the innate difference between the Belgians and Flemish on the basis of features, complexion and facial expression (C. Brontë 1989, 149–152). Subsequent events do nothing to undermine Jane Eyre’s first assessment of Rochester or St John Rivers, or Lucy Snowe’s of Mme Beck or Dr John Graham. There is, however, a crucial corollary: those who seek to read the faces of others have themselves to submit to inspection. Jane Eyre as narrator can give a close account of St John’s classical features, but later, in a paroxysm of tears, she is conscious of him observing her, “like a physician watching with the eye of science an expected and fully understood crisis in a patient’s malady” (C. Brontë 2006, 461). Social and personal interaction in Charlotte’s fiction becomes an exercise in competitive watching and concealment, as when Lucy both reads and is read by M. Paul Emanuel: “The little man fixed on me his spectacles. A resolute compression of the lips, and gathering of the brow, seemed to say that he meant to see through me, and that a veil would be no veil for him” (C. Brontë 1979, 128). Jane Eyre studies John Reed’s face while waiting for the blow she knows is to come; Crimsworth learns to deflect the looks of others with “the gaze of stoicism” (C. Brontë 1989, 148). The autobiographical narrators in Charlotte’s novels – Crimsworth, Jane, and Lucy – have in common, first, a desire not to be readable, and second, bound up with this, an intense commitment to secrecy and privacy. In her work an understanding of selfhood as both dependent on and the expression of social and familial relationships, as it typically is in Austen’s fiction, gives way to an idea of the self as essentially interior, created and maintained by the

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self-command that keeps it hidden from others (Shuttleworth 1996). For both Lucy and Jane, their most vital relationship is the one they have with themselves. Phrenology, derived from theories proposed by the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall at the end of the eighteenth century, shared with physiognomy the belief that inner character could be read from external form, but the conceptual bases of the two were wholly distinct. Physiognomy was essentially idealist: it held that moral or mental life was primary, and impressed itself on the facial features. Phrenology was firmly materialist: it viewed the brain as the organ of the mind, and mental life as governed by its size, form, and constitution. The brain itself comprised many organs, each controlling a specific faculty or function, and each located in an identifiable region of the cranium. The configuration of the skull – in popular terms, its ‘bumps’ – could thus provide a clue to the relative strength of the thirty or more propensities, faculties, and sentiments that, in their totality, constituted the character. Two points are critical here. First, there was no unified ego separate from and presiding over the various faculties. Rather, the self was a congeries of forces, each with a physical origin, which might as easily be in conflict as in harmony: Jane Eyre observes of Rochester that his head shows “an abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen,” yet also that he has a well-developed “conscience,” and can point to “the prominences which are said to indicate that faculty” (C. Brontë 2006, 154–155). Second, while phrenologists held that faculty endowment was innate, they did not regard character as determined and unalterable. On the contrary, George Combe, author of the hugely popular The Constitution of Man (1828), promoted phrenology as an instrument of individual and social reform. In the psyche as in the marketplace, the conflict of energies would allow the best and most valuable to come to the fore. When Huntington justifies his irreligious life by the lack of “a proper organ of veneration,” Helen replies that every faculty, good or bad, “strengthens by exercise” (A. Brontë 1996, 205); Rochester, disguised as a gypsy, reads in Jane’s forehead the evidence that while “the passions may rage furiously [. . .] judgment shall still have the last word” (C. Brontë 2006, 233). Part of the appeal of phrenology was that it offered a vocabulary for those issues of psychological struggle, self-help, and moral management so dear to mid-Victorian commentators. Support for phrenology and physiognomy lingered on through the nineteenth century, though both took increasingly determinist and even malign forms, as in the racial science of craniology, or Cesare Lombroso’s claim to identify the born criminal from facial features – ideas allowed some plausibility in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897, ↗ 32 Stoker, Dracula), but dismissed with open contempt in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). In the meantime, however, scientific interest had turned from what might be visible on the surface to focus on what could not be seen. Even before the mid-century the theory of cerebral localisation, reinforced by anatomical study of the brain’s two hemispheres (Stiles 2012, 27–49), was paving

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the way for new ideas about monomania, the divided self, and the workings of the unconscious (Harrington 1989). These were topics that attracted medical men, philosophers, and jurists, and where they led the novelists were quick to follow. The Brontës, for example, were clearly familiar with James Prichard’s distinction in his Treatise on Insanity (1835) between “moral” and “intellectual” madness, the former marked by “morbid perversion of the feelings,” the latter by irrationality. Intellectual insanity was itself divided into three kinds: mania, or raving madness; dementia, or the complete breakdown of coherence; and monomania, or “partial insanity,” in which the intellectual powers were “disordered” with respect to one train of ideas, but appeared, “when exercised on other subjects, to be in a great measure unimpaired” (Prichard 1835, 5–6). Charlotte’s comment in a letter to her editor about Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, that “there is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness,” employs Prichard’s terms (Brontë 2000, 3); Nelly Dean’s remark that Heathcliff “had a monomania on the subject of his departed idol [Catherine]; but on every other point his wits were as sound as mine,” might have come from one of his case histories (E. Brontë 2003, 324). As several critics have noticed, medical narrative, and in particular the case study, interweaving physical description, personal history, and authorial analysis, emerged as a genre alongside and in conjunction with the Victorian novel (Tougaw 2006, Kennedy 2013). The notion of monomania, in which madness and sanity existed side by side, fascinated the ‘sensation novelists’ of the 1860s and 1870s. Dickens’s description of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) as “wild and yet domestic” (Dickens 1938, 534) is equally apt to the aberrant mental states such as delirium, somnambulism, trance, or temporary insanity, masked by or coexisting with normal behaviour, which recur in his own work and in that of Collins, Ellen Wood (East Lynne, 1861), Mary Braddon (Lady Audley’s Secret, 1862, ↗ 18 Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret), Charles Reade (Hard Cash, 1863), Ouida (Strathmore, 1865), and Thomas Hardy (Desperate Remedies, 1871). Common to these novels, as also to the sensational elements in a number of otherwise mainly realist works – Hetty’s infanticide in Adam Bede (1859), the Laure episode in Middlemarch (1872), Boldwood’s murder of Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) – is their questioning of the autonomy of the will, and consequently of received ideas of legal and moral culpability (Rodensky 2003). In The Moonstone (↗ 20 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone), Franklin Blake’s theft of the jewel is not without motive (he wishes to protect Rachel from the dangers attached to its possession) but since it occurs while he is in an opium-induced trance it is devoid of intention: it is, rather, the outcome of those processes beyond the reach and control of the conscious mind, but still able to affect judgment and action, to which the psychologist William Carpenter (quoted in the novel) gave the name “unconscious cerebration” (Collins 1998, 390; Carpenter 2009, 515–543). The mystery at the heart of The Moonstone, with its “Chinese box” structure of multiple and sometimes misleading narratives, is not the simple question of who stole the diamond, but the uncertain boundary of the rational self (Taylor 1997, 167–173).

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The relation between the conscious and unconscious mind, and the traffic between the two, proved a rich field for psychologists and novelists. Three areas in particular invite comment. There are, first, those occasions when characters’ impulses and motives manifest themselves in behaviours over which they apparently have no control. Hardy’s novels provide numerous examples: psychosomatic illness, such as the blindness that allows Clym, in The Return of the Native (1878), to escape the burden of consciousness in the routines of rural labour; the dissociated state which at different times reduces Eustacia Vye, Henchard, and Tess to passive spectators of their own lives; Angel Clare’s somnambulism in Tess, in which he lays the body of the woman he can no longer love in a tomb; and the seeming mistakes in almost every novel which answer to unacknowledged desires, as when Tess pushes her letter to Angel not only under his door but also under the carpet, at once confessing and concealing her past. Hardy’s notebooks, and many of his personal friendships, attest to his interest in contemporary psychological theories; his fiction emerges from the same context as, say, the work of Paul and Pierre Janet on dissociation, Freud on mistakes in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and even W. H. Rivers on male hysteria (Taylor 2013). In the instances above, the characters are unaware of their motives, and in some cases even of their actions, but of equal interest to both novelists and medical science were the moments of divided consciousness, on the border between sleep and waking, in trance or delirium, or in the excavation in dreams of long-buried memories, in which the mind seemed to glimpse its own secret working. Such moments could be embraced – Stevenson in “A Chapter on Dreams” (1888) links them to the creative powers of the artist – but more often they were seen as pathological. When Pip is delirious with fever in Great Expectations he both knows that Joe is his friend, and tries to kill him; he confounds numerous “impossible existences” with his own, yet knows he is doing so (Dickens 1998, 482–483). The sense that the self could not be identified with the rational mind, and that it was not one but many, lies behind those plots that suggest that one character is a double or alter ego of another, embodying half-admitted wishes: as, for example, both Orlick and Drummle appear as Pip’s shadows, the one enacting his rage at Mrs Joe, and the other crushing Estella’s spirit as she formerly had crushed Pip’s (Moynahan 1960). Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), which drew on and fed into contemporary theories of what F. W. H. Myers called the “multiplex personality,” takes this plotline to its logical and literal conclusion (Reid 2009, 26–29). Myers’s reference to “the shifting sand-heap of our being” suggestively links the Shivering Sand of The Moonstone, in which both secrets and a life are lost, the dangerous landscapes of Victorian Gothic fiction, and late-century debates about the instability of the self (Myers 1886, 654). There is a third point of intersection between mental science and the sensation novel, less direct but equally wide-ranging. As reviewers were quick to point out, the novelists’ preoccupation with the nervous system and its disorders was evident

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in narrative strategy and affect as well as in their choice of subject matter. In a hostile essay in the Quarterly Review, Henry Mansel complained that novelists like Collins were “preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment” (Mansel 1863, 495). Their aim was to replicate in the reader something like the “strange responsive creeping in my own nerves” Marian Halcombe experiences in The Woman in White (1860) as she watches Fosco’s mice creeping about his body (Collins 1996b, 233). Recent critics have drawn further comparisons between mid-Victorian physiological psychology and the reading experience offered by fiction, including the question of what, and why, readers and characters choose to remember, and what to forget (Dames 2001; 2007). The Moonstone is a striking example of a novel both about and structured around “the silencing and erasure of hidden linking narratives” (Taylor 1997, 168), but a similar claim could be made about much, and perhaps most, sensation fiction. Victorian criticism of the novel continued to be addressed primarily to character and morality, but the work of Dickens, Collins, and Braddon in particular invites attention to what happens to the mind and the body when we read.

5 Mind and Body: George Eliot Alongside the exploration of human subjectivity, and of aberrant mental states, mid-Victorian psychology continued to investigate the relation of mind and body, and the extent to which the will had power over mental action. In an essay in 1877 on “The Course of Modern Thought,” part of which Hardy transcribed into his notebooks, G. H. Lewes summarised one key development: Physiology began to disclose that all the mental processes were (mathematically speaking) functions of physical processes, i.e. – varying with the variations of bodily states; & this was declared enough to banish for ever the conception of a Soul, except as a term simply expressing certain functions. (Hardy 1985b, 92)

This is a comment that Lewes’s partner, George Eliot, could only tentatively have endorsed. Critics who thought her language was too scientific pointed to her frequent use of the word ‘emotion’, and especially the related forms ‘emotive’ and ‘emotional’ (James 1894, 84). The latter were both new in the nineteenth century – the OED gives 1821 for the earliest use of ‘emotional’, and 1830 for ‘emotive’ – but the objection was not primarily that they were “hateful modern slang” (Patmore 1921, 137). The deeper concern was that the use of ‘emotion’ in place of such older forms as ‘passions’, ‘sentiments’, and ‘affections’, belonged to a new physical psychology, in which mental states like hope or fear, joy or sorrow, were seen to be grounded in bodily changes at the neurological level (Dixon 2003; Danziger 1997). This was the view held, in various forms, by a number of influential writers, including Herbert Spencer in The Principles of Psychology (1855), Alexander Bain in The Emotions and the Will (1859), Henry Maudsley in Body and Mind (1871), and Lewes

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in The Physical Basis of Mind (1877). Spencer, whose work Eliot knew well, argued that mental life, or “the substance of mind,” was composed of “successive faint pulses of subjective change,” which corresponded to “rapidly-recurring shocks of molecular change” in the activity of the nervous system (Spencer 1890, 150–152). Emotions, on this account, were in effect an involuntary read-out of bodily states. For those who failed to see the implications of such theories for human self-esteem, thinkers like Huxley were on hand to point them out. Consciousness, Huxley argued in a notorious essay “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and Its History” (1874), did not and could not transcend our embodied condition: it was “a collateral product” of the body’s inner mechanisms, with as little independent causative power as the steam-whistle that accompanied the workings of a railway locomotive (Huxley 1898, 236). This scientific materialism, which gained ground steadily in the second half of the century, seemed to leave no room for the soul or the will, or the possibility of maintaining a stable identity or ‘self’ (Stiles 2007, 18). Eliot was clearly alert to such ideas: when in Middlemarch (↗ 22 George Eliot, Middlemarch) Dorothea’s encounter with Rome jars her “as with an electric shock,” or Ladislaw starts up “as from an electric shock” when she enters the room, his fingers tingling as if “every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch,” the language is not simply figurative (Eliot 1997, 191, 382–383). But Eliot also resisted any reductive account of human freedom: she reassured a correspondent that “the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture” (Eliot 1956, 99). The narrator’s claim in Janet’s Repentance that the influence of “one true loving human soul on another” is not “calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty” (Eliot 2000, 263), or in Adam Bede that “The human soul is a very complex thing” (Eliot 2008, 189), allows the soul quietly to return from the banishment to which Lewes had consigned it. It is at least arguable that even as the Victorian novel submitted to scientific thought, in choosing to explore human love and morality rather than the action of molecules it also set itself against the more dispiriting implications of that science. Scientific, moral and literary ideas are so deeply interwoven in Eliot’s fiction as to be virtually inseparable. Reviewing Robert Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect in 1851, she insisted on the principle of “undeviating law in the material and moral world” (Eliot 1963, 31). This, the action of what the narrator of The Mill on the Floss (1860) calls “irreversible laws within and without” (Eliot 1996a, 288), is her essential subject. In the moral as in the physical world actions have consequences, and as the Rev. Irwine warns Arthur in Adam Bede, “Consequences are unpitying” (Eliot 2008, 188). For Eliot this is a biological as well as a moral truth. The past and its consequences necessarily shape the present, whether in society or the individual life: as Maggie Tulliver cries, “If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” (Eliot 1996a, 475). The language here reflects Eliot’s instinctive conservatism, but it also found support in contemporary work in psychology. The theory of association,

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as set out by writers like Bain and Lewes, held that our sense of self is built up through habits of thought and feeling developed in childhood; the repetition of these habits creates physical grooves or pathways in the brain, organising it to receive and integrate subsequent impressions (Rylance 2000, 55–69). So far as we train our habits, we are also able to choose our characters, an idea Eliot regularly puts to the test in her fiction. Silas Marner (1861) may stand as an extreme case. Subject from his youth to cataleptic trances, Silas is a man without an identity, isolated from his neighbours and his own past self. He begins to recover when the need to care for the child who enters his life during one such trance stirs old “fibres,” revives old “habits,” and causes forgotten feelings to “vibrate” in sympathy with hers. He learns to move forward by reclaiming the past: he “grow[s] into memory,” and “gradually into full consciousness” (Eliot 1996b, 124). Despite the irruptions of chance, Marner’s life holds out the hope of the underlying unity of the self. Eliot’s fullest meditation on scientific thought and method occurs in Middlemarch, in the account of Lydgate’s research. Influenced by his hero François Bichat, the founder of histology, Lydgate seeks to interpret organisms in their temporal aspect, or, as Eliot writes in the Prelude, with her own aims as a novelist in mind, to explore how biological forms – in the one case cellular tissues, in the other human beings – behave “under the varying experiments of Time” (Eliot 1997, 3). Such a task requires more than observation alone: the “minute processes which prepare human misery and joy” are “inaccessible by any sort of lens,” and can only be tracked “through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy” (162–163). This echoes Thomas Huxley’s view, in an essay of 1853 on “The Cell-Theory” that Eliot almost certainly read, of the need to summon “the powerful aid of the imagination, kept, of course, in due and rigid subordination, to assist the faculties of observation and reasoning” (Huxley 1898, 248–249); the disciplined imagination is as necessary to the creation of hypotheses as it is to the invention of stories. Lydgate’s later argument, that the scientific mind must be “continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an objectglass” (Eliot 1997, 630), also bears on Eliot’s approach to fiction, as the mind of the narrator similarly moves back and forth between the particular case of, say, Bulstrode’s self-deception or Rosamond’s egotism, and the wider horizons brought into view by the novel’s epigraphs and allusions. There is, however, a critical difference between Lydgate’s research methods and Eliot’s concerns as a novelist. In Problems of Life and Mind (1874), G. H. Lewes argued that to understand the human mind it had to be seen not as an isolated unit but as part of a larger social entity (Lewes 1874, 125–128). Lydgate arrogantly dismisses the power of social life; Eliot does not. Both Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary argument that greater individuation implied correspondingly more complex forms of interdependence, and the zoological studies she and Lewes carried out together among the rock pools at Ilfracombe, persuaded her that the well-being of an organism was contingent on its adaptation to and interaction with the world it inhabited. The same rule held good in human

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society: Dorothea’s recognition in Middlemarch that she is part of “the largeness of the world” and its “involuntary, palpitating life” articulates a scientific truth as well as a moral imperative (Eliot 1997, 776). Not the least part of Eliot’s achievement was to recognise, as contemporaries like Spencer, Lewes, and Maudsley were also doing, that psychology was a social as well as a biological science.

6 Thomas Hardy: The Disenchantment of the World Thomas Hardy’s engagement with science was less systematic than Eliot’s, but just as urgent. He insisted on numerous occasions that his work offered merely the “impressions of the moment,” with no attempt at “a coherent scientific theory of the universe” (Hardy 1967, 49). Yet there emerges from his fiction a clear if not wholly consistent view of an impersonal and purposeless universe, subject to laws that can never perfectly be known, in which change is the only constant, and human consciousness the by-product of an accidental collocation of atoms. A Pair of Blue Eyes evokes the immense lapses of geological time, and Two on a Tower the vastness of interstellar space; William Dare in A Laodicean (1881) reflects on the mathematics of chance and probability, which James Clerk Maxwell had begun to incorporate into foundational theories in physics. In The Woodlanders (1887) the struggle for existence in the natural world is pursued with an intensity strangely lacking in the characters; in the novels of the 1890s, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895, ↗ 30 Hardy, Jude the Obscure), and The Well-Beloved (1892/1897), narrator and characters brood over the shaping power of heredity, and contemporary fears of degeneration. This is not the entirety of Hardy’s view – like Darwin, or like Gabriel Oak in the second chapter of Far from the Madding Crowd, he was also mindful of the beauty and wonder of nature – but it comes close to what Max Weber would term the disenchantment of the world: die Entzauberung der Welt (Weber 1930, 17). After reading Edward Clodd’s biography of Huxley, Hardy wrote to him: “what we gain by science is, after all, sadness [. . .] The more we know of the laws & nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be” (Hardy 1982, 5). Hardy took pains to integrate ideas drawn from his reading in science into the narrative arc of the novels. The scene in which Knight hangs on the Cliff without a Name draws on the “Retrospect” in the first volume of Mantell’s The Wonders of Geology (Mantell 1848, 447–449), but it also sets up a parallel between the “numberless slaty layers” of rock, recording the extinction of successive life forms, and Knight’s fear that he is merely one of a series of men who have loved Elfride, doomed to occupy a single layer in her memory (Hardy 1998a, 214). Two on a Tower similarly sets cosmic and emotional history side by side: the “voids and waste places” (Hardy 1999, 29) of the sky against the inner “void” (43) Viviette endures in the Great House, and the “formlessness” (30) of stellar space against the “listlessness”

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(16) of a woman watching her life slip away in the narrow room allotted to one whose absent husband may be alive or dead. The plot of The Woodlanders features two material brains – Dr Fitzpiers purchases one and dissects another – but it also foregrounds the vagaries of the immaterial mind, including paranoid obsession, forgetfulness, automatic action, day dreaming, somnambulism, and the displacement of one idea by another. Both Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure pick up on Darwin’s claim in the Descent of Man that “the difference in mind” between human and non-human animals “is certainly one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 2003, 126). In the former, published three years after the Descent, the heavily pregnant Fanny is progressively stripped of her human autonomy as she crawls on hands and knees to the Casterbridge workhouse, while the dog who comes to her aid “thoroughly [understands] her desire and her incapacity,” and becomes “frantic in his distress” on her behalf (Hardy 1993, 278): the chapter both tests and affirms Darwin’s speculation that over time animals would “acquire a moral sense or conscience” (Darwin 2003, 98). Similar issues return still more sharply in the pig-slaughtering scene in Jude. Arabella silences “him” (the personal pronoun is used in the text) by slitting his throat, but not before the animal has expressed “rage,” “despair,” a sense of “treachery,” and even “eloquently keen reproach” (Hardy 1998b, 64). In Hardy’s view, the evolutionary principle that “all organic creatures are of one family” required that the “centre of altruism” be shifted from humanity “to the whole conscious world collectively” (Hardy 1985a, 373). Arabella sees matters differently; like Jude’s own deathbed eloquence in the final chapter of the novel, the pig’s cries draw no sympathetic response (West 2017, 131–140). In 1873, Hardy entered in his notebooks a comment from John Addington Symonds: “The very ground-thought of Science is to treat man as part of the natural order” (Hardy 1985b, 65). This ground-thought manifests itself both in the way characters are represented in the novels, and in the way they perceive themselves. In Hardy’s fiction, more than in that of any of his peers, the reader is constantly aware that human beings live in physical bodies, which in turn dwell in and are affected by the external world; the description of Tess as a “sheaf of susceptibilities” (Hardy 2003, 176) might be applied to almost all his characters. Hardy renders emotion somatically: his men and women quiver, flinch, pulsate, palpitate, shudder, tremble, faint, stand rigid, or feel listless, as much they think. Notably, they blush: in A Pair of Blue Eyes alone, Elfride, Stephen, and Knight blush or flush with pique, triumph, jealousy, perplexity, embarrassment, vexation, anger, mortification, gladness, and shame (Mallett 2018). In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Darwin set out to analyse the origin and function of these and other forms of emotional expression, and to show how far these were common to human and nonhuman animals (Darwin 1998; see also Richardson 2013a). Yet he was undecided whether the relation between a mental state and its expression was causative, or merely associative. In an early notebook he proposed that emotions could be described as “effects on the mind, accompanying certain bodily actions,” but then

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hesitated over the implied sequence: “but what first caused this bodily action. if the emotion was not first felt?” (Darwin 1987, 581–582) When in A Pair of Blue Eyes Elfride responds to Stephen’s declaration of love with a “flush of triumph” (Hardy 1998a, 67), is this a thought or feeling that is then expressed through the body, or an involuntary bodily event of which the mind then takes cognisance? Yet that way of putting the question invites a dualistic account of the relation between mind and body, to which both Darwin and Hardy were resistant. In 1882, Hardy transcribed part of a Spectator review arguing that the external “framework” of the universe might have “inner qualities analogous to those which we call mental” (Hardy 1985b, 148). The quoted passage refers to the theory advanced by the mathematician W. K. Clifford, in an essay “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves,” that while a molecule of inorganic matter does not possess consciousness, it does possess “a small piece of mind-stuff [. . .] When matter takes the complex form of a living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition” (Clifford 1878, 57–67). Rather than distinct, mind and matter are continuous: two modes of the same thing. Hardy returned to this idea in his epic poem The Dynasts (1904–1908), but it also informs the presentation of his characters as embodied beings. When Gabriel Oak touches Fanny Robin’s wrist, and feels it “beating with a throb of tragic intensity” (Hardy 1993, 54), the phrasing recalls his observation of the stars earlier, twinkling like the “throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse” (15); when Angel kisses Tess, the acceleration of her pulse makes her part of “the great passionate pulse of existence” (Hardy 2003, 158). Such moments in the fiction offer tentative support to Hardy’s speculation that the disenchanted world known to Victorian science might “[become] conscious with flux of time” (Hardy 1982, 298), and humanity no longer feel alienated within it. The examination of humanity’s place within the natural order takes on an extra urgency in Jude and Tess. Both novels reflect Hardy’s reading about the relation between heredity and environment, and its implications for human consciousness. Either because or despite the fact that Darwin had conceded in The Origin of Species that the laws governing inheritance and variation were as yet unknown, in the following decades novelists increasingly gave to the transmission of character the kind of attention they had once given to the transfer of property (Richardson 2013): among others, George Gissing (The Nether World, 1889), Sarah Grand (The Heavenly Twins, 1893, ↗ 27 Grand, The Heavenly Twins), and Grant Allen (The Woman Who Did, 1895). The debate took a step forward with August Weismann’s Essays upon Heredity (1889), which Hardy read in 1890 while at work on Tess. Weismann argued that the transmission of character was effected by “germ cells,” which passed intact from one generation to the next, impervious to external influence or individual effort. This accorded with the view set out earlier by the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, that our identity and destiny are innate within us, determined by our ancestral past rather than our own choices. In 1888, Hardy took extensive notes from Maudsley’s Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings:

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The individual brain is virtually the consolidate embodiment of a long series of memories; wherefore everybody, in the main lines of his thoughts, feelings, & conduct, really recalls the experiences of his forefathers. (Hardy 1985b, 201; Maudsley 1886, 318)

Tess has much the same thought, when she resists learning about history: “what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only – finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all” (Hardy 2003, 126). Portraits of her d’Urberville ancestors, earlier members of that “long row,” look down from the walls of Wellbridge Manor, where she and Angel stay on their wedding night; their features are recognisable in hers. When she strikes Alec across the mouth with a leather glove, the narrator observes that “Fancy” might regard this as “the recrudescence of a trick in which her armed progenitors were not unpractised” (Hardy 2003, 331), but Fancy here agrees with contemporary science of mind. There is, however, a still darker aspect to this. Maudsley’s work grounded psychology in physiology: mind did not exist outside the material brain. But since matter was subject to the laws of entropy, it followed that both body and mind, including the mental qualities we inherit from our forebears, were bound to decay. Tess’s father has the d’Urberville profile, but “a little debased” (Hardy 2003, 8); Angel Clare justifies his rejection of her with the belief that “Decrepit families postulate decrepit wills, decrepit conduct” (232). In Jude, the Fawley family appears locked into a similar pattern of inevitable decline: as Jude puts it, using Weismann’s term, “I have the germs of every human infirmity in me” (Hardy 1998b, 266). Once bring together, as Maudsley does, the laws of physics and the laws of heredity, and the extinction of the Fawley line, through Little Father Time’s murder of his siblings and his own suicide, has the same kind of inevitability as the future death of the sun. Yet to note the presence of hereditarian ideas in Hardy’s work is not to say that he endorsed them. Tess herself resists “the lure of pedigree” (Greenslade 1994, 157–160); Jude succumbs as much to the idea of a curse on the House of Fawley as to its real effects. The debate about heredity reflected an increasing readiness during the 1880s and 1890s to import into social science concepts drawn from biology, including Ray Lankester’s essay on Degeneration (1880), defined as the gradual adaptation of an organism to less rather than more complex conditions of life (Lankester 1880, 32–33) but quickly extended to the urban poor, and Francis Galton’s introduction of the term “eugenics” to designate the improvement of the racial stock by “judicious mating” (Galton 1883, 26). Hardy followed the debates closely, but he remained wary of the determinism that so often came with them. A lifelong admirer of John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, he continued to believe, or where he could not believe at least to hope, that it was within the power of each individual to form his or her own plan of life.

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7 The End of the Century In his “Discourse introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry,” delivered at the Royal Institution in 1802, Humphry Davy urged his listeners to approach nature not passively, but “as a master”: Science has done much for man, but [. . .] its sources of improvement are not yet exhausted; [. . .] and in considering the progressiveness of our nature, we may reasonably look forward to a state of greater cultivation and happiness than that we at present enjoy. (Davy 1839, 319)

That heroic confidence in humanity’s mastery over the world was never wholly lost in the ensuing years of the century, but it was increasingly chastened. Henry Knight’s misadventure on the cliff in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes may be read as a parable. It begins when Knight moves too near the edge, in order to demonstrate to Elfride how the wind striking the face of the rock surges upwards; minutes later, trapped on the cliff face, with the rain being driven upwards by those same currents, so that only his head and shoulders are dry, he reflects that the experimenter has become the subject of one of nature’s “experiment[s] in killing” (Hardy 1998a, 217). Humanity was a part of nature, not master over it, and like all other parts subject to the laws that science had worked to discover. In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895, ↗ 33 Wells, The Time Machine) the Traveller’s voyage into the future convinces him that “the growing pile of civilisation [is] only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end” (Wells 1995, 83). Neither Wells himself, who had a degree in zoology and in 1885 attended Huxley’s final series of lectures, nor any of the novelists considered in this essay, were quite so desponding about the achievements of the nineteenth century. But the science that was to greet the new century – the discovery of X-rays, radioactivity, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity – was both less accessible to non-specialists, and where it could be understood, still more disconcerting. How, and on what terms, to continue the two-way traffic between science and the novel was a question for a new generation of writers.

Bibliography Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. “Literature and Science.” 1882. Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. R. H. Super. Vol. 10. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1974. 53–73. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 1983. Bell, Charles. Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. London: John Murray, 1824. Brontë, Anne. Agnes Grey. 1847. Ed. Angeline Goreau. London: Penguin, 2004.

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Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1848. Ed. Stevie Davies. London: Penguin, 1996. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Stevie Davies. London: Penguin, 2006. Brontë, Charlotte. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Ed. Margaret Smith. Vol. 2: 1848–1851. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000. Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor. 1857. Ed. Heather Glen. London: Penguin, 1989. Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. 1849. Ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. 1853. Ed. Mark Lilly and Tony Tanner. London: Penguin, 1979. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Ed. Pauline Nestor. London: Penguin, 2003. Buckland, William. Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology. Vol. 1. London: William Pickering, 1836. Buckland, William. An Inquiry Whether the Sentence of Death Pronounced at the Fall of Man Included the Whole Animal Creation, or Was Restricted to the Human Race. London: John Murray, 1839. Carpenter, William. Principles of Mental Physiology. 1874. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Clifford, William Kingdom. “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves.” Mind 3.9 (1878): 57–67 Collins, Wilkie. Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time. 1883. Ed. Steve Farmer. Ontario: Broadview, 1996a. Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. 1868. Ed. Sandra Kemp. London: Penguin, 1998. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. 1860. Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford: OUP, 1996b. Combe, George. The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects. 1828. 3rd ed. Edinburgh: John Anderson, 1835. Connor, Steven. “All I Believed is True: Dickens under the Influence.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 10 (2010). Web. 22 May 2019. . Corton, Christine L. London Fog: The Biography. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870. Oxford: OUP, 2001. Dames, Nicholas. “‘The Withering of the Individual’: Psychology in the Victorian Novel.” A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 91–112. Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford: OUP, 2007. Danziger, Kurt. Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language. London: Sage, 1997. Darwin, Charles. Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844. Ed. Paul Barrett et al. London: British Museum and Cambridge UP, 1987. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 1871. Ed. Richard Dawkins. London: Gibson Square Books, 2003. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 1872. Ed. Paul Ekman. Oxford: OUP, 1998. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. 1859. Ed. Gillian Beer. Oxford: OUP, 1996. Davy, Humphry. Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy. Ed. John Davy. Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1839. DeWitt, Anne. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel. Cambridge: CUP, 2013. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Ed. Nicola Bradbury. London: Penguin, 2003. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861. Ed. Graham Law and Adrian J. Pennington. Peterborough: Broadview, 1998. Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Walter Dexter. Vol. 3: 1858–1870. London: Nonesuch, 1938. Dickens, Charles. Mudfog Papers and Other Contributions, in Bentley’s Miscellany. London: Richard Bentley, 1837–1838.

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Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. Dowden, Edward. “The ‘Scientific Movement’ and Literature.” 1877. Studies in Literature 1789–1877. Ed. Dowden. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1878. 85–121. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Ed. Margaret Reynolds. London: Penguin, 2008. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Ed. Terence Cave. London: Penguin, 2003. Eliot, George. Essays of George Eliot. Ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. Vol. 6: 1874–1877. New Haven: Yale UP, 1956. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. Ed. David Carroll. Oxford: OUP, 1997. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Ed. Gordon Haight and Dinah Birch. Oxford: OUP, 1996a. Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life. 1858. Ed. Thomas A. Noble. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Eliot, George. Silas Marner. 1861. Ed. Terence Cave. Oxford: OUP, 1996b. Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty, and its Development. London: Macmillan, 1883. Golinski, Jan. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel. Cambridge: CUP, 1994. Harcourt, William Vernon. First Report of the Proceedings, Recommendations, Transactions of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. York: Thomas Wilson and Sons, 1832. Hardy, Thomas. A Pair of Blue Eyes. 1873. Ed. Pamela Dalziel. London: Penguin, 1998a. Hardy, Thomas. Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Ed. R. L. Purdy and Michael Millgate. Vol. 3: 1902–1908. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. 1874. Ed. Suzanne B. Falck-Yi. Oxford: OUP, 1993. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Ed. Dennis Taylor. London: Penguin, 1998b. Hardy, Thomas. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Michael Millgate. London: Macmillan, 1985a. Hardy, Thomas. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Lennart A. Björk. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1985b. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. 1891. Ed. Tim Dolin. London: Penguin, 2003. Hardy, Thomas. Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings. Ed. Harold Orel. London: Macmillan, 1967. Hardy, Thomas. Two on a Tower. 1882. Ed. Sally Shuttleworth. London: Penguin, 1999. Hardy, Thomas. “The Science of Fiction.” 1891. Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Michael Millgate. Oxford: Clarendon, 2001. 106–110. Harrington, Anne. Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1989. Heyck, T. W. The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Hutton, Richard Holt. “From Miss Austen to Mr. Trollope.” Spectator 55 (1882): 1573–1574. Huxley, Thomas Henry. Science and Culture and Other Essays. London: Macmillan, 1888. Huxley, Thomas Henry. Scientific Memoirs. Ed. Michael Foster and E. Ray Lankester. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1898. James, Henry. “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation.” 1876. Partial Portraits. London: Macmillan, 1894. 65–93. Jones, Darryl. “‘Gone into Mourning . . . for the Death of the Sun’: Victorians at the End of Time.” Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes. Ed. Trish Ferguson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 178–195. Kennedy, Meegan. “The Victorian Novel and Medicine.” Rodensky 2013, 459–482. Lankester, E. Ray. Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism. London: Macmillan, 1880.

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Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy. Trans. Thomas Holcroft. London: William Tegg & Co, 1789. Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Lewes, George H. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series: The Foundations of a Creed. Vol. 1. London: Trübner & Co, 1874. Lewes, George H. “The Course of Modern Thought.” Fortnightly Review, New Series 21 (1877): 317–327. Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Mallett, Phillip. “The Novel Amid New Sciences.” The Cambridge History of the English Novel. Ed. Robert L. Caserio and Clement Hawes. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. 373–388. Mallett, Phillip, ed. Thomas Hardy in Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2013. Mallett, Phillip. “‘A woman’s flush of triumph lit her eyes’: Hardy, Darwin, and the Blush.” FATHOM 5 (2018). Web. 22 May 2019. Mansel, Henry L. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly Review 113 (1863): 481–514. Mantell, Gideon. The Wonders of Geology. 1838. 6th ed. Vol. 1. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848. Maudsley, Henry. Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co, 1886. Moynahan, Julian. “The Hero’s Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations.” Essays in Criticism 10. 1 (1960): 60–79. Myers, F. W. H. “Multiplex Personality.” Nineteenth Century 20 (1886): 648–656. Otis, Laura. “Howled Out of the Country: Wilkie Collins and H. G. Wells Retry David Ferrier.” Stiles 2007, 27–51. Otis, Laura, ed. Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Patmore, Coventry. “Thomas Hardy.” Courage in Politics and Other Essays, 1885–1896. Oxford: OUP, 1921. 132–137. Prichard, James Cowles. A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1835. Rauch, Alan. Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Reid, Julia. Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Richardson, Angelique, ed. After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013a. Richardson, Angelique. “Heredity.” Mallett 2013, 328–338. Rodensky, Lisa. The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Rodensky, Lisa, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. Oxford: OUP, 2013. Ross, Sidney. “Scientist: The Story of a Word.” Annals of Science 18 (1962): 65–85. Rylance, Rick. Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Secord, James A. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Oxford: OUP, 2014. Sedgwick, Adam. “Natural History of Creation.” Edinburgh Review 82 (1845): 1–85. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996. Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge: CUP, 1996.

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Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: CUP, 1984. Silver, Anna Krugovoy. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body. Cambridge: CUP, 2002. Smith, Jonathan. “The Victorian Novel and Science.” Rodensky 2013, 441–458. Snow, Charles P. The Two Cultures. Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Canto Classics, 2012. Spencer, Herbert. Principles of Psychology. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. London: Williams and Norgate, 1890. Stevenson, R. L. “A Chapter on Dreams.” Further Memories. By Stevenson. London: Heinemann, 1923. 41–53. Stiles, Anne. Introduction. Stiles 2007, 1–23. Stiles, Anne. ed. Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Stiles, Anne. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. Taylor, Jenny Bourne. “Obscure Recesses: Locating the Victorian Unconscious.” Writing and Victorianism. Ed. J. B. Bullen. London: Longman, 1997. 137–179. Taylor, Jenny Bourne. “Psychology.” Mallett 2013, 339–350. Thomson, William. “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat.” Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (1862): 388–393. Tougaw, Jason Daniel. Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel. London: Routledge, 2006. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. 1882. Ed. P. D. Edwards. Oxford: OUP, 1980. Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. 1857. Ed. Robin Gilmour. London: Penguin, 1994. Turner, Frank M. Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life. Cambridge: CUP, 1993. Tyndall, John. Fragments of Science. 6th ed. Vol. 1. London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1879. Weber, Max. Wissenschaft als Beruf. München: Duncker & Humblot, 1930. Weismann, August. “On Heredity.” 1883. Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems. By Weismann. Ed. Edward B. Poulton and Arthur E. Shipley. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1889. 67–106. Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. 1895. Ed. John Lawton. London: Everyman, 1995. West, Anna. Thomas Hardy and Animals. Cambridge: CUP, 2017.

Further Reading Cosslett, Tess. The “Scientific Movement” and Victorian Literature. Brighton: Harvester, 1982. Dowson, Gowan. “Literature and Science under the Microscope.” Journal of Victorian Culture 11.2 (2006): 301–315. Gossin, Pamela S. Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the PostDarwinian World. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Matus, Jill. L. “Emergent Theories of Victorian Mind Shock: From War and Railway Accident to Nerves, Electricity, and Emotion.” Stiles 2007, 163–183. Matus, Jill. L. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Nemesvari, Richard. Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Wood, Jane. Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction. Oxford: OUP, 2001.

Dianne F. Sadoff

2 Remediating Nineteenth-Century Narrative Abstract: In this chapter, I argue that remediation’s double logic of immediacy and mediation always already subtends cinematic practice, and that mid nineteenthcentury retrospective narrative supported this aesthetic’s emergence. However different the visual objects created by painters, computer artists, and filmmakers, all seek to present their products as improved versions of other media; cinema thus repurposes nineteenth-century narrative for new audiences. In a historical trajectory of the Victorian mediascape, visual images, print technologies, and protocinematic entertainments explode. By century’s end, visibility is no longer modeled on the natural process of seeing but on technological mediation by optical technology. Recent cognitive scholarship theorises the motion picture as a gateway to multisensory experience: spectators become active perceptual participants in the film’s material world, as elements of film style cue the viewer’s perceptual experiences. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations models this doubled logic as the retrospective narrator remediates past expressive acts and experiences, presenting his visualised memory scenes from the fictional autobiographer’s present. David Lean’s mise-enscène remediates Dickens’s double temporal logic, using auditory effects, eyeline match and low-angle shots, voice-over, and panoramic long takes to make the spectator feel anxiety and fear, and to take pleasure in the multisensory aesthetic. Keywords: Retrospective narration, remediation, multisensory aesthetic, optical technology, cinematic repurposing

The debates about adaptation have recently focused on fidelity aesthetics: filmmakers in the past, it has been said, respected a classic narrative even as they recreated it in a new medium. In the postmodern era, the shift away from heritage and classic-serial televisual styles means filmmakers tend to freely remediate, update, and repurpose classic nineteenth-century fiction for new, often niche, audiences. This opposition occludes a more nuanced historical trajectory which sketches the gradual emergence of mediation’s double logic in twentieth-century narrative film. Stressing fidelity’s puzzling project in an interview about his adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Alexander Baron said he sought to “keep the fundamental of the framework,” of the “showman opening his box of puppets and putting it away at the end,” yet found it “wasn’t possible” (qtd. in Giddings, Selby, and Wensley 1990, 103). The problem, he added, of “reproducing the tone, of fidelity in general, confronts you every time you dramatize a novel” (103). Likewise emphasising fidelity, Lindsay Doran and Emma Thompson hoped that “love[rs of]

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Jane Austen” would find their film of Sense and Sensibility faithful to the novel’s “humour and wisdom” (Thompson 1995, 16). Yet screenwriters and directors also identified issues of tenor and atmosphere as crucial to their work of adapting narrative for visual media, focusing not on cinematic genres, forms, and modes but on the adaptor’s power to shape observer experience. Avant-garde filmmaker Sally Potter, for example, sought not fidelity but a “live, cinematic form” (Potter 1995, 212), and so she “ruthless[ly]” (Donohue 2001, 58) altered Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1992) for the screen. Andrea Arnold’s “anti-heritage take” (Raphael 2011, 34) on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (2011) used untrained actors and long shots of sodden Yorkshire moors, to “make something very real and raw [. . .] happen” on screen (Mullen 2009, 19). Upending Potter’s and Arnold’s accent on live and raw remediations of nineteenth-century fiction, Marc Napolitano provocatively states that Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! “is in fact the real Dickens” (2014, 127). By focusing on the long history of remediation and using Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) as my case study, I will argue that remediation’s double logic of immediacy and mediation always already subtends cinematic practice, and that mid-nineteenth-century narrative supported and sustained this aesthetic’s emergence.

1 Re-theorising Adaptation and Remediation Adaptation now demands re-theorisation to serve filmmakers’ desire to reimagine film’s look and affective appeal to spectators. During the 1980s classic-serial vogue for the Victorian, Diarmud Lawrence, director of the 1987 BBC-TV classic serial of Vanity Fair, told Chris Wensley that an “adaptation [. . .] is not the novel,” but it “must be true” to the “flavours and the feelings of the novel” (Giddings, Selby, and Wensley 1990, 107–108). Lawrence sought to capture the novel’s tone and atmosphere, to imagine the reader’s taste for the story’s flavours, and to deliver an experience of its evoked feelings. Yet, according to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, remediation – the practice of transferring a tale from one medium to another – pursues a “double logic”: seeking to “achieve immediacy” for its viewers – Potter’s “live, cinematic form,” Arnold’s “something very real and raw” – new media, like some earlier forms, provide experiential immersion yet may also deny “the presence of the medium and the act of mediation” (1999, 11). Although Bolter and Grusin’s project discriminates between new digital and old analogue media, they nevertheless recognise the long history of remediation’s double logic. Renaissance painters deployed linear perspective and “realistic” lighting, they note, and millennial computer graphics specialists “mathematize[] linear perspective” and model “shading and illumination,” yet both “seek to put the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed,” creating immersion and seemingly erasing the process of mediation (1999, 11).

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But this double logic of remediation suggests that the millennial medium granting the observer’s apparent “wish for unmediated mediation” paradoxically proves to be a “highly mediated one” (Armstrong 1999, 14). However different the visual objects created by painters, computer graphics artists, and filmmakers, they all seek to present their products “as refashioned and improved versions of other media” (Armstrong 1999, 15). In their landmark book about early-to-mid twentieth-century Hollywood cinema, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson argue that classical form depends not on the media that displays it but upon story causality and character motivation. Central to their theory are plot and story comprehensibility (flashbacks, durational strategies, and crosscuts), spatial organisation (framing, frontality, roundness, and continuity editing), shot establishment and scene building, development, and sequencing and a range of non-disruptive differentiation (e.g. film noir’s challenges to style, story, and heterosexual romance) (2006, 12–95). Although these film historians think about individual character formation and narrative conflict, acting styles, framing devices (e.g. the close-up as opposed to the panorama), technology, and innovation, they do not address adaptation or the ways film transforms fiction for the screen (157–193, 251–260). In his twentieth-century structuralist theory of adaptation, however, Brian McFarlane distinguishes between the ways film ‘transfers’ some elements from fiction and ‘adapts’ others. The filmmaker who shoots a faithful adaptation must, McFarlane maintains, “seek to preserve the major cardinal functions” of his or her source novel – as did Lawrence with the BBC’s Vanity Fair (1996, 14). For McFarlane, the cardinal functions or “hinge-points” of narrative, which introduce to the story moments of “risk” and provide “‘chronological functionality,’” may be transferred from one medium to another; the “satellites,” which elaborate without disturbing the “narrative logic,” and which “root cardinal functions in a particular kind of reality” and introduce “‘areas of safety, rests, luxuries,’” require “adaptation proper” (13, 195). The transferred story events drive the “narrative, which functions irrespective of medium” (21). Yet “character, atmosphere, tone, [and] point of view,” which are “intransigently tied to the medium [that] displays them” (196), demand adaptation, and it is here that the filmmaker invests a story with his or her vision, for his or her target audience, and reproduces in a different medium “thematic and affective elements of the novel” (197). The “kind of adaptation the film aims to be” (22), McFarlane notes, determines how faithfully it “reworks the original” (202). Yet more experimental films disrupt the features of classical Hollywood storytelling, often calling attention to their own remediation. Hypermediated product combines the experience of immediacy, or immersion, with the logic of hypermediacy, in which multiplied signs of mediation (appropriated bits of text, graphics, split screens, voice-over of source narrative) “rupture” an illusion of immediacy, acknowledging and making visible multiple acts of representation (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 34). This self-conscious text “undercut[s] the desire for immediacy” (34),

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creating in the spectator an attitude of play or subversion as he or she “acknowledge[s] the medium as a medium” (41) and takes “delight in that acknowledgment” (42). Yet historically we can see that the double logic of mediation rather than hypermediation drives film narrative and shapes its audience’s experience. For Linda Hutcheon, media sculpt the remediated text, and her theory suggests mediation’s double logic. In Hutcheon’s model of cultural transmission, historical change becomes a figurative Darwinian survival of the fittest, a conceptual blend of genealogical predecessors and descendants, which demands that Hutcheon reintroduce a version of fidelity criticism. She confesses that “some copying-fidelity is needed” for consumers to recognise a text’s predecessor and thus to take pleasure in a palimpsestic play with original and copy (Hutcheon 2006, 167). Hutcheon likewise diversifies the media she studies by including, along with film, analysis of opera, video games, interactive fictions, and “expanded cinema,” of which the last three may allow the observer to “control the way the story unfolds” (137). “If you think adaptation can be understood by using novels and films alone, you’re wrong,” she notes (xi). Her attention to spectatorial experience, moreover, allies her with an emergent cognitive mode of media studies. Luis Rocha Antunes’s recent cognitive scholarship theorises the motion picture as a gateway to multisensory experience. Thinking about spectatorship as well as medium, genres, and modes, Antunes argues that filmmakers deploy signs of “thermoception (perception of temperature), nociception (perception of pain) and the vestibular sense (perception of orientation and balance)” (2016, 45) to cue spectators’ perceptual affects and shoot character-mediation (facial and bodily expressions) to stimulate viewers’ perceptual inference-making (4–45). For Antunes, spectators are “active perceptual participants” in the film’s material world as elements of film style “cue” the viewer’s perceptual experiences (6). Arnold’s film of Wuthering Heights, he argues, newly configures the story world’s materiality “through the senses” (2015, 2); for the film’s spectators, the “haptic and phenomenal appeal of human bodies and the landscape” evokes a “sensation of experiential immersion” (3). Arnold’s film thus “create[s] a simulation,” inviting the spectator to close his or her eyes and “open [. . .] other perceptual senses” (3). The multisensory imaginary, activated by light, colour, and sound design, enables the spectator to “generate mental images across different senses” (2016, 35–37). Because the human senses are interconnected, interdependent, and synergistic, they together mediate the “mode of operation of numerous brain circuits” and constitute the “substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion” (67; see 58–67). Shooting with minimal lighting and seemingly natural sound design to encourage tactile and auditory perceptions, Arnold cuts to the core of Brontë’s narrative: the feel of plant and animal at Wuthering Heights, the wind’s whoosh across the moors, as the camera “witnesses” the characters’ experience and “delivers” it to the spectator (Antunes 2015, 5). Despite his having read the spectator speculatively from the film, Antunes finds that not the medium but “the experience is the message” (2016, 13).

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2 The Victorian Mediascape Adaptation and remediation did not begin with the new digital media. We can see the double logic of mediation suggested or implied by media long before the appearance of postmodern remediation. John Plunkett argues that the Victorian “royal culture industry” produced and disseminated images of the young Virgin Queen “on a diverse assortment of media,” from “engravings and magic lantern shows to street ballads and photographs” (2003, 2–3). He traces this cultural circulation back to Civil War newsbooks, which newly articulated the “aesthetics of the monarchy and the role of the press”; fashioned by both parliamentarian and royalist factions, newsbooks helped produce the modern English newspaper, with its adherence to “democratic” and liberal ideas (3). The emergence of “large urban markets, gradually rising incomes and literacy levels, and the transport infrastructure provided by the railways” fuelled the expansion of print and visual products (4). In the late 1820s and early 1830s, John Murray’s The Family Library sought to speak to “the common reader” – an entirely new cultural notion (Bennett 1976, 141). The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s publications pioneered serial periodical publication, and Archibald Constable’s Miscellany serialised inexpensive non-fiction (Feltes 1986, 10–12). Here, technology and culture made common cause, as industrialisation and “the mechanization of production” speeded up printing and made newspapers, books, and periodicals “increasingly affordable” (Plunkett 2003, 4). As government regulation of the radical news press waned in the 1830s, a “potential mass readership” emerged (4). Cheap serial fiction and periodicals, with multiple target audiences, became increasingly popular. A similar historical expansion of visual-image reproduction occurred throughout the 1820s and 1830s, from steel-plate engraving’s displacement of woodcut illustration and copper engravings, through the establishment of lithography and the development of the illustrated press in the 1840s. In late 1820s France, Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce shot the first rudimentary photographs. In late 1830s England, William Henry Fox Talbot “developed the technique for ‘photogenic drawing,’” which participated in what I have been calling the double logic of mediation; Fox Talbot’s technology, Nancy Armstrong notes, “fulfilled the wish for unmediated mediation,” yet the “medium that granted the wish for unmediated mediation would [likewise] prove a highly mediated one” (1999, 14). This technology “simultaneously incited and thwarted a historically new desire to make contact with the world itself” and created an “archival desire” for “documentary evidence” (15). When applied to potentially criminal individuals in the new human sciences, the “image usurped the position of the individual body as the basis for legibility” (19) in an “extensive and systematic reversal of original and copy” (22). Plunkett likewise theorises this paradox of the archive, this uncanny reversal of original and copy, when he notes that “[i]t was not that Victoria’s image was disseminated through photographs”; the “royal image itself became photographic” (2003, 7).

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Like visual-image and print technologies, proto-cinematic entertainments expanded throughout the long nineteenth century, and mediation’s double logic emerges in the surveys of this prehistory. Between 1810 and 1840, a newly uprooted vision disrupted the “stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura,” by which the hand reproduced tracings produced by the eye (Crary 1992, 14). This disruption, Armstrong argues, accounts for Fox Talbot’s 1839 move away from camera obscura toward early photography (1999, 13). Yet Jonathan Crary argues that prior to photography’s appearance, a new kind of observer and a “new field of serially produced objects” helped reshape the “territory on which signs and images circulat[ed] and proliferate[d]” (1992, 13). The new valuation of visual experience produced an “unprecedented mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding site or referent” (14). Both Armstrong and Crary, then, challenge the notion that visual scenes appeared in print or graphic media as realistic, and that the double logic of mediation subtends nineteenth-century realism. For Crary, the subject’s reorganisation in the early nineteenth century produced a craving for media that “effectively annihilate[d] a real world [. . .] and shaped a new kind of observer-consumer” (1992, 14). Armstrong’s “history of mediation” problematised mimetic paradigms so that, for her, “mediation began to constitute the very subject and object it presumed to mediate” (1999, 30). Indeed, the “paradox of realism,” she notes, means that the “desire to get beyond the image intensified the love of images” (122): again, the double logic of mediation. The images that constituted mid-to-late nineteenth-century subjects and objects anticipated moving pictures, as the eye’s perceptual apparatus was amplified and extended outside the body. Thomas Alva Edison’s invention and Méliès’s and the Lumière Brothers’ first moving pictures thus cap a century of experimentation in visual entertainment. Media in the 1790s – the magic lantern, panorama, phantasmagoria, and Eidophusikon – used light and sound effects to picture rural and metropolitan panoramic scenes. These early media awed, agitated, or alarmed spectators as dead celebrities paraded across invisible screens or living figures wasted to skeletons; as spectacular avalanches crashed, volcanoes spewed, or St Paul’s burned. Like the phantasmagoria, early nineteenth-century media “moved entertainment a step closer to the cinema” (Altick 1978, 219); the diorama, pioneered in 1822 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in partnership with Charles Bouton, projected picturesque scenes through a “rudimentary camera shutter” (169). These technologies of the visible shaped the observer’s look by offering the body virtual mobility. As the look became virtual, the observer became more immobile. Only the early nineteenth-century diorama literally mobilised by technologically turning the observer’s body; as he or she viewed in sequence two tableaux, an interior scene and a landscape, the diorama transformed him or her into “a component of the machine” (Friedberg 1993, 28; see also Crary 1999, 113). By the 1890s, as the diorama became residual, the moving-image projector emerged: the Kinetoscope, which moved film on spools in the apparatus’s interior, appeared first; later, the

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Theatrograph, the time machine (invented seemingly to shoot H. G. Wells’s science fiction novels The Time Machine, 1895, and The Invisible Man, 1897), and the cinematograph, which, when showing The Arrival of a Train (1896), produced in its spectators panic and awe or “unease but not shock,” depending on the cinematic situation (Marcus 2007, 77; see also 22–23, 44–51, 69–77). By the century’s end, “visibility” had been displaced by “visuality,” a seeing no longer modelled on the “natural process of seeing” but on technological mediation, on an optical apparatus’s unseen activity (Armstrong 1999, 76). And movement had become “‘the only real thing,’” as the moving picture represented realism only when the picture was in motion (Marcus and Bradshaw 2016, 2). This quick genealogy or prehistory of film adaptation, its dependence on notions of visuality, subjectivity, and mobility, points toward the double logic of mediation. Yet retrospection in nineteenth-century narrative is always already a form of mediation: playing between temporal moments, memory constitutes visual scenes that deploy the dynamic of a double logic. Film appropriates that double logic by serving the spectator’s desire for immersion and for mediation. Antunes’s rethinking of film’s power to shoot a landscape as a simulation of the real, of the camera’s witness of characters’ experience and its delivery to spectators of immersive experience, suggests that some mid-twentieth-century filmmakers had already begun to imagine film as multisensory and as delivering a story’s double logic, and that mid-nineteenthcentury narrative supported and sustained their effort to do so.

3 Case Study: Great Expectations as Fiction and on Film In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), the structure of retrospection operates the fictional autobiography’s double logic: the expressive speech in the storytelling present recounts the feelings that belonged to the boy, as the adult narrator writes about that past. The retrospective narrator thus rethinks or remediates past acts and experience, presenting his visualised memory scenes in his present tense, even as the novelist deploys past tense. When Pip claims he “often served [Mrs. Joe] as a connubial missile” (Dickens 2006, 29), the metaphor and vocabulary, which identify Pip’s body as pawn in a marital struggle, belong to the fictional speaker, the adult Pip, although his subjective affective experience – his terror about the Tickler – is located in his childhood past. Pip’s narrative depends upon the double logic of retrospection, which immerses the reader in the boy’s youthful fears and wishes, even as it cues the reader to recognise the adult narrator’s more mature assessments. The retrospective narrator mediates between character and reader, even as the reader is affectively located in Pip’s childish space.

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Indeed, the distinction between adult self-reflection and childhood experience everywhere energises this first-person retrospective narration. When the convict turns him upside down, Pip’s perspective creates a proto-cinematic moment of tilt and roll, a spatial dislocation from the perceived fictional scene recovered by retrospection: When the church came to itself – for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet – when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling [. . .]. He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped over its own weather-cock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright position on the top of the stone [. . .]. (25–26)

Pip’s language identifies this scene as having been experienced by a naïve and frightened child and, in his final position on top of the tombstone, he seeks to stabilise for himself and the reader a sense of the world’s being out of kilter, which the topsy-turvy encounter with the convict produced. In this passage, the boy’s sense of terror is spoken in the narrator’s present, sometimes wry voice. Cued by his words “I say,” the adult speaks from his narrating present moment, but the experiencing boy “was trembling,” as the present and past tenses capture the uncanny logic of temporal doubling in the retrospective narration. As the narrator, Pip explains this logic: “In the little world in which children have their existence [. . .], there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice [. . .]; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter” (Dickens 2006, 75–76). Scale and perspective cause spatial distortion, Pip claims: the child misperceives the sizes of things and so misapprehends affects proper not only to things but to perceived slights or hurts, as well. When the boyish character Pip recalls his first visit to Satis House, he narrates his youthful adventures to an admiring Joe, Mrs. Joe, and Pumblechook: If they had asked me any more questions I should undoubtedly have betrayed myself, for I was even then on the point of mentioning that there was a balloon in the yard, [. . .] my invention being divided between that phenomenon and a bear in the brewery. [. . .] Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all round the kitchen in helpless amazement, I was overtaken by penitence. (81)

Yet Pip’s word “now” refers to a moment before the present moment of the narrator’s speech, recalling when, as a youth, he told these tall tales, and his “then” refers to the boy’s immediately past experience, the moment behind the time of young Pip’s account of the wonders of Satis House. This temporal doubling makes us sympathetic with the guilt-ridden boy even as the adult narrator distances the reader from that boy’s imaginative grandiosity. Pip’s story prominently features adult language about fabrication or invention – forgery, counterfeiting, swindlers, self-swindlers – that retrospectively reassesses

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Pip’s youthful misrecognitions. As he runs across the moors with Mrs. Joe’s pork pie, Pip fancies that objects run and animals speak, that the “gates and dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, ‘A boy with Somebody-else’s pork pie! Stop him!’ The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes and steaming out of their nostrils, ‘Holloa, young thief!’” (35–36). After he has mysteriously acquired his great expectations, Pip recalls himself, as a boy, spying Jaggers’s office skylight, “eccentrically patched like a broken head, and the distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had twisted themselves to peep down at me through it” (162). Here, Pip blends a recalled scene of London buildings and attributes the ability of perception to them, as though glass were a distorting lens capable of generating the boy’s feeling that misshapen things in the world, in this case buildings, might stare at him, single him out, accuse him of criminal taint. As these passages show, Pip’s language often includes the phrase “as if,” which opens up the boy’s richly imaginative world even as the adult retells its events. These words seem to enable the reader to see the world of the novel through Pip’s eyes. Yet visuality here cannot be rendered as visibility. Because the phrase “as if” is spoken by Pip as a narrator about what his childish self felt and saw, it inflects his story’s grammar strongly toward past events that might have happened but not been realised fully or at all, or that reveal conditions that appear false or improbable. When apprenticed by the Justices, for example, the boy imagined and the narrator captures the scene as an irreality, for young Pip surmises that Pumblechook pushed him, “as if I had at the moment picked a pocket or fired a rick,” that Pumblechook held him, “as if we had looked in [at the court] on our way to the scaffold” (Dickens 2006, 112). But Pip did not fire a rick, nor was he en route to his own hanging but to the forge, despite the rebellious, revolutionary, and criminal scenes spun out here through the energy of the narrator’s recounting of the retrospective look. These words testify, moreover, to the presence of childish images and concepts within Dickens’s mature, disillusioned world view; they point to the persistence of juvenile feelings as a source of Dickens’s magical invention (Miller 1958, 152). The phrase “as if” also betrays Pip’s disavowed feelings of dread, terror, and anxiety. He fears, for example, possible violence against his young self: the man with the file at the Jolly Bargeman acts, Pip imagines, as though he were “cocking his eye, as if he were expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun, [. . .] as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last” (Dickens 2006, 87–88). Orlick, jealous of Pip’s promotion at the forge, lunges at him “as if he were going to run [a red hot poker] through my body,” but instead he “whisked it round my head, laid it on the anvil, hammered it out – as if it were I, I thought, and the sparks were my spirting blood” (119). Here, Pip’s interjection “I thought” creates a selfreflection about the past fear of being hurt, even as he utters these words in the present, enabling the adult Pip’s recalled terror and our sympathy with his past dread.

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Likewise, the phrase “as if” expresses Pip’s denied boyish desires to harm those who demean and declass him. During his second visit to Satis House, Pip follows the pale young gentleman, “as if [he] had been under a spell”; the boy, Pip recalls, commands “‘[c]ome and fight,’” while “eyeing my anatomy as if he were minutely choosing his bone”; Pip expresses surprise when, after the first blow, he sees the boy “lying on his back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and his face exceedingly foreshortened” (Dickens 2006, 99–101). Here, the phrase “as if” protects Pip from the necessity to claim his own violent acts as belonging to him, yet expresses his inability to act in the face of the possible violence he imagines that upper-class characters may wield against him. He recalls in the chapter that follows the fight, for example, “I felt that the pale young gentleman’s blood was on my head, and that the Law would avenge it” (102). Earlier, during his first visit to Satis House when Estella takes pleasure in causing the boy’s tears, she treats him, he imagines, “as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace” (75). Pip retaliates: “I saw a figure hanging [. . .] by the neck” on a great wooden beam, a form in “yellow white [and] faded trimmings,” beckoning “as if she were trying to call to me” (77). Terrified, Pip runs from and then toward this accusatory yet helpless effigy of Miss Havisham, but finds “no figure there” (77). Here, the phrase “as if” outs Pip’s hallucination as a disavowed wish; it mixes instances of looking with retrospectively recaptured feelings of gloomy satisfaction, of delight in abjection, and retaliatory, if unconscious, violence. David Lean’s mid-century film adaptation of Great Expectations (1946) witnesses the young boy’s terror and delivers his experience to the spectator, much as Dickens’s narrator had immersed the reader in fear and anxiety and conveyed those experiences to the reader. Lean also shoots Pip’s rhetoric of “as if,” since the miseen-scène remediates the narrator’s double temporal logic. The film opens with a classic visual metaphor for film adaptation: as the camera tracks in to the novel’s first pages, John Mills as the adult Pip voices over the novel’s famous first lines: “So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip” (Dickens 2006, 23; DeBona 1992, 79–80; MacKay 1985, 127). As the pages turn, the wind whooshes and a bird screams on the soundtrack, and Lean dissolves to a panorama of grey marshes; in long shot, a tiny boy crosses a horizontal landscape to frame right, the scene punctuated by two vertical structures, toward one of which – a gallows – the boy runs, moving from background to foreground. Lean’s mise-en-scène dissolves, as the boy scrambles over a stone hedgerow and the spectator experiences the film’s first “as if” moment. Using a sensory approach to the scene, Lean includes visual and auditory elements throughout the opening sequence that ends in the cemetery: on the soundtrack, the wind blows, a tree creaks as boughs stretch across the frame’s top. The spectator watches the boy plant flowers on his parents’ grave; on the soundtrack, a bird squeaks, and the boy looks up at tree limbs in fright. Via eyeline match and in low-angle shot, the spectator sees the tree from Pip’s perspective. Lean cuts to Pip, then to a glance-object shot of a tree trunk with frowning face. Here, Lean’s

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film witnesses Pip’s sensory experience as he imagines the tree grimacing at him, and the sequence delivers to the spectator the boy’s seeming sense of loneliness and anxiety. Lean intensifies figural and spectatorial anxiety via vestibular and nociceptive perception when he tracks to the boy’s running encounter with the criminal. Shot in closeup, the boy screams in terror, the convict’s hand on his mouth; Lean cuts to close-up of the convict: “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat.” The man turns Pip upside down, the boy’s frightened face shot in close-up through the convict’s legs; cut to close-up of his feet, being shaken. As chains clank, the criminal pops the boy on a tombstone. “Know what wittles is?” the convict asks, lowering the boy backwards toward the ground. Here, Lean evokes the spectator’s vestibular perception of orientation and balance to arouse his or her perceptual experience; he or she, too, feels the boy’s fear when the world turns upside down and then seemingly slips from under his or her bodily frame. In these scenes, Lean’s figural shot-reverse shots, the facial close-ups and bodily expressions, also stimulate viewers’ perceptual inference-making: we read the grimace, now on the convict’s face and the fear on Pip’s. As Pip runs toward home, a tree creaks, wind blows, and the spectator experiences the boy’s desire to run, too, away from the convict toward home. As the next sequence opens, Pip sprints across the frame’s background to the left, while the wind howls, and his footfall tramps echo on the soundtrack. At the forge, Joe tells the hard-breathing Pip that Mrs. Joe is on the rampage. She whips the boy’s backside, delivering to the spectator a nociceptive perception of pain; cut to close-up of Joe, wincing with every sounding but out-of-frame lash. Fade to black. Lean shoots a series of classic “as if” moments, deploying voice-over and minimal lighting, when Pip steals a pork pie from Mrs. Joe’s pantry. As Pip peeks out his bedroom window, Lean cuts to his view of the moors; threatening music swells on the soundtrack and the convict’s threats voice over as Pip pulls the blankets over his head. Here, Lean again evokes the spectator’s nociceptive perception of pain, as the camera witnesses Pip’s fear of the convict and his figurative mother. Cut to Pip sneaking down squeaky stairs, as the voiced-over phrase, “Wake up, Mrs. Joe, wake up” whispers the boy’s fear of being caught. As Pip opens the cupboard door, Lean shoots over his shoulder, placing the spectator in the small thief’s space. Cut to a close-up of Pip’s face, looking into the pantry, as the boy and the spectator, now in opposing spatial positions, stare at a dead hare hanging in the depth plane’s front, its eyes glassy. In the next scene, Pip runs across the moors to the convict, as “You’re a thief, Pip; you’ll be sent to the hulks” breathes on the soundtrack. In another classic “as if” moment, the running Pip spots a cow, shot in close-up, who, in hilarious bovine voice-over, accuses “‘Holloa, young thief!’” After Pip delivers the pie, the convict files his manacles and the rasping sound follows him, as Pip disappears into the mist. Shooting the theft in minimal nighttime light and the moors in fog, Lean asks the spectator to open his or her senses, to listen to voice-over, to feel anxiety and fear, to take pleasure in the multisensory aesthetic.

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After the film’s multisensory opening, the doubled narratives of love and guilt disrupt the immersion its spectator experienced. As the film ends, however, Lean’s mise-en-scène returns to sensory immersion and to retrospective voice-over, which remediates Dickens’s doubled temporal logic. Lean shoots again in minimal light, simulating the glow thrown by Pip’s candle and in dusk at Satis House. He again uses voice-over to cue the spectator’s auditory perception and to conjure up and repeat the retrospective narration’s double logic. When Pip returns to Satis House, Lean voices over phrases Pip heard Estella speak when he first visited: “What name?”; “Pumblechook”; “Quite right.” John Mills as the mature Pip, smiling ruefully, once more opens the squeaky gate, enters, and looks around the garden, hearing, in Jean Simmons’s voice-over, “Come in Pip.” He looks up at the clock tower, shot from the boy’s low angle, as Martita Hunt voices over Miss Havisham’s earlier words: “I know nothing of the days of the week, nothing of the weeks of the year.” In voice-over, Estella scolds “Don’t loiter, boy,” and the adult Pip opens the squeaking door. Cut to his backlit figure, black silhouette framed by the open doorway, with brightly lit garden in the background; he enters the hall and repeats the boy’s youthful gesture, putting his hat on the mantelpiece. As Pip again walks up the stairs with a candle, Jaggers voices over the words he spoke on Pip’s second filmic visit: “Whom have we here? A boy of the neighborhood, eh?” Pip recalls and again hears, as does the spectator, Estella’s demeaning phrase, “he is a common laboring boy.” As Pip reaches Miss Havisham’s room and opens the door, Lean cuts from his surprised face, with his figure in medium shot, to the adult Estella (Valerie Hobson), seated in Miss Havisham’s boudoir. Yet Lean plays fast and loose with the novel’s conclusion, rewriting Dickens’s original unhappy ending as well as his revised ambiguous ones (Carlisle 2006, 440–441). Julian Moynahan rightly declares the ending “bad and false – strictly movieland” (1981, 151). Lean’s Pip returns to Satis House to denounce Estella’s intention to become her dead guardian as, sitting in Miss Havisham’s chair, Estella faces her adoptive mother’s props on the vanity – the same gloves, Bible, brush, pearls, and mirror but now without cobwebs and ready for use. Proclaiming himself Estella’s saviour, Pip screams “I have come back, Miss Havisham, to let in the sunlight”: he tears drapes from the windows, dust blowing, light flooding the frame. The music swells, cueing spectatorial pleasure in Pip and Estella’s potential coupling: “We belong to each other; let’s start again, together.” Yet the spectator cannot disavow the immersive experience of darkness barely lit by candlelight, of dust swirling around room, of the voice-over’s uncanny temporal doubling, the character’s wry pleasure, the spectator’s immersion in the mediated image. After avowing their love, nevertheless, the sweethearts exit the house and garden and, as they look back for the last time, close the iron gate behind them. For most of the students I teach in my seminar on Dickens and film, Lean’s ending destroys his adaptation, damaging the opening’s claim to authenticity. Although Lean announces his intention to shoot a film faithful to its source novel, the finale undercuts and undoes remediation’s double logic. Lean

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looks toward a multisensory aesthetic, then, even as his film also anticipates another form of the Dickens legacy, the novel’s cultural commodification.

4 Great Expectations as Cultural Commodity In the nineteenth century, the emergence of large urban markets, gradually rising incomes and literacy levels, and the growing railway infrastructure fuelled the expansion of print and visual products. An emergent industrialisation, in tandem with mechanised production, made newspapers, books, and periodicals increasingly affordable, as technology speeded up production and dissemination of print cultural products. N. N. Feltes locates The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837) at the “take off” moment when the “commodity text” began to supplant the “petty-commodity mode” of book production, as surplus value began to constitute the writer as author, and series production started to engage the swelling bourgeois audience (1986, 8–9). During the long nineteenth century, struggles between publishers and booksellers, the emergence and decline of Mudie’s and other libraries, the “appearance of new publishers,” and the “death of the three-decker” novel were “determinate elements” of the crisis that produced a late-century “buyer’s market” in books and periodicals and a concomitant downward pricing structure (Feltes 1986, 76–79). By the mid-tolate twentieth century, the communication revolution had accelerated the tempo of cultural production, had remediated print on a variety of screens from television to computer to smart phone. As a result, computers may now hurtle digitalised cultural products around the globe or close to home, as dissemination hastens reception and as moving image technologies quicken not only transport infrastructures but human bodies: galvanise nerves, muscles, and senses; arouse anxiety, fear, terror, and pleasure. The observer may now be ‘moved’ without having to move, as postmodernism hastens to its next periodised juncture or spatialised platform. And, of course, money (or its aliases, such as bitcoin) changes hands or terminals at every stage, since capital, too, is increasingly on the move in the computer age. As Jay Clayton reminds us, “Dickens is perhaps the most ‘postmodern’ Victorian writer” (2003, 152). Clayton traces Dickens’s links to postmodernism via his location at the blacking factory, a historical site characteristic of early capitalism; his fictional critique of emerging capitalism’s bureaucratic institutions in Bleak House (1852–1853, ↗ 16 Dickens, Bleak House) and Little Dorrit (1855–1857); and his eccentric “dispersed and decentered” characters (1991, 186–188). Bemoaning Dickens’s apparent absence from postmodern theory, Clayton stages a confrontation between postmodernism and new historicism, an imagined debate that would “force us to be more historical about the political assumptions that inform our historicist criticism” (1991, 195), including “issues of social, economic, political, or cultural development” (192). I will trace some recent filmic adaptations and material cultural spin-offs of Dickens to

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argue that postmodernism appropriates remediation’s double logic, marketing its objects as products for consumption. Film adaptations of Great Expectations since Lean’s might be called postmodern because, located in a later historical moment of late capitalism, they define different parameters of cinematic practice for writers’, directors’, and stars’ cultural activities. Although cinema has no tenses and enunciation – that is, the scene you see when you are watching always takes place in the present –, Lean used voice-over to signify past and repetitive acts and events, motions, and emotions. Yet postmodern filmmakers adapt Dickens for a turn-of-the-century moment drenched with anxiety about shifting gender and career expectations, rising income inequality, globalising economies, and a failure of historical memory and its doubled temporal logic. Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998) modernises Pip’s quest for fame, wealth, and sexual bliss for young millennial spectators unaware of cinematic genealogies. Here, Miss Havisham becomes, in Anne Bancroft’s Miss Dinsmoor, a flashily costumed and made-up harridan; Satis House is Paradiso Perdito, a Spanish equivalent of ‘paradise lost’. Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella announces the film’s historical moment, linking the filmic 1980s – a gilded-age decade of leveraged buyouts and exorbitant spending – with liberated sexual mores, but without the self-reflexivity associated with the uncanny logic of temporal doubling. Cuarón’s Estella is a 1980s liberated girl, seeking sex when she wants it and, when she is done, walking out on Finn, a renamed Pip who sketches rather than narrates. When Finn draws the presumably naked bad-girl sexpot Estella, Cuarón fetishises the female body, shooting body parts rather than the whole nude. Her back to Finn and the spectator, Paltrow unbuckles her bra, then, as the camera tilts down her body, drops her spandex miniskirt and, camera still tilting down, her panties. Here, Cuarón successfully shoots the male gaze as, in shot-reverse shot, we look at Finn looking at Estella, remediating her naked body, but touching the nipples and pubis only on paper. The film paradoxically criticises Hollywood for its exploitation of the nude female body. Yet Cuarón is complicit with such cashing in, for he, too, markets, even as he pans, star images. In the scene in which the vulgar and trashy Miss Dinsmoor puts on her makeup, Cuarón uses quick cuts and mirrored images, as Finn and the spectator watch her apply foundation, mascara, and flashy red lipstick; turning to Finn and to the spectator, she hoots, “I’ve gone red.” Shooting her look at herself in the magnifying mirror, Cuarón highlights her costume in grotesque extreme closeup: red-haired wig, rubber-mask wrinkled skin, inked in beauty spot, garish eye makeup. This freakish star image commodifies the performer’s face and body, advertising the making and marketing of artistic celebrity. Yet it also winks at the knowing spectator, announcing the screenplay’s collusion with the Hollywood remarketing – even ripping off – of a cultural icon: the star who played the sexually starved Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), now aged. Cuarón’s settings transmute the English marshes into Gulf-coast Florida and turn London into the art capital of the world, New York City, where Finn becomes

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an instant superstar. The aptly titled “Here Comes Success” plays on the soundtrack as Finn enters a gallery showing his work, especially the Estella sketches, and we watch as critics praise, society girls coo, and fans adore. And everyone got the memo reminding them to wear green, since the costumes, walls, drawings, and floor have been grotesquely colorised. But Finn’s artistic success ultimately proves due solely to Jaggers’s advertising and marketing; his star image is just that, an empty likeness. Here, urban art markets appear a hoax, a ruse to blind Finn – and the spectator? – to the intricate web of culture, the urban marketplace, and metropolitan metageographies of consumption. Based solely on a manufactured stardom in the cosmopolitan megalopolis, Finn’s faux fame updates Dickens’s ambivalent 1860s take on masculine ambition, sexual obsession, and cultural celebrity. Sarah Phelps and Brian Kirk’s 2011 BBC dramatisation borrows Lean’s conception and Cuarón’s opening shots, as the convict emerges from the sea and uncanny music on the soundtrack spooks the spectator. Track from tombstone to the boy, tearing dead brush from his parents’ grave; alarmed by a tree creaking, by bells from the ships at anchor, he runs from the graveyard – with hard breathing panting on the soundtrack – only to be knocked down by the criminal who lurks below a bridge. Yet Phelps writes after the ‘Great Recession’ wrecked Britons’ and Americans’ financial expectations, and her take on the novel makes Jaggers’s criminal milieu into a madcap world of money, markets, greed, and social climbing. Mrs. Joe, for example, immediately responds to Uncle Pumblechook’s announcement that Miss Havisham “wants a boy,” by chortling, “we’re all going to be raised up”; “we’re associating with the quality now.” But Uncle Pumblechook may be more mercenary than Mrs. Joe, for when Orlick beats her into silence after she threatens to fire him, Pumblechook mutters about benefiting from Havisham’s supposed beneficence, “it’s too late for you but not too late for me.” When Pip asks Wemmick to find Herbert a position, he responds like a Wall Street broker: Clariker needs £500 to “close the deal.” Phelps adapts Estella’s storyline as about the objectification of women. When in London, Estella moans to Pip, “I’m tired of being looked at,” tired of “being evaluated”; her chaperone sneers in response, “This is a market, all the stock must be assessed.” Cut to Pip and Bentley Drummle, who visit a gentleman’s club that is really a brothel. Drummle offers Pip his choice of scantily clad women from across the British Empire; when Pip demurs, Drummle scoffs at his sexual virginity, social aspirations, and loose habits with money: “you’re not one of us, and you know I know, don’t you Pippy?” In the film’s almost purposefully funniest line, when the abusive husband Drummle is thrown from a horse and dies, the newly liberated wife Estella kisses the horse and whispers “thank you.” Yet Phelps’s message sets these twenty-first-century economic and sexual evils against a seemingly innate human goodness more sentimental than was Dickens’s shrewd and self-reflexive take on the desire for social mobility. When Magwitch returns from Australia, he tells the adult Pip, “it wasn’t the file”; “it was the pie,” given “out of goodness,” that made him become Pip’s benefactor. When Pip parts with

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Herbert and Clara, each hugs Pip, as tears threaten. After Magwitch dies in prison, Pip returns to the forge. “I don’t deserve you,” he tells Joe, who forgives, complete with bear hug, promising they are “ever the best of friends.” And when Pip visits Satis House at the episode’s end, Phelps shoots Pip, looking through a window at a watching Estella, who looks back at Pip; she sighs, then runs down the stairs to meet him, breathing expectantly; the soundtrack’s sentimental music, the slow motion shot-reverse shot as the two lovers approach, the track in as they meet and lock hands, the camera circling them in close-up two-shot as their foreheads touch, all signify sentimentalised romance. Phelps’s dramatisation suggests that a happy ending is possible, since goodness, generosity, and love, friendship, hugs, and tears may prevail over ambition, greed, and class climbing. For “today’s consumer society,” ‘Charles Dickens’ has indeed become a cultural commodity, a brand that appropriates remediation to sell youthful emotion and imagination (Clayton 2006, 608). The Dickens icon has also appeared at mid-century and the millennium in multiple popular print and visual cultural media. In 1947 and again in 1990, Great Expectations became a Classics Illustrated comic book: the 1947 cover sketches the novel’s characters exactly as Lean had pictured them in his 1946 masterpiece, as Magwitch and Compeyson duke it out while, in the background, Pip and Joe and uniformed soldiers watch in horror; the 1990 version pictures a camp parody of Pip’s sexual obsession with Estella, as he watches winking harridan and astonished girl, the viewer positioned behind his head, as though participating in a filmic overthe-shoulder shot (Clayton 2003, 154–156). These comics address readers and viewers located in historical moments of gender and economic anxiety after World War II and of male unease about feminism in the 1990s. Later, millennial popular media, whether print or visual, exploit Dickens for ideological, mythological, or financial gain. On television on February 15, 2017, Law and Order premiered “Great Expectations” as a cops and lawyers yarn (2017b). And in theatrical runs, 2017 adaptations of Dickens’s novel have been staged in Baltimore and Washington, D. C. by Everyman Theatre, in Arkansas by Theatre Squared, and in Chicago by Silk Road Rising Theatre. On the web, the company “Great Expectations” advertises itself as “the nation’s premier video dating service for singles,” and, at the mall, the “Great Expectations” shop encourages conspicuous consumption of maternity gear (Clayton 2003, 153). Charles Dickens’s most autobiographical novel lives on, always already poised to address our own post-millennial historical worries about uncertain outcomes in an unstable age. Perhaps the novel’s greatest twenty-first-century legacy, however, is its appearance in material, legal, and financial institutions’ advertisements. On the web, a Wisconsin Rapids restaurant called “Great Expectations” publicises its preparation of food “honoring local growers and farms”; the website features a photographed rainbow striking its sign, a figurative pot of gold for farm-to-table foodies (2017a). More importantly, socially conscious firms, who help young people learn by investing in their futures, borrow the novel’s title, even if their promotional technologies seem

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unaware of the classic Victorian novel. A “major initiative of Virginia’s Community Colleges,” the social programme “Great Expectations” helps “foster youth earn the post-secondary credentials they need to achieve an independent and successful life” (2017e). MDC (“Manpower Development Corp.”) invests in organisations that “close the gaps” that hinder very young children’s access to “opportunity,” their website crows (2017c). The “Great Expectations School” in Grand Marais, Minnesota, teaches “one child at a time,” basing learning on “individual strengths, passions, needs and learning styles” (2017f). The World Health Organization’s project “Great expectations” links mothers in different countries and cultures, so they may share “experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and life with a young baby” (2017d). These sites advertise institutional charitable protections of underprivileged youths, using liberal ideology to rescue them from experiences like Pip’s youthful terror. In the postmodern Dickens adaptations, remediations, and rewrites, then, we can see two registers of historical time colliding; in other words, we witness what Jay Clayton calls the “convergence of two cultures” (2003, 190). First, the repurposing for new audiences and consumers of classic Dickensian tales of boyish adventure and misadventure; second, the remediations’ palimpsestic doubling of an effaced but nevertheless visible past with the film’s present, a film’s location in its historical moment of cultural production as opposed to Dickens’s. On the contrary, Lean’s midcentury adaptation of Great Expectations places Pip squarely at the centre of the film, shooting him in virtually every frame, using eyeline matches and glance-object cuts to place the spectator in Pip’s space, and composing the film frame to ensure the spectator’s sympathy for Pip, despite his snobbishness (McFarlane 1992, 70–73). But Lean also builds into his film, via voice-over and disjoint time frames, the doubled sense of temporality that this cultural genealogy of adaptations lives and breathes within. The commodity text’s narratorial retrospection, visually remediated on screen, constitutes the Dickens legacy’s uncanny double logic. As visual media gratifies the spectator’s wish for unmediated mediation, cinematic technology nevertheless mediates spectatorial perceptual experience. And material culture continues to manufacture and market the ubiquitous Dickens icon.

Bibliography Works Cited Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge: Belknap, 1978. Antunes, Luis Rocha. “Adapting with the Senses: Wuthering Heights as a Perceptual Experience.” The Victorian 3.1 (2015): 1–12. Antunes, Luis Rocha. The Multisensory Film Experience: A Cognitive Model of Experiential Film Aesthetics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016.

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Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Arnold, Andrea, dir. Wuthering Heights. Perf. Kaya Scodelario, James Howson, and Solomon Glave. Film 4, UK Film Council, 2011. DVD. Bennett, Scott. “John Murray’s Family Library and the Cheapening of Books in Early Nineteenth Century Britain.” Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976): 139–166. Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Carlisle, Janice. “The Endings of Great Expectations.” Great Expectations. Ed. Janice Carlisle. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 440–441. Clayton, Jay. Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Clayton, Jay. “Dickens and the Genealogy of Postmodernism.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46.2 (1991): 181–195. Clayton, Jay. “Is Pip Postmodern? Or, Dickens at the End of the Twentieth Century.” Great Expectations. Ed. Janice Carlisle. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 606–624. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. Cuarón, Alfonso, dir. Great Expectations. Screenplay by Mitch Glazer. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anne Bancroft. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1998. DVD. DeBona, Guerric. “Doing Time; Undoing Time: Plot Mutations in David Lean’s Great Expectations.” Literature/Film Quarterly 20.1 (1992): 77–100. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Ed. Janice Carlisle. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. Donohue, Walter. “Immortal Longing.” Interview with Sally Potter. Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader. Ed. Genette Vincendeau. London: BFI, 2001. 57–61. Feltes, N. N. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Giddings, Robert, Keith Selby, and Chris Wensley. Screening the Novel: The Theory and Practice of Literary Dramatization. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Great Expectations. Dir. Brian Kirk. Screenplay by Sarah Phelps. Perf. Douglas Booth and Gillian Anderson. BBC and Masterpiece Theatre, 2011. DVD. “Great Expectations.” Advertisement. Facebook. 21 June 2017a. “Great Expectations.” Law and Order. NBC. 15 Feb. 2017. 21 June 2017b. “Great Expectations.” MDC. Manpower Development Corp. Web. 21 June 2017c. “Great expectations.” WHO. World Health Organization. Web. 21 June 2017d. “Great Expectations: Fostering Powerful Change.” VCCS. Virginia’s Community Colleges. Web. 21 June 2017e. Great Expectations School. Web. 21 June 2017f. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Lean, David, dir. Great Expectations. Screenplay by David Lean and Ronald Neame. Perf. John Mills, Valerie Hobson, and Alec Guinness. Cineguild Prods., 1946. DVD. MacKay, Carol Hanbery. “A Novel’s Journey into Film: The Case of Great Expectations.” Literature/ Film Quarterly 13.2 (1985): 127–134.

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Marcus, Laura, and David Bradshaw. “Introduction: Modernism as ‘a Space that is Filled with Moving.’” Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity. Ed. David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 1–8. Marcus, Laura. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: OUP, 2007. McFarlane, Brian. “David Lean’s Great Expectations: Meeting Two Challenges.” Literature/Film Quarterly 20.1 (1992): 68–76. Web. 17 Aug. 2016. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. McFarlane, Brian. Screen Adaptations: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations: The Relationship between Text and Film. Reading: Methuen, 2008. Miller, J. Hillis. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1958. Moynahan, Julian. “Seeing the Book, Reading the Movie.” The English Novel and the Movies. Ed. Michael Klein and Gillian Parker. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. 143–154. Mullen, Lisa. “Estate of Mind.” Sight and Sound 19.10 (2009): 16–19. Napolitano, Marc. Oliver!: A Dickensian Musical. Oxford: OUP, 2014. Orlando. Dir. Sally Potter. Perf. Tilda Swinton and Quentin Crisp. Adventure Films, 1992. DVD. Plunkett, John. Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Potter, Sally. Interview by Scott MacDonald. Camera Obscura 35 (1995): 187–220. Raphael, Amy. “‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’” Sight and Sound 21.12 (2011): 34–36. Thompson, Emma. The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen’s Novel to Film. New York: Newmarket, 1995.

Further Reading Butt, John, and Kathleen Tillotson. Dickens at Work. London: Methuen, 1957. Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Johnson, E. D. H. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography. New York: Morrow, 1988. Kucich, John, and Jenny Bourne Taylor, eds. The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880. Oxford: OUP, 2012. The Oxford History of the Novel in English 3. Ledger, Sally, and Holly Furneaux, eds. Charles Dickens in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

3 God on the Wane? The Victorian Novel and Religion Abstract: During the nineteenth century, religious beliefs, practices, and affiliations underwent striking changes that both fractured and energised previously existing institutions. Allegiance to the Church of England may have declined, but Nonconformism and Roman Catholicism gained strength; secular criticism surged, but Evangelicalism became mainstream; attacks on Christian domestic priorities animated political satire, but foreign missions enjoyed considerable popularity. The religious novel, as practiced across multiple faiths and denominations, participated in this transformative process. This chapter traces how the religious novel’s emphasis on conversion resonated in four different historical contexts: the growing popularity of Evangelicalism, the conflicts over Catholicism, the increasing toleration for Judaism, and, finally, alternatives to orthodox faiths. In particular, these conflicts play out in terms of the marriage plot, as novelists try to resolve large-scale anxieties via personal romantic reconciliation. By the end of the century, novelists cautiously acknowledged and sometimes affirmed a new pluralism. Keywords: Anti-Catholicism, Christianity, conversion, doubt, Evangelicalism, Judaism, marriage, religion, secularism

In 1851, the British government conducted the first and only census devoted explicitly to religious belief in England. Notably, the census revealed that of 10,896,066 people attending worship that day, just about half (5,292,551) were Anglicans, with the Methodists and Independents coming in second and third (Mann 1854, 130). But since the population of England at the time exceeded 27,000,000, the results indicated that less than a fifth of the English people were attending Anglican services on that day, and considerably less than half of them felt the need to attend any sort of service. For Victorian observers, it was not just the question of non-attendance that was at issue: the census dramatised both the strength of Dissent and the extent to which English Christianity had fragmented. A different way of putting the problem would be to ask the question: Did these results attest to Christianity’s disappearance, or to religion’s vibrancy? The historian Callum G. Brown begins his The Death of Christian Britain with the proposition that secularisation set in “really quite suddenly in 1963” (2001, 1). Brown’s argument asks us to reassess how faith-based Victorian culture changed over the course of the century. As Frances Knight reminds us, the nineteenth century saw the Church of England undergo something of a seismic shift, from “State Church to denomination” (1995, 18). Anglicans may have been drifting away, but Nonconformist denominations and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-004

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Roman Catholicism were newly energised. Ardent secularists gained a new foothold in public life, but Christian revivalists like Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey continued to be popular, Anglo-Catholic ‘slum preachers’ founded settlements amongst the poor, and missionary work remained widely celebrated. As this chapter will suggest, then, the increasing disorder of what for a time had been a stable English religious landscape was not necessarily a sign that belief in God was on the way out. Both programmatically religious novelists and their more famous counterparts reflected on this theological ferment. In order to track how the fragmentation of Victorian religious culture intersected with the novel, this chapter will focus on two key and interrelated plots: the conversion narrative and the marriage plot. Emily Walker Heady has recently argued that in conversion plots “attempts to define and discuss the individual happen persistently within the context of a larger community within (or against) which the convert must define himself and which his testimony must address” (2013, 11). Not surprisingly, conversion was often inseparable from the marriage plot, that cornerstone of Victorian realism, and the two functioned together as a way to imagine how religious communities might come into being. The conjunction of these provides a useful lens for us to see how God did not so much ‘wane’ out of existence as the older confessions found themselves increasingly beleaguered by alternatives. In what follows, I track how the conversion and marriage plots interacted across four key and co-existing contexts: the growing popularity of Evangelicalism, the conflicts over Catholicism, the increasing toleration for Judaism, and, finally, alternatives to orthodox faiths, such as agnosticism.

1 Evangelical Routes to Salvation Although the roots of Evangelicalism lay in the emergence of Methodism during the mid-eighteenth century, it had established itself as a significant pandenominational force by the 1790s. By the 1830s, both Nonconformists and Anglicans might describe themselves as ‘evangelical’. All of them were unified by what David Bebbington identifies as a “quadrilateral of priorities”: “conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross” (1989, 2–3). Although conversion narratives were rooted in such classic accounts as Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus and Augustine’s Confessions, the genre’s form was fundamentally established in the seventeenth century. A once-spiritual child falls into “‘worldliness’ and hardness of heart,” suffers “an awakening or pricking of religious conscience,” and then unsuccessfully tries to solve this spiritual crisis on her own terms (Hindmarsh 1995, 51–52). Only when they have sunk into “self-despair” can they “experienc[e] a divinely wrought repentance

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and the free gift of justification in Christ” (52). Conversion narratives, whether biographical or fictional, formed part of a religious community’s repository of saving knowledge; their repetitiousness supplied a pattern for believers to emulate. Nineteenth-century Evangelicals added an important further rider, namely, that the convert felt assured of their salvation as “the result of simple acceptance of the gift of God” (Bebbington 1989, 43). Sceptical observers frequently caricatured assurance as hypocritical arrogance, of the sort associated with Charlotte Brontë’s gloomy Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre (↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) or Frances Trollope’s villainous William Jacob Cartwright in The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837). That being said, many Evangelicals disagreed that such sudden conversion experiences were necessary or desirable for salvation, and some were concerned that expectations for such conversions might hamper a genuine believer’s confidence. There was more agreement on activism, which united spreading the Word to social engagement. In the early part of the century, William Wilberforce and Hannah More were in the forefront of abolitionist advocacy, while in the 1830s Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, campaigned to improve women’s and children’s working conditions and to alleviate the treatment of the insane. Strategically, a number of Victorian Evangelical novelists turned fictional narrative to the cause of reform. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood: A Tale of the Factories (1841) dramatised both the spiritual and physical ruin of factory work, especially for young women. Similarly, Hesba Stretton, one of the Religious Tract Society’s most successful novelists, specialised in calling attention to the plight of urban street children, most famously in Jessica’s First Prayer (1866), while Mrs. O. F. Walton criticised the abusive working conditions for child actors in A Peep Behind the Scenes (1877). For these novelists, critiques of material conditions were inseparable from calls for widespread spiritual regeneration. In Jessica’s First Prayer, it is impossible to rescue Jessica from her drunken mother until both she and the chapel-keeper-cum-coffee-seller Mr. Daniel have fully converted. Such activist principles were rooted in the principle of sola scriptura, ‘the Bible alone’, which held that the Bible was not only all-sufficient to gain the essentials of Christian knowledge, but also that it was self-interpreting. Evangelicals thus grounded their activism in Christ’s precepts and argued that even the poorest child was capable of achieving spiritual insight through Bible reading. As John Wolffe reminds us, Bebbington’s quadrilateral is a generalisation that does not map precisely onto what any given Evangelical’s faith might actually look like (2007, 97). Yet in terms of Evangelical print culture, the quadrilateral manifests itself as part of the underlying script of conversion narratives, both fictional and biographical. Indeed, early religious fiction tended to use a slim “framework of narrative” in order to showcase “long and sermonic comments and conversations” (Rosman 2011, 141). Early Evangelical novels like Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808), the Dissenter John Satchel’s Thornton Abbey: A Series of Letters on

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Religious Subjects (1806), and Harriet Corp’s Cottage Sketches (1813) all exemplified the tendencies of “polite evangelical fiction of the 1810s” (Mandal 2015, 261), rooted in eighteenth-century pedagogical ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ texts. Characters discussed Evangelical doctrines according to the protocols of Enlightenment sociability, in which disagreement could ultimately be harmonised through the often-feminised codes of politeness. Fiction for children, like Mary Martha Sherwood’s iconic The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–1847), further adapted the conversational mode by inviting both children and parents to participate in the novel’s pedagogical scenes, which introduced different forms of religious expression that ranged from biblical prooftexting to hymn-singing. At the same time, a far more adversarial mode of Evangelical fiction (later to become transdenominational) was emerging – the controversial novel. In controversial novels, righteous characters engaged in antagonistic encounters with religious ‘others’, who struggled mightily to justify the errors of their ways. Significantly, the controversial novel marketed itself as utilitarian: it provided readers with biblical prooftexts and historical snippets to wield in their own controversial debates. Although this genre made itself felt as early as the 1810s, the novel that put controversial fiction on the map was the Scottish Presbyterian novelist Grace Kennedy’s Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Story (1823), a historical novel set during 1745. Father Clement unmasks the evangelical (and Moderate) ‘polite’ tradition by re-embodying it in the form of the subversive Jesuit (Burstein 2019, 404); Father Clement’s primary opponents, a Protestant man and a Catholic woman, only succeed by rejecting his attempts to retreat to good manners. Moreover, the novel invoked the marriage plot to imagine how Protestantism might be consolidated. Two sisters, Catherine and Maria, must choose at the end whether to be Protestants or Catholics. Catherine, who inherits a substantial sum, opts for the celibate monastic life and becomes the “most easily managed” of the local Jesuit’s “tools” (Kennedy 1824, 366). Maria, by contrast, marries her longstanding Catholic intended and becomes a “Protestantized Mary” (Burstein 2019, 403), the “Good Lady” (Kennedy 1824, 368) of the neighbourhood, who supplants the Virgin Mary as both a model for womanhood and the ‘bearer’ of faith. Here, interfaith marriage and conversion work together to suggest, on the one hand, how spirituality rooted in the Bible grounds domestic virtues, and, on the other, how domestic virtue leads to larger-scale religious change. Although Elisabeth Jay has complained that in George Eliot’s novella Janet’s Repentance, the final tale of Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Eliot offers “a hackneyed attempt at revitalizing the language of Evangelical autobiography and tract in a fictional context” (Jay 1979, 232–233), it is also the case that Eliot self-reflexively reworks the Evangelical conversion genre even as she invokes it. The Evangelical Eliza Pratt praises clergyman Mr. Tryan’s choice of Father Clement for the parish library because it is “a library in itself on the errors of Romanism” (Eliot 1985, 187). Her friend Mrs. Linnet notes approvingly that “there didn’t want much to drive people away from a religion as makes ’em walk barefoot over stone floors, like that girl

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in Father Clement – sending the blood up to the head frightful” (187). Miss Pratt reads Father Clement for doctrinal content to the exclusion of literary form, while the more emotionally responsive Mrs. Linnet nevertheless reduces its sensational contents to pragmatic concerns. But both of them grasp that the novel is invested in opposition. Janet’s Repentance itself mobilises important conversion tropes, including the alcoholic Janet’s despair, her turn to exemplary texts for behavioural models, and her abusive husband Dempster’s ‘bad’ death. But the most significant aspect of Janet’s conversion derives not from recitations of doctrine, as in Father Clement, but from sympathetic identification: she warms to Mr. Tryan because of his “direct, pathetic look” (237), and then responds to him deeply during their mutual acts of “confession,” which allow her to be “assured of sympathy” (258). Janet converts not because of doctrine, but because of the act of autobiographical storytelling, which unites instead of divides. Unlike Father Clement, Janet’s Repentance argues that “[i]deas” cannot be grasped fully until they become associated with the “warm breath” and “soft responsive hands” of a “living human soul” (263). To the extent that doctrine figures in Janet’s new spirituality, it is inseparable from its manifestation in communal identification and individual human suffering.

2 Conversion and the Catholic Question Miss Pratt’s disparaging reference to ‘Romanism’ both situates Janet’s Repentance in the 1820s, during the debates leading up to Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and alludes to the anti-Catholic outbursts at the time of the novella’s publication in 1858. In the wake of Emancipation, which allowed Catholics to once again be seated in Parliament, Protestant observers worried that what they regarded as a foreign invader would subvert the English constitution. In addition, increasing Irish immigration made Catholics more visible in both England and Scotland, especially as the Catholic Church had to accommodate them with more priests and places of worship. Matters became heated once again in 1850, when the Pope reinstated the hierarchy in England. What ought to have been a relatively simple transformation instead exploded into what became known as the ‘papal aggression’, as anxious Protestants interpreted the change as a claim on English territory and the royal supremacy. The outrage lasted about two years, but in the long term, it stoked further anxieties about the spread of monastic communities, the presence of ‘Jesuits’ and the practice of confession. Just as importantly, the papal aggression controversy intersected with fears about the Church of England. By the 1840s, Protestant observers were pointing to ‘Romanising’ tendencies in the Church of England, thanks to the growing prominence of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement. The Oxford Movement, most closely associated in the public eye with Edward Pusey, John Keble, and John Henry Newman, attacked

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the influence of the Reformation on Anglican faith, arguing instead for a national church that would return to pre-Reformation theology and liturgy without reuniting with the Roman Catholic Church. They criticised Evangelicalism’s insistence on sola scriptura, arguing instead for the importance of tradition (rooted in patristics) in interpreting the Bible, and emphasised “reverence and reserve as necessary to proper worship” (Faught 2003, 52). Both the Oxford Movement and its direct descendant, Anglo-Catholicism, found popular support in the work of clergymen-novelists such as A. D. Crake, William Gresley, and Francis Paget, whose fiction celebrated the church’s role in maintaining and reviving local communities, often invoking medievalist visions of an organic relationship between the church and the broader social world. Similarly, a number of the bestselling novelist Charlotte Yonge’s works, like The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), The Daisy Chain (1856), and The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), suggested how Anglo-Catholicism opened up a space for some forms of women’s work without insisting that all women were necessarily destined to marry. Nevertheless, the Oxford Movement’s turn to Catholic ritual and its interest in reviving the importance of the sacraments, as well as its invocation of seventeenth-century calls for the ‘beauty of holiness’, led to repeated charges that its clergymen were really Catholics in disguise; matters were not helped by the flurry of conversions beginning in the 1840s, with Newman’s being the most spectacular. In fiction, these controversies frequently played themselves out within the space of the home, rendering domestic boundaries deeply problematic. Catholic (or Anglo-Catholic) priests were often accused of contaminating the minds of women and children in the confessional. “It is not for your ears to hear all the secrets of the confessional,” a distraught woman trapped in a convent tells another in Catherine Sinclair’s Beatrice; Or, the Unknown Relatives (1852). “I must draw a very long black veil over these. If even their printed books on confession be what they are, what shall be said of their secrets?” (Sinclair 1852, 3:297). Moreover, their influence in the household was thought to “endange[r] the typically unquestioned sexual and economic domination husbands maintained over their wives” (Bernstein 1997, 47). Similarly, Catholic servants, teachers, and governesses could be objects of fear because of their power over children’s minds. Thus, Rachel McCrindell’s popular warning against the threat of sending Protestant girls to Catholic schools, The Schoolgirl in France (1840), dramatised how Protestant students were exposed to the Catholic catechism and hagiographical literature while sewing or eating, an “artful snare” (1859, 179) intended to sneakily inculcate Catholic belief. Priests, governesses, teachers, and servants: all sought to undermine the sanctity of the Protestant domestic sphere in order to obtain illicit conversions. Matters were further complicated by interfaith marriage, which both appealed to some as a proof of political and religious liberalism, and was regarded by others as a danger to the spiritual health of both parties. Interfaith marriage plots had enjoyed considerable symbolic value earlier in the century – e.g., the Anglo-Irish and Protestant/Catholic union that concludes Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan’s The

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Wild Irish Girl (1806), where they promised a “private zone of happiness” (McNeff 2013, 32) existing within and enabled by overarching Protestant dominance. But by the 1840s, such plots were far more likely to represent a dangerous threat to whichever religious side the novelist took. Protestant/Catholic marriages were, with some noticeable exceptions (such as the mixed marriages, stripped of nearly all theological content, that conclude Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge [1848] and Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil [1848]) represented as corrosive in both the public and private spheres. For example, in the ex-Tractarian William Sewell’s Hawkstone (1845), protagonist Ernest Villiers’ troubles all derive from the mixed marriage of his horrible father to his devout Catholic mother: not only do the family’s religious divisions impair Ernest’s childhood, but as an adult, he finds himself preyed upon by the Catholic Church itself, which yearns to convert him in order to seize control of his property – a situation familiar from Father Clement. Similarly, Frances Trollope’s Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits (1847) casts a Catholic priest in the guise of an underhanded romantic suitor, pursuing a wealthy Protestant woman with the goal of conversion in the interests of church coffers and thereby “threaten[ing] the security of property by undercutting the laws and systems that protect it” (Moran 2007, 47) – but only subverting his own faith in the process. Notably, in these plots the danger emerges not just from mixed religious messages, but, more seriously, from external interference on the church hierarchy’s part, which keeps tabs on the Protestant half of the marriage via the confessional. Catholic novelists were just as likely to converge on the problem of property in interfaith marriages. Frances Taylor’s historical novel Tyborne (1859), set during the Elizabethan persecutions, features the proud Catholic Isabel de Lisle who, having taken a good Protestant husband, suffers through increasing torments until her husband betrays her brother to the priest-hunters and leaves her insane. Once again, the interfaith marriage proves figuratively and literally sterile, as Protestants usurp the theological and physical property that once rightly belonged to the Catholic Church. In this context, it is worth revisiting the threat of mixed marriages in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847, ↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) and Villette (1853). Kathleen Vejvoda demonstrates that Jane Eyre codes the dubiously Christian Rochester as “Catholic,” especially in his stereotypically casuistical moral practices that rely on “ad hoc moral and religious standards” (2003, 247). When Rochester puts his purportedly hypothetical case about “overleaping an obstacle of custom – a mere conventional impediment which neither your conscience sanctifies nor your judgment approves” (Brontë 1996, 245), his language both reveals and occludes how he grounds self-justification in individual self-interest: both conscience and judgment turn out to be as rooted as transient ‘custom’ in the individual’s self-serving concerns. Jane, by contrast, later opposes ‘custom’ to a conscience shaped by eternal laws rooted in the Bible. “Laws and principles,” thinks Jane to herself, “are not for the times when there is no temptation; they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour;

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stringent are they; inviolate they shall be” (356). Both Rochester and Jane must experience “sincere repentance” (Thormählen 1999, 58) for their mutual mistakes – he, for his casuistical deception; she, for turning him into an “idol” (Brontë 1996, 307) – before the marriage can finally take place. Villette recasts the implicitly Protestant/Catholic split here in explicitly dogmatic terms. Lucy Snowe’s Catholic beloved, Paul Emanuel, proposes a Dickensian or Disraelian alliance: even though he finds Protestantism unappealing himself, he tenderly urges Lucy to “[r]emain a Protestant” (Brontë 1985, 594). Having given up on Lucy’s conversion to Catholicism, Paul proposes a meeting of minds through love instead. But Brontë insists that Catholic and Protestant allegiances cannot simply be subtracted from either subjectivity or society. Although Paul and Lucy appear to meet on the neutral territory of romantic need, which the novel’s Catholic Church understands to be part of “female human nature” (LaMonaca 2008, 88), Paul’s family and their priest keep interfering. And while Paul asserts himself enough to propose marriage, he does not perceive the extent to which his faith leaves him open to what Lucy sees as manipulation. Paul’s presumed death, which consigns Lucy to a loveless future, also “leav[es] her Protestant conscience free” from Catholic interference (Burstein 2016, 449). Ironically, as Monica Mazurek points out, Lucy’s escape from the perils of “Catholic romance” leaves her “celibate” (2016, 301). Once having succumbed even partly to a Catholic suitor, Lucy is unable to return fully to the world of Protestant domesticity inhabited by her friends Graham Bretton and Paulina. The novel denies the possibility of either physical or spiritual union across the chasm of faith, leaving the communities ultimately irreconcilable as the novel’s “jealous Old Testament God” refuses to allow “rivals in the heart and soul of those under his charge” (Carens 2010, 349).

3 Jewish Conversion, Jewish Resistance During the nineteenth century, Catholics experienced a push-and-pull between popular prejudices and greater legal equality, including the right to matriculate at Oxford and Cambridge in 1854 (although the Catholic hierarchy promptly forbade them to attend) and to teach there in 1871. So too did the much smaller Jewish population, whose presence in the British imaginary far outweighed their actual numbers on the ground. The movement towards liberalisation indicated by Catholic Emancipation increased efforts to allow Jews to sit in Parliament, which finally happened in 1858, and similarly entitled Jews to matriculate at Oxford and Cambridge. But much as the Protestant population agonised over whether or not Catholics could be successfully integrated, so too did Christians worry about assimilating Jews. Immigration patterns accentuated these concerns. Until the last third of the nineteenth century, British Jews were of predominantly Sephardic or Italian

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ancestry. The 1880s and 1890s, however, saw a considerable influx of impoverished Ashkenazi immigrants who soon clustered in the East End of London, much to the consternation of both Gentiles and genteel Jews. Formal conversion societies, such as the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (1809) and the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews (1842), drew on the energies of Jewish converts like Joseph Samuel C. F. Frey and the Hebrew scholar Moses Margoliouth, both of whom became Anglicans. Such societies were sharply criticised by the Jewish novelist and polemicist Charlotte Montefiore in Caleb Asher (1845), in which the impoverished title character is driven to convert in order to get a job; one fictionalised conversion society turns out to be composed of greedy men not above duping Jews in order to get charitable donations. Conversion did not necessarily mean wholesale adoption of Gentile practices. Hebrew Christians, a subset of converts, debated the extent to which they should retain such aspects of the law as keeping kosher, a question also raised by Gentiles (Darby 2010, 103–150). Thus, the Evangelical Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna encouraged Jewish converts to nevertheless identify as Jews in her novel Judah’s Lion (1843): her hero, Alick Cohen, insists that “[b]ecoming a Christian, do I cease to be a Jew? God forbid!” (1852, 334), arguing in favour of what we would now call Christian Zionism. Tonna advocated philosemitism, which counselled that Jews should be treated well, as representatives of the older covenant, in order to demonstrate the superiority of Christian love. To that end, children’s novelists in particular urged toleration as proof of Christian belief. A. L. O. E.’s (pseudonym of Charlotte Maria Tucker) A Son of Israel; Or, the Sword of the Spirit (1875), for example, stars a sailor named Ned who rescues a young Jewish boy from his cousin, among others. “‘The Jews have special claim to the kindness of those who call themselves Christians,’ said Ned; and without further remark, the young man walked rapidly down the lane, carrying his little rescued captive on his shoulder in triumph” (1875, 8). Such kindness eventually differentiates Ned from Christians who have previously persecuted this Jewish family, leading them ultimately to convert thanks, in part, to his example. In the English literary tradition, the iconic link between marriage and Jewish conversion to Christianity is that of Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The Shylock/Jessica dyad – tyrannical and misguided patriarch, entrapped in the law; the gentle daughter, guided by love (Sicher 2017) – repeats and mutates across the nineteenth century, most famously in the case of Rebecca and Isaac in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820). Jewish novelists, by contrast, firmly rejected interfaith marriage as a betrayal of both the community’s values and of faith in general: their would-be converts usually turn into half-hearted Christians at best. Grace Aguilar, the best-known Jewish novelist of the nineteenth century (and one with a strong Evangelical following), criticised interfaith marriage in both her posthumously published revision of Ivanhoe, The Vale of Cedars;

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Or, the Martyr (1850), which negated the possibility of any relationship between the heroine and the English hero, and in The Perez Family (1843). Aimed at a specifically Jewish audience, The Perez Family represents a disastrous interfaith marriage between the Jewish Reuben and the Christian Jeanie that turns into a spiritual and communal void: “He called himself, at least to his mother, a son of Israel but all real feeling of nationality was dead within him – yet he was not a Christian, nor was his wife, except in name” (Aguilar 2003, 129). Reuben’s exogamous marriage severs his emotional links to both Judaism and the Jewish people, which are replaced by something that skirts close to atheism; the name ‘Christian’ detaches itself from the idea of a community unified in the love of God, and turns into a belonging that is not one. Both the threat of interfaith marriage and the problem of conversion dog George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), which interrogates multiple tropes associated with both plots. Daniel’s conversion from exceptionally nominal Christian to selfreflexively modern Jew – “I shall call myself a Jew [. . .]. But I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed” (Eliot 1988, 620) – does not simply invert the conversion novel’s usual trajectory. In this unintentional echo of The Perez Family, Daniel willingly identifies with Jewish ‘nationality’, which is associated with feeling, but his approach to Jewish religion remains mediated through his prior cultural affiliations. As the embodiment of one possible Jewish future, Daniel is neither a Hebrew Christian nor an Orthodox Jew, but instead a figure for tradition revitalised through contact with the modern. When he sets off for Palestine, unlike Tonna’s Evangelical Alick, he hopes to “bind our race together in spite of heresy” (642), an idealised evocation of a pre-sectarian past that, like his own Judaism, remains inflected by the history of modern nationalism. Once he identifies as a Jew, Daniel closes down the possibility of marriage with the Gentile Gwendolen and opens up that of marriage to the Jewish Mirah. Instead of presenting an interfaith romance reconciling the split between Jew and Gentile – and the two halves of the novel – Eliot uses Daniel’s marriage to Mirah to establish the potential of an explicitly Jewish communal identity. Although the novel’s vision of Jewish national revival excited some Jewish readers, like David Kaufmann, who praised its representation of the “ardent desire for a national future on the part of the Israelites” (1877, 27), others were sceptical. Most sharply, the novelist and poet Amy Levy dismissed the novel’s nationalist leanings in Reuben Sachs (1888). Her middle-class Jewish characters, thoroughly ensconced in England, have no interest whatsoever in any “Jewish nationalism that would require decamping to the Near East” (Dwor 2015, 122), with one explicitly calling out Eliot’s understanding of Jewish national longings as an “elaborate misconception” (Levy 2006, 100). Moreover, the novel’s Gentile convert to Judaism, a fool who has spent his life shopping among different faiths, mocks Deronda’s own heartfelt adoption of Jewish identity.

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4 Doubt? As we have seen, conversion and marriage plots are never ‘personal’, but about declaring public allegiance to larger corporate bodies. Novels about relinquishing orthodox faith also narrate quests for community, but are often more explicitly about the problem of constructing a community rather than joining one – with or without evading the “earnest shame” Joss Marsh finds characterising novels of doubt (1998, 138). Mrs. Humphry [Mary Augusta] Ward’s bestseller Robert Elsmere (1888) imagined its title character successfully founding a small-scale alternative church, but it is telling that when Ward came to write the sequel, The Case of Richard Meynell (1911), she abandoned the call for alternative faiths and instead turned to the possibility of reforming the Church of England from within. Christopher Lane suggests that “[t]he idea that doubt was inherently godless and heretical was rapidly being supplanted by assurances that it was actually full of hope, insight, and (mostly secular) faith, and just awaiting a plausible place to house all three” (2011, 151). Doubt, that is, could be about the complete loss of religious belief, but it could also herald the search for new theisms. Thus, Maxwell Gray’s [Mary Gleed Tuttiett] bestseller The Silence of Dean Maitland (1886) excoriates its Anglo-Catholic title character (who impregnates a young woman and murders her father), along with the behaviour of his celebrity-loving congregants, but it also proposes a non-dogmatic lay alternative to orthodox Christianity that substitutes humble praxis for a corrupt church. Such novels sought for “[n]ew sorts of Christianity that do without the benefits of current orthodoxy” (Butler 1990, 93), not no religion whatever. Similarly, agnosticism, one of the more respectable forms of doubt, appropriated the Christian fideist position on “the limits of knowledge” when it came to supernatural matters (Lightman 1987, 30), and important agnostics like Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer, no matter how little they agreed with each other, jettisoned Christian dogma but remained profoundly spiritual (88, 120–121). Although novels endorsing unorthodox positions increased in numbers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they did so alongside a burgeoning trade in more explicitly denominational fiction – Methodist novels, Baptist novels, and indeed Catholic novels (which began achieving critical mass in the 1860s with the growth of the dedicated publisher Burns and Oates) (Scott 1973, 221–222). Moreover, it was often the case that a novel of ‘doubt’ was actually a novel about working through doubt back to faith. Novels like Winwood Reade’s The Outcast (1875), whose protagonist journeys from orthodox Anglican to non-dogmatic theist, or William Hale White’s The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Dissenting Minister (1881), whose eponymous clergyman finds his dogmatic faith slowly ebbing until he is left admitting that “the hour of illumination has not yet come” (213), were still outnumbered by works like Edmund Randolph’s Catholic social satire Mostly Fools: A Romance of Civilisation (1886), whose leading female character converts from sceptic to Catholic ascetic. This is not surprising, given that prosecutions for

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blasphemy had dogged freethinkers throughout the nineteenth century – although middle-class novelists were not normally the targets. Still, it is telling, as Marsh points out, that the “scriptural literary sins” (1998, 183) of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (↗ 36 Butler, The Way of All Flesh) meant that it was completed about 1884 but only published posthumously in 1903. Although arguments for a Victorian crisis of faith often point to new scientific developments (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel), such as geology and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (both of which troubled any understanding of the earth derived from Genesis), religion had its own internal fissures. In particular, while it took some time for the Higher Criticism of the Bible to migrate from Germany to England, its implications were frightening once understood (or, at least, partly understood). Instead of treating the Bible as the inspired Word of God, the Higher Criticism studied it as a compilation of texts produced at varying times that needed to be understood in historical context. Thus, D. F. Strauss’ The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835) treats accounts of Jesus’ resurrection in terms of psychology and Jewish tradition, but concludes that the synoptics cannot be used as objective evidence that such an event occurred. In England, the aftershocks of Strauss’ study, along with Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863), made themselves felt in such texts as J. R. Seeley’s biographical study Ecce Homo (1866), which scandalised critics by considering Jesus solely as a man rather than as God incarnate, and the agnostic novelist Eliza Lynn Linton’s The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872), which argued that if Jesus were to return, society would simply kill him again. Similarly, Anglican attempts to incorporate some of the insights of the Higher Criticism led to scandal, most notably the 1861 heresy trial for the contributors to Essays and Reviews (1860), a collection that challenged orthodox positions on such subjects as miracles, and Bishop J. W. Colenso’s The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862), which undermined traditional arguments for the Pentateuch’s Mosaic authority. Novels of doubt often turned to the alluring or frightening possibilities of Roman Catholicism as the repository of that lost authoritative truth. In Geraldine Jewsbury’s Zoe (1845), the narrator acknowledges that “[t]here is so much of human feeling in the Catholic religion, so much that makes itself tangible to human sympathy, that the mourners seem to be restored to the very objects of which they have been bereft” (1989, 291). This spiritual homeliness is very different from Zoe’s affections for multiple men, most notably her celibate interfaith connection with a Catholic priest that ultimately destroys his vocation. A few years later, Markham Sutherland, the agonised clerical protagonist of J. A. Froude’s scandalous Nemesis of Faith (1849), tries to resolve his problems at the end by entering a monastery, but “[h]is crushed sense became paralysed in the artificial element into which he had thrown himself” (1988, 222). The certain solution turns out to be torturous illusion. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the novel of doubt had firmly established itself as a genre, Catholicism remained the doubter’s ‘other’. It is the road not taken in W. H. Mallock’s novel of the effects of scepticism on female sexuality, A Romance of the Nineteenth

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Century (1898), and the last minute escape hatch for both the unhappy clergyman in Robert Buchanan’s The New Abelard: A Romance (1884), who dies converted at Oberammergau, and the secretly sceptical Anglo-Catholic clergyman in Buchanan’s Foxglove Manor (1884), who abruptly converts after he loses both of his female love interests and his illegitimate child. Anglo-Catholicism sometimes served the same function: it is a source of false spiritual authority in Eliza Lynn Linton’s agnostic Under Which Lord? (1879) and, more famously, the last resort of the agonised Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895, ↗ 30 Hardy, Jude the Obscure). Unsurprisingly, the conflicts that characterise the interfaith marriage plot recur in novels of doubt, exacerbated by gendered critiques of the female sceptic that denounced their attempts to wrestle with theology as acts that would “not merely risk their femininity but [would] also engage themselves in an act of blasphemous defiance against their Creator” (Jay 1989, 97). Foxglove Manor, which has a recognisable Herbert Spencer knockoff married to an Anglo-Catholic woman, is unusual in granting the victory to the agnostic. Margaret Maison noted that in the earliest novels of lost faith, “doubters and freethinkers were [. . .] generally treated as sinners and almost invariably punished by madness or death” (1961, 212); although later novels redressed this balance, it remained the case that characters who lost their faith also tended to lose their existence. The death of Mallock’s sexually abused (and, on the terms of the novel, fallen) female protagonist in A Romance of the Nineteenth Century before she can marry the Catholic-inclined hero indicates one popular way of removing such characters from the narrative scene. But this dynamic plays out more subtly in two contemporary novels, Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) and the Catholic novelist Mrs. Wilfrid [Josephine] Ward’s One Poor Scruple (1899). In Helbeck, Laura Fountain grows up agnostic, a position she holds instinctively and “indirectly” (H. Ward 1983, 58) because of her father Stephen Fountain’s influence; when she falls in love with the stern Catholic Alan Helbeck, her emotional attachment to agnosticism is no match for Helbeck’s demand that she convert, yet in the end “the voice of my own life” (387) asserts itself, and she commits suicide. One Poor Scruple, possibly a direct response to Helbeck, features another Laura, Laura Hurstmonceaux, an older woman in high society who does her best to dissuade protagonist Madge Riversdale from embracing the Catholic spirituality of her recusant family. This Laura does not commit suicide, but her meddling in Madge’s relationship with the Protestant Lord Bellasis eventually prompts the suicide of another woman in love with Bellasis, Cecilia Rupert. Whereas Helbeck suggests that both agnosticism and Catholicism are equally “lacking” and “necessary” (Butler 1990, 125) to modern spiritual needs, and celebrates instead the coming of a “new mystical union” to transcend both (H. Ward 1983, 333), One Poor Scruple instead insists that Catholicism remains the true haven. The novel assumes that the “world is fallen and her characters, therefore, highly ‘dependant’ on what is ‘quite outside themselves’” (Erb 1999, 367). Thus, the non-religious Laura, who reveals the unintended effects of her actions with an expression “prey to agony” that

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“asked for no help, looked for no comfort” (W. Ward 1985, 363), exemplifies the barrenness of a life lived without recourse to God, but also the tortures of sin with no possibility of penance and redemption. By contrast, Madge ultimately settles down contentedly with an elderly aristocrat, but first she must go through the “penal suffering” (380) God demands. For Laura Fountain and Cecilia, suffering leads to no spiritual purification; in fact, neither has the language to articulate why suffering might even be necessary. Madge’s embrace of suffering is the novel’s testament to Catholicism’s abiding power as both an explanatory and a consolatory force.

5 Conclusion As Mrs. Wilfrid Ward’s affirmation of Catholicism suggests, neither God nor religion had waned, precisely, by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet, in celebrating recusant endurance in a novel originally published not by a denominational press, but by Longmans, she also demonstrated how earlier nineteenth-century assumptions about what constituted the religious ‘normal’ had become fractured. Anglicans, both Evangelical and otherwise, found themselves sharing spiritual territory with Catholics, Jews, Nonconformists, and the unorthodox of various stripes from agnostic to atheist. Legislative attempts to rein in the Anglo-Catholic movement failed; so too, eventually, did the efforts to keep the atheist activist William Bradlaugh from taking his seat in Parliament (1883). At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was unclear if some new equilibrium had been reached. It is telling that in The Case of Richard Meynell, Mrs. Humphry Ward’s sense in Helbeck that traditional orthodoxy and traditional scepticism prove to be a deadly binary gives way to something far more optimistic: Meynell’s confident assertion that whatever may come, “the future” of the Church of England was “for England to settle” (H. Ward 1911, 625) is the alternative to older certainties, but in the end, it does not dispel the security of the Evangelical Catherine, who dies at peace, experiencing “the vision of an opening glory – a heavenly throng!” (630).

Bibliography Works Cited Aguilar, Grace. Selected Writings. Ed. Michael Galchinsky. Peterborough: Broadview, 2003. A. L. O. E. [Charlotte Maria Tucker]. A Son of Israel; Or, the Sword of the Spirit. Edinburgh: Gall & Inglis, 1875. Bebbington, David. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989. Bernstein, Susan David. Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Michael Mason. New York: Penguin, 1996.

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Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. 1853. Ed. Mark Lilly. New York: Penguin, 1985. Brown, Callum G. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000. London: Routledge, 2001. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “The Religion(s) of the Brontës.” A Companion to the Brontës. Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 433–452. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “Father Clement, the Religious Novel, and the Form of ProtestantCatholic Controversy.” British Catholic History 34.3 (2019): 396–423. Butler, Lance St. John. Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Carens, Timothy L. “Breaking the Idol of the Marriage Plot in Yeast and Villette.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38.2 (2010): 337–353. Darby, Michael R. The Emergence of the Hebrew Christian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Dwor, Richa. Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Ed. Graham Handley. Oxford: OUP, 1988. Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life. 1858. Ed. Thomas A. Noble. Oxford: OUP, 1985. Erb, Peter C. “Some Aspects of Modern British Catholic Literature: Apologetic in the Novels of Josephine Ward.” Recusant History 24.3 (1999): 364–383. Faught, C. Brad. The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2003. Froude, J. A. The Nemesis of Faith. 1849. Introd. Rosemary Ashton. London: Libris, 1988. Heady, Emily Walker. Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: OUP, 1995. Jay, Elisabeth. “Doubt and the Victorian Woman.” The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe: Essays in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Religion. Ed. David Jasper and T. R. Wright. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. 88–103. Jay, Elisabeth. The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Oxford: OUP, 1979. Jewsbury, Geraldine. Zoe: The History of Two Lives. 1845. Introd. Shirley Foster. London: Virago, 1989. Kaufmann, David. George Eliot and Judaism: An Attempt to Appreciate ‘Daniel Deronda’. Trans. J. W. Ferrier. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1877. Kennedy, Grace. Father Clement; A Roman Catholic Story. 1823. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: William Oliphant, 1824. Knight, Frances. The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. LaMonaca, Maria. Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home. Columbus: Ohio UP, 2008. Lane, Christopher. The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. Levy, Amy. Reuben Sachs. 1888. Ed. Susan David Bernstein. Peterborough: Broadview, 2006. Lightman, Bernard. The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Maison, Margaret. The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961. Mandal, Anthony. “Evangelical Fiction.” English and British Fiction, 1750–1820. Ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien. Oxford: OUP, 2015. 255–272.

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Mann, Horace. Religious Worship in England and Wales: Abridged from the Original Report. London: George Routledge, 1854. Marsh, Joss. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Mazurek, Monika. “Marriage Plot and Jesuit Plotting: The Use of Romance in Conversion Narratives.” From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria: Readings in 18th and 19th Century British Literature and Culture 5 (2016): 295–302. McCrindell, Rachel. The Schoolgirl in France. 1840. London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1859. McNeff, Heather. “Finding Happiness: Interfaith Marriage and British Literature, 1745–1836.” Diss. U of Minnesota, 2013. Montefiore, Charlotte. Caleb Asher. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1845. Moran, Maureen. Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. Rosman, Doreen. Evangelicals and Culture. 2nd ed. Eugene: Pickwick, 2011. Scott, Patrick. “The Business of Belief: The Emergence of ‘Religious’ Publishing.” Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World. Ed. Derek Baker. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973. 213–224. Sicher, Efraim. The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative. Lanham: Lexington, 2017. Sinclair, Catherine. Beatrice; Or, the Unknown Relatives. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1852. Thormählen, Marianne. The Brontës and Religion. Cambridge: CUP, 1999. Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Judah’s Lion. 1843. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1852. Vejvoda, Kathleen. “Idolatry in Jane Eyre.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003): 241–261. Ward, Mrs. Humphry. The Case of Richard Meynell. Garden City: Doubleday, 1911. Ward, Mrs. Humphry. Helbeck of Bannisdale. 1898. Ed. Brian Worthington. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Ward, Mrs.Wilfrid [Josephine] . One Poor Scruple. 1899. Introd. Bernard Bergonzi. Padstow: Tabb House, 1985. White, William Hale. The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Dissenting Minister. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881. Wolffe, John. The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney. Downers Grove: InterVarsity P, 2007.

Further Reading Cunningham, Valentine. Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Nixon, Jude V., ed. Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Perkin, J. Russell. Theology and the Victorian Novel. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. Ragussis, Michael. Fictions of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Viswanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Wheeler, Michael. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Cambridge: CUP, 1990. Wheeler, Michael. The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. Cambridge: CUP, 2006. Wolff, Robert Lee. Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England. New York: Garland, 1977.

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4 Genres and Poetology: The Novel and the Way towards Aesthetic Self-Consciousness Abstract: This chapter opens by mentioning Virginia Woolf’s opinions on the nature of the novel as a “cannibalistic” creature, which is capable of incorporating influences not only from the literary world but also from other forms of art. In investigating the various literary genres that characterised the Victorian novel (from the Bildungsroman to the sensation novel, from the realistic novel to the so-called ‘scientific romances’) we will also refer to nineteenth-century art movements such as Impressionism and Aestheticism, so as to reflect on the importance of the dialogue between literature and art. The basic idea is that literary genres are not static constructions but dynamic systems in which changes and mutations occur alongside definite rules that make a genre recognisable. In studying single generic typologies, it could be thus possible to reconstruct a specific historical milieu according to a diachronic perspective. Keywords: Bildungsroman, nineteenth-century art, realistic novel, scientific romance, sensation novel

In describing the dynamics of narrative forms, Virginia Woolf uses a highly idiosyncratic Gothic imagery that makes the novel seem an ever-changing and inclusive form of artistic expression. Within a few years, she believes, “[that] cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art, will have devoured even more. We shall be forced to invent new names for the different books which masquerade under this one heading” (1967, 224, emphasis added). In Woolf’s opinion, this “cannibalistic” creature is capable of incorporating influences not only from the literary world, but also from painting and fine arts in general. In imagining the future of literature, however, Woolf also looks backwards, implicitly reflecting on the nature of many pre-modernist narrative forms besides the Victorian novel. In the famous reflection of another modern novelist, which is similarly idiosyncratic and Gothic, Henry James asks his readers, and himself: “What do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” (1934, 84, emphasis added). James’s reference is specifically to canonical nineteenth-century texts such as William Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1855), Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869). In characterising the novel as a devouring monster (something halfway between Victor Frankenstein’s unnamed creature and an ogre), Woolf and James see Victorian narratives as polymorphous narrative systems involving a multiplicity of genres and sub-genres that continually ‘feed’ on preceding texts and supply material for future literature.

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Along with the enormous changes that affected the printing market (mechanisation, reduction of prices for paper, stamp taxes, etc.), the Victorian literary world changed in the presence of an increasingly educated and literate reading public. The so-called Elementary Education Act of 1870 decreed compulsory education for English and Welsh children aged between five and thirteen. New genres were thus introduced, which, alongside specialised publishers, periodicals, and circulating libraries, offered specific narrative products to quench the literary thirst of the growing audience. At the same time, a more evident separation widened between highbrow and middle- or lowbrow readership. The extremes were represented by George Eliot’s philosophically refined novels (↗ 22 George Eliot, Middlemarch) and George Meredith’s formally complex works (↗ 23 George Meredith, The Egoist) on the one hand and by Wilkie Collins’s and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational tales of murder, bigamy, and blackmail on the other (↗ 20 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ↗ 18 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret). It is therefore fundamental to bear in mind that the literary genres of the Victorian age were not produced in a historic or cultural vacuum but were audience-conscious and that, in creating (or in theorising) new literary forms, intellectuals and writers conceived them with a specific reading public in mind.

1 The Laws of Genres and the Origin of Literary Species If texts are always made and derive from other texts, it is readers who create the conditions for this endless production of literature. In this respect, literary genres always relate to their “use-value” (Beebe 1994, 5) as sets of conventional semiotic systems, whose meanings are motivated and activated by the public. A ‘genre’ is not rooted within a specific artistic work, but results instead from a mediation between the readers’ creative expectations and the artists’ perceptive sensibility to their readership. Whereas specific traits identify each literary genre (the Gothic novel, the romance, the Bildungsroman, etc.), no text can be simply and ‘purely’ an expression of genre. As Jacques Derrida asserts, “a text [does] not belong to any genre. Every text participates in one or several genres” (1980, 230) because the law of genre is “a sort of participation without belonging” (227) based on “a principle of contamination” (225). If it is critically useful to study specific traits that distinguish one genre from another, it is equally important to remark that these recurring traits entail a dynamic aesthetic dialogue with further traits in texts belonging to other literary genres. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847, ↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre), to offer one example, makes a fundamental contribution to the female Bildungsroman, while it includes elements drawn from the Gothic tradition and from the Romantic cult of the ‘tainted’ Byronic hero. Since Maurice Blanchot – who perhaps provocatively suggests

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in Le livre à venir (1959) that books no longer belong to genres because the books alone are important – there has been an increasing critical attention to genre theory, which investigates the relationship between culture, historicity, and literary forms. In “The Origin of Genres” (1976), written as a reply to Blanchot’s conclusions, Tzvetan Todorov reflects on the necessity to single out generic “rules” within the very notion of generic “transgression” (160), thereby anticipating Jacques Derrida. Genres, then, are not static but dynamic narrative systems subjected to change and mutations that occur within the specific rules that make a genre recognisable. In identifying single generic typologies (scientific romances, realistic novels, Gothic novels, sensation fictions, etc.), one reconstructs a well-defined historical milieu according to a changing, diachronic perspective. At the same time, the presence of recurring textual features permits one to analyse literary genres synchronically. This double-sided critical approach is especially suitable for studying the complexity of Victorian novels as “cannibal” and “baggy monsters,” in Woolf’s and James’s words, which defy easy categorisations. “If one avoids the temptation,” as Jonathan Culler puts it, “to separate generic categories into the theoretical and the empirical but insists that genres are always historical yet based on some sort of theoretical rationale, they are more defensible as critical categories, essential to the understanding both of literature as a social institution and of [. . .] individual works” (2009, 881).

2 Forming the Novel, Building a Character: The Bildungsroman The Bildungsroman, also known as ‘novel of education’, ‘novel of youth’, ‘novel of development’, ‘novel of formation’, or ‘novel of initiation’, gives narrative form to the notion of change in nineteenth-century European society. The dissolution of older social structures and of traditional political systems, along with the increasing presence of modern modes of production (which may be defined as protocapitalistic) have created the conditions for the appearance of a new generation that embodies – in the eyes of artists – the very idea of change. The model is represented by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (the reputed progenitor of the Bildungsroman was published in 1795, and translated by Thomas Carlyle in 1824 as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), which ends on an optimistic note. This dynamic process does not always occur, however, in the euphoric terms of the Goethean model. On the contrary, in the particular case of the English ‘novel of formation’, the idea of ‘evolution’ emerges more disturbingly and with far more articulate complexity. Recognisable aspects of the story of a young man or woman (often an orphan or member of a difficult household) that strives to use his or her experiences to grow up professionally, intellectually, and sentimentally do recur,

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but the Victorian declination of the ‘novel of development’ does not always offer an unproblematic depiction of change. Franco Moretti maintains that at the dawn of the Battle of Waterloo on Sunday 18 June 1815, which saw the final defeat of Napoleon’s political aspirations, “Europe plunge[d] into modernity, but without possessing a culture of modernity” (2000, 5). While in the offing, the blooming Victorian bourgeois society – full of potential vitality and energy – did not seem to be ready to face a series of social, political, cultural, and ideological compromises, and nineteenth-century Britain was basically a ‘divided’ nation. The result was that male and female identity was not given a steady ‘formation’, but had to keep its balance amidst difficulties and obstacles in a mutating world instead. Alongside David Copperfield, Pip, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Maggie Tulliver, and Jude Fawley, the gentleman Arthur Pendennis in The History of Pendennis (1848–1850), attempts to set the world right in various ways. Unlike Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895, ↗ 30 Hardy, Jude the Obscure), and Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885, ↗ 24 Pater, Marius the Epicurean) conclude with the death of their main character, whereas the epilogue of Great Expectations (1861) is deliberately left ambiguous. Dickens’s original intention to neutralise Pip’s feelings for Estella was later revised in accord with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s advice. Even David Copperfield, which was published in the same year as Pendennis (and was enormously appreciated, and even envied, by Thackeray), concludes with an unconvincing happy ending that follows a series of deaths (Steerforth, Ham, and Dora) and losses (Peggotty, Emily). If the Bildungsroman dramatises the difficult relationship between its main character and the world surrounding him or her, the real “flaw” that undermines the traumatic process of formation seems to lie “with the hero himself” (Buckley 1974, 22). The situation does not change much in the so-called Künstlerroman, a variation of the Bildungroman centred on the artistic evolution of its protagonist. It does not matter whether the main character is an aspiring writer like Ernest Pontifex in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (written between 1873 and 1884; published posthumously in 1903, ↗ 36 Butler, The Way of All Flesh), a painter like Nick Dormer in James’s The Tragic Muse (1890), or a frustrated intellectual like Jude Fawley in Hardy’s novel. As a matter of fact, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss possesses a unique quality amidst the Victorian novels of formation in depicting the double and parallel entrance into adulthood, and final tragedy, of its two siblings: “Tom’s upward-bound Bildungsroman is fatally assimilated to Maggie’s downward spiral” (Fraiman 1993, 141). A similar form of double Bildung takes place in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893, ↗ 27 Grand, The Heavenly Twins), which features the siblings Angelica and Diavolo Hamilton-Wells, with Angelica representing the figure of the independent and assertive ‘New Woman’.

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Another important element, namely the autobiographical relevance of the novels of formation, is far more problematic than at first appears. Texts such as The History of Pendennis, David Copperfield (and its counter version Great Expectations), Trollope’s The Three Clerks (1858), Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1860), or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853) are not simply inspired or based upon their authors’ lives but describe the contrast between individuals and their sociocultural context. However, the fact that these texts are partially inspired by autobiographical events and details has led to critical misinterpretations. David Copperfield, for example, is certainly not Dickens’s artistic double, but rather his “counterpart” (Buckley 1974, 33), because of his peculiar ability to observe and to retain his manifold experiences in his memory. In pursuing education and independence, Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss embodies Eliot’s (and other Victorian women’s) difficulties in being accepted as a thinking individual. The Mill on the Floss illustrates in tragic terms the central issue of the so-called ‘female’ Bildungsroman, by focussing on the unavoidable problems Victorian women faced when trying to assert their individuality in a patriarchal society. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is certainly among the first examples of a female hero who attempts, in line with the tradition of the ‘male’ novel of formation, to mediate between her aspirations and her socialisation. However, the first and foremost obstacle for a stable female Bildung is Jane Eyre’s sex. Brontë’s novel depicts an unconventional model of femininity (based upon intelligence and volition rather than physical appeal and acquiescence) that would make a large impact on future literary genres like the sensation novel and New Woman fiction. The protagonists of Jane Eyre and of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), which includes some of the elements of the female novel of development in nuce and in which this process of individualisation is developed in the guise of an ironic comedy of manners, “begin as self-assured young women who question their subordinate place in society, but the endings find them less active, less assertive, and reintegrated into society through marriage” (Ellis 1999, 16). Villette revises the generic rules that Brontë has helped to create in her first published novel, wherein Lucy Snowe is a much more self-tormented character than Jane Eyre, and the novel’s epilogue is deliberately puzzling. The ‘reader-I-married-him’ paradigm of Brontë’s and Austen’s novels will recur in many other novels by successive authors. There are manifold variations upon the basic schemes of the Bildungsroman, ranging from the novel of ‘colonial’ formation in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901, ↗ 35 Kipling, Kim) to the novel of ‘scientific’ development in Herbert George Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909). Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885) remains an especially interesting example of the integration of the genre with other aesthetic forms (philosophical novel, historical novel, etc.) and with future artistic movements (Aestheticism). While the story is set in ancient Rome during the dynasty of the Antonines (161–177 AD), this novel of ‘sensation’ – because all the events are filtered through Marius’s physical perceptions – is wholly

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Victorian in illustrating the “mental progress” (Buckley 1974, 144) of the main character. Although its hero, unlike the protagonists of other Bildungsromane, does not have to face economic difficulties, his story bears many resemblances to David Copperfield and Great Expectations (Marius loses first his father and then his mother, and he experiences the difficulties of moving from the province to the city) and replicates the contrasting intellectual and philosophical struggles of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–1834, ↗ 8 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus), which is another peculiar example of philosophical Bildungsroman. In view, moreover, of Marius’s strong homoerotic feelings for the poet Flavian (who is a Roman version of Dickens’s Steerforth) and for the Christian Cornelius, Walter Pater’s text has been also defined as one of the first novels of gay formation (Maynard 2002, 285), thus anticipating Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891, ↗ 26 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray). The English novels of development include, within their own premises, the symptoms of their ideological and formal disintegration. George Meredith’s and Thomas Hardy’s anti-Bildungsromane take to their extremes what has been latent in other Victorian texts, namely the dissolution of the hero’s hopes and worldview. In The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Adventures of Henry Richmond (1871), Meredith questions the aesthetic assumptions of the English Bildungsroman through convoluted language that mimics the psychological investigations underway in the two texts. Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure follows the gradual degeneration, rather than the evolution, of its main character, and of the persons surrounding him. The novel pins down and implacably criticises all the major pillars of the Victorian systems of value: education, culture, religion, and marriage. The suicide by hanging of “Little Father Time” and his killing of Sue’s two children represent the most disconcerting illustration of the tragic disillusionment that characterises this novel. For these reasons, Frank R. Giordano defines Jude the Obscure (along with The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Butler’s The Way of All Flesh) as a “satire of the Bildungsroman, a kind of anti-Bildungsroman” (Giordano 1972, 589). Like other novels of formation, Jude the Obscure features recognisable autobiographic elements (Jude, like Hardy, is interested in church architecture and old music, and shares the writer’s problematic theology), but it should not be read or misread biographically. Rather, its relationship to Hardy’s life and artistry has to be approached in the light of Hardy’s decision (after the critical debates following accusations of the novel’s obscenity) to pursue a career as poet. Indeed, Hardy came to believe that poetry offered a modern artist the sole means for expressing his ideas and impressions in new and experimental forms. Jude the Obscure is certainly not the last Victorian Bildungsroman, but it is a text that highlights the thematic and formal limits of this literary genre. In a few years, the First World War would definitively shatter all residual hopes for a coherent and harmonic development of human beings.

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3 Victorian Realisms Before leaving the Bildungsroman behind, however, we should consider its relationship to the important phenomenon of nineteenth-century British realism. In what respects do Victorian novels depict reality and in what respects do they transgress the rules of realism? More than a discussion of realism it may be critically useful here to refer to the multiple forms and theorisations of Victorian ‘realisms’. The very term is ambiguous, because it often refers to a supposed identification between reality and its artistic translation. Do we refer thus to realism in terms of ‘formal’ representations or of adherence to nature? The British declination of realism must be distinguished, moreover, from its French counterpart. Unlike French realism, the Victorian aspiration to realism was generally related to the acceptance of institutionalised moral codes. These codes were transposed artistically into many kinds of texts such as conduct books, essays, reviews, paintings, poems, and novels. George Eliot’s Ruskinian association between “truth” and “beauty,” established by means of a “humble and faithful study of nature” (Eliot 1981, 273) – included in her review of Modern Painters III, published in the Westminster Review in April 1856 – can be considered one of the manifestos of the implicit moral lesson underlying English realism. The extremes of the Victorian realistic novel may be very roughly identified on the one hand with the omniscient narrator-tailor who weaves a web of social and cultural connections in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874, ↗ 22 Eliot, Middlemarch) and with the first-person narration of moral disillusionment in Dickens’s Great Expectations or of female development in Jane Eyre on the other. Between these extremes, there is a whole textual universe. Although Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield or, say, Vanity Fair (↗ 13 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair) are generally classified as realistic, they also foreground all the limits of this terminology. The narrator in Middlemarch even interrupts the description of events with a metaliterary comment that is indicative of the writer’s own questioning of the formal contradictions of realism: “One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea – but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?” (Eliot 1985b, 313). And it is still Eliot’s self-conscious narrator who states her delight, in chapter XVII, book two, of Adam Bede (1859), in the “faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence” (Eliot 1985a, 224) of Dutch paintings. She admits that the “faithful account of men and things” that have “mirrored themselves” in the narrator’s mind is “doubtless defective,” with its outlines “disturbed,” and its reflection “faint or confused,” (223) but she is “content to tell [a] simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which [. . .] there is reason to dread” (224). By introducing this famous pictorial parallel with the Dutch school, Eliot attests both to the visual nature and concerns of realist poetics (Brooks 2005, 3, 16) and to the limits of this literary genre.

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Eliot’s reflections are a further example of the extremely self-conscious nature of Victorian realism, and of its unexpected affiliation with the French school of Flaubert and Balzac, two novelists who were more explicitly interested in formal issues. Eliot’s opinions, along with those voiced by many other so-called traditional realists (including Anthony Trollope in An Autobiography and Charles Dickens, in particular in his letters or as reported by John Forster in his biography), suggest that Victorian writers were constantly looking for an (impossible) balance between their concessions to the market, to the circulating libraries, and to serial publishing and their awareness of the aesthetic challenges of realistic novel-writing. In this respect, the realist debate replicates the existential, ideological, and artistic struggles between individualisation and socialisation dramatised in the Bildungsroman, with the new bourgeois society at its centre. The underlying idea that seems to be foundational for many of these novels (and for their writers’ speculations) is that of a ‘crisis’, towards which they reacted through their ‘formal’ and narrative attempts at offering an order to a condition of cultural, historical and political disorder. This is why, according to Frederic Jameson, we should approach Victorian realism as an “antinomic” concept, “in which an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) masquerades an aesthetic ideal, with fatal consequences for both of these incommensurable dimensions” (2013, 5–6). The increasing interest in social sciences, in Darwinism, and in the depiction of the conditions of people living in urban contexts (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel) represented the recurring thematic and formal traits of English naturalism, which can be considered an evolution of realistic poetics. However, George Moore and George Gissing, the major representatives of naturalism, had a way of addressing realist issues very different from their French counterparts, and in particular from Émile Zola. In their narratives and journalism, both Moore and Gissing denounced the precariousness of the position of writers and intellectuals, mostly by attacking circulating libraries (Moore published a critical pamphlet entitled Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals in 1885 and Gissing wrote a critical letter for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884, and offered an unromantic view of the profession of the novelist in New Grub Street). But each showed a very personal approach to naturalistic poetics at odds with that of Zola. Gissing, for instance, rejected Zola’s ‘scientific’ view of novelists as detached observers, demonstrating a typically English approach to naturalism. This Victorian declination of the French lesson is further manifested in the strong impact that Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (originally published during the 1840s and collected in three volumes in 1851) would have on Gissing’s first published novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), and The Nether World (1889). Workers in the Dawn describes, for example, the artistic difficulties of Arthur Golding and his tormented sentimental relationship with a prostitute named Carrie Mitchell in what may be defined as a naturalistic anti-Bildungsroman (or anti-Künstlerroman). Moore, at least at the beginning of his literary career, in A Mummer’s Wife (1885) took inspiration instead

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from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877). Defined by Moore himself as his “novel of the senses” (Moore 1894: 481), the book was banned from Mudie’s circulating library. The publisher was Henry Richard Vizetelly – who would be persecuted for obscenity after his English translation of Zola’s novel La terre in 1888, and later for his reissue of other works by the French naturalist writer. Moore describes in his novel the squalid existence of the dreamy Kate Ede, depicting her fall from grace (she leaves her sickly husband to elope with, and then marry, the manager of a travelling opéra bouffe) and her death as an alcoholic. London becomes the most recurrent setting in English naturalist novels: an appropriate environment for the increasingly alienated condition of individuals in the late nineteenth century, morally and physically trapped within urban labyrinths. It is not accidental that London is also at the centre of The Secret Agent, published by Joseph Conrad in 1907 but set in 1886. Conrad’s tragic story of failed bombings and misplaced passions is not narrated, however, according to a naturalistic aesthetics but in a deliberately ‘impressionistic’ style. The metropolis is – as Conrad writes in the “Author’s Note” – a “monstrous town” and “a cruel devourer of the world’s light” (1994, 10). Dickens’s grotesque alleys and Gissing’s degraded metropolitan areas thus give way to nightmarish hallucinations, and Conrad serves as an important trait d’union between Victorian and late-Victorian poetics. Lord Jim (1900, ↗ 34 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim) in particular becomes paradigmatic of the impact that the artistic movement known as Impressionism had on the imagination and style of many nineteenth-century writers. The peculiarity of Charlie Marlow’s perception is that he cannot see (and understand) things distinctly. This ‘limited’ visual and hermeneutic perspective determines the way events are filtered in all the stories that feature this homodiegetic narrator: namely, “Youth” (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), and, to a lesser extent, Chance (1913). Realism as a literary genre, as well as a writing (and reading) practice, had privileged a specific epistemological approach to storytelling, with which the last decades of the Victorian era would demonstrate a decisive cultural, ideological, and formal break. The unifying visual and hermeneutic perspective of the traditional Victorian narrator is replaced by a subjective vision that relies only on ‘impressions’ and disrupts all coherent renderings of events.

4 Writerly Paintings and Painterly Writings: The Dialogue between the Arts The cultural and artistic impact of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, held in April 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar, was so strong as to influence not only European and non-European visual artists, but novelists and writers as well. The term was initially adopted in a derogative sense by Louis Leroy in the

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newspaper Le Charivari and addressed to Claude Monet’s painting Impression, soleil levant (1872), which the critic considered a sketch rather than a finished work. It is therefore not surprising that late-Victorian novelists such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad allude to visual arts, making comparisons between writing and painting. In “The Art of Fiction” (1884), for instance, James argues that a novel is “a personal impression of life” and it is this very “impression” that constitutes its “value” (1979, 292). As for Conrad, his 1897 “Preface” to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” highlights the importance of art as an impression conveyed through the senses (1966, 12–13), whereas Heart of Darkness (a text that puts his aesthetic theories into practice better than The Nigger of the “Narcissus”) repeatedly features scenes and events evoked through Marlow’s visual and hermeneutic ‘impressionistic’ perspective. According to Owen Knowles and Gene Moore, this “misting of clarity” may be associated “with viewing an Impressionist painting” (2000, 189). When dealing with the impact of Impressionism in Victorian England it is necessary to refer to the works of the American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whose interest in the relationship between literary and painterly Impressionism began earlier than 1874. In April 1865, Charles Algernon Swinburne wrote “Before the Mirror,” a poem inspired by Whistler’s painting The White Little Girl (whose title was later changed into Symphony in White no. 2, with Swinburne’s verses engraved in the frame). Although Whistler’s style is not properly impressionistic, and notwithstanding the painter’s own misgivings about the French school, Whistler was labelled as an English Impressionist both during his lifetime and after his death, and his works were fundamental in the debates surrounding the meaning and value of art in the lateVictorian age. Whistler’s paintings became a matter of discussion especially after the virulent attacks that John Ruskin published in Fors Clavigera (1871–1884) against Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1874), exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1877. Offended by Ruskin’s words, Whistler sued him for £1,000, and the trial concluded in 1878 with Ruskin found guilty and subjected to pay a symbolic award of a quarter of a penny as compensation. The Whistler-Ruskin trial dramatised a juxtaposition between two different approaches to the artist’s work: whereas Whistler claimed that a painting should speak to the impressions of each individual viewer according to a process based on a form of aesthetic individualism, Ruskin maintained that the artist-as-vates should teach the public how to enjoy art as a moral lesson. While Whistler underlined the importance of subjective impressions, Ruskin insisted that arts convey a universal ethical message. The relationship between writing and visual art was central not only because of the impact of French Impressionism on late nineteenth-century Britain; it was also crucial for the discussion surrounding the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ precepts of English Aestheticists. This group included – along with Whistler and Swinburne – Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Pater. Although Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, The Renaissance (1873), Imaginary Portraits (1887), and Plato and Platonism (1893) belong to different artistic genres, they are aligned in their evocation of a ‘sensorial’

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and impressionistic perception of reality, which contrasts with the detached atomism and scientific accuracy of English and French naturalists. In his “Preface” to The Renaissance, Pater delineates the role of the critic as one that does not have to teach but rather to suggest how to filter art through the individual impressions of the perceiver. He states that the “objects with which aesthetic criticism deals – music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life – are indeed receptacles of so many powers and forces” (Pater 1980, xix). His comments upon Botticelli’s art lead Pater to ask himself, and his public: “What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us?” (Pater 1980, 39, emphasis added). Although Henry James was basically neutral in his review of the Ruskin-Whistler trial in the columns of The Nation on 19 December 1878, he is especially indebted to Whistler’s impressionist aesthetics. As a result, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1881), which was certainly more successful than James’s previous works, was sometimes charged, like Whistler’s works, with obscurity, as in the anonymous review by Margaret Oliphant published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1882. In accord with the painterly title of James’s novel, Isabel Archer’s story is viewed through a series of contrasting perceptions and ‘framed’ by Gilbert Osmond, who imprisons her physically and morally. As for Thomas Hardy, who insisted in his Preface to the fifth edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) that a novel is an “impression, and not an argument,” (Hardy 2003: lviii), his interest in French Impressionism and in the influence of the French artistic school upon literature is much more explicitly voiced than it is in James. Novels such as The Woodlanders (written after Hardy’s enthusiastic visit to the first London exhibition of impressionist art in December 1886), The Return of the Native (1878), and Jude the Obscure are characterised by a strong impressionistic technique, adopted to render the characters’ sensorial understanding (and misunderstanding) of events. Furthermore, Hardy’s autobiography devotes many pages to his opinions about the perception of nature as “the product of the writer’s own mind” (2007, 235). Reflections on Joseph Mallord William Turner’s experiments with “light modified by objects” lead to Hardy’s idea that art “is a disproportioning” and that, as a consequence, “realism is not Art” (2007, 222).

5 The Impact of Romanticism Considerations of realism do nevertheless remain as relevant as those of naturalism and Impressionism to nineteenth-century fiction. The notion of continuity in change may be seen as one of the foundations of nineteenth-century poetics. The coexistence of tradition and innovation represents not simply a literary principle but, generally speaking, a fundamental trait of the Victorian age from a political, cultural, ideological, and aesthetic point of view. In this respect, the continuing

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influence of Romanticism on the theory and practice of the Victorian novel does not come as a surprise. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847, ↗ 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights), rich and unique in its references to Gothic literature, to German supernatural tales, and to Byron, seems, but only at first view, to constitute “an exception to some of the best literary generalisations” (Kiely 1972, 1) and to exist in an “utterly self-sufficient world” (233) that explicitly rejects the influence of Victorian realism. After a closer look at Wuthering Heights (with its reliance upon an image of nature as an indomitable force), it is also possible to retrace – within this quintessentially Romantic story – some of the elements that are present in other, and more canonical, Victorian novels and novelists. If Emily Brontë’s text testifies to the predominance of the world of individual emotions (an element that is particularly evident in Heathcliff’s wild passion for Cathy), Catherine Earnshaw’s decision to marry Edgar Linton and Hareton Earnshaw’s more prosaic feelings for Catherine Linton identify a need for emotional restraint and social integration. This latter aspect helps us to understand the modalities through which the Romantic ‘lesson’ will be filtered and adapted by its Victorian ‘pupils’. Whereas Charlotte Brontë’s cultural background was evidently as Romantic as Emily’s (ranging from Scott to Byron, who was the major influence of the Angriacycle), Jane Eyre nevertheless testifies to the author’s desire to counterbalance Romantic idealism. The Gothic suggestions and Byronism – mainly identified with Bertha Mason and Rochester – succumb to socialisation and the acceptance of a normative familial model. As for Villette, it deliberately mixes a Gothic world of phantasmal presences (especially in the figure of the ghostly nun) with Lucy Snowe’s desire to conform to Victorian social norms through access to education and to ordinary feelings (identified with Paul Emanuel). Accordingly, the Victorian reconfiguration of Romantic models does not imply a total rejection but rather the transformation of those models. The figure of the wilful Byronic hero is transformed into Thackeray’s gentlemen (from William Dobbin in Vanity Fair to Major Pendennis), and the Romantic writer as ‘sage’ is updated into the ‘Victorian prophet’ identified by Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. The eminently Victorian Dickens, too, has grown from the Romantic roots that he would continue to reaffirm. His naturally Romantic inclination remains in his cult of imagination, in the importance he gave to the artist as public spokesman, and in his reliance upon a ‘humanist’ resolution to the traumas of modernity. In his “Preface” to Bleak House (1853, ↗ 16 Dickens, Bleak House), he admits to having “purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things” (Dickens 2011, 56, emphasis added). Just to offer other examples of the continuing relevance of Romanticism, George Eliot maintained an innate sympathy for Wordsworth’s poetry, and her novels include many epigraphs taken from his works, as well as explicit (or implicit) allusions to his verses. During the composition of Adam Bede, Eliot and George Henry Lewes were reading The Excursion (1814), and even her reflections on the relationship between aesthetic truthfulness and morality in chapter seventeen of Adam Bede echo

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the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798). Mr. Tulliver’s attachment to the Mill in The Mill on the Floss may be compared to Michael’s strong emotional relationship to landscape in Wordsworth’s eponymous poem, and the value of memory that the Poet Laureate advocates in almost all of his compositions (including The Prelude) heavily permeates The Mill on the Floss. Generally speaking, from Adam Bede to Middlemarch, from Silas Marner (1861) to Daniel Deronda (1876), Eliot shares, in Stephen Gill’s words, Wordsworth’s ideological “move from experience to ‘general truths’” (Gill 1998, 148). Silas Marner is an interesting case in point, since here Eliot fuses together the tradition of legendary tales (which represented, as she admits in her letters, her first source of inspiration), a moral fable, and a Victorian ‘realistic’ narration dealing with the impact of industrialisation and the value of communal life. With respect to Byron, Eliot’s feelings were more ambivalent: whereas she first enthusiastically read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818) and gave a strongly autobiographical imprint to the figures of Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda and Savonarola – as individuals who strive to assert their personality – she later dismissed Don Juan (1824) for its harsh cynicism. The impact of the Romantics on Victorian literature is not limited to the Brontës, Dickens, and Eliot. Elizabeth Gaskell met Wordsworth on 20 July 1849, when he was a sort of living Romantic legend for writers and intellectuals (to be replaced in a few years by another Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson), and shared his compassionate interest in human suffering, grief, and isolation. Gaskell alludes to the “Lucy Poems” in Ruth (1853), in the unfinished Wives and Daughters (1866), and in Cousin Phillis (1864), her most Wordsworthian story. In treating its protagonist as a humble Victorian woman rather than a Romantic aspiring writer, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) manifests Gaskell’s own dichotomic oscillation between Unitarian self-denial in the service of society and a typically Byronic aspiration to literary excellence. Anthony Trollope too exemplifies a complex Romantic heritage. While inclined to Wordsworthian models in his Barchester cycle of provincial life (↗ 17 Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne), he favoured the Keatsian notion of the artistic vocation (which An Autobiography associates with a Victorian work ethics) and showed the deleterious effects of Byronism in characters such as the commercial pirate Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (1875). The impulse of Romantic poetics contributed, paradoxically, to the Victorians’ thinking about themselves as ‘modern’ and as unevenly positioned between the illusions and ideals of the past and the urgent political, social, and aesthetic issues of the present. It is not therefore accidental that a post-Romantic like Matthew Arnold assumes such a position. His first lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, “On the Modern Element in Literature” (1858), identifies depression and ennui as the symptoms of the disease of the most advanced societies and civilisations. The lecture uses almost the same expressions adopted five years earlier in “The Scholar Gypsy” (1853), a composition that also belongs to the genre of the Romantic ode, like Wordsworth’s, Shelley’s, and Keats’s poems. George Meredith, who published a

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narrative poem emblematically entitled Modern Love (1862), always tried to reconcile the ideal and the real, romance and realism, in novels such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. The epilogue of this novel dramatises the shattering of all Romantic illusions, with its ‘hero’ Richard wounded in a duel by the villainous Lord Mountfalcon, and with Richard’s beloved Lucy Desborough falling prey to madness and death.

6 Excessive Bodies: From Sensation Novels to Scientific Romances If realism represented the pervasive ideological and aesthetic reference point for writers, readers, and the literary market, the realistic assumptions of this multiform literary genre were also challenged by the Victorians’ continuing interest in the fantastic and the Gothic. Indeed, two of the most transgressive sub-genres of the era – sensation novels and scientific romances – may stem from the same Gothic sources as they share the presence of villainous characters, the ‘sublime’ quality of specific settings, the body as a metaphor of excess, etc. As far as the sensation novel is concerned, however, Pamela Gilbert points to a distinguishing element of this kind of fiction: “its topicality,” being “generally set in the historical moment in which it was published, and [. . .] rife with references to the latest cultural crazes” (2011, 7). The “topical” quality and nature of the sensation fictions penned by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry (Ellen) Wood, which in a way update specific Gothic codes, also involves a critique of the historical moment. The genre tends to question class boundaries, gender stereotypes, and pre-inscribed narrative paradigms related to realistic representation. The very term ‘sensation’ is ambiguous and there are varying opinions on its origin. The OED, for instance, attributes its first appearance to Rev. Henry Longueville Mansel in a notorious article of April 1863 in the Quarterly Review. Apart from his acrimonious accusations of immorality (associated with the genre’s appealing to the public taste for crime), Mansel focused on the stimulation in these novels of uncontrollable, unnatural, and dangerous bodily sensations. Many attacks against sensation novels do not make it clear, however, whether they are the cause of physical (and moral) excitability in readers, or are the effect of a corrupted society. In either cases, these novels participated in the most deleterious aspects of the so-called ‘mass culture’ and the mass literary market, submitting to the consumerist laws of demand and supply of strong emotions for strong palates. Margaret Oliphant was another critic who wrote unsigned attacks in the pages of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Besides focusing, in an article dated 1867, on the French origin of these ‘immoral’ narrations, she applied the term sensation with reference to those spectacular melodramas that employed special effects (such as train

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crashes, fires, and floods on stage). These melodramas induced intense ‘sensational’ emotions in the public, and the readers of sensation literature too were thought to react physically according to what Peter Brooks has defined as the melodramatic mode of excess (Brooks 1995). Their bodies were in fact the means through which their opinions, their points of view, and their identity were voiced. Nevertheless, sensation novels partially differed from traditional popular melodramas because the roles of the stereotypical male and female characters, which identified the principles of good and evil, were often revised and altered. Indeed sensation fiction blurred the boundaries separating justice and crime, legal punishment and moral infamy. Sensation novels derived many of their plots from contemporary trials and journalistic cases (featuring blackmails, murders, poisonings, concealed identities, and sexual scandals) in a sort of updated version of Newgate calendars and of Newgate fictions. Readers from respectable classes now began to appreciate tales that had pleased only the lower classes in third-rate penny serials of the past. This mixture of elements associated with upper and lower social classes was a feature that almost all critics emphatically blamed. Another target of criticism was the depiction of assertive women and of their new ‘species’ that Margaret Oliphant called the “fair-haired demon” (Oliphant 1867, 263), whose aim was to interrogate the rightfulness of the institution of marriage and the role of women within the Victorian patriarchal family. Female economic, social, and sexual oppression became one of the leading topics of sensation fiction, which offered a twist on the past. While traditional Gothic fictions had usually portrayed women as the victims of male villains, female characters now reacted, even violently, against their own pre-inscribed fate. They employed changes of identity, subtle machinations, seductive practices, and other illicit means in the struggle for survival, as the examples of Wilkie Collins’s Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1866) and Lady Audley in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862, ↗ 18 Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret) demonstrate. The sensation novel exists, in fact, not as a single unified generic type but as a form that declines the traits of the same formula in manifold ways (Fantina and Harrison 2006). While Wilkie Collins is considered the father of the sensation school in intricately plotted novels such as The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), and Armadale, his The Moonstone (↗ 18 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone), dated 1868, anticipates late-century detective fictions; furthermore, if on the one hand Charles Reade is renowned for having taken inspiration from contemporary sources and documents in ‘matter of fact’ romances such as Hard Cash (1863), on the other hand Mrs Henry (Ellen) Wood’s moralising sensation East Lynne (1861) represents another variant of the sensational recipe. During the Victorian age, Lady Audley’s Secret was Braddon’s best-known sensation novel, as well as a haunting presence that permeated, for better or worse, all of her artistic career. Braddon’s bestseller was among the first Victorian novels to conflate in its female character angelic physical traits and demonic characteristics; mixing supposedly antithetical aspects, Lady Audley was both a fiend and a doll-like Victorian lady. Despite the various literary styles of its authors,

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sensation novels shared a common interest in the Victorian family, seen as a social, political, sexual, and moral institution, as well as a micro-representation of Victorian Britain in a particular critical phase. The values of the past interact and clash in these texts with the changed cultural patterns of the present. As for the other transgressive sub-genre of the era, the scientific romance, the very term by which it was known seems to be an oxymoron: the rational approach of science apparently negates the escape from reality that romance implies. Nevertheless, the late nineteenth-century scientific romances basically derived from Gothic tales and updated them, replacing haunted castles and villainous Catholic monks with futuristic (or dystopian) settings and ambitious scientists. As Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886, ↗ 25 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Herbert George Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and The Invisible Man (1897) exemplify, “the Gothic, nightmarish plot of the mad scientist concocting monsters suggests that science fiction, rather than celebrating science [. . .] more often illustrates the dangers of scientific overreaching” (Brantlinger 2002, 373). In this respect, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) may be considered as the link between the Gothic-Romantic tradition and the Victorian scientific romance. Furthermore, Mary Shelley’s novel had constituted a link between a Miltonian narrative and the Bildungsroman, depicting the revival of a creature exiled from paradise that enters the social world as the scene of his formation. The creature’s evolution from victim to tormentor (and from angel to demon) runs parallel to Victor Frankenstein’s tragic awareness of his mistakes as a human being and as a scientist. Alongside the technological changes that affected and modified everyday life (faster railway connections, the progress in electrical engineering, the introduction of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, etc.), the factors that determined the success of scientific romances included developments in the publishing market. The circulation of middle-brow magazines such as the Pall Mall Gazette and The Pearson’s Weekly (which serialised Wells’s The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds) increased, the three-decker novel was ousted out by single-volume novels, and travel narratives (from David Livingstone to Henry Morton Stanley and Richard Burton) began to successfully narrate, in adventurous terms, the expanding boundaries of the British empire. In the imperial context, Wells’s The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, may be seen as an imaginary reconfiguration of the colonial ‘alien’ invading London. Finally, in light of Darwinian evolutionary theories, such novels took up debates over the future of the human, as exemplified by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871, ↗ 21 Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), and Wells’s The Time Machine (1895, ↗ 31 Wells, The Time Machine). In many cases, scientific romances depict the future in apocalyptic terms, thus negating William Morris’s hopes for the utopian socialist society described in News from Nowhere (1890). London and the Thames Valley thus become the favourite settings for apocalyptic fictions. The catastrophes range from natural disasters caused

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by comets in John Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885), or by massive volcanic eruptions in Grant Allen’s “The Thames Valley Catastrophe” (1897), to actual invasions in George Chesney’s science fiction novel The Battle of Dorking (1871) and Wells’s The War of the Worlds. By choosing London as the main site of future destructive events, these stories suggest that “the disappearance of London signifies or anticipates the end of the world” (Parrinder 1995, 60), providing future narrators and filmmakers with plenty of suggestions, as Steven Spielberg’s decision to set his twenty-first-century version of The War of the Worlds (2005) in a post-9/11 America testifies. Even George Eliot, the Victorian intellectual and philosophical writer par excellence, participated in the debate regarding scientific romances and the future of the world in her last work, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878). The work is composed of eighteen character studies in which the narrator, named Theophrastus (modelled upon the Greek philosopher Theophrastus of Eresus, who lived from c. 371 to c. 287 BC and succeeded Aristotle in the Peripatetic school), introduces the scientific opinions of various intellectuals and thinkers. These include Ganymede, Mixtus, Scientilla, and Trost, a German scientist. Trost’s essay “Shadows of the Coming Race” in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such is a parodic reflection on Bulwer-Lytton’s and Samuel Butler’s Darwinian scientific romances The Coming Race and Erewhon, imagining a world in which perfectly educated machines replace failing human instincts. Although it is by no means the last Victorian publication, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such serves as an emblem of the dissolution of the narrative principles advocated by nineteenth-century writers. In a way, this hybrid text – which imitates the style and aesthetics of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus as a philosophically oriented collection of rambling thoughts – embodies and anticipates Virginia Woolf’s prophetic view of “[that] cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art” (1967, 224). Even though George Eliot did not take The Impressions of Theophrastus Such too seriously, her use of Theophrastus’s philosophical investigations reveals the limits of Victorian narrative authority. Through Theophrastus’s mediation, Eliot reflects not only on social and intellectual issues, on Jewish culture, and other contemporary topics, but also – in metanarrative terms – on the notion of authorship, of originality, and of plagiarism (for instance in the essay “The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb”). The Impressions of Theophrastus Such must therefore be understood “as an experimental departure from, and self-conscious reflection on, her career,” so that the book stands as her last and most explicit commentary “on the problems of authorship” (Henry 2012, 247). Especially in the opening essays “Looking Inward” and “Looking Backward,” Eliot’s philosophical satire provides an access to her awareness of the importance of “impressions” over notions: “powerful imagination,” Eliot writes through her mediated spokesmen, “is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience” (Eliot 1879, 185). The Impressions of Theophrastus Such is therefore the latest significant example of the

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“loose, baggy monsters” (James 1934, 84) of the Victorian novel; in Eliot’s final work that monster has turned into a proto-postmodern shape. This strange Frankenstein monster-like assemblage of narrative and non-narrative texts proves, as James said in “The Preface” to The Ambassadors (1903), that the novel “remains still [. . .] the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (James 1984, 1321).

Bibliography Works Cited Beebe, Thomas O. The Ideology of Genre. A Comparative Study in Generic Instability. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994. Blanchot, Maurice. Le livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorian Science Fiction.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 370–384. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth. The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974. Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Typhoon and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent. 1907. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Culler, Jonathan. “Lyric, History and Genre.” New Literary History 40.4 (2009): 879–899. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Trans. Avital Ronell. Glyph 7 (1980): 202–232. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Ed. Patricia Ingham. Peterborough: Broadview, 2011. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985a. Eliot, George. George Eliot, A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings. Ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1981. Eliot, George. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such: Essays and Leaves from a Note-book. London: Harper, 1879. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1874. Ed. W. J. Harvey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985b. Ellis, Lorna. Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British ‘Bildungsroman’ 1750–1850. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1999. Fantina, Richard, and Kimberly Harrison, eds. Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. With Illustrations. London: Chapman & Hall, 1890. Fraiman, Susan. Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Gilbert, Pamela. Introduction. A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. Gilbert. Malden: WileyBlackwell, 2011. 1–10. Gill, Stephen. Wordsworth and the Victorians. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Giordano, Frank R. “Jude the Obscure and the Bildungsroman.” Studies in the Novel 4.4 (1972): 580–591. Gissing, George. “Letter.” Pall Mall Gazette 15 Dec. 1884: 2. Hardy, Thomas, and Florence Hardy. The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928. Ed. Michael Irwin. Ware: Wordsworth, 2007.

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Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1891. Ed. Tim Dolin. Introd. Margaret Randolph Higonnet. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Henry, Nancy. The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals. Ed. John Charles Olmsted. Vol. 3. New York: Garland, 1979. 285–306. James, Henry. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Penguin, 1984. James, Henry. “Preface to The Tragic Muse.” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. By James. Introd. Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Scribner, 1934: 70–97. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972. Knowles, Owen, and Gene M. Moore. The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Mansel, Henry Longueville. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly Review 113. (1863): 482–514. Maynard, John N. “The Bildungsroman.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 279–301. Moore, George. Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals: A Polemic on Victorian Censorship. 1885. Ed. Pierre Coustillas. Hassocks: Harvester, 1976. Moore, George. “My Impressions of Zola.” English Illustrated Magazine Feb. 1894: 481. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The ‘Bildungsroman’ in European Culture. 1987. Trans. Alberto Sbragia. New ed. London: Verso, 2000. Oliphant, Margaret. “Novels.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Sept. 1867: 257–280. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The 1893 Text. Ed. Donald Hall. Berkley: U of California P, 1980. Parrinder, Patrick. “From Mary Shelley to The War of the Worlds: The Thames Valley Catastrophe.” Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors. Ed. David Seed. Liverpool: Syracuse UP, 1995. 58–74. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” Trans. Richard M. Berrong. New Literary History 8.1 (1976): 159–170. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. 1883. Ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. Introduction and Notes by P. D. Edwards. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. Vol. 2. London: Harcourt, 1967: 218–229.

Further Reading Cohen, Ralph. “History and Genre.” New Literary History 17.2 (1986): 203–218. Davitt, Amy J. “Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre.” College English 62.6 (2000): 696–718. Fleishman, Avrom. George Eliot’s Intellectual Life. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Frow, John. Genre. London: Routledge, 2006. Mangham, Andrew. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 2013. Maxwell, Catherine. “Whistlerian Impressionism and the Venetian Variations of Vernon Lee, John Addington Symonds, and Arthur Symons.” The Yearbook of English Studies 40.1–2 (2010): 217–245.

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Parkes, Adam. “A Sense of Justice: Whistler, Ruskin, James, Impressionism.” Victorian Studies 42.4 (Summer 1999–Summer 2000): 593–629. Rosmarin, Adene. The Power of Genre. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. Shires, Linda M. “The Aesthetics of the Victorian Novel: Form, Subjectivity, Ideology.” The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. 61–76. Stableforth, Brian. Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. Stang, Richard. The Theory of the Novel in England 1850–1870. London: Routledge, 1961. Tomaiuolo, Saverio. In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Wheeler, Michael. English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1890. New York: Longman, 1985. Williams, Carolyn. “‘Genre’ and ‘Discourse’ in Victorian Cultural Studies.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999): 517–520. Zietlow, Paul. “Pater’s Impressionism Reconsidered.” English Literary History 44.1 (1977): 150–170.

Anna Maria Jones

5 The Art of Novel Writing: Victorian Theories Abstract: This chapter discusses Victorian theories about the novel: its status as commercial commodity versus work of art; its ethical obligations to represent ‘real life’ or an idealised version thereof; the social ramifications of its influence on readers (and writers). The chapter contextualises well-known theories of the novel – for example, George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction,” and Oscar Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray – within larger conversations, particularly as they developed in the periodical press. The essay, thus, offers a corrective to the tendency to read Victorian novels and novel theories separate from the complex debates in which they participated. It also encourages readers to reconsider the canon of the English novel within broader conversations that included transnational and non-canonical voices. Keywords: Novel as art, periodical press, literary reviews, canon formation, novel readers, authorship

Let some conscientious critic pick out by chance some fifty articles from magazines and newspapers which deal with imaginative works; let him take an equal number of prefaces and interviews with novelists or playwriters, and then let him note what expressions occur most frequently. The chances are that he will lay bare, if not the deepest tendencies of living literary artists, at least their intentions and their pretensions. – Paul Bourget, “The Dangers of the Analytic Spirit in Fiction” 1892

The title of this contribution, “The Art of Novel Writing,” both evokes and diverges from one of the nineteenth century’s most important theoretical statements on the novel: Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” (1884). The difference between ‘fiction’ and ‘novel-writing’ points to a tension in Victorian debates about the novel – whether to consider it a work of art or a commodity. As one reviewer in the Saturday Review put it: “perhaps novel-writing is not really an art at all, but a branch of manufacture” (“Difficulties of the Novelist” 1877, 543). In opposition to this view, James argues in his essay for the dignity of fiction as an art and for the novelist’s freedom to depict whatever he chooses in pursuit of that art, a position that put him at odds with those of his contemporaries who saw the novel as fulfilling a moral as well as an aesthetic purpose: “the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free” (1884, 507). This and other, often overlapping, concerns were hotly debated by authors and critics (also, often, overlapping roles), particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As the influential critic Andrew Lang remarked in 1887:

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There has seldom been so much writing about the value and condition of contemporary literature – that is, of contemporary fiction. In English and American journals and magazines a new Battle of the Books is being fought, and the books are the books of the circulating library. (683)

Indeed, as the epigraph with which I began this chapter suggests, by the end of the nineteenth century there was such a great deal of interest in theories of the novel that Paul Bourget could talk about tracking literary currents by taking a random sampling of a hundred or more statements from a range of venues: journals, novels, prefaces, and interviews. Twenty-first-century readers are apt to miss out on these contextual elements in reading significant statements about the Victorian novel like James’s “Art of Fiction.” Readers today most often encounter such statements in one of two ways: either anthologised in historical period surveys (a system of categorisation somewhat complicated in James’s case by his status as a transatlantic author claimed by both American and British literature curricula) or as exemplars of an author’s oeuvre. George Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856), for example, appears in both the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, where it offers a window into her ethical and aesthetic investments in literary realism. Oscar Wilde’s famous Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891, ↗ 26 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray), likewise, features in both the Norton and the Broadview as Wilde’s endorsement of Aestheticism’s dictum of ‘art for art’s sake’ (and resistance to both moral didacticism and realism). But a reader may find little that connects the dots between two such exemplars. Pieces like Eliot’s, Wilde’s and James’s essays, then, do a lot of heavy lifting, serving, on the one hand, as the ‘greatest hits’ of the period, and, on the other hand, as characteristic representations of their authors’ corpuses: brief, typical statements by famous Victorian writers on significant aesthetic developments in the nineteenth century that students of the period can easily digest (indeed, Norton provides only an excerpt from Eliot’s essay). This is, of course, part of the inevitable and necessary process of selection that occurs in constructing any syllabus, but it also tends to create a sort of circular logic that reaffirms the literary canon: the most famous articulations of the Victorian art of novel writing are the most frequently read, and they are the most frequently read because they are the most famous. This process of selection also tends to give an impression of these authors and their theories of the art of the novel as singular, exceptional voices rather than as participants in multifaceted, on-going, and overlapping debates. Anthologies that focus exclusively on criticism of the novel – such as John Olmstead’s A Victorian Art of Fiction (1980), Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth’s Victorian Criticism of the Novel (1985), or Rohan Maitzen’s more recent Victorian Art of Fiction (2009) – offer much richer contextualised accounts of nineteenth-century theories of the novel. Other anthologies – Solveig C. Robinson’s A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women Writers (2003) and Andrew King and John Plunkett’s Victorian Print Media (2005) – do not focus exclusively on the novel, but they likewise contain valuable selections as well as useful introductory headnotes.

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Reading these collections can help to avoid taking any particular theory of the novel in isolation. Both Eigner and Worth’s and Maitzen’s anthologies, for example, include both James’s “Art of Fiction” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Humble Remonstrance,” which was written, in part, as a response to James. Yet, even these topical anthologies, by necessity, draw their selections from a much vaster body of work. Gone from the conversation are Walter Besant’s original lecture, also titled “The Art of Fiction,” which occasioned James’s essay as well as essays of the same name by Andrew Lang and several other unnamed authors. Absent are the many antecedents to the debate. Missing too are the newspaper reports of Besant’s lecture. Taken together, all these documents can offer insight into how Victorians would have been exposed in the periodical press to the ideas that shaped what today we read as classics of the Victorian age. In other words, novels such as George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879, ↗ 23 Meredith, The Egoist), James’s What Maisie Knew (1887, ↗ 33 James, What Masie Knew), and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886, ↗ 25 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) – to name only three novels discussed in this volume – were written, and read, in tandem with the theoretical debates about the novel that unfolded across multiple venues. James’s essay takes its title from and responds to successful and prolific novelist Walter Besant’s lecture of the same name, republished as a pamphlet by Chatto & Windus publishers that same year, in which Besant proclaimed the value of fiction as an art, but laid down some rather prescriptive “Laws which govern this Art. I mean those general rules and principles which must necessarily be acquired by every writer of Fiction before he can even hope for success” (1884, 14), e.g., “[f]irst, and before everything else, there is the Rule that everything in Fiction which is invented and is not the result of personal experience and observation is worthless” (15). James’s claim that the art of fiction must be “perfectly free” rejects the limitations that Besant’s rules impose, even as he agrees with Besant’s endorsement of the art of fiction (James 1884, 507). James argues, further, that the novel as art must be understood not merely as a diversion or entertainment but as a serious undertaking that “compete[s] with life” (1884, 504): “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life. [. . .] It is not expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete” (503–504). Nor was James the only author to respond to Besant. A lively conversation on the topic ensued in the periodical press. Besant’s and James’s statements on the novel likewise share this same title, “The Art of Fiction,” with a number of other pieces that popped up in response to Besant and that are more or less well-known today. Andrew Lang’s “Art of Fiction,” which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette (April 1884), preceding James’s rebuttal, objected to Besant’s dictum that the novelist must write only from personal experience. Lang endorsed invention (or “story,” as he put it) over observation, alluding rather uncharitably to James’s brand of realism: “To my own taste the story is the thing, and I prefer, for sheer sensual enjoyment, a book like ‘Margot La Balafrée’ to

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all the Bostonian nymphs who ever rejected English dukes for psychological reasons” (Lang 1884, 2). When his “Art of Fiction” appeared in Longman’s Magazine the following September, James replied, understandably, with some umbrage to Lang’s characterisation of his work: I am not acquainted with the romance just designated, and can scarcely forgive the Pall Mall critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but the title appears to refer to a lady who may have received a scar in some heroic adventure. I am inconsolable at not being acquainted with this episode, but am utterly at a loss to see why it is a story when the rejection (or acceptance) of a duke is not, and why a reason, psychological or other, is not a subject when a cicatrix is. (James 1884, 517)

Truly, Lang was not wrong in characterising the debate as a “Battle of the Books,” and he might have called it, with some justice, an international battle. Only one of the books here alluded to, James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), remains in print, and the other, Fortuné Du Boisgobey’s Margot la Balafrée – which was translated into English and published in 1885 as In the Serpent’s Coils by Henry Vizetelly in The Gaboriau & Du Boisgobey Sensational Novels series – is largely unknown to readers of the Victorian novel today. Yet, Boisgobey was immensely popular, not only in his native France but abroad, with novels translated into multiple languages including Czech, German, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish by the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the categories by which we organise our study of literature today (the English novel, the American novel, etc.) tend to elide the degree to which Victorian theories of the art of fiction were developed in transnational rather than strictly national contexts. To the lively exchanges between Besant, Lang, and James may be added the other unsigned responses, also titled “The Art of Fiction,” which appeared in the St. James Gazette (April 1884) and the Saturday Review (May 1884), as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Humble Remonstrance,” which appeared in Longman’s in December. In this essay, Stevenson took a position similar to Lang’s in opposition to realism: No art – to use the daring phrase of Mr. James – can successfully ‘compete with life’; and the art that does so is condemned to perish montibus aviis. [. . .] Man’s one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. (1884, 141–142)

Stevenson’s point is not merely that exciting ‘stories’ full of incident are more satisfying to read, as Lang asserts, but that true aesthetic excellence demands a distillation of essence or ideal from the overabundance of detail so much prized by the realists. Of the would-be novelist, he writes: Let him not care particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material detail of the day’s manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the environment. [. . .] [H]is novel is not a transcript of life [. . .] but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity. (147)

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Stevenson’s anti-realist stance was shared by other important theorists of the novel, who nonetheless produced fiction radically different from Stevenson’s ‘romances’. One might compare Stevenson’s position here with George Meredith’s, which he had articulated in 1877 in “An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” originally published in the New Quarterly Magazine, and again two years later in the “Prelude” to The Egoist. In that latter, he sets up the aesthetic project of his novel – a highly stylised work, which he called a “Comedy in Narrative” and which mimics the conventions of a Restoration comedy of manners – arguing that “the realistic method,” described as a “conscientious transcription of all the visible and a repetition of all the audible,” is to blame for “the malady of sameness, our modern malady” (1879, 3). For Meredith, the remedy for this “malady” is what he calls the “Comic Spirit,” which can condense and distil the essence of the raw material of life. The stylised, even artificial, distillation offers readers a salutary view of themselves in an “inward mirror” that realism can’t effect (2). In short, the debate that coalesced around Besant’s lecture was part of an on-going conversation, which included advocates of diverse aesthetic styles and ethical investments. The conversation, moreover, extended well beyond literary circles. In addition to the essays by prominent novelists and critics, a number of other, briefer reports of Besant’s original lecture also appeared in newspapers such as the Guernsey Star and the Chepstow Weekly Advertiser, suggesting that the debate was of interest well outside of cosmopolitan literary circles. And, as late as 1891, a satirical article of the same name appeared in the Saturday Review, in which the unnamed author spoofed Besant’s prescriptive delineation of the laws of the art of fiction, poking fun at the serious tone of the ensuing debate and offering such ‘regulations’ as “VI. A Novel is a Prose Story which may be in one, two, or three volumes. It may be written in any language, but if it is written in American it will be an American Novel” and “XX. Every Critic must know all the Rules, Laws, and Technique of Fiction, and he’d better not forget it” (“Art of Fiction” 1891, 492). The jokes depend on readers being familiar not only with Besant’s lecture but with the tenets of the realism of the American school, which were exemplified by Henry James and had been championed, with much gravitas, by his friend and fellow author William Dean Howells (both Besant and Lang call out Howells in their essays, and Lang would again take up the same topic in 1887, with reference to the works of Howells, James, and Stevenson, among others, in his “Realism and Romance” for the Contemporary Review). We might imagine, then, a conversation like the one in which James’s “Art of Fiction” participates as sitting at the centre of a web from which a number of threads radiate, with each thread representing a separate question or issue that concerned Victorian theorists of the novel and each, in turn, branching into tributary filaments: the various articles, prefaces, interviews, and reviews that Bourget describes. In the pages that follow, I trace several of these threads: What is the proper position of the novel vis-à-vis the other arts? What topics ought (or ought not) the novel to represent? Who ought to write (and read) novels? Bearing in mind that myriad voices, famous

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and not-so-famous, weighed in on these questions in an array of venues, I provide a discussion that places some of the ‘greatest hits’ in their broader contexts.

1 What is the Proper Position of the Novel vis-à-vis the other Arts? Besant’s argument pushes back against the notion that novel-writing is merely manufacture. He, like many of his contemporaries, including James, is at pains to demonstrate the genre’s comparative worth and prestige. The lecture begins with three propositions, the first of which is “[t]hat Fiction is an Art in every way worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry; that is to say, her field is as boundless, her possibilities as vast, her excellences as worthy of admiration, as may be claimed for any of her sister Arts” (Besant 1884, 3). This is a sentiment that Besant would reiterate in other journals throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In 1891, in a piece that was part of a ‘symposium’ on fiction in the New Review, for instance, he writes: It is an Art of which everything that has been said of painting, sculpture, music, and poetry, may also be said; whether of loveliness and grace, fidelity to nature, loftiness of ideal, power of moving the world to pity or to terror, to laughter or to tears, power to raise or to degrade the soul, power to advance or to lower humanity. (Besant 1891, 310)

But the analogy between the art of fiction and other arts, particularly painting, by no means originated with Besant. As early as 1832, novelist and editor Frederick Marryat had drawn the same “analogy between the picture and the novel” in his essay on “Novels and Novel Writing” in the Metropolitan: “In a picture, we must have proportion or correct drawing, so must we in a novel. In both arts, this can only be obtained by a close copy from nature” (Marryat 1832, 233). What is important to note is that the novel’s claim to the ranks of art enabled arguments from vastly differently aesthetic and moral positions. If, throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the analogy between fiction and painting underscored fidelity to nature as the artistic ideal, thereby privileging realism over more fanciful or artificial genres, in the latter decades this hegemony was being questioned. On one side, proponents of Aestheticism and decadence like Wilde would use the appeal to art to divorce the novel from questions of morality. As he claimed memorably in his “Preface to ‘Dorian Gray,’” a series of epigrams first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891: “[t]here is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Wilde 1891, 480), and, again, “[n]o artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. [. . .] Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for his art” (480–481). Following Walter Pater’s influential aestheticist claim in The

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Renaissance (1873) that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (1980, 106), Wilde looks not to painting – though, of course, the plot of the novel itself is woven around the supernatural painting of its title – but to music: “[f]rom the point of view of form, the type of all art is the art of the musician” (Wilde 1891, 481). For Pater and for Wilde, music is the ideal art precisely because it is not representational, evoking feelings or impressions rather than reflecting reality or delivering a moral. The novel’s status as art was, likewise, a lynchpin in debates about the merits of literary naturalism throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Émile Zola, in pushing literary realism to its seemingly logical conclusion, to what came to be called naturalism, likened the novel not to art but to science. As one English apologist describes, for Zola, “the novel has once and for all left the sphere of art and entered the scientific sphere. It now employs the same method as science and aims at the same end” (“Literary Creed” 1888, 565). And, just as the realist James and aesthete Wilde asserted that the art of the novel must not be limited in what it could represent, so the naturalist Zola and his English adherents, authors such as George Gissing and George Moore (↗ 28 George Moore, Esther Waters), demanded that the ‘science’ of novels be similarly unfettered. After all, would a scientist refuse to record any aspect of his experimental subjects simply because it was shocking or offensive to conventional morality? Attacks against the naturalism of Zola and his followers, then, were twopronged: on the one hand, depicting the depraved and vicious aspects of society was immoral and would exercise a deleterious effect on vulnerable readers, and, on the other hand, the ‘scientific’ cataloguing of minutiae without regard for artistic composition or selection was inartistic. E. G. Wheelwright, writing rather circumspectly in the Westminster Review, argues on both fronts at once: We have departed from the old traditions, and the result is an atmosphere of low vitality and degenerate work. In severing this latest product of imaginative literature from the natural and noble fellowship of its kindred arts, we have robbed it of its birthright, and ourselves of joy in its possession. (1896, 208)

Emily Crawford, who was a successful journalist and long-time Paris correspondent to British and American periodicals, declined to address the moral question in offering a much more explicit critique of Zola’s art. Writing for the Contemporary Review, she draws an analogy between Zola’s work and the “very imitative art of present-day Italy,” which she had seen exhibited at the South Kensington museum, in order to explain her dissatisfaction with Zola: Whatever could be done with fingers guided by perceptive eyes, that see well the mere outsides of things in this world of types and shadows, and are blind to all inner spirit, such Italian artists did. But there was nothing more in their work to arouse interest than there is in the reflection of a natural object in a mirror. (1889, 96)

For Crawford, the ‘workmanlike’ skill that Zola exhibits in reproducing, down to the finest detail, his bêtes humaines fails to redeem his scientific novels as art and explains why his “writings easily surfeit” (96).

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Yet, it is worth noting that in championing the novel as art not all critics looked to the fine arts or abandoned the notion of it as a material object of manufacture. Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, influential literary critic – and originator of the writerly advice, often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway, “murder your darlings” (1916, 281) – in a column for the Speaker, remarked that novels should not be valued for their content alone, but for their beauty as physical objects: “Novelists, in fact, might tame and subdue their magnificent conceptions to the service of their fellow-men and try to conceive of a book – its contents and its dress, its style, its print and its binding – as a whole, a beautiful thing made up of beautiful parts” (1898, 399). Quiller-Couch’s collapsing of the distinctions between a novel’s content and its packaging reflects the influence of the Arts & Crafts Movement (a movement that, likewise, crossed national borders during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), with its emphasis on reforming manufacture and mass production through attention to handicraft and the decorative arts. Here again we can see the importance of reading Victorian theories of the novel against the wider backdrop of transnational nineteenth-century cultural and aesthetic debates.

2 What Ought (or Ought not) the Novel to Represent? As the foregoing discussion suggests, aesthetic debates about the novel were also often ethical debates. When, for example, George Eliot famously pauses the action in chapter seventeen of Adam Bede (1859) to argue in favour of realism, she draws direct lines between the author’s duty to verisimilitude and the reader’s ability to sympathise with the flawed individuals they may encounter in the real world. She imagines her reader speaking to her: “‘The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair,’” to which Eliot replies: But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry? With your newly appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor? With the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing? [. . .] These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people – amongst whom your life is passed – that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love. (2008, 159–160)

In other words, creating portraits that are true to life, even or especially if those characters are flawed, trains readers to sympathise with the imperfect denizens of their communities. Eliot’s argument against ‘lady novelists’ in “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” likewise, hinges on sympathy. A lady novelist who is more concerned with pushing an

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agenda or showing off her (imperfect) knowledge or with presenting idealised characters (or with some unfortunate combination of all three) is not just a bad artist but a morally culpable one. The most common form of ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, Eliot remarks archly, is an infelicitous admixture of half-baked ideas and superficial trappings, which she describes as “the mind-and-millinery species” (1856, 443). Those novels unfailingly feature a heroine whose “nose and [. . .] morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity” and who “is understood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers” (443). In contradistinction to such lady novelists is the “really cultured woman” who is “all the simpler and less obtrusive for her knowledge” and who “does not write books to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to delight them” (455). Of this woman, Eliot concludes: “She does not give you information, which is the raw material of culture, – she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence” (455). The notion here, as in Adam Bede, is that good fiction improves its readers, not through delivering a distinct lesson or moral, but in fostering fellow-feeling. Eliot’s vision of sympathetic realism was one widely held by theorists of the novel, but realism was not the only theory that claimed for itself ethical and aesthetic superiority. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for example, championed idealism as opposed to realism. Bulwer-Lytton is perhaps best known today as the originator of the opening line “it was a dark and stormy night” in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford (1874, 13), and as such he has been much mocked, but he was both a successful novelist who experimented with multiple genres – including historical fictions such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and speculative fictions such as his 1871 dystopian hollow-earth novel The Coming Race (↗ 21 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race) – and an influential critic in his time. In Caxtoniana (1863), a collection of essays he first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, he develops his theories on “life, literature, and manners,” including a theory of the novel as dealing in ideal types rather than realities: “Art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature – takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess – viz., the mind and the soul of man” (Bulwer-Lytton 1875, 312). Bulwer-Lytton, too, has recourse to the visual arts to explain his theory of fiction: Just as he is but a Chinese kind of painter, who seeks to give us, in exact prosaic detail, every leaf in a tree, which if we want to see only a tree, we could see in a field much better than in a picture; so he is but a prosaic and mechanical pretender to imagination who takes a man out of real life, gives us his photograph, and says, “I have copied nature.” [. . .] The great artist deals with large generalities, broad types of life and character; and though he may take flesh and blood for his model, he throws into the expression of the figure a something which elevates the model into an idealised image. (1875, 312)

Here Bulwer-Lytton anticipates Stevenson’s argument in “A Humble Remonstrance” and, to a certain extent, Meredith’s in “An Essay on Comedy” and The Egoist, as well as those critics of naturalism who note, not without some justice, that a pretence to

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scientific objectivity on the part of a novelist is just that, a pretence, and that all art depends upon the selection and organisation of one’s raw material.

3 Who Ought to Write (and Read) Novels? In delineating the proper place of the novel – its status as a work of art and its scope – theorists also grappled with what we might call the material conditions of its production and consumption: in short, they worried about who was writing and reading the novel. As literacy rates increased, and the periodical press expanded, opening up larger and larger markets for serial fiction, and as the lending libraries ensured reliable and profitable markets for publishers’ wares, novelists and critics fretted about how these conditions would affect the novel’s status as art. In a market constantly flooded with new novels, many of them mediocre, readers could not be trusted to distinguish the good from the bad. Here was a compound problem. On the one hand, a public with bad taste would force authors to cater to those tastes. As one satirical how-to article in the Monthly Magazine put it, after cataloguing the incidents that ‘must’ fill the first, second, and third volumes of a typical novel: “Your style must be varied by a judicious use of grotesque similes and distorted metaphors. It is not your fault that such ornaments are considered droll and clever by the majority of novel readers” (“Art and Mystery” 1833, 175–176). And, on the other hand, as we have seen, bad fiction was not just aesthetically inferior, but morally injurious. Fears of the ill effects of novels on their readers reached a peak in the 1860s with the popularity of sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862 ↗ 18 Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret), which featured suspenseful plots that hinged on hidden crimes and secrets. As critic H. L. Mansel put it in an 1863 review in the Quarterly Review, referring to sensation novels as “the morbid phenomena of literature,” works of this class manifest themselves as [. . .] indications of a wide-spread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want which they supply. (1863, 482–483)

Margaret Oliphant, herself a successful novelist and prolific critic, likewise decried the effects of sensational reading practices in an 1862 review of Collins’s Woman in White for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, noting that Collins’s success had brought a “shoal of copyists” in his wake who would amplify the negative effects of the sensation novel craze with each fresh imitation: “[t]he violent stimulant of serial publication – of weekly publication, with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situations and startling incident – is the thing of all others most likely to develop the germ, and bring it to fuller and darker bearing” (1862, 568). In many ways, antisensation rhetoric was not just critical of sensation novels but, implicitly or explicitly,

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pro-realism: that is to say, the ‘truthful’ fidelity to nature in realism, as exemplified by works such as Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, was often held up as the antidote to the improbable plots and lurid excesses of the sensation novel. But if the taste for bad fiction was regrettable, perhaps worse was the fact that, trained on a diet of bad fiction, these readers might decide that they too should be novelists. As Bulwer-Lytton remarks sourly, “it is the more natural that there should be a rush toward novel-writing, because no man and no woman who can scribble at all ever doubt that they can scribble a novel. Certainly, it seems that the kinds of writing most difficult to write well, are the easiest to write ill” (1875, 309). Although amateurs of various stamps – strangely, often, country curates – came under fire for attempting to write novels, most frequently fears of the bad amateur novelist focused on gender. For many of the century’s novelists were women, or as one critic condescendingly put it, “good young ladies,” whose over-productivity created a quandary for the critic: For some months of the year hardly any books are published but new novels. They stream forth in a never-ending flow, but unfortunately they are all alike. They are all written by good young ladies – they all breathe the same aspirations, and are marked by the same virtuous preferences. What is a reviewer to do? [. . .] What a strange thing it is to think of all these excellent girls going to work at novel-writing with all the regularity of hands at a factory, and with an equal confidence that they can always go on producing! (“How to Review” 1858, 370).

And another critic, with similar sarcasm, blames the prevalence of young ladies’ novels on critics’ unwillingness to be too exacting: Young ladies now, instead of working an anti-macassar, take to writing a novel, and the thing is hawked from one book-taster to another, until in the end it is published. [. . .] [T]hey receive encouragement enough to write another, and though their last state be worse than their first, not four journals, whose trade it should be to tell the truth, will bring them to a proper sense of their condition. (“Ways and Means” 1866, 665)

The trope of the scribbling girl is well-nigh ubiquitous in discussions of the novel throughout the century – indeed, so much so that Walter Besant used it in an article he wrote to girls who hoped to become novelists. In an essay for the girls’ magazine Atalanta, “On the Writing of Novels,” Besant reprised the rules he had described in the “The Art of Fiction,” gently chiding his young readers for thinking that writing novels would be easy, pleasant, or lucrative and encouraging them to practice their skills before trying their hand at an actual novel. He opened, however, with an unsettling image: As I sit down to write these few lines to young writers, there is borne upon my ear [. . .] a strange sound. It is not at all like the gentle whisper of the leaves, or the babbling of the brook, but it is a sound as of a multitudinous, unceasing, teasing or scratching of paper by steel pens. [. . .] They are the pens of girls trying to write stories and burning to write novels. (1887, 163)

Here, as in “The Art of Fiction,” Besant appoints himself aesthetic gatekeeper to the domain of the novel, but just as his lecture called forth a robust, not to say

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contentious, response from interlocutors such as James, Lang and Stevenson, so too one can recognise – in the scratching pens of this multitude of girls – the ways in which the art of novel writing for the Victorians was not an easily codified discipline but, rather, a dynamic and constantly evolving art, which accommodated multiple genres and which opened itself to practitioners of vastly different perspectives and sensibilities. Whereas Besant and some of his fellow critics saw unlovely excess in the “never-ending flow” of new novels (“How to Review” 1858, 370), looking back, readers today may see instead a gorgeous profusion.

4 Conclusion Digitisation efforts over the past decade and a half or so have made millions of pages of primary source material available to readers. Both famous and long-overlooked works can now be accessed for little or even no expense as e-books, so it has become much easier to get hold of a wide array of Victorian novels. While much of the content of Victorian periodicals that has been digitised in recent years unfortunately is housed behind paywalls, those with access to digital archives such as the British Newspaper Archive (a joint project of the British Library and findmypast) and ProQuest’s British Periodicals will find rich reservoirs of material that speak to the Victorian art of novelwriting and that enable readers to reconstruct the conversations that circulated in and around Victorian novels. Any novel – whether Eliot’s realist masterwork Middlemarch (1871, ↗ 22 Eliot, Middlemarch) or Braddon’s sensational blockbuster Lady Audley’s Secret or some long-forgotten serial – can offer its own locus as a starting point for investigation within a much vaster network: Where was it first published? In what format? How was it reviewed? And in what kinds of periodicals? What other things did the novel’s author write (and for which journals)? Those who wish to undertake such investigations and trace the interconnections among authors, editors, reviewers, and publication venues would do well to refer to the magisterial (and continually expanding) Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, which allows the reader to explore cross-referenced entries on many of the authors and journals discussed in this chapter, as well as entries on larger issues such as ‘Literature and Journalism’, ‘Reviewing’, ‘Reviewers’, ‘Serials and the NineteenthCentury Publishing Industry’ and ‘Authorship and the Press’, to name only a few. Readers of the Victorian novel who take the trouble to trace Victorian theories of the art of novel writing will, I believe, agree with Henry James that “the successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting” (1884, 503).

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Bibliography Works Cited “The Art and Mystery of Fashionable Novel Writing.” Monthly Magazine, or, British Register Feb. 1833: 173–176. “The Art of Fiction.” Saturday Review 25 Apr. 1891: 491–492. Besant, Walter. The Art of Fiction: A Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution on Friday Evening, April 25, 1884 (with Notes and Additions). London: Chatto and Windus, 1884. Besant, Walter. “On the Writing of Novels.” Atalanta Dec. 1887: 163–167. Besant, Walter. “The Science of Fiction.” New Review Apr. 1891: 310–315. Bourget, Paul. “The Dangers of the Analytic Spirit in Fiction.” New Review Jan. 1892: 48–55. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. “On Certain Principles of Art in Works of Imagination.” Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays. 1863. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1875. 303–327. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Paul Clifford. 1830. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1874. Crawford, Emily. “Emile Zola.” Contemporary Review 55 (1889): 94–113. “Difficulties of the Novelist.” Saturday Review 5 May 1877: 542–543. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Ed. Carol A. Martin. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008. [Eliot, George]. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Westminster Review 66.130 (1856): 442–461. “How to Review Novels.” Saturday Review 16 Oct. 1858: 370–371. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Longman’s Sept. 1884: 502–521. Lang, Andrew. “The Art of Fiction.” Pall Mall Gazette 30 Apr. 1884: 1–2. Lang, Andrew. “Realism and Romance.” Contemporary Review 52 (1887): 683–693. “The Literary Creed of Emile Zola.” Time May 1888: 563–571. [Mansel, H. L.]. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly Review 113.226 (1863): 481–514. [Marryat, Frederick]. “Novels and Novel Writing.” Metropolitan 5.19 (1832): 233–236. Meredith, George. The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. Vol. 1. London: Kegan Paul, 1879. [Oliphant, Margaret]. “Sensation Novels.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91.559 (1862): 564–584. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1873. Ed. Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas [A. T. Q. C.]. “A Literary Causerie.” Speaker 1 Oct. 1898: 398–399. Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas. On the Art of Writing. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916. Stevenson, Robert Louis. “A Humble Remonstrance.” Longman’s Dec. 1884: 139–147. “The Ways and Means of Novels.” London Review 16 June 1866: 665–666. Wheelwright, E. G. “A Claim for the Art of Fiction.” Westminster Review 146.1 (1896): 205–212. Wilde, Oscar. “Preface to ‘Dorian Gray.’” Fortnightly Review March 1891: 480–481.

Further Reading Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, eds. The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Ghent: Academia, 2009. Eigner, Edwin M., and George J. Worth, eds. Victorian Criticism of the Novel. Cambridge: CUP, 1985. Jones, Anna Maria. “Victorian Literary Theory.” Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. 236–254. King, Andrew, and John Plunkett, eds. Victorian Print Media: A Reader. Oxford: OUP, 2005.

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Maitzen, Rohan, ed. The Victorian Art of Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the Novel. Peterborough: Broadview, 2009. Olmstead, John Charles, ed. A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals 1859–1869. New York: Garland, 1979. Robinson, Solveig C., ed. A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women Writers. Peterborough: Broadview, 2003.

Monika Pietrzak-Franger

6 Victorian Gender Relations and the Novel Abstract: The Victorian era did not only see unprecedented transformations in the legal, socio-cultural, and political standing of women. It also witnessed the diversification of publically acknowledged gender scripts. The novel offered a space where they could be addressed and negotiated. More often than not, it illustrated their instability, their fluid character, and their simultaneous social conditioning. By that, it drew attention to the incongruences between acknowledged gender scripts and actual quotidian possibilities. At the same time, it naturalised the institution of marriage and thus reinforced specific patterns of gendered behaviour, even as it eventually employed the failed-marriage plot to draw attention to the power inequality that such unions invited. Marriage, of course, was not attainable to all. And so, the Victorian novel also registered debates addressing new-fangled gender roles, such as that of the odd woman and the colonial male. It also took up the topic of sexuality, even if only indirectly. It drew attention to Victorian polymorphous desires while its changing form mirrored transformations that modernity brought to the conception of gender identities and male-female relations. The novel’s utopian variety also provided a space for the envisioning of new gender futures. Last but not least, as part of the larger literary sphere, the novel and novel writing practically contributed to the widening of women’s occupational possibilities and to the public visibility of their concerns. Keywords: Gender scripts, masculinity, femininity, sexuality, marriage, failedmarriage plot, sexual desire

As an era of contrasts and contradictions, the Victorian period was also a time of epochal changes in the understanding and performance of gender identities. In terms of available gender models, it saw the rise and fall of various figures of identification that promised to regulate and organise everyday gender practice. The counter ideals of the ‘Angel in the House’, on the one hand, and the suffragette and the New Woman, on the other, have for centuries indicated the scale of this development: from women’s ideological enclosure within the domestic sphere to their revolutionary, albeit inconsistent, appropriation of the public space. Other figures such as the gentleman, the paterfamilias, the entrepreneur, the New Man, the soldier, the frontiersman, the dandy, and the homosexual marked the new advances in the perception and conceptualisation of masculinities throughout the century. A juxtaposition of George Elgar Hicks’ triptych Woman’s Mission (1863) and Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894) indicates the extent of these transformations: Hick’s idealised version of the family contrasts sharply with https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-007

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Beardsley’s depiction of womanhood as a symptom of millennial crises and “sexual anarchy” (Showalter 1990, 3). These changes, which encompassed modifications in social attitudes along with legal transformations, were associated not only with a rethinking of gender relations but also with an acknowledgement of their performative character. The novel was an invaluable instrument in thinking through and negotiating gender. Gender scripts and relations, their entwining with larger socio-political concerns, along with debates about the nation state and the empire, were as integral to the novel’s subject matter as the questions of sexual desire and reproduction. In fact, many critics have argued that Britain’s socio-political anxieties were often ‘translated’ into fiction as matters of embodiment, gender, and sexuality. They have also established the novel’s role in shaping the rules of “social and biological reproduction” (Armstrong 2001, 97). They have shown how these were narratively linked to economy (especially to capitalism and liberalism, and the modes of consumption they introduced), and explored the ways in which sexual desire and various kinds of erotic passions had to be suppressed within the story world (cf. Nunokawa 2001). Taking these discussions into consideration, this chapter offers an account of how masculinities and femininities were negotiated side by side in texts ranging from Jane Eyre to Heart of Darkness. I start off by sketching general transformations in the legal and socio-cultural relationships between genders and the concomitant ideals that organised them. Against this background, gender performance in fiction is discussed along with the depiction of marriage as the institution that was supposed to bring these performances to fruition and ensure their social, national, and imperial utility. Furthermore, new-fangled gender scripts are addressed, as are utopian visions and their relevance for the national and imperial self-understanding of Great Britain at the time. The last part of this chapter takes up contemporaneous debates about gender and authorship and shows that the novel, as part of a larger literary sphere, offered one possible space where the negotiations of gender could be catapulted outside fiction and into the socio-cultural and economic realm.

1 Bearded Men and Pure Women: The Rise and Fall of Gender Ideals The relational character of Victorian femininity and masculinity was legally anchored in the principle of ‘coverture’, which saw women as indistinguishable from their husbands. “By marriage,” William Blackstone wrote in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), “the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband” (430). This doctrine deprived women of independent legal identity and excluded them from

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the “judiciary, parliament and the franchise” (Griffin 2012, 5). Unsurprisingly, such a system served male interests, undercut women’s agential opportunities, and perpetuated ideologies that throve on this legal inequality. At the same time, the Victorian era was characterised by a series of unprecedented modifications in the legal, economic, and political status of women. Many voices (Barbara Bodichon, John Stuart Mill, Caroline Norton, Marion Reid, Frances Power Cobbe, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy, Emmeline Pankhurst, etc.) stressed women’s precarious situation. In The Subjection of Women (1869), and undoubtedly continuing the reformist work he had pursued with his late wife Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill famously appealed for “a principle of perfect equality” (1878, 1) between the two sexes, claiming that extant social institutions had blindly appropriated the norm of gender disparity (by analogy with the physical inequality of the sexes), whereby women had been reduced to the status of legal slaves. His campaign for the amendment of the Reform Act of 1832 gave necessary gravity to the issue of women’s suffrage. In the course of the century, although not without struggle, this legal bondage was increasingly recognised and women were gradually granted a number of rights. The right to the custody of their children (1839, extended in 1873) was followed by partial property rights (Married Women Property Acts of 1870, 1882, 1884, 1893), and by the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which, even though it treated both sexes differentially, made divorce more easily available to women. They attained a better position in negotiating compensation in cases of domestic violence and abuse and successfully fought against such laws as the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869; repealed in 1886). While their political participation often started at home with the education of their children, it also encompassed communal and parish politics along with philanthropy. By and by, they received franchise in a number of local elections and, even as they were excluded from national franchise, they exerted influence over national politics by ways of petitions, marches, and demonstrations. Nationwide, a number of associations (The Ladies of Langham Place, The Sheffield Female Political Association, National Society for Women’s Suffrage, etc.) drew attention to the causes and effects of inequality in legal representation and fought for the amendment of women’s political and economic status – efforts which culminated in the suffragist (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) and suffragette (Women’s Social and Political Union) movements of the turn of the century and ultimately lead to the granting of the vote to women over thirty in 1918. This legal struggle was accompanied by a series of public debates over women’s education, their right to occupation, their social status, and the economic implications of these. Industrialisation and urbanisation resulted in a heightened demand for female labour force: domestic service, textile and clothing sectors, pottery, seamstressing, laundry work, cleaning, and retail services were just some of the areas of this heightened demand. Needless to say, the working conditions were far from satisfactory. The ‘plea of the seamstress’ epitomises economic exploitation

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and the variety of hazards women workers were exposed to (cf. Harris 2005). Despite that, their contribution to the household economy was considerable. Outside the working classes, women also played a part in market exchange. Before the changes in property rights, it was difficult for married women to operate businesses. Still, evidence shows that they were often involved in family enterprises. The surplus of women (‘odd women’) meant that many had no other choice but to find their own source of sustenance: working as a governess, in millinery, bookkeeping, or retailing afforded some possibilities for the middle classes. Widows and spinsters often managed property and acted as silent investors. The growth of the service sector at the end of the century also made clerical jobs available to many. With this expansion of work opportunities, and against the backdrop of larger socio-cultural developments, the socially accepted ideas of femininity underwent transformation, as did women’s self-perception. By the end of the nineteenth century, the validity of the middle-class-born ideology of the ‘separate-spheres’ (the division into the domestic sphere – usually regarded as women’s space – and the public sphere – dominated by men) had lost its grip on popular imagination. In the mid-century, in contrast, its force was still strongly felt and its influence on the perception of both genders clearly discernible. Coventry Patmore’s poetic celebration of the ‘Angel in the House’ (The Angel in the House [1854–1862]) catered to contemporaneous tastes, which associated middleclass femininity with a subservient, sacrificial, and supportive role in marriage. The famous lines, “Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman’s pleasure” (1885, 73), reverberated through fiction, advice literature, and political commentary. John Ruskin, for instance, has been seen as highly responsive to this ideal (cf. Richards 2009, 22–23) and his belief that “man’s power” is “active, progressive, defensive,” while a woman’s intellect is fit “for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision” (1910, 107) has been regarded as unquestionably hailing the above doctrine. Of course, this celebrated ideal was as little attainable in reality as it was in fiction; it is therefore not surprising that its imaginative force had waned by the end of the century. By and by, the ‘girl of the period’, ‘New Women’, ‘Suffragists’, and ‘Suffragettes’ became publically acknowledged, albeit often dreaded and ridiculed, models of femininity. Masculinity constructs also underwent diversification. When conjured up today, the mid-Victorian ideal of manliness would be “an earnest, mature, hard-working, morally upright paterfamilias, frock-coated and (in that decade [of the 1860s]) fullbearded” (Deane 2014, 4). Even though “self-discipline,” “self-mastery,” and “autonomy” were a man’s virtues (Deane 2014, 4, 5; see also Sussman 1995; Adams 1995; Tosh 2005; Kestner 2010), he was nonetheless associated with continual aspiration for moral refinement and self-improvement, both of which were bound to and fostered by the exigencies of domesticity (Tosh 2005). Obviously, by the end of the nineteenth century, this ideal was also very much in crisis. Indeed, as Regenia Gagnier has aptly observed, there was “a crisis in the 1890s of the male on all levels –

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economic, political, social, psychological, as producer, as power, as role, as lover” (1986, 98). It was not only that his position had slowly been undermined by recent socio-political developments and that he was increasingly associated with the principle of degeneration but also that he was thrown from the pedestal, as the naturalised image of the ‘virtues’ he represented slowly but surely began to exhibit cracks on its surface. Reading the Victorian era through the lens of evolution and progress is too simplistic; it is undeniable, though, that the cultural shift away from the ideals of the ‘paterfamilias’ and the ‘pure’, self-respecting, ‘Angel in the House’ towards a network of socially more and less acknowledged gender roles signals the diversification of gender fashions and performative opportunities in the late nineteenth century. A lot of early scholarly effort has gone into examining the ideology of the ‘separate spheres’ that underpinned nineteenth-century gender politics and has been associated with the binaries of public/private, male/female, reasonable/emotional. This binary thinking, however, has gone out of vogue after the inclusion of performative paradigms into the study of Victorian gender relations. Such performative approaches emphasise the relational character of the concepts of masculinity and femininity. In this context, the binary construction of genders in the Victorian era has been reformulated in terms of ‘gender identities in flux’ – a model that acknowledges not only the developmental character of (hegemonic) gender identities but which also takes into account their contradictions and complexities. These discussions continue to differentiate between gender ideologies (as articulated in certain discursive formations) and gender practices (as seen in individual realisations of nineteenth-century individuals), thus drawing attention to the incongruences between various acknowledged models and actual quotidian possibilities.

2 Gender Performance in Fiction The Victorian novel recorded and contributed to these transformations. It also offered a platform for the negotiation of gender identities and linked these to larger socio-cultural, economic, national, and imperial concerns. As incompatible as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) appear, and as much as they have invited divergent interpretations, they clearly illustrate the instability of gender identities, their fluid character, and their simultaneous social conditioning. Oscillating between “a story of spiritual development” and “romantic rebellion” (Da Sousa Correa 2000, 96), Jane Eyre (↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) takes Victorian women’s education, their social function, and the notion of marriage as its reference points. Its “formal plurality” and narrative polyvalence have been linked to the novel’s “resistance to patriarchy” (Da Sousa Correa 2000, 105). Indeed, as Gayatri

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Chakravorty Spivak reminds us, the novel has become a “cult text” of Anglophone feminism (1985, 243). And although there is little consensus as to its ‘(anti-)feminist’ politics, one thing that critics agree on is the novel’s confrontation with long-standing gender (and genre) orthodoxies (cf. Eagleton 1988). As an orphan and governess, Jane Eyre embodies a socially and economically liminal position, that of “emotional hungering [. . .] and of harshly mechanical necessity” (Eagleton 1988, 16), which sensitises her (and us) to social conventions and, at the same time, awards her the instruments of future success. In his Marxist reading, Terry Eagleton aptly shows how Jane and Rochester’s relationship is “a blend of independence [. . .], submissiveness, and control” (30), in which both characters skilfully move between male and female positions to achieve their aims. Effectively, what the novel seems to argue is that whatever is culturally connoted as masculine (aggression, independence, action) and feminine (caretaking, passivity, submissiveness) is not gender-specific and can be performed by both sexes. This distinction between socio-cultural conditioning and inward ambition is best illustrated by Jane’s ardent plea for “life, fire, feeling” (Charlotte Brontë 1847, 93) and against the solitude and inertia that Thornfield Hall imposes on her and that social constraints force on women: It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity [. . .]. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. [. . .] Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. (93)

While she acknowledges the privileged masculine standing, she nonetheless sees men and women as “fellow-creatures” that would suffer equally under the strain of confinement and inactivity. Indeed, Rochester’s position – a younger son who must marry into colonial wealth (cf. 256) – proves that social conventions and economic dependence is burdening to women and men alike. Although the novel follows the requirements of the romance plot and ends with marriage (and thus adheres to the social and narrative conventions of the time), this marriage, as many critics have been ready to remark, partly levels out the differences between Jane (her uncle’s inheritance makes her economically independent) and Rochester (his maimed physique and burnt-down estate symbolically lower his status), thus reinventing this social and economic bond to cater to the needs of both protagonists as it inadvertently perpetuates the tenets of the patriarchal system. Later in the century, New Woman fiction would even more directly address the cleft between socially acknowledged gender scripts and individual longings. Sarah Grand’s titular ‘Heavenly Twins’ (↗ 27 Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins) most blatantly incarnate the oppressive character of unchanging social expectations. Constructed as foils, Angelica and Theodore (Diavolo) parody this alleged equivalence

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by falling in and out of oppositionally defined gender roles. Both recognise the incongruity of a system in which Angelica, who is repeatedly described as “the taller, stronger, [cleverer], and wickeder of the two” (Grand 2007, 126), is prevented from acquiring adequate education and forced to marry (as her brother is bound to be the only heir of his father’s property) solely on account of her gender. It is only temporarily, by disguising as her brother, that she is able to shed the burden of femininity. This cross-dressing episode is both an “explosion” – after her desires to “do as well as to be” remain unrealised (450) – and an attempt to be seen as more than just a young lady (451). The adverse reaction to her performance highlights the extent to which socially prescribed standards are blindly followed and further perpetuated by romantic ideals, which themselves have little to do with the realities of existence (“You [. . .] fall in love with a girl you have never spoken to in your life” [459]). This temporal liberation is, of course, narratively punished and the heroine can only hope “to live [. . .] to see it allowed that a woman has no more right to bury her talents than a man has; in which days the man without brains will be taught to cook and clean, while the clever woman will be doing the work of the world well which is now being so shamefully scamped” (453). Indeed, the novel offers a caveat against unquestioned binary (gender) distinctions and the ills of a romantic education that presses both men and women into idealised forms they can certainly aspire to but never fulfil. As it acknowledges the performative character of gender identities, the text also makes clear that a society in which binary oppositions reign supreme can never realise its full potential – a belief that is further reinforced in Oscar Wilde’s novel. Although most often read as an expression of closeted homosexual desire, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (↗ 26 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray) also challenges heteronormative gender concepts, as it undermines the institution of marriage along the way. The novel simultaneously highlights the mutability/fluidity of gender identities and spotlights the disastrous, stultifying effects of forced performative consistency. Like The Heavenly Twins, it does so by using foils, in this case Dorian Gray and Sybil Vane. The simple dichotomy of masculine and feminine dissolves here. In the course of the novel, Dorian transforms from a “whimsical” (Wilde 1994, 23), lilac-smelling, fits-throwing lad, with “rose-red youth and [. . .] rose-white boyhood” (26) into a vice-spreading, cold-blooded murderer. Dorian falls in love with Sybil, an actress, who, onstage a sordid East End theatre, incarnates Shakespeare’s heroines from Ophelia to Rosalind, to Juliet, to Imogen, and thus is “all the great heroines of the world in one” (66). His fascination abruptly ends when Sybil abandons her roles and begins to speak with her own voice. Punished with his indifference when she terminates this gender masquerade, she commits suicide. Narratively, Dorian occupies a position similar to Sibyl’s. Like her, who is first focalised from his perspective, Dorian is ‘born’ as an object of Basil Howard’s and Lord Henry’s admiring gazes. Like Sibyl, he is forced to take up (and takes up) a certain kind of gendered script. Like her, he undergoes a transformation; and yet the consistency of his looks deceives those around him and, simultaneously,

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makes it impossible for him to authenticate his behaviour. When he confesses to murdering Basil Howard, Lord Henry dryly dismisses the idea: “you [are] posing for a character that doesn’t suit you” (244). Next to unravelling the hypocrisy of the upper classes, this passage comments on the irrevocable materiality of the performed identity and the dire consequences of the growing incompatibility of one’s actions and appearance. The Picture of Dorian Gray does not only test the bounds of gendered performance but also envisions any identity as a series of performative acts. If Dorian falls for Sybil, it is because of the multiplicity of, historically contingent, identities that she incarnates. Sybil embodies his concept of the human: “[t]o him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within himself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead” (164). If Sybil Vane and Dorian Gray offer two exemplary cases of this type of identity, their performances thereof are characterised by frictions, fissures, inconsistencies, and on-going metamorphoses. In both cases, the complexities of performative acts and the thus created identities clash with the universal tendency to simplify them (“the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence” [164]). Irrespective of his behaviour, many see “or fancy that they [see], in Dorian Gray the true realisation of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days” (149). Similarly, Dorian himself continues to regard Sybil as an incarnation of literary heroines. The novel thus throws into strong relief the paradoxical coexistence of human psychological complexity and the tendency to categorise and to simplify. The latter is, of course, in the service of social and economic ordering. If gendered binaries are abandoned, what is at stake is the institution of marriage and, with that, the future of the nation, the empire, and the whole species.

3 Victorian Marriage and the (Failed-)Marriage Plot Although Decadents, like New Women, endangered established social hierarchies and dangerously blurred gender distinctions at the turn of the century (Showalter 1990, 169), marriage remained an institution that economically and socially dictated life-narratives and gender scenarios for the entire nation (cf. Perkin 1989; Shanley 1989). As much as the middle-class marriage was an epitome of such a union and frequently served as a metaphor for the whole nation and even the empire, Queen Victoria, herself self-styled wife and mother, considered it a risk: “I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness” (qtd. in Hager 2016, 1). The Victorian press was replete with cases of abuse and mistreatment. Despite reports to the contrary, domestic violence was the lot of all the classes. According

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to many, the legal nature of the union invited spousal abuse. George Drysdale wrote in The Elements of Social Science (1861) that marriage is “the instrument in numberless cases of making the man a tyrant and the wife a slave” (356). On marrying Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill objected to the “legal power and control” that marriage granted men “over the person, property, and freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will” (1970, 45). Frances Power Cobbe’s essay “Wife Torture in England” (1878) addressed the brutality of the offence often publically treated with an air of joviality rather than contempt. The case of Caroline Sheridan Norton and her public campaigns have been credited with drawing public attention to marital abuse and preparing grounds for the Infant Custody and Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Acts (1839 and 1857). In 1853, the Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children was passed. Although it raised fines and threatened assaulters with imprisonment, it did not bring expected effects. Physical violence was often accompanied by emotional and psychological strain as women’s staggering economic dependence, the unequal divorce laws, and the social stigma attached to separation forced them to stay on the premises of the abusive household. Although the marriage plot is said to have naturalised the institution of marriage and reinforced specific patterns of gendered behaviour, Victorian fiction failed to produce a satisfactory example of a union that would be of the same narrative centrality that was accorded to bad marriages. The episodic ventures into the harmonious existence of Thomas Micklethwaite and Miss Wheatley in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) do show that such a marriage is possible, even if the parties have to wait seventeen years for the fulfilment. Predictably, and irrespective of subgeneric tendencies, many fictional marriages are the result of economic necessity rather than intellectual or physical attraction. Edward Rochester and Bertha Mason, Isabel Vane and Archibald Carlyle (Ellen Wood’s East Lynne [1861]), Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton (↗ 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights), Monica Madden and Edmund Widdowson (The Odd Women) – all prove that such a marriage can only end in unhappiness, tyranny, disloyalty, hatred, and disillusionment, if not mental instability. Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1871), in contrast, upholds that economy should be the sole grounds for the choice of a male partner (Armstrong 2001, 107). Lady Audley’s (↗ 18 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret) confinement to the lunatic asylum may be, although it should not, dismissed as a mere generic prerequisite of sensation fiction but the suicidal tendencies of husbands unable to stand the tantrums of their silly wives in The Odd Women or the undeniable mental sufferings of wives in New Woman fiction show the extent to which Victorian novels used the “failed-marriage plot” (Hager 2016) both to spread the ideology of affective marriage (out of love and intellectual affinity rather than economic gain) and at the same time to draw attention to the dangerous inequality of power that matrimony invited (cf. Hager 2016). In The Odd

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Women, Rhoda Nunn’s rhetorical battles with her suitor, Everard Barfoot, show the novel’s preoccupation with male-female power-struggles and the right to speak. A proponent of a “free union,” Barfoot acknowledges that such a bond “presupposes equality of position” (Gissing 2000, 162). Until this is the case, such prospect remains pure fantasy. The abundance of ill-conceived marriages, further supported by Nunn and Barfoot’s polemics, does not only demonstrate the fundamental codependence of femininity and masculinity, and their reliance on class and economy, it also illustrates the pitfalls of sentimental education and the gender ideals it perpetuates. Although contested as an ideal, marriage in fiction also often symbolically stood for larger socio-political structures. In the second half of the century, in the wake of Darwinian theories and concomitant social-Darwinist, eugenic, and social purity movements (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel), reproduction no longer was a personal or even gendered choice but became a matter of class, ethnicity, and citizenship (Richardson 2003, 3). In fact, a number of New Women had a maternalist agenda which, in the context of late nineteenthcentury British fears of racial decline and imperial loss, developed as eugenic feminism. The central goal of eugenic feminists was the construction of civic motherhood which sought political recognition for reproductive labour; in the wake of new biological knowledge they argued that their contribution to nation and empire might be expanded if they assumed responsibility for the rational selection of reproductive partners. (Richardson 2003, 9)

Indeed, the three narrative arcs in Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins are about nothing else but the dire consequences of bad matrimonial choices; consequences that reach far beyond the death of a misguided heroine and encompass the enfeebling of the genetic material and the ‘death of the race’. For fear of precisely such racial degeneration, the aristocratic protagonist of Emma Frances Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman (1894), Jessamine Halliday, chooses death over child-birth in a civic attempt to end the degenerate hereditary line of her debauched husband Lord Heriot (on New Woman Writing, degeneration, and STDs, see Pietrzak-Franger 2017). The personal becomes here very much political, even as the means of political agency are none other than one’s suicide. The didactic string of much of New Woman fiction dictated the choice of the male protagonists. Facing the prospect of living with upper-class degenerate scoundrels, selfish husbands, or moneyless workmen, even the most knowledgeable women were at a loss. As Mary Erle in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) contends, “He was weak, vacillating; his phrases were absurd [. . .], and yet he was the only man in the world [. . .] who desired her as a woman” (258). Indeed, in New Woman rhetoric, the male was chiefly seen as a subordinate species that could not, nor would, reform itself. With the resources so scarce, no wonder that fictional heroines chose, if they wanted to stay alive or sane, to remain single rather than improve the male species. And so, by the end of the century, rather than being a reason for stigmatisation, singleness had become a powerful rhetorical and political instrument.

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4 Odd Women and Men in Crisis Indeed, as Elaine Showalter famously claims, “[s]exual anarchy began with the odd woman. The odd woman – the woman who could not marry – undermined the comfortable binary system of Victorian sexuality and gender roles” (1990, 19). Odd women were contradictorily seen as either a social problem (as they challenged the male-dominated job market) or a proof that capitalism outmoded traditional gender roles and that social policies needed to search for new educational and vocational opportunities for women (Showalter 1990, 20). Of course, the fate of unmarried, widowed, and abandoned women was copiously recorded in fiction. In Cranford (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell sketches the peculiarities of and growing challenges befalling the (chiefly) female community of a small northern country town. Next to satirising their quirky ways of life, the novel also signals the economic strain under which many women found themselves at the time. With less emphasis on economics and more on social stigmatisation, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861, ↗ 2 Remediating Nineteenth-Century Narrative) fashions Miss Havisham as a prototypical confined woman. Deceived in her youth and abandoned at the altar, she symbolises the unnaturalness of spinsterhood and, with her eccentric behaviour boarding on mental instability, incarnates the evils of a single life. Miss Havisham is emblematic of Victorian popular-cultural fashioning of odd women as either bitter spinsters, lesbians, or hysterical feminists (Showalter 1990, 23). Undeniably, Victorian fiction abounds in images of women enclosed in their singleness and unable to imagine, let alone lead, an independent existence. The Madden sisters in George Gissing’s The Odd Women embody this position. Virginia’s alcoholism, Alice’s failing health under the strain of badly-paid teaching jobs, and Monica’s ill-suited marriage exemplify the most common traps for women who have internalised what Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have termed the “destructive strictures of patriarchy” (2000, 400). Gissing contrasts this ossified self-imprisonment with a more positive view of the possibilities that odd women had at the end of the century. Miss Mary Barfoot exhibits an entrepreneurial spirit when she uses her inheritance to open a school for middle-class women to prepare them for clerical jobs. This juxtaposition echoes Samuel Smiles’s Self Help (1859) and, of course, registers Victorian class struggle. Barfoot, for instance, sees the working classes as positioned beyond her chosen realm of influence and charity (Gissing 2000, 61–62). Also, her aim is not to dissuade women from marriage but rather to offer them a means of self-sustenance with the hope of thus preventing unions out of economic necessity. Her co-worker, self-professed New Woman and radical Rhoda Nunn, on the contrary, initially sees female celibacy as the sole means of exacting social change (also very characteristic of suffragist rhetoric). Only when women have learned self-respect will marriage as “an alliance of intellect” and not a means of sustenance be possible (68). While offering strong arguments for women’s education and highlighting the importance of men’s role

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therein, Gissing’s novel, nonetheless, fails to imagine a future where singlehood would be free of social stigmatisation. Instead, by signalling the possibility of a ‘free union’, it expertly circumvents the issue. At the same time, it emphasises how strenuous the road to such a union would be and blatantly demonstrates that any new type of heterosexual bond would require a thorough re-constitution of both genders and, with that, the abolishment of the current rule of patriarchy. Heidi Hartmann insists that patriarchy needs to be seen as “relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women” (1979, 14). Early studies of Victorian masculinities have indeed purported their heterogeneity (Sussman 1995) while insisting that literature contributed to the popularisation of various forms and narratives of how (not) to be a man. Whilst didactic fiction (e.g. for children), in particular, propagated an essentialised image of manliness (physical strength and self-professed superiority), in the realist novel, “the dominant medium of social self-inspection” (Schneider 2011, 150), such essentialised middle-class masculinity is conspicuously absent. Ralf Schneider (2011) argues that the novel confronted readers with an image of what hegemonic masculinity “did not mean,” thereby evoking its ideal in absentia (148, 163). Admittedly, the alleged fin-de-siècle ‘crisis of masculinity’ has usually been linked to the devolution of mid-nineteenth-century ideals of self-reliant and morally upright manhood and the concomitant appearance of new masculinity scripts. While New Woman novels drew attention to the ‘New Man’ as a worthy counterpart to the New Woman (cf. MacDonald 2015), popular fiction addressed at boys and men articulated a new form of hegemonic masculinity, one which was equally informed by discourses of manliness and the empire (cf. Deane 2014). Although often associated with such traits as “militarism,” “hostility to feminine influence,” and/or “fascination with the powerful male body” (Deane 2014, 7), this new type was also characterised by a number of contradictions. Deane regards competitiveness, “masculine endurance,” and “instinct and spontaneity” but also “savagery” and “barbarism” as its defining features (2014, 7–8). He also sees it in terms of the New Imperialists’ emphasis on “the performative and [. . .] theatrical dimensions of power” (9). Late nineteenthcentury literature, especially Rudyard Kipling’s, Joseph Conrad’s and Henry Rider Haggard’s works, he argues, linked “boys, foreigners, and the men of Britain’s past” in a celebration of a “purer,” reinvented, “global manliness” (16, 17). Unsurprisingly, similarly to the depiction of femininity, and almost irrespective of the generic tendencies, Victorian novels of all kinds highlight “the ambivalences and insecurities” of the master narratives of masculinity and demonstrate that their representations are “expressions of the ideological contradictions connected with masculinities in the nineteenth century” (Schneider 2011, 148; also see Kestner 1995). Thomas Hardy’s novels most spectacularly illustrate these tensions. In Jude the Obscure (1895, ↗ 30 Hardy, Jude the Obscure), the identity of the titular protagonist is fraught with problems as he alternately pursues and evades established

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ideals of manhood. In this, the novel explores the ways in which the masculinity scripts that patriarchy offers become constraining to individual men and appear contradictory when inflected with other categories such as class (cf. Langland 1993). Likewise, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) draws attention to the oppressive character of masculinity ideals (cf. Wright 1989; Horlacher 2006). Michael Henchard’s misogyny, his attempt to sell his wife and daughter, has been read as a hypermasculine realisation of male power fantasies (exercising his property rights over both) and simultaneously interpreted as a compensation of his anxieties that signal unstable gender identity. The competition between him and Donald Farfrae represents the struggle between Old and New Men; it demonstrates the interdependencies between various types of male ideals and brings to light the instable power relations that underlie their ever-changing hierarchies (Horlacher 2006, 182–192). Homosociality also plays a central role in Charles Marlow’s narrative in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). His obsession and identification with Mr. Kurtz, the agent of an ivory-trading company in charge of an out-post in the Congo Free State, is used to critique the civilising mission of the British empire. Next to that, the text also spotlights the network of masculine communality that both belong to, a network that requires a strict exclusion of femininity and ‘effeminate’ behaviour (Barnett 1996, 278). What is more, as Clive Barnett has argued convincingly, “Heart of Darkness constructs storytelling as a strictly masculine privilege, and with its doubling of Kurtz and Marlow, has just this sort of ‘intended’ reader, and its critical reception has been often characterised by readings which do indeed consent to play the roles marked out by the text itself” (1996, 287). The threat of homoeroticism, inherently present in homosocial relations, is fended off here by a strict division of relations into those of identification between male characters and those of sexual desire between men and women. “If, then, the dynamics of identification which Heart of Darkness sets in play are indeed patriarchal and misogynist,” Barnett argues further, “it is because of the articulation of masculine homosocial desire in specifically modern heterosexual homophobic terms” (289). The position of the colonial male, like that of the odd woman, marks a potentially new gendered way of being in the world, and simultaneously serves as a symptom and symbol of socio-cultural strictures and fears. As the Victorian novel contributed to the negotiation thereof, it also participated in addressing the topic of sexuality.

5 Dangerous Desires: Victorian Sexuality At least since the late 1960s, critical thought has refuted the repressive hypothesis, questioned the stereotype of the sexually frigid Victorian, drew attention to Victorian polymorphous desires, and demonstrated discrepancies between the nineteenth-century idealisations, articulations, and performances of sexuality. The

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contradictoriness of the Victorian era is undeniably visible here: as the century saw the birth of sexology and psychology, and as it spurred erotica and pornographic industries, it also witnessed an increasing discursive regulation and pathologisation of sexuality and sexual desire. Generally speaking, in Victorian public imagination, sexuality was tantamount to reproduction and was regarded and discussed as part of established ideals of masculinity and femininity. One of our received notions of the era has been the Victorian sexual double standard, which saw (controllable) sexual desire as natural in men and as a sign of deviancy in women (Steinbach 2012, 194–211; Furneaux 2011). Regularly quoted in this context, although not representative of medical literature in general, William Acton’s Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations (1865) legitimises the notion of sexual difference. While he did not deny the existence of sexual wants in women, Acton greatly contributed to the pathologisation of female desire (sexual excitement that may culminate “even in nymphomania, a form of insanity which those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with” [qtd. in Jeffreys 1987, 61]). By contrasting ‘proper’ women with their fallen sisters and prostitutes, he added gravitas to his argument that “there are many females who never feel any sexual excitement whatever,” and while some “become, to a limited degree, capable of experiencing it,” it is often only temporary and “[m]any of the best mothers, wives, and managers of households, know little of or are careless about sexual indulgences. Love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they feel. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself” (qtd. in Jeffreys 1987, 62). What is more, and what is often forgotten, Acton attributed male impotence to a “lack of sexual feeling in the female” (61). Thus, he did not only pathologise female sexuality but also made it responsible for male sexual malfunction. Unsurprisingly in this context, a number of appallingly misogynistic discourses linked female desire to hysteria and anaesthesia (cf. Showalter 1987; Gilbert and Gubar 2000; Poovey 1988). Late nineteenth-century commentators, in contrast, emphasised the social construction of female frigidity, even as the “doctrine of passionlessness” (Steinbach 2012, 197) was difficult to undermine in public. In Married Love (1918), Marie C. Stopes highlights the link between women’s socio-economic dependence and their sexual behaviours: “Woman, so long coerced by economic dependence, and the need for protection while she bore her children, has had to be content to mould herself to the shape desired by man wherever possible, and she has stifled her natural feelings and her own deep thoughts as they welled up” (qtd. in Jeffreys 1987, 554–555). Eleanor Marx both draws attention to the existence of sexual desire in women and highlights the hypocritical stance of Victorian society, which “provides [for men] the means of gratifying the sex instinct. In the eyes of that same society an unmarried woman who acts after the fashion habitual to her unmarried brothers

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and the men who dance with her at balls or work with her in the shop, is pariah” (qtd. in Showalter 1990, 119). In his Studies of the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928), Havelock Ellis points out the obvious: the notion of female frigidity is historically and culturally specific, and relatively recent (1942, 196). What is more, the majority of psychological studies have only commented on it in passing and, at that, have chiefly been concerned with the quantifiable differences between sex impulses in men and women. Searching for “qualitative differences,” continues Ellis, may be more profitable, which he shows in the second chapter ( “The Sexual Impulse in Women”) devoted to tracing the socio-cultural and physiological factors influencing female sexuality (1942, vi). In practice, Victorians exhibited an array of sexual preferences, even as critics have distinguished certain class-, space-, and occupation-specific tendencies (cf. Mason 1994; Weeks 1985). As medical case studies and court trials, along with their press coverage, abundantly demonstrate, male extramarital sex (especially among aristocracy and the middle classes) was not uncommon. Nor were behaviours that were incompatible with idealised gender roles, as the thriving erotic and pornographic industry profusely illustrates (cf. Marcus 1967). The wealth of, literarily dubious but culture-historically intriguing, erotic literature of the period could be taken as proof that the control of sexual desires, women’s passivity, and their alleged sexual frigidity, together with a stark division into hetero/homosexual behaviours, were but the exception to the rule. If the memoirs of the mysterious gentleman Walter, penned in My Secret Life (1888), are to be considered plausible, Victorian men had both plenty of fantasy and opportunities to imagine and act on their urges, which spanned love triangles, sex with young prostitutes and their keepers, homosexual encounters, orgiastic nights, not to mention casual and clandestine sex with young maids or country girls. This example of Victorian erotic prose can be read as an instantiation of male and, to a much lesser extent, female desire. In a passage celebrating the unrestrained, orgiastic indulgence of three heterosexual couples, members of both sexes voice their wishes: “Ejaculations burst out on all sides, the couples were meeting again, then all was quiet, and the fucking done. Then all talked. All modesty was gone, both men and women told their sensations and wants” (n. pag.). The often coarse language, unimaginative, formulaic plots, and choppy writing style of most of the erotic fiction forced even its ardent collector, Henry Spencer Ashbee, to admit in the preface to his Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877) that “English Erotic Novels [. . .] are sorry productions from a literary point of view [. . .]. It would appear indeed that the English language does not lend itself to the composition of amatory works, and that delicacy of treatment is with us next to impossible” (xl). Despite that, Ashbee places value on their testimonial character: “Erotic Novels, falling as they generally do into the category of domestic fiction, contain, at any rate the best of them, the truth, and ‘hold the mirror up to nature’ more certainly than those of any other description” (xxxviii). Irrespective of whether we believe this alleged ‘authentic’ rendition of sexuality in

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the novels, they copiously substantiate the interest in and ‘literary’ articulability of male and female (queer) desire. Whereas the characteristics of female readership interested in erotica cannot be determined with certainty, it is evident that women both wrote such fiction (early nineteenth-century dominatrix Theresa Berkley, for instance, published The Favourite of Venus) and featured in it, both as desired objects and desiring subjects. Despite the booming market for these excursions into the ‘netherworlds’ of human sexuality, the insistent normative coding of heterosexual desire in the Victorian era was concomitant with partial toleration of prostitution, wide-ranging sexual ignorance among women, uninhibited spread of venereal diseases, but also, increasingly, with an emergent culture of abstinence, social purity movements, and with a growing visibility of debates about the age of consent and contraception. All this influenced the Victorian perception of same-sex desire. Credited with the discovery of homosexuality (cf. Foucault 1998), the late Victorian period has also been linked to its increased medicalisation, pathologisation, and criminalisation. The Labouchere Amendment (1886) persecuted homosexual acts, leading to their subculturalisation in fin-de-siècle culture. Next to the ‘sodomites’ and the ‘Mary Annes’, there was a group of men who, although they had sex with other men (from various classes), did not consider themselves as homosexual (cf. Steinbach 2012, 203). Discourses about (homo)sexuality and its biological/psychological basis began to evolve at the turn of the century, with Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) leading the way in this pursuit. Two notions of homosexuality developed in parallel: 1) a type of congenital, sexual ‘inversion’, 2) a ‘perversion’ – the result of a corruptive influence of the environment. So while, on the one hand, patriarchy depended on the contingency of male homosocial bonds and saw in them the bulwark of national and imperial fantasies, these same relations fell under scrutiny as potential threats to heteronormativity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick emphasises this ‘double-bind’ of late Victorian men, arguing that “male heterosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement” (2013, 510). Like men, women in the nineteenth century experienced same-sex desire and lived in same-sex unions (e.g. Helen Codrington and Emily Faithfull; Havelock Ellis’ openly lesbian wife Edith Leeds), even as they lacked the language to communicative their experience (cf. Vicinus 2004). The advantage of their inarticulacy was, as Sally Ledger has argued, that sexual activities among women “could be neither pathologised nor criminalised, since they existed neither in law nor in medical textbooks” (1997, 128). Although the non-erotic novel offered a space for the articulation of desires, it did not do so unconditionally. Critics have argued that the genre habitually jettisoned sexuality outside the social, by emphasising its inherently dangerous character and by narratively either punishing or domesticating it. The Brontës’ works have often been read as “sublimating strategies that conceal forbidden desire” (Armstrong 1987, 187). In this context, Catherine Earnshaw has come to epitomise

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the literalisation of unfulfilled female passions and (sexual) longings. Her expression of her love for Heathcliff, and the stark contrast to the characterisation of her love for Earnshaw, exemplarily juxtapose conventional unions and women’s passions that cannot be accommodated within the social: My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Lindon is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it [. . .]. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. (Emily Brontë 1847, 84)

In order to articulate these urges, Emily Brontë appropriates figures characteristic of the romance and Gothic traditions (Armstrong 1987, 192). As a revenant and a continuous ghostly presence, Catherine incarnates the unfulfilled yearnings that return to disrupt the social. Next to providing an array of matrimonial and cohabitational behaviour, the genre of sensation fiction (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology) has been credited with singlehandedly offering the most explicit expression of female sexual desires. The novels’ emphasis on the incompatibilities of women’s longings with the imposed and performed femininity scripts renders visible the complexities of womanhood at the time. In texts such as Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861) or Mary Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863) and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862, ↗ 18 Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret), female sexuality likewise challenges the established rules of social behaviour. In Lady Audley’s Secret, the titular heroine turns out to be a bigamist and criminal whose rapid class mobility endangers the fragile system of social ordering. In East Lynne, adultery becomes a refuge from boredom and confinement for Lady Isabel. The awakening feeling surprises her: “She was aware that a sensation all too warm, a feeling of attraction towards Francis Levison, was working within her; not a voluntary one; she could no more repress it than she could repress her own sense of being; and, mixed with it, was the stern voice of conscience, overwhelming her with the most lively terror” (Wood 1862, 318). Thus presented as unintentional, the affection is not rendered as pathological but rather as naturally belonging to the repertoire of female emotion. There is a similar rendition of Jessamine Halliday’s growing attraction to handsome Scottish crofter Colin Macgillvray in Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman. Apparently involuntary, surprising, and defying all of her received notions of love and class, the feeling overtakes and overwhelms her: “But her brain was a blank place, and while she sought eagerly for an idea, her fingers thrilled with a sudden tormenting memory of the palm of Colin, on which she had permitted them to nestle” (1894, 134). Jessamine’s reaction is corporal: “[s]hivering again convulsively,” she needs time to compose herself (134). This upsurge of emotion gives the narrator a pretext to muse on the nature of human desires in the civilised world: “For us

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Human Passion resembles a sphinxlike woman, with a gray hood drawn over her eyes. She goes about the world groping inexorably for human heart after human heart” (133). Puzzling and dangerous, it drives people to do the unthinkable. Ann Ardis has argued that New Woman novels often include narratives of women’s sexual awakening by employing the Pygmalion myth to portray sexually ignorant heroines who, in the narrative climax, become aware of their own erotic desires mostly with the help of a male protagonist and sexual predator (1990, 90). In Gissing’s Odd Women, Everard Barfoot is fashioned as a quasi-scientist who wagers he will be able to kindle passion in the self-professed New Woman and believer in celibacy, Rhoda Nun. Of course, retribution, ostracism, and (self-)punishment follow almost every expression of female desire in fiction, as becomes blatantly clear in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Jude’s love interest and cousin, Sue Bridehead, embodies the psychological complexities of late nineteenth-century womanhood: “she is an emancipated woman but a repressive personality, advanced but infantile, passionate but sexless, independent but in need of men, unconventional but conventional, a feminist but a flirt” (Blake 1983, 148). In the novel, Sue considers her children’s deaths as a punishment for her ‘sinful’ cohabitation with her cousin Jude, which prompts her to return to her ex-husband and seek consolation in the church that she has hitherto rebelled against. The growing medicalisation of same-sex desire and the concomitant veiling of eroticism in the Victorian novel have prompted critics to employ symptomatic readings in the interpretation of the texts. Heading this trend, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Elaine Showalter have postulated that various ubiquitous figures and tropes – for instance, penetration through closed doors and closets along with the appearance of doubles – encode homosexual desire in Victorian fiction. In this context, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886, ↗ 25 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) has been seen as both “a story about communities of men,” “a fable of fin-de-siècle homosexual panic,” and “a case study of male hysteria” (Showalter 1990, 107). Showalter famously reads the intricate relationship between Jekyll and Hyde in homoerotic terms: “Jekyll’s apparent infatuation with Hyde reflects the late-nineteenth century upper-middle-class eroticization of working-class men as the ideal homosexual object” (1990, 111). In a similar vein, the double/split between Dorian and his portrait in Wilde’s novel has stood for homosexual desire and (auto)eroticism, both of which are, unsurprisingly, narratively punished. Rather than distinguish between hetero- and homosexualities, recent studies have used queer theory to reread Victorian classics and the polymorphous desires they convey (cf. Furneaux 2009), in effect also drawing attention to long-standing, albeit little acknowledged, critical biases. Elaine Showalter illustratively links the nineteenth-century changes in the perception of sexuality to the devolution of the stoutly-bound three-decker novels and the appearance of gilded, slim volumes at the fin de siècle, arguing that each of them “suggested a very different image of character and sexuality”: from the physical

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association of the first with the “nuclear family” to the connotations of “the celibate, the bachelor, the ‘odd woman’, the dandy, and the aesthete” carried by the latter (1990, 16). For her, the breakdown of sexual certainties brought in its wake a transformation of fictional ones (17). Accordingly, the altered form of the novel also meant a divergence both “from subjects, themes, and forms associated with femininity and maternity” (17) and from the chronology and closure that realism ensured (18), thus illustrating the extent to which modernity, and the changing male-female relations it fostered, inflected the genre and the codex.

6 Utopian Visions: Between Encrusted Binaries and Empowerment At the end of the century, utopian literature offered a special site where issues of gender imbalance, sexuality, and their interrelation with larger social frameworks (community, society, nation and empire) could be addressed, negotiated, and newly imagined. As Anne Mellor contends, “[t]hose seeking a viable model of a nonexistent society [. . .] must look to the future; their model must be constructed first as utopia” (1982, 243). Literary utopias served to make a different future comprehensible to readers and, as thought-experiments, defamiliarised daily experience along with offering various strategies of empowerment. The late nineteenth-century revival of utopian fiction has been explained both by the advent of technologies that promised to transform human lives and environments and by the dystopian aftermath of the industrial revolution (Roemer 2010, 82, 101). It has been linked to the achievements and failures of the suffrage movement, the New Women debate, and nascent feminism (cf. Claeys 2009; Beaumont 2005 and 2012; Lewes 1995). Although often dismissed as “didactic guide-visitor narratives that are heavy on long socio-economic dialogues, lightened by touches of romance and travel-adventure episodes” (Roemer 2010, 80), utopian novels of the late nineteenth century have been seen as offering a possible blueprint for future societies. Ideologically, they were highly susceptible to socialist, imperialist, and socialDarwinist ideas. The echoes of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fournier, Robert Owen, and also, if not especially, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels strongly reverberate on their pages as do those of Thomas Henry Huxley and Francis Galton. It is therefore not surprising that many of the utopias emphasise joint communal effort, put emphasis on majority rule, dispose of individual property, and imagine technologically enhanced bodies and environments. In many, the critique of the extant social system and class inequalities is inscribed in new forms of global and national organisation (e.g. division into houses instead of countries or nations in William Henry Hudson’s A Crystal Age [1887]; four classes based on one’s abilities rather than birth in H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia [1905]; disappearance of clothing as a

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class signifier in F. Dickberry’s The Storm of London: A Social Rhapsody [1904]). In the novels, inequalities are directly linked to the economic capital (e.g. no private property in William Morris’s 1890 News From Nowhere), education and new technologies (News From Nowhere famously critiques mass production as devolution of craftsmanship and a source of economic inequality), and are mirrored in the choice of preoccupation (the pastoral setting of many utopias is combined with the celebration of manual labour: for instance, agriculture, household work, and craftsmanship in A Crystal Age, News From Nowhere, and A Modern Utopia). Of course, most of these societies either presuppose a willing adherence to the rules or imagine a series of punitive measures for those who would not comply. Whereas many texts conjure up a healthier, ecologically friendly, and sustainable future, many also include drastic measures to ensure it. In Elisabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889), for instance, regular exercise and vegetarianism along with implantation of animal nerves and special technologies that control weather and facilitate clean air foster health and enable longevity. Still, it cannot be denied that in New Amazonia eugenic principles support the new social structure, as they do in other utopian novels: be it the killing of disabled children at birth in A Modern Utopia or self-induced death for those over sixty-five in Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period (1882), as a guarantee of a better future for the whole species. (Self-)perfection and self-restraint are the key principles of these utopias. In most, the cult of the healthy body and reproductive behaviour serve racial improvement. In many, sexual desire is not only subservient to reproduction but is also seen as dangerous: in A Crystal Age, only the Mother and the Father of the house can reproduce while others experience little or no sexual desire and live together like siblings. Most late Victorian utopian novels either reverse the existing gender order or find a way of justifying extant binaries disguised by the rhetoric of gender equality. Wells’ A Modern Utopia proposes a number of new liberties as it simultaneously perpetuates double standards. Both men and women can be part of the governing structure (the samurai); both, if qualified, can obtain a marriage licence; neither will be punished for any relationships outside marriage as long as these do not result in illegitimate births, in which case the woman must be divorced: “It will be obvious that under Utopian conditions it is the State that will suffer injury by a wife’s misconduct, and that a husband who condones anything of the sort will participate in her offence. A woman, therefore, who is divorced on this account will be divorced as a public offender” (Wells 1905, 194). Both can pursue occupations, even though motherhood remains the only viable profession for women (189). And yet the chapter on “Women in Modern Utopia” makes a strong argument that “women may be free in theory and not in practice, and as long as they suffer from their economic inferiority, from the inability to produce as much value as a man for the same amount of work [. . .] so long will their legal and technical equality be a mockery” (187). What follows is a proposition that women should be paid a wage by the state for their ‘services’ as mothers (188). In News from Nowhere, there is a similar

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tendency to explain ‘desirable’ professions by purportedly inherent personal (albeit generalised) tendencies. The novel claims social equality between men and women: “[t]he men have no longer any opportunity of tyrannising over women, or the women over the men” (Morris 1893, 84). Still, Hammond, the narrator’s interlocutor, responds to the query about women’s position in society with the assertion that “it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully” (85). Today, such statements as “everybody likes to be ordered around by a pretty woman: [. . .], it is one of the pleasantest forms of flirtation” (85) reek of sexism even as the narrative laboriously tries to imagine a society beyond gender inequalities. Corbett’s New Amazonia, although also premised on (quasi-reversed) binary distinctions, makes an attempt at offering a new model in which women enjoy access to education, sports, and occupations, and where unmarried women hold high offices in the socialist state of New Amazonia. Herein lies, for Alexis Lothian, Corbett’s innovative vision, which does not promise a much better world but in which “women’s governance [. . .] has the potential to solve the problems of patriarchy” (2014, 5). From a contemporary perspective, late Victorian utopias may appear as highly misogynist and heteronormative societies in which sexual desire is regarded as dangerous, sexuality often remains subservient to reproduction, and marriage/sexual union, although reimagined, remains a restrictive institution bound to ensure a glorious future for the human species. Many critics have shown that progressive gender thought did “coexist with racism, class hierarchy, imperialism, and the ableism that has justified eugenic reproductive practices” (Lothian 2014, 1). Irrespective of their faulty visions, however, late Victorian utopias, especially feminist utopias such as Corbett’s New Amazonia, Florence Dixie’s Gloriana, Or the Revolution of 1900 (1890), and F. E. Young’s The War of the Sexes (1904), played an important function in that they offered a platform for women to imagine a different future for themselves. They allowed readers to leap from their individual situatedness to a vision of a “future collective” (Beaumont 2005, 90). Their role thus consisted less in distributing ideas of “a future matriarchy or gynocracy than in its latent fantasy of a like-minded community of women in the present,” which prepared them for joint action (Beaumont 2005, 90–91).

7 Gender and Victorian Literary Culture Yet novels did not only take part in voicing extant inequalities and renegotiating gender relations, they also played an important role in women’s economic struggles. The literary market was a burgeoning site of women’s professionalism. Although it goes without saying that Victorian printing, editorial, and publishing businesses were male dominions, recent studies have brought to light women’s attempts to gain a foothold in these industries. Better education, training, emigration,

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and the opening of traditionally male trades to women were proposed as solutions to female under- and unemployment. Women-run business networks provided new opportunities for female workers (Tusan 2004, 103). Highly controversial and inviting stark resistance from the trade unions, female employment in the printing business was promoted by women reformists on account of its high-status, good pay, and minimal physical demand. It thus represented a proper (neither declassing nor desexing) way of providing them with a share in the growing British economy (Tusan 2004, 107–108). The Victoria Press for the Employment of Women, founded by two members of the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women (SPEW), Bessie Rayner Parkes and Emily Faithful, served as a model for such women-run print shops. Next to giving other women the opportunity to train in the printing business, it also propagated SPEW’s ideological and reformist efforts by publishing their periodical (English Woman’s Journal) along with reports and pamphlet literature (Tusan 2004, 106). By founding their system on the principle of shared profits, such businesses not only challenged the gendered labour hierarchies but also attempted to reform capitalist business practices. And although they can in general be seen as utopian experiments, they had a lasting impact in that they “created business networks that ultimately enabled middle-class women to have a voice in debates over the importance of female independence in industrial Britain” (Tusan 2004, 121). Next to publishing, women found employment in the editorial business. Editing a magazine could be done in domestic spaces and combined with other jobs (cf. Palmer 2015, 59). Ellen Wood, the proprietor of The Argosy, a magazine well known for its sensation fiction, worked on it from home; Charlotte Riddell combined her editorial work with a job at her husband’s shop; Mary Howitt worked on the Howitt Journal together with her husband and the whole family. Political activism was another platform that opened editorial possibilities for women who, as members of activist organisations, were often involved in pamphlet and journal publishing. Last but not least, celebrity authors, such as Marry Braddon and Caroline Norton, were often asked to take on editorship. Most famously, George Eliot served as assistant editor to John Chapman on the Westminster Review. Braddon, like many other established authors, also mentored many young writers. Indeed, recent studies have emphasised the importance of networking for the emergence of female writers (cf. Peterson 2015b, 43–58). Of course, writing itself belonged to the range of professions that were open for women. Journalism, writing for periodicals, and reviewing “conferred status and respectability” (Shattock 2015, 30) and expanded the repertoire of available jobs. With these transformations underway, it is not surprising that, in 1852, G. H. Lewes heralded “the advent of female literature” that promised to convey a woman’s view on life (131) while such publications as Anne Katherine Elwood’s Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England (1841), Julia Kavanagh’s English Women of Letters (1863), and Margaret Oliphant’s Literary History of England (1886) acknowledged the presence of

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this new category. This development, of course, did not remain uncontroversial. Women who read, just like women who wrote, had a strong hold on popular imagination. The reading of fiction was regarded with particular suspicion due to, as was believed, its ability to “stimulate inappropriate ambitions and desires” and “to corrupt” readers (Flint 2001, 17), a debate that carried with itself strong gender and class overtones. Indeed, both these factors were regarded as directly linked to the degeneration of literature. Famously, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold ascribed the rise in literacy rates to the erosion of literary quality and the advent of philistinism. Such debates also subsumed discussions addressing the growing ‘feminisation’ of fiction and the unhealthy preoccupations of female readers. A number of advice books appealed to women to reach for more substantial, intellectual reading rather than ‘binge feeding’ on romances “as though they were boxes of sugar-plums, at first deliciously palatable but increasingly inducing an unhealthy, sickly saturation” (Flint 2001, 27). The outcry against female novelists was equally loud. Famously, George Eliot vented her frustration with the “mind-and-millinery” (301) type of the novel in her “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856), in which she accuses upper-class authoresses, “inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains” (2001, 303), of violating the genre by maiming it with improbable characters and ridiculous plots. Especially the second half of the nineteenth century saw a deluge of male “critical abuse of women’s emasculating effect on the English novel” (Showalter 1990, 17). And still, despite these assertions, the nineteenth century was an era which saw the transformation of the literary market: whilst in the 1840s women often had to hide between their pseudonyms to publish, they could become author-celebrities by the end of the century. Today’s assessment of nineteenth-century women authors acknowledges their roles as “originators” and “innovators” of the novelistic form (Peterson 2015a, 9). Contemporaneous critiques already recorded the pioneering character of their work. Margaret Oliphant credited Jane Eyre with revolutionising the literary treatment of love (Peterson 2015, 9). George Eliot’s theorisation of realism spurred waves of admiration from nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century critics alike. Female authors of sensation fiction have been credited with forging a new form that allowed them to address pertinent social questions and simultaneously offered a range of transgressive female characters. Since its ‘re-discovery’ in the 1980s, New Woman Writing continues to be seen as not only extending the formal experiments of realist and sensation fiction but also as recording proto-modernist techniques that would flourish at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is undeniable that the Victorian novel contributed to this development. As it addressed the incongruities between the various gender scripts and the quotidian ways of being, it signalled the necessity of reinventing the former to fit the exigencies of modernity. The novel’s emphasis on the performative character of gender scripts, its acknowledgement of their pliability, was a step towards such a reinvention. It is therefore not surprising that the end of the century saw an appearance of

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new gender models. Despite that, and although the novel questioned the ideal of marriage, the latter continued to play a central role in narratives of Britain’s future, thus maintaining its role in processes of social ordering. As sexuality, gender models, and marriage ideals were addressed in fiction, attitudes towards them were also amended through innumerable material practices of the everyday. As one of such practices, fiction writing certainly contributed to a rethinking of gender imbalance in Victorian times.

Bibliography Works Cited Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. Armstrong, Nancy. “Gender and the Victorian Novel.” David 2001, 97–124. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: OUP, 1987. Barnett, Clive. “‘A Choice of Nightmares’: Narration and Desire in Heart of Darkness.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. 3.3 (1996): 277–292. Beardsley, Aubrey, illus. Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act. By Oscar Wilde. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894. Beaumont, Matthew. The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Beaumont, Matthew. Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Bell, Currer [Charlotte Brontë]. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Lonson: W. Nicholson & Sons, 1847. Bell, Ellis [Emily Brontë]. Wuthering Heights: A Novel. London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1765. Blake, Kathleen. Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of SelfPostponement. Brighton: Harvester, 1983. Brooke, Emma Frances. A Superfluous Woman. New York: Cassell, 1894. Claeys, Gregory, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. Claeys, Gregory. Late Victorian Utopias: A Prospectus. 6 Vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. Cobbe, Frances Power. “Wife-Torture in England.” The Contemporary Review 32 (1878): 55–87. Da Sousa Correa, Delia. “Jane Eyre and Genre.” The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Realisms. Ed. Da Sousa Correa. London: Routledge, 2000. 87–116. David, Deidre, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1917. Cambridge: CUP, 2014. Dixon, Ella Hepworth. The Story of a Modern Woman. London: William Heinemann, 1894. Drysdale, George. The Elements of Social Science, or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion. London: E. Truelove, 1861. Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Westminster Review 66 (1856): 442–461. Rpt. in Women and Romance: A Reader. Ed Susan Ostrov Weisser. New York: NYUP, 2001. 301–306.

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Flint, Kate. “The Victorian Novel and Its Readers.” David 2001, 17–36. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998. Fraxi, Pisanus [Henry Spencer Ashbee]. Index Librorum Prohibitorum: Being Notes Bio- Biblio-Iconographical And Critical, on Curious and Common Books. London: privately published, 1877. Furneaux, Holly. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Furneaux, Holly. “Victorian Sexualities.” Literature Compass 8.10 (2011): 767–775. Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Gissing, George. The Odd Women. 1893. Ed. Patricia Ingham. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Grand, Sarah. The Heavenly Twins. 1893. Ed. Carol A. Senf. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. Griffin, Ben. The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. Hager, Kelly. Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Harris, Beth. Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Hartmann, Heidi. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” Capital and Class 3.2 (1979): 1–33. Havelock, Ellis. Studies of the Psychology of Sex. 1897. Vol. 1. New York: Random House, 1942. Hicks, George Elgar. Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood. 1863. Oil paint on canvas. Tate, London. Horlacher, Stefan. Masculinities: Konzeptionen von Männlichkeit im Werk von Thomas Hardy und D. H. Lawrence. Tübingen: Narr, 2006. Jeffreys, Sheila, ed. The Sexuality Debates. New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Kestner, Joseph. Masculinities in Victorian Painting. Aldershot: Scolar, 1995. Kestner, Joseph. Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1951. London: Routledge, 2010. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “The Beast in the Closet.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. Nigel Wood and David Lodge. New York: Routledge, 2013. 506–508. Langland, Elizabeth. “Becoming a Man in Jude the Obscure.” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy. Ed. Margaret R. Higonnet. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. 32–48. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Lewes, Darby. Dream Revisionaries: Gender and Genre in Women’s Utopian Fiction 1870–1920. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995. Lewes, G. H. “The Lady Novelists.” Westminster Review 2 (July 1852): 129–141. Lothian, Alexis. “A Foretaste of the Future, a Caution from the Past: New Amazonia’s Feminist Dream.” Introduction. New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future. By Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett. Ed. Lothian. Seattle: Aqueduct, 2014. 1–23. MacDonald, Tara. The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel. London: Routledge, 2015. Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England. Toronto: Bantam, 1967. Mason, Michael. The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Oxford: OUP, 1994. Mellor, Anne. “On Feminist Utopias.” Women’s Studies 3.9 (1982): 241–262. Mill, John Stuart, and Harriet Taylor Mill. Essays on Sex Equality. Ed. Alice S. Rossi. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.

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Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. 4th ed. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1878. Morris, William. News from Nowhere. London: Hammersmith, 1893. My Secret Life. 3 Vols. 1888. Project Gutenberg. Web. Nunokawa, Jeff. “Sexuality in the Victorian Novel.” David 2001, 125–148. Palmer, Beth. “Assuming the Role of Editor.” Peterson 2015, 59–72. Patmore, Coventry. The Angel in the House. 6th Ed. London: George Bell and Son, 1885. Perkin, Joan. Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1989. Peterson, Linda H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. Peterson, Linda. “Victorian Women’s Writing and Modern Literary Criticism.” Introduction. Peterson 2015a, 1–11. Peterson, Linda. “Working with Publishers.” Peterson 2015b, 43–58. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika. Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Richards, Jeffrey. “John Ruskin, The Olympian Painters and the Amateur Stage.” Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture. Ed. Anselm Heinrich, Kate Newey, and Jeffrey Richards. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 19–41. Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics among the Late Victorians: Science, Fiction, Feminism. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Roemer, Kenneth M. “Paradise Transformed: Varieties of Nineteenth-Century Utopias.” Claeys 2010, 79–106. Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies: Three Lectures. 1865. London: George Allen and Sons, 1910. Schneider, Ralf. “The Invisible Center: Conceptions of Masculinity in Victorian Fiction – Realist, Crime, Detective, and Gothic.” Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present. Ed. Stefan Horlacher. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 147–168. Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England. London: Tauris, 1989. Shattock, Joanne. “Becoming a Professional Writer.” Peterson 2015, 29–42. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London and New York: Penguin, 1990. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Virago 1987. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critiqual Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 235–261. Steinbach, Susie. Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Routledge, 2012. Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Manly Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005. Tusan, Michelle. “Reforming Work: Gender, Class, and the Printing Trade in Victorian Britain.” Journal of Women’s History 16.1 (2004): 102–125. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2004.

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Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1985. Wells, H. G. A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman and Hall, 1905. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. London: Penguin, 1994. Wood, Henry, Mrs. East Lynne. Vol. 1. London: R. Bentley, 1862. Wright, T. R. Hardy and the Erotic. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989.

Further Reading Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London: Routledge, 1992. Johns, Alessa. “Feminism and Utopianism.” Claeys 2010, 174–199. Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Levine, Philippa. Victorian Feminism 1850–1900. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005. Mallett, Phillip. “Women, Marriage and the Law in Victorian Society.” Marriage and Property. Ed. Elizabeth M. Craik. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1984. 159–189. Sweet, Matthew. Inventing the Victorians. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Tusan, Michelle. Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2005.

Nora Pleßke

7 Empire – Economy – Materiality Abstract: The rise of the novel during the eighteenth century is notably connected with the birth of a new socio-economic system. Extending that idea, this chapter links the formation of the novel as a dominant genre during the nineteenth century to the further development of capitalism, colonialism, and their concomitant social and material realities. Postcolonial theory, economic criticism, and material culture studies are introduced as central approaches to the novel in the Victorian era that bring to the fore new perspectives or revive neglected works. This chapter covers empire writing from the domestic novels of the first half of the century to the sensation fiction of the second half. Additionally, it concentrates largely on economic issues in Condition-of-England novels, such as the struggle of the working classes, the urban poor, and capital finance. A third section focusses on the representation of commodity culture and the profusion of things in the Victorian novel as related to the conjunction of capitalism and imperialism. In closing, the chapter contemplates the status of the nineteenth-century novel as a veritable commodity and thus as a symbol for the economic expansion of Britain during the Second Empire. Keywords: Capitalism, colonial objects, commodity culture, economic criticism, economy, imperialism, industrialisation, material culture studies, postcolonialism, thing theory

In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt links the birth of the English novel to the growth of commercialism during the eighteenth century. Stories of economic enterprise and overseas expansion stand at the origin of the novelistic tradition: works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) show that British colonialism was just as indispensable to the foundations of the genre as the ascent of capitalism and individualism. Edward Said comments: “Without empire [. . .] there is no European novel as we know it” (1994, 87). He particularly points at the convergence of the novel’s narrative authority with the ideological configurations of imperialism (87). Throughout the imperial century, the cultural produce shaped the discursive dissemination, legitimation, reflection, and contestation of British colonialism and was, according to Said, “immensely important for the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences” (xiv). The cultural impact of the Victorian novel on Britain’s overseas empire can thus be considered analogous to that of Condition-of-England fiction on industrialisation during the 1840s. Naturally, nineteenth-century novelists were part of these evolving structures of feeling and, as members of society, were often involved in imperial and economic ventures beyond the literary marketplace: they were politicians (Benjamin Disraeli), navy https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-008

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officers (Frederick Marryat), war correspondents (G. A. Henty), civil servants (Anthony Trollope), colonial officials (H. Rider Haggard), journalists (Rudyard Kipling), cultural critics (Thomas Carlyle), businessmen (Charles Dickens), emigrants (Robert Louis Stevenson), and immigrants (Joseph Conrad). Although this list might suggest otherwise, women were also engaged in the imperial project in multiple roles beside “imperious maternalism” (Boehmer 2009, xxviii, ↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). While they were deemed the strongest consumer group in Britain’s growing mass market, women were equally important producers – for example of fiction. Writing novels developed into one of the few respectable ways to earn a living for Victorian middleclass women. Otherwise, educated women were often destined for the governess trade as vividly depicted in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), which was first published under the pen-name Currer Bell (↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre). It is these various conflations of empire, economy, and materiality with the nineteenth-century British novel that this chapter wishes to address. After respective introductions to the cultural-historical context, I will survey the impact of these specific issues on the Victorian novel via postcolonial theory, economic criticism, and material culture studies.

1 The British Empire, Postcolonial Studies, and Colonial Writing After the loss of the American colonies, which signalled the end of the First Empire, Britain was firmly (re)established as a great power in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo. Although the empire only reached its greatest territorial extent after the First World War, the end of the Boer War in 1902 is considered as the watershed of British imperial self-perception, inducing the decline of its dominance. The expansion of the Second Empire had commenced with improvements in agriculture and the modernisation of production. This initially led to greater wealth and a stronger demand for consumer goods provided by material imported from the widening colonial world and by skilled workers from the domestic industry (Sedlmayr 2017, 41). Industrial capitalism thus developed into the core motor of imperialism; its economic forces encompassed credits, manufactures, capital, as well as faith in free trade and utilitarianism, which supported the idea of British commercial superiority. By the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant political rhetoric transformed into an aggressive assertion of white hegemony over colonial others, which became pronounced in various conflicts from the 1840s onwards: the Afghan Wars, the Opium Wars, the New Zealand Wars, the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the Ashanti Wars, the Morant Bay Rebellion, etc. At the end of the 1850s, the British had seized Acre, acquired the Gold Coast forts and set up multiple trading-ports on the Chinese coast, established colonies at the Cape and Gambia, turned Canada and Australia

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into settler dominions, annexed Transvaal and the Punjab. India, known as the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ due to its location and resources, was the centre for building Britain’s formal empire. After the ‘Sepoy Uprising’, the power of the East India Company, which had monopolised trade with the region for centuries and had intermittently gained control over the whole subcontinent, was transferred to direct Crown rule in 1858. Scholars largely agree that programmatic colonial expansion only started in the 1870s. Benjamin Disraeli’s hallmark speech at the Crystal Palace, in which he advocated the building of a larger formal empire, and the consolidation of the British Raj when Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1877 initiated the phase of New Imperialism. Eric Hobsbawm has called the era from 1875 to 1914, in which the approach to the empire turned officially expansionist, assertive, and self-conscious, “the Age of Empire” (1987, 56). During high imperialism, Western colonial powers engaged in a race to divide up the globe. Within merely twenty-five years, in the socalled Scramble for Africa, the rival nations of Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Belgium sliced up ten million square miles of new territory between them. Moved on by private imperialists like mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, the British eventually got to control the strip of land from ‘Cape to Cairo’ as well as the whole West African Niger River basin. Newly-acquired riches from Africa and Asia were displayed at the Colonial and India Exhibition just before Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. The triumphalist celebration of the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 marked the climax of ‘jingoism’, popular nationalism based on beliefs of monarchism, militarism, and racial superiority. At Victoria’s death in 1901, the world was one of empires and British imperialism had become a historical fact. Following Edward Said, imperialism can be defined as the political domination, economic exploitation, and military subjugation of other territories and peoples, ranging from collaborative influence to strong power and abhorrent abuse (1994, 8–9). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was the first to refute the long-standing notion that imperialism only developed into a significant subject of literary representation with Britain’s growing geopolitical power from the 1860s onwards. In her landmark essay on Jane Eyre, Spivak claims that there is virtually no Victorian novel without a reference to the workings of the empire or the making – “worlding” (1985, 243) – of its colonies. Said, like Spivak, elaborates that while by the end of the nineteenth century the empire became a central area of concern in the works of writers, imperialism had never been an invisible subject in literature (1994, xx). Narratives widely engaged with racial oppression or colonial subjection and, more often than not, fortified notions of British superiority. In Culture & Imperialism (1993), Said extends his dualistic analysis of colonial discourses in Orientalism (1978) to a “contrapuntal reading” (1994, 82) in order to “take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it” (83). This allows for a reinterpretation of canonical nineteenth-century works in a manner that includes what might have been either forcibly excluded or willingly overlooked (85).

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Postcolonial studies have altered our understanding of the Victorian novel by encouraging us to read texts like Jane Eyre in the context of writings on slavery from the nineteenth-century imperial archive and to reassess the colonial novel in the light of its rewritings, e.g. Jane Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Relating Jane Eyre’s rebellious voice and mutinous behaviour to her strive for greater freedom and agency, feminist critics have pointed to the analogies between slavery, empire, and patriarchy with its interconnected hegemonies concerning race, class, and gender (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). Spivak, however, reproves that the confined Creole character, Bertha Mason, is reduced to Jane Eyre’s repressed “dark double” (1985, 248) in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s interpretation of the novel in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Rhys’s postcolonial text instead “expand[s] the frontiers of the politics of reading” (259) because it centralises the links between Victorian women and imperialism. Jane’s socio-economic ascent is based on a larger colonial frame as she acquires her uncle’s as well as Bertha’s plantation riches when they die. The literary phenomena of postcolonial rewriting thus have not only dismantled hegemonic structures of representation but initiated a new critical examination of the Victorian novel and its imperial connections. John Thieme’s Postcolonial Contexts (2001) assesses the manifold forms of ‘writing back’ in famous canonical texts, besides Jane Eyre also Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). The invigorated interest in Conrad’s colonial texts stems not least from the fact that the author as a Polish migrant speaks to the postcolonial situation from various perspectives. The numerous rewritings of his most famous novella include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), which serves as a correction of what, in “An Image of Africa” (1977), the Nigerian author deemed racist and dehumanising representations in Conrad’s text. Said criticises Achebe in his chapter on “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness” for disregarding the aesthetics of Conrad’s novel; he argues that while the text is unable to offer a non-imperialist alternative, it nevertheless presents “a non-European world resisting imperialism” (1994, 35). Because the novella pinpoints imperialism, its contingencies, illusions, violence, rhetoric, and waste, the text enables to imagine something different, which indeed informs the visions of the postcolonial world that succeeded Conrad’s (28–30). For Said, Conrad “both criticiz[ed] and reproduce[ed] the imperial ideology of his time” (xxv). The first book-length study on the widespread and evolving ideologies of empire in nineteenth-century literature was Patrick Brantlinger’s influential Rule of Darkness (1988). Focussing on the 1850s as a turning point of representations, Brantlinger shows that “it was largely out of the liberal, reform-minded optimism of the early Victorians that the apparently more conservative, social Darwinian, jingoist imperialism of the late Victorians evolved” (1990, 27). Literature, most notably by ‘The Bard of the Empire’ Rudyard Kipling, lay at the heart of British imperial self-conception, and the colonies constituted the principal subject of attention as well as a crucial setting in novels by H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson,

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Arthur Conan Doyle, or Joseph Conrad. In contrast to these fictions of empire with their explicit references to global expansion and consequences of imperial politics, “most of the great nineteenth-century realistic novelists are less assertive about colonial rule and possessions” (Said 1994, 80). Although representations of national home seem to constitute a counterpoint to the patterns of writing about the greater empire beyond the British Isles, both spaces are joined together: “a domestic accompaniment to the imperial project for presence and control abroad, and a practical narrative about expanding [. . .] that must be actively inhabited [. . .] before its discipline or limits can be accepted” (88). In that respect, early and mid-nineteenth century novels by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens also prepared the “consolidated vision” (95) of late Victorian fiction. Imperial and national spaces were usually constructed as representationally separate, with the colony subordinate to the metropolis. The territory abroad served the purposes of migration, fortune, adventure, or exile. Brantlinger claims that Australia was a particularly popular colonial backdrop for the “conversion motif” (1990, 110). Dickens, for example, uses the white settler colony as a convenient repository for eccentric characters seemingly unsuitable to be incorporated into English society. In Great Expectations (1860–1861), the convict Abel Magwitch is shipped off to the penal colony in order to provide orphaned Pip with an unexpected fortune. Due to its problematic socio-spatial background, Pip’s new wealth is, however, considered illegitimate, and consequently both criminal benefactor and colonial money are practically removed from the protagonist, making possible his own great expectations as a businessman in Egypt. Literary critic Saree Makdisi argues, therefore, that home and abroad were co-constitutive elements in the construction of imperial attitudes (2014, 133). The expansion of the empire and its shifting relations of imperial hegemony moreover influenced Victorian attitudes to race and manifested in the fictional creation of racially defined characters. While in Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred (1847) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) the East is represented as the habitat of the ‘native’, Victorian novels are also rife with stereotypical representations of characters in the metropolitan centre. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848, ↗ 13 Thackeray, Vanity Fair) features nabob characters, Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone (1868, ↗ 20 Collins, The Moonstone) includes a group of Hindu Brahmins, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four (1890) unleashes a ‘cannibal savage’ from the Andaman Islands. There are also racialised depictions that are more complex. The title hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1900, ↗ 35 Kipling, Kim), for instance, is a white Irish boy who grew up on the streets of Delhi. While his hybrid identity permits him to move between the different ethnicities, castes, and religions on the Great Trunk Road, it also qualifies him for colonial service in the Great Game. In this context, literary criticism has been concerned both with the simplistic image of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and with the racial indeterminacy that is characteristic of Heathcliff’s dark, passionate, and wandering figure in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering

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Heights (1847, ↗ 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights). Heathcliff appears to be of exotic mixed-Chinese and Indian parentage, but his origins remain a mystery as the character might just as well be an Irish Street Arab or an escaped African slave from the near trading port of Liverpool. Since the publication of Robert Knox’s The Races of Men in 1850, the notion of British superiority was more and more linked to industrial productivity and commerce. In this line, Charles Dickens’s journalistic essay “The Noble Savage” (1853) or Anthony Trollope’s travel writings on Australia and South Africa previsioned the extinction of the ‘indolent’ and ‘savage’ races. Furthermore, Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution were re-interpreted by Social Darwinism (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel), which saw European control over the world legitimised by the white man’s natural supremacy over the ‘barbarous’ non-European. The ‘Dark Continent’ Africa was shown as populated by childlike, dark-skinned savages with superstitions as well as diabolical customs, such as human sacrifice and cannibalism, which justified further imperialist ventures (2009, 135). Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ironically lays bare colonial atrocities as the report to the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” by the ivory agent Kurtz, with its final call to “Exterminate all the brutes!” (2008, 155), vividly addresses the acts of barbarism committed by the trading company in the name of imperial commerce and Western civilisation. Reflecting most crucially the self-evident imperialist assumptions in a redefined Anglocentric world view of British superiority, Dickens’s realist novel Dombey and Son (1847–1848) begins with the businessman’s contemplations: The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and the moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them: AD had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei – and Son. (2002, 6)

The trading company in the metropolitan centre around which everything else revolves defines the era of its global domination; it epitomises the imperial attitude assuming global centrality and domination over land and people as Dombey’s birth right (Schmitt 2005, 4–5). The novel is critical of materialistic empire-building and the patriarchal attitudes in which the house participates; its domestic order/tyranny is intrinsically tied to the English order/oppression abroad (David 2002, 85–87). Yet, when the London house is in ruin, Dombey’s daughter Florence sets off to one of the new trading-ports in China with her husband; hence, the final happy ending legitimises the idea of the expansionist-commercial nature of imperialism. Makdisi detects a special “level of imperial intensity” (2014, 196) in Dickens’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). While the text has been predominantly interpreted as based on

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rigid binary distinctions between Occident and Orient, Makdisi identifies a level of hybridisation which signals that Occidental superiority has never been a stable category (197–200). The critic ascribes this “Crisis of Occidentalism” (195) in the 1850s to a sense of a more and more integrated world, which anticipates the fear of Oriental contamination brought about by extensive imperial expansion in the second half of the century (216). In this respect, Dickens’s sensation novels, especially The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but also Great Expectations and Bleak House (1852–1853, ↗ 16 Dickens, Bleak House), draw attention to the problematic split between domestic fiction and imperial romances. Domestic and adventure novels as subordinate forms of the two dominant genres of the period, realist and sensation fiction (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology), incorporate the entwined counterpoints from the origin of novelistic writing: economy and travel, domestic and foreign, self and other. From the 1860s onwards, the sensation novel made the massive invasion of Victorian life by empire a sensational topic for the masses. Precursors of the sub-genre, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), the exotic narrative Zanoni (1842), and the science fiction novel The Coming Race (1871, ↗ 21 Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race), already showed a preoccupation with commercial excess and an engagement with the occult framed by imperial concerns. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) is most thoroughly shaped by imperial history, harking back to the theft of a diamond from a Hindu temple by a corrupt British army officer during the siege of Seringapatam in 1799. Connected to colonial violence, the stone, once it is brought to the metropolitan centre, infiltrates a Yorkshire country house and seems to put a curse on everyone who comes into contact with it (David 2002, 94). The novel, thus, blends the domestic plot and Gothic elements with an adventure story. Non-fiction quests, such as the explorer narratives by David Livingstone or Henry Morton Stanley, further spurred the sensationalist lust for stories of adventure, and English fiction became obsessed with colonial travel. This encompassed stories that pay tribute to Defoe’s original Robinsonade, e.g. R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881–1882), and a whole new array of adventure tales with overseas settings and domestic implications. Imperialist adventure narratives for young adults range from seafaring writing like Frederick Marryat’s midshipman stories to historical romances by Charles Kingsley and G. A. Henty’s military fiction as well as later works by Henry Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. Enlisting the empire as a place of maturation where men could prove their masculinity, these stories, which were often serialised in Boy’s Own Paper, also prepared British youth for their later work in the imperial service (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). The established patterns of quest and treasure hunt as well as hazardous adventure and exploration in an imperial setting not only underpinned a “fantasy of omnipotence” (Brantlinger 2009, 127), but also supported notions of national supremacy and white male superiority. Conrad’s fictions from Almayer’s Folly (1895) onwards revision this imperial

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male heroism. As Paul Goetsch shows in his analysis of the ‘one of us’ leitmotif in Lord Jim (1900, ↗ 34 Conrad, Lord Jim), the protagonist, who joins the merchant marine as he longs for adventure and heroism, fails to live up to both the moral code of the seaman profession and the Englishman’s alleged superior humanity in the colonial project (2010, 75, 79). As such, Conrad’s novellas can be regarded as antiromances; they undermine the savage/civilised distinction, address colonial prejudices and ideological hypocrisy, or subvert established myths about imperialism. With its regressive character Kurtz and its various allusions to the demonic, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, according to Brantlinger, is a “masterpiece of imperial Gothic fiction” (2009, 146). Brantlinger defines this sub-genre as a blend of adventure story with elements of the occult that registers anxieties about Britain’s waning imperial hegemony towards the end of the nineteenth century (1990, 227). Anticipated by the Gothic romances Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the novels of the 1880s and 1890s are preoccupied with primitivism, atavism, degeneration, fetishism, the superhuman, the double, crude scientific experimentation, mutation, sexual perversion, insanity, criminality, the labyrinthine city, and the uncharted regions of the world (106). Examining texts like H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886–1887) or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, ↗ 26 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray), Brantlinger identifies three principal themes: the diminution of opportunities for heroism, individual regression, and invasion-scare (227–253). Finde-siècle literature links degeneration with the fear of “reverse colonization” (Arata 1990), the idea that the ‘heart’ of the British Empire might become ‘contaminated’ by the ‘virus’ of paganism. This is exemplified by Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1895, ↗ 32 Stoker, Dracula) and its racially indeterminate vampire from an exoticised Eastern European region whose ‘bad blood’ infests the metropolitan centre. Such invasion narratives, according to Brantlinger, “express the narrowing vistas of the British Empire at the time of its greatest extent, in the moment before its fall” (1990, 253). Pushed on by Cesare Lombroso’s, Edwin Ray Lankester’s, and Max Nordau’s publications on degeneration, which conjured up the vision of a ‘Dusk of the Nations’, anxieties at the end of the Victorian era turn to visions of an apocalyptic end. Scientific romances from the 1890s, particularly H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895, ↗ 31 Wells, The Time Machine), The War of the Worlds (1897), and The First Men in the Moon (1900–1901), then employ communication technologies as new forms of imagining and criticising imperialism.

2 Capitalism, Economic Criticism, and the Economy in Literature The origins of today’s globalisation with its communication networks and international workings of capital are generally traced back to world-wide connections of

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trade, communication, and migration during the nineteenth century. For the historian John Darwin, “[t]he union of commercial and imperial muscle was the foundation of the British world-system” (2009, 141). Colonial conquest along with the control over and exploitation of other people’s land and goods makes apparent the connection between the economy and imperialism. Ania Loomba defines European colonialism as “a restructuring of non-capitalist economies in order to fuel European capitalism” (2004, 20). In their controversial article “Imperialism of Free Trade,” Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson have argued that the economic imbalance produced during imperialism was necessary for the growth of European capitalism and industry (1953, 12–13). They have also lastingly reformulated the relation of metropolitan centre and the colonial periphery in that they defined the imperial expansion of the 1880s as a consequence of a longer “informal empire” (1) based on principles of free trade. This theory notably influenced Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins, who stress that British imperialism was driven by the financial system of the City of London largely supported by a new elite of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ who had gained power at home by means of commercial penetration and political influence in the colonised regions (1993, 52–58). Rather than being caused by geopolitical influences, imperial expansion is predominantly interpreted as one of commercial and financial forces. This economic understanding of imperialism has been important to grasp other forms of oppression, such as racial subjugation or class struggles, which influenced material existences. The historiography of nineteenth-century Britain has been much informed by this economic-imperial reading. Historians have traced the complex relations between the empire, modernisation of manufacture, technological innovation, trade, finance as well as consumerism, all of which underpinned Britain’s industrial and commercial transformation. For example, Eric Hobsbawm’s important trilogy on the history of the ‘long nineteenth century’ moves from industrialisation in The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1968) and issues of the capitalist economy in The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975) to The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (1987). Considering the expansion of the empire, the consolidation of the British nation, its building of maritime hegemony, and the dissolution of trade monopolies in the early nineteenth century, we can date the formation of a liberal free trade ideology as the dominant commercial and economic policy of the Victorian period to the late 1820s (Sedlmayr 2017, 43). During the 1830s, the permanent transformations of society induced by the progressing industrial revolution were increasingly registered. For Karl Polanyi, 1834 marks the advent of industrial capitalism because the Great Reform Bill and the New Poor Law opened the market society as a socio-economic system in the full sense of the term (Makdisi 2014, 18–19). As a response to economic and social changes wrought by industrial capital, Chartism developed into the largest political movement. Campaigning for improvements in working-class conditions, it was devoted to a six-point charter

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including universal male suffrage, secret ballot, and the abolition of property qualification for MPs. Chartist petitions and violent demonstrations in 1839, 1842, and 1848 also drove on the ‘Factory Question’. The multiple Factory and Mines Acts between 1833 and 1900 initiated controls and restrictions on the new workplaces, particularly concerning child labour and working hours. Overall better living conditions had led to a population growth from ten million in 1801 to nearly twenty-one million in 1851. Britain moreover transformed from a rural into an urban society with eighty per cent of the population living in cities by the end of the century. Asa Briggs notes in Victorian Cities (1968) that life in new industrial towns such as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham dominated the experience of most of the population by the mid–nineteenth century. The Victorian city was a site of contrast and more often than not a spectacle was made of the desperate experiences in the London slums, which became particularly palpable with the Long Depression between 1873 and 1896. The beginning of the century’s economic boom in 1843 coincided with the height of the Anti-Corn Law movement, an agitation against trade barriers that had been initiated by the petition of London and Manchester merchants. The repeal of these protectionist laws in 1846 is often seen as having inaugurated a new phase of free trade. Inspired by the political economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Malthus, free trade was variously promoted as a solution to population growth, unemployment, and food shortages. However, free trade was much more than laissez-faire economics; it was a whole mid-century philosophy of utility, enterprise, individualism, and self-reliance, which found expression in publications such as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) or Utilitarianism (1863). In Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill states that free trade will not only lead to more equal distribution but also enable humanity to progress ethically and politically. In this regard, another central ideological notion of the free-trade principle was adopted from Smith’s doux-commerce thesis, namely that military, moral, and economic superiority will secure a global Pax Britannica. A point of crystallisation for these free-trade ideas and a showcase for Britain as the ‘workshop of the world’ was the Great Exhibition in 1851. It epitomised the global nature of Britain’s politics and brought to the fore the country’s centrality in world economics. During the period of New Imperialism, levels of trade and consumption changed considerably alongside enforced conquest and annexation. The historian Frank Trentmann points out that, while the world with an advancing integration of consumption, production, and labour became commercially more open, the new system of “Dispossession and Repossession” also fostered a “great divergence” between East and West (2014, 122). Despite the growth of the colonies, their share in the metropolitan market fell and they became increasingly dependent on the centre, which consolidated colonial power. Writing in the aftermath of the European Scramble for Africa, John A. Hobson returned as a correspondent during the Boer War and launched an attack on empire and capitalism with his book Imperialism (1902) by linking the aggression

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abroad to an underconsumption at home. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin developed Hobson’s ideas based on Marxist economic criticism, arguing that the growth of finance-capitalism and industry in Western countries was founded on profits generated from colonialism. From today’s point of view, economic criticism during the nineteenth century is mainly associated with the work of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. In 1845, Engels, a German textile entrepreneur, published The Condition of the Working Class in England, in which he recorded his experiences in Manchester. He mapped the social consequences of industrialisation in the socio-spatial separation of the classes and their divergent living conditions. Based on these empirical findings, Marx, who moved to London in 1849, elaborated his economic theories in Capital (1867). He emphasises that as capitalism advances, money and commodities increasingly stand in and are mistaken for human values. Around 1871, economic theory shifted the focus from the socio-economic and macroeconomic perspectives of production to subjective consumption demands and the psychology of the consumer. Former theories were thus displaced by analyses of consumer patterns and taste. In 1899, the American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen conceptualised ‘conspicuous consumption’ as the display of socio-economic power, which has since become a central category in understanding forms of selffashioning or social distinction via commodities. Two founding texts of cultural studies in the twentieth century, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and Edward P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), proceed from Marxist theories in analysing class and cultures of consumption. Also, they explicitly deal with nineteenth-century texts and have been instrumental in the revivification of Victorian studies. From a postcolonial perspective, Ania Loomba asks for new interdisciplinary work on the period by connecting material realities to colonialism or economics to literature (2004, xvii; 24). In the late 1990s, a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary field that specifically investigated the contact points of literature and economics emerged with Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen’s The New Economic Criticism (1999), which strives to pay attention to the wider economic, social, and political contexts of literature. A specific form of economic criticism comprising cultural, postcolonial, and literary studies arose in the early twenty-first century that “explores the interrelations between literature, culture, and the economy, as well as those between literary studies, cultural studies, and economics” (Grünkemeier, Pleßke, and Rostek 2018, 117). In the study of Victorian literature, one can analyse the representations of the economy and its constitutive elements, investigate the economic framework that shaped the literary marketplace, and explore central concepts in texts related to the economy. Victorian novels, particularly of the Condition-of-England, social problem, industrial, and city genre, thus are central for assessing the economic imagination of the period. The new economic system on which industrialisation was founded

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radically changed the social structure; most notably, the transformation of Britain into a market society was accompanied by the development of a tripartite class structure. In mid-century fiction, various images of the emerging working classes can be found alongside culturally dominating middle-class perspectives. Underpinning Victorian bourgeois ethics, a persistent theme deals with upward social mobility on the grounds of self-determination paired with initiative, self-discipline, and morality (Adams 2005, 52–54). Depictions of social aspiration often focus on the private life and the expression of social status and character. In this way, the novelistic view of socio-economic relations extends far beyond those of contemporary political economists (Gagnier 2002, 57). Referring to the division of society and the poverty of the working classes, Thomas Carlyle, in Chartism (1839), coined the term ‘Condition of England question’. The Condition-of-England novel was to turn into a significant sub-genre of nineteenthcentury fiction with Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845, ↗ 8 Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations). Subtitled “The Two Nations”, the novel details the Chartist agitation and exemplifies the class conflict in Britain by showing the widening gap between the rich and the poor and between rural and urban labourers. The book was also the first to make popular the new genre of industrial fiction. Bound to the Chartist movement and industrial unrest, many other novels between the 1830s and 1850s, such as Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), express middle-class anxieties about possible insurrections instigated by violent agitators who utilise working-class discontent. More often though, novels on the ‘Factory Question’ show sympathy with ‘factory slaves’ and stress the horrors of work, the exploitation of women and children, or problems of unemployment and poverty. Similar to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Factory Girl (1863) or Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton (1848, ↗ 14 Gaskell, Mary Barton) reconciles the desperate workman and the aggrieved manufacturer on the base of humanity, despite their clash in economic interests. Gaskells’ Mary Barton and North and South (1855) also exemplify the generic shift to the social problem novel, which intended to teach middle-class readers about the socio-economic disenfranchisement of the working classes by including stories concerning material hardships, domestic lives, and urban existences. By the 1850s, the focus slightly changed from inter-class struggles to the growing inequalities created by the developing urban environment. Gaskell’s Mary Barton was already subtitled A Tale of Manchester Life and the dirty manufacturing town of Milton in North and South is the only thinly disguised Cottonpolis. The most iconic description of a nineteenth-century city, which conflates the industrial with an imperial imagery, is that of Coketown in Dickens’s Hard Times: It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents

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of smoke trailed themselves [. . .]. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with illsmelling dye, and a vast pile of building [. . .] where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. (2000, 18)

Dickens’s infatuation with life in the ‘urban jungle’ had started with the Pickwick Papers (1836– 1837) and Oliver Twist (1837–1839), in which, besides the social problems of the New Poor Law, he explored the horrors of dire sanitation, crime, and overcrowding in London. Mapping the material transformations of the urban socioscape, his imaginary cityscapes, for instance in Bleak House, also provided a novel language for the description and the understanding of the newly emerging phenomenon of the metropolis (Pleßke 2014, 11–12). Towards the end of the century, accounts from urban slums, particularly in London’s East End, became informed by the anthropological representation of the poor in proto-sociological studies like Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1903) and journalistic accounts, for example, George Sim’s How the Poor Live (1883). The novels that emerged in the 1880s, such as George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) or Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896), consequently mixed the detached descriptions of naturalist writing with humanitarian sympathy and sensationalist images of degradation. Moreover, via publications like William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), race became increasingly plotted onto class in fiction linking the ‘black savage’ from central Africa with the ‘irrational’, ‘superstitious’, ‘lazy’, ‘criminal’, ‘sexual’, ‘violent’, ‘childlike’ slum dweller of the East End. This unknown region of the city was drafted as a place where the Orient began. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness suggests that London, as the metropolitan centre, was, however, also home to another form of ‘evil’, namely that of capital finance residing in the City. The majority of the world’s trade in all commercial and financial operations passed through the “commercial republic” (Darwin 2009, 112), thus turning the City of London into a cluster of markets and exchanges, banks and deposits, accountancies and insurance companies. Mirroring the beginning of Dombey and Son, the original title of Dickens’s novel, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation, not only conflates trade with British imperialism but also intertwines business transactions with personal relations. From Dombey to the speculators and hypocritical nouveau riches that overrun the city in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), the capitalist enterprise is connected to social and moral demise. Simultaneously hollow and villainous as well as rich and fascinating, the financier Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) represents “the pure form of the power of credit to transform human lives” (Gagnier 2002, 49) as he determines the fates of others by the stock’s spectacular rise and fall. James Adams stresses that Trollope’s and Dickens’s novels envision the social mobility of resourceful performers “whose

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careers remind us that the term ‘credit’ (from Latin credere, to believe) links financial commitment to a more encompassing faith in appearances” (2005, 58). There are many such narratives of financial scandal and bankruptcies in the Victorian novel, which emphasises the ongoing transformation of the self and its social relations with the nineteenth-century financial revolution. The new financial system from the 1860s onwards enabled transactions and speculation without economic and moral constraints and consequently pitted men against one another in a new form of excessive competition. Against this background, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend projects a crisis of masculinity and can thus be read as an attempt to put a nostalgic representation of femininity and domesticity against the threat posed by new economic forces. In Uneven Developments (1988) and Making a Social Body (1994), Mary Poovey shows that also new economic perspectives on gender and sexuality were created as speculation and credit took over older versions of patriarchy (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). Several Victorian novels cast women as goods in the marketplace. Characters like Becky Sharp, Lady Audley, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Clare Kirkpatrick, Lucy Morris, or Agnes Grey, for example, demonstrate how the governess trade exploits the intellectual property of women. During the Victorian period, until a change of law in 1870, married women counted as legal property of their husbands. Jane Eyre’s pearl earrings for the wedding with Rochester and Margaret Hale’s hands that turn to ivory under the gaze of Thornton emphasise the concomitant ornamentation and objectification in the context of their legitimate maternal empire of home-making. In contrast, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873) investigates women’s potential to capitalise on the material level from the commodification of female identity and sexuality by reinventing and reinscribing the feminine conceived in and through commodity culture (Lindner 2003, 65). On the Victorian marriage-market, Lizzy Sharp becomes depersonalised like the material decoration of the jewellery she wears. However, she uses the economic value of the stones as an agent for constructing a public identity (75–76), only that this transgression against the patriarchal order eventually turns her into a “damaged good” (86). This example emphasises that the commodification of women and women as consumers strongly ties in with thing culture of the nineteenth century and its representations of material culture in fiction.

3 Material Culture, Thing Theory, and Literary Commodities Victorians were obsessed with objects. After his studies on Victorian People (1955) and Victorian Cities (1963), cultural historian Asa Briggs was the first to contemplate this penchant for materiality in Victorian Things (1988). For Briggs, the “Victorian ‘universe of things’” (1990, 34) was influenced by the growing international trade

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and the revolution in communication but especially by the development of consumer culture. Thomas Richards connects the material to nineteenth-century visual culture and stresses how commodity culture emerged as a focal point for cultural representations (1990, 7–8). Owing to the scientific, technological, agricultural, political, economic, and legislative developments of the industrial revolution, the influences of capitalism on everyday life generated “a culture organized around the production and exchange of material goods” (Lindner 2003, 3). In the mid-nineteenth century, consumerism intensified across the English-speaking world so that the different forms of social life – economic, political, cultural, psychological, and literary – became more and more grouped around the new coordinating frame of the commodity (Richards 1990, 14). Conceptual constructions of the consumer that arose in the period thus engrained Victorian attitudes towards materiality, market, and money as well as class, gender, and empire (Rappaport 2008, 291). Categories of curiosity, luxury, or mass product, for instance, relate to constructions of class-specific tastes that, in turn, tie in with the establishment of the middle class as the ideal consumer. Moreover, a critique of consumption in early nineteenth-century discourses of abolitionism concerning two central commodities (tea and sugar) that were relevant for the formation of English national identity anticipates the feminisation of the consumer towards the fin de siècle. Erika Rappaport’s Shopping for Pleasure (2001) deals with women and their commodification in urban marketplaces, suggesting a strong gendering of the consumer in both private and public spheres. It was the increasingly open and global trading system after 1850 that transformed the imperial architecture of consumption (Trentmann 2016, 162). On the one hand, Britain generated industrialised mass products for export to an ever-expanding empire; on the other hand, the larger colonial market secured Britain’s imports of resources and valuable luxuries. During the Age of New Imperialism, jingoism constituted a further vital prop for the new mass consumer culture as material hierarchies between Britain and the colonised world were constructed via “commodity racism [which] converted the narrative of imperial progress into mass-produced consumer spectacles” (McClintock 1995, 33). The “Empire of Things” (Trentmann 2016) of the Victorian period particularly shows how various forms of representation aided in the appropriation, domestication, and authentication of foreign things as more goods with colonial origins entered the domestic mass market, carved their way into British homes, and gave rise to new material practices. With good reason, the ‘material turn’ of the last decades has once more underlined the integral importance of objects in the construction of societies. Arjun Appadurai’s paradigmatic introduction in The Social Life of Things (1986) calls for the reading of objects in “their forms, their uses, their trajectories” (5). Thus, by focussing on changes of meaning in the lifecycles of things according to the social context, it reconfigures material culture as a rich category for cultural analysis. The semiotic emphasis on the material has also re-inspired views on the materiality of

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and the materialistic in literature, from the literary marketplace to ecphrasis. Bill Brown’s seminal work A Sense of Things (2003) adopted cultural materialist and new historicist approaches to the objects of Victorian literature. His ‘thing theory’ stresses that paying close attention to material culture in literature allows us to see “how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies” (Brown 2003, 4). Illustrating the complex and manifold interrelations between people and objects in the Victorian period, Briggs draws extensively from novels as they “do not simply illustrate or decorate: they compel attention through their insights, and they frequently point to explanations. Many of them are thick with things” (1990, 18–19). Cynthia Wall argues that the development of the novel played a pivotal role in the representation and construction of material culture (2006, 158). She identifies a change between the eighteenth and nineteenth century as descriptions of objects became more minute and absorbed the ornamental into the contextual of the “upholstered Victorian novel” (2). Elaine Freedgood elaborates on the profusion of things in nineteenth-century literature: “The Victorian novel describes, catalogs, quantifies, and in general showers us with things: post chaises, handkerchiefs, moonstones, wills, riding crops, ships’ instruments of all kinds, dresses of muslin, merino, and silk, coffee, claret, cutlets – cavalcades of objects [. . .]” (2010, 1). For her, mid-Victorian realist novels, such as Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, North and South, and The Way We Live Now call to attention the centrality of non-symbolic objects (4). Things in fiction nevertheless have far-reaching metonymic functions relating to the social condition and labour, commercialisation and capitalism, as well as the impact of commodities and consumer culture. Christoph Lindner considers commodity culture in Victorian social novels and assesses how the representation of industrialism, consumption as well as materialism “accommodates and responds to the commodity’s colonization of the social imagination and its desires” (2003, 1). He takes his cue from Andrew Miller’s Novels Behind Glass (1995), which aligns literature with nineteenth-century spectacles and outlines how ambivalent attitudes and sensuous fantasies of consumer culture translated into cultural discourses. For example, Suzanne Daly’s study on Indian commodities in Victorian domestic novels shows how, on the one hand, the colonial objects are key for mediating the very idea of imperialism, and, on the other hand, how fiction helped in the domestication of these very things as intricate parts of middle-class Englishness (2014, 6–7). Alongside Daly’s The Empire Inside (2011), Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things (2006), Julie Fromer’s A Necessary Luxury (2008), and John Plotz’s Portable Property (2008) are crucial for an understanding of the complex social histories as well as symbolic values of imperial objects. Jonathan Shears and Jen Harrison’s collection Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians (2013) further emphasises the reification of the literary through the material, which centralises the importance of objects in their various narrative constructions. By contrast, Daniel Hack’s The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (2005) looks at

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writers’ engagement with the materiality of the text, such as in discourses of physical format, textuality of the world, and the literary marketplace. According to Briggs, of all Victorian fiction preoccupied with commodity culture and the signifying power of material objects, particularly Dickens’s novels constitute a “necessary reading for the historian of things” (1990, 19). Whereas Richards argues that in Dickens’s novels “furniture, textiles, watches, handkerchiefs seem to live and breathe” (1990, 2), for Lindner The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841) presents a “cemetery for discarded material objects” (2003, 94). This setting for dead clutter is dislocated from the modern consumer world and deliberately defies consumer logics. It anticipates the critique of a hedonistic consumer society in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), which again had its forerunner in the popular sub-genre of silver fork fiction of the 1820s to 1840s. For instance, Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) are concerned with gentlemanly characters whose property, tastes, and consumption habits provide models for the improved bourgeois man. These texts thereby integrate middle-class characters and ideals into early-nineteenth-century politics of aristocratic reform (Gagnier 2002, 61), even as the genre has been best remembered for its parodies, particularly the minute details of clothing in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–1834, ↗ 8 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus) or the class snobbery in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Andrew Miller reads the profusion of goods and their carnivalesque consumption in Thackeray’s novel as underlining the reduction of Victorian social and moral order to one of a “warehouse of goods and commodities” (1995, 6), pointing to the ambivalences generated by commodity culture. The fair as marketplace and spectacle emphasises the performative aspects of commodity culture (Lindner 2003, 46–49); the display of exchanging and consuming goods serves as a matrix for human relations, i.e. personal agency, social order, or identity (10, 20). Colonial commodities on display in domestic settings bring to attention that realist novels and, with them, the whole of Victorian material culture, are not only embedded in histories and narratives of production and commodification, but also in a colonial framework of material exploitation. Erika Rappaport stresses that “imperialism is consumption, ingestion, decoration” (2008, 289). The mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre, calico curtains in Mary Barton, and tobacco in Great Expectations analysed by Elaine Freedgood underline the material domestic impact of imperial conquest. On the most British of all consumer goods, Daly comments: “It is possible that tea is at least mentioned in every canonical mid-Victorian novel” (2014, 84). Famously, we encounter the luxury-cum-mass consumer good in “A Mad Tea-Party” of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865, ↗ 20 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). Before, Elizabeth Gaskell variously employs the commodity for characterisation. In Cranford (1851–1853), there is a female tea-trader whose femininity defies any forms of adulteration of valued beverage, while the chapter “Manchester Tea Party” in Mary Barton encourages sympathetic connection with the lower-class characters despite their distance in class, manner, and habit (Fromer 2008, 120). Julie

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Fromer argues that “[w]ithin North and South the image of the tea table functions as a crystallization of English national identity and the various social classes that make up that national sense of self” (129). Initially, the tea table presents a microcosm of the larger class struggle and a mediating power to forge connections between different social strata of Great Britain (117–119). Throughout the novel, there are various instances of tea-drinking in Helstone, London, and Milton embedded in social gatherings reaffirming the female characters’ social status. As a close reading of the tea table in chapter ten reveals, goods with imperial origins, such as tea, muslin, chintz, china, ivory, gold, cocoa, sugar, or mahogany, become ornaments of comfortable middle-class English domesticity (Gaskell 2008, 79). This actually invites readers to reconsider the relationship between material and imperial culture, the domestic and the foreign, as well as the aforementioned distinctions between the social realist novel and exotic romances (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology). Interestingly, Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure tales set in the South Seas, which blur genre boundaries of romances, realist stories, and anthropological studies, suggest a similar ambiguity of material culture (↗ 5 The Art of Novel Writing): “The exchange of material goods between members of different societies was the central mechanism governing virtually all aspects of the Pacific life Stevenson recorded in his writings” (Jolly 2010, 121). Lately, his stories have been read as undermining the Arcadian image of the region. For instance, the map in Treasure Island (1883) as a key-object for imperial expansion is described as “The Black Spot” (Stevenson 2012, 57) and the “buried gold” (37) is tainted by its history of “previous terrors” (213) of imperial plunder. Thus, the buried hoard of riches on the tropical island promising pleasant luxuries for heroic endurance only causes nightmares and death (224). Likewise, in their allusion to the Arabian Nights and its wonderful objects, the curious tales from Stevenson’s Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893) merge realism and romance to expose the commercial ruthlessness and “the shabbiness of European civilization” (Buckton 2007, 65). “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) brings to attention the ambiguous character of curiosities, both of South Sea and Western production. The trader-colonialist, Case, is a “good forger of island curiosities” (Stevenson 2008, 54), which he sells to European travellers catering for their imagination and hunger for the fake ‘primitive curios’. Case’s treasure cave is a colonial factory which has a double purpose, namely to “season his curiosities” (54) and to control the island-trading monopoly of coconut meat. During his travels in the South Seas, Stevenson actually contemplated buying his own copra trading schooner, but settled in Samoa instead, where he became strongly involved in colonial politics. While Stevenson spent the last six years of his life in Oceania, Joseph Conrad worked sixteen years for the British merchant navy before he became a writer. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, similar to The Beach of Falesá’s scathing critique of economic imperialism, subtly lays bare the futilities of colonialism, with the overarching motif of “the merry dance of death and trade” (2008, 115). The object-world

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in his novella hightlights the colonial machinery of death, with European and North American industrial products like rifles or war ships that end up in the “graveyard of things,” but it also finds expression in the instrumentalisation and final dehumanisation of enslaved natives in the “grove of death” (116–121). This violent exploitation and destruction of land and people analogises modern consumption to alleged African cannibalism (144–146). Material aspirations have turned into a mere “grubbing for ivory in the wretched bush” (147). England alone imported about 550 tons of ivory annually, which equals forty thousand dead elephants, mainly required for bibelots such as dominoes, toys, billard balls, combs, cutlery, and piano keys (Stevens 2002, 26–27). The piano that dominates the drawing-room of Kurtz’s fiancé in Europe is described as “a sombre and polished sarcophagus” (Conrad 2008, 183). The musical instrument which is played at the expense of slaughtered animals and enslaved peoples conjures up the motif of the dance of death (Stevens 2002, 27). Thus, as the wealth of the empire provided for many of the commodities of Western civilisation or Victorian bric-à-brac, the colonial horrors are a direct consequence of European ideals of leisure and beauty. According to Said, “Conrad’s realization is that [. . .] like narrative, imperialism has monopolized the entire system of representation” (1994, 29), and this also concerns the conspicuous consumption of colonial objects. At the turn of the century, especially in the works of early modernist writers, commodity culture bespeaks decline and degeneracy. Such fiction attests to the decadent effects of capitalism on social values and practices (Lindner 2003, 93). In this context, Lindner particularly refers to Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), in which objects become human subjects, while human subjects take on the characteristics of objects (108). Verloc’s shop is a corrupt version of the old curiosity shop in Dickens’s novel, which underlines how human subjects like their material counterparts have become damaged goods (93–95, 107–108). The domestic spaces have turned into a hostile and potentially lethal environment (122). The characterisation of the Professor as a human time-bomb underlines “commodity culture’s decay as incurable, its damage as irreparable, its corruption as irreversible, its stagnation as inevitable” (124). The bombing of Greenwich Observatory not only connects the modern construction of time with the mechanisation of a productive (domestic) society, but the prime meridian importantly facilitates the colonial project (112). All in all, the novel as aesthetic object is unthinkable without the link to imperialism. It was Britain’s wealth produced in domestic industry and overseas trade that proffered middle-class prosperity and enabled the growth of producing and consuming novels (Said 1994, 88–89). And just as much as Victorian writers register, thematise, and construct visions of Britain’s imperial venture, the evolution of capitalism with its concomitant changes in trade, the marketplace, commerce, and the influences of the new consumer culture, they implicitly or explicitly express attitudes to the commodification of their own literary products. Against the background of the industrial revolution and its technological innovations, the

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material conditions of print culture altered forms of publishing and distribution. Also, rising incomes and increasing literacy fuelled the dissemination of literary products on a newly developing global marketplace. This was aided by the emergence of a large urban market and especially via the establishment of lending libraries turning literature into an affordable good. Thus, with regard to production, distribution, and consumption of the novel, the literary form developed into a mass commodity itself. Norman Feltes locates Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837) as the “take off” moment of the “commodity-text” (1986, 27). The rise of the periodical press during the nineteenth-century communication revolution was advanced by famous examples, such as Punch, The Illustrated London News, The Graphic, Household Words, and the Daily Mail. The Cornhill Magazine, a shilling monthly founded in January 1860 and initially edited by William Makepeace Thackeray, became the market leader of fiction-led magazines. Eliot, Gaskell, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, Stevenson, Wilde, Doyle, and Conrad all serialised narratives in periodicals. The magazines were subsidised by advertisements, showcasing the various Victorian commodities (Richards 1990, 7–8). In this combination of serialised fiction, poetry, essays, advertisements, illustrations, and cartoons, the periodical underlines the novel’s connection to the larger media culture of the nineteenth century (↗ 2 Remediating NineteenthCentury Narrative). Beyond constituting a lucrative way of publication, Anthony Trollope, who produced up to three triple-deckers per year, in his Autobiography (1883) laid open the mechanical and utilitarian attitude in writing for serialisation. These processes necessarily affected the literary form. Thus, the Victorian novel with its idiosyncratic materiality must be seen as part of an increasingly commercial publishing industry. Consequently, we need to be aware that the emergence of the novel as dominant genre was embedded in a wide range of material implications during the nineteenth century. Regarding the context of imperialism, fiction played a pivotal role in English education throughout the British Empire and was crucial for constructing metropolitan authority. Similar to the reading strategies of postcolonialism, new approaches in economic criticism and material culture studies not only allow us to revisit canonical texts of the Victorian period, but also to reassess twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels in the light of their generic predecessors, for example with regard to neo-imperial, economic, or material phenomena of post-Fordism.

Bibliography Works Cited Adams, James E. “‘The Boundaries of Social Intercourse’: Class in the Victorian Novel.” A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 47–70.

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Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist. Dracula and the Fear of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33.4 (1990): 623–640. Boehmer, Elleke. “Introduction.” Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870–1918. Ed. Elleke Boehmer. Oxford: OUP, 2009. xv–xxxvi. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. 1988. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Brantlinger, Patrick. Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Briggs, Asa. Victorian Things. 1988. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Buckton, Oliver S. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body. Athens: Ohio UP, 2007. Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914. London: Longman, 1993. Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” 1899. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford: OUP, 2008. 101–187. Daly, Suzanne. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels. 2011. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2014. Darwin, John. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. David, Deirdre. “Empire, Race, and the Victorian Novel.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 84–100. Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. 1846–1848. Ware: Wordsworth, 2002. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. 1854. Ware: Wordsworth, 2000. Feltes, Norman N. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. 2006. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Fromer, Julie E. A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England. Athens: Ohio UP, 2008. Gagnier, Regenia. “Money, the Economy, and Social Class.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 48–66. Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson. “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” The Economic History Review 6.1 (1953): 1–15. Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1854–1855. Ed. Angus Easson. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Goetsch, Paul. “‘One of Us’: Meanings and Functions of a Leitmotif in Conrad’s Lord Jim.” From Interculturalism to Transculturalism: Mediating Encounters in Cosmopolitan Contexts. Ed. Heinz Antor et al. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. 67–84. Grünkemeier, Ellen, Nora Pleßke, and Joanna Rostek. “The Value of Economic Criticism Reconsidered: Approaching Literature and Culture through the Lens of Economics.” Anglistentag 2017 Regensburg: Proceedings. Ed. Anne-Julia Zwierlein et al. Trier: WVT, 2018. 117–126. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. 1987. London: Abacus, 2013. Jolly, Roslyn. “Stevenson and the Pacific.” The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Penny Fielding. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 118–133. Lindner, Christoph. Fictions of Commodity Culture: From the Victorian to the Postmodern. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 2004. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.

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Makdisi, Saree. Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014. Miller, Andrew H. Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. Pleßke, Nora. The Intelligible Metropolis: Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Rappaport, Erika. “Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn. Response.” Victorian Studies 50.2 (2008): 289–296. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. 1993. London: Vintage, 1994. Schmitt, Cannon. “‘The sun and moon were made to give them light’: Empire in the Victorian Novel.” A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 4–24. Sedlmayr, Gerold. “Political and Social History c. 1780–1832.” Handbook of British Romanticism. Ed. Ralf Haekel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017. 27–48. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry (1985): 243–261. Stevens, Ray. “Conrad, Slavery, and the African Ivory Trade in the 1890s ” Approaches to Teaching Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and the “Secret Sharer”. Ed. Hunt Hawkins and Brian W. Shaffer. New York: MLA, 2002. 22–30. Stevenson, Robert Louis. “The Beach of Falesá.” 1892. South Sea Tales. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. Oxford: OUP, 2008. 3–72. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. 1883. Ed. John Sutherland. Peterborough: Broadview, 2012. Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first. London: Allen Lane, 2016. Wall, Cynthia Sundberg. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. 2006. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014.

Further Reading Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Guy, Josephine M. The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and NineteenthCentury Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Porter, Andrew, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century. 1999, Oxford: OUP, 2009. Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London: Continuum, 2001.

Part II: Close Readings

Natalie Roxburgh and Felix Sprang

8 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) Abstract: This chapter sheds light on one of the most difficult thinkers and writers of the Victorian period: Thomas Carlyle. We scrutinise the political and philosophical dimension of Carlyle’s only work of prose fiction, the satirical novel Sartor Resartus, and we read the text as an adaptation of key concepts from German idealism and phenomenology. Carlyle’s criticism of political economy as it had evolved in nineteenth-century Britain facilitates our understanding of the novel, and we discuss the work’s formal aspects as well as its central imagery, the Philosophy of Clothes. We argue that Sartor Resartus is an experimental novel that challenges conventional plot-driven modes of narration and thus criticises a cause-and-effect mentality as well as a purpose-driven efficiency that is at the heart of Victorian culture. Instead, the novel urges readers to embrace transcendentalism as a means to accept the contingencies of life and to refute narrative mystifications of social realism that, with hindsight, always make sense of individual experiences and social changes through a utilitarian logic. It is our contention that Carlyle’s novel, through its form, imagery, and mode of narration, gestures towards a stance that escapes fatalism and thus empowers readers to embrace possible modes of political agency. Keywords: Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, experimental novel, idealism, phenomenology, political economy

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), essayist, satirist, novelist, and historian, alongside Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin arguably the primus inter pares of the “Victorian Sages” (Holloway 1953, 3), is perhaps best known for his crushing verdict of political economy as a “dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing [science]; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science” (Carlyle 1849, 672). With that view, he is arguably the most original Victorian voice criticising the very foundations on which Victorian society was built: progress, liberty, and expansion. Doing justice to the complexity of Carlyle’s views, we need to take into account that he was esteemed by many of his contemporaries despite his often caustic condemnation of what many of them believed in. Sometimes accused of racism or anti-democratic sentiments, Carlyle was – and remains – a controversial figure. His damning verdict of political economy in the 1849 essay “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro

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Question,” for example, was read as supporting slavery, but his conviction was in fact more fundamental. When Carlyle famously condemned “the dismal science,” he criticised an “economics [that] assumed that people were all the same, and were all entitled to liberty” (Peart and Levy 2003, 134) – a liberty he felt was misconceived as freedom and autonomy when it was no more than a market-driven assertion of selfdetermination and a notion of human well-being articulated solely through the new logic of utilitarianism. It is fair to say that Carlyle’s criticism of prevailing economic models rings more true today with financial crises looming large and societies showing signs of lapsing into post-democratic practice, for the reason that market authority seems to have trumped democratic governance (Crouch 2004, 6). Despite his controversial reception and sometimes problematic outlook, therefore, it perhaps now behoves readers to revisit Carlyle’s complicated oeuvre with contemporary contexts in mind, especially those texts having to do with the rise of liberalism. Carlyle’s multifaceted literary production transcends mere criticism of political economy and its social effects. Indeed, his biography and his publications speak to interests that stretch our very conception of politics and economy, as these categories are – through the mind of a complex thinker genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of humanity – also tied to thoughtprovoking notions about the eminence of art in society and the notion of hero worship. To contextualise Carlyle, and to find out why he was so well admired by many of his contemporaries, it is necessary to account for the roots of his despair. On the one hand, he experienced anguish in his personal life; on the other, he was concerned that, through a liberalism that sought to promote economic rationality at the expense of all else, society may very well have taken a wrong turn. As the eldest of nine children to Margaret Aitken (1771–1853), daughter of a bankrupt Dumfriesshire farmer, and James Carlyle (1757–1832), a stonemason, Carlyle was brought up under a rural Calvinist regime in Ecclefechan, Annandale, Dumfriesshire (Kaplan 2008). In this rural Presbyterian community, it was his mother who taught him how to read before he entered a private school in Ecclefechan, and, from the age of six, he began attending the Hoddam parish school. From an early age, Carlyle’s education was bent on a clerical profession. Due to his father’s resolve, and against his mother’s inclination, he was sent to Annan Academy, a school preparing him for university entrance. It was at Annan School that he discovered his interest in mathematics but also taught himself German, Italian, and Spanish. In 1809, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, and it was in the mathematics classes taught by Professor John Leslie that Carlyle was introduced to the idea that the universe was a system of natural forces. In 1813, Carlyle left Edinburgh University without a degree and signed up for classes at the Divinity Hall, but when he left Edinburgh in June 1814 to return to Dumfriesshire, he had neither a degree nor a vocation. He had, however, taken an interest in contributing to debates in newspapers, responding to mathematical queries with satirical fervour. With a letter of recommendation from Professor

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Leslie, he applied for the position of mathematics master at Annan Academy, and on the basis of his merit he was offered the job at £70 per annum (Kaplan 2008). Generally feeling ill-equipped for teaching, but most importantly resenting his return to the place of his miserable school days, Carlyle accepted the offer to relocate to Kirkcaldy and to teach “Latin, French, arithmetic, bookkeeping, geometry, navigation, geography, and mensuration, with some Greek occasionally” at the parish school (Kaplan 2008). After only a year, in November 1818, Carlyle resigned and returned to Edinburgh. There, a life-long ailment, a digestive disorder, developed as he resumed his self-study of German, torn between jubilant moments when finding that he was able to read Goethe and Fichte and moments of despair at the aimless course that his life had taken. It was in this period, arguably, that the character of Teufelsdröckh, the manic-depressive protagonist of his Sartor Resartus, first took shape. During his time as a teacher at Annan School, Carlyle had been introduced to Edward Irving, a native of Annan and a charismatic clergyman who was then master at Kirkcaldy Academy; in May 1821, through Irving, he met Jane Welsh (1801–1866). A complicated relationship between Welsh and Carlyle ensued, a relationship that Carlyle in his letters defined as a “Romantic Friendship” (Carlyle 1974b, 21). After handing in his resignation at Annan School and accepting the offer as private tutor to Charles and Arthur Buller in Edinburgh at a salary of £200 per annum (Cumming 2004, 43), Carlyle began to visit Jane Welsh regularly. On 17 October 1826, Jane and Thomas exchanged their marriage vows and moved to a modest house on Comely Bank in suburban Edinburgh. While their marriage lasted for nearly forty years, “fragile evidence suggests” that “puritanical inhibitions and romantic idealizations” (Kaplan 2008) were an obstacle they could not overcome, and their relationship remained complicated. In the meantime, Carlyle’s German studies had taken a productive course. He had written a short biographical sketch of Schiller in serial form for the London Magazine (October 1823 to September 1824), and his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796) was published in 1824 with Oliver & Boyd and Whittaker. During summers spent in London, Carlyle now moved in literary circles where he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Crabb Robinson, and Charles Lamb, among others. Carlyle’s experience in London shaped his perspective on society at large and on literary society in particular. In Coleridge he saw the epitome of the dependent artist full of self-pity, locked in a symbiosis in which “the fallen individual and the fallen society [. . .] create one another in their own image” (Kaplan 2008). As is so often the case, Carlyle’s contempt for the artist at home gave rise to his veneration for the artist overseas, and he penned an enthusiastic letter to Goethe in Weimar, presenting him with a copy of his translation. Six months into their marriage, Carlyle and Jane moved to Craigenputtoch, where Carlyle wrote short essays on Voltaire, Novalis, Burns, and Tasso for the Foreign Review as well as a longer piece titled “Signs of the Times” for the Edinburgh Review.

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In this essay, Carlyle identifies as the “overriding characteristic” of his age the “mechanical” nature, not only with respect to “machines [. . .] changing the nature of work and life” but more importantly with respect to the social fabric of society (Harris 1990, 442). In 1830, Carlyle began working on another essay that appeared in serial form in Fraser’s Magazine in the years 1833 and 1834 and which eventually, after many revisions, became a novel published as Sartor Resartus. Both “Signs of the Times” and the novel lament the effects of industrialisation: the increasingly mechanical outlook and the lack of spirituality that pervaded, in Carlyle’s view, every aspect of life in Britain. When Carlyle and Jane moved from Craigenputtoch to Edinburgh in 1833 and then to Chelsea, London, in 1834, Carlyle started on a book project about the French Revolution. His motivation for turning to history was no less radical than the enthusiasm that had governed his satirical prose: “For Carlyle, history had become the sanction of the seer and the prophet: it enabled him to address the realities of the present and future while discussing the ‘realities’ of the past” (Kaplan 2008). The manuscript for the three-volume book on the French Revolution, given to John Stuart Mill for comments, was mistaken for scrap paper and completely destroyed. Carlyle was distraught but sat down to begin anew and finished the manuscript in two years, preparing it to be published with James Fraser in March 1837. That year, at the suggestion of and with the support of friends in London, Carlyle also began lecturing on the history of German literature at rented halls, and “The Times and The Spectator reported favourably” (Kaplan 2008). In 1838, Sartor Resartus was published in book form in England; the American edition had been printed in 1836 with the support of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had visited Carlyle in Craigenputtoch. Carlyle, whose ailments vanished during this period, now saw Jane’s health decline. Under these circumstances, he turned to lecturing again, this time on European literature. Complaining that the existing lending libraries did not provide critical reading material, he was involved in setting up a committee for a non-profit lending library in London. The London Library opened its doors at 57 Pall Mall in late 1840, and “[b]y the beginning of the year 1841 about five hundred subscribers were entered on the books” (Christie and Harrison 1907, 93). Carlyle’s involvement in the public library coincided with the publication of Chartism in 1839, in which he describes, in the opening paragraph, the demonstrations of the rebellious crowds in the streets of London as “agencyless acts” and redefines “Chartism’s orderly and seemingly legible demonstrations” as indicative of a “world filled with active objects and silenced human beings, a world where passive verbs and vague abstract nouns stand for the upper classes, while specific heavy and threatening machinery takes the place of the life of the lower-class mob” (Plotz 2000, 96). Carlyle’s criticism of the working class movement had to do with contemporary concerns that industrialisation combined with the expansion of voting rights could lead to factionalism, which ultimately might threaten the stability of civil society.

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Indeed, this general anxiety pervades most of his essays of the period, finding its expression in the sardonic Past and Present (1843) and the satirical Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), published a year before the Great Exhibition in London, in which he attacks “the corrupt web of business, bureaucracy, aristocracy, and government” (Kaplan 2008). Carlyle, inspired particularly by Goethe, Fichte, and Schelling, condemned the “Pig Propositions” of his time, i.e., a Whig historiography that promoted the idea of a linear progress founded on materialism and technology (Carlyle 1850, 28). The pamphlets were not well received in literary circles: They were deemed to be too aggressive, lacking artistry, and resorting to crude expressions such as “Pig Philosophy” to attack the materialism that Carlyle saw all around him. Carlyle increasingly sought solace in “the concept of élite leadership” (Kaplan 2008), an idea hinged on the unity of political, military, and spiritual power, fully developed in his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) and exemplified in the monumental study of Cromwell in The Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell (1845). In 1846, Carlyle visited Ireland because he wanted to see with his own eyes what harm the English administration caused there. For Carlyle, “modern Ireland demonstrated the end point of the failings of contemporary society” (Morrow 2008, 644), and he wrote a series of short newspaper articles on the topic of Ireland, which were published in The Spectator and The Examiner. The mistreatment of the Irish by English landowners, sanctioned by the government in London, also triggered his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine at the end of 1849. In the following year, Carlyle penned The Life of John Sterling (1851), a homage to the Scottish author who had introduced him into London’s literary circles in the 1820s and whose papers were given to Thomas Carlyle and Julius Charles Hare after Sterling’s death. Carlyle pitted Sterling’s rational radicalism against a Romantic idealism, and an unsigned Times review picked up the implicit criticism: Compare this biography with that of some illustrious men recently published; compare it with the miserable trash called a Life of Wordsworth; with the rambling patchwork of incompetence the Life of Southey; with the Life of Coleridge, which might have been so high and tragic a picture of wasted life and baffled speculation; with the Life of Shelley, which ought to have been intensely interesting [. . .]. (qtd. in Fielding 1999, 309)

Visiting Germany for the first time in the summer of 1852, Carlyle began working on his History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858–1865), which was praised in the 1916 Oxford edition with the words: “At its most characteristic pitch this poetical history is a mystic vision” (Hughes 1916, xii). The years 1857 and 1858 also saw the publication of the first volumes of his Collected Works, and even many of his critics now accepted that Carlyle, the author who had been hardpressed to find a publisher for Sartor Resartus and whose Latter-Day Pamphlets were derided by the public, had now, at the age of 63, become a classic.

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During these years of Carlyle’s literary success, Jane’s health further declined. While caring for his wife, Carlyle finished Frederick the Great in early 1865, and later that year he was nominated as Rector of the University of Edinburgh. He and Disraeli ran to follow in the footsteps of Gladstone, the retiring Rector, and Carlyle was elected with 657 votes in favour of him while Disraeli received 310 votes. In the eyes of many, “the result seemed a symbolic triumph for some kind of political idealism over the materialist machinations of Disraeli” (Symons 2001, 1). At his inaugural address, Carlyle was greeted with “tumultuous applause burst[ing] from the enthusiastic students” (Kaplan 2008). Only a few days later, on 22 April 1866, news arrived from London that Jane had passed away. In the fifteen years that Carlyle survived his wife, he mostly turned to collecting and ordering letters and to correcting the manuscript of a biography of Jane that Geraldine Jewsbury, a mutual friend, had sent him shortly after Jane’s death. In emending and editing Jane’s biography, Carlyle was forced to reflect on his own life. In August 1867, the Macmillan’s Magazine published his essay “Shooting Niagara: and after?” in which he condemned the Reform Bill of 1867 and its “[d]ivine commandment to vote” alongside its praise of “universal ‘glorious liberty’” (Carlyle 1867, 321). The essay, re-published as a fifty-five-page pamphlet later that year, was Carlyle’s final substantial intervention in the press. “The last six years of his life show a gradual, and in general quiet and calm, progress down the road to desired death” (Symons 2001, 297), and on 4 February 1881, his niece Mary Aitken “thought she heard him saying to himself, ‘So this is Death: well . . . ’” (Kaplan 2008). It had been Carlyle’s wish not be buried at Westminster Abbey and, according to his will, he was laid to rest “in the Kirkyard of Ecclefechan, as near as possible to [his] father and mother” (Symons 2001, 298).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), “the seminal expression of the thought of the most influential of the Victorian cultural prophets” (McSweeney and Sabor 1987, vii) and “one of the most eccentric and original works of its age” (Ryan 2003, 287), is Carlyle’s only work of prose fiction. In a review published in The Leader in 1855, George Eliot made a distinction between the contemporary reception of Carlyle’s opinions and the esteem for Sartor Resartus: “The character of his influence is best seen in the fact that many of the men who have the least agreement with his opinions are those to whom the reading of Sartor Resartus was an epoch in the history of their minds” (Eliot 1963, 214). With its frame narrative purportedly written by an “unreliable editor” and its imaginary characters and events, Sartor Resartus can be classified as a novel, even if the text, “half-mystical rhapsody [. . .] composed by turns of fragments of biography, autobiography, philosophic fantasy, satire and apocalyptic prose-poetry,” certainly stretches the boundaries of the novel as a

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genre (Ryan 2003, 287). Fundamentally, the text shares concerns and topics with the essays, histories, and biographies that Carlyle wrote throughout his life; and its generic indeterminacy can facilitate our understanding of Sartor Resartus as an experimental novel. On the level of plot and character, Sartor Resartus stitches together fragments of the life of the German philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, fragments that barely add up to tell the story of orphanage, schooling, unrequited love, despair, and a spiritual awakening. In that sense, the novel is a Bildungsroman that is experimental in its arrangement of biographical sketches and fragmented autobiographical testimonies. As Chris Vanden Bossche has pointed out, “[v]irtually every detail of the biography of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh [. . .] may be found in the sketches of the lives and works of German writers – Musæus, Fouqué, Tieck, Hoffman, Richter, Werner, Heyne, and Novalis as well as Goethe and Schiller – that Carlyle composed between 1823 and 1830” (1991, 20). The fictional biography is divided into three parts, which are all narrated by an editor: In book one, the editor gives an account of Teufelsdröckh’s adult years and of the circumstances that led to the protagonist’s treatise on clothes, Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken, ending up in the editor’s hands. Book two recounts Teufelsdröckh’s childhood and youth in a provincial town named Entepfuhl and takes the reader through the protagonist’s spiritual crisis in adulthood. Book three is centred on the “gist and purport of Professor Teufelsdröckh’s Philosophy of Clothes” (Carlyle 1974a, 165) and outlines some of its central ideas. As the novel painstakingly recounts the efforts, and ultimately the failure, of an English editor to appropriate German philosophical ideas for his English audience, the book also reads as an autobiographical reflection by the author Carlyle on his endeavours to convey the ideas of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Schelling to his fellow countrymen. However, the book is not simply a fictional account of Carlyle’s attempt at intercultural transfer: Sartor Resartus also carves out Carlyle’s conception of history, culture, and hero worship. The novel begins with the editor wondering why “the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science, – the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen or other cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its being” (Carlyle 1974a, 2). Stressing that the social sciences should focus on “man as a Clothed Animal” (2), the editor of the novel is adamant that Teufelsdröckh’s Philosophy of Clothes can only be understood if the author’s biography and the context in which the book was conceived are scrupulously presented. Consequently, Sartor Resartus is both: a biography of the protagonist Professor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo and a book review of the treatise Die Kleider ihr Wirken und Werden in the form of a novel. Sartor Resartus testifies that Carlyle, despite his literary aspirations, was “foremost a historical writer” (Vanden Bossche 2002, xix). One of his historical foci was the French Revolution, in which the French monarchy was overthrown and a

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secular democratic republic was installed in its aftermath. Carlyle chose the central theme of the novel – clothes – with the events of the July Revolution, the Trois Glorieuses of 1830, in mind. In that revolution the sans-culottes, who wore pantaloons and not breeches to testify that they were, or sympathised with, the common people, were the militant supporters of the rule of the people. This “shapeless, mostly urban movement of the labouring poor, small craftsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, tiny entrepreneurs and the like” (Hobsbawm 1996, 63), situated between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, is evoked throughout the novel, for example in the portrayal of the protagonist: “Teufelsdröckh, though a sansculottist, is in practice probably the politest man extant” (Carlyle 1974a, 190). In the final volume of his French Revolution, Carlyle explains that “Sansculottism [. . .] still lives; still works far and wide, through one bodily shape into another less amorphous” (268). Sansculottism brings out the connection between a symbolic use of clothes and political activism, and the novel Sartor Resartus is grounded in the historical moment of 1830 in which sansculottism, a movement deemed to have run out of steam in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, reshaped itself to address the injustice that came with the restoration of the monarchy. The revival of sansculottism as the historical phenomenon that prompted Carlyle to come up with an account (however satirical) of a “Philosophy of Clothes” is very much in keeping with Carlyle’s overall conception of history. The novel presents a view of historical processes that differs markedly from the prevailing conviction of his contemporaries that history is, according to Saint John Bolingbroke, “philosophy teaching by examples” (1752, 26). Carlyle did not subscribe to the idea that studying the past closely would facilitate anticipating the future. Instead, he viewed human culture as a series of unrelated epochs punctuated by upheavals. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle paints a grim picture of these cataclysmic processes. According to the protagonist Prof. Teufelsdröckh, European culture experiences a fundamental crisis as the narrative voice, the English editor, explains: Thus, if Professor Teufelsdröckh can be relied on, we are at this hour in a most critical condition; [. . .] “The World,” says he, “as it needs must, is under a process of devastation and waste, which whether by silent assiduous corrosion, or open quicker combustion, as the case chances, will effectually enough annihilate the past forms of society; replace them with what it may.” (Carlyle 1974a, 178)

Sartor Resartus interweaves history and political economy. As such, the clothes metaphor in Sartor Resartus historicises what Carlyle felt was “a most critical condition”: the first volume of the “Philosophy of Clothes,” the editor explains, proposes the notion that “Government is, so to speak, the outward SKIN of the Body Politic [. . .] and all your Craft-Guilds, and Associations for Industry, of hand or of head, are the Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues” (172). The second volume, hinted at by Teufelsdröckh but never completed, will “treat[] practically of the Wear, Destruction, and Retexture of Spiritual Tissues, or Garments” (173).

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It is in Teufelsdröckh’s clothes metaphor, then, that Carlyle gives expression to his views on history and historiography: Is the Past annihilated, then, or only past; is the Future non-extant, or only future? Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, already answer: already through those mystic avenues, thou the Earth-blinded summonest both Past and Future, and communest with them, though as yet darkly, and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal. (Carlyle 1974a, 208)

Sartor Resartus thus presents a mythical view of history that aims at the eternal, and the clothes metaphor at its centre makes a strong case for a poetic dimension, an aesthetics of distancing oneself from the present, as a requirement to grasp history and make it meaningful. The episodic plot-line of Sartor Resartus is reminiscent of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and we know that Carlyle was a great admirer of Sterne’s ingenuity. Sartor Resartus also picks up the idea of a contingent world made meaningful by one’s life and opinions. In the words of philosopher Georg Lukács, “[i]n such a world [in which everything is accidental], what can a man mean in the life of another? Infinitely much and yet infinitely little” (1974, 112). Sartor Resartus thus explores individualism as a quintessential part of political economy in emphasising the moral worth of the individual vis à vis society. It is noteworthy that the protagonist leads a secluded life: “[a]s for Teufelsdröckh, except by his nightly appearances at the Grünen Ganse, Weissnichtwo saw little of him” (Carlyle 1974a, 14). Teufelsdröckh’s adolescence and adulthood are depicted as a constant struggle to assert his life and “[. . .] and opinions with a personal crisis at the heart of the novel. The protagonist [. . .]” with “[. . .] and opinions. With this personal crisis at the heart of the novel, the protagonist eventually falls into despair [. . .]” chapter eight of book two, accordingly named the “Centre of Indifference”: “‘This,’ says our Professor, ‘was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now reached, through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass’” (Carlyle 1974a, 146). Elizabeth Vida has argued that Carlyle borrowed both the terminology “Centre of Indifference” and the concept itself from Schelling’s Über das Verhältnis der Naturphilosophie zur Philosophie überhaupt (1802) “in order to convey a spiritual state that existed in Teufelsdröckh’s mind” (1993, 136). The novel indeed evokes transcendentalism at this pivotal moment as a way of accepting the contingencies of life, gesturing perhaps towards eschatological assurance but more importantly pointing out that “[w]e are not to become imprisoned in narrative mystifications, neither those of the philosophy nor those of life” (Haney 1978, 325). The protagonist in this novel thus finds his place in life, paradoxically, by retreating from society or, perhaps more correctly, by withdrawing from political economy. However, the editor rejects Teufelsdröckh’s autobiographical account of having transcended space and time and points out that “[o]ur own private conjecture, now amounting almost to certainty, is that, safe-moored in some stillest obscurity, not to lie always still, Teufelsdröckh is actually in London!” (Carlyle 1974a, 237). Being

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cautioned earlier that “the Professor and Seer [is] not quite the blinkard he affects to be” (229), the novel, and in particular the chapter “Natural Supernaturalism” discussing transcendentalism, allows for a satirical account of Teufelsdröckh’s German Idealism as being intellectually lacking: “When we consider the axis of communication between the editor-narrator and the implied reader, the novel thus explicitly rejects the notion of transcendental philosophy as consolation” (Sprang 2011, 97). Furthermore, the editor questions the applicability of Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy for a British audience: “[C]an it be hidden from the Editor that many a British Reader sits reading quite bewildered in head, and afflicted rather than instructed by the present Work? [. . .] O British reader, it leads to nothing, and there is no use in it; but rather the reverse, for it costs thee somewhat” (Carlyle 1974a, 215). Yet, while Carlyle exposes individualism and transcendentalism as escapism, the hint that reading the novel “costs thee somewhat” also cleverly calls into question utilitarianism and principles of economy that seem so dear to the “British Reader.” Teufelsdröckh’s withdrawal from society is thus juxtaposed with the readers’ calculated participation in society. Quoting from Carlyle’s Past and Present, Sara Atwood has maintained that Carlyle protested against the “liberty especially which has to purchase itself by social isolation, and each man standing separate from the other, having ‘no business with him’ but a cash-account” (2013, 255). Considering Carlyle’s oeuvre, Teufelsdröckh’s flaw is his reluctance or incompetence to engage with society. He is too much of a thinker, and not enough of a labourer. As Vanden Bossche has argued, “Carlyle held out the hope that authors who work with words, like laborers who till the soil, could produce something outside themselves, could create a world” (1991, 83). Despite the editor’s efforts to turn the “Philosophy of Clothes” into practical philosophy, Teufelsdröckh fails to “produce something outside” himself. With his protagonist, then, Carlyle “expresses Victorian anxiety about the autophagic tendency of self-conscious philosophy” (Vanden Bossche 1991, 83). Arguably, Teufelsdröckh’s flaw, his failure to assert his personality and to promote his “Philosophy of Clothes,” is to be found in the fact that he is not a hero but too much of a bourgeois pedant unable to turn individualism and transcendentalism into a productive force. He is not the charismatic “noble, wise, and strong leader, the sort of man to whom obedience is naturally due and freely given” (Atwood 2013, 255). This is the more problematic because, for Carlyle, the “Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all” (2013, 133). So, while Sartor Resartus conceptualises a trajectory from individualism to transcendentalism and ultimately heroism, the novel presents the relationship between transcendentalism and heroism as a task, as a goal to be achieved by the individual and recognised by society. Carlyle’s hero, the ideal Teufelsdröckh that the editor seeks to find, promises to reground authority in a form of sovereignty that is not tied to political economy. On the part of the reader, the novel thus highlights the

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virtues of hero-worship with which Carlyle “encourages the sort of discernment that will lead to good government and universal justice” (Atwood 2013, 256).

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Sartor Resartus is an experimental novel on several accounts, most strikingly because of its narrative framing. Vanessa L. Ryan has shown that the idea of the unreliable editor, who is “self-consciously referring to his own ‘Editorial Difficulties’ (I. ii), takes up more than half of the work” and thus “gives dramatic form to questions of authenticity, veracity and imaginative invention in the art of biography,” reflecting debates at the time (2003, 290). While the multiple perspectives and different voices are an essential feature of the novel’s narrative structure, it is the central metaphor – the intricate and complex clothes allegory at the heart of the book – that creates the particular self-reflexive texture of the novel. The clothes metaphor taps into a classical trope explored fully in the eighteenth century. Pope, in his Essay on Criticism (1711) resorted to the phrase “expression is the dress of thought” (Sloane 2001, 752) in order to establish the connection between language and thinking. In chapter eleven of Sartor Resartus, entitled “Prospective,” the editor explains, in the words of the protagonist Teufelsdröckh, that: Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognised as such, or no longer recognised; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colourless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language, – then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments. (Carlyle 1974a, 57–58)

This passage corresponds with the opening remarks in the chapter “Preliminary” in which “man as a Clothed Animal” is juxtaposed with man “by nature [as] a Naked Animal” (2). Carlyle’s trope, captured by the title “The Tailor Retailored,” explores an anthropological perspective that is reminiscent of the zoon politikon and foreshadows the homo faber, but it differs from most anthropological conceptions in that it adds a hierarchical component, suggesting that humans are not all the same, not all equal. The metaphor of clothes applied to the relationship between language and thought highlights the hierarchical notion of linguistic forms like decorum and register. Carlyle’s metaphor also adds a material quality to the abstract philosophical take on the relationship between language and thought. Clothes may be symbolic, but they are also ‘real’, and the novel thus establishes a connection between idealism and realism in the literary domain. It brings out the social nature of language and it thus pictures a mechanic and materialistic society (such as the liberal one with its language of utilitarianism) as a society stripped bare: in Teufelsdröckh’s assessment “we are at

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this hour in a most critical condition; beleaguered by that boundless ‘Armament of Mechanisers’ and Unbelievers, threatening to strip us bare!” (178). The imagery of an “‘Armament of Mechanisers’ [. . .] threatening to strip us bare” brings to the fore the impression that “Carlyle could hardly have chosen a more appropriate figure than clothing to represent an era of revolution” since “clothing was also the chief product of the industrial revolution” (Vanden Bossche 1991, 42). With the imagery of a society stripped bare, Sartor Resartus also draws attention to its aesthetic quality as a work of verbal art. This self-reflectivity is matched by the experimental form of the novel with respect to plot, characters, and the peculiar narrative voice of the editor: “An opaque, allusive, and politically ambiguous text, Sartor Resartus belongs to the same tradition of self-reflexive literature as Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy” (Dunne 2016, 42). Carlyle presses readers to pass a verdict on whether the novel is a suitable genre for exploring a system of philosophy. He pushes his readers to judge whether the novel is a fitting literary form for addressing the gap between realism and idealism. Hence Sartor Resartus is also a text that renders this experiment in form as an extension of political economy: What concessions is the editor willing to make to adhere to the expectations of his readers qua consumers? Seen through the lens of Carlyle’s experimental novel, Victorian novels in the mode of social realism are thus exposed as commodities as products for easy consumption. On the basis of his concern that society might have taken a wrong turn in embracing utilitarianism and political economy, Carlyle engages in formal experimentation that gives Sartor Resartus its particular style. For J. Hillis Miller, Carlyle’s treatment of ornament brings his creative criticism of the novel form to the fore. “In the case of Sartor Resartus,” he argues, “the ornament takes two forms” (1989, 2). One form is the “openly elaborated style,” the ‘Carlylese’, as Miller calls it, marked by “hyperbolic elaboration” often verging on the incomprehensible (2). “The other mode of ornament in Sartor Resartus is the more comprehensive, large scale, all-encompassing form of the complex narrative machinery” that, according to Miller, foregrounds “the act of achieving knowledge by a process of reminiscent retelling, retailoring the tailor, repatching the patcher” (3). In writing a patchwork novel with its peculiar fragmentary style and the clothes metaphor at its centre, Carlyle made a strong case for literary texts opening a space to reflect on the alienations created by prevailing principles of political economy. Sartor Resartus thus exemplifies the stance that “[i]f literature is to have public meaning [. . .] it must neither adopt the value-free discourse of economic efficiency nor continue to mimic the transcendental discourse of religious mysticism” (Vanden Bossche 1991, 173).

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4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives The reception of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is entangled with the reputation of the author himself. As Simon Heffer has pointed out, Carlyle’s reputation has been “a long and damaging fall from the pedestal he occupied at his death” (1995, 23). It is generally agreed that Sartor Resartus “inspired, haunted, and infuriated two generations of Englishmen. John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and William Morris all reacted to Carlyle’s baroque mixture of satire and invective” (Morrisey 1996, 51). While the book was a favourite for many of Carlyle’s contemporaries, it is now viewed as obscure, and its author is often deemed to have been a crypto-fascist (Park 1990, 1). The question William H. Pritchard raised in 1997 with his essay “What to Do with Carlyle?” is a pressing one even today. The “most intractable and cantankerous of Victorian sages,” Pritchard argues, has undoubtedly fallen from favour, but to “blame ‘the world’ for undervaluing Carlyle because that world seeks to avoid unpalatable truths, while not understanding the sage’s humor, seems an abstract and unuseful way of blaming anything but Carlyle himself” (1997, 246). On one level, Carlyle’s hero-worship, his elitism, his inexorable rejection of the political economy of his – and indeed also our – time make it difficult to engage with Carlyle’s oeuvre as a whole and Sartor Resartus in particular. For some, he was the “Prophet of Fascism,” so that it was “no wonder that the Nazis recognized in Carlyle a kindred spirit whose ideas had anticipated their own” (Schapiro 1945, 115). Marxist thinkers, who shared his critical stance towards an all-pervading mechanistic alienation, were repelled by his anti-egalitarian positions; they could not brush aside the “differences between Carlyleanism and Marxism” in that Carlyle fundamentally did not share their materialistic view (Mendilow 1984, 226). Carlyle “held an axiological theory in which social relations, and the interpretations given them, are conditioned by ethical values,” and as he “saw social history as essentially the record of alternating expansions and contractions of gaps reflecting cyclic processes of wearing down and rejuvenation of symbol-systems for inculcating values,” he is more in line with a strand of continental philosophy that was equally at odds with Marxism (226). On yet another level, Carlyle’s semiotics, in particular the clothes metaphor in Sartor Resartus, taps into a field of inquiry equally marginalised in the twentieth century: Kulturphilosophie. Exemplified by Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen (1923–1929), this historical and systematic field of inquiry viewed culture as praxis, stressed its unity, and subscribed to a moderate form of metaphysical thinking. Cassirer, like Carlyle, places myth at the centre of culture and at its heart “the dialectic of semiotic and linguistic knowledge, which leads to a new kind of phenomenology of perception” (Meyer 2013, 490). This is very much Carlyle’s concern, and as Cassirer was marginalised with the triumphant advance of analytic philosophy, so was Carlyle. Another reason for Carlyle’s mixed reception is the autobiographical nature of his oeuvre. Cassirer has argued that “read[ing] into Carlyle’s work [. . .] a definite philosophical construction of the historical process, taken as a whole, or a definite political

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program is precarious and illusive” because his “conception of history and politics always depends on his own personal history; it is much more biographical than systematic or methodical” (1946, 191). Carlyle’s conviction that art should always move close to history is thus also an impediment to claiming Sartor Resartus as a literary text that warrants literary criticism from a distinctly theoretical angle. Further, as Tom Toremans has argued, owing to the self-reflective thematisation of the novel as a work of art that has to be deciphered with the help of criticism, the text’s “critical condition [. . .] has led to Sartor’s migration into the margins of literary theory” (2010, 210). Readings of Sartor Resartus that are ‘purely’ psychological, post-colonial, ecocritical, or gender-based do not exist; introductions to the text carefully contextualise the ideas in a late-Romantic or Victorian context. In that vein, the novel has become a marker for literary history. As George Levine asserts, “Sartor Resartus [. . .], though always regarded as one of the primary texts for tracing the shift from Romanticism to Victorianism, is rarely now accorded the kind of attention it deserves” (1964, 132). Sartor Resartus may be a novel that has not received adequate critical attention. The scholarship that ties its aesthetic experimentalism – and its ‘irrational’ form – to Carlyle’s criticism of political economy, however, has a long trajectory and is thriving. Starting with Leonard Deen’s “Irrational Form in Sartor Resartus,” the novel’s resistance to a systematic reading, and the possibilities that arise from experiments in aesthetic distancing, have been acknowledged. While it might be true that Carlyle is often associated with a reactionary conservatism that looks too longingly backwards, Sartor Resartus, like no other novel from the period, allows us to envision – through the act of reading – alternative futures from the perspective of the past, alternatives that fall neither into the trap of mechanism nor succumb to the problematic nostalgia that would be the political and ethical bugbear for the following century.

Bibliography Works Cited Atwood, Sara. “‘Leading Human Souls to What Is Best’: Carlyle, Ruskin, and Hero-Worship.” Sorensen and Kinser 2013, 247–259. Bolingbroke, Henry Saint John. Letters on the Study and Use of History. London: Millar, 1752. Carlyle, Thomas. “The Hero as Man of Letters: Jonson, Rousseau, Burns.” Sorensen and Kinser 2013, 132–161. Carlyle, Thomas. History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great. London: Chapman & Hall, 1858–1865. Carlyle, Thomas. Latter-Day Pamphlets. London: Chapman & Hall, 1850. Carlyle, Thomas. “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 40 (1849): 670–679. Carlyle, Thomas. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1837. New York: AMS, 1976. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. 1833–1834. New York: AMS, 1974a.

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Carlyle, Thomas. “Shooting Niagara – And After?” Macmillan’s Magazine 16 (1867): 319–336. Carlyle, Thomas, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Charles Richard Sanders. Vol. 2. Durham: Duke UP, 1974b. Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale UP, 1946. Christie, Mary, and Frederick Harrison. Carlyle and the London Library. Account of its Foundation: Together With Unpublished Letters of Thomas Carlyle to W. D. Christie, C. B. London: Chapman & Hall, 1907. Crouch, Colin. Post-Democracy. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Cumming, Mark, ed. The Carlyle Encyclopedia. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004. Deen, Leonard. “Irrational Form in Sartor Resartus.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5.3 (1963): 438–451. Dunne, Fergus. “‘Custom [. . .] doth make dotards of us all’: Peripheral Perspectives on the Centre in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Francis Sylvester Mahony’s ‘Prout Papers.’” The Modern Language Review 111.1 (2016): 38–60. Eliot, George. “Thomas Carlyle.” Essays of George Eliot. Ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. 212–215. Fielding, K. J. “Thackeray and ‘The Great Master of Craigenputtoch’: A New Review of ‘The Life of John Sterling’ – and a New Understanding.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 307–314. Haney, Janice L. “‘Shadow-Hunting’: Romantic Irony, Sartor Resartus, and Victorian Romanticism.” Studies in Romanticism 17.3 (1978): 307–333. Harris, Wendell V. “Interpretive Historicism: ‘Signs of the Times’ and Culture and Anarchy in Their Contexts.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 44.4 (1990): 441–464. Heffer, Simon. Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. London: Vintage, 1996. Holloway, John. The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument. London: Macmillan, 1953. Hughes, A. M. D., ed. Carlyle’s Frederick the Great. Oxford: Clarendon, 1916. Kaplan, Fred. “Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online edn. Oct 2008. Web. 28 July 2017. Levine, George. “‘Sartor Resartus’ and the Balance of Fiction.” Victorian Studies 8.2 (1964): 131–160. Lukács, Georg. Soul and Form. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin, 1974. McSweeney, Kerry, and Peter Sabor. Introduction. Sartor Resartus. By Thomas Carlyle. Ed. McSweeney and Sabor. Oxford: OUP, 1987. vii–xxxiii. Mendilow, Jonathan. “Carlyle, Marx & the ILP: Alternative Routes to Socialism.” Polity 17.2 (1984): 225–247. Meyer, Thomas. “Ernst Cassirer’s Writings.” Journal of the History of Ideas 74.3 (2013): 473–495. Miller, J. Hillis. “‘Hieroglyphical Truth’ in Sartor Resartus: Carlyle and the Language of Parable.” Victorian Perspectives. Ed. John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. 1–20. Morrisey, Will. Culture in the Commercial Republic. Lanham: UP of America, 1996. Morrow, John. “‘Young Ireland’ and the ‘Condition of Ireland Question.’” The Historical Journal 51.3 (2008): 643–667. Park, T. Peter. “Thomas Carlyle and the Jews.” Journal of European Studies 20 (1990): 1–21. Peart, Sandra J., and David M. Levy. “Post-Ricardian British Economics, 1830–1870.” A Companion to the History of Economic Thought. Ed. Warren J. Samuels, Jeff E. Biddle and John B. Davis. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 130–147. Plotz, John. “Crowd Power: Chartism, Carlyle, and the Victorian Public Sphere.” Representations 70 (2000): 87–114.

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Pritchard, William H. “What to Do with Carlyle?” The Hudson Review 50.2 (1997): 245–254. Ryan, Vanessa L. “The Unreliable Editor: Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and the Art of Biography.” The Review of English Studies 54.215 (2003): 287–307. Schapiro, J. Salwyn. “Thomas Carlyle, Prophet of Fascism.” The Journal of Modern History 17.2 (1945): 97–115. Sloane, Thomas O. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Oxford: OUP, 2001. Sorensen, David R., and Brent E. Kinser, eds. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Sprang, Felix. “‘The dark bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open.’ The Rescission of the Male Melancholic Genius in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.” The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern. Ed. Martin Middeke and Christina Wald. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 87–100. Symons, Julian. Thomas Carlyle: The Life and Ideas of a Prophet. London: House of Stratus, 2001. Toremans, Tom. “Perpetual Remnant: Sartor Resartus and ‘the Necessary Kind of Reading.’” Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlyle’s Contribution to the Philosophy of History, Political Theory, and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Paul E. Kerry and Marylu Hill. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010. 204–225. Vanden Bossche, Chris R. Carlyle and the Search for Authority. Columbia: Ohio UP, 1991. Vanden Bossche, Chris R. Introduction. Thomas Carlyle: Historical Essays. Ed. Vanden Bossche. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. xix–lxviii. Vida, Elizabeth Maximiliana. Romantic Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle. A Study in the History of Ideas. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993.

Further Reading Emig, Rainer. “Eccentricity Begins at Home: Carlyle’s Centrality in Victorian Thought.” Textual Practice 17.2 (2003): 379–390. Hogan, Trevor. “Pre-Victorian Post-Romanticism: The Peculiar Case of Thomas Carlyle.” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 3.2 (1998): 70–85. LaValley, Albert J. Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1968. Rundle, Margaret. Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Tennyson, G. B. Introduction. A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. Tennyson. Acton: Copley, 1999. xi–xxxiv.

Nils Clausson

9 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) Abstract: This chapter situates Disraeli’s novels within the literary context of the nineteenth-century English novel. The primary focus is on the Young England trilogy (Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred) on which his reputation rests, and particularly on the relationship of Disraeli’s fiction to such nineteenth-century literary forms as the Irish tale, the silver fork novel, and the Condition-of-England novel (also known as the social problem or industrial novel). The discussion of Coningsby and especially Sybil calls attention to their form as ‘contemporary’ historical novels modeled on Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances. Disraeli’s main achievement, it is argued, was to write about contemporary English society from the first Reform Bill to Chartism in a way influenced by the narrative form Scott devised to portray earlier English and Scottish history. The chapter also discusses both the reception of Disraeli’s fiction from contemporary reviews to recent criticism and the theoretical issues raised by fiction that intervenes in politics and addresses social issues. Keywords: Young England, Condition-of-England novel, silver fork novel, political novel, historical romance

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) enjoyed one of the longest literary careers of the Victorian Age. His first novel, Vivian Grey (1826), was published two years after the death of Byron and more than a decade before Queen Victoria ascended the throne. His last appeared in 1880, and he was writing another when he died. He is also unique among Victorian novelists in being much better known as a politician than as a novelist. This dual career has made it difficult to separate the novelist from the politician. Few critics have concurred with Leslie Stephen, who lamented, “I wish that Mr Disraeli could have stuck to his novels instead of rising to be Prime Minister of England” (1881, 345). Biographers have not so much written biographies of a novelist as of a politician who was twice prime minister, and thus the boundary between the novelist and the politician has virtually disappeared. The novelist has been viewed through the prism of the politician. “His novels are part of his politics,” explains his premiere biographer Robert Blake, “and his politics at times seem to be an emanation of his novels” (1967, 220). Disraeli was the son of the bibliophile Isaac D’Israeli, author of the popular Curiosities of Literature, friend of the publisher John Murray, and acquaintance of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-010

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many of the literary celebrities of the early nineteenth century, including Byron. Educated primarily in his father’s huge library (estimated at 25,000 volumes), Disraeli attended neither an English public school nor a university. The future prime minister burst upon London’s literary scene at the age of twenty-one with the anonymous publication of Vivian Grey in 1826. The next decade was spent writing five more novels and attempting to launch a career in politics. After four unsuccessful attempts, he finally secured a seat in Parliament in 1837. He wrote no more novels for the next seven years, and then wrote the trilogy – Coningsby, or the New Generation (1844), Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), and Tancred, or the New Crusade (1847) – on which his reputation today largely rests. Coningsby is widely considered to be the first political novel, and Sybil is one of the most important examples of a sub-genre of the Victorian novel variously known as the industrial, social problem, or Condition-ofEngland novel. He went on to write two more novels: Lothair (1871) and Endymion (1880), each of which was written after he served twice as prime minister. The fiction that Disraeli wrote between 1826 and 1837 is pre-Victorian, arising from the context of late Romanticism. His Oriental tale Alroy (1833) was partly inspired by the Romantic interest in the Middle East, popularised by Byron’s Eastern tales. Venetia, or The Poet’s Daughter (1837) is a fictionalised account of the lives of Shelley and Byron, set, improbably, during the American War of Independence. Blake’s criticism that the novel takes “liberties with history” (1967, 146) is certainly true but probably beside the point, since it in no way aims at historical accuracy. All of the early novels, as well as the later ones, have been mined for clues to Disraeli’s personality and character and hence have regularly been read as a thinly disguised autobiography rather than as fiction. In his General Introduction to The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli, Daniel Schwarz declares: “Reading Disraeli’s novels we read the biography of his soul [. . .]. In the novels Disraeli presented various aspects of his complicated personality as he imagined it at a particular time and place; the novels stand as metaphorical vehicles for which his mind and psyche are the tenors” (2004, ix). The most recent (and best) biographical study of the novels is Robert O’Kell’s Disraeli: The Romance of Politics. Disraeli’s novels, he argues, are “an embodiment of his fantasies about himself” and writing them “provided an opportunity for compensatory selfjustification by enabling Disraeli to reconstruct imaginatively [his] immediate past and project it upon the future” (2013, 7, 16). Vivian Grey is the most significant and certainly the most discussed of the early novels. Much of the commentary on it has been written by biographers looking for clues to Disraeli’s life and personality. Blake, for example, is quite explicit about the value of Vivian Grey as an autobiographical document, justifying his decision to discuss the novel “at some length not only because of its effect on Disraeli’s career but because of what it reveals about his character” (1967, 49). Biographers from Monypenny down to the present have read it as a thinly veiled retelling of Disraeli’s role in the efforts of John Murray to finance a new daily newspaper to rival The Times. This ill-fated enterprise is transformed by the young Disraeli, who acted as

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Murray’s agent, into a fictional political scheme to create a new parliamentary party led by the Marquess of Carabas, whom insiders took to be an unflattering portrait of Murray. The precocious and brilliant Vivian convinces Carabas to lead the party in the House of Lords and to bring back a disaffected former political ally, Frederick Cleveland, to do the same in the House of Commons. Vivian’s elaborate scheme falls apart when Carabas’ daughter-in-law, Mrs. Felix Lorraine, betrays Vivian, who then duels with and kills Cleveland and escapes into exile on the continent. The focus on the novel’s biographical revelations has blinded critics to its literary connections. Vivian is an early example of a new kind of hero who emerges in the early nineteenth century, one that Lionel Trilling has called the “Young Man from the Provinces”: It is the fate of the Young Man to move from an obscure position into one of considerable eminence in Paris or London or St. Petersburg, to touch the life of the rulers of the earth. His situation is as chancy as that of any questing knight of medieval romance. He is confronted by situations whose meanings are dark to him, in which his choice seems always decisive. He understands everything to be a “test” [. . .]. That the Young Man be introduced into great houses and involved with large affairs is essential to his story. [. . .] Unlike the merely sensitive hero, he is concerned to know how the political and social world are run and enjoyed; he wants a share of power and pleasure, and in consequence he takes real risks, often of his life. (1950, 62–63)

The striking similarities between Vivian Grey and Trilling’s “Young Man” strongly suggest that Vivian’s story is more than a thinly fictionalised version of Disraeli’s. Like Stendhal’s Julian Sorel, he is introduced to an important house, Château Desir, in which he rises to a position of considerable power. Above all, Vivian, like Trilling’s Young Man, wants a share of worldly power and as a result he takes risks, even of his life (Mrs. Felix Lorraine tries to poison him and he fights a duel). Disraeli returned to writing fiction in 1844 with Coningsby, or the New Generation, the first novel in what came to be known as the ‘Young England trilogy’, although there is no evidence that when he began it he planned to write a trilogy. It was succeeded a year later by his best-known novel, Sybil, or the Two Nations, which was followed two years later by Tancred, or the New Crusade. Although less autobiographical than his earlier works, these novels have nevertheless been read by biographers and historians as articulations of the political principles and programmes of Young England. It was a small group of conservative MPs who were unhappy with what they perceived as the liberal-leaning tendencies of the Conservative party and, under the leadership of Disraeli, coalesced into a political faction that often attacked the Conservative leader and Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. Before Disraeli became its dominant figure, the group was centred on George Smythe, the eldest son of Lord Strangford, who had supported Disraeli’s political aspirations in the 1830s, and Lord John Manners, second son of the 5th Duke of Rutland. Also prominent in Young England was a Cambridge friend of Smythe and Manners, Alexander Baillie-Cochrane.

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All three men soon came under the influence of the more experienced Disraeli, who saw in Young England a vehicle for his political ambition and especially for his opposition to Peel. Young England was part of the reaction against what the historian Asa Briggs (1959) has named “The Age of Improvement.” Three troubling features of the age as they appeared to contemporaries who questioned whether Victorian society was improving were: the emergence of the factory system run by steam power, what we now call the Industrial Revolution; the extension of the electorate in 1832 to include the new middle classes but not the new working classes, what we now call the beginnings of democracy; and the dominance in the world of ideas of the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), founded on the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. These three features were all interrelated. The development of the factory system had created not only new classes but a new conception of class, including class conflict. The emergence of new forms of economic power encouraged demands for shifts in political power. The Benthamite philosophy of utility seemed to sustain both economics and politics: everything had to be judged by the same yardstick. “What is the spirit of the age?” the young hero of Coningsby asks a young Whig peer (Disraeli 1983, 159). “The spirit of utility,” replies Lord Everingham (160). The anti-utilitarian reaction was strong in the 1840s and the idealistic young Coningsby affirms, in opposition to the widely held view expressed by Everingham, that “the Utilitarian system is dead. It has passed through the heaven of philosophy like a hailstorm; cold, noisy, sharp and peppering; and it has melted away” (378). Disraeli, Blake remarks, “belongs to the same strand in nineteenth-century English thought as Coleridge and Carlyle, the romantic, conservative, organic thinkers who revolted against Benthamism and the legacy of eighteenth-century rationalism” (1967, 210). In the closing pages of Sybil, Disraeli states, “A year ago [i.e., in 1844], I presumed to offer to the public some volumes [Coningsby] that aimed at calling their attention to the state of our political parties; their origin; their history, their present position” (420), thereby seeming to underwrite the subsequent designation of Coningsby as the first example of a new kind of novel. “In Coningsby,” says Blake, “[Disraeli] produced the first and most brilliant of English political novels, a genre which he may be said to have invented” (1967, 190). It is usually read as an exposition of the political ideas of Young England, its characters taken to represent the members of the group. But designating Coningsby as a political novel defines this new subgenre exclusively on the basis of its content and thereby ignores the question of its form and overlooks the literary models Disraeli drew upon to write about contemporary English politics. The origins of the political novel are not to be found entirely in the singular mind of Disraeli. Contemporary readers did not in fact see Coningsby as the first example of an entirely new sub-species of fiction (a view that can only be taken retrospectively). For example, the antiquarian John Britton, who was a friend of Disraeli’s father,

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wrote a letter to Disraeli in response to Coningsby in which he remarked: “I will not call it a novel [. . .] but must rank it in another, higher grade of literature: as philosophical, historical, political, epic romance” (qtd. in Jerman 1954, 63). Britton did not see Coningsby as an entirely new species of fiction; rather he responded to it in the context of genres, both literary and non-literary, that he was already familiar with. In his review of Coningsby for the Morning Chronicle, an admiring and astute Thackeray (↗ 13 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair) recognised the kind of novel Disraeli had written: “It is the fashionable novel, pushed, we do really believe, to the extremist verge, beyond which all is naught. It is a glorification of dandyism, far beyond all other glories which dandyism has attained” (qtd. in Stewart 1975, 184). Thackeray, while obviously recognising its unprecedented engagement with post-Reform English politics, could not read it as a political novel, in the later sense of that term, because the political novel, as a recognisable class of fiction, did not yet exist. Thackeray did what any well-read, intelligent reader of fiction in 1844 would have done: he read Coningsby in terms of its ‘pushing’ to the greatest extent possible an existing novelistic form, one that contemporary readers had for some two decades been familiar with: the fashionable novel, or, as it was also known, the silver fork novel – a form with which the young Disraeli had launched his career as a novelist. Thackeray even reminds his readers of one of Disraeli’s contributions to that immensely popular genre: “Those who recollect the prodigious novel of ‘The Young Duke,’ will remember, when Mr. Disraeli had a mind to be fashionable, to what a pitch of fashion he could raise himself: he outduked all the dukes in the land” (qtd. in Stewart 1975, 184). Thackeray goes on to notice the multiplicity of discourses jostling within Disraeli’s novel, while appreciating that they are formally controlled by the dominant form of the fashionabledandy novel: “‘Coningsby’ [. . .] is a dandy-social, dandy-political, dandy-religious novel” (qtd. in Stewart 1975, 184–185). For all its originality, there is a literary precedent for Coningsby. Disraeli was certainly not the first to appropriate and adapt the fashionable novel for political purposes. The year after Disraeli published his first novel, Vivian Grey, the Irish political novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) published her second-to-last novel and her last national tale, The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale. Julia Wright describes it as an often fast-paced tale of political intrigue and aristocratic vanity – a romp through 1793 Dublin, as Ireland, divided into a disempowered Catholic majority and a politically powerful Protestant Ascendancy, and spurred by fresh waves of government repression and the examples of the French and American Revolutions, pitches towards the United Irishmen Uprising of 1798. If follows Murrogh O’Brien as he tries to find his way between his nostalgic-forprecolonial Ireland father, the politically savvy and uncloistered Irish-Italian Beavoin O’Flaherty, the dashing Ascendancy flirt, Lady Knocklofty, the idealistic United Irishmen, and his comically old-fashioned aunts, only to be caught up in a sweep of arrests (and revelations) in the novel’s dramatic fourth volume. (2013, 9)

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As Wright points out, although The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys is now read as a national tale, “it was read in its time, at least in part, as a so-called ‘silver fork’ novel, a genre primarily known for giving readers a peek into the glittering lives of the upper classes” (2013, 21). This popular novelistic form, of which Disraeli had been a clever practitioner, could be modified by a political insider to give readers a peek behind the doors of the drawing rooms and clubs frequented by that segment of the upper classes whose lives are taken up with politics. Coningsby, like The O’Briens, contains a good deal of satire. Disraeli clearly adapted the satirical potential of the silver fork novel to create the political satire on both Whigs and Tories in Coningsby. To this form, Disraeli added discursive analyses of the history and origin of the political parties that had governed England since the Glorious Revolution, as well as partisan commentaries on contemporary politics of the sort readers might encounter in newspapers and quarterly and monthly magazines. Coningsby is thus a generic hybrid. The silver fork novel was also closely associated in the minds of contemporary readers with the roman-à-clef (novel with a key), in which fictional characters are taken to be thinly veiled portraits of real people. Contemporary reviewers of Owenson’s novels had regularly tried to identify the originals of her fictional characters, leading her to remark in her Preface to The O’Briens, “the only ‘key’ [. . .] that I acknowledge, is that which is to be found in the great repository of human nature” (2013, 42). Numerous keys to Coningsby circulated immediately after its publication, identifying the major young characters in the novel with the historical members of Young England. The original of Coningsby’s grandfather, Lord Monmouth, was taken to be the fabulously wealthy Marquess of Hertford. The leading publisher of silver fork novels was Henry Colburn, who was Owenson’s publisher from 1814 to 1829 and who also published many of Disraeli’s novels, including Vivian Grey, The Young Duke, Henrietta Temple, Venetia, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred. Similarly, in the first third of Tancred (1847), Disraeli contrasts the eponymous hero’s quest for spiritual and moral certitude with the superficial lives of the characters who adorn the drawing rooms and salons of Mayfair and Westminster. Thus, the early part of the novel, set in London, combines the well-established conventions of the silver fork novel with the novel portraying a crisis of faith, of which the most famous example, published a year after Tancred, is John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), the second novel in Disraeli’s Young England trilogy, is his best-known and most influential novel and the one that has received most critical attention. It is usually classified as, variously, a social problem novel, or a

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Condition-of-England novel, or an industrial novel. As this classification implies, the novel has been read almost exclusively in terms of its content, of what it reveals about England in the throes of industrialisation, and the political conflicts attendant upon the rise of the new class of industrialists and manufacturers, on the one hand, and the new class of industrial workers on the other. Thus, critics have approached Sybil less as a novel and more as a manifesto of Disraeli’s political programme and as an intervention in the Condition-of-England debate of the 1840s. This has been the orthodox approach since the 1950s, when two influential critics, Raymond Williams (1958) and Arnold Kettle (1958), discussed it in the context of several other similar novels, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848, ↗ 14 Gaskell, Mary Barton) and North and South (1850), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850). Williams and Kettle essentially created the lens through which subsequent critics have viewed Sybil. This approach has, to be sure, produced illuminating readings of it, but it has also had the unfortunate consequence of interpreting and judging it not as a novel but as a programme of political action or, even more problematically, as the term ‘social problem’ novel suggests, as a solution to the problems that constituted the Condition-ofEngland question. Once Sybil is labelled a ‘social problem’ novel, it is almost inevitable that critics would ask what his solution to the problem is and then judge the solution largely on the basis of its practicability.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Rarely have critics asked the obvious question: What kind of narrative is Sybil and where did this new form of fiction come from? The standard classifications – social problem novel, industrial novel, Condition-of-England novel – are not formal ones at all and certainly were not familiar to Disraeli’s contemporaries; they were constructed more than a century later. How we read a novel (or any work) depends on the inter-textual grid against which we place it in order to understand it: reading is always reading as. The mid-Victorians were, of course, familiar with the ‘novel with a purpose’, as it was widely called, but this was a much broader classification and included religious works like Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848) and such egregiously silly examples of the type as Felicia Skene’s The Inheritance of Evil, or The Consequences of Marrying a Deceased Wife’s Sister (1849). Blake praises Sybil for giving a highly realistic picture of life in the grim northern manufacturing towns which formed the breeding-ground of Chartism, a picture based partly on his own observations; partly on the correspondence of Feargus O’Connor obtained for him by his friend Thomas Duncombe, a Radical MP; and very largely upon Part II of the Appendix to the Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission of 1842. (1967, 212)

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Close attention to the form of Sybil, however, reveals that it is modelled on two familiar and well-established early nineteenth-century sub-genres of fictional narrative: the historical romance, popularised by Sir Walter Scott, and the national tale, of which Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806) is the widelyacknowledged prototype. Disraeli’s contribution to the history of the Victorian novel was to transform these familiar and well-established types of fiction into what became the Condition-of-England novel. A novelist who is planning to write about a new subject matter still has to find a form, a set of literary conventions, in which to embody it. It is rare for a novelist to invent an entirely new narrative form. New forms are not born ex nihilo. More likely, a novelist will borrow, or appropriate, or transform an existing set of narrative conventions and adapt them to the new subject matter. In Sybil, Disraeli adapts the plot structure and character types of Scott’s historical romances, most notably Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816) and The Antiquary (1816), to write about the social and political conflicts happening not in the past but in the present or the very recent past. It is generally acknowledged that what Scott contributed to the history of the novel was history itself; that is, he represented society not as static and unchanging, as earlier writers took for granted, but as in the process of undergoing historical change, change shaped not by great men but more importantly by trans-personal historical forces. Criticism of Scott since Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel (1937) takes for granted that Scott did more than add a new subject matter to the novel, the representation of a defined historical setting. His innovation was to make the novel itself historical in the way it imagined societies undergoing historical transformation. Disraeli’s modification to the form of the early Victorian novel, first in Coningsby and then in Sybil, was to apply Scott’s innovative form to writing about recent and contemporary English society in the wake of industrialisation, representing it as undergoing a process of continuous change, similar to the historical societies depicted by Scott. Disraeli discovered that he could write about contemporary society as if he were writing a historical narrative, adapting the form of Scott’s historical romances but setting the action in the contemporary England of Chartist protests and rick burning. Published in May 1845, Sybil covers the tumultuous period of Chartism from 1837 to 1842: the first three books are set in 1837, the last three focus on the Chartist movement from 1839 to 1842, ending with the movement’s descent into factionalism and eventually violence during the summer of the Plug Shot riots. As John Vincent points out, “[e]ven in its first year of publication, Sybil was a historical novel” because it reflected the condition of England not in 1845 (the year of its publication), but several years earlier: “Sybil [. . .] reflected the severe slump of 1842, not the prosperity and great railway boom of three years later. Moreover, as prosperity returned, corn [i.e., grain] prices fell; they were significantly lower in 1843–45 than they had been in 1837–42” (1990, 96). In The Forms of Historical Fiction, Harry T. Shaw calls attention to the overlooked formal similarity between the historical and the

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Condition-of-England novel, though he does not discuss Disraeli: “Though it seems fair to say that the industrial novel is a narrower category, it is the same sort of category as the historical novel” (1983, 20). Avrom Fleishman calls Edward BulwerLytton’s historical novels The Last of the Barons (1843) and Harold, Last of the Saxons (1848) tracts for the times – the times being the hungry forties, when the condition-of-England question was being raised [. . .] in a historical context. In these novels, Bulwer-Lytton expresses a political creed, combining Tory nostalgia for the lost nobility of pre-Reform England [. . .] with Whig satisfaction in the hardy virtues of the progressive English people. (1971, 34)

Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels, along with many other contemporary historical novels and Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), were read as interventions via history into current social and political debates. Thus, the literary boundary between historical and ‘Condition-of-England novels’ is not one that can be firmly drawn. However, it is not just in Sybil’s relationship to Scott’s historical romances and their descendants that Disraeli foregrounds its engagement with history. The novel includes what at first might appear to be a digression presenting Disraeli’s revisionist Tory (and hence anti-Whig) interpretation of English history. Critics tend either to ignore or to dismiss this aspect of the novel as evidence of its formal incoherence. But English history, or at least Disraeli’s idiosyncratic version of it, is central to the novel’s engagement with the contemporary condition of England. In the last chapter of Sybil, Disraeli explicitly states what his aim has been in the novel, an aim that is framed in terms of what he believes to be the historical origins of England’s contemporary political discontents: “I would have impressed upon the rising race not to despair, but to seek in a right understanding of the history of their country [. . .] the elements of national welfare. The present work advances another step in the same emprise” (Disraeli 1981, 420–421; emphasis added). The reference to the “national welfare,” a variant of the Condition-ofEngland question, suggests that Sybil may be profitably read as an English ‘national tale’ formally modelled on the Irish national tale popularised a generation earlier by such Irish writers as Owenson and Edgeworth. At first glance, the midVictorian Condition-of-England novel and the earlier national tale may seem to have little in common. But attention to their structure and to the historical, political, and ideological project that this structure is designed to carry out suggests that Disraeli found in the form of Owenson’s national tale a model that he could transform to write his own English ‘national tale’ about the two nations within England. The Wild Irish Girl is one of the first nineteenth-century novels to address the Irish Question in fictional form, and Owenson’s ‘national tale’ might appropriately be called a seminal ‘Condition-of-Ireland novel’ and hence offering a formal model for the Condition-of-England novel.

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The many structural similarities – too many to be coincidental – between Sybil and The Wild Irish Girl strongly suggest that Disraeli was likely familiar with Owenson’s novel and, furthermore, that the way she presents the cultural and political opposition between an imperialist England and a colonised Ireland – the ‘two nations’ of her national tale – influenced the way in which he formally structures the opposition between the two nations, the rich and the poor, of his (English) ‘national tale’. The plot of the typical Irish ‘national tale’ is centred on an absentee Anglo-Irish landowner, who travels to Ireland where he meets the heroine who embodies the Irish national character, falls in love with her, and marries her. Although the journey motif is much more geographically limited in Sybil, the novel’s hero, the younger brother of the Earl of Marney, disguises himself as a journalist named Franklin and travels into the nation of the poor, where he meets Sybil and Walter Gerard, the equivalent of Owenson’s heroine (the Princess Glorvina) and her father. The first meeting of Owenson’s hero, Horatio Mortimer, and heroine, Glorvina, is remarkably similar to that of Egremont and Sybil. The equivalent of the ruins of Marney Abbey, where Egremont first hears Sybil singing the evening hymn to the Virgin, is the Castle of Inismore, the home of Glorvina and her father. The castle (in the Vale of Inismore in Connaught) is “wildly romantic beyond description” (Owenson, 1999, 44). Horatio views it with Glorvina as “the last strain of the vesper hymn died” and “the sun’s last beam faded on the casement of the chapel,” with the light of the setting sun fading on “the ocean’s swelling bosom” and the evening star (as in Sybil) just rising “on the deep cerulean blue” and shedding its “fairy beam on the mossy summit of a mouldering turret [of the castle]” (Owenson 1999, 50–51), which Horatio had earlier described as “the noblest mass of ruins on which my eye ever rested” and as “grand even in desolation, and magnificent in decay” (35). Both novels conclude with an allegorical marriage between the ‘two nations’ – rich and poor, Ireland and England – portrayed in them. Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee also ends with an allegorical marriage representing the unification of Old Ireland and Anglo-Ireland.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives From Anthony Trollope’s contemptuous dismissal of his novels as “paste diamonds” (1980, 259–260) to F. R. Leavis’ call for “permanent currency” (1948, 1–2) – few novelists have elicited such diametrically opposed responses as Disraeli, and the same contradictory evaluations appear among historians and biographers, who are just as divided over whether Disraeli is the quintessential political opportunist who climbed, as he himself quipped, to the top of the greasy pole, or the principled founder of the modern Conservative party. Critical response to Disraeli the novelist has, to a large extent, been inseparable from the response to Disraeli the man and the politician.

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Despite the attention many of his novels received when they first appeared, to his fellow writers and to many reviewers and readers, they were an offence. As soon as Disraeli began pursuing a political career, contemporary readers found it impossible to separate the novelist from the politician and hence to view his novels almost exclusively as the expressions of the views of a political leader. Trollope is typical of those contemporary readers who came to the novels eager to find in them all the faults they had already found in their creator. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Tait, recorded that Endymion left him “with a painful feeling that the writer considers all political life as mere play and gambling” (qtd. in Blake 1967, 735). The novels were regularly cited as evidence of Disraeli’s political insincerity and lack of principle. Perhaps the most famous contemporary attack on Disraeli’s fiction was Trollope’s scathing denunciation in his Autobiography, where he wrote: [His] glory has ever been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks. An audacious conjurer has generally been his hero, – some youth who, by wonderful cleverness, can obtain success by every intrigue that comes to his hand. Through it all there is a feeling of stage properties, a smell of hair-oil, an aspect of buhl, a remembrance of tailors, and that pricking of the conscience which must be the general accompaniment of paste diamonds. (1980, 259–260)

This attack, which Marius Bewley rightly calls “the perversion of criticism written with malice aforethought” (1972, 8), is representative of those contemporaries who viewed him as a charlatan and a political opportunist and then read this visceral response to the man into his works and their heroes, who are viewed as revelations of their creator. Yet the protagonists of Coningsby and Sybil certainly do not obtain their success by intrigue – just the opposite is true. The only hero in Disraeli’s fiction who does resort to intrigue, Vivian Grey, fails spectacularly, leading to his exile and to this judgment of him by the narrator in the final sentence: “I fear me much, that Vivian Grey is a lost man; but, I am sure that every sweet and gentle spirit who has read this sad story of his fortunes, will breathe a holy prayer this night, for his restoration to society, and to himself (Disraeli 1827, 380). The only major contemporary novelist who admired Disraeli was Thackeray. Though finding faults in Coningsby, he nevertheless praised it highly in a review in the Morning Chronicle (Stewart 1975, 182–186). Modern praise of Disraeli is rare and most recent criticism has not been particularly interested in the literary aspects or the artistic value of his fiction. There are, however, notable exceptions. In The Great Tradition (1948), F. R. Leavis called for a revival of Disraeli’s novels: The novelist who has not been revived is Disraeli. Yet, though he is not one of the great novelists, he is so alive and intelligent as to deserve permanent currency, at any rate in the trilogy Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred: his interests as expressed in these books – the interests of an

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extremely intelligent politician who has a sociologist’s understanding of civilization and its movement in his time – are so mature. (1948, 1–2)

Placing Disraeli in the company of Carlyle, Eliot, Newman, Arnold, and Hardy, John Holloway also had high praise for him five years later. He called Disraeli “one of the liveliest and most versatile novelists of his period” and acknowledged the generic and thematic variety of his works (1953, 86). Two decades later Marius Bewley claimed that “a scrupulous reading of his novels, especially from Coningsby on, will show that Disraeli became one of the most vigorous and morally alive novelists that the late Romantics and the middle Victorians can boast of” (1972, 7). The two decades after the Second World War saw a brief rise in interest in Disraeli, signalled by Raymond Williams’ discussion of the genre of the industrial novel in Culture and Society (1958) and by Arnold Kettle’s discussion of the same novels, which he called social problem novels, in The Penguin Guide of English Literature (1958). But in the heyday of the New Criticism, novels with a political and social purpose were unlikely to make it into the canon. Although Disraeli’s critics have rarely interrogated their own theoretical premises and assumptions, criticism of Disraeli’s fiction raises two fundamental theoretical issues: the relation of a novel to the life of the novelist, and the relation of the novel to the external world it is taken to, in some way, reflect or represent. Disraeli was a puzzling and controversial figure to his contemporaries, and he has remained just as enigmatic to biographers and historians down to the present. Not surprisingly, as Marius Bewley, comments, “[s]ome of the best observations [of the novels] have been made by biographers and historians who have been primarily interested in his political life” (1972, 5). But since Disraeli’s biographers have not been literary critics – and certainly not literary theorists – the question of the validity of reading his novels as if they were diaries, or journals, or (in the cases of Coningsby and Sybil) socio-political documents is never raised. Although Blake does make some perceptive literary observations about the novels, most biographers have been content to treat the novels as sources of clues about Disraeli the man: “It is impossible to dissociate our minds from what we know about his life” (1967, 191). Biographers are not troubled by Barthes’ death of the author. Just how useful are novels as sources of biographical information about their authors? The question is complicated by the fact that Disraeli himself has tantalisingly invited this approach to his fiction. In a diary he kept in the 1830s Disraeli wrote: “In Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition. In Alroy my ideal ambition. The P. R. [Psychological romance, the subtitle of Contarini Fleming] is a development of my poetic character. This trilogy is the secret history of my feelings – I shall write no more about myself” (qtd. in Blake 1967, 38). This revelation has proved irresistible to biographers eager to solve the riddle of the Sphinx-like Disraeli. Alroy, Coningsby, and Tancred have been scrutinised for clues to his ‘real’ views about Judaism, the Jews, and the role of race in forming the character of individuals and the history of

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nations. Similarly, Coningsby and Sybil have often been read as documents or manifestos straightforwardly revealing Disraeli’s political views and the programme of Young England. “The hidden agenda of Coningsby,” asserts Jane Ridley, “is Disraeli’s immediate political ambition and manoeuvring” (1995, 279). But when a novel is read for its “hidden agenda,” its aesthetic value and its relations to other novels are likely to be ignored. Another major theoretical issue raised by Disraeli’s novels is succinctly defined by Northrop Frye: “When we start to read Zola or Dreiser, our first impulse is to ask, not what kind of a story is being told, but what is being said about the society that the work is ‘reflecting’” (1976, 45). Both Coningsby and Sybil have been read for what they tell us about the society they are supposedly reflecting. Essays on Sybil often have titles like “The Treatment of Rural Distress in Disraeli’s Sybil” (Fido, 1975). This approach was initiated in 1903 by Louis Cazamian in his Le Roman social en Angleterre, but this pioneering work was not translated into English until 1973. Cazamian’s approach was given new life in the mid-1950s by Arnold Kettle (1958) and Raymond Williams (1958), who both discussed Sybil in the context of a group of novels they called, respectively, social problem and industrial novels. This line of scholarship culminated in Sheila Smith’s The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s (1980), and Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867 (1985). The obvious theoretical questions that Smith’s study of the representations in fiction of Disraeli’s ‘other nation’ are: How useful are novels as documentary sources of historical information about the lives of the poor, and what happens to a novel when it is read as a historical document alongside parliamentary reports? A particular question that this critical approach to Sybil tries to answer is whether or not they were instrumental in making middle-class readers aware of the economic and social problems faced by the poor and, perhaps even more crucially, whether Disraeli’s proposed solution is the right (i.e., historically verifiable) solution to the problem of the two nations. But the answers to these questions require that readers judge them primarily by what are essentially non-literary criteria. The Other Nation leaves one with the impression that reading Sybil (or any other social problem novel) is probably not the best way to collect data about the representation of the mid-Victorian poor. If that is one’s goal, then it could be argued that the researcher would be better off concentrating on contemporary reports produced by parliamentary commissions, such as Edwin Chadwick’s exemplary Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), or contemporary social critiques, such as Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), or such pioneering works of investigative journalism as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851). As J. M. Blom astutely points out: “If the literary critic wants to turn social historian – needless to say, a perfectly legitimate activity – he would do well to bear in mind all the non-literary material

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that is suggested in The Other Nation, since that might be far more suitable for his purpose than novels” (1981, 124–125).

Bibliography Works Cited Bewley, Marius. “Towards Reading Disraeli.” Prose 4 (1972): 5–23. Blake, Robert. Disraeli. New York: St. Martin’s, 1967. Blom, J. M. “The English ‘Social-Problem’ Novel: Fruitful Concept or Critical Evasion?”English Studies 62.2 (1981): 120–127. Briggs, Asa. The Age of Improvement. London: Longmans, 1959. Cazamian, Louis. The Social Novel in England, 1830–1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley. Trans. Martin Fido. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Trans. of Le Roman Social en Angleterre (1830–1850): Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley. Paris: Société Nouvelle Libraire, 1903. [Disraeli, Benjamin]. Vivian Grey. Vol. 2. London: Henry Colburn, 1827. Disraeli, Benjamin. Sybil, or the Two Nations. 1845. Ed. Sheila Smith. Oxford: OUP, 1981. Disraeli, Benjamin. Coningsby, or the New Generation. 1844. Ed. Thom Braun. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Fido, Martin. “The Treatment of Rural Distress in Disraeli’s Sybil.” Yearbook of English Studies 5 (1975): 153–163. Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1971. Leavis. F. R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1948. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Revolution of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Holloway, John. The Victorian Sage. London: Macmillan, 1953. Jerman, Bernard. “Disraeli’s Fan Mail: A Curiosity Item.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 9.1 (1954): 61–71. Kettle, Arnold. “The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel.” From Dickens to Hardy. Ed. Boris Ford. Vol. 6 of The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958. 169–178. O’Kell, Robert. Disraeli: The Romance of Politics. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Owenson, Sydney [Lady Morgan]. The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale. 1806. Ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Oxford: OUP, 1999. Ridley, Jane. Young Disraeli 1804–1846. New York: Crown, 1995. Schwarz, Daniel L. General Introduction. The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli. Ed. Michael Sanders. Vol. 1. London: Chatto & Pickering, 2004. ix–xxvi. Shaw, Harry E. The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Smith, Sheila M. The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Stephen, Leslie. Hours in a Library. Second Series. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1881.

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Stewart, R. W. Disraeli’s Novels Reviewed, 1829–1968. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1975. Trilling, Lionel. “The Princess Casamassima.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. By Trilling. New York: Viking, 1950. 52–92. Trollope, Anthony. 1883. An Autobiography. Oxford: OUP, 1980. Vincent, John. Disraeli. Oxford: OUP, 1990. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1850. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958. Wright, Julia M. Introduction. The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys. 1827. By Sydney Owenson [Lady Morgan]. Peterborough: Broadview, 2013. 9–29.

Further Reading Braun, Thom. Disraeli the Novelist. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Clausson, Nils. “Interpretation, Genre, Revaluation: The Conventions of Romance and the Romance of Religion in Disraeli’s Lothair.” Dickens Studies Annual 43 (2012): 187–208. Flavin, Michael. Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as Political Discourse. Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2005. Kirsch, Adam. Benjamin Disraeli. New York: Schocken, 2008. Richmond, Charles, and Paul Smith, eds. The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli 1818–1851. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Schwarz, Daniel R. Disraeli’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1975. Spector, Sheila A. “Alroy as Disraeli’s ‘Ideal Ambition.’” British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature. Ed. Sheila Spector. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 235–248. Weintraub, Stanley. Disraeli: A Biography. New York: Truman Talley/ Dutton, 1993.

Adina Sorian

10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) Abstract: This chapter revisits Jane Eyre (1847) in the light of key concepts of Victorian culture, the traditions of the Bildungsroman, the autobiography, and the Gothic, as well as feminism, psychoanalysis, and Bakhtinian aesthetics, and shows that while on the one hand the novel represents the typically Victorian attempt to synthesise the individual’s freedom with social integration, on the other hand Brontë’s most noted piece of writing bristles with internal contradictions and ideological ambiguities, which create ruptures not only in the contemporaneous system of beliefs but also in the variety of theoretical frames that were later applied to the text. Juxtaposing interpretations of Jane Eyre that seek to support specific theories with readings that highlight the text’s penchant for ambiguous colonial tropes, diaologicity, and nuanced gender concepts, the chapter seeks to suggest that Brontë’s text engages in a complex process of both expressing and destabilising ideologies, thereby preventing any single-minded reading and enriching our understanding of the open quality of the work. Keywords: Bildungsroman, autobiography, feminism, psychoanalysis, dialogicity

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment In April 1846, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell offered their publishers, Aylott and Jones of London, a three-decker novel consisting of three unconnected tales. The tales were Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (↗ 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights), and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (↗ 12 Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey). The Brontë sisters, who used the pen names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton to improve their chances of publication in a male dominated business, were rejected on that occasion, but Charlotte continued to send forth their manuscripts separately, and Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were eventually accepted by Thomas Newby. Charlotte was less lucky with The Professor, which was “plodding its weary round in London” (C. Brontë qtd. in Gaskell 1997, 233) and found no acceptance at first. Though increasingly despairing at the continuous rejections, Charlotte found the courage to begin her second novel Jane Eyre, and when George Smith of the publishing firm Smith, Elder & Co. wrote to her, in turning down The Professor, that “a work in three volumes would meet with careful attention” (qtd. in Gaskell 1997, 242), she was able to send him a manuscript within a couple of months. Jane Eyre appeared in October 1847 and was an instant success. 2,500 copies were sold in three months and the novel was reprinted in January 1848. W. S. Williams, reader for Smith, presented the work to William Makepeace Thackeray, who expressed https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-011

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his appreciation with the words: “I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period, with the printers I know waiting for copy” (qtd. in Allott 1974, 70). Charlotte, who regarded “[o]ne good word” from her adored Thackeray as “worth pages of praise from ordinary judges” (qtd. in Dunn 2001, 442), enthusiastically dedicated the second edition to him, unaware that he had a mentally disturbed wife and that she would provoke rumours that Jane Eyre was in reality written by a former governess in Thackeray’s household, who had become his mistress and whom he had himself chosen as his model of Becky Sharp (Rigby 1990, 140). But there was also much misunderstanding in the reading world about the identities of the three Bells. Some conjectured that the three authors were in fact but one, others suspected them to be the ‘brothers Bell’, and not even the publishers knew whether Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were real or assumed names. When Charlotte and Anne travelled from their parsonage home at Haworth to Cornhill in London to dispel the rumours about their identities, a short phase of perplexity followed on the parts of Smith and Williams. After that, they treated the authoresses like celebrities and introduced them to the vibrant cultural scene of London, leaving Charlotte much impressed and highly motivated. Upon her return to Haworth, Charlotte began her new novel Shirley. It was during this time that the decline of her family took its course, beginning with her brother Branwell’s death in September 1848 and followed by Emily’s and Anne’s deaths in December 1848 and May 1849. Shirley was written under circumstances very different from that of her previous novels: not only was the progress of the novel interrupted by her siblings’ deaths, but Charlotte was now a well-established writer, measuring herself against her famous contemporaries including Charles Dickens, William M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Kingsley, all of which would have major works published in the same year. The novel appeared in 1849 as a panoramic Condition-of-England novel and met with mixed reviews. A specifically sour critic wrote that Shirley had “floated into circulation on the popularity of its predecessors,” but displayed nothing of the skill in the delineation of character and nothing of the artistic power in the development of plot of Jane Eyre (qtd. in Allott 1974, 158). Charlotte’s fourth novel Villette returned to the first-person voice and the governess theme of The Professor and Jane Eyre. It was published in January 1853 and considered, along with Jane Eyre, as Charlotte’s finest work. It was also her last novel. In 1857, having completed two chapters of a new novel, Willie Ellen, Charlotte died as a result of complications with her pregnancy. Only two years later did The Professor, Charlotte’s much rejected first novel, also appear in print; that same year, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë was published, the first full-length biography of a female novelist written by a female novelist, which created what Elizabeth Jay has called the “myth of the Brontës” (1997, ix). All of Charlotte Brontë’s mature novels may be called Bildungsromane (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology), concerned as they are with the conflict between the inner

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life of a self and the demands of social and professional life. From Charlotte’s and her sister’s own governess-novels to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (↗ 22 George Eliot, Middlemarch) to Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield to Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (↗ 33 Henry James, What Maisie Knew), Bildungsromane follow the classic narrative trajectory of the quest for maturation, which begins with a sense of discontent with the constraints of society on the part of the hero or heroine and, through a long and arduous process of development, ideally leads to their accommodation into society. Paramount in the worlds of these Victorian Bildungsromane is the conflict between reason and passion, and in classical specimens of this genre, such as Jane Eyre, the conflict is usually resolved by the novels’ endings, which present the societal standards of reason and propriety and the self’s ‘passionate’ desires as complementary (Moretti 1987, 16–17). Aesthetically, Brontë’s novels reflect the distinctly Victorian synthesis of the heritage of Romanticism and the contemporaneous trend toward literary realism. While realism structures her writing, Romantic elements clearly persist in her novels. In Jane Eyre, echoes of the Gothic romance are apparent in the description of the red-room, which recalls the chambers in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, in the adaptation of the Byronic hero in the portrayal of Rochester, and in the presentation of Bertha Mason, who reminds Jane of “the foul German spectre – the vampire” (Brontë 2006, 327). Several critics have also acknowledged Charlotte’s indebtedness to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (↗ 8 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus), which places her oeuvre within the tradition of the spiritual autobiography. However, not only have her works redefined that tradition by adapting it to a specifically secular and distinctively female context (Qualls 1982), but Brontë also added a new inflection to the autobiographical form.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns It is well established that Charlotte, who gave Jane Eyre the subtitle “An Autobiography,” used her novels as an outlet for her own, often unhappy life experiences. Clearly, in the Lowood episode in Jane Eyre, Charlotte revisits the childhood trauma of her elder sisters Maria’s and Elizabeth’s death in a tuberculosis epidemic at Cowan Bridge School, while in The Professor and Villette she uses the autobiographical mode to come to terms with her experience as a teacher in a girls’ school at Brussels, haplessly in love with a married schoolmaster. Yet Charlotte’s affinity with autobiography was not only motivated by psychological concerns. It reflected a larger tendency in the literary world of the day, in which the autobiographical mode had a firm place, both in the novel and beyond. As Linda Peterson has shown, the autobiographical form was used extensively by Victorian writers, who “inherited a well-established tradition of spiritual autobiography” (2012, 245).

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By the middle of the nineteenth century, widening social and economic class disparities had led to a growing sense of personal dislocation, and the proliferation of the autobiographical novel as well as the explosion of the other two key forms of the nineteenth century, the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman, surely testified to the importance of forging a stable sense of self for the dislocated individual. The epitome of this dislocated individual was, of course, the Victorian governess, who, neither properly a servant nor a family member, held a precarious position in the nineteenth-century household. In her 1865 work Principles of Education, Elizabeth Missing Sewell observed that “the real discomfort of a governess’s position in a private family arises from the fact that it is undefined. She is not a relation, she is not a guest, not a mistress, not a servant – but something made up of all. No-one knows how to treat her” (qtd. in Peterson 2013, 9–10). A frequent theme in Victorian novels, the governess problem resulted in confused and often contradictory behaviour, both from the governess and her associates, as M. Jeanne Peterson has pointed out in her classic essay “The Victorian Governess” (2013). Being genteel, but exiled from gentility as a woman who sought paid employment, Jane Eyre, too, is subject to the status incongruence of the Victorian governess. In this context, the heroine’s suggestive name has often been remarked upon: “she is invisible as air, the heir to nothing, secretly choking with ire,” as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have put it (2000, 342). While the concern with the protagonist’s elusiveness and social marginalisation make Jane Eyre a typical Victorian governess novel, a genre scrutinised by Cecilia Wadsö-Lecaros (2001), the novel would not be the masterpiece Jane Eyre without the heroine’s typical ‘ire’. Indeed, ‘plain’ Jane’s constitutional anger, the feature that outraged Victorian critics most, is what ultimately sets in motion the action of this “novel of liberation” (Hagan 1971, 351). It brings on her quest for freedom, after, in an outburst of anger in chapter one, little Jane seeks to defy the tyrannies of her wicked stepbrother John Reed and is punished by being confined to the red-room. Likely the most memorable motif of Jane Eyre, the red-room recurs in variations at crucial moments throughout the book, evoking what Kathleen Tillotson has termed “the double impression of constraint and freedom” (1954, 300). With its massive furniture, the blinds always drawn down, the white easy-chair looming out of the darkness like “a pale throne” (Brontë 2006, 17), the room has been seen as “a kind of patriarchal death-chamber” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000, 340), representing the society in which Jane is trapped both as a woman and as a governess. It is this space that presents her for the first time in the novel with the two alternatives of escaping that will recur throughout her pilgrimage: “running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die” (Brontë 2006, 19). Flight or starvation: imagining such radical ways of escaping, little Jane clearly emerges as the stubbornly freedom-seeking character that we will come to know as the adult Jane Eyre. But the drama enacted in the red-room is even more immediately crucial for the development of the plot: it catalyses the next step of Jane’s pilgrimage, in which she will learn to domesticate her passions and to compromise – Lowood.

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Lowood is a charity school for the poor controlled by the sadistic figure of Mr Brocklehurst, whom many have read as the personification of the Victorian superego, noting the novel’s consistent descriptions of his figure in phallic terms. Lowood, whose garden is surrounded by “spike-guarded walls” (Brontë 2006, 90), can be seen as a variation of the prison motif of the red-room, another ‘patriarchal death-chamber’ in which Jane is trapped as she was in Gateshead, additionally suffering from cold and hunger there. However, Lowood also has a positive side, for despite the hardships Jane suffers in the rigid institution, it is there that she meets the two angelic female figures and mentors whom Adrienne Rich has recognised as Jane’s surrogate mothers, Miss Temple and Helen Burns (1990, 146–147). The benevolent Miss Temple, who dispenses food for the starving girls at Lowood, visits the sick, and clears Jane from the charge of lying, has widely been read as the Victorian ‘angel in the house’. When Miss Temple leaves Lowood, Jane realises the woman’s impact on her: “I had imbibed from her something of her nature and much of her habits; more harmonious thoughts; what seemed better regulated feelings had become the inmates of my mind. I had given in allegiance to duty and order. [. . .] [T]o the eyes of others, usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character” (Brontë 2006, 100). It is crucial that despite Miss Temple’s indubitable importance for the development of Jane’s character, Jane states to only have ‘appeared’ a disciplined and subdued character as a result of her influence. Similarly, only a putative, at best superficial change seems to be brought about on her character by Helen Burns. Helen, Jane’s saintly friend at Lowood, embodies the virtues of duty, humility, endurance, forbearance, and Christian devotion, and apparently initiates Jane into Christ’s teaching of ‘turning the other cheek’ (Brontë 2006, 66). Her name is notably suggestive, it can signify “both suffering and passion” (Eagleton 1987, 30), and though Jane is intrigued by the principles Helen is imparting to her, she ultimately finds them incomprehensible: “I heard with wonder: I could not comprehend this doctrine of endurance; and still less could I understand or sympathise with the forbearance she expressed for her chastiser” (Brontë 2006, 67). While, like Miss Temple’s ladylike equanimity, Helen’s saintly asceticism is not a quality that Jane can or will fully internalise, she tends to reproduce it, as a means to an end, at crucial moments in the novel. The apex of this strategy is reached when she makes herself appear to have converted to Helen’s religious credence. In chapter twentyseven, after the prevented marriage, Jane decides to leave Rochester and recommends to him at their separation: “Do as I do: trust in God and yourself. Believe in heaven. Hope to meet again there” (364). Not surprisingly, it has seemed hard to believe for critics that Jane really has made that step from her initial religious scepticism to Helen’s otherworldly faith. Barbara Hardy has pointed out that the novel leaves undramatised Jane’s conversion from the worldly, sceptical child she was at Lowood to the ascetic Christian adult that will not yield to her love for Rochester (2013, 68). That Jane has indeed

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not, in the long run, internalised the patient and submissive role she learned from her stoic mentor is endorsed thematically by her final rejection of St. John Rivers. We first meet Rivers as the devout clergyman of the parish at Marsh End who saves Jane when she reaches the brink of starvation after fleeing Thornfield. Later revealed to be Jane’s cousin, Rivers initially seems to offer her a viable alternative to the life she abandoned at Rochester’s Thornfield: his love of hard work resonates with her conviction that women need “exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do” (Brontë 2006, 130). However, when Rivers offers her to accompany him to India to perform missionary work as his wife, she refuses him, aware that, “as his wife,” she would be “at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked – forced to keep the fire of [her] nature continually low” (470). While Rivers gives her a glimpse of a future that may be suited to her character, he is not able to offer Jane a life where spiritual passion and the desire for self-efficacy are reconciled with the things that orphaned Jane needs even more desperately: real love, and a protected home. It is only with Rochester that she finally attains those aims, even though she does so in what has been perceived as the rather contrived happy ending of the novel. Indeed, just when Jane is tempted to give in to John’s pressures, she hears the voice of Rochester cry out to her: “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (Brontë, 2006, 483), at which she breaks away from John and sets forth for Thornfield, affirming her own will in an extraordinary gesture of self-assertion: “It was my time to assume ascendancy. My powers were in play and in force” (484). Returning to Thornfield Hall and finding it in ruins, Jane learns that the mansion has been burned to the ground by Bertha Mason, who died in the fire, and that Rochester now lives at Ferndean, a nearby manor house “deep buried in a wood” (496). Jane finds Rochester a humbled man, blinded and maimed by the fire, and, teasingly, resolves to “rehumanise” him (503). Filled with love and gratitude, Rochester proposes to her, and they marry, as we learn in the concluding chapter, when the narrative finally arrives in the reading present. But if this seems like a stalwart Bildungsroman closure, the novel’s last three paragraphs certainly refuse to be contained by it. These paragraphs are devoted to John Rivers, and the privileged final words of the novel are even “his own words” (Brontë 2006, 521). He writes a last letter to Jane from India, knowing he will die: “My master,” Jane quotes from Rivers’ letter, “has forewarned me. Daily He announces more distinctly, ‘Surely I come quickly!’ and hourly I more eagerly respond, ‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’” (521). The closing paragraphs of Jane Eyre may startle readers for the prominence they give to Rivers, but they are evidence that Brontë’s novel cannot be neatly defined as the ‘monologic’ autobiography of Jane Eyre, in which Jane’s ‘romantic’ way is the only right way, symbolically defeating Rivers’ religious dogmatism. Rather, as Jerome Beaty (2001, 499–503) has asserted, the fact that the novel ends with John Rivers’ words (which in turn echo the last words of the New Testament, the Revelation of St. John the Divine) makes Jane Eyre a full-fledged

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polyphonic novel in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), an open-ended dialogue between the voice(s) of the first-person narrator, the author, and that of the characters, none of which is ultimately given precedence over the other.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies With more than thirty apostrophes to the reader, Jane Eyre certainly exemplifies what Peterson, writing on the rise of autobiography in the nineteenth century, has referred to as the Victorian confidence in the educative uses of life writing, the belief that “an individual life, rightly understood, could be instructive to others as well as oneself” (2012, 264). Sylvère Monod has shown persuasively how the addresses to the reader in Jane Eyre anticipate and attempt to direct the reception of the novel, inscribing specific readerly responses into the discourse (1971, 497–504). And yet the much-noted reader in Jane Eyre is by no means only a compliant listener, to be told what to do or think by Jane. Garrett Stewart has rightly emphasised the participatory nature of reading Jane Eyre, suggesting that the reader is constituted “not by attribution but by immanent participation” (1996, 243). More strikingly even, the self-aware reader of Jane Eyre is not only to be understood as the empirical (or implied) reader of the novel. Rather, at many instances, the term ‘reader’ applies also to the teller of the tale, the autobiographical subject, Jane Eyre, herself. When, for example, Jane reflects on the stultifying routine of her new position at Thornfield Hall, and we learn that “[her] sole relief was to walk along the corridors of the third story [. . .] and, best of all, to open [her] inward ear to a tale that was never ended – a tale [her] imagination created, and narrated continuously” (Brontë 2006, 129), it becomes quite clear that Jane is not only the teller of her fabulation; she emerges as its listener as well, the distinctively self-aware recipient of her own story. We find this double status of Jane’s on several occasions in the novel (Stewart 1996, 244–249). Moreover, we are dealing with ‘two Janes’ in the sense that the narrative constantly oscillates between the positions of the narrating I and experiencing I. Thus, while some passages are clearly from the adult Jane’s perspective, evaluating the narrated events from a sobered point of view, others are from the much more emotional perspective of the child or young girl, sometimes signalled by quotation marks, question marks, or the present tense (Beaty 2001, 493). The text’s emphasis on the complexity of narrative voice, the ‘double’ status and awareness of the protagonist, her existence and self-consciousness both as narrator and auditor of her own narrative, and her shifting between her older and younger self in the act of narration, stress the nature of the heroine’s crucial predicament in this novel: the need to constantly interrogate her own status and identity, which never seem to be certain or definite.

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The question of identity or, more largely, of subjectivity, is where the unique formal characteristics of Jane Eyre are flaunted most extensively. A crucial stylistic trait that suggests the centrality of subjectivity in the novel is Brontë’s idiosyncratic syntax. Margot Peters has pointed out the striking number of relatively short independent clauses of which Brontë’s prose is composed. As these are strung together by colons and semicolons, there is more punctuation in Charlotte Brontë, according to Peters’s count, than in Austen, Emily Brontë, Thackeray, Eliot, or Dickens. The effect of these paratactic constructions, Peters states, is a highly subjective prose, in which “the subject/author – the ‘I’ – is kept “constantly before the reader” (Peters 1973, 41–42). A typical sentence, taken from chapter four, may serve to illustrate this: The play-hour in the evening I thought the pleasantest fraction of the day at Lowood: the bit of bread, the draught of coffee swallowed at five o’clock had revived vitality, if it had not satisfied hunger; the long restraint of the day was slackened; the schoolroom felt warmer than in the morning – its fires being allowed to burn a little more brightly to supply, in some measure, the place of candles, not yet introduced: the ruddy gloaming, the licensed uproar, the confusion of many voices gave one a welcome sense of liberty. (Brontë 2006, 65)

This sentence alone contains five independent clauses. Even though the ‘I’ occurs only once in the sentence, which is dominated by a high number of verbs, with the numerous short clauses stressing the restlessness of the narrator’s observations, the prose is so focused on the narrator’s immediate sensations that it is easy to overlook that most of the actions described are in fact external, detailing the evening routine at Lowood. The attention to subjective experience in Jane Eyre is further testified by the ubiquity of what Peters has called “the emphatic adverb” in Brontë’s prose – something that is characteristic of her style at large (1973, 15–39). In sentences such as “Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned?” (Brontë 2006, 18, emphasis added), the adverbs of time express very clearly not something temporal but the child Jane’s intense suffering at being treated unjustly. Here, as elsewhere in the novel, adverbs are used to intensify the words describing Jane’s state of mind. They suggest the protagonist’s usually heightened emotions and her necessity to express them; and they eclipse the chronology of external events (which both in Jane Eyre’s Thornfield episode and in Charlotte Brontë’s life in the Haworth parsonage are scarce; Peters 1973, 28) to foreground instead the timelessness of the protagonist’s states of mind. The subjective intensity and energy of Jane Eyre’s discourse is also communicated by Brontë’s tendency to reverse the common sentence order. “Me, she had dispensed from joining the group” (Brontë 2006, 9); “What a consternation of soul was mine” (19); “Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!” (19). The direct object placed in a stressed, initial position in the first sentence effectively puts before us the subject, while the latter two sentences display a rather awkward verb order, using the constructions “was mine” rather than “mine was,” and “was the [. . .] battle fought” rather than “the [. . .] battle was fought.” The overall effect of such marked, conspicuous syntactical structures is a quality that Peters has called “pervasive

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tension” – “Charlotte Brontë’s prose is simply never at rest,” she claims, correctly I believe (Peters 1973, 57). Given this restless, highly subjective prose, whose distinctive features, even where we get the more sobered accounts of the adult protagonist, never substantially change throughout the novel, it seems all the more unlikely that Jane’s life at Lowood should eventually enable her to become that “disciplined and subdued character” that in the Thornfield section she claims herself to have appeared “to the eyes of others, usually even to [her] own” (Brontë 2006, 100). Not only does the style of her prose not change enough to justify this assumption, but the novel’s entire composition quite clearly suggests that while she may outwardly have controlled the rebellious temperament characterising her as a child, Jane’s ‘true self’, her ire, is still lurking underneath the subdued surface, threatening to erupt any time. Perhaps most influential among the critics noting this repression structure were Gilbert and Gubar, who proposed that Jane’s repressed rage is ubiquitous in the figure of Bertha, the ‘mad’ Mrs Rochester, whose every appearance in the novel is associated with an experience or repression of anger on Jane’s part (2000, 360). The most dramatic example of this Gothic doppelgänger theme in Jane Eyre is Bertha’s attack on the bridal veil on the penultimate night before Jane and Rochester are to be married. The importance of this instance (and the concomitant identification of Bertha and Jane) is unmistakably marked by Charlotte Brontë’s narrative technique in this chapter. The narrative systematically brings Jane’s encounter with Bertha into prominence by withholding it for the most part of the chapter, so that we only learn about the occurrence when Jane tells it to Rochester, as the constantly postponed climax of a lengthy recapitulation of that night’s events and her premonitory dreams. Jane’s reaction to Bertha’s attack is also explicitly associated with the red-room experience. As Jane recalls, “I was aware her lurid visage flamed over mine, and I lost consciousness: for the second time in my life – only the second time – I became insensible from terror” (Brontë 2006, 327). The verb “flamed” in a passage that describes the encounter between Jane and the personification of her repressed passions is not coincidental. In fact, images of fire pervade the novel, providing “objective correlatives” that express the inner life of the protagonist (Lodge 1966, 120–121). While, as David Lodge has noted, Brontë uses an entire system of elemental and natural imagery, featuring images of earth, water, and air, the last of which images is a punning association with the protagonist’s name, fire is the most prominent one and the one that characterises numerous aspects of Jane’s character besides her quick temper. Lodge observes how Brontë uses fire to express her heroine’s romantic longings for Rochester, the sense of awe and danger she feels as her desire for him grows, and the agony of wrestling with her love for Rochester after their marriage has been thwarted (1966, 132–133). Finally, fire is the symbol that connects Jane spiritually and metaphorically with Rochester, who in chapter twenty confides to his “little friend,” in a downright prophetic pronouncement, “[t]o live, for me, Jane, is to stand on a crater crust which may crack and spure fire any day” (Brontë 2006, 250).

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4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Jane Eyre is one of the most discussed works in English literature and has been analysed with the help of virtually every possible critical approach: feminist, psychoanalytical, Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, ecocritical, rhetorical. The widespread interest that has fastened onto the novel began almost immediately after its publication, and though the general opinion of the novel’s merits at the time was positive, some Victorians made a point of upbraiding the questionable morality of the book. One reviewer for The Christian Remembrance of January 1848, though praising “the remarkable power” of Jane Eyre, found fault with the author’s stubborn rejection of Christian values: “All virtue [in Jane Eyre] is but well masked vice,” he surmised, “all religious profession and conduct is but the whitening of the sepulchre, all self-denial is but deeper selfishness.” His advice for ‘Currer Bell’ was “to be a little more trustful of the reality of human goodness, and a little less anxious to detect its alloy of evil” (qtd. in Dunn 2001, 450). More openly hostile was Elizabeth Rigby’s review in The Quarterly Review, published, to make matters worse, in the month of Emily’s death. For Rigby, Jane Eyre was “throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit,” “pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition,” written by “a person who [. . .] combines a total ignorance of the habits of society, great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion” (1990, 139–141). In the twentieth century, Jane Eyre soon became a focus for feminist literary analysis. An early feminist voice, at a time when feminist criticism as such did not yet exist, was Virginia Woolf, who criticised what she saw as the severely limited perspective of Jane Eyre: “always to be a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other” (1948, 221). Woolf’s commentary pioneered what were to become generations of scholarship raising debates as to whether Jane Eyre was a novel of female rebellion or a novel of female restraint. Adrienne Rich’s famous essay “The Temptations of a Motherless Woman” directly responded to Woolf and held Jane Eyre’s personal strength against Woolf’s charges: “Always a governess and always in love? Had Virginia Woolf really read this novel?” (1990, 151). Other important feminist works emerging in the 1970s – a decade that saw an explosion of feminist literary criticism – included Helene Moglen’s Charlotte Brontë, Ellen Moers’s Literary Women, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own, and Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, all of which advocated Jane Eyre’s central place in the alternative female literary canon they endeavoured to establish. Incidentally, the category of ‘gender’ these critical works introduced to literary analysis opened up some very productive lines of engagement with the novel. Terry Eagleton combined a gender-aware approach with a focus on power relations and emphasised the fluidity of both categories in Jane Eyre. He argued that “Jane moves deftly between male and female roles in her courtship of Rochester; unlike Blanche, who is tall, dark and dominating like Rochester himself, she settles astutely for a

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vicarious expression of her own competitive maleness through him” (1987, 45). Similarly stressing the gender ambiguities in the novel, Showalter has seen Rochester’s injuries at the end of the novel as “symbolic immersions of the hero in feminine experience” (1977, 152). As indicated by statements such as these, both feminist and cultural/political approaches have tended to cross-fertilise with psychoanalysis. The greatest success of such alliances has been the (in)famous pronouncement of the novel’s vital doppelgänger theme – Rochester’s secret wife as Jane’s secret self. Most famously Gilbert and Gubar, but also R. E. Hughes, have identified “the fiend in the attic” with “Jane’s own irrationality” (Hughes 1964, 358). That Bertha could, however, also be psychoanalysed as a part of Rochester has been shown by critics like Mark Kinkead-Weekes, John Hagan, and M. H. Scargill. For Kinkead-Weekes, “the mad woman does not simply represent an external impediment, but also something within Rochester himself which he tries to deny, to escape, to imprison” (1970, 83). John Hagan has suggested that “Bertha [. . .] is both the wife who enslaves [Rochester] and, in her raging madness, his grotesque alter ego – a hideous mirror of his own licentiousness” (1971, 357). And Scargill has noted: “But behind Mr Rochester [. . .] is Bertha Mason, the mad wife. Rochester symbolizes uncontrolled physical passion, and with uncontrolled passion there is always the menacing figure of complete degeneracy and madness” (1950, 122–123). Critical attention to Jane Eyre has also been given by Marxist scholars. Foremost among these has been Eagleton, who read Jane Eyre as a complex and extremely contradictory response to the contemporaneous conflict between passionate, romantic rebellion and a blunt bourgeois ethic. For Eagleton, the salient point of the matter was that Jane Eyre’s heroine (or indeed its author) at once pursues a way of passionate self-fulfilment beyond social customs and refuses to abandon those. Though it seems that Jane seeks to move away from the restraints of class structure and toward a romantic ethic based on spiritual equality, she continues to abide by the codes of blood-kinship and social hierarchy: she refuses to marry Rochester until they are social equals, and the novel grants her the socially elevated position of Mrs Rochester only through the event of her inheritance (Eagleton 1987, 39–45). By the 1980s, postcolonial criticism had entered the field of literary studies, and Jane Eyre was promptly recognised as a major reference point. The now classic postcolonial reading of the novel is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Three Women’s Text and a Critique of Imperialism,” in which Spivak calls Jane Eyre a “cult text of feminism” (1985, 244) and condemns both the novel and conventional feminist readings of it for “reproduc[ing] the axioms of imperialism” (243). Influential as it has been within Brontë scholarship, Spivak’s reading was rarely left unchallenged. Susan Meyer has found Spivak’s bold claim of Jane Eyre as “the militant female subject” (245) problematic, observing that “[t]hroughout the novel, the marginality and disempowerment Jane experiences due to her class and gender are represented through a metaphorical linking between Jane and several of the

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nineteenth century’s ‘dark races’” (1996, 74). However, Meyer also asserted that the very use of such colonial metaphors in Jane Eyre revealed Brontë’s embeddedness within an imperial ideology. Lori Pollock, responding to Spivak and Meyer, reexamined the treatment of colonial tropes in Jane Eyre and observed that the novel is ultimately a “more subversive text” (1996, 256) than the previous readings had granted. For Pollock, who draws on Homi Bhabha, the text of Jane Eyre repeatedly produces slippages, excesses, and differences, and so works to challenge the racial stereotypes it employs. The text’s numerous ambiguities and inconsistencies have been noted by most scholars. An especially rich ground for interpretations in this regard has proved to be the ending of the novel. While some critics have found that the “utopian elements” Brontë seems to be portraying in the closing section at Ferndean are “disrupt[ed]” by the “dank and unhealthy atmosphere” of the setting (Meyer 1996, 93; see also Gilbert and Gubar 2000, 369; see also Martin 1966, 60), Gilbert and Gubar have seen Ferndean as a “green” world where “the healing powers of nature will eventually restore the sight of one of Rochester’s eyes” and allow the lovers to flourish in a natural order beyond social restrictions (2000, 370). Such a reading may be worth scrutinising more closely by ecocritics, who thus far have largely been hostile to Jane Eyre (see Buell 2005, 38 and Giblett 2011, 34–37). Controversy was also stirred up by the closing paragraphs of the novel. Following Beaty, I outlined above that the many-voicedness of Jane Eyre in these parts justifies a Bakhtinian interpretation, in which the fact that the last words of the book are John Rivers’ points to the novel’s ultimate reluctance to provide an ideological closure that pits Jane’s ‘worldly way’ against John’s ‘martyr’s way’. However, Brontë scholarship has also offered diametrically opposed readings of this matter. Carolyn Williams countered the view that the intertextual elements of the novel’s end work to disseminate and decentre meaning and argued, based on a rigorous rhetorical analysis, that Jane uses other voices as a means to her end – that of engendering her own identity (1989, 67). Readers with a further interest in the question of closure in Jane Eyre are referred to J. Hillis Miller, who showed convincingly that the notion of closure, for any given novel, is notoriously difficult. As he argued in his essay “The Problematic of Ending in Narrative,” “the notion of ending in narrative is inherently ‘undecidable’” since it is ultimately impossible to separate the complication of a plot from its dénouement, the “tying up” from the “untying” of the plot (2005, 259). We can, in other words, never know for sure whether a given narrative is ever complete; and indeed, major examples of apparently closed novels have shown that they “can always be reopened” (Miller 2005, 260). In light of this, the “Further Reading” section of this chapter includes a number of works that have attempted to ‘reopen’ Jane Eyre from ever new theoretical perspectives. While some of those reinvestigate the novel itself, others attend to the overgrown field of intertextual and intermedial reworkings of the classic, which to date has encompassed narrative, visual, and stage adaptations.

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Bibliography Works Cited Allott, Miriam, ed. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Carly Emerson. Introd. Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Beaty, Jerome. “St. John’s Way and the Wayward Reader.” Dunn 2001, 491–503. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. and introd. Stevie Davies. London: Penguin Classics, 2006. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Dunn, Richard J., ed. Jane Eyre: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001. Norton Critical Editions. Eagleton, Terry. “Jane Eyre: A Marxist Study.” Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Ed. and introd. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987. 29–45. Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 1857. Ed. and introd. Elizabeth Jay. London: Penguin Classics, 1997. Gates, Barbara T., ed. Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë. Boston: Hall, 1990. Giblett, Rod. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect, 2011. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Gilbert and Gubar. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. 336–371. Hagan, John. “Enemies of Freedom in ‘Jane Eyre.’” Criticism 13 (1971): 351–376. Hardy, Barbara. The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Hughes, R. E. “Jane Eyre: The Unbaptized Dionysos.” Ninteenth-Century Fiction 18 (1964): 347–364. Jay, Elizabeth. Introduction. Gaskell ix –xxxii. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “The Place of Love in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.” The Brontës: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Gregor. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970. 76–95. Lodge, David. “Fire and Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s War of Earthly Elements.” The Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel. Ed. Lodge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. 114–143. Martin, Robert Bernard . The Accents of Persuasion: Charlotte Brontë’s Novels. New York: Norton, 1966. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. Miller, Hillis J. “The Problematic of Ending in Narrative.” The J. Hillis Miller Reader. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. 259–269. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: OUP, 1985. Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived. New York: Norton, 1976. Monod, Sylvère. “Charlotte Brontë and the Thirty ‘Readers’ of Jane Eyre.” Jane Eyre. An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. New York: Norton, 1971. Norton Critical Editions. 496–507. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Trans. Albert Sbragia. London: Verso, 1987. Peters, Margot. Charlotte Brontë: Style in the Novel. Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1973. Peterson, Linda H. “Autobiography.” The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature. Ed. Kate Flint. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. 243–264. Peterson, M. Jeanne. “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society.” Suffer and Be Still. Ed. Martha Vicinus. London: Routledge, 2013. 3–19.

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Pollock, Lori. “An(Other) Politics of Reading Jane Eyre.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 26.3 (1996): 249–273. Qualls, Barry V. The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life. Cambridge: CUP, 1982. Rich, Adrienne. “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman.” Gates 1990, 142–155. Rigby, Elizabeth. Rev. of Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, by Charlotte Brontë. Gates 1990, 139–142. Scargill, M. H. “‘All Passion Spent’: A Revaluation of Jane Eyre.” University of Toronto Quarterly 19.2 (1950): 120–124. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 243–261. Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. London: OUP, 1954. Wadsö-Lecaros, Cecilia. The Victorian Governess Novel. Lund: Lund UP, 2001. Williams, Carolyn. “Closing the Book: The Intertextual End of Jane Eyre.” Victorian Connections. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989. 60–87. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948.

Further Reading Bouhelma, Penny. Charlotte Brontë. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Chase, Karen. “Jane Eyre’s Interior Design.” Jane Eyre: New Casebooks. Ed. Heather Glen. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 52–67. Da Sousa Correa, Delia. “Jane Eyre and Genre.” The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Realisms. Ed. Da Sousa Correa. Milton Keynes: Open University, 2000. 87–116. Dunn, Richard. “The Natural Heart: Jane Eyre’s Romanticism.” Wordsworth Circle 10 (1979): 197–204. Federico, Annette R., ed. Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years. Introd. Annette Federico. Fwd. Sandra M. Gilbert. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2009. Ingham, Patricia. The Brontës. Oxford: OUP, 2006. Authors in Context. Oxford World’s Classics. Kaplan, Cora. “‘A Heterogeneous Thing’: Female Childhood and the Rise of Racial Thinking in Victorian Britain.” Human, All Too Human. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1995. 169–202. Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Unuttered: Withheld Speech and Female Authorship in Jane Eyre and Villette.” Novel 32 (1999): 331–354. Michie, Elsie. “‘The Yahoo, Not the Demon’: Heathcliff, Rochester, and the Simianization of the Irish.” Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 46–78. Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. Oates, Joyce Carol . “Romance and Anti-Romance: From Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Rhys’s Sargasso Sea.” Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: A Case Book. Ed. Elsie B. Michie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 195–208. Poovey, Mary. “The Anathematized Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre.” Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. 126–163.

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Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Sternlieb, Linda. “Jane Eyre: ‘Hazarding Confidences.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53.4 (1999): 452–479. Stoneman, Patsy. Charlotte Brontë. Tavistock: Northcote, 2013. Rubrik, Margarete, and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, eds. A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

Simon Marsden

11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) Abstract: This chapter begins by contextualising Wuthering Heights in relation to Emily Brontë’s life in Haworth, West Yorkshire, in the early nineteenth century. It examines Brontë’s literary relationship with the landscape and situates her novel in relation both to Romanticism and to her father’s Evangelical Christianity. The analysis of the novel takes as its central theme the prominence of boundaries and oppositions. It argues that the refusal to welcome the stranger is a key aspect of the social world of the novel and that the physical and social borders in the novel reflect Brontë’s interest in social and psychological fragmentation and in the ambiguous possibility of reconciliation and restored wholeness. The final sections consider the complex polyphonic narrative structure of the novel and suggest that the narrative foregrounds questions of interpretation and the preconceptions that all readers and critics bring to their readings. The chapter concludes by surveying a range of influential critical interpretations and suggests that the novel complicates all interpretative approaches by drawing attention to the limitation and partiality of interpretation itself. Keywords: Romanticism, barriers/boundaries, fragmentation, wholeness, polyphony

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Wuthering Heights begins by locating itself in a time – “1801” – and in a landscape: “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord,” the narrator Lockwood informs us, “the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society” (Brontë 2009, 1). Emily Brontë’s only novel is set in a rural, isolated region in the north of England; a fictional landscape rooted in the real topography of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Lockwood, a selfdeclared misanthrope – though on this, as on many other things, the reliability of his judgment must be questioned – identifies the beauty of the region with the scarcity of its population, the openness of its moorland and the isolation of its houses. The landscape of Wuthering Heights is a bleak place, where the houses must be fortified against the elements: The walls of the Heights are built strong, the windows “deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones” (2). Like Lockwood, the reader is assumed to be a stranger in this place. Even the title of the novel requires explanation: “Wuthering,” Lockwood informs us, is “a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which [the Heights] is

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exposed in stormy weather” (2). Brontë’s novel addresses its reader as an outsider, unfamiliar with the region, its customs, and its language. The landscape of Wuthering Heights has often been conflated with the moors around Haworth, the Yorkshire town in which the Brontë siblings spent most of their lives. When Charlotte Brontë wrote a preface to the new edition of Wuthering Heights in 1850 (two years after Emily’s death in December 1848), she associated the novel’s strangeness and violence, its disregard of social proprieties, with the parochialism of its author. Rereading the novel, Charlotte claimed, had given her “a definite notion of how it appears to other people – to strangers who knew nothing of the author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West-Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar” (C. Brontë 2009, 307). Like Lockwood, Charlotte addresses a reader assumed to need assistance in navigating the landscape and social world of Wuthering Heights, but her preface also makes an overt association of the novel with the Brontës’ home. The reader requires guidance not only because the world of Heathcliff and Catherine is disorientating and unfamiliar, but because the hills and hamlets of the West Riding are equally unknown. The publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857 would further establish the connection between the landscapes of the Brontës’ fiction and their Yorkshire home. In Gaskell’s biography, the sisters are tragic heroines whose natural creative genius emerges against the backdrop of the lonely moors of their childhood. In reality, the Brontës’ Yorkshire was very different to the isolated moorland imagined by Gaskell. By 1847, when Wuthering Heights was published, the industrial revolution had reshaped the landscape of the West Riding. The Haworth that Emily Brontë knew was a growing industrial town at the heart of the Yorkshire textile industry, and it had the social problems common to many similar towns, including poverty, poor sanitation, inadequate education, disease, and a high mortality rate: In 1850, the average age at death in Haworth was twenty-five (Barker 1995, 96). The moorland landscapes upon which Emily Brontë drew in her writings remained, but Haworth itself was becoming increasingly urban and industrial by the mid-nineteenth century. In this respect, Wuthering Heights can be regarded as a historical novel that recalls a preindustrial Yorkshire increasingly distant from the experiences of many people of Brontë’s generation. There is little evidence of modern industry in the novel. Its characters are landowners and agricultural labourers. Its historical setting is the rural Yorkshire of the late eighteenth century, not the industrial north of the Victorian era. Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, to Patrick and Maria Brontë, the fifth of their six children. In 1820, the family moved to Haworth when Patrick was appointed to the perpetual curacy of the Church of St Michael and All Angels, a position he would hold until his death in 1861. The family’s early years in Haworth were marked by tragedy. Maria Brontë died in 1821, leaving Patrick to manage the competing demands of his young children and his pastoral

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duties. Further loss followed in 1825, when the two eldest children, Maria and Elizabeth, died within weeks of each other from typhus contracted at the Clergy Daughters’ School in Cowan Bridge, Lancashire. Fearful for the health of his remaining children, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school (Anne, the youngest, had not gone to school with her sisters). Emily’s six-month stay at Cowan Bridge, when she was seventeen, was the only period of formal education in her childhood until a brief period at Roe Head School in Mirfield (where Charlotte was a teacher). The rest of her education, along with that of her siblings, took place at home in the Haworth parsonage. Patrick (who was himself a published poet) encouraged his children to read widely and from a variety of sources: newspapers, periodicals, poetry, novels and other books, many of them borrowed from neighbours or from circulating libraries. By 1825, the siblings had begun to invent stories based around imagined kingdoms: Angria for Charlotte and Branwell, Gondal for Emily and Anne. They wrote these stories in miniature books, in tiny handwriting designed to avoid waste of even the smallest space on the paper. The Gondal stories remained a significant part of Emily’s creative work throughout her life: her final poem, “Why ask to know what date what clime,” (1992, 190–191) which remained incomplete at her death in 1848, tells the story of a civil war in Gondal. Professional publication began for Emily when Charlotte discovered a notebook of her poems and suggested that the sisters might produce a collection of their works. This collection became Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), the pseudonyms chosen to conceal the sisters’ gender and identity while retaining their initials. Despite some favourable reviews, the collection sold few copies. Faced with difficult circumstances at home – Branwell was descending into alcoholism and despair, while Patrick’s health and eyesight were deteriorating – the sisters turned to fiction in the hope of earning a much-needed income. Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was rejected, but Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey (↗ 12 Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey) were published in 1847. There is some evidence that Emily began work on a second novel (Barker 1995, 579) but, if so, it was never published. Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1847 after a short illness. Emily’s surviving writing reflects the multiple intellectual and creative influences of her early life – Romantic poetry, Gothic narrative, traditional folklore, politics, theology and more – synthesised and developed by a rigorous intellect and creative imagination. Opposed as much to dogmatic thinking as to conventional sentimentality, Emily’s work lays bare the violence that she saw as inherent to fallen human nature, while condemning oppressive moralism and religious authoritarianism. In Wuthering Heights, Joseph’s belief that the young Heathcliff and Catherine are predestined for damnation exerts a destructive influence upon the Earnshaw household (Marsden 2014, 101–112). This distaste for Calvinism was not untypical of the Brontë family, but Emily went further than her sisters in moving

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beyond dogmatic approaches to religious thought. One of her best-known poems, “No coward soul is mine” (1846), rejects the “thousand creeds” (1992, 182; l.9) of the Christian denominations in favour of an unmediated encounter with the divine. Her writings echo the turn to personal, subjective experience that characterised Romantic philosophies of religion. Her version of Romanticism, however, owes at least as much to the scepticism of Shelley as to the visionary confidence of the early Wordsworth and Coleridge. In Brontë’s poetry, as in Wuthering Heights, the natural world is both a source of liberating spiritual and imaginative experience, and a place in which such experience often seems absent or impossible. Like Shelley, Brontë depicts imaginative vision as transient. The imagination seeks to penetrate beyond the superficial realities of mortality, conflict, and division. Imaginative vision offers glimpses of transformation and renewal. In this respect, Brontë’s writing belongs to a transitional moment in the development of British writing from the Romantic era to the Victorian. It carries echoes of the visionary sensibilities of the early Romantics, blended with something of the spiritual fervour of John Wesley and the Methodist revival. Yet its glimpses of a world emptied of transcendent meaning also anticipate the secularised landscapes of George Eliot (↗ 22 George Eliot, Middlemarch) and Thomas Hardy (↗ 30 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure). Though more recent popular culture has come to receive Wuthering Heights primarily as a Gothic romance, perhaps Brontë’s greatest artistic and intellectual achievement lies in her negotiation of the legacies of Romanticism and eighteenth-century Evangelicalism into a sustained exploration of human cruelty, suffering, and failure that remains open to possibilities of liberation, reconciliation, and restored wholeness.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns From its opening paragraphs, Wuthering Heights establishes the strangeness of its imagined world. Like Lockwood, the reader enters into a domestic environment in which familiar social structures seem no longer to make sense. Introduced to “Mrs Heathcliff” – the second Catherine – Lockwood twice fails to identify her husband, looking first to Heathcliff and then to Hareton. Seeking to make polite conversation with her, he gestures to what he assumes to be her pets, only to discover that what he took to be “something like cats” is in fact “a heap of dead rabbits” (Brontë 2009, 7). Even the most basic social conventions of language seem to break down at the Heights. Lockwood has come to a place where an invitation to “walk in” is “uttered with closed teeth and expressed the sentiment, ‘Go to the Deuce!’” (2). Both Lockwood and the reader arrive as strangers in a place that signals from the outset that strangers are not welcome and which gives only the most grudging assistance to those seeking to navigate its social and linguistic eccentricities.

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Hostility towards the stranger is a key trope of Wuthering Heights, a novel that frequently emphasises the barriers – physical, social, or ideological – that separate individuals from each other, and which illustrates the difficulty and danger of seeking to cross its multiple thresholds. Ironically, perhaps, Lockwood himself provides the novel’s most striking image of this persistent refusal to entertain the stranger. During his first night at the Heights, Lockwood dozes while reading the diaries of the young Cathy. In the dream that follows, Cathy’s ghost appears at the window of her childhood bedroom in which Lockwood now sleeps. Attempting to silence the knocking at the window, Lockwood inadvertently breaks the glass and finds himself grasping “a little, ice-cold hand”: The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in – let me in!” “Who are you?” I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. “Catherine Linton,” it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton). “I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!” As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window – Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, “Let me in!” and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear. (Brontë 2009, 20–21)

Lockwood, himself a stranger allowed reluctantly into what he calls the “penetralium” (2) of Wuthering Heights, now uses violence to preserve the boundary of the house against one who seeks to penetrate it from outside. The broken window is an epistemological as well as a physical border: It represents for Lockwood the barrier between life and death, present and past, reason and unreason, civilisation and wildness (Mills 2007, 165–166). Lockwood attempts to re-establish a secure boundary: Reaching for the physical embodiments of reason and authority, he builds a barrier of books in front of the shattered glass. The scene stands as a metaphor for the hostility to the outsider that shapes the social world of Wuthering Heights. Barring Cathy’s spectre from entry into her childhood bedroom, Lockwood seeks to expel both the stranger and the disruptive forces that the stranger embodies. Similar efforts to preserve barriers against the stranger can be seen elsewhere in the novel. As a child, Heathcliff himself is a victim of this hostility to the outsider. Brought to the Heights from Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw, Heathcliff is met with resentment by the wider household. Mrs Earnshaw is “ready to fling it out of doors,” while Hindley and Cathy refuse to have the child in their bedroom and Nelly “put it on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow” (Brontë 2009, 31–32). These initial acts of hostility towards the defenceless child are often neglected in critical readings of the novel, which have tended to interpret Heathcliff and Cathy in terms of an original union that becomes divided as

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they move into adulthood (see section 4: Reception and Theoretical Perspectives). In fact, though they quickly develop a strong attachment to each other, their first encounter is marked by the same rejection of the outsider that is common to the social world of the novel. Heathcliff’s first arrival at Thrushcross Grange provokes a different kind of rejection, one that more fully reveals the discourses of class and race upon which the social hierarchy is based. When Heathcliff and Cathy are overheard laughing at the Linton children from outside their window, the Lintons set their dogs on them. Cathy is bitten, sustaining injuries that render her unable to run. At this moment, the two children are forcibly reminded of their different social statuses. Cathy, recognised as an Earnshaw, is taken into the Grange and given treatment for her wound. Heathcliff, too, is identified, but in his case the identification focuses on his socio-economic dependency and ethnic otherness: “I declare,” says Mr Linton, “that he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool – a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (Brontë 2009, 44). Heathcliff is expelled from the house into which Cathy is taken and is left to look in at her through the same window at which the two of them had watched the Linton children moments earlier. Describing the incident to Nelly, Heathcliff claims that “if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million fragments, unless they let her out” (44). Less easily shattered, however, are the social barriers that now separate Heathcliff and Cathy. Cathy’s induction into the Lintons’ world of social and economic privilege marks the beginning of the conflicted desires that culminate in her choice of Edgar Linton as husband. The choice of Heathcliff or Edgar as husband is for Cathy also a choice between two different modes of being, or two versions of the self. Cathy describes her relationship with Heathcliff in terms of ontological union: “Whatever our souls are made of,” she tells Nelly, “his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire” (Brontë 2009, 71). Her love for Edgar, conversely, is framed in terms of socioeconomic prudence and conventional romantic feeling: She loves him because he is “handsome, and pleasant to be with,” “young and cheerful,” “because he loves me,” and because “he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband” (69). From Cathy’s own perspective, then, her choice of husband is the choice between the emotional and psychological sympathy that she shares with Heathcliff – sympathy that is always defined in opposition to its wider social context – and the social advantage to be gained by conformity to the normative, socially-sanctioned version of romance offered by Edgar. Cathy’s acceptance of Edgar’s proposal, which prompts Heathcliff’s departure, is a decisive moment in the fragmentation of her identity, a fragmentation that gathers renewed momentum when Heathcliff returns from his three-year absence as a wealthy gentleman. As Mrs Linton, Cathy becomes estranged from her own

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past and unrecognisable to herself, as she admits in another confession to Nelly during her final illness: But supposing at twelve years old I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every early association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and been converted in a stroke into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger; an exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world – You may fancy a glimpse of the abyss where I grovelled! [. . .] I wish I were out of doors – I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free . . . and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills . . . Open the window again wide, fasten it open! (Brontë 2009, 111)

Once again, a window stands as a physical barrier between Cathy and the remembered psychological wholeness and coherence for which she longs. As this semidelirious speech makes clear, however, the window is only a physical representation of the impossibility of the return that Cathy desires. She seeks to undo the passage of time and history, to return to her childhood self before she entered the ‘exile’ of her life as Mrs Linton (we may here recall Lockwood’s surprise when the ghost-child of his dream uses the married woman’s name). The window functions as a symbol of the multiple conceptual oppositions that shape the novel and of the imaginative and ideological barriers that maintain them as oppositions: between civilisation and wilderness, domesticity and nature, adulthood and childhood, society and individuality. Wuthering Heights, then, is a novel of boundaries. It depicts the barriers – social, psychological, and ideological as well as literal – that divide people from each other. It also shows the ways in which these individual boundaries are representative of a fragmented society, in which strangers are unwelcome and moralistic judgement supersedes mercy. What becomes visible here is a form of social collapse exemplified in the first half of Lockwood’s dream when an Evangelical congregation descends into violence, each seeking to exact vengeance upon the sinner guilty of the unforgivable sin and each unable to identify either the sinner or the sin (Brontë 2009, 18–20). In this context, Cathy’s often-expressed desire for union both with Heathcliff and with the natural world reflects an aspiration towards wholeness and integration that is always in tension with the exclusions and divisions that shape her society. Emily Brontë shares with the Romantics the imaginative aspiration to see the individual as part of a greater totality. Cathy’s confession to Nelly Dean of her feelings for Heathcliff employs this Romantic discourse overtly: I cannot express it; but surely you and every body have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. (72–73)

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Cathy describes Heathcliff as the source of her integration with the natural world, a trope echoed in her later descriptions of herself as in exile, estranged from her world, and separated from nature by the confines of domesticity at Thrushcross Grange. Her dream of expulsion from heaven, in which she is flung “into the heath on top of Wuthering Heights” before she wakes “sobbing for joy” (71) demonstrates the collapse of differentiation between Heathcliff and the heath recalled by his name, and shows Cathy’s desire for restored harmony with both Heathcliff and the natural world.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies A key question for readers of Wuthering Heights, then, is whether the novel allows a resolution of its various conflicts and divisions. If the narrative brings into view both a fragmented society and a parallel fragmentation of the self, does it also suggest that what is broken might be made whole again? In order to assess the kind of resolution offered by Wuthering Heights, we must pay attention not only to the ending of the novel, but also to the narrative techniques that work to render that ending ambiguous. Two aspects of Brontë’s narrative style – the unreliable narrator and the use of repetition – work together to complicate our reading of the novel’s conclusion. Wuthering Heights is a polyphonic novel that incorporates multiple narrative voices. Rather than simply shifting between different narrators, Brontë employs a layered narrative structure containing several levels of narration. The whole of the novel is narrated by Lockwood, but from chapter four onwards he mostly reports the words of Nelly Dean, who in turn relays stories told by Heathcliff, Cathy, Isabella, and others. None of these narrators speaks from a position of objectivity or neutrality; all of them are implicated in, or have vested interests in, the stories that they tell. Lockwood himself hints at an unspecified degree of editorial intervention in Nelly’s narrative: “I’ll continue it in her own words,” he tells us at the beginning of the second volume, “only a little condensed” (Brontë 2009, 137). Lockwood is prone to misunderstanding and is unfamiliar with the social world and conventions of the Heights. Yet, if Lockwood’s narrative is limited by his status as an outsider, Nelly Dean shows that unreliability might also be the result of a narrator being too close to her subject. Nelly is part of the events that she narrates and, at times, seeks to justify her own conduct: her decision to withhold from Catherine the fact that Heathcliff can hear her speak of her engagement to Edgar Linton demonstrates both Nelly’s understanding of the power of words to shape events and the extent to which questions might be asked of her own moral responsibility for the novel’s unfolding tragedies (71–72). None of the novel’s various narrators can offer an entirely reliable view of events; none of them can offer a secure or definitive moral perspective upon those events.

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A further level of narrative complexity is introduced by the novel’s persistent use of repetition. Characters and events seem to repeat themselves throughout the novel, particularly between the two generations of its main protagonists. The romance between Hareton and Catherine that develops in the novel’s closing chapters has seemed to many readers a second version of the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy, this time one that succeeds in establishing itself in the socially-recognised form of marriage (Brontë 2009, 300). Catherine herself, born on the night of her mother’s death, seems in some way a renewal of Cathy, though, as Heathcliff points out, the stronger physical resemblance to Cathy is borne by Hareton, her nephew (288). The sequence of names that the young Cathy carves into the window ledge of her childhood bedroom – “Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff and then again to Catherine Linton” (15) – perhaps better describes her daughter: the first Catherine never becomes Catherine Heathcliff, but her daughter legally holds all three names at different points in the novel. Indeed, names themselves recur in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff, nameless when he arrives at the Heights, is given the name of an Earnshaw sibling who died in childhood (32). Linton Heathcliff’s name is given to him by his mother to spite his father; it is a symbol of the enmity between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. The recurrence of names points to a still longer history of repetition. When Lockwood arrives at the Heights, he observes carved above the door the name “Hareton Earnshaw” and the date “1500” (2); when he leaves for the final time, a Hareton Earnshaw is again master of Wuthering Heights. The ending of the novel brings into view both the questions of narrative reliability and the structure of repetition that have been present throughout the text. Brontë gives us a conclusion that seems to combine two different kinds of ending, one located in the social world and the other in ambiguous glimpses of life beyond the grave. Hareton and Catherine achieve the stable, sustainable romance that was never experienced by their predecessors: a stability made possible, perhaps, by the lesser intensity of their feelings. Where Cathy had seen in Heathcliff a marriage that would “degrade” her socially, her daughter teaches Hareton to read and thus helps him to become the “young man, respectably dressed, and seated at a table, having a book before him” (Brontë 2009, 273) that Lockwood encounters on his return to Wuthering Heights. Our final glimpse of the couple sees them standing together on the door-stones of the Heights (300), locating them symbolically and literally at the interstices between inside and outside, civilisation and nature, domesticity and wildness. Leaving the Heights for the final time, Lockwood passes the churchyard in which Heathcliff, Cathy, and Edgar are buried. In place of closure, the novel’s final sentences seem to foreground the questions of interpretation that have persisted throughout the narrative:

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I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor – the middle one grey, and half buried in heath – Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf, and moss creeping up its foot – Heathcliff’s still bare. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. (Brontë 2009, 300)

Lockwood’s narrative ends with one more attempt to exclude the novel’s ghosts, this time by reassuring himself of the quietness of the earth in which their physical remains are buried. Yet these final sentences paradoxically raise the very spectres that they seek to exorcise. Lockwood’s final image of the dead at rest in their graves – an image that invokes the alternative that it seeks to exclude – contrasts with the imaginative and symbolic life of the scene he has described. The “heath, and hare-bells” around the graves suggest the names of Heathcliff and Hareton, extending the association of these characters with the natural world that has been developed through the narrative; the description of Cathy’s grave “half buried in heath” is an uncanny image of erotic embrace. The “soft wind breathing through the grass” recalls both the wind as a symbol of imaginative inspiration in Romantic poetry and, as Lisa Wang (2000) has shown, the Christian imagery of the Holy Spirit as both wind and breath. Despite Lockwood’s best efforts, the ending of his narrative neither consigns Heathcliff and Cathy to the grave nor leaves them to wander the moors as ghosts. The final scene of Wuthering Heights is one of openness rather than closure: It implicates the reader in the act of interpretation and reminds us that the meaning of the novel is not fixed or determined by the ending of its narrative.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Despite the ambiguities of the final scene of Wuthering Heights, the image of a ghostly reunion between Heathcliff and Cathy has become for many readers the truth of the novel’s ending. Lockwood’s failure to imagine a ghostly afterlife for the lovers is typically seen as further evidence of his limitations as a narrator. His inability to believe in them having become roaming ghosts is thus taken as a sign that the reader should do so. (It is not usually noted that the only one of the novel’s main characters who does claim to have seen the ghosts is Joseph.) This is not to say that this view of the novel should be rejected, but rather to suggest that the recognition of its prevalence provides an insight into the novel’s reception and, indirectly, into the hermeneutic questions it raises. In contemporary popular culture, Brontë’s novel has been understood and interpreted primarily as a Gothic romance, a reading shaped significantly by William Wyler’s 1939 film adaptation that cast the relationship between Laurence

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Olivier’s Heathcliff and Merle Oberon’s Cathy as a love that outlasts the grave: The film ends with the lovers wandering the moors as ghosts and omits the secondgeneration characters. More recently, Stephenie Meyer has used Wuthering Heights as the basis for the paranormal love-triangle plot of Eclipse (2007), the third of her bestselling Twilight series. To a significant extent, the tendency of popular culture to view the novel primarily in terms of the Heathcliff-Cathy romance has been echoed in critical readings. Indeed, Lynne Pearce argues that critical readings of Wuthering Heights have frequently concealed “their own susceptibility to the discourse of romantic love: that is to say, the way in which the apparently overwhelming force of Catherine and Heathcliff’s love for one another becomes the text’s baseline ‘truth’ and raison d’être” (2007, 92–93). Pearce’s psychoanalytic interpretation offers a different view of its firstgeneration lovers: What begins as a symbiotic union in childhood gives way in their adult lives to a more destructive (and adulterous) psychological dynamics of narcissism (Cathy) and object-idealisation (Heathcliff). Most significantly, perhaps, Pearce shows that modern critical readings of Wuthering Heights have often been based on an unargued assumption that the novel was fundamentally a celebration of the love between Heathcliff and Cathy, and that the role of criticism is to understand the ways in which the strength of their passion for each other is contested by various external and/or internal pressures (2007, 92–102). The nature of these pressures varies according to the particular theoretical frameworks and methodologies applied to the novel, but the central view of the novel itself as a narrative of original union, division, and final reunion remains quite consistent. In order to understand the key developments of modern Brontë criticism, it is useful to survey some of the most influential of these readings before considering some of the new directions taken by more recent scholarship. J. Hillis Miller’s The Disappearance of God (1963) sees Romantic resonances in the narrative shape of Wuthering Heights. Miller observes of Heathcliff and Cathy: “Their love moves through a process of union, separation, and reunion on a higher level which appears often in writings in the romantic tradition, and is like the dialectic of Hegel or like Novalis’ vision of human life and history” (2000, 206). For Miller, Emily Brontë is one of several Victorian writers whose work responds to “the gradual withdrawal of God from the world” (1). Rather than insisting upon a Nietzschean ‘death of God’ narrative, Miller describes the nineteenth century as a time in which God is increasingly experienced as silent or absent; the divine “no longer inheres in the world as the force binding together all men and all things” (2, ↗ 3 God on the Wane?). Brontë, then, depicts a world in which communal relationships have broken down and the dominant version of religion is the moralistic and vindictive Calvinism of Joseph and Jabes Branderham. Against this background of social fragmentation, the Heathcliff-Cathy relationship represents an overwhelming force of love that not only achieves their own reunion against the psychological and social forces of division, but which becomes a point of reconnection between the human and the

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divine. “Wuthering Heights is dominated by an immense strain,” Miller argues, “the effort of longing and will necessary to pierce through to the supernatural world” (209). Heathcliff’s willingness to enter into the danger of loving unreservedly and without restraint effects nothing less than a restoration of the divine into the world. By the end of the novel, Miller argues, the “love of Heathcliff and Cathy has served as a new mediator between heaven and earth, and has made any other mediator for the time being superfluous. Their love has brought ‘the new heaven and the new earth’ into this fallen world as a present reality” (211). Where Miller reads the Heathcliff-Cathy relationship as a means of achieving transformation and renewal of society, Terry Eagleton’s Marxist study Myths of Power (1975) focuses on the social conditions and ideological tensions that threaten and disrupt the symbiotic union of their childhood. Their relationship, Eagleton argues, represents an attempt to “preserve the primordial moment of pre-social harmony, before the fall into history and oppression” (1975, 109). A union based on mutual sympathy in childhood is divided both by external socio-economic structures that emphasise their differences in social rank and wealth, and by their own awakened consciousness of these divisions. Eagleton writes: The loving equality between Catherine and Heathcliff stands, then, as a paradigm of human possibilities which reach beyond, and might ideally unlock, the tightly dominative system of the Heights. Yet at the same time Heathcliff’s mere presence fiercely intensifies that system’s harshness, twisting all the Earnshaw relationships into bitter antagonism. (103)

In two ways, then, the non-social nature of the Heathcliff-Cathy relationship introduces conflict into the novel. Because Cathy does not conceptualise her union with Heathcliff in social terms, she is able to convince herself that it will be unaffected by her socially sanctioned marriage to Edgar. At the same time, the freedom embodied by Heathcliff represents a challenge to the strict social hierarchies and power structures of the Heights and Grange and thus provokes a violent response. The novel, then, “projects a condition in which the available social languages are too warped and constrictive to be the bearers of love, freedom, and equality; and it follows that in such a condition those values can be sustained only in the realms of myth and metaphysics” (Eagleton 1975, 120). Heathcliff and Cathy are finally unable to establish their relationship as a social reality not simply as a result of an individual failure on their part, but because their love embodies an ideal irreconcilable with the prevailing ideology of their social context. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar take a different approach in their groundbreaking book The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Like Eagleton, Gilbert and Gubar read the Heathcliff-Cathy relationship in terms of original union divided by the pressures of social division. In their view, however, these pressures are best understood in terms of patriarchy and its policing of gendered identity and behaviour. The moment of crisis in the novel occurs when Cathy and Heathcliff visit Thrushcross Grange for

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the first time. Cathy, wounded by the Lintons’ dog, is taken into the house from which Heathcliff is excluded. In childhood, Heathcliff has been for Cathy “an alternative self or double,” who “gives the girl a fullness of being” and is “a complementary addition to her being who fleshes out all her lacks the way a bandage might staunch a wound” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000, 265). With her forced introduction into Thrushcross Grange comes socialisation into the norms of patriarchy, culminating in her choice of a socially advantageous marriage to Edgar Linton rather than her transgressive union with Heathcliff. By providing critical frameworks for discussion of important power structures – Calvinist theology and Evangelical authoritarianism, social class and economics, gender and patriarchy –, these readings have exerted significant influence upon subsequent criticism. In a detailed reception history of Emily Brontë and religion, Micael M. Clarke (2009) argues that Miller’s reading of Wuthering Heights has given rise to a critical tendency to read Brontë’s novel as a protest against or rejection of Christianity: Such readings, Clarke argues, emphasise Miller’s account of a vindictive, extreme Protestantism while neglecting the more benevolent and transformative Christian vision that Miller sees as equally integral to the novel. In Gilbert and Gubar’s reading, Christianity is identified with the structures of patriarchal oppression against which Brontë’s writings protest (2000: 248–308). Later feminist criticism has pointed to the lack of a female literary tradition within which Brontë might situate herself: Readings by Margaret Homans (1980), Irene Tayler (1990), and Stevie Davies (1994) have seen in Brontë’s writings an imaginative rebellion against the narratives, language, and power structures of patriarchal religious and literary traditions. Yet this critical approach has not gone unchallenged. Marianne Thormählen’s The Brontës and Religion (1999) not only offers a significant reappraisal of Emily Brontë’s relationship to Christianity, but suggests an alternative to romance as the most appropriate generic framework within which to understand Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s novel, Thormählen argues, is “a nineteenth-century Revenger’s Tragedy in which the avenger is never reconciled – Heathcliff seeks no forgiveness and grants none – but ultimately disarmed by the one force [i.e. love] that is stronger than his hatred” (119). Thormählen’s analysis is one of several recent readings that challenge the common view of Wuthering Heights as a celebration of the Heathcliff-Cathy relationship, pointing to the violence and selfishness of their behaviour as evidence that Brontë seeks to depict the destructive consequences of human vengeance. Emma Mason offers a different perspective, reading the novel as an analogy of the discourse of religious enthusiasm in Wesleyan theology. On this view, Heathcliff’s single-minded pursuit of Cathy is analogous to the intense religious passion associated with early Methodism (and towards which Wesley himself was ambivalent): Heathcliff and Cathy display an intensity of feeling that “offers a compelling metaphor for renewal and revision, but one that simultaneously threatens to overwhelm that which it promises to renew” (Mason 2006, 73).

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Few literary romances have produced such widely divergent critical responses to their central characters. For J. Hillis Miller, the love between Heathcliff and Cathy breaks through the separation between humanity and God, restoring divine love as immanent presence in the world. Conversely, for Lynne Pearce and Marianne Thormählen, Heathcliff and Cathy are damned by (respectively) their pursuit of an adulterous, socially and psychologically destructive relationship or the refusal of forgiveness to others by which, according to the standards of nineteenth-century Protestant ethics, they bring divine judgment upon themselves. Yet it is appropriate that the novel should yield such a wide range of competing readings. As Michael S. Macovski has observed, Wuthering Heights is “about the act of interpretation itself” (1994, 135). Its complex, multilayered narrative structure internalises the acts of storytelling and interpretation: At the end of the novel, as Lockwood stands beside the graves of Cathy, Heathcliff, and Edgar and contemplates the rumours of “unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (Brontë 2009, 300), the narrator’s attempts to make sense of his narrative remain incomplete. Macovski, however, does not draw out the full implications of his insight. In his reading, Nelly and Lockwood are to be regarded as unreliable narrators because they fail to grasp the truth of the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy (1994, 135–138). This argument, however, rests on the unargued assumption that Heathcliff and Cathy are reliable interpreters of themselves and of each other. It is far from clear that this is the case: Cathy, after all, tries to convince herself that Heathcliff “does not know what being in love is” (Brontë 2009, 72), while it is the supposedly unreliable Nelly who sees, against Cathy’s denials, that her intention of maintaining her relationship with Heathcliff while married to Edgar is unsustainable. If there is a hermeneutic key to Wuthering Heights, it is perhaps to be found in a brief aside by Nelly Dean. Reflecting upon the moral lessons to be drawn from the decline of Hindley, Nelly breaks the flow of her narrative to remark: “But you’ll not want to hear my moralising, Mr. Lockwood: you’ll judge as well as I can, all these things; at least, you’ll think you will, and that’s the same” (Brontë 2009, 163). Nelly’s comment articulates something of the hermeneutic challenge posed by Brontë’s novel. It insists that there is no interpretation that is not conditioned by ideology, assumption, prejudice, or preconception. It reminds us, as Nelly reminds Lockwood, that all of us believe ourselves to be judging truly insofar as our judgements satisfy our own predetermined criteria. Brontë gives us only one character who remains entirely confident in his own ability to judge others – and few readers would regard Joseph as an example to be emulated. By declining to provide an authoritative judgment on the characters and events of its own narrative, Wuthering Heights implicates its reader in the act of interpretation, which is also an act of moral and ethical judgment. In doing so, it reminds us that our interpretations too are unavoidably partial and limited.

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Bibliography Works Cited Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. London: Phoenix, 1995. Currer Bell [Brontë, Charlotte]. “Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights.” Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. By Ellis Bell [Emily Brontë] and Acton Bell [Anne Brontë]. Ed. Currer Bell [Charlotte Brontë]. London: Smith, Elder& Co., 1850. Rpt. in Wuthering Heights. Ed. Ian Jack. Introd. Helen Small. Oxford: OUP, 2009. 307–310. Brontë, Emily. The Complete Poems. Ed. Janet Gezari. London: Penguin, 1992. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Ed. Ian Jack. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Clarke, Micael M. “Emily Brontë’s ‘No Coward Soul’ and the Need for a Religious Literary Criticism.” Victorians Institute Journal 37 (2009): 195–223. Davies, Stevie. Emily Brontë: Heretic. London: Women’s, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. London: Macmillan, 1975. Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 1857. Ed. Angus Easson. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Macovski, Michael S. Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse. New York: OUP, 1994. Marsden, Simon. Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Mason, Emma. “The Clue to the Brontës? Methodism and Wuthering Heights.” Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000. Ed. Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 69–77. Meyer, Stephenie. Eclipse. London: Atom, 2007. Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. 3rd ed. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. Mills, Kevin. Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007. Pearce, Lynne. Romance Writing. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Tayler, Irene. Holy Ghosts: The Male Muses of Emily and Charlotte Brontë. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Thormählen, Marianne. The Brontës and Religion. Cambridge: CUP, 1999. Wang, Lisa. “The Holy Spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Poetry.” Literature and Theology 14.2 (June 2000): 160–173. Wuthering Heights. Dir. William Wyler. United Artists, 1939.

Further Reading Chitham, Edward. The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë at Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995. Gezari, Janet. Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems. Oxford: OUP, 2007. Knoepflmacher, U. C. Wuthering Heights: A Study. Athens: Ohio UP, 1989. Reardon, Bernard. Religion in the Age of Romanticism. Cambridge: CUP, 1985. Wheeler, Michael. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.

Joanna Rostek

12 Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (1847) Abstract: This chapter argues that Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is comparable to its eponymous heroine and to standard portrayals of its author: under the ostensibly self-controlled, plain, and unassertive exterior linger hidden depths of anger and despair. This makes Agnes Grey interesting both from a psychological point of view and as a historical document giving insight into the situation of English middle-class women in the 1840s. The chapter demonstrates that besides engaging in topics such as women and work, religion, education, and human-animal relationships, Agnes Grey both unwittingly reflects and consciously condemns an oppressive class and gender ideology that curtails the scope of female agency. Relating Brontë’s novel to nineteenth-century women’s writing as analysed by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the chapter argues that Agnes Grey reworks the tropes of imprisonment, a split sense of self, and a deviant double and that it constitutes a noteworthy contribution to Victorian literary representations of female identities. Keywords: Female identity formation, psychological effects of gender norms, Madwoman in the Attic, social criticism, governess trade

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment For those wishing to get a notion of the psychological effects of the limited economic agency of Victorian women, Anne Brontë’s two novels are cases in point. The youngest of the Brontës relied on her own experience in penning them, as in the course of her short life she engaged in two of the few acceptable professions middle-class women could pursue: governessing and authorship. Born on 17 January 1820, Anne spent the first fifteen years of her life at Haworth Parsonage. Like her siblings, she was a creative child, fond of reading and writing. Together with Emily, to whom she felt united by a strong albeit sometimes fraught bond, she created the Gondal saga which the sisters intermittently developed as a private pleasure well into their twenties. In 1835, Anne was sent to Roe Head School to take the place of the homesick Emily. Though unhappy to be away from Haworth herself, she remained there until 1837. After two more years at home, with no clear prospect either of marriage or an inheritance that would secure her economic needs, Anne took up her first post as governess with the Ingham family at Blake Hall, near Mirfield, some twenty miles from Haworth. Employed in April 1839, she was dismissed as early as December, allegedly because the children had not made sufficient progress. Five months later, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-013

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Anne set out for her second post, this time as a governess with the Robinson family at Thorp Green, near York. Despite recurring moments of personal anguish – traces of which can be found in her novels and poems – she remained there until 1845, which marks her out as the most enduring employee of all the Brontë siblings. Anne’s return to Haworth brought the governess episode to an end and heralded the onset of the sisters’ literary career. Yet that path, too, entailed risks for a woman, as the masculine pseudonyms famously chosen by the Brontës show: 1846 saw the publication of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. In 1847, Thomas Newby issued Ellis’s Wuthering Heights (↗ 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights) and Acton’s Agnes Grey as a three-volume work. While Anne’s first novel was largely overlooked by critics, the second, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (first and second edition in 1848), received numerous, if mixed, reviews. That same year, Fraser’s Magazine published two of Anne’s poems. The literary success of those years, however, was not matched by a blissful private life. In September 1848, Anne’s brother Branwell died after a prolonged addiction to alcohol and opium. Three months later, Emily succumbed to consumption. At that point, Anne was already showing the same distressing symptoms as her sister. Despite medical treatment and a change of air provided by a trip to her beloved seaside, she did not recover. Anne Brontë died in Scarborough on 28 May 1849, only twenty-nine years old. While the facts of Anne Brontë’s life are thus quickly summed up, it is much more complicated to reconstruct how she felt, not least because merely five letters and two diary entries of Anne’s have survived. Those seeking to gain a first-hand impression of her character therefore often take recourse to Agnes Grey’s initial paragraph, in which the narrator avers that “shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture, and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend” (Brontë 2004, 3). This assertion, together with a similar passage in Anne’s “Preface” to The Tenant, has established a tradition of viewing Agnes Grey as the author’s semi-autobiography. Several obvious parallels between Agnes’s and Anne’s careers invite this approach, the most salient being the employment as a governess at two different households. There are also similarities between the ages and possibly even personalities of Agnes’s fictional and Anne’s real pupils (Chitham 1991, 61; Goreau 2004, xxxvi–xxxvii). The emotional and psychological disposition of author and heroine seem to match, too. Agnes, for example, complains during her work for the Murrays that she is “an alien among strangers” (Brontë 2004, 63) and “lonely – never, from month to month, from year to year, except during my brief intervals of rest at home, did I see one creature to whom I could open my heart, or freely speak my thoughts with any hope of sympathy, or even comprehension” (96). A similar feeling of solitude and dejection pervades several poems composed by Anne. The first two stanzas of her “Lines Written at Thorp Green” (1840), for example, read:

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O! I am weary Though tears no longer flow; My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe. My life is very lonely, My days pass heavily; I’m weary of repining, Wilt thou not come to me? (Brontë 1979, ll.1–8)

In Agnes Grey, the curate Edward Weston mitigates the protagonist’s sense of existential loneliness. Who is it, then, for whom Anne Brontë repines in the poem above? Several critics maintain that Weston was to some extent modelled on Patrick Brontë’s curate William Weightman, for whom Anne is said to have cherished a deep, though unfulfilled, affection (Chitham 1991, 80; Leaver 2012, 349–350). The autobiographical dimension of Anne Brontë’s fiction was given further weight by Charlotte Brontë’s comment on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel that recounts the gradual decline and alcoholism of the heroine Helen Huntingdon’s first husband. Some reviewers took issue with the realistic portrayal of Arthur Huntingdon’s deplorable state and the rendering of obscene language, scenes of bawdry, and sexual attraction. In the “Biographical Notice” of 1850, Charlotte rushed to her late sister’s defence by putting forward Anne’s personal experiences as an explanation for the choice of the unfeminine topic: “[Anne] had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused [. . .]” (2004, lxi). Charlotte here alludes to their brother Branwell’s infatuation with his married employer Lydia Robinson and to his subsequent fatal addictions. Anne was more exposed to her brother’s disgrace than Emily or Charlotte since she was working for the Robinsons alongside Branwell. Again, it would seem, she used her fiction as a means of responding to personal crises. But even if Agnes Grey or Helen Huntingdon might share certain experiences, feelings, and traits of personality with their creator, they are not to be confused with Anne Brontë. There are, first and foremost, significant departures at the level of plot. The relatively happy marriages and motherhood of both heroines, for example, were denied to the author, to Anne’s considerable regret, as several of her poems testify (for instance, “A Voice from the Dungeon” [1837], “Verses to a Child” [1838]). Even more crucially, a too strong focus on the autobiographical dimension risks overshadowing the artistic and aesthetic merits of Anne’s fiction. Although with some 200 pages her first novel is a rather slim volume by nineteenth-century standards, it tackles social concerns with a complexity and audacity that tends to be overlooked at first glance. In this respect, Agnes Grey is comparable to its eponymous heroine and to standard portrayals of its author: Under the ostensibly self-controlled, plain, and unassertive exterior linger hidden depths of anger and despair. This makes Agnes Grey interesting both from a psychological point of view and as a historical document giving insight into the situation of English middle-class women in the 1840s.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Besides engaging in topics such as class, religion, and education, Agnes Grey both unwittingly reflects and consciously criticises an oppressive gender ideology that curtails the scope of female agency (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). As such, the novel can be related to nineteenth-century women’s writing as analysed by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Gilbert and Gubar argue that Victorian women had to repress and disown deeply felt desires in order to adhere to ideals of feminine propriety and to secure social acceptance. The resulting self-monitoring could lead to intense self-doubt and even selfloathing if women discovered that parts of their personality were incongruous with socially expected behaviour. Female identities thus became a battle ground for fierce inner conflicts, with the culturally acceptable sense of self attempting to subdue ‘dark’ and ‘fearsome’ personality traits. Gilbert and Gubar draw attention to three crucial tropes through which nineteenth-century female authors processed these dilemmas in their novels and poems: (i) the staging of various “separations within the self” (1979, 359); (ii) images of imprisonment that reflect women’s “central symbolic drama of enclosure and escape” (85); (iii) the creation of deviant doubles that act out the heroines’ (and authors’) hidden desires (78). Gilbert and Gubar make extensive use of Charlotte’s and Emily’s fiction to illustrate their points, but they pay scant attention to Anne. However, the claims made in The Madwoman in the Attic can be fruitfully applied to elucidate the specific contribution of Agnes Grey to Victorian literary representations of female identities. Agnes Grey constitutes a paradigmatic example of a female heroine suffering from a split sense of self. Like Jane Eyre (↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre), she is plagued by a perpetual sense of injustice. Agnes resents being looked down upon and slighted by her employers whom she has to obey even though she deems them uncultivated, cruel, arrogant, and hypocritical. She complains that her “powers were so limited” (Brontë 2004, 27) through barriers imposed not by the intrinsic merit of her person, but through the extrinsic markers of class and gender. But whereas Jane Eyre vents her anger, Agnes’s inner conflict is not unleashed on the outside world but kept precisely that: a thoroughly inward affair. This makes Agnes at first glance less interesting than the defiant Jane or the impulsive Catherines of Wuthering Heights and might explain why the complexity of her inner ordeals has remained unnoticed for a long time. Yet it is not the case that Anne fails to feel love, jealousy, despair, and rage, but rather that she consciously strives to subdue and hide these feelings. “I chose to keep silence, and bear all” (49) she claims, thereby combining a deliberate act of will (“I chose”) with overt submission. This gesture of merging inner resolve with outer meekness reappears time and again: “I determined to refrain from striking [. . .] even in self-defence” (27); “I manfully strove to suppress all visible signs of molestation” (28). Formulations such as “I chose,” “I determined,” “I manfully strove” convey a sense of autonomy and agency.

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They stem from Agnes’s defiant and adventurous self – the self that made her leave her sheltered home and loving family to seek paid employment. While this part of her identity prompts her to speak out, to protest, or to strike, a stronger counterpart prevents her from acting on her feelings. Partly because of her personality and upbringing, and partly because she has internalised restrictive gender norms, Agnes seeks to turn what she perceives as futile and condemnable passions against themselves. She diverts the energy sparked by her inner rebellion into the external performance of exaggerated submission. Her demure exterior thus comes at an enormous, yet invisible, cost – invisible but to her and the careful reader. Agnes is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her outer and her inner self. One instance out of many in which she perceives a frustrating disparity between her calm outside and her tumultuous inside occurs when she comments on a poem of hers that “cold and languid as the lines may seem, it was almost a passion of grief to which they owed their being” (Brontë 2004, 142). While secretly harbouring a growing affection for the curate Edward Weston she notes: “I was a close and resolute dissembler [. . .]. My prayers, my tears, my wishes, fears, and lamentations, were witnessed by myself and Heaven alone” (142). This statement is not strictly accurate, however, because Agnes’s emotional ordeals are consciously shared with us, the readers of the novel. We therefore witness the consistent discrepancy between Agnes’s inward desires and outer behaviour, which can render Agnes Grey quite an excruciating reading experience, as we perceive the heroine’s lonely acts of self-repression. When, for example, the young Tom Bloomfield envisages new ways of tormenting animals, Agnes retorts: “I am determined you shall do nothing of the kind, as long as I have power to prevent it” (21). Yet this bold claim to power is made only “internally” (21), while the ‘outward’ Agnes watches Tom violate norms she holds dear. After she is dismissed and confronted with false accusations by her unamiable employer Mrs Bloomfield, she admits: “I wished to say something in my own justification, but in attempting to speak, I felt my voice falter” (49). Jane Eyre’s story is that of a governess finding a voice (Frawley 2008, 488). Jane speaks up for herself and counters her antagonists, thus paving the way for modern readers’ emotional relief and a sense of poetic justice. Agnes, by contrast, deliberately chooses not to retort and to uphold the gulf between inner and outer experience. In the words of Janet H. Freeman, she “learns to keep still” (1997, 68). As I will explain presently, it is paradoxically from this self-silencing that Agnes derives a sense of self-worth. Gilbert and Gubar claim that “[d]ramatizations of imprisonment and escape are so all-pervasive in nineteenth-century literature by women that [. . .] they represent a uniquely female tradition in this period” (1979, 85). On the face of it, Agnes Grey seems to contradict this diagnosis, given the heroine’s voluntary spatial mobility. Agnes twice chooses to leave her home and become a governess, against the wishes of her family. One could argue, of course, that the harsh treatment and humiliation she endures as a “hireling among strangers, despised and trampled upon by old and young” (Brontë 2004, 165) constitute symbolic acts of imprisonment. In such a

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reading, Agnes’s eventual retreat to a seaside town (which is usually taken to represent Scarborough) would signify a means of escape. This is, after all, where she begins “a new mode of life” (164) by establishing a school with her mother and where she becomes reunited with her future husband Edward Weston. But such a positive reading is complicated in at least two respects. Firstly, as Maggie Berg shows, Agnes “does not make a straightforward discovery of autonomy and equality” within her marriage, but “rather, like Jane Eyre after her, she discovers the ‘new servitude’ of ‘a good master’” (2002, 190). Susan Meyer likewise illustrates that Agnes’s marriage fixes her in just another hierarchical constellation: “If there is a problem even with Agnes’s marriage to the good and gentle Mr Weston, [. . .] it is because the relationship between men and women unfortunately mimics the relationship between the wealthy and the poor” (2003, 144). These readings suggest that despite the relative contentment ultimately professed by its protagonist, Agnes Grey is not a tale of straightforward female emancipation culminating in the heroine’s literal or metaphorical escape. Secondly, and more crucially perhaps, a Foucauldian logic is at play throughout Agnes Grey that makes the heroine become her own, most ardent jailer. The imprisonment she suffers from is not primarily one of the body, even if she is at times subjected to assaults by her unruly pupils. Her confinement is above all psychological and thus, in the end, much more difficult to escape. In this context, it is imperative to note that Agnes’s internalised self-monitoring is to a high degree the product of social norms. This is explicitly voiced by Weston who surmises that “[t]he fault” for Agnes’s dejection “is partly in society, and partly, I should think, in your immediate neighbours, and partly, too, in yourself” (Brontë 2004, 127). As a narrator, Agnes pays equal attention to all three factors: She critically examines her own traits of character, but she also perceives the flaws of society and her upper-class employers. Meyer shows that “[i]n this novel about a heroine who is, at crucial moments, nearly speechless, Anne Brontë explores the nature of a society that makes it quite literally the ‘business’ of some of its members ‘not to speak’” (2003, 133). Thus, “[t]he novel clearly demonstrates that the ‘business’ of being a governess is one completely at odds with all healthful self-expression” (135). To a large extent, therefore, Agnes’s damaging self-silencing results from class and gender expectations. Her second employer, Mrs Murray, makes explicit that a good governess “lives in obscurity,” “loses sight of herself” and does not “yield to indolence or self-indulgence” (Brontë 2004, 148–149). Failure to obey may lead to immediate sanctions, as Agnes knows at this point, since during her first employment at Wellwood Nurse Betty was dismissed after chastising the tyrannical Bloomfield children (43). This incident highlights the limited choice of nineteenth-century (gentle) women forced to make a living: either to practice self-restraint and bear humiliation or risk unemployment and thus poverty if they dared to vent their accumulated frustration.

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In view of this predicament, it is hardly surprising that Agnes opts for selfcontrol and sublimation. In fact, it is telling that immediately before she learns of Betty’s dismissal, Agnes is insulted by the overbearing Mr Bloomfield. Instead of rebutting his unfounded accusations, she reacts with a highly symbolic gesture: “getting up; and, seizing the poker, I dashed it repeatedly into the cinders, and stirred them up with unwonted energy; thus easing my irritation, under pretence of mending the fire” (Brontë 2004, 42). Agnes’s desire to be active (getting up), to seize male power (gripping the phallic poker), to defend herself (dashing), and to let loose her emotions (the energetic stirring of the fire) has to be veiled and transposed into a benign activity of domestic service (mending the fire) that is congruent with her socially inferior station as a hired employee. Again, therefore, Agnes’s rebellious energies are contained and rerouted to produce the semblance of the exact opposite of rebelliousness. Difficult as it might be for modern readers to witness these efforts at dissimulation, they give an insight into what it must have been like to be a sensitive, intelligent, and educated woman subjected to Victorian gender and class norms. At the same time – and this renders Agnes a psychologically interesting protagonist – her internalised practice of self-repression cannot, as she knows herself, be exclusively blamed on social expectations. Anne Brontë avows in her autobiographical poem “Self-Communion”: “And my worst enemies, I know / Are those within my breast” (1979, ll.301–302), and to a certain degree, this also holds true for the heroine of Agnes Grey. Although Agnes’s attitude at times borders on the masochistic, she adheres to it, because it is from self-repression that she derives self-worth. Katherine Hallemeier points out that “one feels as the narrative goes on that Agnes rather enjoys shame – that she seeks it out precisely because it distinguishes her from the employers she never admits she loathes” (2013, 255). A revealing example can be found towards the end of the novel when Agnes reluctantly agrees to visit Ashby Park, the new home of her former pupil Rosalie. Though no longer obliged to please Rosalie, she nevertheless accepts the invitation, but notes: “I made a great sacrifice for her, and did violence to my feelings in many ways” (Brontë 2004, 169). During the visit, Rosalie expects Agnes to admire the rich interiors of the landed estate. Though Agnes’s initial impulse is to refuse what she deems a degrading experience, “immediately conscience whispered, ‘Why should I disappoint her to save my pride? No – rather let me sacrifice my pride to give her a little innocent gratification’” (172). These examples illustrate Agnes’s constant and exhausting inner dialogue between pleasure and duty. She keeps addressing “my sterner to my softer self” (165), with the latter inevitably losing out. Such acts of “sacrifice” (169, 172) trigger in her both a sense of self-worth and selfcontempt: Agnes ends up proud of and frustrated by the predictable outcome of her inner battles. In Freudian terms, while she applauds the fortitude of her superego, she also suffers from the suppression of her id. The ego meanwhile finds no rest, as it remains torn between the two conflicting poles. As such, the putatively calm Agnes is at bottom akin to the impulsive Catherine Earnshaw/Linton of Wuthering Heights, who is

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driven to insanity and death by the impossibility of reconciling her id (Heathcliff) with her superego (Edgar Linton). In a somewhat comparable manner, though with a more consolatory outcome, Agnes hovers between self-praise for her heroic “perseverance” (27, 28, 33, 49) and self-contempt for her tendency towards “reasoning [that] prevented me from making any sufficient effort to shake off my fetters” (143). She loves and loathes the prison of which she is both inmate and overseer. So far, I have demonstrated that Agnes Grey features two central tropes of nineteenth-century women’s literature identified in the Madwoman in the Attic: the separation of the self and imprisonment. Gilbert and Gubar point to depraved doubles as a third common trope: [B]y projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or poem), female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them. What this means, however, is that the madwoman in literature by women is not merely [. . .] an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage. (1979, 78)

Agnes Grey does not feature such starkly ‘deviant’ characters as Bertha Mason or Heathcliff. Yet in a similar way that Bertha is “Jane’s truest and darkest double” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 360) and Catherine, in her own famous words, is Heathcliff, Agnes Grey likewise features a double, if only a domesticated one: Rosalie Murray, Agnes’s pupil at Horton Lodge. At first glance, Rosalie is a very unlikely candidate for a deviant double. Beautiful, rich, spoilt, mercenary, self-centred, and conceited, she seems to embody just another literary middle-class criticism of the upper-class ideal of femininity. Given her constant preoccupation with charming men and attracting a rich husband, she moreover appears to support patriarchal norms, rather than challenge them. But on a deeper level, Rosalie does things that the novel’s heroine secretly wishes to be capable of herself. While Agnes, for example, engages in self-denial, Rosalie fails “to moderate her desires, to control her temper or bridle her will, or to sacrifice her own pleasure for the good of others” (Brontë 2004, 64). In contrast to Agnes, she unabashedly communicates her wishes, regardless of how much they may go against decorum and ideals of female modesty: [I]f I could be always young, I would be always single. I should like to enjoy myself thoroughly, and coquet with all the world, till I am on the verge of being called an old maid; and then, to escape the infamy of that, after having made ten thousand conquests, to break all their hearts save one, by marrying some high-born, rich, indulgent husband, whom, on the other hand, fifty ladies were dying to have. (78–79)

Rosalie’s self-confidence, pride, recklessness, and egoism are characteristics that Agnes with her split sense of self simultaneously admires and rejects. Though in a less obvious manner than Bertha in Jane Eyre, Rosalie acts out some of the heroine’s

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deeply held wishes, as is borne out by Rosalie’s treatment of the rector Mr Hatfield. Agnes devotes two chapters to the censure of Hatfield’s arrogant, heartless, and harmful way of discharging his clerical duties, but her disapproval is, as usual, conveyed indirectly and ex-post to the readers of her intimate narrative. Rosalie, by contrast, uses her charms to entice the pompous rector, only to haughtily reject his proposal of matrimony. She then congratulates herself on having “humbled Mr Hatfield so charmingly” (121): “I was not a bit taken by surprise, not a bit confused, or awkward, or foolish; I just acted and spoke as I ought to have done, and was completely my own mistress throughout” (122). Whether justifiably or not, Rosalie claims for herself all the characteristics that her governess – who deplores her own “unattractive exterior, [. . .] unamiable reserve, [and] foolish diffidence” (166) – feels to be lacking. Though Agnes declares to be shocked at Rosalie’s “perfidy” (Brontë 2004, 120) and feels “sorry for her” (122), she nevertheless asks herself whether she “envied” her buoyant pupil. Her reply, as can be expected, is: “I did not – at least I firmly believe I did not” (122). But the qualifying part of the sentence makes clear that Agnes is not entirely sure whether she can trust her own professed nonchalance. And rightly so, given that an avowal she makes afterwards inadvertently exposes her jealousy: “I wondered why so much beauty should be given to those who made so bad a use of it, and denied to some who would make it a benefit to both themselves and others” (122). When forced to observe Rosalie’s flirtatious conversation with Weston, Agnes again admits: “I listened with envy to her easy, rapid flow of utterance [. . .]” (128). While Agnes is unable to assert her affection for Weston and suffers in silent agony, Rosalie boasts: “I intend him to feel my power – he has felt it already, indeed – but he shall acknowledge it too [. . .]” (133). Rosalie, then, neither doubts her power over men nor does she have any scruples about exerting that power for her own amusement. But since Victorian gender norms censure such a boisterous attitude in a woman, Agnes – and through her, Anne Brontë – act accordingly. Rosalie is not only condemned and pitied by the narrator, but also punished in terms of plot, as she ends up the unhappy wife of Sir Thomas Ashby, to whom she “must be a prisoner and a slave” (179). Rosalie’s marriage has a consolatory dimension for nineteenth-century middle-class female readers, as it suggests that a rich, beautiful, and self-confident woman is ultimately just as much subjected to the coercive forces of patriarchy and moneyed interest as her poor, plain, and diffident counterpart. Her sad fate moreover serves as another admonition for Victorian women to curb their desires and valorises Agnes’s self-repression. By preventively keeping herself low, she, in contrast to Rosalie, leaves to others less scope for subduing her. Given this attitude, it is no wonder that Agnes’s marriage to Weston and her rather brusque and dry description of it at the end of the narrative fall short – at least to modern readers – of a convincing happy ending. The novel’s major asset is surely not that it provides emotional satisfaction to readers, but that it reveals why

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emotional satisfaction was so hard to achieve for women in Agnes Grey’s and Anne Brontë’s social, economic, and cultural circumstances.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Agnes Grey features an autodiegetic narration. Starting with a short summary of Agnes’s childhood, the events are described in retrospect by the adult narrator, who at the point of rendering her story is no longer a governess but a married mother of three. This trajectory, together with the highly self-reflective narrator-as-protagonist, her spatial mobility, and her conflict with social norms, calls to mind the patterns of the Bildungsroman (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology). But because the self-effacement practised by Agnes to some extent precludes the development of an autonomous self, critics have reached very different conclusions as to the novel’s relationship to this genre. While Cates Baldridge terms Agnes Grey a “Bildungsroman That Isn’t” (1993), Larry H. Peer avers the exact opposite, by counting Agnes Grey among “the first true Bildungsromane created in England” (2006, 145). Agnes claims to have compiled her tale from a diary which she kept as a governess (Brontë 2004, 192). This authenticating strategy adds credibility to her autobiographic tale, the publication of which is driven by three principal motives: an overt one of instruction and the two more covert aims of social criticism and therapeutic self-expression. The didactic rationale behind the narrative is established right at the outset, with the first words of the novel paraphrasing a classical motto: “All true histories contain instruction” (3). As Marianne Thormählen notes, to contemporary readers such an opening looks “aggressively flat” (2014, 335), but it conforms to the gendered genre conventions of the time, when young women were still advised against excessive novel reading and encouraged to peruse didactic fiction instead. Until the mid-nineteenth century, conduct manuals and didactic literature were among the most accepted avenues for women into authorship, and it is possible that Agnes’s/Anne’s insistence on the usefulness of her text to some extent reflects this. Accordingly, Agnes offsets her “fear of trespassing too much upon the reader’s patience, as, perhaps, I have already done” with her hope of performing her (female) duty: “but if a parent has, therefrom, gathered any useful hint, or an unfortunate governess received thereby the slightest benefit, I am well rewarded for my pains” (Brontë 2004, 35). The statement suggests that the target audience of the novel are parents (more likely mothers) as well as fellow governesses. This, however, means that Agnes Grey is not only a text of instruction, but also a veiled selfhelp book of sorts providing consolation to other “unfortunate” (35) women who have undergone similar trials as the protagonist. The fact that such consolation is deemed necessary in turn gestures towards the social criticism transported by the novel. Agnes’s account partakes in the larger nineteenth-century debate on the

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governessing profession, but it also tackles the hypocrisy of the clergy, the arrogance of the upper classes, the oppressiveness of patriarchy, and cruelty towards animals. The wide scope of this critique does not come out immediately, because it is cloaked under the heading of “instruction” and put forward by a self-debasing narrator who keeps foregrounding “my own ill-temper” (27), “my own fault” (70), or “my own stupidity” (128). In truth, however, Agnes is anything but stupid. Her narration is not just a means of indicting gender and class injustice, but also a form of self-therapy and self-empowerment. As I have shown, throughout her work as a governess, Agnes suffers from a split sense of self, with her outer behaviour departing significantly from her inner experience. Sharing her thoughts and feelings with a wider audience allows her to bridge that divide, at least ex-post. By turning her intimate diary into a public narrative, Agnes can vindicate herself and demonstrate that what she appeared to be on the outside is not how she felt within. The publication of her tale thus constitutes a postponed act of self-expression and a means of defining herself, instead of being defined by others. Though George Moore’s much-repeated dictum that Agnes Grey was “the most perfect prose narrative in English literature” (qtd. in Thormählen 2014, 332) might not be universally shared, critics agree that Anne’s novels should be noted for their devotion to nineteenth-century realism (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology). Although she was involved in the creation of the Gondal saga together with her sister Emily, Anne avoids Romantic, supernatural and Gothic elements in her fiction, foregrounding down-to-earth, sober, and often painful facets of life instead. She formulates her claim to literary realism in her “Preface” to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: but when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? [. . .] Oh, reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts – this whispering, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience. (Brontë 1996, 4)

In Agnes Grey, the realistic-cum-didactic approach entails the selection of settings which Anne had visited herself and the depiction of characters from social strata she was familiar with. The straightforward, unspectacular plot evolves at a slow, even pace. Anne moreover pays attention to direct speech, which she employs as a means of indirect characterisation. She has representatives of the local community use a literary dialect that serves as a marker of their class and regional identity. The poor cottager Nancy Brown, for example, extensively relates her encounters with the local clergy, contrasting Hatfield’s callousness with Weston’s empathy. Her speech is generally rendered in a literary variant of the regional dialect, though in a

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slight aesthetic incongruity, Nancy reproduces Hatfield’s and Weston’s words in standard English (which might be put down to a subsequent, if somewhat patronising, editing of Nancy’s tale by Agnes). Incidentally, even if in this passage the male representatives of the clergy retain the authority to spread the word of God, the strengths and weaknesses of their religious doctrines are ultimately explored by a female author (Anne Brontë) who has two female characters (Nancy and Agnes) debate and evaluate Hatfield’s and Weston’s propositions. In sum, despite privileging personal issues, Anne’s novels, with their mixture of realism, didacticism, and social commentary, partake in the ascent of the Victorian realist novel which from the 1840s onward would become a privileged genre for the exploration of public concerns.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives It is a commonplace that compared with her sisters, Anne Brontë has received a lesser share of scholarly interest. This is evinced by seminal readings of the Brontës’ fiction, such as Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) or Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (1975) by Terry Eagleton, who is of the opinion that “the orthodox critical judgement that Anne Brontë’s work is slighter than her sisters’ is just” (1988, 134). Susan Meyer’s perceptive essay on social resistance in Agnes Grey was published in the mid-1990s in a volume tellingly titled Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction, while the first collection of essays exclusively devoted to Anne’s literary art was edited as late as 2001 by Julie Nash and Barbara A. Suess. Encouragingly, however, it has also become a commonplace for those exploring Anne Brontë’s work to make a case for acknowledging the merits of her work. Before suggesting a few theoretical vantage points from which Anne’s writing can be profitably approached, it is interesting to consider for a moment the possible reasons for her lingering relative obscurity. Thormählen, in an essay with the programmatic title “Anne Brontë Out of the Shadow,” offers several convincing explanations, one of which goes back to the publishing history of Agnes Grey, which in 1847 appeared together with Wuthering Heights as the last part of a triple decker. In contrast to her sister’s novel, Anne’s work conformed more closely to the ideal of feminine modesty and propriety, but precisely its seeming conventionality, its eponymous greyness, made it appear tamer and less interesting (Thormählen 2014, 330). In addition to that, for over a century, Anne was often perceived through the eyes of Charlotte, who immortalised her youngest sister in the “Biographical Notice” as milder and more subdued; she [Anne] wanted the power, the fire, the originality of her sister [Emily], but was well-endowed with quiet virtues of her own. Long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the

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shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted. (Brontë 2004, lxiii)

It is hardly surprising that generations of readers and critics prefer(red) to devote their time to the “power,” “fire,” and “originality” of Emily (or Charlotte), rather than to their seemingly tranquil and boring sister. Though Charlotte’s juxtaposition of ‘Romantic’ Emily with ‘Victorian’ Anne is not downright inaccurate, it nevertheless fails to do full justice to the youngest Brontë. Notably, the characteristics Charlotte ascribes to Anne to a large extent hold true of her first fictional heroine, Agnes Grey. But as I have argued, the very point in Agnes Grey is that the protagonist uses her narration to lift the “nun-like veil” and lay bare her tormented inner self – her suppressed power, fire, and originality. It is therefore a cruel irony that Charlotte should have cloaked her sister’s complex attempt at self-expression and social criticism under a silencing veil of her own. Anne Brontë’s fiction can be in fact uncovered from a number of theoretical perspectives, four of which I highlight in what follows: 1) The most obvious and so far most frequently applied lens has been provided by the field of gender studies. Anne has been termed “A Quiet Feminist” by Marion Shaw (2013), and as my own reading of Agnes Grey has attempted to demonstrate, feminist and psychological interpretations of her writing reveal Anne Brontë’s concern with female self-expression and identity. Besides, Agnes Grey investigates various concepts of masculinity (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). Agnes’s father, the Reverend Richard Grey, is a kind but weak man, whose self-pity has to be compensated by Anne’s “active, managing” (Brontë 2004, 8) mother. The upperclass men for whom Anne works – Mr Bloomfield and his son Tom, Uncle Robson, Mr Murray – display a resolve and hardiness that is wanting in her father, but their brutal masculinity is rejected as too ruthless and self-serving. The “thoughtful and stern” Edward Weston comes closest to the novel’s ideal of manliness, as he unites “decision of character,” “an eye of singular power,” and “firm purpose” – characteristics that the female protagonist sees as lacking in herself – with “true benevolence and gentle, considerate kindness” (98). 2) Due to the ‘governess theme’ and the prevalence of class issues, Agnes Grey lends itself formidably to various forms of economic criticism. In his early Marxist reading of Agnes Grey, Eagleton accuses Anne of separating the personal from the social and of foregrounding morality rather than the subversive force of the imagination (1988, 136–137). Contrarily, Nora Gilbert has recently contended that the connection between the governessing profession and women’s literary writing – of which Agnes Grey offers a paradigmatic instance – blurs the lines “between work and domesticity, between isolation and privacy, between subjugation and liberation” (2015, 480). From a feminist economic vantage point, Agnes Grey encourages female financial agency and independence, as is evidenced by the school run by the protagonist and her resourceful mother. Via the economically incompetent

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Richard Grey and Rosalie’s unhappy marriage it moreover cautions female readers not to rely too strongly on the financial benefits of matrimony. 3) Given its emphasis on nature and the (im)proper treatment of animals, Agnes Grey can be productively analysed through the lens of ecocriticism and animal studies. An exploitative attitude to nature (hunting, birdnesting, excessive consumption of meat) serves as an emblem of unjust class privilege. As Berg has illustrated, the novel additionally establishes “structural links between women and animals” (2002, 176), so that it can be read as “a feminist vegetarian text – a text which connects meat eating to male domination” (183). Marilyn Sheridan Gardner has moreover analysed the connection between food and “Agnes’s ongoing acculturation into the Victorian society” (2001, 45). 4) Taking stock of extant criticism on the youngest Brontë sister, Thormählen observed in 2014 that “[t]he relevance of contemporary social issues to the novels of Anne Brontë is a field of inquiry in which much remains to be done” (337). With regard to Agnes Grey, historical and cultural contextualisations have been to some extent provided by essays on religion (Leaver 2012; Summers 2012; Thormählen 2012), the governessing profession (Gilbert 2015; Rossman Regaignon 2001), and education (Shaw 2013). Meyer has tentatively explored Agnes Grey’s criticism of class differences against the background of the British Empire. She concludes that “[i]t does not seem to occur to Anne Brontë to question British colonialism or to criticize the concept of a racial hierarchy [. . .]; she simply uses the supposed racial hierarchy as a metaphor to question the class hierarchy” (2003, 139). As the preliminary and incomplete list of theoretical approaches suggests, there yet exists a plethora of open research questions on Anne Brontë’s work that would merit further scrutiny. But given the limited scope of this contribution, “now I think I have said sufficient” (Brontë 2004, 193), to quote Agnes Grey’s last words – words that capture the peculiar mixture of determination and effacement so distinctive of her split self.

Bibliography Works Cited Brontë, Anne. Agnes Grey. 1847. Ed. Angeline Goreau. London: Penguin, 2004. Brontë, Anne. “A Voice from the Dungeon.” 1837. Brontë, The Poems of Anne Brontë 60–61. Brontë, Anne. “Lines Written at Thorp Green.” 1840. Brontë, The Poems of Anne Brontë 75. Brontë, Anne. The Poems of Anne Brontë: A New Text and Commentary. Ed. Edward Chitham. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979. Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1848. Ed. Stevie Davies. London: Penguin, 1996.

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Brontë, Anne. “Preface to the Second Edition.” 1848. Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 3–5. Brontë, Anne. “Self-Communion.” 1847–1848. Brontë, The Poems of Anne Brontë 152–161. Brontë, Anne. “Verses to a Child.” 1838. Brontë, The Poems of Anne Brontë 69–71. Brontë, Charlotte. “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell.” 1850. Brontë, Agnes Grey lvii–lxiv. Baldridge, Cates. “Agnes Grey: Brontë’s Bildungsroman That Isn’t.” Journal of Narrative Technique 23.1 (1993): 31–45. Web. 3 Aug. 2016. Berg, Maggie. “‘Hapless Dependents’: Women and Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey.” Studies in the Novel 34.2 (2002): 177–197. Web. 15 July 2016. Chitham, Edward. A Life of Anne Brontë. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Frawley, Maria. “The Victorian Age, 1832–1901.” English Literature in Context. Ed. Paul Poplawski. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. 403–518. Freeman, Janet H. “Discord in the Parsonage, or, How to Speak (or Not Speak) for Yourself: Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre.” Brontë Society Transactions 22.1 (1997): 65–71. Gardner, Marilyn Sheridan. “‘The Food of My Life’: Agnes Grey at Wellwood House.” Nash and Suess 45–62. Gilbert, Nora. “A Servitude of One’s Own: Isolation, Authorship, and the Nineteenth-Century British Governess.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 69.4 (2015): 455–480. Web. 15 July 2016. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Goreau, Angeline. Introduction. 1988. Brontë Agnes Grey vii-xlvii. Hallemeier, Katherine. “Anne Brontë’s Shameful Agnes Grey.” Victorian Literature and Culture 41.2 (2013): 251–260. Web. 3 Aug. 2016. Leaver, Elizabeth. “The Critique of the Priest in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society 37.4 (2012): 345–351. Meyer, Susan. “Words on ‘Great Vulgar Sheets’: Writing and Social Resistance in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847).” The Brontës. Ed. Patricia Ingham. London: Longman, 2003. 132–145. Longman Critical Readers. Nash, Julie, and Barbara A. Suess, eds. New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Peer, Larry H. “The Discourse of Religious Bildung in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey.” Romanticism: Comparative Discourses. Ed. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 143–151. Rossman Regaignon, Dara. “Instructive Sufficiency: Re-Reading the Governess through Agnes Grey.” Victorian Literature and Culture 29.1 (2001): 85–108. Web. 15 July 2016. Shaw, Marion. “Anne Brontë: A Quiet Feminist.” Brontë Society Transactions 21.4 (2013): 125–135. Summers, Mary. “Fact to Fiction: Anne Brontë Replicates La Trobe’s Biblically Inspired Advice in Scenes from Agnes Grey.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society 37.4 (2012): 352–358. Thormählen, Marianne. “Anne Brontë and Her Bible.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society 37.4 (2012): 339–344. Thormählen, Marianne. “Standing Alone: Anne Brontë Out of the Shadow.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society 39.4 (2014): 330–340.

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Further Reading Allott, Miriam, eds. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1974. Berry, Elizabeth Hollis. Anne Brontë’s Radical Vision: Structures of Consciousness. Victoria: U of Victoria P, 1994. Betty, Jay. Anne Brontë. Horndorn: Northcote, 2000. Writer’s and Their Work. Frawley, Maria H. Anne Brontë. New York: Twayne, 1996. Guérin, Winifred. Anne Brontë. London: Allen. 1976. Han, Catherine Paula. “The Myth of Anne Brontë.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society 42.1 (2017): 48–59. Hay, Adelle. Anne Brontë Reimagined: A View from the Twenty-First Century. Salford: Saraband, 2020. Holland, Nick. Crave the Rose: Anne Brontë at 200. Scarborough: Valley Press, 2020. Langland, Elizabeth. Anne Brontë: The Other One. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Le Guern, Joseph. Anne Brontë (1820–1849): La Vie et L’Oeuvre. Paris: Champion, 1977. Scott, P. J. M. Anne Brontë: A New Critical Assessment. London: Vision, 1983. Thormählen, Marianne, ed. The Brontës in Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2012.

Linda M. Shires

13 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–1848) Abstract: This chapter interprets Vanity Fair, serialised in 1847–1848 with illustrations by the author, in terms of cognitive processes. Thackeray’s ironising of both narrator and characters extends to his readers when he demands that they do more than sit back, after dinner, to underline a few words and feel self-satisfied. This chapter argues that through image and text Thackeray structures the process of reading he values by emphasising different cognitive processes, those registering visual and verbal information, collecting details, remembering, and rethinking. He works to block stereotyping or judgments based on a moral absolutism. Thackeray’s four distinct kinds of illustrations act reciprocally with the verbal text and with each other to engage the attentive reader. This relationship, however, is equally important across illustrations. In creating a cognitive ethics, Thackeray teaches his readers to compare, erase, and rethink the horrors and pleasures of Vanity Fair. Keywords: Irony, ethics, cognitive, image/text, satire

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), whose life spanned the Regency and early Victorian periods, was born, an only child, to Anglo-Indian parents, in Calcutta, India. Like many children of Anglo-Indians, William was sent to be educated as a gentleman in England. After attending boarding schools (including the Charterhouse School), which he would later denounce, Thackeray entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Staying there just two years, he travelled to the Continent, then studied law at the Middle Temple, London, before abandoning that profession to educate himself by extensive reading, travel, and art lessons abroad. Thackeray remains one of England’s most important writer-illustrators. Having squandered much of his paternal inheritance, Thackeray was forced to earn money as a journalist, writing to deadline. Yet he also began to write novels. Starting with Catherine (1839–1840) and The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), he achieved fame with Vanity Fair (1847–1848). He then published Pendennis (1849), The History of Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1855), and The Virginians (1857–1859). During his lifetime, Thackeray was equally known for his Punch essays and cartoons, travel notebooks, satires, light verse, parodies, essay collections, and a children’s book. Although other nineteenth-century novelists spread their talents across genres, the number of pseudonyms and personae Thackeray invented – along with linguistic or visual https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-014

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codes – seems unique. Sometimes appearing as Ikey Solomons, Esq. Junior, Hibernis Hibernior, M.A. Titmarsh, Théophile Wagstaff, George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Major Goliah Gahagan, Mr. Charles James Yellowplush, Mr. Snob, and Spec, Thackeray relied on masks and voices not only to depict his characters, but also to handle the fluctuating relations between his narrators and his readers. After marrying Isabella Shawe in 1836 while in Paris, Thackeray moved the couple back to London. To support his family, he often published over fifty articles a year in addition to novel-writing, lecturing, and illustrating. After one daughter died in infancy and after the birth of their third child, Isabella’s depression became a chronic mental illness that led to necessary confinement. Thackeray then raised his two surviving children, one of whom, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, became a writer and the other, Harriet Marian (‘Minnie’), the first wife of Leslie Stephen. During the 1850s, while his health worsened, Thackeray secured lucrative publishing contracts and lectured in the United States on two tours, while narrowly missing election to Parliament. He also served as a founding Editor at the Cornhill Magazine 1860–1862. Dying suddenly of a stroke in 1863 at the early age of fifty-two, he was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, honoured with a memorial bust in Westminster Abbey, and is largely remembered today for his finest novel, a satire of early nineteenth-century society.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns With strong claims to being “the greatest novel in the English language” (Carey 2002, ix), Vanity Fair repays close analysis. Serialised in twenty parts in Punch from January 1847 to July 1848, then published by Bradbury & Evans in 1848, it tells the parallel, interconnected stories of two young women: wealthy, passive, good Amelia Sedley and poor, feisty, amoral Rebecca Sharp. Beginning on graduation day from Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, the novel invites the reader to compare and contrast the two classmates’ respective evolutions. Against a backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, their backgrounds, marriages, children, loss of husbands, later attachments, and value systems are steadily counterpointed. Becky, “the little adventuress” (Thackeray 1990, 524), uses her brains and siren-like eyes to get ahead. Although she hardly escapes the narrator’s censure for her machinations and cruel behaviour, she excites the reader by defying the conformism demanded by a patriarchal society. In contrast, polite and dutiful Amelia seems to be “the heroine,” a title awarded by the narrator for her good nature (15). Yet this attribution is ironic, for the 1848 volume version’s subtitle, “A Novel without a Hero,” indicates that, while there may be protagonists, there are neither heroes nor heroines in Thackeray’s world. Rejecting the Bildungsroman (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology) as model, Thackeray’s unfolding text demands that its readers relate to characters and events without elevating them.

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Vanity Fair deserves the intense critical scrutiny it has received. The ironic narrator’s steady subversion of Victorian moralism is at odds with the work of Thackeray’s contemporaries. Derived from John Bunyan’s religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the trope of ‘Vanity Fair’ differs in Thackeray’s hands. Translators of Ecclesiastes 1:2 had rendered the impermanence (‫ָהֶבל‬, vapour) of all earthly pursuits when compared to an unchanging realm as: ‘Vanitas vanitatum . . . omnia vanitas’ or ‘Vanity, vanity . . . all is vanity’. Bunyan’s year-round fair in a town called Vanity, established by Satan, features fools and knaves mixing with thieves, murderers, adulterers, and liars. Because the Holy Way to Heaven winds through the town, the pilgrims Christian and Faithful must shield their eyes from temptations, before being beaten, jailed, and tried. Thackeray’s fair, however, is a secular, hedonistic playground where good and evil are not as clearly demarcated. Symbolising frivolity, dalliance, and pretentious display, the fair conveys Thackeray’s satiric but melancholy vision of the world. As in Bunyan’s fair, all is for sale: material objects, animals, favours, feelings, persons, countries, even life itself. Instead of focusing on pilgrims who want to flee “Vanity Fair,” Thackeray features the social-climbing consumers who desire to stay alongside inhabitants of wealth and rank. He avoids Bunyan’s preaching by “suppressing” the Puritan inheritance (Milne 2015, 103). Although his narrator is part preacher and part entertainer, the ‘show’ he introduces ironically calls attention to the loss of religious meaning in a nineteenth-century social order. Influenced by Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), John Dryden’s translations of Juvenal’s Satires (1711), and Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Thackeray’s novel challenges its Victorian readership. As he explained to his mother in 1847: My object is not to make a perfect character or anything like it. Don’t you see how odious all the people are in the book (with the exception of Dobbin) – behind whom all there lies a dark moral I hope. What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase) greedy pompous mean perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior virtue. (Thackeray 1945, 309)

The novel’s vision remains secular; there is no Celestial City; there are transitory pleasures, with only a hint of anything both meaningful and lasting.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies If Thackeray gives a new twist to the Bunyanesque fair, he also revises the picaresque mode that goes back to Miguel de Cervantes and to imitators like Henry Fielding. Vanity Fair retains the picaresque’s episodic structure, but overtly stresses parallelism, revises viewpoints (via text and illustrations), and provides retrospection (via serial format). Because it features irony, the novel does not only present likenesses and correspondences, but also demands a more complicated reaction to

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each item individually and together. When a comparison exists within the ironic mode, as J. Hillis Miller has pointed out, “the second meaning undoes the first” (1982, 104–105). A second image, a second character, a second description is never like the first, but effectively erases the first. Irony thus offers a “permanent negativity,” a blurring or confusion of sense and a separation as much as a correspondence (Miller 1982, 105). Irony forces a revision of one’s assumptions; it suffuses Vanity Fair so thoroughly, in fact, that one remains unsure whether any centre of value or certainty of meaning exists. In its emphasis on character, chance, and interruption, Vanity Fair thwarts a reader’s desire for traditional plotting and character identification. For Thackeray, plot means a narrative of striking incidents collected in the same place, like booths at a fair. Moreover, all characters are exposed, sooner or later, as being different than expected. Amelia may be kind-hearted, but she is a stupidly sentimental “tender little parasite” (Thackeray 1990, 871). George Osborne is a selfish pleasure hound, but dutifully writes a farewell letter to his father. The narrator continuously punctures a reader’s complacency (Knoepflmacher 1971, 64). Readers must constantly reevaluate different kinds of behaviour. Whereas an all-knowing narrator, such as George Eliot’s in Middlemarch (↗ 22 George Eliot, Middlemarch), can sort out confusions created by irony, the omniscience of Vanity Fair’s first-person narrative voice is countered by Thackeray’s verbal descriptions and illustrations. Three differing portraits of the narrator indicate how Vanity Fair toys with his identity to amuse and confuse the reader. The original cover illustration for the serial instalments feature a jester-preacher who stands on a tub and harangues a crowd that does not seem to be attending. Both preacher and audience sport asses’ ears that suggest idiocy may trump both morals and fun. In the background, England’s military heroes, Nelson and Wellington, are presented as non-heroes. In another picture of the narrator, a new frontispiece drawn for the novel’s 1848 edition, the clown-narrator sits on the ground, leaning against a puppet box, looking into a cracked mirror (Figure 1). He wears a wooden sword to indicate the absurdity of military glory. In a third illustration, in chapter nine at the end of a passage where the narrator mocks the value we place on money, the jester sits facing the reader-viewer. His stick is raised, but the comic mask is removed and peeking out is William Makepeace Thackeray himself. He now resembles a small boy playing with toys. Simultaneously, he is unmasked as an adult. His face reveals a mixture of sadness, surprise, and puzzlement. Thackeray is a quick-change artist who thwarts the reader’s expectations by denying us consistency and certainty at all levels of the novel. He distinguishes between author and narrator in the 1848 preface “Before the Curtain,” which introduces a man who strolls through the fair as an observer yet also refers to the Poor Tom Fool who sadly gazes at his image in the frontispiece of 1848. Later, the narrator will claim that he befriended Dobbin, served as Becky’s confidante, and became acquainted with Amelia. Is he an actor manager who appears to hold strong opinions, an objective

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Figure 1: Title Page. William Makepeace Thackeray, illustration for Vanity Fair: a novel without a hero. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848. Photographed from the personal copy of William Charles Macready. EC85 T3255 848vb Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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observer, or a member of the world he satirises? Indeed, as if to mock his listeners, he poses questions he refuses to answer: “Was she guilty or not? What had happened?” (Thackeray 1990, 677). Thackeray’s aim was to goad readers, not delight them. “I want to leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story,” he wrote to Robert Bell, a critic who complained that the illustrations would corrupt children’s morals (Thackeray 1945, 503). “Good God don’t I see (in that maybe warped and cracked looking-glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses wickednesses lusts follies shortcomings? [. . .] We must lift up our voices about these and howl to a congregation of fools; so much at least has been my endeavour” (503). Vanity Fair forces us to suffer inconsistency and see beyond the fictions created by our own egoistic desires. Ultimately, Vanity Fair asks us to question the nature of the real. Attentive to objects, from whips to keyholes to mirrors to clocks to puppets, Thackeray is fascinated by how objects change hands over time and how they bear cultural, as well as personal, meanings. Yet his later The History of Henry Esmond reminds us that Thackeray’s realism is also always a historical and conscious reaction against the melodramatic, sentimental, or sensational productions of rivals like Charles Dickens (↗ 16 Charles Dickens, Bleak House) and Wilkie Collins (↗ 20 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone). Thackeray opposes falsifications. Responding to a review of his own work besides that of Dickens’s “charming” novels, he wrote (1851) to the critic David Masson, “[I hold] that the Art of Novels is to represent Nature [. . .] a coat is a coat and a poker a poker; and must be nothing else according to my ethics, not an embroidered tunic, nor a great red-hot instrument like the Pantomime weapon” (Thackeray 1945, 772–773). Reality based in fact surpasses all exaggerations created by human sentiment. Thackeray’s ironising of both narrator and characters extends to his readers when, in his very first chapter, he demands that we do not sit back, after a fine dinner of wine and mutton, to underline a few words and feel self-satisfied. Here, Thackeray’s mockery, through both word and image, seems to focus on the reader’s class and the book’s subject matter. The narrator insists that his novel is not offering the “great and heroical” narrative expected by readers like the upper-class, misogynistic, club member “Jones” (Thackeray 1990, 9). Moreover, the narrator mocks “Jones” for quick, complacent judgments that are not derived from attentive reading. The novel is deeply concerned with the nature of comprehension and understanding. Previous critics have rightly noted Thackeray’s many references to books (Lund 1992, Flint 2007, Dames 2007) and have analysed the actual reading of serials (Patten 2003, Lund 1992). While agreeing that the reader is the subject of Vanity Fair, I also would suggest, through a close analysis of image and text, that Thackeray uses irony to structure the process of reading he values. He does so by emphasising different cognitive processes, both visual and verbal, that stress registering information, collecting details, remembering, and rethinking, and hence are opposed to stereotyping or judgments based on a moral absolutism.

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Thackeray’s four distinct kinds of illustrations act reciprocally with the verbal text and with each other. Each serial instalment of the novel featured a full-plate steel engraving at the beginning with a caption (now placed inside chapters of the novel). Pictorial woodcut capital letters, modelled after a style in Punch, open each chapter. Small woodblock illustrations complicate reader reactions. Endblocks satirically comment on or reinforce the tone of chapters. Selectively or totally omitted by most modern novel editions, the illustrations have been judged as aesthetically inferior to other Victorian comic grotesques or as subsidiary echoes of the verbal text (Harvey 1970, Fisher 1995; but see Cook 2014 and Elliott 2003). However, the place between text and image is what theorist W. J. T. Mitchell calls a “third thing” or the “gap” (Mitchell 2015, 39). It is a contact zone where verbal and visual interact in the mind of the reader-viewer, a place where a reader explores the convergence and divergence of meanings, where something new emerges as the reader is invited to make sense of their relationships. Thackeray takes full advantage of this space in-between, forcing the reader-viewer to acknowledge an ocular fascination with spectacle and to try to feel with characters, while foregrounding the very process of sorting out what we see from what we feel and from what we know. Three different verbal and visual scenes featuring Baronet Sir Pitt Crawley play off of each other in order to question the desires and biases of any reader/viewer. Chapter seven of the fourth serial instalment features wealthy Sir Pitt at whose home Queens Crawley Rebecca has worked as a governess. A titled but low-bred and unpleasant man, Pitt appears in dirty clothing with a lustful twinkle in his eye. At the end of that instalment, in chapter fourteen, when Pitt offers to marry Becky, the narrator denigrates him by comparing him to a “satyr” (Thackeray 1990, 178). Part man, part goat, the classical satyr was a drunken chaser of nymphs. The narrator thus moves from physical disgust to a darker stereotyping. At the very same time, he ironically elevates Becky, as he concurrently exposes the little fortunehunter, by having her weep “some of the most genuine tears that ever fell from her eyes” when she admits “Oh, sir – I – I’m married already” (178). Thackeray brilliantly forces the reader of his original serial to wait a month for more information. At the start of the fifth instalment, chapter fifteen, the narrator subverts the Victorian addiction to romance: “Every reader of a sentimental turn (and we desire no other) must have been pleased with the tableau with which the last act of our little drama concluded; for what can be prettier than an image of Love on his knees before Beauty?” (Thackeray 1990, 179). But Pitt learns that Becky has married his son Rawdon. Appearance is one thing, reality another. Stereotypes may sometimes work (Sir Pitt is a satyr); but more often they don’t (Love and Beauty). Instead of a fairy tale ending in which Beauty can redeem her Beast, the scene ends with Sir Pitt’s rage at Becky’s deception. The relationship between the visual and verbal, however, is equally important across illustrations as a means of subversion. At the start of the fifth instalment with chapter fifteen, the pictorial capital E is shaped like a keyhole. Within the

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enclosed space, readers view a room in which a young knight on his knees, with hands covering his face, prays or weeps before a be-skirted statue, possibly that of a saint or the Virgin Mary. This image narratively reverses what has occurred, yet it is also subverted by a satyr-like figure who seems to cling to the frame of the keyhole. The pictorial thus complements the clash of contrary meanings. By indicating how long we have worshipped women, imagistically as well as verbally, and by reintroducing a satyr, Thackeray continues to contrast idealisation and immorality. Picturing an outside and an inside scene, he draws attention to public and private moralities. In other words, one may act like a satyr while thinking of oneself as a knight worshipping a female saint. By revealing that Sir Pitt’s kneeling before Becky hardly resembles a knight’s veneration of a virgin, Thackeray can mock the reader for objectification and voyeurism. When we turn the page to the next illustration, we discover that observers of a “sentimental turn” had happened “by chance” to witness the scene that ended so unromantically (Thackeray 1990, 179). Mrs. Firkin and Miss Briggs, a maid and lady-companion, “had also seen accidentally through the keyhole the old gentleman prostrate before the governess” (179). Thackeray uses these two voyeurs to expose our own companionate activities as readers and viewers. We, too, have peeked through the keyholes he offered, falsely idealising a crass reality. Because the illustrations are so crucial to the reading process for Vanity Fair, the drawing process can be highly instructive. The original sketch of “Rebecca’s Farewell” in chapter one of the novel (Figure 2) is recast in the printed serial version (Figure 3). Such a comparison allows us to grasp how Thackeray structures what and how we see, even though he remains fully aware that individual readers will look in divergent directions and vary in registering different details. Nevertheless, visual artists like Thackeray still invite patterns of focus through line and placement. Whereas the verbal text of chapter one subordinates the story of Becky Sharp to that of Amelia Sedley, the initial illustration (which preceded verbal text in the serial instalment version) insists on making Becky its main subject. Her prominence is established by the full-plate steel engraving that depicts their joint departure from Miss Pinkerton’s Academy. The image caption reads Rebecca’s Farewell and the image we see omits Amelia, although we know from reading the text that she sits in the carriage with Becky. Thackeray revised his original sketch that showed Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary flying over the head of the little girl who weeps to see Amelia depart. In the published version, Becky has become the centre of attention. We look up at her and the falling book she has tossed at the sentimental Miss Jemima. Our focus on up and down movement is re-emphasised by the two figures, whose hands are raised up, one to brush tears and the other to express horror. Thackeray emphasises Becky’s resistance to manners by having her literally throw down the privileged sign system for meaning: a book of verbal definitions. The large coach wheel, also more centred in the final version, predicts and retrospectively confirms the narrator’s much later characterisation of Becky’s “wild, roving nature” (Thackeray

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Figure 2: “Rebecca’s Farewell,” William Makepeace Thackeray, original sketch for Chapter 1 of serial Vanity Fair: a novel without a hero MS Hyde 93. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Figure 3: “Rebecca’s Farewell,” William Makepeace Thackeray, illustration for Vanity Fair: a novel without a hero. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848. Photographed from the personal copy of William Charles Macready. EC85 T3255 848vb Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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1990, 830). The image itself rejects Bunyan as well as Johnson. The journey of life that lies before Becky will hardly be a pilgrim’s progress; no approved book, bible or dictionary, will weigh her down. Along with Becky’s face being darkly sharpened into a witch-like visage, the placement of the long lunge whip, extending visually above Becky’s head, is not accidental. The horsewhip, floating above her, comments on her own sudden thrusting motion, as it links her visually to animal pain and cruelty. While noticing such a detail may be retroactive, especially for those who have seen later illustrations linking her to curving lines (snakes, wands, whips), and while every whip pictured in the book is not linked to Becky, it may be considered a visual foreshadowing of later observations and narrative events. Yet there is more to be said. For this revised first illustration balances two key reactive emotions that the narrator will control, the affection and grief shown by the innocent little girl and the shock and horror evinced by Miss Jemima. A child’s pure sentiment and the defeat of an adult’s sentimental assumptions go hand in hand in the image. The illustration previews the novel as a whole. While the child’s sentiment is directed at passive Amelia, not Becky, the illustration complicates the responses articulated by the verbal text: so that sentimental identification vies with disgust. This doubleness of affect is reinforced by inclusion of two coachmen, two pillars, two urns, two windows, two chimneys. At the very same time, the illustration stresses the speed by which one affectual response can be replaced by the other. But even more, the image undermines, with Becky’s smile, both affectual responses, illustrating a space between image and text in the novel. The double response opens up a third area, that of ironic ridicule that questions the reality of deep feeling and of shock based on formulaic sentiment aimed at the wrong person. Thus the image works dialogically not only with the verbal text but with itself. The virtues professed here – affection, respect, kindness –, indicating the admiration Jemima feels before her surprise, are all exposed as questionable aspects of Victorian mentality and morality. And while readers may not understand the power of the text-image dialogue until a later reading, it may exert a subconscious influence nonetheless and be retained in memory. It is equally instructive to study a set of illustrations in a single chapter. Thackeray carefully designs illustrations to comment upon each other and on the verbal text – they may reinforce, challenge, revise, or destabilise each other. Chapter thirteen, entitled “Sentimental and Otherwise,” starts with George Osborne’s embarrassment over love notes that Amelia has sent to him. These letters have followed him from army post to army post and caused him to be teased by fellow officers. Osborne has always been a topic of conversation because the men adore his superior accomplishments of drinking more, bowling better, and seducing with style. Moreover, nobody knows the notes’ author. When William Dobbin, a friend who sincerely loves Amelia, demands that Osborne stop flirting and be a man of honour by spending time with her, Osborne promises reform when married. Amelia, meanwhile, sits at Russell Square waiting. When George finally arrives, he sports a new diamond

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stickpin he bought with money Dobbin lent him to buy a gift for her. After a few hours, George sends her to his sisters, so he can continue with his more important duties of shopping and billiards. That night he learns that Amelia’s family has gone bankrupt and his father commands him to marry someone else. The pictorial “I” (Figure 4) opening this chapter demonstrates that no matter what occurs in the pages that follow, Osborne is interested only in himself. One might hope that when he looks into the mirror he sees more than his dark curls, whiskers, and self-satisfied smile, but the “playful placement” of that “I” right on the reflection of his head, as Elliott notes, “renders it a horn as well as a grapheme, a mythological allusion strengthened by a verbal reference to him as ‘a devil of a fellow’ in the adjoining paragraph” (2013, 75). While stressing his bachelor freedom, sexual potency, and single-mindedness at the same time, the face and reflection differ, as Elliott points out, so that in the reflection his head floats without a neck. Thackeray has it both ways – stressing his self-absorption while punishing him. It is no surprise that when Osborne is killed in battle, he lands face down in the mud. Whereas the verbal and pictorial here support each other in meaning, it is the back and forth observation of both separately and together that elicits a range of meanings.

Figure 4: “I,” William Makepeace Thackeray, illustration for Vanity Fair: a novel without a hero. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848. Photographed from the personal copy of William Charles Macready. EC85 T3255 848vb Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The illustration entitled “Lieutenant Osborne and his Ardent Love Letters” (Figure 5) shows George standing erectly with one knee on a chair, among his military friends,

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Figure 5: “Lieutenant Osborne and his Ardent Love Letters,” William Makepeace Thackeray, from illustrations for Vanity Fair: a novel without a hero. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848. Photographed from the personal copy of William Charles Macready. EC85 T3255 848vb Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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while using one of Amelia’s love letters to light his cigar. Her love evaporates, as it were, into smoke – consumed by George’s vanity – while a military underling at the regiment sits swinging his legs on a table and having a smoke as well. Dobbin sits uncomfortably against the far wall of the barracks room beneath a picture of a ballerina. It seems clear that Osborne or other men have put up the picture as a pin-up, as the svelte dancer poses with her right leg raised in the air. Dobbin notably does not share a smoke. His legs crossed, but his arms apart and open, he appears to be the passive, sentimental, but inhibited, proper young man. His long military coat ruffles form a skirt reinforcing his feminisation, as he sits beneath the portrait of a girl. The underling, in turn, partakes of the manly smoke while also parodying Osborne and Dobbin. He looks silly and his bearing makes a mockery of Osborne’s show of rectitude (which itself parodies, while reproducing visually, the tall thin “I” of the pictorial illustration), while his military skirt and easy leg and arm positioning call attention all the more to Dobbin’s uncomfortable position. In a smaller intertextual woodblock illustration that implicitly contrasts Amelia’s loneliness to George Osborne’s communion with his male friends and his situation among friends, she is depicted as staring out of a window. Unlike the male egoist who regarded his mirrored image in the pictorial “I” opening the chapter, she looks longingly (the verbal text indicates) at the moon and towards Osborne’s barracks. However we may empathise with this sweet, loving, and waiting woman, the picture also makes fun of her passivity, as she does nothing but sit, while mooning for her beloved (who is busy converting her love notes into tinder for his “I”-shaped cigar). “Mr. Osborne’s Welcome of Amelia,” the next full-page illustration, depicts the patriarchal foundations responsible for George Osborne’s excessive vanity. As “their dark leader,” the older Osborne, in a black-suited, full-length image, dominates the right foreground, while two daughters, Amelia Sedley and Miss Wirt, submissively stand or sit behind him (Thackeray 1990, 150). Described by the verbal text as bearing a face “puffy, solemn, and yellow at the best of times,” he is known by his “scowl,” his “growl,” and his “severity” (150, 153). Old Osborne’s very presence creates anxiety. Whereas two women stare away, the others look up or across at him, acknowledging his authority. Amelia, long ago betrothed to George, by their fathers’ arrangement, has joined the Osbornes for dinner. On the mantel sit a candelabrum (notably with four candles duplicating the four women) and a decorated timepiece with a single figure in a commanding position (duplicating Old Osborne’s domination). The figure appears to be a military man carrying a sword raised in the air. The verbal text tells us that the Osbornes keep time by a French chronometer “surmounted by a cheerful brass group of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia” (149). It is thus likely that the male statue we see is Agamemnon, husband of Clytemnestra, who, in classical myth, offends Artemis by killing a deer and is told to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia if he wants winds to sail his fleet to Troy. The accurate mechanical timekeeper on the mantle memorialises the sacrifice of a girl in a family tragedy. How “cheerful” could such a brass grouping be?

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An “observant reader” (Thackeray 1990, 147), who is directly addressed in this chapter, cannot line up the references one by one, because, while some seem obvious, they in fact are not. As Mr. Osborne scowls over his shoulder at the “four females” and four candles, he growls out a “blessing” that sounds like a “curse” (150). The chapter documents the sacrifice of Amelia to the concerns of men like Agamemnon, those obsessed with money, boats, battles, and fame. Her father Mr. Sedley, we discover, is in the process of losing his ship, the “Jeune Amelie,” to a Yankee Privateer. Is it Sedley or old Osborne who wields the sword that will sacrifice Amelia? Or is it George when he goes up to Amelia, kinder than ever on that evening, right after being told to find another wife? All? Although not a Greek tragedy, the situation begins to feel tragic. The illustrations all mock pretensions. Any affection George feels for Amelia stems from condescension, not warmth. What is the fate of true love in such a world? The last, the smallest illustration can be seen as a response to this question. A little boy Cupid brings a message to a door. Carrying a number of letters, the boy wears a tri-cornered military hat but has angel wings. He represents not only Amelia’s love for George but also Dobbin’s for Amelia. Dobbin has been the matchmaker between these two. The lanky, boring, repressed Dobbin is here cast as a little boy, pure of heart. But in promoting the match, and by suppressing his own love, he will become Amelia’s sacrifice. She too can now wield a sword against a deer/dear; she too can be an Agamemnon who sacrifices another for her own needs. The importance of this last illustration, however, lies not only in its multiple applications, or even in its mockery of little Cupid and big Dobbin, but also in its representation of time. Unlike most all other illustrations in the novel, this one transcends a single point in the narrative where it appears. It indicates that Dobbin has, over time, been bringing all the letters that Osborne has then boxed and vaporised. In other words, the illustration contains within it a temporal expansion of duration that can remind the reader of the painful endurance of true love. Our affections cannot be clocked by an accurate timepiece or simply burned away by a self-involved suitor. The illustration, due precisely to its extreme sentimentality, its very absurd artificiality, its silly reduction and elevation of Dobbin at once, is serious. Repeated self-sacrifice, not sacrificing others, is a virtue. By forcing the reader to reassess word and image as they interact and revise each other across his novel, Thackeray continually exposes our reading-viewing activities as cognitive processes to which we must attend. By looking, we acknowledge ourselves as part of a modern society and economy based on voyeurism, surveillance, and spectacle. By unpacking the varying relationships of images and verbal text to multiply meanings, not reduce them, we participate in a dialogic rhythm, established by the narrator, one of relentless substitution and critique. By exposing the cultural economies of the Victorians and their successors, Thackeray relishes his position of illustrator and writer in this system of satiric exchange. At this point in his life, Thackeray felt a new responsibility toward his readers that matched the obligations he assumed to the mother-deprived daughters, aged

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just nine and six years old, whose future lay in his hands. It is significant that the child characters who end Vanity Fair, Rawdy, Georgy, and little Janey, may turn out better than their parents due to the separate loving attentions of Dobbin and Jane Crawley. One of Thackeray’s most significant letters, dated 24 February 1847, written during the serialisation of Vanity Fair, stresses his recognition that the purpose of writing goes beyond a need to earn money or to entertain. In this letter, addressed to Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, Thackeray remarked: “A few years ago I should have sneered at the idea of setting up as a teacher at all, [. . .] but I have got to believe in the business, and in many other things since then. And our profession seems to me to be as serious as the Parson’s own” (Thackeray 1945, 282). In creating a cognitive ethics, Thackeray teaches his readers to compare, erase, and rethink the horrors and pleasures of Vanity Fair. Only through such a process of discrimination in life, not only in fiction, could unrecognised virtues appear and gain the support necessary to survive.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Thackeray’s writing, influenced by numerous intellectual currents during an era of enormous change, engaged reading audiences throughout the nineteenth century. Although Vanity Fair began with very slow sales, by 1848 each serial instalment had sold about 7,500 copies (Shillingsburg 1992, 266). As early as June 1847, the novel was recognised as his greatest writing to date and he was praised as “the Fielding of the Nineteenth Century” (Rev. 1967, 52). Charlotte Brontë, regarding Thackeray as a champion of truth and justice, dedicated Jane Eyre (↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) to him in October 1847. Vanity Fair remains his most-widely read piece of writing and the reason for his lasting fame. Yet no major Victorian novelist, according to David Stewart has provoked “so much adverse criticism, as has Thackeray” (1963, 629). Applauding his wit, pathos, and satiric realism, intellectuals still critiqued the novel. For instance, George Henry Lewes understood Thackeray’s “tear[ing] away the mask from life,” but felt that he erred aesthetically in revealing corruption everywhere (Lewes 1848, qtd. in Tillotson and Hawes 1968, 46). Harriet Martineau objected to the “moral disgust” (1877, qtd. in Peters 1987, 151). Even disciple and friend Anthony Trollope attacked Thackeray’s fictions for a lazy, faulty craftsmanship, especially in “contriving a story” (1879, qtd. in Sutherland 1974, 2). Historical movements in art and the novel did little to attract new admirers. The rise of the golden age of illustration (1860s onwards) disparaged precursors’ work, while Henry James’s 1890 negative assessment of “large, loose, baggy monsters” included Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1934, 84). If one were to read a “monster,” Dickens and George Eliot seemed better options, even if for different reasons. Though considered an important transitional

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figure from the eighteenth century to the modern era, Thackeray’s reputation declined. The single most important scholar in Thackeray studies was Gordon Norton Ray (1915–1986), renowned for collecting and editing the author’s private papers and letters, and for his two definitive biographical studies. Ray’s labours encouraged further archival research into biography (D. J. Taylor 1999) and study of his working methods (J. A. Sutherland 1974). While 1950s New Critics such as Dorothy Van Ghent (1954) vainly sought formal unity and a moral centre, it was during the same period that the author was finally disentangled from the narrator. As Robert Colby pointed out, Geoffrey Tillotson’s (1974) claim for the centrality of the narrator as actor in his own commentary allowed, for the first time, a focus on the strategies of the novel itself (1978, 127). Interpretations of Vanity Fair since then have especially benefited from theories of narrative, gender, race, cultural geography, and inter-art analysis. Precisely because Thackeray holds all belief open to question, critics have directed multiple perspectives at a text fascinated by how we make and re-make meaning. For example, Judith Fisher, drawing on narratology and ethics, brilliantly analyses how Thackeray encodes his scepticism about the reliability of traditional information in both style and structure (2002). Patrick Brantlinger explores the novel as a “domestic realist antithesis to imperial romances” (1988, 94). Matthew Ingleby studies the “nuanced nature” of Thackeray’s geographical project and the history of Bloomsbury, showing how “local history is always implicated in national and international history” (2016, 115). Other critics explore unequal power relationships with women, slaves, and the Jews (Clark 1995, Thomas 1993, Prawer 1992). Preceding thing theory, Andrew Miller’s work on commodification stresses the novel’s economics of words, not just objects (1995, 49). Maria DiBattista argues for the literalising of history as performance in the charade “The Triumph of Clytemnestra” (1980, 828), while other critics focus on the performativity of gender roles. Finally, Kamilla Elliott (2003) has used the novel to overturn false paradigms in which words and images are opposed to each other in fiction and film. Numerous types of academic discourse thus illuminate Vanity Fair from various angles, with no single approach exhausting the breadth or depth of the novel.

Bibliography Works Cited Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Carey, John. Introduction. Vanity Fair. By William Makepeace Thackeray. Ed. Carey. New York: Penguin, 2002. ix–xxxii.

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Colby, Robert. Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research. New York: MLA, 1978. Cook, Simon. “Thackeray and Illustration: Style and Purpose.” The Victorian Web, 16 Oct. 2014. Web. 11 July 2016. Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. New York: OUP, 2007. DiBattista, Maria. “The Triumph of Clytemnestra: The Charades in Vanity Fair.” PMLA 95.5 (1980): 827–837. Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. Fisher, Judith L. “Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray.” Victorian Literature and the Visual Imagination. Ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 60–87. Fisher, Judith L. Thackeray’s Skeptical Narrative and the ‘Perilous Trade’ of Authorship. New York: Routledge, 2002. Flint, Kate. “Women, Men and the Reading of Vanity Fair.” The Practice and Representation of Reading in England. Ed. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. 246–262. Harvey, John. Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970. Ingleby, Matthew. “Thackeray and Silver Fork Bloomsbury: Vanity Fair as Local Historical Novel.” Thackeray in Time: History, Memory, and Modernity. Ed. Richard Salmon and Alice Crossley. New York: Routledge, 2016. James, Henry. “Preface to The Tragic Muse.” The Art of the Novel. By James. Introd. Richard Blackmur. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934. 79–97. Knoepflmacher, U. C. Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. Lewes, George Henry. Rev. of Vanity Fair, by Thackeray. The Morning Chronicle 6 March 1848. Rpt. in Thackeray: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Geoffrey Tillotson and Donald Hawes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. 44–49. Lund, Michael. Reading Thackeray. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992. Miller, Andrew H. Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Milne, Kirsty. At Vanity Fair: From Bunyan to Thackeray. New York: OUP, 2015. Mitchell, W. J. T. Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. Patten, Robert L. “Serialized Retrospection in The Pickwick Papers.” Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. 123–142. Peters, Catherine. Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality. New York: OUP, 1987. Rev. of Vanity Fair, by Thackeray. The Sun 10 June 1847. Rpt. in Thackeray’s Critics: An Annotated Bibliography of British and American Criticism 1836–1901. Ed. Dudley Flamm. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1967. 52. Shillingsburg, Peter. Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992. Stewart, David. “Thackeray’s Modern Detractors.” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 48 (1963): 629–638. Sutherland, J. A. Thackeray at Work. London: Athlone, 1974. Taylor, D. J. Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999.

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Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Volume II: 1841–1851. Ed. Gordon Norton Ray. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1945. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair, A Novel without a Hero. 1848. Ed. John Sutherland. Oxford: OUP, 1990. Tillotson, Geoffrey. Thackeray the Novelist. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974. Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Harper & Row, 1954.

Further Reading Catalan, Zelma. The Politics of Irony in Thackeray’s Mature Fiction: Vanity Fair, The History of Henry Esmond, The Newcomes. Sophia: St. Kliment Ohridski UP, 2009. Clark, Micael. Thackeray and Women. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1995. Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reader as a Component Part in the Realistic Novel: Esthetic Effects in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.” The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. 101–120. Miller, J. Hillis. The Form of Victorian Fiction. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1968. Prawer, S. S. Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W. M. Thackeray. New York: E. J. Brill, 1992. Sheets, Robin Ann. “Art and Artistry in Vanity Fair.” ELH 42.3 (1975) 420–432. Thomas, Deborah. Thackeray and Slavery. Athens: Ohio UP, 1993.

Ellen Grünkemeier

14 Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848) Abstract: Drawing on the literary, cultural and historical contexts of industrialisation and urbanisation, this chapter reads Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) as a Condition-of-England novel that renders visible the social realities of urban life in the new manufacturing districts of Northern England. While addressing the inequalities and conflicts between industrialists and labourers, the novel does not openly advocate social or political change. Instead, the ending is informed by the principles of Unitarianism in that it seeks reconciliation, and it corresponds to (Victorian) literary traditions that offer romantic closure and individual solutions for the protagonists. Despite some melodramatic elements in its plot design, the novel follows the conventions of literary realism, as evident in the configurations of space and use of dialect. Given that Mary Barton is the cornerstone of Elizabeth Gaskell’s professional literary career, the chapter closes by tracing briefly the novel’s history of reception, from its anonymous publication in 1848 to the present day. Keywords: Industrialisation, urbanisation, Condition-of-England novel, realism, melodrama, Unitarianism, anonymous publication, female authorship

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) is best known for her industrial novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), but she also merits recognition for her historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and for her fiction foregrounding women’s lives, especially in rural communities, Cranford (1853), Ruth (1853), and Wives and Daughters (1866), which remained unfinished and was published posthumously. In addition to short fiction such as Cousin Phillis (1864), she also wrote the widely celebrated first biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë (1857). Although Mary Barton was her first novel, Elizabeth Gaskell was “hardly a complete literary novice” (Foster 2006, vii) when she published it in 1848. “Sketches among the Poor,” a poem which she co-authored with her husband William, was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1837, and William Howitt’s collection Visits to Remarkable Places (1840) features her short piece of non-fiction on Clopton House in Warwickshire. He went on to publish three of Gaskell’s short stories in Howitt’s Journal under the general heading “Life in Manchester”: “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras” (June 1847), “The Sexton’s Hero” (September 1847), and “Christmas https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-015

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Storms and Sunshine” (January 1848). While these stories were published under the pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills, Mary Barton was published anonymously. Anonymity was advantageous to Gaskell insofar as she lived among and socialised with many manufacturers in Manchester. As contemporary reviews show (Greg 1849, 403–404, 411; Rev. of Mary Barton 1849, 122, 130), some indeed felt offended by what they considered a biased and distorted portrayal of industrial capitalists. Although it soon became clear that Gaskell was the author of the texts, she continued to write anonymously. In her recent literary biography, Shirley Foster attributes this to Victorian gender politics (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). “As for many of her female contemporaries, too, worries about the effects of entering the literary marketplace led to her reluctance to use her own name as author” (Foster 2002, 3). Nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics tended to refer to her as ‘Mrs. Gaskell’; and this domesticating classification as wife (and mother) has had a lasting influence on the reception of her work (Stoneman 2007, 132). It was not until feminist criticism began to explore the mechanisms of patriarchy and to revisit literary history that ‘Mrs. Gaskell’ ultimately became canonised as ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’ (D’Albertis 2007, 14). Mary Barton is the cornerstone in Gaskell’s professional literary career. While her earlier writing was published due to the encouragement of friends such as William Howitt, her first novel brought her into direct contact with major publishers (Foster 2002, 40). Taking an increasingly active part in the publishing process, also in regard to negotiating her payment, she became “her own businesswoman, operating in a public, male-dominated sphere” (Foster 2002, 41). Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born into a prosperous, educated Unitarian family. After the early death of her mother, she grew up with maternal relations in Knutsford, which was, “despite its small-town image as recalled in several of Gaskell’s novels and short stories, [. . .] a thriving town of about three thousand inhabitants, containing a mix of gentry, tradesmen, and working-class spinners and weavers” (Foster 2002, 10). Her family was connected to “other leading families such as the Wedgwoods, Turners, and Darwins through shared faith, intermarriage, and commerce. The importance of this religious and social milieu, in terms of the young girl’s education and assumptions, is hard to overstate” (D’Albertis 2007, 17). In 1832, Elizabeth married the scholar and Unitarian minister William Gaskell. Subsequently, the Gaskells moved to Manchester, to the genteel district of Ardwick, close to the factories and working-class dwellings of Ancoats (Foster 2002, 23). As an industrial, commercial, and cultural centre, Manchester had a major impact on Gaskell: Despite the cultural and social richness which Manchester offered Gaskell, however, it was the encounter with social distress on a hitherto unknown scale which had the greatest effect on her. As a minister’s wife, she inevitably came into contact with this suffering population, the lowest in the city’s social scale, even while she refused to allow charitable work to dominate her life. (Foster 2002, 22)

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Overcoming the comfortable state of ignorance and distance, Gaskell began to question the spatial segregation of social classes in Manchester, which was most famously investigated by Friedrich Engels. In addition to her experiences in Knutsford and Manchester, Gaskell’s personal outlook and writing were shaped by Unitarianism with its emphasis on tolerance, forgiveness, free thought, and rationalism. Unitarians were actively involved in all kinds of civic improvement, including people’s living conditions and education (Millard 2001, 6–8). They were indeed particularly prone to address contentious issues because they themselves were socially marginalised for questioning orthodox religious beliefs (Foster 2002, 13). The very term ‘Unitarian’ was introduced in the mid-eighteenth century by orthodox Christians as a derogatory term for those who did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity (Millard 2001, 1). In line with her Unitarian principles, Gaskell’s fiction promotes reconciliation – between the employing and the labouring classes, between ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ members of society – as a possible means of tackling social ills.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton (1848), tellingly subtitled A Tale of Manchester Life, renders visible the social realities of urban life in the new manufacturing districts of Northern England. Exploring the social consequences of industrialisation and urbanisation, the novel focuses on the conflicts between industrialists and labourers in a period of social and political unrest, of strikes, unemployment, and poverty. While the novel opens in the 1830s, it moves on – via the failure of the Chartist Petition in 1839 and the gradually more discernible consequences of the Corn Laws – to the ‘Hungry Forties’. In the course of the novel, the trade unionist and Chartist John Barton becomes increasingly disillusioned as he faces his fellow workers’ acute misery. This is augmented by the mill owners’ ignoring of labourer suffering and failure to alleviate the abysmal conditions. When Henry Carson, the son of the local mill owner, blatantly ridicules destitute workers in their negotiations with their ‘masters’ and their struggle to survive, a group of enraged labourers decides to take action. With the lot falling on him, John Barton kills Henry Carson and flees the city. The young engineering worker Jem Wilson, in turn, is suspected of having committed the murder. He is in love with John Barton’s daughter Mary who, however, had turned him down because at the time she was flattered by Henry Carson’s attentions and had high hopes for a grand marriage. When Mary comes to realise her affection for Jem and happens to find out about her father’s deed, she desperately tries to prove Jem’s innocence without incriminating her father. In the end, her efforts are successful. John Barton, who returns to Manchester a broken and dying man, confesses to Carson’s father, is forgiven, and dies. After getting married, Mary and Jem emigrate to Canada.

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Even this brief summary of the story makes evident to what extent the novel’s plot is shaped by political and personal relations alike. The mixing of genres in Mary Barton has received some critical attention, especially in recent scholarship (see Dentith 1997, Ohno 2001, Elliott 2007). In her article “The Romance of Politics and the Politics of Romance in Mary Barton,” Kamilla Elliott, for example, scrutinises the “inversely analogical, horizontal, elsewhere-looking relations of the two plots” (2007, 23–24). Unlike such comparative approaches, other research on Mary Barton has frequently prioritised the political plot, especially since the time of its classification as an ‘industrial’ (Williams 1963, 99–119), a ‘social-problem’ (Kettle 1970; Guy 1996), or a ‘Condition-of-England’ novel (Cuddon 1999). Despite their different origins and connotations, these labels are often used synonymously to describe a body of English fiction from the 1840s and 1850s that takes England’s contemporary industrial society as its subject matter. The novels feature prominently in English literary and cultural history. Alongside Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South, well-known representatives of this subgenre of the Victorian novel are Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) and Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845, ↗ 9 Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations), as well as Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848, ↗ 15 Kingsley, Yeast) and Alton Locke (1850). Although the labels ‘industrial’ or ‘social-problem’ novel were not used until the 1950s (Guy 1996, 3), the ‘Condition-of-England’ was a contemporary phrase. It was coined by Thomas Carlyle in his famous essays Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843), in which he attacks the industrial-capitalist age for its laissez-faire politics and economics which, to him, threaten the social order. With discontent growing among the impoverished working classes, the ruling, employing, and propertied classes begin to fear social and political unrest. The rise of Chartism, the first large-scale working-class movement for democratic reform that flourished between 1838 and 1850 and that took its name from a six-point charter of demands, exacerbated these fears among the middle classes. As Carlyle states in the opening chapter “The Condition-of-England Question” of Chartism: “A feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done, in regard to it. [. . .] [I]f something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody” (Carlyle 2015, 121). His writing style – famous for its excessive and unidiomatic use of noun phrases, capitalisation, and the passive voice – leaves much room for interpretation, especially with regard to the social agents who are supposed to intervene. This very vagueness keeps stirring up fears among the middle classes. Continuing to warn of a working-class revolution, he argues that “Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the Working Classes of England” (122). Moreover, the ‘Condition-of-England’ is shaped by what Carlyle conceives of as an increasing economisation of society, “with Cash Payment as the sole nexus between man and man” (169). Using ‘cash’ metonymically for ‘money’, which, in

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turn, connotes commerce, business, economy, and capitalism, Carlyle discusses grand topics in everyday terms and concepts. He cautions that “there are so many things which cash will not pay! Cash is a great miracle; yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth” (169). He thus takes issue with Britain’s transition to industrial capitalism. Carlyle’s writing has been – both at the time and in retrospect – an influential force in England’s mid-nineteenth-century literature, culture, and politics. The very phrase ‘Condition-of-England’ indicates that these novels “are premised on the idea that they have a sense that what they describe is the state of England at that time” (Earnshaw 2010, 214). In fact, the novels focus specifically on this subject matter because “the sense of ‘urgency’, the idea that art should concern itself with the ‘here and now’, is still partly a consequence of the pressure of industrialisation, brought on by the fact that the world is changing very quickly in the nineteenth century and bringing with it a need to reflect society as it operates within such speedy change” (Earnshaw 2010, 30). Making a similar point in The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (1988), Bodenheimer addresses the question as to how literature can attend to the radical social transformations resulting from industrialisation. Industrial novels set themselves in a dramatic way to the task of giving fictional shape to social questions that were experienced as new, unpredictable, without closure. Their story lines offer a particularly well-focused arena of inquiry because they must bring order and meaning to situations characterized exactly by their lack of historical meaning, or by acute conflicts about the meanings assigned to them in public discourse. (1988, 4)

Industrial novels are set in northern England where they explore the manufacturing regions that were subject to radical transformations over a short period of time due to massive increases in population and in the number of factories. That Mary Barton actually takes its readers to ‘uncharted’ territory becomes evident in its painstaking descriptions of Manchester’s neighbourhoods, streets, courts, and houses (see part three). The setting matches the broad social range of characters from the working and middle classes, especially industrial capitalists who form a special interest group within the bourgeoisie. While John Barton and his daughter Mary feature prominently as protagonists, Mary Barton also introduces several other labourers and their families such as Jem Wilson, who – as an engineering worker – belongs to the labouring elite; John’s fellow worker Ben Davenport, who falls ill and dies in dire destitution; the young seamstress Margaret, who is going blind but manages to make a living from singing; and her grandfather Job Legh, a weaver and self-educated naturalist with extensive botanical and zoological knowledge. By depicting workers not simply as miserable, deprived, and oppressed, but also in terms of their agency and sense of injustice, the novel provides a nuanced picture of working-class culture. In doing so, it confronts – if only indirectly and moderately – middle-class fears about the working

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classes as a threat to contemporary society (Foster 2006, xiii). Paradoxically, by characterising the working classes as ultimately reliant on self-help, the novel reinforces the ideology of laissez-faire, according to which the workers themselves – instead of the ruling and employing classes – are responsible for improving the grossly unfair conditions (Foster 2002, 38). Although industrial novels draw attention to inequalities and conflicts between the classes, they do not openly advocate social or political change. The character and plot design indicates that Mary Barton is particularly sceptical of early trade unions and political organisations of the working classes. Ultimately, the novel seeks reconciliation, although its ending differs from other industrial novels. “What makes the allegory of the social plot less visible [in Mary Barton] than in a novel such as Sybil or North and South is that the courtship does not lead to a marriage between classes” (Vanden Bossche 2014, 165). Rather than a marriage, it is the final encounter between the penitent John Barton and the forgiving mill owner Mr Carson that – if only symbolically – unites workers and industrialists. Moreover, Mary and Jem emigrate, suggesting that they cannot have a future in Britain. Corresponding to the happy endings of many (Victorian) novels, Mary Barton offers romantic closure and individual solutions for its protagonists. In doing so, the novel seemingly reinstates the status quo by not allowing for social commentary or change. The ending would thus provide a melodramatic and naïve resolution, ignoring the conflicting material and ideological positions of the social classes. However, “Gaskell’s reluctance to detail specific industrial reform (which she probably could not envisage), or to offer a clear and radical political solution (which in the late 1840s would have been utopian), should be seen [. . .] not as a failure but as another aspect of her realism as well as articulating her own moral beliefs” (Foster 2006, xviii). In Unitarianism, a resolution of strife is only possible if the conflicting social groups begin to recognise and understand each other; this message is “subversive, too, in that it challenges the male hegemony of rationality and theory and seeks to empower the feminine (empathy, emotional understanding, nurturing)” (Foster 2002, 38). On closer inspection, the conciliatory, generically conventional, and politically conservative ending is, in fact, more ambiguous than much secondary literature suggests. One of the central arguments for this more complex reading can be found in Mary Barton’s nuanced bourgeois perspective: it is written by a female middle-class author who was influenced by the intellectual tradition of Unitarianism and her personal experiences. Had it not been for her charitable work as a minister’s wife in Manchester, Gaskell would not have become acquainted with such high levels of poverty and suffering. In her writing, Gaskell was then “bold enough to present these hardships and apparent injustices to a readership many of whom were unprepared to receive the truth of her depiction” (Foster 2006, ix). Looking at the spatial, economic, and social gap that nineteenth-century writers (and readers) of industrial fiction had to bridge, Kathleen Tillotson asserts in her classic study that “the

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novelists were scouts who had crossed the frontier [. . .] and brought back their reports” (1961, 81). Scholars in postcolonial and cultural studies would find such metaphors as “scout” and “frontier” problematic – to say the least – as they are tied to colonial(ist) discourse: for example, the narrative of sending out an ‘expedition’ into the ‘unknown’ and bringing back a fixed image of the working classes. Moreover, her conception of fiction as a “report” falls short of recognising the novel’s complex signifying strategies. Although Tillotson’s study has proven to be very influential in scholarship on early Victorian novels, it is important to bear in mind that it was published over sixty years ago and thus does not reflect more recent turns in literary and cultural theory. The idea of ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ readers about the dreadful conditions in industrial England is also taken up in more recent publications, which, however, do not ignore Mary Barton’s aesthetics. Foster argues that, with its dialect speech, the novel gains “something of the force of social documentary, encouraging readers to regard it as an illustrative and informative text” (2002, 36). In a similar way, Kamilla Elliott substantiates her argument about the intertwined plots of politics and romance in Mary Barton: “Gaskell places the romance plot alongside the political plot, infuses the political plot with romance, and injects the courtship plot with politics not from inexperience or ambivalence, but to teach readers how to assess the less familiar genre of the social, industrial, political plot” (2007, 23). Following this reasoning, the novel functions as Gaskell’s didactic attempt at raising awareness among her bourgeois readers of the working and living conditions of the masses. In doing so, Mary Barton corresponds to the aims of numerous nonfiction texts published at the time which are equally preoccupied with exploring the ‘condition of England’, for example government’s blue books, parliamentary reports both on the working and living conditions of the masses as well as on child labour and, perhaps most importantly, several social investigations of these conditions: Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845/1887), Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), and James Phillips Kay’s The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832). Yet, as a literary text, Mary Barton not only raises awareness and sustains philanthropic efforts to improve the conditions of the working classes. It does not simply ‘reflect’ and ‘transmit’ realities about Manchester’s labouring population to a broad public, but contributes to the cultural construction of industrial society. Concerning the methodologically challenging issue of how fiction relates to its social, political, and historical contexts, Bodenheimer contends that “public matters [concerning the condition of England] are necessarily reimagined as they are shaped to the forms and conventions of fiction” (1988, 4–5). Exploring how Mary Barton aesthetically mediates current topics and concerns, the next section will offer an analysis of the novel’s narrative and literary strategies.

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Despite some melodramatic elements in its plot design, Mary Barton employs patterns of literary realism (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology), as evident in the following close reading of the novel’s configuration of space and use of dialect. Gaskell’s preface maintains that the novel is based on her immediate and physical encounters with the working classes in Manchester as they “elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided” (2006, 3). Representations of space are indeed one of the defining features of the realist novel. Towns, neighbourhoods, streets, and dwellings provide not only the story’s ‘background’, but serve as a means of characterisation. Accordingly, setting “is not merely incidental, providing colourful or recognisable backdrops for dramatic stories, but it often demonstrates the wholly interdependent connection between humans and their environments” (Earnshaw 2010, 20). In linguistic terms, literary realism relies on metonymy, shifting between items that belong to the same spatio-temporal world. The eminent linguist Roman Jakobson therefore argues that “it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called ‘realistic’ trend [. . .]. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time” (1971, 92). This definition stresses that the places, objects, and characters described in realist novels are not only geographically close but are also ontologically, logically, and causally connected. In Mary Barton, this becomes particularly apparent in the passages about the Barton family dwelling, which the narrator constructs in meticulous detail (Gaskell 2006, 14–15). This is not to suggest, however, that the configuration of space is ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’. In fact, it is biased towards the needs and wishes of the implied bourgeois reading audience. Bridging the social gap between the inscribed reader and the fictional world among the working classes, the novel’s authorial narrator acts as guide and mediator (Earnshaw 2010, 63). Introducing the Bartons’ dwelling, especially their parlour, the narrator characterises it as their “home,” connoting ‘cosiness’, ‘comfort’, and ‘privacy’ (Gaskell 2006, 14). With references to “curtains, which were now drawn,” and to “geraniums” that “formed a further defence from out-door pryers” (14), the description resonates with the bourgeois cult of ‘domesticity’ and ‘privacy’. Moreover, the narrator uses the military metaphor of “defence” to underscore the binary opposition of ‘inside vs. outside’ and ‘private vs. public’. The cellar flat of the impoverished Davenport family, by comparison, offers no such protection. The ‘outside’ ‘penetrates’ into their dwelling because the cellar features many broken window-panes and a “damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up” (58). Yet the narrator is careful to contextualise the comparative splendour of the Barton home by presenting it as a “sure sign of good times among the mills” (15). The dwelling is further defined by a staircase and additional doors, indicating its size. The narrator

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comments on the “tolerably large room” (14), and there is some functional space, albeit only “a sort of little back kitchen” (14). As there is no reference to beds or other places to sleep, the ‘public’ area of the parlour is set apart from more ‘private’ spaces. The dwelling and, by metonymic extension, the Barton family thus live up to bourgeois ideals of ‘decency’ and ‘respectability’. Among several pieces of furniture mentioned in a longer passage depicting the home, the narrator describes “a table, which I should call a Pembroke” (Gaskell 2006, 15), calling forth the image of an elegant small table with four fixed legs and two hinged sides. However, the narrator immediately qualifies this description by stating “that it was made of deal [cheap wood], and I cannot tell how far such a name may be applied to such humble material” (15). This type of table thus becomes affordable to working-class households in their attempts at imitating bourgeois interiors. The same holds true for the “japanned tea-tray” (15) and the “crimson tea-caddy, also of japan ware” (15), both of which copy Japanese lacquer work. Given that objects of foreign origin from all over Europe and the British Empire were very fashionable in the nineteenth century (Freedgood 2012, 372–373; Humble 2010, 229), these imitations show how a working-class family, despite limited funds, tries to meet bourgeois standards of ‘respectability’. The cupboard, full of tableware and glass, serves a similar purpose. Mrs Barton is very proud of the household objects as her “glance round of satisfaction and pleasure” (Gaskell 2006, 14) indicates. In fact, she is so closely associated with them that, after her death, they remind John Barton of his late wife and her daily routines (21). In this particular passage, Mrs Barton leaves open the cupboard door, thereby inviting ‘public’ inspection. Her behaviour shows that “the Victorian home, far from being the place of inward familial comfort and retreat [. . .], was in fact a place of show, a sort of theatre for the enactment of performances of successful family life” (Humble 2010, 226). The narrator presents a working-class home that characterises John Barton and his family as respectable, reliable, and trustworthy by the standards of the novel-reading bourgeoisie. Substantiating this characterisation, the narrator also comments on some “nondescript articles, for which one would have fancied their possessors could find no use – such as triangular pieces of glass to save carving knives and forks from dirtying table-cloths” (Gaskell 2006, 14). While these objects are not useless per se, the remark implies that they are useless for average working-class families. Mrs Barton, however, owns such articles, which suggests that she is aware of and possibly aspires to middle-class ideals of ‘taste’ and ‘cleanliness’. Thus, the novel’s construction of the Barton household perfectly illustrates how “[t]he home was an emblem of social status, but also the means of subtly advancing it. Furnishing, decoration and style needed to be up to – and perhaps a touch beyond – the mark [. . .], but not noticeably out of keeping with the householder’s rank and income” (Humble 2010, 227). The novel’s realist configurations of space become evident not only in workingclass dwellings, but also in representations of Manchester’s streets and districts.

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Mary Barton opens with a scene set in “some fields near Manchester, well known to the inhabitants as ‘Green Heys Fields’” (Gaskell 2006, 5). Throughout the novel, the narrator refers to many very specific places in and around Manchester, thereby enhancing the story’s regional ‘authenticity’. In these fields, where various groups of workers go for a walk in the afternoon, John Barton and his wife meet their friends, the Wilson family, with whom they return home. Reminiscent of the conventions of travel writing (Rubiés 2002, 244–251), the narrator elaborates on the journey itself and guides the implied reader through Manchester. [T]he party proceeded home, through many half-finished streets, all so like one another, that you might have easily been bewildered and lost your way. Not a step, however, did our friends lose; down this entry, cutting off that corner, until they turned out of one of these innumerable streets into a little paved court, having the backs of houses at the end opposite to the opening, and a gutter running through the middle to carry off household slops, washing suds, &c. (Gaskell 2006, 13)

Here the binary opposition ‘insider vs. outsider’ serves as a central structuring device. Following the workers home, the narrator comments on the confusing layout of numerous and uniform streets, thus characterising him- or herself as someone who is unfamiliar with the working-class district. Furthermore, by using the second-person pronoun when stating that “you might have easily been bewildered and lost your way,” the narrator also marks the reader as ‘outsider’. By comparison, the workingclass characters are ‘insiders’ who know their way around the streets, courts, and back-to-back houses. Despite occupying an authorial and supposedly privileged position, the narrator is not presented as omniscient and sovereign, but rather as reliant: were it not for the working-class characters, neither the narrator nor the bourgeois reader would become privy to these districts and communities. Later, in one of the most famous scenes of the novel, John Barton and George Wilson go see their fellow worker Ben Davenport, who has fallen ill. As the narrator describes their way to the cellar dwelling in Berry Street (Gaskell 2006, 58), it becomes clear that Barton and Wilson are outsiders not adapted to these surroundings; they are all but overwhelmed by the stench in the streets and the cellar. Considering the squalor, the narrator finds it necessary to emphasise that it is a “cellar in which a family of human beings lived” (58). The graphic description of the street, gutters, waste, and the actual dwelling, which seems to be shaped by both Gaskell’s own experiences and her reading (Foster 2002, 24), serves as a means of characterisation, thereby setting apart the non-working poor from the likes of John Barton. Establishing this hierarchy within the working classes, it presents John Barton in favourable terms as congenial – even to the implied middle-class reader. Nonetheless, Mary Barton sympathises with the poor. Refraining from moralising, the novel does not attribute poverty to idleness, failure, or guilt. Ben Davenport is not held responsible for his family’s destitution; following the novel’s logic, poverty results from circumstance, namely from Ben’s illness which renders him unable

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to work. John Barton, in turn, sacrifices his own food and pawns his last valuables in order to help. As he himself states in the novel’s very first chapter, “it’s the poor, and the poor only, as does such things for the poor” (Gaskell 2006, 11). Promoting individual commitment and aid as an individual solution to supposedly individual problems such as illness, poverty, and insanitary housing, Mary Barton acknowledges and upholds the ideology of self-help. Yet it also criticises the manufacturers’ aloof and detached manner. Immediately after the extensive account of the destitute circumstances in the cellar dwelling, the narrator presents the mill owner’s dwelling, where George Wilson seeks an infirmary order for the dying Davenport: “Mr. Carson’s was a good house, and furnished with disregard to expense” (65). The place abounds in light, fire, food, beautiful objects, and flowers because, for Carson’s daughter, “[l]ife was not worth having without flowers” (68). By juxtaposing the scenes and settings, the novel derides the industrialist for being ignorant of his workers’ plight although their labour ensures his comfortable living. Mary Barton evokes ‘reality’ and regional ‘authenticity’ not only by means of its minute representations of Manchester’s spaces but also by its use of the Lancashire dialect. For most nineteenth-century writers, dialect-speaking characters are held to be socially inferior (Slater 1994, 87). Deviating from this convention, Gaskell constructs in Mary Barton “a whole society of dialect speakers and by allowing them dignity she has established their worth. Not only does she display the worth in individual workers in the industrial scene but she also sets a precedent for the future use of dialect in literary form” (Slater 1994, 96). In employing the vernacular, Mary Barton gives the working classes a voice. Underscoring Gaskell’s “Unitarian approach to humanity” (Millard 2001, 11), dialect speakers are not patronised for their supposedly inferior command of English – they are recognised as full members of a regional community. Stressing the innovative quality of Gaskell’s writing, Earnshaw discusses her use of dialect as an example of how the realist novel “exhibits experimentation with form” (2010, 75). The epigraphs in Mary Barton are mostly quotes from songs and poems, several of which were written by contemporary self-educated poets such as Samuel Bamford, Ebenezer Elliott, and Thomas Hood. These intertextual references pay tribute to emergent urban working-class cultures. Moreover, the novel also includes a complete dialect song, which the narrator introduces in a direct reader’s address: “Do you know ‘The Oldham Weaver’? Not unless you are Lancashire born and bred, for it is a complete Lancashire ditty. I will copy it for you” (Gaskell 2006, 34). While assuming that the reader is unfamiliar with the song, the narrator attributes the lack of knowledge not simply to ignorance or arrogance but to regional differences. In The Industrial Muse (1974), an influential early study of nineteenth-century British working-class literature, Martha Vicinus calls her chapter on dialect literature of the industrial North “An Appropriate Voice,” thus underscoring how significant dialect writing was among Lancashire’s working classes as a “vehicle for literary self-expression” (185). While “most dialect writing was apolitical, emphasizing the home life and local

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customs of northern workers and rural folk” (192), “The Oldham Weaver”, also known as “Jone o’ Grinfilt, Jr.”, is among “the very best pieces [that] come out of the political tradition of satire and comic irony” (191). As far as the song’s origins and contexts are concerned, Vicinus explains that in the 1790s, a schoolmaster wrote a song about ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’, i.e. John of Greenfield, a village near Oldham. The song spread quickly because its story about a poor and discontented weaver who leaves home to find a better life could easily be adapted to various occasions (48). Among the best-known versions is one about ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt, Jr.’, a destitute hand-loom weaver who laconically describes his impoverished living and working conditions in industrial England. While the poem takes issue with suffering and oppression, it does not aim at dismantling social hierarchies. In comparison with the version discussed in Vicinus’s study, Mary Barton features a less radical one in which “Owd Dicky o’ Billy,” instead of the church parson, tries to silence and suppress the weavers: Owd Dicky o’ Billy’s kept telling me lung, Wee s’d ha’ better toimes if I’d but howd my tung, Oi’ve howden my tung, till oi’ve near stopped my breath, Oi think i’ my heeart oi’se soon clem to deeath, [. . .]. (Gaskell 2006, 35)

While it is possible that Gaskell knew only this less radical version, similar tendencies are at work in the epigraphs. As Foster points out in her annotations, some extracts are taken from less subversive texts in the growing corpus of working-class literature, thereby accommodating Mary Barton to a bourgeois reading audience (2006, 419, 426). Yet, this does not necessarily mean that the novel was received favourably by contemporary readers and reviewers, as the following section will show.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Mary Barton immediately met with critical attention upon its publication in 1848. Given that it is an anonymous publication, many contemporaries pondered on the question of (fe)male authorship (Chorley 1848, 1050; Forster 1848, 708; Greg 1849, 403). Yet above and beyond assumptions concerning the author, the novel’s ‘faithfulness’ was an issue looming large in the vigorous debates among contemporary readers and reviewers (Bamford 2008, 363; Chorley 1848, 1050; Forster 1848, 709; Greg 1849, 403, 404, 411; Rev. of Mary Barton 1849, 122, 130). The historical, political, and social contexts, both in continental Europe and in England, provide possible reasons for the often controversial responses. After all, this potentially destabilising representation of industrial society was published in the very year of revolutions in continental Europe. As a ‘Condition-of-England’ novel,

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Mary Barton addresses contentious issues concerning power relations in the manufacturing regions. The reviewers’ (dis)approval of Mary Barton is therefore shaped by their political and ideological views and position in industrial society. In other words, much depends on whether they follow or reject Gaskell’s liberal politics. Moreover, the interpretation of the novel also varies with regard to the politics, scope and target audience of the journals publishing the reviews. Elaborating on the novel’s ‘fidelity’ to social realities, the commentators grappled with how the novel is shaped by both realism and romance, bringing questions of genre and aesthetics into the debate (Bamford 2008, 363–364; Chorley 1848, 1050; Greg 1849, 403). Discussing the function(s) of literature in his review for Athenaeum, one of the most influential weekly papers of its day, Henry Fothergill Chorley raises the question as to “how far it may be kind, wise, or right to make Fiction the vehicle for a plain and matter-of-fact exposition of social evils” (1848, 1050). From today’s theoretical perspective, it can no longer be the aim of critical analysis to identify an appropriate genre or subject matter for fiction (by women) (Chapman 1999, 22). Rather, informed by literary and cultural theory, scholarship aims at “Reading (as) Conflict” (7), to quote the telling title of Alison Chapman’s introductory chapter of her guide to criticism on Gaskell. Fiction is polyvalent; it never only raises awareness or disseminates ‘information’. As a novel, Mary Barton produces ambiguous and potentially conflicting meanings about the social realities in industrial-capitalist Manchester. The representations need to be scrutinised again and again because much can be gained from rereading the novel at different historical moments with different theoretical or methodological paradigms. In fact, “throughout the history of Gaskell criticism, readers return to the same two questions, although formulated in different ways or obliquely addressed: What are the limits of realist fiction? Are the industrial novels conservative or subversive?” (Chapman 1999, 14). As straightforward as these questions seem to be, they allow for controversial debates. As far as Gaskell’s place in literary history and criticism is concerned, it is noteworthy that Elizabeth Gaskell has long been underrated, although contemporaries considered her a major woman writer alongside the Brontës and George Eliot. Susan Hamilton points out in her article “Gaskell Then and Now” that Gaskell’s reputation was “chased into the shadows of modernism’s onslaught on the Victorians, and remained remarkably unchanged until revisited in the 1960s and 1970s by materialist and feminist critics” (2007, 178). Gaskell’s writing has since been ‘rediscovered’ for its subtlety, nuance, and innovation. Especially poststructuralists and cultural studies scholars have been interested in “the very ambivalences that once banished her from the great formalist canon” (Hamilton 2007, 186). By now, Gaskell’s writing is well established as a compelling and dynamic field of study. The significant increase in research over the last few decades (Hamilton 2007, 186–188; Shelston 2010, 2) is evident in the activities of the Gaskell Society, especially the Gaskell Society Journal; in Nancy Weyant’s updated bibliographies of

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theses, articles, and books on Gaskell (Weyant 1994; 2004); and in new editions of many of Gaskell’s texts. Indeed, Alan Shelston opens his article “Where Next in Gaskell Studies?”, published on the occasion of her bicentenary, with the observation that there has been substantial research on Gaskell in the last decade alone (2010, 1). Still, the sheer range of possibilities for future research is bound up with shifts and developments in literary and cultural theory, which are constantly reinvigorating critical enquiry into Gaskell’s writing.

Bibliography Works Cited Bamford, Samuel. “To the Authoress of ‘Mary Barton.’” Mary Barton. By Elizabeth Gaskell. Ed. Thomas Recchio. New York: Norton, 2008. 363–364. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Carlyle, Thomas. Selected Writings. Ed. Alan Shelston. London: Penguin, 2015. Chapman, Alison. Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘Mary Barton’ and ‘North and South’. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Palgrave Reader’s Guides to Essential Criticism. Chorley, Henry Fothergill. Rev. of Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, by Elizabeth Gaskell. Athenaeum 21 Oct. 1848: 1050–1051. Cuddon, J. A. “Condition of England Novel.” The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th ed. London: Penguin, 1999. 172–173. D’Albertis, Deirdre. “The Life and Letters of E. C. Gaskell.” Matus 2007, 10–26. Dentith, Simon. “Generic Diversity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton.” Gaskell Society Journal 11 (1997): 43–54. Earnshaw, Steven. Beginning Realism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010. Elliott, Kamilla. “The Romance of Politics and the Politics of Romance in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton.” Gaskell Society Journal 21 (2007): 21–37. Foster, Shirley. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Foster, Shirley. Introduction. Mary Barton. By Elizabeth Gaskell. Oxford: OUP, 2006. vii–xxviii. Forster, John. Rev. of Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, by Elizabeth Gaskell. Examiner 4 Nov. 1848: 708–709. Freedgood, Elaine. “Material.” The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature. Ed. Kate Flint. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. 370–387. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. 1848. Ed. Shirley Foster. Oxford: OUP, 2006. Greg, W. R. Rev. of Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edinburgh Review 89 (1849): 402–435. Guy, Josephine M. The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life. London: Macmillan, 1996. Hamilton, Susan. “Gaskell Now and Then.” Matus 2007, 178–191. Humble, Nicola. “Domestic Arts.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. 219–235. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” Fundamentals of Language. Ed. Jakobson and Halle. 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. 69–96.

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Kettle, Arnold. “The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel.” From Dickens to Hardy. Ed. Boris Ford. Vol. 6 of The Pelican Guide to English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. 169–187. Matus, Jill L., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Millard, Kay. “The Religion of Elizabeth Gaskell.” Gaskell Society Journal 15 (2001): 1–13. Ohno, Tatsuhiro. “Is Mary Barton an Industrial Novel?” Gaskell Society Journal 15 (2001): 14–29. Rev. of Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, by Elizabeth Gaskell. British Quarterly Review 17 Feb. 1849: 117–136. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Travel Writing and Ethnography.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: CUP, 2002. 242–260. Shelston, Alan. “Where Next in Gaskell Studies?” Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian Culture, and the Art of Fiction: Original Essays for the Bicentenary. Ed. Sandro Jung. Gent: Academia, 2010. 1–11. Slater, Rosalind. “The Novelist’s Use of Dialect.” Gaskell Society Journal 8 (1994): 87–97. Stoneman, Patsy. “Gaskell, Gender, and the Family.” Matus 2007, 131–147. Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: OUP, 1961. Vanden Bossche, Chris R. Reform Acts. Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Vicinus, Martha. The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature. London: Croom Helm, 1974. Weyant, Nancy. Elizabeth Gaskell: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Sources, 1976–1991. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1994. Weyant, Nancy. Elizabeth Gaskell: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Sources, 1992–2001. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2004. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

Further Reading Corley, Liam. “The Imperial Addiction of Mary Barton.” Gaskell Society Journal 17 (2003): 1–11. Maidment, Brian, ed. The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987. Maunder, Andrew. “Mary Barton Goes to London: Elizabeth Gaskell, Stage Adaptation and the Working Class Audiences.” Gaskell Society Journal 25 (2011): 1–18. Morgan, Kenneth. The Birth of Industrial Britain: Social Change, 1750–1850. Harlow: Pearson, 2004. Purchase, Sean. Key Concepts in Victorian Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Royle, Edward. Chartism. London: Longman, 1996. Steinbach, Susie L. Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in NineteenthCentury Britain. London: Routledge, 2012. Warwick, Alexandra, and Martin Willies, eds. The Victorian Literature Handbook. London: Continuum, 2008.

Timothy L. Carens

15 Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem (1851) Abstract: This chapter approaches Charles Kingsley’s Yeast: A Problem (1848; rev. 1851) as an urgent response to the mid-century ‘Condition-of-England question’ and other contemporary debates about religion, sexuality and gender, and middle-class social responsibility. Without presenting the novel as an aesthetic success, it affirms that Yeast deserves close attention from anyone intrigued by the Victorian period and the complexities of its ideological terrain. To locate the work on a map of this terrain, the chapter offers contextual readings focusing on its relation to Condition-of-England discourse, Anglican anti-Catholicism, and middle-class gender roles. The last of these topics functions paradoxically. On the one hand, Kingsley envisions the heterosexual union as the source of chivalric energy that inspires the middle-class hero to combat poverty, injustice, and ecological catastrophe. On the other, he represents romantic love as a distraction from the hero’s reform quest. The unexpected death of the heroine and collapse of the marriage plot, the chapter argues, expose the intensity of the author’s ambivalence about love and marriage and triggers an unconventional discussion within the novel about its purpose and form. Keywords: Condition-of-England question, anti-Catholicism, muscular Christianity, gender and sexuality, marriage plot

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Charles Kingsley wrote his first novel, Yeast: A Problem (1851), at a critical moment in his own life and the life of his country. The first version of the novel appeared as a serial in 1848, a year marked by revolutions on the continent and, in Britain, a series of political debates and cultural crises that forced intellectuals, artists, the clergy, and the public at large to confront a set of vexing questions. Did the Chartist movement, which had enlisted vast numbers of the working class in its campaign for universal manhood suffrage, represent a legitimate step toward political equality or a subversive threat to social stability? How should the nation respond to the horrific living conditions in urban slums and rural villages (↗ 7 Empire – Economy – Materiality)? What were the appropriate roles and responsibilities for middle-class men and women (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations)? In the wake of the Oxford movement and the defection to Roman Catholicism of John Henry Newman and others, how might the Anglican Church recapture legitimacy and moral authority (↗ 3 God on the Wane)? With a young and growing family and a recently launched career as vicar of Eversley, Kingsley had enough to occupy his time and his thoughts in 1848. And yet https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-016

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he was eager to take a public role in finding answers to these questions. For several years, he had been working on The Saint’s Tragedy (1848), a closet drama based on the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. But he also wanted to engage more directly the socio-economic crises of the moment. He was deeply influenced by Thomas Carlyle through works such as Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843), both of which treat the living conditions of the working class as prophetic signs of impending chaos. Kingsley had also read the early novels of Benjamin Disraeli, who, in Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845, ↗ 9 Disraeli, Sybil), documents the extent of the class divide. He wanted to join those writers who were striving to impress on middleclass readers the grave dangers that Britain faced and the hopeful opportunities it might embrace. On 10 April 1848, a Chartist rally in London pulled Kingsley into the fray of politics and into a new field of literary endeavours. The Chartists intended to present their petition to Parliament on the appointed day. Authorities in London gathered a huge force of constables and soldiers to repress rebellion should Parliament deny the petition (as indeed it did). On the previous day in Eversley, Kingsley was hosting his friend John Parker, son of the publisher of The Saint’s Tragedy. The two decided to head to London on the following day to witness the historic events. Although the demonstration remained peaceful, it ignited a passion in Kingsley to promote the workingman’s cause. Early in the day, on 10 April, he visited his spiritual mentor F. D. Maurice, a widely respected theologian who emphasised the social mission of the Church of England. Maurice, sick in bed, urged Kingsley to seek out John Ludlow, a lawyer equally interested in the cause. Kingsley found Ludlow in his office and the two immediately sympathised. Together they set off to the Chartist rally, Kingsley eager to address the crowd, arriving only to find the rally had ended. His energy and sense of purpose unabated, he stayed in London and pitched himself into fervid discussions with Parker, Maurice, Ludlow, and other middle-class men about the best way for them to address working-class discontent. Over the course of the following week, a plan emerged to publish a new journal, Politics for the People, designed both to support and to influence working-class political activism. Maurice, who largely shaped the journal’s vision, sought to align the publication with his interpretation of Christianity as a form of social reform, and the figures associated with the journal came to describe themselves as Christian Socialists. In addition to working on the editorial board, Kingsley wrote many articles, often under the penname Parson Lot. Politics for the People offered a perspective characterised by equal parts of sympathetic concern and paternalistic advice. In the first of his series of “Letters to the Chartists” (13 May 1848), for example, Kingsley introduces himself to his audience as a “radical reformer” who “would die to make you free” (28). After thus ingratiating himself, however, he scolds Chartists for adopting the language of revolutionary violence, accusing them of “trying to do God’s work with the devil’s tools” (29). Failing to win a devoted readership, the journal had a short life, ceasing publication after just three months. Middle-class

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readers, particularly the clergy, were shocked by its radical stances, while workingclass readers no doubt perceived with suspicion an effort to co-opt and control their movement. For Kingsley, though, Politics for the People and a longer-running subsequent journal, The Christian Socialist, offered crucial early opportunities to grapple with contemporary questions that engaged his political and religious sympathies. Kingsley also aimed to address these questions in fiction. When still working on Politics for the People, he began to do so in a novel with a curious title. Yeast; or, The Thoughts, Sayings, and Doings of Lancelot Smith, Gentleman began to appear serially in the July 1848 issue of Fraser’s Magazine, published by Parker’s firm. In 1851, Kingsley released a revised version with a shortened title, Yeast: A Problem. Both versions were published anonymously. The episodic plot follows the young middle-class hero’s search for principles on which to base a meaningful life amidst the turbulent events of mid-nineteenth-century British society. After publishing Yeast, Kingsley enjoyed a broad and interesting life. He served as rector of Eversely for the rest of his life while continuing to develop and diversify his literary career. He wrote more social problem novels akin to Yeast, but also worked in other genres. In his day, he became especially well known for historical romances such as Westward Ho! (1855). An amateur botanist, Kingsley promoted the study of nature in Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore (1855). Unlike many Victorian theologians and intellectuals, he was untroubled by the work of evolutionary scientists such as Charles Darwin (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel). He perceived no conflict between scientific and spiritual truths, believing that the law of evolution governed development within both realms. He developed this parallel in The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863), one of a number of texts he wrote for children and the book for which he is best known today. He also published sermons, prose essays on various topics, and anti-Catholic polemics in a public debate with John Henry Newman (discussed below). In 1860, high regard for his historical fiction led to his appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. This was a controversial honour, as many academic historians did not perceive Kingsley as one of their own, but he retained the position for nearly a decade. Another mark of esteem came in 1861 when he was chosen to serve as tutor to the Prince of Wales. Late in life, Kingsley travelled far from Eversley, visiting the West Indies in 1870 and publishing a narrative of the journey, At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies, the following year. In 1874, he wore himself out on an extensive tour of the United States, returning home to die early in 1875.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Yeast opens with a description of various figures collected for a fox hunt in the countryside. Against this backdrop, the protagonist is introduced as a wealthy

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middle-class gentleman who “kept two good horses, and ‘rode forward’ as a fine young fellow of three-and-twenty who can afford it, and ‘has nothing else to do,’ has a very good right to ride” (Kingsley 1883, 2). Though Lancelot Smith may indeed have the right to pleasant dissipation, the novel soon indicates that more important occupations await. The overarching concern of the novel is the effort to determine how, regardless of rights, such a “fine young fellow” should spend his time and energy. For Kingsley, romantic love represents a new-found diversion for Lancelot but also, much more importantly, a central thematic concern of this novel and most of his other works of fiction as well. The plot of Yeast is set in motion when Lancelot, suffering from a bout of existential despair, first meets Argemone Lavington. His attraction to her is powerful and immediate, intertwining sexual and spiritual energy. As the narrator observes, Argemone’s “face and figure, and the spirit which spoke through them, entered his heart at once, never again to leave it” (Kingsley 1883, 14). It would be difficult to emphasise too much the significance of sexual passion for Kingsley, especially since many modern readers come to the Victorian novel with a general assumption of its prudery. Rather than politely ignoring or cloaking in sentimentality the sexual instinct, he seeks to normalise desire and, more significantly, reconcile it with spiritual purity. In the first chapter, the narrator blames the taboo on speaking frankly about love for preventing young men such as Lancelot from perceiving the holiness of “woman’s beauty” and, by extension, of their own sexual desire (4). The novel treats female sexuality with more reserve, but it too becomes a source of explicit concern. Argemone is drawn to ‘high-church’ Anglicanism, a faction which in the period drifted toward Catholic ideals and practices. Even as she falls in love with Lancelot, she entertains the possibility of embracing a celibate life. Her conflict comes to a crisis when she wilfully decides, against the feelings of her family and her lover, to enter a Protestant convent. Lancelot refuses to let her go without a struggle and, by confronting her openly with the fact of their mutual desire, he finally breaks the “ice of artificial years” and liberates “the clear stream of her woman’s nature” (167). When Lancelot leaves the room, having awakened her consciousness of love and desire, she follows with “greedy eyes her new-found treasure” (167). The novel thus represents heterosexual desire as one of the compelling facts of human life and social order. The novel’s commitment to romantic passion falls in line with its broad attack on Catholicism. Kingsley was bitterly opposed to Catholicism for several reasons, but Yeast emphasises his perception that it demonised sexuality rather than acknowledging it as a fact of human nature as constructed by God. Through an exchange of letters between Lancelot and his cousin Luke, Kingsley provides his hero with the chance to assert the significance of the physical body and its appetites. Luke, who eventually converts to Catholicism, appears in the character of a weak and effeminate creature who seeks a religion that will allow him to retreat into a state of infantile dependence. “Will you reproach me,” he asks Lancelot, “because when I see a soft cradle lying open for me . . . with a Virgin Mother’s face smiling

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down all woman’s love about it . . . I long to crawl into it, and sleep awhile?” (Kingsley 1883, 74). Although Lancelot has yet to reconcile himself to the Church of England, he instinctively despises a faith that cannot tolerate adult sexual desire. “If there be a God,” he exclaims, “[m]y body, and brain, and faculties, and appetites must be His will” (81). Largely detached from the central action, this sub-plot focuses on Lancelot’s search for a faith that recognises the significance of body as well as soul. Yeast emerged from a turbulent period of social and political unrest, as noted above, and the “Condition-of-England Question” – a term popularised by Carlyle in Chartism (1986, 151) – represents another central concern. Lancelot begins to probe social problems as he falls in love, finding that “his new interest in the working classes,” as the narrator observes, “was strangely quickened by his passion” (Kingsley 1883, 84). Although Argemone inspires this interest, she herself pays slight attention to the poor. Lancelot must look elsewhere for guidance. In addition to Carlyle’s text itself, he studies parliamentary reports on various subjects and finds a more vibrant source of information in Tregarva, an earnest working-class man who works as gamekeeper on the Lavington estate. Despite the class divide, the two men quickly become friends and Tregarva increasingly opens Lancelot’s eyes to the living conditions endured by the working poor. Accompanied by Tregarva and disguised in working-class clothes, Lancelot tours scenes of misery and drunken squalor from which his class position has thus far shielded him. Given the predominantly middle-class perspective of the Victorian novel, the role Tregarva plays in the hero’s development is worth considering. Kingsley presents the gamekeeper as a shrewd social critic who looks beyond the boorish behaviour of the rural poor and sees its root cause in their lack of education, lack of healthy food, and dependence on mind-numbing labour. As Tregarva tells his companion, “[i]t wears them out in body, sir, that field-work, and makes them brutes in soul and in manners” (Kingsley 1883, 205). Kingsley is careful to align Tregarva with a form of social activism rooted in Christian principles rather than in the political activism of Chartism. It is further telling that Tregarva himself, for all his insight into social problems, ironically defers to the class of the fellow he teaches. Lamenting his own unregulated mind, he exclaims, “what a blessing is a good education! What you gentlemen might do with it, if you did but see your own power!” (70). The friendship between Lancelot and Tregarva indicates that the socio-economic problems besetting the nation cannot be solved without an alliance between the classes. Ultimately, though, Kingsley upholds the necessity of middle-class authority. If Kingsley indicates that men such as Lancelot should take the lead in reforming the nation, he does not suggest that Lancelot himself is yet prepared for that work. The reform of the individual man must occur first. The protagonists of Kingsley’s best-known novels exemplify their heroism by working to confront, accept, and enact the full range of duties as Kingsley conceptualised them for young English gentlemen. They must learn to channel sexual desire within the sanctioned institution of marriage. They must accept the responsibility attendant on their class

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position to work toward a more equitable and just society. And above all they must open themselves to a fully realised faith within the framework of Protestant Christianity. In Yeast, Lancelot does not achieve this final requisite step until the very end of the story when he follows his mentor into St. Paul’s Cathedral to worship “Jesus Christ – THE MAN” (Kingsley 1883, 309). Heroism, for Kingsley, requires ardent, selfless action in the service of God, nation, the downtrodden, and women. This is the code of ‘Muscular Christianity’, a term that Kingsley himself did not particularly like but that does effectively describe the heroic ideal as developed by Kingsley, his friend and fellow novelist Thomas Hughes, and certain other Victorian writers. In Kingsley’s novels, the male protagonists have generally not yet internalised the precepts of Muscular Christianity at the beginning of their stories. Rather, they struggle toward them, sometimes stubbornly resisting one or another, sometimes making progress only to regress, but in the end they reach a spiritual and moral clarity that infuses and necessitates active and often dangerous work in the world.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Early critics justifiably faulted Yeast for its fragmented structure. Fundamentally, Yeast is a novel of ideas, its central character and his search for meaning a vehicle that allows Kingsley to engage with the political, religious, and sexual questions that mattered most to him at the time. In the epilogue, he reflects on the novel’s title in defence of its “unconnected form,” asking: Do not young men think, speak, act, just now, in this very incoherent, fragmentary way; without methodic education or habits of thought; with the various stereotyped systems which they have received by tradition, breaking up under them like ice in a thaw; with a thousand facts and notions, which they know not how to classify, pouring in on them like a flood? – a very Yeasty state of mind altogether. (Kingsley 1883, 213)

Kingsley thus takes the unusual stance of presenting his novel’s lack of coherence as a deliberate effort to capture the state of mind of those earnest and disorganised young men who, like Lancelot Smith, want to take a leading role in the reform of their society but, while full of ideas and energy, have no clear notion about how to begin. Although this passage might sound merely like a justification of an unsatisfying conclusion, Kingsley gives reason to take seriously his commitment to an “incoherent fragmentary” form. His narrator sometimes articulates a restless discontent with the conventional devices that novels use in order to achieve resolution. Late in the novel, for example, he expresses hostility to the very notion of aesthetic unity; Barnakill, a prophet figure who becomes Lancelot’s mentor in the final chapters, denounces as the “true hell of genius” that perspective from which “[a]rt is regarded as an end and not a means, and objects are interesting, not in as far as they form our spirits, but in proportion as they can be shaped into effective parts of some beautiful

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whole” (286). By ultimately rejecting this “true hell,” the novel seems to be striving to conceptualise a different fictional model for interacting with readers, not pleasing them with a “beautiful whole” but rather plunging them into a “flood” of ideas in the hope that they, like Lancelot, become determined to make sense of the “thousand facts and notions” that surround them. The problem of form becomes especially noticeable toward the end of the narrative. At the start, the love story that sets the plot in motion lends consistency and focuses interest. Kingsley suggests from the first pages, when Lancelot and Argemone fall in love at first sight, experiencing what the narrator suggestively calls “eye-wedlock” (15), that the novel will develop a traditional marriage plot in which the lovers must overcome a series of obstacles before attaining wedded bliss. Initially, their own social awkwardness and inability to express or even understand their mutual affection presents the central difficulty. Misunderstandings and wounded feelings arise to complicate the development of their relationship. This process reaches a crescendo when Argemone, as explained above, is persuaded to embrace a celibate life of self-effacing worship. Although Lancelot’s defiant energy carries the marriage plot forward, another obstacle then presents itself when Lancelot suddenly loses his fortune and the Lavingtons refuse to let their daughter accept the attentions of a penniless man. In a more conventional novel, such passion would eventually prevail over misfortune and social bias. But Yeast next introduces an insurmountable problem with the heroine’s sudden death. Readers coached to expect the eventual triumph of romantic passion are left only with an impassioned deathbed scene, in which Argemone proclaims Lancelot her husband, despite their lack of vows. Kingsley well understood that the collapse of the marriage plot would disappoint his readers. His decision to kill off his heroine in part reflects the extent of his commitment to another plotline focusing on social reform. Early in the text, these two plots seem to work in tandem. When Lancelot falls in love with Argemone, he begins to hold himself to a higher standard, determining to prove himself worthy of her by reforming himself and society as well. In this light, Muscular Christianity functions as a Victorian interpretation of the chivalric code (which helps to explain the hero’s curious name). Lancelot enacts the part of a latter-day knight, inspired by feminine purity to seek opportunities to do good work. As the narrative draws to a close, however, it sacrifices the heroine to the very problems that she has inspired Lancelot to combat. Argemone dies of typhus that she catches when visiting the miserable hovels of the local poor. She herself interprets her deadly illness as symbolic retribution for her family’s neglect of those living in dire poverty not far from their doors. As she lies dying, she beseeches Lancelot to “wash away the sins of the Lavingtons” by working to improve the lives of the poor (Kingsley 1883, 282). The narrative thus shifts away from heterosexual romance toward a uniformly masculine effort to reform the nation. Lancelot and Tregarva have already formed a pact to live together and devote themselves to a social mission, “join[ing] hands in that

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sacred bond – [. . .] the utter friendship of two equal manful hearts” (256). Detached from the marriage plot and deprived of his social position, Lancelot, accompanied by his fellow knight, forges ahead with chivalric duty inspired by the memory of Argemone. Ultimately, however, the novel seems no more committed to the fulfilment of this social mission than to the marriage plot. After Argemone’s death, Lancelot falls increasingly under the influence of Barnakill, the prophetic spiritual mentor who emerges late in the narrative to determine the hero’s course of action and lay the groundwork for England’s resurrection. Barnakill decides that Lancelot must be a politician to have the greatest effect on his nation, but he insists that he is not yet prepared for such work, that he and Tregarva must first leave England to learn how to reform it, accompanying him on an epic journey to his own home in Asia, “the country of Prester John, that mysterious Christian empire, rarely visited by European eye” (Kingsley 1883, 296). After learning in that mythic kingdom the principles and practices of a truly Christian society, Lancelot might “bring home, after long wanderings, a message for [his] country which may help to unravel the tangled web of this strange time” (296–297). The novel concludes with the very first step of this grand programme for the hero’s education. Led by his mentor to St. Paul’s, Lancelot follows him “like a child through the cathedral door” (310). In the epilogue, Kingsley predicts that his readers might complain about this “very mythical and mysterious dénouement” (1883, 311). The curious decision to verge away from the domestic romance and social realism, which characterise most of the novel, into the vision of a highly romantic quest in part reflects the difficulty of envisioning practical solutions to the intractable problems of poverty and inequality. At the same time, the conclusion, for all its obscurity, does indicate certain priorities that Kingsley believed should undergird any social or political reform movement. As a Christian socialist, he wanted to be sure that any effort to address poverty and inequality adhere to Christian principles; the search for those principles must, he believed, take precedence over action. It is also important to note the extent to which the novel invests authority in the middle-class hero, apparently destined to become a reforming politician, and above him a spiritual mentor who seems to establish the pace and parameters of reform. Yeast thus responds to the Chartist movement by rejecting its call for universal manhood suffrage, instead putting its trust in a benevolent hierarchy.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Yeast has never been widely considered a great novel and it no longer holds much appeal for general readers. Unlike contemporary novels by the Brontës, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, it has fallen out of print and mostly out of notice.

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Nonetheless, scholars of the Victorian period cannot afford to ignore it. Although there are more accomplished novelists than Kingsley, there are few who dared throw themselves with such brash enthusiasm into public debates about industrialisation and poverty, the separation of the classes, sexual relations, and religion. The positions that he strikes are unpredictable, sometimes quite conventional, and sometimes idiosyncratic. In Yeast, arguably his most wide-ranging narrative, Kingsley clarifies our conception of the issues that enlivened the period and stretches our understanding of the way that Victorians engaged with them. As a mid-century novel devoted to raising awareness of the problems besetting the nation and urging readers to imagine their reform, Yeast represents one of the most interesting contributions to the Condition-of-England debate of the 1840s and 1850s. Many other sorts of texts participate in this debate as well: political speeches, journalism, and governmental reports; social criticism written by Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold; poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson; and novels by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Along with Kingsley, in other words, many notable writers and thinkers were responding to an array of social problems with moral fervour, all sharing the feeling, as articulated by Carlyle, “that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done, in regard to it” (1986, 151). Analysing Yeast in the context of this diverse set of texts sharpens understanding of the content and form of the novel. In the Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985), Catherine Gallagher does not discuss Yeast (although she does include a chapter on Kingsley’s second novel, Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet [1849]). In her discussion of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848, ↗ 14 Gaskell, Mary Barton), Gallagher makes a suggestive remark that helps to explain why Kingsley might have chosen to discard the marriage plot in favour of a much less satisfying open-ended conclusion. Arguing that Gaskell “does not find a narrative form that satisfactorily reveals the reality of working-class life,” Gallagher finds that “she does identify several conventional genres that hide the reality. Her attempt to render the truth is beset by irresolvable difficulties, but some relief, some certainty, is secured in attacking what is obviously false” (1985, 67). In Yeast, Kingsley does in places attempt to render the “reality” of working-class life, but his ambition is less to capture that life than to imagine the middle-class authority equipped to reform it. Despite that difference, Gallagher’s point applies well to his novel. When he began writing, Kingsley seems to have believed that he could integrate the reform plot and the marriage plot. At some point, though, he became convinced that a tidily resolved marriage plot would provide an “obviously false” ending to a narrative committed to the transformation of the world outside the middle-class marriage. “Thus, in the very act of trying to evade certain narrative responsibilities,” as Gallagher argues of Gaskell, “the book becomes peculiarly self-regarding” (1985, 68). This process occurs much more blatantly in Yeast than in Mary Barton. In the

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epilogue, as the narrator addresses the various criticisms that might be lodged against his story, he gives particular attention to the collapse of the marriage plot. “Strange!” he declares, “that the death of one of the lovers should seem no complete termination to their history, when their marriage would have been accepted by all as the legitimate dénouement” (Kingsley 1883, 322). This “self-regarding” moment affords Kingsley a chance to denounce the artificiality of the conventional resolution that he has deliberately frustrated and, implicitly at least, to raise the question of the ultimate aim of fiction. Is the point to make his readers happy and comfortable or to goad them into confronting the difficult necessity of reforming England and transforming themselves? In relation to most of the novels that take up the Condition-of-England debate, Yeast is atypical in that it focuses its social criticism on poverty and living conditions in the countryside rather than in the urban industrial setting. As a rural clergyman concerned about the unhealthy cottages of his parishioners and angered by the indifference of wealthy landowners, Kingsley uses his novel to address the vast inequalities of country life and the laws that maintain it. Tregarva loses his position when Squire Lavington discovers a ballad in which the gamekeeper expresses bitter contempt for a system as brutal to the rural poor as industrial labour was to the factory workers. In the ballad, a poacher’s widow accuses a wealthy landowner of exploiting and impoverishing her class. “You have sold the labouring man, squire,” she cries, “Body and soul to shame, / To pay for your seat in the House, squire, / And to pay for the feed of your game” (Kingsley 1883, 173). If the novel cannot bring itself to fully endorse such resentment, it does at least give it sympathetic attention. At the time, such attention in itself was a daring stance for a person in Kingsley’s position. In a recent biography that provides the most thoroughly contextualised account of Kingsley’s work, J. M. I. Klaver notes that Tregarva’s ballad “was condemned as a radical piece of work which was to taint Kingsley’s reputation in some eyes for the rest of his life” (2006, 156). Still, like most other Condition-of-England novels written by middle-class writers, Yeast does not perceive working-class activism as a legitimate response to inequality. In her analysis of Alton Locke, Rosemarie Bodenheimer detects in Kingsley’s work an “actual horror at the idea that working-class talent might be translated into legitimate social agency”; the “yearning” on the part of characters such as Tregarva and Alton for a more just society “remains sympathetic only so long as it is hopeless” (1988, 146). Bodenheimer offers a persuasive account of Kingsley’s ambivalent treatment of working-class activism. For Kingsley, a troubled relationship between human beings and the natural world offers one of the clearest indications that the nation has veered away from the path of righteousness. The emerging field of ‘Ecocriticism’ – which approaches literature with an eye for the representation of the natural world and of the impact that humans have on it – has only just begun to influence Victorian studies, but it is not surprising that Kingsley has received some attention from this perspective. Christopher Hamlin argues that Kingsley promotes a “green agenda” (2012, 256)

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and works to “serve an ecological ideal, one cobbled from an array of theological and scientific sources. Acting as prophetic witness, he would reconceive human creatureliness and reconcile biotic and Christian identities” (257). Yeast registers the hero’s moral development in part through his awakening understanding of the effect that human agriculture and industry have on the biosphere. An enthusiastic hunter and angler (like Kingsley himself), Lancelot is used to viewing the landscape primarily as the ground of his own pleasure. He must learn to perceive the deeper significance of the relationship between humanity and nature, to strive for an “ecological ideal” that reflects divine approval. An energetic proponent of sanitation reform, Kingsley interprets pollution and disease as indications that humans have failed to attain this ideal. When, in their first interaction, Lancelot praises the beauty of the stream on the Lavington estate, Tregarva responds by informing him of the “fever, and ague, and rheumatism” spread to cottagers by its fogs (Kingsley 1883, 41). When asked by Lancelot if he blames the river for such illness, the gamekeeper explains, “[n]o, sir. The riverdamps are God’s sending; and so they are not too bad to bear. But there’s more of man’s sending, that is too bad to bear” (41). This enigmatic response points toward Kingsley’s belief that if humans respect the laws of nature they can live in harmony with it. A society that ignores those laws, on the other hand, invites miseries upon itself and those miseries will undoubtedly be distributed unevenly according to class. The novel applies this principle to the problem of untreated sewage that occupied so many Victorian sanitation reformers. Lancelot walks past farmyards “from which the rich manure-water [is] draining across the road in foul black streams, festering and steaming in the chill night air” (220). He sees “the fruitful materials of food running to waste” and, further on, he passes a miserable house with a “filthy drain running right before the door” (220–221). Properly treated, sewage provides fertiliser to boost the yield of healthy food and to better feed the hungry poor. The ecosystem follows a divinely sanctioned order able to recuperate everything it produces. Those who violate its principles invite disciplinary punishment that, in this particular case, has severe repercussions for middle-class characters as well as for the poor. It is in this hamlet, its water and air poisoned by “festering” sewage, where Argemone catches the illness that kills her. In her last dismal moments, she cries, “I am festering away!” (282). Kingsley ensures that retribution circles back around to the family that holds stewardship of the land and fails to exercise authority over its maintenance. Critics who emphasise the significance of Victorian attitudes toward gender and sexuality find abundant material in Kingsley’s life and work. In The Beast and the Monk (1975), the most original of several biographies published in the second half of the twentieth century, Susan Chitty strives to make sense of Kingsley’s diametrically opposed attitudes toward sexuality. On the one hand, Kingsley proclaimed the spiritual virtue of physical passion. Chitty quotes a letter to his wife Frances (then his fiancée) in which he insists, looking toward their marriage, that “[o]ur animal enjoyments must be religious ceremonies” (1975, 80). On the other hand, he seemed equally

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intent upon mortifying the flesh. This side of Kingsley expressed itself through efforts to chastise his body – by fasting and sleeping on the cold floor without covers, for example. Ironically, in his writings Kingsley frequently associates such impulses with Catholic perversion. In Yeast, it is Luke, the Catholic convert, who extolls the “self-satisfaction, the absolute delight, of self-punishment” (Kingsley 1883, 242). Yet Kingsley himself distrusted the flesh even as he proclaimed its purity. Chitty was the first biographical critic who had access to private drawings through which Kingsley struggled to visualise and integrate ‘the beast’ and ‘the monk’, most startlingly in a sketch of himself and Frances making love while attached to a cross. In his fiction, Kingsley generally adheres to conventional Victorian perspectives on differences between the sexes. As Laura Fasick argues, Kingsley perceived sexual differences as a “natural law, in which men and women defined their gender identities through and against each other, [that] decreed the proper forms for individual and familial life” (1994, 93). Heroines such as Argemone enact the virtues and failings broadly attributed to women. She is morally pure, tender-hearted, nurturing, and yearns to bring her rakish suitor back in line with Christian faith. She falters when attempting to argue her case, however, and the narrator takes the opportunity to hold her up as a type of her sex. “She tried, as women will,” he condescendingly observes, “to answer [Lancelot] with arguments, and failed, as women will fail” (Kingsley 1883, 24). Unlike many of his time, Kingsley supported higher education for women, indeed speaking at the opening ceremony of Queen’s College in 1849. Yet he never shook the belief that women were intellectually inferior. Kingsley’s heroes similarly enact the virtues and failings associated with masculinity. Lancelot is large and well proportioned, physically as well as intellectually courageous, forthright, earnest, and eager to make an impact on the world. His heroes are sometimes, like Lancelot, socially awkward and they are frequently rash and insensitive, even brutal. Through the development of fictional types such as these, readers can sense the urgent need within Victorian culture to affirm essential characteristics that clearly distinguish the sexes. If Kingsley largely falls in line with an essentialist understanding of sexuality, his representation of gender roles does furnish some interesting twists. In certain cases, for example, he advocates forms of gender hybridity, as when the narrator of Yeast praises Colonel Bracebridge for tending to Lancelot after a riding accident with “almost womanish tenderness” (Kingsley 1883, 18) or when Argemone “imperiously” commands her lover to stay by her side, upon which he “shr[inks] down” and obeys (62). Even such exceptions, of course, are reluctant to abandon the stereotype; tenderness remains a feminine virtue even when enacted by men. Muscular Christianity furnishes its own interesting complexities. On the surface, this code seems to validate the “animal” pleasures of sexual gratification and vigorous combat (Kingsley qtd. in Chitty 1975, 80). “But although Kingsley celebrated bodily impulse,” as James Eli Adams argues, “he also wrestled constantly with the

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Pauline imperative to keep the body in submission” (1995, 110). This paradoxical attitude toward masculine vitality and potency helps to explain the collapse of the marriage plot in Yeast and, indeed, it may help to explain the fact that so few of his works find it possible to fulfil the promise of a sexual relationship. As John Maynard observes, Kingsley generally “fails as an author to bring alive the central experience upon which his philosophical glorification of married sexuality depends” (1993, 127). Rather than embracing masculinity in the context of heterosexual romance, Yeast forces its heroes to find satisfaction in the prospect of an ascetic spiritual quest. Kingsley clearly aligns the variety of masculine agency he promotes with class position, nation, religion, empire, and race, and these multiple intersections afford fruitful approaches for analysis of his work. Early in Yeast, Tregarva scolds Lancelot for planning a holiday abroad, asking him, “are there not temptations enough here in England that you must go to waste all your gifts, your scholarship, and your rank, far away?” (Kingsley 1883, 69). Tregarva seeks to retain the power of upper-middleclass masculinity within the sphere of the nation, conserving its energy for the good of England rather than wasting its force in trivial pursuits abroad. But if Kingsley thus prioritises the reform of the home nation, he does so in part in the service of a grand imperial vision. Despite the fact that he is identified as a foreigner, Barnakill frequently affirms the global significance of England. “It has been England’s privilege,” he claims, “to solve all political questions as they arise for the rest of the world; it is her duty now” (268). This solemn hyperbole reveals the extent to which this Condition-of-England novel, like many other nineteenth-century texts discussed by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1994), broadcasts its commitment to an imperial world view. It is notable that a sceptical social critic such as Kingsley takes it for granted that England operates as a divinely sanctioned force of good in the world. The “rhetoric of power,” as Said observes, “all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence when deployed in an imperial setting” (1994, xvii). The imperial ideology that informs Barnakill’s prophetic wisdom always implies a conception of racial superiority that sometimes becomes glaringly obvious in Kingsley’s fiction, as when Barnakill champions “our Caucasian empire” and concisely notes that “[t]o our race the present belongs” (Kingsley 1883, 296). It also arises with particular clarity in his historical romance of Westward Ho! (1885), set in the Elizabethan era, in which stalwart Protestant English sailors enact an early phase of the ‘white man’s burden’, exemplifying justice and mercy in their interactions with the indigenous peoples of Central and South America and striking a clear contrast to the oppressive and cruel Catholic Spaniards. C. J. W.-L. Wee perceives in such texts Kingsley’s effort to construct “a pure national-imperial identity based on racial and religious heritage” (1994, 67). The religious opposition of Protestantism and Catholicism invites further analysis as a broad and recurring theme in Kingsley’s thought that links religious faith to a network of affiliated concepts including gender, nation, and socio-economics. In

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a letter of 1851, Kingsley thus compares Protestantism, “which teaches every man to look God in the face for himself” and has “contributed more than anything else to develop family life, industry, freedom in England, Scotland, and Sweden,” to Catholicism, a “creed which by substituting the Confessor for God [. . .] by substituting a Virgin Mary, who is to nurse [men] like infants, for a Father in whom they are men and brothers,” has incapacitated its adherents from attaining “independence, self-respect, self-restraint” (qtd. in F. Kingsley 1908, 100). Kingsley was by no means the only British Protestant whose reaction to Catholicism prompted such extravagant claims and occasionally veered into hysteria. In 1850, when the Catholic Church re-established a governing hierarchy in England and installed Nicholas Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster, the Prime Minister and many other officials, mainstream newspapers, and an untold number of citizens denounced this act of ‘Papal Aggression’, as it became known. Effigies of the Pope and Wiseman were burnt in the streets. In Anti-Catholicism and NineteenthCentury Fiction (2004), Susan M. Griffin establishes the breadth of such attitudes and explores how they influence the content and form of novels published in England and America. Those interested in the role Kingsley played in the shaping of mid-century anti-Catholic discourse generally turn to the public debate he initiated with John Henry Newman, who had caused a stir in 1845 when he left the Church of England to become a Catholic priest. Kingsley’s distrust of Newman emerges quietly in Yeast; the unnamed priest who guides Luke to Rome is generally taken to be a representation of Newman. Lancelot admires this figure for his sensitive “heart” but disparages him for lacking “a truly English brain” (Kingsley 1883, 241). Years later, Kingsley expressed his hostility more explicitly. In 1863, in the middle of a book review published in Macmillan’s Magazine, he explicitly accused Newman of dishonesty. The intemperate aside led to a testy exchange of letters and then a very public debate conducted through pamphlets. In his pamphlet What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean? (1864), Kingsley presented evidence from Newman’s writings to justify his accusation but undercuts his rational argument with numerous insults and immoderate charges. In his celebrated Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), Newman then offered an elegant defence of his theological positions and, in the eyes of many readers past and present, effectively won the argument. The controversy offers a valuable perspective on the anti-Catholic bias that informs so much of Kingsley’s work. Driven more by the discussion of topical ideas than by a carefully constructed plot or a nuanced study of character, Yeast rewards readers with a survey of its author’s deeply held convictions about poverty and pollution, gender and sexuality, the Catholic and Anglican churches, the reform of the nation, and reform of self. The novel’s treatment of these topics always reflects the perspective of Charles Kingsley, but the issues themselves broadly occupied mid-Victorian culture.

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Bibliography Works Cited Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Carlyle, Thomas. Chartism. Selected Writings. By Carlyle. Ed. Alan Shelston. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986. 151–232. Chitty, Susan. The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley. New York: Mason/Charter, 1975. Fasick, Laura. “Charles Kingsley’s Scientific Treatment of Gender.” Hall 1994, 91–113. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Griffin, Susan. Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 2004. Hall, Donald D., ed. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Cambridge: CUP, 1994. Hamlin, Christopher. “Charles Kingsley: From Being Green to Green Being.” Victorian Studies 54.2 (2012): 255–282. Kingsley, Charles. “Letters to the Chartists – No. I.” Politics for the People 13 May 1848: 28–30. Kingsley, Charles. Yeast: A Problem. 1851. London: Macmillan, 1883. Kingsley, Frances, ed. Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life. London: Macmillan, 1908. Klaver, J. M. I. The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley. Boston: Brill, 2006. Maynard, John. Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion. Cambridge: CUP, 1993. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Wee, C. J. W.-L. “Christian Manliness and National Identity: The Problematic Construction of a Racially ‘Pure’ Nation.” Hall 1994, 66–88.

Further Reading Abberley, Will. “Animal Cunning: Deceptive Nature and Truthful Science in Charles Kingsley’s Natural Theology.” Victorian Studies 58.1 (2015): 34–56. Bradstock, Andrew, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan, and Sue Morgan, eds. Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Hall, Donald E. “On the Making and Unmaking of Monsters: Christian Socialism, Muscular Christianity, and the Metaphorization of Class Conflict.” Hall 1994, 45–65. Harrison, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. Rosen, David. “The Volcano and the Cathedral: Muscular Christianity and the Origins of Primal Manliness.” Hall 1994, 17–44. Smith, Sheila Mary . The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s. Oxford: OUP, 1980. Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. Uffelman, Larry K., and Patrick G. Scott. “Kingsley’s Serial Novels: Yeast.” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 9.4 (1976): 111–119. Vance, Norman. The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Wolff, Robert Lee. Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England. New York: Garland, 1977.

Norbert Lennartz

16 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853) Abstract: This chapter focuses on Charles Dickens’s dark mid-Victorian novel Bleak House and reads it in terms of an elaborate response to a world that is in the firm grip of the rigorous mechanisms of industrialisation. Before the backdrop of the leitmotif of the ossified lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, this chapter highlights to what extent ecological threats loom large over London that, in their poisonous effects, contaminate the old body politic. Drained by vampiric lawyers, struck down by contagious diseases, and often reduced to the abject state of humanoid fungi, people are bereft of their identities, lose their anthropomorphous nature, and find themselves deprived of their time-worn masks, roles, and epistemological habits. Conceived of as the Bildungsroman of the orphaned Esther Summerson whose ventriloquised autodiegetic story rivals and cuts across the male voice of omniscient narration, the essay argues that the novel is eventually geared to a Dickensian deusex-machina solution which, in the end, leaves persistent questions about ecology, gender, and metropolitan life vexingly unanswered. Keywords: Gender, ecology, body, vampirism, female narration, ventriloquism

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Bleak House (1853) is a caesura in Dickens’s prolific work, if not in Victorian novel writing. Having published successful novels that were deeply moored in the eighteenth-century tradition of the picaresque (Oliver Twist, 1839; Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844; and David Copperfield, 1850, to name but a few), in the autumn of 1851, midcareer, Dickens started his work on a new type of novel which not only testified to the progressive darkening of his world (eventually culminating in the gloomy novel Our Mutual Friend, 1865), but which also showed him deviating from the welltrodden paths and patterns of mid-Victorian narrative literature. Professing a profound dislike both of burgeoning feminist novel writing that produced Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847, ↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) and of a post-Byronic cynicism which informed his greatest rival’s novel, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848, ↗ 13 Thackeray, Vanity Fair), Dickens ventures on the project of writing a panoramic novel which invites some critics to

Note: I am indebted to Jeremy Tambling (Manchester) for his enlightening ideas on Bleak House and to Ian Duncan (Berkeley) for pinpointing the link between Dickens and Wordsworth and showing the extent to which the Romantic’s ‘spots of time’ are reflected in Esther’s narration. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-017

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read it along the lines of what came to be known as Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (a fact supported by Dickens’s close and final collaboration with the illustrator Hablot Knight [‘Phiz’] Browne). It is for this reason (and possibly for want of other terminology) that critics such as J. Hillis Miller and HansDieter Gelfert revert to comparisons taken from art and music when they try to characterise this tantalising generic melting pot either as a monumental “canvas” (Miller 1988, 11), as an all-inclusive painting in the vein of Ford Madox Brown’s Work (begun in 1852), or as a flamboyant musical composition (Gelfert 2011, 198), with all the elements of a Wagnerian opera such as a startling overture, leitmotifs, and a chorus. Having grown up in the riotous and dizzying Regency period where aristocratic dissipation and prodigality glaringly clashed with poverty and economic failure (ruthlessly turning Dickens’s own family into paupers), Dickens retranslated his traumatic experiences of bankruptcy and social ostracism into the early 1850s, where Victorian London was still revelling in the (colonial) splendour of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Repelled by (but otherwise conspicuously reticent about) this ostentation of bluntly capitalist optimism, Dickens was wondering in his article “The Last Words of the Old Year,” published in Household Words (January 1851), whether the country was ready to hold a similar “great display of England’s sins and negligences” (qtd. in Schlicke 2011, 236). Thus, it is this disillusioned mood and recollections of William Wordsworth’s depiction of London in The Prelude (1850) that must have prompted Dickens to draft the first gloomy chapters of Bleak House. While Wordsworth always stuck to the (albeit abortive) idea that the dismal passages of The Prelude were integral parts of the monumental verbal architecture of The Recluse (with the London passages in Book IX as the hideous gargoyles of his literary cathedral), Dickens seems to have temporarily lost his faith in an all-encompassing pattern of teleology, obliging him to see that poetic justice became a construction hopelessly at variance with the development of the city into an urban jungle. Dickens’s growing pessimism about modern metropolitan life is not only reflected in darkish letters that he wrote to Bulwer-Lytton during the time of the novel’s gestation – “London is a vile place, I sincerely believe” (Dickens 1988b, 287) – but also in his deflection from the epistemologically sound device of omniscient narration and in his hitherto unthought-of idea of leaving the novel vexingly open-ended. The meaningful and thought-provoking dash which, in nineteenth-century literature, is a tantalising signifier of the ineffable and which here vexingly truncates Esther Summerson’s very last sentence (“even supposing – ” [935]) reveals a new, less peremptory Dickens, unconsciously inviting generations of readers to fill the gap and to contribute to a long and turbulent history of the novel’s interpretation.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Attracting more critical attention nowadays than any of Dickens’s other novels, Bleak House has lately invited intriguing readings of and comments on what can be identified as its main concerns: (mis-)constructions of gender, body, and ecology. Performing the function of an overture, the first chapter of the novel deploys the emblematic image of the ubiquitous fog, “[f]og everywhere” (Dickens 1988a, 49). In its obfuscating dampness, in its stultifying oppressiveness, it not only permeates all habitations, but detrimentally affects all people, all genders, and all bodies (private and politic) in a far-sweeping disaster that has ecological, epistemological, political, and moral reverberations, leaving everybody in a foggy, truth- and health-impairing vacuum, “as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds” (49). As the gravitational centre of the fog, as the nidus of society’s decay, the High Court of Chancery dealing with the perennial lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce instils poison into society and disseminates an atmosphere of fog-bred paralysis, which, as the reference to the primordial mud and the Megalosaurus indicates, has dampened all hopes of progress and evolution since time immemorial. Apart from showing its effect as an enormous anti-evolutionary clog, Dickens uses it – like its later feline equivalent in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) – as a symbol of corruption that creeps into all crevices and, in its corroding humidity and infectiousness, eats into all textures and bodies, subjecting them to mould and death. Even the country estate of the Dedlocks in Lincolnshire, to which the heterodiegetic narrator switches after the preludic first chapter, is soaked in this post-diluvian wetness which blurs all demarcation lines between human and architectural bodies and imperceptibly spreads disease and putrefaction into what used to be the seclusion of bucolic areas. What is disconcerting about this bucolic place is not so much that the deer are soaked and “leave quagmires” where they move (Dickens 1988a, 56) as the fact that the small church in the park is so damp that it has become “mouldy” and the oak pulpit even “breaks out in a cold sweat” (56). The “inherent deathliness of material property,” which Claire Wood comments upon (Wood 2015, 106), is enhanced by the fact that, as in most of Dickens’s novels, objects, concepts, and humans share the same decrepitude and moribundity of body. The sweaty porousness of the pulpit is accordingly another symptom of what Sir Leicester Dedlock, the doyen of Victorian virtues, has vague premonitions of: the porousness and the erosion of the body politic, “the floodgates of society” bursting open and, like a political haemorrhage, washing away the great chain of being, the last remnants of which survived in the Victorians’ rigid stratification of society (Dickens 1988a, 628). Despite the odd subversive element surfacing in the novel, such as the sea featuring as the “Radical of Nature” (206), Dickens focuses less on revolutionary therapies than on depictions of the diseased status quo, on the rotting and withering body politic. The most appalling evidence of the bodily decomposition of society is

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the slum area Tom-all-Alone’s whose inhabitants are shown as vermin feeding on a corpse (Schülting 2016, 95): “these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps and walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers” (Dickens 1988a, 272). This description of the people swarming around and infesting a corpse-like house has an uncannily Baudelairean quality; but without highlighting the aesthetic attraction of the decomposing carcass, as Baudelaire prefers to do in his Fleurs du mal (1857), Dickens unwaveringly shows London for what it is: a festering necropolis. In this context, it is strikingly consistent that the only cohesion between the bourgeois part and the proletarian part of the body politic is the fatal disease which is transmitted by Jo, the crossing-sweeper who is liminally situated between the human and the animal world. In her endeavour to help the poor and to alleviate their hardship (especially the brickmaker’s family that is no longer of any use in mouldy and dilapidated structures), Esther is suddenly infected with a highly contagious disease which reaches her body via the lower classes and threatens to destroy it. It is open to conjecture what disease Esther suffers from, smallpox or cholera (the latter of which hit London in 1853 and became one of the worst pandemics), but as another leitmotif it underlines the fact that the entire fabric of Victorian society is sick and teetering on the verge of its final collapse. What the social and political body in this advanced stage of seepage and toxic leakiness is able to produce and, in a process of abiogenesis, gives horrifying birth to is freakish creatures, imps, and monsters (Goetsch 2002, 127). While Dickens’s early examples of these freaks of nature, Fagin (Oliver Twist), Quilp (The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841), and Uriah Heep (David Copperfield) are true-born offshoots of the Gothic tradition, his later ones seem to comply with bourgeois standards, but, as the lawyers Tulkinghorn and Vholes underline, they are not any less insidious when they feed parasitically on the cadaverous bodies (private, public, and politic) of their age. Surrounded by the moral ooziness that produces him, Mr Tulkinghorn is astoundingly compared to an “Oyster of the old school” (Dickens 1988a, 182). The image is not only typically Dickensian because it insinuates that Tulkinghorn shares other characters’ liminality and inhumanity; it is also Dickensian in its corrosive humour, subjecting the daunting lawyer to a relentless process of comic deconstruction. But what bears witness to Dickens’s growing pessimism is the fact that this streak of comic relief is a non sequitur that, in contrast to the cathartic simile comparing Heep’s mouth to a post-office (Dickens 2004, 391), no longer has the power to change the tragic tenor of the novel. Next to oysterous Tulkinghorn, the ailing body politic produces a variety of vampiric parasites. One is Mr Vholes, Richard Carstone’s legal advisor in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit, who attaches himself to his client and thrives on his infected blood. Sitting like a spider in his corner office, “in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning” (Dickens 1988a, 603), Mr Vholes is unlike other nineteenth-century vampires, neither exotic, atavistic, nor protean, but a

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vermin-like creature that contributes to the overall putrefaction of the dying body politic. The other blood-sucking parasite is Harold Skimpole, a friend of Mr Jarndyce’s who by pretending to be an innocent and child-like simpleton, feeds as egotistically on his host’s purse (and nerves) as the lawyers do. The intriguing fact that the financial and emotional vampire Mr Skimpole is modelled on the Romantic poet and critic Leigh Hunt has fuelled speculations about Dickens’s attitude towards the Romantics. Although Hunt, at that time approaching seventy (Slater 2009, 343), was one of the last and almost forgotten remnants of Romanticism, he, in the guise of a superannuated Byronic Childe Harold (Sanders 2003, 88), seems to represent an attitude of Romantic self-referentiality which Dickens had strong reservations about and which he considered to be as detrimental to the body politic as the other forms of juridical vampirism. As Robert Douglas-Fairhurst argues, decadence and encrusted structures (epitomised by the paralytic lawsuit) do not only lead to anaemia, contamination, and foulness, but also to physical and psychological atrophy (Douglas-Fairhurst 2011, 184). In this context, Dickens’s novel contains one of the most distinctive descriptions of both physiological and cognitive stagnation and dementia avant la lettre. Doomed to sit opposite each other, old Mr Smallweed is constantly busy smothering his wife’s outbreaks of (allegedly) senile nonsense and pelting cushions at her. The tableau showing this old, debilitated, and atrophied couple fighting with each other, leaving both of them immobile and in dire need of constant assistance, has an ominously Beckettian quality and shows Dickens’s intuition for translating the yet unknown morbus dementiae into a domestic theatre of the absurd. While Beckett disposes of the festering human refuse into dustbins (Endgame, 1957) and urns (Play, 1963), consigning it to the circularity of never-ending mise-enabîme situations, Dickens eventually lets the fermenting stagnation of the diseased body politic come to a head and, as in the spectacular case of Krook’s spontaneous combustion, explode. Thus, Krook’s contentious death should not only be read “in the context of his fetishization of refuse and waste” (Schülting 2016, 93), but also before the backdrop of Dickens’s diminishing belief in the body politic’s selfhealing powers. In possession of letters and documents which might reveal society’s scandalous interconnectedness, such as Lady Dedlock’s pre-marital relationship with Captain Hawdon (introduced into the novel as the dead scrivener Nemo) and the fact that she is Esther’s disgraced mother, Krook, the owner of a bizarre shop and a precursor of Mr. Venus, the taxidermist in Our Mutual Friend, not only plays a pivotal role in the solution to the novel’s riddle, but also personifies a suppurating boil that needs to burst so that a possible regeneration of the rotting body politic can be set in motion. Waiting for the bundle of letters to be handed over, the law clerk Mr Guppy and his friend Jobling alias Weevle (independently seeking to investigate the mystery) experience an uncannily Gothic and extraordinary night. The Gothicism of the scene is enhanced when – in addition to “ghosts of sound,” cracklings and tickings (Dickens 1988a, 507) – Krook fails to appear, and Mr Guppy not

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only notices layers of soot and black fat on his coat sleeve, but also rivulets of a sickening oil gathering in “a little thick nauseous pool” (509). The fact that Krook’s spontaneous and surreal combustion takes place right in the middle of the novel (chapter thirty-two) makes it abundantly clear that a central function must be accorded to it. Referring to the humoral pathology of the early modern age, to the ignition of “corrupted humours” in the K/crook’s “vicious body” (512), the narrator makes use of an anachronism to stress that the bursting of the boil and the draining of the “foetid effluvia” (513) stand for a cathartic process that has been triggered. Since Krook is often facetiously correlated with the Chancellor of the court and, as a chaotic monger of “old parchment rolls” (99), seen as an inverted mirror image of the judge in Chancery, his death is ultimately instrumental in removing blockages and rankling congestions which had impeded the resolution of the lawsuit. Although the body politic is so moribund and infested with parasites, Dickens leaves his readers in no doubt that a cure or at least a therapy can only be effected by a special doctor, a kind of a magical healer or docteur thaumaturge. Having spent a considerable time abroad, in heterotopian India, the surgeon Mr Woodcourt returns and administers medical and psychological remedies which help to heal or soothe the bruised bodies (and souls) of Esther, Richard, Jo, and, as partes pro toto, of Victorian society in its entirety. In an earlier shipwreck, Mr Woodcourt proved to be at his most anti-Byronic, when, unlike the blood-sucking and cannibalising surgeon in the shipwreck scene in Byron’s Don Juan, he saved as many lives as possible. Owing to Dickens’s gloom-soaked view of the world, Mr Woodcourt’s medical skills, however, remain limited, unable to prevent Lady Dedlock’s suicide, the end of Esther’s mother at the gates of the cemetery where her illicit lover Hawdon was buried. The fact that the allegedly impervious lady dies in a place where the walls exude “a thick humidity [. . .] like a disease” (Dickens 1988a, 868) makes it emphatically clear that the doctor’s position is still that of a Sisyphus in the face of overwhelmingly physiological, social, and economic diseases, but by marrying Esther he might prove to be successful in helping to produce a new generation that will in the future cure and rejuvenate the ailing body politic. That infection, parasitical diseases and sanitary problems were tightly knit with what later, in 1858, came to be known as the Great Stink, with the first pre-twentiethcentury ecological disaster in London, is one of the core messages of the novel. In his study The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel (2010), Jules Law shows the Victorians increasingly checkmated by the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Differentiating between public and private fluids, Law pinpoints the dilemma that existed in the Victorian age between the staggering ubiquity of life-endangering public fluids and the need not only to keep the individual’s body shut, but also to subject its private fluids to constant and rigorous policing. While Law foregrounds Dombey and Son for his argument, similar ecological issues can be detected in Bleak House. It is not only the aforementioned dampness of the walls and the sweatiness of objects that reveal an imbalance between swampy nature and

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culture, it is also the fact that the inhabitants of Tom-all-Alone’s have lost their theomorphic quality and metamorphosed into “extraordinary specimens of human fungus” (Dickens 1988a, 426) which shows Dickens’s awareness of an socio-ecological catastrophe that had been looming large in cities since the Romantic age. While John Jarndyce’s Bleak House is a haven of order and ecological sensibility, beyond the pale of the teeming metropolis and situated in the “green landscape” (Dickens 1988a, 110), London is represented as a vortex of waste, pollution, and infectious filth blurring all ontological categories. What seems to be a typically tongue-in-cheek Dickensian argument is that in the novel’s metropolitan life, human beings are as persistent sources of ecological damage as the industrial places which dramatically contribute to the increase in the public water level. Next to Mr Krook exploding in oil and soot, Mr Chadband, an Evangelical fanatic, is characterised as an ecological (and intellectual) disaster: not only are his homilies “oily exudations” (411–412) accompanied by an “oily” (414) and “greasily meek smile” (416), Mr Chadband’s body seems to be continuously producing fluids, transmuting “nutriment of any sort into oil” (319) and leaving repellent oil slicks wherever he goes. While this outstanding example of individual porousness and pollution is attributable to Dickens’s scathing satire of religious fundamentalism, the references to the foul public waters which precede and put the reader in the right mood for the central event of Krook’s ecological scenario of combustion are anything but parodic. With “a laggard mist” obstructing the view, the night when Krook is dissolved into sooty and oily particles is an uncommonly “steaming” one, turning “the slaughter-houses, the unwholesome trades, the sewerage, bad water, and burial-grounds to account” and giving “the Registrar of Deaths some extra business” (499). Inexplicably missing in A. N. Wilson’s survey of The Victorians (2002), the aspect of the ecological havoc that his contemporaries had wreaked on nature seems to be one of Dickens’s major concerns. As early as in 1842, Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain had alerted social activists to the sanitary atrocities which the impoverished working classes were known to be suffering from. While postmodern ecocriticism tends to focus more on Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865), and therein to foreground the “global problem of energy and irreversibility” (MacDuffie 2014, 131), Dickens never forgoes his ecological perspective and persistently voices his grievances about the cost that the Victorians were paying for technological progress. It is this ecological awareness which shows Dickens’s singularity and his difference from Wordsworth who, in his poetry of the 1840s, saw technology and urbanisation as expressions of a new ugly consumer culture which threatened to turn both the Lake District and London into Jonsonian breeding places of vulgarity (Gigante 2005, 82). In this respect, Dickens is more ‘green’ than Wordsworth arguing that metropolitan monstrosity is less a matter of taste than of ecology. One nucleus of ecological threat is the cemetery, which, as a place of contamination, is,

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next to the courts, another gravitational centre of the novel to which characters such as Lady Dedlock are magically drawn: “a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed” (Dickens 1988a, 202). Overcrowded and wedged into the teeming metropolis, the graveyard is a hotbed of disease transmitting corruption to the inhabitants of London and, as Tyson Stolte argues, “accelerat [ing] the perfectly natural progression from corpse to food” (Stolte 2011, 413). The fact that Hawdon is buried in a grave of “one foot or two” depth makes it shockingly clear that the graveyard is an active agent in the transmission of diseases and a point of intersection where private and public fluids mingle. Far from separating the oozing spheres of the living from the dead, the iron gate of the churchyard even epitomises the eco-catastrophe that was descending over nineteenth-century cities: “on [it] the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch!” (Dickens 1988a, 203). The extent to which ecological issues were either unknown or interwoven with folklore or pseudo-scientific explanations is revealed in Dickens’s novel. The “poisoned air,” which twenty-first-century readers might identify as a life-endangering mixture of soot, industrial fumes, and indefinite chemicals, is astoundingly and belittlingly related to Gothic ideas of witches, sorcery, and Walpurgis Night. Read before this backdrop, ecological threats were persistently mythologised or subjected to a supernaturalism which tended to acquit the ecological offenders. The graveyard with its “beastly scrap[s] of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination” (202), and the entire city with its ecological atrocities are – according to Dickens’s proclivity for dualisms – pitted against rare places of pristine beauty and innocence. One of these is – next to Bleak House – Mr Boythorn’s cottage, where Esther recuperates from her illness. The floods of infectious public waters are here superseded by a cornucopian abundance of fruit which is reminiscent of the fecundity of nature in Keats’s ode “To Autumn” (1819). The trees are depicted as being “heavy with fruit, the gooseberry-bushes were so laden that their branches arched and rested on the earth, the strawberries and raspberries grew in like profusion, and the peaches basked by the hundred on the wall” (301). What is here troped as a Keatsian “vegetable treasury,” as a locus amoenus, is also characterised by the olfactory pleasantness and the salubriousness of the air. The “wholesome growth” that can be observed everywhere and the fact that “the whole air [is] a great nosegay” (301, emphasis added) underscore that, in the country, health is a matter of totality (wholesome – whole) and, thus, happily remote from the odour of the rotting carcasses presided over by Mr Vholes’s “unwholesome figure” (924), epitomising in his figure and name the perversion of the whole into a (V)hole. While the solemn and sublime spectacle of a thunderstorm is unfolding, and uncontaminated water is refreshingly pouring on to the flowers “to make creation new again” (Dickens 1988a, 309), it is here that Esther is brought into contact with Lady Dedlock, her mother whom she unconsciously looks for and loses three times in the course of the novel (Dever 2012, 363). The juxtaposition of these two female

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protagonists not only suggests a clash of different concepts of femininity, but also dissimilar ways of how to deal with the imminent ecological, medical, political, and moral threats. Both women epitomise the tragic consequences of keeping their bodies insufficiently closed to the various fluids, but while Lady Dedlock, a remnant of the ancien régime, chooses “the freezing mood” (Dickens 1988a, 57), and in this way perfectly matches her (cuckolded) husband, the “magnificent refrigerator” of the bygone Regency period (623), it is only Esther who will benefit from the purifying storm. Although her social openness does not protect her from being contaminated by disease and corruption, Esther is one of the first characters to eschew all strategies of mask-like imperviousness and iciness, courageously facing her cadaverous society with her visor down. With a variety of masks, camouflages and carapace-like structures such as forbidding corsets distorting the female body and transforming its chest into an “ironbound bosom” (Dickens 1988a, 134), it is absolutely clear that issues of femininity are addressed by Dickens from a conservative, mid-Victorian point of view. While identities seem to be excessively blurry in Dickens’s novels, leaving male and female characters with a plethora of (nick-)names, concepts of gender are comparatively fixed and unnegotiable in Dickens’s works. A few re-readings of Dickens’s novels in the wake of queer studies are intriguing (Furneaux 2009), but they turn out to be “queer, revisionist lens[es]” (Edwards Keates 2012, 171) brought into focus by postmodern sexual policies. Women deviating from their Victorian roles were more often than not castigated by Dickens and unmasked as monstrosities, caricatures, and grotesque aberrations. Jane Murdstone in David Copperfield (1850), a steely woman with bushy masculine eyebrows that look like dislocated whiskers is supremely liminal and, as a spinster, beyond the pale of femininity; Edith Dombey in Dombey and Son (1848) is even accorded the role of a New Woman avant la lettre, when at her husband’s banquet she appears like a vindictive stony guest, but, by the end of the novel, she is duly buried in a grave-like room and thus, as another madwoman in a closet, exorcised out of the redemptive tableau of the final chapters (Lennartz 2012). There is no denying that there is a certain fatal kinship between Edith Dombey and Lady Dedlock. Both women are distinguished by a Byronic haughtiness and an implicit refusal to comply with the role of the Victorian ‘angel in the house’. While Edith Dombey, however, reverts to a mask-like stoniness as a rebellion against her commodification by her husband, Lady Dedlock is in dire need of an even more opaque and icy camouflage, since, as a fallen woman who had pre-marital sex with Hawdon / Nemo, she personifies a shocking breach of taboo. As if over-eager to conceal the scandal of her sexual misdemeanour and her bodily openness, Lady Dedlock readily accepts the role of being an icon and a harbinger of fashion. Like a female dandy, she hides her body’s weakness and vulnerability not only behind layers of cloth, but also behind self-fashionings and airs such as that of an “exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers” (Dickens 1988a, 217). If one takes into

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consideration the fact that Dickens, in real life, was unwaveringly committed to providing fallen women with a refuge (Urania Cottage, which he had run in cooperation with Angela Burdett Coutts since 1847), as a novelist, he prefers to be reticent about female grievances and rather feels coerced into subjecting these women either to a kind of grim poetic justice or, as in the case of Little Emily in David Copperfield, to bundle them off to less straitlaced places such as Australia. Loyalty to public taste and to the pervasive Mrs Grundy (the proverbial personification of prim morality) were expected of Dickens and Victorian novelists, and still almost forty years had to elapse before Oscar Wilde’s Mrs Erlynne could flippantly thematise her fallenness in the play Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892). The image that Lady Dedlock uses shortly before her tragic death gives apt expression to the impasse (or deadlock situation) that women rebelling against gender expectations or breaking out of their roles (prior to Ibsen’s Nora) were trapped in. She provocatively compares the Victorians’ policing of the female body to a “destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart, like flies in amber” (812). Thus congealed into strict patriarchal patterns, Lady Dedlock pre-empts Emma Bovary’s fate by six years when she also resorts to the only possible way out of her captivity: suicide. The astounding likeness between Esther and Lady Dedlock (which at one point puzzles Mr Guppy and gives him and the reader the first clue to the protagonist’s hidden identity) is thus only superficial; on closer inspection, they reveal conspicuous differences. While Lady Dedlock stands for an urbanity, for an erotic rebelliousness which, by the end of the nineteenth century, frenzied Victorians in novels such as Dracula (1897) wanted to see punished by phallic stakes, severed heads, and ritualised murders, Esther’s identity is more palatable to Victorian patriarchy, since on the clean slate that she is everybody feels entitled to scribble a name that they find suitable for her: while some of her friends call her Dame Durden, others (among them her ward and almost-husband John Jarndyce) prefer to construe her identity into fairy creatures (Little Old Woman, Cobweb, Mother Hubbard) or blurry gender neutrality (Fitz[=fils]-Jarndyce). As Nemo’s (or nobody’s) daughter, her identity is constantly re-invented and re-defined by her (male) fellow beings who readily adopt the Victorian role of being Pygmalions, ready to chisel their ideal of a woman as a self-effacing, meek, and asexual non-entity out of cold slabs of stone. Coming to terms with Dickens’s stereotypical idea of femininity (Sanders 1982, 72), one is intrigued to find readings such as that of Elizabeth Langland, who refuses to see the domestic realm as a place of dwarfed and thwarted female ambitions, but argues that it is an alternative site of power which supplies Esther with opportunities for surveillance that eventually place her on the same level as Tulkinghorn and the detective Bucket. In marked contradistinction to the chaos that (male) Chancery has brought upon the Jarndyce family, Esther, so Langland argues (Langland 1995), imposes order on Bleak House and shows her new authority by the keys which she conscientiously keeps in her custody. In this respect, Esther’s household management epitomises a counter-world not only to the male sphere of legal confusion, but also to

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the Jellybys’ inverted home, where Mrs Jellyby, a fanatic combatant for the cause of the Borrioboola-Gha project and a glaring example of negative mother-figures in Dickens’s novels, creates a state of disarray and messiness that is not dissimilar to the world of Chancery. While Dickens takes a fancy to depicting households that are incompatible with Victorian ideas of decorum and, as in the case of the Bagnets, is even not reluctant to display families in which some women aspire to a (more or less) subversive position of control, by the end of Bleak House, he is eager to cater to his audience’s bourgeois tastes and to show Esther in a traditionally subservient position. In line with the numerous female characters who readily truckle to men’s ideas of angelic domesticity in Dickens’s oeuvre, Esther is just another sibling of Agnes Wickfield, Florence Dombey, Rose Maylie or Amy Dorrit, like all of them, dutiful, altruistic, disembodied – and boring. At the beginning of the last chapter, Esther emphatically (and with recourse to the number seven, the biblical number of totality) states that “[f]ull seven happy years” she has been “the mistress of Bleak House” (932) which, not least due to her effective and brightening management, has always been a misnomer. As the mother of two daughters and the maternal friend of Ada, Caddy, Peepy, and many other children or child-like adults, she epitomises what scholars of the Victorian age came to define as marginal motherhood (Langland 1987). And it is from these margins of domesticity that the reader eventually learns what happens to women who aspire to the patriarchal centre and stray beyond the pale of family life. Reverting to the same scathing mockery that Byron levelled at the Bluestockings of the Regency period, Dickens exposes Mrs Jellyby to the same ridicule as Mrs Pardiggle and Miss Wisk; as Miss Wisk in particular turns out to be a staunch feminist avant la lettre vociferously calling for women’s liberation. As Daumier-like caricatures of a riotous feminism, this triumvirate of D. H. Lawrencian ‘cocksureness’ ends on the fringes of parody and foolishness. Yet, it is basically the same marginality (minus the caustic satire), that awaits Esther: While being permitted to bask in her husband’s reputation as a quasi-Christological doctor – “the people even praise Me as the doctor’s wife. [. . .] They like me for his sake, as I do everything I do in life for his sake” (Dickens 1988a, 935) –, Esther, the paragon of anti-feminist virtue, is finally reduced to being the plain and unattractive “shadow and attendant image of her lord” (Ruskin, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ qtd. in Houghton 1957, 349), totally eclipsed by his fame, his personality and his handsomeness.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Esther’s female marginality and inferiority are also underlined by narratological strategies: for the first time, Dickens eschews traditional third-person omniscient narration and, in the same novel, juxtaposes two gendered narrators to cope with

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the complexity of the plots. While an unidentified male voice introduces the reader to the intricacies of the lawsuit and, in the present tense, sheds a satirical and trenchant light on the diseased fog-drenched body politic, Esther’s autodiegetic voice is not only that of a passive observer, grammatically confined to the past tense, but also that of a focaliser who admits to being intellectually incapacitated: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that” (Dickens 1988a, 62). Conversing with dolls (“Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!” 62), and living in a pre-Ibsenite dolls’ house, her chapters are prime examples of what Ina Schabert characterises as an écriture féminine (Schabert 1997, 484–485): in contrast to the generously panoramic view of the male narrator, her scope of vision and words is limited and quite in accordance with the microscopic range that, in the mid-nineteenth century, was allotted to Victorian women. Considered to be “too weak and twaddling” even by female readers such as Charlotte Brontë (qtd. in Slater 2009, 348), Esther seems to tease and provoke nineteenth-century readers with her domesticity and intellectual unreliability. Esther’s slow emergence from foggy orphaned non-existence to being Nemo’s and Lady Dedlock’s bastardised daughter is also reflected in her tentative and faltering narrative which is not without repetitions (“I find I am saying it for the second time,” 74), inconsistencies and riddles such as the lawyer’s inserted letter in enigmatic law hand. Dickens’s bold experiment of combining two contradictory focalisers (and even going so far as to ventriloquise a female one) is also attributable to the fact that, after sticking to the concept of the Smollettian picaresque novel in the 1840s (laced with a decent amount of Pickwickian humour), he was now dallying with perspectives and straddling generic boundaries, so that the Victorians saw their great expectations of a well-made instalment novel seriously challenged. What is a novelty is that the new Bildungsroman (unlike the preceding autobiographically tinted David Copperfield) is now embedded into a crime and mystery novel, introducing Mr Bucket (among a considerable number of dilettantish detectives) as one of the first eccentric and ingenious inspectors into British literature. Familiar with Poe’s stories at least since his sojourn in America in 1842, Dickens seems to have recognised the narrative potential that crime stories revolving around a sleuth had, a fact that possibly led him to (partially) abandon the omnipresence of the authorial narrator and to focus on the tantalising advantages of unreliable narration. That the manifold and tangled narrative skein (analogous to the tightly interwoven lawsuit) also retains a few showy threads of the Gothic novel, of the budding sensational novel, and some vestiges of the sentimental novel reveals Dickens to be a romantique manqué whose professed intention in the ‘Preface to the First Edition’ to highlight “the romantic side of familiar things” (Dickens 1988a, 43) sounds as anachronistic as Wordsworth’s revised Prelude, which, after the Poet Laureate’s death in 1850, Dickens was among the splendid few to buy.

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The fact that, by the end of the novel, Esther’s voice quantitatively supplants that of the traditional narrator and that she eventually leaves John Jarndyce moored in his old “bachelor habits” (Dickens 1988a, 915) has recently been read as evidence of Dickens’s refusal to comply with the flamboyant expectations of a heroic or “[h]egemonic” masculinity in the vein of Thomas Carlyle (Morgan 2000, 204). Although it might be far-fetched to go so far as to see Bleak House in the light of “unconventional feminized masculinity” (Morgan 2000, 209), the changes to the concept of Victorian masculinity began to be mirrored not only by the delineation of the Victorian ancien régime as fossilised or paralytic relics (Sir Leicester Dedlock or old Mr Turveydrop), but also by the doubt that writers such as Dickens expressed about the stentorian voice of the omniscient narrator. That Esther’s narrative is finally stuck in inchoateness seems to be an apt expression of the pervasive Arnoldian feeling of living in an age of transition, of a liminality appropriately translated by Dickens into the device of narratological aposiopesis.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives The serialisation of the novel in the autumn of 1852 was an immediate success rocketing Dickens into the position of a bestseller and (in the words of his contemporaries) “a literary Croesus” (Robert Patten, qtd. in Schlicke 2011, 50). Despite the fact that dramatisations of Dickens’s works into tear-eliciting melodramas were on the wane in the 1840s, staged versions of Bleak House became boxoffice hits, and notable productions of the novel after Dickens’s death in the 1870s and 1880s came to be associated with Victorian star actresses such as Jennie Lee and Fanny Janauschek who scintillated in the (breeches) roles of Jo and Lady Dedlock respectively. Dickens’s biographer John Forster, however, spearheaded a considerable group of critics who tended to see in the novel a decline of Dickens’s narrative powers and complained about a too overt and palpable didacticism. While these readers seemed to compare this Dickens novel unfavourably with the emergent and popularly action-packed sensational novels, severe criticism came from the Positivists who particularly censured Dickens for his relapse into the romance and into the implausibility of crude Gothic fiction. In this context, two open letters were addressed to Dickens by G. H. Lewes in the Leader (5 and 12 February 1853) arguing that the spontaneous combustion of a human body was an impossibility (Slater 2009, 349) and utterly incompatible with the novel’s claim to realism and veracity. While Dickens took up the gauntlet and responded irritably to Lewes, staunchly clutching at “arcane authorities” for the existence of spontaneous combustions, the controversy illustrates in an exemplary way that Bleak House exceeds the narrow hermeneutic boundaries of Positivism and that Dickens was unwittingly ushering in a

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new mode of novel writing, a symbolist approach to reality that is more associated with French fin-de-siècle literature than with mid-Victorian novels. This certainly serves as an explanation for the interest that the figurehead of French symbolism, Joris-Karl Huysmans, took in Dickens, when he has his brooding protagonist Floressas des Esseintes in À rebours (1884) go on an imaginary tour of Dickens’s London, there meeting with Mr Tulkinghorn, “le funèbre avoué de Bleakhouse” (Huysmans 1977, 241–242), in his drug-induced hallucinations. What proves to be another ironic facet is that even the exponent of naturalism, Émile Zola, pays tribute to Bleak House and, after four decades, resuscitates the debate about Krook’s explosion into a “nauseous pool” of oil. In his last novel of the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, Docteur Pascal (1893), Zola not only challenges the ingrained Grundyism of Dickens’s novel, when he has his 59year old equivalent to John Jarndyce, Doctor Pascal, successfully make love to his 24-year old niece Clotilde and even father a child with her; he is openly at his most Dickensian when he lets his readers follow Pascal to a deserted house where he finds the old, wayward, and alcoholic Macquart reduced to a small pool of rancid fat after the spontaneous combustion of his alcohol-saturated body. While Lewes imperturbably insisted on Positivist facts and empiricist truth, the zeitgeist seems to have changed so fundamentally that even the most scientific of novelists, Zola, not only endorses symbolism, but also feels free to revert to Dickens’s Romanticism and to plagiarise the English novelist’s most controversial scene (Huguet 2013, 146). With early-twentieth-century critics such as the Zolaesque George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton showing a conspicuous taciturnity about the kaleidoscopic and dense novel, Bleak House’s critical fortunes only began to rise when dark novels of the Kafkaesque metropolis became fashionable and critics were ready to shift their attention from the convivial Pickwickian Dickens to the writer of sombre and disquieting city novels. While E. M. Forster’s devastating verdict on the flatness of Dickens’s characters reverberated for quite a long time, making modernists such as Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf flaunt an attitude of haughty ignorance of Dickens’s works, Bleak House survived these spells of critical disfavour and (even in the face of Terry Eagleton’s derogatory remarks about Dickens’s delight in “material clutter” and “off-beat detail,” Eagleton 2005, 149–150) regained its place both in literary criticism and in today’s canon of dead, white males. That Ian McEwan sets his novel The Children Act (2014) in the milieu of the law courts and conjures up in the very first lines the fog-bred and dismal atmosphere of the midVictorian novel is more than an indication of the fact that Bleak House, after its chequered history of reception, is now counted among Dickens’s most revered classics.

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Bibliography Works Cited Dever, Carolyn. “Broken Mirror, Broken Words: Bleak House.” Dickens, Sexuality and Gender. Ed. Lillian Nayder. New York: Routledge, 2012. 363–386. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Introd. J. Hillis Miller. Ed. Norman Page. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988a. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. 1850. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. London: Penguin, 2004. Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1850–1852. Ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis. Oxford: OUP, 1988b. Vol. 6 of The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, gen. eds. 12 vols. 1965–2002. Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Eagleton, Terry. The English Novel. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Edwards Keates, Kim. “‘Wow! She’s a Lesbian! Got to Be!’: Re-Reading/Re-Viewing Dickens and Neo-Victorianism on the BBC.” Dickens and Modernity. Ed. Juliet John. Cambridge: Brewer, 2012. 171–192. Furneaux, Holly. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Gelfert, Hans-Dieter. Charles Dickens, der Unnachahmliche: Eine Biographie. München: Beck, 2011. Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Goetsch, Paul. Monsters in English Literature: From the Romantic to the First World War. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002. Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. Huguet, Christine. “Dickens in France: Major Writers.” The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. Ed. Michael Hollington. Vol. 1. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 142–153. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. À rebours. Ed. Marc Fumaroli. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Langland, Elizabeth. “Patriarchal Ideology and Marginal Motherhood in Victorian Novels by Women.” Studies in the Novel 19.3 (1987): 381–394. Law, Jules. The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010. Lennartz, Norbert. “Dickens as a Modern Romantic: The Case of Edith Dombey in Dombey and Son.” Dickens’s Signs and Readers’ Designs: New Bearings in Dickens Criticism. Ed. Francesca Orestano and Norbert Lennartz. Rome: Aracne, 2012. 105–125. MacDuffie, Allan. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: CUP, 2014. Miller, J. Hillis. Introduction. Bleak House. By Charles Dickens. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. 11–34. Morgan, Thaïs E. “The Poetry of Victorian Masculinities.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. 203–227. Sanders, Andrew. Charles Dickens. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Sanders, Andrew. Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist. London: Macmillan, 1982. Schabert, Ina. Englische Literaturgeschichte aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1997. Schlicke, Paul, ed. The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens. Oxford: OUP, 2011.

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Schülting, Sabine. Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture: Writing Materiality. New York: Routledge, 2016. Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Stolte, Tyson. “‘Putrefaction Generally’: Bleak House, Victorian Psychology, and the Question of Bodily Matter.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44.3 (2011): 402–423. Wilson, A. N. The Victorians. London: Arrow Books, 2003. Wood, Claire. Dickens and the Business of Death. Cambridge: CUP, 2015.

Further Reading Allan, Janice, ed. Dickens’s Bleak House. A Source Book. London: Routledge, 2004. Gravil, Richard. Reading Charles Dickens: Bleak House. London: Indie Books, 2017. Miller. D. A. The Novel and the Police. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988. Tambling, Jeremy, ed. Bleak House: Contemporary Critical Essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998. Tomalin, Claire. Charles Dickens. London: Penguin, 2011.

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17 Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne (1858) Abstract: Anthony Trollope published forty-seven novels plus a great many short stories, travel books, biographies, journal articles, and other prose works. In his posthumously published An Autobiography Trollope gives an account of his miserable childhood as a day-boarder at elite schools, his later life as a Postal Surveyor in the British Post Office, and his travels in Ireland and many other parts of the British Empire. At the same time, in a continuiation of a youthful habit of daydreaming that was a compensation for his unhappy real life, Trollope was writing novel after novel which eventually earned him what he did not have as a child: membership in a community, in this case the London community of writers, editors, and publishers. Trollope’s fiction often focuses on the way marriages, frequently between an aristocrat and a commoner, were rearranging the distribution of rank, power, and money in the Victorian middle and upper classes. Many of his novels focus on some imaginary British maiden who marries well through sticking stubbornly to her love against the opposition of family and friends. Doctor Thorne is a good example of Trollope’s masterful use of Victorian novel techniques (dialogue, indirect discourse, narrator’s commentary) in a characteristically powerful and winning treatment of this theme. Keywords: Marriage, daydreaming, irony, plot and character, gender difference

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Anthony Trollope was born at Keppel Street in Bloomsbury, London, on April 24, 1815. He died at 34 Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square, London, on December 6, 1882. These facts might make it sound as if Trollope were a confirmed Londoner. That is in a sense true, but few Victorian novelists travelled so much and lived in so many different places as did Anthony Trollope before he settled again in or near London. During all this moving around and then after he settled in London, Trollope published forty-seven novels, plus a great many short stories, travel books, biographies, journal articles, and other prose works. He published books about the West Indies, North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Cicero, Caesar, Lord Palmerston, Thackeray, etc. Project Gutenberg has e-texts, including versions with the illustrations for works that were illustrated, of eighty-two books by Anthony Trollope. This includes not only his forty-seven novels and short story collections, but his multitudinous prose works too. The inclusion of the illustrations is important because earlier twentieth-century reprints, such as the Oxford World Classics editions of the novels and stories, omitted them as not important. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-018

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This obscures the way many of Trollope’s novels, like most Victorian fiction, were multimedia works.1 One of Trollope’s most wonderful of his many wonderful books, An Autobiography (first published in 1883, though written in 1875–1876), tells better than any other narrative the story of Trollope’s life and writings. My account depends on Trollope’s. His father was an unsuccessful barrister (too bad-tempered), farmer, and writer of an endless and always unfinished book on all ecclesiastical terms, including every fraternity of monks and convent of nuns. He eventually had to flee with his wife and children to Belgium to avoid imprisonment for debt. Everything Trollope’s father touched turned to dust. Trollope’s mother, Frances Trollope, on the contrary, was an exceptional woman. She held the family together by becoming the successful author of many novels and other writings, 114 books altogether! Perhaps her best-known book is The Domestic Manners of the Americans. It is based on her experience trying, unsuccessfully, to recoup the family fortunes by running a “bazaar” in Cincinnati, Ohio, of all places. Trollope’s father intended that Anthony should go to a distinguished public school and then on to his father’s college, New College, Oxford, or to some other Oxford or Cambridge College. Because his father was so poor, Trollope was sent as a day pupil, first to Harrow, then to Winchester, then to Harrow again. As Trollope reports in An Autobiography, his school experiences were extravagantly miserable. This was primarily a result of his poverty and awkwardness. My schoolfellows of course knew that it was so [his poverty], and I became a Pariah. [. . .] I suffered horribly! I could make no stand against it. I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But, ah, how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart; how I considered whether I should always be alone; – whether I could not find my way up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to everything! (Trollope 1996, 12)

The reader will note two features of this citation. These features are characteristic of Trollope’s style throughout all his books: (1) It is written with remarkable ease and power; (2) It is ironic. The irony in this case, as in many others of Trollope’s writings, arises from the presence of two minds, that of the character and that of the narrator, here the young Trollope and the grown-up Trollope. The focus is on the interior experience of a specific person as reported, often in free indirect discourse, by someone else, in this case the inner life of Anthony Trollope as a suffering schoolboy ironically reported on and appraised by the adult Trollope.

1 For much more detail than space allows me to include here about Trollope’s life, writings, and reputation, as well as for listing of secondary material about him, see the Wikipedia entry for Anthony Trollope. This entry also contains a more or less complete list of Trollope’s writings.

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Trollope’s fortunes changed when his father gave up the idea of getting him into Oxford or Cambridge and withdrew him from Harrow. He was taken with his family into exile in Belgium. While there, he was offered a Civil Service clerkship in the General Post Office by way of connections his mother had. Once more Frances Trollope saved the day. Trollope’s beginning at the Post Office was not auspicious. It is recounted fictitiously in his early novel The Three Clerks (1858). Nevertheless, Trollope eventually became a valued and fairly high-level member of the Post Office staff. He invented the pillar post-box! Trollope was especially charged with making the rural postal service ubiquitous and efficient in Ireland, then in parts of rural England. He was sent to the West Indies, Egypt, and Scotland on postal missions in 1858–1859. He lived in Ireland for a good many years as a Surveyor of the Post Office. He travelled all over Ireland on horseback visiting remote farms and post offices. “[I]t was the ambition of my life to cover the country with rural Letter Carriers” (Trollope 1996, 61). A parallel exists between this ambition and Trollope’s desire to write novels that would communicate a shared imaginary world to all sorts of readers. During his time in Ireland Trollope became a serious and enthusiastic foxhunter, a “rider to hounds.” He also wrote his first novels. Why should a busy and successful Civil Servant want to write novels? An Autobiography gives the quite extraordinary answer to that question. As a way out of his miserable solitude at school, Trollope began a habit of daydreaming. That habit was in a compensation for being excluded from ‘play’ with his schoolfellows. We all daydream. Freud has, in the twenty-third lecture of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–1917), proposed that daydreams function as imaginary substitutes for what we do not have in real life. Creative writers have the ability to write these “phantasies” down and thereby allow others to take pleasure in them. The artist has by this means, says Freud, “achieved through his phantasy what originally he had achieved only in his phantasy – honour, power and the love of women” (1963, 376–377). Unusual features of Trollope’s daydreams were their continuity, consistency, and long duration. The young Trollope’s daydreams had a unity like that of a novel that takes months or even years to write, and many hours or days to read. Since the following passage is crucial to understanding not only the origin of Trollope’s novelwriting, but also some chief features of those novels, I must cite it at some length: For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions and proprieties and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced, – nor even anything which from outward circumstances would seem to be violently improbable. I myself was of course my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. But I never became a king, or a duke, – much less, when my height and personal appearance were fixed, would I be an Antinous, or six feet high. I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart and open of hand and noble in thought, despising mean things; and altogether I was a very much better fellow than

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I have ever succeeded in being since. This had been the occupation of my life for six of seven years before I went to the Post Office, and was by no means abandoned when I commenced my work. There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice; but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life. In after years I have done the same, – with this difference, that I have discarded the hero of my early dreams, and have been able to lay my own identity aside. (1996, 32–33)

Freud’s analysis of daydreams indicates why daydreaming is a “dangerous mental practice.” Daydreams are compensatory wish-fulfilment in “phantasy.” This may explain why novel-reading was in the Victorian period viewed with suspicion, particularly by parents of novel-reading girls and boys. Those young people needed, so their parents thought, to learn to live in the ‘real world’ and abjure fantasy, especially sexual phantasy. Today the fear would be for young people who watch too much TV, use too much Facebook and Twitter, play too many video games, and watch too much Netflix. Two more comments: (1) It is by no means the case that Trollope gave up his “own identity” in his novels. Their heroes are suspiciously like the imaginary heroes of Trollope’s daydreams. (2) Often, though by no means always, the central figure in Trollope’s novels is a young unmarried girl of marriageable age. I shall have more to say later about the significances of this sex-change. The actual circumstances of Trollope’s novel-writing are no less amazing than his account of their origin in the dangerous mental practice of daydreaming. Trollope’s first two novels, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848), were written about Irish subjects in the interstices of a busy professional life while he lived in Ireland as a Postal Surveyor. Two better-known novels, The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857), were also written in Ireland. After Trollope settled at the end of 1859 in Waltham Cross, twelve miles from London, to continue his daily work at the Post Office, he commenced his extraordinary career as what must be called a fanatical writer of novels. He would get up early, at 5 a.m., and write from 5:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. every day before going to his work at the Post Office. He committed himself to writing 250 words for each page and setting himself so many pages to write in a week. If he finished one novel on a given day he would begin a new novel the next day. “When I have commenced a new book,” says Trollope, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if, at any time, I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face and demanding of me encreased labour so that the deficiency might be supplied. (1996, 79–80)

Some of these ‘diaries’ are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. I have seen several. They are tiny documents with the daily record in very small handwriting, and

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“eheu” (‘alas’) written on those days when he failed to write any pages. This was sometimes, he says, because of too much brandy and cigars the night before. Nor did his novel-writing stop when Trollope was travelling on Post Office business. He wrote on trains, on shipboard, or wherever he happened to be. Doctor Thorne, for example, about which I’ll say more in some detail later, was begun on a voyage by sea back to England from New York. An Autobiography discusses in chronological sequence many of his novels, their circumstances of writing and his judgment of their merits. Trollope repeatedly mentions plot and character as the most important features of his or any other novels. Of the two, character is by far the most important: How short is the time devoted to the manipulation of a plot can be known only to those who have written plays or novels; – I may say also how very little time the brain is able to devote to such wearing work. There are usually some hours of agonizing doubt, almost of despair, – so at least it has been with me; – or perhaps some days. And then, with nothing settled in my brain as to the final development of events, with no capability of settling any thing, but with a most distinct conception of some character or characters, I have rushed at the work, as a rider rushes at a fence which he does not see. Sometimes I have encountered what, in hunting language, we call a cropper. (1996, 114)

The metaphor from foxhunting is significant. Writing novels was for Trollope like riding to hounds. Both required the same blind foolhardy courage. Almost nothing is said in Trollope’s autobiography about his mastery of a complex narrative technique, nor of their expression of a particular version of Victorian class and gender ideology. These are more or less taken for granted, beyond a few comments here and there, for example about how his novels help young girls be modest and young men be manly. He hopes, he says, to succeed “in impregnating [another revealing metaphor: his relation to his readers is quasi-sexual] the mind of the novel reader with a feeling that honesty is the best policy, that truth prevails while falsehood fails; that a girl will be loved as she is pure and sweet and unselfish; – that a man will be honoured as he is true and honest and brave of heart; that things meanly done are ugly and odious, and things nobly done beautiful and gracious” (Trollope 1996, 96). The unabashed Victorianist sexism of this and other such passages in An Autobiography hardly needs comment. Women should be modest. Men should be manly, that is, true, honest, and brave. One truly strange feature of Trollope’s novels is that they fall into 70,000 word units, the one-volume ones at that length, and then some at 140,000, some at 210,000, etc., with the longest ones at 350,000 words. Trollope was determined to give good measure for his money, but not to go beyond his self-assigned limit either. As Gordon Ray asserts, “I suggest that all this amounts to a somewhat breathtaking discovery. [. . .] There is a grandeur of conception in thinking of one’s stories in terms of multiple units of about 70,000 words to which few novelists have aspired” (1981, 111).

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This fanatical novel writing, as I have called it, along with the details of just how much money he made from each novel, have often been held against Trollope and his novels. He just wrote mechanically, to make money, critics say. On the contrary, I hold that these details indicate the depth of Trollope’s commitment to the psychological benefits to him of writing novels as a continuation of his daydreaming habit. That is what I mean by ‘fanatical’. He had to have his hours of novel-writing every day, wherever he was. In doing this he was getting by way of written and published fantasy what he got at first through solitary, secret, daydreaming fantasy: “honour, power, and the love of women.” Or rather, in Trollope’s case, he got what he so longed for: recognised and rewarded membership in a community, in his case the London literary and journalistic community. As Trollope describes in detail in An Autobiography, when he settled more or less permanently near London, he became an accepted member of London literary society. He came to count as friends all sorts of important members of that community: Thackeray and many others, editors, journalists, other novelists, and so on. He published many of his novels in parts in important London periodicals, before he published them as separate books, frequently by the important publishing house of Chapman and Hall. As he describes in detail in his autobiography, he also wrote many articles for those journals, acted in various editorial ways for a number of them, or wrote commissioned essays for them: “Over and above my novels I wrote political articles, critical, social, and sporting articles for periodicals without number” (Trollope 1996, 174). He mentions especially his work for the Cornhill Magazine, the Pall Mall Gazette, Blackwood’s Magazine, and The Fortnightly, all important journals at the time. He names especially as friends not only Thackeray, but also other important Victorian literary figures: Sir Charles Taylor, Robert Bell, Albert Smith, Higgins, E. S. Dallas, George Augustus Sala, G. H. Lewes (George Eliot’s partner), ‘Russell of the Times’, Thomas Hughes, Charles Reade, and the painter John Everett Millais. Millais did splendid illustrations for some of his novels, such as Framley Parsonage. Trollope pays homage to Millais for that in An Autobiography. Trollope makes a special point of saying he was “on affectionate terms” with all of these important London people, not just their casual acquaintance. Being loved by important people was his achieved compensatory goal. “I have long been aware,” he says, “of a certain weakness in my own character which I may call a craving for love. I have ever had a wish to be liked by those around me, – a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified” (1996, 104). Another evidence of his desire to ‘belong’ and to be loved was his joining an inordinate number of London clubs, including accepting an invitation to the Athenaeum, a great honour. “The Garrick Club,” he says, “was the first assemblage of men at which I felt myself to be popular” (105). Other clubs soon followed. Trollope lists, for example, the important men he met at the Cosmopolitan Club (105). Note that these are all male friendships, though Trollope was happily married

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and the father of two sons. No Freudian “love of women” was attained through his writing, at least not that he mentions.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns I have so far shown, with the help of An Autobiography, what was extraordinary about Trollope’s motivation for writing novels and non-fictional works, and also what was extraordinary about his success at that enterprise. I shall now discuss in more detail one admirable Trollope novel, Doctor Thorne (1858). Why do I choose Doctor Thorne? My reasons are several. For one thing, Doctor Thorne is the third novel in the celebrated Barchester series. For another, I want to suggest that you should not limit yourself in teaching, reading, or studying Trollope to such well-known novels as Barchester Towers or The Way We Live Now. Do not be misled by critics into thinking only a few of Trollope’s novels are worth reading thoughtfully, carefully, and interrogatively. All of Trollope’s fictions repay that kind of attention. Each is, moreover, different in various ways from all the others. I single out Doctor Thorne, therefore, partly because of its characteristic Trollopean excellence, but also partly because of the amazing details of how it came to be written. Trollope began writing Doctor Thorne on board ship from New York back to England. He ultimately finished it in Egypt, writing away day after day wherever he was. “Doctor Thorne has,” says Trollope, “I believe, been the most popular book I have written” (1996, 84). He suggests that this may be because “[t]he plot of Doctor Thorne is good” (84). Well, what is so good about it? That plot, by the way, was, quite exceptionally, suggested to Trollope by his brother, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, also a novelist. Trollope almost always invented his own plots. I assume he means that Thomas suggested the basic story in Doctor Thorne about Mary Thorne, the illegitimate niece of Doctor Thorne, and about her love affair with Frank Gresham, the future squire of Greshambury. I begin by making some assertions about Trollope’s novels generally, both about their themes and about their narrative techniques. Trollope does not mention any of the most salient of these features. They tend just to be taken for granted as ‘the way we write novels now.’ I shall along the way show the particular ways Doctor Thorne exemplifies my generalisations. Trollope’s great subject is the way marriage, in Victorian society, rearranges, in however small a way, class, rank, and wealth. The importance of these three social elements in Victorian times is an aspect of Trollope’s novels that is hardest to make plausible to American students. “If these two young people are in love, why should they not marry and get on with it?” they ask. “What’s the big deal? One or both will need to get a job, that’s all.” They cannot understand why Frank Gresham, the hero of Doctor Thorne, who is the heir to the impoverished Greshambury estate, must, as

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the novel puts it over and over, “marry money.” Frank cannot just somehow earn a living, as an American could do. This is partly because he is not trained to do any such thing, and partly because it is incompatible with his class rank as the most important commoner in the region. He ranks just below the actual aristocrats, such as the De Courcys. All of the De Courcy women are Lady This or Lady That, “Lady Arabella” (Frank Gresham’s mother), “Lady Amelia,” and so on, even if they marry commoners. This social structure means that the centre of many Trollope novels is the question of what man a given young maiden will marry. Her marriage and her ensuing children will rearrange class, rank, and wealth to some degree in the local society to which she belongs. Her whole family and community watches in fascinated attention to see what marriage choice she will make. In Doctor Thorne the maiden in question is Mary Thorne, Doctor Thorne’s illegitimate niece. Mary is the daughter of Doctor Thorne’s brother, who had seduced Mary’s mother, sister of a local stonemason. The stonemason then killed Dr Thorne’s brother in revenge for his sister’s defilement. This is the ‘plot’ that Anthony’s brother Thomas presumably suggested to him, though Trollope does not specify this. Just here some firm and not entirely plausible ideological presuppositions of Trollope’s novels generally and of Doctor Thorne in particular must be stressed as crucial. One essential feature is the assumption that falling in love, as Mary Thorne and Frank Gresham do with one another, is, for Trollope, a kind of absolute. Falling in love is a radical change in the bedrock selfhood of the one to whom it happens. In good people, falling in love happens once and for all. This assumption is by no means entirely absent from present-day novels, films, TV dramas, and other fictions, though it is often presented these days with a degree of irony that is missing in Trollope’s fiction. For Trollope, those who fall in love must either be true to their loves or basely betray their deepest selves by trying to change to another beloved. Many of Trollope’s characters, for example the De Courcy women in Doctor Thorne, are incapable of falling in love in the way Mary and Frank do. The protagonists’ love in Trollope’s fictions, such as that of Mary and Frank, is usually imprudent from a worldly point of view. It is also usually strongly opposed by all their family and friends. One of the great pleasures of reading Trollope is sympathising with the obstinacy with which the lovers stick to their loves in defiance of all family and social pressure. In Doctor Thorne all his family tells Frank Gresham he cannot marry the baseborn and impoverished Mary Thorne. He must recoup the Greshambury Estate by ‘marrying money’. That would mean marrying someone like Miss Dunstable, the rich owner of the “Oil of Lebanon” quack medicine business. In scene after scene in Doctor Thorne Frank and Mary openly stick to their love and defy all those around them who have authority over them. Only thereby can the desirable rearrangement of wealth, rank, and class ultimately take place in a marriage of true love.

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Another quite different example of the reader’s pleasure in Trollopean defiant stubbornness is the moment in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) when the lowly parson of Hogglestock Parish, Josiah Crawley, falsely accused of stealing a check for twenty pounds, defies the obnoxious Mrs. Proudie, wife of the henpecked Bishop Proudie. She commands him to resign his position at Hogglestock. He replies, “Peace, woman. [. . .] Madam, [. . .] you should not interfere in these matters. You simply debase your husband’s high office. The distaff were more fitting for you” (Trollope 1961, 192). Crawley then walks home after dark in the muddy lanes in triumph, glorying in his dirty boots. This is another example, by the way, of Trollope’s sexism. Women should stick to the distaff, that is, to work in the home like spinning yarn. A distaff is a rod on a spinning wheel that holds the unspun yarn. Women should not meddle in men’s work. Gender difference is not quite so simple in Trollope’s later work, however, as such a character as Lady Glencora in his political novels illustrates, not to speak of Mary Thorne herself. The stubborn love of Frank and Mary is rewarded in Doctor Thorne by the more or less improbable discovery that Mary is the heiress to her uncle Sir Roger Scatcherd’s enormous fortune. Once a lowly drunken stonemason, Scatcherd has made that fortune through his skill, drunkard or not, in building railroads all over the world. Frank then can have his cake and eat it too, since he has married money after all. Because Mary is now rich, the De Courcys and Greshams accept Mary into their families, illegitimate though she is. Three cheers! Everyone lives happily afterwards through a good marriage based on undying love. Such a happy ending often happens in Trollope’s novels and in Victorian novels generally. Doctor Thorne, like most Trollope novels, has a large cast of characters and numerous subplots or episodes. Examples are the marriage stories of the various De Courcy women who reach marriageable age. In one episode, told, as is occasionally the case for Trollope, by way of an exchange of letters, the stern De Courcy unmarried daughter, Lady Amelia, dissuades her cousin, Augusta, from accepting the De Courcy family lawyer Mortimer Gazebee’s marriage proposal. Gazebee is, says Amelia, too far beneath her. Some years later Lady Amelia marries Gazebee herself. Such subplots are usually counter-stories, negative analogies, to the real centre of the novel. In Doctor Thorne this centre is Mary Thorne’s integrity in obstinately loving Frank Gresham once and for all, along with Frank’s stubbornness in sticking to his love for her, in defiance of all his family and friends. Mary ultimately triumphs and lives happily ever after in great affluence as wife and mother, the Mistress of Greshambury, This happens in exemplification of my claim that Trollope’s novels are not just centrally about courtship and marriage, but about the way marriage rearranges rank and wealth at a time in England when the social structure was changing rapidly. Talk about the pleasures of happy endings!

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies My goal in this section will be to show that what Trollope says in An Autobiography about Doctor Thorne and about his other fictions by no means accounts for all their distinctive traits. The chapter of An Autobiography entitled “On Novels and the Art of Writing Them” (1996, 138–155) is an exemplary small treatise on the presuppositions of Victorian ‘realism’ in fiction as Trollope practiced it, but it has none of the subtlety of modern narratology. Trollope’s emphasis is all on the need to invent fictitious characters that seem like “real people,” on the need to “please” and to “teach” virtuous behaviour by examples, and on the need to “tell a story” in a way that is easily “intelligible” and “harmonious” (151). Almost nothing is said about the actual narrative procedures that Trollope employs, nor about the rather surprising sources, in my view, of the intense pleasure I and many other readers get from reading Trollope’s novels. One source of the intense pleasure of reading Trollope is the direct access the third person narrator allows the reader to the subjectivities of the characters. This is a pleasure I do not have in the real world. I must guess from speech, facial expressions, and gestures at what those around me are thinking and feeling, even those closest to me. In Trollope’s novels, the characters are transparent to the narrator and even to a considerable degree to one another (but only to a degree). This happens by way of that extraordinary convention, the omniscient narrator, or, in Nicholas Royle’s better term for it, since it is not an explicitly theological device, the “telepathic” narrator (see Royle 1991). My old colleague at Johns Hopkins, Georges Poulet, a great reader of Trollope, thought of Trollope’s narrators as the voice of a given community’s ‘collective consciousness.’ The narrator of Doctor Thorne can and does enter at will into the subjectivities of all the characters and tells the reader just what they are thinking and feeling. This is an intense pleasure because, though it is something for which we may all wish, we do not have in ‘real life’. We have it primarily in the imaginary worlds of novels like Doctor Thorne. Here is just one example out of hundreds in Doctor Thorne. I choose a crucial moment in the courtship of Frank Gresham and Mary Thorne. I select it because the scene is so important in the novel and also because it illustrates so clearly an important source, for me at least, of my pleasure in reading the novel. Moreover, this passage exemplifies succinctly all the chief ways of story-telling Trollope uses. In this scene, which goes on for several pages and of which I cite only the happy climax, Frank Gresham has come back unchanged in his love for Mary from the year of exile in London he has promised his family. They presume this absence will cure him of his love for Mary. When Frank punctually returns after one year, he immediately seeks Mary out to declare his unchanged love. He accosts her when he finds her out for her daily donkey ride. The scene takes place as he stands beside her while she sits on her amiable donkey. The donkey appears to be “approvingly conscious of what was going on behind his ears” (Trollope 1963, 361):

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“I have a right to a word, Mary; say ‘Go,’ and I will leave you at once.” But Mary did not say “Go.” Perhaps she would have done so had she been able; but just at present she could say nothing. This came from her having failed to make up her mind in due time as to what course it would best become her to follow. “One word, Mary; one little word. There, if you will not speak, there is my hand. If you will have it, let it be in yours; – if not, push it away.” So saying, he managed to get the end of his fingers on to her palm, and there it remained unrepulsed. “La jeunesse” was beginning to get a lesson; experience when sought after sometimes comes early in life. In truth, Mary had not strength to push the fingers away. “My love, my own, my own!” said Frank, presuming on this very negative sign of acquiescence. “My life, my own one, my own Mary!” and then the hand was caught hold of and was at his lips before an effort could be made to save it from such treatment. “Mary, look at me; say one word to me.” There was a deep sigh and then came the one word – “Oh, Frank!” (361)

The power of this passage depends greatly on overt or covert bodily and tactile sensations, as in a sentence shortly before my passage: “‘Mary, Mary!’ said Frank, throwing his arms round her knees as she sat upon her steed, and pressing his face against her body” (361). Even more erotic is the way Frank’s fingers in Mary’s hand mime and anticipate the sex act, as lovers’ handholding always tacitly does: “[. . .] he managed to get the end of his fingers on to her palm, and there it remained unrepulsed.” My male peers, in my innocent “jeunesse,” told me that stroking a girl’s palm, if you could manage to do it, was a sexual invitation. Frank’s “getting the end of his fingers on to Mary’s palm” is followed by Frank’s kiss of her hand, and then by her sigh and by her “one word” of consent. She speaks as someone who already deeply loves him: “Oh, Frank!” The passage is about as explicitly sexual as Trollope gets. Trollope’s scene, however, leads not to immediate sex but to a longish engagement followed by lawful marriage. Mary behaves throughout Doctor Thorne in accordance with Trollope’s version of Victorian gender distinctions. These seem pretty antiquated today. Mary is modest to a fault. She speaks her own love only when Frank speaks his love for her first. Frank is frank, manly, courageous, noble, and honourable. Mary, however, shares with Frank the trait of stubborn obstinacy that may seem particularly male, but that many Trollopean heroines also have. In telling the story of Frank’s reunion with Mary, Trollope uses dialogue. He also masterfully uses free indirect discourse, in which the narrator transposes what the character originally thought in the first person present tense into third person past tense. Indirect discourse is always delightfully ironic, since the narrator ironises to one degree or another the character’s inner thoughts and feelings. Here is an extended example on the page before my main citation above: He was well born – as well born as any gentleman in England. She was basely born – as basely born as any lady could be. Was this sufficient bar against such a match? Mary felt in her heart that some twelvemonth since, before she knew what little she did now know of her own story, she would have said that it was so. And would she indulge her own love by inveigling him she

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loved into a base marriage? But then reason spoke again. What, after all, was this blood of which she had taught herself to think so much? Would she have been more honest, more fit to grace an honest man’s hearthstone, has she been the legitimate descendant of a score of legitimate duchesses? Was it not her first duty to think of him – of what would make him happy? Then of her uncle – what he would approve? Then of herself – what would best become her modesty; her sense of honour? Could it be well that she should sacrifice the happiness of two persons to a theoretic love of pure blood? (Trollope 1963, 358)

Trollope also uses in this scene, as throughout his fiction, direct commentary by the narrator, as in what just follows the citation above: “So she had argued within herself; not now, sitting on the donkey, with Frank’s hand before her on the tame brute’s neck; but on other former occasions as she had ridden along demurely among those trees. So she had argued; but she had never brought her arguments to a decision” (Trollope 1963, 358). This language mode slides over into more detached generalizations, as in “‘Si la jeunesse savait . . . ’ [If youth only knew . . .] There is so much in that wicked old French proverb” (360)! Trollope elsewhere, though not in the scene I am discussing, also notoriously uses overt comments by the author about the novel as something he is in the process of writing and could write otherwise if he wished. This procedure appears in Doctor Thorne, for example, in comments toward the end in which Trollope, speaking as an ‘I’, expresses his anxiety about whether he has the laws of inheritance right in making it possible for Scatcherd to have left his entire fortune to his illegitimate grand-daughter, Mary Thorne. Could he legally do that by simply naming in his will his daughter’s eldest child as his heiress, without specifying her name? He might, says Trollope, need a committee of lawyers to help him get the law right in his novel: “I can only plead for mercy if I be wrong in allotting all Sir Roger’s vast possessions in perpetuity to Miss Thorne, alleging also, in excuse, that the course of my narrative absolutely demands that she shall be ultimately recognized as Sir Roger’s undoubted heiress” (1963, 536). The ‘I’ who speaks here is not that imaginary personage inside the fiction, the telepathic narrator, but the author, Anthony Trollope, speaking from outside the fiction, as the real person who has made it all up as he likes but is anxious to be true to the English laws of inheritance. Dialogue, indirect discourse, narrator’s commentary, narrator’s generalisations, often allusive or figurative ones, occasional direct citation of letters exchanged between the characters: these forms of narration are masterfully deployed as interwoven ways Trollope uses to tell his stories. They are used so expertly and ‘naturally’ that the reader is hardly aware of shifts in technique. Some of Trollope’s novels, though by no means all, were also illustrated. Examples are the masterful illustrations for Framley Parsonage and several other Trollope novels by John Everett Millais. Doctor Thorne, however, has no illustrations.

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4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Henry James, in a number of reviews and essays about Trollope’s work that he wrote early in his (James’s) career, by no means wholly approved of Trollope’s novels. Though I think James learned a lot from Trollope about how to write novels, he professed to view Trollope as too much a chronicler of everyday English social life and ordinary banal English men and women: “His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual” (James 1984, 1333). Such condescension was perhaps James’s way of clearing the ground for his own novels and short stories about more exceptional imaginary personages. I think, however, that Mary Thorne is, in her own way, as much an exceptional person as James’s Isabel Archer or his Kate Croy. In any case, James is notorious for having deplored, with stern disapproval, the author’s interpolations in Trollope’s novels: “It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as an historian and his novel as a history. It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempts a backbone of logic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real” (1984, 1343). Trollope commits this grievous crime all right, but James exaggerates its frequency in Trollope’s novels. In any case, does any sane reader of Doctor Thorne ever doubt that he or she is reading an account of fictitious events? Such interpolations, moreover, insert an additional charming irony into Trollope’s discourse. In spite of Henry James’s reservations about Trollope’s fiction, he was right on the mark in one thing he asserted with great eloquence about Trollope. This was in a comprehensive obituary essay of 1883. Trollope, wrote James, made the English girl his main theme. After briefly mentioning Eleanor Bold in Barchester Towers, James goes on to say: Trollope settled down steadily to the English girl; he took possession of her, and turned her inside out. He never made her a subject of heartless satire, as cynical fabulists of other lands have been known to make the shining daughters of those climes; he bestowed upon her the most serious, the most patient, the most tender, the most copious consideration. He is evidently always more or less in love with her, and it is a wonder how under these circumstances he should make her so objective, plant her so well on her feet. But, as I have said, if he was a lover, he was a paternal lover; as competent as a father who has had fifty daughters. He has presented the British maiden under innumerable names, in every station and in every emergency in life, and with every combination of moral and physical qualities. She is always definite and natural. She plays her part most properly. She has always health in her cheek and gratitude in her eye. She has not a touch of the morbid, and is delightfully tender, modest and fresh. Trollope’s heroines have a strong family likeness, but it is a wonder how finely he discriminates between them. One feels, as one reads him, like a man with “sets” of female cousins. (1984, 1349–1350)

Of all the many modest and lovable, but resolutely stubborn, British maidens that Trollope made his special province, Mary Thorne is one of the best and most

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lovable. Doctor Thorne provides many pleasures and benefits, such as its political and class satire. The De Courcys are really awful people. This is so even though Trollope claims in An Autobiography to be “an advanced but still a conservative Liberal” (1996, 186), that is, someone who deplores the gap between rich and poor, but who believes nevertheless that class and wealth distinctions are the work of “the hand of God, and his wisdom” (187). I conclude that the dramatisation of Mary Thorne’s ultimately triumphant love for Frank Gresham is the true source of Doctor Thorne’s initial great success. As I have mentioned already, it sold more copies, as Trollope says, than any other of his novels (1996, 84). Mary Thorne’s story is also the chief reason for Doctor Thorne’s continued impressive ability to give great imaginary pleasure to readers today.

Bibliography Works Cited “Anthony Trollope.” En.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 12 June 2018. “Books: Anthony Trollope.” Gutenberg.org. Project Gutenberg. Web. 12 June 2018. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part III). 1916–1917. Trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1963. Vol. 16 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. 1956–1974. James, Henry. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. New York: Library of America, 1984. Ray, Gordon N. “Trollope at Full Length.” The Huntington Library Quarterly 31 (1968): 317–334. Rpt. in The Trollope Critics. Ed. N. John Hall. London: Macmillan, 1981. 110–127. Royle, Nicholas. Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Ed. David Skilton. London: Penguin, 1996. Trollope, Anthony. Doctor Thorne. 1858. London: Oxford UP, 1963. Trollope, Anthony. The Last Chronicle of Barset. London: Oxford UP, 1961.

Further Reading apRoberts, Ruth. The Moral Trollope. Athens: Ohio UP, 1971. Booth, Bradford Allen. Anthony Trollope: Aspects of His Life and Art. London: Hulton, 1958. Cockshut, Anthony O. J. Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study. London: Collins, 1955. Hall, N. John. Trollope: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Kincaid, James R. The Novels of Anthony Trollope. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. McMaster, Juliet. Trollope’s Palliser Novels: Theme and Pattern. London: Macmillan, 1978. Olmsted, J. C. and J. E. Welch. The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography 1925–1975. New York: Garland, 1978. Polhemus, Robert M. The Changing World of Anthony Trollope. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. Pope-Hennessy, James. Anthony Trollope. London: Cape, 1971.

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Sadleir, Michael. Trollope: A Bibliography. An Analysis of the History and Structure of the Works of Anthony Trollope and A General Survey of the Effect of Original Publishing Conditions on A Book’s Subsequent Rarity. London: Constable, 1928. Sadleir, Michael. Trollope: A Commentary. London: Constable, 1927. Smalley, Donald, ed. Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. 1969. Super, Robert H. The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1988. Super, Robert H. Trollope in the Post Office. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1981. Trollope, Anthony. The Letters of Anthony Trollope. Ed. N. John Hall. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1983. Van Dam, Frederik. Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016.

Silvia Mergenthal

18 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) Abstract: This contribution situates Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret at the interface of Victorian constructions of gender and genre. As to the former, gender, it shows how the protagonist of Braddon’s novel, the eponymous Lady Audley, appears to be the embodiment of ideal Victorian femininity, but only because she has been indoctrinated in its script from an early age. Considering the latter, genre, Lady Audley’s Secret is discussed as a prototypical example of a ‘sensation novel’, and this subgenre is compared to other fictional conventions such as the Gothic novel, the Newgate novel, and the novel of domestic realism. In this context, the article also reviews Victorian publication strategies such as serialisation. Finally, the concluding section provides a brief survey of critical approaches to Braddon’s novel, again foregrounding those approaches which privilege questions of gender and genre. Keywords: Gender, genre, Victorian femininity, sensation novel, serialisation

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London in 1835 into a middle-class family. She died in 1915, two years after she had seen the film adaptation of her novel Aurora Floyd. One of the most prolific and best-known British authors of the nineteenth century, Braddon wrote over eighty novels for a rapidly expanding literary market that she knew well and played to her financial advantage. Apart from the novels that she acknowledged, she produced anonymous or pseudonymous serial fiction (of the ‘penny dreadful’ variety) for a newly literate lower-class readership, and, between 1866 and 1876, edited the periodical Belgravia for lower-middle-class readers. The title of the periodical was meant to suggest to its intended audience that when they opened its pages they “would be moving into the fashionable world of the aristocratic rich” (Wolff 1979, 179). During the last decades of her life, Braddon, by then a “comfortably established matron” (Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie 2000, xxiv), lived in one of those country estates she had so often written about, surrounded by a large social circle and numerous literary friends. However, and although one need not go as far as her most devoted twentieth-century biographer Robert Lee Wolff in excavating the autobiographical substrata of her novels, it is fair to say that Braddon was well acquainted, from personal experience, with the darker sides of Victorian domesticity which she https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-019

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explored – and exploited – in her fiction. Thus, as Wolff explains, Braddon’s parents separated when she was five years old because of her father’s marital and financial infidelities. However, seventeen years before the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, they were unable to obtain a divorce. Given the differential gender treatment of this Act, a divorce would have been unlikely even under its provisions, as it was only husbands who could petition for divorce on the sole grounds of infidelity, whereas for wives, their husbands’ adultery had to be compounded by other offences such as incest, cruelty, bigamy, or desertion. Be that as it may, Braddon’s mother had to raise three children (of whom Braddon was the youngest) on her own in difficult economic circumstances. In 1857, at the age of twenty-two, Braddon became an actress in order to provide an additional source of income for her mother and herself. Using the stage name of ‘Mary Seyton’, Braddon appeared in a variety of minor roles on provincial stages, before she finally moved to London in 1860 and embarked on her literary career. There she met publisher John Maxwell, with whom she lived from 1862 and with whom she had six children, while also looking after his five sons and daughters. Braddon and Maxwell finally married in 1874, on the death of his first wife, who had long been confined to a mental institution in Ireland. The first instalments of Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon’s most successful novel, initially appeared in the London weekly sixpenny magazine Robin Goodfellow as of 6 July 1861. When the magazine folded after only thirteen issues, Braddon abandoned Lady Audley’s Secret and started on Aurora Floyd. However, when some of her readers asked her how the story of Lady Audley would develop, she embarked on serial publication for the second time in Maxwell’s monthly Sixpenny Journal in January 1862. In October 1862, three months before the twelfth and final instalment, the novel was also published in the usual three-volume format. Another eight three-volume editions were to follow before the end of that year (Wolff 1979, 4–5).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns The title of Braddon’s novel is misleading: in the eyes of the law, its protagonist is not ‘really’ Lady Audley. Furthermore, throughout the novel, she is known to the other characters under a number of different names, each of which is associated with a role that she self-consciously chooses and plays as if she were fashioning a completely different identity, perhaps even a different self, for herself (Tilley 1995, 199). Therefore, it hardly comes as a surprise that ‘Lady Audley’ does not have just one, but several secrets, most – but not all – of which will be revealed in due course. As a very young woman, the protagonist Helen Maldon, daughter of an impoverished retired naval officer, marries George Talboys, cornet in a cavalry regiment. Because of this imprudent marriage, George is disinherited by his father. When the young couple runs out of money, and Helen gives birth to their first child (another

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George, or Georgie), George the elder deserts his young family to seek his fortune in Australia. Three and a half years later, George, now a rich man after he has found gold, returns to England, fully expecting to find his wife waiting for him, in spite of the fact that, during his absence and until just prior to his departure from Australia, he has never once communicated with her. Helen, however, has changed her life completely, together with her name: she has left her son with her father, and – as ‘Lucy Graham’ – has become a teacher at a private girls’ school in London, from whence she is hired as a governess by a doctor in Essex. In the doctor’s house, Helen transforms into an eligible single woman, meets Sir Michael Audley, and eventually – and of course bigamously as George Talboys is still alive, for aught she knows to the contrary – marries him. The novel opens with Helen Maldon a. k. a. Helen Talboys a. k. a. Lucy Graham already the wife of Sir Michael and then narrates the story of their courtship, during which Helen, to her credit, has made it clear that she does not love her much older suitor, but once married will fulfil the terms of the “bargain” that he offers to her (Braddon 1987, 11): indeed, Helen – childlike, golden-haired – will turn out to be a model wife and veritable ‘Angel in the House’. Meanwhile, George Talboys is on his way back from Australia, and by one of the strange coincidences with which the novel abounds, the first person he encounters upon his arrival in London is his old school-fellow Robert Audley, who happens to be Sir Michael’s nephew. The two are at a coffee house when George, instead of the letter from his wife he expects to receive there, comes across her obituary in The Times. From this point in the novel the main sequence of events unfolds proleptically, while, analeptically, the prehistory of ‘Lady Audley’ will be reconstructed as a chain of circumstantial evidence which establishes, beyond doubt, that Helen Maldon and ‘Lady Audley’ are one and the same person. In the process, the reader will discover that Helen has recruited a terminally ill young woman, Matilda Plowson, to perform her part as languishing wife in her father’s household. When Matilda conveniently succumbs to her illness, she is buried as ‘Helen Talboys’. Incidentally, this conflation of two female identities, one living, one dead, is only one of the many parallels between Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s 1860 novel The Woman in White (Langland 2000, 4–5). Robert accompanies George to the Isle of Wight to visit Helen’s father and ‘Helen Talboys’s’ grave. In parenthesis it should be noted that chapter five (of volume one), which describes the visit to Captain Maldon, is quite literally strewn with clues to the deception practiced upon George. The portrait of his wife, which used to hang next to one of himself while they were married, is missing (otherwise casual visitors to her father’s lodging would have notice the difference between it and the ‘Helen Talboys’ – Matilda Plowson – living with him), the lock of ‘Helen’s’ hair which George is given has a different texture from how he remembers it, and ‘Helen’s’ last words reference Matilda’s (rather than Helen’s) family situation. What is difficult to gauge, from the perspective of a twenty-first-century reader familiar with the conventions of detective fiction, is whether Braddon’s

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first readers would have picked up these clues immediately, or only after the mystery had been solved for them. Robert looks after his bereaved friend during the first year of his widowhood. At the end of this period of mourning, he takes George down to Essex, on one of his regular visits to his uncle. By another set of coincidences – and by Helen’s design – a face-to-face confrontation between George and his bigamous wife is at first avoided, but he and Robert are shown her portrait. George behaves strangely after he has seen it – of course because he recognises his wife in the sitter – and soon afterwards disappears without a trace. Robert tries to discover what has happened to him, and eventually suspects his aunt of having killed him. This is, in fact, what Helen herself believes has happened, which is why she is blackmailed by her former maid Phebe and Phebe’s husband Luke. In desperation, she sets fire to Phebe and Luke’s pub, where Robert has just taken a room. While Robert escapes unscathed, Luke is badly injured; on his deathbed, Luke confesses to Robert that George managed to climb out of the well into which Helen had pushed him, and is still alive. This, then, is one secret which ‘Lady Audley’ herself does not know. For Lady Audley, the ultimate secret of her life (beyond, or rather beneath, that of her bigamy and her other criminal acts) is her mother’s madness, which she claims to have inherited – though the ultimate secret may be that she is not mad but pleads insanity in order to escape punishment. Or perhaps, as Judy Cornes has suggested (Cornes 2008, 198), there are yet other riddles which remain unsolved, namely, whose ring, “wrapped in an oblong piece of paper – the paper partly printed, partly written, yellow with age, and crumpled with much folding” (Braddon 1987,12), Lady Audley wears on a ribbon around her neck, and whose bootee and lock of “pale and silky yellow hair” (30) she keeps in her secret drawer (given that her son Georgie is dark-haired like his father and she is not particularly attached to this child). At any rate, in spite of her plea, Helen’s punishment is severe enough: Robert Audley, selfappointed investigator, prosecutor, and judge of his aunt’s crimes, arranges for her to be “Buried Alive” (382–394) in a mental asylum in Belgium. While Helen is thus banished from the universe of the novel, Robert is rewarded with a conventionally happy ending: he is reunited with his long-lost friend George, and married to his friend’s sister Clara, and his dream “of a fairy cottage [can be] realised between Teddington Lock and Hampton Bridge, where, amid a little forest of foliage, there is a fantastical dwelling-place of rustic woodwork, whose latticed windows look upon the river” (445). Braddon’s novel, then, engages with a hegemonic construction of femininity, the short-hand formula for which, as promoted for example in novels of domestic realism, is the ‘Angel in the House’. This construction foregrounds the roles of women as daughters, wives, and mothers whose sphere is the home, while, complementarily, their fathers’ and husbands’ sphere of wealth or work is outside the home. As has already been suggested, Braddon’s Lady Audley is the embodiment of the feminine ideal:

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Lucy Audley, with her disordered hair in a pale haze of yellow gold about her thoughtful face, the flowing lines of her soft muslin dressing-gown falling in straight folds to her feet, and clasped at the waist by a narrow circlet of agate links, might have served as a model for a mediaeval saint, in one of the tiny chapels hidden away in the nooks and corners of a grey old cathedral, unchanged by Reformation or Cromwell [. . .]. (216)

However, in Lady Audley’s Secret, Helen’s beautiful exterior conceals her twisted mind, and, as she has been indoctrinated in the feminine script at a very early age, her angelic behaviour is an elaborately crafted performance to enhance what she has taught to recognise as her value in the marriage market.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies For Braddon’s contemporaries, Lady Audley’s Secret was a prototypical example of a ‘sensation novel’ (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology), so-called, firstly, because it dealt with sensational material such as bigamy, murder, and madness, and secondly, because it created a sensation in the literary market. Thirdly, and most importantly, texts were assigned to this subgenre category, in spite of differences in style and content, because they seemed to elicit physical responses – sensations – in their readers, often at the expense of more intellectual stimulation. Women readers were believed to be particularly at risk from sensation fiction’s “preaching to the nerves,” a phrase taken from an 1863 review of sensation fiction by Henry Mansel (Brantlinger 1982, 9–10; Garrison 2011, xiii and 1–11; Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie 2000, xix). Mansel’s review, incidentally, is also cited for the first occurrence of the phrase ‘sensation novel’ in The Oxford English Dictionary, though according to Carnell, the first known use of the term can be dated to 1861 (and, quite appropriately, is to be found in Sixpenny Magazine) (2000, 142). Yet, while the heyday of this subgenre of Victorian fiction was in the 1860s and 1870s, the sensational as a mode both predates the sensation novel proper, and impacts on later depictions of deviant social behaviour, not only in fiction but also in other cultural forms such as the theatre and early film (Pykett 2012, 211–213). As to literary predecessors of sensation fiction, the most immediately obvious is the Gothic novel, to which sensation novels are indebted for their mysterious, sometimes supernatural events – events which can often be traced back to unresolved conflicts in the history of a family. In nineteenth-century psychologised versions of Gothic fiction as written, for instance, by the Brontës, the supernatural is largely limited to the realm of premonitions or prophetic dreams. In Lady Audley’s Secret, the dreamer is Robert Audley, who, at an early stage in his investigation, has a dream in which He was in the churchyard at Ventnor, gazing at the headstone George had ordered for the grave of his dead wife. Once in the long rambling mystery of these dreams he went to the

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grave, and found this headstone gone, and on remonstrating with the stonemason, was told that the man had a reason for removing the inscription, a reason that Robert would some day learn. (Braddon 1987, 95–96)

Additionally, in novels such as Jane Eyre (↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre), Wuthering Heights (↗ 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights), or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the Gothic has been, as it were, domesticated. While the settings of eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Gothic novels are usually far removed in time and space from the habitats of their first readers, with the typical Gothic villain an Italian aristocrat, as in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), or a lecherous Spanish priest, as in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), sensation novels are typically set in recognisably contemporary English landscapes (London, Essex, the Isle of Wight, Yorkshire in Lady Audley’s Secret), their crimes perpetrated by (equally recognisable) English upper and middle class character types. However, the contemporary settings of sensation novels are as charged with symbolic meaning as are those of their Gothic models; in particular, Great Houses such as Braddon’s Audley Court may metonymically represent the fates of their owners (Langland 2000; Haynie 2000; Badowska 2009). Thus, the opening descriptions of Audley Court, ancestral home of the Audley family, as an exclusive and secluded space full of secret passages that is, at the same time, open to penetration, as are Helen’s private rooms within that space, already indicate that what has been concealed will eventually be exposed: A fierce and crimson sunset. The mullioned windows and the twinkling lattices are all ablaze with the red glory; the fading light flickers upon the leaves of the limes in the long avenue, and changes the still fish-pond into a sheet of burnished copper; even into those dim recesses of briar and brushwood, amidst which the old well is hidden, the crimson brightness penetrates in fitful flashes, till the dank weeds and the rusty iron wheel and broken woodwork seem as if they were flecked with blood. The lowing of a cow in the quiet meadows, the splash of a trout in the fishpond, the last notes of a tired bird, the creaking of waggon-wheels upon the distant road, every now and then breaking the silence, only made the stillness of the place seem more intense. It was almost oppressive, this twilight stillness. The very repose of the place grew painful from its intensity, and you felt as if a corpse must be lying somewhere within that grey and ivy-covered pile of building – so deathlike was the tranquillity of all around. (Braddon 1987, 25)

It is, in particular, through its use of colours – crimson, red, copper – and through the contrast it establishes between the sounds and movements of ordinary life without and the extra-ordinary quietness and stagnation within Audley Court that this paragraph foreshadows the eruption of violence which will shake this Great House to its core (though no corpse will actually be found in the building, or its grounds). Fittingly, once the family’s secrets have been revealed – the old well is, of course, the well into which Helen had pushed George – Audley Court will be shut up, its only visitors (“though the baronet is not informed of the fact”) tourists

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who “admire my lady’s rooms, and ask many questions about the pretty, fair-haired woman, who died abroad” (446). Individual objects, for example Lady Audley’s portrait, painted in the latest fashion by a member of the “pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, for he had spent a most unconscionable time upon the accessories of this picture – upon my lady’s crispy ringlets and the heavy folds of her crimson velvet dress” (Braddon 1987, 69), as well as the luxury items of conspicuous consumption with which she surrounds herself, are similarly charged with meaning, most importantly when they serve as ‘clues’ in chains of circumstantial evidence. Objects clutter the pages of sensation fiction in much the same way as they appear to have cluttered Victorian drawing rooms: on the one hand, these objects are yet another legacy of Gothic fiction, in which plots often revolve around the loss and subsequent restitution of treasured heirlooms; on the other hand, they, and their role as indicators of taste and social status, establish one of the links between the sensation novel and novels of domestic realism. In this “violent yoking together of romance and realism” (Hughes 1980, 16) the sensation novel’s outrageous subject matter is carefully documented, and its protagonists rely, like Helen in Lady Audley’s Secrets, on railway time-tables and postal delivery schedules to commit their crimes. Another feature which sensation novels and novels of domestic realism share is their concern with family relationships, which also suggests that their thematic focus is less on courtship (as it had been in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels of manners) than on marriage. It is in this context that the Freudian concept of the ‘uncanny’, both as that which renders the domestic, the home, ‘unhomely’ – unfamiliar, strange, or uncomfortable – and as that which should have remained hidden but now comes to light, can be brought to bear upon sensation fiction (Pykett 2012, 218–219). Two further fictional subgenres which, in addition to the Gothic novel and novels of domestic realism, are usually cited as sources of sensation fiction are the ‘Newgate novel’ of the 1830s, and the ‘silver fork novel’ of the 1820s to 1840s. From the former, sensation fiction differs in that the crimes it depicts are not committed by members of the low-life criminal classes, but by those who should have been upholding Victorian moral codes. Silver fork novels, while promising an insider’s insight into how the upper classes live, tend to foreground the frivolities and peccadilloes of upper-class behaviour rather than actual crimes. However, the hybrid nature of sensation fiction does not only encompass fictional models, but other cultural forms of the period such as newspapers and magazines, and their reports of sensational criminal cases (after 1857 also of the proceedings of the new divorce courts). Thus, when Robert muses that if “I were to go to-morrow into that common-place, plebeian, eight-roomed house in which Maria Manning and her husband murdered their guest” (Braddon 1987, 140), Lady Audley’s Secret presupposes its readers’ familiarity with this (real-life) criminal case in which Manning, a domestic servant, together with her husband was executed for the murder of her lover in 1849. Since sensation novels were serialised in some of the very newspapers and

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magazines in which these accounts of real-life crimes were published (as is, of course, Lady Audley’s Secret), two types of crime-writing, factual and fictional, vied with one another for the attention of the reader (Chase and Levenson 2000, 206–207). Serialisation imposed certain demands on the novelist: for instance, by multiplying narrative enigmas and only ever offering partial solutions to them, suspense was maintained across the narrative break between instalments so as to invite continued consumption (Hagedorn 1995, 28–29; Leighton and Surridge, 2008). A similar dynamic of mutual appropriation and adaptation is, arguably, at work between sensation fiction and melodrama, the most popular form of dramatic entertainment of the nineteenth century. While the sensation novel borrows from melodrama some of its incidents and its emotional and linguistic excesses – most strikingly displayed, in Lady Audley’s Secret, in the carefully staged and highly theatrical confrontation scenes between Robert Audley and his aunt –, it also puts melodrama to new uses in that it tends to destabilise the clear-cut moral categories of good and evil between which, in melodrama, the struggle is played out (Pykett 1992, 74–76).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives In spite of multiple links to other cultural phenomena, contemporary critics regarded the sensation novel as a new type of fiction, the popular and commercial predominance of which they recognised (and frequently deplored). In more recent discussions of sensation fiction a few key reviews have been identified as particularly influential, for instance, Margaret Oliphant’s “Sensation Novels” in Blackwood’s Magazine (1862) and Henry Mansel’s “Sensation Novels” in Quarterly Review (1863). But these are only the most prominent among a vast number of reviews, defences, and parodies, which, taken together, do not so much describe a genre (or subgenre) which already exists as, by their classificatory activities, bring it into being as a distinct entity in the first place (Garrison 2011, 1–55, 211–214; Brantlinger 1982, 2; Hughes 1980, 38–72). One of the issues which contemporary critics address is, naturally, how to define the sensation novel; in other words, which texts are in fact sensational, and what it is that makes them so. While there is considerable disagreement about these questions, not least because of the fact that the term ‘sensation’, as has already been pointed out, has multiple meanings (Garrison 2011, 2–3), the common denominator appears to be that sensation novels generate artificial thrills in their readers. This “preaching to the nerves” – in Mansel’s memorable phrase (1863, 481) – is to be considered, for the contemporary observer, from the interrelated perspectives of class and gender. As sensation fiction is seen to have roots in working-class forms of entertainment (such as the Newgate novel and the stage melodrama), these forms of entertainment now infiltrate mainstream fiction, and, by appealing to lower-class and middle-class readers alike, threaten social distinctions. At the same time, the

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newly emergent mass market of periodicals and serial publication, circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls is increasingly stratified along gender lines, with mass market formulaic fiction such as sensation novels allegedly written by women authors about women and for women readers; by contrast, fiction by male authors continues to be defined as uniquely expressive of individual genius (Pykett 1992, 23–33). Ultimately, given the prestige accorded to the novel as the preeminent literary form of the period, and therefore as a major social and ethical force, class as well as gender discourses are underpinned by moral concerns, concerns which centre on what Margaret Oliphant has termed the “equivocal heroine” (qtd. in Hughes 1980, 46) of sensation fiction (of whom Lady Audley, lower-class impostor in an upper-class household, and a criminal, is a prime example). As Winifred Hughes has remarked, “[if] the ideal middle-class society is founded on the cornerstone of womanly purity, then it is quite understandable to find the ‘equivocal heroines’ of the sensation novel condemned as a threat to the entire social and moral fabric of Victorian England” (1980, 46). However, Hughes argues that, in addition to provoking criticism on moral grounds, the sensation novel also forces critics to develop a vocabulary with which to discuss fiction in more strictly aesthetic terms: because of its hybrid nature – that is, its “violent yoking together of romance and realism” (16) – they are obliged to reconsider the nature of verisimilitude in fiction, in order to define a mimetic standard from which novels like Lady Audley’s Secret can then be seen to deviate. Although sensation fiction in general, and Lady Audley’s Secret in particular, remained popular throughout the nineteenth century and mid-twentieth century, processes of canon formation militated against the inclusion of Braddon’s novel in histories of Victorian fiction. On the one hand, Leavisite narratives of the “Great Tradition” – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad (Leavis 1948, 1) – show a marked preference for supposedly ‘realistic’ texts. On the other hand, as Elaine Showalter has famously stated, “[in] the atlas of the English novel, women’s territory is usually depicted as desert bounded by mountains on four sides: the Austen peaks, the Brontë cliffs, the Eliot range, and the Woolf hills” (1982, vii). It was only when critics, from the 1970s onwards, started to question the dominance of realism in Victorian literature – either by emphasising the non- or anti-realist aspects of canonical novels, or else by directing their attention to non-canonical, but bestselling Victorian fiction – and when feminist scholars such as Showalter engaged in “construct[ing] a more reliable map from which to explore the achievements of English women novelists” (vii) that Lady Audley’s Secret was republished in paperback editions and became, once again, the focal point for a lively debate, which, coincidentally, revisits some of the parameters established in the 1860s. First and foremost, Lady Audley’s Secret has been regarded as a text which intervenes in the mid-Victorian discourse on the ‘Woman Question’, that is, in discussions concerning the legal status and property rights, as well as the social and cultural roles of women in the family and in society at large. Thus, in her discussion of Lady Audley’s Secret, Showalter stresses the transgressive power of Braddon’s

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text, claiming that Helen’s “unfeminine assertiveness [. . .] must ultimately be described as madness [. . .] to spare the woman reader the guilt of identifying with a cold-blooded killer.” What is more, “[a]s every woman reader must have sensed, Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, more often representative” (167). At the same time, Showalter suggests in her concluding remarks on sensation novels authored by women, these novelists are too caught up in their own “feminine conflicts” (180) to work out the implications of their plots so that, in addition to confining Helen to a continental madhouse, the ending of the novel invariably reinscribes a domestic idyll. Showalter’s reading of Lady Audley’s Secret, while indubitably influential, has come to be recognised as a somewhat problematic attempt to categorise the agenda of literary texts as ‘radical’, ‘subversive’, or ‘conservative’ in accordance with modern (and ahistorical) “standards of progressiveness,” not least because of her tendency to concentrate on – often placatory – endings “at the expense of the more complex middles of novels” (Pykett 1992, 50). By contrast, critics such as Lyn Pykett and Ann Cvetkovich (1992) have shown convincingly (the latter from a Foucauldian perspective) that sensation novels are typically caught in a dialectic of transgression and containment; in other words, they do not only subvert the gender discourses in which they participate, but conversely, participate in the very gender discourses which they seek to subvert. For Cvetkovich, the portrait of “Lady Audley” – which George Talboys and Robert Audley view and the painter of which “so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid lightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes” (Braddon 1987, 70) – is emblematic of this dialectic and of how sensation novels work more generally. She argues that “[t]he sensation of repulsion produced by Lady Audley’s criminality is indistinguishable from the fascination produced by her beauty; sensationalism consists in the indistinguishability of the two feelings” (Cvetkovich 1992, 50). Critics who focus on the transgressive potential of Braddon’s text and regard it as a fantasy of feminine rebellion tend to treat Robert Audley’s work of detection as neutral, and himself as the disinterested agent of it. However, if one stresses the novel’s attempts at containment, one is invited to read Lady Audley’s Secret from Robert’s (anything but neutral) point of view, as a fantasy of masculine power, control, and surveillance. This fantasy is reinforced by the narrative perspective of the text: as the omniscient narrator privileges Robert’s point of view and, pushing omniscient narration to its logical limits, very rarely grants insights into Helen’s thoughts and feelings, she is placed (like her portrait) in a specular relationship to Robert, and through Robert, to the reader. Hence, Braddon’s text does not only engage with hegemonic constructions of femininity, but also investigates culturally dominant as well as subordinate masculine roles. The trajectory of Robert’s development, in and through the process of detection, from “a handsome, a lazy, care-for-nothing fellow” (Braddon 1987, 32) to respectable homeowner, husband, father, and successful professional thus provides

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a contrast to the fates of his uncle Sir Michael, his prospective father-in-law Harcourt Talbot, and Luke Marks (who is as much Robert’s shadowy double as his wife Phebe is Helen’s). Inspired by masculinity studies, this latter aspect of Lady Audley’s Secret has come to the fore in recent analyses of the novel. In particular, attention has been drawn to Robert’s homosocial relationship to his friend George Talboys, and to how George’s sister Clara, who resembles her brother physically and whom Robert will eventually marry, emerges as a stand-in for Robert’s and George’s bond. Likewise, attention has been drawn to Robert’s pronounced misogynist streak, as in the following outburst, which the omniscient narrator (here as elsewhere speaking in the first person) seems to sanction. Alluding to the biblical story of the Fall, which presents Eve’s disobedience as the cause of Adam’s and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise, the narrator describes Robert’s mental state, empathetically, as follows: I do not say that Robert Audley was a coward, but I will admit that a shiver of horror, something akin to fear, chilled him to the heart as he remembered the horrible things that have been done by women, since that day upon which Eve was created to be Adam’s companion and help-meet in the garden of Eden. [. . .] Robert looked at the pale face of the woman standing by his side: that fair and beautiful face, illumined by starry blue eyes, that had a strange and surely dangerous light in them; and remembering a hundred stories of womanly perfidy, shuddered at the thought how unequal the struggle might be between himself and his uncle’s wife. (Braddon 1987, 274)

Of the various approaches to Lady Audley’s Secret in which Robert shares centre stage with his aunt (Heinrichs, 2007; Klein 2008), the most interesting is Hansson and Norberg’s essay “Lady Audley’s Secret, Gender and the Representations of Emotions” (2013). It explores the depiction of shame and anger in Braddon’s novel. Hansson and Norberg show that in Lady Audley’s Secret female characters typically exhibit signs of anger and male characters show signs of shame. As this behaviour violates contemporary codes of appropriate feminine and masculine behaviour, this distribution seems to support, once again, a reading which stresses the transgressive potential of the text. However, a qualitative evaluation of the contexts in which the terms ‘anger’ and ‘shame’ occur reveals that, although male characters are angry less often than women, their anger, when displayed, is invariably presented as justified, while women’s anger is not (Hansson and Norberg 2013, 444). Conversely, while Helen does not appear to feel any shame, although she should, Robert and other male characters are ashamed of her. Additionally, female and male anger show different physical manifestations and are performed differently: the one contained within a woman’s body, the other directed outward, towards other characters or inanimate objects. This, according to Hansson and Norberg, contributes to “the construction of women as bodies and men as intellect” (453). Hence they conclude that [despite] the novel’s reputation for sensationalism, and in contrast to interpretations that attempt to identify feminist undertones in the text, an analysis of the gendering of anger and

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shame in the text demonstrates that Lady Audley’s Secret in fact deploys representations of emotion to construct gender in a highly conventional manner. (453)

Hansson and Norberg’s article provides a connection between a linguistically inflected survey of Lady Audley’s Secret and critical work which situates, or resituates, Braddon’s novel in a variety of contemporary discursive contexts, aligning it, for example, with contemporary scientific theories of bodily processes (Garrison 2011, 1–11), and of madness as “moral insanity” (Matus 1993, 338). Alternatively, critics like Karen Chase and Michael Levenson try to reconstruct the precise historical moment and the “agitating social circumstances” to which sensation fiction responds – “the wars of the fifties, the expanding network of railways, the extension of the telegraph, the urban building boom, and the emergence of conspicuous consumption”; For Chase and Levenson, these circumstances produce an “enervated subjectivity” so that contemporary readers recognise, in Lady Audley, the “monstrous counterpart” of their own restlessness and distraction (2000, 203–204). Finally, and most recently, the imperial dimensions of Lady Audley’s Secret – the colonial experiences of George Talboys in Australia, and references to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 – have attracted the attention of Maia McAleavey (2015). The author compares the direction of George Talboys’s various journeys in the novel to the imperial vector of most Victorian fiction. In this context, Lillian Nayder (2000) argues that the novel establishes subtle parallels between the threats posed to the British Empire by unruly natives in the colonies and those emanating from rebellious women at home. Thanks to Robert, the latter threat is, in Braddon’s novel, averted, and the mutiny of women, like those of the mutinous Indians of 1857, has been put down. In a letter to Mary Elizabeth Braddon, which he wrote from Samoa just before his death in 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson shares his memories of reading Lady Audley’s Secret when he was fifteen, and adds, à propos of her Aurora Floyd, that this is one book which every trader in the Pacific has read: “It is something to be out and away greater than Scott, Shakespeare, Homer in the South Seas, and to that you have attained” (qtd. in Wolff 1979, 9). While, perhaps, this notion of greatness should be confined to the South Seas of the 1890s, the ultimate secret of Lady Audley’s Secret which, since its publication in 1862, its readers have uncovered over and over again is its – dare one say sensational? – multi-facetedness.

Bibliography Works Cited Badowska, Eva. “On the Track of Things: Sensation and Modernity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.” Victorian Literature and Culture 37.1 (2009): 157–175. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. 1862. Oxford: OUP, 1987.

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Carnell, Jennifer. The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work. Hastings: Sensation P, 2000. Brantlinger, Patrick. “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37.1 (1982): 1–28. Chase, Karen and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Cornes, Judy. Madness and the Loss of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings. Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992. Garrison, Laurie. Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hagedorn, Roger. “Doubtless To Be Continued: A Brief History of Serial Narrative.” To Be Continued: Soap Operas Across the World. Ed. Robert C. Allen. London: Routledge, 1995. 27–48. Hansson, Heidi, and Cathrine Norberg. “Lady Audley’s Secret, Gender and the Representation of Emotions.” Women’s Writing 20.4 (2013): 441–457. Haynie, Aeron. “‘An idle hand that was never turned, and a lazy rope so rotten’: The Decay of the Country Estate in Lady Audley’s Secret.” Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie 2000, 63–74. Heinrichs, Rachel. “Critical Masculinities in Lady Audley’s Secret.” Victorian Review 33.1 (2007): 103–120. Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Klein, Herbert G. “Strong Women and Feeble Men: Upsetting Gender Stereotypes in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.” Atenea 28.1 (2008): 161–174. Langland, Elizabeth. “Enclosure Acts: Framing Women’s Bodies in Lady Audley’s Secret.” Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie 2000, 3–16. Leavis, Francis R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948. Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge. “The Plot Thickens: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s.” Victorian Studies 51.1 (2008): 65–101. [Mansel, Henry]. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly Review 113 (1863): 481–514. Matus, Jill L. “Disclosure as ‘Cover-Up’: The Discourse of Madness in Lady Audley’s Secret.” University of Toronto Quarterly 62.3 (1993): 334–355. McAleavey, Maia. The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. Nayder, Lillian. “Rebellious Sepoys and Bigamous Wives: The Indian Mutiny and Marriage Law Reform in Lady Audley’s Secret.” Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie 2000, 31–42. [Oliphant, Margaret]. “Sensation Novels.” Blackwood’s Magazine 91 (1862): 564–584. Pykett, Lyn. The ‘Improper’ Feminine. The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992. Pykett, Lyn. “Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Deirdre David. 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. 211–230. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. Tilley, Elizabeth. “Gender and Role-Playing in Lady Audley’s Secret.” Exhibited by Candle-Light: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. 195–204. Tromp, Marlene, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, eds. Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000.

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Tromp, Marlene, Pamela K. Gilbert and Aeron Haynie. Introduction. Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie 2000, xv–xxviii. Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. New York: Garland, 1979.

Further Reading Houston, Gail Turley. “Mary Braddon’s Commentaries on the Trials and Legal Secrets of Audley Court.” Tromp, Gilbert and Haynie 2000, 17–30. King, Emily. “Reconsidering Reparation: Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Critical Reading Practices.” Pacific Coast Philology 43 (2008): 55–71. Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Loesberg, Jonathan. “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction.” Representations 13 (1986): 115–138. Morris, Virginia B. Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1990. Pykett, Lyn. “Sensation and New Woman Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing. Ed. Linda H. Peterson. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. 133–143. Tailarach-Vielmas, Lawrence. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Carolyn Sigler

19 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Abstract: This chapter considers Lewis Carroll’s children’s fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), placing it in the context of the diverse cultural afterlives of both the author and his iconic character. After introducing Carroll’s life and literary legacy, the chapter analyses the novel as a complex response to a longstanding tradition of didactic moral literature for the young as well as emerging nineteenth-century genres of imaginative writing for children, examining the book’s engagement with anti-didactic works through its many satirical, intertextual references to popular moral verses and tales. The chapter then turns to a discussion of the novel’s eponymous heroine as a figure of resistance challenging other forms of authority and moralising, including conventional Victorian ideas about childhood and girlhood. The chapter concludes by considering Carroll’s novel as a literary and cultural phenomenon, and the diverse history of its many hundreds of literary and media adaptations as theorised by recent intertextuality and influence studies. Keywords: Literary fantasy, anti-didacticism, influence, intertextuality, adaptation, childhood, gender

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Despite Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration that the reclusive “Rev. C. L. Dodgson had no life,” the author known to the world as Lewis Carroll and his most famous work have had extraordinarily rich and diverse afterlives (1977, 47). Even during its author’s lifetime, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was already one of the most recognised and frequently quoted works of nineteenth-century literature. Published in 1869 in The Spectator, “Alice Translated” describes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as “beyond question, supreme among modern books for children,” containing “treasures of hidden wisdom” (168), and the 1898 Pall Mall Gazette survey titled “What Children Like to Read,” conducted not long after Carroll’s death, shows that child readers ranked Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a resounding first choice. Carroll himself initiated translations of the novel into French and German in 1867, and it has since been published in nearly every language and dialect on earth. It remains one of the most quoted books after the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays – Alice’s cry of “curiouser and curiouser,” the Cheshire Cat’s insistence that “we’re all mad here,” and the White Rabbit’s alarmed exclamation https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-020

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of “Oh my fur and whiskers!” are instantly recognisable (Carroll 2009, 16, 58, 31). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871) continue to stimulate scholarly and popular interest, debate, and, occasionally, controversy. The Alice books added many words, phrases, and concepts to the English language – galumph, burble, curiouser, frabjous, mimsy, and the linguistic concept of the portmanteau word, to name a few – and Alice and the characters from her two adventures have also lent their names and attributes to a variety of philosophical, philological, political, scientific, and medical theories. The Alice novels have been adapted and interpreted for countless literary, theatrical, cinematic, gaming, musical, and advertising purposes, and continue to have, as Gillian Beer points out, “a remarkable capacity to absorb new contexts, from science fiction to musical theatre, surrealism to politics” (2016, 1). Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll were the subjects of intense interest, even during Carroll’s lifetime, and have become increasingly mythologised. Indeed, only two years after Carroll’s death, William Tuckwell, an Oxford colleague, quipped that Carroll had already been “biographised, facsimile’d, IsaBowmanised, to the nth” (1900, 161). Despite having been the subject of more biographies and memoirs than just about any other Victorian author since his sudden death in January 1898, however, Carroll has presented a challenge to biographers. “In the fallow space left by the lack of prima-facie evidence, and the silence of [Carroll’s] family,” biographer Karoline Leach argues, this discursive myth-making evolved and flourished in “an unprecedented and powerful way” (1999, 9). Indeed, as Leach has shown in her revisionary interpretation of Carroll’s biographical record, the variety of cultural meanings taken on by both Carroll and his literary creation have complicated the work of both biographers and author-focused critics. In The Story of Alice, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst underscores the fugitive and paradoxical nature of his subject, observing that “nothing in Carroll’s life is capable of being interpreted in just a single way; the more closely the supposed facts of his biography are examined, the more each one starts to divide into a squabbling Tweedledum and Tweedledee” (2015, 16). Shortly after Carroll’s death, the New York Times obituary, “The Rev. C. L. Dodgson,” observed that “Mr. Dodgson’s life was as grotesque in its contradictions as his most deliciously absurd conceptions” (1898, 7). Like his fictional Alice, Carroll could indeed “be very fond of pretending to be two people” (Carroll 2009, 15). Actress Isa Bowman describes in her 1899 memoir how he always maintained “that Lewis Carroll the author and Mr. Dodgson the professor were two distinct persons” (1900, 14), carefully separating his pseudonymous public identity as the celebrated author of Alice from his private identity as the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Oxford mathematician, lecturer, cleric, and photographer. As Reverend Dodgson, he would indignantly return mail addressed to Lewis Carroll unopened; however, to those with whom he hoped to further an acquaintance, particularly children, he was more amenable to identifying himself as the celebrated author of the Alice books. Writing in 1876 to the mother of one of

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his child acquaintances, to whom he had sent a photograph, Carroll insisted that he did not “want people who had heard of Lewis Carroll to be able to recognise him in the Street. [. . .] Will you kindly take care, if any of your ordinary acquaintances (I don’t speak of intimate friends) see it, that they are not told anything about the name of ‘Lewis Carroll’?” (qtd. in Collingwood 1898, 311). Even Carroll’s physical appearance suggested incongruity: an artist acquaintance, Edith Shute, described him as “present[ing] the peculiarity of having two very different profiles; the shape of his eyes, and the corners of the mouth did not tally” (1932, 560). Our understanding of Carroll’s biography has been further complicated both by the abundance of personal documentation Carroll accumulated during his lifetime and by its selective expurgation after his death by would-be guardians of his legacy. Carroll wrote thirteen volumes of diaries, which he began in 1854 while still a student at Oxford and continued to keep until shortly before his death. He also left behind a twenty-four-volume letter register listing reams of personal documents and correspondence with hundreds of personal and business acquaintances, friends, and relations, totalling over 100,000 letters. Much of this material seems to have been sold, lost, or destroyed after Carroll’s death, when Wilfred Dodgson, as literary executor, assumed custodianship of his elder brother’s personal papers. Four volumes of Carroll’s diary went missing or were destroyed, and sections of the remaining volumes were expurgated with a razor: over five years of personal documentation that, like the hapless Baker at the end of Carroll’s epic nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876), suddenly and mysteriously “vanished away” (1979a, 96). The loss or destruction of these documents has continued to raise questions in the minds of Carroll scholars about his relationships with many child friends and, in particular, with his “ideal child-friend,” as Carroll described Alice Liddell Hargreaves in an 1885 letter written to her when she was an adult (1979b, 1: 561). In her Victoria Through the Looking-Glass, Florence Becker Lennon was the first Carroll biographer to suggest that he may have had romantic feelings for Alice Liddell, based on no documentary evidence other than an 1898 biography by Carroll’s nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (Lennon 1945, 192). Lennon’s speculative theory was quickly repeated as fact by later biographers. In the Preface to his biography The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson, Alexander Taylor asserts confidently that “[t]here is no doubt in my mind, that Dodgson was in some sense in love with his heroine or that the breakdown of their relationship which occurred as Alice grew up was the real disappointment of his life” (1952, v). This confabulatory narrative of unrequited love has, in one form or another, been reiterated in most of the many biographies that have followed Lennon’s, including more recent biographies by Morton N. Cohen (1995), Michael Bakewell (1997), and Donald Thomas (1996). Leach’s In the Shadow of the Dreamchild was the first biographical study to criticise this conventionalised ‘myth’ of Lewis Carroll and Alice: “With our modern

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love of literalism we have interpreted his ‘Alice’ as the real-life Alice he knew when he wrote the story. [. . . T]he consensus in modern biography is that Alice Liddell is the ‘dreamchild’ and, beyond that, the key to Dodgson’s inner mind, his muse, the love of his life, the cipher by which we read his soul” (1999, 161). Leach leads readers to question such mythic consensus, but only by theorising the possibility of a different, equally speculative love affair. In Lewis Carroll: A Biography, the most thorough biographical treatment of Carroll’s life and career to date, Morton N. Cohen summarises the complex and contradictory nature of the Alice books’ author, noting that Carroll “has provoked curiosity at all times, and literary historians and psychologists have tried to discern what made him tick. But their efforts have resulted largely in contradictory assessments. No consensus has emerged. Lewis Carroll remains an enigma, a complex human being who has so far defied comprehension” (1995, xxi). Indeed, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst observes, “the more that has been written about him, the more elusive he has become” (2015, 14). “We think we have caught Lewis Carroll,” writes Virginia Woolf, “we look again and see an Oxford clergyman. We think we have caught the Reverend C. L. Dodgson – we look again and see a fairy elf” (1977, 47). Like the figure of the White Rabbit, which inspires Alice’s “burning [. . .] curiosity” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2009, 10), Carroll remains a figure of fascination: perplexing, fugitive, but still inspiring pursuit. Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Daresbury, Cheshire on 27 January 1832, the third of eleven children and eldest son of Frances Jane Lutwidge and Reverend (later Archdeacon) Charles Dodgson. In 1843, Carroll’s father was relocated to a more prestigious parish, and the family moved into the large rectory at Croft, Yorkshire. Carroll’s career as an author and humorist began at Croft in 1845 with the creation of Useful and Instructive Poetry, the first of a series of handwritten household magazines produced to entertain his family, for which Carroll was both chief editor and contributor. The Rectory Umbrella (1850), another of these family publications, is dedicated to the “Inhabitants of the Rectory, Croft, and especially to the younger members of that house” (1932, n. pag.). In his introduction to The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, a collection of his uncle’s unpublished writings and juvenilia, Carroll’s nephew and first biographer Stuart Dodgson Collingwood observes that “the author of ‘Alice’ began to write for child-readers when he was himself a child, and continued to do so during the whole of his school and early college days” (1899, 2). Having shown early promise in mathematics as grammar-school student, Carroll continued to win academic honours in the field after becoming a student at Oxford University’s Christ Church College in 1851, achieving a B.A. in mathematics in 1854, an M.A. in 1857, and a position as a lecturer in 1855. Carroll also continued to establish himself as a humourist and satirist, contributing poems and stories to humour magazines such as the Comic Times and The Train, where he first made use of the pseudonym “Lewis Carroll” in 1856.

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On 4 July 1862, Carroll and an Oxford University colleague named Robinson Duckworth made an excursion up the River Isis (the local name for the Thames) for an afternoon picnic with the young daughters of Henry Liddell, the dean of Christ Church College. As the men rowed, the three girls – Ina, Alice, and Edith – demanded a story to pass the journey, and Carroll began spinning a tale about another Alice, whose boredom and curiosity led her into a series of comical adventures in a fantasy world ‘under ground’. Duckworth later recalled “turning round and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along’” (Collingwood 1899, 358). While records show that the weather was overcast and cool that day, later reminiscences by members of the boating party describe Carroll’s story of Alice’s underground adventures emerging fully-formed during what all recalled as a sublimely warm and sunny “golden afternoon” (Carroll 2009, n. pag.). Evidence suggests that the narrative of Alice’s adventures actually developed slowly in a series of tales told over a number of months. In a diary entry on 6 August 1862, Carroll describes another boating trip with the Liddell sisters during which he complains about having “to go on with my interminable fairy-tale of ‘Alice’s Adventures’” (1993–2005, 4: 115). Alice Liddell Hargreaves herself recalls in a memoir that Carroll “told [her, Lorina, and Edith] many, many stories before the famous trip up the river to Godstow” (1932, 5). “Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream – the three little maidens and I,” Carroll later reminisced, “and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit. [. . . Y]et none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her” (Carroll 1899, 165). Carroll began drafting the major incidents of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground shortly after the July 4 boating trip, outlining the major events of the narrative the next day, and eventually presented a meticulously hand-lettered and illustrated manuscript to Alice Liddell as Christmas gift in 1864. While Carroll later insisted in his preface to a published facsimile of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground that “there was no idea of publication in my mind when I wrote this little book” (1886, vi), his letters and diaries indicate that he had in fact already begun considering the possibility of revising and expanding this early version of Alice’s adventures for publication long before its completion. In the spring of 1863, having finished the text of the story but still hard at work on the illustrations, Carroll lent the manuscript to close friends, the author George MacDonald and his wife Louisa, asking them to read it and advise him regarding its merits. “Accordingly,” recalls MacDonald’s son Greville in a biography of his parents, “my mother read the story to us. When she came to the end I, being aged six, exclaimed that there ought to be sixty thousand volumes of it. Certainly it was our enthusiasm that persuaded our Uncle Dodgson, as we called him, to present the English-speaking world with one of its future classics, Alice in Wonderland” (1924, 342).

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Encouraged by the MacDonalds, Carroll began revising the text of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, eventually expanding the narrative from 18,000 to over 53,000 words. A number of scenes were expanded and developed: the Knave of Hearts’s trial at the end of the novel, originally a little over a page in length, became two full chapters (eleven and twelve), and Carroll added the chapters “Pig and Pepper” (chapter six) and “A Mad Tea-Party” (chapter seven). In April 1864, Macmillan and Company agreed to publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on commission, one of several common nineteenth-century publication models, with the publisher handling only distribution and sales for a commission of ten percent, the author covering all costs of printing, illustration, binding, and promotion. The Methods of Publishing, a popular Victorian handbook for authors, claims that “at least three-quarters of modern fiction” was published on commission (Sprigge 1890, 71). This model enabled Carroll to maintain almost complete control over the design and appearance of his book. As Morton N. Cohen and Anita Gandolfo note, “because [Carroll] paid the bills and undertook the risks, he called the tune” (1987, 28). In his pamphlet The Profits of Authorship, Carroll later paid tribute to the forbearance of “that most patient and painstaking firm, Messrs. Macmillan and Co.” upon whom his demands for perfection “inflicted [. . .] as much wear and worry as ever publishers have lived through” (qtd. in Collingwood 1898, 228). Initial publishing expenses for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were steep for a college lecturer, especially with the additional expenses of a costly reprinting after illustrator John Tenniel complained about the quality of the pictures in the initial run of two thousand copies. With the prospect of receiving a ninety-percent profit on the sale of each copy under the commission model of publication, however, Carroll clearly had confidence that the book was a good investment. Indeed, on 30 November 1865, less than two weeks after publication, Carroll recorded a significant sales figure in his diary: “Called on [his publisher, Alexander] Macmillan, who tells me that 500 Alices are already sold” (1993–2005, 5: 117). Sales continued to flourish, and Carroll noted in his diary, after another visit to Macmillan on 8 January 1869, that “Alice has had a great sale this Christmas, more than 3,000 having been sold since June!” (6: 75). Ultimately, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland sold over 180,000 copies in Great Britain alone during Carroll’s lifetime.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns In the introduction to her edition of two of Carroll’s early family magazines, The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch, Florence Milner observes that Carroll’s juvenilia reveals the development of “many interests that matured and were emphasized in later years: writing, a keen sense of humor shown through his skill in playing with words, drawing, music, photography, mathematics, and even science. In all these,

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the future Lewis Carroll is foreshadowed” (1932, xii). The household magazines produced for his younger siblings clearly demonstrate Carroll’s developing skills as a humourist and satirist, and as an author with a perceptive understanding of what it feels like to be a child. The first of these, Useful and Instructive Poetry (1845), created when the author was himself only thirteen years old, includes parodies of cautionary tales and didactic verse considered appropriate for Victorian child readers. Carroll’s parodies conclude with mock-morals solemnly exhorting his young readers “[d]on’t get drunk” (1954, 24), “[n]ever stew your sister” (29), “[b]e rude to strangers” (40), or simply “[y]ou mustn’t” (15). These early works anticipate the satirical skewering of popular moral verses that were later to distinguish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which all of Alice’s attempts at recitation are, as the Caterpillar points out reprovingly, “wrong from beginning to end” (Carroll 2009, 45). In Wonderland, as Edmund Wilson notes, “the bottoms dismayingly drop out of the didactic little poems by Dr. Watts and Jane Taylor, which Victorian children were made to learn, and their simple and trite images are replaced by grotesque and silly ones” (1977, 199). The exemplary “little busy bee” in Puritan author Isaac Watts’s “Against Idleness and Mischief” (1715) is transformed into a crocodile with “spreading claws” and “gently smiling jaws” (Carroll 2009, 19). Robert Southey’s pious “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them” (1799) becomes a poem about the rejection of conventional wisdom and platitudes: “Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?” Carroll’s “old Father William” demands, “[b]e off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!” (Carroll 2009, 44). David Bates’s lugubrious poem about infant mortality, “Speak Gently” (1848), is transformed as the Duchess’s “Speak Roughly,” sung “while tossing the baby violently up and down” (Carroll 2009, 54). And the 1806 nursery classic “The Star” by Jane Taylor, that famously begins “Twinkle, twinkle little star,” is rendered as “Twinkle, twinkle little bat”: “You know the song, perhaps?” the Hatter asks Alice, who replies with both diplomacy and understatement that she has “heard something like it” (Carroll 2009, 63). Carroll’s Alice books are not the first works for children to break with the moralising tradition of ‘improving’ literature for the young. Donald Rackin argues that, rather than “initiating the revolt against didactic children’s literature,” the Alice books brought to fruition “a movement begun considerably earlier by continental writers [. . .] and by English authors like Charles and Mary Lamb, Catherine Sinclair, Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, and John Ruskin” (1991, 154n). Carroll particularly admired Catherine Sinclair’s novel Holiday House for its humorous depiction of the unrepentantly “noisy, frolicsome, mischievous” Graham children (Sinclair 1839, iv), and presented an elaborately inscribed copy as a Christmas gift to Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell in December 1861. In the novel’s preface, Sinclair directly criticises the narrow utilitarian aims of didactic children’s literature, presenting the creation of imaginative literature for the young as a moral imperative: “In this age of inventions, the very mind of youth seems in danger of becoming a machine; [. . .] no room is left for the vigour of natural feeling” (iv). Contemporary reviewers also noticed and

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regularly commented on the lack of overt moralising in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In a December 1866 review that echoes Sinclair’s critique, The Daily News praised the novel’s break with “the violent, bitter, and puritanical tone [of earlier literature for the young], calculated to harden and contract, rather than to expand and vivify the minds of its readers” (qtd. in Sigler 2014, 162). “The book has got a moral,” Carroll wrote to George MacDonald’s daughter Lila regarding Frederik Paladin-Müller’s fantasy novel The Fountain of Youth (1867), “so I need hardly say it is not by Lewis Carroll” (1979b, 1: 96). Carroll lived and wrote during a period of cultural, political, and technological transformation, which found expression in new attitudes toward children and their reading. Despite its many anti-didactic antecedents, the 1865 publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is almost unanimously cited in modern histories of children’s literature as a fundamental break with the long-standing tradition of moral tales and instructional literature for children, suggesting the power and endurance of the book’s critique of “finding morals in things” (Carroll 2009, 80), as in the Duchess’s famous insistence that “[e]verything’s got a moral, if only you can find it” (79). Indeed, driven by boredom and “burning” curiosity (10), Alice’s pursuit of the White Rabbit is a rejection of the sort of ‘improving’ literature, with its lack of entertaining “pictures or conversations,” being read by her sister in the novel’s opening scene (9). Morals and moralising are, however, never fully left behind after entering Wonderland. Soon after her fall down the rabbit hole, Alice recalls uneasily the calamitous consequences that inevitably befall disobedient children in cautionary and moral tales, having “read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds” (13–14). The novel satirises the elaborate and ludicrous punishments meted out in such cautionary tales when Alice shortly thereafter finds herself immersed in salt-water. “I shall be punished [. . .] I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!” (20) she exclaims, adding stoically: “That will be a queer thing, to be sure!” (21).

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Conventional didacticism and moralising are not the only forms of authority and rule-making with which Alice finds herself at odds in Wonderland. Indeed, she proves to be a most unconventional Victorian heroine: a young girl on a journey without an accompanying protector, not just unaided but in active conflict with nearly every adult character she meets, all of whom attempt to criticise, intimidate, and impose arbitrary rules on her. Morton Cohen argues that “the Victorian idea of

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the child – or [. . .] misconception of the child,” is at the centre of Alice’s adventures, “as are the child’s observations of the adult world and the adult world’s insensitive, abusive treatment of the child” (1995, 137). Alice is interrogated by the pompous Caterpillar, whom she observes to be “in a very unpleasant state of mind” (Carroll 2009, 41); she is angrily rebuked for her “very dull” questions by the Mock Turtle (84), threatened with beheading by the Duchess and Queen of Hearts (54, 72), and carries off the baby from the Duchess’s house because “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two” (55). Indeed, seven-year-old Alice largely serves as the voice of reason in Wonderland, while figures and systems of traditional authority – educational, legal, political, class-based, even familial – are presented as comically childish and capricious, as in the Lory’s sullen insistence that “I’m older than you, and must know better” (24), and the Mock Turtle’s explanation of “the different branches of Arithmetic – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision” (86). When the King of Hearts attempts to impose the mysterious “Rule Forty-Two” to eject Alice from the courtroom, she calmly retorts, “that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now” (105). Indeed, Jennifer Geer argues that by “challenging the King’s ‘Rule Forty-Two’ and the Queen’s dictum of ‘Sentence first – verdict afterwards!’ Alice openly embraces Wonderland’s tactics, loudly declaring her status as a player powerful enough to create and enforce her own rules” (2003, 10). Alice’s Wonderland adventures thus represent Alice growing more confident and assertive as she makes her own way through Wonderland, exercising her intellectual curiosity by asking questions, adapting to new situations and experiences, and increasingly asserting herself in the face of un-reason and hostility. “Who cares for you?” Alice angrily demands of Queen and courtroom at the Knave of Hearts’s trial in the final chapter: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (Carroll 2009, 108). “‘Wonder’ in Carroll’s work,” Gillian Beer argues, “is not an unfocussed state but an active response. It demands an exploration of challenging phenomena; it is never passive” (2016, 182). Among the novel’s, and Alice’s, most insistent questions is that of her own identity, which is as mutable as the circumstances and creatures she encounters: “‘Who in the world am I?’” she wonders after her fall down the rabbit hole, “that’s the great puzzle!” (Carroll 2009, 18). Thus, when the Caterpillar poses the question again – “Who are you?” – Alice is unable to answer: “I – I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then” (40–41). Donald Rackin argues that “not only is Alice’s previous identity apparently meaningless in Wonderland; the very concept of permanent identity is invalid” (1991, 42). Indeed, in Wonderland Alice assumes with growing receptiveness a variety of sizes, shapes, and identities. James Kincaid argues that Alice is “both child and adult [. . .] a person in transition. She is not only the steady innocent but the adolescent continually asking, ‘Who in the world am I?’” (1973, 93). Beyond acclimating herself to the unpredictable and unlearnable world of Wonderland, Alice must learn to adapt to her own

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developing and mutable identity: “How puzzling all these changes are!” she finally exclaims: “I’m never sure what I’m going to be from one minute to another!” (Carroll 2009, 49). Roni Natov and Wendy Fairey read the brief ‘frame’ scenes set outside Wonderland at the beginning and end of the narrative as further highlighting the novel’s exploration of the liminal period between adulthood and childhood. These scenes between Alice and her sister, they argue, underscore the novel’s focus on “the behaviours, pleasures, and fears that are childlike and about how they’ve been made conscious and adult” (1999, 149). Sarah Gilead maintains, however, that the closing frame attempts to impose “adult didactic and escapist impulses” (1991, 283) and “a sentiment-dimmed adult’s view of childhood’s idyll” (282). Indeed, Alice’s sister’s idealised recollections of “little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures” in the novel’s final scene ignores Alice’s growing assertiveness and confidence in challenging authority, wistfully concluding the novel with an affirmation that Alice will “keep through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood” (Carroll 2009, 111). Indeed, Jennifer Geer suggests that “the contrast between the frames and adventures in the Alice books implies that the frames’ idealized visions of Alice are [. . .] as fantastic in their own way as the dream tales they so radically reinterpret” (2003, 1).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Early reviews of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were largely positive, with commentators praising the book’s originality, humour, and charm. As Carroll was virtually unknown as an author in 1865, many initial reviews placed great emphasis on the illustrations by John Tenniel, already famous as the renowned chief cartoon artist for Punch Magazine. The December 1865 reviewer for The Guardian praises Alice’s adventures as “so graceful and so full of humour that one can hardly help reading it through,” while still reserving its highest praise for the book’s artist: “The illustrations, by Tenniel, are, if anything, still better than the story; together they furnish children with materials for many a hearty laugh, which older children may very easily share” (qtd. in Sigler 2014, 155). A few reviewers were less impressed, however, some questioning the book’s appropriateness for younger readers. The December 1865 Athenaeum, for example, condemns Tenniel’s illustrations as “square, and grim, and uncouth,” and the story as “stiff” and “overwrought” (qtd. in Sigler 2014, 157). Overall, though, both the story and illustrations met with almost universal praise, with many reviewers already hailing the novel as a future classic, and often noting what we would now call the crossover appeal of Alice’s adventures to both child and adult readers. The 1866 London Review assures readers that “‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ is a delightful book for children – or, for the matter of that, for grown-up people” (qtd. in Sigler 2014, 158).

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Responses from individual readers were equally enthusiastic. Carroll made gifts of the book to numerous friends and acquaintances, and sent inscribed presentation copies to many eminent figures and their children, including Princess Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Queen Victoria. The poet Christina Rossetti responded with “a thousand and one thanks [. . .] for the funny, pretty book. My Mother and Sister as well as myself made ourselves quite at home yesterday in Wonderland” (qtd. in Carroll 1979b, 1: 81n). Her brother, pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who later claimed that his pet wombat was the inspiration for the Wonderland dormouse, also wrote with appreciation: “I saw Alice in Wonderland at my sister’s, and was glad to find myself still childish enough to enjoy looking through it very much. The wonderful ballad of Father William and Alice’s perverted snatches of school poetry are among the funniest things I’ve seen for a long time” (qtd. in Carroll 1979b, 1: 81n). The novelist Henry Kingsley, who was among those who had encouraged Carroll to publish Alice’s adventures, wrote to describe how after receiving his copy in the mail he “could not stop reading. [. . .] The fancy of the whole thing is delicious” (qtd. in Carroll 1979b, 1: 81n). In August 1866, with sales figures having grown steadily throughout the year, Carroll wrote to Alexander Macmillan to discuss what Carroll describes with a certain amount of trepidation as his publisher’s “magnificent idea” of printing a third edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1979b, 1: 93). Carroll also asks for Macmillan’s thoughts on translating the novel “into French, or German, or both and trying for a Continental sale,” concluding with “a floating idea of writing a sort of sequel to Alice” (1979b, 1: 94). Less than a year after its publication, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a critical and commercial success. Carroll had successfully made the transition from private to published storyteller, able to consider Alice’s future as both character and enterprise, and his own future as a children’s author. Within a decade of its publication, the novel was regularly being referred to as a classic, appearing on lists of recommended reading for children on both sides of the Atlantic. On 8 December 1891, Carroll wrote to Alice Liddell Hargreaves that “your adventures have had a marvelous success [and] have now sold well over 100,000 copies” (1979b, 2: 876). By the time he died unexpectedly on 14 January 1898 of a bronchial infection, Carroll’s reputation as a humorist and children’s author, and that of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a masterwork, had been firmly established. Carroll’s New York Times obituary, “The Rev. C. L. Dodgson,” declares that Alice’s “wonderful adventures have probably delighted more children than any other book that was ever written” (7). “Nobody since Dickens has given us so many popular sayings and left his mark so firmly in common speech as Mr. Lewis Carroll,” proclaimed children’s author Andrew Lang in a column shortly after Carroll’s death: “How well one remembers, after more than thirty years, the happy surprise which Alice brought! the entire novelty of the amiable nonsense! No one could imitate it, though many will still try the impossible feat” (1898, 469).

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In the one hundred and fifty years since its publication, the ongoing popularity and persistence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its eponymous heroine have both fascinated and frustrated scholars. Virginia Woolf observes that whenever readers attempt to capture the meaning of Carroll’s Alice novels “we fail – once more we fail. [. . .] The book breaks in two in our hands” (1977, 47). Nevertheless, the Alice books have inspired hundreds of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century scholars to continue Woolf’s impossible task, and to produce a vast body of criticism. The scholarly perspectives that have been brought to bear on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are extraordinarily diverse and productive, including psychological, biographical, feminist, cultural, gender, childhood development, educational, ecocritical, postcolonial, neo-Victorian, linguistic, and influence approaches. Useful studies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have considered its enactment of debates over Victorian and post-Victorian attitudes and theories regarding childhood, individual identity, empire, gender, class, language, or education. Rose Lovell-Smith considers the novel’s engagement with Victorian cultural considerations of natural history, scientific classification, human identity, and evolution, particularly those surrounding the ideological challenges posed by Charles Darwin’s 1859 theory of natural selection, with “its contradictory effects of endorsing the competitive social struggle at home and imperialist ambitions abroad, while simultaneously undermining biblical accounts of the creation and origins of humankind” (2007, 35). This critical and theoretical diversity suggests the novel’s continuing relevance to modern critical and cultural concerns, and the extent to which Alice and Wonderland continue to intellectually and imaginatively challenge readers. The first sustained critical studies of Carroll’s Alice books began to appear in the 1930s, with the surge of critical attention surrounding the celebrations marking the centenary of Carroll’s birth, and were largely psychological in focus. Indeed, in one of the earliest of these, William Empson observes that “[t]o make the dreamstory from which Wonderland was elaborated seem Freudian one has only to tell it” (1977, 357). Carroll seemed to understand that the enigmatic nature of his work invited both critical curiosity and uncertainty, observing in an 1884 reply to child readers asking about the meaning of The Hunting of the Snark (1876) that “words mean a great deal more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I’m very glad to accept as the meaning of the book” (1979b, 1: 548). A number of adaptation studies have also considered the literary and cultural afterlives of Alice’s adventures. Beginning in the nineteenth century numerous adaptations, such as Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874), were written, as Rossetti explained to her publisher, “in the Alice style with an eye to the market” (qtd. in Rossetti 1908, 44). Carroll was already aware of such pastiches, parodies, and sequels when he described in his diary a collection of “books of the Alice type” (11 September 1891), which included Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869),

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Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses, and Anna Matlack Richards’s A New Alice in the Old Wonderland (1895). Adaptation and influence studies, such as those by Susina (2010), Sigler (1996; 1997; 2005), and Brooker (2004) have considered the diversity of literary, cinematic, video, artistic, and other Victorian and neo-Victorian adaptations of the novel. Such adaptations, Donald Rackin asserts, “are, in a sense, also critical readings: they constitute verbal, musical, and visual interpretations of the Alices that can often enhance our understanding of the books’ power and perennial popularity” (1991, 31). Michael Hancher explains how the various and variable roles of author, narrator, illustrator, speaker, and reader have enabled both Alice and the Alice books to attain a mythic status and power that exceeds the historical and cultural boundaries of their narratives, and to endure as “a polymorphous text [. . . that] thrives in an indefinite number of forms” (1991, 202). Richard Kelly describes Alice’s adventures as “an inexhaustible fairy tale. There are simply too many aspects of Alice for them ever to be fully dramatized, illustrated, or explicated” (1990, 165). “There is always something else, something other, to say about Alice,” Gillian Beer insists (2016, 1). Just as Alice grows in curiosity and confidence in the book’s ambiguous world of puzzles and confrontations, successive generations of critics, scholars, and readers have been challenged to create their own ‘good meanings’ in the imaginative space of Carroll’s boundless Wonderland.

Bibliography Works Cited “Alice Translated.” The Spectator 7 Aug. 1869. Rpt. in Sigler 2014, 168–169. Bakewell, Michael. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. London: Mandarin, 1997. Beer, Gillian. Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. Bowman, Isa. The Story of Lewis Carroll Told for Young People By the Real Alice in Wonderland. New York: Dutton, 1900. Brooker, Will. Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll and Alice in Popular Culture. New York: Continuum, 2004. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865. London: OUP, 2009. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, Being a Facsimile of the Original M.S. Book Afterwards Developed into “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” London: Macmillan, 1886. Carroll, Lewis. “Alice on the Stage.” The Theatre April 1887.Rpt. in Collingwood 1899, 163–174. Carroll, Lewis. The Complete Diaries of Lewis Carroll. 10 vols. Ed. Edward Wakeling. Oxford: Lewis Carroll Birthplace Trust, 1993–2005. Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark. 1876. Ed. Martin Gardner. New York: Penguin, 1979a. Carroll, Lewis. The Letters of Lewis Carroll. 2 vols. Ed. Morton N. Cohen. London: OUP, 1979b. Carroll, Lewis. The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch. Ed. Florence Milner. London: Cassell, 1932. Carroll, Lewis. Useful and Instructive Poetry. 1845. Ed. Derek Hudson. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Cohen, Morton N. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

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Cohen, Morton N., and Anita Gandolfo, eds. Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan. Cambridge: CUP, 1987. Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson, ed. The Lewis Carroll Picture Book: A Selection from the Unpublished Writings and Drawings of Lewis Carroll Together with Reprints from Scarce and Unacknowledged Work. London: Unwin, 1899. Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson . The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. London: Fisher Unwin, 1898. Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland. London: Harvill Secker, 2015. Empson, William. “Alice in Wonderland: The Child as Swain.” Phillips 1977, 344–373. Geer, Jennifer. “‘All Sorts of Pitfalls and Surprises’: Competing Views of Idealized Girlhood in Carroll’s Alice Books.” Children’s Literature 31 (2003): 1–24. Gilead, Sarah. “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction.” PMLA 106 (1991): 277–293. Hancher, Michael. “Alice’s Audiences.” Romanticism and Children’s Literature in NineteenthCentury England. Ed. James Holt McGavran. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991. 190–207. Hargreaves, Alice. “Alice’s Recollections of Carrollian Days, As Told to Her Son, Carryl Hargreaves.” Cornhill Magazine 73.453 (1932): 1–12. Kelly, Richard. Lewis Carroll. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Kincaid, James R. “Alice’s Invasion of Wonderland.” PMLA 88.1 (1973): 92–99. Lang, Andrew. “At the Sign of the Ship.” Longman’s Magazine 31 (1898): 461–470. Leach, Karoline. In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll. Chester Springs: Dufour, 1999. Lennon, Florence Becker. Victoria Through the Looking-Glass: The Life of Lewis Carroll. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945. Lovell-Smith, Rose. “Eggs and Serpents: Natural History Reference in Lewis Carroll’s Scene of Alice and the Pigeon.” Children’s Literature 35.1 (2007): 27–53. MacDonald, Greville. George MacDonald and His Wife. New York: MacVeagh, 1924. Natov, Roni, and Wendy W. Fairey. “Dickens’s David and Carroll’s Alice: Representations of Victorian Liminality.” Australasian Victorian Studies Association Journal 5 (1999): 143–155. Phillips, Robert, ed. Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as Seen Through the Critics’ Looking-Glasses. New York: Vintage, 1977. Rackin, Donald. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning. New York: Twayne, 1991. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies 81. “The Rev. C. L. Dodgson Dead: He Wrote ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Under the Name of Lewis Carroll.” New York Times 16 Jan. 1898: 7. Rossetti, William Michael, ed. Family Letters of Christina Rossetti. New York: Scribners, 1908. Shute, Edith. “Lewis Carroll as Artist: and Other Oxford Memories.” Cornhill Magazine 73.453 (1932): 559–562. Sigler, Carolyn, ed. Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” Books. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1997. Sigler, Carolyn. “Brave New Alice: Anna Matlack Richards’s Maternal Wonderland.” Children’s Literature 24 (1996): 55–73. Sigler, Carolyn, ed. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: A Documentary Volume. New York: Gale, 2014. Dictionary of Literary Biography 375. Sigler, Carolyn. “‘Wonders Wild and New’: Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books and Postmodern Women Writers.” Twice-Told Children’s Tales: The Influence of Childhood Reading on Writers for Adults. Ed. Betty Greenway. New York: Routledge, 2005. 133–145. Sinclair, Catherine. Holiday House. New York: Carter, 1839. Sprigge, Samuel S. The Methods of Publishing. London: Glaisher, 1890. Susina, Jan. The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Taylor, Alexander L. The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd 1952. Thomas, Donald. Lewis Carroll: A Portrait With Background. London: John Murray, 1996. Tuckwell, William. Reminiscences of Oxford. London: Cassell, 1900. Wilson, Edmund. “C. L. Dodgson: The Poet Logician.” Phillips 1977, 198–206. “What Children Like to Read.” Pall Mall Gazette. 1 July 1898: 1. Woolf, Virginia. “Lewis Carroll.” Phillips 1977, 47–49.

Further Reading Armstrong, Nancy. “The Occidental Alice.” Differences 2.2 (1990): 3–40. Auerbach, Nina. “Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child.” Victorian Studies 17.1 (1973): 31–47. Bivona, Daniel. “Alice the Child-Imperialist and the Games of Wonderland.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.2 (1986): 143–171. Carroll, Lewis. The Rectory Magazine. 1850. Austin: U of Texas P, 1975. Cohen, Morton N., ed. Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989. Hancher, Michael. The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1985. Israel, Kali. “Asking Alice: Victorian and Other Alices in Contemporary Culture.” Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Ed. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 252–287. Jaques, Zoe. “Alice’s Moral Wonderland: Lewis Carroll and Animal Ethics.” Victorian Ethics. Ed. Nathan Uglow. Leeds: Leeds Trinity and All Saints, 2008. 74–87. Jaques, Zoe, and Eugene Giddens. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: A Publishing History. London: Ashgate, 2013. Lovell-Smith, Rose. “The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll’s Reader.” Criticism 45.4 (2003): 383–415. Lovett, Charles C. Lewis Carroll Among His Books: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Private Library of Charles L. Dodgson. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005. Robson, Catherine. “Reciting Alice: What Is the Use of a Book Without Poems?” The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience in Victorian Literature. Ed. Rachel Ablow. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. 93–113.

Nadine Böhm-Schnitker

20 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868) Abstract: This chapter reads Wilkie Collins’s 1868 sensation novel The Moonstone in the literary and cultural context of nineteenth-century discourses on physiological psychology, gender, race and class, as well as on drugs such as opium and alcohol. It argues that the novel translates the violent dispossessions of Empire into domestic negotiations of inheritance and social relations, which is reflected both in the novel’s character constellation and the power hierarchies implied in the mode of narration. The chapter also provides an overview of Wilkie Collins’s œvre, the cultural and generic contexts of his writing, and the reception of The Moonstone from contemporary reviews to recent theoretical approaches. Keywords: Colonialism, hierarchies of gender, race, and class, opium, postcolonial studies, sensation fiction, unconscious cerebration

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment On an emerging mass market, Wilkie Collins knows how to cater to the demands of a growing readership, a readership that is to include “an Unknown Public; a public to be counted by millions; the mysterious, the unfathomable, the universal public of the penny-novel Journals” (Collins 1858, 217). He arranges plots for serialisation, concocting a “striking opening to the work so as to increase the chances of its ‘taking’ with readers, the episodic integrity of the instalment, and frequent ‘climax and curtain’ endings to make readers come back for more” (Baker 2005, xxxii). As the presumable inventor of sensation fiction (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology), Collins used to be considered a minor writer, particularly in contradistinction to Charles Dickens, his mentor, employer, collaborator, friend, and final rival. This evaluation is only slowly changing. The postmodernist refutation of a clear differentiation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture was crucial to render the “literature of the kitchen” (Allan 2013, 92) palatable to academia. After Collins’s fairly laudatory reception by T. S. Eliot in his contribution to the Times Literary Supplement (1927), Collins is re-evaluated and established as culturally worthwhile only in the 1970s and 1980s (Bourne Taylor 2006, 1). Nevertheless, as Peter Thoms argues, the genre’s largely negative evaluation continues to the middle of the 1990s (1995, 183). The son of a landscape painter, William Collins (1788–1847), and an actress and later governess, Harriet Collins (née Geddes, 1790–1868), Wilkie Collins embodies two contrastive Victorian features, a Protestant work ethic and a supposedly bohemian lifestyle associated with the profession of acting (Pykett 2005, 3). He is considered to be “markedly at odds with mid-Victorian middle-class morality” (Dolin 2006, 12), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-021

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because he lived together with two lower-class women out of wedlock, Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd. Nevertheless, he is far from being the age’s enfant terrible, but rather vacillates between provocation and containment. Collins’s ambivalent cultural position is sometimes mirrored in the representation of his biographical persona. Peter Ackroyd, for instance, describes him as a “peculiar appearance” (2012, 1): At five feet and six inches he was relatively short even for the 1850s and 1860s. His head was too large for his body; his arms and his legs were a little too short, while his hands and feet were too small and considered to be ‘rather like a woman’s’. There was a large bump on his right temple as a result of a gynaecological accident. (1; see also Pykett 2005, 5; Lycett 2014, 1)

Both Collins’s bodily stature and his association with sensation fiction – a genre supposedly written by and for women – serve to position the writer in a feminised context. Collins wrote twenty-three novels, more than fifty short stories and novellas, several plays, and over one hundred journalistic essays. His fiction deals, for example, with stolen identities, madness, inheritance, gender imbalances in and out of marriage, colonial exploitation, disability, class differences, science, and vivisection. Through his father and as the godson of Sir David Wilkie, Collins was well versed in art, which is reflected in intermedial references to painting in his texts. His apprenticeship as a barrister allows for ample recourse to legal discourses in his novels, while his actual career in law was of a rather short duration. Entering it in 1846, Collins soon decided that his true vocation was to be a novelist: “I went through the customary forms (with little or no serious study), and was ‘called to the Bar’ at Lincoln’s Inn. But I have never practised my profession. An author I was to be, and an author I became in the year 1848” (qtd. in Law and Maunder 2008, 1). The onset of Collins’s career as a novelist is thus situated in a year of revolutions in Europe and at the apex of Chartism in Britain (Pykett 2005, 37), a context in which the established social order is called into question. In his journalistic writing – Collins contributed to the liberal agenda of The Leader – as well as in his novels, legal discourses are employed to illustrate social ills and injustices. Collins is particularly concerned with the legal representation of women, for instance regarding private property and marriage, and the question of the so-called ‘coverture’, i.e. a woman’s lack of a “legal identity separate from her husband” (Pykett 2005, 41). Collins explores gender hierarchies (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations) in novels such as Man and Wife (1870), The Law and the Lady (1875), and perhaps most famously in The Woman in White (1859–1860), in which Laura Fairlie is to be tricked to confer her entire inheritance to her husband. His fiction can draw on a plethora of political innovations in this regard. Major parliamentary decisions reflecting the changes in gender hierarchies comprise, among others, the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), moving the jurisdiction over divorce from the ecclesiastical to the civil courts, the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882), which granted married women control over their own money, and the Custody of Infants Acts (1839, 1873), regulating the

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rights of custody over children, which were previously granted exclusively to the father. The socio-historical moment in which Collins writes is one defined by reform and debates on the distribution of power along the lines of gender and other categories of difference, prominently among them race and class. After the extension of the electorate in the 1832 Reform Act, the later Reform Acts of 1867, 1884, and 1885 paved the way for a greater democratic basis for British politics. With the access of more social groups to the ballot, established class hierarchies were challenged. Collins’s work frequently deals with the volatile nature of the ascription of social positions and the construction of social identity by way of external markers such as wealth and heritage, descent, gender, race, age, and religion. His sensation fiction was correspondingly criticised for performing a “trick of substituting characteristics for character” (“Our Novels” 1870, 412), an important argument in the debate distinguishing realism from sensation fiction. While the critical focus is now shifting away from a concentration on the Wilkie Collins of the 1860s and hence on the heyday of sensation fiction for the benefit of his later work (Bourne Taylor 2006, 3), I will nevertheless focus on The Moonstone in further detail because this novel is among those characterising his “distinctive narrative method” and “establish[ing] him as a leading novelist” (Trodd 2006, 35).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns The Moonstone is frequently considered one of the first English detective novels (T. S. Eliot 1999, 464) with Sergeant Cuff as professional if only moderately successful detective figure. The novel was serialised in Dickens’s All the Year Round between January and August 1868, but already “published in three volumes by William Tinsley in July 1868” (Page 1974, 168). Launched during the heyday of physiological psychology (Ryan 2012, 53), the novel also represents “one of the first major works in the fiction of the unconscious” (Marshall 1970, 77). It mainly draws on William B. Carpenter’s notion of ‘unconscious cerebration’, “the hidden activity of the mind and its behaviour in states of suspended consciousness like sleep, hypnosis, and drunkenness” (Gilmour 2009, 141), and on the less canonised mesmerist approach by John Elliotson (Ryan 2012, 40; Bourne Taylor 1988, 183). These two opposing theories are employed to render the novel’s main plot element plausible and justifiable: its protagonist’s unconsciously stealing the Moonstone from his cousin and eventual wife, Rachel Verinder, while he is unknowingly under the influence of opium. Scientific discourses are used to morally and legally exonerate Franklin Blake from this theft. Crucially, this exoneration is made possible by several marginal(ised) characters in the novel, particularly by Rosanna Spearman and Ezra

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Jennings. A medical specialist, Jennings elaborates on the different physiological theories and thus provides Blake’s exculpation: “The book in your hand is Doctor Elliotson’s Human Physiology; and the case which the doctor cites rests on the well-known authority of Mr. Combe.” The passage pointed out to me was expressed in these terms: – “Dr. Abel informed me,” says Mr. Combe, “of an Irish porter to a warehouse, who forgot, when sober, what he had done when drunk; but, being drunk, again recollected the transactions of his former state of intoxication. On one occasion, being drunk, he had lost a parcel of some value, and in his sober moments could give no account of it. Next time he was intoxicated, he recollected that he had left the parcel at a certain house, and there being no address on it, it had remained there safely, and was got on his calling for it.” (Collins 2008, 386)

According to this theory, Franklin Blake may indeed have stolen the Moonstone without being conscious of it and might be able to retrieve it as soon as he is under the influence of opium again (grieving his mother’s death and “crippled in every limb by the torture of rheumatic gout,” Collins himself depended on laudanum to be able to finish The Moonstone [Sutherland 2008, xxxv]). This insight initiates an experiment to re-stage the night of the theft in the “secret theatre of home” (Bourne Taylor 1988) under Jennings’s supervision. During the theft’s second experimental performance, “the body of the most unlikely (and very English) suspect is made into a theatre of scientific observation that tells its own story to the medical expert and to the gathered community” (Thomas 2006, 68). Imbibing laudanum, Franklin indeed steals the stone a second time, but again remains unconscious of it so that he never intentionally commits a crime and never realises his own guilt. The present observers, however, can testify to his innocence through their eyewitness accounts, i.e. through a narrativisation of that which remains inaccessible to the protagonist. The novel’s intertextual references to physiological theories, however, deconstruct the plot strand relying on them as they run counter to one another (Bourne Taylor 1988, 176). Apart from scientific discourses, The Moonstone incorporates colonial and economic discourses to represent the complex enmeshments of power in a growing British Empire in the mid-century. Rachel Verinder inherits the Moonstone from her (and Franklin’s) uncle, John Herncastle, who had violently appropriated it from an Indian shrine. Franklin’s cousin Godfrey Ablewhite, the novel’s actual culprit, steals the Moonstone from Franklin in his turn in order to pay off his debts. The novel thus integrates a colonial theft into a domestic context of inheritance, economics, and finance as different characters try to appropriate the gem. Yet the Moonstone, modelled on the Koh-i-Noor and its history in the British Empire (Arnold 2011, 96), cannot serve as a bequest of property because the stone is never really owned by any of the novel’s British characters. A symbol of impossible appropriation, it rather bequeaths a “curse of vengeance” (Thomas 2006, 71) and serves to provide a figurative nexus for the complex discursive spectrum the novel negotiates. Intertwining a colonial frame story with a domestic core, the novel articulates

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questions of gender and class hierarchies with colonialism and capitalism. As Ilana Blumberg elucidates: “In a novel wholly concerned with the inability of human beings to recognize what they owe and what they have unrightfully appropriated [. . .], unconscious debt is the most common sort” (2005, 169). Colonial guilt is thus translated into financial debt in the domestic context, which, symptomatically, remains unacknowledged. Furthermore, Herncastle’s theft of the Moonstone is paralleled by Franklin Blake’s unconsciously stealing it from Rachel Verinder and used to let the colonial guilt reverberate in a symbolically transmitted sexual violation. However, the events leading up to the successful closure of the marriage plot leave some doubt as to whether this is indeed a happy ending. Franklin’s stealing Rachel’s precious gem can be read as a “symbolic defloration” (Lonoff 1982, 210). Their encounter in Rachel’s “boudoir” (Collins 2008, 87), which Franklin leaves with his nightshirt stained, symbolically stages a wedding rite. Rachel, who observes the theft, refuses to give evidence against him and remains silent, but also silenced, which insinuates traumatisation and rape. To achieve the conventional closure of the plot, Rachel has to forget her violation, as “the narrative that consists of an interrupted and then resumed courtship is the ‘master’ text that teaches Rachel to want the man she accused of symbolically violating her” (Heller 1992, 153, also see 160). In the romance plot, heteronormative desire glosses over the inflicted transgression. Desire thus corresponds to opium in that both represent physiological means of letting violations slip into oblivion (Boehm-Schnitker, forthcoming). The Moonstone provides social and colonial critique by way of a negotiation of what is repressed or forgotten, relegated to the unconscious or physiologically submerged. Drugs such as tobacco, alcohol, and opium (Zieger 2011, 208–219) serve as metaphors to articulate economic, medical, and physiological interdependencies between Britain and its colonies: “Habit-forming substances reveal the imperial dependence on colonial resources and labour – a dependency felt physiologically, at the intimate physical level of craving – and yet forgotten most easily in the effects of oblivion” (211). Forms of conduct which turn into habits become naturalised and the novel cleverly plays at this to reveal the production of ideology in the guise of very quotidian acts (Boehm-Schnitker, forthcoming). Like the Moonstone itself, the drug discourse in The Moonstone projects political enmeshments on individual bodies, elucidating the complicity of every single character with the machinations of Empire. The novel opens with a Prologue, “Extracted from a family paper” (Collins 2008, 1), which structurally mirrors the novel’s domestic core set in a colonial framework. “I ADDRESS these lines – written in India – to my relatives in England” (1), writes the anonymous first narrator and intends “to explain the motive which has induced me to refuse the right hand of friendship to my cousin, John Herncastle” after “the storming of Seringapatam, under General Baird, on the 4th of May, 1799” (1). Historically, this storming ends the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, fought by the East India Company.

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In the prologue, the narrator cannot claim to have been an eyewitness to the very act of Herncastle’s killing three Indian guardians of the Moonstone (6), but sees him “with a torch in one hand, and a dagger dripping with blood in the other. A stone, set like a pommel, in the end of the dagger’s handle, flashed in the torchlight, as he turned on me, like a gleam of fire” (4). The narrator betrays this only to his family so that colonial guilt remains a family secret while its ‘curse’ is passed on within family itself (Gruner 1998, 222). Indian legend has it that Vishnu the Preserver ordered three Brahmins to constantly watch the Moonstone: “The deity predicted certain disaster to the presumptuous mortal who laid hands on the sacred gem, and to all of his house and name who received it after him” (Collins 2008, 2). The prologue thus establishes the year 1799 as a relevant backdrop for the actual domestic story set between 1848 and 1850. While this time frame does not yet include the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, which is nevertheless evoked in the novel for its readership, it does, for example, comprise events such as the first Opium War (1839–1842) – fought to protect Britain’s “‘right’ to import opium from India to China against the laws of the land, resolving their trade imbalance” (Nayder 2006, 140). The Moonstone negotiates colonial discourses and cannot but allude to the Opium Wars with its great reliance on the drug for its plot construction. Not only the narrator, editor, and protagonist Franklin Blake is crucially defined by the drug, John Herncastle is described as “a notorious opium eater” (Collins 2008, 35) and Ezra Jennings depends on the palliative function of opium, “that all-potent and all-merciful drug” (376). Drawing on the medical, physiological, political and economic aspects of opium, the novel reveals the different layers of interdependence between Britain, India, and China. Particularly the first Opium War is a model example of the economic and political intertwinements on which British colonialism was based. While the historical representation and contextualisation of the war differs widely between Britain and China, a postcolonial perspective certainly concentrates on the fact that the war was fought in Britain’s interest to force China into a trading relationship. Importing, among other things, silk, cotton and tea, Britain paid a large amount of silver to China that, in turn, was hardly interested in British goods. The opium trade was a means to receive revenues. Cultivated in India, the drug was exported to China much to the country’s social and economic detriment. While China had imported opium since the eighth century (Lovell 2011, 21), the trade increased considerably when Britain’s East India Company got involved. “In 1780, a British East India Company (EIC) ship could not break even on a single opium cargo shipped to Canton. By 1839, imports were topping 40,000 chests per annum” (23). Fostering addiction, opium ensured demand while colonial expansion opened up ever new and larger markets. When China tried to suppress the trade – the leading official on opium, Lin Zexu, had 20,000 chests confiscated and burned – this triggered events leading up to the first Opium War (Schmidt-Glintzer 2014, 17–18). It culminated in the treaty of Nanjing (1842), opening

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several ports and ceding Hong Kong to the British. The Opium War is thus instrumental in opening China to international trade. The Moonstone translates such historical economic interdependencies into characters’ physiological dependence on opium. Consumption and addiction within the domestic core of the novel allude to the larger context of Britain’s colonial enterprise, with The Moonstone’s strong emphasis on financial debt and moral guilt figuratively connecting the intra- and extratextual level. Franklin Blake is the character rendering these intertwinements most conspicuous because he commits a theft of which he remains entirely unconscious and for which he is not made accountable; ironically, it is the consumption of opium that exonerates him. Consumption is the very means of oblivion, and by revealing this, The Moonstone hints at that which is forgotten (Boehm-Schnitker, forthcoming). The novel’s time frame also encompasses the year in which Queen Victoria was given the Koh-i-Noor by the East India Company, 1850. While the Koh-i-Noor “to this day resides with the British Crown Jewels in London,” The Moonstone offers “a fantasy of imperial reversal” (Arnold 2011, 100) by having the gem return to India, albeit with the option of further appropriations. In the novel’s Epilogue, Mr Murthwaite, “the celebrated Indian traveller [. . .], who, at risk of his life, had penetrated in disguise where no European ever set foot before” (Collins 2008, 65), relates in 1850: Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. [. . .] So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell? (466; emphasis added)

The possible reiteration of dispossession undermines the phantasmatic restitution of the Koh-i-Noor, but the novel’s ending nevertheless provides a critique of colonialism in that the Moonstone is finally restored to its rightful place. In the domestic context, The Moonstone represents social differences in its character constellations and reflects on these differences by letting characters comment on the positions they can take. Taken together, these comments amount to a general reflection on viable subject positions in the given social context the novel is set in (Boehm-Schnitker, forthcoming). Some marginal(ised) characters are provided with powerful and memorable roles challenging the established order while others readily affirm it. Regarding class differences, the novel makes a clear distinction between characters who can acquiesce in the positions assigned to them and those who cannot. While Gabriel Betteredge, Lady Verinder’s house-steward and the narrator of the novel’s “First Period,” is quite happy to turn a blind eye to things he is not entitled to comment on in his position – “It is one of the rules in my life, never to notice what I don’t understand” (Collins 2008, 41) – Rosanna Spearman and Limping Lucy articulate the discrimination they are faced with and the social blindness that upholds it. Both characters are further defined by physical disabilities,

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most clearly reflected in Lucy’s telling moniker. According to Betteredge, Rosanna is “the plainest woman in the house, with the additional misfortune of having one shoulder bigger than the other” (22). In addition to this physical deformity, Rosanna is marginalised in the Verinder household because she committed a theft in her past. Hence, her position as a second housemaid is granted her only due to the benevolence of Lady Verinder, “intend[ing] to save forlorn women from drifting back into bad ways” (21). When the Moonstone is stolen, however, she is among the first suspects. Her character illustrates that class difference forecloses any option for her to take the role and position of the romance plot’s heroine. Rosanna Spearman is set against Franklin Blake’s romantic love interest, Rachel Verinder. Both are described as being rather silent (Collins 2008, 22; 52–53), and Betteredge concedes that there is “just a dash of something that wasn’t like a housemaid, and that was like a lady” in Rosanna (22). Neither Rachel nor Rosanna serve as narrators in The Moonstone: as they are both in on the secret of Franklin’s theft, their narrative would render the plot pointless. In contrast to Rachel, however, Rosanna leaves a written legacy to Franklin Blake after her suicide in the Shivering Sand, a setting she is closely associated with. Only after her death is she able to state what she feels, whereas in her lifetime, the intersection of gender, class, and disability forestalls her open speech. In her letter, she reflects on the superficiality of the allocation of social positions and “insinuates that female beauty and male desire are also class-constructs” (Mehta 1995, 626): Suppose you put Miss Rachel into a servant’s dress, and took her ornaments off – ? I don’t know what is the use of my writing in this way. It can’t be denied that she had a bad figure; she was too thin. But who can tell what the men like? And young ladies may behave in a manner which would cost a servant her place. [. . .] [I]t does stir one up to hear Miss Rachel called pretty, when one knows all the time that it’s her dress does it, and her confidence in herself. (Collins 2008, 311)

By sacrificing herself, Rosanna enables her upper-class counterpart to take the position of the heroine in the romance plot. She can only metonymically indulge in an amorous relationship with Franklin, who turns a class-blind eye to all her attentions. Rosanna triumphs over Rachel only in the realm of symbolic exchange: “you wore my roses oftener than either you or she thought” (311), she tells Franklin. Her power/knowledge to incriminate Franklin is contained by a heteronormative romance, thwarting Limping Lucy’s hopes of an alternative lifestyle together with Rosanna. This emotional conundrum sheds light on different aspects of class-blindness. Apart from Franklin’s failure to ‘see’ Rosanna, the performative construction of class within the given setting is also a prerequisite for Franklin to appear ‘innocent’. Both Gabriel Betteredge and Rosanna Spearman see to it that his actual guilt is not acknowledged: Betteredge because he affirms the hegemony of the Verinders, Spearman because of her emotional entanglement and through her

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eventual suicide. When Franklin is close to acknowledging his guilt, Betteredge is quick to point out that it is inconsequential. In the face of the visual proof of his crime, Franklin concedes: “The paint on the nightgown, and the name on the nightgown are facts” (308) and Betteredge duly answers: “Take a drop more grog, Mr Franklin, and you’ll get over the weakness of believing in facts! Foul play, sir!” (309). The steward’s loyalty and/or complicity as well as another drug, alcohol, safeguard the hero’s moral innocence. Rosanna, in turn, protects Franklin by ‘drowning’ in the “Shivering Sand” that “looks as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it – all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps!” (Collins 2008, 25). While the “Shivering Sand” is frequently read as a metaphor of female sexuality (Heller 1992, 151), it also serves as a metaphor for the silencing of people who do not affirm the status quo. The novel thus reveals the high cost for the romance plot to run smooth but nevertheless ends in its consumption, thus containing the novel’s subversive potential.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The Moonstone emulates narrative strategies already introduced in The Woman in White. Collins’s 1859 novel provides a Preamble (95), a paratext introducing the story as a sequence of eye-witness accounts, thus discarding a unified, ‘Olympic’ point of view along with the omniscient narrator considered so typical of ‘the’ Victorian novel. The very structure of the story’s presentation amounts to a “struggle over how to see, over the control of time and memory, and over the control of writing” (Bourne Taylor 1988, 99–100) and as such reveals the ways in which the novel enacts a power play about the narrative control of perspective. The Moonstone is similarly structured into a prologue, a main story, and an epilogue and equally presents a multitude of narratives by characters who are either paid for their services or who are in some way indebted to the narrator-editor Franklin Blake. All narratives are hence interest-based and biased, they only seemingly underscore the truth claim of such a mode of narration. Consequently, the reader is challenged to piece together a number of subjective and partly unreliable testimonies. What is more, the biased nature of the narratives is not only effected by the character narrators, but is implicitly conveyed by the structural representation of the novel’s colonial concerns. Jenny Bourne Taylor describes the structure as “an ‘English’ chain embedded within an ‘Indian’ frame” (1988, 179), and this gets to the heart of the central enmeshments of power negotiated in the novel. The Moonstone modulates the domestic and the colonial, and reveals Britain’s dependence on Indian and Chinese markets. Temporally, the novel is told retrospectively from the vantage point of the mystery’s solution. Franklin Blake’s narrating I is defined by several social changes

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compared to his experiencing I, predominantly by a large inheritance and marriage. The editor commissions Gabriel Betteredge’s narrative on 21 May 1850 and lets him look back to events set in 1848 (Mehta 1995, 617). As the story is to be retold in what is to appear as chronological order, the identity of the thief must remain a secret until the end of the novel. What emerges is that Franklin Blake is the first thief, who, however, is soon overreached by Godfrey Ablewhite. Blake correspondingly requires all narrators to affirm his own innonce. This turns into an ethical problem as many of the commissioned narrators depend on him financially. With Blake remaining unconscious of the theft in each of its ‘performances’, he paradoxically embodies both the criminal and the amateur detective. In the capacity of the latter, he, like Oedipus (Hutter 1975, 207–208), is on a journey to discover his own identity, specifically his identity as a thief, which is finally revealed by the circumstantial evidence of the name tag in his own nightgown that Rosanna Spearman hides to protect him (Collins 2008, 307). However, he is quick to disavow this identity, a denial which is enabled by the parallelism of the detective and the romance plot: I found the mark, and read – MY OWN NAME. There were the familiar letters which told me that the nightgown was mine. I looked up from them. [. . .] I looked back again at the letters. My own name. Plainly confronting me – my own name. [. . .] I had penetrated the secret which the quicksand had kept from every other living creature. And, on the unanswerable evidence of the paint-stain, I had discovered Myself as the Thief. (307)

The short moment of hesitation in Franklin’s narration, indicated by the aposiopesis, illustrates a split between ‘I’ and ‘me’ (Mead 1952, 173–178; Arnold 2011, 99), between Franklin’s ‘subjective’ innocent sense of self based on the oblivion of guilt, and his ‘objective’ guilty identity as a thief. Nevertheless, this confrontation compels him to identify briefly with a moral and political legacy of violent dispossession only to disavow it. The structure of the detective plot with its progress from the assumption of guilt to Franklin’s exoneration ratifies this foreclosure. Paradoxically, it is enabled by opium consumption, i.e. the consumption of the very drug emblematising colonial violence. Proven innocent, Franklin can figure as the hero of the romance plot and finally marry Rachel Verinder, thus retrospectively justifying her violation. Colonial dispossession, domestic theft, and rape are hence structurally aligned and the different layers of the story, past and present, loop into one another to form a “set of interlocking frameworks” (Bourne Taylor 1988, 179).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives The Moonstone’s contemporary reception is split between highly laudatory responses and very negative ones. Geraldine Jewsbury discusses the novel in a surprisingly positive light for the conservative weekly Athenaeum (Page 1974, 170–171).

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Charles Dickens, apparently reflecting the growing personal differences between Wilkie Collins and himself, combines both responses, initially describing The Moonstone to his “sub-editor” of All the Year Round, W. H. Wills, as “wild, and yet domestic – with excellent character in it, great mystery,” but later denounces it by remarking that its “construction is wearisome beyond endurance” (Page 1974, 169). Consolingly, in 1899, The Moonstone was ranked as one “of the 100 best novels of the nineteenth century [. . .] in the Daily Telegraph’s selection” (Pykett 2013, 210), paving the way for a neutral appreciation of sensation fiction. With the onset of High Modernism and critical developments such as New Criticism, such a descriptive stance was not to be until postmodernism challenged the binary of high and popular culture. The time of Collins’s academic reappraisal in the later 1970s and 1980s roughly coincides with the high tide of discourse analysis (D. A. Miller) and the emergence of gender studies, which are soon further subdivided into masculinity studies (Kucich 2006) and queer studies (Haefele-Thomas 2012), among others. In the 1970s, John Reed provides an early critique of imperialism in The Moonstone, an approach which is taken up again in the 1990s, with the reinvigoration of postcolonial studies (e.g. Nayder 2006). In the same decade, A. D. Hutter presents a seminal psychoanalytical reading. Reformulating dream analysis, he reveals structural and historical parallels between detective fiction and psychoanalysis, arguing that “like a psychoanalysis, the detective story reorders our perception of the past through language” (1975, 191). Besides, he explores the sexual symbolism in the encounter between Rachel and Franklin on the night of the theft. In the 1980s, Jenny Bourne Taylor’s circumspect study In the Secret Theatre of Home focuses on the relevance of physiological and psychological discourses on the unconscious in The Moonstone and shows “how the novel becomes Collins’s most ambitious exploration of social and psychic identity, as a study in ambiguity itself” (1988, 176). Combining discourse analysis with a thorough scrutiny of generic, structural, and narrative aspects of the novel, and also taking into consideration questions of gender and race, she presents an encompassing reading of Collins’s oevre. From the vantage point of gender studies with a focus on genre, Tamar Heller considers The Moonstone “the clearest instance in Collins’ canon in which the female Gothic is revised to become the traditionally ‘masculine’ genre of detective fiction” (1992, 11). However, the novel “tells two stories, a masculine one about the triumph of male reason, and a feminine one about buried writing, associated with the subversive discourse of the Gothic and radical Romanticism that cannot be wholly effaced” (11–12). Heller focuses on silencing processes elucidating that Rosanna Spearman’s and Ezra Jennings’s “buried writings” reflect “the novel’s tendency at once to diffuse its social criticism and to draw attention to its own selfcensorship” (144), reflecting the novel’s general vacillation between subversion and containment.

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More recently, readings focus on particular discourses such as forensic science (Thomas 2006), legal discourses (Pettitt 2005) or ethical and economic concerns (e.g. Blumberg 2005, Gooch 2010). Disability studies (Flint 2006) have become a vibrant field emphasising the great relevance of characters such as Rosanna Spearman or Limping Lucy in The Moonstone. After having established the greater political impact of the novel, postcolonial studies now focus on topics such as drug traffic and drug consumption (Zieger 2011).

Bibliography Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. Wilkie Collins. London: Vintage, 2012. Allan, Janice M. “The Contemporary Response to Sensation Fiction.” Mangham 2013, 85–98. Arnold, Jean. Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Baker, William. Introduction. The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters. Ed. Baker. Vol. 1. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005. xix–xliv. Blumberg, Ilana M. “Collins’s Moonstone: The Victorian Novel as Sacrifice, Theft, Gift and Debt.” Studies in the Novel 37 2 (2005): 162–186. Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine. Senses and Sensations: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel (working title). Forthcoming. Bourne Taylor, Jenny. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. New York: Routledge, 1988. Bourne Taylor, Jenny, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Cambridge: CUP, 2006. Bourne Taylor, Jenny. Introduction. Bourne Talyor 2006, 1–6. Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. 1868. Ed. with an Introduction and Notes by John Sutherland. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Collins, Wilkie. “The Unknown Public: A Description of the Millions Who Read the Penny Journals and Their Potential as a New Audience for Good Writing.” Household Words 21 Aug. 1858: 217–222. Collins, Wilkie. “The Woman in White.” All the Year Round 26 Nov. 1859: 95–104. Dolin, Tim. “Collins’s Career and the Visual Arts.” Bourne Taylor 2006, 7–22. Eliot, T. S. “Wilkie Collins and Dickens.” The Times Literaray Supplement (4 August 1927): 525–526. Rpt. in Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. 460–470. Flint, Kate. “Disability and Difference.” Bourne Taylor 2006, 153–167. Gilmour, Robin. The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830–1890. London: Longman, 2009. Gooch, Joshua. “Narrative Labor in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.” Literature – Interpretation – Theory 21 (2010): 119–143. Gruner, Elisabeth Rose. “Family Secrets and the Mysteries of The Moonstone.” Pykett 1998, 221–243. Haefele-Thomas, Ardel. Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2012. Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Hutter, A. D. “Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction.” Victorian Studies 19 2 (1975): 181–209.

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Kucich, John. “Collins and Victorian Masculinity.” Bourne Taylor 2006, 125–138. Law, Graham, and Andrew Maunder. Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Lonoff, Sue. Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship. New York: AMS, 1982. Lovell, Julia. The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. London: Picador, 2011. Lycett, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation. London: Windmill, 2014. Mangham, Andrew, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 2013. Marshall, William H. Wilkie Collins. London: Twayne, 1970. Mead, George Herbert . Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Ed. and introd. Charles W. Morris. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952. Mehta, Jaya. “English Romance: Indian Violence.” The Centennial Review 39.3 (1995): 611–657. Nayder, Lillian. “Collins and Empire.” Bourne Taylor 2006, 139–152. “Our Novels: The Sensational School.” Temple Bar July 1870: 410–424. Page, Norman, ed. Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1974. Pettitt, Clare. “Legal Subjects, Legal Objects: The Law and Victorian Fiction.” A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 71–90. Pykett, Lyn. “The Sensation Legacy.” Mangham 2013, 210–223. Pykett, Lyn. Wilkie Collins: Authors in Context. Oxford: OUP, 2005. Pykett, Lyn, ed. Wilkie Collins. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Reed, John. “English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of The Moonstone.” Clio 2 (1973): 281–290. Ryan, Vanessa. Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Schmidt-Glintzer, Helwig. Das neue China: Von den Opiumkriegen bis heute. 6th ed. München: Beck, 2014. Sutherland, John. Introduction. The Moonstone. By Wilkie Collins. Ed. Sutherland. Oxford: OUP, 2008. vii-xxix. Thomas, Ronald R. “The Moonstone, Detective Fiction and Forensic Science.” Bourne Taylor 2006, 65–78. Thoms, Peter. “Escaping the Plot: The Quest for Selfhood in The Woman in White.” Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments. Ed. Nelson Smith and R. C. Terry. New York: AMS, 1995, 183–207. Trodd, Anthea. “The Early Writing.” Bourne Taylor 2006, 23–36. Zieger, Susan. “Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco: The Substances of Memory in The Moonstone.” A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. Pamela K. Gilbert. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 208–219.

Further Reading Bachmann, Maria K., and Don Richard Cox, eds. Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003. Baker, William, and William M. Clarke, eds. The Letters of Wilkie Collins. 2 vols. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Beller, Anne-Marie. “Detecting the Self in the Sensation Fiction of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.” Clues 26.1 (2007): 49–61. Davis, Jim. “Collins and the Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Bourne Taylor 2006, 168–180.

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Dever, Carolyn. “The Marriage Plot and its Alternatives.” Bourne Taylor 2006, 112–124. Duncan, Ian. “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 55.3 (1994): 297–319. Grass, Sean C. “The Moonstone, Narrative Failure, and the Pathology of the Stare.” Dickens Studies Annual 37 (2006): 95–116. Heller, Tamar. “Afterword: Masterpiece Theatre and Ezra Jennings’s Hair: Some Reflections on Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going in Collins Studies.” Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003. 361–370. Heller, Tamar. “Blank Spaces: Ideological Tensions and the Detective Work of The Moonstone.” Pykett 1998, 244–270. Hultgren, Neil. “Imperial Melodrama in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.” Victorians Institute Journal 35 (2007): 53–80. Manavalli, Krishna. “Collins, Colonial Crime, and the Brahmin Sublime: The Orientalist Vision of a Hindu-Brahmin India in The Moonstone.” Comparative Critical Studies 4.1 (2007): 67–86. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Nayder, Lillian. “Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Victorian Britain: ‘Discipline,’ ‘Dialogue,’ and Collins’s Critique of Empire in The Moonstone.” Dickens Studies Annual 21 (1992): 213–241. Nayder, Lillian. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship. New York: Cornell UP, 2002. Pearl, Sharrona. “Dazed and Abused: Gender and Mesmerism in Wilkie Collins.” Victorian Literary Mesmerism. Ed. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 163–181. Radford, Andrew. Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Rance, Nicholas. Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1991. Roberts, Lewis. “The ‘Shivering Sands’ of Reality: Narration and Knowledge in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone.” Victorian Review 23.2 (1997): 168–183. Roth, Marty. “Victorian Highs: Detection, Drugs, and Empire.” High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction. Ed. Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002: 85–93. Roy, Ashish. “The Fabulous Imperial Semiotic of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.” New Literary History 24.3 (1993): 657–681. Rzepka, Charles. “‘A Deafening Menace in Tempestuous Uproars’: De Quincey’s 1856 Confessions, the Indian Mutiny, and the Response of Collins and Dickens.” Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions. Ed. Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts. London: Routledge, 2008. 211–233.

David Seed

21 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871) Abstract: This chapter examines how Bulwer-Lytton uses his novel as a means to engage with the then current debate over evolution through allusions to such figures as Faraday, Lyell, and Muller. His account of a subterranean race dramatises a possible imminent future for humanity and his protagonist discovers the radical changes brought about in social and gender organisation by the force ‘vril’, which was an extrapolated version of electricity. The primary focus in the novel falls on race and humans’ relation to other primates. The essay considers how the novel has been read as an early dystopia and also how its futuristic force vril was subsequently incorporated into occult circles. Keywords: Evolution, dystopia, vril, subterranean, race

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) was a member of the landed gentry. He was twice elected MP and in 1858 served with his friend, the politician and writer Benjamin Disraeli, as Secretary of State for the Colonies. However, his main career was from 1820 until his death as an author of poems, plays, and essays. His historical novels sold widely and Rienzi (1835) was adapted into an opera by Richard Wagner. He became a close friend of Charles Dickens, initially through a shared enthusiasm for amateur theatricals. In the second half of his life, he became increasingly interested in the occult, which fed into his 1842 novel Zanoni. The Theosophical Movement later claimed him as a formative influence. But while he was fascinated by the occult, he was at the same time extremely sceptical of its descriptions. In his essay “On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination,” for example, he argued that the contents of published accounts of clairvoyance constantly fell short of their grandiose claims and concluded that “the imagination is but the faculty of glassing images,” controlled by “truth and nature” (Bulwer-Lytton 1868, 36). Consequently, the wondrous force Vril is applied scientifically in The Coming Race and is thus distinguished from accounts of mesmerism which the narrator mentions. Similarly, his 1862 novel A Strange Story balances its narrative of visionary experiences against scientific explanations of that faculty. Indeed, Bulwer-Lytton planned to include an extra chapter in this novel containing an extended dialogue on the supernatural in which, having ridiculed popular superstitions and the then current vogue for spiritualism, the scientist stresses the drama arising from the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-022

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“doubt whether the apparent supernatural may not have a natural cause” (Brown 1998,173). A Strange Story anticipates The Coming Race in situating the marvellous onthe boundary of the known and the latter preserves traces of mesmerism in the capacity of the Vril-ya to throw the narrator into a trance by simply pointing a finger at him. The central theme of The Coming Race is evolutionary change (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel). As early as 1833 Bulwer-Lytton had declared in England and the English: “[w]e live in an age of visible transition – an age of disquietude and – doubt of the removal of time-worn landmarks, [. . .] ancestral customs and institutions are crumbling away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds are darkened by the shadow of change” (1874, 281). Displacement, decay, and obscurity hardly suggest an optimistic embrace of progress as a continuous sequence of eras, nor of the continuous grand narrative of evolution. Fiona J. Stafford has stressed how Bulwer-Lytton’s writings began to include phrases like “last of the race” as early as 1818 (1994, 272). However, when he turned to historical fiction in the 1830s, he repeatedly depicted characters caught up in large processes of change that they were powerless to resist. This change is articulated with reference to race, whether lost, fallen, or vanished. Stafford does not include The Coming Race in her study, but nevertheless offers a valuable approach to that novel through Bulwer-Lytton’s exploration of the pathos in the endings of eras. Thus, his historical novels regularly conclude with deaths carrying connotations way beyond the fate of their protagonists. The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) closes with reflections on mortality occasioned by archaeological excavations; Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835) ends apocalyptically with a fire destroying Rome; and Harold, the Last of the Saxons (1848) closes with melancholy reflections on the inadequacy of monuments.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel The Coming Race has variously been described as the first dystopia (Cowan 2016), the “prototypical Victorian novel” (Sinnema 2008, 13), a satire on the women’s rights movement (Judge 2009, 141), and a novel “based on the first major application of evolutionary ideas in the history of fiction” (Clarke 1979, 143). It also combined topical themes of the period like “unknown races, new power sources and spiritual awakening of a distinctly orientalist nature” (Bloom 2013, 38). Bulwer-Lytton himself declared that the novel was “satirical upon many things now discussed political and social but very gravely so” (qtd. in Mitchell 2003, 228). The Coming Race concerns itself less with endings than with evolutionary transition as Bulwer-Lytton draws on his extensive reading in science and the occult throughout the text. In 1861, he conducted experiments in electricity with the

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occultist Elias Levi (Mitchell 2003, 142). Out of this conjunction of interests was born the mysterious force Vril, which lies at the heart of The Coming Race. In March 1870, Bulwer-Lytton wrote to his publisher to explain: “I did not mean Vril for mesmerism, but for electricity, developed into uses as yet only dimly guessed, and including whatever there may be genuine in mesmerism, which I hold to be a mere branch current of the one great fluid pervading all nature” (qtd. in V. A. R. Lytton 1913, 466). The term was probably conceived, as Helena Blavatsky surmised, as a contraction of ‘virile’ (1876, 125), and has been subsequently glossed to mean “the universal principle of vital-energy, life-force, or vital magnetism,” derived from IndoEuropean terms for “man” (Atkinson 1911, 7, 8). Vril has been described as an “all-purpose force” (Mazlish 1993, 740), which can be applied in a whole range of fields. During composition, Bulwer-Lytton took care to distinguish it from the occult and to position it nearer to science. Electricity – still referred to at mid-century as a ‘fluid’ – was to be introduced in lighting during the 1880s. In the novel, Vril is compared to electricity, but this is only a partial analogy since “it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature” (BulwerLytton 2005, 26). Its application is evident from the moment the narrator enters the underground world and sees lamplight extending into the distance. It was only later in the nineteenth century that the utopian dimension of electricity was explored, for example, in W. T. Stead’s “Looking Forward: A Romance of the Electrical Age” (1890), where he declares: “We are standing at the day-dawn of the Electrical Age” (qtd. in Gooday 2015, 137). The panorama confronting Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator on his emergence into this new world is lamp-lit. It is a technological environment displaying the working of Vril before it is even named. Vril is primarily applied through a short staff, whose ease of use makes the force equally accessible to children and adults. This staff visually echoes the wand in A Strange Story (1862) and is compared to a musical instrument with stops, a latter-day magic flute. Though a force which cannot be resisted, its application depends on the personal qualities of those applying it (Stone-Blackburn 1993, 247). The central chapters of The Coming Race make up the core of the narrator’s educative experience in this underworld and supply the reader with the evolutionary back story of the Vril-ya. From that race, the role of tutor is played by Zee, who later becomes a focus of romantic attraction for the narrator. She historicises Darwinism as “that early process in the history of civilisation, by which life is made a struggle, in which the individual has to put forth all his powers to compete with his fellow” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 61). Although different societies continue to exist “in remote regions” (81), they are scarcely recognised as belonging to the same species since “their wretched existence is passed in perpetual contest and perpetual change” (82). One of these communities’ central tenets is given the Orwellian name of “Soc-Sec” (81) (glossed as “money-getting,” [82]), an abbreviation of ‘social security’, which had been introduced in the USA as the Civil War Pension programme during the 1860s. The main factor transforming the life of the Vril-ya is Vril itself, which is so easily

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applicable as a super-weapon that conflict of necessity has died out. Thus, the trope at the heart of Darwinism of physical strength and struggle has itself become an anachronism, as if evolutionary time has come to a stop in an extended utopian present. Within the Vril-ya’s College of Sages, portraits from different periods give indications of how their physiognomy has been shaped over the ages and also of the evolutionary controversies in their past – the “Wrangling Period of History” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 70). Bulwer-Lytton repeats the Victorian debate over humanity’s relation to the apes by replacing the latter with the frog. Rival schools of thought debated whether the ‘An’ was descended from the frog, or vice versa. Bulwer-Lytton probably took his cue from Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which cites the frog as an example of species change, showing the “laws of organic development” (198). Here, we are told: The frog, for some time after its birth, is a fish with external gills, and other organs fitting it for an aquatic life, all of which are changed as it advances to maturity, and becomes a land animal. The mammifer only passes through still more stages, according to its higher place in the scale. Nor is man himself exempt from this law. (199)

On this episode in the novel, Michael R. Page has commented that “the novel is full of such philosophical moments that require the reader to rethink contemporary habits and conceits” (2012, 131). Indeed, it has been argued that the novel sets up an extended dialogue between social habit and theories of perfectibility (Judge 2009). The evolutionary themes of the novel play themselves out in one of the most dramatic episodes where the narrator is confronted by a primeval monster, a Krek (Kraken), which has emerged from a lake, “its jaws bristling with fangs and its dull eyes fixing themselves hungrily on the spot where I sat motionless” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 91). He is saved by a Vril-ya child destroying the monster with his wand. Years before Arthur Conan Doyle described similar encounters from across the evolutionary eras in The Lost World (1912), Bulwer-Lytton confronts the primeval with the futuristic, underlining the irony that the helpless narrator has to be saved by a child. Knowledge of evolutionary processes does not confer any security on the narrator. In Vestiges, Chambers was arguing for a common pattern of physical change across species and Bulwer-Lytton speculatively opens up similar hypothetical connections through multiple scientific allusions. The novel’s text is punctuated with quotations and citations from, among others, Michael Faraday, on the interaction between magnetism and light; Max Muller, on linguistic evolution; Louis Agassiz, on the relation between species; Charles Lyell, on the stratification of evolutionary history; and phrenologists, on the relation of physiognomy to mind. The narrator’s conservative materialism is constantly being challenged by the self-evident superiority of Vril-ya culture, which has synthesised much of Victorian scientific knowledge and moved beyond to a surprisingly modern perception of matter itself as a

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field of particles constantly in motion. In that sense, Vril has a symbolic central role to play in foregrounding the whole concept and applicability of force. The Vril-ya live in a millennial “serenity of mind” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 75) reflected in the rational organisation of their institutions. At one point the narrator questions his “host” about the strange absence of literature in Vril-ya culture, only to be told: “all that part of literature [. . .] which relates to speculative theories on society is become utterly extinct” (78). Thus, by implication, The Coming Race could not exist and the novel predicts its own obsolescence as well as that of the narrator’s race. The first U.S. edition of the novel carried the title The Coming Race, or the New Utopia, but its utopian dimension is problematic. There is a brief dismissive reference to Robert Owen’s New Lanark community and the narrator’s reservations about the Vril-ya reflect his own nationalism, yet the conflict-free life of the Vril-ya appears to be “deadening” in its monotony (Huckvale 2015, 218). Their society appears to embody the triumph of scientific rationalism at the expense of the passions. Its institutions are accordingly well-organised and yet the narrator is struck dumb with terror when he sees a chief magistrate, who might apply against him one of their stringent laws. The most striking feature of the Vril-ya society is thus its efficiency underpinned by scientific principles, a system which does not emerge as a triumph of democracy. Although Bulwer-Lytton supported the new suffrage laws, he retained a fear of democracy, declaring in the 1860s that England was a country “in which democracy would be a ruinous experiment” (qtd. in Snyder 1995, 201). Hence the throw-away irony in the narrator of The Coming Race recording: “my father once ran for Congress, but was signally defeated by his tailor” (BulwerLytton 2005, 5). When he explains the institutions of America to his Vril-ya hosts, they write them off as anachronistic signs of demotic divisiveness, classifying them collectively as “Koom-Posh” (46). The word is glossed as combining echoes of the Welsh cwm (“valley,” therefore “hollow”) and “bosh,” denoting “the government of the many” (46). From such evidence the novel has been interpreted as an anti-democratic satire (Wagner 1965). In effect, the kingdom of the Vril-ya is organised on imperial lines, with a strong, civilised centre ruling over their marginal tribes of so-called ‘barbarians’. Accordingly, the novel has been read as a displaced examination of “the problem of Anglo-Saxon globality” (Joseph 2015, 234). Throughout his life, Bulwer-Lytton had been a supporter of the cause of empire (↗ 7 Empire – Economy – Materiality). As early as 1838, he was declaring: “England is essentially a colonizing country – long may she be so! – to colonize is to civilize” (qtd. in Snyder 1995, 155). In 1858, he accepted Lord Derby’s invitation to serve as Colonial Secretary and during the following year he was closely involved in the politics of the Canadian provinces (Knox 1984). In a speech of 1861 delivered after the outbreak of the Civil War, Bulwer-Lytton expressed anxieties about the development of the “giant Republic,” arguing that any separations brought about by

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the war would reduce that nation to European proportions and thus remove a potential threat to that continent (Bulwer-Lytton 1861). In The Coming Race, the narrator proudly declares to the reader that he is American, but of British ancestry, and clearly identifies himself with the evolution of history from antiquated Europe, which “tremblingly foresees its doom,” to the New World (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 25). He blithely expatiates on the benefits of democracy and foresees the millenarian culmination of the Monroe Doctrine “when the flag of freedom should float over an entire continent” (25). With all the pride of Gulliver boasting to the Brobdingnagians, the narrator looks forward to an indefinite expansion of American rule around the globe. However, this hope is ironically premature, especially when he attempts in his imagination to appropriate the power of Vril and participate in the “rule over an empire in which the sun never sets” (124). Of course, here he is displacing a catch-phrase from the British Empire on to a newly strengthened American realm (Nayder 2004, 213). His power fantasies are constantly being undercut by his Vril-ya companions, who regard him as an unusually articulate barbarian. Only towards the end of the narrative does the narrator realise that there is no possibility of accommodation between the Vril-ya and his world. Long after their original displacement from the surface, the former are “destined to return to the upper world and supplant all the inferior races now existing therein” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 61). In short, the Vril-ya serve as a satirical mirror to the narrator’s imperial fantasies. The narrator of The Coming Race briefly plans to write a study of the Vril-ya, who have themselves reversed the roles of scientist and raw material by considering him as a fit specimen for dissection. Indeed, one of the main ironies of the whole novel lies in the different ways in which the narrator is disempowered. He is infantilised and hospitalised by the Vril-ya, constantly displaced from a position of Victorian manhood with all its attendant presumptions of superiority. He soon becomes designated a “Tish,” usually a feminine name, derived from ‘Letitia’ (BulwerLytton 2005, 70). Through such ironies, Bulwer-Lytton makes an intervention in the debate over women’s rights, which was taking place in the 1860s and 1870s. Virtually the only contemporary writer named in The Coming Race, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had co-written with her sister The American Woman’s Home (1869), where she spelt out the principle that the man should be the “controlling head,” to whom his wife owed a “duty of obedience” (Beecher and Beecher Stowe 1869, 203). Conservative in her account, Beecher Stowe nevertheless made an exception for the independent woman who was supporting herself. Her outline of domestic practice would have been more or less in line with the presumptions of Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator, who is struck by the lack of “softness and timidity of expression” in the Vril-ya women (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 18). Throughout the novel, the narrator’s main guide to Vril-ya society is Zee, exemplar and commentator. As a number of critics have noted, Victorian gender norms

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are inverted in the novel in that the women are taller and stronger than the men (Nayder 2004, 218–219). Despite these suggestions of physical superiority, after marriage the women forego their wings, suggestive of freedom and independence, to submit to domesticity. The ultimate taboo preventing the narrator from marrying a Vril-ya is a racial one, hence his ultimate return to the surface.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The Coming Race diverges from the tradition of describing the visitor’s initial journey to a utopia by having the narrator fall down a mineshaft into a subterranean world. He gradually realises that this world embodies the imminent future of his society and becomes increasingly uncomfortable as presumptions of gendered cultural superiority are brought into question. The few action scenes, including a confrontation with a monstrous animal, graphically demonstrate his physical dependence on the subterranean beings, who have harnessed a force called Vril, a developed form of electricity. Most of the narrative consists of an extended dialogue between the narrator and his companions about the technology and social organisation of this new world. His main guide is the young woman Zee, but his romance with her fails and at the close of the novel he returns to the surface alone. The Coming Race has been interpreted as a satire on Victorian social norms (Rodriguez-Salas 2005, Judge 2009) and in this context, the narrator’s female companion “stands as the active and pursuing agent in courtship rituals” (Graça da Silva 2012, 161). Such reversals occur in other fiction of the period which debates this subject: in Pantaletta (1882) by ‘Mrs. J. Wood’, where the satire focuses on crossdressing; in Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1890), where men have become extinct; in Alice Jones and Ella Marchant’s Unveiling a Parallel (1893); and in A. O. Grigsby’s Nequa (1900). With the exception of Unveiling a Parallel, where the utopia is located on Mars, these narratives are set within the Earth and the narrator of Mizora offers her account in the spirit of “giving encouragement to those progressive minds who have already added their mite of knowledge to the coming future of the race” (Lane 2000, 8). This sounds more benign than the practice of the Vril-ya, until we hear later in the novel that the dark race and criminals have been “eliminated” (92) to clear the way for the white race and maintain its purity. For his method, Bulwer-Lytton drew on Gulliver’s Travels, which he admired for its satire, declaring “the art of the book is so wonderful in rendering lifelike the creations of a fancy only second to Shakespeare’s in its power of ‘imagining new worlds,’ that, age after age, it will contribute to the adornment and improvement of the human race” (Bulwer-Lytton 1864, 118). The implication is, as we shall see, that the narrator of The Coming Race is used to set up a shifting dialogue between his

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own gullibility and the chillingly emotionless values of the race he discovers in a subterranean world. Max Muller, the novel’s dedicatee, opens his 1868 lecture On the Stratification of Language with the assertion that “there are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering” (1). Bulwer-Lytton drew explicitly on this lecture for The Coming Race, where the narrator on the opening page records how he became fascinated by the “gloomy wonders” (2005, 5) of a mine introduced to him by a friend. His account of an involuntary descent into a world within the earth’s interior grows out of his amateur activities as explorer and geologist. As his narrative proceeds, he punctuates his account with the term “wonder” (19, 58, 87, 144, 209) both in the sense of awe-inspiring spectacle and of amazement. However, there is a further dimension to the term as used by Muller, which bears on the novel as a whole. The Coming Race is a speculative work describing its narrator’s encounter with a possible future for humanity. The novel is based on a premise which Bulwer-Lytton explained to his publisher John Forster in 1870 as follows: “The only important point is to keep in view the Darwinian proposition that a coming race is destined to supplant our races, that such a race would be very gradually formed, and be indeed a new species developing itself out of our old one, that this process would be invisible to our eyes, and therefore in some region unknown to us” (qtd. in V. A. R. Lytton 1913, 465). Ironically, The Coming Race is rarely even mentioned in critical discussions of Darwinism in late nineteenth-century fiction. In chapter twelve of The Coming Race, Bulwer-Lytton suspends the narrative in order to explain the language of the Vril-ya. His guide at this point was the writings of Max Muller, who suggests the narrator’s temporary role as ethnographer. On the Stratification of Language is quoted twice to establish the evolutionary terms of reference here. Bulwer-Lytton follows Muller’s principle of qualitative improvement, the “natural progress from the imperfect towards the perfect” (Muller 1868, 5), to demonstrate the superiority of the Vril-ya in evolutionary ascent. In paraphrasing Muller, Bulwer-Lytton repeats the former’s analogy between geological strata and levels of linguistic evolution, and also makes explicit the metaphor in the term “root,” which suggests that language is a growing organism (2005, 44). He notes that “it is surprising to see how much more boldly the original roots of the language project from the surface that conceals them” (44). Although the Vril-ya exist in a notional near future, the whole thrust of the analysis in chapter twelve is to demonstrate their living continuity with ancient Indo-European languages, especially that of the Aryan family, which for Muller was given primacy over all others. The suffix in the name of this race is indeed taken from the Aryan radical ‘ya’, meaning ‘to go’, and sample declensions of nouns establish the broad pattern of Vril-ya grammar and the whole discussion can be read as an exercise in familiarisation. Their language resembles Latin and thus displays features common to other European languages, but, more importantly, it evokes a

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whole culture so that the reader perceives the race as similar but advanced in “simplicity and compass” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 49–50). Apart from suggesting continuity between the Vril-ya and the projected reader’s culture, Bulwer-Lytton plays with cross-language ambiguity to destabilise gender terms. We are told that ‘gy’ (perhaps suggested by the Classical Greek ‘gyne’), their term for ‘woman’, has a hard sound as in ‘guy’, which immediately suggests a male name and even the Americanism which was becoming popular from the mid-nineteenth century. Similarly, the plural of ‘an’, meaning ‘man’ (probably from the Greek ‘anir’) becomes ‘ana’, a Greek suffix suggesting recurrence and homophone of the female name Anna. There is irony in the fact that the narrator falls in love with a young woman called Zee, the American equivalent of ‘zed’. Bulwer-Lytton appears to have conceived the subject of The Coming Race in the form of a trilogy approaching racial evolution from different perspectives. His introduction to The Parisians (1872) draws an explicit continuity with the earlier novel, presenting Parisian life through the lens of “Koom-Posh,” the “ascendancy of the most ignorant and hollow,” and concludes with the declaration: “mayest thou, O Paris, be the last to brave the wands of the Coming Race and be reduced into cinders for the sake of the common good!” (Bulwer-Lytton, 1894, 1: vi–vii). National and gender characteristics form central parts of the novel’s dialogue. The narrator meets Mrs Morley, who is “delicately handsome, as the American women I have seen generally are, and with that frank vivacity of manner which distinguishes them from English women,” but her husband jokes that “in America the women are absolute tyrants” (Bulwer-Lytton, 1894, 1: 70). Indeed, a French character declares that “America is to extinguish Europe” (Bulwer-Lytton, 1894, 1: 223). The eponymous hero of Kenelm Chillingly (1873) is the heir to an ancient landed family burdened with an over-active intellect which leads him to question the whole issue of inheritance. By using the term ‘race’ throughout to signify both family line and species, Bulwer-Lytton universalizes the fate of the Chillinglys and casts Kenelm as wry commentator on their imminent destiny. As a convinced Darwinian, having drawn unflattering comparisons between humans and spiders, at one point he declares: “If human beings despise each other for being young and foolish, the sooner we are exterminated by that superior race which is to succeed us on earth the better it will be” (Bulwer-Lytton, 1896, 113). Kenelm sees himself as being the last of his race, both in family and in nation, being convinced that the English are in a state of physical decline, “becoming more slight and delicate” (Bulwer-Lytton, 1896, 133). At one point he even casts himself as a member of a “superior race” retrospectively analyzing extinct humans through the evidence of fossils of their teeth and thumbs.

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4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Although initially published anonymously, the authorship of The Coming Race soon became known and when Samuel Butler’s Erewhon appeared in 1872, also anonymously, some readers took it to be a sequel by the same author. Butler took steps to correct this misunderstanding in his preface to the second edition, where he insisted that he completed his own novel without seeing The Coming Race. Both Erewhon and The Coming Race were subsequently cited by George Bernard Shaw in his 1887 lecture on utopias (Shaw 1997, 65, 66) and it has been argued that The Coming Race helped shape Shaw’s treatment of Darwinian themes in Back to Methuselah (1921) (Knepper 1971). Within a year of publication, The Coming Race went through five printings both in Britain and the USA, and was listed by the Annual Register with George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking as books “which have made the widest impression on the public” (qtd. in Clarke 1979, 323). Chesney describes a German invasion through southern England, national defeat, and the dismantling of the British Empire. Just as Bulwer-Lytton closed his narrative by summarising it as “forewarnings” (2005, 144), so Chesney’s narrator looks back from a future vantage point some fifty years later to bemoan British indifference to the numerous warnings emerging from Europe that their imperial supremacy was under threat. He sums up the national complacency in ironic tones: “We thought that all this wealth and prosperity were sent us by Providence, and could not stop coming” (Chesney 1914, 19). The narrative method is one of futuristic reportage, which captures the immediacy of combat in the home counties. Indeed the account triggered an extended debate throughout the 1870s on national defence and empire (Clarke 1997). Coincidentally with Bulwer-Lytton’s activities on behalf of British Columbia, Chesney stressed the absurdity of Britain trying to retain possessions on the Pacific coast of America. Bulwer-Lytton foresaw the probable decline of the British Empire. Chesney’s narrator experienced its defeat first-hand. Even more satirically, one ‘Lang-Tung’ (probably a British pseudonym) in The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1881) not only describes British imperial collapse, but even reduces its history to that of a short text-book for use in Japanese schools. George Eliot (the pseudonym of the writer Mary Anne Evans) was a friend of Bulwer-Lytton’s and read The Coming Race as soon as it was published. Probably in tribute to the latter, she included “Shadows of the Coming Race” in her 1879 volume of dialogues, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, where humanity’s future is debated by an optimist named Trost and the more sceptical narrator, who exclaims at one point: “Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?” (Eliot 1879, 301). Trost predicts a benign symbiosis between humanity and

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machines, where the latter will heighten the human faculties; the narrator, at the same time, foresees the gradual enfeebling of the human race, prior to the ultimate change when “the process of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field” (307). The Coming Race became one of H. Rider Haggard’s favourite novels (Mazlish 1993, 738), no doubt because of its engagement with racial evolution, which Haggard made central to his novel She (1887). There is textual evidence also of H. G. Wells incorporating allusions to Bulwer-Lytton’s novel in The Time Machine (1895, ↗ 31 Wells, The Time Machine). In documenting these connections, Stephen Derry argues that Wells engages in a “parodic re-enactment of The Coming Race” not least in the radical diminution of Zee to the frail child-like Weena (1995, 21). The scene confronting Wells’s time traveller is famously presided over by the statue of a white winged sphinx, traditionally a “symbol of foreboding and prophecy” (Parrinder 1995, 42). Like other objects in the novel, the statue is time-worn and stands as an enigmatic icon of future disease. In The Coming Race, however, each member of the Vril-ya carries their own physiognomic signature: the “face of the sculptured sphinx – so regular in its calm, intellectual, mysterious beauty” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 12). The effect is of a flattening out of expression. The very sublimity of the facial image, its evident freedom from conflict and worry, induces fear in the narrator, who approaches these alien beings like an ethnographer, a strategy repeated in The Time Machine. Thanks largely to Bulwer-Lytton’s mysterious force Vril, The Coming Race featured prominently in two quite distinct subsequent contexts over the years – the occult tradition and the culture of empire. In 1891, not only did a sequel written by ‘XYZ’ appear under the title The Vril Staff: A Romance, but also that same year Dr Herbert Tibbitts, the founder of the West End Hospital in London and a pioneer of the medical applications of electricity, mounted a costume fund-raising ‘Coming Race Bazaar’ at the Albert Hall (Munro 2014). His pamphlet included a glossary of the Vril-Ya language and winged mannequins were designed to fly over the heads of the guests. However, these devices failed, as did the fund-raising, leaving Tibbitts bankrupt. In 1903, Arthur Lovell founded the Vril-ya Club in London as an organisation promoting the “practical cultivation of vril, a force which may be likened to mesmerism, hypnotic power, or personal magnetism” (1904, 1). The club firmly distinguished its activities from Christian Science, Theosophy, and Spiritualism, and conducted a number of scientific experiments into electro-magnetism. For their pains, the organisation was attacked for quackery in suggesting cures for cancer (Bashford 1911, 1228–1229). In a similar spirit, William Walker Atkinson (aka Yogi Ramacharaka) published his Vril, or Vital Magnetism in 1911, essentially a manual about how to develop Vril, which included postural advice. Much more successful were the efforts of a Scottish butcher, John Lawson Johnson, who in the wake of the Siege of Paris devised a beef extract, whose name Bovril incorporated Bulwer-Lytton’s coinage. Established in the 1880s, by 1890 the product had become promoted as the food of the nation and the Stanley Number of

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The Graphic of that year carried an image of the explorer drinking a mug of Bovril from a castle-shaped vessel (Hadley 1970, 29). During the South African wars, Bovril became firmly established as soldiers’ food. Baden-Powell recorded that it was part of his equipment in the Matabeleland Campaign of 1896 and an advertisement of 1900 depicted how Lord Roberts had led his army to march the word Bovril into the African landscape during the Boer War (Hadley 1970, 12–17). The First World War saw an even broader promotional campaign for Bovril, which was served to the wounded at the Battle of Mons and in the company’s production of publications like the 1916 Bovril Handy-Book and Diary of the War. At the same time as it entered imperial culture through Bovril, The Coming Race was also being appropriated in occult circles. E. Nelson Stewart’s 1927 book Bulwer Lytton as Occultist asserts that he was a formative figure in theosophy, but without substantiating the case. S. B. Liljegren later demonstrated in detail how Helena Blavatsky had been strongly influenced by Bulwer-Lytton’s work – specifically The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Zanoni (1842) – in forming her Theosophy movement. He claims that she saw the writer as “not only a prophet but a superior being who even in his life upon earth partook of some sort of existence in the invisible world” (Liljegren 1957, 13). Certainly, Blavatsky incorporated The Coming Race into her investigation of primal forces and racial evolution. In Isis Unveiled (1876–1877), she related Bulwer-Lytton’s term to the primal force in the universe, admitting: “Absurd and unscientific as may appear our comparison of a fictitious vril invented by the great novelist, and the primal force of the equally great experimentalist, with the kabalistic astral light, it is nevertheless the true definition of this force” (Blavatsky 1876, 126). In The Secret Doctrine (1888) she declares that “the name vril may be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works” (563). Blavatsky attempted to conflate Bulwer-Lytton’s novel with ancient spiritual writing, as did the American occultist William Walker Atkinson. In a similar spirit, the theosophist William Scott-Elliot drew on The Coming Race for his account of airships in The Story of Atlantis (1896), which are originally propelled by “personal vril” before it is developed into an “etheric” force similar to electricity (53). It is even central to the educational process: the object towards which the teachers’ efforts were mainly directed, was the development of the pupil’s psychic faculties and his instruction in the more hidden forces of nature. The occult properties of plants, metals, and precious stones, as well as the alchemical processes of transmutation, were included in this category. But as time went on it became more and more the personal power, which Bulwer-Lytton calls vril, and the operation of which he has fairly accurately described in his Coming Race, that the colleges for the higher training of the youth of Atlantis were specially occupied in developing. (46)

In both these instances, Vril has been abstracted from the novel and woven into a grand narrative of spiritual and material progress, a process which has been

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repeated in the retitling of the work by American occult and New Age publishers since the 1970s as Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. The line of influence through theosophy extended into the Berlin-based Luminous Lodge or Vril Society in the 1910s. The concept of Vril thus entered Nazi ideology through a tortuous process of assimilation (Strube 2013, 98–142). The émigré German rocket engineer Willy Ley later reported that an occult group, the ‘Society for Truth’, subsequently assimilated into the Nazis, had based itself on The Coming Race and that its members “devoted their spare time looking for Vril” (1947, 92). He continues: “They knew that the book was fiction, Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this ‘power’” (92). Ley’s assertion was brief but it has been repeated by many commentators, including Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in The Morning of the Magicians (1960). This connection features in Barbara Hambly’s The Magicians of Night (1992), which describes Germany of 1940 as having institutionalised the occult and the pursuit of Vril as the “mystical power inherited by the Aryan races” through “Atlantean Supermen” (48). The primary location of The Coming Race in a subterranean world was unusual for 1871, having one precedent in Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins of 1751, where a traveler enters a subterranean world near the South Pole and embarks on a romance with a flying woman. Bulwer-Lytton’s emphasis falls more on futuristic technology and indeed during the 1880s a whole new genre of Hollow Earth fiction began to emerge (listed in Ward 2008), primarily by American writers, who used the interior as a location for speculative alternative societies (Standish 2006, Ward 2008). In 1875, Ellis James Davies published Pyrna, an account of a utopia under a Swiss glacier. Here, equality between the sexes has been achieved and also a uniform bodily health through eugenics. As the visitor’s guide boasts, “we exterminate every form of life but that which is natural, healthy, and likely to grow up capable of taking its place in our community” (Davies 2009, 50). Lane’s Mizora (1890), noted above, describes how an exiled Russian aristocrat falls through a polar opening to discover an interior world peopled exclusively by eugenically enhanced women. Their culture includes applications of electricity, which is used to produce rain. William R. Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892) follows Bulwer-Lytton’s practice in describing a journey of exploration, once again triggered by access through a polar opening into a world populated by a lost race. Rather than utopian speculation, this inner world becomes the site for imperial conquest motivated by its phenomenal mineral wealth. Here the American traveler enacts the ultimate colonising fantasy in falling in love with the local queen, defeating her enemies with a giant “terrorite gun” (Bradshaw 1892, 229) and becomes the ruler of the country. In these and later Hollow Earth fiction, the interior world becomes a site for speculation on gender relations, military practice, and even metaphysical improvement. John Uri Lloyd’s Etidorhpa (1895 – ‘Aphrodite’ reversed) describes how a traveler falls through a cave in Kentucky, only to be guided by a sage through an increasingly

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surreal series of landscapes towards ultimate enlightenment. The Coming Race was an early formative work in this emerging genre. Most recent critical writing on The Coming Race has focused on its general conservatism and specifically on its hostile presentation of feminism (Judge 2009; Rodriguez-Salas 2005). It has also been read as expressing nostalgia for an England Bulwer-Lytton felt was on the verge of disappearing (Cowan 2016). Historical readings have included commentaries on the novel’s defence of empire (Nayder 2004) and its complex relation to Nazi culture (Strube 2013). Attempts to situate the novel within the history of Science Fiction have continued (Stone-Blackburn 1993; Sinnema 2008).

Bibliography Works Cited Atkinson, William Walker. Vril, or Vital Magnetism. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1911. Bashford, E. F. “Cancer, Credulity, and Quackery.” British Medical Journal 1.2630 (1911): 1221–1230. Beecher, Catharine E., and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman’s Home. New York: J. B. Ford, 1869. Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. Vol. 1. New York: J. W. Bouton, 1876. Blavatsky, H. P. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. Vol. 1. London: Theosophical Publishing, 1888. Bloom, Clive. Victoria’s Madmen: Revolution and Alienation. London: Springer, 2013. Bradshaw, William R. The Goddess of Atvatabar, or the History of the Discovery of the Interior World. New York: J. F. Douthitt, 1892. Brown, Andrew. “The ‘Supplementary Chapter’ to Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story.” Victorian Literature and Culture 26.1 (1998): 157–182. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. “American Topics Abroad; Sir Bulwer Lytton on the Overgrowth of the United States.” New York Times 12 Oct. 1861. Web. 5 April 2017. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners. New York: Harper, 1864. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. The Coming Race. 1871. Ed. David Seed. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2005. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. England and the English. 1833. London: Routledge, 1874. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Kenelm Chillingly, His Adventures and Opinions. 1873. Boston: Little Brown, 1896. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. “On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination.” Miscellaneous Prose Works. Vol. 3. London: Richard Bentley, 1868. 27–38. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. The Parisians. 2 vols. 1872. Boston: Little Brown, 1894. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. A Strange Story. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1862. Butler, Samuel. Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited. 1872; 1901. London: Everyman’s Library, 1975. Chambers, Robert. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. London: John Churchill, 1844. Chesney, George Tomkyns. The Battle of Dorking. Reminiscences of a Volunteer. 1871. London: Grant Richards, 1914. Clarke, I. F. “Before and After The Battle of Dorking.” Science Fiction Studies 24.1 (1997): 33–46. Clarke, I. F. The Pattern of Expectation, 1644–2001. London: Jonathan Cape, 1979.

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Cowan, David. “The First Dystopia. Science Fiction Begins with Bulwer-Lytton’s Attack on Egalitarianism.” The American Conservative 15.3 (2016): n. pag. Web. 16 July 2017. Davies, Ellis James. Pyrna: A Commune; or, Under the Ice. 1875. Late Victorian Utopias: A Prospectus. Vol. 1. Ed. Gregory Claeys. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. 1–64. Derry, Stephen. “The Time Traveller’s Utopian Books and His Reading of the Future.” Foundation 65 (1995): 16–24. Eliot, George. Impressions of Theophrastus Such. London: William Blackwood, 1879. Gooday, Graeme. Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914. London: Routledge, 2015. Graça da Silva, Sara. “The Law of Sexual Selection in Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871): Gendering Utopia.” (Dis)Entangling Darwin: Cross-Disciplinary Reflections on the Man and His Legacy. Ed. Sara Graça da Silva, Fatima Vieira, and Jorge Bastos da Silva. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. 150–170. Hadley, Peter. The History of Bovril Advertising. London: Bovril, 1970. Hambly, Barbara. The Magicians of Night. New York: Del Rey, 1992. Huckvale, David. A Dark and Stormy Oeuvre: Crime, Magic and Power in the Novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. Joseph, Terra Walston. “Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and an Anglo-Saxon Global ‘Greater Britain.’” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 37.3 (2015): 233–248. Judge, Jennifer. “The ‘Seamy Side’ of Human Perfectibility: Satire on Habit in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race.” Journal of Narrative Theory 39.2 (2009): 138–158. Knepper, B. J. “Shaw’s Debt to The Coming Race.” Journal of Modern Literature 1.3 (1971): 339–353. Knox, Bruce A. “Conservative Imperialism 1858–1874: Bulwer Lytton, Lord Carnarvon, and Canadian Confederation.” International History Review 6.3 (1984): 333–506. Lane, Mary E. Bradley. Mizora: A Prophecy. 1890. Ed. Jean Pfaelzer. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000. Lang-Tung. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. 1881. Oxford: Alden, 1905. Ley, Willy. “Pseudoscience in Naziland.” Astounding Science Fiction 39.3 (1947): 90–98. Liljegren, S. B. Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels and Isis Unveiled. Uppsala: Lundequistska, 1957. Lloyd, John Uri. Etidorhpa. Cincinnati: John Uri Lloyd, 1895. Lovell, Arthur, ed. Transactions of the Vril-ya Club No. 2. London: Simkin, Marshall & Co., 1904. Lytton, V. A. R. The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton. Vol. 2 London: Macmillan, 1913. Mazlish, Bruce. “A Triptych: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Rider Haggard’s She, and Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993): 726–745. Mitchell, Leslie. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters. London: Hambledon and London, 2003. Muller, Max. On the Stratification of Language. London: Longmans Green, 1868. Munro, Michael. “The Ill-Fated, SF-Themed ‘Coming Race Bazaar’ of 1891.” Observation Deck. 4 Feb. 2014. Web. 5 April 2017. Nayder, Lillian. “Bulwer Lytton and Imperial Gothic: Defending the Empire in The Coming Race.” The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections. Ed. Allan Conrad Christensen. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004. 212–221. Page, Michael R. The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology. London: Routledge, 2012. Parrinder, Patrick. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1995. Rodriguez-Salas, Gerardo. “E.G.E. Bulwer-Lytton’s Covert Anti-Feminism in The Coming Race.” FEMSPEC 6.2 (2005): 87–100.

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Scott-Elliot, William. The Story of Atlantis and The Lost Lemuria. 1896; 1904. London: Theosophical Publishing, n.d. Project Gutenberg. Web. 5 April 2017. Shaw, George Bernard. “Utopias.” Shaw and Science Fiction. Ed. Milton T. Wolf. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. 65–80. Sinnema, Peter. Introduction. The Coming Race. By Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Ed. Sinnema. Toronto: Broadview, 2008. 8–25. Snyder, Charles W. Liberty and Morality: A Political Biography of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Stafford, Fiona J. The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Standish, David. Hollow Earth. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2006. Stewart, E. Nelson. Bulwer Lytton as Occultist. London: Theosophical Publishing, 1927. Stone-Blackburn, Susan. “Consciousness, Evolution and Early Telepathic Tales.” Science Fiction Studies 20.2 (1993): 241–250. Strube, Julian. Vril: Eine okkulte Urkraft in Theosophie und esoterischem Neonazismus. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2013. Wagner, Geoffrey. “A Forgotten Satire: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19.4 (1965): 379–385. Ward, Cynthia. “Hollow Earth Fiction: Journeys to the Centre.” The Internet Review of Science Fiction (Sept. 2008): n. pag. Web. 5 April 2017.

Further Reading Alkon, Paul K. Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New York: Routledge, 2002. Claeys, Gregory, ed. Late Victorian Utopias. London: Routledge, 2008. Fitting, Peter, ed. Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2004. Seed, David. “The Land of the Future: British Accounts of the USA at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century.” European Journal of American Studies 11.2 (2016): n. pag. Web. 5 April 2017. Suvin, Darko. Victorian Science Fiction: Discourses of Power and Knowledge. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.

Ute Berns

22 George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–1872; 1874) Abstract: This chapter reads George Eliot’s novel as a classic text of nineteenth-century realism and one of the genre’s most complex manifestations. The first part traces how the novel’s preface introduces, on a metatextual level, the topic of time, of natural and human history and of history’s gendered representation. These issues are then pursued through more specific themes – the ‘Woman Question’, the Great Reform Act, contemporary science – in the fictional world’s multi-strand narration. The second part introduces the concept of realism, which also figures in Eliot’s prose. Points of discussion are the function of the prominent narrator figure and the web of complex metaphors used in constructing the fictional world, as well as strategies to elicit empathy for the characters and even a sense of community in the reader. The last part surveys the novel’s tellingly uneven fate in literary history from contemporary reviews to feminist or post/modernist debates and beyond. Keywords: Realism, historiography, role of science, Woman Question, Great Reform Act

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment After the publication of Middlemarch (1871–1872), contemporaries celebrated George Eliot as the unrivalled novelist of the age. For Eliot such praise, directed at a supreme literary achievement, also marked a social triumph. Her literary reputation had steamrolled the objections to the way she lived her life, considered scandalous by Victorian standards: the unmarried Eliot was a self-declared atheist and openly living with another woman’s husband. Born as Mary Anne Evans in Warwickshire in 1819 and the daughter of a respected land agent and his wife, Eliot grew up with two siblings. Her mother died early and with her father’s financial support Mary Anne Evans acquired an excellent education largely by herself. She abandoned her religious faith, took on translations, and contributed articles to the radical newspaper Coventry Herald. Aged thirty when her father died, she moved to London to find work as a reviewer, essayist, and translator and soon rose to the position of de facto-editor of the Westminster Review. In London, Marian Evans (as she then called herself) fell in love with George Henry Lewes, a married novelist and critic, who was legally unable to obtain a divorce. Her decision to openly live together with Lewes cut her off from her family. Though never without friends, the two were faced with a protracted struggle against https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-023

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being ostracised from polite society. They frequently found relief in long travels to the Continent (Hardy 2006, 35–67), which helps to explain why her writing was so strongly influenced by European literature and discourse (Rignall 2011). While Lewes’s reputation was already firmly established by his biography of Goethe (1855), Evans soon afterwards published her first and well-received novel Adam Bede (1859), under the pseudonym ‘George Eliot’. The revelation of her true identity did not diminish the favourable reception of her second novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860), and the couple’s growing prestige in literary and intellectual circles brought an increasing number of illustrious visitors to their household. These included the writers Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Coley and his wife Georgiana Burne-Jones, as well as the scientists T. S. Huxley, Charles Darwin, and the long-time friend Herbert Spencer. A circle of suffragette activists also came to visit, two of whom, Bessie Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, became Eliot’s close friends. After Lewes died in 1878, Eliot married her financial advisor John Cross, twenty years her junior. She died soon after the marriage in 1880. Denied burial in Westminster Abbey, reportedly on account that her “life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practice in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma” (Huxley 1900, 18), she was buried instead next to Lewes at Highgate Cemetery (Ashton 1996, Hardy 2006, Hughes 2015, Rignall 2011). Before she embarked on writing novels, Eliot had completed several important translations. In 1846, she published, anonymously, The Life of Jesus (D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, 1835–1836), a study that engages in radical historical criticism of the Bible. The treatise The Essence of Christianity (Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1841) followed in 1854 under her own name; this text traces the origin of religion back to human needs rather than to divine inspiration. Her third substantial translation, Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), from Latin, found its way into print only in the late twentieth century; it argues that moral concepts are founded in human psychology. Central philosophical ideas from these studies left their marks on her fiction. These include a secular perspective and a deep interest in ethics and human psychology as they impact on social life. Eliot’s later review-essays offer valuable insights into her aesthetic aims and standards. The reviews “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) and “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), for instance, could be said to sketch her poetic credo: the former rejects improbable plots featuring stereotypical upper-class characters, while the latter praises, as a model for artists, Wilhelm H. Riehl’s proto-sociological study of, especially, the lower social ranks in Germany. Her diaries and journals, moreover, offer glimpses into her private life and writer’s laboratory, and her extant letters (Eliot 1954–1978) reveal a wide and international network of correspondence. Eliot also wrote poetry, most of it after 1860, which was popular during her time (Tucker 2013). Critical appreciation has later been granted to the experimental plots of female development in her verse drama Armgart (1870) and the long poem

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The Spanish Gypsy (1868) as explorative comments on the more conventional endings of Middlemarch. Before the publication of Middlemarch (1871–1872; 1874), Eliot had written three further novels – Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Romola (1862–1863), and Felix Holt, The Radical (1866); she wrote one more afterwards, entitled Daniel Deronda (1876). With the exception of Romola, a historical narrative situated in fifteenth-century Florence and Daniel Deronda, where the action moves to the Continent, her novels have been acclaimed for their vivid and penetrating depiction of rural life and provincial towns in Britain. When Eliot first mentioned a novel project entitled ‘Middlemarch’ in January 1869 (1998, 134), the country had seen two decades of relative stability, increasing manufacturing power and new railway networks connecting the growing urban centres with smaller towns. A decade had passed, in the country’s intellectual life, since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), which, at least implicitly, re-situated the origins of human history (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel). Darwin’s The Descent of Man followed in 1871, having been anticipated by Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature in 1863. The ensuing debate about man’s place in the world fired Victorian society’s growing religious doubt (↗ 3 God on the Wane?). The more immediately political context for Eliot’s inception of Middlemarch was defined by the Second Reform Bill, passed two years earlier. The Representation of the People Act in 1867 took steam off the rising pressure – since the First or Great Reform Act in 1832 – for an enlarged franchise by doubling the number of the previous one million voters. The ‘Woman Question’, the second major topic next to the franchise, was beginning to take the shape of a movement intent on practical campaigns. The year 1869 saw not only the publication of John Stuart Mill’s influential treatise The Subjection of Women, but also preparations for establishing the first Women’s College in Cambridge (Girton College opened in 1873) and the first public women’s suffrage meeting with female speakers in London. Finally, in 1870, the Married Women’s Property Act installed women as legal owners of the money or property they earned or inherited (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). Eliot supported the contemporary endeavour for reform in principle, although she voiced her concern about the ruptures it might cause if it came too fast, claiming that “[w]hat has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws” (Eliot 1990, 127). She also endorsed improvements concerning women’s welfare, education, and general access to knowledge (Eliot 1990, 332–338), though her position on specific political issues, among them women’s franchise, has remained a matter of debate (Chase 2000, 443–448).

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Eliot’s Middlemarch was first published in eight separate volumes over the course of twelve months; the first one-volume edition followed in 1874. The main body of the novel is framed by two very short texts of thematic and metatextual import, entitled ‘Prelude’ and ‘Finale’. The Prelude opens with the question “[w]ho that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Teresa [. . .]?” (Eliot 2015, 3). Introducing “the history of man” as the principal topic, this opening sentence pictures the performance of “experiments” on a “mysterious mixture” in a trope that appears to allude to experimental science. Under the sway of the powerful agent Time, man himself is cast as a mystery to be investigated. In a deceptively conversational tone, the narrator thus broaches the topic of history and, in what follows, raises fundamental questions as to its nature and representation. More specifically, the Prelude opposes two different conceptions of history to each other. According to the first idea, here associated with St. Teresa of Avila, history consists of the heroic acts of outstanding individuals, to be narrated in epic form – “she found her epos in the reform of a religious order” (Eliot 2015, 3). (St. Teresa, a gifted young woman of the Spanish Renaissance, was inspired by a religious passion for a purer monastic life, became a famous religious reformer, and is remembered above all for her mystical writings.) The second idea of history is more speculative, focusing on gifted young women born after Teresa whose fervour may not have been matched by opportunity; who were not helped by a “coherent social faith” and an institution that could provide “the function of knowledge” (3). At least implicitly, the narrator invites the reader to think of these anonymous individuals as young women of their own century, in which social conventions and post-Enlightenment religious faith (or lack of it) were drifting apart, and in which women, no matter how talented and inspired, had no access to universities (rather than monasteries). Eliot thus juxtaposes the “constant unfolding of far-resonant action” and the thoughts, deeds and struggles since then which, “to common eyes,” appear as “indefiniteness,” as mere “inconsistency and formlessness” (3–4). This very “indefiniteness,” the narrator insists, may, however, take widely different forms and may still manifest the life of “a Saint Teresa, foundress of nothing, whose [ . . . ] sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances instead of centring in some longrecognizable deed” (4). The Prelude thus presents the ensuing novel, in a programmatic manner, as a literary experiment. Readers are to revise their idea of history as that of memorable individuals and to consider instead gifted women whose lives may not centre in any long-memorable deed. How do their histories unfold, and which forms can they take? What are their histories’ causes and motivations and what are their effects? And if great deed belongs to the “epos” (Eliot 2015, 3), then the author’s very choice of genre, the novel, seems significant. Reaffirming the genre’s

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experimental and democratic potential, the Prelude shifts attention from heroic individuals to common men and, in particular, women, and from the “constant unfolding of far-resonant action” to actions performed “with dim lights” in “entangled circumstances” (3). Moving away from the “centr[ed]” deed, the narrator sets out to trace its “trembl[ing]” and “dispers[al] among hindrances” (4). Reconstructing the Prelude’s argument is easier than gauging its precise tone. Does it convey that these “blundering” female lives lack historical significance and thus prepare the reader for novelistic illuminations of “tragic failure” only (Eliot 2015, 3)? Or does the author-narrator hope to reorient our reading and direct our attention to another kind of historical significance that is to be found elsewhere? In any case, the opening of the novel thematises the narration of history in the most fundamental way, asking, first, ‘whose history is to be narrated and what is to be the focus of this narration?’ And second, ‘how is this history related to the narrative’s genre and the protagonist’s gender and what kind of evaluation does it allow for?’ Posing these questions through the imaginative comparison between the early modern St. Teresa and her latter-day doubles, moreover, the narrator reminds her readers that these questions cannot be answered in the abstract, since historical deeds, historiography, and its generic choices always need to be historicised. The Renaissance example serves as a foil, which demonstrates that the late-nineteenthcentury narrator will have to look for different kinds of actions and will need to find a different form for narrating them. – In referring to the narrator as female, I obey the convention of assimilating the narrator’s gender to that of the author, even though, especially in her later work, Eliot’s narrator positions herself as androgynous (Fludernik 2013, 23). Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, is set in a fictitious small town in Northern England in the first half of the nineteenth century, right before the First Reform Act in 1832. The novel presents the inhabitants’ lives and relations by focusing on several households. Portraying the characters’ relationships and inner lives with depth and subtlety, the narrator simultaneously depicts the town’s social fabric and institutional practices in vivid and meticulous detail. Henry James recognised the rich social history the text offers when he commented that “[i]f we write novels so, how shall we write History?” (James 1972, 154). Yet, as we have seen, the experiment this novel undertakes in the writing of history is remarkable not only for its density of detail. In addition to its self-reflexive approach to genre and gender, it is a narration that references the history of nature (implicitly), the Renaissance (explicitly), and the eve of the Great or First Reform Act (the novel’s setting) as it invites readers, through these displacements, to reflect on the historicity of their own culture in the wake of the Second Reform Act (1867). The two main narrative strands of Middlemarch foreground the significance of idealist visions for the development of individuals and the community. This idealism characterises Dorothea Brooke, a passionately intellectual young woman of the gentry who marries an elderly clergyman in the hope of helping him to complete

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his scholarly opus magnum. Idealist ambition also drives the young medical doctor Tertius Lydgate, who plans to devote his life to scientific research and medical progress. The two protagonists’ hopes and aspirations do not materialise. Both characters, like those around them, gradually realise that they are linked to each other in emotional and ethical as well as social and financial “interdependenc[ies]” (Eliot 2015, 92), which not only enable but also rigorously foreclose their autonomy and agency. Dorothea’s intellectual passion is thwarted in a domestic context as she comes up against her husband’s rigid conceptions of womanhood and selfisolating assertions of mental superiority, while Lydgate, tied down financially by his wife’s life-style, manages neither to allay the harmful professional rivalry with his defensive colleagues nor to win the prejudiced townspeople’s trust in his advanced scientific treatments. Lydgate’s fate is terminated by his leaving town, Dorothea’s is alleviated by her early widowhood, which brings a set of new choices; she eventually becomes the wife and helpmate of Will Ladislaw, a reformist journalist, and, ultimately, member of parliament. Yet, even though the novel records the failure of these high-spirited endeavours, the text gradually shifts the attention to the ways in which these and other characters’ sympathy and impulse to help and support others selflessly exert an influence on other lives and benefit the town as a whole. Such gestures and their impact, emerging from diligently scrutinised social positions and complex psychological and ethical motivations, have to be gauged against the power of social hierarchies, intransigent customs, and complex intrigues, if not criminality, as well as the religious hypocrisy characterising Middlemarch life. First of all, the narrator depicts a gendered class structure, manifest in the landed gentry’s prestige or the banker’s financial power, but also in the total dependency of powerless tenants, like Dagley, who find themselves in abysmal living conditions on badly managed estates. Secondly, she portrays scientific and scholarly knowledge in the grip of intransigent habits and customs: Mr. Casaubon cultivates his high reputation as a scholar, obviously unfounded, while the brilliant young doctor eventually withdraws, and Mr. Farebrother’s expertly tended natural history collection remains unacknowledged. And finally, the narrator traces the ambivalent social force of different shades of religious faith in Dorothea’s and Mrs. Bulstrode’s life, its absence in the up-right clergyman Farebrother, and its corrupted form that shields banker Bulstrode’s greed. Against the background of these local social structures, the novel’s historical focus, i.e. the campaign for political reform, turns into a highly fraught project. Mr. Brooke’s campaign for the reform faction lacks understanding and consistency and it is the outsider Will Ladislaw who becomes the source of genuine reformist insight. And the Woman Question, though ubiquitous in that it fundamentally determines the gifted female characters’ options, remains implicit. It has not yet taken any public shape in Middlemarch’s political life of the early 1830s.

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The textual strategies Eliot deploys in her “study of provincial life” are frequently referred to as ‘realist’, and Eliot has, indeed, been credited with first using the term ‘realism’ in English (C. Levine 2013, 63). ‘Realism’, however, is a slippery term, the full ramifications of which are beyond the scope of this article. The concept denotes, first, a philosophical perspective, but may also refer, second and more specifically, to a set of artistic or specifically literary principles (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology). As a philosophical position, it affirms the existence of objects and properties in the outside world and their relative independence from anyone’s conception, beliefs or linguistic concepts relating to them; this often goes together with assertions of empiricism, a theory of evolution, and a recognition of the facticity of the social (A. Miller 2014). As a set of nineteenth-century textual strategies, realism tends to be associated with an omniscient narrator function, the representation of everyday life in its material, social, and psychological detail, and with the rejection of highly improbable or supernatural elements (for literary realism’s history, see Morris 2003). Eliot’s secular scientific convictions could be said to testify to the philosophical side of her realism, which is complemented by her praise for Riehl’s large-scale sociological study. And in her role as critic discussing the art critic John Ruskin, she fully endorses what she calls “realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality” (Eliot 1990, 368). In her essay on Riehl, she more specifically argues for the need, in the arts, to shake off idyllic, sentimental, and formulaic representation, especially but not only, of workers and peasants, and insists on the necessity of “direct observation” (1990, 108). This approach, she claims, is crucial for circulating a fuller and more accurate knowledge in society, which forms the basis of an empathic attitude and the sine qua non for the “political reformers” (112). In the same text, she also claims that “[t]he greatest benefit we owe to the artist [ . . . ] is the extension of our sympathies,” not least because this works “towards linking the higher classes with the lower” (110). Hence, in her conception, strategies of literary realism are inseparable from the social project of circulating knowledge and eliciting sympathy, which, for Eliot, is tantamount to working “towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness” (110) and affirming the communality of the social. The narrator function in Middlemarch has become a landmark of Eliot’s version of realism and the focus of much critical debate. Presenting a multi-plot narrative, the Middlemarch narrator creates a rich array of highly individualised characters, who are shown to be moulded by the social structures they are placed in and by the influence they exert on each other. The characters themselves may, of course, be entirely unaware of this influencing power, at least initially. For instance, the narrator comments on Tertius Lydgate’s perfect indifference towards Dorothea Brooke on

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their first encounter: “[d]estiny stands by sarcastic, with our dramatis personae folded in her hand” (Eliot 2015, 92). Connecting her narrative threads, the narrator constantly moves back and forth between the external world and the mind and feelings of her characters, whose inner lives and motivations are presented both in interior monologues and free indirect speech. “[C]haracter too is a process” (146), the narrator argues, and as she unfolds their socially situated processuality, the novel’s central characters, ultimately, seem to demonstrate the narrator’s conclusion in the Finale: “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it” (786). Eliot’s narrator is conspicuously present or overt as she negotiates the reader’s encounter with the fictional world. Addressing an unnamed “you” as narratee or, less frequently, referring to “the reader,” she offers philosophical reflections or ethical judgements, usually “in reference to very specific circumstances in the fictional world” (Fludernik 2013, 33). Rather than pontificating, however, the narrator takes care to establish common ground with the narratee, for instance by switching to an inclusive “we” or suggesting a shared background of experience – “[Lydgate’s] faults will not, I hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of your interest in him. Among our valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little too self-confident [ . . . ]?” (Eliot 2015, 146, emphasis added). Monika Fludernik’s survey of Eliot’s narrative choices (focusing, though, on Adam Bede), also highlights her narrators’ gnomic utterances as a means of establishing accord with her narratee (Fludernik 2013, 24). In a similar vein, the critic draws attention to the construction of the first sentence of the novel’s first chapter. Beginning “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress” (Eliot 2015, 7), the narrator immediately forges a common imaginative horizon with her narratee in figuring a shared deictic “that” (“that kind of beauty”) (Fludernik 2013, 23). Thus engaging and tentatively positioning her narratee, the narrator continuously shapes the reader’s attitude. Although the narrator invites empathy and communality with the Middlemarch characters as she asks the narratee, and, by extension, the reader, to consensually share her perspective on them, her rendering of the fictional world is frequently modified by varying degrees of irony and other distancing strategies. They indicate a qualified detachment on the narrator’s part, which creates distancing effects readers have to come to terms with as they try to establish the precise nature and extent of the sympathy that is, in fact, suggested as appropriate. Irony may also modify the narrator’s more general ethical and philosophical reflections. And irony almost invariably characterises her depiction of the collectivised mind-set of Middlemarchers, be they the potential suitors contemplating a “marriageable girl” with a “theoretic” mind (Eliot 2015, 89), or those prejudiced against the new Fever Hospital (442–458); her voice even acquires a satirical tone when portraying “the temptation[s that] befell the Christian carnivora” marching in Featherstone’s funeral (322).

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The narrator frequently deploys metaphors and similes from everyday life, from the natural world, and from science. The semantic cluster most commented on encompasses the tropes ‘web’/‘spinning’, ‘fabric’/‘weaving’ or ‘tissue’, used to illuminate the intricate and multifarious interrelations making up the Middlemarch universe. This rhetoric is supplemented by tropes of ‘rivers’, ‘streams’, and ‘water’ ‘flowing’/‘streaming’, that emphasise the dynamism of this world on different levels, especially on that of affect and emotion (J. H. Miller 1992, 67–71). Furthermore, the narrator knowledgeably draws on images of botanical and animal life to portray individual characters and social life, thus also gesturing towards natural history as an underlying point of reference for her imaginative novelistic history. In addition, numerous scientific tropes favour the fields of chemistry, medicine, and physics, especially optics. Optical tropes are particularly prominent in the narrator’s comments on her own narrative practice, even though she does not enlist science in an argument for straightforward observational positivism. On the contrary, the narrator’s reflection on the use of such instruments as the “telescope” or “microscope” conveys the understanding that her “study of provincial life” depends on the skilled deployment of the right lenses for different purposes (Eliot 2015, 57). Investigating Mrs. Cadwallader’s “matchmaking,” for instance, demands “a strong lens” which will “show a play of minute causes” (57). And the famous metaphor of the “pier-glass,” “multitudinously scratched in all directions,” yet apparently patterned around the light of the candle that is brought to it, serves to underline the irreducible perspectivism affecting all the characters’ views of their environment (256). Arguably, this pier-glass parable even implicates the narrator herself, who, elsewhere, talks about concentrating “all the light [she] can command” in her attempt to portray Middlemarch life (138). On this metatextual level, the pier-glass metaphor elaborates the narrator’s task; the web and fabric of the imagined Middlemarch life cannot be adequately narrated and focalised through one character only. This is dramatised in the opening of chapter twenty-nine: “One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea – but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?” (270). The narrator overtly performs a rupture in the flow of narration in order to alert the reader to an implicit genre expectation. Conventional reading-habits take the young heroine’s perspective for granted, rather than inquire into “this marriage” from the bookish elderly clergyman’s point of the view, who begins to surmise that he may never actually finish his life-defining opus, which, to make things worse, his intellectually demanding young wife does not seem to take an altogether favourable view of. As narratives are thus shown to easily obliterate alternative perspectives or counternarratives, the historian-narrator underlines the need for balance, transposing the scientific strength of the pier-glass metaphor into an ethical and, arguably, ‘democratic’ imperative for the historian-narrator. Obviously, Eliot’s realism does not invite naïve readers into any facile illusion that they are looking at the world through a transparent window glass (if I may

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thus expand on her optical metaphors). Instead, the narrator foregrounds the issue of the ‘how’ of narration and thus renders pertinent the fundamental questions relating to the representation of history; questions also raised in the metatextual frame of Prelude and Finale for the realist micro-level depiction of the Middlemarch world. In all this, the narrator’s metatextual awareness extends to the act of reading, too. Discussing how the characters (mis-)read each other, she reflects almost in passing, “[s]igns are small, measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable” (Eliot 2015, 24). This evocation of potentially limitless interpretations of signs automatically affects the sense of scientific exactitude in the communication between narrator and reader that may be too easily inferred from the text’s insistent deployment of scientific metaphors. History on a larger scale figures explicitly, too – albeit in tropes of an intriguingly indeterminate manner. As if to build on the Prelude’s metaphor of Time as experimenter, the narrator comments on the uncertain possibilities inherent in situations and characters: “We know what a masquerade all development is and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos” (Eliot 2015, 80). The term “embryo” suggests the physiological teleology of the unfolding of a preordained form, while conceding that the ultimate shape may not be obvious at an early historical stage; the trope could thus be taken as a prime example of Eliot’s complex ‘organicism’. The sentence following immediately, however, conveys Will’s full awareness of “pitiable instances of long incubation producing no chick” and undercuts organic certainties at the level of biology itself (80). And in Dorothea’s memorable encounter with history during her trip to Rome, an emphatically human history does not grant any certainties, either. On the contrary, the protagonist’s awareness of the historical layers surrounding her in this ancient city, towering and barely comprehensible, produce her impulse to escape – “away from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes” (188). The power of history as constructive agent endangers her sense of self; her familiar dress appears to her as an enigmatic costume in a life that she suddenly perceives as a self-alienating performance within the masquerade of history. Thus revisiting her opening reflexions on history in its natural, human, and gendered forms, the narrator, not least, reflects on her own position in (literary) history when, comparing herself to the writer and “great historian” Henry Fielding, she returns to the issue of genre (Eliot 2015, 138). The genre in question is no longer the epic; nor does she concern herself with the different generic conventions of the novel of development, the psychological or social novel, the prototypical detective novel, or even manifestations of melodrama or the Gothic, all of which may be traced in Middlemarch. Instead, she returns to a more archetypal generic feature already broached in the Prelude. Six weeks into Dorothea Brooke’s marriage and shortly after her return from her honeymoon in Rome, the narrator observes that she succumbs to “fits of weeping” and considers this as “not unusual” (189). Stating “we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual,” she

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goes on: “[t]hat element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind” (189). She briefly ponders to broaden or ‘democratise’ the traditional generic meaning of ‘tragic’. Instead of being moved only by exceptional calamities befalling people of the highest rank, ought we not be moved just as much by the sheer frequency of deep unhappiness among more ordinary people? And yet she hesitates – “[ . . . ] perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (189). This is the moment in the novel where the always eloquent, often humorous, and selfreflexive narrator gestures, with considerable gravitas, towards history not in the sense of generically pre-formed templates of writing but as that form of material otherness, the “roar [. . .] on the other side of silence,” against which all her metanarrative reflexions take shape (189). Not so much the established genres of historiography or literature, but the trope of this undifferentiated, deafening (if not deadly) soundscape of all living things together offers a glimpse of the challenge the narrator sets herself as she attempts to create for her characters an intelligible narrative in a bearable, i.e. non-tragic, novelistic form.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives The critical evaluation of Middlemarch across the centuries has been less straightforward than might have been expected during Eliot’s lifetime, when praise for the novel – “Middlemarch bids [ . . . ] to be one of the great books of the world” (Hutton 1971, 302) – was rapturous, though not entirely unqualified. First, the serial publishing engendered a specific reading practice, and the contemporary critic R. H. Hutton held that “those will understand [Middlemarch] best and value it most who have made acquaintance slowly during the past year with all its characters, and discussed them eagerly with their friends, in all the various stages of their growth and fortune” (1971, 306). Second, and in view of the novel’s canonical status today, it is important to emphasise that contemporary readers and critics were conscious of seeing something new. Edith Simcox, for instance, was overwhelmed by the novel’s depiction of psychological interiority: “Middlemarch marks an epoch in the history of fiction in so far as its incidents are taken from the inner life [ . . . ], the direct influence of mind on mind and character on character” (1971, 323; see also Dicey 1971, 343–344). Other critics, in contrast, highlighted the novel’s world knowledge – the “scientific and especially physiological knowledge in it” and admired that it was “so full of her time, [ . . . ] saturated with modern ideas” (Colvin 1971, 331). More specifically, these early critics took note of the author’s historical perspective (“she has walked between two epochs”) (Colvin 1971, 332), they discussed the

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novel’s attitude to the Woman Question (Hutton 1971, 307) and its celebration of selflessness (Simcox 1971, 326), and they deplored the dark view of religion with a “sort of shock” (Hutton 1971, 313). Emerging from these perceptive reviews was a pervasive awareness that Eliot’s realism in Middlemarch has a melancholic strand, considering the unhappiness of so many deserving characters (Hutton 1971, 287, 299–300; Simcox 1971, 325) and the novel’s ending that left many readers discontented (Dicey 1971, 345). Summarising Eliot’s approach to the world as ‘scientific’ and ‘disillusioned’ yet infused with an ethical and philosophical perspective, Sidney Colvin asks, “[i]s it, then [ . . . ] that such a literature must be like life itself, to leave us sad and hungry?” (1971, 338). Regarding its narrative and textual strategies, most critics appreciated the novel’s multi-plot narration, which, they argued, crucially contributes to its rich social panorama and diversity. This notwithstanding, Henry James’s verdict on the novel’s form in his 1873 review – “Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole” (1971, 353) – remained influential for quite some time. All of the early critics also commented on Eliot’s (or rather the narrator’s) double character. They juxtaposed the narrator-artist who composes her novel and its characters “as a series of pictures” (Dicey 1971, 346) or “like a picture – vast, swarming, deepcoloured, crowded with episodes” (James 1971, 354) with the narrator-critic whose “mind is pre-eminently contemplative and analytic” (353) and whose “presence of thought, of generalizing instinct, of brain” (359) leads her to step back, inspect and comment on her creations. Three positions will recur, with variations, throughout the later critical reception. Edward Dowden closely aligns the reader’s position with the narrator-persona’s capacity and power, marvelling at her intellect and sympathy. The reader, he suggests, admires “the presence of a soul” with experience and a history of her own, even though “the moral soul of any complete work of hers [Eliot’s]” cannot be separated from the “artistic medium” (Dowden 1971, 322). While Dowden thus celebrates the narrator’s prominence and control, his contemporary, A. V. Dicey, criticises the way her authority is consistently foregrounded: “if it gives her novel a peculiar charm, [it] also greatly damages its whole effect” (1971, 349). He elaborates that though Eliot “intends to make [the Middlemarchers] prominent by their own acts and speeches” (349), she tends “to make even the most lively and original characters in the book the representatives of [. . .] her own thoughts” and thus becomes a “moralizer over her own handiwork” (350). Finally, R. H. Hutton goes so far as to actually level the positions of characters, narrator, and reader when he claims that Eliot’s “characters are so real that they have a life and body of their own quite distinct from her criticism on them” (1971, 303). Therefore, he argues, the reader sometimes finds himself “taking part with her characters against the author” (303). Far from taking the narrator’s authority for granted, this reader feels invited to discursively engage with her over the issues the novel presents.

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After Eliot’s death, John Cross’s moralising biography (1885) contributed to her loss of reputation. She was increasingly considered overly didactic and insufficiently artful, and in this context Leslie Stephen’s preference for her earlier writings over her later work found many followers (1971, 464–484). James Adams suspects, moreover, that these negative judgements often served as a pretext for relegating an author seen to recalibrate the balance of entertainment and intellectual challenge (2013, 220). The modernists, though advertising a highly demanding poetic agenda themselves, did not turn the tide. On the contrary, they used the Victorian novel as the negative foil against which they set out their own artistic creed, especially where this emphasised the subjective point of view as opposed to the omniscient narrator or the representation of psychological realities rather than panoramic depictions of the social world. In an 1885 essay on Eliot, Henry James struck a final blow when he claimed that her characters emerged from the author’s brain rather than observation and that she constructed “a moralized fable” (1971, 497). In this context, Virginia Woolf’s very different estimation appears all the more remarkable. She saw Eliot’s power “at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” (Woolf 1965, 187). Her comment, though a point of reference for later feminist appraisals, was not picked up at the time. The revaluation of Eliot’s achievement had to wait until F. R. Leavis included her in his study The Great Tradition (1948) that placed her with Austen, Conrad, and Lawrence and stressed the “mature genius” (Leavis 2008, 76) of Middlemarch. Like Dowden’s early review, Leavis argues from a humanist perspective. He is enthralled by the novel’s narrator, “a spirit profoundly noble,” who exerts her benevolent influence on the reader. (80). The formalist orientation in literary studies soon offered a very different perspective. Barbara Hardy considered George Eliot’s composition “as complex and as subtle as [those] of Henry James or Proust or Joyce” (1959, 5), and her analyses, followed by W. J. Harvey’s (1961), drew attention to the carefully patterned structures of contrast and correspondence in the narrative form and imagery. The latter had also been discussed by Mark Schorer, who focussed on the “conceptual portent” and function of the metaphors in Eliot’s novels, which he saw bound up with “the thinking that underlies the dramatic structure” (1965, 271). Refuting James’s verdict of the text’s formlessness, these and similar studies established Middlemarch as an undisputedly worthy object of formal analysis. George Eliot’s realism became a key site of critical controversy and clashing theoretical perspectives. Colin MacCabe resorted to Middlemarch to elaborate his concept of the classic realist text as a “hierarchy of discourses” between the characters’ direct speech and the omniscient narrator’s “meta-language,” authoritatively ‘clarifying’ the characters’ words (hence he praised James Joyce for subversively omitting all quotation marks that set off direct speech) (1978, 13–16). While this position is reminiscent of A. V. Dicey’s earlier argument that Eliot’s narrator overpowers, as it were, the autonomy of her characters, MacCabe also and crucially claimed

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that this narrator makes us believe that she can treat us “to the simple unravelling of the real,” which “can be displayed through a perfectly transparent language” (1978, 18–19; but see also Lodge 1992). George Levine, however, emphasises the very continuity between the modernist endeavour and nineteenth-century realist authors. The Victorian authors, he argues, “do not acquiesce in the conventions of order they inherit but struggle to reconstruct a world out of a world deconstructing, like modernist texts, all around them,” and he highlights that “with remarkable frequency, they are alert to the arbitrariness of the reconstructed order toward which they point” (G. Levine 1981, 4). K. M. Newton (2011) and J. Hillis Miller (2012, 36–69) reappraise this deconstructive dynamic in a poststructuralist context. Furthermore, critics ask, for example, to what extent the realism displayed in Middlemarch affirms or undermines totalising representations, and how conservatism or change are related to realist depictions of the fictional world (Warhol 2013; G. Levine 2001; C. Levine 2013). Drawing on Martha Nussbaum, Rohan Maitzen even locates the novel’s ethics in its “literary form and prose style” (2006, 190). In a move reminiscent of the early critic Hutton, Maitzen argues that by presenting herself in full view rather than remaining covert and opaque, the narrator takes on public responsibility for her statements that can then be challenged in a democratic discursive manner. The Marxist critic Raymond Williams has recognised that Eliot “extended the real social range of the novel” (1970, 82). He sees a “new and emphatic consciousness of historical process” manifested in her depictions of limitations and frustrations (88), a truly “modern consciousness” (88) that sensed “the first phase of a post-liberal world” (90) and singled out Will Ladislaw as “a thread to the future” (93). Terry Eagleton, in contrast, holds that Eliot’s fiction attempts “to integrate liberal ideology [ . . . ] with certain pre-industrial, idealist or positivist organic models” (1992, 42). The “mystification” of the realist mode, which “cast[s] objective social relations into interpersonal terms,” supported that ideology in Middlemarch where, Eagleton argues, this resulted in a shift “from the ‘historical’ to the ‘ethical’” (39). More recently, Henry Staten has restored the historical dimension of radical reform to the novel by reconstructing its manufacturing context and exploring the country labourers’ position. He relates the narrator’s comment on “rustics [ . . . ] in possession of undeniable truth” (Eliot 2015, 542) to the political reformer Ladislaw, who claims that “[t]he only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class” (450; see Staten 2000, 996). Even though Virginia Woolf’s reappraisal of Eliot was not followed up at the time, Elaine Showalter established that “women writers joined Eliot in a secret sisterhood” (1996, 143), drawing on letters from Katherine Mansfield, Simone de Beauvoir, and others. Early second-wave feminists, however, did not unanimously take to Middlemarch; as Zelda Austen summarised, “feminist critics [were] angry with George Eliot because she did not permit Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch to do what George Eliot did in real life,” i.e. lead a socially transgressive life that is

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independent, intellectual, and productive (1996, 115). Rejecting the narrow concept of feminism this implied, Austen herself locates Eliot’s feminism in her realist depiction of the “nineteenth-century limitations on women” (1996, 552) that is underlined by the narrator’s comment on Dorothea in the Finale – “But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done” (Eliot 2015, 786). Ten years later, Gillian Beer offered a historicised in-depth study of Eliot’s feminist concerns. She reads the novel as an imaginative laboratory investigating “the idea of what is ‘natural’ in function and in attitude for women” (1992, 171), while Mark Allison has shown that Eliot’s conception of women’s emancipation was, in fact, also indebted to early concepts of utopian socialism (Beer 1992, 165–172; Allison 2011). Recently, June S. Szirotny has combined historical and biographical perspectives in her discussion of Middlemarch as a novel where “rebellion [is] doing good” (2015, 170). Pioneered by Gillian Beer’s seminal study Darwin’s Plots (1983), critics’ interest in the scientific discourses and practices in Middlemarch has established a further vibrant field of research. Beer sensitised readers to patterns of emplotment the novel shares with contemporary evolutionary theory and drew attention to the range of concepts and metaphors (such as repetition, variation, domestication, energy, relationship, analogy, experiment etc.) that added strong scientific connotations to Middlemarch, thus stressing its experimental dimension. Sally Shuttleworth thoroughly analysed the shaping impact of contemporary organic theory on the novel’s topics and form (1984, 142–174). And other critics have situated Eliot’s work in the wider context of Victorian psychology and cognitive science (Davis 2006; Dames 2007), emphasising the material and critical inflection of the concepts of ‘sympathy’ and ‘morality’ in Middlemarch (Staten 2014, esp. 76–111). Diverse topics, such as medievalism (Johnston 2006), music (Da Sousa Correa 2003) or art history (Witemeyer 1979; Rischin 1996) in Eliot’s texts have also attracted critics’ attention. And more recently, scholars have approached Middlemarch at the intersection of material culture (Arnold 2011, Flint 2006), book history (Beer 2006) and the new economic criticism (Frost 2012, Kornbluh 2010). They have investigated how the novel’s function as a commodity on the book market and as an object of contemporary advertising strategies shaped readers’ responses to the text’s material and fictional configuration of aesthetic and economic strategies.

Bibliography Works Cited Adams, James Eli. “The Reception of George Eliot.” Anderson and Shaw 2013, 219–232. Anderson, Amanda, and Harry E. Shaw, eds. A Companion to George Eliot. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2013.

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Szirotny, June Skye. George Eliot’s Feminism: “The Right to Rebellion. ” Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Tucker, Herbert F. “Poetry: The Unappreciated Eliot.” Anderson and Shaw 2013, 178–191. Warhol, Robyn. “‘It Is of Little Use for Me to Tell You’: George Eliot’s Narrative Refusals.” Anderson and Shaw 2013, 46–61. Witemeyer, Hugh. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Williams, Raymond. The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence. London: Chatto & Windus, 1970. Woolf, Virginia. “George Eliot.” Haight 1965, 183–189.

Further Reading Billington, Josie. Eliot’s Middlemarch. New York: Continuum, 2008. Reader’s Guide. Gardner, Catherine Villanueva. Rediscovering Women Philosophers: Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2019. Graver, Suzanne. George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Harris, Margaret, ed. George Eliot in Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. MacKillop, Ian, and Alison Platt. “‘Beholding in a Magic Panorama’: Television and the Illustration of Middelmarch.” The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen. Ed. Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Ding, Chinney. “‘Myriad-Headed, Myriad-Handed’: Labour in Middlemarch”. SEL 52.4 (2012): 917–936. Orr, Marilyn. George Eliot’s Religious Imagination: A Theopoetical Evolution. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2018. Tambling, Jeremy. “Middlemarch, Realism and the Birth of the Clinic.” ELH 57.4 (1990): 939–960.

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23 George Meredith, The Egoist (1879) Abstract: This chapter considers George Meredith’s The Egoist as representative of his broader oeuvre, especially through its genre- and period-defying qualities: at once brilliant and confounding, the novel invokes realist and Romantic tropes along with probing self-reflexivity and comedy to challenge egoism and sexism. After tracing the novel’s major plot points, the chapter explores its situation within Meredith’s corpus, addressing his treatment of satire in The Egoist in light of the novel’s Prelude and the author’s well-known “Essay on Comedy.” Surveying the vacillating critical and popular reception of the novel, the chapter acknowledges the difficulty of Meredith’s often baroque prose style, while arguing that he leverages that difficulty to create productive distance between characters and readers. Ultimately, the novel is about flawed individuals performing the difficult task of growing into greater awareness of themselves and others. Keywords: Realism, Romanticism, egoism, Victorian, comedy, satire

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment In Oscar Wilde’s celebrated 1889 essay in dialogue, “The Decay of Lying,” the main speaker insists that the foundation of art is the beautiful lie. Railing against literary realism, Vivian critiques authors who turn to life for their subject matter, eschewing the creative act altogether. Cyril, his interlocutor, counters that surely George Meredith is a realist, and yet his literature is nevertheless valuable. Vivian responds: But whatever [Meredith] is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and after all, even if the man’s fine spirit did not revolt against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. (Wilde 1889, 40)

In Vivian’s view, this counts as praise: steeped in realism and writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, Meredith was nevertheless able to engage the elements of Romanticism that Vivian views most valuable, embracing an idiosyncratic style and the generative impulse of the lie. Wilde’s analysis was a relatively novel one at the fin de siècle. By this point, Meredith (1828–1909) had achieved a level of literary renown that qualified him as a leading man of letters, even if the public opinion was still divided on his prickly prose and verse. To defend him as a realist was retrogressive enough; to defend him as a Romanticist was nearly perverse. But the description also re-enacts a kind https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-024

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of paradoxical push and pull that is at the heart of Meredith’s writing: spanning realism and Romanticism, the high Victorian and the proto-modernist, the comic and the tragic, prose and verse, his work can be as confounding and alienating as it is illuminating and engrossing. Meredith’s 1879 novel, The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative, is often considered his most representative prose work, drawing on these tensions to satirise the smug confidence of a consummate English gentleman. Meredith’s background primed him for just this kind of detached critique of aristocratic foibles and romantic misadventures. Despite being the son and grandson of tailors who was educated primarily on the Continent, he established himself among a circle of influential authors and ultimately contributed to most of the major literary moments of the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1849, he wed Mary Ellen Nicolls, the beautiful and intelligent widowed daughter of novelist Thomas Love Peacock. In 1858, she left Meredith for the painter Henry Wallis, only two years after Meredith had posed for Wallis’s landmark depiction of the death of Chatterton. When Nicolls died in 1861, after the end of her relationship with Wallis, she was still estranged from Meredith and their son (Harris 2004). So dramatic was the split that it informs much of Meredith’s work, most prominently his 1862 sonnet sequence, Modern Love, which details in surprisingly frank terms the dissolution of a marriage following the wife’s infidelity. The marriage was important for another reason: it solidified Meredith’s connection with Peacock, which proved equally influential for his writing. Their starkly different temperaments ensured a shaky relationship – Meredith was famously an active, outdoorsy type, whereas Peacock preferred a cloistered existence – that was not helped when financial woes forced Meredith and his wife to live with her father. Despite their personal differences, Peacock became an important literary forbear (and a likely inspiration for The Egoist’s Dr Middleton). Like his son-in-law, Peacock was in his own time a well-respected author whose commercial success never matched his formal innovations; while his fiction drew heavily on Romantic and Gothic tropes, Peacock’s idiosyncratic novels brim with epigrammatic dialogue structured explicitly like a play. Resonances of Peacock’s style appear throughout Meredith’s oeuvre. The most obvious echo is “Up to Midnight,” a series of dialogues published in the Graphic from December 1872 to January 1873, but the extended passages of sharp, finely observed dialogue in The Egoist equally hearken back to Peacock’s example. Meredith’s connections to Romantic and post-Romantic writers reach well beyond his father-in-law, most notably in his relationships with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Lacking the Oxford pedigree of the core band of PreRaphaelites, he never fully integrated into the movement, but was close friends with many members of the group, at one point sharing a house in Cheyne Walk with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, W. Michael Rossetti, and Algernon Swinburne. Meredith’s careful attention to both nature and the embodied sensual experience bear the traces of Pre-Raphaelite influence. For all his sympathy with Romantic feeling, though, Meredith could just as easily be considered – to borrow Wilde’s

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formulation – a “child of realism” (Wilde 1889, 40). Honoré de Balzac’s work was certainly a touchstone for Meredith, a connection noted by contemporary reviewers, and the most productive period of his fiction writing aligned with the height of British literary realism (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology). His first full-length novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), was published the same year as George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel), two foundational works. Meredith’s version of realism was prescient: his unremitting precision and awareness of burgeoning developments in physiology and psychology anticipated the naturalism of Thomas Hardy (↗ 30 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure). Ultimately, Meredith’s body of poetry, prose fiction, and non-fiction spanned from the spasmodism of the midcentury to fin-de-siècle New Woman fiction. His earliest writing, though, showed little evidence of the range he would eventually achieve. His first volume of poetry, Poems (1851), left little mark, and while his subsequent efforts at fiction writing attracted some attention – Eliot championed his Orientalist novella, The Shaving of Shagpat (1855) – he did not achieve early fame. Dependent on writing for income, he tried his hand at editing and criticism, including a short-lived stint writing the “Belles Lettres” column in the Westminster Review (1857–1858), a role he took over from Eliot. His best-known work of non-fiction is surely his influential essay “On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” commonly known as his “Essay on Comedy” (1877). In it, he argues that the “Comic Spirit” is capable of encouraging individual and social progress, especially through the deflation of unfounded self-regard, provided it reaches a receptive audience. Gender equality is central to that receptivity: “There never will be civilization where Comedy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social equality of the sexes” (22). By the time he wrote The Egoist, which was heavily shaped by the ideas forwarded in the “Essay,” his reputation was firmly tethered to his novels (he had written an additional nine since Shagpat), and he was regarded as one of the leading authors – if not one of the most widely read – of his day. He would follow The Egoist with an additional five novels (six, if one includes the posthumously published Celt and Saxon), including 1885’s Diana of the Crossways, his most commercially successful work, which built productively upon his ideas of gender equality. Written over the course of two years, from summer 1877 to April 1879, The Egoist was never Meredith’s own favourite. It seems that he was “in no hurry to see it appear,” writing to Robert Louis Stevenson that he found himself “shunning the day of publication” (Meredith 1970, 568, 569). He further feared, perhaps preemptively, that even partisans would not find it appealing: “[i]t is a Comedy, with only half of me in it, unlikely, therefore, to take either the public or my friends” (569). In fact, publisher Kegan Paul did hold the novel a few months, releasing it in three volumes only in October 1879. After its initial release, Paul sold the serialisation rights to the Glasgow Weekly Herald without the author’s permission.

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There it appeared in instalments from June 1879 to January 1880 under the title Sir Willoughby Patterne, The Egoist. Meredith was outspoken in his disapprobation of both the licensing and the title change, referring to the revision as “a perversion of my title” (577). His letters contain little additional information about the novel’s writing process, though the fair copy manuscript held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library shows that Meredith continued to make revisions even at this late stage (Collie 1974, 44).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns The novel focuses on the romantic misfortunes of Sir Willoughby Patterne, whose narcissism qualifies him as the novel’s titular (though not its only) egoist. Physically attractive and wealthy, Sir Willoughby is in search of a wife, and he passes over a daughter of one of his tenants, the ever-faithful Laetitia Dale, in favour of the beautiful and wealthy Constantia Durham, who quickly realises Willoughby’s nature and elopes with an officer instead. After three years of ostensible soul searching while travelling the Continent, Willoughby returns, reigniting the hopes of the waiting Laetitia before pursuing an engagement with Clara Middleton. The daughter of a self-absorbed academic, Clara serves as a psychological nexus for the novel; her movement towards self-realisation is the focus of the book. When her pleas to be released from her engagement are ignored, Clara conspires to run away, but is intercepted and returns to Patterne Hall. Willoughby ultimately agrees to release Clara, but only by promising her to Vernon Whitford, his poor but thoughtful cousin who manages his estate, an arrangement that Willoughby is certain will disappoint Clara. Once his second engagement is dissolved, he finally turns to Laetitia, who has grown outspokenly disenchanted with him, rejecting him initially before recognising the practical wisdom of the match. Clara and Vernon’s union, meanwhile, is desired by both and seems destined for happiness. Much of the action of the novel places characters in intimate social situations with each other, and their egoism is thus cast into relief only in relation, a dynamic that helps to explain why Meredith might have found the revision of his title for the Glasgow Weekly Herald – which singled out Willoughby – so problematic. Orbiting around the core triad of Willoughby, Clara, and Laetitia are a number of secondary characters and plots. Clara’s boorish father enjoys the hospitality and wine cellar of Patterne Hall, and is loath to put his daughter’s desire for freedom above his own comfort. Whitford undertakes the care and tutelage of Crossjay, a young, freespirited distant relation of Willoughby, whose suitability for a military career clashes with Willoughby’s intention to make a gentleman out of him. Colonel De

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Craye provides a counterpoint to his friend Willoughby, potentially threatening Clara’s devotion to her betrothed. Overseeing this society is the widowed Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson, known for bestowing epithets upon her neighbours that are often as insightful as they are pithy. These clever turns of phrase distil into a few words the essence of a person, and play an important role within the social circles of Patterne Hall and in the novel itself. Laetitia “comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes” (Meredith 1968, 42) in Mountstuart’s phrase, an image supported by Meredith’s story: she is introduced in the novel as being “bold as only your timid creatures can be bold,” making no mystery of her adoration of Willoughby, and her “long and dark” eyelashes are hailed as a chief indicator of her beauty (48). Clara, christened a “dainty rogue in porcelain” by Mrs Mountstuart Jenkins, projects the perfection of Dresden china through her delicate beauty, even if that exteriority gives the lie to the thoughtful, even rebellious woman within (75). Yet, for all their astuteness, Mountstuart’s epithets are, and can only be, reductive. Meredith takes pains to highlight the limitations of her character-defining descriptions. The point is driven home in the narrator’s reflection on Willoughby’s odd epithet, “he has a leg” (Meredith 1968, 43). To be sure, his physical charms are significant, but Mountstuart’s proclamation does more than succinctly state this fact. The narrator invites the reader to “dwell a short space on Mrs Mountstuart’s word” before unpacking what it means to “have a leg” worthy of showing off (43). The narrator’s biting sarcasm in the excurses is unmistakable: Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish Highlanders, and the corps de ballet, draymen too, have legs, and staring legs, shapely enough. But what are they? not the modulated instrument we mean – simply legs for leg-work, dumb as the brutes. Our cavalier’s is the poetic leg, a portent, a valiance. He has it as Cicero had a tongue. It is a lute to scatter songs to his mistress; a rapier, is she obdurate. In sooth a leg with brains in it, soul. (45)

Alas, Willoughby’s brains and soul are clearly no match for his leg. This narratorial gloss on Mountstuart’s epithet demonstrates how insufficient it is. To encapsulate Willoughby’s character in the phrase “he has a leg” might account for his physical prowess and might even signal the buoyant self-regard that fuels his faith in and constant display of his “leg.” But, on its face, it encourages Willoughby’s over-confidence and, moreover, it hardly captures the limitations of his character or the impact of his actions on others. These freighted epithets trouble the idea that the individual is comprehensible in isolation, that one’s character can be concentrated into a very few digestible, if evocative, syllables that define and fix identity. They provide one avenue for Meredith to explore interpersonal relationships. Further, Mrs Mountstuart’s quips foreground the significance that the novel places on accurately reading those around us. The role of town gossip was hardly new in fiction, but as realist novelists placed increasing attention on the social and relational contexts of individuals, the voices from the margins of society – or even

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from the margins of a novel’s cast of characters – can be used to great effect, commenting on the dynamics from within the novel’s diegesis but from without the consciousness of the central characters. Mrs Cadwallader, the town busy-body of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (↗ 22 George Eliot, Middlemarch) performs a similar role: her advice to heroine Dorothea Brooke is not always appreciated – such as when she encourages the unorthodox Dorothea to “call things by the same names as other people call them by” (Eliot 1994, 537) – but she is shown to be rarely mistaken. Mountstuart’s interpretations are necessarily imperfect (the narrator describes her insights as “coarse and broad, not absolutely incorrect, but not of an exact measure with the truth” [Meredith 1968, 427]), and she sometimes meets resistance from those she labels. Willoughby, for example, objects to her characterisation of Clara as “a dainty rogue in porcelain” (75) because his notion of Clara excludes the rebellious streak that older woman easily identifies. Yet, for all of her sometimes empty chatter, Mountstuart also wields her insight to great effect. When counselling a petulant Willoughby on his romantic prospects, she need only utter the word, “[t]wice,” to pull him up sharply (452). “The word,” the narrator notes, “was big artillery” (452); reminding Willoughby of the potential embarrassment of being twice jilted with a single syllable, she summons his egoism to make her point without belabouring an even more embarrassing explanation. She has shown herself, in other words, to be a good reader of Willoughby, even if her readings are incomplete, and in the final lines of the novel she claims that epithet for herself, telling Colonel De Craye, “I can read men” (601). With that statement, Mrs Mountstuart identifies a core aspect of the novel’s account of egoism, which is often shown to be an inability to discern the thoughts or feelings of others. Scholar Sean O’Toole tracks the significance of this theme, arguing that Willoughby’s egoism is fundamentally “a problem of reading” (2013, 109). Indeed, Willoughby is not malicious: he is no sadist. Rather, his mind is narrow, and the limits of his vision prevent him from engaging with others around him productively. In the novel, inaccuracies arise through the solipsism of his ego, when the other is only understood in relation to the needs of the self. Muddles also arise through miscommunication, a lack of curiosity or unfounded sense of certainty about the other’s experience or feelings, and the adherence to convention. If Mrs Mountstuart can be counted on for mostly insightful readings, Willoughby is remarkable for his consistently misguided or wrong readings, although it is unclear whether these are the cause or the result of his egoism. The stark terms that are used to report Willoughby’s internal reasoning exposes the gulf between the motivation for his actions and the reception of those actions. When Willoughby draws Clara’s “hand more securely on his arm, to make her sensible that she leaned on a pillar of strength” (Meredith 1968, 146), the reader knows that she does not perceive him as a pillar of strength at all. The narrator informs readers that when Willoughby spoke to Clara, he “supposed the whole floating bulk of his personality to be securely sustained” on “the full river of love” (149), yet Clara’s impression of Willoughby, as

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readers learn, contains no such “river.” The novel demonstrates that correcting Willoughby’s unfounded interpretations is no easy task. Even after Clara has expressed her displeasure with their continued engagement, readers are told that Willoughby “associated Clara with the darker Power pointing the knife at the quick of his pride” (357). Reacting to romantic rejection with injured pride is only natural, but we are given additional insight into the way that Willoughby processes Clara’s misery: “Still, he would have raised her weeping: he would have stanched her wounds bleeding: he had an infinite thirst for her misery, that he might ease his heart of its charitable love” (357). It is a complicated reaction. He “would have” eased her pain, but the potential kindness suggested by this suppositional desire to help Clara is undercut by his “infinite thirst for her misery.” He wishes misery on Clara insofar as it serves as an opportunity to perform his role as hero. Its impact on her remains unregistered. Willoughby cannot take in Clara’s feelings when she articulates them explicitly, so it perhaps should be expected that he remains blind to Laetitia’s unspoken change of heart. This oversight is founded at least partially on the fact that she had been so dependably constant, and it is her constancy that Willoughby privileges: “There was one woman who bowed to him to all eternity! He had inspired one woman with the mysterious, man-desired passion of self-abandonment, self-immolation! The evidence was before him. At any instant he could, if he pleased, fly to her and command her enthusiasm” (Meredith 1968, 383). As was the case in his interpretations of Clara’s regard for him, Willoughby is wrong here. He imagines Laetitia’s enthusiastic love for him as a reflection of his own self-regard. “It would be marriage with a mirror, with an echo,” he thinks, “marriage with a shining mirror, a choric echo” (456). When she rejects his proposal, it comes as a shock to Willoughby, as Laetitia was not mirroring his own wishes, chiming with choric agreement, but asserting her own contrary feelings. Her rejection also comes as a surprise to readers. In his seminal 1927 Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster cites Meredith’s withholding of Laetitia’s evolving feelings as an exemplary act of plotting, one which conforms to Meredith’s theory of comedy. Forster writes: It would have spoiled [Meredith’s] high comedy if we had been kept in touch with it [Laetitia’s mind] throughout. Sir Willoughby has to have a series of crashes, to catch at this and that, and find everything rickety. We should not enjoy the fun, in fact it would be boorish, if we saw the author preparing the booby traps beforehand, so Laetitia’s apathy has been hidden from us. (1955, 92)

Indeed, Willoughby’s deflation is a Meredithian deployment of the comic spirit, but withholding Laetitia’s evolving feelings also speaks to the difficulty of accurately reading the other, especially when we – like Willoughby – are denied a narrator’s insight into the conscious or unconscious mind of the other. Even if Willoughby were an unfailingly devoted, self-abnegating suitor, the novel makes clear that there are still social and institutional obstacles that thwart

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happiness. As in the “Essay,” the novel suggests that sexism is another barrier to genuine communication and progress. Laetitia thinks that, “with the exception of a strain of haughtiness,” Willoughby “talked excellently to men, at least in the tone of the things he meant to say; but that his manner of talking to women went to an excess in the artificial tongue” (Meredith 1968, 381). Clara also gives voice to these differences: “Oh, men! men! They astounded the girl; she could not define them to her understanding. Their motives, their tastes, their vanity, their tyranny, and the domino on their vanity, the baldness of their tyranny, clinched her in feminine antagonism to brute power” (395). If Laetitia’s frustration is directed at Willoughby’s unconscious gendering, Clara’s is aimed at a much broader sense of injustice. Willoughby’s egoism and misbegotten self-certainty is countered in Clara’s willingness to question, doubt, and admit astonishment. The early sign of her nascent love for Vernon Whitford comes at the end of chapter eleven when, after a profoundly discomforting conversation with the stubborn Willoughby, she asks herself, “Could she marry this man? [. . .] Could she condescend to the use of arts in managing him to obtain a placable life?” (Meredith 1968, 152). Upon encountering Whitford asleep under a double-blossomed cherry tree, she becomes deeply curious about him and his motivations. Seeing that Whitford holds a book in his hands, she wonders, “what book? She had a curiosity to know the title of the book he would read beneath these boughs” (154). The tree had been introduced earlier as a marvel of breeding, its showy blooms won at the cost of fertility. The gardener had, Dr Middleton suggests, “improved away the fruit” (114). But for Clara, and apparently for Vernon, the real interest was in its sublime beauty. A sense of wonder defines the glory of the encounter – “[w]onder lived in her” (155) – which is then superseded by reflection. She concludes: “He must be good who loves to lie and sleep beneath the branches of this tree” (155). It is a fair conclusion, and Vernon is good, insofar as the novel is concerned. But the surety of her conclusion is checked: She would rather have clung to her first impression: wonder so divine, so unbounded, was like soaring into homes of angel-crowded space, sweeping through folded and on to folded white fountain-bow of wings, in innumerable columns; but the thought of it was no recovery of it; she might as well have striven to be a child. (Meredith 1968, 155)

The episode establishes their shared affinity for the beautiful double-blossomed tree, but it also attests to the importance of reflection borne of curiosity and wonder. “Poor by comparison with what it displaced,” Clara’s reflection “presented itself to her as conferring something on [Vernon], and she would not have had it absent though it robbed her” (155). This kind of knowledge, based on curiosity and reflection, is different from the sublime pleasure of her first impression, but it exceeds the surefooted assertions of Willoughby or even Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson. Willoughby’s egoism occurs because he does not consider others’ desires or interests independent of his own. Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson’s epithets might be based on perception of those around her, but their definition-like brevity obscures the

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nuances of those people. The Egoist shows that the dynamics of the interpersonal relationship are as important in shaping people’s lives as the more global obstacles of normative gender expectations or class differences.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Jonathan Swift writes in his Preface to The Battle of the Books (1704) that “satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” (2010, 142). It is an idea that Meredith forwards in the “Essay,” writing of “cultivated men and women” that “they approve of Satire, because, like the beak of the vulture, it smells of carrion, which they are not” (Meredith 1877, 9). The very sharpness of satire is, in Meredith’s telling, an aspect that prevents one from seeing oneself in it, as doing so would be uncomfortable. The comic, on the other hand, leads to a recognition that spurs change, and progress: “You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image of you proposes” (29). For Willoughby, the road to acceptance is long and the correction incomplete, but to the extent that readers can recognise themselves in Willoughby or Mrs Mountstuart, they too may appreciate the novel’s comedy. In addition to recognizing their own shortcomings, readers face another kind of challenge: Meredith’s prose is syntactically complicated and laden with allusions and elisions. The sheer difficulty of Meredith’s writing is often seen as a flaw of style, if not a flaw of the author’s own character. But, as The Egoist shows, that difficulty can be enormously productive, an obstacle necessary to disrupt complacency. Some critics, in fact, regard such difficulty as central to Meredith’s project. “By insisting on the work of reading,” Anna Maria Jones writes, “Meredith inaugurates a new kind of reader, and a new relationship to the novel, in which the pleasures of reading are explicitly the pleasures of critical acumen and resistance to the emotional pull of sensational or sentimental tropes” (2007, 92). The novel itself then becomes a site of cultivation, challenging readers’ assumptions and teaching them how to read. This is especially evident in moments in The Egoist when readerly scepticism is checked. After relating another episode of Willoughby’s inept interpretation of Clara’s feeling, the narrative voice addresses the ostensibly doubting reader directly: “And if you ask whether a man, sensitive and a lover, can be so blinded, you are condemned to re-peruse the foregoing paragraph” (Meredith 1968, 153). Like Willoughby, then, readers can be blissfully resistant to an uncomfortable reality. Readers might be resistant, but it is difficult to ignore the novel’s insistent selfawareness, beginning with the title of the first chapter. The Egoist opens with a

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Prelude, titled “A Chapter of which the Last Page only is of any Importance,” in which the authorial voice stakes out clear boundaries. The succeeding novel is a comedy. It shirks any notion of fealty to objective reality, a sentiment that bears out Wilde’s description of Meredith as a novelist who actively rejected realism: “the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness” (Meredith 1968, 34). The Prelude also describes the Egoist as deserving of pathos, as one “who would clothe himself at everybody’s expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked” (36). “Through the very love of self,” Meredith writes, “himself he slew” (38). Not all readers were amused. “Nothing could be more appalling than the prelude,” wrote one early critic, “with [. . .] paradoxes meant for deep philosophy, and its obscure passages intended for deep wisdom” (“The Egoist” 1869, 1409). Later scholars, though, have seen the Prelude as part of Meredith’s larger project, an extension and application of the ideas he established elsewhere. Gillian Beer describes the novel’s introductory chapter as “an epitome of the main ideas of the Essay” (1965, 165). Meredith was keenly aware of the interrelationships between books, often building his novels upon the conceit of other fictions. The Prelude of The Egoist introduces the “Book of Egoism,” described as “a book full of the world’s wisdom” (Meredith 1968, 33). Twice in the novel, the narrator has recourse to the epigrams included in this “Book”: “An injured pride that strikes not out will strike home” (211) and “Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity” (175). The tone is wry, but here the narrative voice demonstrates an awareness that books are read as instruction manuals, readers seeking out lessons in what to do or what to avoid. It is an awareness that Meredith explored previously in, for example, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, the story of a boy’s education and upbringing. Richard’s father had published a collection of epigrams titled The Pilgrim’s Scrip, which is quoted throughout the novel, and he imagines that he will publish a book on the educational system he has developed for raising Richard. It is a failed effort, as clinging to book wisdom proves to be no guarantee of success. In The Egoist, narrative self-reflexivity is not limited to the “Book of Egoism.” As a number of scholars have noted, Willoughby Patterne’s name immediately calls to mind the Blue Willow blue-and-white china pattern, made famous by Staffordshire in the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, the pattern was ubiquitous and the story ascribed to its central image was well known: the daughter of a nobleman is promised to a wealthy man she does not love and she elopes with her lover, a poor, scholarly man, escaping across the bridge depicted in the image. If the resonances between the Blue Willow story and the narrative of The Egoist were not obvious, they are underscored by repeated references to porcelain in the novel. Clara’s epithet, “dainty rogue in porcelain” (Meredith 1968, 75), links her to the daughter in Blue Willow, and a broken porcelain vase – a wedding

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present – portends the unhappy end of Willoughby and Clara’s relationship. Robert Mayo suggests that the Blue Willow pattern “seems to have provided Meredith with the ground plan of The Egoist” (1942, 74), but even if the novel was not inspired by Blue Willow, repeated references to it serve as a reminder that being familiar with a story does not necessarily mean we will be able to avoid repeating it, or that we will recognise ourselves in it. Yet one’s capacity for appreciating the comic spirit, as Meredith wrote, depends on “being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous” in the eyes of others and “accepting the correction” (1877, 29). It might be easy to identify with Clara or Vernon compared to the often odious Willoughby, but the novel does not shy away from this challenge, starting with the title. Unlike Jane Eyre (1837, ↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) or David Copperfield (1849–1850) – novels with powerfully sympathetic titular characters and narrative voices – The Egoist could provoke resistance, not identificatory sympathy or self-recognition. For Robert Louis Stevenson, though, self-recognition was exactly what the novel encouraged: “It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision” (1897, 13). Any cruelty caused by such precision is blunted by the universality of recognition. Stevenson continues: “A young friend of Mr. Meredith’s (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. ‘This is too bad of you,’ he cried. ‘Willoughby is me!’ ‘No, my dear fellow,’ said the author, ‘he is all of us’” (13), suggesting that Willoughby is universal, or universally identifiable, even if readers might be reluctant to admit it.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Upon its initial publication, the response to The Egoist seemed to reinforce existing critical sentiment towards Meredith’s fiction, one based on ambivalence or extremes. Though most contemporary reviewers granted Meredith’s erudition and talent, they frequently complained about the obscurity of his prose, taking particular exception to his “monstrous cleverness” (Henley 1879a, 555). Frequent comparisons to Carlyle underscored this sentiment. Some critics saw that difficulty rooted in the authors’ commitment to verisimilitude: “the jerky pauses with which [the speakers’] conversation is interrupted may be true to nature, but in a novel, where the mind has to grasp the meaning without any outward aid, it is necessary for the various characters to express themselves more distinctly than they would in real life,” wrote a reviewer for the Examiner (“The Egoist” 1869, 1409). Others saw this merely as undisciplined indulgence. R. H. Hutton declared that “Mr Meredith is frequently captivating, but he does not know when to stop” (1879, 19). W. E. Henley, writing in the Pall Mall Gazette agreed: “At its best, his work is of the first order; at its worst, it is brilliant, but tedious. [. . .] Extremely clever, he seems to prefer his cleverness to

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his genius” (Henley 1879b, 10). According to this line of thinking, by giving in to his worst writerly tendencies, Meredith shows himself to be as self-centred as the maligned title character of the novel, and the theme of egotism gave critics a ready line of attack. In a separate piece on The Egoist, Henley insisted that “The literary egoism of the author of Sir Willoughby Patterne appears to overshadow the amorous egoism of Sir Willoughby himself, and to become the predominating fact of the book” (1879a, 556). Yet, among Meredith’s fiction, the subject of egoism, especially in relation to the challenges of understanding, seems uniquely suited to stylistic complexity. Or, as Woodcock writes, “[i]n Meredith’s other works his mannerisms and artifices perplex and annoy; in The Egoist, for once, they are entirely appropriate, entirely absorbed into a carefully integrated structure of speech and thought” (1968, 9). What is more, the novel comments explicitly on the challenges posed by overwrought diction. As noted above, Laetitia bemoans the excessively “artificial tongue” that Willoughby adopts when talking to women. And while Vernon acknowledges that Mrs Mountstuart is “kind and charitable at heart,” he cautions that the reason “people of ability like Mrs Mountstuart see so little” is because “they are so bent on describing brilliantly” (Meredith 1968, 371). Noting that a predilection for over-clever description can get in the way of vision, Meredith’s own display of over-clever description is evidently intentional and self-conscious. Despite the strident complaints of some critics, the novel’s brilliance was also widely acknowledged. In a review reprinted in multiple newspapers, one writer insisted that The Egoist was the “novel of the season,” “by far the greatest work that George Meredith has yet produced,” and that “the demand for it at the libraries is so great that the first edition has been exhausted” (“From our London Correspondent” 1897, 3). Henley praised the novel’s “minor personages” and dialogue. “There are chapters of an imaginative truth so vivid and intense,” he wrote, “as to be discomforting” (1897a, 556). Even this praise, it is worth noting, was no salve for Meredith. He wrote to James Thomson in November 1879 that he did not find the “‘applause of the critics’ very digestible” (Meredith 1970, 583). He acknowledged Henley’s positive review, but maintained that he did “not want my reviewer to be running over me in phosphorus, lighting me up bright and black, but that he should attend to the matter I commit to him,” something that had “not been done either by the laudatory or the condemnatory” (1970, 583). Before the century was out, Meredith’s oeuvre did begin to garner sustained consideration, with critics ‘attending to the matter’ quite carefully. Fin-de-siècle poet Richard Le Gallienne wrote one of the first full length studies of Meredith’s work, George Meredith: Some Characteristics (1890), in which he named The Egoist “the most absolute product” of the author’s “peculiar art” (13). Meredith’s art might have been peculiar within his own time, but as he lived on well into the first decade of the twentieth century, he increasingly came to be viewed as one of the last Victorians, a designation that did little to check the staunchly partisan response to

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his works. In the wake of his death, the Academy published two letters on Meredith in the same issue. The writer of the first letter quoted the first lines of the Prelude before noting that “to a full ‘90 per cent’ of readers they will appear to be so much in articulate drivel or sheer madness” (Ridley 1909, 355). The second letter defended Meredith against charges of obscurity by appealing to the intellect of the true believers: “Little wonder that the dilettante or sybarite in his letters complains. Like all truly great writers, [Meredith] reveals his magic thoughts only in return for one’s deepest study” (Germany 1909, 355). Neither argued that Meredith’s work would, in the twentieth century, be appreciated by a wide readership. After the mid-twentieth century, Meredith’s work was the subject of relatively few studies, with The Egoist appearing only occasionally in the pages of academic journals. A revival in the late 1970s and 1980s is best represented by Gillian Beer’s work, spurring studies into Meredith’s engagement with science that continue today. Postmodern criticism found much fodder in the famous difficulty of Meredith’s diction, leading to a group of studies that, according to Randall Craig, “examined the linguistic dimensions of The Egoist, suggesting that Meredith’s language deconstructs itself and that his fiction questions the possibility of stable meaning and essentialist thinking” (Craig 1989, 897). More recently, critics have pushed these lines of inquiry further. Scholars including Sean O’Toole have demonstrated that Meredith’s novel was deeply engaged with contemporary debates of psychology and human consciousness and their embodied forms. Erik Gray picks up the linguistic analysis in a new register in the 2010s; writing in Partial Answers, he explores the ways that the characters of The Egoist join or resist joining in shared linguistic metaphors. These function, he writes, “not just as a marker, but as a microcosm of conjugal compatibility” (Gray 2014, 270). In her 2014 study, Melissa Jenkins hones in on the father-son (or fatherpotential son-in-law) relationship in The Egoist, suggesting that it is indicative of Meredith’s descriptions of familial ambivalence in other novels. Compared to other masterworks of nineteenth-century fiction, though, The Egoist remains relatively underexplored. On the centennial of Meredith’s birth, Virginia Woolf surveyed his novels, acknowledging his precarious position in the canon: “This brilliant uneasy figure has his place with the great eccentrics rather than with the great masters. [. . .] He will be forgotten and discovered and again discovered and forgotten” (1960, 213). It is a premonition that history has borne out, The Egoist riding the ebb and flow of Meredith’s changeable popularity. Yet, if Woolf was right in that prediction, we might assume her ultimate conclusion will be correct as well: “if English fiction continues to be read, the novels of Meredith must inevitably rise from time to time into view; his work must inevitably be disputed and discussed” (213).

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Bibliography Works Cited Beer, Gillian. “Meredith’s Idea of Comedy: 1876–1880.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20.2 (1965): 165–176. Collie, Michael. George Meredith: A Bibliography. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974. Craig, Randall. “Promising Marriage: The Egoist, Don Juan, and the Problem of Language.” ELH 56.4 (1989): 897–921. “The Egoist.” Examiner 1 Nov. 1879: 1409. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871–1872. London: Penguin, 1994. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, 1955. “From Our London Correspondent.” Dundee Advertiser 6 Nov. 1879: 3. Germany, Alfred. “George Meredith and His Style.” Academy 24 July 1909: 355. Gray, Erik. “Metaphors and Marriage Plots: Jane Eyre, The Egoist, and Metaphoric Dialogue in the Victorian Novel.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12.2 (2014): 267–286. Harris, Margaret. “Meredith, George (1828–1909).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. OUP, 23 Sept. 2004. Web. 8 Jan. 2018. Henley, W. E. “Literature.” Athenaeum 1 Nov. 1879a: 555–556. Henley, W. E. “Mr. Meredith’s New Book.” Pall Mall Gazette 3 Nov. 1879b: 10. Hutton, R. H. “Mr. George Meredith’s New Novel.” Spectator 1 Nov. 1879: 19. Jenkins, Melissa Shields. Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831–1901. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Jones, Anna Maria. “The ‘New Fiction’ Theorizes Cultural Consumption.” Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007. 91–126. Le Gallienne, Richard. George Meredith: Some Characteristics. London: John Lane, 1890. Mayo, Robert. “The Egoist and the Willow Pattern.” ELH 9.1 (1942): 71–78. Meredith, George. The Egoist. 1879. New York: Penguin, 1968. Meredith, George. The Letters of George Meredith. Ed. C. L. Cline. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970. Meredith, George. “On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit.” New Quarterly Magazine 8 (1877): 1–40. O’Toole, Sean. Habit in the English Novel, 1850–1900: Lived Environments, Practices of the Self. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Ridley, Edwin. “George Meredith’s ‘Genius.’” Academy 19 June 1909: 233. Stevenson, Robert Louis, et al. Books Which Have Influenced Me. New York: James Pott, 1897. Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub and Other Works. Ed. Marcus Walsh. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” Nineteenth Century Jan. 1889: 35–56. Woodcock, George. Introduction. The Egoist by George Meredith. London: Penguin, 1968: 9–29. Woolf, Virginia. “The Novels of George Meredith.” The Common Reader: Second Series. By Woolf. New York: Harcourt 1960. 204–213.

Further Reading Bartlett, Jami. “Meredith and Ends.” ELH 76 (2009): 547–576. Beer, Gillian. “The Egoist: The Two Masks and the Idea of Comedy.” Meredith: A Change of Masks. By Gillian Beer. London: Athlone, 1970. 108–139.

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Henry, Anne C. “Explorations in Dot-and-Dashland: George Meredith’s Aphasia.” NineteenthCentury Literature 61 (2006): 311–342. Miller, J. Hillis. “‘Herself against Herself’: The Clarification of Clara Middleton.” The Representation of Women in Fiction. Ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. 98–123. O’Hara, Patricia. “Primitive Marriage, Civilized Marriage: Anthropology, Mythology, and The Egoist.” Victorian Literature and Culture 20 (1992): 1–24. Wilkenfeld, Roger. “Hands Around: Image and Theme in the Egoist.” ELH 34 (1967): 367–379. Williams, Carolyn. “Natural Selection and Narrative Form in The Egoist.” Victorian Studies 27.1 (1893): 53–79.

Julia Straub

24 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885) Abstract: This chapter examines Walter Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) as a key text of the late Victorian period. It identifies important intersections and continuities with Pater’s other works and explore the novel’s engagement with cultural and philosophical history and its reflections on contemporary culture and society. The close reading part of this chapter shows how the novel’s themes and numerous aspects of its plot relate to Victorian debates on religious scepticism, positivism, and social change. It also demonstrates how the novel translates different notions of (cultural) history into literary practice. In the final part of the chapter, the critical reception of the novel and more recent theoretical approaches to Marius the Epicurean are presented. Keywords: Aestheticism, historical novel, cultural history, religious scepticism, positivism

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Walter Pater (1839–1894) completed only one novel, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, which was published in 1885. In many respects, it relates to his other writings and is thus a continuation of themes and styles developed in his essays and shorter prose pieces. While reflecting Pater’s expertise in classical history, literature, and philosophy, the novel goes far beyond the generic boundaries of the historical novel. It merges a variety of genre elements and presents itself in explicit ways as a complex portrayal of Pater’s own time, the late Victorian or fin-de-siècle period. Walter Pater spent most of his professional life teaching Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford, and, after resigning his tutorship in 1880, devoted himself to writing. He had received his education from King’s School in Canterbury and Queen’s College, Oxford, at a time when the ‘Victorian sages’ (Morgan 1990) such as John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold made themselves heard as prominent voices in cultural and aesthetic discourse. His life was rather secluded, but his position at the University of Oxford turned him into a pivotal figure given his impact as a teacher. Marius the Epicurean, the Imaginary Portraits (1887), and The Renaissance (1877) are Pater’s most prominent works, although other titles such as his essay collections Appreciations (1889), Plato and Platonism (1893), and Greek Studies (1894) can be considered as equally important. They all reflect his knowledge of antiquity, rich in allusions as they are to Greek art and myth, but also display a more general https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-025

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cultural syncretism, i.e., an interest in various styles, historical periods, and philosophical movements. Essays such as “Winckelmann” and “Coleridge,” both of which were first published in the Westminster Review in the 1860s, are evidence of his strong and persistent fascination with German idealism. His skills as an essay writer also had an influence on his fictional writing, as will be shown below. With Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873, and then re-published in 1877 under the title The Renaissance, Pater caused a scandal within and outside the university: his opponents regarded parts of it as a eulogy of Hedonism. “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (1986, 152): many contemporary readers perceived this one sentence as an abomination, due to Pater’s advocating the ecstatic experience as life’s highest goal. This hedonistic stance, with its prioritising of physical beauty, connected him to Aestheticists such as Oscar Wilde (↗ 26 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray), Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, Arthur Symons, or Vernon Lee, some of whom he had encountered as undergraduate students while teaching at Oxford. Pater’s reflections on the disinterestedness of art – in the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, he praises the significance of “the love of art for its own sake” (1986, 153), echoing the Symbolists’ dictum that art should be created for its own sake (Schaffer 1928) – turned him into a central figure within European aestheticist discourse of the late nineteenth century. In fact, Pater’s position in literary history is awkward given that, both historically and in terms of his aesthetic approach, he is sandwiched between the Romantic and the modernist paradigms. According to some critics, he represents a typical late age artist, whose possibilities for creative renewal have been exhausted by the preceding Romantic writers (Hough 1949; Uhlig 1974). For others, he is a liminal figure on the threshold to modernism (Iser 1959). There are good reasons for each of these interpretations. Pater’s aesthetic programme rests on the synthesis of literary traditions and the evocation of the past, a point which will be discussed in more detail below. On the one hand, his writing mirrors late age nostalgia for a Romantic experience of life, for example his idealisation of childhood. On the other hand, his understanding of the function of art and his representation of an atomistic experience of time, for example, anticipate an experience of life which modernist writers and intellectuals such as Virginia Woolf would seek to recreate thirty or forty years later in their works (Meisel 1980; Saunders 2010). Furthermore, Pater was the creator of a distinct literary genre, the so-called ‘imaginary portrait’ (Imaginary Portraits, 1887). These short prose writings blend the fictional portrayal of an individual with the conditions of his or her time, and put on display Pater’s interest in the relations between literature and other media, especially painting and sculpture, but also photography (Rajan 1997; Straub 2008; Clements and Higgins 2010; Østermark-Johansen 2011 and 2013; Rippl 2011). One of these verbal portraits, “A Prince of Court Painters,” features the French painter Antoine Watteau, and in another, “Denys l’Auxerrois,” he describes landscapes by alluding to William Turner’s Rivers of France while recounting the story of Dionysus’s return in

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the modern world (Pater 1997, 21–43, 45–62). As in many other texts, Pater combines several temporal layers and interconnects different cultural backdrops. Pater was well-versed in aesthetic theoretical thought: he was a contemporary of John Ruskin, the great Victorian critic of art and culture, whose works he eagerly read (Bloom 1974; Daley 2001). He was also familiar with the works of eighteenthcentury continental scholars such as art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. His interests and expertise were manifold and his literary imagination drew on a number of sources and traditions that went far beyond literature. The intellectual canvas against which Marius the Epicurean is set is complex and erudite, merging cultural and philosophical history with reflections on contemporary culture and society.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Marius the Epicurean deals with the spiritual quest of its eponymous protagonist, Marius, who lives in Italy in the second century AD, under the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Following his mother’s death, adolescent Marius moves from the rural surroundings of his childhood to Pisa, where he embarks on his studies, before leaving for Rome. The experience of loss following his mother’s death makes Marius prone to ruminations on the mutability of life, death, and decay. These are central themes in the novel. Marius the Epicurean abounds with descriptions of cemeteries, catacombs, vaults, ruins, and other places associated with mortality. To find answers to the questions raised by his confrontation with human ‘vanitas’, Marius probes various systems of faith. He abandons his childhood religion, a religion of nature called Numa, and investigates the philosophies of Epicurus, Heraclitus, Stoicism, and one could also add the Aesculapian religion of bodily health, hedonistic Euphuism, and Apuleius’s pantheism among others. Eventually, it is in Christianity that he finds a much longed-for lived principle of charity. He will die as a martyr for his faith in the eyes of others, his inner convictions remaining conflicted until his death. On his quest, Marius depends on the guidance of friends and mentors. There is Flavian, whom he first encounters as a young man, who dies a mysterious death, and introduces the novel’s most important poetological considerations; the priest at the garden of Aesculapius, who opens his eyes for the beauty of the moment; Marcus Aurelius, who is both admired and rejected for his Stoicism; and, finally, there is Cornelius, the knight-like figure who leads Marius to Christianity. What makes Marius forsake the doctrines of Epicureanism and Stoicism is their inability to account for pain and death. Death is the enemy, whose power stands against what is beautiful and good. But there is also a moralistic aspect to Marius’s search and eventual endorsement of Christianity (which could be interpreted as Pater’s apology following the scandal caused by The Renaissance): neither Stoicism nor Epicureanism can accommodate

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his devouring need to feel pity for others. The most startling scenes of the novel depict cruelty inflicted on human beings and animals alike: the skinning of a Christian martyr as well as the butchering of pregnant animals cause great internal turmoil to Marius. Marius is not only an aesthete, but he also owns a deeply felt ability for compassion. The novel’s main themes – time and temporality, the relationship between the past and the present, religious agnosticism and scepticism, desire for beauty – all relate to broader Victorian concerns such as an obsession with history, a pervasive sense of spiritual disorientation afflicting the entire period, and the emergence of Aestheticism. Similarities with the Victorian present are made explicit throughout the novel, the narrator establishing links between ancient Italy and Pater’s Britain, as it happens at the beginning of chapter sixteen: “That age and ours have much in common – many difficulties and hopes. Let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives – from Rome to Paris or London” (1985, 182) or in chapter fourteen, when he compares the shows in the Roman amphitheatre to the popularity of novels in his own age (168). Pater was not the only writer to see connections between the two periods; the comparison was “in the air” (Rosenblatt 1962, 247). In 1863, Matthew Arnold had published an essay in which he underlined the “modern applicability and living interest” of the Roman Emperor who was “a truly modern striver and thinker” and whose writings have to be treated as “a present source from which to draw an example of life, and instruction of manners” (1908, 231). In the late 1870s and 1880s, periodicals such as The Fortnightly Review featured several articles that underscored the modernity of the age of Marcus Aurelius and pointed out parallels between contemporary philosophical debates and the old philosophical schools of Epicureanism and Stoicism. Thus, Marius the Epicurean figures as part of a larger cluster of novels that appeared in the second part of the nineteenth century and features titles such as Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1852–1853), Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Callista (1855), and Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman’s Fabiola (1854) (Dahl 1973). They form a subgenre of novels set in the early days of Christianity but are concerned with moral, philosophical, and historical ideas that belong to Victorian discourses. Many Victorianist scholars have investigated the popularity of such historical comparisons and the Victorians’ pervasive interest in past periods. The Victorians had a productive interest in Hellenism and ancient Italy (Dowling 1994; Stray 2007; Evangelista 2009; Saunders et al. 2012), for example, but they also had a penchant for their own Anglo-Saxon past or medieval times (Bryden 2005; Holloway and Palmgren 2005). This turn to the past and the critical engagement with old and/or foreign systems of thoughts and doctrines had several reasons, but they were largely the consequence of a gradual disillusionment with orthodox religion so typical of the period (↗ 3 God on the Wane?). The nineteenth century saw the rise of Auguste Comte’s positivism, for example, but also the evolutionist theories of Darwin and Spencer (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel), or Marxist philosophy.

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Marius the Epicurean reflects Pater’s familiarity with these decisive developments in social and scientific discourses. Like other writers, such as George Eliot or Edmund Gosse, he was very much aware of the tectonic shifts in the intellectual landscape that eroded old beliefs. Pater paid attention to debates on science (e.g., materialism), drawing upon scientific texts that were scattered all over the prominent periodicals such as the Fortnightly Review or Macmillan’s Magazine at the time (Dawson 2005). Marius the Epicurean teems with spiritual and religious scepticism. Scepticism assumes that no philosophical doctrine is truer or better than the other, because after all it is questionable whether we have access to any positive knowledge at all. In the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, Pater wrote that what we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. (1986, 153)

In chapter twenty-four of Marius the Epicurean, named “A Conversation Not Imaginary” (a title chosen in reference to Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, 1824–1829) Lucian proposes this position in his dispute with Hermotimus. Sceptical thought became virulent in Victorian literature (e.g., Thomas Hardy) and philosophy (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer). These thinkers proposed a stark sense of subjectivism, which, as in Pater’s case, often had pessimistic connotations. In the “Conclusion,” he famously discussed the perception of reality as solipsistic: Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner in its own dream of a world. (151)

Each individual is wrapped up by their own experience of the world, which makes it hard if not impossible to relate to other individuals. There is not the one reality that everyone shares, but each individual constructs their own view of the world based on their impressions and perceptions. According to Linda Dowling, Pater radicalised a British tradition of empiricism. Pater’s aim was to “show that even the self, a category so close to Western experience as to seem indistinguishable from it [. . .] was subject to the vicissitudes of change” (1989, 69). Despite its lengthy questioning of knowledge and subjectivity, Marius the Epicurean ends on a reconciliatory note. Sensing his death after days of illness, Marius finds “the thought of the great hope” (Pater 1985, 295) during his last hours in the prospect of generations to come: “without [hope], dim in truth as it was, he could hardly have dared to ponder

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the world which limited all he really knew, as it would be when he should have departed from it” (295). Beauty offers a means of escape from the brutality of life and the progress of time. It is the task of art to celebrate and preserve beauty against the vicissitudes of time and the hazards of modern life. Victorian Britain saw major changes to its rural landscapes and urban environments due to industrialisation. While the empire relied on its various industries for its expansion, poverty among the working classes, child labour, shabby housing conditions, and urban crime were only some of the negative consequences that contemporaries immediately noticed and that both cultural critics and literary writers would pick up as themes in their works. To use art as a bulwark against the de-humanising forces of industrialisation was an important impulse behind the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement, founded by William Morris, for example. These artists tried to revert to pre-modern styles and means of production to undo the felt alienation between the individual and his or her work (Prettejohn 1999). This resulted in the emphasis of the beautiful and edifying in art as well as the amalgamation of modern and, e.g., medieval styles in the visual arts and interior design. Given the protagonist’s quest for beauty, it comes as no surprise that ritual and ceremonies are of special appeal to Marius: Gathering, from a richer and more varied field of sound than had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies, some notes of which Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after generations of interrupted development, formed into the Gregorian music, she was already, as we have heard, the house of song – of a wonderful new music and poesy. As if in anticipation of the sixteenth century, the church was becoming ‘humanistic’, in an earlier, and unimpeachable Renaissance. (Pater 1985, 243)

The comfort which the rituals of the Catholic Church offer to Marius points to a renewed interest which writers and artists began to take in Catholicism in the later nineteenth century. The Oxford Movement, Tractarianism, the Gothic Revival in architecture, and Art-Catholicism were four of its obvious manifestations. The “house of song” in the above quotation reminds the reader of Pater’s notion of the “House Beautiful,” which he introduced in his essay collection Appreciations, and which epitomises his aestheticist understanding of an interiorised sense of beauty. He describes it as the product of a collective effort, the “House Beautiful, which the creative minds of all generations – the artists and those who have treated life in the spirit of art – are always building together, for the refreshment of the human spirit” (Pater 1910a, 241). According to Wolfgang Iser, the “House Beautiful” is “an almost total identification of art and history. There is no operative principle of selection; instead it blends together all contrasting movements into a totality of life that continues to expand indefinitely” (1987, 82). The “House Beautiful” embodies the finde-siècle epitome of self-culture, i.e., the belief that “the phases of different cultures reflect the subject’s inner development” (75), which allows the individual to reach a

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better understanding of itself. Pater also entitled one of his imaginary portraits “The Child in the House.” This concept leaves a trace in Marius the Epicurean. The house in this story is not only a place where the sensitive young protagonist Florian – who resembles Marius a lot – has spent his childhood and a site of his memory which he idealises out of a spirit of nostalgia. It is also the gate through which he has to pass to embark on a labyrinthine journey into his own self. In Marius the Epicurean, the protagonist’s self-fashioned creeds and convictions are described metaphorically as a “House of Thought” (Pater 1985, 177). For Pater, the house functions as an important metaphor on various levels, as a means of representing interiority and human memory. Also on a literal level, houses add an important dimension to the plot, not only by structuring it according to the distinct phases in Marius’s life, for which they stand, but also because they possess symbolic value. Amongst the important houses in the novel are Marius’s home at White Nights, the temple of Aesculapius, Marcus Aurelius’s villa, and Cecilia’s house. The house at White Nights and Cecilia’s house are complementary: both are associated with femininity. White Nights is a sanctuary linked up to his mother, a “warm place” of “urbane and feminine refinement” (47).

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Given the novel’s dense intellectual subject matter – Marius the Epicurean has, as a result, been labelled a “roman à thèse” (Fleishman 1971, 176) – it comes as no surprise that its plot is not action-driven. Its predominant mode of narration is introspective, which is in tune with Marius’s character, who is “more given to contemplation than to action” (Pater 1985, 49). The omniscient narrator focuses mostly on Marius’s inner life, his thoughts, and experiences, allowing much space for reflection while slowing down the narrative pace. The following passage describes Marius’s ruminations while listening to a speech given by the Stoic teacher Cornelius Fronto at the court in Rome: Marius felt that his own thoughts were passing beyond the actual intention of the speaker; not in the direction of any clearer theoretic or abstract definition of that ideal commonwealth, but rather as if in search of its visible locality and abiding-place, the walls and towers of which, so to speak, he might really trace and tell, according to his own old, natural habit of mind. (179)

This passage shows how crucial it is for Marius to process and thus appropriate knowledge about the world through introspection. This emphasis on interiority also explains why it is difficult to clearly classify this novel. Some readers have approached it as an autobiographical account of Walter Pater’s own life and intellectual journey (Ryan 1976; Nadel 1984), others see it as a Bildungsroman or a “study in the formation of consciousness” (Buckler 1978, 149). Marius does encounter real historical individuals on his journey, and the setting is occasionally framed by real

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historical events. These are obvious features of the historical novel, a genre which thrived in the nineteenth century following the success of Sir Walter Scott’s novels such as Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and Ivanhoe (1819). However, the reader accesses ancient Italy through the filter of Marius’s perceptions, his aesthetic observations, and his philosophical musings. Marius’s experiences are interwoven with his surroundings, and it is through him that the historical fabric, as whose product he emerges, comes to life. A fictional biography at first glance, Marius’s life also functions as a piece of cultural history. Jules Lubbock has argued that Pater’s characters in general are “thrown” against a luxuriously decorated background, but that there are hardly any concrete events – in short, the “art of drama,” as Lubbock calls it, is completely renounced (1983, 129). In this respect, the novel finds itself in good company. Avrom Fleishman has identified a group of novels (George Eliot’s Romola [1862–1863], Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth [1861], Joseph Henry Shorthouse’s John Inglesant [1881], and Marius the Epicurean) which recount the spiritual quests of disoriented individuals informed by contemporary philosophical and religious debate. In these, the late Victorian hero “is never fully in the historical world from the outset, but is caught passing through it toward a definition of his own identity, a religious affirmation, or a predestined vocation” (Fleishman 1971, 149). The text thus comes across as a tapestry from or against which the individual emerges, enhanced by the many intertextual references and allusions that are included in the novel. In the novel, Pater introduces voices both from the past and the present, referring, more or less explicitly, to Virgil (1985, 269), Dante Alighieri (202), William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (141), Emanuel Swedenborg (226), Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (113), Théophile Gautier (70), Alfred Lord Tennyson (209), and Charles Baudelaire (270), among many others. Another relevant genre element is that of the previously mentioned imaginary portrait, which provided Pater with a suitable form for Marius’s characterisation, allowing him to embed a verbal portrait of Marius amidst the conditions of his time. The imaginary portrait is a literary genre “peculiarly adapted to bring out this kind of correspondence that Pater saw as holding between a type of mind and varying aspects of culture” (Wollheim 1974, 160). Marius’s subjective experience functions as the keyhole to a heterogeneous, multi-layered cultural environment. This results in an intriguing, but ultimately very complex representation of different models of time in the novel. Pater puts great emphasis on the single moment, which echoes, of course, his view of life and personal identity as fluctuating, as set out in the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance. The most famous passage, which takes up the Heraclitean notion of the fluidity of time, reads like this: each object is loosed into a group of impressions – colour, odour, texture – in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn

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and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the chamber of the individual mind. (Pater 1986, 151)

The flux of time dissolves all points of stability and rest. This resembles a passage taken from Marius the Epicurean, which describes Heraclitus’s philosophy: The one true being – that constant subject of all early thought – it was his merit to have conceived, not as sterile and stagnant inaction, but as a perpetual energy, from the restless stream of which, at certain points, some elements detach themselves, and harden into non-entity and death, corresponding, as outwards objects, to man’s inward condition of ignorance: that is, to the slowness of his faculties. (Pater 1985, 108)

For Pater, human perception of the world occurs in the form of a constant flow of impressions. Knowledge of any kind, of the self and of the world, is unstable. The moment is all that matters. But, as regards Pater’s notion of time and history, there is more to it than just an emphasis on the transitory. As Martin Middeke has argued, Pater’s relationship to the past takes the form of a re-reading of the old in the present. Access to the past is thus closely entwined with the individual’s impressions in the here and now (2004, 113). At the same time, and to complicate matters, there is a mythic yearning for temporal closure, which co-exists with the narrative’s insistence on temporal continuity across the ages (132), leading to a complex agglomerate of concepts of time in the novel. While Pater’s appreciation of German idealism and Hegel in particular has been widely perceived (Whiteley 2010; Hext 2013), it has also been observed that he merges Hegel’s teleological principles with a Heraclitean notion of ongoing temporal change. In fact, different as they are, Hegel and Heraclite were commonly brought into relation in the nineteenth century (Shuter 1997, 62). This complex temporal structure finds expression in the novel’s generic hybridity and has invited much critical interest. It also gives evidence of the Victorian period’s more general fascination with time and its representation (Amigoni 2011, 147–173; Ferguson 2013).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Contemporary critics found fault with the novel’s erudition, its perceived lack of dramatic action, or they doubted the validity of its religious content (Court 1984). Mary Arnold Ward, Pater’s Oxford neighbour and a popular novelist herself, bemoaned its lack of structural coherence, but praised Pater’s pity for the “tragedy of human weakness,” which, in her eyes, justified a comparison with George Eliot (Ward 1980, 130). Furthermore, she singled out Pater’s strategy of hiding his autobiographical account behind the character of Marius, seeing that the English are not “fond of direct ‘confessions’” (131). Some contemporary readers approached Marius as an autobiographical – even confessional – work, most likely in the wake of Pater’s fall from grace following

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the publication of The Renaissance. Ward remarks that “it is in books like [. . .] ‘Marius’ [ . . . ] that the future student of the nineteenth century will have to look for what is deepest, most intimate, and most real in its personal experience” (131). While the novel may have been challenging in terms of its form and narrative structure, its thoughtful engagement with contemporary discourses was acknowledged. Thus, its first readers found Marius the Epicurean an awkward novel, while recognising its value, especially as a mirror of their own time. For some of its modernist readers and critics, Marius seemed to carry too heavy of a historical burden. T. S. Eliot referred to it as “incoherent [. . .] a hodgepodge of the learning of the classical don, the impressions of the sensitive visitor to Italy, and a prolonged flirtation with the liturgy” (1932, 440–441). Eliot still regarded Pater as a “moralist,” representing a “new variation” of old Victorian values, but not anticipating a departure from them (438). However, W. B. Yeats assigned a prominent position to Pater in the “Introduction” to his famous Oxford Book of Modern Verse as the one Victorian writer who had elicited the “entire uncritical admiration” of the younger generation of Modernists (1970, viii). Yeats, who placed a lyrical rendering of the famous Mona Lisa passage from Pater’s “Leonardo da Vinci” essay at the beginning of his influential anthology, describes Pater’s impact on his own generation in his autobiography as follows: Three or four years ago I re-read Marius the Epicurean, expecting to find I cared for it no longer, but it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to all of us, the only great prose in modern English, and yet I began to wonder if it, or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm. (qtd. in Christ 1984, 76)

His words are full of admiration for the novel, the reading of which he depicts as a key experience for himself and his entourage. The “disaster of his friends” that Yeats ominously refers to suggests a sense of danger that may have been triggered by homosexual tendencies in Pater’s writing (Potolsky 1998). It certainly attests to the subtle persuasiveness of Pater’s writing that had a lasting impact on writers of the modernist avant-garde despite the cumbersome Victorian ‘luggage’ that Eliot still complained about. Pater’s novel may have never reached the broad canonical popularity of other Victorian novels by, e.g., George Eliot, Charles Dickens, or William Makepeace Thackeray. However, thanks to Harold Bloom’s interventions in the 1970s and 1980s, Marius the Epicurean re-entered scholarly debates and has ever since preserved its position as an essential novel of the fin-de-siècle period (Bloom 1971 and 1985). Recent critical approaches have focused on Pater’s contribution as an early theorist and practitioner of cultural history, in the vein of Jacob Burckhardt or Aby Warburg (Lubbock 1983). Aleida Assmann has discussed Marius the Epicurean as an important study on the palimpsestic dimension of culture (2011, 218). She examines the

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cultural archaeology that the novel accomplishes, i.e., its continuous unearthing of fragments and remains from former periods in an attempt to make more sense of the present. For Pater, signifying practices depend on material carriers, i.e., media, for their transmission. His interest in the material conditions of individual and collective memory make him a relevant author for scholars interested in media studies and cultural memory. Queer theorists have revisited Pater’s oeuvre given his preference for male characters and male-male friendships. The first major investigations in this field were Richard Dellamora’s Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990) and Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994). In his study of the “Early Christian Novel,” Vincent A. Lankowish argues that in this sub-genre not only does the setting of these novels, i.e., catacombs, imply a notion of secrecy, but that the marriage between male Christians and Christ articulates desire between men. In the case of Marius, it is by virtue of his eventual martyrdom that he marries Christ but also creates a strong bond with Cornelius, for whose sake he renounces marriage with Cecilia. It is this sacrifice which effaces the homoerotic tensions that inform the structure of the novel (Lankowish 2000, 247). James Eli Adams’s study on the impact of ascetic self-discipline on male self-fashioning in the later nineteenth century, Dandies and Desert Saints (1995), considered Pater an important agent in a reconfiguration of masculinity (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). According to Adams, Marius is a Christian gentleman, who renounces “hearty, unguarded spontaneity” (1995, 188), in favour of a reserve deemed effeminate, but ultimately a sign of his character strength. Michael F. Davis has argued that Pater deserves particular attention as an early theorist of homosexuality, approaching same-sex desire as a field of theoretical enquiry (2002, 262). Marius the Epicurean has thus profited from a cultural turn within English literary studies, which places literature amidst broader contexts of cultural production. The novel’s bringing together of various discourses (from philosophy, aesthetics, religion, and science), its complex depiction of psychological aspects of identity formation, and its multi-layered encounters with history turn it into a key text for the study of late Victorian mentalities.

Bibliography Works Cited Adams, James E. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Amigoni, David. Victorian Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. Arnold, Matthew. “Essay on Marcus Aurelius.” The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. Trans. George Long. London: Cassell, 1908. 225–254.

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Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: CUP, 2011. Bloom, Harold. “Introduction: The Crystal Man.” Selected Writings of Walter Pater. Ed. Bloom. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. vii–xxxi. Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Walter Pater. By Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. 1–21. Bloom, Harold. “The Place of Pater: Marius the Epicurean.” The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. By Bloom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. 185–196. Bryden, Inga. Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Buckler, William E. “Marius the Epicurean: Beyond Victorianism.” Victorian Poetry 16.1 (1978): 147–166. Christ, Carol T. Victorian and Modern Poetics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Clements, Elicia, and Lesley J. Higgins, eds. Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Court, Franklin E. “The Critical Reception of Pater’s Marius.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 27.2 (1984): 124–139. Dahl, Curtis. “Pater’s Marius and Historical Novels on Early Christian Times.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28.1 (1973): 1–24. Daley, Kenneth. The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Athens: Ohio UP, 2001. Davis, Michael F. “Walter Pater’s ‘Latent Intelligence’ and the Conception of Queer ‘Theory.’” Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams. Greensboro: ELT Press, 2002. 261–285. Dawson, Gowan. “Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and the Discourse of Science in Macmillan’s Magazine: ‘A Creature of the Nineteenth Century.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 48.1 (2005): 38–54. Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Dowling, Linda. “Walter Pater and the Matter of the Self.” Die Modernisierung des Ich: Studien zur Subjektkonstitution in der Früh- und Vormoderne. Ed. Manfred Pfister. Passau: Rothe, 1989. 64–73. Eliot, Thomas S. “Arnold and Pater.” Selected Essays, 1917–1932. By Eliot. London: Faber, 1932. 431–443. Evangelista, Stefano. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Ferguson, Trish, ed. Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardization, Catastrophes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971. Hext, Kate. Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. Holloway, Lorretta M., and Jennifer A. Palmgren. Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Romances. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Hough, Graham. The Last Romantics. London: Duckworth, 1949. Iser, Wolfgang. Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment. Cambridge: CUP 1987. Iser, Wolfgang. “Walter Pater und T. S. Eliot: Der Übergang zur Modernität.” GermanischRomanische Monatsschrift 9 (1959): 391–408. Lankowish, Vincent A. “Love Among the Ruins: The Catacombs, the Closet, and the Victorian ‘Early Christian’ Novel.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28 (2000): 239–273.

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Lubbock, Jules. “Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean – The Imaginary Portrait as Cultural History.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 166–190. Meisel, Perry. The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. Middeke, Martin. Die Kunst der gelebten Zeit: Zur Phänomenologie literarischer Subjektivität im englischen Roman des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. Morgan, Thaïs, ed. Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourses: Renegotiating Gender and Power. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. Nadel, Ira B. “Autobiography as Fiction: The Example of Pater’s Marius.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 27.1 (1984): 34–40. Østermark-Johansen, Lene. “Pater and the Painterly: Imaginary Portraits.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 56.3 (2013): 343–354. Østermark-Johansen, Lene. Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pater, Walter. Appreciations: With an Essay on Style. 1889. London: Macmillan, 1910a. Pater, Walter. Greek Studies: A Series of Essays. 1894. London: Macmillan, 1895. Pater, Walter. Imaginary Portraits. 1887. Ed. Bill Beckley. New York: Allworth P, 1997. Pater, Walter. Marius the Epicurean. 1885. Ed. Michael Levey. London: Penguin, 1985. Pater, Walter. Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures. 1893. London: Macmillan, 1910b. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. 1877. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: OUP, 1986. Potolsky, Matthew. “Fear of Falling: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence.” ELH 65.3 (1998): 701–729. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. “Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting.” After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England. Ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. 36–58. Rajan, Gita. Oeuvres Intertwined: Walter Pater and Antoine Watteau.” Textual Bodies: Changing Boundaries of Literary Representation. Ed. Lori H. Lefkovitz. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. 185–205. Rippl, Gabriele. “Culture as Continuum: Walter Pater’s Dionysus in Exile and the Power of Ekphrasis.” Anglia 129 (2011): 333–361. Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The Genesis of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean.” Comparative Literature 14.3 (1962): 242–260. Ryan, Michael. “Narcissus Autobiographer: Marius the Epicurean.” ELH 43.2 (1976): 184–208. Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. New York: OUP, 2010. Saunders, Max, et al., eds. Romans and Romantics. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Schaffer, Aaron. “Théophile Gautier and ‘L’Art Pour l’Art’.” Sewanee Review 36.4 (1928): 405–417. Shuter, William F. Rereading Walter Pater. Cambridge: CUP, 1997. Straub, Julia. “Diaphanous Angels: Julia Margaret Cameron’s and Walter Pater’s Go-Betweens.” Textus 21 (2008): 65–82. Stray, Christopher, ed. Remaking the Classics: Literature, Genre and Media in Britain 1800–2000. London: Duckworth, 2007. Uhlig, Claus. “Walter Pater und die Poetik der Reminiszenz: Zur literarischen Methode einer Spätzeit.” Poetica 6 (1974): 205–227. Ward, Mary A. “Review of Marius the Epicurean, Macmillan’s Magazine May 1885.” Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage. Ed. R. M. Seiler. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. 127–138. Whiteley, Giles. Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism. London: Legenda, 2010. Wollheim, Richard. On Art and the Mind. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974.

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Yeats, William B. Introduction. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. 1936. Ed. Yeats. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970. v–xlii.

Further Reading Arata, Stephen. “The Impersonal Intimacy of Marius the Epicurean.” The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experiences and Victorian Culture. Ed. Rachel Ablow. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. 131–156. Behlman, Lee, and Anne Longmuir, eds. Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates. London: Routledge, 2016. Brake, Laurel, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams, eds. Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Greensboro: ELT, 2002. De Bruyn, Ben. “Art for Heart’s Sake: The Aesthetic Existences of Kiekegaard, Pater, and Iser.” Art and Life in Aestheticism: De-Humanizing and Re-humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic Receptor. Ed. Kelly Comfort. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 208–231. Losey, Jay. “Disguising the Self in Pater and Wilde.” Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-Century England. Ed. Jay Losey and William D. Brewer. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2000. 250–273.

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25 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) Abstract: This chapter explores how Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde negotiates both generic traditions, such as urban Gothic or detective fiction, and some of the most pressing late-Victorian concerns, such as fragmented and dissociated forms of identity, contemporary fears of biological and social degeneration, and more modernist preoccupations with the unconscious and repressed parts of the human psyche. These issues also help explain some of the aesthetic strategies of the novella – its plurality and disappearance of narrators, its deconstruction of characters as allegedly self-conscious subjects in a knowable community, and its gradual dissolution of a coherent storyline. Strange Case also already enacts modernist notions of textuality, including the uncertainty of authorship and of cultural authority in general. A final section presents modern readings that situate Stevenson’s text in an urban popular culture: by linking visual spectacles to consumer culture, the novella highlights new modes of consumption and perception. The text’s implicit parody of scientific discourses, but also its sensational subtexts of sexual transgression and addiction, account for the unbroken appeal of Strange Case and its status as a cultural myth. Keywords: Crime and detection, degeneration, the Gothic, identity, the uncanny

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. He was raised in a Calvinist household, and his nurse is said to have stimulated the child’s imagination with supernatural tales and stories from Scotland’s turbulent religious past (Arata 2010, 59). At the age of seventeen, Stevenson started studying at Edinburgh University, first engineering and then law, but he abandoned his studies, which resulted in ongoing conflicts with his father, a successful engineer. He became known for frequenting the less reputable parts of the Old Town of Edinburgh, and the fact that Stevenson spent his summers in France with a group of artists fostered his repute as a Bohemian. It was in France in the year 1876 that he met his future wife, Fanny Osbourne, a thirty-six-year-old American married woman with two children. Three years later, Stevenson travelled through America, and in 1880 he married Fanny Osbourne, who meanwhile had obtained a divorce. Until 1884, Stevenson and his wife lived primarily in France. The year 1880 saw the publication of Deacon Brodie, a play he wrote with William E. Henley on the double life of a cabinetmaker https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-026

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in Edinburgh. Treasure Island, which had first been serialised in the magazine Young Folks in 1881, was published in book form in 1883. After Stevenson had moved to Bournemouth with the financial aid of his father in 1884, his literary output increased and branched out considerably. He wrote short stories and poetry for children, composed two Gothic tales, i.e., “The Body Snatcher” (1884) and a story about a motiveless murder, “Markheim” (1885), as well as an urban Gothic novel, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Kidnapped, a historical adventure romance, was published the same year. After a sizable inheritance allowed the family to relocate to New York in 1887, he published a novel on Scottish history, The Master of Ballantrae, in serial instalments (1888). That year, Stevenson rented a yacht to explore the South Seas. He decided to settle on Samoa in 1890, where he wrote a number of short stories (among them “The Beach of Falesá”, 1892) and novels (Catriona and The Ebb-Tide in 1893, St. Ives and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston a year later) – texts which began to undermine the genre of imperial romance. Stevenson, who had suffered from ill health all his life, died on 3 December 1894, aged fourty-four, on the Samoan island of Upolu. Stevenson’s biography and his different roles as author, Bohemian, and adventurer (Gray 2004) have been highly stylised and mythicised, not only as a result of his (literary) reception but also because of Stevenson’s own self-fashioning (Fielding 2010, 3). While Stevenson is mainly remembered for Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his work is rich and multifaceted (Fielding 2010, 6), encompassing travel literature, historical narrative, children’s literature, short stories, novels, plays, essays, poems, memoirs, letters, photographs, and musical pieces. His texts incorporate different modes of writing, such as fantasy and realism; they blur the lines between fictionality and factuality, and between genres such as novel and romance (Duncan 2010, 15, 17) or detective fiction and the urban Gothic (Hirsch 1988, 228–242). Stevenson’s writings have been examined with a geographical focus and in terms of his affiliations with Scottishness, Englishness, Americanness, and the South Seas. They have been placed in the context of (Scottish) Romanticism and Victorian realism. It is, however, important to remember that Stevenson mixes and subverts these traditions (Duncan 2010, 15–16). His complex narrative techniques, his experiments with new, shorter narrative forms, and his choice of subject matter (fragmentations of subjectivity, new and uncanny urban spaces as a visualisation and exploration of the unconscious, the dissolution of cultural differences, or the pretensions of British imperialism) have all been classified as distinctly modern (Sandison 1996, 4–15). In Stevenson’s time, the production and consumption of literature changed significantly. Aided by the growing rates of literacy among the lower classes, fiction became a ‘mass’ market, in which Strange Case proved extremely successful. Other socio-cultural changes in late-Victorian Britain included economic recessions, a surge in working-class movements, and occasionally even riots, marking the end of

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an era of a social compromise that had been firmly based on middle-class values. The intensifying class conflict highlighted poverty and urban slums, bringing them into the focus of cultural awareness (and literary representations). The limits of colonial expansion also became a central issue of national discourse. Thus, national pride and a continued idealisation of the ‘white man’s civilising mission’ went hand in hand with concerns about immigration, discussions about the ‘health’ of the nation, and racism. In late-Victorian (Gothic) fiction, anxieties about a decline across all spectrums of society, both on the collective and individual level, were represented in terms of fragmentation and the loss of identity. The late-Victorian era was characterised by centrifugal tendencies, by disparate shifts in power, which re-positioned the ‘individual’ both as an object of history and a victim of social developments. The loss of certainties, a breakdown in traditional systems of belief, and epistemological relativism all contributed to the overall feeling of insecurity. The theory of evolution not only questioned the significance of the individual, it seriously undermined the notion of humanity as the epitome of a perfect creation. It also triggered fears about possible devolution (a reversion to earlier stages in the evolutionary process) leading to primitivism and animality – one of the central concerns of Strange Case. Such fears culminated in the discourses of degeneration that became prominent at the end of the century (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Stevenson’s Strange Case can be associated with a number of generic traditions. The text incorporates elements of Victorian realistic fiction, the Gothic novel, and the classic story of crime and detection. The traditional English Gothic motif of the doppelgänger is extended to encompass notions not only of split and even multiple personalities, but also of fragmented, dissociated forms of identity. Additionally, Strange Case represents a ‘classic’ example of the late-Victorian urban Gothic, in which London, the largest city in the world and the centre of a vast empire, is represented as uncanny, a place where repressed issues resurface in deferred and altered forms. The text highlights the city’s duality, visible, for instance, in a disparity between façades and interiors, which becomes linked to the characters’ behaviour and to their mental states. Strange Case can be read as a response to a series of social, psychological, and anthropological issues and concerns of the late-Victorian era. Indeed, the categories of cultural difference, discourses of devolution, and the latent fear of degeneration have all been of significant interest to literary scholars. The title not only draws attention to questions of social status (Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde), it also invites a reading of the text as a (medical or legal) ‘case study’. By connecting the scientist Jekyll to the

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monstrous and by employing many of the then-current (scientific) discourses, the text highlights and scrutinises the ideology of (scientific) progress. Hyde, Jekyll’s ‘double’, is ‘overdetermined’ in that he condenses a number of ideas. Like other literary monsters, he is an ambivalent, liminal figure; he blurs binary oppositions and disrupts dominant classificatory systems, opening himself up to a variety of interpretations in terms of class, race, gender, or sexuality. The narrative structure of Strange Case is a tightly woven mystery plot revolving around a series of crimes (committed by Hyde) and the quest for answers about their perpetrator and his motivation. Suspense is created by deferring those answers; the last step in this ‘game’ is Jekyll’s own statement, a confession which does not provide a conventional solution, however, but remains ‘strange’ in that it diversifies and dislocates the narrative perspective. This “Full Statement of the Caseˮ (Stevenson 2003, 47) is given by an unreliable narrator who splits himself into a subject (‘I’) and the double object (Jekyll, Hyde) of his own story. Moreover, in the course of the narrative, the authorial narrative voice gives way to a number of ‘witness’ reports and subjective narratives by deceased characters. With these techniques, Strange Case paves the way for modernist notions of textuality and authorship. Strange Case starts off conventionally with a third-person narration in which Gabriel John Utterson, Henry Jekyll’s close acquaintance and lawyer, is introduced. Utterson is first presented as a figure of middle-class respectability, rationality, and professionality. The narrator characterises him as a “cold, scanty” man, “lean, long, dusty, dreary” (Stevenson 2003, 7) – a description which is soon countered by an ironic subtext that runs through the narrative: “At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye [. . .]” (7). Already, respectability appears as a form of repression and as a façade: Utterson “drank gin when he was alone [. . .]; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years” (7). This ‘duplicity’ becomes menacing when the lawyer’s “approved tolerance for others” (7) turns out to be nothing but ruthless indifference (Annwn 2010, 9–10): “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way” (Stevenson 2003, 7). The reader first learns about Hyde in a story told by Richard Enfield, a distant relative and companion of Utterson. Enfield, “the well-known man about town” (Stevenson 2003, 8), relates that he had been “coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o’clock of a black winter morning” (9). This alludes either to the World’s End, a district of Chelsea which had a reputation as London’s Bohemian quarter (Sandison 1996, 233), or else to the East End of London, which was associated with immigration and (racial) otherness and therefore with the colonial margins of the British Empire (Dryden 2003, 84). Enfield recounts that he saw Hyde trampling calmly over a girl’s body, leaving her “screaming on the ground” (Stevenson 2003, 9). The scene may carry undertones of child prostitution (Dryden 2003, 82), but its uncanny quality is mostly located in the reaction of the decent

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citizens who try to save the girl. They call Hyde a “damned Juggernaut” (Stevenson 2003, 9), but in their reaction towards him they actually share Hyde’s ‘barbaric’ propensity for violence and murder: “[The apothecary] was like the rest of us; [. . .] Sawbones turn[ed] sick and white with the desire to kill him [i.e. Hyde]” (9). Women in particular begin to act like animalistic monsters: “we were keeping the women off him as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces [. . .]” (10). In the ‘civilised’ space of the modern metropolis, such murderous instincts are displaced onto the realm of finance: “killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them” (9). As a “gothic signifier of repressed desire” (Hirsch 1988, 223), Hyde resists detailed textual or verbal representation. Enfield can register his own feelings, but he remains unable to describe Hyde. Utterson, who takes on the role of a detective (“If he be Mr. Hyde, [. . .] I shall be Mr. Seek.” [Stevenson 2003, 15]), is convinced that an exercise in observation, similar to a scientific investigation, will bring an explanation: “If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined” (15). However, the reader’s “chief investigator and rational guideˮ (Hirsch 1988, 233), who practices self-discipline and self-denial (Danahay 2013, 36), has hidden depths and secrets himself: “the lawyer [. . .] brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some Jackin-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; [. . .] yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done [. . .]” (Stevenson 2003, 19). It comes as no surprise that Utterson, “a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest” (13), becomes obsessed with Hyde: “his imagination [. . .] was engaged or rather enslaved [. . .]” (14). The faceless figure begins to haunt the lawyer – first in his dreams, and then when he follows Hyde “through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city” (15). By linking the city with the exploration of the unconscious, Strange Case can be seen to anticipate strategies of literary modernism (Sandison 1996, 229, 224). Hyde represents ‘alterity’, an otherness that remains closely related to the self (Feldmann/Böhm-Schnitker 2009). This concept illustrates a change in Western notions of subjectivity: Twentieth-century philosophers argue that definitions of the self are always relational and based on an ambivalent demarcation between the self and its ‘others’, who may simultaneously appear desirable and menacing. The development of an ethics of alterity is illustrated by Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1969), which highlights the responsibility that emerges in a face-to-face encounter, a situation where the ‘I’ is exposed and subjected to the other. In Strange Case, Hyde is the other in a purely relational sense. Accordingly, he cannot be understood by detached, empirical observation and escapes Utterson’s ‘super-vision’.

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Rational and positivist mechanisms of power, such as precise observation and linguistic as well as discursive classification – strategies traditionally attached to the detective figure (and to Victorian realism) – prove to be insufficient when dealing with Hyde. Hyde is only presented in terms of the effects he evokes in his observers – a characteristic he shares with other ‘uncanny’ characters. In a Freudian sense, they are all frightening because their uncanniness leads back to something that is known and familiar (or heimlich) but has been repressed and now returns in a transformed or displaced Gestalt (Arata 2010, 53–57). This incomplete process of dealing with the hidden issues of one’s own past also takes on a phylogenetic aspect. In Utterson’s words: “There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?ˮ (Stevenson 2003, 17). Hyde is represented as an evolutionary throwback, an atavistic figure bearing many similarities with Cesare Lombroso’s ‘description’ of the degenerate criminal (Arata 2005, 186; Böhm-Schnitker 2013, 132): “Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation [. . .]ˮ (Stevenson 2003, 17). What makes the figure uncanny, then, is the fact that he turns the “discourses of atavism and criminality back on the bourgeoisie itself” (Arata 2005, 188). Hyde, who is consistently referred to as a gentleman, mimics the ‘cultivated’ lifestyle of the professional class, as his decent but ill-fitting clothes and the luxurious interior of his flat in a seedy part of Soho demonstrate. Apparently, the social status of the gentleman is under pressure, since it seems to be available to anybody with enough money (Danahay 2013, 25). All in all, the character blurs some of the key distinctions on which Victorian notions of ‘civilised’ behaviour were based: between humans and animals, between respectability and criminality, and between the rational, self-controlled gentleman of science and the urban degenerate driven by his primitive instincts. Utterson even “read[s] Satan’s signature” (Stevenson 2003, 17) upon Hyde’s face. Similar to other characters, Hyde amalgamates new scientific concepts with older Christian terms (Arata 2005, 187), thus adding a metaphysical dimension to the threat. In the course of his relentless chase for Hyde, Utterson, the primary focaliser at the start of the narrative, uncovers another aspect of Hyde’s uncanniness. He closes in on Hyde’s home in a “dismal quarter of Soho,” which “seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare” (Stevenson 2003, 23), a space in which the boundaries of cultural identity are blurred and social order is eroded: “the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass [. . .]” (23). This representation unveils a culture that is neither British nor patriarchal nor sober, a culture that appears ‘strange’ and ‘other’ from the perspective of established norms. Here, literature is cheaper than food: In the 1880s, the penny numbers (or ‘penny dreadfuls’, the literature of the streets) raised the anxiety of the middle classes with regard

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to the ‘depraved’ taste of the newly literate masses (Brantlinger 1998, 170). Strange Case can be seen to negotiate these new mass-cultural trends since it also stages a spectacular murder in the form of its mass media representation. The “Carew Murder Case” is cast as a sensational (and melodramatic) newspaper report, relating an eye-witness account of a maid who “was romantically givenˮ (Stevenson 2003, 21), that is, who indulged in reading romantic literature. The female servant represents a new kind of (literary) public sphere, signalling a potential shift in cultural authority (O’Dell 2012, 515). Strange Case already anticipates central modernist preoccupations with questions of identity and the ‘self’: In the figure of Hyde, it explores the unconscious, the suppressed part of the human psyche, undermining the pretensions of the knowing subject. Both the spatial representations of the city and the discourses of atavism that inform the novella are used to assess notions of an alienated and fragmented self. Later modernist works will explore these issues in more depth. The fact that Soho is the home of Jekyll’s heir, a man who stands to inherit “a quarter of a million sterlingˮ (Stevenson 2003, 23), has serious implications, since it indicates socio-economic shifts within the metropolitan space. Threats to established class and gender privileges also become manifest in the representation of the three main characters, all of them gentlemen and representatives of the professional classes. The group seems thoroughly self-assured; Utterson and Dr. Lanyon are “old matesˮ and “thorough respecters of themselves and of each otherˮ (13). The homosocial bonds between the three middle-aged bachelors carry the aura of an exclusively male “Clublandˮ (Showalter 1992, 11–12). However, the members of the group begin to show signs of egoism, distrust, conflict, transgression, and (self-) destruction – including oedipal conflict and sibling rivalry (Veeder 1988, 122–139). Utterson does not honour his word with regard to Jekyll’s will, and he ignores the latter’s explicit wishes when he breaks down the door to the laboratory “by brute forceˮ (Stevenson 2003, 38). Behind the door, the butler has heard his master “[w]eeping like a woman or a lost soulˮ (38), and the homicidal (or suicidal) ‘Jekyll’ himself recalls terrors that were “unmanningˮ (30). “[T]he Great Dr. Lanyon” (13), the representative of scientific rationalism, who bears the nickname “Hastieˮ (47), dies of shock after getting to the bottom of Jekyll’s secret. At the heart of the symbolic representations of potential threats to the upper middle class and of the decline of Victorian patriarchal structures lies Jekyll’s degeneration into a “profound [. . .] double-dealerˮ (48).

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The novel’s last chapter, “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case” (Stevenson 2003, 47), promises a ‘solution’ to the (legal and medical) case. Instead, the ‘dissolution’ of

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the narrative finds its culmination. By the penultimate chapter, “Dr. Lanyon’s Narrative” (41), the third-person narration has already ended, and the focalising character of Utterson is gone. The narration has shifted to a series of first-person narratives in the form of letters and documents, which dismantle and fragment the text’s structural coherence. Readers are thus confronted with a compilation of subjective ‘witness’ statements that disrupt the authority of a single voice and highlight the ‘dialogical’ form of the novel. Furthermore, the authors of these documents have all either died or disappeared. Jekyll’s narrative in the last chapter starts out like a conventional autobiography, but it soon reveals an apologetic tendency and hints at the fact that the whole story will not be revealed: [T]he worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as [. . .] I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection [. . .] I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. (47–48)

What Jekyll implies here is that a culture of respectability virtually breeds and cultivates secrecy, duplicity, and deceit. In a society in which name, reputation, and public image are of prime importance, respectability can function as a mere façade. Accordingly, Jekyll has divided his existence into a ‘secret’ and a ‘public’ life; a fissure that begins to transform the life of ‘Henry Jekyll’ into a series of poses and masks – a process similar to the one affecting the protagonist of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891, ↗ 26 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray). In Strange Case, the motif of the doppelgänger – a narrative device common in Gothic fiction – serves to represent ‘modern’ concepts and constructions of identity: [M]an is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. (48)

According to Jekyll’s prediction, the self transcends the notion of a mere dualism (as represented in traditional moral allegories). It potentially comprises a multitude of – sometimes uncontrollable – parts or fragments; it resembles the chemical experiment in which different ingredients are mixed to make up the drug that “shook the very fortress of identity” (50), as Jekyll has it. Stevenson was acquainted with late-Victorian accounts of dual or multiple personalities, and Jekyll’s ‘Full Statement of the Case’ can be seen to mimic and perhaps implicitly even parody the objective stance and rationalist rhetoric of scientific texts (Stiles 2012, 29–30, 44–47). In his narrative, Jekyll, the scientist, becomes the object of his own case study. Accordingly, his ‘full’ statement is full of ambiguities and lacks a coherent form of self-reference:

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The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified [. . .]. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn towards the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. [. . .] Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde [. . .]. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired [. . .]. And thus his conscience slumbered. (Stevenson 2003, 53)

The narrating ‘I’ generates a narrated Hyde and a narrated Jekyll, slipping from a first-person into a third-person point of view and ‘splitting’ the narrator into (at least) one ‘subject’ and two ‘objects’. The narrative voice of the final chapter remains indeterminate. While on the one hand distancing itself morally from Hyde as “pure evil” (Stevenson 2003, 51) and a “child of Hell” (59), it nevertheless completely merges with Hyde just at the moment when Carew’s murder is recounted (Garrett 1988, 63): “With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow [. . .]” (Stevenson 2003, 56). The novel thus also subverts the very notion of ‘character’ (Thomas 1988, 75) associated with Victorian realism. Rather than presenting a self-conscious subject, integrated in a knowable community (Feldmann 1995, 356) and conveying a sense of personal and social identity, Jekyll’s character not only disintegrates and dissolves, it simply vanishes: “Think of it – I did not even exist!” (Stevenson 2003, 52). According to the ‘Full Statement’, Jekyll’s reconfiguration also affects his “seemingly so solid body” (Stevenson 2003, 49), his (self-) perception, his senses, and his sensuality: “There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and [. . .] incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body [. . .]” (50). His physical transformations into Hyde, which occur spontaneously and are no longer controllable, happen exactly in those moments when he is focusing on his body, i.e. in moments of bodily self-awareness and self-indulgence (Danahay 2013, 30). While he is enjoying the sun on a park bench, “the animal within” (Stevenson 2003, 58) surfaces; while he is lying languidly in bed one morning, his “large, firm, white and comely” hand merges into Hyde’s hand, being “lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair” (54). Hyde’s (sexualised) hand (Drury 2003, 101–102) is not just a marker of gender and class (Danahay 2013, 29). Similar to the frequent allusions to Hyde’s ‘ape-like’ behaviour, it is also a reference to evolutionary biology and to discourses of degeneration; references which occur in similar form in other late-Victorian texts such as H. G. Wells’s scientific romance The Time Machine (1895, ↗ 31 Wells, The Time Machine) (Böhm-Schnitker 2013, 133–138) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897, ↗ 32 Stoker, Dracula). In Strange Case, the evolutionary degeneration happens on the level of physical deterioration, which leads to a dissolution of the ‘human’, culminating in the inorganic (Böhm-Schnitker 2013, 131): “for all his energy of life,” Jekyll thinks of Hyde as

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something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born [. . .]. (Stevenson 2003, 60–61)

While Jekyll’s body is merely in a state of dissolution, Hyde represents an undifferentiated body, even undifferentiated matter, which threatens an extinction of ‘spirit’ (Hurley 2004, 32–33, 42). This moment also marks a generic shift from the Gothic to horror. Psychoanalytically speaking, the scene represents the repulsive (and, at the same time, fascinating) quasi-primordial experience of ‘abjection’ – the transcending or denying of bodily borders that becomes a source of horror – a concept most prominently developed by Julia Kristeva in her book Powers of Horror. This also explains the “hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear” (Stevenson 2003, 17), which Hyde provokes. Hyde’s body, and particularly his hand, also carries further cultural connotations, namely a struggle for discursive and textual mastery (Feldmann 1995, 557). What Jekyll remembers as “one part” of his “original character” is that he “could write [. . .] [his] own hand” (Stevenson 2003, 58–59). Yet Hyde learns to imitate Jekyll’s hand; consequently, (hand)writing and signature no longer serve as an expression of individuality and a means for authentication. Having “more than a son’s indifference” (55), Hyde defaces and destroys Jekyll’s texts and the signs of patrilineal power, and, in doing so, usurps Jekyll’s cultural authority: “Hence the apelike tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father [. . .]” (61). While Jekyll is no longer contained in the life story through which he tries to define himself, Hyde keeps breaking out of the formula Jekyll has written for him (Thomas 1988, 74). In addition, Jekyll cannot maintain authority over his own narrative anymore because his ‘character’ disintegrates and threatens to vanish completely. At the end of the story, he is either dead or has disappeared, as his note to Utterson, appended to the ‘Full Statement’, declares: “When this shall fall into your hands, I shall have disappeared [. . .]” (Stevenson 2003, 41). It remains unclear to whom the ‘I’ in the last sentences of the text refers, and who the author of the ‘Full Statement’ even is: “Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? [. . .] God knows; I am careless; [. . .] what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen [. . .], I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end” (62). The ending of Strange Case exhibits a distinct meta-narrative reflexivity (Garrett 1988, 63) and can be seen to enact some of the concerns of literary modernism: the estrangement of the narrator from ‘his’ text as well as the disappearance of the author (Thomas 1988, 79). In telling an incomplete story, withdrawing from the scene of narration, and leaving behind written documents to replace him, Jekyll can be compared to Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900, ↗ 34 Conrad, Lord Jim) (Thomas 1988, 80–81). Within a larger literary and cultural historical context, the

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collapse of Victorian narrative conventions corresponds with a shift of power from writers to both texts and their readers (as the site where meaning is produced), and from literary ‘masters’ to literary markets (Feldmann 1995, 558).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Strange Case was a huge success. Published in 1886 in the popular format of a ‘shilling shocker’, it sold forty thousand copies in its first months. In the speculations surrounding the so-called Ripper Murders (1888), Stevenson’s tale of criminal duality had already become a stock reference for a split personality, a model that shaped the popular stereotype of the ‘mad doctor’ (Walkowitz 2000, 207). Contemporary readers also interpreted Jekyll/Hyde’s nocturnal “adventures” (Stevenson 2003, 53, 55) as erotic, and journalists referred to Hyde’s acts of random violence as sexual crimes (Walkowitz 2000, 206). The novel’s sensational ‘Carew murder case’ in particular began to be associated with a night-time ‘lust murder’, a concept recently introduced by the new science of sexology (Heath 1996, 74–77). Major female characters are absent in Stevenson’s text. The successful theatre version of Strange Case, which opened in the West End in 1888 and became the blueprint for movie adaptations such as Rouben Mamoulian’s classic horror film (1932), added a female character as an object for Jekyll/Hyde’s ‘lust’. In doing so, it relocated any potential sexual transgressions within the boundaries of heterosexuality (Walkowitz 2000, 206). However, the novel contains vague references to the “secret pleasures” (Stevenson 2003, 55) which Jekyll makes “haste to seek in [. . .] disguise” (53). Read in the context of contemporary sexual politics, Strange Case can be interpreted as a symptom of late-Victorian homosexual panic (Showalter 1992, 107). From this historical perspective, the reference to Jekyll’s “nameless situation” (Stevenson 2003, 41) is an appropriate rhetorical strategy: The silent speech of homosexuality reacts to the strict legislation (the Labouchère Amendment Act of 1886) which criminalised homosexual acts (Sanna 2012, 21–30). Strange Case has invited modern queer readings (e.g. Hall 2003, 130–144), including (over)readings of Jekyll as a masochist-turned-sadist (Johns 2015, 82). Critics have also examined other transgressive subtexts of the tale. It is plausible to read Strange Case as a narrative of drink and addiction. The many literal references to alcohol serve as a means of individual characterisation and as a marker of class, albeit an ambivalent one: Gin palaces are located in Soho, the respectable middle-class characters drink wine, but Utterson also “drank gin when he was alone” (Stevenson 2003, 7), and Hyde’s house in Soho has “[a] closet [. . .] filled with wine” (24). In addition, the novel resonates with the concepts and rhetoric of the temperance movement, for instance, through the repeated use of the adjective ‘sober’ (Reed 2006, 96–113). The “transforming draught” (Stevenson 2003, 56) which Jekyll swallows, however, could

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be any kind of drug, including laudanum, a then widely available opium-derived narcotic. By situating Strange Case in a developing discourse on addiction, critics have been able to focus on Utterson as an integral part of the novel’s structure and on neglected chapters in which the tension (and dialectic) between Utterson and Jekyll surfaces, for instance in “Dr. Jekyll was Quite at Ease” (19). As an embodiment of addiction that stands between Utterson (who represses his desires) and Jekyll, Hyde can be theorised as “the surplus of reality that cannot be symbolized in discourse” (Comitini 2012, 118) – an aporia, which leaves a (gaping) hole at the centre of the novel. Another way of assessing the ‘transgressive’ elements in Strange Case is to look at them through the lens of contemporary law (Frank 2010) – an approach anchored in a new, interdisciplinary ‘law-and-literature movement’. The novel addresses a number of current legal issues, including questions of testamentary and inheritance law, the right to privacy, the obligation to exercise discretion, and criminal offences such as coercion and forgery. Specifically, transgression is repeatedly symbolised by the liminal space of the door, and there are many legal issues involved in the opening, closing, and breaking down of doors as barriers. The sensational appeal of Stevenson’s bestseller has provoked questions about the text’s ‘literary merits’ and raised doubts about its canonical status in literary history. Assessments of Strange Case as a romance with mass-cultural appeal, as the product of an emerging literary mass market, tend to counter these doubts by emphasising Stevenson’s (supposed) ambivalence toward his own popular success. The novel is often read as an allegory of the commercialisation of literature and an expression of late-Victorian fears about the effects of mass literacy (Brantlinger 1998, 167–176). Such biographical readings see the author in a double bind, torn between his need for commercial success on the one hand and his desire to write a ‘timeless masterpiece’ on the other (Brantlinger 1998, 170, 176). In doing so, they reproduce some of the ideologically charged discourses of nineteenth-century ‘authorities’ about a ‘depraved’ street literature and the ‘cheap’ taste of the ‘masses’, and they reiterate simplistic binary oppositions between ‘high’ or elite and ‘low’ or popular, which have restricted analyses of popular literature ever since. It is more fruitful to locate Stevenson’s Gothic novel historically in the context of late-Victorian popular culture. Strange Case can be read as a symptom of new modes of consumption and perception. Allusions to optical technologies – the magic lantern, the kaleidoscope, and other popular projection devices – pervade the representation of Utterson’s sleepless night and of his nightmare (Annwn 2010, 13–18). The ‘pre-cinematic’ images racing through his mind in “a scroll of lighted pictures” (Stevenson 2003, 14) suggest links between popular visual entertainments and emotion, between imagination and (day)dreams, between visual spectacles and city (night)scapes. The feminised cityscape of the first scene points to a consumerist spectacle in which visual attraction guarantees sale. Shopkeepers invest in the façades of their houses, and in doing so produce a kind of screen effect (which may carry the implication of hiding secrets beneath its surface): “the shop

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fronts stood along that thoroughfare with an air of invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it veiled its more florid charms [. . .], the street [. . .] instantly caught and pleased the eye of the passenger” (8). The metaphorical charms of the saleswomen are connected with prostitution and, by extension, with a trade in human bodies. The representation of consumer culture and the importance of money (Walker 2007, 86–88) in Strange Case are topics that still deserve more attention. In recent years, new theoretical approaches have opened up new avenues of interpretation. Animal studies have placed Hyde’s ‘animality’ in a larger context of nineteenth-century human-animal relations and the controversial ethical issues emerging from late-Victorian biopolitics (Ortiz-Robles 2015). Ecocritical approaches have inspired other re-readings of Hyde, investing this ‘degenerate’ figure with ecological significance. The depiction of Hyde’s energy appears to be modelled on popular discussions about contemporary thermodynamic research, with which Stevenson was acquainted. The fact that Jekyll runs out of ingredients for his chemical compound subverts dreams of unbounded energy and places the text in contemporary (as well as modern) discussions of resource depletion (MacDuffie 2014, 170–197). Moreover, the small, malformed urban degenerate Hyde is consistently associated with a polluted atmosphere. When Utterson drives to Soho in search of Hyde, the novel foregrounds darkness and brown fog – an articulation of concerns about environmental pollution. The fog’s chemical composition and the deadly effects of what later will be coined ‘smog’ were already discussed in the 1880s (Taylor 2016, 104–105, 110–113). The motif of the transgressive difference of an ‘other’ self (in conjunction with the dissociative symptoms resulting from scientific self-experiments) has become so pervasive that the ‘Jekyll and Hyde’-formula has turned into a cultural code, “a constant cultural referent” (Dryden 2010, 13), open to reinterpretations in diverse historical contexts and appropriations in new media. Transformations of the cultural myth have resulted in Marvel’s comic book hero Hulk (Dryden 2010, 15) or in Valery Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990), a neo-Victorian novel written from the perspective of a maidservant in Jekyll’s household. The long-lasting impact of Strange Case on the popular imagination can also be traced in film and TV history, ranging from early film adaptations in the silent era to (post)modern TV series (Weber 2015, 216–236). While studies of such adaptations have explored various intertextual models (Leitch 2011), a critical history of the different cultural imaginaries in which these adaptations are embedded – in analogy to Auerbach’s thesis (1995) that every epoch embraces the monster it needs – is still waiting to be written.

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Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Leitch, Thomas. “Jekyll, Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde: Four Models of Intertextuality.” Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation. Ed. Abigail Burnham Bloom and Mary Sanders Pollock. Amherst: Cambria, 2011. 27–47. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. 3rd ed. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991. MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: CUP, 2014. O’Dell, Benjamin D. “Character Crisis: Hegemonic Negotiations in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Victorian Literature and Culture 40.2 (2012): 509–521. Ortiz-Robles, Mario. “Liminanimal: The Monster in Late Victorian Gothic Fiction.ˮ European Journal of English Studies 19.1 (2015): 10–23. Reed, Thomas L., Jr. The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorian Alcohol Debate. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. Sandison, Alan. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism: A Future Feeling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. Sanna, Antonio. “Silent Homosexuality in Oscar Wilde’s Teleny and The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Law and Literature 24.1 (2012): 21–39. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Virago, 1992. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886. Ed. Katherine Linehan. New York: Norton, 2003. Stiles, Anne. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. Thomas, Ronald R. “The Strange Voices in the Strange Case: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the Voices of Modern Fiction.” Veeder and Hirsch 1988, 73–93. Veeder, William. “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy.” Veeder and Hirsch 1988, 107–160. Veeder, William, and Gordon Hirsch, eds. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after One Hundred Years. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Walker, Richard J. Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago, 2000. Weber, Johannes. ‘Like some damned Juggernaut’: The Proto-Filmic Monstrosity of Late Victorian Literary Figures. Bamberg: U of Bamberg P, 2015.

Further Reading Ambrosini, Richard, and Richard Dury, eds. Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006. Goetsch, Paul. Monsters in English Literature: From the Romantic Age to the First World War. Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 2002.

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Maunder, Andrew, and Grace Moore, eds. Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. McCracken-Flesher, Caroline, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: MLA, 2013. Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: OUP, 1999. Reid, Julia. Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Scholz, Susanne. Phantasmatic Knowledge: Visions of the Human and the Scientific Gaze in English Literature, 1880–1930. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013.

Susanne Bach

26 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Abstract: This chapter initially focusses on the literary influences on Wilde’s novel (among many others, Ruskin and Pater), thus placing it in the force field of fin-de-siècle Aestheticism, decadence, and dandyhood, all of which play a major part in the construction and concern of Dorian Gray. Located in the grey area between Victorianism and modernism, different approaches to genre questions are discussed, since the work has been read, for instance, as a tragedy, a negative Bildungsroman, a morality play, an intertextual melée, and a metafictional and deconstructive mise en abyme exploring double-voiced discourse strategies. Gender, masculinities, and queer studies influences on the reception of the novel are expounded. The chapter closes by identifying open research questions in the area of intersectionality. Keywords: Aestheticism, gender, homoeroticism, metafiction, intersectionality, deconstruction

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment At first glance, secondary literature on Oscar Wilde, much more than on other authors, is likely to convey the impression that the Irish-born writer preternaturally was several persons living at the same time. Some studies monolithically, biographically, and/or salaciously foreground his sexual proclivities and find evidence for their statements in his writing; others see in Oscar Wilde the committed man of the theatre, while even others focus on the generic diversity of his writing and point out the narratological, psychological, and intellectual finesse of his erudite, elegant, and witty style. For one academic scholar, for instance, Wilde was primarily “distinguished by both his class and his education” (Sanders 2004, 483), while others unkindly recite, very much like a mantra, the poverty and squalor of his last years in Paris and his death as a “penniless outcast” (Henley 2000) ‘in the gutter’ (Pesch 1991, 14, my translation). The bare facts are: Oscar Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin, Ireland, and baptised Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde; and he died in Paris, not in the gutter but in the Hôtel d’Alsace (now simply L’Hôtel), Rue des Beaux-Arts, on 30 November 1900. On his deathbed, he was conditionally baptised into the Catholic Church by Father Cuthbert Dunne (Kohl 2000, 276). Wilde’s friend and first male lover Robert Ross was present along with another old friend, Reginald Turner. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-027

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The Irish author was buried in Paris (first at Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, later – in 1909 – his remains were transferred to the Cimetière du Père Lachaise). Oscar Wilde’s father was William Wilde, a well-known medical doctor, who not only founded a hospital for the poor at his own expense but was also knighted for having acted as an advisor for the Irish censuses. His private life was colourful, to say the least: He fathered several children in and out of wedlock, went on exotic travels – partially funded by a rich patient –, collected items from an Egyptian tomb and was at the centre of a scandal when the daughter of a colleague claimed to have been anaesthetised and raped by him (Ellman 1987; Belford 2000; Fryer 2005). Oscar Wilde’s mother was Jane Francesca Elgee, known as ‘Speranza’, a well-known poet, translator, and women’s rights activist. Critics’ opinions are divided on her; Sanders, for instance, does not mince words and calls her “a romantically inclined mother who dabbled in sentimental nationalist verse” (2004, 483; see also Fitzsimons 2016). Be that as it may, she published poems in The Nation, spoke several languages, and was able to draw forth admiration and support (Kohl 2000, 14–16). Oscar Wilde received an outstanding education. At Trinity College, Dublin, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, he read Greats (i.e. Roman History, Greek History, and Philosophy). He excelled in these subjects, received scholarships and prizes, and successively became interested in Aestheticism. This movement originated in the writings of the philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867), who first coined the phrase l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake; Ullrich 2005), and in the poetry of Théophile Gautier, whose polished style demonstrated his belief in the perfection of form as an end in itself. Aestheticism rejected both the mimetic and the didactic roles of art and placed supreme emphasis on the intrinsic worth of formal values [. . .]. It thus [. . .] ran counter to Ruskin’s interpretation of art as an imitator of nature and a means to convey moral and spiritual truths. [. . .] An extension of the idea that art was independent of moral teaching was the belief that the artist stood outside conventional society. (Treuherz 1993, 131–132)

Teachers who can be credited with having inspired Wilde’s interest in Aestheticism were John Pentland Mahaffy, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater. Especially the latter would prove influential for him since he advocated a refinement of sensation in pursuit of an ultimate truth in Art and Life [sic] and in order that an ecstasy of passionate response might be maintained. In the face of the transience of life, he suggests, the cultivation of the momentary appreciation of the beautiful, and therefore of the ‘truthful’, could serve to fire the spirit. (Sanders 2004, 469)

Wilde, then a student with “outrageous clothes and opinions” (Nunokawa and Sickles 2005, 13), early in his life became a self-professed dandy with a “green carnation in his button-hole” and “velvet knee breeches” (Abrams et al. 1979, 1676). On the intellectual side, Pater’s influential study Renaissance was his “golden book”: “I never travel anywhere without it. But it is the very flower of decadence; the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written” (qtd. in Abrams et al.

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1979, 1676). Aestheticism became Oscar Wilde’s credo. For him, “Art for Art’s sake [. . .] included not only French poets and critics but also a line of English poets going back through Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites to Keats” (Abrams et al. 1979, 1676). Realism was a “prison house” which he rejected; for him, it was art that allegedly shaped life, since “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” (qtd. in Middeke 2004, 139). In 1878, Wilde was pronounced winner of the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Ravenna’. After graduation and the publication of a poetry collection (1881), he travelled across the United States, giving lectures, and meeting with Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, and other influential contemporaries. But he was not selective in the choice of his audience. One could even call him courageous, considering that he did not shrink from giving “refinedly outrageous lectures” to “Colorado miners” in the early 1880s, “kitted out in velvet knee-breeches” (Sanders 2004, 483). Never lost for words, in one lecture, he asserted that “to disagree with three-fourths of all England on all points of view is one of the first elements of sanity” (qtd. in Abrams et al. 1979, 1676). On returning home, he continued his lecture tours in Great Britain and Ireland. In 1884, Wilde married the affluent Constance Lloyd, an author of children’s stories. Their sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born in 1885 and 1886. The marriage seems to have been happy: In 1888, Constance Lloyd had known Oscar Wilde for nine years; she had been married to him for four. Her love for her brilliant husband (“As long as I live you shall be my lover,” she wrote in answer to his proposal in 1883) was fully returned. “I feel incomplete without you,” Oscar told her shortly after their marriage. A proud new father, he couldn’t stop urging male friends to get married. (Seymour 2011)

While working as an editor of the women’s magazine Lady’s World, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888); and in 1891, Intentions followed, an essay collection on Aestheticism. This, however, was just the beginning. Oscar Wilde wrote nine plays and – given the fact that he died at the early age of 46 – left an impressive body of poems, short stories, and essays to posterity. Yet his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, suffices to demonstrate the wit, the creativity, and the variety of the author’s talent. Andrew Sanders, like many others, sees The Picture of Dorian Gray as Wilde’s “most important work of fiction” (2004, 484). But it was not just his writing which made him famous. His private life was also of interest to the public and the press. His hedonistic and, moreover, increasingly eccentric and scarcely hidden homosexual lifestyle made him notorious; caricatures of him abounded (e.g., Janes 2016). Although he was married and a father, his 1891 meeting with a “handsome young poet” (Abrams et al. 1979, 1677), Lord Alfred Douglas, would set off his undoing. The two men established “a homosexual relationship, which was to prove a disaster for him. In 1895, Lord Alfred’s father [. . .]

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accused Wilde of homosexuality; Wilde recklessly sued for libel, lost the case, and was thereupon arrested” (Abrams et al. 1979, 1677). Convicted for “acts of gross indecency between men” (Foldy 1997, ix), he was to serve a two-year prison sentence, beginning in Newgate Prison. He then was transferred to Pentonville Prison, where he suffered under the terms of his sentence. ‘Hard labour’ consisted of walking on a treadmill and picking oakum for many hours nearly every day. Prisoners were kept isolated from each other; the only texts they were allowed to read were the Bible and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Abrams et al. 1979, 1678). A few months later, Wilde was transferred to Wandsworth Prison, where he also had to serve a sentence of hard labour. In the end, Reading Gaol would be his last prison address; there, he was simply prisoner ‘C.3.3ʹ. The transfer to Reading was traumatic, as Wilde states: [. . .] on November 13, 1895 I was brought down [to Reading prison] from London. From two o’clock till two thirty on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at . . . of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. (qtd. in Pratt 2002, 57)

After his release from prison in 1897, ill and destitute, Wilde would reflect on these dark and sad times in his Ballad of Reading Gaol: [. . .] With slouch and swing around the ring We trod the Fool’s Parade! We did not care: we knew we were The Devil’s Own Brigade: And shaven head and feet of lead Make a merry masquerade. We tore the tarry rope to shreds With blunt and bleeding nails; We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors, And cleaned the shining rails: And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank, And clattered with the pails. We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones, We turned the dusty drill: We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns, And sweated on the mill: But in the heart of every man Terror was lying still. [. . .] (Wilde 2016a)

The ballad was an immediate success even though the author’s name was not given. Instead, it was published under the pseudonym ‘C.3.3.’, the number of Wilde’s cell at Reading Gaol which became his new ‘name’, as prisoners were not

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addressed by their given name but their number. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was met with enthusiastic appraisal, but also with criticism directed at the sophism contained in its lines (Kohl 2000, 231–232). On 18 May 1897, Wilde was released from prison, he immediately left for France, never returned to Great Britain or to his native Ireland, and died in Paris on 30 November 1900. In hindsight, it seems that not only Wilde himself was taken to court, but also his challenging convictions and his extravagant lifestyle, his courageous oeuvre, his outré eccentricity, his bold behaviour, and finally, his allegedly ‘deviant’ sexuality, which led him to not only cheat on his wife, but to do so with male prostitutes, cross-dressers, and male members of the aristocracy. Society might have forgiven an extramarital affair, but in the eyes of his contemporaries his choice of partners was an unpardonable offence.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns The first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890; a revised – and longer – version appeared in 1891 at Ward, Lock and Company, London. It caused more than just a stir, even though the social mores had changed by late-Victorian times: ‘Victorian’ values, beliefs, and standards of personal and social behaviour were already being challenged, sometimes angrily, by a new generation of intellectuals and writers. The literature of the last twenty years of the century engages in an extended and various [sic] discourse which attempts to re-evaluate the assumptions of the 1850s and 1860s and to work out the implications of new concepts of liberation [. . .]. (Sanders 2004, 465)

But they had evidently not changed enough to allow room for a novel like The Picture of Dorian Gray. Press reactions were hostile: “A Study in Puppydom [. . .] stupid and vulgar” (qtd. in Wilde 2005, 412). They also criticised the novel’s “effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophising and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity” (qtd. in Kohl 1980, 226). Wilde was not intimidated by the strong reaction. His opinion was firm: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Wilde 1985, 3). Moreover, he fought back by writing a letter to the editor of the Scots Observer, claiming that “[e]ach man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them” (Wilde 1968, 248). The Picture of Dorian Gray’s subversive power, at work on “symbolic and literal levels” (Smith 2004, 151), became apparent at the latest when it was used in the cross-examination of Wilde by barrister Edward Carson in the by now famous case of Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry in 1895, blurring the boundaries between literature and life:

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Carson: The affection and love of the artist of Dorian Gray might lead an ordinary individual to believe that it might have a certain tendency? Wilde: I have no knowledge of the views of an ordinary individual. [. . .] Carson: [. . .] Have you ever adored a young man madly? Wilde: No, not madly. I prefer love – that is a higher form. (qtd. in Smith 2004, 150).

Seen from a modern perspective, The Picture of Dorian Gray fits well into the fin-desiècle feeling: Located between Aestheticism and decadence, it cannot be called Victorian any more and at the same time, it is not yet modernist. In Wilde’s novel, boundaries are blurred and old certainties are questioned. Dorian, the decadent protagonist, is a dandy (Knoll 2013, 175) who challenges heteronormative gender conceptions and, moreover, the clear-cut division between expected, traditional performance scripts of masculine and feminine behaviour (Höfele 1983, 159–161). On top of that, the novel places an overtly explicit, if not aggressively demonstrative focus on the senses already in the very first sentences: The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs [. . .]. (Wilde 1985, 5)

With this unabashed and brazen focus on highly sensual, ‘decadent’ perceptions, Wilde challenged society’s norms of appropriate behaviour. A Lord lounging on a “divan of Persian saddle-bags” did not fit the expectations of the majority of the reading public. Neither should a Lady like Victoria Wotton wear dresses that “always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy” (52). Wilde often made use of double-voiced discourse. Lady Wotton is not a ‘real’ lady and Dorian is not a ‘real’ man, since he is subliminally described in a rather feminine manner: “His finely-chiselled nostrils quivered, and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling” (Wilde 1985, 26). His eyes and lips are also described as “parted in frightened pleasure” (42). When he considers the length of the expected affection on the part of his admirer, he measures it with the external signs of ageing (32). Thus, the novel is not only “subversive” (Sanders 2004, 483), it also manoeuvres between “visibility and invisibility. Wilde, by creating a secret gay identity, was trying to make that identity visible to a gay culture and invisible to the dominant one” (Smith 2004, 151). He was not to succeed. “The love that dare not speak its name,” as his later partner and lover Lord Alfred Douglas put it in his poem “Two Loves” (Douglas 1894), was an emotion and a

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practice the majority of Victorian society could and would not tolerate. In general, the novel oscillates between various ideologies: “Aestheticism is both damned and dangerously upheld; hedonism both indulged and disdained. Dorian Gray is a tragedy of sorts with the subtext of a morality play; its self-destructive, darkly sinning central character is at once a desperate suicide and a martyr” (Sanders 2004, 484). Wilde’s novel left behind the dire naturalism of a Thomas Hardy (↗ 30 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure), for instance, but also the focus on social criticism and realistic detail of a Charles Dickens (↗ 16 Charles Dickens, Bleak House). Its preface – more a credo than anything else – sets the tone for the narration that is to follow: “The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. [. . .] All Art is at once surface and symbol. [. . .] It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. [. . .] All art is quite useless” (Wilde 1985, 3–4). This aestheticist manifesto introduces the hedonistic, the decadent, the narcissistic agenda of Wilde’s more or less subtly hidden homoerotic novel. Basil Hallward, a painter, is so impressed by Dorian Gray’s beauty that he decides to paint his portrait. Soon after, Hallward’s friend Lord Henry Wotton comes to visit and thus also meets Dorian. Both older men are enchanted with his youth and beauty. But the charm works both ways: Dorian becomes fascinated by Wotton’s hedonistic lifestyle and consorts with him. While his portrait is being painted, Dorian realises that he will age like everyone else, and will thus lose his power of attraction. He offers a bargain: How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that! (Wilde 1985, 31)

His quasi-prayer is strengthened by Basil Hallward’s mysterious confession: “[. . .] I really can’t exhibit [the picture]. I have put too much of myself into it” (6). After that, Dorian Gray’s portrait ages and shows signs of his sins and character faults, while Gray himself remains young and untouched by time, passions, and decay. It is now Wotton’s influence that makes Dorian (the ‘golden boy’; d’or in French means ‘of gold’) explore, experience, and love the world and all its opportunities. Dorian’s guide book, given to him by Lord Henry, is the decadent French novel À Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (Holland 2004, 94; Middeke 2004, 104). Dorian learns to love women and men, he experiments with drugs, enjoys the opera and the theatre, and he travels. But he never ages visibly. When he falls in love with the actress Sybil Vane, he quickly proposes marriage. She is as happy as can be, but makes the fatal decision to end her acting career. In his essay “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde would implicitly expound the background to Dorian’s horrified reaction to Sybil’s decision: “All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be

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used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything” (Wilde 2016b, 55). As if acting on this principle, Dorian now rejects Sybil; she, in turn, commits suicide. Dorian’s life takes a turn for the worse: he frequents opium dens, and more and more turns his attention to men, some of whom are obviously tarnished by having associated with him. Basil accuses him of homosexuality; an accusation that he barely tries to hide: Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James’s Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with him? (Wilde 1985, 165)

More than eighteen years after having painted his portrait, Hallward comes to visit. When he sees the terribly altered image of Dorian, an argument erupts in which Dorian blames Basil and, in a bout of anger, stabs him to death. Following this, Dorian blackmails a chemist friend of his into destroying the corpse of Basil, on account of which the chemist will later commit suicide. Sybil Vane’s brother James comes close to uncovering Dorian’s secret, but is shot in a hunting accident before he can expose Dorian as the cause of Sybil’s suicide. In the end, Dorian decides to destroy the picture and attacks it with a knife. His servants hear a cry and run to the locked room in which the picture was kept, but find merely a “withered, wrinkled and loathsome” (Wilde 1985, 246) old man, and the portrait which again shows Dorian in the beauty of his youth. The old man, however, can only be identified as their former master with the help of the rings he is wearing. A central feature, if not the central feature, of the novel is its extreme homosociality. It is a male society that is depicted; women are flat characters, misogynistically located at the margins, who serve as ex negativo examples for the men; they are “the triumph of matter over mind” (Wilde 1985, 54). For Lord Henry’s wife, a character description imitating the rhyme scheme of a limerick is apparently sufficient: “Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church” (52). Other women are likened to animals: “A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a steeplechase. They take things flying” (40). At the same time, female characters are stupid. Lady Wotton does not understand Dorian’s role for her own husband, even though in a conversation with her adversary she admits: “I know you quite well by your photographs. I think my husband has got seventeen of them” (52). Conversely, Lord Wotton has fixed opinions on women: “there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society” (54). Obviously, his wife does not belong to this group, since the couple divorce (232).

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Only the actress Sybil Vane is briefly able to leave the sphere of ‘tainted’ womanhood and to transcend the stereotypical masculine/feminine division: “One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. I have seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb [. . .]. I have watched her [. . .] disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap” (58). “When she came on in her boy’s clothes she was perfectly wonderful” (85). She can only be successful when she is not her own self, as a discussion between Lord Henry and Dorian details: “Tonight she is Imogen, [. . .] and tomorrow night she will be Juliet.” “When is she Sybil Vane?” “Never.” “I congratulate you.” (62)

However, as soon as Sybil decides to end her acting career for Dorian, the latter loses all interest in her. Sybil’s sin lies in recognizing herself, therefore losing all of the paradoxical authenticity which manifested itself in and through her acting and which Dorian had treasured above all other of her qualities. Sybil’s following realisation ironically represents the beginning of her demise: “Tonight, for the first time, I became conscious [. . .] that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my own words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection” (97). Thus, the novel appears to foreground the dandy and/or the homosexual at the expense of another large, marginalised group: women. The New Woman and women per se, here functioning as counter concepts to the dandy and the homosexual, are a threat that must be contained: In this novel, men can be everything to men, thus rendering women superfluous. Nature, seen as being closer to women (Ortner, 1974), needs to be tamed, contained, or even eradicated: What the male protagonists seek are culture and control.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies “A patina of pluralism surrounds a range of diverse contemporary readings” of the novel, Michael Patrick Gillespie seems to sigh in his essay on “resistant readings” of Wilde’s novel (1992, 7). First and foremost, however, Aestheticism is probably the novel’s key concept, influencing narrative strategies comprehensively as their underlying credo, their invisible motto, and their vital force. The word aesthetic was first used in a Latin form as the title of two volumes, Aesthetica (1750–1758) by Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762). Baumgarten defined beauty as phenomenal perfection and the importance of this, in thinking about art, was that it places a predominant stress on apprehension through the senses. “By 1880 the noun aesthete was being widely used, most often in a derogatory sense. The principles and

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practices of the ‘aesthetic movement’ around Walter Pater were both attacked and sneered at [. . .]” (Williams 1976, 28). In The Picture of Dorian Gray, told by a third person narrator, questions of Aestheticism are intimately linked to those pertaining to identity and temptation, to narcissism and homoeroticism, to class, gender, and religion. Wilde’s novel can also be read as an aesthetic, and at the same time, metafictional mise en abyme, since it refers back to and mirrors the reading of novels and their sometimes lifechanging influence: [Dorian’s] eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed. (Wilde 1985, 138–139)

The novel implicates its readers and their perception, which could serve as an explanation for the heated response by Wilde’s contemporaries. By only alluding to certain vices or sins, the recipient’s mental participation is required, previous knowledge is activated and thus the reader colludes with the morally tainted Dorian. It is the reader who fills in the narrative gaps of the novel with his or her own fantasies and images. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the mirror-like painting as a medium of understanding/recognising takes up a prominent place within the novel. Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture, and turned towards it. When he saw it, he turned back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. He stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before. (Wilde 1985, 30)

This passage ties in with Wilde’s conviction that it is “the spectator, and not life, the art really mirrors” (Wilde 1985, 4). Similar to Dorian’s recognition of himself in a painting, the novel offers itself as an instrument which conveys to the readers a reflection of themselves. The Picture of Dorian Gray not only makes use of the readers’ individual images and fantasies, it also borrows from other works of literature. The novel’s hypotextual influences can be, among many others, traced back to the Gothic tradition, in particular to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886, ↗ 25 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) (see Dryden 2003, 110–146). In addition to these works, topics, themes, and influences, the Doctor Faustus tale

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(Pinyaeva 2016), Shakespeare’s plays (Bach 2006, 227–228; Townshend 2015, 49–51), and Walter Pater’s works (Clausson 2003) intertextually structure and permeate the novel at the same time. On a formal level, the novel is divided into twenty chapters and a preface, written by the author in 1891. The plot development seems to follow the parameters of a negative Bildungsroman, as the protagonist initially reminds readers of a blank page, “unspotted from the world” (Wilde 1985, 21), even though, at approximately twenty years of age, he cannot be called a child any more. Paradoxically, The Picture of Dorian Gray “narrates the development of male identity within a milieu that actively subverts the traditional bourgeois representations of appropriate male behaviour” (Cohen 1991, 75–76). The style employed in doing this can be termed ornate: tropes of excess, decadence, and dominant sensuality as well as frequent epigrams and quips pay their homage to dandyish wit. According to Kohl, the novel can be divided into two parts, the first encompassing chapters one to ten (2000, 126–127), ending in and climaxing with Sybil’s suicide. The second part contains two narrative strands. One is woven around Basil’s death while the other deals with Dorian’s encounter with James Vane. The two main parts are not rigorously separated; instead, there are semi-visible links between them, for instance when chapter nineteen refers back to the second chapter (Kohl 2000, 127). The novel itself obviously is on most levels “striated with images of duality and the double life,” writes Peter Ackroyd, and as an example adds that its tone, too, can be divided into “that of sentimental tragedy” on the one hand and of “outrageous epigram” on the other (1985, xiii).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives From the moment of publication, critical responses to the novel started a discussion that still continues today. Early reactions were, as mentioned before, mostly hostile and deprecatory. Very often, fact and fiction were merged in the sense that the biography of the author was allegedly closely intertwined with plot elements of his novel. Even the excellent introduction to the 1985 Penguin edition by the famous novelist, biographer, and critic Peter Ackroyd is not free from these awkward combinations: “The novel is more than a veiled account of Wilde’s sexual predilections, it is also an exploration of that accidie which afflicted him in his private moments” (1985, ix). Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray has undergone countless readings and rereadings. It has been called a (negative) Bildungsroman (Broich 1983; Castle 2006), a Gothic novel (Sammells 1998, 252), a roman à clef (Nair 2012, 23), a Gothic melodrama (Drabble 1995, 772), and innumerable other epithets. The Picture of Dorian Gray has also been adopted by other academic fields. For example, a gerontophobic

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theory (Zoja 1983) took it as a point of departure and a psychopathological syndrome in young people was even named after the protagonist (Reese 2008). Most recently, The Picture of Dorian Gray has profited from gender, masculinities, and queer studies analyses, yet further research is needed in the sphere of intersectionality studies, a theory of how different types of discrimination interact. When asked to expound the origins of this term, Kimberle Crenshaw said in an interview: It grew out of trying to conceptualize the way the law responded to issues where both race and gender discrimination were involved. What happened was like an accident, a collision. Intersectionality simply came from the idea that if you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you are likely to get hit by both. [Black] women are injured, but when the race ambulance and the gender ambulance arrive at the scene, they see these women of color lying in the intersection and they say, “Well, we can’t figure out if this was just race or just sex discrimination. And unless they can show us which one it was, we can’t help them.” (Crenshaw 2004)

Even though race is not one of the novel’s interests, gender, age, class, and religion are very much at the centre of attention and develop force fields which interact with and change each other; they form an interlocking matrix of oppression and dominance. Other approaches read the work under the headings of subjectivity (Middeke 2004), genre conventions (Pfeiffer 2015), ekphrasis (Manion 2010; Bertman 2015), misogyny-cum-biography (McKenna 2003), or as a manifestation of theatricality and performativity (Bach 2006, 223–278; Irmak 2015; Lea 2014). The doppelgänger motif has been analysed (Pfister 1986); influence studies (Urquhart 2015) and theological questions (Shea 2014) have been used as further analytical tools. Decadence has been a major critical focal point of analysis (Ahn 1996, Lynch and Lynch 2012) as well as the broad field of sexuality (Allen 1993). On a more general level, Freudian readings abound (Bowlby 1993); the discussion of stage (Tunstall 2009) and cinematic (Alexander 2008; Boehm-Schnitker 2009; Meissinger 2013) adaptations feature prominently in secondary literature. The broad fields of postmodernist – with its keywords “discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentering, indeterminacy, and antitotalization” (Hutcheon 1988, 3) –, deconstructivist, and poststructuralist theories have exerted a strong influence on the reading of Wilde’s novel. “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air,” writes critic J. Hillis Miller (1976, 341). In this sense, The Picture of Dorian Gray is very much a postmodern text (Gillespie 2015, 19), since the novel only suggests “solid ground” to its readers who, as soon as they start reflecting on their reading experience, find a multitude of contradictory, interlinking, and/or hidden discourses which in the end turn out to be “thin air.” Simple dichotomies and hierarchies, for instance, dissolve as soon as one starts to take a closer look at them: male/female, hetero-/homoerotic, youth/age,

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upper-/working class, presence/absence. The playfulness of language manifests itself in the novel’s double-voiced discourse: “Yesterday I cut an orchid, for my buttonhole. It was a marvellous spotted thing, as effective as the seven deadly sins,” says Lord Henry, also known as “Prince Paradox” (Wilde 1985, 212–213), who possibly and with secret pleasure implies the etymology of orchid (Lat.: orchis, Gr.: orkhis, “testicle”). And even if readers are able to decode this allusion, this will not entail a better or more competent access to the novel. For Wilde holds true what J. Hillis Miller originally wrote about Wuthering Heights: texts like the latter “lead the reader further and further into the novel in his attempt to get in, to reach the inside of the inside where a full retrospective explanation of all the enigmatic details will be possible. [. . .] The text itself, in its presentation of enigmas in the absence of patent totalizing explanation, turns him into [. . .] a detective” (1992, 372). Moreover, Wilde’s writing seems to already deconstruct itself. “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,” Wilde claimed in a different context (Wilde 2017). Under a deconstructivist heading, Lee Edelman compared Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Marcel Proust’s Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe of 1920–1921) and focussed on their functionalising the topics of identity, sexual difference, lesbian, and gay theory. Edelman’s essay proved so influential that it was included in Jonathan Culler’s Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2003). Another exemplary deconstructivist reading can be found in Rohy’s “Strange Influence: Queer Etiology in The Picture of Dorian Gray” (2015) and in Davis’ “‘I Seemed to Hold Two Lives’: Disclosing Circumnarration in Villette and The Picture of Dorian Gray” (2013). Boyiopoulos adopts the interesting angle of looking at The Picture of Dorian Gray with a focus on (Baudrillardean) simulation (2014); and the problem of ambiguity features prominently in Schulz’ comparison Setting the Record Queer: Rethinking Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (2011). Of course, Oscar Wilde knew all this before: “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself” (Wilde 1985, 4).

Bibliography Works Cited Abrams, M. H., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 4th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1979. Ackroyd, Peter. Introduction. The Picture of Dorian Gray. By Oscar Wilde. Ed. Ackroyd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. vii–xv. Ahn, Bang-Soon. Dekadenz in der Dichtung des Fin de siècle. Göttingen: Cuvillier, 1996. Alexander, Jonathan. “Dorian Gray in the Twentieth Century: The Politics and Pedagogy of Filming Oscar Wilde’s Novel.” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Philip E. Smith II. New York: MLA, 2008. 75–82.

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Allen, Dennis W. Sexuality in Victorian Fiction. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1993. Bach, Susanne. Theatralität und Authentizität zwischen Viktorianismus und Moderne: Romane von Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde und Wilkie Collins. Tübingen: Narr, 2006. Belford, Barbara. Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius. New York: Random House, 2000. Bertman, Stephen. “Platonic Inversion in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Wildean: A Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies 46 (2015): 130–131. Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine. “Adapting Victorian Masculinities: Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray (2009) and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009).” Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790–1914 5.2 (2015): 143–164. Bowlby, Rachel. Shopping with Freud. London: Routledge, 1993. Boyiopoulos, Kostas. “Simulation in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Echoing Hamlet, Anticipating Baudrillard, and the Comparative.” Comparative Critical Studies 11.1 (2014): 7–27. Broich, Ulrich. “Der ‘negative Bildungsroman’ der neunziger Jahre.” Pfister and Schulte Middelich 1983, 197–226. Castle, Gregory. Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2006. Clausson, Nils. “‘Culture and Corruption’: Paterian Self-Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Papers on Language & Literature 39.4 (2003): 339–365. Cohen, Ed. “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation.” Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde. Ed. Regenia Gagnier. New York: G. K.Hall, 1991. 68–87. Crenshaw, Kimberle. Interview by Sheila Thomas. “Intersectionality: The Double Bind of Race and Gender.” Perspectives (2004): n. pag. American Bar Association. Web. 3 June 2017. Davis, Helen H. “‘I Seemed to Hold Two Lives’: Disclosing Circumnarration in Villette and The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Narrative 21.2 (2013): 198–220. Douglas, Lord Alfred . “Two Loves.” The Chameleon 1.1 (1894): 26–28. Poets.org. Web. 27 Aug. 2016. Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1995. Dryden, Linda. The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Edelman, Lee. “Homographesis.” Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Jonathan Culler. Vol. 2. London: Routledge, 2003. 388–410. Ellman, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987. Fitzsimons, Eleanor. Wilde’s Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women of His Life. New York: Overlook, 2016. Foldy, Michael S. The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Fryer, Jonathan. Wilde. London: Haus, 2005. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Postmodern Work.” Etudes Anglaises: Revue du Monde Anglophone 68.1 (2015):19–31. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “Picturing Dorian Gray: Resistant Readings in Wilde’s Novel.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 35.1 (1992): 7–25. Henley, Jon. “Wilde Gets Revenge on Wallpaper.” The Guardian 1 Dec. 2000. Web. 5 Sep. 2016. Höfele, Andreas. “Dandy und New Woman.” Pfister and Schulte-Middelich 1983, 147–163. Holland, Merlin. The First Complete Record of the Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Irmak, Burak. “Acting Out Gender: Performativity and Becoming Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” B. A. S.: British and American Studies/Revista de Studii Britanice și Americane 21 (2015): 77–82.

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Janes, Dominik. Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750–1900. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. Knoll, Joachim H. Der Dandy: Ein kulturhistorisches Phänomen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Kohl, Norbert. Oscar Wilde. Frankfurt: Insel, 2000. Kohl, Norbert. Oscar Wilde: Das literarische Werk zwischen Provokation und Anpassung. Heidelberg: Winter, 1980. Lea, Daniel. “Queens of Hearts: Dorian, Princess Diana and the Sign of the Authentic.” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 95.2 (2014): 195–216. Lynch, Sonja Froiland, and Robert Lee Lynch. “Innocence and Experience, Good and Evil, and Doppelgangers: Decadent Aesthetics in Cather’s ‘Consequences,’ James’s ‘The Jolly Corner,’ and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Willa Cather and Aestheticism: From Romanticism to Modernism. Ed. Sarah Cheney Watson and Ann Moseley. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2012. 29–39. Manion, Deborah Maria. “The Ekphrastic Fantastic: Gazing at Magic Portraits in Victorian Fiction.” Diss. University of Iowa, 2010. Web. 27 Aug. 2016. McKenna, Neil. The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. London: Century, 2003. Meissinger, Tanja. “Film Adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Diplomarbeit. U Wien, 2013. Web. 28 Aug. 2016. Middeke, Martin. Die Kunst der gelebten Zeit: Zur Phänomenologie literarischer Subjektivität im englischen Roman des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. Miller, J. Hillis. “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure.” The Georgia Review 30.1 (1976): 5–31; 30.2 (1976): 330–348. Miller, J. Hillis. “Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the ‘Uncanny.’” Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë. Ed. Linda H. Peterson. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1992. 371–384. Nair, Sashi. Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism: Writing Romans à Clef Between the Wars. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Nunokawa, Jeff, and Amy Sickles. Oscar Wilde. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005. Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Woman, Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974. 67–87. Pesch, Josef W. Wilde, about Joyce: Zur Umsetzung ästhetizistischer Kunsttheorie in der literarischen Praxis der Moderne. Frankfurt: Lang, 1991. Pfeiffer, Daniel. “Reconceiving Morality in Dorian Gray: An Investigation in Antecedent Genre.” Sigma Tau Delta Review 12 (2015): 37–45. Pfister, Manfred. Oskar [sic] Wilde: “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” München: UTB, 1986. Pfister, Manfred, and Bernd Schulte-Middelich, eds. Die Nineties: Das englische Fin-de-siècle zwischen Dekadenz und Sozialkritik. München: Francke, 1983. Pinyaeva, Elena. “Faustian Motifs and Transformations of Modern Myths in the Fictions of Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee.” The Fantastic of the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Irena Grubica and Zdeněk Beran. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. 55–72. Pratt, John. Punishment and Civilization: Penal Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Society. London: Sage, 2002. Reese, Angelika. Forever young! Das Dorian-Gray-Syndrom im Jugendalter als Herausforderung für die Schule. Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner, 2008. Rohy, Valerie. “Strange Influence: Queer Etiology in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Ed. Robyn Warhol, Susan S. Lanser, and Irene Kacandes. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2015. 275–292.

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Sammells, Neil. “Oscar Wilde.” The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. 252–253. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Schulz, Dirk. Setting the Record Queer: Rethinking Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Seymour, Miranda. Rev. of Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, by Franny Moyle. The Guardian 24 June 2011. Web. 5 Sep. 2016. Shea, C. Michael. “Fallen Nature and Infinite Desire: A Study of Love, Artifice, and Transcendence in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 17.1 (2014): 115–139. Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Townshend, Dale. “Gothic Shakespeare.” A New Companion to The Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Blackwell, 2015. 38–63. Treuherz, Julian. Victorian Painting. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. Tunstall, Darren. “The Aesthetic Uncanny: Staging Dorian Gray.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 2.2 (2009): 153–165. Ullrich, “L’art pour l’art: Die Verführungskraft eines ästhetischen Rigorismus.” Was war Kunst? Biographien eines Begriffs. Ed. Wolfgang Ullrich: Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005. 124–143. Urquhart, Ilona. “Devils, Souls, and the Spectre of Matthew Arnold in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 20.2 (2015): 14–27. Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. Wilde, Oscar. The Ballad of Reading Gaol. 1898. Wikisource. Web. 28 Aug. 2016a. Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” 1891. Literature Network. Web. 6 Dec. 2017. Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” Intentions. Vol. 7 of The Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde. New York: Nottingham Society, 1909. 3–57. Victorianweb. Web. 3 Sep. 2016b. Wilde, Oscar. A House of Pomegranates, The Happy Prince and Other Tales. London: Keller, 1907. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Peter Ackroyd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. With supplementary material by Moira Muldoon. Ed. Cynthia Brantley Johnson. New York: Pocket, 2005. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana/Croom Helm, 1976. Zoja, Luigi. “Working Against Dorian Gray: Analysis and the Old.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 28.1 (1983): 51–64.

Further Reading Blackford, Holly. “Childhood and Greek Love: Dorian Gray and Peter Pan.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38.2 (2013): 177–198. Bristow, Joseph, ed. Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Clifton, Glenn. “Aging and Periodicity in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Ambassadors: An Aesthetic Adulthood.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 59.3 (2016): 283–302. Dunn, Thomas R. “‘The Quare in the Square’: Queer Memory, Sensibilities, and Oscar Wilde.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100.2 (2014): 213–240. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996.

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Haslam, Richard. “The Hermeneutic Hazards of Hibernicizing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 57.1 (2014): 37–58. Magid, Annette M., ed. Quintessential Wilde: His Worldly Place, His Penetrating Philosophy and His Influential Aestheticism. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2017. Rassau, Kellee. “Mischievous Mentors and Marvelous Males: Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Manipulating the Aristotelian Aesthetic.” The Image of the Hero in Literature, Media, and Society. Ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo: Colorado State University, 2014. 226–232. Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth. “‘Most People Die in Exile’: Oscar Wilde’s Final Personality, or the Queerness of the Non-Place.” Censorship and Exile. Ed. Johanna Hartmann and Hubert Zapf. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. 243–254. Saltzman, Esther Bendit . “The Picture and Dorian Gray: Interpretive Pluralism in Graphic Adaptations of Wilde’s Novel.” Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works. Ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick and Esther Bendit Saltzman. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 177–193. Smith, Philip E.II, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: MLA, 2008. von Hagen, Kirsten. “A Picture Is a Picture Is a Picture: Filmic Transformations of Oscar Wilde’s Novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Old Age and Ageing in British and American Culture and Literature. Ed. Christa Jansohn. Münster: LIT, 2004. 107–119. Wenaus, Andrew. “Monstrorum Artifex: Uncanny Narrative Contexture and Narcissism in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 13 (2014): 57–77.

Monika Pietrzak-Franger

27 Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (1893) Abstract: Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) addresses such issues as women’s access to knowledge, gendered educational standards, sexuality, (mental) health, heredity, degeneration, social construction of marriage, and generational conflicts. In other words, it contributes to the debate over the Woman Question. Taking this into consideration, this chapter looks at the novel in the literary context of New Woman Writing and proto-modernist literature. It contends that the three major ‘anti-marriage plots’ of the novel exemplify various stages of progress in women’s status quo. They are illustrative of the underlying argument of the book that any transformation in women’s socio-cultural position requires time: progress demands steadfast negotiation and re-negotiation of extant roles. In The Heavenly Twins, this process of negotiation is shown as a struggle between ‘natural’ progressive impulses and the restrictive patriarchal system. In this context, not an unhealthy exertion of ill-guided individuals but solidarity amongst women and men of various generations and joint, on-going effort have the chance to succeed; the “politics of alliance” (Butler 2015, 70) is the only way out of precarity. In their continuous alternation between progressive thinking and traditional behaviour, Grand’s characters do what the novel attempts to do on a meta-level: find expression for complex gender identities and negotiate the limits of existing regimes. Keywords: The Woman Question, marriage, education, suffrage, social change, New Woman, venereal disease, Proto-Modernism, degeneration

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Sarah Grand (10 June 1854 to 12 May 1943) was a woman of many talents and aspirations. An author, journalist, and social campaigner, she was also a wife, mother, breadwinner, lecturer, mayoress, and a “pioneer of public enlightenment on venereal disease” (Fairfield 2000,1: 568). She has been credited with coding the term ‘New Woman’ and her works, although out of print for over half a century, have been increasingly significant for literary history (Senf 2007, xii). Her life and works can be read as testimonies to the contradictions of the Victorian era, and her career as a proof of all the budding possibilities and pervasive constraints that women experienced at the time. Both are records of continuous negotiations between progressive thought and the limitations of Victorian conventions. She was born Frances Bellenden Clarke. After her father, naval lieutenant Edward John Bellenden Clarke, died in 1861, the family moved from Ireland to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-028

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Yorkshire, the birthplace of her mother, Margaret Bell Sherwood. While her two brothers were granted formal education, she and her two sisters were apparently schooled at home. In spite of that, as Frances confirmed later, she enjoyed access to literature and was well-read (Senf 2007, xxvii). In 1868, at the age of fourteen, she was sent to the Royal Naval School at Twickenham and then to a finishing school at Holland Road in London. Her sojourns at both institutions were brief and, although the reasons for her leaving are not clear, it has been argued that she was expelled from the former establishment after organising a club for the support of Josephine Butler’s campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (Senf 2007, xxviii). This incident has been seen as an early indicator of her sensitivity towards social inequalities, which would become central to her future journalistic and novelistic works. In 1871, at sixteen, Frances Clarke married David Chambers McFall, a distinguished army surgeon, over twenty years her senior, widower, and a father of two sons. Together, they had another son, David Archibald Edward, born on 7 October 1871. Although she herself saw marriage as an “escape from routine” in her “Recollections” (Grand 2000,1: 195), and even though it has been speculated that she was more interested in writing than in following her wifely and motherly duties (Senf 2007, xxiii), it is undeniable that McFall’s profession, and their frequent travels, were of paramount formative value for her. Before his appointment in Norwich in 1879, they spent five years (1873–1878) travelling across Singapore, Ceylon, Japan, the Straits Settlements, and China. They also spent a considerable time in Malta and on the Isle of Wight. After her husband’s half-retirement in Norwich, Frances engaged in social work and began to write. Although her first didactic work, Two Dear Little Feet (1873), which explored the evils of modern fashion, enjoyed considerable success, she experienced little encouragement from publishers. Ideala (1888), her breakthrough novel, was published seven years after completion at the expense of the author. Her search for the publisher of The Heavenly Twins took three years, and it was only after she had decided to self-publish that an aspiring young publisher accepted her manuscript. Before she embarked on this quest, however, Frances McFall left her family, and assumed the name of Sarah Grand. After the death of her husband in 1898, Grand revealed in a letter to F. H. Fisher that the new name was not simply a nom de plume but rather a way of forging a new identity as her husband did not want to be associated with either her views or her writing (Grand 2000,2: 64). After The Heavenly Twins (1893), a number of novels and collections of short-stories followed: Singularly Deluded (1893), Our Manifold Nature (1894), which included short stories she had written for the bohemian journal Temple Bar, The Modern Man and Maid (1898), Babs the Impossible (1901), and The Beth Book (1897), which has been considered as her most autobiographical work. Adam’s Orchard (1912) and The Winged Victory (1916) belong to the latest of her writings. None of these late works, however, received much general attention or critical appreciation.

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While the separation from her husband allowed Grand certain freedoms, it also, like his death, imposed on her the burden of financial self-sufficiency. And although the money she received from the publication of The Heavenly Twins amounted to over eighteen thousand Pounds (Senf 2007, xxxii), it was hardly sufficient, as Grand continued to support her son and step-sons as well as her sister Nelly, who came to live with her in her old years. In 1900, Grand embarked on a four-month lecture tour of the United States of America, travelling from New York to Chicago and then to San Francisco. Two years later, she began lecturing in England, which she continued until 1912. In 1920, she moved to Bath, where she served (with the exclusion of one year) as mayoress (1922–1929), a function she shared with Cedric Chivers, a local philanthropist. At the time, “her reputation as a best-selling writer and feminist was behind her” (Senf 2007, xxxv) and yet, although her “fiction may have been out of touch in the new century, [. . .] her interest in women’s lives remained unchanged” (Heilmann 2000,1: 10) until her death at the age of eighty-eight. Next to novel writing, which she slowly abandoned, Grand engaged in politics: she was a member of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League and the Women Citizen’s Association; she also served as vice president of the Women’s Suffrage Society along with being president and speaker of the local branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. In her lectures, interviews, and journalistic writings, Grand addressed a number of social debates that ranged from the rational dress reform, cycling, and sports for girls to the make-up of modern marriage and sexual education. Her 1894 essay “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” came down in history as the foundational piece on the ‘New Woman’ and the novel role she usurped in late nineteenth-century society. In fin-de-siècle popular imagination, “[t]he New Woman was by turns: a mannish amazon and a Womanly woman; she was oversexed, undersexed, or same sex identified; she was antimaternal, or a racial supermother; [. . .] she was radical, socialist or revolutionary, or she was reactionary and conservative; she was the agent of social and/or racial regeneration, or symptom and agent of decline” (Richardson and Willis 2001, xii). And although Sarah Grand’s ideology also underwent shape-shifting and was set with a number of inconsistencies, her writings have been associated with a moderate reformist approach that combined “radical arguments” with the partly essentialist conservatism of the social purity movement (Heilmann 2000,1: 2). Although she was strictly against divorce, her novels depicted marriage as a testing-ground, and often a downfall, for many of her female characters. As she called on women to harness male insatiable desires, she also highlighted their moral responsibility for the shape of current society, and for the future of the nation. Grand’s advocacy of “civic motherhood” (Richardson 2003, 67–77), women’s access to (sexual) knowledge, and her criticism of the institution of marriage accompanied her throughout her life.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns The Heavenly Twins tackles all of these subjects as it directly addresses the social construction of marriage, gendered educational standards, sexuality, (mental) health, heredity, degeneration, and generational conflicts. It also engages, albeit in an indirect manner, in an exploration of the constructedness of heteronormativity and in an examination of convoluted homoeroticism. The nature of the conflicts dealt with in the novel (from venereal diseases to cross-dressing) received contradictory responses from Grand’s contemporaries. In the Review of Reviews, a critic expresses praise and acknowledgement for the novel that seems to be a harbinger of silenced truths: “In this book ‘Sarah Grand’ has done to a good many people what Angelica did to Sir Mosley Menteith. She has flung a heavy Bible in their faces, and they howl” (“Some Books of the Month” 2000,1: 431). At the same time, the review compares the novel’s combination of didacticism and the choice of themes to “a vivisected dog describing the process of vivisection” when petrified at the sight of the vivisector’s knife and “dulled with curari” (1.425). Indeed, The Heavenly Twins can be read as highlighting the changes under way in the late nineteenth century and demanding further improvements in women’s status quo. What transpires, however, is that this goal is extremely laborious. Or, as Lady Adeline claims in the novel, “evolution if slower is surer” (Grand 2007, 602). The metamorphosis of women’s social standing is possible, the novel seems to argue, yet it is a continuous process of negotiation that requires time and necessitates joint effort and the alliance of all those who have a say in society. In The Heavenly Twins, this process of negotiation is shown as a struggle between ‘natural’ progressive impulses and the restrictive patriarchal system. Two assumptions lie at the core of the debate: the belief in the existence of certain innate propensities in humans and in the performative character of lived identities. Grand takes up the nature/nurture debate and shows that, like men, women have the ‘natural’ inclination to learn, and, if allowed and offered proper guidance, they can help reform society. The three female protagonists, and the ‘anti-marriage plots’ they are involved in, illustrate the potentialities and the limitations of the educational system and its results. Edith Beale, the daughter of the Bishop of Morningquest, receives a traditional Christian education. Her bedroom – “with its thick walls, high stone mantelpiece, small gothic windows, and plain ridged vault,” with the furniture “severely” kept and the decorations amounting to “photographs or engravings of sacred subjects” – and her dress, with costly lining but few adornments, “concealed the fine quality and cultivation of her mind” (Grand 2007, 158). Yet her education, which has screened from her the problems of the surrounding world, makes her incapable of either actively contributing to society or avoiding the evils of a misconceived marriage. “She might have done great good in the world,” comments the heterodiegetic narrator, “had she known of the evil; she would have fought for the right in defiance of

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every prejudice, as women do” (158–159). As it was, she was educated to live in “the society of saints and angels” and thus remained largely “unprepared to cope with the world” (159). Unsurprisingly, and quite in keeping with Grand’s didacticism, Edith Beale marries a rake and, having born him a child, dies of the effects of syphilis, which he infects her with. She thus functions as a scapegoat in a society that promotes female ignorance through unsuited education. Edith recognises her role on her deathbed and, in a hallucinatory speech, accuses the representatives of three major orders – patriarchy, medicine and religion – of sacrificing her and her child’s life (300). This accusation is further addressed to generations of women who “refuse to know” (304) and thus perpetuate existing structures of inequality and contribute to their own and their daughters’ oppression. In this context, Edith’s ‘hysteria’ has been interpreted as an emancipatory impulse in the sense that it empowers Edith to articulate her precarious situation and to speak out against women’s oppression (Heilmann 2004, 61; Pietrzak-Franger 2017, 71–126). Similar allegations are raised by another representative of the upper classes, Evadne Frayling, who unwittingly marries a man of a dubious past, leaves him on the day of their marriage, consents to live with him after the intervention of the family but refuses to consummate the marriage, even as they reconcile and become friends. Evadne, unlike Edith, is endowed with a ‘natural’ thirst for knowledge. “Ages of education,” emphasises the narrator, “ages of hereditary preparation had probably gone to the making of such a mind, and rendered its action inevitable” (Grand 2007, 3). What transpires from this description of Evadne’s capacities is the acceptance of Lamarckism, the belief in the inheritance of acquired traits, and thus in the ‘naturalisation’ and inevitability of progress. In fact, Evadne is twice described by her physician and future second husband as “the seventh wave of humanity,” which he explains as “men and women who, by the impulse of some one action which comes naturally to them but is new to the race, gather strength to come up to the last halting place of the tide, and to carry it on with them ever so far beyond” (99). Her potential, however, is thwarted both by unguided education and by social constraints. “Find out for yourself” (5) and “to know the facts of life exactly is a positive duty” (4) are two among the many lessons that she learns from her father. Medical books, a variety of English, French, Italian and German novels, which she annotates and uses as sources of reflection in her “Commonplace Book” (13), also assist her in her discoveries and are fundamental in her observations of society. The possibilities that they open and the knowledge that they divulge, however, appear of little help in her struggles against the limitations of the system that aborts all her efforts and forces her to assume a commonplace role: “Evadne had been formed for a life of active usefulness; but now she found herself reduced to an existence of objectless contemplation” (349). This narratorial expression of regret, like recurrent confinement metaphors, echoes Jane Eyre’s speech on women’s inactivity (↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) and highlights the dangers of a solely contemplative life by showing Evadne’s steady psychological and physical deterioration despite the help of two doctors.

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While Evadne’s story registers certain possibilities open to women, it also highlights the laboriousness of the negotiation processes and their uncertain outcomes. As the novel finishes with Evadne’s second husband Dr. Galbraith’s realisation that his only power is “to make her life endurable” (Grand 2007, 679), and as all the efforts to restore her to the active social service fail, it becomes clear that there is still a long way ahead of women in their battle for better lives. Evadne’s acknowledgement of the necessity of “active usefulness” for women is, however, also accompanied by her deep disillusionment with their capacity to withhold a steadfast battle against inequality: “[y]ou need not be afraid to give us the suffrage [. . .]. After the excitement of conquering your opposition to it was over we should all be content, and not one woman in a hundred would trouble herself to vote” (559). With hindsight, and with the recent backlash of postfeminism, Evadne’s words also, unfortunately, ring very true. Evadne’s marriages show that progress demands steadfast negotiation and re-negotiation of positions that require effort and time. Her development – from a knowledge-thirsty young woman to an acquiescent wife who misconceives her duty and breaks under the burden of inactive life – shows the necessity of joint exertion but also makes clear that many of these efforts will misfire. Some of these negotiations of positions, however, are successful. Angelica Hamilton, one of the eponymous titular twins, represents a more advanced stage in this evolutionary process. In contrast to sacrificial Edith and self-taught Evadne, Angelica receives a better, albeit still rather chaotic, education and more guidance on the parts of tutors, friends, and her brother. Her continuous juxtapositions with her brother Theodor (Diavolo) emphasise her ‘innate’ superiority (“she was also the elder, taller, stronger, and wickeder” [Grand 2007, 7]). They also, at the same time, point to the stark limitations of the existing system that legally, economically, and customarily constrains women, as in the case of Edith and Evadne. While as children the twins used to settle such questions by fighting, Angelica soon discovers that adult life requires a series of skilful negotiations for her to reach her goal. Even though she describes her choice to propose to and marry Mr. Kilroy of Ilverthorpe as a “bargain” that “should let [her] do as [she] liked” (459), this bargain becomes a burden that she associates with contemplative, useless life, boredom, and listlessness. Yet, quickly realising the performative character of identities, Angelica searches for ways to vent her energies, as is illustrated by her cross-dressing episode, expounded in chapter four, “The Tenor and the Boy – An Interlude.” When the titular Tenor discovers her true identity after enjoying her company for a considerable amount of time and wonders at her powers to pass as a boy, she compares her actions to a theatrical performance, “a mere exercise of the actor’s faculty under the most favourable circumstances” (Grand 2007, 456), and recalls a number of women – George Sand, James Barry, women in the army and the navy – who also successfully lived in disguise. Next to being a curious experiment, her choice to

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masquerade as a man is propelled by a desire to loosen the gender regime for a while. Her explanations of her actions spotlight the realisation that women, like men, are perceived through a haze of conventional expectations and that fictional narratives are constantly used by both genders to make sense of their own and others’ actions. Unlike Evadne, who misunderstands her own emotions and falls into the trap of a ‘romance plot’, Angelica is careful to take up existing cultural narratives of disparate gender identities. She believes that even the best-educated men are taught “deliberately to think of women chiefly as the opposite sex” (458). Her decision to assume the role of her brother is therefore also an attempt to experience life exempt from such gender prejudice. Realising that the Tenor developed feelings for her without knowing her, she wonders at the force and stringency of these narratives: “You go and fall in love with a girl you have never spoken to in your life, you endow her gratuitously with all the virtues you admire without asking if she cares to possess them; and when you find she is not the peerless perfection you require her to be, you blame her!” (459). This putting a woman on a “pedestal” not only restrains her in her actions (“There is no room to move on a pedestal” [458]), it also fosters misinterpretation and demonstrates the power of customs. The narratorial voice thus comments on the Tenor’s reaction to Angelica’s revelations: It is a noteworthy fact, as showing how hopelessly involved man’s moral perceptions are with his prejudices and faith in custom even when reprehensible, that the Tenor was if anything more shocked by Angelica’s outspoken objection to grossness than he would have been by a declaration of passion on her part. The latter lapse is not unprecedented, and therefore might have been excused as natural; but the unusual nature of the declaration she had made put it into the category to which all things out of order are relegated to be taken exception to, irrespective of their ethical value. (459–460)

Indeed, Angelica is shown to be privy to this insight: “You cannot bear to see me decently dressed as a boy, but you would think nothing of it if you saw me half undressed for a ball, as I often am” (454). Although this episode emphasises the performative character of one’s identity, it at the same time highlights the sturdiness of Victorian conventions and highlights the extent to which identities are not free-floating. It thus draws attention to the commonplace fictions that guide people’s lives and their self-perception. When Angelica divulges to her husband her escapade with the Tenor, he cannot conceive of the information as factual and considers the story one of her “romances,” concluding, when she asks him for advice on how to act towards the Tenor, “upon the whole I think you had better sacrifice the husband, otherwise you lose your readers’ sympathy” (481). These instances emphasise the role of literature in maintaining gendered fictions. They also accentuate the concomitant interpretative blunders that hamper effective intra- and inter-gender communication. Although she acknowledges the righteousness of Evadne’s decision to leave her husband and admires her courage, Mrs. Orton Beg

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“felt in her heart the full force of the custom and prejudice that would be against her” (79). The narrator gives the readers insight into Evadne’s train of thoughts, as she comprehends who is responsible for her wasted life: “It was the system, the horrid system that was to blame, and neither he, nor she, nor any of them” (238). These instances reiterate the crucial role of the habitus, custom, and the patriarchal system as reactionary forces in the struggle for social reform. These three are responsible for slowing down change. Yet the novel shows that, at its steady pace, change does occur. For it to be possible, however, as Teresa Mangum argues, the New Woman and, by extension, everybody interested in progress must learn to ‘read’ and to become “a critic of her culture” (2001, 90). The characters in the novel register slow transformations in the conduct or their peers. Diavolo is quick to acknowledge this, stating that “[i]n the old days, women were so ignorant and subdued, they couldn’t retaliate or fight for themselves in any way” (Grand 2007, 273). Today, in contrast, “if you hit a woman, she’ll give you one back promptly [. . .]. She’ll put you in Punch, or revile you in the Dailies; Magazine you; write you down as ass in a novel; blackguard you in choice language from a public platform; or paint a picture of you which will make you wish you had never been born” (273). This litany of new means of women’s public expression is accompanied by a growing acknowledgement of the changing attitudes of younger generations. Seeing Diavolo’s adoration of and attachment to Evadne, her husband comments: “Times are changing, [. . .] when I was a lad, if a lady liked me as well as Evadne likes that boy, I’d have taken advantage of her preference” (607). He thus recognises the transformation in inter-gender relations and in male behaviour. Such a change is also indicated by Angelica and her husband’s relationship. As she comprehends that his love is supportive rather than restrictive (he leaves her to herself, but he also has an open ear to her problems and offers guidance when consulted), Angelica begins to perceive marriage not only as a means of escape from conventions but also as a platform for her own development and a privileged place from which to reform society. Mr. Kilroy’s unfaltering support and almost fatherly guidance seem to be some of the reasons why Angelica develops from a “cyclone in petticoats” (Grand 2007, 306) to a self-satisfied woman who learns to accommodate her energies and articulates women’s needs, i.e. she becomes the “Jael,” “Judith,” and Cassandra” (300) that she always considered herself to be. Ultimately, her success is possible thanks to her husband, who not only partakes in her decisions, but also uses his position to help her by taking her speeches to the parliament. This new-found partnership is one of the many outcomes of the continuous negotiation of acceptable possibilities, albeit one whose validity and usefulness are yet to be proven, as Mrs. Orton Beg is quick to notice: “No one can pretend that the old system of husband and master has answered well, and it has had a fair trial. Let us hope that the new method of partnership will be more successful” (591).

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Critics, like today’s audience, have been dissatisfied with this moderate conclusion of the three ‘anti-marriage plots’. Heilmann has interpreted this narrative progress, and especially Evadne’s marriage, as a “literary attack on medical patriarchy” (2004, 79). Liggins has argued that these developments indicate that “surviving outside marriage was still perceived to be too radical to be incorporated into fictional plots” (2000, 175). For Bjørhovde, the silencing of the female voice is intentional and has to do with the overall design of the book and Grand’s aim to involve readers conceptually as well as affectively (1987, 119). The fact that Angelica’s growing success and gratification in marriage, along with her political engagement, are only reported and not shown in the novel can also be regarded as significant for a different reason. This arrangement clearly qualifies her as one possible success story. And yet, as Dr. Galbraith has the propensity to repeat, the New Woman “will have the perception, the inclination; but the power – unless she is exceptional, the power will only be for her daughter’s daughter” (Grand 2007, 98). Not an unhealthy exertion of ill-guided individuals but solidarity and joint, on-going effort have the chance to succeed; only the “politics of alliance” (Butler 2015, 70), embodied by Angelica, her husband, and her brother, seem useful in the struggle against precarity.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Grand’s moderate position on the issues of suffrage, marriage, and the potential of social change has been linked to her concern with the careful conveyance of knowledge and with the concomitant anxiety about what form to give to a novel that, as mentioned above, brings together such topics as venereal disease, suicidal attempts, and cross-dressing (Kennedy 2004, 259). Grand herself has termed the novel her “allopathic pill” and confessed to the necessary formal sugar-coating of such medicine to make it palatable to the general public (qtd. in Mangum 2001, 124). Although she decided to publish the novel in the, by then, disappearing three-decker form, she combined a number of narratorial modes, styles, and generic traditions to achieve a degree of “healthy visibility” for her arguments (Pietrzak-Franger 2017, 118). This new approach – thematic and formal experiment in a traditional form – has been seen as a clever solution that definitely “marks a decisive break with the traditional Victorian novel” (Bjørhovde 1987, 128). However, it was not altogether favourably received by Grand’s contemporaries. The formal qualities of The Heavenly Twins were quickly criticised. “[C]haotic and haphazard arrangement” and “unsatisfactory ending” (qtd. in Senf 2007, xxi) were some of the phrases used to describe it. George Meredith’s oft-quoted rejection of the manuscript (he was reader for Chapman and Hall) on account of its style is excruciating: “if only she will practise, without thought of publishing, until she can narrate, and sketch credible human creatures

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[. . .]” (qtd. in Ellis 1920, 211). The accusations of stylistic insufficiency came together with the difficulties in assessing the genre of the novel. F. M. Bird called it “less novel than a tract” (2000,1: 417), while others categorised it as a ‘novel with a purpose’ (“Some Books of the Month” 2000,1: 421) or a “problem novel,” and a “novel of development” (Bjørhovde 1987, 90, 99). Rather than dismissing it as a sign of stylistic immaturity, contemporary critics have interpreted this generic and stylistic diversity as partaking in late nineteenthcentury attempts to find a proper form for the expression of modern subjectivities (see e.g. Liggins 2000). Although mainly written in the realist tradition, the novel also incorporates melodrama, the pastoral and idyllic tradition, adventure and detective fiction, along with Aestheticism, and sensation fiction (Mangum 2001, 5). It also varies in tone, meandering between satire, comedy, tragedy, and slapstick: at times amusing, it is also sentimental, lyrical, and analytical (Bjørhovde 1987, 90, 109). Bjørhovde argues that these continuous shifts ‘alienate’ the readers and force them to think (109). Juxtaposing the “logic of the bildungsroman” with that of the “marriage plot” (90), the novel at the same time uses the tenor and the characteristic elements of sensation fiction and melodrama as a way of eliciting affective responses from its audiences but also in order to further political thought (91–94). Edith’s early death is one such element, which affects the novel “[t]hematically and structurally,” as her illness “becomes an infectious metonym for the moral illness Grand attributed to the ruthless, irresponsible, destructive exploitation of women, whether by individuals or institutions” (Mangum 2001, 91). Sensational elements, like Edith’s hallucinatory visions and murderous thoughts and her and Angelica’s dreams, offer one of the platforms on which the existing order can be criticised. The abundance of critical voices – ranging from moderate but thoughtful Mrs. Orton Beg, to traditional but occasionally rebellious Mrs. Fryling, to progressive but professionally blinded Dr. Galbraith – foretell the multi-vocality that will become associated with High Modernism. This multi-perspectivity is also stressed by the changing modes of narration. The heterodiegetic narrative voice of the first five books, studded with letters, notes, and poems, allows changing degrees of insight into the thought processes of various characters. Along with passages that have been described as “stream-ofconsciousness writing in embryo” (Bjørhovde 1987, 112), they convey the complexity of the human self, represent the mind in conflict, and emphasise the subjectivity of time and space, thus demonstrating key characteristics of Modernism (115). This and the shift to a homodiegetic narration with Dr. Galbraith’s voice in the last book emphasise the themes of (mis)reading and (mis)interpretation as well as the Victorian preoccupation with the issues of seeming and being. While many critics have associated this change in perspective with a rather conservative trajectory towards Evadne’s objectification through professional male gaze, Galbraith’s inability to interpret Evadne’s emotional states and his continuous misinterpretations have also been associated with a “protomodernist sense of complexity”

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(Mangum 2001, 117; Bjørhovde 1987, 120), and with the “exploration of human psychology” (Senf 2007, xv). Critics have also seen them as indicative of the role of the reader and his/her interpretative processes (Mangum 2001, 117; Bjørhovde 1987, 120) and as a meta-textual gesture that addresses the debate on the quality of late Victorian fiction and its various modes. Repetition, and especially doubling, builds the structural core of the novel. Through mimicry and masquerade, the titular twins test out, and often undermine, the existing socio-cultural binaries (Mangum 2001, 129). Yet, although Angelica is presented as superior to Theodore in most respects, it transpires that hers is a secondary status in society (Bjørhovde 1987, 99). The “grammar of repetition” that they are involved in throughout the book – the constant implicit comparison of both and their actions and the subsequent realisation of the unfairness of a system built on gender inequality – “validate[s] and also radicalize[s] [Grand’s] concerns” (Heilmann 2004, 59). Other doublings further contribute to this project: like Edith, Evadne marries a “moral leper” (Grand 2007, 79) but, unlike the former, she resists the conventions. Evadne also marries twice, and while her first husband drives her to drastic means and ultimately breaks her, the second aims to restore her health but fails to do so. These and many other doublings create a peculiar rhythm in the novel, which is stressed by the echo of the chime from the Morningquest cathedral. Introduced in a structurally separate section that precedes the novel, entitled “Poem,” the chime returns with an unmistakable regularity that indicates both the passage of time but also signals the changing tenor of the novel. Similarly to Virginia Woolf’s use of the striking of Big Ben, the chime also psychologises (Bjørhovde 1987, 96). What is present in these continuous turns and returns is the budding realisation of the malleable, metamorphosing, and never stable self. The repetition and doubling within the novel often also emphasises the very minuscule steps with which the march of progress occurs. Various recurrent metaphors stress this. Dr. Galbraith not only returns to the image of Evadne as the “seventh wave of humanity” (Grand 2007, 99) but also to that of a narrow “groove” (659) that restricts women and does not allow them to grow. By appropriating his wife’s articulation of her position, he also – at least in the latter case – takes up her perspective. Another image – that of a woman returning to a foetal position – is indicative of the hurdles on the (r)evolutionary road. Galbraith introduces the image in the first book in his talk to Mrs. Orton Beg to emphasise the slow workings of change: Women have been cramped into a small space so long that they cannot expand all at once when they are let out; there must be a great deal of stretching and growing, and when they are not on their guard, they will often find themselves falling into the old attitude, as newborn babes are apt to resume the ante-natal position. (98)

This oscillation between evolutionary growth and regression returns when Angelica witnesses Edith’s physical and psychological deterioration, when she is, in other

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words, “baptized into the world of anguish” and “curl[s] herself up” (305). In their continuous alternation between progressive thinking and traditional behaviour, Grand’s characters do what the novel attempts to do on a meta-level: find expression for complex identities and negotiate the limits of existing regimes.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Having envisioned problems with publishing The Heavenly Twins, Sarah Grand described her contemporaries’ reaction to her novel in the foreward to the second edition of her book as “an exhilaratingly stormy reception” (2000,1: 397). In a letter to publisher William Blackwood, following the rejection of her manuscript, she wrote: “I rather expected The Heavenly Twins would make your hair stand on end,” ascertaining that she understood the reaction (2000,2: 24). Yet, in view of the urgency of the subject, she continued, it would be “criminal” to ignore it, especially given that “[she had] been urgently incited to write the book by other women, who [had sent] [her] accounts of cases so horrifying and so heartrendering that [she] believe[d] if [he] knew but a little of them [he] would take up the subject [himself]” (2.24). An example of the succes de scandale, the novel became a bestseller in Britain and in the United States. As popular as Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (↗ 25 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), it sold, at the prize of a guinea-and-a-half, twenty thousand copies in the first two years in the UK and five times as many copies in the USA. This unexpected success obliged Heinemann to tear up the old contract and set up a new one that guaranteed Grand financial benefits from the sales (Senf 2007, xxxiii). Translated into German and Dutch, it was also reissued in 1923 with Grand’s foreword in which she explains the circumstances of the book’s publication. Despite this popularity, the novel received mixed responses from the literary and critical establishments. Most of the reviews addressed its “morality and aesthetics” (Senf 2007, xviii) but varied in their assessment so that, while some praised Grand for her “willingness to tackle difficult issues” and highlighted her “high moral purpose” (xix), many saw the book as of little literary quality. In terms of its aesthetic value, the novel was praised for introducing interesting characters (especially Angelica and Diavolo) but had to face criticism on account of its style and organisation (Senf 2007, xx). Since the novel went out of print in 1923, it only began to receive critical attention thanks to feminist critics who returned to Victorian women writers and began to re-canonise Victorian literature in the 1980s. Senf’s 1992 edition, along with continuing digitalisation and print-on-demand projects, made the novel largely available. With the continuing interest in New Women Writing and the recent popularity of Victorian Studies, the novel has earned a steadfast place in contemporary discussions of nineteenth-century fiction. Most of the critical thought, though, remains

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focused on the gender problematic. Teresa Mangum’s chapter “Love Triangles” offers a very detailed overview of the major themes in relation to the form of the novel (2001, 85–143). Angelique Richardson discusses it in terms of changing “romance plots” as evidential of eugenic tendencies in fiction that records late nineteenth-century notions of “civic motherhood” (2003, 67–77). In line with these works, Ann Heilmann (2004) takes up earlier interpretations of the novel to highlight the appropriative character of New Woman fiction, which took up, played with, and, at times, subverted existing male discourses. Other topics that have been explored in this context include education (Beer and Heilmann 2002), sexuality (Richardson 2003; Bogiatzis 2001), and imperialism (Jusova 2000). Another set of articles and chapters has been especially concerned with the formal properties of the novel. Like John Kucich (1996), Teresa Mangum (1994), and Adam Seth Lowenstein (2007), Gerd Bjørhovde draws particular attention to the structure of the novel and links it to both proto-modernist tendencies in fiction and Grand’s anxieties concerning the conveyance of problematic knowledge (1987). Meegan Kennedy (2004) and myself (Pietrzak-Franger 2017) have taken up these issues to look in more detail at the modes of depicting venereal disease and its implications for broader systems of knowledge production and power distribution. Anna Maria Jones attends to the ‘politics of reading’ that the novel encourages and argues that its failures “offer to the reader an enactment of the ebb and flow of New Woman activism” (2007, 237). She also lists one of the reasons why the politics of the novel continue to be of use today: “perhaps what the novel shows us [. . .] is how much, as for those women of the 1890s, the utopian future for us too is just barely visible on a distant shore” (237). Perhaps it is indeed worth discussing the ‘failures’ and the negotiations present in the book. Because, like for Edith, Evadne, and Angelica, for us today, the way out of precarity necessitates an on-going struggle that depends on the “politics of alliance” (Butler 2015, 70).

Bibliography Works Cited Beer, Janet, and Ann Heilmann. “‘If I Were a Man’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand and the Sexual Education of Girls.” Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms 1854–1936. Ed. Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 178–201. Bird, F. M. “A Three-Volume Tract.” Lippincott’s Magazine 52 (1893): 637–640. Rpt. in Heilmann and Forward 2000,1. 414–419. Bjørhovde, Gerd. Rebellious Structures: Women Writers and the Crisis of the Novel 1880–1900. Oslo: Norwegian UP, 1987. Bogiatzis, Demetris. “Sexuality and Gender: ‘The Interlude’ of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 44.1 (2001): 46–63.

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Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. Ellis, S. M. George Meredith: His Life and Friends in Relation to His Work. London: Grand Richards, 1920. Fairfield, Letitia. “Mme Sarah Grand.” Manchester Guardian 16 May 1943: 4. Rpt. in Heilmann and Forward 2000,1. 568. Grand, Sarah. Foreword. The Heavenly Twins. By Grand. London: Heinemann, 1923. v–xvi. Rpt. in Heilmann and Forward 2000,1. 397–408. Grand, Sarah. The Heavenly Twins. 1893. Ed. Carol A. Senf. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. Grand, Sarah. “The New Aspect of the Woman Question.” North American Review 158 (1894): 270–276. Grand, Sarah. “Some Recollections of my Schooldays.” Lady’s Magazine 1901: 42–43. Rpt. in Heilmann and Forward 2000,1. 194–196. Grand, Sarah. “To F. H. Fisher.” 10 March 1898. Heilmann and Forward 2000,2. 63–64. Grand, Sarah [Frances E. McFall]. “To William Blackwood.” 23 Sept. 1891. Heilmann and Forward 2000,2. 23–24. Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Heilmann, Ann. General Introduction. Heilmann and Forward 2000,1. 1–16. Heilmann, Ann, and Stephanie Forward, eds. Sex, Social Purity, and Sarah Grand. 4 Vols. London: Routledge, 2000. Jones, Anna Maria “‘A Track to the Water’s Edge’: Learning to Suffer in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26.2 (2007): 217–241. Jusova, Iveta. “Imperialist Feminism: Colonial Issues in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 43.3 (2000): 298–315. Kennedy, Meegan. “Syphilis and the Hysterical Female: The Limits of Realism in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins.” Women’s Writing 11.2 (2004): 259–280. Kucich, John. “Curious Dualities: The Heavenly Twins (1893) and Sarah Grand’s Belated Modernist Aesthetics.” The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction. Ed. Barbara Leah Harman and Susan Meyer. New York: Garland, 1996. 195–204. Liggins, Emma. “Writing against the ‘Husband-Fiend’: Syphilis and Male Sexual Vice in the New Woman Novel.” Women’s Writing 7.2 (2000): 175–195. Lowenstein, Adam Seth. “‘Not a Novel, Nor Even a Well-Ordered Story’: Formal Experimentation and Psychological Innovation in Sarah Grand’s ‘The Heavenly Twins’.” Studies in the Novel 39.4 (2007): 431–447. Mangum, Teresa. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Mangum, Theresa. “Style Wars of the 1890s: The New Woman and the Decadent.” Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s. Ed. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. 47–66. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika. Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis. Introduction. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Finde-Siècle Feminisms. Ed. Richardson and Willis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 1–38. Senf, Carol A. Introduction. The Heavenly Twins. By Sarah Grand. vii–xxxvii.

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“Some Books of the Month.” Review of Reviews 7 (1893): 543–555. Rpt. in Heilmann and Forward 2000,1. 425–431.

Further Reading Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1990. Bonnell, Marylin. “Sarah Grand and the Critical Establishment: Art for [Wo]man’s Sake.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14.1 (1995): 123–148. Cunningham, Gail. The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. London: Macmillan, 1978. Kersley, Gillian. Darling Madame: Sarah Grand and Devoted Friend. London: Virago, 1983. Heilmann, Ann. “Narrating the Hysteric: Fin-de-Siècle Medical Discourse and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins.” Richardson and Willis 2001. 123–135. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Richardson, Angelique. “Allopathic Pills? Health, Fitness and New Woman Fictions.” Women: A Cultural Review 10.1 (1999): 1–21. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Bloomsbury, 1990.

Stephan Karschay

28 George Moore, Esther Waters (1894) Abstract: This chapter reads George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894) as a late-Victorian novel whose proto-modernist qualities render it a transformational, rather than a transitional, work of fiction. After placing the novel within Moore’s prolific oeuvre, the chapter foregrounds the text’s class concerns by focusing on the social aspirations of its characters, their actual social mobility (both upwards and downwards), and the question of social determinism and personal free will. Esther Waters is then situated within the contexts of Aestheticism and Impressionism, fin-de-siècle movements which shaped the representation of its protagonist’s consciousness. This section also highlights the novel’s literary qualities evident in its narrative focalisation, the use of free indirect speech, and the structural circularity of its plot. Finally, this chapter sketches the novel’s critical reception from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first. Keywords: Aestheticism, class, fallen woman, gambling, (stream of) consciousness

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment In Ave (1911), the first part of his autobiographical trilogy Hail and Farewell! (1911–1914), George Moore assessed his most popular novel Esther Waters (1894) as one that “ha[d] perhaps done more good than any novel written in my generation” (86). Without context, this statement might read like a rather unabashed attempt at authorial self-aggrandisement, yet what Moore performs on the subsequent pages is an ironic account of how the novel’s success deprived him not only of “that personal poverty which is necessary to the artist” but of “the way of all poverty” (88) by allowing him to move out of the garret lodgings he had occupied in the Inner Temple. Despite this almost Wildean flippancy, Moore’s evaluation of Esther Waters as a literary beacon is remarkable when considering the roster of writers who actually constituted Moore’s generation: Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Marie Corelli, ‘George Egerton’ (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), George Gissing, Sarah Grand, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, William Morris, R. L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde, to name only a selection of the most fêted. All irony aside, Moore was a self-consciously ambitious writer, who aspired to the highest literary accolades. He regularly imagined himself as a scaler of Mount Parnassus, the mythical home of the Muses, and Esther Waters was designed to prove the “female helpmate” in this “quest for canonization” (Youngkin 2003). “I have strained every nerve to make it a masterpiece,” Moore wrote to his brother https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-029

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Maurice on 23 October 1893, adding that “[i]t will decide what my position is. It is sink or swim” (qtd. in Frazier 2006, 6). George Moore’s position among the lateVictorian era’s literary grandees is still a somewhat contested one. Neither as entrenched as that of Stevenson, Hardy, Kipling, and Conrad, nor as revitalised as that of the ‘New Woman’ novelists Egerton and Grand, Moore’s reputation was until recently peculiarly precarious. One reason for this uncertain status as an important novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was undoubtedly Moore’s squabbles with erstwhile friends and collaborators whose standing in English literary history proved more steadfast than his own. Fellow Irishman W. B. Yeats, for instance, wrote famously of Moore in his autobiographical collection Dramatis Personae (1936): “His nature, bitter, violent, discordant, did not fit him to write the sentences men murmur again and again for years. Charm and rhythm had been denied him. Improvement makes straight roads; he pumicestoned every surface because will had to do the work for nature” (56). The metaphor of the pumice stone refers to Moore’s near-obsessive revising of his work in order to produce as chiselled a style and as consistent a work as possible – in the case of Esther Waters resulting in three different versions of the novel (1894, 1899, and 1920). This “George Moore idiosyncrasy” (Huguet 2006, 160) and his early championing of the novels of Émile Zola in Britain may have added to Moore’s reputation as a ‘scientific’ novelist, whose prose and subject matter seemed to align him most closely with a mode of writing more marginal and less popular in Britain than on the European and North American continents: literary naturalism (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology). Even though literary historians have long treated Moore as an, at best, transitional figure, whose novels offer the closest approximation to naturalist fiction on the British Isles, no small part of the blame that the label would adhere so persistently to his name has to rest with the author himself. Born on 24 February 1852 near Lough Carra, County Mayo, in the West of Ireland to a family of Roman Catholics, the young George spent his childhood at the family residence Moore Hall, which his father had furnished with an impressive racing stable. The atmosphere of racing and betting that he breathed during this time would provide him with a central theme for Esther Waters, which he also touched on in two earlier novels, Spring Days (1888) and Mike Fletcher (1889) (Flavin 2003, 186). When his father died unexpectedly in 1870, Moore inherited the parental estate, which furnished him with the financial means to pursue his art studies in France and saved him from the prospect of a career in the military. From 1873, Moore spent his apprenticeship years as a writer and art critic in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Zola and frequented the Café Nouvelle Athènes, a favourite haunt of celebrated artists like Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, who would paint one of the most famous portraits of Moore in 1879. When he was forced to return to England in 1879 for financial reasons (the rents he received as the absentee landlord of Moore Hall were gradually drying up), he had long determined to become, in his own famous phrase, “un ricochet de Zola en Angleterre” (‘a ricochet of Zola in England’, Frazier 2000, 104).

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His earliest novels were written in deliberate imitation of Zola’s roman expérimental (experimental novel), a creative heritage that did not escape the Academy reviewer of Moore’s first novel A Modern Lover (1883), a Künstlerroman of bold sexual relationships across class lines: “It is Zola in evening dress and with a clean face, but Zola all the same” (qtd. in Frazier 2000, 93). When Mudie’s ‘Select’ Library and W. H. Smith & Sons severely curtailed the circulation of the novel by only ordering a total of seventy five copies between them, they precipitated Moore’s sustained struggle with the Victorian system of library censorship. A Mummer’s Wife (1885), deliberately designed in one volume as a gesture of defiance against the lending libraries (who had institutionalised the expensive threedecker novel), was taken up by none other than Zola’s English publisher Henry Vizetelly, who himself would be prosecuted twice (in 1888 and 1889) for his translation and distribution of the French master’s work and ultimately sentenced to a three-month term of imprisonment (Manchester 2001, 2584). This novel of a young draper who leaves her husband for a travelling actor combines a plot of sexual transgression with an almost clinical interest in the degenerative consequences of alcoholism, subjects that proved too risqué for Mudie and Smith, who banned the volume from their library shelves and railway stalls. In a pre-emptive gesture, Moore had railed against the prudishness and extortionist politics of the Victorian publishing world in an article for the Pall Mall Gazette titled “A New Censorship of Literature” (10 December 1884) and more extensively in his pamphlet Literature at Nurse, or, Circulating Morals (1885). With these contributions he added an early voice to what was to become a spirited debate about ‘Candour in English Fiction’, entertained in a series of opinion pieces by Thomas Hardy, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Walter Besant in the New Review in 1890. Moore mocked Mudie’s catering to the “British Matron” (1885, 16), a reference to the character of Mrs Grundy from Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798), whose name had become idiomatic in the Victorian period for impeccable moral standards. The restrictive middle-class values that constituted the ideological bedrock of Mudie’s business model were castigated by Moore for threatening not only recent publications, but the entire tradition of English literature “to suit the commercial views of a narrow-minded tradesman” (16). With the goal of protecting young ladies from the realities of life, “English literature is sacrificed on the altar of Hymen,” when “to write as grown-up men and women talk of life’s passions and duties” (21) would offer the writer a middle ground for his subject matter between the extreme poles of prudery and lasciviousness. After the novels A Drama in Muslin (1886) and A Mere Accident (1887), Moore delivered his recollections of the years spent in Paris in the autobiographical Confessions of a Young Man (1888). By this time, Moore had established himself as a sought-after journalist, a reputation he cemented during the 1890s, the most productive period in the career of a very productive writer. (By the end of his life, Moore had written well over sixty volumes of fiction, journalism, poetry, and drama.) After the disheartening

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failure of his novel Vain Fortune (1891), which served as an intertext for James Joyce’s story “The Dead” (1914), Moore made himself instrumental in the foundation of the Independent Theatre Society, where he promoted the ‘New Drama’ of Henrik Ibsen in Britain and discovered the young Bernard Shaw in 1892. In 1894, Moore landed a critically-acclaimed bestseller with Esther Waters, his masterpiece and the only one of his novels that has never been out of print. At the dawning of the twentieth century, Moore became deeply involved with the Irish Renaissance, when Yeats recruited him as a collaborator for the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin, where he moved in 1901. The most remarkable achievements from this time in Ireland are The Untilled Field (1903), a collection of tales that mark Moore as an important contributor to the tradition of the Anglo-Irish modernist short story (Garcier 2006, 46), and The Lake (1905), “the first deliberate experiment in streamof-consciousness prose in English fiction” (Frazier 2006, 5). Less successful as a playwright than as a novelist and critic, Moore returned to London in 1911 from where he alienated the circle around Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory through their satiric depictions in Hail and Farewell!. Moore’s productivity did not cease until his death on 21 January 1933: his final memoir A Communication to My Friends (1933) was published posthumously.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Tracing the trials and tribulations in the life of a servant girl who has to raise her illegitimate son without his father, Esther Waters is an exceptionally rich and multi-layered novel, packing its odd 300 pages with a multitude of topics and concerns of the late-Victorian period in a density that is rare for such a short novel: class difference and social mobility, gender inequality and female desire, the pressures of the environment in an individual’s destiny, country and city life, the betting culture of Victorian England, and the Victorian double standards underlying all of these areas are the subjects brewed up into a heady mix in this fin-de-siècle bestseller. In his final memoir, A Communication to My Friends, Moore described his motivation for writing about a working-class life, having been inspired by a newspaper article on servants “who in English literature are never introduced except as comic characters” (1933, xlvi). This made him wonder whether they “might not be treated as the principal characters of a novel,” as he recognised their “partial slavery” through economic want (xlvi). The contrasted settings of Woodview, a Sussex country house, and the workingclass districts of London allowed Moore to investigate the relationships between the lower and upper classes at a historical moment already showing the fissures that would lead up to the juncture in 1910 when, according to Virginia Woolf, human character changed with a shift in relations between masters and servants, husbands and

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wives, and parents and their children (2008, 38). Esther Waters shows these relationships to be at the same time porous and ossified, a paradox that undergirds much of the heroine’s social struggles and aspirations. At the beginning of the novel, Esther Waters arrives at the train station of Shoreham to take up her position as the new kitchen maid at Woodview, the country estate of the Barfield family. When some months later the trophy horse of the Woodview stables, Silver Braid, wins two consecutive races, the “decrepit and colourless” little town of Shoreham experiences an unprecedented surge of money that affects the lives of all classes: “A golden prosperity” begins to shine on the Barfield estate and prompts a more extravagant lifestyle of conspicuous consumption both “upstairs and downstairs” (Moore 2012, 57). “[D]rawn like moths to a candle” (56), the landed gentry flock to Woodview to pay their calls to ‘the Gaffer’ (the servant’s moniker for Mr Barfield), and for the servants the “jollifications” (57) culminate in a celebratory ball at the local Shoreham Gardens. The money released by the successful gamble of the racecourse brings out the working-class characters’ social aspirations, as they mimic their masters’ dress and comportment. In an attempt to keep their ball “select,” the organisers of the event (drawn from the servants of Woodview and two other “leading county families”) issue invitations with the notice: “Evening dress is indispensable” (57). Having borrowed a suitable outfit from her employer’s daughter Mary, the kitchen maid Esther is temporarily transformed into something of a fairy-tale princess: she is talked of as “the belle of the ball” (58), who even gets to dance with one of the young country squires. Yet the success of this social mimicry is entirely dependent on the servants’ familiarity with upperclass codes of fashion, and the performance of upper-class authenticity falters with some of the villagers. A girl in her grandmother’s bridal dress and a young man in an incongruous combination of yellow waistcoat and ancient blue military coat are just two guests with whom “many a touch suggested costume” (58). The servant class may aspire to the lifestyle of the landed gentry, yet ultimately such transgressive energies are only permitted in the carnivalesque context of the ball – and even here they are disciplined through the presence of their social superiors. Barfield’s son Arthur (called ‘Ginger’ by the Woodview servants) starts dancing a vigorous polka with “his elbows advanced like a yacht’s bowsprit” and “his coattails flying,” and when he “dashe[s] through a group of tradespeople,” the latter are “bobbing up and down, hardly advancing at all” (58). The paraphernalia of gentility cannot obliterate class hierarchies: the servants (“this menial, work-a-day crowd” [58]) are merely wearing fancy dress and, despite their own dancing, they are never propelled forward. Throughout Esther Waters, working-class hopes of social advancement are fuelled by success stories circulated about the class history of some of its central characters. Mrs Barfield, lady-of-the-house and Esther’s patroness at Woodview, is herself the daughter of the tenant farmer Elliot, who works his land on the squire’s estate. This mésalliance between Fanny Elliot and the Gaffer prompted only the

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“ambitious members of the Barfield family” to speak of “social ruin,” while less biased critics found it “a very suitable match” considering the Barfields’ own history as “livery-stable keepers” only three generations previously (Moore 2012, 27). When the footman William Latch shows Esther the lay of the Barfield land, he cannot suppress the urge to tell his future lover and wife that a large section of the estate used to belong to his own family, who “were once big swells” at a time when “the Barfields could not hold their heads as high as the Latches” (38). What these important details of Moore’s novel help to foreground is that, in this society, social progress is no inevitable law, and that a family’s ‘descent’ can be read metaphorically and literally – it can signal both the ties binding an individual to her familial ancestors and a dangerous downward spiral in social terms. That families may be subject to either a rise or a fall provides the novel’s characters with different rationales for their variable class aspirations according to their relative status within the social hierarchy. At the novel’s close, the once prosperous country house Woodview has suffered severely from the financial losses of the Barfields’ racing and betting, with its “stables, coach-houses, granaries, [and] rick-yards, all in ruin and decay” (Moore 2012, 323). On a brief return visit to his inherited estate, the deceased Gaffer’s son Arthur firmly clings to his social prestige, regardless of and untroubled by the material disintegration of his house: “The Barfields at least were county, and he wished Woodview to remain county as long as the walls held together. He wasn’t a bit ashamed of all this ruin. You could receive the Prince of Wales in a ruin, but he wouldn’t care to ask him into a dissenting chapel” (319). Even though this snub of the Plymouth Brethren, the sectarian community of both Mrs Barfield and Esther, seems to be grounded in religious disapprobation, their snide characterisation as “a lot of little shop-keepers” (319) betrays Arthur’s motivations as thoroughly classist. The footman William shows a similar attitude when he disregards class boundaries by refusing to travel third-class on the underground and pushing his sweetheart Esther into a second-class compartment instead. The potential permeability of Britain’s class boundaries is a powerful enticement for most characters in Moore’s novel to either strive for social improvement or retain their status quo in society. The daily struggles of Esther Waters’s eponymous heroine, by contrast, are fuelled by the basest economic necessity. At the very outset of the narrative, Esther assumes the position of kitchen maid at Woodview because of her desire to escape the violence of a step-father and the despondency of a home that has become “unendurable” (Moore 2012, 78) to her. Having succumbed to the flirtatious advances of the servant William, she is dismissed by the Barfields and has to return to her family “seven months gone” (80). The novel is painstaking in its numerical registering of the financial demands of London and Esther’s family, which are a constant strain on the girl’s meagre savings of twelve pounds and threaten to force the young mother and her child into the workhouse. This middle section of the novel races through Esther’s increasingly desperate attempts to avoid

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slipping into what the late-Victorian period thought of as “outcast London,” the “residuum” of a metropolitan underclass of casual labourers, criminals, and prostitutes (Stedman Jones 1976, 11–12). On the streets of London, the “weakness of the flesh” she experiences because of hunger, thirst, and physical exhaustion nearly turns into “a sudden weakness of the spirit” when a young, kindly-looking man accosts her – yet she escapes “temptation” (Moore 2012, 148). Moore’s Esther is, in Gina M. Dorré’s words, “a woman who does not fall” (2006, 147). Esther Waters can thus be read in a tradition of novels like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles about the ‘fallen woman’, with Moore’s unmarried heroine battling the social injustices regularly brought against someone of her class and sex. Esther’s deep determination to soldier on through the most abject adversity is an even more powerful accusation of the sexual double standard than suicide by drowning, a decidedly female fate that hovers in the background of Moore’s novel and was visually captured by George Frederic Watts’s painting Found Drowned (ca. 1850). Indeed, it is important to emphasise that the novel indicts the plight of Esther as a working-class woman at least as harshly as it does the more general and less gender-specific social evil of gambling in which she becomes caught up through her marriage to William. Despite immaculate references from previous employers, she struggles to find service as a wet-nurse for the offspring of middle-class ladies because her own child was born out of wedlock, branding her as “a loose woman” (Moore 2012, 142) in a culture that is characterised by what Kevin Swafford has recently called “the fetishization of chastity” (2007, 136). Esther herself recognises this injustice of Victorian gender roles when she comments on her own destiny in conversation with the benevolent novelist Mrs Rice: “We can’t do wrong without being punished – at least women can’t” (Moore 2012, 201). The character who suffers the consequences of her sexual transgressions most violently is Esther’s former co-worker Sarah, who has to become a prostitute in order to sustain her violent and good-for-nothing husband and ends up in prison for having stolen from her employers (240). Sarah serves as Esther’s foil throughout the novel with the course of their lives similar enough to highlight the dangers that Esther narrowly escapes. Esther’s tribulations should thus be read as emblematic of an entire class of servant girls whose position in their households was not only financially precarious and dependent on the capriciousness of their social superiors, but made them vulnerable to patriarchal violence and sexual predation in the workplace, at home, and on the streets of the city – a space which the novel represents as both dangerous and alluring. The suggestion that Esther’s protracted struggles are determined by social circumstance puts Moore’s novel within the purview of naturalistic fiction, and the “sordid story” (Moore 2012, 297) of a girl who is exposed to the vagaries of life with little agency of her own can certainly be read in this context. Yet Esther Waters also has something of the inevitability of classical tragedy with less clearly social forces

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(alternatively coded as ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ at multiple points in the novel) pushing against Esther’s will to survive. The almost archetypal plot of a star-crossed individual (the name Esther is derived from the Persian stara for ‘star’), who struggles against incomprehensible forces that are as arbitrary as they are relentless, is powerfully illustrated by the sad demise of her husband William, who succumbs to the gradual degeneration of his body: “He felt it was no use struggling against fate” (295). Here, the novel also suggests that the wasting away of William’s body and his death of consumption (like that of the Gaffer) should be read as the ultimate punishment for the wastefulness inherent in a culture of racing and gambling, in which Esther gets caught up by proxy. Gina M. Dorré has chronicled how the late-nineteenth century saw the transformation of horse racing from an expensive leisure activity of the aristocracy to a more demotic form of popular entertainment (2006, 122–126). Yet, despite the moral outrage this caused among lawmakers and reformers (the National Anti-Gambling League was founded in 1890), it is a matter of contention whether social reality gave much justification for the moral anxiety pertaining to horse racing (125). Rather than reading Esther Waters as a direct critique of the turf’s pleasures, it may be more productive to consider the narrative function that gambling holds in the novel. On the one hand, the contingent quality of Esther’s life is neatly mirrored by the unreliability inherent in the betting process in which all rationalising attempts fail wholeheartedly. While betting certainly offers the characters in Esther Waters the illusion of escaping the determining pull of fate (Gilbert 1978, 56), neither Ketley’s belief in the power of omens to predict the winner of a race nor Journeyman’s preoccupation with the weights and measurements of the participating horses provide a viable strategy to pick a winner. (Significantly, the only punter who makes a profit off his wagers is the uncanny George Buff, a character who follows no perceivable strategy at all and remains invisible throughout the novel.) On the other hand, the fin-de-siècle culture of gambling offers Moore yet another possibility to reveal the social hypocrisies and double standards underlying late-Victorian society. Mid-century legislation (the Betting Houses Act of 1853) had made betting in private homes and pubs illegal in Britain, while leaving the same practice unaffected as long as it took place out of doors (Dorré 2006, 124). This law was geared towards discouraging the gambling habits of the working classes as it did not prohibit the betting that occurred on the racecourse, in private gentleman’s clubs, or on the stock market. The publican William rails against this legal injustice which upholds “the old story – one law for the rich and another for the poor” (Moore 2012, 254). Moore’s novel indicts this hypocrisy by making William contract his fatal illness while operating his business as a bookmaker on the racecourse within the limits provided by the law. In Esther Waters, Moore does not offer a straightforward rejection of gambling as a social practice. By showing that betting is common among “[a]ll kinds and conditions of men” (229) – and thus echoing the title of Walter Besant’s 1882 novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men – he offers a more

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wide-ranging critique of Britain’s class system. The novel makes it clear that betting is nothing less than a placebo for the most entrenched of social injustices: “A bet on a race brings hope into lives which otherwise would be hopeless” (219). Esther rejects her pious suitor Fred and re-associates with the betting man William precisely because she feels the hopelessness of a life that seems steered by a relentless fate: “The life she had dreamed would never be hers [. . .]. Everything seemed to point to the inevitableness of this end” (Moore 2012, 192). This is not to suggest, however, that Esther lacks all agency in a contingent world. A counterforce to these external pressures that Esther can neither control nor fully grasp is an energy all of her own, which the novel codes as “instinct” (e.g. 126, 138, 195) and which comprises the intertwined drives of self-preservation, maternal feeling, and sexual desire, a constellation indebted to Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy (Alvarez 1995, 173). Even though Esther is almost overwhelmed by the choice of marrying either Fred or William – and has a faintly bigamous dream of marrying both (Moore 2012, 198) – she comes to a decision after imagining herself at a crossroads: She had never seen much life, and felt somehow that she would like to see a little life [. . .]. She stopped thinking, surprised at her thoughts. She had never thought like that before; it seemed as if some other woman whom she hardly knew was thinking for her. She seemed like one standing at cross-roads, unable to decide which road she would take. (197)

Even though Esther conceives of her final decision to live with William as a “risk” (201), she is convinced that a woman has “to chance it in the end” (202), and at least attempt to be the agent of her destiny. Some of the greatest aesthetic achievements of Moore’s novel are the representation of Esther’s consciousness when she attempts to comprehend the forces that move her from without and within, and the mirroring of Esther’s situation in the novel’s imagery and structure.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The indebtedness of Esther Waters to the naturalism of Zola’s fiction can most clearly be traced in the scenes of domestic violence involving Esther’s step-father Jim Saunders, the shocking suicide of Ketley, the miseries of the lying-in hospital (the reason why W. H. Smith banned the novel), and the direct representation of working-class speech patterns. Yet Moore employs a wide range of styles and representational techniques that align Esther Waters with other, no less modern artistic movements such as Aestheticism and Impressionism, which add to the novel’s multifaceted quality. While working on the proofs of A Mummer’s Wife in spring 1885, Moore received a copy he had ordered of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (↗ 24 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean) and was fascinated by it (Furst 1974, 144). One of the books that John Norton, the protagonist of Moore’s A Mere Accident (1887),

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reads at college is Pater’s volume Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) with its famous “Conclusion,” which reminded readers that life was “but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways” (2010, 118). The desire to capture moments of the most exquisite energy, which is such an important tenet of both Pater’s Aestheticism and French Impressionism, is palpable at a decisive moment in Esther Waters. When Esther falls in love with William during their incidental tête-à-tête on the estate grounds, the novel seems to riff on Pater’s injunction that “[t]o burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (120): “It seemed that all life was beating in that moment, and they were as it were inflamed to reach out their hands to life and to grasp it together” (Moore 2012, 40, emphases added). Significantly, this receptiveness to the impressions of the outer world is occasioned by the first stirrings of Esther’s dawning sexuality: “There was a stillness and a sweetness abroad which penetrated and absorbed her. [. . .] It was a pleasure to touch anything, especially anything alive. [. . .] She was full of a romantic love for the earth, and of a desire to mix herself with the innermost essence of things” (36). Sexual desire here facilitates a frame of mind that allows Esther to find new meanings in external objects that, until then, had eluded her as “insignificant,” but suddenly “seemed like symbols of her emotion” (39). Moore’s representation of Esther’s sexual awakening heralds the arrival of D. H. Lawrence on Britain’s literary scene, as much as the sudden revelations of the landscape can be read as prefiguring the epiphanic moments in James Joyce’s modernist fiction. Pater claimed in his “Conclusion” that, as a consequence of the moment-like quality of human life, we would be overwhelmed by the flood of experience, were it not for the human faculty of reflection through which “each object is loosed into a group of impressions – colour, odour, texture” within our consciousness until “the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind” (2010, 119). Even though Esther Waters is a third-person narrative with an, at some moments, intrusive narrator, Esther is the novel’s dominant centre of consciousness. In narratological terms, Moore’s novel is largely characterised by internal focalisation (Chapman 2002, 308) so that readers share the experiences of the protagonist just as they register in the “narrow chamber” of her mind, to use Pater’s phrase. One of the most famous episodes in the novel is Moore’s rendering of Derby Day that extends over three chapters, yet in contrast to William Powell Frith’s panoramic painting of the event (1856–1858), readers follow Esther’s highly subjective (and selective) experiences. Having wandered around for most of the race, she watches part of it “through a multitude of hats,” unsure whether there had been “two or three false starts,” and unable to see the horses clearly: “They passed like shadows, flitted by [. . .]” (Moore 2012, 235). This narrative technique emphasises not so much the event of the race itself, but rather the way in which it is perceived and transformed in Esther’s mind as a series of impressions.

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This impressionistic quality of Moore’s writing is evident almost everywhere in Esther Waters. At a particularly low point, Esther finds herself on the streets of Wandsworth without work, money, or accommodation: She would have to spend the night in the workhouse, and then? She did not know . . . All sorts of thoughts came upon her unsolicited, and she walked on and on. At last she rested her burden on the parapet of a bridge, and saw the London night, blue and gold, vast water rolling, and the spectacle of the stars like a dream from which she could not disentangle her individuality. Was she to die in the star-lit city, she and her child; and why should such cruelty happen to her more than to the next one? (Moore 2012, 131)

In her misery, thoughts crowd in on her mind without clear direction, mirroring her aimless wandering. Taking a break, Esther perceives the city in pictorial terms (possibly with echoes of paintings by James McNeill Whistler and John Atkinson Grimshaw) and struggles to extricate her identity from the canvas painted by her mind. Esther’s sense of disorientation and the threat of suicide that hangs over the scene are powerfully reinforced by Moore’s framing of the passage with questions in free indirect discourse, a modern way of representing consciousness that is such a prominent feature in the novel and aligns Moore with twentieth-century avantgarde writers (“She would have to spend the night in the workhouse, and then?”, “Was she to die in the star-lit city [. . .]?”). The image of the star-lit sky and the tumbling waters of the Thames also raise the question how Esther can escape the inexorable push and pull of fate and the determining forces of her environment. How can she continue her life’s journey and, just as importantly, where will it end? In structural terms, this question is easily answered: back at the beginning. In the last chapters, Esther returns to Woodview, and the novel famously repeats its first paragraph almost verbatim: She stood on the platform watching the receding train. A few bushes hid the curve of the line; the white vapour rose above them, evaporating in the grey evening. A moment more and the last carriage would pass out of sight. The white gates swung slowly forward and closed over the line. (Moore 2012, 311)

No aspect of Esther Waters has received more critical attention than this striking circularity, and yet commentators are divided on how to interpret the cycle of Esther’s life. A pessimistic reading would suggest that the repetitiveness of the novel’s structure is an index to the futility of Esther’s life choices (Alvarez 1995, 178–179). Whatever little agency she is given, ultimately Esther is returned to where she started off, with Woodview now “a final stage” in her life (Moore 2012, 318). In such a view, the positive depiction of Esther’s and Mrs Barfield’s ultimate companionship is undermined by a less egalitarian current that stresses the differences (“these slight social distinctions”) that persist between the two women: “Not that Esther ever failed to use the respectful ‘ma’am’ when she addressed her mistress, nor did they ever sit down to a meal at the same table” (321).

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Alternatively, the ending of Esther Waters can help to highlight the changes the setting and the protagonist have undergone since the novel’s beginning. After all, some eighteen years have passed, and Woodview – unmistakably – “isn’t what it was” (Moore 2012, 317), and neither is Esther. If we understand the Woodview of the novel’s opening as a quasi-pastoral paradise into which “the jaded town girl” (5) retreats from the sordid circumstances of her life (unmindful of the “bleak country” surrounding the estate [4]), then the decaying Woodview of the closing chapters represents a space shorn of all idealisations. At the outset, “life in Woodview was a great dream for Esther” (4), and after a short settling-in period she starts to enjoy the pastoral pleasures it seems to offer, with its flock of sheep, its romping boys, its song and dance. This idealised depiction of Woodview at the beginning of the novel establishes the illusion that horse racing and gambling are innocuous pastimes (Dorré 2006, 145), and it is only against the backdrop of this pastoral setting that Moore can bring out in relief what insidiously destructive energies are at work underneath the surface of this Eden. Finally released from the world of gambling after her husband’s death, Esther gains a sense that “[t]here’s a good time coming” (Moore 2012, 324), and when her son Jack, now an enlisted soldier, comes to visit her at Woodview, even “the possibility that any moment might declare him to be mere food for powder and shot” (325–326) retreats into the background: “All was forgotten in the happiness of the moment [. . .]” (325). This simple relishing of the here-and-now may appear as a meagre compensation for the privation and misery Esther had to endure in the past. Yet an outlook that focusses on the present moment (as do the representational strategies of Aestheticism and Impressionism) ultimately serves as a more realistic view of life than the forward-looking, yet illusory, hopefulness of the novel’s failed gamblers.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives The first reviews of Moore’s novel were largely positive, ranging from the guarded approval of the Saturday Review that the author “has come nearer than ever before to the production of a really fine novel” (“Novels” 1894, 476) to Arthur QuillerCouch’s effusive appraisal of Esther Waters as “the most artistic, the most complete, and the most inevitable work of fiction that has been written in England for at least two years” in the Speaker (367), a conclusion Quiller-Couch arrived at after comparing Moore’s novel to no less successful work than Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In its first year alone, Esther Waters sold 24,000 copies and was commended by the British Prime Minister William Gladstone (Frazier 2000, 465). In its annual roundup “English Literature in 1894”, the Athenaeum called Moore’s novel “the most widely discussed and in some ways the most interesting book of the year” (1895, 9). Much of the vigorous discussion that followed the publication of Esther Waters was

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triggered by W. H. Smith’s decision to ban the book in April 1894, an injunction that baffled reviewers who thought the novel – if anything – showed “a moral purpose far too insistently” (G. Y. 1894, 52). Fellow writers recognised Moore’s mastery over his material without delivering verdicts on the novel’s supposed morality – a measure of literary greatness which Moore rejected as forcefully as Wilde had done on the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890. After Moore’s fin-de-siècle contemporaries Lionel Johnson and Sarah Grand had praised the novel on publication, the modernist icons Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (in reviews of the 1920 edition) both acknowledged Esther Waters as a significant contribution to British literature, even if not without reservation. Mansfield was amazed at “the amount of sheer labour” that Moore had exerted: “Having read it carefully and slowly [. . .], we are left feeling that there is not a page, paragraph, sentence, word, that is not right, the only possible page, paragraph, sentence, word” (1930, 234). Nonetheless, she felt that Esther Waters “never could be a great novel” (235) for its supposed lack of emotion, a sentiment shared by Woolf, yet not without calling Moore “a born writer” (1920, 485). In a double obituary of George Moore and John Galsworthy for the English Review, Ford Madox Ford praised the author of Esther Waters as “the only novelist of English blood who had produced a novel that was a masterpiece at once of writing and of form” (1933, 132). As early as 1933, Ford felt the need to reinstate Moore – that “most skilful man of letters of his day” – in the history of world literature from which he “was almost invariably forgotten” (135) and ventured his own speculation for Moore’s relative obscurity: “That was due, perhaps, to the fact that he belonged to no school in England; perhaps to his want of personal geniality, perhaps to something more subtle” (135). The difficulty of associating George Moore – and for that matter Esther Waters – with a single ‘school’ or movement in literary history has certainly been responsible for Moore’s wavering fortunes. In Confessions of a Young Man, Moore had originally described his variable allegiances as “fads,” in a passage he later reworked without retaining any of the following ‘isms’: “Naturalism I wore round my neck, Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried, like a toy revolver, in my waistcoat pocket, to be used in an emergency” (qtd. in Gruetzner Robins 2014, 48). This suggests that Moore preferred not to be remembered as part of any individual coterie. Yet literary history is to a great degree concerned with the description of patterns, the identification of categories, the construction of parallel developments, and naturalism became the dominant paradigm used to make sense of Moore’s novels, up to and including Esther Waters. This is all the more surprising when considering Lillian R. Furst’s critical intervention which – through a comparison of the prominent race scenes in Zola’s Nana (1880) and Moore’s Esther Waters – concluded as early as in 1974 that “Zola-ism must be counted among Moore’s wild oats” (155). More recent criticism such as Simon Joyce’s Modernism and Naturalism in British and Irish Fiction, 1880–1930 (2015) has shown that naturalism can still prove a

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valuable prism through which to view Esther Waters as long as other contemporaneous literary movements and techniques such as realism, Aestheticism, and Impressionism are taken into account. The twenty-first century has seen a noticeable rise in George Moore criticism, and Esther Waters has also gained renewed attention. This renaissance was certainly triggered by Adrian Frazier’s monumental biography George Moore, 1852–1933 (2000), which provided the first extensive account of Moore’s life since Joseph Hone’s early treatment in 1936. An increasing number of critics have joined the project of re-establishing Moore as an important and multifaceted figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, realising that a writer who was as much at the centre of literary and artistic culture as Moore should not be allowed to dwell on the margins of literary history. The recent string of edited collections of criticism on Moore’s life and work mirrors the eclectic nature of his oeuvre, which may be most fruitfully investigated from a multitude of perspectives rather than the unifying voice of an individual critic or theory. Since Mary Pierse’s collection George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds (2006), several volumes of articles on Moore have been published, prompted by a number of international conferences on Moore and each with a restorative critical agenda. Conor Montague and Adrian Frazier’s collection George Moore: Dublin, Paris, Hollywood (2012) foregrounds Moore as an international writer, whose work has a contemporary relevance that goes beyond the context of the late nineteenth-century literary scene. In a similar vein, the contributions in Christine Huguet and Fabienne Dabrigeon-Garcier’s George Moore: Across Borders highlight Moore’s cosmopolitanism, reassessing his career as that of “the influential rather than the versatile artist, the precursor rather than the disciple” (2013, 26). Both these volumes engage with Moore’s evident eclecticism (which is one reason for Moore’s erstwhile critical neglect), and María de Pablos and Mary Pierse cast their editorial net wide in order to celebrate Moore’s ‘quirkiness’ as a productive rather than diminishing force in George Moore and the Quirks of Human Nature (2014). Acknowledging the importance of these earlier collections, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn offer “a sustained interrogation” (2014, 16) of Moore’s position among his peers in the most recent collection of articles on Moore’s oeuvre. In George Moore: Influence and Collaboration they aim “to reconceptualize [. . .] his interactions with and impact on his literary and artistic contemporaries” (16), while also excavating some forgotten works by Moore from the archives. What all of these contributions share is the desire to de-marginalise “this often-disparaged master of the modern novel” (Frazier 2006, 2) and show Moore and his work not as merely transitional, but transformational (9).

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Bibliography Works Cited Alvarez, David. “The Case of the Split Self: George Moore’s Debt to Schopenhauer in Esther Waters.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 38.2 (1995): 169–185. Chapman, Siobhan. “‘From Their Point of View:’ Voice and Speech in George Moore’s Esther Waters.” Language and Literature 11.4 (2002): 307–323. de Pablos, María Elena Jaime, and Mary Pierse, eds. George Moore and the Quirks of Human Nature. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. Dorré, Gina M. Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. “English Literature in 1894.” Athenaeum 5 Jan. 1895: 9–11. Flavin, Michael. Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel: “A Leprosy is o’er the Land.” Brighton: Sussex Academic P, 2003. Ford, Ford Madox . “John Galsworthy and George Moore.” English Review 57 (1933): 130–142. Frazier, Adrian. George Moore, 1852–1933. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Frazier, Adrian. “‘I No Longer Underrate Him:’ The Question of Moore’s Value.” Pierse 2006, 2–11. Furst, Lilian R. “George Moore, Zola, and the Question of Influence.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 1.2 (1974): 138–155. G. Y. Rev. of Esther Waters, by George Moore. Bookman 6.32 (1894): 52–53. Garcier, Fabienne. “George Moore’s The Untilled Field: The Irish Short Story at a Crossroads.” Pierse 2006, 40–48. Gilbert, Elliot L. “In the Flesh: Esther Waters and the Passion for Yes.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 12.1 (1978): 48–65. Gruetzner Robins, Anna. “‘A Visit to an Impressionist Exhibition’ in Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man.” Heilmann and Llewellyn 2014, 39–51. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn, eds. George Moore: Influence and Collaboration. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2014. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. “George Moore: Influence and Collaboration.” Introduction. Heilmann and Llewellyn 2014, 1–23. Hone, Joseph. The Life of George Moore. London: Victor Gollancz, 1936. Huguet, Christine. “Charting an Aesthetic Journey: The Case of Esther Waters.” Pierse 2006, 160–172. Huguet, Christine, and Fabienne Dabrigeon-Garcier. Introduction. George Moore: Across Borders. Ed. Huguet and Dabrigeon-Garcier. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 1–12. Joyce, Simon. Modernism and Naturalism in British and Irish Fiction, 1880–1930. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. Manchester, Colin. “Henry Vizetelly: British Publisher, 1820–1894.” Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. Ed. Derek Jones. London: Routledge, 2001. 2584–2585. Mansfield, Katherine. “Esther Waters Revisited.” Novels and Novelists. By Mansfield. Ed. John Middleton Murry. London: Constable, 1930. Montague, Conor, and Adrian Frazier, eds. George Moore: Dublin, Paris, Hollywood. Newbridge: Irish Academic P, 2012. Moore, George. Ave. London: Heinemann, 1911. Moore, George. Esther Waters. 1894. Ed. Stephen Regan. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Moore, George. Literature at Nurse, or, Circulating Morals. London: Vizetelly, 1885. Moore, George. A Mummer’s Wife with A Communication to My Friends. London: Heinemann, 1933. “Novels.” Saturday Review 5 May 1894: 476–477.

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Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Ed. Matthew Beaumont. Oxford: OUP, 2010. Pierse, Mary, ed. George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2006. Quiller-Couch, Arthur. “A Literary Causerie.” Rev. of Esther Waters, by George Moore. Speaker 31 March 1894: 366–367. Stedman Jones, Gareth. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Swafford, Kevin. Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and Its Representation. Youngstown: Cambria, 2007. Woolf, Virginia. “A Born Writer.” Rev. of Esther Waters, by George Moore. Times Literary Supplement 29 July 1920: 485. Woolf, Virginia. “Character in Fiction.” Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: OUP, 2008. 37–54. Yeats, William Butler. Dramatis Personae. London: Macmillan, 1936. Youngkin, Molly. “George Moore’s Quest for Canonization and Esther Waters as Female Helpmate.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 46.2 (2003): 117–139.

Further Reading Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Berry, Betsy. “Voyage in the Dark, Esther Waters, and the Naturalistic Tradition.” Jean Rhys Review 7.1–2 (1996): 17–25. Cirillo Nancy R. “A Girl Need Never Go Wrong, or, The Female Servant as Ideological Image in Germinie Lacerteux and Esther Waters.” Comparative Literature Studies 28.1 (1991): 68–88. Federico, Annette. “Subjectivity and Story in George Moore’s Esther Waters.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 36.2 (1993): 141–157. Gilcher, Edwin. “Moore, George Augustus (1852–1933).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Web. 21 Nov. 2016. Hall, Wayne. “Esther Waters: An Irish Story.” Irish Renaissance Annual 1.1 (1980): 137–156. O’Toole, Tess. “The Servant’s Body: The Victorian Wet-Nurse and George Moore’s Esther Waters.” Women’s Studies 25.4 (1996): 329–349. Shields, Agnes. “Religion as Trope in the Naturalistic Novels of George Moore: A Mummer’s Wife, A Drama in Muslin, and Esther Waters.” Excavatio 18.1–2 (2003): 363–371. Watt, George. The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. London: Croome Helm, 1984.

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

29 Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus (1894) Abstract: The chapter reads Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894) as a prime example of the New Woman writing of the 1890s while emphasising Caird’s unique outlook: her refutation of eugenics and dissent from the time’s maternity cult and women’s sphere ideology sharply differentiate her position from that of other New Woman writers who, while sharing her opposition to patriarchy and the Victorian marriage laws, still biologised their arguments about women’s alleged moral superiority. After introducing Caird’s literary and journalistic oeuvre, the chapter explores the novel’s narrative strategies: its feminist reworking of the Künstlerroman, use of temporal dislocations to convey cultural-historical relativism, and combination of a philosophy of individualism and autonomy with Greek and Celtic mythological allegories. Rewriting the bourgeois message of mid-Victorian novels, which naturalised the class and gender system and the closure of matrimony, the novel asserts the legitimacy of women’s participation in cultural production – but still ends in “futility” when the protagonist, like the eponymous daughters of Danaus, is ‘punished’ for her ambition. While the often hostile rejection of her work during her own lifetime testifies to Caird’s radicalism, she was celebrated as a “pioneer of humanity” by women’s rights activists. This ‘novel with a purpose’ creates its own political aesthetics. Keywords: Künstlerroman, ‘woman of genius’, feminism, sexual double standard, marriage laws

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment I do not share your admiration for the woman who is ‘sacrificial’ [. . .]. I do not agree with you in thinking that women have to prove themselves heroines and devotees of duty before they have a right to claim the fullest opportunity for development and life. They claim this right as human beings [. . .]. (Caird, qtd. in Heilmann 2004, 157)

In her literary and journalistic oeuvre, Mona Caird (1854–1932), as one of the bestknown New Woman writers, offers a complete inventory of the themes and techniques that informed this late-nineteenth-century literary and political movement. Yet her work is also unique in terms of Caird’s radical and individualistic stance on many of her time’s most burning issues. The injustices of patriarchal gender conventions and marriage laws, which consigned the (middle-class) Victorian wife to the undignified status of “slave” and “parasite,” were recurring concerns in her https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-030

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writing (Caird 1888, 194). While the goal of full equality for women is at the core of Caird’s literary production, other social and philosophical issues, such as eugenics or radical pacifism, are addressed vigorously throughout. Approaching her society through the lens of cultural relativism, Caird laid bare the artificiality, dishonesty, and hypocrisy implicit in nineteenth-century gender roles, middle-class domesticity, and the moral double standard. Her astute analysis of how social ‘realities’ are constructed, how allegedly biological phenomena (her most favourite example: the ‘maternal instinct’) are not only described but also produced and reinforced by language, make Caird’s writing prefigure, as Ann Heilmann has pointed out, “aspects of modern second-wave feminism” (1996, 68): Her journalistic and narrative work reflects what Adrienne Rich, in 1971, conceptualised as the feminist project of ‘re-vision’. Caird ‘re-visioned’ the law, language and literature of the ‘fathers’ in multiple and intersecting ways: historically, by tracing the emergence and impact of patriarchy on the condition of women in the family and society; discursively, by challenging dominant scientific taxonomies and models of interpretation; and intertextually, by rewriting Classical and modern myth in order to dismantle the foundation stories which defined women as objects of exchange. (Heilmann 2004, 158)

The most important influence on Caird’s thinking was John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869) defined liberal thought for the modern age and continued the fight for gender equality from the pioneering advances of Mary Wollstonecraft (Hookway 2012). Like Mill, Caird believed that individual rights were the basis for social freedom. Indeed, she argued in the preface to The Morality of Marriage that “the emancipation of women would be both the sign and the safeguard of our national liberties” (1897, 16). Born as Alice Mona Alison in Scotland to John Alison of Midlothian and his wife Matilda Hector, who was of German extraction, Caird was proficient in French and German besides English. She married James Alexander Henryson-Caird in 1877 and gave birth to a son, Alister James, in 1884. Her husband was eight years her senior and supportive of her independent pursuits, and Caird proceeded to divide her time between his estates in Scotland and Hampshire and travelling on the Continent. She also moved in intellectual circles in London, where she formed close friendships with writers Elizabeth and William Sharp and Thomas Hardy (whose famous novels have much in common with Caird’s). Her first two novels, Whom Nature Leadeth (1883) and One That Wins (1887), were published under the pseudonym ‘G. Noel Hatton’. Her subsequent fictional work includes the short story collections A Romance of the Moors (1891), Some Whims of Fate (1896) and The Crook of the Bough (1898). Her bestknown short story, “The Yellow Drawing-Room” (1892), stages an erotic triangle in which independent Vanora Haydon rejects the conventional separation of male and female ‘spheres’. She is mostly remembered for her novels: The Wing of Azrael (1889), which revolves around the question of marital rape and to some extent anticipates Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) in its rendering of the female protagonist’s murder of her husband in self-defence; The Daughters of Danaus (1894), which will

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be at the centre of this chapter; The Pathways of the Gods (1898), which exposes the mythologies around women as willing martyrs; Love and His Mask (1901); The Stones of Sacrifice (1915), which is about female self-sacrifice and its terrible consequences; and The Great Wave (1931), which attacks the racist underpinnings of eugenic thought. Caird also produced pamphlets and one play on anti-vivisection and pacifism, as well as travel writing, such as Romantic Cities Of Provence (1906) (Shaw and Randolph 2007, xii). Caird became a public figure with a long article on “Marriage,” printed in 1888 by the Westminster Review, which denaturalised patriarchy and the nineteenthcentury concept of marriage (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations) as relatively recent, historically and culturally contingent institutions. Identifying the first societies as matriarchal, Caird here protests against “the careless use of the words [. . .] ‘woman’s nature’” (1888, 185). She calls for marriage to be reinvented and “torn from the arms of ‘Respectability;’” only then could the hitherto “utopian impossibility” of “free marriage” be achieved (196). Drawing on Mill’s The Subjection of Women and Lamarckian evolutionary theory, Caird argues that what are declared ‘deficiencies’ of female nature are in fact the results of a long “distorting process” (187). Lamarckism, which theorised the organism’s acquisition of new characteristics through environmental influence and their hereditary transmission, indeed was of special value to feminist reformers, whose emphasis was upon changing social conditions of circumstance and environment. In a drastic image, Caird here compares women to chained dogs whose “nature has adapted itself to the misfortune of captivity” (187), a fact which society then uses to justify continued restriction: “We chain, because we have chained” (187). Thus, she insists that the docility and immaturity of women caused by domestic and social servitude are acquired and not inherent: they can change again with changing conditions. Her essay is also eloquent on the sufferings of unmarried women (the famous ‘surplus’ or ‘odd’ women who were a major topic of debate in the 1850s and again the 1890s): “Society, having forbidden or discouraged other ambitions for women, flings them scornfully aside as failures when through its own organisation they are unable to secure a fireside and a proper ‘sphere’ in which to practise the womanly virtues” (194). Rather than accepting such degrading unions, Caird advocates the economic independence of women, their full autonomy as human beings: “she ought not to be tempted to marry, or to remain married, for the sake of bread and butter” (196). The article drew a reported 27,000 letters in response during a three-month-long debate staged by the Daily Telegraph in its series “Is Marriage a Failure?” and Caird responded in a follow-up article, “Ideal Marriage,” at the end of the same year. She returned to the subject with “The Emancipation of the Family” (1890), and later collected her essays on such topics, written between 1888 and 1894 (among them the famous “A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women” [1892]), in a volume called The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women (1897).

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Caird’s fictional work can be grouped with other prominent feminist writing that had an impact on the development of British fiction during the fin de siècle; yet she remains in a ‘church of her own’ in terms of her unorthodox views and syncretistic combination of Greek and Celtic mythology with late-nineteenth-century social concerns. Caird also bridges the divide between militant suffragettism on the one hand and the reformist stance of New Woman writers on the other; between the political (and often morally conservative) objectives of the suffragettes, and the (often apolitical) outspokenness of New Women on sexuality and reproduction (Ledger 1997, 124). We should keep in mind, however, that the concept and the reality of the ‘New Woman’ were notoriously elusive, and that, in terms of class alignments, both this literary movement and political suffragettism, with its demand for the vote and for access to higher education and the professions, were in the main middle-class (Shaw and Randolph 2007, 3). Caird’s radical dissent from her society’s pieties about (middle-class) women’s ‘sphere’ and maternal qualities does, however, sharply differentiate her from New Woman writers like Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Olive Schreiner, who biologised their arguments about women’s alleged moral superiority (Surridge 2005, 129). Caird warned against the dangers of eugenic thought at a time when New Women by and large adopted theories about the ‘progress of the race’ to underpin their demands for sexual empowerment. Exposing “the patriarchal roots of all authoritative discourses” (Heilmann 2004, 158), she opted out of such mythologies about ‘racial purity’ and women’s duty to ‘heal’ the social body. Caird also sided emphatically with the military wing of the suffragette movement. From her early twenties, she was active in several political organisations: the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, the Women’s Franchise League, the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, and the Women’s Emancipation Union. She supported the WEU with a paper entitled “Why Women Want the Franchise” that was read at their 1892 conference. She was only loosely involved with the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), but in 1908 participated in their second Hyde Park Demonstration for women’s suffrage (Heilmann 2004, 163). Her essay “Militant Tactics and Woman’s Suffrage” (1908) defended the militant section’s public protests, seen by some as ‘inappropriate’ for women; here, she ironically contrasts the alleged “inherent and Heaven-inflicted unsuitability of women for the franchise” with the fact that the same “privilege [is] not denied to duly qualified men, though in the earlier stages of intoxication” (Caird 2004, 71). Breaking the law had become a necessity for women, Caird emphasised; and militancy had at least succeeded in drawing public attention to the cause: When women possess full human and civic rights, they may justly be called upon [. . .] to confine themselves to constitutional measures, but since quiet appeals of forty or fifty years’ duration failed to obtain a hearing, it can hardly be said that constitutional measures of any efficacy are really open to them. [. . .] A State which refuses the ordinary constitutional means of expression and self-defence to half its members must not be surprised if sooner or later they resort to unauthorized ones. History teems with instances of this fact. (2004, 74)

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While Caird was an “intellectual feminist” rather than a militant activist (Leaker 2000, 314), Casey Cothran has argued that she deliberately showcased female suffering – like that of her heroine Hadria in The Daughters of Danaus – in order to symbolise how militant members of the women’s movement (while imprisoned or tortured) “suffered vocally, meaningfully, and productively” (2009, 84).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Caird’s novel The Daughters of Danaus was published in 1894, that ‘golden year’ of New Woman writing, along with Katherine Mannington’s The Yellow Aster, Emma Frances Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman, and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman. The novel embodies literally all the aspects that make Caird’s oeuvre stand out even among the advanced (and diverse) group of New Woman thinkers. It centres around the story of intellectual Hadria Fullerton, whose talent and Celtic heritage predispose her to a life as a musician and composer but whose time for productive work is severely curtailed by family obligations, first to her parents, subsequently to her husband and children. After many struggles and an attempt to escape to artistic freedom in Paris, Hadria returns to tend her ailing mother. She resigns her ambitions and lives out the rest of her days in the rhythms of domestic duty, conscious of the ‘futility’ that one of her earliest musical compositions had prophetically explored as a leitmotif of her life. Strongly rooted in Caird’s radical philosophy of autonomy, this programmatic novel highlights the logical fault lines of the Victorian idealisation of motherhood, which is here seen as masking the patriarchal appropriation of the female body (Heilmann 2004, 160). While not denying the reproductive instinct per se, Hadria, as Caird’s mouthpiece, argues that not every female individual shares in it to the same degree – and firmly deromanticises it, arguing that it has been harnessed for centuries as a weapon in the battle of the sexes: Throughout history [. . .] children had been the unfailing means of bringing women into line with tradition. Who could stand against them? [. . .] An appeal to the maternal instinct had quenched the hardiest spirit of revolt. No wonder the instinct had been so trumpeted and exalted! Women might harbour dreams and plan insurrections; but their children – little ambassadors of the established and expected – were argument enough to convince the most hardened sceptics. Their helplessness was more powerful to suppress revolt than regiments of armed soldiers. (Caird 1989, 187)

As Hadria recognises, motherhood prevents women from defining their lives in other directions; their (undenied) love for their children, their sense of responsibility, and the weight of social expectations combine to fix them in a position which can then be declared “a simple matter of biology, not of social and political conditions” (Heilmann 2004, 161). This sacrifice of their own potential, even if only dimly

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realised, would then drive women unconsciously to seek revenge from the next generation – to demand the same from their daughters, “perpetuating the cycle of internalised oppression” (Heilmann 2004, 161). Hadria’s own mother, who has “sacrificed [herself] for the children” (Caird 1989, 364) and ends up as an embittered invalid, in her turn now obstructing Hadria’s aspirations, is a case in point. Hadria’s male tutor Jouffroy in Paris, by contrast, reinforces her drive to cultivate her talents, and Hadria herself pronounces severely upon highly gifted women “toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling their nurseries” (207). Along with her friend Lady Engleton, an ambitious but thwarted painter, Hadria deconstructs the argument from biology. Confronted with “the enormous pressure of law and opinion” (342), she seeks new, autonomous models of mothering, rejecting her biological children (who receive very little ‘screen time’ in the novel, let alone names) and choosing to mother little Martha, the illegitimate child of a local schoolmistress who was ostracised socially and committed suicide. Like Sue Brideshead in Jude the Obscure (↗ 30 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure) for Little Father Time, Hadria becomes a surrogate mother for Martha – with a political edge: she sees her choice as “strik[ing] a blow at the system which sent [Martha’s] mother to a dishonoured grave, while it leaves the man [. . .] in peace and the odour of sanctity” (190). Dismissing nineteenth-century marriage law which did not give mothers any legal rights over their own children, Hadria in a characteristic inversion declares Martha’s birth out of wedlock to be more legitimate than that of her own ‘lawful’ children. Against the extreme self-surrender of motherhood, The Daughters of Danaus pits the equally extreme notion of the ‘woman of genius’, whose irrepressible intellectual and creative drive legitimise her participation in cultural production. Adapting the male genre of the Künstlerroman with its inherent tragedy of unrecognised artistic talent, Caird illustrates how for the gifted female artist the struggle is aggravated as it plays out in everyday conflicts between public and private roles (Heilmann 2000, 165). Caird here negotiates biological theories of genius, like Francis Galton’s in Hereditary Genius (1869), or like the Aestheticist Vernon Lee’s, who claimed that “genius, like murder, would out; for genius is one of the liveliest forces of nature: not to be quelled or quenched, adaptable, [. . .] explosive [. . .]. Hence, to my mind there are no mute inglorious Miltons, or none worth taking into account” (1897, 2). Lee’s allusion is to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), which surveys a number of imagined anonymous dead, buried with their talents unrevealed; in denying the possibility of such tragic defeat, Lee also chimes in with Mill’s championing of the forces of “individuality” and “character” (Mill 1996, 56, 59). In The Daughters of Danaus, however, both positions on genius are modified: although endowed with hereditary genius, Hadria nonetheless has to undergo a strenuous apprenticeship, and she eventually fails because of the disabling laws of patriarchy. In contradistinction to Lee’s and Mill’s claims, the novel thus argues

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that genius will not “out” regardless of context. This philosophical theme is introduced in the novel’s opening pages with reference to the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose optimism about individual willpower becomes the centre of a heated lecture-cum-discussion by the ‘Preposterous Society’, a private debating club founded by Hadria and her siblings. Their midnight meetings show their liberal and flexible minds in action while at the same time this opening sequence sets the – much darker – tone for the rest of the novel. While her brother Ernest champions Emerson’s claim “that circumstance can always be conquered” (Caird 1989, 10), Hadria argues that if Emerson “had been a girl, he would have known that conditions do count hideously in one’s life” (14). Like Gray, she imagines numberless dead who never managed to realise their potential: “poor things – pale hypotheses, nameless peradventures – lie in forgotten churchyards – unthought of, unthanked, untrumpeted, and all their tragedy is lost in the everlasting silence” (13). She thus refutes Emerson’s (and Lee’s, and Mill’s) claim that artistic power will always conquer circumstances: “thousands have [. . .] been swamped by maladjustment of character to circumstance, and [. . .] perhaps the very greatest of all are those whom the world has never known, because the present conditions are inharmonious with the very noblest and the very highest qualities” (12). Hadria thus maintains, like Jude and Sue in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895, ↗ 30 Hardy, Jude the Obscure), that the most advanced thinkers often find themselves ‘misfits’ in their own era. In evolutionary terms, we might indeed see two female (Darwinian) ‘types’ in the sisters Hadria and Algitha: Hadria is the fractured, tormented female subject, whose (Celtic) sensitivity and proneness to depression are also implicitly racialised, whereas the less finely-tuned Algitha, although not centre-stage in the novel, ironically turns out to be a more successful New Woman, happily married to a ‘New Man’ and engaged in social work. In the latter half of the text, she tends to judge severely her sister’s “over-wrought nerves”: “She had found her will-power sufficient to meet all the emergencies of her life, and she was disposed to feel a little contemptuous [. . .] at a persistent condition of difficulty and confusion” (470; see also Cothran 2009, 66–67). As with Virginia Woolf’s “Judith,” the imaginary sister of Shakespeare in the famous essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), Hadria’s talent is stifled. She becomes an example of the monotonous narrative of female self-sacrifice, and her earlier Emerson lecture keeps resurfacing throughout, her pessimistic philosophy corroborated. Her musical genius will remain unknown to the world. The novel thus confronts the idea of the female as tragic genius with observations on the numbing routine for women in a Victorian middle-class household – the specifically female problem of interruptions, “the peculiar claims that are made, by common consent, on a woman’s time and strength” (Caird 1989, 322). Virginia Woolf was to reiterate this observation in A Room of One’s Own. As Lisa Surridge has argued, the very lack of outward events in the novel is an indication of “the ruinous effects wrought by a patriarchal culture’s stringent regulation of a woman’s time” (2005, 132). Hadria’s desperate attempts to escape are frustrated as

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she is “once again entrammeled in temporal regulation” (132); she is recalled from Paris by a telegram, symbolic of rationalised, bourgeois time-keeping – and women’s alienated time. While Jouffroy admiringly confirms Hadria’s genuine artistic talent, he then “mistakenly interprets” her difficulties “as weakness of character,” while in fact they are caused by an “overwhelming omnipresence of social pressures to which men would not be subject to the same degree” (Heilmann 2004, 218). Hadria finds it hard, even in Paris, to extricate herself from social obligations, “often long[ing] for the privilege that every man enjoys, of quietly pursuing his work without giving [pain or offence]” (Caird 1989, 322). Her “resistance to ideology is [thus] tragically untragic,” as Catherine Leaker has argued (2000, 341), and her final defeat an everyday, common process. When Hadria ‘stages’ her embroidery on receiving guests in her home, she offers a mock-image of women’s futile work, satirically exaggerating the conformity expected of her. Eventually, she dwindles away in “a conscious slow decay” that takes away both her physical strength and creative powers (Caird 1989, 478). Her musical gift has diminished from disuse: “like a creature accustomed to the yoke, she had found it increasingly difficult to use the moments of opportunity when they came. The force of daily usage, the necessary bending of thoughts in certain habitual directions, had assisted the crippling process” (478). There are moments in the novel when, rather than such alienated time, entirely different temporalities are invoked. An example is the initial cave vision of Algitha stirring a fire like a prehistoric witch, or Hadria’s trance vision of a “vastness revealed” that seems like a glimpse of a freer life: “One sees, now and then, in a flash, what the world may some day be. [. . .] The vision comes, perhaps, with the splendour of a spring morning, or opens, scroll-like, in a flood of noble music. It sounds unreal, yet it brings a sense of conviction that is irresistible” (Caird 1989, 272). Her later visions of a timeless Greece have a similar function of disrupting the time of domestic routine. As Surridge argues, “while the novel’s realist narrative depicts Hadria’s submission to social circumstances, its formal dislocations celebrate the mutability of those very circumstances” (2005, 133). Temporal shifts are also eloquent in terms of their silences: for instance, the plot gap between the first and second part of the novel erases five years which include Hadria’s wedding and the birth of her children. Part two shows us a seemingly new character, Mrs Temperley, who we only belatedly realise is Hadria, now married (Surridge 2005, 134). It seems as if the novel was arguing with acerbic irony that her identity has been swallowed up in marriage, reminiscent of Jude’s remark in Jude the Obscure that “[w]ifedom” tends to “assimilate [. . .] and digest [. . .] [women] in its vast maw as an atom which has no further individuality” (Hardy 1985, 197). As Surridge observes, the plot gap also signals, in generic terms, “that Caird rejected the Victorian family narrative, with its relentless emphasis on reproduction, inheritance, and succession” (2005, 134). Yet when Patricia Murphy observes that Hadria’s experimenting with dance and music is expressive of an alternative “female language” that “enables her to reshape the masculine temporal

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order” (2001, 171), this renaturalises women as more ‘instinctive’ than men – a problematic reading considering Caird’s own rewriting of such clichés. Caird does, however, racialise Hadria’s affinity to music, her sensuality and sensitivity as Celtic, revealing sympathies with the ‘Celtic twilight’ movement which produces ideological contradictions in the novel.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The novel format itself was ideologically fraught, as Fredric Jameson (1981) and D. A. Miller (1988) have argued about the implicitly bourgeois message of midVictorian novels, which naturalised the class and gender system and insisted on the traditional closure of matrimony. Novelistic realism thus seemed to eliminate any option of dissociating feminine success from marriage, as evidenced in contemporary reactions to feminist novel writing: “For many readers the nervous breakdown, illness, madness and suicide that were characteristic of New Woman novels did not connote high tragedy but, rather, confirmed that the heroine had gone too far outside her sphere, and suffered because she tried to do things for which she was unsuited” (Miller 1997, 20). Besides such punishment for transgression, self-sacrifice also seemed a ‘natural’ trajectory for female protagonists, which again caught New Woman writing in a double bind: “making the heroine a martyr also came perilously close to reinforcing female stereotypes which romanticised self-sacrifice and failure” (Miller 1997, 20). Yet Gullette has argued that, in The Daughters of Danaus, Caird actually manages to steer between naturalising bourgeois order on the one hand and martyring the rebellious woman on the other: she sees Caird as breaking with a tradition of assigning death to heroines, and as choosing a tragedy of “high-minded failure,” thus ushering in a countertradition that focuses on endurance rather than martyrdom (1989, 513). Indeed, Caird also uses a particular technique to convey alternative messages: like feminist writer Elizabeth Robins, for instance, she offers a novel in the new realist mode, which is at the same time a “tract,” a political manifesto (Miller 1997, 132; see also Zwierlein 2016, 50–51). The strong polemical voice of Hadria, the author’s mouthpiece, at times overrules traditional aesthetic criteria – or rather, invents a new, political aesthetics, which includes such characteristic features as using mythology as a defamiliarising strategy, deconstructing discursive conventions and formulating feminist parables. The Daughters of Danaus is set in the late-Victorian period, yet the Greek mythological title serves to defamiliarise its events, as do temporal juxtapositions such as the boys’ conventional English names, while the girls’ – Algitha, Hadria – allude to medieval or Roman times. Despite being named after Roman emperor Hadrian, who erected the famous Hadrian’s Wall defending the Roman province of Britannia against the Picts, Hadria is determined by her Celtic inheritance, as the novel

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argues. The different temporalities enable differential viewpoints and the questioning of seeming certainties. As Surridge has argued: “The point is not that the women’s lives would have been better in another historical time, but that they would have been different” (2005, 127). Most mythological points of reference in the novel are either Greek or Celtic. The Greek legend of the fifty daughters of Danaus that Caird chose for her title emphasises the waste and futility of women’s lives: having murdered their husbands, these fifty daughters are sentenced eternally to draw water in sieves – in the same way that formerly rebellious Hadria is eventually found “toiling submissively at [the] eternal treadmill” (Caird 1989, 207). The idea of female sacrifice is again corroborated via Greek associations when Hadria’s tutor invokes a procession of gifted female composers being ‘devoured’ by family obligations – a modern version of the virgin sacrifices to the Minotaur (Heilmann 2004, 215). Caird had offered a similar re-deployment of ancient mythology in her essay “A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women” (1892), where she saw the circumscribed lives of women as modern versions of the Andromeda legend – about another sacrificial victim (Pykett 1995, 137). Yet despite such attacks, Caird’s complex novels avoid levelling blame onesidedly: they claim that women are also held back by their own internalised biases, and by what Caird partly naturalises as biological inheritance. This is where Celtic mythology comes in: Hadria is seen as determined by “[e]very instinct that was born in her with her Celtic blood – which lurked still in the family to the confounding of its fortunes” (Caird 1989, 17). Like Hardy’s Jude and Sue, Hadria is – or seems to be – ‘doomed’ by heredity. In New Woman fiction, Highland settings sometimes offered utopian escapes, ‘pagan’ versions of free sexual unions and maternity, as in Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman (1894). Yet, in The Daughters of Danaus, they seem to add to the pressure. Hadria’s acceptance of Hubert as her husband takes place in an unexplained trance-like state, induced by music and ancestral memories (Peak 2014): “Some mad spirit seemed to possess her. [. . .] [S]he had passed into a different phase of character. She lost caution and care and the sense of external events” (Caird 1989, 136). Thus, Hadria may be a rebellious spirit, but the racial construct overdetermines her identity: “‘I suppose it is all pre-ordained,’ she said. [. . .] The sense of the importance of personal events had entirely disappeared” (137). Through their mythological and Biblical references, their rhetoricity and symbolism, Caird’s novels become carefully crafted works of art, which simultaneously employ “political shock tactics” to further the cause of feminism (Heilmann 2004, 162). They jolt readers out of their own ‘trances’, waking them up by deconstructing discursive conventions – as for instance in Caird’s polemical equation of marriage with prostitution. English feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft had already drawn the same comparison in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In The Stones of Sacrifice (1915), Caird suggests Leah’s plunge into prostitution to be more autonomous, and hence preferable to the sentimental hypocrisies of married women’s lives. Hadria in The Daughters of Danaus emphasises that “[m]otherhood [. . .]

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among civilized people, represents a prostitution of the reproductive powers, which precisely corresponds to that other abuse, which seems to most of us so infinitely more shocking” (Caird 1989, 343) – and again, Hardy’s Sue in Jude the Obscure, published the ensuing year, associates institutionalised motherhood with rape and mutilation. Less shocking but equally effective as deconstructive exercises are Caird’s parodies of conventional discourse, distributed liberally throughout her novels and non-fictional writing. A representative example is her role-reversal parody “Does Marriage Hinder a Woman’s Self-Development?” (1899), which paints an entertaining picture of how the banalities of women’s everyday lives obstruct their intellectual creativity by inviting us to “ask ourselves honestly how a man would fare in the position, say, of his own wife” (Caird 1899, 199). She proceeds with a humorous world-upside-down vision of a husband busily raising the children and looking after the household while being desperate for some time to pursue his chemical studies: “To every true man, the cares of fatherhood and home are sacred and allsufficing. He realises, as he looks around at his little ones, that they are his crown and recompense. [. . .] Only, he feels that those parts of his nature which are said to distinguish the human from the animal kingdom, are getting rather effaced” (200). With similarly acerbic wit, The Daughters of Danaus deconstructs clichés about domestic bliss in having the youthful audience at the Preposterous Society politely listen to – and then take to pieces – Henriette Temperley’s pious expositions on women’s duty and matrimony: “The lecture was followed by a discussion that rather took the stiffness out of [her] phrases” (Caird 1989, 125) – a discussion that also metatextually reproduces Caird’s own satirical technique. Caird had a keen sense of the pomposities of bourgeois style, and she targeted such inanities with well-aimed irony, as in the examination of poor Henriette’s lecture: Then, with new sweetness [. . .], [Henriette] went on to speak of the natural responsibilities and joys of her sex, drawing a moving, if somewhat familiar picture of those avocations, than which she was sure there could be nothing higher or holier. [. . .] For some not easily explained cause, the construction of this sentence gave it a peculiar unctuous force: ‘than which’, as Fred afterwards remarked, ‘would have bowled over any but the most hardened sinner.’ – For weeks [afterwards], if any very lofty altitude had to be ascended in [conversation], the aspirant smiled with ineffable tenderness [. . .], murmuring ‘than which’ to a vanquished audience. (124–125)

Caird attacked such fossilised stylistic turns all through her oeuvre. The phrase “than which,” seemingly slight, but representative of the unctuous self-congratulatory mode of bourgeois style, in fact was a repeated target, for instance in The Stones of Sacrifice (1915, 343). Caird’s political novels, with their allegorical titles, are also parables, stylistically situated between Christ’s parables in the New Testament and Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic parables. These links also provide the combined connotations of an uncanny, oppressive present and a brighter, redemptive future. Indeed, Caird often

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used the format to defamiliarise the current political and social situation. Some of these parables are built into her novels, replicating their own function and message on the micro-level. An example is the long simile in The Daughters of Danaus about the ash-tree growing in a chink so that it becomes “twisted, and crooked, and stunted”: “I think,” Hadria comments, “most women have to grow in a cranny. It is generally known as their Sphere” (Caird 1989, 271). Simultaneously, the ash-tree slowly cracks up the building it has been forced to grow into – society will be ruined by its systematic destruction of female lives. Hadria’s most elaborate parable in the novel symbolises the cycle of oppression sustained from one generation to the next, but also indicates that defeat can be meaningful: [She] recalled a strange and grotesque vision, or waking-dream, that she had dreamt a few nights before: of a vast abyss, black and silent, which had to be filled up to the top with the bodies of women, hurled down to the depths of the pit of darkness, in order that the survivors might, at last, walk over in safety. Human bodies take but little room, and the abyss seemed to swallow them, as some greedy animal its prey. But Hadria knew, in her dream, that some day it would have claimed its last victim, and the surface would be level and solid, so that people would come and go, scarcely remembering that beneath their feet was once a chasm into which throbbing lives had to descend, to darkness and a living death. (451)

This parable both deplores and celebrates women’s sacrifice for the sake of later, more emancipated generations. Their own failure will help to build the road for others, as Cothran observes about this allegorical vision: “it is not the works of living women that are needed to create a new world for the women of the future. Instead, their bodies are called forth to serve. These living forms are necessary to fill the pit” (2009, 77). Moreover, the novel might also be seen as acknowledging here the political, and physically dangerous, self-sacrifice of the militant suffragettes. Cothran asserts that Hadria’s failure becomes meaningful because in “surviving [and] suffering” she can “look [. . .] forward to the ways that the members of the twentieth century’s women’s movement suffered vocally, meaningfully, and productively” (2009, 84).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Caird has been called “the classic case of the New Woman writer as both campaigning journalist and fictional polemicist” while her novels have also been addressed as “self-conscious aesthetic artefacts” (Pykett 1995, 132). Because she emphasised the political investments of the Victorian languages of domesticity and sentiment, Caird is acknowledged as having “broke[n] discursive boundaries [. . .] between the private and the public [. . .] and between the political and the subjective” (Leaker 2000, 308). As for her contemporary reception, reviewers frequently treated her novels as “merely fictionalized versions of her journalistic

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concerns” (Pykett 1995, 132). Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British Women Writers (1989) still chastised her for “sacrific[ing] characterization and dialogue” and producing characters who are “shallow and verbose” (119). Caird herself was aware of the problems encountered by “novels with a purpose”: in her “Prologue” to The Wing of Azrael (1889) she distinguished between novels that render an “impression of the world” and novels that offer the “illustration of a thesis” – while declaring both to be valuable and necessary (1889a, vii). This contribution has argued that in her ensuing fictional work she managed to combine both forms into a new political aesthetics. And indeed, even though Virginia Woolf ostentatiously rejected ‘fiction with a purpose’, Woolf’s own fiction has been shown to return again and again to late-Victorian women writers and feminist activists – there are obvious continuities across the feminist generations (Corbett 2014). From the 1970s onwards, literary critics have re-examined New Woman writings, identifying them, alternatively, as sequels to Victorianism or forerunners of Modernism. Caird saw her own work as positioned in a time of transition; like Hardy’s protagonists, her own frequently emphasise the isolation brought about by their advanced views. The author’s personal situation was comparable: “Caird’s friend Elizabeth Sharp recorded that, ‘disturbed and shocked by her plain statements’, many of her contemporaries responded to her articles ‘with acute hostility’” (Heilmann 2004, 159; see also Pykett 1992, 192). Even the liberal journalist and editor W. T. Stead saw Caird as going “far beyond the bounds of moderation” and attacked her as “a priestess of revolt” (1894, 67). Heilmann reminds us that “Caird was felt to pose a challenge even to an advanced audience” (2004, 161), and Judith Walkowitz has traced how Karl Pearson’s progressive Men and Women’s Club “regarded her as too much of a loose cannon to grant her full membership” (1992, 167). At the same time, Caird was celebrated as a “pioneer of humanity” (Ethelmer 1898, 61) by the women’s rights magazine Shafts. Margaret Sibthorp’s long 1895 piece in Shafts on The Daughters of Danaus spoke of the novel in hyperbolic terms: The Daughters of Danaus will be acknowledged by the wise and far-seeing, by those who think ahead of their times, to be one of those great developments of human thought, which every now and then stir up from the still waters of life, and waken the under currents into strong moving power: a book whose utterances will arouse those that have slept. [. . .] To the gifted author of this book, the world of women owes a deep debt of glad and grateful thanks; the work which she espouses so nobly will be consummated only, by the complete and worldwide emancipation of woman from every shadow of thraldom. (6)

In terms of recent research on Caird, one of the most rewarding avenues was applying the lens of ‘science and literature studies’, which helped to reveal the remarkable differences between her thinking and that of other New Women. Angelique Richardson was able to highlight Caird’s prescient insight into the dangers of eugenic thought and practice, and how she sought to protect the freedom of the individual against negative eugenics’ drive to eliminate ‘inferior’ stock (Richardson 2004, 280–282; see also Surridge 2005, 129–130). “[Seeking] to reveal the social

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biases that made up and motivated biological discourse” (Richardson 2003, 27), Caird was not agitated by the questions about ‘fit’ breeding partners or ‘unfit’ children that New Women like Grand and Egerton habitually worked into their own essentialist visions of female virtue and racial health. Caird rather “co-opted” the language of evolutionary biology, as Richardson has shown, in order to undermine it through ironic twists (2004, 280). In The Morality of Marriage she argued, for instance, that if modern women were “really insurgents against evolutionary human nature, instead of being the indications of a new social development,” then their “fatal error” would “assuredly prove itself in a very short time” – the new feminists would disappear again, as mutations unfit for survival (Caird 1897, 169). Building on Richardson’s findings, we can argue that already in her article on “Marriage,” Caird offers an idiosyncratic mixture of Darwinism and Lamarckism when complaining that “[women] are treated as if they alone were exempt from the influence of natural selection, of the well-known effects upon organs and aptitudes of continued use or disuse” (1888, 186). Caird again and again points out that current social conditions seem to suit best the species of “cunning, shallow, heartless women” who have degenerated to a status without dignity, comparable to that of a “woman of the harem”: “That is the sort of ‘woman’s nature’ that our conditions are busy selecting” (1989, 347). This combination of biological models then helps her, as recent research has shown, to argue for an emancipation of women from just such biological definitions, and open up new avenues for identity-formation. Another highly rewarding avenue into Caird’s work is attending to the oral style of her writing, which links her engaged literary mode with her public political agenda, and allows for comparisons with other New Woman writing, where the eloquent, vociferous female is a symbol and problem at the same time, as in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and Henry James’s ambivalently sympathetic The Bostonians (1886) (Zwierlein 2016, 47–52). Molly Youngkin has started the project of investigating how the “spoken word [functions] as the site for expression of agency” (2007, 85) in The Daughters of Danaus, from philosophical debates about women’s rights at the Preposterous Society to the numerous recorded private conversations. She argues that this oral quality of Caird’s fiction also reflects on Caird’s personal experiences with public debate and journalistic style, as well as on her “involvement in club life [which] often centered on debates about specific social concerns” (85). The Daughters of Danaus thus joins the considerable number of New Woman writings which tend to emphasise rather than erase the problem of the late-Victorian speaking (middle-class) female. The unattainable ideal of Emerson’s charismatic platform presence might be an implicit issue in the novel just like his philosophy, as he had “overthrow[n] the previous dominance of scientific lecturing” in Britain in his “triumphant [lecturing] tour” of 1847 (Hewitt 2002, 17). While Hadria starts out as an eloquent lecturer, she uses the platform, paradoxically, to voice her misgivings about female agency. It is true that in the novel, as Catherine Leaker argues, the dull rhythms of domestic life are to some

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extent countervailed by the “overt political passion and intensity [which] is reabsorbed at the level of rhetoric” (2000, 343). The fact that the few events of this eventless story are being commented on extensively is thus also “an assertion of the need to verbally resist the tyranny of the everyday” (343). Hadria is “flamboyant [. . .] in her speaking style,” and her monologues are like “editorial writ large” (343). Yet Hadria fails to translate her verbal protest into effective counteraction and resigns herself to “play[ing] the humble role of scarecrow” (Caird 1989, 474), warning other women against succumbing as she did (Cothran 2009, 69). The novel offers a built-in critique of this fault line between attack in theory and submission in practice: “We may talk to all eternity, if we don’t act” (Caird 1989, 448). Hadria and her women interlocutors are thus figured as mentally advanced beyond their age, yet they can only dream, as in the parable about the pit filled with bodies, of the step into the militant feminism that Caird herself endorsed in her writing about the suffrage fight. Looking at Caird’s controversial reception and recent research into her oeuvre enables us to acknowledge her far-reaching thought and unique stance both against biological determinism and eugenics, and for women’s expression of agency through militant visibility and vocality.

Bibliography Works Cited Caird, Mona. The Daughters of Danaus. 1894. Ed. Margaret Morganroth Gullette. New York: Feminist, 1989. Caird, Mona. “Does Marriage Hinder a Woman’s Self-Development?” Lady’s Realm 5 (March 1899): 581–583. Rpt. in Nelson 2001. 199–202. Caird, Mona. “Marriage.” Westminster Review 130 (Aug. 1888): 186–201. Rpt. in Nelson 2001. 185–199. Caird, Mona. “Militant Tactics and Woman’s Suffrage.” Westminster Review 170 (Nov. 1908): 525–530. Rpt. in Literature of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in England. Ed. Carolyne Christensen Nelson. Peterborough: Broadview, 2004. 71–75. Caird, Mona. The Morality of Marriage, and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women. London: George Redway, 1897. Caird, Mona.Prologue. The Wing of Azrael. By Caird. London: Trübner, 1889. vii–viii. Caird, Mona. The Stones of Sacrifice. London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1915. Corbett, Mary Jean. “Behind the Times? Virginia Woolf and ‘the Third Generation.’” TwentiethCentury Literature 60 (2014): 27–58. Cothran, Casey A. “Mona Caird and the Spectacle of Suffering.” New Woman Writers, Authority and the Body. Ed. Melissa Purdue and Stacy Floyd. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 63–87. Ethelmer, Ellis. “Feminism.” Westminster Review 149 (1898): 50–62. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Afterword. The Daughters of Danaus. Ed. Gullette. 1989. 493–534. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Ed. Patricia Ingham. Oxford: OUP, 1985. Heilmann, Ann. “Mona Caird (1854–1932): Wild Woman, New Woman, and Early Radical Feminist Critic of Marriage and Motherhood.” Women’s History Review 5.1 (1996): 67–95.

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Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First Wave Feminism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, and Mona Caird. Manchester: MUP, 2004. Hewitt, Martin. “Aspects of Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Ed. Hewitt. Spec. issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose 29.1 (2002): 1–32. Hookway, Demelza. “Liberating Conversations: John Stuart Mill and Mona Caird.” Literature Compass 9.11 (2012): 873–883. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell UP, 1981. Leaker, Catherine Joan. “Breaking Possibilities: The New Woman Novel and the Failures of Feminist Fiction.” Diss. U of Rochester, 2000. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: MUP, 1997. Lee, Vernon. Limbo and Other Essays. London: Grant Richards, 1897. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. 1859. On Liberty and The Subjection of Women. Ed. Jane O’Grady. London: Wordsworth, 1996. 5–114. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988. Miller, Jane Eldrige. Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Murphy, Patricia. Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman. New York: State U of New York P, 2001. Nelson, Carolyn Christensen, ed. A New Woman Reader. Peterborough: Broadview, 2001. Peak, Anna. “Music and New Woman Aesthetics in Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus.” Victorian Review 40.1 (2014): 135–154. Pykett, Lyn. “The Cause of Women and the Course of Fiction: The Case of Mona Caird.” Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature. Ed. Christopher Parker. Aldershot: Scolar, 1995. 128–142. Pykett, Lyn. The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992. Richardson, Angelique. “Eugenics and Freedom at the Fin de Siècle.” Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media. Ed. Louise Henson et al. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 275–286. Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Shaw, Marion and Lyssa Randolph. New Woman Writers of the Late Nineteenth Century. Horndon: Northcote, 2007. Sibthorp, Margaret. Rev. of The Daughters of Danaus, by Mona Caird. Shafts 3.1 (1895): 5–7. Stead, W. T. “The Novel of Modern Woman.” Review of Reviews 10 (1894): 64–73. Surridge, Lisa. “Narrative Time, History, and Feminism in Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus.” Women’s Writing 12.1 (2005): 127–141. Todd, Janet. Dictionary of British Women Writers. London: Routledge, 1989. Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago, 1992. Youngkin, Molly. Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia. “The Lecturer as Revenant(e): Sensation and Conversion in Late-Victorian Popular Lecturing and Mass Print.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 23.1 (2016): 41–56.

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Further Reading Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940. Cambridge: CUP, 1994. Mann, Abigail. “Of ‘Ologies and ‘Isms: Mona Caird Rewriting Authority.” New Woman Writers, Authority and the Body. Ed. Melissa Purdue and Stacy Floyd. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 43–62. Pykett, Lyn. “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Representations of the Female Artist in the New Woman Fiction of the 1890s.” Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question. Ed. Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge: CUP, 1999. 135–150. Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis. The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms. London: Palgrave, 2001. Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Wilson, Cheryl A. “Mona Caird’s Dancing Daughters.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 8.1 (2012): 1–22. ncgsjournal.com. Web. 10 Jan. 2016.

Martin Middeke

30 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895) Abstract: The essay presents Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as a paradigmatic text of English literature in transition from Victorianism to literary modernism. Hardy’s sparse theoretical remarks on the writing of fiction will be taken into account to contextualise questions of realism and naturalism. Taking the cue from Thomas Mann, Hardy’s last novel is then analysed as a Zeitroman. The interlacing of multiple dimensions of time (consciousness) forms the major topical and structural feature that is reflected in character psychology, narrative structure, focalisation patterns, leitmotifs and carefully wrought repetitions with differences that often appear as variations and inversions and reveal Hardy’s insight into the iterability of the signifier. The novel is characterised by a pessimist outlook on life fuelled by evolution theory and the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The chapter links Jude and Hardy’s fiction in general to major strands of critical theory and points to theoretical approaches and strands of critical thinking that for Hardy scholarship will be worth pursuing in the future. Keywords: Realism, naturalism, transition, evolution, Darwin, Schopenhauer, deconstruction, gender relations, Zeitroman, time, chronotope, repetition, iterability, subjectivity, existence

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840 in Higher Bockhampton in the county of Dorset as the eldest of four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason, and his wife Jemima. From his father he derived an interest in music and in the countryside, his mother inspired his love of books and poetry. He visited schools in Dorchester and, at the age of sixteen, became an apprentice to local architect Thomas Hicks. In 1862, he moved to London to become a draftsman for Arthur Blomfield, a leading architect of his time, who in later years was to design the Royal College of Music and the Bank of England, yet ill health made Hardy return to Dorset where he worked for Hicks again. Hardy became friends with William Barnes, a Dorset dialect poet, who was to become an important influence and mentor. So strong were Hardy’s roots in the Dorset countryside, storytelling, and folk traditions that he named all his major novels ‘Wessex novels’ after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed before the unification of England. Famously, for each of these novels he devised a map of ‘Hardy’s Wessex’ and for which he coined place names for the actual places (see Morgan with Rode 2010). Hardy’s Wessex is no country for https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-031

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the sentimental. It serves as the ancient rural counterpoint to such major topics of Hardy’s work as progress, evolution, nature, or sexuality. On a visit to Cornwall in 1870, he met Emma Gifford, who was socially ranked above him, and was utterly fascinated by her. Both married in 1874, but in the course of the years until Emma’s death in 1912 their marriage turned out an uncongenial one. All the precariousness of their ill-suited partnership is expressed in Hardy’s “Poems of 1912”, great elegies that Claire Tomalin in her biography of Hardy identified as “the moment when Hardy became a great poet” (Tomalin 2007, 17). The fact alone that upon his death in 1928 Hardy’s ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner while he wanted his heart to be buried with Emma after he had been married to Florence since 1914 speaks volumes and biographically pinpoints all the problematic marriages in Hardy’s work. Despite early and unsuccessful attempts at poetry, Hardy always wanted to be a poet and embarked on the writing of fiction only for financial reasons. It took only a few years until he was able to make a living from his writing. By 1874, he had A Pair of Blue Eyes and Far From the Madding Crowd published in serial form, the latter in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine. Hardy acquired fame and wealth already during his lifetime and today holds a safe place as one of the most renowned novelists and poets in English literary history. Jude the Obscure (1894/95) is rightly considered a masterpiece today and, together with Hardy’s later fiction, renders him a paradigmatic writer of English literature in transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, torn between the Victorian heritage on the one hand and the approaching social, psychological, philosophical, epistemic, and aesthetic upheavals and challenges of modernism on the other: the re-definition of the concept of reality; the loss of transcendental confidence and the alienation of the individual from their metaphysical, social, and subjective certainties; and, as Swinburne’s poem prominently phrased it, ‘the triumph of time’ (see Buckley 1966, Middeke 2004, Wolfreys 2009, and most recently also Ireland 2014). Hardy’s entire oeuvre can be subdivided into two phases: the novels appeared in print between 1870 und 1895, after that he turned entirely to writing poetry. The publication and reception of Jude the Obscure (1894/95) marks the turning point. It was met with mostly bad reviews, the notorious unsigned review in the Athenaeum called it “a titanically bad book,” but even this anonymous writer observes what really was the most innovative sign of the twentieth century in Hardy’s last novel, namely “a sense of a gloomy background of nature,” “a sense of inevitable doom,” and a sense of a “grotesque” human condition devoid of metaphysical havens that makes “anything but absolute quietism an absurdity” (anon. 1895, 709). The emerging contrast between the ideal life envisaged by Jude, who comes from a poor background but has a keen, though often naïve, interest in education and learning on the one hand, and the events, developments, and blows he has to endure on the other hint at a

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proximity to the French naturalists, whose works appeared in English translation in the 1880s. Yet although Hardy had never advanced a fully-fledged theory of the novel, the few (and rather unsystematic) essays on literary matters clarify that he looked upon his writing neither as paradigmatically naturalist nor realist (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology). “Realism,” he wrote in “The Science of Fiction” (1891), “is an unfortunate, an ambiguous word” that for him connotated either “copyism” or “pruriency” (Hardy 1966b, 136). For Hardy, the naturalist aim to provide scientific measurements to their writing was a “fallacy” and an “error” (135, 136), because neither the realist nor the naturalist would be able to escape “the exercise of Art in his labour or pleasure of telling a tale” (134). Even though he was “intrigued by the ordinary, provincial and day-to-day” (O’Gorman 2013, 115), he broke away from the exalting, harmonising, and didactic formal tendencies that had traditionally been characterising Victorian fiction. Hardy did not aim for meticulous verisimilitude, but intended to find a representation for essential characteristics and conditions of ontological, anthropofugal truths of humanity via a “disproportioning of [. . .] realities” (Hardy 1965, 228), which is corroborated by the many distortions and instances of the grotesque in Hardy’s work (Widdowson 1999, 97). Hardy, in fact, was overwhelmed by “the phantasmagoria of experience” (Hardy 1966b, 135) that established a reality which he thought was ultimately unfathomable and, hence, impossible to reproduce in its entirety “with infinite and atomic truth, without shadow, relevancy, or subordination” (135). Rather than that, the aesthetic truth Hardy was interested in consisted in “[a] sight for the finer qualities of existence, an ear for the ‘still sad music of humanity’” (137). This thoroughly sensual, much more subjective impression was not to be gained by an outer, scientific approach aiming at reason or photography-like precision. The novelist was to a greater degree to be characterised by a “mental tactility” and a “sympathetic appreciativeness of life in all its manifestations” (137). Whereas Hardy insisted that he had “no philosophy,” but “only a confused heap of impressions, like those of a bewildered child at a conjuring show” (Hardy 1984, 441), his engagement with Darwinist thought and, especially, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer form important cornerstones for Hardy’s thinking (Phillpotts 1951, Weber 1957, Garwood 1969, Kelly 1980, Beer 1983, Scheick 1987, Beer 1989, Mallett 2009, Levine 2009, Asquith 2010, Asquith 2013). For Hardy, evolution theory brings about a profound scepticism as regards knowledge and cognition, which is symptomatic of a growing perplexity amongst late-Victorians in the face of the difficulties in comprehending the social and causal relationships of the world in the last third of the nineteenth century. The characters in Hardy’s novels are driven by their dreams and desires, their movements follow an immanent “Cause” that Hardy thought was “neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral” and “loveless and hateless” (Hardy 1984, 439). This indifferent ‘Cause’ time and again confronts the individual with fortuities and contingencies. In manifold and complex metaphorical variations Hardy presents the individual as a prisoner, while nature itself epitomises the indifference of a universe utterly devoid of a divine plan.

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2 Basis Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns All the major topical features and concerns that have always distinguished Hardy’s novels are immanent in Jude: the process of modernisation and civilisation and, consequently, conflicts inherent in the breakdown of traditional orders; the clash of the new and the old; social and communal upheavals and inequalities; frictions between the local and anthropocentric and the global, existential and anthropofugal; tensions between rural Wessex and urban life, and between nature and nurture/culture; interrelations of the classes and sexes, eroticism and sexuality, and, ensuing from this, the re-definition of femininity and masculinity, and, of course, all matters matrimonial. The dualistic scheme Hardy devised for the assessment of life and reality is based upon oppositions such as mind vs. body, subject vs. object, or idealism vs. mundane ordinariness. In Jude, mind, ideal, and culture more and more assume the lineaments of the unreal: Characters like Jude appear too weak and insignificant, their energy or élan vital (Bergson), their morality, their strength of belief, and their idealistic vigour can no longer make them stay aloof from their (oppressive) material conditions. Here, the traditional Victorian confidence in the emotional security in ‘the real’ – or, in Matthew Arnold’s words, the belief in the ability “to see things as they are” and “to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the world, [. . .] to learn, in short, the will of God” (Arnold 1903, 6, 10) – turns out to be irreversibly shattered to the core. Thrown back upon his sole self, Jude again and again has to face the meaningless, the destructive, the inhuman, the enigmatic, and the ungraspable. Consequently, the most innovative, topical, and modern feature of Jude the Obscure (and indeed of most late-nineteenth century literature) is that the characters find themselves opposed to a new adversary: time (Buckley 1966; Schweik 1994, Middeke 2004). Ineluctably, time is foregrounded whenever reality appears as meaningless. Time turns into their antagonist once human beings lose their connection to a higher reality beyond the laws of becoming or decaying. Time urges human beings to conceive of themselves as insignificant and transitory. In a preface to his modernist masterpiece The Magic Mountain (1924), Thomas Mann called his novel a “Zeitroman” (i.e., a ‘novel of time’) in a double sense: in a historical sense, as the novel depicts an epoch, but also because time itself forms the actual subject matter of the novel (see Mann 1980, 12). Hardy’s Jude is a Zeitroman par excellence: Time as well as the experience of time are the central topics of the novel, in fact, time becomes a, if not the, protagonist of the text. Hardy presents time as a multi-facetted and multi-dimensional phenomenon that inextricably couples “multiple scale” and “multiple time” (Freeman 1991, 170). As they are seeking for orientation, coherence, and structure, Hardy’s characters inhabit these multiple dimensions of time experience all at once. Even as a child Jude is characterised by a melancholy experience of time and temporality, “his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his time” (Hardy 1978, 11). Later in the

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novel, Jude’s son – little Jude, or the grotesquely eponymous ‘Father Time’ – is on the train to Aldbrickham with the same worn expression on his face: “Age masquerading as Juvenility,” taking “a back view over some great Atlantic of Time” (218). Time in Jude the Obscure is not experienced as a creative space or as an imaginative continuum that leads (or could ever lead) to a potentially fulfilled future. This echoes Schopenhauer’s emphasis of the insignificance of human will against temporality. For Jude, the merciless flow of time constantly jars with his subjective temporal experience. His relationship to Arabella, for example, initially turns out as a veritable time problem because he realises that he can only do a limited number of things at the same time. Meeting Arabella postpones and, ultimately, prevents his self-imposed timetable for studying. In other words, Jude’s conflict is a conflict with time and its succession, simultaneous action and necessary prioritising. On a more abstract level, such scheduling problems reveal that Jude is “Hardy’s least pastoral, most urban of the Wessex novels” (Lodge 1979, 199; Eagleton 1987, 69). Jude the Obscure portrays time in industrial cultural contexts as conflict, and, accordingly, time-experienced-asconflict entails such modern social factors as productivity, working hours, and time pressure. Hardy, therefore, links the knowledge of the rules of modern industrial society to the conflict with linear progress and teleology. A central chronotope of the novel reflecting on the metamorphosis of the society throughout the entire nineteenth century is the railway. Time and again, the protagonists’ paths in Jude the Obscure cross on railway stations. Consequently, the characters have to face the particular problems of train travelling: waiting at platforms, planning travel routes, finding train connections for joint activities, as well as missing trains. Desiring to meet Sue, Jude counts on their trains coinciding at Alfredston, but he meets Arabella instead and – in an ironical reversal of the initial plan – joins her on the train to Aldbrickham (147). Railway schedules are the signatures of the enormous acceleration of life rhythms in the industrial revolution. As Elizabeth Ermarth points out, the railway epitomises “rationalisation,” “mobility” and the idea of “time as a track, the historical linkage between the railroads and synchronised clock-time, and the implied link between such universally synchronised time and a mechanical juggernaut” (Ermarth 1992, 44–45). In the face of the machine, therefore, the characters often feel ridiculously small, yet, at the same time, they build their hopes on the basis of the accelerated rhythm of life and its promise of greater individual freedom and mobility. “The railway station,” Sue teaches Jude, “that’s the centre of the town life now. The Cathedral has had its day.” For Sue, “the traipsing along to the station, the porters’ ‘B’your leave!’ the screaming of trains” form “the basis of a beautiful crystallization” (109). Nevertheless, the railway chronotope in Jude the Obscure remains ambiguous: On the one hand, it supplies the characters with time understood as a linear track, as railway schedules embody an objective, verifiable grid that makes progress measurable. On the other hand, these tracks are laid out by others for their users, and, thus, time in Jude presents free will and determinism, autonomy and heteronomy,

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as complementary elements. When Jude arrives in Christminster and enters the labyrinth of the colleges, for instance, he hears the college clock without being able to understand the idiosyncrasy of its striking: “A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokes had sounded. He must have made a mistake, he thought: it was meant for a hundred” (64). Jude’s non-knowledge of the college community and its conventions places him outside an intersubjective social frame of reference. Social time and intersubjectivity in Jude the Obscure have a distinctively ethical and even moral component that becomes most visible in the morals of marriage and gender relations (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). The precariousness of social time in the novel centres on the fact that Jude’s and Sue’s relationship deviates from the traditional chronology of Victorian gender relations and that society’s answer to this deviation is stigmatisation, marginalisation, and, in a thoroughly Foucauldian understanding, ‘discipline and punishment.’ Phillotson’s friend Gillingham characteristically suggests that Sue “ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses.” (225) Social order always implies a social order of time and an ordering by rigid rather than open temporal structures. In the Melchester training school-episode, for instance, in which Sue is punished for being late in the dormitory, the transgression of social time is answered by isolation and an even stricter time regiment: “nobody was to speak to Bridehead without permission. [. . .] she had been severely reprimanded and ordered to a solitary room for a week, there to be confined, and take her meals.” (113) Jude’s weakest moments in the novel are those unfortunate ones in which he fashions himself as an “order-loving man” (167) and seeks to impose a rigid chronology of love on Sue. He urges Sue’s evasive and, admittedly, at times “cockteasing” (Brooke-Rose 1989, 35) character to consummate their love sexually and, sadly so, pathologises in her what he deems as deviating from the norm. His hurt pride accuses her of being “incapable of real love” when she feels she merely has not “felt about them what most women are taught to feel” (Hardy 1978, 192). John Goode aptly points out that whereas Sue’s differentiation is merely cultural “Jude makes it biologistic” (Goode 1979, 105). Jude exploits Sue’s jealousy for Arabella and enforces her surrender to his sexual desires – “if I must I must [. . .] I ought to have known that you would conquer in the long run” (210–211) – which amounts to a barbaric act of cruelty. Their interaction with social norms and social time leaves them in a paradoxical double bind situation: Sue wants intellectual closeness and physical distance while she feels bound to socially determined chronologies and, strangely, is tortured by jealousy for Arabella. Jude appreciates her independence as “Voltairean” (122), but his masculinity feels misunderstood and used by her at the same time. Such deadlock is further borne out by the innumerable manifestations of subjective time in the novel. The first book of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea begins as follows:

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‘The world is my idea:’ – this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e, only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. (Schopenhauer 1909, 25)

Jude, for the most part, is wrong in his assumption that his failure could wholly be ascribed to outer circumstances. David Lodge half ironically states that we never quite get the impression “that he and Sue would have been happier in the age of the Open University and the Permissive Society” (Lodge 1979, 193). Both Jude and Sue also founder on the subjective time inherent in their worlds of ideas and dreams. “His dreams,” knows the narrator, “were as gigantic as his surroundings were small” (20). Christminster, for instance, is experienced as an impressionistic daydream featuring “points of light like the topaz” that have their own temporal structure transcending clock time: “The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes” metamorphosing Christminster into the subjective image of a “vague city [. . .] veiled in mist,” the foreground of which “had grown funereally dark, and near objects punt on the hues and shapes of chimaeras” (19). Throughout the novel subjective time is experienced by Jude as an oscillation process between illusion and disillusionment. His ideas about the Latin grammar, the naïve belief in Phillotson’s affection, the (embarrassingly) “chimerical” (155) pilgrimage to the composer of the hymn that moved him so much, and even Sue herself remain objects of idealisations and daydreams that constantly ricochet against the reality principle. The harshest example of this is Jude’s symbolic initiation into sexuality by the piece of flesh of the pig’s pizzle that Arabella throws at him: In his deep concentration on these transactions of the future Jude’s walk had slackened, and he was now standing quite still, looking at the ground as though the future were thrown thereon by a magic lantern. On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him and had fallen at his feet. (23–23)

For Sue subjective time implies the emancipation from the fetters of tradition and history. She re-chronologises the gospels and, symbolically, rejects a historical model of Jerusalem she sees at an exhibition: “I fancy we have had enough of Jerusalem” (87). Symbolically also, she prefers the apocryphal gospels to the canonical ones for their lyrical rather than historical quality: “All cut up into verses, too; so that it is like one of the other evangelists read in a dream, when things are the same, yet not the same” (163). This emphasis of difference illustrates her desire for subjectivity, creativity, and freedom in social surroundings that provide liberties only for rich, famous, or fallen women. Sue calls for her own time and time on her own, thus, she is no longer satisfied by the sociocultural, socio-symbolic, and, indeed, socio-temporal contract implied, for instance, in the role of a ‘mother’ or a ‘wife.’ Sue’s idiosyncrasies reveal the revolt against her place in society, against

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tradition, and the claim to transform social time and place (Kristeva 1981). Her conclusion is to both actively enter into the modern ways of life (embodied, as was shown above, by her fascination for the railway) and to relish in sheer jouissance, that is, to play with the moral signifiers of her time, which includes her coquetting with Jude’s (more callow and conventional) feelings. Sitting in his room half-naked and drenched she playfully demystifies all sexual connotations of the scenery: “I suppose, Jude, it is odd that you should see me like this and all my things hanging there? Yet what nonsense! They are only women’s clothes – sexless cloth and linen” (116). In the grotesque and shockingly unforgettable moment of the final catastrophe in the novel fate or nemesis crash in upon Jude and Sue in the figure Father Time, the prematurely aged child of his first marriage, who takes his own life and the lives of their children: Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his hand, timing the eggs, so that his back was turned to the little inner chamber where the children lay. A shriek from Sue suddenly caused him to start round. He saw that the door of the room, or rather closet [. . .] was open, and that Sue had just sunk to the floor within it. Hastening forward to pick her up he turned his eyes to the little bed spread on the boards; no children were there. He looked in bewilderment round the room. At the back to the door were fixed two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a piece of box-cord round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner. An overturned chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the room; but those of the girl and the baby boy were closed. (265)

The symbolic charging of the scene is blatant: Jude stands with his back to the events, and while he is timing eggs, (Father) Time has killed his children. The scenery is Hardy’s excruciating illustration of Schopenhauer’s renunciation of the possibility to account for the world historically or rationally. The suicide and death of the children remain enigmatic and incommensurable distortions and, thus, even touch on the realm of the sublime. The scene also shows that Jude’s and Sue’s failure is intersubjective and subjective at the same time: Neither is there a connection to society for them, nor can their dreams and aspirations be attuned to reality. More profoundly still, they founder on temporality, as the distortion and absurdity inherent in the trickster-figure of Father Time deflect our attention from the immanent to the ontological, from the concrete realistic detail to the abstract principles of being and Dasein (Heidegger), that is, to the experience of being peculiar to humans: “He [. . .] seemed to be doubly awake, like an enslaved and dwarfed Divinity, sitting passive and regarding his companions as if he saw their whole rounded lives rather than their immediate figures” (219).

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The conflict of multiple dimensions of time that are intertwined is aesthetically reflected in equally multiple modes of narration and focalisation. The confrontation between social and subjective time is reflected by the oscillation between internal and zero focalisation, between “the narrator’s retrospective view and the time of the characters as they live from moment to moment moving toward the future.” (Miller 1970, xii–xiii) Extensive passages of internal focalisation and free indirect discourse configure immediate experience, thoughts and introspection. Internal focalisation highlights the individual pacing of subjective time, the figural mode of narration is time-stretching: “What were his books to him? What were his intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a single minute of time day by day? [. . .] It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson; ay, or a pope!” (41) Free indirect discourse, however, remains bound to a linguistically consistent form of representation (i.e., third person narrative, past tense, subjunctive) organised by a narrator, and, hence, still unites the present moment of experience and an intersubjective reference to the world. The oscillation process between passages of immediate experience of time and those of historicising reflection becomes even clearer if the heterodiegetic perspective of the “chronicler of moods and deeds” (Hardy 1978, 228) is considered. This “unknown omniscience” (Shires 2002) does not “express his personal views” (Hardy 1978, 228), yet is able to comment upon “documents which, simple and commonplace in themselves, are seen retrospectively to have been pregnant with impassioned consequences” (81) and, therefore, constructs proleptic markers, as it were, that aggravate the prevailing sense of doom. The heterodiegetic narrator slows down the course of events or, in turn, accelerates them. Dale Kramer points to “abruptness” as a central narrative technique for the creation of distance in Jude, “a technique often described as grotesque, expressionistic, and symbolic distortion” (Kramer 1975, 140). The multiple oscillation process between internal and zero focalisation appears comparable to a zoom lens in motion and an ongoing shifting between telephoto and wide-angle views (see Middeke 2004, 240). Famously, David Lodge attributes a cinematic camera view to Hardy’s narrative (Lodge 1977). Christine Brooke-Rose does not dispute the comparison to such cinematic techniques, yet she also complains about what she thinks are “ultra-simplistic shifts of focalisation” (Brooke-Rose 1989, 31), the mere function of which is to withhold information for the reader. James Kincaid points to the “tentativeness” and “inconsistency” (Kincaid 1979, 202–203) of Hardy’s narrators. Patricia Ingham shows how utterly the narrator fails in making Sue’s character plausible. In fact, she aptly points out that Sue “is manifestly [. . .] so contradictory that no critical reading of her as unitary will hold. [. . .] As a signifier she is inconstant and the text enacts the struggles of all accounts of her to recreate stability” (Ingham 1989, 54–55).

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The structure of the plotline of Jude the Obscure makes two directions of movement coalesce: there is the (inevitably) linear development of both characters and, on a more abstract level, the plotline development from beginning to ending in terms of text time. Concurrently, however, Jude is characterised by a circular movement emerging as strictly geometric patterns and as repetitions, variations, and inversions of plot sequences, motifs, and character configurations. Both directions – the linear and the circular – are intertwined and produce a structure that resembles a “geometrically fluid spiral” (Scheick 1987, 51). The progressing and, at the same time, contracting spiral movement is the structural equivalent to the oscillation process between will and disillusionment, hope and despair, panorama view and close focus, the need for explanation and the concomitant impossibility of explanation. The movement of this progressing spiral is therefore both constructive and deconstructive (Miller 1982, 208; Middeke 2004, 242–244): it mirrors the modernist desire for coherence and a (moral, ethical) centre in the novel and, at the same time, it lays bare the knowledge that there is no (ultimate) coherence and centre. Each instance of repetition deconstructs actions and sequences of plot that appear as identical as, in fact, varied or inverted. Scholars have emphasised the X-shape of the hour-glass or the quadrille as structural models for Hardy (Stallman 1947; Scheick 1987, 246; Freeman 1991, 170). Structurally, one could also point to music and the mirroring techniques of the fugue or the canon and their variations of identical tonal material in, for example, inversions or retrogrades (Middeke 2004, 246). Examples from Jude the Obscure are manifold, as the multiple, deceptive mirror images of Arabella, variations of trap-motifs, Jude’s regular flight to alcohol after disillusionments, or the inversions of marriages and ‘rehearsed’ marriages between Jude, Arabella, Phillotson, and Sue amply show. All ‘real’ marriages imply unhappiness, and, paradoxically at that, the character constellations of the initial marriages (Jude/ Arabella, Sue/Phillotson) are ‘repeated.’ This inversion/variation pattern reaches down as deeply as the phonemic structure of the novel where occasions such as those when Sue and Jude put each other up in their places invert helplessness and consolation: Jude is ‘wet’ from alcohol, Sue ‘wet’ from water. Hardy’s pun demonstrates the gist of the matter: Things seem the same, yet they are not. Jude’s final insight that they are “acting by the letter; and ‘the letter killeth’” (247) reveals the same remarkable insight into the demystifying iterability of the linguistic signifier that Sue had shown before when she was speaking about the gospels. Jacques Derrida shows that signifiers are much more than reifications of primordial images (Derrida 1988), and both Sue and Jude (and Hardy, of course) have moments when they see a liberating potential in the arbitrariness of the signifier. As both break the frames of identical repetition, their insight into the iterability of signifiers amounts to the apotheosis of temporal difference, change, development. Hardy (similar to Freud, in this context) emphasises that whenever the subject is frozen in definite shapes (or the linguistic sign restricted to rigid interpretative contexts) that flout development and change, life itself and interpretation become prison-houses (see Middeke 1999, 116).

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Consequently, the ending of the novel remains without closure (Schweik 1994, 50): Jude, de facto, commits suicide by returning to Arabella and, eventually, by catching cold in freezing weather on his last visit to Sue; Sue commits social suicide, as it were, by reuniting with Phillotson as if she could purge her guilty feelings by an act of self-abasement. Characteristically, the (linear) arrow (of time) that Jude once craved into the milestone on the way to Christminster reappears in ironically inverted form when the heterodiegetic narrator/chronicler brings to the reader’s knowledge that Jude lies dead and “straight as an arrow” (323) on his bed. Not only does this constitute the sarcastic illustration of the futility of Jude’s (and any other character’s or even human being’s) life-long teleology, the variation of the arrowmotif reveals the triumph of time and temporality and lays bare their utter indifference towards the individual fate. Jude’s moment of death, “one of the most grimly magnificent passages in English fiction” (anon. 1896, 154), is indifferently portrayed by Jude’s recitations from the Book of Job, which are cross-cut with the voiceover of cheers and chants from the festivity-filled streets of Christminster where Arabella is looking out for a new suitor while Jude is – literally – dying of thirst. In accordance with the paradoxical spiral movement of the plotline, the geometrical structures, and the multiple focalisations and perspectives, such (shockingly) neutral crosscutting makes clear that Hardy aims for the Schopenhauerian position that no longer focuses on ‘whence’, ‘wither’, ‘where’, or ‘why’ (as all realist fiction does), but rather on the sheer phenomenological ‘what’ of a world in which ‘being’ – thoroughly in Heidegger’s sense – equals ‘care’ and ‘being-towards-death.’ If our being is finite, authentic human life can only be found by facing finitude and temporality and trying to make a meaning out of the fact of the incommensurability of our death. The ending of Jude the Obscure is therefore no longer able to graft a seal of order onto the contingencies the narrative has laid bare both topically and aesthetically. Whereas the characters of Hardy’s novels in general and Jude in particular have oftentimes been linked to classical tragedy and even Shakespeare (see Kramer 2010, Taylor 2010, Newton 2013), on this ontological layer of Jude the Obscure, tragedy is altogether suspended. Nature, evolution, and time know no tragedy. The ironical twist in the arrow-motif reveals that Jude on his nineteen-year-long journey has not come much further than the point where he started. The structure of the Bildungsroman (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology), therefore – that Jude the Obscure largely adheres to as it starts on a potentiality and then follows the process of its actualisation when steps are taken to reach defined objectives – is, ultimately, directed towards failure. The main objectives of gaining knowledge from subjective experience on the one hand and intersubjective reconciliation with society on the other are thwarted. Hence, on the macrostructural level, in this similar to Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (↗ 36 Butler, The Way of All Flesh), George Gissing’s New Grub Street or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (↗ 26 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray), Hardy’s Jude transmutes into a “negative bildungsroman” (Broich 1983), “Antibildungsroman” or “inverted Bildungsroman” (see Ireland 2014, 190).

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4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Thomas Hardy’s work in general and Jude the Obscure in particular belong to the best- researched oeuvres and single texts in world literature. The sheer number of book-length studies, collections, articles is as vast as the range of theoretical approaches. A number of critical guides have appeared in the last thirty years which facilitate both overview and orientation as they contain and map out eminent scholarship of Hardy’s life, its cultural, political, historical, and philosophical contexts, and its aesthetics. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (1999), edited by Dale Kramer, comprises major critical essays on Hardy’s biography, Wessex, gender, religion, aesthetics, and critical theory. Keith Wilson edited A Companion to Thomas Hardy (2009), and especially Philip Mallett has produced important work as the editor of such notable guides as The Achievement of Thomas Hardy (2000), Thomas Hardy: Text and Context (2002), Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies (2004), and Thomas Hardy in Context (2013). These studies relate further cultural and interdisciplinary contexts like, for instance, the New Woman question, marriage, femininity and masculinity (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations), empire and Englishness (↗ 7 Empire – Economy – Materiality), evolution theory, geology, biology, astronomy and physics, medicine, psychology, archeology, sociology, architecture, philosophical backgrounds (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel), or theories of human perception and aesthetic and narrative structure (↗ 2 Remediating Nineteenth-Century Narrative) of Hardy’s oeuvre. Rosemarie Morgan’s The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy (2010) is a magisterial collection that besides providing further contextual work (on popular culture, law, intertextuality, music, visual arts, genre, and the illustration work on Hardy’s novels) gives excellent insights into the bibliographical studies and also contributes an outstanding bibliography that ranges from Hardy’s work, its criticism, audio and electronic material, film studies, video performances to journals dedicated to Thomas Hardy. Major aesthetic questions dominating Hardy scholarship have been focusing on genre questions, on Hardy’s relationship to nineteenth-century poetics, realism, naturalism, his relationship to Hellenism and to the (Greek) classics, on tragedy and, in this vein, have been tracing manifold intertextual and intermedial connections. The treatment of Hardy’s oeuvre within critical theory has been vitally documented by Peter Widdowson (1999) and Geoffrey Harvey (2003). Widdowson provides a brilliant account of Hardy’s reception in the twentieth century. He carefully maps out Hardy’s position within ‘literary studies’ until the 1960s, which were characterised by a hardly self-conscious theoretical position and were to a large extent occupied by formalist, (post-)New Criticism readings of Hardy’s language, imagery, symbolism, and structure (see Widdowson 1999, 75–76). Since the 1960s, literary analysis received a much more elaborate and pronounced theoretical spine. Widdowson comments on the major developments of critical theory that range from ‘materialist’, i.e. sociological, Marxist, socialist positions (i.e., Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, George

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Wotton and Widdowson himself, Roger Ebbatson, John Goode) to feminist and poststructuralist positions on Hardy (i.e., Elaine Showalter, Penny Boumelha, Patricia Stubbs, Rosemarie Morgan, Marjorie Garson, and – towering above all – the meticulously astute rhetorical readings of Hardy’s novels by J. Hillis Miller). Harvey likewise identifies “humanist formalism,” “structuralism and deconstruction,” “psychoanalytic approaches,” “Marxist criticism,” and “feminist and gender studies” (see Harvey 2003, 143–189) as the major directions critical theory has taken to engage with Hardy’s work and provides a helpful overview of the most influential research. Writing from a feminist point of view, Mary Jacobus puts forward the inversive structure inherent to Sue’s tragedy as her collapse coincides with Jude’s growing self-confidence. Until the moment of the death of the children Sue challenges traditional and essentialist concepts of gender. Jacobus emphasises that when she loses her unborn baby she is broken by her femaleness (Jacobus 1975, 328). Penny Boumelha has identified oppositions of class and sexual oppression on the one hand and (uncontrollable) sexual drives and rationality on the other as the central driving force of the conflict in the novel (see Boumelha 1982). Rosemarie Morgan accentuates that Sue Bridehead was Hardy’s deliberate transgression of the ‘classical’ Victorian norm of madonna/whore (Morgan 1988, xvi). Questions of feminism and gender studies have been productive to this day: While Eithne Henson analyses the relationship of gender and landscape in Hardy (Henson 2011), Deanna K. Kreisel interrelates aspects of economy, gender, and narrative (Kreisel 2012). Interesting and promising new perspectives on gender relations in Jude the Obscure and Hardy’s work in general have sprung from recent analyses of masculinities in Hardy’s work (Horlacher 2006, Langland 2013, Mallett 2010, Dellamore 2014, and Thomas 2015): “Hardy’s male protagonists,” Elizabeth Langland concludes, “typically struggle and fail to achieve equipoise and become pale shadows of the men they might have been” (Langland 2013, 382). Disputing the essences of ‘male’ and ‘female’ and stressing the performativity of gender (and, ensuing from this, marriage norms etc.) as a constructed product of culture rather than nature, the interrelation of feminist criticism and poststructuralism/deconstruction has always been close and is, understandably, still very productive in Hardy criticism. Above, I pointed to Hardy’s own aesthetic belief in the ‘disproportioning of reality’, which in itself constitutes nothing short of an open invitation to deconstructionist readings that are fuelled by the proliferation of meanings in language, by decentring, by displacing the signifier from the signified, by making systems insecure and multiple rather than unified, by highlighting the instability of all meanings. Sue and Jude, albeit, as has been shown, in a tragically asynchronous fashion, seek to make the most of free play, undecidability, aporia and différance – the word Jacques Derrida famously coined for the incommensurability of stabilising ideas of origins, authorities, and authenticity – only to be punished for their insight in the arbitrariness of cultural signs and norms in the end. Writing about The Well-Beloved, J. Hillis Miller in Fiction and

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Repetition (1982) famously pointed to the interlacing of a Platonic mode of repetition (indicating identity) and a Nietzschean one (indicating difference) in Hardy’s narrative. I have shown elsewhere and above that Hardy’s emphasis of the iterability of the signifier in Jude the Obscure places him in an open spiral movement that can access the past, albeit always but imperfectly because such access is constantly moving forward towards an open future. In a temporalised continuum, any approach to unity, closure, knowledge, insight etc. via repetition (of the past) is, thus, always already bracketed and hence under erasure (see Miller 1982 and Middeke 2004, 215–251). Auspicious new developments in Hardy criticism come from inter- and transdisciplinary approaches and contexts. A pioneering essay from Richard Kerridge identifies Hardy’s work as “an obvious candidate for the ecocritical canon” (Kerridge 2001, 126), pointing to Hardy’s responsiveness to the natural world and human relations with that world. Hardy’s characters are presented as life forms that are part of a network, a(n) (eco)system, as it were, who find a multiplicity of material, cultural, and emotional uses in order to connect to their natural environments. Such network thinking links ecocritical writing on Hardy with existing research from (social) psychology, sociology, and also Marxist criticism. Moreover, Kerridge succeeds in showing how narrative procedures in Hardy’s fiction correspond to ecological principles (see Kerridge 2001, 131–134). It needs to be said, however, that, in the wider context of the environmental humanities, the terrains of eco-criticism, environmentalism, deep ecology, social ecology, eco-marxism, eco-feminism, and cultural ecology still need to be mapped out for Hardy in much greater detail. Questions of sustainability must interrogate Hardy’s fiction as symbolic spaces of expression that are integrated into the larger ecology of cultural discourses. From the perspective of neuroscience and psychology, Suzanne Keen explores the relation between Hardy’s imagination and psychology/neurology (Keen 2014), whereas Kay Young interrogates Hardy’s neuroaesthetics (Young 2010). In this context, existing Hardy research is still clearly lacking in critical studies that look at Hardy’s work from the perspective of both affect theory and the new materialisms, which would relate questions of (evolutionary) ethics, biomedia, man/animal interrelations, the body, and affect(s) as physical experience to Hardy’s work. Analyses of affective issues such as anxiety, sympathy (see, for instance, Sumpter 2011), empathy, shame, or excess, to name but a few, are/ would be able to build productive theoretical as well as methodological bridges to directions of literary and cultural approaches such as reader response theory that have hitherto been thoroughly neglected by Hardy criticism. The theoretical assumption of a transaction between reader and text could be made productive in a number of ways, as, for instance, affective feedback structures in Hardy’s fiction could be focused upon, in which a reading of a text enables the readers to recreate prominent identities. Furthermore, it is only a very small methodological step from Penny Boumelha’s observation on The Return of the Native (1878) that the narrative is

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characterised by a “conjectural mode of narration,” by a “disavowal of certainty,” by the “irresolution” of an ending that is devoid of “authoritative comment” (Boumelha 2009, 264) to Wolfgang Iser’s studies (i.e. The Act of Reading and The Implied Reader) in how reader communication is inscribed into the fictional structure of a literary text. The implied reader that Iser has devised is not a historical reader, but a linguistic and rhetorical appeal structure generated by gaps and blanks in the text prompting readers to fill these with meanings that the text itself leaves ambiguous and void. In Jude the Obscure, ‘obscurity’ itself becomes a pervasive leitmotif on all topical, textual, and structural and aesthetic levels. Not only are we faced with multiple structural “problems of information and chronologies” (Doheny 2002, 111), character psychologies are also left ambiguous, enigmatic, and precarious, and, throughout, Hardy himself seems to have been thoroughly ambivalent about both of his protagonists. What is more, in “The Profitable Reading of Fiction” (1888) Hardy revealed himself to be entirely conscious of the fact that aesthetic truth was not only the result of the production side of writing, but also involved a high degree of reader activity. Fiction, for Hardy, was an “exercise of a generous imaginativeness” (Hardy 1966a, 112). Rather than following a photographic copy of the real and reality the reader was forced to add their own “intensitive power of [. . .] imagination” set into motion by contrasts in the narrative. Fiction prompts and necessitates “imaginative reading” (112), and, thus, Hardy points out that neither authors nor texts produce meanings by themselves alone, but that the reader takes a vital part in the construction of meaning. If one recalls briefly an ambiguous trickster figure such as Father Time or, even more famously, looks at the pivotal seduction/rape scene between Tess and Alec in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), it becomes more than clear that Hardy ultimately was not only not too keen on disambiguation, but also intentionally constructed narratological blanks for the reader in the plotlines that echoed the “quest for a true exhibition of man,” the “true object [of] a lesson in life,” and “mental enlargement from elements essential to the narratives themselves and from the reflections they engender” (Hardy 1966a, 115, 114). Reality was indeed more complex than the alleged objectivity of a scientific experiment. The best fiction, Hardy summarised, “like the highest artistic expression in other modes, is more true [. . .] than history or nature can be” (117). Hence, tracing such indeterminacies and absences in Jude and in Hardy’s work in general does not attribute an encompassing relativity and arbitrariness to both text and interpretative work, but rather re-anchors the interpretative movements of the reader in textual signals that readers face and react to in their encounter with Hardy’s “brilliantly incoherent art” (Kincaid 1979, 213).

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Bibliography Works Cited Anon. “Unsigned Review of Jude the Obscure.” Saturday Review lxxxi, 8 February 1896. 153–4. Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage. Ed. R. G. Cox. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. 279–283. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. Vol. 6 of The Works of Matthew Arnold in Fifteen Volumes. London: Macmillan, 1903. 1–226. Asquith, Mark. “Hardy’s Philosophy.” Mallet 2013, 285–295. Asquith, Mark. “Philosophy, Metaphysics and Music in Hardy’s Cosmic Vision.” Morgan 2010, 181–197. Beer, Gillian. Arguing With the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney. London: Routledge, 1989. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Boumelha, Penny. Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982. Boumelha, Penny. “‘Wild Regions of Obscurity.’ Narrative in The Return of the Native.” Wilson 2009, 254–266. Broich, Ulrich. “Der ‘negative Bildungsroman’ der Neunziger Jahre.” Die ‘Nineties: Das englische Fin de Siècle zwischen Dekadenz und Sozialkritik. Ed. Manfred Pfister and Bernd SchulteMiddelich. München: UTB-Francke, 1983. 197–226. Brooke-Rose, Christine. “Ill Wit and Sick Tragedy: Jude the Obscure.” Alternative Hardy. Ed. Lance St. John Butler. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. 26–48. Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress and Decadence. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966. Dellamore, Richard. “Male Relations in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 50.3 (2014): 245–268. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. 1–21. Doheny, John R. “The Characterisation of Jude and Sue: the Myth and the Reality.” Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Phillip Mallett. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. 110–132. Eagleton, Terry. “The Limits of Art.” Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 61–71. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Freeman, Janet H. “Highways and Cornfields: Space and Time in the Narration of Jude the Obscure.” Colby Quarterly 27.3 (1991): 161–173. Garwood, Helen. Thomas Hardy: An Illustration of the Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Philadelphia: Winston, 1911. Repr. Folcroft: Folcroft, 1969. Goode, John. “Sue Bridehead and the New Woman.” Women Writing and Writing About Women. Ed. Mary Jacobus. London: Croom Helm, 1979. 100–113. Hardy, Florence Emily. The Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840–1928. London: Macmillan, 1965. Hardy, Thomas. “The Profitable Reading of Fiction.” Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences. Ed. Harold Orel. New York: St. Martin’s, 1966a. 110–125.

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Hardy, Thomas. “The Science of Fiction.” Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences. Ed. Harold Orel. New York: St. Martin’s, 1966b. 134–138. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Ed. Norman Page. New York: Norton, 1978. Hardy, Thomas. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Michael Millgate. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. Harvey, Geoffrey. The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy. London: Routledge, 2003. Henson, Eithne. Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Horlacher, Stefan. Masculinities: Konzeptionen von Männlichkeit im Werk von Thomas Hardy und D. H. Lawrence. Tübingen: Narr, 2006. Ingham, Patricia. “Provisional Narrative: Hardy’s Final Trilogy.” Alternative Hardy. Ed. Lance St. John Butler. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. 49–73. Ireland, Ken. Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative: A Narratological Approach to his Novels. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2014. Jacobus, Mary. “Sue the Obscure.” Essays in Criticism 25 (1975): 304–329. Keen, Suzanne. Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2014. Kelly, Mary Ann. “Thomas Hardy’s Reading in Schopenhauer: Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1980. Kerridge, Richard. “Ecological Hardy.” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. 126–142. Kincaid, James. “Hardy’s Absences.” Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Dale Kramer. London: Macmillan, 1979. 202–214. Kramer, Dale. Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1975. Kramer, Dale. “Hardy: The Driftiness of Tragedy.” Morgan 2010, 371–386. Kreisel, Deanna K. Economic Woman: Demand Gender and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7.1 (1981): 13–35. Langland, Elizabeth. “Hardy and Masculinity.” Mallet 2013, 374–383. Levine, George. “Hardy and Darwin: An Enchanting Hardy?” Wilson 2009, 37–53. Lodge, David. “Jude the Obscure: Pessimism and Fictional Form.” Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Dale Kramer. London: Macmillan, 1979. 193–201. Lodge, David. “Thomas Hardy as Cinematic Novelist.” Thomas Hardy After Fifty Years. Ed. Lance St. John Butler. London: Macmillan, 1977. 78–89. Mallett, Phillip, ed. Thomas Hardy in Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2013. Mallett, Phillip. “Hardy and Philosophy.” A Companion to Thomas Hardy. Wilson 2009, 21–35. Mallett, Phillip. “Hardy and Masculinity.” Morgan 2010, 387–402. Mann, Thomas. “Einführung in den Zauberberg. Für Studenten der Universität Princeton, als Vorwort. ” Der Zauberberg. Frankfurt on the Main: Fischer, 1980. Middeke, Martin. “On Circles and Spirals: Time, Repetition, and Meta-Hermeneutics in Literature.” Literature and Circularity. Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics. Ed. Martin Middeke and Christoph Henke. New York: AMS, 1999. 103–128. Middeke, Martin. Die Kunst der gelebten Zeit: Zur Phänomenologie literarischer Subjektivität im englischen Roman des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts. Text und Theorie Vol. 1. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004. Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Oxford: Blackwell. 1982. Miller, J. Hillis. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. Cambridge.: Harvard UP, 1970.

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Morgan, Rosemarie, with Scott Rode. “The Evolution of Wessex.” Morgan 2010, 157–177. Morgan, Rosemarie. Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. London: Routledge, 1988. Morgan, Rosemarie, ed. The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Newton, K. M. “Tragedy and the Novel.” Mallet 2013, 122–131. O’Gorman, Francis. “Thomas Hardy and Realism.” Mallet 2013, 113–121. Phillpotts, Eden. “Thomas Hardy and Schopenhauer.” From the Angle of 88. London: Hutchinson, 1951. 68–76. Scheick, William J. “Schopenhauerian Compassion, Fictional Structure, and the Reader: The Example of Hardy and Conrad.” Twilight of Dawn: Studies in English Literature in Transition. Ed. O. M. Brack. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1987. 45–67. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Vol. 1. Trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909. Schweik, Robert. “The ‘Modernity’ of Jude the Obscure.” A Spacious Vision: Essays on Hardy. Ed. Phillip Mallett and Ronald P. Draper. Newmill: Patten, 1994. 49–63. Shires, Linda. “‘And I Was Unaware’: The Unknown Omniscience of Hardy’s Narrators.” Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Phillip Mallett. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 31–48. Stallman, R. W. “Hardy’s Hour-Glass Novel.” Sewanee Review 55.2 (1947): 283–296. Sumpter, Caroline. “On Suffering and Sympathy: Jude the Obscure, Evolution, and Ethics.” Victorian Studies 53.4 (2011): 665–687. Thomas, Jane. “Growing up to Be a Man: Thomas Hardy and Masculinity.” The Victorian Novel and Masculinity. Ed. Phillip Mallett. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 116–150. Tomalin, Claire. Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man. New York: Penguin, 2007. Taylor, Dennis. “From Stratford to Casterbridge: The Influence of Shakespeare.” Morgan 2010, 123–156. Weber, Carl J. “Hardy’s Copy of Schopenhauer.” Colby Library Journal 4 (1957): 217–224. Wilson, Keith, ed. A Companion to Thomas Hardy. Oxford. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Widdowson, Peter. “Hardy and Critical Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy. Ed. Dale Kramer. Cambridge: CUP, 1999. 73–92. Wolfreys, Julian. Thomas Hardy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Young, Kay. Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy. Columbus: Ohio State UP. 2010.

Further Reading Hughes, John. ‘Ecstatic Sound’: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Ingham, Patricia. Thomas Hardy. Authors in Context. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Mallett, Phillip (ed.) The Achievement of Thomas Hardy. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Mallett, Phillip, ed. Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Page, Norman. Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Wolfreys, Julian. Critical Issues: Thomas Hardy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Wright, T. R., ed. Thomas Hardy on Screen. Cambridge: CUP, 2005.

Eckart Voigts

31 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) Abstract: The chapter provides an analysis of H. G. Wells’s key scientific romance The Time Machine: An Invention (1895). Wells provided some of the most permanently influential cautionary tales and technological scenarios of contemporary science fiction, inspired by late Victorian fin-de-siècle scepticism and fears of biological and cultural degeneration. The chapter begins by providing the context for his early phase of writing scientific romances. It also touches on Wells’s biography, focusing on the impact of his lower-middle-class background, socialist leanings, free love attitudes, and scientific training on The Time Machine. The textual interpretation describes the way in which evolutionary thinking and cultural scepticism exerted considerable influence on Wells and the entire late Victorian fin de siècle. Finally surveying the reception of Wells’s work, the chapter argues that he is the arch myth-maker of science fiction, establishing a reservoir of recurring themes and motifs that have become a significant point of departure for today’s science fiction, dystopian, and post-apocalyptic narratives. Keywords: Scientific romance, science fiction, dystopia, utopia, fin de siècle, degeneration, technology, post-apocalypse, evolution, Darwinism

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Herbert George Wells is best known as one of the most important originators of science fiction. Influenced by his precursor Grant Allen, he is the key writer of the scientific romance, a significant genre that fed into the early science fiction emerging at the end of the nineteenth century. He introduced and popularised some of the most enduring and powerful motifs of contemporary science fiction, such as time travel, technology-based interplanetary travel, interplanetary war, natural disasters, the ‘mad scientist’, and failed scientific experiments. Particularly in his early phase of writing scientific romances (texts that he preferred to call ‘scientific fantasies’), Wells provided some of the most permanently influential cautionary tales, technological scenarios, of contemporary science fiction, inspired by late Victorian fin-de-siècle scepticism and fears of biological and cultural degeneration (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel). Wells’s key works are the early scientific romances written prior to his utopian predictions in Anticipations (1900) and A Modern Utopia (1905), which envision a world state. This set of key texts begins with Wells’s first novel The Time Machine: An Invention (1895), published as a book by Heinemann in 1895, after having gone https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-032

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through various revisions from previous serialised versions in Science School Journals (entitled “The Chronic Argonauts,” 1888), the National Observer (1894), and the New Review (1895). The novella The Invisible Man (1897) focuses on a scientist who is corrupted by his irreversible invention of invisibility; The War of the Worlds (1898) adapts popular British invasion fantasies and Darwinist survivalism on an interplanetary scale; The Island of Dr. Moreau: A Possibility (1896) links vivisection to fears of degeneration, anticipating posthuman discourses on bio-engineering; When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) far-sightedly debates personality cult, advanced technologies, and social engineering; First Men on the Moon (1901) features extra-terrestrial aliens and debates industrialism. Wells’s short stories predict tanks (“The Land Ironclads,” 1903), envision an impact event and climate change (“The Star,” 1897), and discuss totalitarianism and disability (“The Country of the Blind,” 1904), while his novel The War in the Air (1908) presciently extrapolated aerial warfare from the flight experiments of Orville and Wilbur Wright since 1903. A prolific writer, Wells also wrote realistic fiction, such as his Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), The History of Mr Polly (1910), and the Condition-of-England novel Tono-Bungay (1909). Most of these works have autobiographical roots, addressing his lower-middle-class background or his ‘feminist’ free love attitudes, subsequently often dismissed as ‘philandering’ (Ann Veronica, 1909). Wells married twice (Isabel, his cousin, in 1891, and Amy Catherine, his student, in 1895) and had numerous documented affairs (with, for instance, author Rebecca West, Amber Reeves, Odette Keun etc.), which frequently inspired his female characters. The socialist-leaning Wells became a member of the Fabian Society in 1903, and ran for Parliament for the Labour Party in the 1920s. His biographical narratives are highly significant beyond their roots in Wells’s life as they show an acute awareness of the social conflicts tearing the cohesive social fabric of late Victorianism apart. Born in the suburban Bromley-on-Kent to a shopkeeper, Wells was introduced to the class divide when his mother took service as a maid and housekeeper with a wealthy family at Uppark House and Gardens on the South Downs. Both his father’s meagre income and his own rather squalid career as a draper’s apprentice, before he studied science and became a teacher and author, sensitised him to social injustice and sparked his utopian visions (Godfrey 2016, 3–4). In Wells’s later life – he was born in 1866 and died in 1945, straddling the turn of the twentieth century –, he became increasingly enmeshed in global politics, particularly after the popular success of his sociological predictions for the year 2000 in Anticipations and, subsequently, the bestselling Outline of History in 1919. As a publicly visible intellectual, he spoke at the German Reichstag in 1929, met Albert Einstein, and acted as President of PEN (1924–1933), discussing and outlining his ideas for a global future with political leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, or F. D. Roosevelt. There is no record, however, of the fiction of this visionary of time travel in the fourth dimension ever having influenced Einstein, its scientific theoretician. While Wells’s political activities, which for decades

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seemed to overshadow his work, have long been forgotten, he is chiefly remembered for his early scientific romances. The two most influential of Wells’s narratives are The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. The first of the two narratives relates an experiment of time travel; in the second we learn about an invasion by aliens from outer space – again technologically advanced but ultimately isolated and conquered by earthly bacteria. Traditional utopias feed on the idea of an isolated space, so that, for instance, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s eponymous subterranean Coming Race is discovered underground (↗ 21 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race). One of the most remarkable features of The Time Machine is the fact that its uchronia or Zeitutopie is technological in character. Whereas William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) send their utopian travellers forward in time by having them fall asleep, Richard Jefferies’ After London: Wild England projects a regressed future disconnected from the present, and M. P. Shiel orders an apocalyptic purple cloud in his futuristic last-man narrative The Purple Cloud (1901), Wells invents a – theoretically possible, but technically implausibly extrapolated – time machine. In Wells’s scientific romances, the progressive technological object contrasts sharply with cautionary narratives warning against hypertrophy and regression. The cause of this productive schizophrenia in Wells’s early writings may be seen in the influence of Thomas H. Huxley (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel), who taught Wells for a year when he was a student at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. Huxley championed Darwinism, and in Man’s Place in Nature (1863), he discussed the implications of Darwin’s ideas expressed in On the Origin of Species for humanity, comparing men and apes and dogs and concluding that humans descended from lower forms of life (Huxley 1873, 81). In Evolution and Ethics (1893), Huxley rejected religion and accepted Darwinian ideas of “cosmic struggle for existence” (Huxley 2009, 18). At the same time, he sought to counter social Darwinism with an agnostic ethics that insisted on the place of moral choice, often in antagonism with natural drives and urges. Huxley also warned of a reverse evolution in humanity, which he termed “retrogressive metamorphosis” (2009, 6), leading to chaos and uniformity in the place of the complexities of nature that resulted from the struggle for existence. In Hereditary Genius (1869), Francis Galton expounded his views that the social, cultural, and technological progress of humanity might be imperilled, for instance by the tendency for highly talented individuals to produce fewer offspring than the less intelligent ones (362). Concepts of human regression, explored by Galton, can also be culled from his cousin Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), which attacked the traditional distinction between humans and animals. In his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Galton not only coined the term ‘eugenics’, he also held, just as Huxley did, that healthy rural people produced more offspring than their sickly urban counterparts,

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leading, in the long run, to an urbanised deterioration of the genetic make-up of the British nation as a whole: “It cannot be doubted that town life is harmful to the town population. [. . .] The vital functions are so closely related that an inferiority in the production of healthy children very probably implies a loss of vigour generally, one sign of which is a diminution of stature” (2004, 14). In this way, Social Darwinism became a standard paradigm of thinking. Herbert Spencer’s “The Study of Sociology” (1873), for instance, argued against attempts to reform and preserve the weak, warning against spreading degeneration and “unworthiness”: For if the unworthy are helped to increase by shielding them from that mortality which their unworthiness would naturally entail, the effect is to produce, generation after generation, a greater unworthiness. [. . .] Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good, is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing-up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals. [. . .] Such acquaintance with the laws of life as they have gathered incidently, lead many to suspect that appliances for preserving the physically-feeble, bring results that are not wholly good. (qtd. in Guy 1998, 283–287)

It is easy to see the Eloi-Morlock dichotomy in The Time Machine as resonating with the persistence of Gothic writing modes, merged with Huxley’s, Galton’s, and Spencer’s statistical sociology on the precarious fitness of modern civilisation. Clearly, the ‘struggle for existence’ proposed by Darwin to result in ‘natural selection’, and translated by Herbert Spencer as ‘survival of the fittest’, was at odds with the prevalent Christian ethics of charity – and this tension palpably informs Wells’s works. At the same time, the concept of degeneration exerted considerable influence on Wells and the entire fin de siècle. In Entartung (1891; transl. into English as Degeneration, 1895), the Hungarian Jewish social critic Max Nordau takes a pessimistic view on the future of European civilisation, arguing that the ‘degenerate art’ of modern writers was a symptom of regression. Edwin Ray Lankester’s Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880) is an even earlier example of the regressive turn of Darwinist thinking. The narrator in The Time Machine also invokes Thomas Carlyle (Wells 2009, 50), who criticised the decline of the European aristocracy. Another decisive influence, particularly on Wells’s later project of laying out universal and totalising plans for the future of humanity, was Winwood Reade’s universal history The Martyrdom of Man (1872).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns The short novel is composed of two key entropic journeys of the unnamed Time Traveller – first to the Eloi and Morlocks and the Sphinx at the Palace of Green Porcelain in the year 802,701, and subsequently to the ‘Terminal Beach’ – the end

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of the world brought about by an entropic cooling of the sun. In view of the consistent downward spiral of future experience, from social degeneration to global death, the descending figures in the digits of the target year (802,701; i.e. 8 to 7 and 2 to 1) are clearly metaphoric (Manlove 2009, 250; Schenkel 2001, 69). Another episode, in which the Traveller meets kangaroo- and centipede-like animals, appeared in an earlier version of the tale serialised in the New Review, but was subsequently discarded (Wells 2009, 124–125). The overall structure thus consists of a frame narrative and three embedded far-future episodes that move from the dystopian (Eloi and Morlocks) to the apocalyptic (Terminal Beach). The Time Traveller reports of his future sojourning embedded in the frame narrative, and the contrast could not be starker between the bourgeois complacency of the “luxurious after-dinner atmosphere” (Wells 2009, 5) and the dishevelled appearance and voracious hunger of the Time Traveller upon his return. The scientific adventuring of the Time Traveller, vigorous and enthusiastic at first and contrasted with the complacency of the other guests, is subsequently rendered melancholic by his disillusioning experience of decline. His meeting with the dinner guests is reflected in the reactions of the guest Filby and the reports by the sceptical frame narrator possibly called Hillyer (67n1), a journalist who attends the meetings and acts as a witness to the Time Traveller’s departure, return, and final disappearance. At the implied moment of narration – three years after the disappearance of the Time Traveller – the narrator speculates that the Time Traveller will never return and contrasts his own continuing faith in humanity and future “manhood” with the frustration of the Traveller (71). In emulation of standard scientific practice, the Time Traveller first confronts the circle of friends with a model. Significantly, the scientific object is imbued with the quasi-eroticism of the technological sublime, while its exact functioning is kept conveniently nebulous and abstract. It is a “metallic framework” made with ivory, nickel, and “twisted crystalline bars,” apparently made from Quartz, a saddle and two levers (Wells 2009, 9, 11). Critics have suggested that this ivory bike (Geduld 1987b, 96) references its liberatory and mobilising role in the New Woman movement. Elaine Showalter (1992), in particular, has highlighted the gendered dimension of the time machine as a surrogate birthing machine, similar to other late nineteenth-century narratives that replace heterosexual procreation with male auto-creation (Jekyll and Hyde [↗ 25 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde], Dracula [↗ 32 Bram Stoker, Dracula], The Picture of Dorian Gray [↗ 26 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray], The Island of Dr Moreau). The Time Traveller, at any rate, highlights the haptic pleasure in operating the machine generating “a kind of hysterical exhilaration” and reports feeling “a pleasure in the mere touch of the contrivance” (Wells 2009, 18, 63). Taking recourse to the Freudian notion of phallic machinery, the sexual connotations of the bicycle, its cultural appropriation by the New Woman as well as its use in art by Marcel Duchamp’s Machines Célibataires or, English, bachelor machines, the autoerotic masculine birthing machine, Showalter

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argues: “Wells descended into his own unconscious and retrieved primitive images” (1992, 76). The fin-de-siècle obsession with degeneration and the fantasy of evolutionary regression sketched above appears in a variety of ways in the text. On his way back, the Time Traveller sees “evidences of decadent humanity” (Wells 2009, 67). The metaphorical pattern that shapes the text is blatant. The Time Traveller even supplies a meta-commentary on the character names when he asserts that he does not know the meaning of the Eloi ‘Weena’, but he finds the name appropriate (58). The name may have been suggested by Percy Greg’s previous novel of interplanetary travel, Across the Zodiac (1880), which features the childlike Martian woman Eveena. The name evokes smallness (‘teenie-weenie’) or childlikeness (‘tweenie – a pre-teen’). Kathryn Hume argues that small size is an antithesis to ideals of ‘great’ Victorian manliness and counts the epithet ‘little’ eight times for the Eloi (2009, 204). The name ‘Eloi’ ironically invokes the Hebrew word for God, elohim, but, according to Bernard Bergonzi, also ‘elves’; the French term for ‘distant’, eloigné; an élite; old age (eld); or St. Loy, a seventh-century courtier famed for his beauty (Bergonzi 2009, 194). Indeed, the Eloi remind the narrator, pursuing his theory of the aristocracy and working classes after Darwinian change, of the weak “Carlovingian kings” (Wells 2009, 46). The Time Traveller first sees the Eloi as a success story: annoying and dangerous animals have disappeared; they seem to live in large buildings in a perfect harmony associated with communist collectivism and have, as strict vegetarians, developed a harmonious unity with nature. Indeed, the Time Traveller finally comes to the conclusion that Eloi and Morlocks must have constituted a “perfect mechanism” with little evolutionary need for human intelligence (61). At the same time, the Eloi’s diseased frailty suggests “the more beautiful kind of consumptive” (20). Quoting “the Dresden china type of prettiness” of the Eloi (21) and remarking that their intellectual capacity is described as that of five-year-old children, Kathryn Hume also notes the use of descriptive codes usually applied to women and children (2009, 205). She convincingly argues that the Eloi, held as cattle by the Morlocks, suggest a feminine loss of civilisation in an awkward gendering: “Power and size support the superior status of maleness. Wells extends this prejudice to the point of defining humanity as male” (205). The Morlocks, on the other hand, suggest the sorcery of warlocks, mors (Latin for ‘death’), and the child sacrifice for the Phoenician God Moloch (for more onomastic speculation, see Geduld 1987b, 106, 109, 110). Interestingly, Hume extends the feminisation of the Eloi to the Morlocks as well, describing them as vulnerable to light and “deficient in strength and size to the Traveller” (2009, 209). Even Hume, however, admits that the predatory and aggressive qualities of their man-eating hunts must be seen as rather ‘masculine’, and the operation of heavy industries as well as the metaphoric amalgamation with the shadowy subterranean machines also suggest the limitation of her argument. Upon closer consideration, Showalter is more convincing when she argues that

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the race of Morlocks is hypermasculine and can be aligned with a “guiltily rapacious male sexuality” (1992, 76). Extrapolated from the Victorian working classes, the Morlocks constitute a sinister combination of bodies and technology: in the subterranean machine, world machines and Morlocks amalgamate to ‘shadows’ in the eyes of the Traveller. In an expression of middle-class anxiety, the narrator is at pains to de-humanise the anthropophagous antagonists, thus legitimating his aggressive defence. “[F]ilthily cold to touch,” they are described as machines, and frequently as objects – “this Thing [. . .] this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing,” “white Things” (Wells 2009, 42, 38, 49). The subterranean technology space is loud and dangerous, and its vertical symbolism echoes the descriptions of Victorian industrial hells. The narrator compares the Morlock habitat with the dark, sky-less East End and various Victorian urban subterranean spaces, such as subways, underground work spaces and restaurants, or the Metropolitan Railway (underground, since 1863): “Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?” (40). Thus, the Morlocks exhibit an amalgamation of machine-like and animalistic qualities. As Herbert Sussman argues in his classic study of Victorian attitudes to technology, “[w]ith an air of scientific credibility, the biological and psychological effects of mechanization are projected onto the future in concrete, physical form. The first fictional example of this evolutionary mode is the Morlocks” (1968, 173). Touching the narrator with lanky hands, the Morlocks emit “a peculiar unpleasant odour” (Wells 2009, 45). They are non-Platonic, soulless animals according to the pre-Darwinian separation of men and animals, less human than cannibals, a “new species of animal, and a very peculiar one” (110) as the narrator says in the 1894 version of The Time Machine (serialised in the National Observer). The large eyes invoke nocturnal animals such as owls and cats (39). Imagery of worms (42), “human rats” (54), spiders (54), and bees is invoked to suggest the ant-hill quality of these collective, automatic creatures (cf. Sadrin 1990, 129) that seem like “new vermin” (Wells 2009, 42) to the narrator. The “queer little ape-like figure” of a Morlock instils the traveller with “dread of wild beasts” (38). Suggesting both the nocturnal mammal primate and the spirit of the death, the narrator speaks of his fear of the “whitened Lemurs” (42) – a fear that can be traced to the eight-year old Wells, who was terrified by a picture of a Gorilla (cf. Geduld 1987a, 28). This dread of the simian shape balances the implied Darwinian ancestry with a thoroughly Gothic Othering. The “pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes” of the Morlocks, in fact, make them “nauseatingly inhuman” (45), “sickening” and “malign” (46). Preparing the reader for his murderous desires, the Time Traveller concludes that “it [is] impossible [. . .] to feel any humanity in the things” (54). Always prone to relativise its dualisms, The Time Machine ascribes to the human visitor the bloodthirst of the Morlocks. Delightfully sticking his fork into meat after his return from the cannibal Morlocks, he turns out to be just as carnivorous as they are. In addition,

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the Time Traveller, almost sorry that he need not wield his crowbar against the Morlocks (62), also shares in their murderous inhumanity: “I longed very much to kill a Morlock” (54). In late Victorian logic, it would be acceptable to murder a Morlock if the kind of Othering typically applied to the colonial and imperial Other could be reasonably invoked (Hume 2009, 203). One must not forget, however, that their shared interest in machinery links the Victorian engineer more to the Morlocks than his mere sympathy conjoins him to the Eloi, the feeble aristocratic cattle of the Morlocks. His flirtation with the little Eloi woman Weena is not only the most embarrassingly unconvincing part of the narrative, but it ultimately does not lead to intertemporal attachment as the engineer rejects the pre-Raphaelite, anti-industrialist, and aestheticist beauty of the Eloi (Bergonzi 2009, 195). When he recovers his time travelling bicycle from the Morlocks, he finds that it has been studied and “carefully oiled and cleaned” – just as he himself would probably have handled the valuable mechanism (Wells 2009, 62). Finally, Wells’s novelette provides another glimpse of a geological long-term future. Having escaped from the Morlocks, the Time Traveller moves forward in time to a vision of entropic cooling. There are no stars in the sky, whose colour has turned red and black, with a motionless, expanded sun. These passages were probably inspired by William Thompson, who predicted a solar cooling in as little as ten thousand years (Luckhurst 2009, 256). Charles Darwin’s son, George H. Darwin, may have provided the aspects of tidal friction and slowed rotation that permeate this apocalyptic vision (Hume 2009, 212). London has become a terminal beach without tidal movement and only faint, oily surf. Lichen (i.e., fungi, algae) are the only flora, while a dismally voiced white butterfly and a group of slimy, attacking monster crabs represent the further development of Wells’s foundational dualism. The antennae and metal, luminous eyes show that the giant crabs are descendants of the technologised Morlocks. Travelling further yet towards the entropic ‘death’ of earth, the Time Traveller encounters a freezing scenario that features a dull solar eclipse, slime, and a football-size round, black thing with tentacles as the last signs of life, instilling “terrible dread” (Wells 2009, 65) in the fully disillusioned, hopeless Traveller. As Kathryn Hume notes, the blood-red water is a loan from the Book of Revelation in an otherwise scientifically structured apocalypse (2009, 212). This world exhibits the effects of radiation, the levelling of energy, and the “universal chilling of an exhausted world” (Allen 1881, 225). Roger Luckhurst has argued that this final passage fully depicts a “post-human future” (2009, 255) marked by cosmic-scale terror and awe at the futility of world-building. A key figure in Wells’s narrative is the gifted, but isolated, occasionally mad or at least ‘overweening’ scientist (for example, Griffin in The Invisible Man or Moreau in The Island of Dr. Moreau) – a character first introduced in the context of figurations of heroic rebelliousness and heightened individualism in Romantic narratives such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818). The largely positive view of the late Victorian scientist or engineer in The Time Machine, who

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travels in time to find the corruption or, at best, futility of scientific progress, expresses Wells’s somewhat schizophrenic attitude towards science best narrativised in R. L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886, ↗ 25 Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Colin Manlove sums up that in “Wells the scientist is separate from the social fabric” (2009, 246). Wells anticipates time travel as occurring in a fourth dimension beyond the three spatial ones, predating Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity by a decade. Wells’s skilful extrapolation seems to have been inspired by an 1893 lecture by Simon Newcomb, a non-fictional astronomer and mathematician mentioned by the Time Traveller (Parrinder 1995, 44; Russell 2001, 50). Inspired by an essay of his fellow student E. A. Hamilton Gordon, entitled the “Fourth Dimension,” Wells wrote an early precursor of The Time Machine, “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888), set in Wales. Wells also draws on theories speculating on a fourth dimension by August Ferdinand Moebius (1827) and C. H. Hinton (1884–1885), as well as on Edwin Abbott’s two-dimensional utopia Flatland (1884). While his worlds are unstable, permeable, and subject to (socially) predominantly regressive change, and thus reflect the relativity of pre-Einsteinian physics, he fails to address the paradoxes and causal loops which have since dominated discussions of the motif, such as the grandfather paradox: One might travel to the past and kill one’s own grandfather before the conception of one’s father or mother, which prevents the time traveller’s existence. The causal loop is explained by Lobo and Crawford: Imagine a time traveller going back to his past, handing his younger self a manual for the construction of a time machine. The younger version then constructs the time machine over the years, and eventually goes back to the past to give the manual to his younger self. The time machine exists in the future because it was constructed in the past by the younger version of the time traveller. The construction of the time machine was possible because the manual was received from the future. Both parts considered by themselves are consistent, and the paradox appears when considered as a whole. (2003, 291)

Wells’s narrative moves straight into the future and back, failing to fully explore ideas of mutable timeline and alternate histories, as notable subsequent re-workings of this classic science fiction motif have done – from Doctor Who (1963–) to the Back to the Future (1985–1990) or Twelve Monkeys franchises (1995, 2013). All in all, one should not overestimate the scientific foundations of this inaugural time travel narrative, even if Hans Ulrich Seeber argues that Wells’s scientific background helped render the narrative plausible (1983, 172). The constant hesitation of the Traveller, who tends to form hypotheses about what he sees and quickly dismisses them in the light of further discoveries, is more effective in heightening the plausibility of the plot. This epistemological scepticism pays lip service to the incredulity of the after-dinner guests (and the reader), but the two strange flowers left after his final disappearance also contribute to the narrative strategies of substantiation. For Wells

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himself, the fourth dimension, going beyond Euclidian geometry, is little more than a “magic trick” (qtd. in Geduld 1987b, 93). Wells’s Time Traveller is clearly on a quest, as for instance, Robert J. Begiebing (1984) and Elaine Showalter (1992) have noted. Unnamed, he might symbolically stand for the masculine Victorian adventurer penetrating on behalf of all of humanity into the dark unknown world of the future and encountering its future as nemesis. In the previous version serialised in the National Observer in 1894, he is called “The Philosophical Inventor” (Wells 2009, 95), before he merely becomes the functional “Time Traveller” in the New Review version in 1895. In Wells’s first version, “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888), he was given a name with mythical dimensions, Dr. Moses Nebogipfel, a compound of the Russian word for sky and the German for summit or peak, whose first name references the leader of the Israelites in the Exodus of Judaic tradition. Wells’s narrative is connected to the nineteenth-century idea of future planning and temporal management, and the time machine exemplifies his own verdict that his tales tend to be constructed around a single scientific development that sets it off from the actual world. Darko Suvin has influentially described this as a ‘novum’, his key criterion of science fiction. For Scholes and Rabkin, the technological novum is central to The Time Machine: [T]he importance of this [time travel] is not in the vague, pseudoscientific rationale he provided for the time machine in this novel, but in the fact that it was a machine, which could move through time under the control of its operator. The replacement of the dream, enchantment, mesmerization, hibernation or other method of reaching the future by a new mechanical agent, a time machine, changed the whole footing of time travel, opening up the past as well as the future, for imaginative investigation. (Scholes and Rabkin 1977, 19)

The time machine itself is a means to uncover the disillusionment with machine culture, and Herbert Sussman has pointed out this central irony in the text (1968, 175–176). In the ‘Palace of Green Porcelain’ – built in the Kensington museum quarter where the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum are located – the Time Traveller encounters a massive machine cemetery (reminiscent of the machine-breaking society in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon). He identifies “huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded and many broken down,” and stays a while as he has a “certain weakness for mechanism” (Wells 2009, 53). This Victorian technological everyman comes upon the degenerate uselessness of future machinery. It seems rather ironic that he is finally driven to fight the Morlocks with a rusty lever he uses as a mace in addition to using their fear of fire (54). The most basic, archaic, precivilised, and premechanical techniques such as a camphor torch prove to be the most useful. Explosives turn out to be dummies and in spite of his technological resourcefulness, the Time Traveller forgets that the Promethean gift of fire only works if the matches are struck alight against a matchbox (63). Hence, the Time Traveller uses the machine only to encounter its destruction and irrelevance. While

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a text that celebrates machine-induced time travel can hardly be rated as an aesthetic condemnation of technology, the Morlocks as descendants of the Victorian working class serve as a projection of failed social ‘engineering’ of technology in the text of this lower-middle-class writer.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies There are two main components of Wells’s oeuvre: first, his fictional assessments of societal change and technological developments (both progressive and regressive), and second, his championing of stylistic realism, seeking for transparent modes of writing, that put him at odds with his opponent Henry James and the major strands of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Joseph Conrad famously called Wells the “Realist of the Fantastic!” (qtd. in McCarthy 1986, 38). Whereas Wells was inspired by fantastic voyage narratives, neo-Gothic and supernatural fiction, he is generally seen as a prophet of the thoroughly industrialised and urbanised world of the twentieth century. He is a key voice in the late Victorian discourses on technology, using the genre of scientific romance, in ways similar to utopianism and somewhat differently from his ‘hard’ (i.e., scientifically bent) science fiction rival Jules Verne, as a “set of literary devices for discussing the present” (Patrouch 1988, 40). Wells’s scientific romances exhibit the trademarks of science fiction, speculation, and extrapolation (i.e., conjecture on the basis of prior knowledge). As Paul Alkon has pointed out, however, following the classic study The Early H. G. Wells by Bernard Bergonzi, the metaphoric structuring of science as a narrative instrument is far more important for Wells than accuracy of extrapolation (Alkon 1994, 53). Among the set of highly effective key motifs of science fiction that can be traced to Wells are the spatial organisation of the narrative: cities in ruins (The Time Machine), subterranean hubs of productivity (The Time Machine, First Men on the Moon), and the battlefield of an expanded interplanetary future war in the context of the future-war fiction popular since Chesney (The War of the Worlds); Wells’s character concept and constellations have been equally influential (the isolated genius engineer at odds with distrustful complacency), as has been his demand for realist, dynamic action to replace expository, ‘preachy’ Utopianism. Wells’s strategies of authentication are clear: structurally, the frame narrator serves as a dummy for the incredulous audience that willingly suspends its disbelief in the face of the Gothic and sublime but scientifically worded adventuring. In addition, the narrator rejects the fictionality of his stories by comparing his adventures favourably with the artificial political extrapolation of existing dystopias, relegating them to the realm of mere imagination:

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In some of these visions of Utopias and coming times which I have read, there is a vast amount of detail about building, and social arrangements, and so forth. But while such details are easy enough to obtain when the whole world is contained in one’s imagination, they are altogether inaccessible to a real traveller amid such realities as I found here. (Wells 2009, 34)

Wells’s mode of the ‘scientific romance’ thus seeks to do justice to his acclaim as a realist of the fantastic, rejecting the exhaustive descriptions of controversial political world-building in texts such as Butler’s Erewhon, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or Morris’s News from Nowhere. At the same time, the Time Traveller himself casts plausible doubt on his own narrativisation of experience, his self-doubt stabilising the narrative world by providing an equivalent to the doubts present also in the bourgeois complacency of the listeners and the scepticism even of an audience that has accepted Einsteinian relativism. The generic term ‘scientific romance’ was adapted by Wells from Charles Howard Hinton, who chose this title for a series of essays published in 1884 and 1886 (Hinton 1976). It was subsequently widely adopted for translations of Jules Verne into English and to the work of Grant Allen and H. G. Wells (James 1995, 28). Brian Stableford adopted the term in 1985 to denote the British precursors of science fiction, written well before the classic American pulp phase of the Amazing Stories magazine inaugurated by Hugo Gernsback in 1926, as “a story which is built around something glimpsed through a window of possibility from which scientific discovery has drawn back the curtain” (1985, 8). Darko Suvin has suggested a chronology in the development of the genre, from an insignificant prologue (1848 to 1871) to a constitutive phase (1871 to 1885) and an increasing number and variety of publications (1885 to 1893) to a climax (1893 to 1901) (Suvin 1983, 325, 386). The change was driven by the trends towards cheap editions and expanded readership in the publishing industry. 1871 was the genre’s epiphanic annus mirabilis: on 1 May, both Edward BulwerLytton’s The Coming Race (↗ 21 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race) and George Tomkyns Chesney’s future-war narrative The Battle of Dorking were published, and Samuel Butler handed in the manuscript for his anti-technological utopia Erewhon with Chapman und Hall. As Stableford has shown, Wells could draw on a set of preceding generic modes (1985, 18–38). These include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imaginary voyages (journeys to the moon, Robinsonades, the adventures of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or of the eponymous hero of Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), as well as those of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874), and of Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Another influence can be seen in seventeenth-century utopias, particularly the technological and scientific variants, such as Tommaso Campanella’s Il Città del Sole (1623), Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and, above all, Francis

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Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). In the nineteenth century, this static “utopia of agrarian calm felicity” (Manuel and Manuel 1979, 29) becomes dynamic or – to use Wells’s term for A Modern Utopia – ‘kinetic’, with the prevalence of new Darwinian paradigms of permanent change. Thus, evolutionary speculation, such as Butler’s Erewhon (1872) or Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race also had influence on his works. Invasion fantasies, such as the ‘Dorking’ literature in the wake of Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, or George Griffith’s The Angel of the Revolution (1892) palpably inspire The War of the Worlds and other future-war visions by Wells. Another generic precursor is eschatological fiction emanating from the Romantic modes of the last-man narratives such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1820), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), or M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). And lastly, there was a rich corpus of supernatural or metaphysical fantasy, from supernatural, neo-Gothic ghosts and vampires (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897, ↗ 32 Stoker, Dracula) to the Swedenborgian mysticism of Camille Flammarion, or the occultism of Madame Blavatsky, Marie Corelli, Bulwer-Lytton and others.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives As Wells saw himself as a realist writer at odds with the encroaching stylistic finesse of the interiorising modernists (Hammond 1990, 66), his antagonism to James Joyce and his increasing disenchantment with Henry James damaged his reception for decades in the twentieth century. Influential critics such as Virginia Woolf complained about Wells’s superficiality, and Mark Schorer criticised his anti-modernist realism, which appeared to be increasingly out of tune with aesthetic paradigms in the first half of the twentieth century. To some extent, this critical consensus has collapsed: While John Hammond attempts to rehabilitate Wells as an experimental author, Patrick McCarthy shows that until the 1890s Wells and modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad were mutually influential (1986, 40). Wells’s texts have been hailed as a literature of ideas, but increasingly also been praised for their narrative art (Slusser and Chatelain 2001, xii). Jorge Luis Borges pre-figured the postmodernist reappraisal of this pioneer of a definitive genre of postmodernist and popular culture (Draper 1987, 112–113). The ambiguity and hybridity of Wells’s ideas is evident, as he pairs his apocalyptic cosmological scepticism with technologised utopian idealism and juxtaposes an authoritarian collectivism with the championing of individual achievement, balancing his rationalist agnosticism with an undercurrent of temporary religious desperation. Today, as science fiction, dystopian, and post-apocalyptic narratives have become key arenas for future projections of contemporary developments in a thoroughly technologised world, H. G. Wells’s early science fiction has gained an unprecedented cultural centrality (Parrinder and Rolfe 1990, 12). He is the arch myth-maker of science

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fiction, establishing a reservoir of its classical, recurring themes and motifs. In the judgment of John Rieder, his major works since The Time Machine in 1895 “comprise arguably the most important and influential body of fiction any writer has contributed to the genre” of science fiction (2009, 23). Rieder argues while the idea that Wells founded science fiction might be exaggerated, he “gathered together in one place all of the disparate threads of what we now identify as early sf”. Rieder is certainly not alone in praising the compelling breadth and “depth of his exploration and transformation” of subject matters (23). The critical consensus praises in particular Wells’s early scientific romances for their powerful literary evocation of the foundational myths of science fiction (Bergonzi 2009; Amis 1962). His utopian visions have fared much worse and were subjected to rigorous criticism based on their implausibility (Wagar 1988) or their rampant ‘liberal Fascism’ that asked for an authoritarian vanguard and scientific elite to answer the threat posed by the impoverished workingclass paupers to Wells’ lower-middle-class perspective (Coupland 2000). Critics such as F. R. Leavis and George Orwell focused on the superficial hyper-rationalism that Wells increasingly seemed to embody (Parrinder and Rolfe 1990, 11–13; Huntington 1990, 168, 176). John Huntington’s assessment is more positive, attesting more complexity than is generally allowed to Wells’s portrayal of the simian working classes in the Morlocks. For Huntington, the Morlocks express Wells’s ambivalence towards the upstairs-downstairs hierarchies of late Victorian society as well as towards his own sadistic aggression (2009, 223). The Time Machine, just as the other key scientific romances by Wells, has inspired countless narratives, and spawned numerous adaptations in various media, as well as prequels and sequels. It has been adapted for film and television four times so far, notably in technologically and temporally updated versions in 1949 (BBC, live, no recording), 1960, 1978 (a TV movie for NBC’s Classics Illustrated series), and 2002. George Pal’s Hollywood MGM production from 1960 adds the Cold War as new context to Wells’s narrative, having the time traveller (called ‘George’) stop in 1917, 1940, and 1966 to witness air raids and nuclear destruction. Pal’s Eloi are superblonde Aryans with Weena (Yvette Mimieux) a rather silly, very young love interest who suggests a less queer and complicated heterosexual attraction than Wells’s novel. Pal’s traveller George (Rod Taylor) takes a much more active part, modelled on “the American man of action” (Stein 2001, 153) and instilling the will to resist and survive in the Eloi. In addition, he does not travel to the world’s entropic ending, so that a narrative emerges that is more in line with popular special-effects action cinema and less with fin-de-siècle pessimism. The filmic Hollywood blockbuster remake of The Time Machine was genealogically authorised, as it was directed by Wells’s great-grandson Simon Wells, but projected only as a rewrite of the 1960 version rather than an adaptation of Wells. The movie is noteworthy in its further departures: Rather than investigating future utopias or questions of free will (Stein 2001, 152) the time traveller Dr Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce), a non-conformist academic rather than a dynamic engineer, is motivated by

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the attempt to travel to the past to rescue his girlfriend. Thus bridging the gap between a special-effects laden science fiction blockbuster and an Americanised rom-com, the film also switches from Cold-War destruction to a cosmic ecological disaster the time traveller witnesses in 2037. The movie intensifies the metafictional aspects of Pal’s film by introducing comments on Wells’s novel from a holographic librarian (Orlando Jones) as dystopian guide at the New York Public Library. An eloquent Uber-Morlock (Jeremy Irons) allows for more dystopian guidance and explanation on the more humanoid Morlocks. He becomes a telepathically equipped antagonist – a character absent from previous character constellations of The Time Machine. Finally, Alexander begins a new life with Mara (Samantha Mumba), the renamed Weena character and utopian love interest who becomes the traveller’s saviour and carer. Thus, Simon Wells goes at least some way towards inverting the classically passive roles accorded to women in the thoroughly patriarchal The Time Machine. Beyond these film adaptations, as Slusser and Chatelain argue, all time travel narratives owe a debt to Wells and in this sense “the myriad stories in this genre written from the 1930s [. . .] are rewritings of The Time Machine” (2001, xv). Wells’s social critique of class divisions remains just as resonant as his visions of a globalised world. The wish for immortality as well as the traumata of Western civilisation since 1895 have ensured that this vision of witnessing the end of the world has acquired a quasi-mythical status. Wells’s enduring legacy is the infusion of futuristic science fiction writing with its most essential ingredient: narratives of Darwinian change, both in regressive and progressive versions.

Bibliography Works Cited Alkon, Paul. Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New York: Twayne, 1994. Allen, Grant. Vignettes from Nature. London: Chatto & Windus, 1881. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. London: Gollancz, 1962. Arata, Stephen, ed. The Time Machine: An Invention. Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: Norton, 2009. Begiebing, Robert J. “The Mythic Hero in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.” Essays in Literature 11.2 (1984): 201–210. Bergonzi, Bernard. “Wells the Myth-Maker.” Arata 2009, 190–201. Coupland, Philip. “H. G. Wells’s ‘Liberal Fascism.’” Journal of Contemporary History 35.4 (2000). 541–558 Draper, Michael. H. G. Wells. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan, 1869. Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. 1883. Ed. Gavan Tredoux. Online Galton Archives, 2004. Web. 20 June 2017.

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Geduld, Harry M. Introduction. The Time Machine. By H. G. Wells. Ed. Geduld. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987a. 1–28. Geduld, Harry M. Notes. The Time Machine. By H. G. Wells. Ed. Geduld. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987b. 91–120. Godfrey, Emelyne. “Tomatoes and Cucumbers.” Introduction. Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space. Ed. Godfrey. London: Palgrave, 2016. 1–32. Guy, Josephine, ed. The Victorian Age: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. London: Routledge, 1998. Hammond, John R. “Wells and the Novel.” Parrinder and Rolfe 1990, 66–81. Hinton, Charles. Scientific Romances: First and Second Series. 1884–86. New York: Arno, 1976. Hume, Kathryn. “Eat or Be Eaten: H. G. Wells’s Time Machine.” Arata 2009, 202–213. Huntington, John. “H. G. Wells: Problems of an Amorous Utopian.” Parrinder and Rolfe 1990, 168–180. Huntington, John. “The Time Machine and Wells’s Social Trajectory.” Arata 2009, 222–229. Huxley, Thomas Henry. Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. 1863. New York: Appleton, 1873. Huxley, Thomas Henry. Evolution and Ethics. 1893. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. James, Edward. “Science Fiction by Gaslight: An Introduction to English-Language Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century.” Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors. Ed. David Seed. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1995. 26–45. Lankester, E. Ray. Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism. London: Macmillan, 1880. Lobo, Francisco, and Paulo Crawford. “Time, Closed Timelike Curves and Causality.” The Nature of Time: Geometry, Physics and Perception. Ed. R. Buccheri, Metod Saniga, and William Mark Stuckey. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. 289–296. NATO Science Series II 95. Luckhurst, Roger. “The Scientific Romance and the Evolutionary Paradigm.” Arata 2009, 252–259. Manlove, Colin. “H. G. Wells and the Machine in Victorian Fiction.” Arata 2009, 243–252. Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. McCarthy, Patrick A. “Heart of Darkness and the Early Novels of H. G. Wells: Evolution, Anarchy, Entropy.” Journal of Modern Literature 13.1 (1986): 37–60. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. 1895. Introd. George Mosse. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968. Parrinder, Patrick. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1995. Parrinder, Patrick, and Christopher Rolfe, eds. H. G. Wells under Revision. London: Associated U Presses, 1990. Patrouch, Joe. “Symbolic Settings in Science Fiction: H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 1.3 (1988): 37–45. Reade, Winwood. The Martyrdom of Man. 1872. London: Watts, 1945. Rieder, John. “Fiction, 1895–1923.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Adam Roberts, Sherryl Vint. London: Routledge, 2009. Russell, W. M. S. “Time Before and After The Time Machine.” H. G. Wells’s Perennial Time Machine. Slusser, Parrinder, and Chatelain 2001, 50–61. Sadrin, Anny. “De la métaphore à la métamorphose: L’homme-machine de Descartes à la sciencefiction post-darwinienne, avec arrêt sur H. G. Wells.” Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 31 (1990): 119–136. Schenkel, Elmar. H. G. Wells: Der Prophet im Labyrinth. Eine essayistische Erkundung. Wien: Zsolnay, 2001. Scholes, Robert, and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: OUP, 1977.

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Seeber, Hans Ulrich. “Utopier und Biologen: Zu H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) und A Modern Utopia (1905).” Literarische Utopien von Morus bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Hans Ulrich Seeber. Königstein: Athenäum, 1983. 172–190. Showalter, Elaine. “The Apocalyptic Fables of H. G. Wells.” Fin de Siècle/Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century. Ed. John Stokes. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992. 69–84. Slusser, George, Patrick Parrinder, and Danièle Chatelain, eds. H. G. Wells’s Perennial Time Machine. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2001. Slusser, George, and Danièle Chatelain. “Introduction: The Time Machine’s Centennial Audience.” Slusser, Parrinder, and Chatelain 2001, xi–xvi. Stableford, Brian. Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950. London: Fourth Estate, 1985. Stein, Joshua. “The Legacy of The Time Machine.” Slusser, Parrinder, and Chatelain 2001, 150–159. Sussman, Herbert L. Victorians and the Machine. The Literary Response to Technology. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968. Suvin, Darko. Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power. Boston: Hall, 1983. Wagar, W. Warren. “Dreams of Reason: Bellamy, Wells, and the Positive Utopia.” Looking Backward 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy. Ed. Daphne Patai. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. 106–125. Wells, Herbert G. The Time Machine: An Invention. 1895. Ed. Stephen Arata. New York: Norton, 2009. Norton Critical Editions.

Further Reading Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1961. Hughes, David Y. “Bergonzi and After in the Criticism of Wells’s Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 3 (1976): 165–174. Huntington, John. The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Renzi, Thomas C. H. G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film. 2nd ed. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2004. Suvin, Darko, and Robert M. Philmus, eds. H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP.

Susanne Scholz

32 Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) Abstract: This chapter discusses Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as a symptomatic narrative articulating the cultural anxieties and political fears of late Victorian Britain. Read against the backdrop of the Eastern question on the one hand and mass culture and urbanisation on the other, the figure of the Transylvanian vampire count serves as a projection screen for fears of reverse colonisation, invasion, contagion, and miscegenation. The heroes who fight against this menace enrol all available technologies of modernity, science, media, communication, and transport, in order to protect the ‘racial’ and sexual purity of the inhabitants of the motherland against this corrupting invader from the East. The article traces the cultural discourses feeding into the novel, such as evolution theory, degeneration, urbanisation, hygiene, gender anxiety, and also looks at the various genres and aesthetic strategies such as travel journal, romance, melodrama, fantastic tale, detective story, and medical case narrative, which are woven into this complex multiperspectival narrative. Since Dracula is an extremely successful Gothic figure with a long afterlife both in critical appreciation and as a cultural icon, the article follows the main strands of its critical reception in the light of psychoanalysis, gender studies, media studies, and historical discourse analysis; it also briefly touches upon the serial figure of the vampire count in the actualisations and media adaptations of the 20th and 21st century. Keywords: Urban Gothic, degeneration anxiety, multiperspectival narrative

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula introduced one of the most popular figures in British literary history. Published on 26 May 1897 at the price of three shillings (Frayling 2003, vii), the novel has never been out of print since. It was successfully adapted for the stage shortly after its publication and has been turned into numerous film versions and TV serials between 1922 and today, making its eponymous protagonist, the centuries-old vampire count from Transylvania, one of the most popular and most successful serial figures of the twentieth century and one of the stock figures in our Western cultural imaginary. Born on 8 November 1847 as the third of seven children in the Dublin suburb of Clontarf to parents who belonged to the bourgeois class of Anglo-Irish Protestants, Bram (Abraham) Stoker grew up a frail and sickly child. Only at the age of seven did https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-033

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he start to attend a private day school, but later went on to Trinity College Dublin, where he earned a degree in Pure Mathematics. He went on to study law and was eventually called to the bar in 1890. Following his father’s footsteps, he entered the Civil Service as a clerk in Dublin Castle, where he soon became clerk of the petty sessions, and in 1879 published a handbook on The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, which remained a standard work. Complementary to his professional training in science and law, he indulged in an interest in theatre and a love for literature that made him write theatre reviews and children’s stories. In 1872, he was elected Auditor of the Historical Society at Trinity College, an honour that is comparable with the post of President of Oxford or Cambridge Unions. His subsequent rise through Dublin society also brought him into frequent contact with the literary and artistic elite of late nineteenth-century Ireland. Among other Dublin celebrities, he was also introduced to the Egyptologist Sir William Wilde and his wife Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, whose son Oscar had just entered Trinity college by the time. Apparently, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker contended for the same woman, a local beauty. Bram Stoker married Florence Balcombe on 4 December 1878, when he was 31, and she 19. They had one child born in December 1879, Irving Noel Thornley Stoker. Stoker’s boredom with his clerical job was eventually relieved and his literary interests were re-energised when he met Henry Irving, who was playing Hamlet in Dublin in the season of 1876. Stoker eventually gave up his position in Dublin castle and followed Irving as his business manager and he and Florence moved to London where Irving owned the Lyceum Theatre. Stoker managed the Lyceum Theatre for twenty-seven years and became intimate with London literary society. He toured Europe and America with Irving, visited the White House, and met his idol Walt Whitman. Although “doing the accounts for [ . . . ] Irving [ . . . ], keeping the Lyceum solvent and persuading Irving not to overdo the special effects” (Frayling 2003, ix) was a full-time job, Stoker still found the time to write numerous novels, none of them as famous as Dracula, however. Bram Stoker died after having suffered a number of strokes on 20 April 1912. His ashes were placed in a display urn at the Golders Green crematorium where they can still be seen. Dracula remains Bram Stokers most well-known literary work. The novel’s historical moment, if such a one can be made out, is the Victorian fin de siècle with its multiple anxieties triggered by the implications of scientific research, especially evolution theory (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel), political threats from the East, unspecific fears of contagion caused by an emerging mass society, and worries about deviant forms of sexuality (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations). Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm (1911), for example, deals with forces of evil which at the same time appear as zoological remnants from a remote past and as over-sexualised females which threaten to overpower the sober English country gentry. The Lady of the Shroud (1909) stages a conflict between the troops of a local Voivode and the Turks at the Dalmatian coast, which is solved by the intervention of a young Briton who falls in love with an allegedly undead lady who turns out to be the Voivode’s

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daughter. The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903) describes the search for knowledge about the forces of life as a quest for a 4000-year-old mummy, which re-emerges in the form of a young woman in Edwardian London. All of these envisage the re-birth of archaic forces in the guise of modern women, and they voice anxieties about powers that could ‘remote-control’ modern subjects, e.g. by telepathy or psychic invasion. Many of his works feature returns from a distant past (The Snake’s Pass, The Mystery of the Sea, The Jewel of Seven Stars, The Lair of the White Worm, and of course Dracula), suggesting a preoccupation with history, deep time, and the alleged aging of the world. However, they also deal with concerns closer to home and the Victorian subject, such as of the return of the repressed, archaic or ‘racial’ atavisms or the revenge of the evolutionary drawback. Almost all of his other works share with Dracula the sense of impending danger, which needs to be staved off by a joining of the forces of civilisation, usually in the form of Christian masculinity. Lisa Hopkins even makes the point that “there is a sense in which he wrote Dracula many times over and called it a variety of different things” (2007, 1). Dracula’s success seems to be based on its capacity to tap into a cultural moment characterised by intense anxiety, yet leaving so much open to interpretation that it can still induce us to fill these gaps with our own issues (see, for instance, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film version, where the contagion carried by blood is, of course, AIDS).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Bram Stoker’s Dracula condenses the concerns and anxieties of late Victorian England. Its central storyline is well-known: the Transylvanian count transfers to London after imprisoning his English agent Jonathan Harker in his dilapidated castle on the Borgo Pass, he endeavours to colonise England by imposing his will on lunatics and women, and is hunted down by the concerted effort of a heroic ‘crew of light’ who thus save civilisation. The narrative makes use of well-known modes of emplotment (romance, travel writing, fantastic/Gothic, melodrama, quest narrative) and offers ample opportunities to encode current fears and anxieties. Stoker learned about the historical Vlad Tepes from Hungarian traveller and scholar Armin Vámbéry, whom he met in London, and he started to make notes about this fascinating figure as early as 1890, the year in which he also spent his summer holiday in Whitby. Stoker can be credited with inventing the rules of vampiric existence that have become common knowledge for readers and film audiences of the twentieth century: Vampires have no reflection in mirrors, they hate garlic, they can be banned by the sign of the cross, a consecrated host, sometimes also holy water. Contrary to later vampires, Dracula can move during the day, but he cannot shift his shape then. Vampires are not hurt by normal weapons, they can be killed by driving a stake through their heart and severing their head from the

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body, sometimes also by silver bullets (but not so in Dracula). Stoker here has invented not simply one eerie protagonist, but the rules for a whole genre. Yet, while later vampire narratives, e.g., Ann Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (1976) as well as Stephenie Meyer’s extremely successful Twilight series (2005–2008), psychologised and ‘humanised’ their vampiric protagonists, Stoker’s vampire remains a monster until the very end, when his soul is released. The novel’s dark anthropology casts the vampire as selfish, egomaniac and power-hungry, a creature which contends with humans for their position at the top of the food chain, and which is ultimately defended by the virtues of unselfish love and duty towards the common good – eminently Victorian values in an emerging modern(ist) world. The novel starts by presenting the diary of a journey to Transylvania. As many critics have pointed out (Gibson 2014; Dittmer 2002/2003; Coundouriotis 2000/ 2001; Senf 2000/2001), Jonathan Harker’s description ties in with travel narratives describing the East, thus making use of images and ideas which can clearly be identified as orientalist (Said 1978). The urgency, however, of the threat coming from Eastern Europe stems from a more recent political conflict with the Ottoman Empire, which had implicated Britain ever since the Crimean War of the 1850s. Eleni Coundouriotis locates Dracula in the context of the British debates about Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria in 1876 on which Gladstone based his political vision of a Concert of Europe, which would give the great powers a mandate of settling disputes by consensual authority. Britain had until the mid-1870s been traditionally pro-Ottoman because it saw in the Ottoman Empire an important bulwark against Russia’s ascendancy. Moreover, Britain had significant economic interests in Turkey (Coundouriotis 2000/2001, 149–150). After the Bulgarian massacre, public opinion turned and the Ottomans were again seen as a danger but also, in the melange of symbolic and realist representations so characteristic for orientalist discourse, as the ultimate menace to Western civilisation, pictured in charges of monstrosity, excessive violence, and autocratic rule: Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them; and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view. They represented everywhere government by force, as opposed to government by law. [. . .] This advancing curse menaced the whole of Europe. (Gladstone 1876, 13)

Interestingly, Gladstone’s twin concerns in the 1880s, and until the end of his government, were the Eastern Question and Home Rule in Ireland. David Glover and others have argued that the East in Dracula could also be read as a representation of Ireland, giving additional meaning to the novel’s latent threat of reverse colonisation (1996, 22–57). In both cases, Gladstone, who was a friend of Stoker’s, lurks behind Dracula’s politics. Harker’s claim that in crossing the westernmost bridge over the Danube in Budapest means “leaving the West and entering the East” (Stoker 2003, 7) activates a stock formula of Enlightenment travel writing and at the same time seems

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to introduce a change of narrative mode, from realist description to romance. His encounter with Dracula is characterised by his fascination with the aristocrat’s perception of himself as a leader of people and a bulwark against the Turks, and of course by his claims for mastery, for an absolute and arbitrary power which eventually turns against Harker himself: We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. [. . .] [T]he Szekelys – and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords – can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. (Stoker 2003, 35–37)

In tune with the conventions of travel writing, Jonathan always already knows what he sees. He is, as it were, moving into the imaginary space of romance when “entering the East” (7), casting the East in terms of medieval Europe, when he compares what he sees to initials in missals, as a realm of barbaric manners and blatant superstition, things the enlightened and modern West hopes to have left behind. Harker’s travel journal, which he keeps in shorthand, another modern documentary technique, activates well-worn orientalist dichotomies: Western civilisation vs. Eastern barbarism (e.g., the feudal relations between the Boyar and his Romany followers), Western rationality vs. Eastern carnality (the over-sexed female vampires preying on Jonathan), Western science vs. Eastern magic (the count’s ability to control the weather and to change shapes), Eastern archaism vs. Western modernity. While trying to stabilise himself by keeping the two realms apart, commenting, e.g., on train punctuality (Stoker 2003, 8) or describing the ‘barbaric’ manners and clothes of the people (9), he is also increasingly fascinated by them, as if his immersion in this land of romance had weakened his rational faculties (or his super-ego). The most obvious example is certainly Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the female vampires, who seem to promise release from his duty-bound bourgeois existence: “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (45). In the spatial division the text stages, London comes to embody the locus of modernity while Transylvania with its picturesque landscapes and its dilapidated castles stands for the archaic and the primitive. The London which is described, however, is populated by “teeming millions” (Stoker 2003, 60) and its inhabitants as they appear in the novel are greedy drunkards, abandoned children, and thieving maids. Dracula plans to thrive on, precisely, the downsides of modernity: urban degeneration as a consequence of a mass society in which ranks become undistinguishable and boundaries are permanently transgressed (Spencer 1992, 203–209). It is no coincidence that the five men who form the ‘band of brothers’ entering a solemn compact to destroy the monster are members of the professions (two doctors, a lawyer), an aristocrat and a wealthy American. This is where the hopes for the future of the nation must lie, these men represent the progressive sides of modernity, supported by Mina Harker of course, who is a perfect mixture of New Woman and Angel in the House, mastering the techniques of modernity while remaining meek

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and submissive to the men who, in true romance fashion, would venture their lives to save her soul. It is here, in the description of the men’s relations to Mina, that the narrative borders on the melodramatic, stabilising the threats posed by modernity by taking recourse to traditional notions of gender difference, morality, and chivalry. If the novel acts out, as a number of critics have claimed (Senf 1998; Arata 1996), a conflict between archaic and modern ways of life, science comes to epitomise the modernity of Britain. Science, the pursuit of knowledge by empirical means, by experiment, accumulation of data and information, using state-of-the-art technologies like the phonograph and state-of-the-art methods of treatment such as blood transfusion and hypnosis, takes up a large part of the narrative and embodies the Westerners’ claim to superiority over the pre-modern power-techniques of the count. Indeed, the plot of the novel is based to a large extent on the pursuit of knowledge that would give his pursuers power over the vampire, and the novel itself is the result of a great knowledge-making project, coordinated by Van Helsing and realised by Mina Harker and her typewriter. In terms of narrative form, much of the story comes in the form of a case narrative (e.g. Stoker 2003, 69, 77), one of the new forms of scientific documentation, especially in the emerging human sciences (Scholz 2013). One of the members of the crew of Dracula’s pursuers, Dr John Seward, runs a lunatic asylum, and his favourite patient Renfield’s states are portrayed in great detail. Seward’s narrative here makes use of all the stages and methods of a classic case study, the observation and accumulation of data, recurrent interviews with the patient, attempts at a diagnosis, even the Doctor’s hope to make a name for himself by exactly this case: “I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoophagous (lifeeating) maniac; [ . . . ] Had I even the secret of one such mind [ . . . ] I might advance my own branch of science to a pitch compared with which Burdon-Sanderson’s physiology or Ferrier’s brain-knowledge would be as nothing” (Stoker 2003, 80). In the hands of the two doctors, Seward and Van Helsing, Dracula himself eventually turns into the ultimate ‘case’ which needs to be solved in order to save mankind. A case is a knowledge-making project, depending on visual evidence and empirical proof, but also on narrative methods: facts need to be put in a temporal and logical sequence in order to function as an explanation of events. It is here that Mina Harker and her secretarial and editorial skills come in, for it is her work (happening, in typically Victorian fashion, in the background) that provides the data basis for the grand enterprise (Wicke 1992; Kittler 1993). One of the most prominent tenets of Victorian science is of course the theory of evolution and Dracula’s preoccupation with fitting into London society reads like a nightmare of evolutionary adaptation, with the vampire species struggling for the position at the top of the food chain. Harker comments on the intense preparation the count has undergone, gorging himself on useful information from, among other works, the London directory, Bradshaw’s Guide, Whitaker’s almanac and the law list,

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and soon realises that the count aims at adaptation to the point of unrecognisability, a mimicry that he identifies as extremely dangerous: “This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps for centuries to come he might, among its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” (Stoker 2003, 60). As in other texts of the late Victorian urban Gothic, the Victorian anxiety about the atavistic monster in our midst, or the beast that disguises as a gentleman (↗ 25 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is here given a palpable form. While Jonathan in his diary constantly identifies the count as alien, his appearance in London is never commented on in terms of foreignness, not even his accent is remarked upon. In evolutionary terms, he is perfectly adapted to contend for a position of power in the centre of the modern world. Count Dracula’s most potent opponent is of course Dr Abraham Van Helsing, Seward’s teacher from Amsterdam, the only representative of the older generation after Lord Godalming, Mrs Westenra, and Mr Hawkins, Harker’s mentor, have died within the same week (see entries of 20 and 22 September, Stoker 2003, 169, 183). Contrary to the professionals of the younger generation, Van Helsing seems to embody the encyclopaedic pursuit of knowledge of a premodern age. Being at the same time a doctor, an alienist, and a philosopher, as well as being in possession of an indulgence to carry a consecrated host, he is unconfined by the disciplinary strictures of modern science, which make it so difficult for Dr Seward to believe that something like vampirism can exist in the ‘modern’ nineteenth century. Van Helsing’s continuous pleas to keep an open mind sound like a caveat to modern scientists not to overdo their disciplinary specialisation. His methods to ultimately hunt down and kill the vampire are, despite repeated claims to his scientific expertise in both blood transfusion and hypnosis, eminently archaic: garlic, the consecrated host, a wooden stake, and an unlimited trust in God. As a Catholic, a ‘Renaissance man’, and a member of the older generation, he is sometimes closer to the count than to his modern companions, and his foreignness is permanently emphasised by the way his foreign accent is transcribed. This blurring of boundaries between the domains of the archaic and the modern, between the count’s reliance on history and magic, and the pursuers’ reliance on science and technology is also troped in the central and most over-determined signifier in the novel, namely blood. When Renfield, Dr Seward’s pet patient, claims that “the blood is the life” (Stoker 2003, 152) he makes both a religious and a scientific statement. In the novel, blood functions as a symbol for both aristocratic inheritance and biological heredity; it is a medium of character traits and contagion, a symbol for both the Christian Eucharist and primitive sacrifice. It is via the medium of blood that the vampiric contagion is spread (Scholz 2008), and through the identification of the vampire with the Szekely warrior, Dracula’s invasion is essentially a biological as well as a political one. The penetrative act of blood sucking implies an onslaught on both sexual and racial purity, and it is no coincidence that Dracula

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aims for young women as his prime victims. In the paradoxical logic of the Victorian gender order, women are both the ‘weaker vessel’ and the moral stronghold of the family. Being physically prone to external influences due to their weaker constitution and alleged greater susceptibility for nervous or hysteric afflictions, they are at the same time idolised as ‘Angels in the House’, who keep up the morale of both their husbands and the nation at large. The imaginary link between female body and the social body of the British nation lies behind Dracula’s attack on both Lucy and Mina. By weakening the physical and moral strength of the nation, he aims to gain ascendancy. Blood is here quite literally taken as an equivalent for semen, it inseminates Mina with Dracula’s vampiric seed and forges a telepathic link between them. When Van Helsing calls Lucy a “polyandrist” (Stoker 2003, 187) after she has received blood donations from four different men, and when Mina claims that she is “unclean” (303) after having been forced to drink Dracula’s blood, both statements explicitly cast blood as a sexual fluid (Scholz 2008, 39). Finally, the climactic staking of Lucy after she has become a vampire reads like a pornographic fantasy of sexual violation (Stoker 2003, 230–231). Concerning Dracula’s gender politics, Mina Harker, née Murray, is one of the most interesting figures in the novel. In clear contrast to her friend Lucy, who is rich and beautiful and waits for a knight in shining armour to take her away, Mina must work to support herself. Before she marries Jonathan, she works as a schoolmistress and in her spare time acquires the secretarial techniques she wants to use when married (and thus will no longer be allowed to work independently). Being an orphan, she has no social affiliations that could help her on in life, and so she must rely on her own resources to make a living. In the figure of Mina, the novel thus offers a modern complement to Lucy, her affluent friend who lives with her mother and gets three marriage proposals in one day. Lucy’s flirtatious behaviour as well as her ‘polyandrous’ reaction to the three proposals (“Why can’t they let a girl marry three men” [Stoker 2003, 67]) marks her out as sexually vulnerable, and so it is no coincidence that she becomes Dracula’s first English victim. His nightly visitations seem to make her more sexually alluring, up to the point when she turns into an oversexed vampire after her death. As long as rescue still seems possible, all men present unite in order to save her, as if their desire of the same woman had forged a homosocial bond between them. Lucy’s increasing powers of sexual seduction and her preying on children are cast as an attack on the family and the health of the social body (Armstrong 2005, 11). By contrast, Mina’s motherliness supports the ‘band of brothers’ during their struggles with the monster and literally concludes the novel seven years after the events described. Narrated in retrospect, the birth of her son, who bears the name of all protagonists, provides a slightly antimodernist closure to the novel’s fantastic events.

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Dracula is a radically multiperspectival novel. Made up of the diary entries, professional records, letters, and memoranda of all major protagonists, interspersed with newspaper clippings, telegrams, and the log-book of a ship, it provides no authorial voice to guide the reader through this heterogeneous amalgamation of texts. This lack of narrative coherence and the use of first-person narrative make the story of Dracula extremely unreliable. While all narrators claim to provide the mere facts of the story and assert their authenticity, be they ever so unbelievable, the mere fact that the different entries make use of different narrative modes points to their subjectivity. Chronology seems to be the only guide for editorial control of the collated documents. As the introductory statement, spoken from the off by (presumably) Jonathan Harker, claims, these papers were put in chronological sequence and present the bare facts, yet are “given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them” (Stoker 2003, 6). What emerges is thus “a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief,” which nevertheless, by the method of ordering the first-hand accounts, and through the authenticity of the documents, “may stand forth as simple fact” (6). This editorial note, meant to give instructions about how to read what follows, already indicates the implicit tension which drives our readings of the novel. In its juxtaposition of an unbelievable story with the documentary character of the evidence, it contains a promise of fantastic ambivalence. Dracula thrives on this ambivalence throughout. Both in terms of its subject matter (a ‘strange case’) and its narrative strategies (especially case and quest narrative), it creates readerly interest and builds up expectation by oscillating between the documentary power of hard fact and visual evidence, and the modes of romance, magic, or the supernatural. This conflict between eye-witness evidence and the sheer factual impossibility of what is narrated is also one of the core characteristics of the fantastic mode as it re-surfaces in the late Victorian Gothic, troped in the formula “I could not believe my eyes,” which occurs repeatedly in the novel (e.g. Stoker 2003, 41, 176; for further references to seeing the impossible cf. 201, 204, 254, 390). Read in the light of Tzvetan Todorov’s conceptualisation of the fantastic mode as a clash between what is observed by the focaliser of a narrated event and the laws of nature which claim that this is impossible, the novel thrives on the ambivalence between the visible and the physically possible (Todorov 1975, 24). Protagonists and readers are constantly called upon to believe what is essentially unbelievable. Like many other examples of the late Victorian Gothic, Dracula here enacts a crisis of vision (both Harker and Seward must learn to believe that the ‘supernatural’ exists) that links directly to the problematic reductionism of empirical science: “Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain” (Stoker 2003, 204; see also Scholz 2013). Dracula participates in this critique of scientific materialism, e.g. by making the ‘pre-modern’ Van Helsing the ultimate conqueror of the

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count, but also, of course by departing from the realistic mode in different directions. Readers of the novel must follow the clues given, not only in the diegesis, but also by the choice of narrative mode (romance, quest, melodrama, adventure story, Gothic), and much of the pleasure of reading hinges exactly on the ambivalence or undecidability of what is really going on. This sophisticated narrative structure seems to stand in stark contrast to the text’s contemporary reception as a piece of popular literature, between penny dreadful and adventure story, science fiction, melodrama, and imperial romance. If taken for themselves, the records of events by the single narrators follow different modes of emplotment. Jonathan Harker’s diary starts out as a travel narrative, but it also introduces elements of romance. As a masculinist counter-genre to the high Victorian novel, adventure romance with its underlying quest pattern and its permanent claims of British technological and scientific superiority provided a means of cultural stress relief for repressed young males (Showalter 1991, Ch. 5). Dr Seward’s diary clearly follows the pattern of a case narrative and thus also introduces forensic methods and the search for clues into the story. Lucy’s diary and her letters, short as they are, provide an insight into a Victorian girl’s mind in the fashion of an epistolary novel, and newspaper clippings, passages in local dialects and the mimicking of foreign accents promise authenticity as well as immediacy. All of these documents are positioned in the frame of a detective story, so that the reader can feel the urgency of the hunt while empathising with the protagonists’ feelings. Dracula himself is given no voice apart from what he relates about himself and his history while Jonathan is with him in Transylvania. The self-narrative is, however, seriously inflected by Harker’s sense of the count’s foreignness, so that there is no direct, unmediated account of Dracula’s own version of things. The novel’s effect of immediacy and authenticity is created, among other things, by the amalgamation of different media. What we get in the end is, as Jonathan Harker’s closing statement puts it, “nothing but a mass of typewriting” (Stoker 2003, 402). However, although the typewriter has an homogenising effect on the individual utterances, Mina, who is in charge of the collation, takes care to transport the idiosyncrasies of her records, manners of speech, tones of the voice, foreign accents and dialects, into her typewritten account. She even transcribes hiatuses caused by the speaker’s emotion, e.g. when Seward describes a joint prayer for the contaminated Mina: “I – cannot go on – words – and – v-voice – f-fail m-me! . . . ” (354). In doing so, she needs to creatively translate the different modes of recording handed over to her. After all, how do you signify “I wish they would kiss me with those red lips” (45) in shorthand? Dr Seward’s diary is recorded on a phonograph, and Mina clearly recognises that her act of transforming what she hears into typewritten words implies a reduction of the emotional charge of the words as they were spoken in the respective moment. While on the diegetic level, the use of the phonograph suggests the modernity of its user, his grip on things, but also, maybe, his reductive perspective (after all, the phonograph record in itself is useless since Seward cannot

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even find a specific entry; it is only made operable by its transformation into text), on the narrative level the ‘spoken diary’ alerts us to media difference and thus to the mediality of every utterance. Closely related to this is the dissemination aspect of the medialised records. Many of the texts included are mass-culturally produced (Wicke 1992, 471), with the notion of vampirism standing in for modernization processes (photography, mass-medialisation) and “the uncanny procedures of modern life” (473). When blood no longer circulates in her veins, Lucy circulates as tabloid “bloofer lady” (Stoker 2003, 189) and only because of that newspaper coverage can the hunters know where and what she is. The use of media technology thus provides the means to hunt the monster down. At the same time, these media vampirically prey on the mass-society that Dracula has chosen as his new feeding ground. Something is profoundly wrong with modernity, and this anxiety is contained by the novel’s use of fantastic ambivalence. The resurgence of the Gothic in late Victorian England thrives on a new scepticism about scientific and technological progress, and it locates the threats to a ‘healthy’ bourgeois society in the consequences of urbanisation, immigration, and mass culture in general. The fantastic mode allows writers to articulate both sides by keeping up an ambivalence between the supernatural events described and the modern world in which they unfold. Readers are kept in suspense as to whether what is described actually happens or whether it is a projection of a protagonist’s internal state. Todorov has established a link to psychoanalysis here, reading the radical subjectivity celebrated in the late nineteenth-century fantastic as a precursor of the psychoanalytic case narrative (1975, 148–153). In its radical destabilisation of certainties, reflected, among other things, in its blatant display of narratorial subjectivity and unreliability, the late Victorian Gothic can be seen as a proto-modernist mode of writing.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives The impact of Dracula on Western culture can hardly be underestimated. The basic coordinates of vampire knowledge and vampire aesthetics as established in the novel have acquired a set place in the cultural imaginary. In literary scholarship, the reception started rather hesitatingly but rocketed in the 1980s and early 1990s. While traditional literary studies were rather disinterested in non-canonical, popular literature, there is a marked revival of interest in the novel from the 1970s onwards. The theoretical approaches of the 1980s and early 1990s strongly focused on the sexual symbolism of the narrative which inspired psychoanalytic, gender and queer readings from Maurice Richardson’s The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories (1958) via C. F. Bentley’s “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Dracula” (1972) to Robert Mighall’s “Sex, History and the Vampire” (1998). Most of these readings concentrate on one central scene in making their case for “male sexual terror” (Hindle 2003, xxii) and the

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necessity to apply a psychoanalytic reading in order to uncover the subtext of repressed Victorian sexuality. The scene in case is of course the description in Harker’s journal of the three female vampires attacking him, his recording of his languishing angstlust and Dracula’s interruption by issuing the (in)famous injunction “this man belongs to me!” (Stoker 2003, 46). Elaine Showalter reads Dracula as a novel about “the thrills and terrors of blurred sexual, psychological and scientific boundaries” (1991, 179) while Elisabeth Bronfen, in a psychoanalytic reading inspired by Charcot’s research, sees Harker as the hysteric subject of the novel, who fantasises an alternative reality of possession and obsession around his traumatic feeling of bereavement after the death of his fatherly mentor Mr Hawkins. Dracula here assumes the position of the powerful phantomatic ‘Other’ who is always conjured up whenever the core of the hysteric affliction is approached. Ultimately, the reading suggests that the supernatural here reappears as a toxic side effect of scientific anticlericalism (Bronfen 1998, Ch. 4). Franco Moretti famously links sexuality and capitalism as the two basic subjects of the novel, claiming that the vampire here features as a metaphor of the terrors which beset the late Victorian bourgeois society. Dracula is then at the same time a representation of the monopoly capitalist who preys on the members of the lower classes, standing in for a form of capital which sucks the life of the working classes, and a metaphor for the return of the repressed in sexual terms, which also threatens the social equilibrium (Moretti 1982, 72–75). For Moretti, this makes the Gothic an extremely conservative genre, which excites fear as a means of consent to the ideological values put forward by the novel. In the wake of the turn to cultural studies and to context-oriented readings of literature since the New Historicism, symptomatological readings of Dracula prevail. These focus particularly on late Victorian anxieties as they are negotiated in the text of the novel: mass culture, racial purity, female sexuality. Nina Auerbach (1995) sees the vampire as a reflection figure of cultural concerns and anxieties, claiming that every culture gets the vampire it deserves. Kelly Hurley’s (1996) study of the Gothic body contextualises Dracula in the field of late Victorian degeneration anxiety and reads his unstable, monstrous and at the same time penetrating body as a representation of abjection which threatens a stable personal and national identity. Stephen Arata (1996) reads count Dracula as an occidental tourist who, by inverting the perceptual hierarchy of ethnographic studies by studying the West from the point of view of the East, evokes fears of reverse colonisation. Carol Senf’s numerous contributions to Dracula scholarship focus on the uses of Victorian science in the novel, making the point that Stoker used his familiarity with scientific and technological novelties in order to negotiate the place of science in society. Following Friedrich Kittler’s inspirational intervention, media studies have developed an interest in Dracula, and the media in the novel have become the centre of intense scholarly attention. Kittler himself sees Dracula as a ‘handbook of bureaucratisation’ / “das Sachbuch unserer Bürokratisierung” (1993, 43), reading the novel against the frame of a technical revolution that brings forth the audiovisual

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and documentary techniques which ultimately kill the vampire, but which also allow for his perpetual resurfacing in the popular culture of later times. Jennifer Wicke focuses on Mina’s typewriting and establishes a connection between the emerging mass culture of the metropolis London, the feminisation and standardisation of the clerical work force and mass-medialisation: the methods by which Dracula disseminates his contagion can be said to reflect back on techniques that vampirically prey on the modern subject. A number of scholars have read Dracula in the light of a new politics and aesthetics of popular fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century. Kathleen Spencer (1992) links a growing preoccupation of Victorians with forms of urban degeneration with the emergence of a new kind of Gothic writing which she identifies as ‘urban Gothic’. Elaine Showalter (1991) sees it as part of a movement which reinvigorated romance as a response to the feminised and decorum-driven Victorian novel. David Glover is interested in a “sociology of narrative elements” (1996, 5) at work in the novel, which in the form of a romantic fantasy deals with current problems at home. Robert Mighall rejects the ‘anxiety model’ advocated by contextoriented readings, claiming that horror literature has a “generic obligation to evoke or produce fear” (2003, 167) and can thus not be used as a reliable indicator of cultural anxieties. He suggests seeing Dracula as a case of “reverse sexology” (Mighall 2003, 238): while “sexology produces sexual perverts, horror fiction produces monsters” (246). The sexualisation of the monster is merely used as a technique to contain the threat of the supernatural, perverts are easier to contain than monsters. The most recent criticism has targeted the ongoing fascination with the vampire figure in popular culture. It focuses on the cultural work of Dracula not only in its own time but especially in later adaptations of the figure. Lyndon W. Joslin’s Count Dracula goes to the Movies lists fifteen more or less faithful film adaptations plus eighteen films inspired by Dracula between 1922 and 2003, and several more have appeared in the years since then. Dracula has left the domain of the literary and has become a serial figure, because it is by serialisation that literary protagonists become cultural icons. As an eminently modern(ist) practice, “[s]eriality relies on iconicity, on emblematic constellations, and on recognizable images, figures, plots, phrases, and accessories that, once established, can be rearranged, reinterpreted, recombined, and invested with new significance” (Mayer 2013, 10–11). Dracula is endowed with all the characteristics of a serial figure: he is flat, stereotypical, familiar, iconic. Easily identifiable by a handful of basic signs, he moves across media and medial forms. Making use of a detective plot that thrives on modern media, and choosing as its setting a mass society that is threatened from without (the foreigner from the East) and within (degeneration, contagion), Dracula can easily be resuscitated in later times as long as similar cultural constellations pertain. The ongoing appeal of Dracula for readers and film audiences into the twentyfirst century suggests that there is no end of anxieties on which a serial Dracula can feed.

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Bibliography Works Cited Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Armstrong, Nancy. “Feminism, Fiction, and the Utopian Promise of Dracula.” Differences 16.1 (2005): 1–23. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Bronfen, Elisabeth. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Princeton Legacy Library. Coundouriotis, Eleni. “Dracula and the Idea of Europe.” Connotations 9.2 (2000/2001): 143–159. Dittmer, Jason. “Dracula and the Cultural Construction of Europe.” Connotations 12.2–3 (2002/2003): 233–248. Frayling, Christopher. Preface. Dracula. By Bram Stoker. Ed. Maurice Hindle. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. vii–xii. Gibson, Matthew. Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Gladstone, William Ewart. Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. London: John Murray, 1876. Glover, David. Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Hindle, Maurice. Introduction. Dracula. By Bram Stoker. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. xvii–xxxix. Hopkins, Lisa. Bram Stoker. A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Joslin, Lyndon W. Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker’s Novel Adapted, 1922–2003. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. Kittler, Friedrich. Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften. Leipzig: Reclam, 1993. Mayer, Ruth. Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Mighall, Robert. “Sex, History and the Vampire.” Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic. Ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998: 62–77. Moretti, Franco. “The Dialectic of Fear.” New Left Review os 136 (1982): 67–85. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Senf, Carol A. Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism. New York: Twayne, 1998. Senf, Carol A. “A Response to ‘Dracula and the Idea of Europe’ by Eleni Coundouriotis.” Connotations 10.1 (2000/2001): 47–58. Scholz, Susanne. “Blutspenden – Lebensgaben. Zur Medialität des Blutes in Bram Stokers Dracula.” Disturbing Bodies. Ed. Sylvia Mieszkowski and Christine Vogt-William. Berlin: trafo, 2008. 33–48. Scholz, Susanne. Phantasmatic Knowledge: Visions of the Human and the Scientific Gaze in English Literature, 1880–1930. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.

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Spencer, Kathleen. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the late-Victorian Degeneracy Crisis.” English Literary History 59.1 (1992): 197–225. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Ed. Maurice Hindle. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” English Literary History 59.1 (1992): 467–493.

Further Reading Barreca, Regina, ed. Sex and Death in Victorian Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Boone, Troy. “‘He is English and therefore Adventurous’: Politics, Decadence and Dracula.” Studies in the Novel 25.1 (1993): 76–91. Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss me with those red lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8 (1984): 107–133. Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge, 1994. Hughes, William. Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Pykett, Lyn, ed. Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions. London: Longman, 1996. Law, Jules David. The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk and Water in the Victorian Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010. Mayer, Ruth, and Shane Denson. “Spectral Seriality: The Sights and Sounds of Count Dracula.” Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus: Ohio State UP 2017. 155–178. Senf, Carol A. Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker. Westport: Greenwood, 2002. Showalter, Elaine. “Blood Sells: Vampire Fever and Anxieties for the Fin de Siècle.” TLS 4685 (1993): 14. Stoker, Bram. Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition. Ed. Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. Stott, Rebecca. The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in late-Victorian London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Timo Müller

33 Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897) Abstract: The chapter positions What Maisie Knew as a pivotal text in the turn from the Victorian to the modernist novel. Following a brief introduction to James’s life and oeuvre, the chapter discusses the turn of the twentieth century as a time in which knowledge and identity were reconceived as relational, temporary constructs. What Maisie Knew negotiates this shift on several levels. It depicts fin-de-siècle London as a world of ever-shifting alliances in which even family bonds are dissolved into temporary arrangements. It traces the intellectual growth of its protagonist, Maisie, who under these circumstances comes to embody the modernist relational self. Finally, the shift from authorial to figural narration in the course of the novel foreshadows the loss of epistemological certainty that would preoccupy novelists throughout the twentieth century. The chapter closes with a discussion of the theoretical perspectives critics have brought to the novel, from its canonisation by the formalists to recent discussions of its colonial implications. Keywords: Henry James, What Maisie Knew, modernism, perspective, relationality

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Born in 1843 to a cosmopolitan New York family, Henry James became the first in a series of great modernist writers whose work was shaped by transatlantic encounters. Like T. S. Eliot, James settled permanently in England and eventually became a British citizen. Like Ezra Pound, he was a fixture in literary London and remains a cornerstone of British literary history. Like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others, he crafted his impressions of European sceneries and lifestyles into outstanding literary works. All of this he achieved a generation before these great innovators, who looked to him as a forerunner and intellectual authority. How did this immigrant from America become a key figure in the development of the English novel? For one thing, James had perhaps the widest intellectual horizon of all writers of his generation. He grew up among the great minds of nineteenth-century America, many of whom were friends with his father: Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau. From his early childhood he travelled Europe with his family and eventually became fluent in French and Italian. After a half-hearted attempt to study law at Harvard, James returned to Europe in 1869 to become a writer. He met Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, immersed himself into artistic circles in Paris and Rome, and read widely in the literatures of Europe. By 1880 he was https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-034

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a minor celebrity in his own right and moved among the outstanding artists and intellectuals of fin-de-siècle England (Edel 1953–1972; Harden 2005). The most innovative novelists of James’s time were not English or American, however, but French and Russian. Gustave Flaubert revolutionised narrative perspective and proclaimed the primacy of style over content. Émile Zola set new standards for precise, almost scientific description. Ivan Turgenev debunked Romantic idealisation and developed a sleek, melodious prose style. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anton Chekov (in his short stories) probed the depths of the human mind more radically than the Victorians and more realistically than the Romantics. What all of these writers shared was an interest in psychology. They were looking for ways of representing human consciousness and subjective perception in the novel. James was friends with many of them. His intimate knowledge of European literatures and cultures put him in a position to introduce these strategies into English literature (Lerner 1941; Fussell 1990; Walker 1995). He also benefited from his familiarity with psychological research: his older brother William was one of the foremost psychologists of the time. Studying the processing of outward impressions in the human mind, William James was the first to describe the mind as a “stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” rather than an orderly succession of logically connected thoughts (1890, 239). The attempt to render this ‘stream of consciousness’ in literature became one of the driving forces behind the modernist experiments with narrative voice and perspective, and Henry James’s later novels are among the earliest manifestations of this new approach. Over the course of his writing career James published some twenty novels, more than a hundred novellas and short stories (the boundaries are difficult to draw), eight books of travel writing, two biographies, three memoirs, several plays, and a steady flow of literary criticism. This remarkable body of work is often separated into three phases. In the early phase, James explored romanticist and realist modes of writing to develop a literary voice of his own, which he found in the detailed depiction of transatlantic encounters. His earliest publications from the mid-1860s to the mid-1870s are fairly conventional. The influence of European Romanticism shines through stories such as “De Grey: A Romance” (1868) and “The Last of the Valerii” (1874), which rely heavily on Gothic elements and present anecdotes rather than psychologically complex tales. James’s first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), was a melodramatic apprentice piece that the author soon came to regard as an embarrassment; his second, the artist-novel Roderick Hudson (1875), shows his progress in narrative technique but remains suspended between romanticist conventions and the beginnings of realistic character development. The breakthrough came with the novella Daisy Miller (1878), the great popular success of James’s lifetime, and was confirmed by the novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881), which established him as a leading voice of his generation. Both of these works explore the signature theme of James’s oeuvre: the fate of an innocent, somewhat naïve American who encounters the cultivated but ethically questionable customs of the European upper classes.

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Instead of settling comfortably on the heights of the realist novel that he had reached with The Portrait of a Lady, James spent the next two decades casting about for new themes, modes, and styles of writing. The uneven output of this middle phase includes political novels such as The Bostonians (1886), a satirical romance about North-South relations in the United States, and The Princess Casamassima (1886), an oddly Dickensian study of a young Londoner’s transformation into an anarchist assassin. The middle phase includes another James classic, the Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), and a series of stories about writers – from “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884) to “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) – that indicate James’s uncertainty about his own career and legacy. The most notorious episode in the middle phase was James’s attempt to establish himself as a playwright, which failed spectacularly because neither his lifestyle nor his writing style connected with that of theatre audiences. The first novel he published after this failure, What Maisie Knew (1897), marks a turning point in James’s oeuvre. The novel follows the childhood and early youth of its title character, the only daughter of wealthy divorcees in fin-de-siècle London. Instead of chronicling Maisie’s life and times, however, the novel chronicles her developing consciousness. This shift from the external to the internal world, from action to perception, became the great achievement of the third or ‘major’ phase in James’s career. Drawing on his mastery of realist description, his innovations in narrative perspective, and his interest in psychology, James created a distinct writing style that foregrounded the complexity and subjectivity of the human mind. The novels he published in the following years, especially The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), announced a new era in English literature. All of these novels take up the theme of the gullible American in Europe, but they minimise external action and stage encounters of different perceptions, interpretations, and opinions instead. These novels confront readers with a problem more and more people were encountering as the twentieth century began: the awareness that our knowledge of the world is highly limited and subjective, that it depends on our social position and our intellectual environment. Traditionally, the stability and validity of knowledge had been guaranteed by religion, which offered universally applicable answers to all questions people might have about the world and their position in it. From the eighteenth century onward, the sciences made the same promise and gradually replaced religion in the role of guarantor of knowledge (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel). The controversial debates around Darwin’s theory of evolution in the Victorian period were an indicator of the deep conviction religion and science inspired among their respective followers. When Queen Victoria, the head of the state church, became patroness of the Royal Societies for scientific research, the nation state established itself as an overarching, unifying force in this contest and became yet another guarantor of the stability and validity of knowledge.

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The frequent clashes between these guarantors cast doubt on the very possibility of a universally applicable explanation of the world. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was an increasing sense that knowledge had become relative: that God was dead, as Nietzsche claimed; that the results of scientific experiments depend on the standpoint of the observer, as Einstein theorised; that words only become meaningful in their shifting relations to other words, as Saussure argued. These insights suggested that the world could no longer be understood by appealing to absolutes such as God or truth or stable meaning. It could only be understood by examining the role of individual perspectives and the relations among different perceptions of the world. Henry James was among the first writers who realised what this meant for the novel. It meant that the authorial narration of most Victorian novels – from Jane Austen to Thackeray, from George Eliot to James’s own earlier work – was fast becoming outdated. The god-like narrator who provides a complete and reliable depiction of the (fictional) world reflected the old belief in stable knowledge guaranteed from a position of absolute superiority. If the novel wanted to remain relevant, it had to provide different perspectives and explore the subjectivity of perception. With the novels of his major phase, James proved not only that the novel was up to this task but that it was ideally suited to it. His experiments with narrative point of view, his techniques of rendering subjective impressions and the stream of consciousness, made the English novel ready for the twentieth century. They pointed the way for the next generation of innovative novelists, most importantly James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (Fogel 1990; McGurl 2001), whose masterpieces stand in a direct line from the innovations James began exploring in What Maisie Knew.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Given the prominence of subjective perception in What Maisie Knew, it is hardly surprising that the main topic of the novel is the development of its protagonist’s personality. The novel opens with a brief account of the very public divorce of Maisie’s parents, Beale and Ida Farange, and then shifts to Maisie’s perspective as she grows from childhood into puberty. Maisie is six when her parents separate. At this early age she loses the absolute reference points of her life, on whom children tend to rely in the process of identity formation and socialisation. For the rest of her childhood and youth she is shuttled back and forth between her parents’ households. Since neither of her parents shows much interest in her, she turns to a second set of parent figures that ironically mirrors the first one: her father’s governess, Miss Overmore, and her mother’s lover, Sir Claude.

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As the parents’ role is divested from its biological foundations, the unity of the Victorian ideal family breaks down. This development stands out most clearly when both surrogate parents marry the respective biological parent and then become romantically involved with each other. Sir Claude is introduced as Ida Farange’s new partner early on, and about halfway through the novel Miss Overmore tells Maisie that she has married Beale Farange. Both Sir Claude and Miss Overmore are quickly estranged from their self-centred partners and eventually take up an affair with each other. In the end, Sir Claude asks Maisie to enter into a new familial arrangement with him and Miss Overmore. If nothing else, this proposal makes it clear to both Maisie and the reader that the modern family is no longer a reliable unit rooted in biological absolutes. It becomes a temporary arrangement constructed by whichever group of people decide to define themselves as a family in a given moment. In this sense, the familial environment in which Maisie grows up becomes a synecdoche for the social environment of the modernist period (Müller 2010). After she loses the stable reference points her parents were supposed to provide, Maisie needs to learn new, modern ways of social behaviour. Under these conditions knowledge becomes a central concern of the novel – another parallel to the socio-cultural conditions of the early twentieth century. As the scholar Brian McHale has influentially argued, modernist fiction is preoccupied with epistemological questions, or questions related to knowledge: “What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of the knowable?” (1987, 9). These epistemological questions become more urgent the less one’s perception of the world is guaranteed (and limited) by stable reference points. Child figures like Maisie offer rich possibilities for exploring the acquisition, structure, and consequences of knowledge. Many Victorian novels centre on children and their quest for knowledge. What distinguishes What Maisie Knew from these novels is the parallel it draws between the child and the narrator. For the omniscient authorial narrator of the Victorian novel, child figures were at the opposite end of the epistemological scale. Their knowledge was vastly inferior to the narrator’s, who ranged across various characters’ perspectives and could look into past, present, and future alike. Even in comparison with other characters, the child’s knowledge was regarded as limited and less reliable than that of the adult characters. Dickens’s novels of childhood and maturity, from David Copperfield (1850) to Great Expectations (1861), derive much of their tension and humour from the narrators’ benevolently ironic stance toward the inadequate perception of their younger selves. Even the Romantics, who foreshadowed the modernists in attributing to the child a role similar to the writer’s, did so for very different reasons. They saw in the child’s purity and closeness to nature a precondition for the higher insights to which they aspired themselves.

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What distinguishes What Maisie Knew from these earlier approaches is that the novel values Maisie’s knowledge far more highly. Rather than looking down on Maisie, the narrator respects her view and impressions. He often takes her side and points out that while she may know less about social convention than the adult characters, she understands more about their personalities and relationships than they expect. In fact, her unassuming role and lack of conventionality sometimes help Maisie understand things that the adults do not understand about one another. The lack of parental guidance increases Maisie’s awareness of her lack of knowledge, but also of the subtleties of social life. In response she assumes a distant attitude toward her social environment, becoming a spectator in order to learn more about it. The novel foregrounds this attitude not least to negotiate the ethical conditions of modern identity. Children tend to develop ethical standards by imitating or questioning behaviour they observe in their immediate social environment. For Maisie this is unusually difficult because the ethical standards her parents (or parent figures) offer are neither useful nor consistent. All of the adults around her act out of self-interest rather than ethical considerations, and they develop a variety of double-edged strategies to get what they want. The scholar Alfred Habegger convincingly argues that Maisie develops her codes of behaviour by imitating the form of the adults’ social interaction while changing the contents. After observing the continual bargaining among her elders, she begins to negotiate contracts with them herself, but the difference is that her contracts benefit both sides equally. At the end of the novel she has fully defined her ethical standards, Habegger argues, when she offers Sir Claude a contract of “friendship founded on reciprocity” (1971, 470). Reciprocity is a relative concept, and thus a useful ethical category in a world of ever-shifting values and positions. What Maisie Knew shows how ethically responsible behaviour can emerge in the kind of complex, instable social environment that would come to characterise the twentieth century. While the novel largely takes place in the internal sphere of Maisie’s thoughts and perceptions, it does offer glimpses into the cultural environment of fin-de-siècle London. Recent critics have shown that the novel’s depiction of this environment responds to contemporary debates in both England and the United States, which James followed with much interest. In this view, What Maisie Knew announces not only the interest in psychology and interiority that would characterise literary modernism, but also its ambivalent stance on political questions such as capitalism, alienation, race, and imperialism. These questions come to the fore with the appearance of the Countess, one of Beale Farange’s romantic affairs. Maisie first sees the Countess in Earl’s Court, a popular entertainment ground of the time, and describes her as dark-skinned, “almost black” (144). She is then taken to the Countess’s luxurious home, where her father discloses that he plans to leave the country with the Countess and might never return. Maisie keeps her distance to the Countess, not only because of this plan but also because the Countess looks different. “She literally struck the child more as an

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animal than as a ‘real’ lady,” the narrator remarks: “she might have been a clever, frizzled poodle in a frill or a dreadful human monkey in a spangled petticoat. She had a nose that was far too big and eyes that were far too small and a moustache” (161). The point of this passage is not that Maisie is hopelessly racist but that she has been brought up in an environment whose racist categories she unconsciously adopts. The influence of her social environment on her perception of race is highlighted by the setting in which she first gets a glimpse of the Countess. She spots her at a sideshow in Earl’s Court among pictures of African women that cast these women as exotic, sexually alluring “Flowers of the Forest.” When her father suddenly comes out of the show with the Countess, the narrator points out that “Maisie at first took her for one of the Flowers” (143), underlining the power of cultural stereotypes in shaping Maisie’s view of other people. Critics have been divided over the significance of this episode, and especially over the question of whether the novel exposes racial clichés here or simply perpetuates them. They have also debated whether the episode comments on the racial politics of imperial Britain or of segregation in the United States. Walter Benn Michaels, for example, notes that Beale links the Countess with America at several points but that the novel does not thematise their relationship as “an instance of racial mixture,” which would have been the dominant view in the contemporary United States. In his view, the novel “fails, by American criteria, to see either Beale or the Countess as properly belonging to races in the first place” (1995, 289). Most critics interested in the historical contexts of the novel have therefore read the episode in the context of British Imperialism. In a path-breaking study of these contexts, The Other Henry James, John Carlos Rowe argues that the Countess stands in for a range of marginalised people in the British view of the Empire. The episode thus shifts attention “from American binaries of ‘black and white’ to the confusion of race, nationality, class, gender, sexuality, and age often used to prop up otherwise unstable notions of English ‘national’ identity in the late nineteenth century” (1998, 129). These readings indicate that the novel offers a complex representation of social and cultural questions that preoccupied England at the turn of the twentieth century.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies For all its commentary on social and cultural questions, the most innovative aspect of the novel is the aesthetic form it assumes by tracing its character’s perceptions and psychological development. In order to foreground this internal dimension, the novel sheds the stable framework of classic authorial narration. Most of the action is focalised through Maisie, whose subjective perception largely stands for itself and constitutes almost our only source of knowledge. Maisie is the youngest and most child-like of these ‘centres of consciousness’, as they are often called, in

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James’s oeuvre. What Maisie Knew opens with an authorial prologue but then delves immediately into the child’s consciousness. The narrator makes it clear that from now on he will be acting as a sort of interpreter for the “patient little girl” who will “see much more than, at first, she understood” (6). The narrator is still a palpable presence, but where the Victorian authorial narrator used his superior perspective and authority to provide a stable framework that corrected the characters’ misinterpretations, What Maisie Knew increasingly replaces the narrator’s authority with Maisie’s. This development makes the novel representative of the displacement of authorial by figural narration in James’s oeuvre and, more generally, in the transition from Victorian to modernist fiction (the following discussion is adapted from Müller 2010, 133–138). The widespread assumption that Maisie is somehow unreliable in her perception provides a useful starting point for narratological analysis. Since Maisie is not a narrator, she is not unreliable in the technical sense, but she may be what Seymour Chatman calls a “fallible filter.” In Chatman’s classic definition, the fallibility of a filter character is revealed when “the narrator asks the narratee [. . .] to enjoy an irony at the expense of a filter character” (1990, 151). Little Maisie’s limited perception should provide numerous opportunities for such joking, and indeed, there are often ironic overtones in the narrator’s speech when he reports Maisie’s doings. Take, for example, the scene in chapter six where Miss Overmore explains why she is glad to have Maisie back. Her reason is that she can now resume the role of governess and thus a respectable life in the same house with her lover, Maisie’s father. Moreover, she is happy that Ida Farange’s affair with Sir Claude will never become respectable since Sir Claude cannot pretend to be a governess. Here is Maisie’s reaction: She meditated on these mysteries and she at last remarked to Miss Overmore that if she should go to her mother perhaps the gentleman [Sir Claude] might become her tutor. “The gentleman?” The proposition was complicated enough to make Miss Overmore stare. “The one who’s with mamma. Mightn’t that make it right – as right as your being my governess makes it for you to be with papa?” Miss Overmore considered; she coloured a little; then she embraced her ingenious disciple. “You’re too sweet! I’m a real governess.” “And couldn’t he be a real tutor?” “Of course not. He’s ignorant and bad.” “Bad – ?” Maisie echoed with wonder. Her companion gave a queer little laugh at her tone. “He’s ever so much younger – ” The speaker paused. “Younger than you?” Miss Overmore laughed again; it was the first time Maisie had seen her approach so nearly to a giggle. “Younger than – no matter whom.” (35)

Maisie does not know about the subtle differences the public makes between her parents’ positions. Ida cannot pretend innocence when a younger man is living under her roof, no matter if she calls him a tutor or anything else. Maisie believes

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she can grasp the situation by analogy. She sees her mother in the same position as her father and extends the parallel to their respective partners. Unimpressed by Miss Overmore’s empty phrases, Maisie keeps asking astute questions until her governess is forced to draw another, rather telling parallel: both Sir Claude and she are younger than their respective partners. Miss Overmore has to break the argument off. In doing so she leaves a gap that the reader is left to fill and that reveals the weakness of her position. Maisie, by contrast, appears not only more mature and sensible as a person, but also more trustworthy as a focaliser after this dialogue. Paradoxically, it is her childish fallibility that becomes an advantage here. In the decadent, immoral world of the Faranges, the child’s straightforward honesty elevates her above the adults. In narratological terms, she gains credibility both on the “axis of events” and on the “axis of ethics” (Phelan 2005, 33). It is the other characters’ perceptions and judgments, more than Maisie’s, that the reader needs to question and correct. Maisie’s strength as a filter character – and here the dialogue becomes exemplary of the book as a whole – undermines the narrator’s authority as well. In the middle of the dialogue, the narrator tries to establish an ironic perspective on Maisie by calling her “ingenious.” This is a wink at the reader, a suggestion to enjoy a joke at the expense of the filter character, as Chatman puts it. Since most readers side with Maisie rather than Miss Overmore, however, the joke backfires on the narrator. Rather than sharing with the reader an adult’s amusement at Maisie’s childish fallibility, the narrator is now associated with Miss Overmore, and thus marked as problematic. Authority is transferred from the narrator to Maisie – authority of perception as well as authority of judgment. This conclusion is confirmed by two predictions Maisie effects by her questioning: by drawing a parallel between Miss Overmore and Sir Claude, she not only foreshadows their later relationship but at the same time forces Miss Overmore to establish a counter-argument that binds her to Beale Farange. This is a first, if at this point rather vague, hint that she has already married Maisie’s father in secret. Maisie’s new role as the moral norm of the novel, which begins to take shape here, is gradually strengthened as the other characters’ ethical and/or perceptual reliability is increasingly drawn into doubt. The last remaining rival is Mrs. Wix, whose Cockney morality provides the only stable norm in the self-centred Farange world. But even her morality is revealed to be ultimately egocentric. The longer she lives in the Farange household, the more self-complacent she becomes. All too often, she gives in to the temptation of reinterpreting her moral standards so as to suit her own wishes and desires. Maisie increasingly doubts these standards as a result. A crucial act of reflective distancing occurs when Mrs. Wix suggests that Sir Claude should leave London with Maisie and herself. The contrast between her smug, assertive morality and the girl’s sensitive restraint is tangible in such passages as the following:

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“It will be the right thing – if you feel as you’ve told me you feel.” Mrs. Wix, sustained and uplifted, was now as clear as a bell. [. . .] Sir Claude’s eyes reverted to Maisie, rather hard, as she thought; and there was a shade in his very smile that seemed to show her – though she also felt it didn’t show Mrs. Wix – that the accommodation prescribed must loom to him pretty large. (85)

Sir Claude is non-committal, as is Maisie, but Mrs. Wix fails to take the hint. She even goes so far as to claim that Maisie and herself live in unbearable circumstances because Ida’s servants refuse to wait on her. Sir Claude rightly objects that if he leaves Ida she can turn the tables on him and present herself as the wronged wife and Sir Claude as an unfeeling villain. Mrs. Wix has a solution: her beneficent influence will keep him chaste and protected from all evil. There are palpable sexual overtones in her proposal, and her ability to misrepresent the situation so completely disqualifies her from serious consideration as a moral guide. Like Ida, she is vying for sexual possession of the attractive young man; like Ida, she uses a pretence of motherly feeling for Maisie to achieve her own goals. While Mrs. Wix and Sir Claude are discussing the revealing proposal, Maisie comes to understand that the governess’s arguments are untenable, that she therefore must shed her guidance. From now on, Maisie’s sensitive, disinterested perception is the only moral norm in the narrative. Maisie is not a fallible filter anymore but represents the author’s norms and values. This is traditionally the authorial narrator’s role, and the second half of the novel shows how the narrator loses this role to Maisie. The most striking sign of this transition is that the narrator falls from his godlike position in that he becomes aware of himself and discusses his own problems. This often occurs in situations where Maisie’s development is beyond his comprehension. “Oh, decidedly, I shall never get you to believe the number of things she saw and the number of secrets she discovered” (171), he says, and later on: “I so despair of tracing her steps that I must crudely give you my word for its being from this time on a picture literally present to her. [. . .] I am not sure that Maisie had not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was concerned” (233). In the closing chapters of the novel, set in Boulogne, the narrator has almost vanished and is hardly distinguishable from Maisie’s consciousness. Without narratorial guidance the novel becomes at once more objective and more dramatic (Perosa 1983, 45–76). As the critic Jean Blackall points out, the very spaces Maisie encounters in Boulogne register the development of her consciousness: they “objectively correlate the internal process of decision-making” (1978/79, 135). Blackall lists several examples: the Madonnas Maisie sees in the museum, whose promise of authentic motherhood stands in contrast to Ida’s falsity; the beach, which Maisie originally associates with “all the colourful, the enjoyable, and the adventurous elements in foreign travel” but which also becomes “a place of fleshly diversion and of irresponsibility” (1978/79, 138–139); the salon, which stands for security and social status but also for the temptations of material wealth; and the balcony, which

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becomes a sanctuary of the unreserved love Maisie feels for Sir Claude. Unlike Hemingway’s objective correlatives, these symbolic correlations have an indirect effect: they are still mediated through the narrative voice and Maisie’s consciousness. Yet the analogy indicates that the closing chapters of What Maisie Knew approximate modernist techniques of focalised narration and objective characterisation. The disappearance of the authorial narrator can also be read as a shift from a traditionally novelistic to a dramatic mode of presentation. The final chapter of What Maisie Knew has been likened to a “morality play” in which Maisie “moves, sometimes literally, sometimes in thought, among settings which symbolize her alternatives, trying to resolve a moral issue” (Blackall 1978/79, 142; cf. Wolk 1983, 203). One could also draw an analogy to classical tragedy: in the final chapter there are no subplots, no digressions; the plot moves continuously and climatically toward the fatal confrontation of the four remaining characters. In keeping with the logic of classical tragedy, the final conflict is between the spouses-to-be, Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale (the former Miss Overmore). These two figures represent with a certain dignity the basic oppositions from which the drama has taken its force. In their contest over Maisie, Sir Claude represents sensitivity, profoundness, and autonomy, while Mrs. Beale stands for disinterest, superficiality, and violent appropriation. Mrs. Wix has by now become a comical minor character. She comments on the events and provides a contrastive perspective. Her function, in some respects, is that of the chorus of classical tragedy. Mrs. Beale still guarded the door. “Let them pass,” said Sir Claude at last. She remained there, however; Maisie saw the pair look at each other. Then she saw Mrs. Beale turn to her. “I’m your mother now, Maisie. And he’s your father.” [. . .] They stood confronted, the step-parents, still under Maisie’s observation. That observation had never sunk so deep as at this particular moment. “Yes, my dear, I haven’t given you up,” Sir Claude said to Mrs. Beale at last, “and if you’d like me to treat our friends here as solemn witnesses I don’t mind giving you my word for it that I never, never will. There!” he dauntlessly exclaimed. “He can’t!” Mrs Wix tragically commented. (301–303)

Narrative elements are scarce in this passage, as in much of the chapter; we only get a few short statements on the characters’ movements and appearance. These statements are given from Maisie’s perspective. They are short and precise, reminiscent of stage directions. The narrator, whose epistemological insecurity has been palpable through the second half of the novel, has now resigned his interpretive function. It is the readers, the audience of the drama, who are called upon to form their own opinion about the characters and events. In keeping with the Aristotelian definition of the playwright (or writer in general), the narrator does not offer a factual report of what has happened but a fictional version of what might have happened. The conclusion to the complicated moral problem the novel has set up is not sustained by the authority of an authorial narrator anymore but remains speculative, preliminary, even exchangeable.

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Maisie’s knowledge is less accessible than ever in the last sentence of the novel, where Mrs. Wix “still had room to wonder at what Maisie knew” (304). Maisie has overcome not only the substitution of her parents by her stepparents, but also the mediation of her view of things through the narrator. Accompanied only by Mrs. Wix, who is in every respect beneath her, she begins her journey through calmer regions, through the “quiet sea” of her adulthood (303). Her impartial, sensitive perception has proven superior to the adults’ dogmatic interpretations and orders. In the end, she is released to interpretive freedom by the equally sensitive but less self-assured narrator – and by the character who had the most authority over her, Sir Claude. As we have noted, the shift from authorial narration to focalisation through the main character has considerable epistemological implications. In replacing stable reference points with subjective impressions and shifting relations, it announces modernist conceptions of society and identity. Narration from one character’s perspective becomes a central device in the novels of James’s major phase and in many masterpieces of literary modernism.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives While Henry James was a highly respected writer in his lifetime, it was the rise of formalist literary criticism in the mid-twentieth century that secured his enduring fame. The formalist critics found in James both a precursor and a model of their conception of literature. James’s critical writings, including the prefaces he wrote for the collected ‘New York Edition’ of his fiction, anticipated the central claim of formalist criticism: that the merit of literary works lies in aesthetic qualities such as complexity, subtlety, and style much more than in their subject matter or the author’s personality. James’s novels appeared to illustrate this claim in exemplary fashion, and formalist critics held them up as models of literary achievement. F. R. Leavis, the most influential critic of the mid-twentieth century, positioned them as cornerstones of the ‘great tradition’ of the English novel, in company with such writers as George Eliot and Joseph Conrad (Leavis 1948; cf. Simon 2007; Anesko 2012). Against this background it is hardly surprising that What Maisie Knew has become one of James’s most thoroughly discussed novels. As we have seen in the previous section, it marks a decisive stage in the shift from content to narrative form as the dominant principle of his writing. Formalist readings of What Maisie Knew largely centred on narrative perspective, especially on the relationship between the authorial narrator and Maisie as a ‘centre of consciousness’ (Gargano 1961; Wiesenfarth 1963; Yeazell 1976). While formalism is sometimes regarded as conservative or apolitical today, it was actually a liberal project. The stylistic and narrative complexity of a novel like What Maisie

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Knew was regarded as a sign of liberal values: openness to different points of view, genuine interest in other people, careful ethical judgment rather than prejudice and simplification. This liberal-humanist perspective informs many early readings of Maisie and her unfolding social world. Such readings stress, for example, that beneath its humorous surface the novel negotiates existential experiences such as love, virtue, loss, and betrayal. By the end of the novel, the critic Walter Wright concluded, Maisie “has been forced to know evil – not in the sense of having a rational understanding of it, but in the far deeper sense of having become imaginatively aware of its ubiquity” (1962, 168; cf. Ward 1961, 82–83). As it explores these values through the consciousness of its protagonist, What Maisie Knew, like many of James’s novels, can be read as a variation on the Bildungsroman or novel of education (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology). As more recent critics have pointed out, the novel revises the conventional patterns of the genre. The classic Bildungsroman, from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1796) to Dickens’s David Copperfield and Great Expectations, takes place in a relatively stable social environment shaped by familiar roles and institutions. While the hero may rebel against these roles and institutions, the Bildungsroman usually ends in the hero’s successful integration into society. In What Maisie Knew, by contrast, it is the very instability of social roles and institutions that drives the formation of the protagonist’s personality. If this formation can be called successful at the end, this is because Maisie has emancipated herself from her social environment rather than found a place in it (Habegger 1997; Jeffers 2005). From the 1970s onward, the humanist consensus of formalist criticism was challenged by the advent of poststructuralism in English literary studies. The poststructuralists were suspicious of coherent narratives and polished surfaces; they looked for the cracks, dead ends, and misunderstandings at work in literary texts. Moreover, they rejected the notion that literature reflected and negotiated a shared reality with which all readers were familiar. Instead they emphasised the role of literature in constructing reality in the first place: literary texts in their view were particular versions of reality that carried the worldview, beliefs, and ideological assumptions of the author and his cultural environment. The poststructuralists’ relationship to James was ambivalent from the beginning. On the one hand, they distrusted the degree of control James exerted over his works: the polish, the coherence, the authorial narration. On the other hand, his self-reflexive treatment of literary authority, the reading process, and the social construction of reality made him seem almost a forerunner of poststructuralist criticism (Miller 1980). What Maisie Knew did not attract much interest among these critics, however, despite its many illustrations of how Maisie’s understanding of reality is shaped by the language she is taught and by the misunderstandings that arise when characters give different meanings to the same words (Eckstein 1988). A more consequential shift for James criticism, and for readings of What Maisie Knew in particular, was the rise of cultural studies. Where the formalists

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had championed James for the aesthetic complexity of his texts, cultural studies shifted attention to the complexity of his subject matter: to the subtle yet sophisticated ways in which his texts negotiate cultural phenomena of the time. Following Rowe’s pioneering The Other Henry James (1998), cultural studies scholars opened up various new perspectives on What Maisie Knew by examining the role of class, race, sexuality, imperialism, and so forth (Tambling 2000, 125–131). The discussion of the Countess in section 2 of this article is an example of this approach. Beyond conventional political categories, cultural studies scholarship has positioned the novel within a number of contemporary discourses, for example discourses around kinship (Bentley 1994), childhood (Shuttleworth 2010), and most recently evolutionary theory (Wardley 2016; Laing 2018). Over the years, What Maisie Knew has become one of James’s most popular novels both in literary criticism and among a general readership. His exploration of complex aesthetic and cultural phenomena through the mind of a child seems to strike a balance that appeals to a wide range of readers today.

Bibliography Works Cited Anesko, Michael. Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Bentley, Nancy. “James and the Tribal Discipline of English Kinship.” Henry James Review 15.2 (1994): 127–139. Blackall, Jean F. “Moral Geography in What Maisie Knew.” University of Toronto Quarterly 48 (1978/79): 130–148. Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Eckstein, Barbara. “Unsquaring the Squared Route of What Maisie Knew.” New Casebooks: The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew. Ed. Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone. London: Macmillan, 1988. 179–193. Edel, Leon. Henry James. 5 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953–1972. Fogel, Daniel Mark. Covert Relations: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990. Print. Fussell, Edwin Sill. The French Side of Henry James. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Gargano, James W. “What Maisie Knew: the Evolution of a ‘Moral Sense.’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.1 (1961): 33–46. Habegger, Alfred. “Reciprocity and the Market Place in The Wings of the Dove and What Maisie Knew.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (1971): 455–473. Habegger, Alfred. “What Maisie Knew: Henry James’s Bildungsroman of the Artist as Queer Moralist.” Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Ed. Gert Buelens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 93–108. Harden, Edgar F. A Henry James Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. London: Heinemann, 1898. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Henry Holt, 1890.

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Jeffers, Thomas L. Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Laing, Roisin. “What Maisie Knew: Nineteenth-Century Selfhood in the Mind of the Child.” Henry James Review 39.1 (2018): 96–109. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto & Windus, 1948. Lerner, Daniel. “The Influence of Turgenev on Henry James.” Slavonic Year-Book 20 (1941): 28–54. McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Jim Crow Henry James?” Henry James Review 16.3 (1995): 286–291. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Figure in the Carpet.” Poetics Today 1.3 (1980): 107–118. Müller, Timo. The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Perosa, Sergio. Henry James and the Experimental Novel. New York: New York UP, 1983. Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Rowe, John Carlos. The Other Henry James. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Shuttleworth, Sally. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Simon, Linda. The Critical Reception of Henry James: Creating a Master. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. Tambling, Jeremy. Critical Issues: Henry James. London: Macmillan, 2000. Walker, Pierre A. Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1995. Ward, J. A. The Imagination of Disaster: Evil in the Fiction of Henry James. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 1961. Wardley, Lynn. “Fear of Falling and the Rise of Girls: Lamarck’s Knowledge in What Maisie Knew.” American Literary History 28.2 (2016): 246–270. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. Henry James and the Dramatic Analogy: A Study of the Major Novels of the Middle Period. New York: Fordham UP, 1963. Wolk, Merla. “Narration and Nurture in What Maisie Knew.” Henry James Review 4 (1983): 196–206. Wright, Walter F. The Madness of Art: A Study of Henry James. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 1962. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 1976.

Further Reading Bloom, Harold, ed. Henry James. New York: Chelsea, 1987. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 1989. McWhirter, David, ed. Henry James in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Rowe, John Carlos and Eric Haralson, eds. A Historical Guide to Henry James. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Wagenknecht, Edward. The Novels of Henry James. New York: Ungar, 1983.

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34 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900) Abstract: This chapter starts by noting that while Conrad’s fiction is a forceful reminder that no literary text is written in a historical and cultural vacuum, it also shows how elements of an author’s biography can form the basis for literary creativity. That this point applies in full measure to Lord Jim is illustrated by Conrad’s combined use of an early draft of the novel, “Tuan Jim: A Sketch,” and his memories of many voyages to the East. Considering the novel through a narratological perspective, the chapter emphasises the role of Marlow as a character and narrator whose narrative motivation is curiously strengthened by his unconscious or semi-conscious impression that he is revealing a thematics which tends to absorb himself. The chapter links the narratological analysis of Lord Jim to considerations of genre and the transition from realist to modernist fiction in European literature. Three concluding points are, first, that Lord Jim provides a rich illustration of the close connection, at this point in the history of the novel, between changes of literary form and developments in the visual arts; second, that theoretical approaches within postcolonial studies have improved our understanding of how Lord Jim is implicated in the historical processes of European colonialism and Western imperialism; and, third, that while the novel’s plot is prompted by Jim’s jump from the Patna, it is the narration that makes the ethics of Lord Jim so insistent and pervasive. Keywords: Biography, fiction, narrative, genre, ethics

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Conrad’s complexity, including his biographical complexity, is best illustrated by the phrase homo duplex, ‘the double man’. “Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning,” Conrad wrote to a Polish friend, Kazimierz Waliszeweski (Conrad 1983, 89). Relating this quality of Conrad’s ethos to his fictional work, and in this chapter to Lord Jim, it is striking to what extent his novels and short stories are characterised by tensions and conflicts that, at least in large part, remain unresolved. Although there are links between the tensions and conflicts observable in Conrad’s fiction and the ideological fissures of his life, it would be reductive to explain the former by referring to the latter. Yet it would also be reductive, even misleading, to claim that no such connection exists. If Conrad’s fiction is a forceful reminder that no literary text is written in a historical and cultural vacuum, it also illustrates how elements of an author’s biography can form the basis for literary creativity. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-035

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Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Nałęcz Konrad Korzeniowski, 1857–1924) was born into a subjugated Poland that, after having been partitioned by Russia, AustriaHungary, and Germany, had disappeared from the map of Europe. As both his parents, Ewa Bobrowska and Apollo Korzeniowski, were members of the land-owning gentry (the szlachta), Józef belonged to a relatively wealthy, upper-class family. Thus, he was at an early age introduced to, and influenced by, the attitudes and characteristics of that privileged class – in his family perhaps best represented by his uncle and guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski. At the same time, Apollo, who took a strong interest in literature and in politics, was not only strongly patriotic but also remarkably progressive politically: after the family had moved to Warsaw, he became a leading figure of the ‘Reds’, a patriotic party that worked for Polish independence and advocated the liberation of the serfs. In 1861, Apollo was arrested, and he, Ewa, and four-year-old Józef were sent to the Russian province of Vologda. Here they lived under very difficult conditions, and not long after this trying period of exile first Ewa and then Apollo died (Najder 2007, 3–47). As Zdzisław Najder has observed, “Conrad held an idea of Europe as a potential political entity based, implicitly, on shared elements of civilization and culture” (1997, 169). While he found few such elements in Russia, he was also unsure about Germany’s role. Thus it is in one sense consistent that, after leaving Poland in 1874, he first went to France and then to England, where he became a sailor and later qualified as a master mariner in the British merchant navy. He became a British citizen in 1886 and settled permanently in England in the 1890s, embarking on a new career as a writer of fiction. Early in 1890, Conrad signed a three-year contract as officer on a river boat operated by the Belgian concern for trading in the Congo, the ‘Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo’. When he left for the Congo, Conrad, in common with virtually all British citizens of the late nineteenth century, was influenced by contemporary ideas of Europe’s civilising mission in Africa. On his return to Britain half a year later, he was ill both physically and mentally, and never wholly regained his health. Moreover, his scepticism about human beings’ inclination to dominate and conquer seems to have been reinforced by the shocking experiences that the trip to Africa led to. Unsurprisingly, critics have linked Conrad’s trip to the Congo to Heart of Darkness. Without denying that there is a significant, though indirect and complicated, connection between this phase of his biography and the novella, I would argue that, in combination with and as an addition to his many voyages to the East, Conrad’s Congo experience also proved important with a view to Lord Jim, the novel that he wrote at the same time as Heart of Darkness. One reason for this complex linkage is that the journey to Africa seems to have prompted memories of his childhood experiences in Poland. As Conrad’s Polish background was fundamentally marked by a series of events and traumas variously related to imperialist oppression, in the Congo he could observe similarities, not least with regard to the systematic use of violence, between variants of imperialist

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activity. Although Lord Jim in many ways is different from Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim too evolved out of a rich matrix of sources that were not only historical and literary, but also personal. Conrad wrote the first draft of the novel, “Tuan Jim: A Sketch,” on the blank pages of a letter album of Polish poems from the 1820s (Najder 2007, 284). All poems in the album were copied by the same hand, that of Teofila Bobrowska, Conrad’s grandmother. If Conrad’s “Congo Diary” (1890) forms a kind of biographical basis for Heart of Darkness, there is also a curious sense in which Conrad did not start Lord Jim from scratch but began tentatively to take notes using the blank pages of a manuscript in Polish, thus adding to, and in a way building on, his grandmother’s writing in a different language. In both cases, though perhaps less obviously in the latter than in the former, forms of repetition and memory (which is a kind of repetition) blend into artistic creativity.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns As regards the Entstehung of Lord Jim, the variants of beginning, continuation, elaboration, and repetition observable in embryo in “A Sketch” are also linked to Conrad’s memories of many voyages to the East. One particular historical incident proved unexpectedly inspiring. This event, known in the 1880s as “The scandal of the Eastern seas,” consists of a series of occurrences. The steamer Jeddah was carrying Muslim pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah. She left Singapore on 17 July 1880, with over nine hundred pilgrims on board. After a stormy passage during which one of her boilers began to leak, the Jeddah was abandoned on 8 August by her captain and European officers. They were later found and picked up by the steamship Scindia and taken to Aden. Here they reported that the Jeddah was lost with all her passengers. One day later, however, the Jeddah appeared at Aden with the pilgrims aboard, towed in by the steamship Antenor. This caused a great scandal in Singapore and London. There was an inquiry at Aden, and the London newspaper Daily Chronicle wrote: “It is to be feared that pilgrim ships are officered by unprincipled and cowardly men who disgrace the traditions of seamanship. We sincerely trust that no Englishman was amongst the boatload of cowards who left the Jeddah and her thousand passengers to shift for themselves” (qtd. in Sherry 1976, 62). In Conrad’s Eastern World, Norman Sherry notes that this scandal must have attracted Conrad’s attention for two reasons: first, the predicament of the captain and officers when, they believed, the Jeddah was sinking; second, the fact that the ship did not sink after all, thus removing any possibility of the officers concealing their act of cowardice (1976, 44). To these two reasons I would like to add a third: when Conrad was a sailor in the East in the 1880s, the scandal of the Jeddah had already become a legend, and this transformation into legend shows – as in the case of the Titanic disaster thirty years later – its literary potential.

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The Jeddah scandal is a historical narrative which formed the basis both for legends and for the fictional narrative of Lord Jim. In the novel, the old steamer Patna, sailing across the Indian Ocean with eight hundred pilgrims aboard, suddenly and unexpectedly strikes an unidentified object floating in the water. Believing she will sink quickly and knowing there are not enough lifeboats, the officers – including, eventually, the second mate Jim – leave the ship, thus committing an act of desertion. But the Patna does not sink, and Jim spends the rest of his life trying both to remedy his grave mistake and to understand why he failed his test. Eventually, in the remote settlement of Patusan, he seems partly to succeed in his endeavour, becoming Patusan’s virtual ruler and being loved by the natives, who call him Tuan (or Lord) Jim. But when Patusan is invaded by a white man, Gentleman Brown and his gang, Jim, whose social and moral duty to Patusan would seem to demand that he destroy Brown, allows him to leave Patusan unharmed. As the result is catastrophic, and as Jim has pledged his own life to guarantee the safety of the community, he allows himself to be shot. (For a more detailed summary see Knowles and Moore 2000, 211–214). Brief as it is, this paraphrase of the novel’s plot indicates several of the novel’s basic coordinates, including a strong and consistent focus on the protagonist’s life, a detailed presentation of variants of test and testing in order to ascertain or unveil a character’s moral strength, a sustained exploration of a character’s dreams, ambitions, fears, and doubts, and an equally thorough investigation of facets of European imperialism linked to, and manifested in, cultural and ethnic differences. Yet there is a lot that this paraphrase does not reveal. Most strikingly, the fact that it does not mention Marlow illustrates the problem of adequately summarising Lord Jim. Even though the narrator named Marlow in Lord Jim is different from the narrator with the identical name in Heart of Darkness, here too Marlow is not just a key narrator but also a main character who contributes significantly to the novel’s thematics. For example, we need to mention Marlow to state that, as the following discussion will make clear, Conrad’s presentation of the friendship between him and Jim is definitely one of the novel’s coordinates.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies In fact, the way Conrad uses Marlow and other narrators in Lord Jim is more sophisticated, and more distinctly modernist, than the narration of Heart of Darkness. In order to show how he achieves this I want to briefly return to the inspiration provided by “The scandal of the Eastern seas.” Here is a section of the report which the captain of the Jeddah, named Clark, had to write in connection with the inquiry at Aden, and which was published in the Straits Times, 8 September 1880: I left Penang on 20th July with a crew of 50 men, 5 European officers and 953 adult pilgrims bound to Jeddah. [. . .] [F]or two days only we had fine weather. After this (29th July) the weather

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became very heavy the wind increasing almost to hurricane force at times with a very high cross sea, the ship rolling, pitching and straining heavily [. . .]. The gale continued with unabating fury and the ship labouring and straining so heavily caused the boilers to break adrift from their fastenings on the 6th August. . . . The water rose in the ship very rapidly and the steam pumping power was rendered useless. The deck pumps were all at work and the Hadjis and firemen were bailing the water out of the engine room in buckets. Notwithstanding, the water gained about an inch per hour, and on the 7th, the water still increasing, all the boats were ordered to be prepared and provisioned. (qtd. in Sherry 1976, 48, 50)

This is a first-person, documentary narrative that reports what, according to Clark, actually happened aboard the Jeddah. I note the enumeration of factual details; I also register the connection between the difficulties encountered and the adverse weather conditions. Captain Clark attempts to give a reliable account of what occurred, and there is no particular reason to question his statement. With a view to his act of desertion, though, the concluding part of the last sentence takes on an additional meaning: clearly, the boats “were ordered to be prepared and provisioned” for the officers, not for the pilgrims. Compare the captain’s statement with the following passage from Lord Jim: She held on straight for the Red Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle – viscous, stagnant, dead. The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that plain luminous and smooth, unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer. Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the men, glided past on his descent and sank mysteriously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her advancing bows [. . .]. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way, black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity. The nights descended on her like a benediction. (Conrad 2012, 18)

While the Jeddah encounters a fierce storm, the Patna is moving across an Indian ocean described by the narrator as “luminous and smooth.” Thus, while in Captain Clark’s statement the problems of the Jeddah are a direct result of the storm, in Lord Jim there is a striking contrast between the apparent safety of the calm sea and the following collision with some unidentified object floating in the water. In referring to the narrator I have already identified one fictional marker of this passage. For although Captain Clark is also a narrator in that he produces his ‘statement’, its relatively straightforward discourse does not invite us to distinguish

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between author and narrator (and main character) the way the discourse of Lord Jim does. In the quoted passage there is, to use J. Hillis Miller’s term, a “displacement” (2002, 24) from Conrad to the imaginary third-person narrator (and later also to Marlow, the first-person narrator who takes over the narration in chapter five, and to other narrators). That this third-person narrator is part of the fictional universe of Lord Jim is signalled by the extraordinary powers of which he is possessed: it is as though he is hovering like an eagle high above the Patna, looking down at the ship and describing it in a way which accentuates its vulnerability in relation to the enormity of the ocean and the sky. Moreover, Conrad makes the anonymous third-person narrator – who functions as a rhetorical tool in the author’s service and thus, as indicated already, becomes a fictional marker in his own right – use all four devices which Miller, in his discussion of Heart of Darkness, considers as invitations to reading a narrative as “literature” (Miller 2002, 23). In addition to the displacement from Conrad to a narrator, there is the use of simile, an illustrative example of which is the short sentence: “The nights descended on her like a benediction” (Conrad 2012, 18). This sentence, which also ends the chapter, is not just a sentence but a paragraph of its own. One reason for the sense of relief and consolation it provides is suggested by the way in which, including the simile linking “night” and “benediction,” it is connected with the prosopopoeias of the passage, especially the personification of the sun. Pouring “the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the men” (18), the sun is a mighty power in this passage – even though, significantly, it does not become clear who or what the sun represents. Finally, we note that, especially on a second reading, it may be possible to read an element of irony (which Miller [2002, 25] sees as a further literary sign) into the passage. I am thinking of “the progress of the pilgrimage” (Conrad 2012, 18), which can refer both to the pilgrims and to Jim. The following description of the collision and of the officers’ desertion of the Patna suggests that the third-person narrator is sceptical about Jim; and Jim has to embark on a pilgrimage of his own after his failure to pass the test prompted by the collision. The lyric effect of this evocative passage is obtained by repetition, by personification of the sun and of the ship, by the light and dark imagery, and by a rhythmical syntax which seems to imitate the ship’s slow movement across the Indian Ocean. In my reading of this passage, its lyric qualities are also generated by the way in which repetition is linked both to beginning and to a possibly apocalyptic ending, and they are further enhanced by our sense of reading a description based on, and inspired by, an act of intensified memory. Having said this, the element of irony may reduce the lyric effect, which depends in large part on the way we combine and respond to the passage’s fictional markers and its relation to the following description of Jim. Effective as it is, the third-person narration of the novel’s beginning does not extend beyond its opening chapters. The ending of chapter four reveals, as does the first sentence of the second paragraph of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890), the

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author’s dissatisfaction with the parameters of the realist novel to which the beginning of Lord Jim seems to conform. In a different essay I have argued that the ending of chapter four is instrumental in demonstrating a kind of narrative change or rift which signals one beginning of modernist fiction (Lothe 2008, 244). On the level of narrative, this rift parallels the structural and thematic one between the novel’s first and second parts, that is, the part dealing with and revolving round Jim’s jump from the Patna (chapters 1–20) and the Patusan section (chapters 21–45). Chapter four ends thus: And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly. Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane chair harboured a silent listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and expanding, light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past. (Conrad 2012, 31)

Marlow here seems effortlessly to assume the role of the traditional storyteller. And yet, as he starts imparting the story of Jim to his audience on the verandah, it soon becomes clear that his attitude to Jim is different from, and more sympathetic and understanding than, that of the third-person narrator. Although this narrative community is vulnerable and somewhat unstable, I want to stress its forceful presence in the narrative situations, and thus also in the narrative discourse, of Lord Jim. The narrative situation and storytelling community on the verandah provide a fictionalised illustration of a point argued by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan in her discussion of Lord Jim in Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper: “We all construe our sense of identity in terms of our role in the narrative we are part of, and this fictional identity is not necessarily fictitious as long as one can maintain some measure of congruence between the fictional ego-ideal and one’s actual conduct” (1991, 38). Presenting a problem and (after the jump) prompting an identity crisis for Jim, this “measure of congruence” attracts the attention and continuing interest of Marlow as well as his listeners or narratees, and indeed the reader. There does not seem to be a firm, identifiable historical or biographical basis for this thematic thrust, which is arguably one of the most important in the novel. Yet in an oblique manner, the novel’s basic narrative situation (including the narrative concerns which it serves to bring out) is inspired by communities of sailors which Conrad not only knew but of which he was, for many years, an integral part. As the wealth of readings of Lord Jim demonstrates, many critics have been, and continue to be, intrigued by this novel. One reason for this development is that there is a remarkably productive interplay of experimental narrative form and thematic innovation throughout. Marlow’s expanding, repetitive narrative seems to be

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groping for a centre, a stable meaning or ground it never quite reaches. Jim remains “under a cloud” (Conrad 2012, 312) and so does the novel’s thematic core or centre (Miller 2017, 72–73). There is a correlation between the great difficulty of identifying the novel’s thematic centre and the apparent impossibility of understanding its protagonist. Yet both these challenges serve to make the narrative more, not less, compelling, stressing not only the difficulty but also the necessity of human communication and belief. Seen in this light, the novel’s epigraph puts emphasis on communication as well as interpretation: “It is certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it” (Conrad 2012, 1). On a second reading of the novel, this sentence from Novalis’s fragment 153 of Das allgemeine Brouillon (1798/1799) approximates to a reflection on the need for, and problems of, narrative communication (Hardenberg 1975; Conrad 2012, 521–522). If an effort to narrate implies an attempt to convince, the narratee’s readiness to listen signals a readiness to be convinced – at least in the sense of becoming interested in, and perhaps absorbed by, the narrative. This fragment is interestingly linked to Novalis’s fragment 242, where he comments on the centrifugal tendency of all matter (Hardenberg 1975, 581). The human mind, Novalis goes on to argue, opposes this tendency: the way in which the human mind observes and makes sense of the world at once reflects and indicates a centripetal inclination, a search for stability or ground (581). If the centrifugal tendency of matter makes the world appear as a series of unrelated fragments, the human mind – and Marlow as one possible fictional personification of it – seeks to relate the fragments to each other, to explain, to create order out of a myriad of impressions. “Perhaps,” says Marlow, unconsciously I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse. I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible – for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm and more chilling than the certitude of death – the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct. (Conrad 2012, 43)

As formulated in this key passage, both Marlow’s narrative motivation and the thematics generated through it would appear to revolve around the word “doubt.” For J. Hillis Miller, Marlow’s doubt of the sovereign power is the most explicit formulation of the “theme” of Lord Jim (1982, 26). This view has much to recommend it, but we should be wary of generalising so strongly on the basis of just one passage from a long and complex literary text. Although Miller may be right to note that “Marlow’s aim (or Conrad’s) seems clear: to find some explanation for Jim’s action which will make it still possible to believe in the sovereign power” (28), the doubt which not only motivates Marlow’s narrative but also underlies all of it modifies the aim by introducing a pervasive scepticism as to whether it can be reached. The novel’s intention, an intention created by Conrad as implied author, is not identical with, and far more complex than, that of Marlow.

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In Lord Jim as in Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s narrative motivation is curiously strengthened by his unconscious or semi-conscious impression that he is revealing a thematics which tends to absorb him. In both texts, this feature of the narrative makes its implications more profound both for Marlow and for the reader. In Lord Jim, this tentacular effect also makes it more difficult to isolate Jim’s narrative from Marlow’s report of it. Jim’s narrative in his conversation with Marlow after the inquiry is characterised by an intense personal involvement: it is a fervent attempt to explain what the court of inquiry did not allow him to. Yet Marlow’s involvement is also strong: as Jim ends his narrative he is “overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue” (Conrad 2012, 103) which, extending into chapter twelve, colours the blend of information and reflection that precedes the episode constituted by his conversation with the French lieutenant: “Fort intrigués par ce cadavre,” as I was informed a long time after by an elderly French lieutenant whom I came across one afternoon in Sydney, by the merest chance, in a sort of café, and who remembered the affair perfectly. Indeed this affair, I may notice in passing, had an extraordinary power of defying the shortness of memories and the length of time; it seemed to live, with a sort of uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their tongues. (107)

In his restless attempts to understand Jim, Marlow meets with many minor characters who, sharing Marlow’s fascination with Jim, perform important functions as first-person narrators. Different in kind and scope, these encounters provide fragmentary information about the enigmatic Jim. Marlow’s narration of his meeting with the French lieutenant is particularly compelling. The way in which his story is interposed between Marlow’s commentary is peculiarly effective, and so is the insertion of French words – both as stylistic variation and in underlining the key notions of the lieutenant’s account. His perspective throws new light on Jim. Actually, only the French lieutenant and the merchant Stein, whom Marlow meets with later on in the narrative, seem to understand Jim’s behaviour. The lieutenant’s understanding of Jim turns on the concept of honour. “The honour,” he exclaims, “ . . . that is real – that is!” (114). As Najder has shown, Marlow, whom the lieutenant is addressing, “perceives correctly the basic attributes of the ethics of honour: its inflexibility, anti-emotionalism and anti-pragmatism” (1997, 89). In consonance with this ethics of honour, the lieutenant has performed the extremely dangerous but, as he saw it, necessary task of staying aboard the Patna for thirty hours while she was being towed to harbour. In an important sense, then, he seems to have passed his test – or rather, this test – while Jim failed his. Yet although the lieutenant and Jim are clearly presented as contrastive characters, and although one effect of this contrast is to emphasise the gravity of Jim’s mistake, the lieutenant’s ability to understand Jim’s dilemma suggests that his attitudinal distance from Jim is not absolute. One remarkable feature of Lord Jim is the way Conrad constructs a radically new, modernist novel by building on, and innovatively combining, constituent elements of various sub-genres of narrative fiction, including the legend, the episode,

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and the adventure story (see Lothe 2008). Facets of different sub-genres can blend into each other; for example, the French lieutenant episode (Conrad 2012, 107–115) calls the genre of fragment strikingly to mind. The meeting is entirely coincidental; the lieutenant’s account is selective and incomplete; it ends abruptly; and there is a narrative ellipsis associated with it. More importantly, although the lieutenant’s account is genuinely illuminating and his action approximates to the fixed standard of conduct Marlow has come to doubt, the lieutenant repeatedly emphasises how strange and difficult the Patna case is. It is “impossible de comprendre – vous concevez” (108), “so that (de sorte que) there are many things in this incident of my life (dans cet épisode de ma vie) which have remained obscure” (110). Not only does the lieutenant relate a fragment, a part of a larger whole, additionally, the constituent aspects of the fragment are hard to identify and difficult to comprehend. Considered as a variant on the epic sub-genre of the fragment, the French lieutenant episode provides an illustration of, and offers an oblique comment on, the transitional quality of Lord Jim as a narrative written at the turn of the twentieth century. In his classic essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin reflects on the transition in the European cultural tradition from oral to written narrative. For Benjamin, literature is not only one significant manifestation of that tradition but provides an illustrative example of the transition, too. Whereas the teller of a story is in the company of his listeners, Benjamin observes, the writer of a novel is isolated, solitary: The storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. (1979, 87)

A complexly wrought modernist novel, Lord Jim provides considerable textual evidence in support of Benjamin’s notions about the genre. Yet, although it would appear to be a novel written after the transition outlined by Benjamin, part of Lord Jim’s narrative and thematic complexity derives from the way in which this multi-faceted cultural change is reflected in the movement of the discourse from repetitive, oral narrative (Marlow addressing his audience on the verandah) to written account (the letter to the privileged reader). The French lieutenant episode occupies an intermediate position in this process, as Marlow’s narrative authority here seems to be questioned by a mere fragment, an incomplete story imparted by a minor character. The effect of the passage is dependent on, and furthered by, perspectival variation. As perspective designates the act of narration and the point of orientation associated with that act, it incorporates a measure of narrative authority: that we are shown the events from a certain perspective implies that this perspective is given

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priority over other possible ones. In addition to covering the agent that performs the act of narration, however, perspective can also describe how a given event is perceived. As Mieke Bal has shown, perspective covers both the physical and the psychological points of perception (2009; 2017, 32). At this crucial stage of the narrative development of Lord Jim, Conrad activates both of these constituent aspects of perspective: both an act of narration and perception. Marlow characteristically combines these two perspectival functions, and so do other narrators in the novel, including the French lieutenant and Stein. One of Conrad’s most original, and thematically productive, narrative manoeuvres is performed when, later on in the narrative, he makes Marlow meet with the merchant Stein: Late in the evening I entered his study, after traversing an imposing but empty dining-room very dimly lit. The house was silent. I was preceded by an elderly, Javanese servant in a sort of livery of white jacket and yellow sarong, who after throwing the door open exclaimed low ‘O master’ and stepping aside, vanished in a mysterious way as though he had been a ghost only momentarily embodied for that particular service. Stein turned round with the chair, and in the same movement his spectacles seemed to get pushed up on his forehead. He welcomed me in his quiet and humorous voice. Only one corner of the vast room, the corner in which stood his writing-desk, was strongly lighted by a shaded reading-lamp, and the rest of the spacious apartment melted into shapeless gloom like a cavern. (Conrad 2012, 155)

The passage suggests an affinity of two narrative situations: that of Marlow and his narratees on the verandah and that of Marlow and Stein in the latter’s study. Significantly, in both situations the light is dim, the mood pensive, and time ample, thus granting Marlow the possibility of remembering Jim “in detail and audibly” (30). In contrast to most of Marlow’s other informants, Stein bears no relation to Jim on the level of plot. This makes him, of course, dependent on Marlow’s account, which, though detailed, is unavoidably incomplete and subjective. Thus, the importance of the narrative situation is further accentuated, and the possibility of a new beginning is blended with, if not exactly qualified by, elements of repetition. Having listened to Marlow, Stein responds by diagnosing Jim as “romantic” (Conrad 2012, 161) and suggests the possible remedy of Patusan. Trusting Stein, Marlow passes on Stein’s suggestion to Jim, who follows it. That the consequences will prove disastrous is of course something neither Marlow nor Stein can know at the time; and, on a second reading, there is the implication that Jim, retreating further and further east, would have failed whatever he tried to do. In the narrative web of the novel, Stein’s direct characterisation of Jim as “romantic” is related to the epigraph from Novalis. Marlow comments that “[h]is history was curious” (156). It is as though Marlow’s curiosity is extended to include not only Jim but also Stein, and there is a sense in which Marlow’s account of Stein’s background in chapter twenty echoes the third-person’s introduction to Jim in chapter one. Both narrative presentations put emphasis on past experiences, and both suggest there is a significant, though typically indirect and frequently confusing, connection between what

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we have done and been in the past and the question, as Stein puts it, of “how to be” (161). I use the plural form of the first-person pronoun advisedly in order to indicate that, at a different yet related level, a subtle form of repetition is involved here concerning the relationship of fiction and autobiography. Clearly, Lord Jim is a work of fiction, and should be approached and read as such. Yet to make this point is not to claim that this novel contains no autobiographical elements. It certainly does, and they are possibly more striking in chapter twenty than anywhere else in Lord Jim. Although we need to proceed with caution here, it is hardly coincidental that both Jim and Stein are exiles, as was Conrad; nor is it a coincidence that Stein, like Conrad’s father Apollo, “had taken an active part” (156) in a revolutionary movement. It is partly because of autobiographical elements like these that the narrative discourse of Lord Jim is imbued with a sustained moral urgency seldom encountered in fiction. I have noted that Marlow’s oral narrative is introduced, and framed, by thirdperson narration. Towards the end of the novel the third-person narrator, who in chapters 5–35 has been relaying Marlow’s story about Jim to his narratees, and thus also to the reader, returns: With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret; but there was only one man of all these listeners who was ever to hear the last word of the story. It came to him at home more than two years later, and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in Marlow’s upright and angular handwriting. The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then, laying it down, went to the window. His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes of glass as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse. (Conrad 2012, 254)

Linking this passage to that which introduces the narrative situation with Marlow addressing his narrates on the verandah, I find that they are remarkably similar yet also strikingly different. Both are told by a third-person narrator, and the atmosphere of this narrative situation is also evocative, almost magic. This dreamy atmosphere is generated through an aesthetically productive combination of syntax, punctuation, and key words such as “seemed” and “impression.” Thus there is a significant link between this passage and the third-person’s description of the Patna moving across the Indian ocean. Both passages are illustrative examples of the “epistemology of temporality” (Peters 2001, 95) which can be extrapolated from Conrad’s fiction and which in both passages is virtually inseparable from his presentation of space. Yet although “the privileged man” was one of Marlow’s listeners on the verandah, he is now alone in the “flat of a lofty building” (Conrad 2012, 254). It is as

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though Conrad, attempting to conclude his story of Jim, has moved the narrative situation of teller and listeners on the verandah to a different kind of narrative situation which reflects the isolation of the modern reader – and, by implication, the modern writer. Relating this narrative manoeuvre to Benjamin’s notion of the novelist as a “solitary individual” (1979, 87), we could, appropriating the terms of Ferdinand Tönnies, consider this new situation as part of an urban Gesellschaft (society) rather than a Gemeinschaft (community) in which communication is conducted orally. The way Conrad uses narrative to subtly indicate this complex historical and cultural change is a main reason why critics have increasingly considered Lord Jim as a key text in early European modernism. Building on and yet disrupting the form of the nineteenth-century realist novel (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology), and questioning its assumptions about reality, Conrad insistently explores, in remarkably innovative fashion, the enigma of Jim not just by making him fail his test as first mate aboard the Patna but also by making his character traits, his ethos as a modern figure, utterly dependent on the presentation of the narrative. As a result of this process, Marlow does not only become a second main character; as the main narrator in the novel, he depends on information about Jim imparted by a series of narrators who also, through the act of telling, become important characters who illustrate aspects of Jim’s – and modern man’s – ethical obligations when tested under difficult circumstances and with limited time to decide which choices to make and what action to engage in.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Aesthetically, Lord Jim is as sophisticated as, and possibly more distinctly modernist than, Heart of Darkness. At the same time, there is broad critical consensus that Lord Jim is anchored in, and proceeds from, nineteenth-century fiction (Watt 1980; Stape 1996; Knowles and Moore 2000). Conrad’s combination of epic sub-genres illustrates this kind of transitional movement. It is the combination and repetition of aspects of different genres that, as the narrative slowly progresses, become constituent elements of a novelistic project motivated by Conrad’s literary ambition to give a nuanced presentation of Jim. I have attempted to show that Lord Jim can be fruitfully seen through a narratological perspective. Yet I have also tried to indicate that a narrative analysis of Lord Jim needs to be linked to considerations of genre and the transition from realist to modernist fiction. I conclude by adding three more critical perspectives that feature prominently in recent approaches to the novel. First, Lord Jim provides a rich illustration of the close connection, at this point in the history of the novel, between changes of literary form and developments in the visual arts. Critics have linked the

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novel’s impressionist qualities to a painter such as Monet (Watt 1980, 170), but the way Marlow’s sketch-like impressions of Jim further a new kind of fiction in which subjective, incomplete narratives verbally present what cannot be clearly seen also resembles the paintings of the early Edvard Munch (Bal 2017). Moreover, as John G. Peters has shown, “Conrad investigates all objects of consciousness, not just visually perceived objects” (2001, 31). Second, theoretical approaches within postcolonial studies have improved our understanding of how Lord Jim, as a sophisticated modernist novel, is implicated in the historical processes of European colonialism and Western imperialism (Said 1994, Francis 2015). Aspects of Jim’s ethos are marked by a kind of elitism that, underlying the imperialist project, is possessed of elements of racism. Moreover, neither Marlow as main narrator nor Conrad as implied author is free of racist attitudes. And yet the account of Jim’s fate in Patusan serves to make the presentation of race somewhat more nuanced; while Jim cannot avoid complicity, he is not aggressively racist the way Gentleman Brown is. This observation blends into a concluding point, which is to stress the ethical aspects of Lord Jim. The novel’s plot, and in large part its thematics as well, is prompted by, and revolves around, Jim’s jump from the Patna. Yet it is the narration that makes the ethics of Lord Jim so insistent and pervasive. Relayed through Marlow, ethical questions are asked to, and by, all the novel’s narrators and characters, including the third-person narrator. Moreover, the novel’s ethics absorb the reader, who, intrigued by the narrative, is inclined to ask: what would I have done if I were Jim? Can I be sure I would not have jumped? If I had jumped, what would or could I have done to rectify my mistake? That these questions cannot be easily answered is a strong indication of the novel’s insistent ethical dimension.

Bibliography Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Edvard & Emma Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic. Oslo: Munch Museum, 2017. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 3rd ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. London: Fontana, 1979. 83–109. Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Vol. 3. Ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: CUP, 1983. Conrad, Joseph. Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces. Ed. Zdzisław Najder. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim: A Tale. 1900. Ed. J. H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan II . Cambridge: CUP, 2012.

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Conrad, Joseph. “Tuan Jim: A Sketch.” Lord Jim: A Tale. Ed. Thomas C. Moser. New York: Norton, 1996. 283–290. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Francis, Andrew. “Postcolonial Conrad.” The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. 147–159. Hardenberg, Friedrich von [Novalis]. Das philosophische Werk I. Ed. Richard Samuel. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges. 1975. Vol. 2 of Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, eds. 6 vols. 1960–1999. Knowles, Owen, and Gene Moore. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Lothe, Jakob. “Conrad’s Lord Jim: Narrative and Genre.” Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre. Ed. Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, and James Phelan. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. 236–255. Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Miller, J. Hillis. Reading Conrad. Ed. John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2017. Miller, J. Hillis. “Should We Read Heart of Darkness?” Conrad in Africa: New Essays on Heart of Darkness. Ed. Attie de Lange and Gail Fincham. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. 21–33. Najder, Zdzisław. Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity. Cambridge: CUP, 1997. Najder, Zdzisław. Joseph Conrad: A Life. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. Peters, John G. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Eastern World. Cambridge: CUP, 1976. Stape, J. H., ed. “Lord Jim.” The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. 63–80. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society. Ed. José Harris. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980.

Further Reading Collits, Terry. Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire. New York: Routledge, 2005. Dryden, Linda. Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Jasanoff, Maya. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. London: William Collins, 2017. Kaplan, Carola M., Peter Lancelot Mallios, and Andrea White, eds. Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2005. Lothe, Jakob. “Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Fragment: Narrative, Genre, History.” Lord Jim de Joseph Conrad. Ed. Nathalie Martinière. Nantes: Éditions du Temps, 2002. 15–24. Lothe, Jakob. “Repetition in Conrad’s Lord Jim.” L’Époque Conradienne 30 (2004): 97–105. Numéro spécial: Lord Jim. Lothe, Jakob, Jeremy Hawthorn, and James Phelan, eds. Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. Simmons, Allan. Joseph Conrad in Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Stape, J. H., ed. The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: CUP, 2015.

U.C. Knoepflmacher

35 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1900–1901) Abstract: Kim builds on earlier Kipling texts that dramatised a perilous passage from boyhood and adolescence to the acquisition of a stable adult identity. Despite the inventiveness and variety of his short stories and poems, the writer who received the 1907 Nobel prize had struggled with the traditional form of the novel. But his creation of fictions that appealed to a dual audience of children and adults eventually led him to conceive an episodic novel rooted in recollections of the Indian sub-continent. Kim is a hybridic text whose Irish/Indian protagonist is a trilingual hybrid. The novel enlists this highly resourceful and worldly youngster in the other-worldly quest of an aged innocent. But despite the strong bond that unites Kim and the Lama who acts as his prime surrogate father, they remain in a binary opposition. The beatific priest and the youngster who has concealed his fealty to other masters are at odds. Kim may reactivate and reverse William Blake’s notion of the contrary states of innocence and experience, but it also looks forward to the irresolution of modernist fictions such as Ulysses or To the Lighthouse. Keywords: Hybridity, transculturalism, identity formation, religion, intertextuality

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment When Rudyard Kipling received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, he became England’s first winner of the award. As a precocious journalist and poet, Kipling had quickly gained a wider audience after collecting his verses in Departmental Ditties (1886) and Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). But he was primarily acclaimed for the short stories reprinted in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Life’s Handicap (1891), Many Inventions (1893), The Day’s Work (1898), Traffics and Discoveries (1904), and his tales for and about children such as those in the two Jungle Books (1894 and 1895), Stalky & Co. (1899), Just So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). The success of Kim (1900–1901) may have contributed to the Nobel Prize selection committee’s choice. But Kipling’s previous attempts to write a sustained narrative were less memorable than his compact poems and short fictions. He had destroyed the manuscript of a long novel set in India, Mother Maturin, before presenting American and British readers with two different versions of a Künstlerroman, The Light That Failed (1891). That work, which featured an artist’s vain efforts to persuade a female painter to convert their childhood symbiosis into a romantic relationship, was followed by two very different attempts to chart a young male’s maturation. Whereas Captains Courageous (1897) dramatised a pampered boy’s growth among https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-036

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Massachusetts fishermen, a new Jungle Book (1897) rearranged all existing Mowgli stories into a chronological sequence that begins with the toddler’s adoption by Mother Wolf and concludes with his exaltation as a mysterious young man who carries his teenage bride into the forest. Like the older Henry James and like many younger transatlantic British and American writers of the early twentieth century, Kipling profited from his multicultural background. Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1865, ‘Ruddy’ fiercely clung to his early memories of India during his school years in England from 1871 to 1882. Back in Lahore as a seventeen-year-old (the age that Kimball O’Hara attains by the end of Kim), Kipling helped edit the Civil and Military Gazette before moving to Allahabad in 1887 where, as a reporter for the Pioneer, he continued to perfect his grasp of a polyglot subcontinent’s infinite variety. His skill as a ventriloquist who could mimic the voices of highly divergent characters was soon hailed as ‘Shakespearean’. By March 1889, Kipling was ready to return to England. Yet only a few months before his departure, he revisited the trauma of being left there by his parents in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” an autobiographical narrative that dramatised the abandonment felt by a little boy and his equally unsuspecting younger sister as boarders at the English home of an abusive surrogate mother. Still acting as a correspondent for the Pioneer, Kipling chose to take a long Eastern detour before reaching England. His protracted journey allowed him to regale his Anglo-Indian readers with vivid impressions of Burma (Myanmar), Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. But the dispatches from his transcontinental journey from California to Connecticut (where he met and interviewed Mark Twain) also recorded the ethnographic variety of the country in which Kipling would soon settle. Despite the young writer’s success in London’s literary circles, where he was wooed by publishers and befriended by James, Rider Haggard, Edmund Gosse, and Thomas Hardy, he portrayed himself as a “fog-bound exile howling for Sunlight” (Kipling 1986, 470) in a poem sent to his old Indian outlets, the Gazette and the Pioneer. In January of 1892, back in London after a series of short trips to Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, Kipling suddenly married Caroline Balestier, the sister of a young American he had helped write an adventure book, The Naulahka: A Tale of Two Continents. The newlyweds moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where they built a splendid home and welcomed their first two daughters, Josephine and Elsie. Fatherhood, so thematically crucial a component of Kim, vitalised Kipling’s creativity during his years in Vermont. Shortly after his arrival in America, he was approached by Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine with a worldwide circulation. He had already published the animal fable of “The White Seal” elsewhere but promised to offer all future tales to St. Nicholas. After submitting two tales set in India, he proposed one about a “small boy who got a blessing and a ghost-dagger from a Thibetan lama who came down from Thibet in search of a miraculous river that washed away all sin” (Kipling 1990b, 62). This “old, old priest with his priestly tam o’shanter and the young English child” would

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jointly go “hunting” for that river (62). Although most Jungle Book stories appeared in St. Nicholas, the adventures of a Tibetan Lama and an English child were put aside, though discussed with Kipling’s father, who eventually played a significant role in the creation of Kim. Kipling left the United States in 1896 after a painful family dispute had brought swarms of reporters to his rural haven. Back in England, where his son John was born in 1897, he published collections of recent stories and earlier travel sketches. A return to America in 1899 ended tragically after a freezing transatlantic passage. Although Kipling recovered from a life-threatening lung infection, his daughter Josephine died in a New York hospital. Appearing a year after Kim, the playful, global animal tales of Just So Stories for Little Children paid a joint tribute to his first born ‘American maiden’ and to her siblings, the child-auditors of Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies (1910). But the resurrected ghosts who address this pair dwell on the losses, sacrifices, and displacements of Britain’s strife-ridden historical past. Kipling’s disenchantment with a seemingly chaotic America and with the failures of the 1899–1902 Boer War he had witnessed, turned a cosmopolitan author into a nationalist. His ideology was hardened further by the 1914–1918 Great War that claimed his eighteen-year-old son. Although his inventiveness was unabated, his battlefield dispatches, elegiac war poems, and powerful stories such as “Mary Postgate” (1915), “The Janeites” (1924) and “The Gardener” (1926) mix anger with sadness. Less popular than he had been, Kipling struck a post-war generation as an alarmist reactionary. But the writer, who immediately stopped using the Sanskrit swastika as a personal icon when it became a Nazi emblem, gloomily predicted the advent of a devastating Second World War. After dying of an internal bleeding, he was buried at Westminster Abbey on 23 January 1936. His memoir Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown, appeared posthumously in 1937.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns In the year before his death, Rudyard Kipling proudly noted that Kim “stood up” well in the thirty-five years that had passed since its publication (1990c, 84). He had let the story sit for a long time after having had a “vague notion” that its central character might be an Irish boy, born in India and mixed up with native life. I went as far as to make him the son of a private in an Irish Battalion, and christened him ‘Kim of the ‘Rishti’ – short, that is, for Irish. This done, I felt like Mr. Micawber that I had as good as paid that I.O.U. on the future, and went after other things for some years. (1990c, 81)

The allusion to Mr. Micawber, the ever-hopeful character in Dickens’s David Copperfield may be less casual than it seems: after all, Kipling’s novel feeds on

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the forward-looking optimism of a protagonist propelled from childhood naiveté towards maturity. Generically, Kim is as hybridic as its Irish-Indian protagonist or as the book’s fusion of other ethnicities. Often read as “a spy thriller” or as “an imperialist adventure tale with a boy-hero” (Sullivan 1993, 148; Brantlinger 2011, 126), the novel primarily blends two major literary modes. Kim’s transformation from gifted picaroon into a crafty spy is charted as a Bildungsroman (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology), the form Victorian novelists such as Dickens, Thackeray, the three Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy had perfected. But by counterpointing the different quests of young Kim and the “old, old” Tibetan Lama (whose joint journey he already had mentioned to Mrs. Dodge [Kipling 1990b, 62]), Kipling also adopts the picaresque form first introduced by sixteenth-century Spanish writers, developed further by the eighteenth-century British novelists such as Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett, and revitalised by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn (1884). The stop-and-go forward movements of Kim as a reality-oriented Sancho and Teshoo Lama as an idealist Don Quixote also allowed Kipling to make good use of the travel sketch, a format which he had refined as an itinerant reporter in India. As central character of a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman, the parentless Kim O’Hara possesses a resilience and inventiveness that make him markedly different from his fellow orphans in the Victorian novel, abused waifs such as Dickens’s Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Esther Summerson (↗ 16 Charles Dickens, Bleak House); Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff (↗ 11 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights); Hardy’s Jude Fawley (↗ 30 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure); or Kipling’s own Dick Heldar, the selfmaiming protagonist of The Light That Failed. As a boy, Kim already possesses many of his creator’s powers. He shares Kipling’s metamorphic capacity to assume multiple guises and identities; has a multilingual command of Hindi, Urdu, and English; and is able to interpret the significance of details others would overlook. Initially as illiterate as the boy Punch in Kipling’s far more overtly autobiographical “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” Kim soon benefits from an English education that, according to the Lama, should set him “on the road to much honour as a scribe” (Kipling 2002, 161). But by that point in the novel, Kim has grown far beyond the native letter writer he had hired to transcribe messages he could not write on his own. Trained to record all observations before passing them on to his superiors in the secret service, he has become a sleuth. Like the teenage Anglo-Indian reporter who became a poet and fiction-maker, this scrivener ferrets out clues and is adept in the art of lying. Kim tells the Lama that his services as “scribe” are still in the future and that he remains “all free” to serve his former master (161). But as an imperial servant who will use the old man as a convenient decoy, Kim is hardly free. Although the pacifist monk benignly assumes that a scribe cannot become a “warrior,” his protégée already serves a war-machine (161). By the end of the novel, Kim must still sort out his conflicting allegiances. Yet Kim’s search for an identity that can reconcile his European and Indian selves is linked to the Lama’s own search for a mythical river whose waters might

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liberate him from the corruptions and temptations of an ever-gyrating Wheel of Life. Set in motion at the end of the novel’s crowded first chapter, the joint and separate journeys the two characters undertake will convert the reader into a mesmerised fellow tourist. The attractions of the unexpected encounters that lie ahead often outweigh our involvement in the account of Kim’s maturation, for the novel’s movement through its diverse settings frees it from steadily unfolding a continuous plot. Kipling conceded that his aims could not have been carried out without the adoption of the picaresque form: “what was good enough for Cervantes” would work for him (Kipling 1990c, 82). Having amassed a hoard of ethnographic detail, he and his father, John Lockwood Kipling, had become overwhelmed by an “opulence of detail.” That surfeit (still noticeable in the novel’s densely cluttered first chapter) demanded severe cuts. Since both men knew “every step, sight, and smell” and “all the persons” the Lama and Kim would meet, the story could move through a well-trodden terrain, although Kipling’s mother somewhat sarcastically noted that “hiding behind Cervantes” only perpetuated her son’s inability “to make a plot” (82). The pauses in the plot’s progression, however, enlist Kipling’s early mastery of the art of the travel sketch. A year before Kim’s serialisation, he had gathered the 1887–1889 vignettes written for Indian newspapers in the two-volume From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (1899). Set in different localities and at different times, these sketches can easily be read out of sequence. In Kim, however, the diversity of sects, customs, and creeds that Kim and the Lama will meet are integral to the reader’s own educational journey. Even spellbinding episodes, such as the paranormal experiences featured in chapters nine and ten, are not detachable.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies At the end of Kipling’s autobiographical “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” the mother who tries to kiss her son after more than five years of separation is deeply distrusted by Punch, now known as “Black Sheep.” Having been abused for half of his early life by Aunty Rosa, a woefully deficient mother-surrogate, the boy is understandably suspicious of this “young, frivolously young, and beautiful” Mamma (Kipling 1990a: 163). As she bends over Punch’s bed, he flings up his right arm: “It wasn’t fair to come and hit him in the dark. Even Aunty Rosa never tried that. But no blow followed” (163). Although Kipling here may have borrowed an incident from Mark Twain’s 1881 The Prince and the Pauper, he insisted on its biographical veracity in the first chapter of Something of Myself when he claimed that “the Mother” herself later told him “that when she first came up to my room to kiss me goodnight, I flung up an arm to guard off the cuff I had been trained to expect” (1990c, 12). The ensuing reconciliation of mother and son is undercut by a narrator who injects misgivings that continued to preoccupy Kipling. When Punch assures his little

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sister that “we are just as much Mother’s as if she had never gone,” his optimism is subverted by an ominously pessimistic voice: “Not altogether, O Punch, for when young lips have drunk deeply of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge” (Kipling 1990a, 164). In the fictions that followed this story, Kipling sought remedies for the harm caused by the absence or by the neglect of biological parents. In the Jungle Books, the Indian toddler who has no memory of his woodcutter parents finds a host of caring substitutes. Educated by the loving animal patriarchs who oversee his gradual elevation as their king, Mowgli also is adored by two rival adoptive mothers: both Raksha, the fierce wolf who names the baby boy she tenderly nurses, and Messua, the woman who teaches the youngster the language of the treacherous villagers he will defeat, claim him as their son. Yet, as an adult, Mowgli wants to be sexually confirmed by a mate of his own species. The young girl in a white sari he glimpses in “Spring Running,” the last story of the second Jungle Book, eventually became Messua’s daughter and his bride in The Jungle Play (2000), a never-performed drama discovered and published by Thomas Pinney. Rather than rely on the fantasy of a wolf boy schooled by beasts, Kipling’s two Bildungsromane deal more realistically with a young male’s predicament. An oppressive foster mother reappears in the first chapter of The Light that Failed, where Mrs. Jennett not only thwarts Dick Heldar but also seems responsible for the deformation of Maisie, the boy’s fellow orphan. Repudiated by this young woman later in their lives, Heldar relies on the recognition he receives from a fraternity of London artists and writers. Wounded and blinded, the young man rejects an offer to be nursed as a son by Madame Binat, the owner of a seedy saloon, before dying in the arms of his best male friend. He never regains the female validation he had once received from “a sort of Negroid-Jewess Cuban” on board of a ship (Kipling 1992, 98). No such confirmation from the opposite sex, however, is required by the fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne in Captains Courageous. Although deficient parenting by a neurotic mother and an absentee father has malformed this boy, he is altered by the education he receives aboard the schooner We’re Here. If a male community could not sustain Dick Heldar, the ship’s multi-ethnic crew allows Harvey to feel “like the most ancient of mariners” (Kipling 2008, 155). The bond between the ship’s captain Disko Troop and his son Dan will be emulated by Harvey’s own father when he reclaims his boy in a happy ending denied to Punch in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.” While the boy’s incessantly sobbing mother has to be “babied” by Mrs. Troop, his father honours Harvey’s rescuers by furthering the careers of Dan and of the “coal-black” cook who had correctly prophesied the novel’s outcome (Kipling 2008,156). Although Kim is as motherless as Mowgli or Dick Heldar, the “keen-eyed threeyear-old baby,” reared by an opium-smoking “half-caste woman who looked after him,” has had little need for maternal nurturance or for later validation by young women (Kipling 2002, 4, 3). Dropped from the novel after its first pages, this nameless

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caretaker is far less important than the Old Lady of Kulu, a provider who first appears in chapter four, reappears in chapter twelve, and finally nurses Kim back to health in the book’s last chapter. Unlike this grandmother, Kim’s earlier guardian merely acts as an executor for his dead father when she sews together documents he entrusted to her and slings them around the boy’s neck. Before his death, the elder Kimball O’Hara, a weepy, self-pitying opium addict, who fears having been forgotten by his former comrades of an Irish battalion, hopes that “some day” its commander might “attend to Kim” and ensure that the boy will be “better off than his father” (4). Most critics of Kim have noted that its protagonist’s transformation from a selfreliant street-urchin and artful dodger into a resourceful “scribe” is brought about by his interactions with “multiple father-figures” (Sullivan 1993, 148). It seems significant, however, that the first and foremost of these carefully differentiated figures, the Lama, should be associated with the artist-father his son credited for whatever “beauty” and “wisdom” readers might find in a novel that followed his “suggestions, memories, [and] confirmations” (Kipling 1990c, 84, 83). The kindly curator of the Lahore Museum, who provides his guest with photographs and maps, gives the Lama his own spectacles, and attentively listens to the monk’s account of the mythical “stream” into which a virginal Lord Buddha had shot an arrow, is none other than John Lockwood Kipling. As Kim later discovers, the Lama has often revisited the scholarly museum keeper he regards as a “Fountain of Wisdom” (Kipling 2002, 11, 12). Teshoo Lama, who is separated from his chela (disciple) during the boy’s long years of schooling, discovers from the Rissaldar, a veteran soldier, that Kim has not forgotten him. When the Rissaldar, who proudly embraced his own grown up son “as do father and son in the East” (Kipling 2002, 52), asks the monk whether he and Kim have permanently “parted” (141), the Lama’s reply barely conceals the pain their separation has caused: ‘Yes and no,’ the lama replied. ‘We – we have not altogether parted, but the time is not ripe that we should take the Road together. He acquires wisdom in another place. [. . .] ‘All one – but if it were not, the boy how did he come to speak so continually of thee?’ ‘And what said he?’ asked the lama eagerly. ‘Sweet words – an hundred thousand – that thou art his father and mother and such all. Pity that he does not take the Queen’s service. He is fearless.’ This news amazed the lama [. . .]. (141)

Irony and sentiment are neatly balanced in this exchange between the two aged innocents. Neither man knows that Kim is being groomed to take the Queen’s service. Nor are they aware that the boy’s new patriarchal masters, the secretive Colonel William Creighton and Mahbub Ali, the Afghan horse-trader, have prohibited Kim from continuing his summer travels with the Lama. Posing as a roving ethnographer, Creighton deceived the kindly Father Victor, to whom the Lama had entrusted Kim, into thinking that he merely wants the boy to serve him as a future surveyor.

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For his part, the “Sunni horse-dealer” (145) who regards Kim as his “son” (149) also tried to undermine the boy’s devotion to his Buddhist benefactor. But Mahbub Ali’s belittlement of his ascetic rival as nothing but “an old dreamer of dreams” cannot shake Kim’s proclamation of his ardent allegiance to “my lama” (122). The reader who knows about the boy’s decision to honour his “contract” with Creighton and Mahbub Ali thus is in a better position to speculate about Kim’s future than the two old naïfs (141). Although the Lama will be screened from the deceptions created by Kim’s conflicting loyalties, our awareness of that conflict sharpens the emotional impact of his joyous reception of the Rissaldar’s “sweet words” (141). We empathise with his continued belief that his bond with Kim will remain untarnished. Despite his elevation as the novel’s prime father-figure, the Lama’s anxieties resemble those which had plagued little Punch after he and his sister were separated from their parents. Described as resembling a trustful and guileless “child” (Kipling 2002, 14, 33), the monk himself concedes that “old folk are as children” (163). His single-minded pursuit of an Edenic site that might remove the last residues of his attachment to a material order are at odds with Kim’s extraordinary adaptive capacities. The Irish boy who fooled the Lama by turning into a “Hindu urchin in a dirty turban” during their second encounter will succumb to the treacherous reality the old man distrusts (16). Critics who read Kim as a novel of imperial empowerment that converts a shape-shifting boy into an “image of the colonizer” (Suleri 1992, 130) may underestimate the counterweight provided by the Lama’s retrospective quest for the recovery of an untarnished innocence. By financing Kim’s education, this wealthy abbot of a Tibetan monastery fulfils the role formerly discharged by philanthropic father-surrogates such as Fielding’s Squire Allworthy or Dickens’s Mr. Jarndyce, whose “benevolent presence” and “kind eyes” so overwhelmed the orphaned Esther Summerson (Dickens, 1977, 87). Unlike these secure landowners, however, the itinerant Lama is a seeker who must rely on the protection of his savvy chela during all their joint adventures on the road. The boy who fed him, sheltered him, and guarded him against thieves in the early chapters of Kim becomes a pistol-packing young adventurer who cannot slip into his former role after using the Lama as a screen for his mountain mission. Despite having earlier cured the feverish son of a young father, Kim now jeopardises the Lama’s health as well as his own. Although he nurses the injured father surrogate who has so patiently waited for him to come back, Kim is overwhelmed by the physical and psychological strain of their safe return. The role reversal offers an ironic new twist to William Wordsworth’s famous dictum that “The Child is father of the Man” (1966, 460). Among the materials Kipling “removed almost with tears” from the bulging first draft of Kim was “a half-chapter of the Lama sitting down in the blue-green shadows at the foot of a glacier, telling Kim stories out of the Jatakas,” the “beautiful” sixteenth-century fables that feature the Buddha’s previous incarnations (Kipling 1990c, 83). Yet, as Sandra Kemp has pointed out, the novelist retained one of those fables,

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the twenty-seventh Jataka (“Abhina Jataka”), “The Story of Constancy,” in order to stress the Lama’s belief in the time-transcending “idea of reincarnation” (1988, 32). Unlike Kim’s forward progression toward an integrated manhood, the Lama’s spiritual quest depends on the recovery of a previous existence. His attempt to reach the higher state of Nirvana requires a restoration of childhood’s lost unities. In the parable that rewards the constancy of a “fettered” elephant that nurtured “a day-old calf” whose “mother had died,” this “virtuous” elder is redeemed when the “very calf” he had saved turns out to be “none other” than Buddha, “The Lord Himself” (Kipling 2002, 140). In retelling this Jataka, the Lama seeks a precedent for his guardianship of the boy-orphan who may lead him to a site where his own fetters can be broken. In the 1895 tale of “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” Kipling had dramatised another pilgrim’s quest for Nirvana. The aged Brahmin whose mother was a “Hill-woman” from Kulu ascended the same “Himalaya-Thibet road” that the Lama and Kim will traverse (Kipling 1989, 195, 196). It seems significant that near the novel’s end, the Lama should find the mystic river he has been seeking without the assistance of his chela. His quest and Kim’s have bifurcated. Before collapsing physically and mentally, a weeping Kim will credit the old man for having taught him how “to love” (Kipling, 2002), 225. He begs the Lama to forgive “my many carelessnesses towards thee” and penitently berates himself for having failed his surrogate father: An hysterical catch rose in his throat. ‘I have walked thee too far: I have not picked good food always for thee; I have not considered the heat; I have talked to people on the road and left thee alone. . . . I have – I have . . . Hai mai! But I love thee . . . and it is all too late. . . . I was a child. . . . Oh, why was I not a man?’ Overcome by strain, fatigue, and the weight beyond his years, Kim broke down and sobbed at the lama’s feet. (Kipling 2002, 225)

It is indeed “all too late.” Although Kim’s avowal is sincere, the incompleteness of his confession precipitates the emotional breakdown that follows. Bound by his commitment to Creighton’s Secret Service, Kim cannot bring himself to admit what should come after his halting “I have – I have . . . .” He must suppress the ending of his sentence in order to conceal the gravest of his transgressions: his secret mission has led him to betray the Lama. He has exposed the unwitting old man to dangers which remain unacknowledged. Kim’s dual identity has produced unforeseen duplicities. Instead of asking himself “why was I not a man?”, this torn young realist might have lamented his inability to share the Lama’s faith in the “possibility for an eternal childhood” (Sullivan 1993, 148). A chastened Kim must also confront the discovery that he is not really the hero of a boy’s adventure book. Although he has obtained, and can pass on to his superiors, the “oilskin packet of letters” and the “locked books and diaries” of the “unEnglish” agents who tried to subvert Britain’s control of India (Kipling 2002, 228, 201), it is the clever and brave Hurree Chunder Mokerjee, who deserves credit for the successful completion of Kim’s first mission as a secret agent. Earlier in the

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novel, Kim’s trainer, Lurgan Sahib, had warned the “proud” boy not to underestimate “the Babu” (136). This seemingly cartoonish figure, he insisted, should be prized as one of the elect: “These souls are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best. Among these ten I count the Babu” (136). Kim’s mistake is replicated by the foreign agents when they cling to a demeaning caricature of the “always smiling Bengali, talking the best of English with the vilest of phrases” in an “ingratiating” way (197). Before being outwitted by Hurree, these contemptuous outsiders dismiss him as an emblem of “the monstrous hybridism” of a hopelessly divided “India in transition” (199). It hardly seems coincidental that Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, rather than Kim, should witness the Lama’s completion of his quest. Though opposites, he and the scholarly monk can easily be misread as simpletons. Whereas the Lama wants to disseminate his belief in an ancient theology, the “whale-like Babu” maintains that a study of French as well as of Herbert Spencer’s materialist social science and Wordsworth’s poetry are indispensable assets for any modern savant (Kipling 2002, 136). In honouring this Bengali intellectual’s “hybrid” interests, Kipling may well have tried to amend his youthful mockery of “the Chatterjees, Bannerjees, Mookerjees” in an early poem that had adopted a racial stereotype familiar to his Anglo-Indian readers (1986, 278). Lurgan Sahib’s endorsement of Hurree is significant, for the mysterious jeweller who can cook a “purely Persian meal” in a shop that holds “thousand of oddments” from all over Asia strikes Kim as being very different from the “imported” sahibs “from England” (Kipling 2002, 129). Based on an actual Simla shopkeeper, Alexander M. Jacob, this exotic outsider is as un-English a servant of the Queen as are “the Babu” and Mahbub Ali. His wizard-like skills resemble those of another strange foreigner whom Kipling credited for contributing to British ‘law’ in “The Treasure and the Law,” the last story of Puck of Pook’s Hill. Lurgan tests Kim’s fitness as a candidate for Creighton’s secret service by hypnotising the boy into believing that a jar that “had been smashed before his eyes” is restored to its unbroken shape (130). But Kim resists the sight of fused fragments. To relinquish his childish belief in magic, he forces himself to shift from “thinking in Hindi” by fastening on the English word “smashed – yess, smashed – not the native word, he would not think of that – but smashed,” and by clinging to a repetition of the multiplication tables he learned from his British school-masters (130). Although Kim successfully resists self-fragmentation in this scene and will, thereafter, think in English, the novel’s ending suggests that he cannot wholly expunge a yearning for the integrity of his Indian boyhood. Creighton’s secret agent, after all, also acts as an agent for the Anglo-Indian author who had mourned Punch’s loss of his childhood wholeness. To be sure, Kim has moved much farther than the blind and suicidal Dick Heldar or than Mowgli, the jungle cub who cannot become complete without a human mate. Whereas Heldar rejected Madame Binat’s offer to adopt and nurse him as her son, Kim gratefully accepts the ministrations of

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the old Sahiba of Kulu. He addresses her as “Mother” and confides that he never has had a mother of his own: “She died, they tell me, when I was young” (Kipling 2002, 230). Nor does Kim need the sexual validation that Mowgli and Heldar required. Having carried nightly “commissions” for “sleek and shiny young men,” he is highly familiar with “the sights and sounds of the women’s world” (5). He easily gains the “approval” (28) of the courtesans and teenage girls with whom he flirts while on the road. And his repudiation of the sexual advances of the tall Woman of Shamlegh, who orders her husbands to carry the Lama back to the lowlands, hardly stems from prudishness. Aware that this polygamous mountain-queen who bitterly recalls her failed romance with an Englishman assumes that he is a native little priestling, he reveals his identity as a Sahib. After wallowing in “self-pity” and feeling “unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things,” Kim’s “unnerved brain edge[s] away from the outside” (Kipling 2002, 234). He repeats the question he has asked himself several times before: he is Kim, and yet “what is Kim?” (234). The catharsis that ensues reconciles him to the solidity of a real world: He did not want to cry – had never felt less like crying in his life – but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, the houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true. (234)

When Kim staggers outside to fall asleep in the shadow of a cart, “Mother Earth” completes his rebirth by restoring “the poise he had lost lying so long on a cot cut off from her good currents” (235). His head lies “powerless upon her breast” and his hands are opened in a surrender “to her strength” (235). Yet this reconciliation with the maternal cannot resolve the dilemma posed by Kim’s devotion to the contrary father figures who awake him from his Adamic slumber. Still at odds, Mahbub Ali and the Lama now openly vie with each other. Will Kim “go forth as a teacher” of sacred texts, as the Lama expects (Kipling 2002, 236), or will he agree that he is “urgently needed as a scribe by the State,” as the redbearded horse dealer informs the “Old Red Hat” he dismisses as a “madman”? (237). After Mahbub leaves, the monk assumes the cross-legged posture of the “stone Bodhisat” at the Lahore Museum and recounts, at great length, the “marvel” of his transcendence and liberation. His airy account is thrice interrupted by Kim’s practical, down-to-earth questions. But the Lama hardly hears the “Son of my Soul” he is addressing (240). His are the novel’s last words. Critics who have assumed that Kim will remain an imperial agent tend to superimpose a finality on what remains an “unending” (Brantlinger 2011, 135). Kim cannot share the Lama’s apotheosis. But it is also unclear whether he will continue to serve as Creighton’s agent. John Lockwood Kipling’s last illustration for

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his son’s novel, a photographic reproduction of a clay-relief entitled “The End of the Search,” depicts the Lama’s ecstatic closure. The priest’s Buddha-like posture is enhanced by a halo produced by the arrested cart-wheel behind him. Close to death, he has mastered the Wheel of Life. Kim, however, looks longingly at the back of a retreating Mahbub Ali. The two months he spent traveling with the horse trader were the happiest of his young life. To Creighton those sixty days were “altogether wasted” (Kipling 2002, 124), but for a Kim who had not yet been inducted as an agent, “all was pure delight” (123). Like Kipling, he is in love with India’s diversity: “A fair land – a most beautiful land is this of Hind” (124). Might the ‘scribe’ who now commands English be able to imitate the writer who spoke his Indian ayah’s tongue before mastering his mother-language? If so, Kim may not only try to mimic “the voices of a thousand water channels” or “the chatter of the monkeys” (124), but also be equipped to reproduce, as Kipling did, the multivocal polyphony of the land in which both he and his creator were born.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Kim was still appearing in serial form when Queen Victoria died in January of 1901. Like Joseph Conrad’s 1900 Lord Jim (↗ 34 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim), the book can thus be read both as the last major Victorian novel and as a proto-modernist text. Both Jim and Kim, those monosyllabically-named young men, are seen as ‘us’ by cosmopolitan elders (Stein and Lurgan) who induct them into a transnational community. But unlike the Polish-French writer who perfected his English late in life, Kipling’s British education and colonial apprenticeship led his readers to regard him as an advocate of Victoria’s vast empire (↗ 7 Empire – Economy – Materiality). Written on the occasion of the queen’s diamond jubilee, his 1897 poem “Recessional” was enthusiastically received by two contrary readerships: whereas liberals and radicals hailed it as an attack on the excesses of British colonialism, “more vocal” and conservative “patriots” prized it as “a proper rebuke” of the unspiritual materialism that had presumably infected the empire (Wilson 1978, 204). Two years later, as Kipling began to work on Kim, he remarked that ever “since people found out that I was putting two meanings into my work,” he had become less “accepted as a story-teller and rhymester” (Kipling 1990b, 357). “The Two-Sided Man” – the poem he used as an epigraph for the novel’s eighth chapter – celebrates what English Romantics had called a ‘negative capability’, a writer’s ability to keep opposites in check: “Something I owe to the soil that grew – / More to the life that fed – / But most to Allah Who gave me two / Separate sides to my head” (Kipling 2002, 111). The early responses to Kim bear out Kipling’s awareness that his readers expected a single-mindedness he was unwilling to deliver. Both positive and negative reviews failed to engage with a “complexity and ambivalence” (Booth 2011, 2) best

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understood by later creative writers such as Randall Jarrell, André Gide, Jorge Luis Borges, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Salman Rushdie. Reviewers praising the book in 1901 welcomed the “wonderful” (Kipling 2002, 285) panoramic depiction of the “great Peninsula” (284) that only a writer who did “so much for the maintenance of our Empire” (283) could have produced. By way of contrast, dissenters cruelly ridiculed Kipling’s vain attempt to rake “through the cinders of his youth” in order to revive an “irrevocably gone” fire (286). Though far more sophisticated in their approaches, twentieth-century critics of Kim often superimposed dialectic binaries on a text that keeps opposites in suspension. By upholding extra-textual coordinates over authorial agency, such analyses – whether post-colonial, Foucauldian, or psychoanalytical – try to resolve conflicts that the novel keeps unresolved. Kim acquired a new relevance in the aftermath of India’s independence and the creation of Pakistan. More recently, after Russia’s failed intervention in Afghanistan and the West’s vain attempts to democratise Iraq, the novel became highly topical. But to convert Kim into a prescient socialpolitical text or to lash it retrospectively for failing to honour Indian resistance against European ‘subjugation’ only revives a disregard for its two-sidedness. Even Edward Said fell into this trap by condemning Kipling for aestheticising “British imperialism” and by denouncing any reader who succumbed to the text’s pleasures by accepting its “obfuscatory end” (1987, 45). Said’s lengthy 1987 introduction to the Penguin edition of Kim was incorporated into his influential 1993 Culture and Imperialism. Indebted to that work and to Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonial criticism, Don Randall’s Kipling’s Imperial Boy, contends that in Kim, as well as in Jungle Books and Stalky & Co, “Kipling functions as a reassuring myth-maker for a British Empire that must consolidate itself in the face of contestation and resistance” (2000, 161). Although Randall cites Sara Suleri’s wider-ranging The Rhetoric of English India, he fails to engage with her thoughtprovoking chapter on Kim. In a pessimistic reading of the novel’s ending, Suleri suggests that Kipling mutes Kim because the boy’s colonial education has forever “silenced his voice” (1992, 131). Zoreh T. Sullivan’s more innovative Narratives of Empire subjects Kim to a Lacanian reading by casting Kim’s conflict as a collision between the levels of the Symbolic and Imaginary and concluding that his yearning “to belong to a primal family” is voided upon his entry “as an alienated adult” into “the bitter heritage of his dead father” (1993, 175). Her reinstatement of the relation between author and text as well as her close attention to the novel’s texture are assets put to good use in her fine Norton edition of Kim. The vexed question of how to read the novel’s ending is given a new twist by Matthew Fellion in “Knowing Kim, Knowing in Kim,” a reading of the novel as the deliberately “inconclusive conflict that Mikhail Bakhtin calls “‘dialogue’” (2013, 897). Kim is now seen as a novel that offers us “an encounter with the challenges of knowing” (Fellion 2013, 910).

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Finally, William B. Dillingham’s Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism stands out for placing Kim within a continuum of close readings of Kipling’s poems, essays, short stories, and longer works of fiction. Pairing Kim with Stalky & Co., Dillingham takes a positive view of the “Great Game” Kim will play: the costumes, disguises, and ingenuity of the three schoolboys in Stalky are adopted on a larger “international stage” by a “brotherhood” dedicated to “the heroic life” (2005, 240). That fraternity feeds on anachronisms which ideological critics too often want to remove. For Dillingham, Kim anticipates later fictions such as “The Janeites,” the 1924 story in which Masonic survivors of the 1914–1918 trench war are united by their love of Jane Austen. Kipling’s “writerly capacity for sympathy with opposite or different identities” (Montefiore 2007, 3) is essential for an understanding of his work. The Lama’s chela resists a reconstitution of Lurgan’s shattered urn. But by attaching Kim to a great variety of Kipling texts as well as by linking it to later novels such as Ulysses and To the Lighthouse, patient readers of the novel can defy fragmentation and recover larger wholes. Only connect.

Bibliography Works Cited Booth, Howard J. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: CUP, 2011. 1–6. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Kim.” The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling. Ed. Howard J. Booth. Cambridge: CUP, 2011. 126–140. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod. New York: Norton, 1977. Dillingham, William B. Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Fellion, Matthew. “Knowing Kim, Knowing in Kim.” SEL. 53.4 (2013): 897–912. Kemp, Sandra. Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Kipling, Rudyard. “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.” 1888. Something of Myself and other Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: CUP, 1990a. 135–172. Kipling, Rudyard. Captains Courageous. 1897. Ed. Leonee Ormond. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Kipling, Rudyard. Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879–1998: Unpublished, Uncollected, and Rarely Collected Poems. Ed. Andrew Rutherford. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Books. Ed. Daniel Karlin. London: Penguin, 1989. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Play. Ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Penguin, 2000. Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. Ed. Zoreh T. Sullivan. New York: Norton, 2002. Kipling, Rudyard. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. 2. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1990b. Kipling, Rudyard. The Light that Failed. 1891. Ed. John Lyon. London: Penguin, 1992. Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself. 1937. Something of Myself and other Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: CUP, 1990c. 3–134. Montefiore, Jan. Rudyard Kipling. Tavistock: Northcote, 2007.

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Randall, Don. Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Said, Edward. Introduction. Kim. By Rudyard Kipling. London: Penguin, 1987, 7–46. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Sullivan, Zoreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: CUP, 1993. Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. New York: Viking, 1978. Wordsworth, William. “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Poetical Works. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: OUP, 1966, 460–462.

Further Reading Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Penguin, 1986. Crook, Nora. Kipling’s Myths of Love and Death. London: Macmillan, 1990. Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. Jarrell, Randall. “On Preparing to Read Kipling.” Kipling, Auden, & Co.: Essays and Reviews 1935–1964. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Karlin, Daniel, ed. Rudyard Kipling. London: OUP, 1999. Kipling, J. Lockwood. Beast and Man in India. London: Macmillan, 1921. Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999. Mallett, Phillip, ed. Kipling Considered. London: Macmillan, 1989. Orel, Harold, ed. Kipling: Interviews and Recollections. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1983. Pinney, Thomas, ed. Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches: 1884–88. New York: Schocken, 1986. Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Tompkins, J. M. S. The Art of Rudyard Kipling. London: Methuen, 1965. Young, W. Arthur, and John H. McGivering. A Kipling Dictionary. London: Macmillan, 1967.

Ruth Parkin-Gounelas

36 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903) Abstract: The full title that Samuel Butler gave his posthumously-published novel, Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh: A Story of English Domestic Life (1903), reflects its triple emphasis: on the individual (Ernest Pontifex), its specific sociocultural determinants (English domestic life), and what is shared by all human “flesh” – instincts and desires. Shifting focus constantly, the novel requires an agile reading strategy, further skewed by irony at every level. This chapter reads the novel from the point of view of Butler’s conflictual engagement with English middle-class culture (the family, gender norms, education, religion, science) in the last decades of the nineteenth century, focusing on the way it employs at least five (all ultimately unreliable) narrative voices. This structure, it is argued, reflects Butler’s knowing representation of the vicissitudes of the human psyche as it seeks to integrate an imaginary ‘self’ into the symbolic order. Keywords: Unreliable narrative, symbolic order, evolutionary psychology, homoerotic, anti-sentimentalism

1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment Unlike some authors who seem to have a timeless quality to them, Butler has tended to fall rather dramatically in and out of favour in the 150 or so years since he began writing. The most dramatic of these alternating peaks and troughs came soon after his death in 1902 and the publication of his long-suppressed novel The Way of All Flesh (1903), when he suddenly began to be hailed as a major spokesperson for the liberation from Victorian values. During his lifetime, he had acquired a bad reputation in many circles for his sometimes underhand attacks on established religious, scientific, and philological positions and was mostly snubbed. Given the controversial nature of Butler’s temperament and ideas, today’s opinions of his work will be as specific to their historical moment as they have been in the past. Butler was born into a comfortably-off clerical family with upwardly mobile aspirations. His grandfather, about whom he was later to write a biography, had been Bishop of Lichfield and headmaster of Shrewsbury school, and the model of impeccable clerical and academic credentials was instilled into the young boy from the start as the only way forward. Growing up in his father’s rural parish in Nottinghamshire, Butler had little opportunity for rebellion: he was to make up for this in his early twenties. Until then he attended Shrewsbury school, then St. John’s College, Cambridge, where https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-037

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the main focus was on the classics. Although in later years he lived a sedate bachelor existence, Butler’s biography became synonymous with rebellion with the publication of The Way of All Flesh, which makes little attempt to disguise the autobiographical details of his early life. His life and his work, via the novel, have been conflated in his reputation. Attempting to disentangle them, in fact, has become a paradigmatic exercise in dealing with the so-called phenomenon of ‘biographical reductionism’. But as with James Joyce, Butler’s fiction was at its best when he kept to what he knew at first hand, and for him the overwhelming experience of his life was his troubled relationship with his father and, more generally, the tensions within the family of a Church of England clergyman. His life (1835–1902) spanned almost exactly the years of Victoria’s reign (1837–1901), so that to follow his progress at both private and public levels, as both son and intellectual polemicist, is to move through a broad sweep of the period along with its multi-faceted orientations. Butler was to engage with many of these; his most influential insights, however, come from his analysis of the Victorian family. The full title Butler gave the novel, Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh: A Story of English Domestic Life, reflects this emphasis and highlights the text’s double focus on the individual (Ernest Pontifex) and the general (“the way of all flesh”). From inside the suffering mind to its implications for the period and culture more generally, the book shifts attention constantly and requires an agile reading strategy. In his own day, Butler was known as a satirist, someone who said one thing but probably meant another. His first novel, Erewhon (1872), turned things back to front (the title is the reverse of ‘nowhere’), giving him the opportunity to destabilise accepted assumptions by testing out the validity of their opposite. Erewhon is a fictional version of the South Island in New Zealand, where, after refusing to be ordained, Butler had gone to make money in sheep farming (1859–1864). Casting off the stranglehold of his parents by sailing to the opposite side of the earth liberated Butler to imagine a radical reversal of everything he had left behind. Unlike in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), however, in the land of Erewhon the reversals are far from neat or consistent and the reader is often left wondering what is being satirised. It is fairly clear that Butler despises many of the theological and ethical assumptions of Victorian England, such as the primacy of ‘original sin’, the arrogance of Christian proselytism, and the repressions of the education system. But what about the implied critique of the system of criminal justice in the Erewhonian practice of severe punishment for illness and mere ‘straightening’ (a form of counselling or psychoanalysis) for crimes like embezzlement? With Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) it is quite clear that what we are dealing with is a straight-faced satire on heartless attitudes to the poor. With Butler it is less straightforward: we know that he admired good health and good looks – Towneley in The Way of All Flesh is the embodiment of this. But did Butler really mean that achieving this must involve the punishment of the sick? As readers we are left to make up our own minds.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Erewhon, an ambivalently utopian and dystopian tale of an encounter with a fictional land, has remained a thought-provoking book with considerable relevance for our own age. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend, part of its profundity stems from this very ambivalence, its refusal to countenance either the mechanist or the vitalist position (2004, 312), pitched as it is at the centre of debates over evolution and technology. Butler had responded enthusiastically to Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and published a pro and contra dialogue on it in a New Zealand newspaper in 1862. The following year, “Darwin Among the Machines” presented a playful argument, later espoused by the Erewhonians, that machines are dangerous in that they too evolve over time and have developed powers of self-regulation such that they will be able to reproduce themselves one day. Although Butler was here characteristically hovering on the edge of satire, this time on technophobia (Gounelas 1981, 25–27), the force of his conclusion rings loud today amidst claims being made by scientists of the Technological Singularity that artificial intelligence is developing at such a rate that it will one day, (perhaps as early as 2045), result in a self-producing superintelligence that will surpass all human intelligence. Looking back on Butler’s involvement in evolution debates, George Orwell wrote in the mid-1940s that, although Butler’s obsession with the distinction between Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution now seems unimportant, at least to non-biologists, his insight into the impact of technology on the “physical organisation” of different humans is more relevant than ever (1968, 188). People who can take a boat to New Zealand should be regarded as belonging to a different category than those who have only their legs for transport – or, as Butler put it, “he who can tack a portion of one of the P. & O. boats on to his identity is a much more highly organised being than one who cannot” (1919, 52). The difference, in other words, between the rich and the poor is the only one of any significance within the human species. Such insights, Orwell observed wryly, almost make a Marxist out of Butler, for all his political conservatism (1968, 188). Butler’s view of the family was another integral part of his response to evolution. His negative experiences as a child and young man enabled him to cast off sentimentality more easily than most and subsequently to examine the inter-generational links with a sober biological eye. In an age which had idealised home and hearth, with ‘woman’ as the ‘angel’ at its centre, Butler set about exploring individual psychology in new ways by presenting the point of view of four generations of the Pontifex family, one after the other, and tracing the way harsh treatment can lead to resentment which, in turn, can lead to radical rebellion in the fourth generation. With this process, which could be called psycho-sociological in its constant search for root causes of conflict within the nuclear family, Butler succeeds in apportioning responsibility in more sophisticated ways than in earlier novels. Modern readers may be shocked by the, at times, savage expressions of mistrust and antipathy in The Way of All Flesh. As Graham Greene put it, the “savour of hatred” can be tasted and the

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“soreness of the unhealing wound” can be felt on the skin throughout the novel (1951, 126–127). Even Christianity, he continues, could not be considered dispassionately because it is the history of Father and Son (127). It is as if Butler wanted to shatter, once and for all, the myth of familial harmony and bliss and needed, in reaction, to do so with a sledge-hammer. Contemporary novelists such as Jeanette Winterson have applied similar energy to the demolition of the institution of the nuclear family, but with Winterson affection seeps through in the humour which, unlike Butler’s, has a partially reparatory effect. U. C. Knoepflmacher is right to point out that there is a seeming contradiction in The Way of All Flesh in that it both rejects the family bond and at the same time posits the inheritance of identity through the unity of ancestors and offspring (1970, 232). But perhaps this is less of a contradiction if we take into account a more psychoanalytic explanation, which posits the inevitability of the battle between father and son. Butler, in his own way, was in the vanguard of the psychoanalytic revolution which was about to take place at the end of the nineteenth century. Another closely related concern for Butler, one that he would return to repeatedly in his fiction and other writings, was education. Everyone who has read The Way of All Flesh remembers the scene where Ernest, aged four, is dragged off to be beaten by his father for his inability to pronounce “come” properly, or irony such as the following: “Before Ernest could well crawl he was taught to kneel; before he could well speak he was taught to lisp the Lord’s prayer, and the general confession. How was it possible that these things could be taught too early?” (Butler 1966, 79). From a “little sallow-faced lad” (237) he develops into a “shrink[ing]” adolescent at boarding school (113), where again the regime is one of “blundering and capricious cruelty” (103). Most of his education, the narrator tells us later, attempting to excuse Ernest’s similarly blundering and capricious actions in later life (and, incidentally, using terms clearly indicating the Oedipal crime), had been “an attempt not so much to keep him in blinkers as to gouge his eyes out altogether” (234). This exaggeration for dramatic effect may be compared with descriptions by Dickens in Hard Times (1854). Writing a good generation before Butler, Dickens created the schoolmaster/father Thomas Gradgrind with a similar propensity for repression of imagination, if rather less for corporal punishment. Butler was less inclined to admire the Romantic poets than Dickens, but shared his anger at the smothering of creative expression in the Victorian nursery and schoolroom. In his industrial-town (Coketown) school, in the famous opening words of Dickens’s novel, Gradgrind tells his pupils that “what I want is, Facts [. . .]. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else” (1969, 47). The middle-class clergyman/father in Butler’s novel, who also talks frequently of planting certain things and (especially) rooting out others in young people’s minds, places emphasis instead on the catechism and the classics. Ernest’s inclinations, from a young age, are for painting and music – “dangerous tendencies,” his father Theobald muses, which “will interfere with his Latin and Greek” (Butler 1966, 108). The Way of All Flesh later depicts the hero attempting

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(not eventually successfully) to un-learn his childhood lessons; as Thomas L. Jeffers notes, “Butler joins a chorus of Victorians – Macaulay, Carlyle, Kingsley, Froude – who insist that education be materially useful” (1981, 94). It is ironic, as Butler himself was to admit, that much of his work in the last decade of his life was to be dedicated to these very classics, in particular the Odyssey, which became a late-life passion. But here again it was the controversial aspect of the topic which attracted him, the object of his attack this time being academic classicism. Butler deplored the sort of approach (which he had himself suffered under at Shrewsbury School and Cambridge) which “[n]either knows [n]or wants to know anything of the Odyssey beyond its grammar” (1934, 323), and which he elsewhere described as the process of skinning, stuffing, and setting ancient authors up in a case (1919, 197). It is significant that though his theories of the female authorship and Sicilian origin of the Odyssey were scorned by the Oxbridge men of his time, Butler’s work on Homer has come increasingly to be regarded as catalytic in a major shift of approach, one which attempts (as he put it) to breathe “new life” into ancient texts, maintaining “the spirit though not the form of the original” (Butler 1919, 198). As James I. Porter has argued recently, “Butler’s self-styled ‘subversive’ intervention in the debates of the big boys at Oxbridge [. . .] deserves to be recognized as a watershed of sorts in the history of classical scholarship” (2013, 265). “All our education,” Butler complained in a Note-Book entry in the early 1890s, using a metaphor from photography, in which he was a pioneer, “is very much a case of retouching negatives till all the character and individuality is gone” (1934, 270). Behind Theobald’s mistrust of ‘soft’ subjects, like music and painting, can be heard the harsh tones of gender stereotyping (↗ 6 Victorian Gender Relations) to which Ernest is subjected. The puny little boy who shrinks from his father and yearns hopelessly for maternal trust and love grows up with some twisted attitudes to women, and to sex, and eventually settles, like Butler himself, for a retired bachelor existence. One of the many shifts in Butler criticism in recent years is the way his biography has ‘come out’ to acknowledge his unmistakable (if well disguised) homoerotic impulses. Earlier commentators like Malcolm Muggeridge (1936) and Philip Henderson (1953) had hinted carefully in this direction. But it is only recently, in the excellent essay by Herbert Sussman, that the full extent of Butler’s erotic attraction to men has been revealed. Sussman deciphers the elaborate codes observed by men in late Victorian England in order to manage same-sex desire and remain within the boundaries of social respectability, arguing that “[m]uch of what seems merely quirky and even risible in his [Butler’s] intellectual, literary, and emotional life can be seen as consistent with this effort to create, in the absence of an accepted discourse in England, a justification for his homoerotic impulses” (2007, 171). In the decades leading up to the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1894, the very period in which The Way of All Flesh was written, strategies of evasion became increasingly necessary for those of a same-sex persuasion. Butler’s text, on close analysis, can be read as circling around its unspoken desire with a defensive anxiety. It is from

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this position, also, that Butler’s opposition to marriage and the institution of the family can be most usefully understood. At the same time, one of the reasons why The Way of All Flesh has been so popular, why (for example) the Modern Library site lists it as twelfth in the Board’s choice of the “Hundred Best Novels” of all time, has undoubtedly to do with its capacity to deflate emotional expectation with a well-timed squib and dead-pan humour, much of which has to do with heterosexual romance. A classic example is Ernest’s clumsily rushed proposal to Ellen: “It did not take my hero long, for before he got past the ham and beef shop near the top of Fetter Lane, he had told Ellen that she must come home with him” (Butler 1966, 274). Butler’s wry-witted friend Eliza Mary Ann Savage particularly appreciated the earlier scene when Theobald is courting Christina, which is brought to an abrupt halt when “the moon had risen and the arbour was getting damp” (Butler 1966, 48; Butler and Savage 1935, 77). After the high sentiment of so many of the great Victorian novels, it is as if Butler wipes the slate clean to start again in a new mode, drawing a line under a form of sentimentality which could never be the same again.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The temptation with The Way of All Flesh has always been to translate the novel back into Butler’s life and then the life back into the novel. Fictional autobiography occupies a rather uneasy zone between fact and fiction, open to accusations of betrayal of either genre. But Butler liked to cross boundaries, in his writings at least. The Way of All Flesh could be described as a psycho-biological autobiography in fictional form, one which involved an experimental foray into the new scientific fields gathering momentum around him. Like many Victorians, although the age was witnessing a rapid decline in amateurism, Butler was a consummate interdisciplinarian, which means that reading this novel necessarily involves attempting to untangle the different strands of his intellectual preoccupations. The overriding preoccupation in Butler’s life was his quest to understand what made him the person he was, a quest which took him to the fuzzy border between nature and culture, the innate and the acquired – in ways contemporary psychology and biology would now endorse (↗ 1 Science and the Victorian Novel). Until recently, The Way of All Flesh has been read within the genre of the fictionalised autobiography of a Victorian doubter, along with others such as Froude, Gosse, and Mark Rutherford (Knoepflmacher 1970, 259; Cockshut 1964) – or, as P. N. Furbank puts it, of the “literature of Conversion” (1948, 10). Ernest’s decision not to be ordained after he leaves Cambridge is certainly a central concern in the novel, which details the particularities of the heated debates among different branches of the Anglican Church, from the low-church Simeonites Ernest meets in Cambridge to the

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high-church fraudster Pryer, who robs him of his income. But when it comes to it, Ernest throws off the Christian dogma with relative ease. It takes only a few words from the handsome Towneley, whom Ernest idolises, for Ernest to recognise that his self-righteous moralising is a sham and that he would be much better off with a more worldly philosophy of life. Writing to his aunt from New Zealand in September 1861 and apologising for his earlier narrow-minded prejudice about her Unitarian religion, Butler confessed that he had “felt an immense intellectual growth shortly after leaving England – a growth which has left me a much happier and more liberal-minded man” (Butler 1962, 104). His novel, written over a period of more than a decade (1873–1884) in the most creative period of his life, charts the stages of this radical ‘growth’ – as well as its cost to his psychological well-being. Amidst the upheavals of his life choices – casting off religion, family, and (temporarily) country – Butler felt compelled to seek out his “true self” (1966, 116). How should he position himself in relation to the “way of all flesh” as opposed to “the way of the world” (146) – such as, for example, the punishment of ‘fallen women’, which the novel also explores? Flesh (genes) versus the world (cultural practices): the dialectic is posited throughout. The uncertainty about what makes Ernest the way he is results in a powerful late-Victorian description of the shifting terms of debate about the psychobiological versus the social determinants of human character. The picture is further complicated in this case by the indeterminacy of the novel’s autobiographical status. Butler’s unconcern (or incapacity) to keep ‘Samuel Butler’ separate from ‘Ernest Pontifex’ is reflected in the novel’s shifting narrative perspectives, from Overton (‘over-tone’), the presumably impartial narrator who nonetheless palpably shares many of Butler’s own views and traits, to the young Ernest, whose viewpoint is frequently conveyed as well. In between, another even more supposedly ‘external’ voice keeps interrupting the narrative to offer generalised commentary on a range of issues; readers familiar with Butler’s other work will recognise this as the voice of the Note-Books, a voice adept in witty epigrammatic statements about a wide range of scientific, cultural and ethical issues. And as if this were not enough, further dispersal of perspective is introduced in the splitting of Ernest’s own viewpoint into his ‘true’ or ‘inner’ self and his ‘conscious’ or ‘reasoning’ self, the two selves being pitted against each other in a dialogue without resolution. A good example of this almost postmodern mishmash of perspectives can be found in chapter thirty-one, which describes the thirteen-year-old Ernest’s early reactions to “Roughborough” School and his confused attempt to assume an appropriate adolescent persona (Butler 1966, 114–117). It is worth examining in detail several extracts from this short (eight-paragraph) chapter in order to trace the way the text slips in and out of different modes: from the most intimate and autobiographical to the most ‘external’, from a seemingly ‘true’ ‘inner’ discourse to its ironic undercutting, from physiology (body) to psychology (mind), and from ‘I’ to ‘we’ to ‘you’ to ‘he’.

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The chapter opens with the prevailing voice of Overton detailing Ernest’s progress through life, but very quickly shifts focus: He had more liberty now than he had known heretofore. The heavy hand and watchful eye of Theobald were no longer about his path and about his bed and spying out all his ways; and punishment by way of copying out lines of Virgil was a very different thing from the savage beatings of his father. The copying out in fact was often less trouble than the lesson. Latin and Greek had nothing in them which commended them to his instinct as likely to bring him peace even at the last [. . .]. (Butler 1966, 114)

The opening lines clearly come from the sympathetic but often frustrated voice of the middle-aged Overton, who has witnessed Ernest’s harsh treatment as a child, knows about Theobald’s own harsh childhood, and therefore accepts with weary resignation the boy’s inevitably twisted development. Very soon, however, it is Ernest’s viewpoint which is being narrated (“The copying out in fact was often less trouble [. . .]”) in the style of free indirect speech common in the English novel since Jane Austen. But, in the next sentence, the viewpoint zooms way out to that of Butler the epigrammatist of the Note-Books – in a voice, what’s more, overlaid by echoes of the Pauline epistles (“likely to bring him peace even at the last”). At this point, we have come as far as possible from the young Ernest’s thoughts; neither is this Overton, the author of light theatricals. Rather, it is the Butler who has suffered from the deadening impact of the classics in his own education, taking the opportunity to denounce the public school education of his day. The second paragraph again begins with Overton’s voice, shading into Ernest’s, but quickly shifts to a new perspective with the introduction of a first-person-plural subject: Indeed the more pleasant side of learning to do this or [that] had always been treated as something with which Ernest had no concern. We had no business with pleasant things at all; at any rate very little business; at any rate not he, Ernest. [. . .] If we were doing anything we liked, we, or at any rate he, Ernest, should apologise and think he was being mercifully dealt with if not at once told to go and do something else. [. . .] It never occurred to him that the presumption was in favour of the rightness of what was most pleasant, and that the onus of proving that it was not right lay with those who disputed its being so. (Butler 1966, 114–115)

Whose voice is this “we”? Is it the patronising voice of the puritanical pedagogue taking upon himself the mantle of high authority, the right to speak for everyone? Is it perhaps Overton including himself among the victims of such education? Or is it possibly the collective voice of the boys in Ernest’s class? Twice in the paragraph a certain discomfort at the outward zoom is registered in the phrase “we, or at any rate he, Ernest,” as if the narrator is struggling to maintain the particularity of Ernest’s story. The next two sentences attempt to restore Overton’s voice, this time pointedly outside Ernest’s pattern of thought (“It never occurred to him that [. . .]”).

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Paragraphs three and four take us to the heart of the Butlerian problematic of ‘selfhood’, introducing the concept of the ‘other’ self ‘within’, of which the boy on the brink of adolescence has as yet no knowledge: I have said more than once he believed in his own depravity; never was there a little mortal more ready to accept without cavil whatever he was told by those who were in authority over him; he thought, at least, that he believed it, for as yet he knew nothing of that other Ernest that dwelt within him and was so much stronger and more real than the Ernest of which he was conscious. The dumb Ernest persuaded with inarticulate feelings too swift and sure to be translatable into such debatable things as words, but practically insisted as follows – “Growing is not the easy plain-sailing business that it is commonly supposed to be: [. . .] it requires attention, and you are not strong enough to attend to your bodily growth, and to your lessons too.” (Butler 1966, 115)

Childhood ignorance viewed from a later perspective had been a popular theme in the Victorian novel, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847, ↗ 10 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–1850) to Thackeray’s History of Pendennis (1848–1850) and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860). Butler’s take on the theme introduces a more analytic approach to human psychology, including extensive reference to conscious versus unconscious forces at work in the development of the human psyche. Like his fellow novelists before him, he distances himself with gentle (or not so gentle) irony from the gullibility and delusions of the earlier self. But to a greater extent than they do, he describes an inner battle ultimately beyond resolution. Freud too was soon to demonstrate that the unconscious self is “much stronger” (as it is put here, Butler 1966, 115) than the conscious self; Ernest – or rather his unruly ‘bodily’ self – will soon be led in directions beyond his conscious control. In light of the ways in which Ernest’s sexuality is soon to play him false (the assault on Miss Maitland which lands him in prison), this admonition from within is far from a guide to greater self-awareness. Nearly a century after Butler, Jacques Lacan would explore in detail this intra-personal dialectic between the externallyembodied Other (language, the Father, the law) and a self (what Lacan called “le moi”) which seeks constantly yet fruitlessly for self-identity, beginning with the mirror image (1966, 94). As Butler suggests in chapter thirty-one, the self has no alternative but to resort to “debatable [. . .] words” – which, however, no more represent ‘him’ than anything else does (115). The admonition from within is voiced here in the second person (“you are not strong enough [. . .]”) to convey the intimacy of this constant dialogue within; yet its articulation, by its very nature, can never be ‘his’ (115). Language, as the Erewhonians put it, “being like the sun [. . .] rears and then scorches” (Butler 1965, 132). Critics have linked Butler’s version of the unconscious to a form of vitalism found later in the work of G. B. Shaw and D. H. Lawrence, a rich “fountain of real motivity,” as Lawrence put it (qtd. in Jeffers 1981, 91 and 136n3; see also Knoepflmacher 1970, 255; Joad 1924, 164–165). And yet Butler’s text rarely offers a promise of reliable guidance from any source, least of all

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from some vital force within. Butler himself would have known too well that whatever sexual impulse may have sought (homoerotic) expression in him had to be urgently repressed. What Ernest has to learn is that none of the voices, either from within or without, is ultimately reliable. In the fifth paragraph the voice of Ernest’s so-called “dumb”/ “more real” self within (Butler 1966, 115) continues to warn him against the “lies” (115) which surround him and which his “reasoning” (116) self will believe: This conscious self of yours, Ernest, is a prig – begotten of prigs, and trained in priggishness; I will not allow it to shape your actions, though it will doubtless shape your words for many a year to come. [. . .] Obey me, your true self, and things will go tolerably well with you, but only listen to that outward and visible old husk of yours which is called your father, and I will rend you in pieces even unto the third and fourth generation [. . .]. (116)

On the one hand, the voice would seem to suggest that this “true” self is a fixed and pre-programmed core, not subject to the shifts inevitable upon growth and development, one capable of punishing Ernest if he strays from its dictates (“I will rend you in pieces even unto the third and fourth generation”). The very tenor of this voice, however, gives it away as an externally-imposed dictate, echoing as it does the words of the jealous Old Testament God. Embedded as he and every human being must be in the discourses of the law and the father, Ernest will escape neither their words nor his own resulting actions, in spite of what the voice may promise. This “conscious” self will indeed make him a “prig,” right to the end of the novel. The “outward and visible old husk,” as the developing narrative will show, can never be entirely shed. The battle of id and super-ego for control of the ego, to put it in Freudian terms, never reaches a peaceful resolution but must continue as long as life does. With Ernest, this is played out in the “almost incessant conflict within” (169), which he only sometimes manages to bring under control. This paragraph, in other words, can be read as a seminal novelistic demonstration, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, of the way a sought-after ‘true’ self, a residue from the Romantic period, must bow to the dictates of the Symbolic order in its struggle for articulation. Or, to put it differently, this ‘true’ self is a chimera which Ernest will be fated to pursue to the end. It too, like his conscious self, will lie to him, deceive him into believing he can unearth it and identify with it; it will elude him at the last, however much he (and Overton) may think otherwise. Some readers have complained about what Edmund Gosse called the “divagations” or “wandering style” in Butler’s narrative, the way the Note-Books epigrammatist tends to take over and neglect his hero (1922, 59). Chapter nineteen, for example, is taken up with a discussion of what “the business of life” should be (pleasure), and clinches the argument at various points with characteristic Butler paradoxes. Four pages later, the narrator scrambles out of his diversion to return abruptly to Overton and the Pontifexes with the phrase “And now I will continue my story” (Butler 1966, 77). D. H. Lawrence, who himself, particularly in his late work, was inclined to

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diverge into long personal homilies, famously admonished novel readers to “Never trust the artist, trust the tale” (qtd. in Hazell 1978, 18). With Butler, it is less easy than it may seem to separate the one from the other, and in the final analysis, perhaps, the distinction does not really matter. Lawrence’s dictum is a good guide to reading The Way of All Flesh, however, in that it pays to focus on the text as a whole rather than on any particular view articulated in it. The full implications of Butler’s position often appear in the gaps and contradictions between the different viewpoints.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives In chapter fourteen, Overton attempts an apology for the autobiographical nature of the novel, worrying no doubt that he was violating novelistic codes: Every man’s work [. . .] is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him. [. . .] I know that whether I like it or no I am portraying myself more surely than I am portraying any of the characters whom I set before the reader. I am sorry that it is so, but I cannot help it [. . .]. (Butler 1966, 55–56)

The view that “the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him” places the novel firmly within the framework of psychological understanding in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Butler was extremely interested in this work, as recent scholarship has shown (Shuttleworth 2007; Gounelas 2007), and not just in the view that “it is our less conscious thoughts and [. . .] actions” which “mould our [. . .] lives” (Butler 1966, 22). As has been amply demonstrated, his engagement in the debates over evolution resulted in theories of unconscious hereditary memory between generations, which impacted directly on his fiction. His first book in the field, Life and Habit (1878), is in fact quoted from in The Way of All Flesh (Butler 1966, 125). Sally Shuttleworth explores how for Butler, unlike for other Victorian novelists, the Bildungsroman (↗ 4 Genres and Poetology) with its focus on the individual life no longer seemed an appropriate structure for his narrative. She continues: In The Mill on the Floss Eliot had explored how the young attempt to rise above the “oppressive narrowness” of their society “to which they have nevertheless been tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts.” Butler intensifies both elements, heightening the sense of estrangement, and indeed revulsion, whilst making the emotional tie an even more complex biological one. (Shuttleworth 2007, 145)

Like Darwin, Butler held that all life has descended from one primordial cell, which means, as he puts it in Life and Habit, that “we are all one creature, and that each one of us is many millions of years old” (1923, 165). Individuation, therefore, is not a founding moment in human life; we have made too much of the significance of birth. Far more important is the battle required from offspring to achieve separate identity,

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a battle fought fiercely throughout life. And it is here, as I have suggested, that the Freudian model of Oedipal rivalry between father and son – extending, in complex ways in Freudian theory, to girls as well – comes into play. Butler, of course, had not read Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex, which was not to be published until 1900, sixteen years after Butler completed his novel. But he had read and translated a great deal from the sources that influenced Freud, work by Hermann Helmholtz, Ewald Hering, and Gustav Fechner (Gounelas 2007, 200–207), and The Way of All Flesh presents a remarkable foreshadowing of Freud’s groundbreaking ideas. The rivalry between father and son in Butler’s work is as savage as that in the original Oedipus myth. Much of this is tested out theoretically in the Note-Books, which record the starkest Oedipal expressions in directly Freudian terms, as in the following: “The Ancients attached such special horror to the murder of near relations because the temptation was felt on all hands to be so great [. . .]. The fable of the Erinyes was probably invented by fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts” (Butler 1934, 91). Or, on the previous page: “Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one” (90). In the novel itself, the battle may not end in parricide, but it makes up for this in its uncompromising insistence on the hatred on both sides. Theobald, who had himself cowed before his bullying father George Pontifex, and feels that the only child who has treated him in a “filial” way is the baby who died at a day old (Butler 1966, 352), fantasises wistfully about the tenth plague of Egypt which resulted in the death of all first-born sons (108–109). Competition rages at every level, culminating in Theobald’s ashen-faced fury on hearing that it is Ernest rather than himself who has inherited aunt Alethea’s money (324). Money is valued in the novel to an extent that has raised protests from critics like Edmund Wilson and Arnold Kettle reading from the point of view of a socialist critique of capitalism (Jeffers 1981, 97–98). But as Malcolm Muggeridge has pointed out, after decades of enduring his father’s threats and willshaking, “Butler came to think of money as the only defence the weak had against the overbearing” (1936, 13). Individuation, therefore, is not the liberating discovery that the Romantics had described but rather a process of repression and compromise. In Hard Times, Louisa and Tom Gradgrind are blighted for life by their father’s pedagogical and paternal repressions. But as an advocate of the Victorian family, at least in theory, Dickens redeems Gradgrind at the end through the forgiveness of his daughter. With Ernest there is no forgiveness, only a determination never to attempt a family himself. The ‘discontents’ of civilisation, which in modern times cannot exclude the hegemony of the nuclear family, were described by Freud in terms of a process of life-long compromise. Butler, succumbing to the temptations of fiction as wish-fulfilment, allowed himself to plaster a small utopian idyll of bachelorhood over the wounds of Oedipal rivalry. Into the bargain, he threw off a Heavenly Father whose threats reminded him too much of Theobald’s. His (Old Testament) words were harder to delete, however, as we have seen, and the plaster all too readily peels off under closer scrutiny. After their deaths, Theobald and the patriarchal

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schoolmaster Skinner may no longer molest Ernest. To the last, however, he has “fierce and reproachful encounters” with them in his dreams (Butler 1966, 335). Butler’s handling of his female characters is another telling symptom of these Oedipal scars. Ernest’s yearning for maternal love, betrayed repeatedly, provides some of the most poignant scenes in the novel. In the famous sofa scene where Christina attempts to wheedle Ernest’s secrets out of him, the young boy is described as being “still so moved by the siren’s voice as to yearn to sail towards her, and fling himself into her arms” (Butler 1966, 152). The dual voice here, that of the yearning son overlaid by the ironic narrator, returns in Christina’s death-bed scene twelve years later, where “Ernest broke down and wept as he had not done for years. [. . .] ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘forgive me – the fault was mine [. . .].’ The poor blubbering fellow meant what he said [. . .]” (322). The point to be made here is that to read Ernest’s adult rejection of his parents as a demonstration of complacent triumphalism is surely an over-simplification. It is similarly misleading, I think, to read Ernest’s final position as a contented bachelor in terms of a successful overcoming of “trauma” in the achievement of personal identity (Nielsen 2011). It is the conflict between the two voices, unresolved to the last, which is at issue and which determines all of both Butler-Ernest’s and Butler-Overton’s defensive attitudes to women. Hopelessly uninformed and unprepared, the only model being the handsome Towneley who visits a prostitute in his lodgings, Ernest first assaults a respectable woman and then (after serving his prison sentence) marries the next one he comes across (Ellen had been dismissed from Battersby rectory for unmarried pregnancy), without noticing her weakness for gin. All too quickly, in fact shockingly so, Overton is rejoicing that Ernest “no longer liked his wife” (Butler 1966, 293). This misogynistic twist to the theme of the ‘fallen woman’, common in the nineteenth-century novel from Dickens to Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, betrays the scars evident throughout the novel, which are only partly alleviated by the idealised portrait of aunt Alethea, herself also determinedly single. Such polarisations in the depiction of women are an inherent part of Butler’s (self-)portrait, as he was well aware. Of course Ernest is priggish, he replied to Miss Savage’s complaint with disarming selfawareness, “for as I have told you I am very priggish myself” (Butler and Savage 1935, 303). To read Butler’s Way of All Flesh through the perspectives of psychoanalysis, queer theory, and evolutionary psychology, as I have done here, is of course an act of historical relativism. But, as a supreme inter-disciplinarian, Butler lends himself to an exceptionally wide range of approaches – as the recent volume edited by James Paradis (2007) demonstrates, with its studies of Butler as colonial farmer, biblical critic, natural theologist, evolutionary psychologist, painter and art critic, photographer, musician and composer, classicist, and ‘man of letters’. Whichever perspective is taken, Butler can be found responsive. As in The Way of All Flesh, he takes up one position and then slips into another, leaving the reader, as he has done for a century

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and a half now, wondering where to place him. His contemporary relevance, perhaps, can be said to reside in this very slipperiness.

Bibliography Works Cited Butler, Samuel. Erewhon [and] Erewhon Revisited. 1872 and 1901. London: Dent, 1965. Butler, Samuel. Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh. 1903. Ed. Daniel F. Howard. London: Methuen, 1966. Butler, Samuel. The Family Letters of Samuel Butler 1841–1886. Ed. Arnold Silver. London: Cape, 1962. Butler, Samuel. Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Ed. A. T. Bartholomew. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934. Butler, Samuel. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Ed. Henry Festing Jones. London: A. C. Fifield, 1919. Butler, Samuel. The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler. Vol. 4. Life and Habit. 1878. Ed. Henry Festing Jones and A. T. Bartholomew. London: Jonathan Cape, 1923. Butler, Samuel, and E. M. A. Savage. Letters between Samuel Butler and Miss E. M. A. Savage 1871–1885. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. Cockshut, A. O. J. The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought 1840–1890. London: Collins, 1964. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times: For These Times. 1854. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Furbank, P. N. Samuel Butler 1835–1902. Cambridge: CUP, 1948. Gosse, Edmund. “Samuel Butler.” Aspects and Impressions. By Gosse. London: Cassell, 1922. 55–76. Gounelas, Ruth Parkin. “Mind Matters: Butler and Late Nineteenth-Century Psychology.” Paradis 2007, 195–219. Gounelas, Ruth. “Samuel Butler’s Cambridge Background, and Erewhon.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 24.1 (1981): 17–39. Greene, Graham. “Samuel Butler.” The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951. 126–128. Hazell, Stephen. Introduction. The English Novel, Developments in Criticism since Henry James: A Casebook. Ed. Stephen Hazell. London: Macmillan, 1978. 11–31. Henderson, Philip. Samuel Butler: The Incarnate Bachelor. London: Cohen and West, 1953. Jeffers, Thomas L. Samuel Butler Revalued. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1981. Joad, C. E. M. Samuel Butler (1835–1902). London: Leonard Parsons, 1924. Knoepflmacher, U. C. Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970. Lacan, Jacques. “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la function du Je telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique.” Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. 93–100. “Hundred Best Novels.” Modern Library. Web. 16 Nov. 2016. Muggeridge, Malcolm. The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1936. Nielsen, Danielle. “Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh: Traumatic Evolution.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 54.1 (2011): 79–100.

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Orwell, George. As I Please 1943–45. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Secker and Warburg, 1968. Vol. 3 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Paradis, James G., ed. Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain: A Critical Overview. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Porter, James I. “Homer, Skepticism, and the History of Philology.” Modernity’s Classics. Ed. Sarah C. Humphreys and Rudolf G. Wagner. Heidelberg: Springer, 2013. 261–292. Shuttleworth, Sally. “Evolutionary Psychology and The Way of All Flesh.” Paradis 2007, 143–169. Sussman, Herbert. “Samuel Butler as Late Victorian Bachelor: Regulating and Representing the Homoerotic.” Paradis 2007, 170–194.

Further Reading Forster, E. M. “The Legacy of Samuel Butler.” The Listener 12 June 1953: 955–956. Gurfinkel, Helena. Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2013. Holt, Lee E. Samuel Butler. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964. Jones, Henry Festing. Samuel Butler: Author of Erewhon (1835–1902): A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1920. Shaffer, Elinor. Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer and Art Critic. London: Reaktion, 1988. Shaw, George Bernard. “Samuel Butler: Author, Philosopher, Biologist, Oddity and Genius: A Prophet of Creative Evolution.” The Manchester Guardian 4 Dec. 1935: 11–12.

Index of Subjects abjection 60, 454, 576 adaptation 16, 51–57, 60, 62–64, 66–67, 207, 216, 230, 337, 344, 352, 362–363, 381, 455, 457, 472, 560–561, 565, 577 adaptation (evolutionary) 24, 26, 31–32, 40, 44, 513, 570–571 adolescence 89, 179, 181, 332, 357, 359, 433, 467–468, 472, 583–584, 613, 632, 635, 637 adulthood 57–58, 90, 179, 181, 209, 226, 227, 231, 359, 360, 484, 585–586, 592, 618 adventure literature 139, 155–156, 166, 446, 488, 556, 574, 606, 614, 616, 621 aestheticism 91, 96, 108, 112, 432, 434, 436, 461–463, 466–470, 488, 503–506, 508, 516, 554 affect 38, 54, 57–58, 263, 405, 487–488, 542 Africa 3–4, 151–152, 154, 158, 161, 167, 321, 392, 587, 598 agency 130, 152, 165, 176, 237, 240, 249, 277, 298, 301, 402, 501, 503, 505, 524–525, 625 agnosticism 8, 26, 72, 81–84, 434, 549, 559 alcohol, alcoholism 11, 33, 75, 95, 131, 223, 238–239, 318, 367, 371, 375, 455, 459, 497, 538 alienation 4, 8, 11, 14, 43, 95, 184–185, 406, 416, 436, 451, 498, 518, 530, 586, 625 alterity/otherness 226, 407, 448–449, 457 amateurism 27, 30, 117, 291, 376, 381, 388, 634 anaesthesia 3, 27, 134, 462 Angel in the House 121, 124–125, 209, 313, 339, 340, 569 Anglicanism, Anglican 30, 71–72, 76, 82, 84, 292 Anglican Church 8, 289, 302, 634 animals 4–5, 24, 39, 42, 54, 59, 167, 255, 387, 551–553, 618 – animal studies 250, 457 – cruelty to animals 30, 42, 241, 247, 250, 263, 434 – human-animal relation 24, 42, 179, 183, 250, 299–300, 308, 405, 434, 447, 449–450, 453, 457, 468, 521, 542, 549, 553, 586–587 Anthropocene 1, 4 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-038

anthropology 161, 166, 183, 447, 568 anxiety 5–9, 26, 59–61, 63–64, 66, 75, 122, 133, 156, 160, 164, 177, 182, 244, 266, 385, 447, 450, 487, 491, 502, 542, 553, 566–567, 571, 575–577, 620, 633 arbitrariness 8, 87, 358, 410, 502, 538, 541, 543, 569 aristocracy 84, 130, 135, 165, 177, 193, 306, 328, 337, 342, 393, 416, 465, 502, 550, 552, 554, 569, 571 Arts and Crafts Movement 114, 436 associationism, theory of association 39–40 astronomy 24, 28, 540, 555 atavism 156, 308, 450, 451, 567, 571 Athenaeum 285, 326, 360, 376, 506, 530 authorial narration 36, 280, 282, 316, 424, 448, 495, 573, 584–585, 587–588, 590–593, 625 authority 174, 182, 225, 266, 293, 296–297, 299, 314, 328, 358–360, 370, 514, 543, 456, 568, 581, 592, 636–637 – authoritarianism 223, 233, 559–560 – cultural authority 8, 29–30, 168, 451, 454 – narrative authority 103, 149, 234, 408, 452, 454, 588–589, 591, 593, 606 – spiritual authority 8, 82–83, 248, 289 authorship 103, 118, 122, 237, 246, 284, 390, 448, 633 autobiography 97, 190, 207, 211, 322–327, 440, 608 – autobiographical novel/elements 66, 91–92, 99, 178–179, 185, 190–191, 207–208, 238–239, 243, 316, 337, 437, 439, 480, 495–497, 548, 608, 614, 616–617, 630, 634–635, 639 – autobiographical narration/fictional autobiography 34, 57, 75, 81, 91, 181, 207–208, 210–211, 246, 452, 634, 639 autodiegetic narration 246, 316 bestseller 81, 101, 317, 456, 490, 498 Betting Houses Act (1853) 502 Bible, biblical 7, 25, 62, 72–74, 76–77, 82, 263, 315, 347, 351, 362, 398, 464, 482, 520, 641 bigamy 88, 137, 338–341, 503

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Bildungsroman 88–94, 102, 179, 206–208, 210, 246, 254, 316, 406, 437, 471, 488, 539, 593, 616, 618, 639 binarism 84, 125, 127–128, 131, 139–141, 155, 280, 282, 377, 448, 456, 489, 587, 625 biography, biographical 41, 82, 94, 174–175, 177–179, 183, 186, 189–191, 198, 200, 222, 239, 248, 269, 273–274, 298–300, 317, 321, 337, 352–355, 362, 368, 398, 409, 411, 438, 446, 456, 461, 471–472, 508, 530, 582, 597–599, 603, 629–630, 633 – biographical fiction/narrative 73, 178–179, 438, 548 biology 7, 24, 31, 39–41, 44, 122, 130, 136, 406, 453, 512, 514–516, 520, 524–525, 534, 540, 547, 553, 571, 585, 631, 634–635, 639 body 5, 11, 55–57, 100, 132, 140, 292–293, 300–301, 307–311, 347–348, 368, 370, 393, 433, 453–454, 502, 542, 576, 637 – bodily sensation 100, 331, 542 – body and mind 11, 33, 38–39, 42–44, 77, 293, 298, 427, 532, 635 – body politic 180, 307–310, 316 – female body 64, 313–314, 347, 515, 572 – social body 514, 572 Boer Wars 4, 150, 158, 392, 615 brain 35, 40, 42–44, 54, 127, 137, 143, 254, 293, 302, 325, 408–409, 419, 569–570, 623 Buddhism 620–621, 624 Byronic (hero) 88, 98–99, 207, 305, 309, 310, 313 capitalism 1, 4–7, 11, 13, 63–64, 89, 122, 131, 142, 149–150, 156–164, 167, 274–277, 285, 306, 371, 576, 586, 640 carnivalesque 165, 499 case narrative 570, 574–575 Catholic – Catholic Church 75–78, 302, 436, 461 – Catholicism 71–78, 81–84, 289, 292, 300–302, 436, 571 – Catholic emancipation 75, 78 – Anglo-Catholicism 72, 76, 81, 83–84 – anti-Catholicism 75, 291, 302 – Art-Catholicism 436 cautionary tales 357, 358, 547

Celtic 514–515, 517, 519–520 Celtic Twilight 519 censorship 8, 377, 497 Chartism 2, 157–160, 176, 195–196, 275–276, 289–290, 293, 296, 368 chemistry 3, 29, 45, 405, 452, 457, 468, 521 childhood 40, 57–59, 73, 77, 207, 209, 212, 225, 227, 231–233, 246, 263, 353–354, 357–362, 432, 532, 552, 583–589, 594, 616, 620–622, 633, 636–637 child labour 2, 158, 279, 436 children’s literature 74, 79, 132, 253, 291, 351, 357–361, 446, 463, 566, 614 China (country) 150, 154, 372–375, 480 china (product) 166, 419, 424, 552 Church of England 8, 71, 75, 81, 84, 290, 293, 302, 630 cinematograph 14, 57 circulating/lending libraries 12, 88, 94–95, 108, 116, 168, 176, 223, 345, 497 city 92, 156, 158–161, 255, 306, 312, 318, 373, 449, 451, 456, 498, 505, 535 civilisation 3, 45, 99, 133, 137, 154, 156, 166–167, 200, 225, 227, 229, 383, 417, 447, 449–450, 532, 550, 552, 561, 567–569, 598, 640 class 2, 13, 29, 31–32, 100–101, 130–143, 152, 157, 159–161, 163–166, 192, 208, 215, 226, 233, 240–250, 258, 274–284, 289–293, 296–299, 301, 325, 327–328, 334, 342–345, 359, 362, 367–369, 371, 373–374, 402, 423, 446–448, 451, 453, 455, 461, 470, 472–473, 497–503, 514, 519, 532, 541, 548, 561, 587, 594 – lower class 12, 101, 165, 176, 308, 337, 343–345, 368, 403, 446, 576 – middle class 2, 5–6, 11–13, 80, 82, 124, 128, 131–132, 135, 138, 142, 150, 160, 163–167, 192, 201, 237, 239, 244–245, 276–278, 281–282, 289–293, 296–299, 337, 342–345, 367, 447–448, 450–451, 455, 497, 501, 511–512, 514, 517, 524, 548, 553, 557, 560, 632 – upper class 13, 60, 101, 128, 130, 143, 176, 194, 242, 244, 247, 249, 258, 342–345, 374, 398, 403, 483, 498–499, 582, 598 – working class 7, 13, 124, 131, 138, 157–160, 176, 192, 195, 201, 274–284, 287, 289–293, 297–298, 311, 344, 436, 446,

Index of Subjects

473, 498–499, 501–503, 552–553, 557, 560, 576 closure 139, 210, 216, 229–230, 277–278, 371, 439, 519, 539, 542, 572, 624 cognitive ethics 268 cognitive processes 258, 267 cognitive studies 17, 54, 411 colonialism, colonial 4–5, 102, 126, 133, 149–159, 163–167, 198, 216, 250, 279, 306, 348, 368, 370–373, 375–376, 385, 393, 447–448, 554, 567–568, 576, 610, 620, 624–625, 641 comedy, comic 26, 91, 111, 256, 259, 284, 308, 355, 359, 416–417, 421–425, 488, 498, 591 commission 326, 356, 376 commodity 63–64, 66–67, 107, 159, 163–165, 167–168, 184, 411 – commodification 63, 162–163, 165, 167, 269, 313 – commodity culture 162–165, 167 – commodity racism 163 communication 12, 63, 156–157, 163, 168, 422, 485 – narrative communication 182, 406, 420, 543, 604, 609 Condition-of-England novel/fiction 149, 159–160, 190, 195–197, 206, 276–277, 279, 284, 298, 301, 548 Condition of England Question 160, 195, 197, 276, 293, 297 conduct 11, 44, 93, 228, 246, 371, 486, 603–604, 606 conscience 7, 35, 42, 72, 77–78, 137, 199, 243, 410, 453 consciousness 9, 11, 30, 33, 36–43, 213, 232, 292, 330, 360, 369, 410, 427, 437, 439, 504, 535, 582, 590–591, 610, 635, 637–638 – narrative representation of consciousness 420–421, 407, 437, 503–505, 582–584, 587–588, 590–593 consumer culture 163–164, 167, 311, 457 consumerism 100, 157, 163, 456 consumption (tuberculosis) 238, 502 consumption (economics) 64–66, 122, 158–159, 163–165, 167, 250, 344, 554, 456 – consumption of drugs 373, 376, 378 – consumption of literature 116, 168, 184, 375, 446

647

– conspicuous consumption 66, 159, 167, 343, 348, 499 contingency 8, 31, 40, 128, 136, 152, 181, 502–503, 513, 531, 539 conversion 14, 72–80, 153, 209 – conversion literature/narrative 72–75, 80–81, 634 Cornhill Magazine 13, 28, 168, 254, 326, 530 Corn Laws 158, 275 cosmopolitanism 65, 111, 326, 508, 581, 615, 624 courtship 23–24, 214, 278–279, 329–330, 339, 343, 371, 387 coverture 122, 368 crime 100–101, 116, 161, 316, 333, 340, 342–344, 370, 375, 436, 447–448, 455, 630, 632 criminality, criminal 35, 55, 59, 61, 65, 136–137, 153, 156, 161, 340, 343–346, 376, 387, 402, 450, 455–456, 501, 550, 630 cross-dressing 127, 482, 484, 487 cultural studies 17, 159, 279, 285, 576, 593–594 Custody of Infants Acts (1839, 1873) 6, 368 dandy, dandyism 121, 139, 193, 313, 462, 466, 469, 471 Darwinism 7, 31–32, 54, 94, 130, 383–384, 388–390, 517, 524, 531, 548–550, 553, 559, 561, 631 decadence 5, 7, 112, 128, 167, 309, 462, 466–467, 471–472, 552, 589 deconstruction 17, 308, 410, 427, 472–473, 519–521, 538, 541 degeneration 5, 7, 41, 44, 92, 113, 125, 130, 143, 156, 167, 215, 447, 450–453, 457, 482, 497, 502, 524, 547–552, 569, 576, 577 dementia 36, 309 democracy, democratic 2, 11, 55, 173–174, 180, 192, 276, 369, 385–386, 401, 405, 410 despair 3, 42, 72, 75, 174–175, 179, 181, 197, 205, 223, 239–240, 292, 325, 538, 590, 618 detective, detection 314, 316, 346, 369, 376–377, 449–450, 473, 577 detective fiction 101, 339, 369, 376–377, 406, 446–447, 488, 574 devolution 132, 138, 140, 447

648

Index of Subjects

dialect 247, 279–280, 283, 529, 574 – literary dialect 247, 283 didacticism 108, 130, 132, 139, 246–248, 279, 317, 357–360, 409, 462, 480, 482–483, 531 diorama 14, 56 disability 368, 374, 548 – disability studies 378 disease 11, 99, 116, 222, 299, 307–310, 312–313, 391, 552 – Contagious Diseases Acts 123, 480 – venereal disease 136, 479, 482, 487, 491 dissent, dissenter 8, 71, 73, 500 divorce 112, 123, 129, 140, 338, 343, 368, 397, 445, 468, 481, 583, 584 domesticity 78, 124, 162, 166, 227–229, 249, 280, 315–316, 337, 387, 512, 522 – domestic fiction/novel 135, 155, 164, 340, 343 – domestic sphere 76, 121, 124, 142, 243, 314, 343, 386, 521, 524 – domestic violence 123, 128, 503 – domestic duty/virtue 74, 134, 515 doppelgänger 213, 215, 447, 452, 472 double 16, 37, 91, 138, 152, 156, 233, 240, 244, 347, 401, 448 double standard 134, 140, 498, 501–502, 512 doubt 7–9, 81–84, 240, 325, 382, 399, 422–423, 558, 584, 589, 600, 604, 606, 634 dream 33, 37, 213, 225, 227–228, 341, 360, 362, 377, 449, 456, 488, 503, 522, 535, 556, 641 – daydreaming 42, 323–326, 456, 535 drugs 11, 318, 371–372, 375–376, 378, 452, 456, 467 dystopia 26, 102, 115, 139, 382, 551, 557, 559, 561, 631 East India Company 151, 371–373 ecocriticism 17, 186, 214, 216, 250, 298, 311, 362, 457, 542 ecology 140, 299, 307, 310–313, 457, 542, 561 economics 5, 7, 131, 158–159, 174, 192, 233, 276, 301, 370 economy 2–4, 6, 11, 17, 64, 122–124, 130, 142, 149–168, 173–174, 182, 192, 267, 277, 371–373, 446, 568

– economic criticism 150, 159, 168, 249, 378, 411 – economic dependence/inequality 76, 101, 123, 126, 129, 131, 134, 140–141, 151, 157–158, 160, 166, 201, 208, 226, 232, 237, 246, 249, 276, 278, 290, 293, 306, 371, 484, 498, 513 – political economy 158, 173–174, 180–182, 184–186 education 6, 11, 27, 30, 91–92, 103, 123, 140, 168, 174–175, 190, 223, 240, 250, 254, 274–275, 279, 293, 296, 322, 359, 362, 392, 397, 416, 424, 431, 461–462, 480–485, 491, 530, 590, 616–618, 620, 624–625, 630, 632–633, 636 – access to education 98, 127, 141, 222, 293, 399, 514 – compulsory education 3, 88 – Elementary Education Act (1870) 88 – romantic/sentimental education 127, 130 – women’s education 123, 125, 131, 141, 150, 243, 300, 399, 482–483 engraving 12, 55, 259–260, 482 electricity 3, 10, 39, 102, 382–383, 387, 391–393 emotion, emotional 16, 30, 38–39, 41–43, 54, 64, 66, 75, 80, 83, 98–101, 125–126, 129, 137, 211–212, 226, 238, 241, 243, 245–246, 263, 278, 309, 344, 347–348, 374, 402, 405, 407, 423, 456, 466, 485, 488, 504, 507, 532, 542, 574, 620, 633–634 empathy 247, 266, 278, 347, 403–404, 542, 574, 620 empire 1, 3, 8, 65, 102, 122, 128, 130, 132–133, 139, 149–168, 250, 281, 301, 348, 362, 370–371, 385–386, 390–391, 394, 436, 447–448, 540, 568, 587, 624–625 – British Empire 3, 8, 65, 102, 133, 150, 156, 168, 250, 281, 348, 370, 386, 390, 448, 625 employment 6, 10, 142, 208, 238, 241–243 – Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women 142 – unemployment 142, 158, 160, 242, 275 – The Victoria Press for the Employment of Women 142 entropy 26–27, 44, 550–551, 554, 560

Index of Subjects

environment 5–6, 17, 43, 95, 110, 136, 139, 160, 167, 224, 280, 383, 405, 436, 438, 457, 498, 505, 513, 542, 583, 585–587, 593 Epicureanism 433–434 epistemic 1, 530 epistemological 9, 15–16, 94–95, 225, 306–307, 447, 555, 585, 591–592, 608 erotic literature 134–136, 138 ethics 5–6, 16, 99, 160, 234, 258, 268–269, 398, 410, 449, 542, 549–550, 589, 605, 610 ethnography 388, 391, 576, 614, 617, 619 eugenics 44, 393, 512, 523, 525, 549 Evangelicalism 8, 14, 72–75, 76, 79–80, 84, 224, 227, 233, 311 evolution (theory) 7, 14, 24–26, 31, 40, 42, 82, 89, 92, 102, 125, 154, 254, 291, 307, 362, 382–384, 386, 388–392, 403, 411, 434, 447, 450, 453, 482, 484, 489, 513, 517, 524, 530–531, 539–540, 542, 549, 552–553, 559, 566–567, 570–571, 583, 594, 631, 639, 641 The Examiner 177, 425 experiment, experimentalism (aesthetic/ literary) 15, 26, 53, 56, 92, 97, 103, 113, 115, 139, 142–143, 179, 183–184, 186, 283, 316, 398, 400–401, 411, 446, 487, 497–498, 559, 582, 584, 603–604, 634 experiment, experimentation (scientific) 5, 29, 40, 45, 156, 370, 382, 391, 400, 411, 452, 457, 484, 543, 547–549, 570, 584 Factory Acts 2, 158 fallibility, fallible filter 588–590 fallen woman 313, 501, 641 (Victorian) family 5, 101–102, 121, 139, 281, 315, 343, 345, 512–513, 518, 520, 572, 585, 630–635, 640 fate 14, 101, 502–503, 505, 536 female emancipation 242, 411, 512, 514, 523, 524 femininity 83, 91, 122, 124–125, 127, 130, 132–134, 137, 139, 162, 165, 244, 313–314, 340, 346, 437, 532, 540 feminism 66, 126, 130–131, 138–139, 141, 214–215, 249–250, 305, 315, 394, 410–411, 481, 512–515, 519–520, 523–525, 541, 548

649

– feminist criticism 152, 214–215, 233, 248–249, 274, 285, 345, 347, 362, 409–411, 490, 541 figural narrative 537, 588 finance 13, 65–66, 157, 159, 161–162, 174, 190, 249–250, 309, 337–338, 370–371, 373, 402, 416, 449, 481, 490, 496, 500, 530 fin de siècle 8, 132, 136, 138, 163, 318, 415, 417, 426, 431, 440, 481, 498, 502, 507, 514, 547, 550, 552, 560, 566, 582–583, 586 first-person narrative 58, 93, 206, 211, 256, 452–453, 573, 601–602, 605 food 158, 250, 283, 293, 299, 391–392 formalism 541, 592, 593 The Fortnightly Review 112, 326, 434, 435 Fraser’s Magazine 176, 177, 238, 291 free indirect discourse/speech 322, 331, 404, 505, 537, 636 free trade 150, 157, 158 French Revolution 1, 6, 176, 179–180 frigidity 133–135, gambling 199, 501–502, 506 gender 5, 17, 66, 83, 117, 121–144, 152, 162–163, 186, 214–215, 223, 233, 240–247, 269, 299–302, 307, 315, 344–348, 362, 369, 374, 377, 387, 393, 401–402, 406, 422, 448, 453, 470, 472, 482, 485, 491, 501, 511, 534, 540–541, 551–552, 575, 587 – gender identity 121, 125–127, 232, 300, 485 – gender equality/inequality 123, 129–130, 139–141, 144, 247, 300, 329, 331, 338, 368, 393, 417, 484, 489, 498, 512, 570 – gender norms/order 5, 126, 140, 241, 243, 245, 368, 386, 371, 572 – gender performativity 121–122, 125–128, 133, 143, 269, 541 – gender roles/scripts/stereotypes 64, 100, 122, 125–127, 131, 135, 143, 242, 269, 300, 314, 423, 485, 501, 512, 633 – gender studies 17, 249, 377, 541, 575 genius 6, 23, 222, 294, 345, 409, 426, 516–517, 557 genre 13, 17, 36, 52, 54, 72, 74, 82, 87–106, 112, 115, 118, 126, 129, 132, 136–137, 139, 143, 149, 155, 159–160, 165–166, 168, 179,

650

Index of Subjects

184, 192–194, 200, 207–208, 233, 246, 248, 253, 276, 278–279, 285, 291, 297, 306, 316, 344, 351, 367–368, 377, 393–394, 400–401, 405–407, 431–432, 438–439, 446–447, 454, 472, 487–488, 516, 518, 540, 547, 557–561, 568, 574, 576–577, 593, 606, 609, 616, 634 – subgenre 87, 100, 102, 155, 156, 160, 165, 190, 192, 196, 276, 341, 343, 344, 434, 441, 605, 606, 609 gentleman 98, 121, 157, 165, 253, 292, 293, 416, 418, 450, 451 gentry 274, 381, 401–402, 499, 566, 598 geology 6, 25–28, 41, 82, 388, 540, 554 gothic (fiction) 37, 87–89, 98, 100–102, 137, 155–156, 207, 213, 223–224, 230, 247, 308–309, 312, 316–317, 341–343, 377, 406, 416, 436, 446–447, 449, 452, 454, 456, 470–471, 482, 521, 550, 553, 557, 559, 567, 571, 573–577, 582–583 governess 76, 124, 126, 150, 162, 206–208, 214, 237–238, 241–242, 245–247, 249–250, 259–260, 339, 367, 584, 588–590 – governess novel 207–208 The Graphic 168, 392, 416 Great Exhibition 3, 306, 158, 177 Great House 41, 342 habits 40, 65, 165, 209, 214, 294, 317, 323, 326, 371, 384, 402, 437, 502, 639 health 3, 6, 131, 140, 143, 216, 223, 293, 298–299, 307, 312, 333, 393, 433, 446–447, 482, 489, 524, 549–550, 572, 575, 619–620, 630 hedonism 165, 255, 432, 467, 432, 433, 463, 467 hegemony 16–17, 112, 125, 132, 150, 152–153, 156–157, 278, 340, 346, 374, 640 Hellenism 434, 540 heredity 41, 43–44, 130, 482–483, 513, 516, 520, 571, 639 heroism 30, 45, 110, 156, 166, 177, 182, 244, 293–294, 317, 400–401, 554, 567, 626 hero-worship 177, 182–183, 185 heterodiegetic narration 307, 482, 488, 537, 539 heteronormativity 127, 136, 141, 371, 374, 466, 482

Hindi language 616, 622 history 1, 8, 16, 41, 44, 155, 176–181, 185–186, 190–193, 196–197, 200–201, 227, 231–232, 239, 269, 333, 370–371, 386, 399–402, 405–407, 410, 431–434, 436–441, 446–447, 462, 473, 535–537, 543, 555, 567, 571, 609 – historical context 82, 150, 197, 250, 279, 284, 372, 454, 457, 540, 587, 597 – historical moment 64, 66–67, 100, 180, 285, 348, 369, 498, 566, 629 – historical novel/fiction/narrative 74, 77, 91, 115, 155, 189, 196–197, 222, 273, 291, 301, 381, 382, 399, 431, 438, 446, 600 – art history 9, 268, 411, 433, 436 – cultural history 10, 135, 150, 276, 431, 438, 440, 454 – human history 1, 10, 383, 399–400, – natural history 28, 362, 384, 401–402, 405 – literary history 1, 16, 142, 186, 196, 268, 274, 276, 285, 354, 382, 394, 406–407, 432, 454, 456, 479, 496, 507–508, 530, 565, 581, 609 historiography, historian 11, 89, 157, 173, 179, 176–177, 181, 201, 291, 333, 372, 390, 400–401, 406–407, 432, 504, 550, 573 home 76, 93, 134, 153, 162–163, 210, 222, 241, 280–283, 315, 329, 340, 343, 386, 450, 521, 614, 631 homodiegetic narration 95, 488 homoeroticism 92, 133, 138, 441, 467, 470, 472, 482, 633, 638 homosexuality; see sexuality homosociality 133, 136, 347, 451, 468, 572 household magazines 354, 357 Household Words 13, 168, 306 hunger 209, 299, 501, 551 – hungry forties 197, 275 hybridity 103, 153, 155, 194, 300, 343, 345, 439, 559, 613, 616, 622 hypermediacy 53–54 hysteria 37, 134, 131, 138, 302, 483, 551, 572, 576, 621 idealism 35, 98, 115, 177, 178, 182–184, 192, 401–402, 410, 432, 439, 532, 559, 616 identity 39, 40, 43, 101, 128, 132, 165, 206, 211–212, 223, 226, 241, 256, 299, 313–314, 324, 352, 359–360, 362, 368,

Index of Subjects

376–377, 398, 419, 438, 447, 450–453, 466, 470, 473, 480, 484, 490, 505, 518, 520, 542, 576, 586, 592, 603, 616, 621, 623, 626, 631–632, 637, 639, 641 – identity formation/construction 29, 128, 162–163, 216, 314, 338, 369, 441, 452, 524, 584, 603 – communal identity 80, 247 – female identity 5, 90, 162, 240, 249, 339 – gender identity; see gender – legal identity 122, 368 – male identity 90, 471 – national identity 16, 163, 166, 301, 576, 587 – performativity of identity 128, 482, 484–485 ideology 13, 16, 66–67, 90, 92, 94–95, 97, 99–100, 121, 123–125, 129, 132, 139, 142, 149, 152, 156–158, 197, 216, 225, 227, 232, 234, 240, 278, 283, 285, 301, 325, 328, 362, 371, 393, 410, 448, 456, 467, 481, 497, 518–519, 576, 593, 597, 615, 626 The Illustrated London News 12, 25, 168 illustrations 13, 27, 55, 121, 168, 253–268, 306, 321, 326, 332, 355–356, 360, 363, 540, 623 imperialism 7, 132, 139, 141, 149–168, 198, 215–216, 301, 362, 377, 446, 491, 586–587, 594, 598, 600, 610, 625 – imperial 4, 5, 102, 122, 125, 130, 136, 149–168, 269, 348, 371, 373, 385–386, 390–393, 446, 554, 616, 620, 623 impressionism 9, 15, 95–97, 503–508, 535, 610 India 151, 154, 164, 210, 253, 310, 370–373, 375, 392, 613–618, 621–625 – Indian Mutiny/Rebellion 4, 150, 348, 372 industrialisation, industrial 1–7, 10–12, 55, 63, 99, 123, 142, 149–150, 154, 157–160, 163–164, 167, 176, 184, 190, 195–197, 222, 274–279, 283–285, 297–298, 311–312, 410, 436, 533, 548, 553–554, 557, 632 – industrial novel/fiction 160, 195, 197, 200–201, 273, 277–278, 285 – Industrial Revolution 2–3, 6–7, 14, 139, 157, 163, 167, 184, 192, 222, 310, 533 influence 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 28, 31–33, 38, 76, 123–124, 132, 151, 153, 157, 167, 178, 192, 209, 213, 215, 223, 233, 263, 268, 274, 278–279, 283, 290, 298, 302, 344, 346, 381, 392–393, 403, 407–409, 417, 470,

651

472–473, 512, 548–550, 556, 585, 592, 630, 640 – artistic/literary influence 13–14, 87, 95, 97–98, 112–114, 194, 198, 223, 255, 277, 290, 398, 416, 432, 462, 469–470, 508, 529, 547, 557–560, 582 – environmental influence 43, 135–136, 162–163, 513, 524, 572, 587, 598 – influence studies 362–363, 472 inheritance 74, 126, 131, 215, 237, 253, 332, 338, 368, 370, 376, 399, 446, 451, 456, 496, 640 – biological inheritance 43, 44, 340, 389, 483, 518, 520, 571, 632 – cultural inheritance 207, 255, 519, 571 insanity 33, 36, 73, 77, 134, 156, 244, 340, 348 interiority 34, 322, 407, 437, 586 intersectionality 472 intertextuality 16, 216, 266, 370, 438, 457, 540 irony 91, 154, 225, 249, 254–256, 258–259, 263, 284, 293, 300, 318, 322, 328, 331, 333, 373, 384–390, 404, 448, 469, 495, 514, 517–518, 521, 524, 533, 535, 539, 552, 556, 584, 588–589, 602, 619–620, 632–633, 635, 637, 641 journalism 94, 101, 118, 142, 154, 201, 297, 326, 368, 480, 481, 497, 511–512, 522, 524 Judaism 72, 80, 200, 556 kinetoscope 14, 56 knowledge 8–9, 12, 15–16, 29, 30, 73, 81, 94, 115, 130, 184–185, 277, 384, 387, 399–400, 402–403, 407, 422, 435, 437, 439, 481, 483, 487, 491, 531–533, 539, 542, 567, 570–571, 583–586 Künstlerroman 90, 94, 208, 497, 516, 613 Labouchere Amendment 136, 455 l’art pour l’art (movement) 462 laissez-faire 6–7, 158, 276, 278 The Leader 178, 317, 368 liberalism 2, 55, 67, 76, 122, 152, 157, 174, 183, 191, 285, 334, 368, 410, 512, 523, 560, 592–593, 624 machines 56–57, 103, 160, 176, 357, 391, 533, 549, 551–553, 556–557, 616, 631 Macmillan’s Magazine 28, 178, 302, 435

652

Index of Subjects

madness 33, 36, 83, 100, 161, 215, 340–341, 346, 348, 368, 427, 519 magic lantern 55–56, 456, 535 magnetism 383–384, 391 manhood 132–133, 289, 296, 386, 551, 621 market 4, 6, 10, 35, 55, 63, 65, 124, 131, 149–168, 174, 372, 375, 502 –literary/publishing market 88, 94, 100, 102, 116, 136, 141, 143, 149, 159, 164–165, 274, 337, 341, 345, 362, 367, 411, 446, 455, 456 – market society 157, 160 – marriage market 162, 341 – mass market 150, 163, 345, 367, 446, 456 marriage 78–80, 91–93, 101, 122, 124–131, 140–141, 144, 162, 175, 198, 213, 229, 232–233, 237, 239, 242, 245, 250, 254, 274, 275, 278, 293, 297–299, 324, 327–329, 331–332, 338, 341, 343, 368, 376, 387, 398, 404–405, 416, 421, 441, 463, 467, 480–484, 486–487, 501, 511–513, 516, 518–521, 524, 530, 532, 534, 538, 540–541, 572, 634 – interfaith marriage 74, 76–77, 79–80, 83 – marriage plot 72, 74, 76, 81, 83, 129, 295–298, 301, 371, 482, 487–488 – failed-marriage plot 128–130 – Married Women’s Property Acts 123, 368, 399 – Matrimonial Causes Acts 123, 129, 338, 368 Marxism 159, 185, 434, 631 – Marxist criticism 126, 214–215, 232, 248–249, 410, 540–542 masculinity 65, 121–127, 130–134, 162, 155, 249, 295, 300–301, 313, 317, 346–347, 377, 441, 466, 469, 472, 518, 532, 534, 540–541, 552–553, 556, 567, 574 mass culture 100, 575–577 materialism 6, 28, 32, 35, 39, 154, 164, 177–178, 183, 185, 285, 384, 435, 540, 542, 573, 622, 624 materiality 12, 15–16, 42, 44, 54, 114, 128, 132, 144, 149–168, 183, 411, 441 – material culture (studies) 67, 150, 162–166, 168, 411 – material turn 163 material conditions 11, 73, 116, 157, 160, 278, 532 mathematics 41, 174–175, 354, 356, 566

maturation 1, 89, 155, 207, 384, 585, 589, 613, 616–617 media, medium 2, 52–56, 66, 67, 168, 432, 441, 451, 457, 560, 574–577 – digital media 52, 55 – mediation 52–57, 67, 88, 103, 592 – media studies 54, 441, 576 medicine 3, 11–12, 33, 36–37, 134–136, 310, 313, 328, 352, 370–372, 391, 402, 405, 447, 451, 483, 487, 540 melancholy 4, 11, 15, 33, 161, 225, 255, 382, 408, 532, 551 melodrama 100, 101, 258, 278, 280, 317, 344, 406, 451, 471, 488, 567, 570, 574, 582 memoir 135, 352, 355, 446, 498, 582, 615 memory 40–41, 57, 64, 91, 99, 181, 263, 296, 375, 437, 441, 449, 599, 602, 639 mesmerism 27, 369, 381–383, 391 metafiction, metanarration 93, 103, 407,470, 454, 552, 561 metamorphosis 1, 12, 482, 533, 549 metaphysics 11, 185, 232, 393, 450, 530, 559 metatextuality 400, 405–406, 521 Methodism 8, 71–72, 81, 224, 233 metropolis, metropolitan 56, 65, 95, 153–158, 161, 168, 306, 311–312, 318, 449, 451, 501, 577 misogyny 133–134, 141, 258, 347, 468, 472, 641 mobility 56–57, 241, 246, 533 – social mobility 65, 137, 160–161, 498 modernism 5, 15, 143, 167, 285, 318, 377, 409–410, 416, 432, 440, 448–449, 451, 454, 466, 488, 491, 498, 504, 507, 523, 530, 532, 538, 557, 559, 572, 575, 581–582, 585–586, 588, 591–592, 600, 603, 605–606, 609–610, 624 modernity 1, 5, 11, 90, 98, 139, 143, 434, 569–570, 574–575 money 63, 65, 153, 159, 163, 253, 256, 264, 267–268, 276, 325–326, 328–329, 338, 368, 383, 399, 450, 457, 481, 499, 505, 630, 640 monomania 36 monster 87, 95, 102, 104, 308, 384, 387, 448–449, 457, 554, 568–569, 571–572, 576–577 morality 5, 7, 11, 13, 29–30, 33–36, 38–39, 41–42, 77, 93, 95, 98–102, 107–108,

Index of Subjects

112–116, 124, 132, 158–162, 181, 194, 200, 214, 228, 234, 249, 256, 258, 260, 263, 268–269, 278, 289, 294, 297, 299–300, 307, 313–314, 344–345, 357–358, 367, 369, 373, 375–376, 398, 408–409, 411, 434, 453, 462, 465, 467, 470, 481, 485, 488–490, 497, 502, 507, 512, 514, 531–532, 534, 536, 538, 549, 570, 572, 589–591, 600, 608, 635 – moral code 93, 156, 343 – moral insanity/madness 36, 348 – moral order 14, 165 – moral philosophy 28, 33 – moralism 223, 227, 231, 255, 433, 440 motherhood 134, 140, 239, 246, 274, 315, 340, 480–481, 515–516, 521, 535, 590 – civic motherhood 130, 481, 491 – surrogate mother 209, 516, 551, 585, 614, 617–618 Mudie’s ‘Select Library’ 12, 63, 95, 497 multiperspectivism 9, 183, 375, 405, 448, 520, 539, 573, 584–585, 631, 635, 639 multivocalism 183, 452, 488 murder 36, 44, 81, 88, 101, 114, 127–128, 255, 275, 314, 341, 343, 446, 449, 451, 453, 455, 488, 512, 520, 553–554, 640 myth, mythology 31, 156, 181, 185, 232, 264, 266, 296, 312, 352–354, 363, 431, 439, 446, 457, 495, 512–514, 519–520, 556, 559–561, 616, 619, 625, 632 – myth of the Brontës 206 – Greek mythology 431, 514, 519–520 – Oedipus myth 376, 640 – Pygmalion myth 138, 314 national tale 193–194, 196–198 natural selection 7, 31, 362, 391, 524, 550 naturalism (aesthetics) 94–97, 113, 115, 161, 318, 417, 467, 496, 501, 503, 507, 531, 540 naturalism (science) 26, 30, 32, 277 nature vs. nurture 482, 532 Nazi 185, 393–394, 615 New Historicism 17, 63, 164, 576 New Man 121, 132, 517 New Woman 90–91, 121, 124, 126, 128–132, 138–139, 143, 313, 417, 469, 479, 481, 486–487, 490–491, 496, 511, 514–515, 517, 519–520, 522–524, 540, 551, 569 Newgate novel/fiction 101, 343–344

653

nonconformism 8, 71–72, 84 non-fiction 55, 155, 273, 327, 417, 521, 555 occult 155–156, 381–383, 391–393, 559 odd women 124, 131–133, 139, 513 Oedipus complex 451, 632, 640–641 omniscient narrator 93, 256, 282, 306, 315, 317, 330, 346–347, 375, 403, 409, 437, 537, 585 opium 36, 150, 238, 369–373, 376, 456, 468, 618–619 – Opium War(s) 150, 372–373 organicism 76, 192, 406, 410–411 orientalism 151, 382, 417, 568, 569 Oxford Movement 8, 75–76, 289, 436 pacifism 512–513, 616 palimpsestic 54, 67, 440 Pall Mall Gazette 94, 102, 109–110, 326, 351, 425, 497 Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union 514 panorama 14, 27, 56 papal aggression 75, 302 parasite 256, 308–310, 511 parody 66, 103, 126, 165, 253, 266, 311, 315, 344, 357, 362, 391, 445, 452, 521 pastoral 140, 222, 488, 506, 533 paterfamilias 121, 124–125 patriarchy 79, 91, 101, 125–126, 131–133, 136, 141, 152, 154, 162, 208–209, 232–233, 244–245, 247, 254, 266, 274, 314–315, 450–451, 482–483, 486–487, 501, 511–517, 561, 618–619, 640 penny dreadful 13, 337, 450, 574 performativity 132, 165, 374, 472 – gender performativity; see gender – performativity of identity; see identity periodicals, periodical press 12–13, 55, 63, 88, 109, 113, 116, 118, 142, 168, 223, 326, 337, 345, 434–435 phantasmagoria 56, 531 philosophy 2, 5–7, 28–29, 33, 36, 88, 91–92, 103, 115, 158, 177–185, 192–193, 224, 301, 352, 384, 398, 403–404, 408, 424, 431–435, 438–439, 441, 449, 462, 465, 503, 512, 515, 517, 524, 530–531, 535, 540, 571, 635 phonograph 570, 574

654

Index of Subjects

photography 14, 55–56, 115, 352–353, 356, 432, 446, 468, 482, 531, 543, 575, 619, 624, 633, 641 phrenology 27–28, 33–35, 384 physics 24, 26–29, 39, 41, 44, 405, 540, 555 physiognomy 33–35, 384, 391 physiology 33, 38, 44, 135, 309–310, 369–373, 377, 406–407, 417, 570, 635 – neurophysiology 33 picaresque 255, 305, 316, 616–617 poetry 13, 24, 92, 97–98, 112, 168, 178, 223–224, 230, 297, 311, 361, 398, 417, 446, 462–463, 497, 529–530, 622 Politics for the People 290–291 polyphony 211, 228, 624 positivism 24, 317, 405, 434 postcolonialism 17, 150–156, 159, 168, 214–215, 279, 362, 372, 377–378, 610 postmodernism 8, 15, 51, 55, 63–64, 67, 104, 311, 313, 367, 377, 427, 472, 559, 635 poststructuralism 31, 214, 286, 410, 472, 541, 593 poverty 143, 160, 222, 242, 275, 278, 282–283, 295–298, 302, 306, 322, 436, 447, 495 – the poor 44, 72, 160–161, 180, 198, 201, 209, 242, 282–283, 293, 295, 298–299, 308, 462, 630 – rich vs. poor 3, 160, 198, 242, 245, 334, 502, 631 – New Poor Law 6, 157, 161 pre-Raphaelite 343, 361, 398, 416, 436, 463, 554 progress 1–6, 11, 13, 28, 32, 45, 102, 125, 158, 163, 173, 177, 307, 311, 382, 388, 392, 402, 417, 422–423, 448, 482–486, 489, 500, 514, 530, 533, 549, 555, 557, 575 prostitution 94, 134–136, 448, 457, 465, 501, 520–521, 641 Protestantism 8, 74–78, 83, 193, 233–234, 292, 294, 301–302, 367, 565 prudishness, prudery 8, 292, 497 pseudonym; see publication psychoanalysis 17, 214–215, 231, 323, 377, 454, 541, 575–576, 625, 630, 632, 641 psychology 4, 37–39, 41, 44, 82, 128, 134, 159, 398, 411, 417, 427, 489, 540, 542, 582–583, 586, 631, 634–635, 637, 641 – physiological psychology 38, 44, 369

publication, publishing 12–13, 102, 116–118, 141–143, 168, 205, 274, 345, 356, 497, 558 – anonymous/pseudonymous publication 28, 143, 150, 190, 205–206, 223, 238, 253, 274, 284, 291, 337, 352, 354, 390, 398, 464, 512 – serial publication/fiction 13, 25, 28, 55, 94, 101–102, 116, 118, 155, 168, 175–176, 254–260, 268, 289, 291, 317, 326, 337–338, 343–345, 367, 369, 407, 417–418, 446, 530, 548, 551, 553, 556, 617, 624 Punch 168, 253–254, 259, 268, 360, 486 Queen Victoria 1, 55, 128, 151, 189, 361, 373, 583, 624 queer 17, 136, 138, 313, 377, 441, 455, 472–473, 560, 575, 641 race, racial 7, 35, 44, 80, 130, 140, 151–157, 161, 197, 200, 216, 226, 250, 269, 301, 369, 377, 382–383, 386–389, 391–393, 448, 472, 481, 483, 514, 517, 519–520, 524, 567, 569, 571, 576, 586–587, 594, 610, 622 – racism 7, 141, 152, 163, 173, 447, 513, 587, 610 (horse) racing 496, 499–504, 506 radioactivity 45 railway 3–4, 10, 12, 14, 39, 55, 63, 102, 196, 343, 345, 348, 399, 497, 533, 536, 553 rationalism, rationality 4, 6, 9, 28, 37, 102, 130, 174, 177, 192, 275, 278, 385, 448, 450–452, 502, 518, 533, 536, 541, 559–560, 569 – irrationality 36, 161, 186, 215 realism 14–15, 33, 36, 52, 56–57, 72, 89, 93–95, 97–100, 108–117, 132, 139, 143, 153–155, 164–166, 183–184, 195, 207, 239, 247–248, 258, 268–269, 278, 280–283, 285, 296, 317, 330, 345, 369, 403–406, 408–411, 415–417, 419, 424, 446–447, 450, 453, 463, 467, 488, 508, 518–519, 531, 539–540, 548, 557–559, 568–569, 574, 582–583, 603, 609, 618 reality 11, 15, 28, 30, 53, 93, 102, 110, 113, 115, 176, 224, 258–260, 279, 283, 285, 297, 318, 403, 409, 423–424, 435, 456, 512, 530–532, 536, 543, 576, 593, 609, 620

Index of Subjects

– disproportioning of reality 97, 531, 541 – perception of reality 14, 97, 435 – reality principle 535 Reform Bills 6 – First/Great Reform Act/Bill (1832) 2, 123, 157, 369, 399, 401 – Second Reform Act/Bill (1867) 2, 178, 369, 399, 401 – Third Reform Act/Bill (1884) 2, 369 Regency period 253, 306, 313, 315 regression 156, 489, 549–550, 552 relationality 122, 125, 419, 449, 584, 592 relativism 8, 447, 512, 558, 584, 641 relativity 7–9, 45, 543, 555, 558 religion 8–9, 28, 35, 71–84, 92, 153, 184, 193–195, 209–210, 214, 223–224, 231–233, 240, 248, 250, 255, 274–275, 291–294, 297, 299–301, 311, 369, 397–400, 402, 408, 433–435, 438–439, 441, 445, 470, 472, 483, 500, 540, 549, 559, 571, 583, 629, 635 remediation 14, 17, 51–55, 62–67 repression 137–138, 152, 213, 240–241, 243, 245, 371, 447–450, 456, 567, 574, 576, 638, 640 – repressive hypothesis 133 romance 78, 88, 100–102, 110–111, 137, 139, 143, 155–156, 166, 191, 193, 200, 233–234, 259, 276, 279, 285, 317, 343, 345, 355, 446, 456, 485, 567, 569–570, 573–574, 577, 583 – romance plot 126, 279, 371, 374–376, 485, 491 – gothic romance 156, 207, 224, 230 – historical romance 155, 196–197, 291, 301 – imperial romance 155, 269, 446, 574 – scientific romance 89, 100, 102, 103, 156, 453, 547, 549, 557, 558, 560 Romanticism 1, 6, 13, 16, 88, 97–100, 102, 173, 177, 186, 190, 192, 198, 200, 207, 223–224, 227, 230–231, 247, 249, 305n, 309, 311, 316, 318, 377, 415–416, 432, 446, 504, 507, 554, 559, 582, 585, 607, 624, 632, 638, 640 romantic love 23, 77–78, 125, 127, 210, 213, 215, 226, 231, 292, 295–296, 353, 374, 383, 418–421, 451, 504, 585–586, 613

655

satire 6, 71, 81, 92, 103, 111, 116, 174, 176–178, 180, 182, 185, 194, 253–255, 258, 267–268, 284, 311, 315–316, 333–334, 354, 357, 382, 385–387, 390, 404, 423, 488, 498, 518, 521, 583, 630, 631 The Saturday Review 13, 107, 110, 111, 506 scepticism 3, 8, 81–84, 209, 224, 269, 390, 423, 434–435, 531, 547, 555, 558–559, 575, 598, 604 science 3, 6, 12, 23–45, 55, 82, 94, 102, 113, 163, 291, 299, 312, 348, 352, 356, 362, 368–370, 378, 381–385, 391, 400–408, 411, 427, 435, 441, 448–452, 455, 457, 496, 523, 531, 547–551, 555–558, 566, 569–571, 573, 575–576, 582–584, 629, 631, 634–635 – scientific knowledge 8, 28–30, 384, 402, 407 – scientific materialism 39, 573 – scientist 2, 28–31, 102, 113, 138, 381, 386, 447, 452, 547, 548, 554–555, 571 – British Association for the Advancement of Science 29 – Christian science 391 – the ‘dismal science’ 173–174, – mental science 33–38, 44, 411 – neuroscience 542 – social science 44, 94, 179, 622 science fiction 26, 57, 102–103, 155, 352, 394, 547, 555–561, 574 Scramble for Africa 151, 158 secularisation, secularism 7–8, 71–72, 81, 180, 207, 224, 255, 398, 403 selfhood 33–40, 162, 166, 207–208, 210, 226, 228, 240–244, 247, 302, 328, 376, 406, 435–437, 439, 449, 452, 637 – self-awareness 211, 453, 637 – self-consciousness 5, 53, 93–94, 103, 151, 182–183, 211, 338, 426, 453, 522 – self-determination 160, 174 – self-fashioning 159, 313, 437, 441, 446 – self-referentiality 309 – self-reflection 58–59, 246 – self-reflexivity 1, 15, 64–65, 74, 80, 183–184, 186, 401, 407, 424, 593 sensation 54, 97, 100–101, 128, 135, 137, 212, 331, 341, 344, 388, 453, 462

656

Index of Subjects

sensationalism 36, 75, 116, 155, 161, 346–347, 423, 451, 455–456, 488 – sensation(al) fiction 33, 39–38, 88–91, 100–102, 116–118, 129, 137, 142–143, 155, 258, 316–317, 341–348, 367–369, 377, 488 sentimentalism 65–66, 94, 130, 223, 256, 258–260, 263, 266–267, 292, 316, 403, 423, 462, 471, 488, 631, 634 separate spheres 77, 124–125, 163, 512 sex, sexuality 5, 8, 13, 16, 24, 64–66, 83, 101–102, 121–144, 162, 239, 264, 292–294, 297, 299–302, 313, 324–325, 331, 371, 448, 455, 461, 465, 471–472, 481–482, 491, 497, 501, 504, 514, 520, 530, 532, 534–536, 541, 552–553, 566, 571–572, 576–577, 587, 590, 594, 618, 623, 633, 637–638 – sexual anarchy 122, 131 – sexual desire 23, 122, 133–138, 140–141, 292–293, 503–504, 534 – sexual difference 123, 134–135, 300, 407, 473, 485 – sexual domination/oppression 76, 101, 541 – sexual perversion 156 – sexual symbolism 371, 377, 575 – sexual transgression 455, 497, 501 – female sexuality 82, 101, 134–138, 162, 292–293, 375, 576 – heterosexuality 132–133, 135–136, 292, 455, 551, 560 – heterosexual romance 53, 295, 301, 634 – homosexuality 121, 127, 135–138, 440–441, 455, 463–464, 468, 469, 633 – oversexed 481, 566, 569, 572 sexism 141, 325, 329, 415, 422, 472 sexology 134, 455, 577 short story 273–274, 321, 333, 368, 446, 463, 480, 498, 512, 548, 582, 598, 613, 626 silencing 38, 42, 176, 241–242, 249, 284, 371, 375, 377, 482, 487, 625 silver fork novel 165, 193–194, 343 social criticism 5, 201, 246, 249, 293, 297–298, 301, 377, 467, 550 social Darwinism 7, 130, 139, 152, 154, 549–550 social purity movement 130, 136, 481 socialism 102, 139, 141, 290–291, 296, 411, 481, 540, 548, 640

social problem novel 160, 194–195, 200–201, 276, 291 sociology 7, 9, 11, 24, 159, 161, 200, 398, 403, 540, 542, 548, 550, 577, 631 South African Wars 392 The Spectator 32, 176–177, 351 spinsterhood 124, 131, 313 spiritualism 381, 391–392 spirituality 30, 73–87, 125, 179, 181, 194, 210, 214–215, 224, 291–292, 294, 296, 299, 301, 382, 462, 623 – spiritual autobiography 74, 207 – spiritual awakening 72, 179, 382 – spiritual crisis 4, 8–9, 72, 82, 176, 179, 194, 434–435 – spiritual health 30, 76 – spiritual quest 301, 433, 438, 621 spontaneous combustion 27, 309, 317–318 Stoicism 34, 433–434, 437 stream of consciousness 15, 488, 498, 582, 584 subjectivity 9, 15, 33, 38–39, 57, 78, 212, 330, 348, 435, 446, 449, 472, 488, 535, 573, 575, 583–584 subjective perception/experience 15, 57, 95–96, 212–213, 224, 375–376, 409, 435, 438, 448, 452, 488, 504, 531, 533, 535, 539, 582–584, 587, 592, 607, 610 suffrage, suffragist 2, 121–124, 131, 139, 158, 289, 296, 385, 398–399, 481, 484, 487, 514, 522, 525 – National Society for Women’s Suffrage 123, 514 – National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 123, 481 – Women’s Franchise League 514 supernaturalism 43–44, 81, 98, 113, 182, 232, 247, 312, 341, 381–382, 403, 445, 557, 559, 573, 575–577 symbolism 318, 377, 432, 507, 520, 540, 553, 575 sympathy 30, 40, 42, 58–59, 67, 75, 82, 114–115, 160–161, 165, 209, 226, 238, 282, 290–291, 298, 328, 402–404, 408, 411, 425, 485, 531, 542, 554, 603, 626, 636 syphilis 483

Index of Subjects

tea 163–166, 372 technology 2–3, 6, 14, 27, 53, 55–57, 63, 66–67, 102, 139–140, 156–157, 163, 167, 177, 311, 358, 383, 387, 393, 456, 547–560, 570–571, 574–576, 631 – technological singularity 631 telegraphy 3, 10, 14, 27, 348 telepathy 330, 332, 561, 567, 572 theology 25–26, 29, 72, 76–77, 83, 92, 223, 233, 290–291, 299, 302, 330, 472, 622, 630, 641 theosophy 381, 391–393 thermodynamics 26, 457 thing theory 164, 269 third-person narrative 316, 330–331, 448, 452–453, 470, 504, 537, 602–603, 607–610 three-decker 12–13, 63, 102, 138, 168, 205, 238, 248, 369, 338, 417, 487 time 9–11, 15, 25, 28, 31, 40, 43, 167, 181, 212, 227, 266–267, 280, 373, 375, 384, 391, 400, 406, 434, 436, 438–439, 467, 488–489, 518, 532–539, 603, 607, 621 – temporality 15, 67, 434, 518, 520, 532–533, 536, 539, 608 – ‘deep time’ 25, 567 – experience/perception of time 1, 11, 432, 488, 532–533, 537 – geological time 41 – multiple dimensions of time 532, 537 – social time 11, 534–536, – subjective time 11, 534–535, 537 – time travel 391, 548–561, – ‘triumph of time’ 9–11, 530, 539 The Times 176, 190, 326, 339, 367 tobacco 165, 371 Tractarianism 8, 75, 77, 436 tragedy, tragic 14, 43, 90–92, 95, 102, 177, 222, 233, 266–267, 290, 308, 313–314, 401, 407, 416, 439, 467, 471, 488, 501, 516–519, 539–541, 591, 615 transformation 1–5, 12, 14, 31, 56, 75, 98, 121–125, 127, 139, 142–143, 157–163, 190, 196–197, 224, 232–233, 277, 297–298, 313, 339, 357–358, 383, 450, 452–453, 455, 457, 486, 499, 502, 504, 508, 536, 560, 574–575, 583, 599, 616, 619

657

transition 5, 15, 224, 268, 277, 317, 359, 382, 508, 523, 530, 588, 590, 606, 609, 622 trauma 16, 90, 98, 207, 306, 371, 464, 561, 576, 598, 614, 641 travel literature 102, 139, 154–155, 253, 282, 321, 446, 513, 567–569, 567, 574, 582, 615–617 uncanny 55, 58, 62, 64–65, 67, 230, 308–309, 343, 446–450, 502, 521, 575, 605 the unconscious 36–37, 369–371, 377, 421, 446, 449, 451, 552, 605, 637, 639 unconscious cerebration 36, 369 Unitarianism 99, 274–275, 278, 283, 635 unreliability 178, 183, 221, 228–229, 234, 316, 375, 448, 573, 575, 585, 588–589, 629, 637–638 urban 3, 44, 55, 63, 65, 73, 94, 95, 158, 160, 161, 163, 168, 180, 222, 275, 283, 289, 298, 306, 314, 348, 399, 436, 446, 447, 532, 533, 549–550, 553, 609 – urban degeneration 450, 457, 569, 577 – urban Gothic 446–447, 571, 577 urbanisation 1, 3, 4, 11, 123, 273, 275, 311, 557, 575 utilitarianism 5–6, 9, 74, 150, 158, 168, 174, 182–184, 192, 357 utopia 102, 122, 139–142, 216, 383–385, 387, 390, 393, 411, 491, 513, 520, 547–549, 555, 557–560, 631, 640 vampire, vampirism 156, 207, 308–309, 559, 565–572, 575–577 vegetarianism 140, 250, 552 verisimilitude 114, 345, 425, 531 vivisection 30, 368, 482, 513, 548 vril 381–394 – Bovril 391–392 Westminster Review 93, 113, 142, 397, 417, 432, 513 Woman Question 345, 399, 402, 408, 481, 540 women’s rights 3, 123, 345, 368, 382, 386, 399, 462, 512–513, 523–524 women’s writing 142–143, 206, 240–241, 244, 285, 345–346, 410, 490, 523

658

Index of Subjects

womanhood 74, 122, 137–138, 402, 469 First World War 1, 92, 150, 392 Second World War 66, 200, 615 x-rays 45

Young England 191–194, 201 Zeitroman 532 zoology 24, 40, 45, 277, 566

Index of Names A.L.O.E. (Charlotte Maria Tucker) 79 – A Son of Israel; Or, the Sword of the Spirit 79 Abbott, Edwin 555 – Flatland 555 Abrams, Weyer Howard 16 Achebe, Chinua 152 Ackroyd, Peter 368, 471 Acton, William 134 – Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations 134 Adams, James Eli 124, 161–162, 300–301, 409, 441 Aguilar, Grace 79–80 – The Perez Family 80 – The Vale of Cedars; Or, the Martyr 79 Aitken, Margaret 174 Alcott, Bronson 581 Alighieri, Dante 438 Allen, Grant 43, 103, 547, 558 – “The Thames Valley Catastrophe” 103 – The Woman Who Did 43 Appadurai, Arjun 163 Armstrong, Nancy 53, 55–57, 122, 136–137 Arnold, Matthew 3–4, 8–9, 29–30, 98–99, 143, 165, 173, 185, 200, 297, 317, 431, 434, 532, 581 – Culture and Anarchy 9, 165, 532 Assmann, Aleida 440 Ashbee, Henry Spencer (Pisanus Fraxi) 135–136 – Index Librorum Prohibitorum 135 Agassiz, Louis 384 Atkinson, William Walker 383, 391–392 – Vril, or Vital Magnetism 391–392 Austen, Jane 32, 34, 91, 153, 212, 345, 409, 584, 626, 636 – Emma 34 – Mansfield Park 34 – Pride and Prejudice 91 – Sense and Sensibility 52 Baillie-Cochrane, Alexander 191 Bain, Alexander 38–40 – The Emotions and the Will 38–40 Bakhtin, Mikhail 211, 216, 625 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-039

Bal, Mieke 607 Balestier, Caroline 614 – The Naulahka: A Tale of Two Continents 614 Ball, Robert 27 – The Story of the Heavens 27 Ballantyne, R. M. 155 – The Coral Island 155 Balzac, Honoré de 94, 417 Barnes, William 529 Bart, Lionel 52 – Oliver! 52 Bates, David 357 – “Speak Gently” 357 Baudelaire, Charles 308, 438 – Les fleurs du mal 308 Beardsley, Aubrey 121–122 Beaty, Jerome 210–211, 216 Beckett, Samuel 16, 309 – Endgame 309 – Play 309 – Waiting for Godot 16 Beecher Stowe, Harriet 386 – The American Woman’s Home 386 Beer, Gillian 31–32, 352, 359, 363, 411, 424, 427 – Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll 352, 359, 363 – Darwin’s Plots 31, 411 Behn, Aphra 149 – Oronooko; Or, the Royal Slave 149 Bell, Acton; see Brontë, Anne Bell, Alexander Graham 102 Bell, Charles 34 – Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 34 Bell, Currer; see Brontë, Charlotte Bell, Ellis; see Brontë, Emily Bell, Robert 326 Bellamy, Edward 549, 558 – Looking Backward 549, 558 Benjamin, Walter 606, 609 Bentham, Jeremy 5–6, 192 Bergier, Jacques 393 – The Morning of the Magicians 393 Berkley, Theresa 136 – The Favourite of Venus 136 Besant, Walter 109–112, 117–118, 497

660

Index of Names

– All Sorts and Conditions of Men 502 – “The Art of Fiction” 111, 117–118 – “Candour in English Fiction” 497 – “How to Review” 118 – “On the Writing of Novels” 117 Bichat, François 40 Blackall, Jean 590–591 Blackstone, William 122–123 – Commentaries on the Laws of England 122 Blackwood, William 24, 490 Blake, Robert 189–190, 192, 195–196, 200 Blake, William 613 Blanchot, Maurice 88–89 – Le livre à venir 89 Blavatsky, Helena 383, 392, 559 – Isis Unveiled 383, 392 – The Secret Doctrine 392 Bloom, Harold 440 Blomfield, Arthur 529 Bobrowska, Ewa 598 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith 123, 398 Boisgobey, Fortuné de 110 – In the Serpent’s Coils / Margot la Balafrée 110 Booth, Charles 161 – Life and Labour of the People of London 161 Booth, William 161 – In Darkest England and the Way Out 161 Borges, Jorge Luis 559, 625 Botticelli, Sandro 97 Boumelha, Penny 541–543 Bourget, Paul 108, 111 Bowman, Isa 352 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 36, 38, 100–101, 116, 118, 129, 137, 142, 160, 337–350 – Aurora Floyd 137, 337–338, 348 – The Factory Girl 160 – Lady Audley’s Secret 36, 101, 116, 118, 129, 137, 337–350 Bradlaugh, William 84 Bradshaw, William R. 393 – The Goddess of Atvatabar 393 Brantlinger, Patrick 152–153, 156, 269 Briggs, Asa 158, 162, 164–165, 192 Bronfen, Elisabeth 576 Brontë, Anne 28, 33–34, 205–206, 223, 237–252 – Agnes Grey 33, 205, 223, 237–252 – “Lines Written at Thorp Green” 238–239

– Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell 223, 238 – “Self-Communion” 243 – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 28, 34, 238–239, 247, 342 – “Verses to a Child” 239 – “A Voice from the Dungeon” 239 Brontë, Branwell 33, 206, 223, 238–239 Brontë, Charlotte 27, 33–36, 73, 76–78, 88, 91, 98, 125–126, 150, 160, 205–219, 222–223, 238–240, 248–249, 268, 273, 297, 305, 316, 342, 425, 483, 637 – “Biographical Notice” 239, 248–249 – Jane Eyre 34–36, 73, 77–78, 88, 90–91, 93, 98, 122, 125–126, 129, 143, 150–153, 156, 162, 164–165, 205–219, 240–241, 244, 268, 305, 342, 425, 483, 637 – Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell 223, 238 – The Professor 34, 205–207, 223 – Shirley 34, 160, 206 – Villette 33, 77–78, 91, 98, 206–208, 473 – Willie Ellen 206 Brontë, Emily 33–34, 52, 54, 98, 137, 153–154, 156, 205–206, 212, 214, 221–235, 237–240, 243, 247, 248–249, 342, 616 – Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell 223, 238 – Wuthering Heights 34, 52, 54, 98, 106, 129, 153–154, 156, 205, 221–235, 238, 240, 243, 248, 342, 473, 616 Brooke, Emma Frances 130, 515 – A Superfluous Woman 130, 515 Brooke-Rose, Christine 537 Brooks, Peter 101 Brown, Bill 164 Brown, Ford Madox 306 Browne, Hablot Knight (‘Phiz’) 306 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 297 Browning, Robert 398 Buchanan, Robert 83 – Foxglove Manor 83 – The New Abelard: A Romance 83 Buckland, William 25–26 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 90, 102–103, 115, 117, 155, 165, 197, 306, 381–396, 549, 558–559 – Caxtoniana 155 – The Coming Race 102–103, 115, 155, 197, 381–396, 549, 558–559

Index of Names

– England and the English 382 – Harold, The Last of the Saxons 197, 382 – Kenelm Chillingly 389 – The Last Days of Pompeii 115, 155, 382, 392 – The Last of the Barons 197 – “On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination” 381 – The Parisians 389 – Paul Clifford 115 – Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes 381–382 – A Strange Story 381–383 – Zanoni 155, 381, 392 Bunyan, John 207, 255, 263, 464 – The Pilgrim’s Progress 207, 255, 464 Burckhardt, Jacob 440 Burdett Coutts, Angela 314 Burton, Richard Francis 102 Butler, Josephine 480 Butler, Samuel 82, 90, 92, 102–103, 390, 539, 556, 558, 559, 629–643 – “Darwin Among the Machines” 631 – Erewhon 102–103, 390, 556, 558–559, 630–631, 637 – Life and Habit 639 – The Way of All Flesh 82, 90, 92, 539, 629–643 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 98–99, 189–190, 310, 314–315 – Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 99, 309 – Don Juan 99, 310 Cain, Peter J. 157 Caird, Mona 511–527 – The Crook of the Bough 512 – The Daughters of Danaus 511–527 – “A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women” 513 – “Does Marriage Hinder a Woman’s SelfDevelopment?” 521 – “The Emancipation of the Family” 513 – The Great Wave 513 – Love and His Mask 513 – The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women 512–513, 524 – One That Wins 512 – The Pathways of the Gods 513 – A Romance of the Moors 512

661

– Romantic Cities Of Provence 513 – Some Whims of Fate 512 – The Stones of Sacrifice 513, 520–521 – Whom Nature Leadeth 512 – The Wing of Azrael 512, 523 Carlyle, Thomas 11, 29, 89, 92, 98, 103, 150, 160, 165, 173–188, 192, 197, 200, 207, 276–277, 290, 293, 297, 317, 425, 550, 633 – Chartism 160, 176, 276, 290, 293 – History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great 177 – Latter-Day Pamphlets 177 – The Life of John Sterling 177 – On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History 177 – Past and Present 177, 182, 197, 276, 290 – Sartor Resartus 92, 103, 165, 173–188, 207 Carpenter, William B. 36, 369 Carroll, Lewis (Rev. Charles L. Dodgson) 165, 351–365, 630 – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 165, 351–365 – Alice’s Adventures Under Ground 355–356 – The Hunting of the Snark 353, 362 – Mischmasch 356 – The Profits of Authorship 356 – The Rectory Umbrella 354, 356 – Through the Looking-Glass 352–353 – Useful and Instructive Poetry 354, 357 Cassirer, Ernst 185–186 Cervantes, Miguel de 255 – Don Quixote 184, 616 Chadwick, Edwin 201, 279, 311 – Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain 201, 279, 311 Chambers, Robert 28, 384 – Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation 28, 384 Chase, Karen 348 Chatman, Seymour 588–589 Chaudhuri, Nirad 625 Chekov, Anton 582 Chesney, George Tomkyns 103, 390, 558–559 – The Battle of Dorking 103, 390, 558–559 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 318 Chitty, Susan 299–300 – The Beast and the Monk 299–300

662

Index of Names

Clarke, Frances Bellenden; see Grand, Sarah Clarke, Micael M. 233 Clayton, Jay 63, 66–67 Clifford, William Kingdon 29, 43 – “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves” 43 Clodd, Edward 41 Cobbe, Frances Power 123, 129 – “Wife Torture in England” 129 Cohen, Morton N. 353–354, 356, 358–359 Colenso, John William 82 – The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined 82 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 175, 192, 224 Collins, Wilkie 30, 36, 38, 88, 100–101, 116, 153, 155, 168, 258, 339, 367–380 – Armadale 101 – Heart and Science 30 – The Law and the Lady 368 – Man and Wife 368 – The Moonstone 36–38, 88, 101, 153, 155, 367–380 – No Name 101 – The Woman in White 38, 101, 116, 339, 368, 375 Combe, George 35, 370 – The Constitution of Man 35 Comte, Auguste 24, 434–435 Conan Doyle, Arthur 153, 168, 384, 495 – The Lost World 384 – The Sign of the Four 153 Conrad, Joseph (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) 13–15, 27, 35, 95–96, 132–133, 150, 152–156, 161, 166–168, 345, 409, 454, 495–496, 557, 559, 592, 597–611, 624 – Almayer’s Folly 155 – Chance 95 – Heart of Darkness 95–96, 122, 133, 152, 154, 156, 161, 166, 598–602, 605, 609 – Lord Jim 15, 95, 156, 455, 597–611, 624 – The Nigger of the “Narcissus” 96 – The Secret Agent 35, 95, 167 Constable, Archibald 55 – Miscellany 55 Cooper, Anthony Ashley 73 Corbett, Elisabeth Burgoyne 140 – New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future 140 Corelli, Marie 495, 559 Corp, Harriet 74

– Cottage Sketches 74 Crake, A. D. 76 Crawford, Emily 113 Culler, Jonathan 89, 473 Cvetkovich, Ann 346 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 55–56 Dallas, E. S. 326 Daly, Suzanne 164–165 Darwin, Charles 6–7, 11, 24, 26, 31–33, 41–43, 54, 82, 102–103, 130, 154, 274, 291, 362, 388–389, 398–399, 417, 434, 529, 549–550, 552–554, 559, 583, 631, 639 – The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 42 – On the Origin of Species 6, 26, 31, 43, 362, 399, 417, 549, 631 – The Descent of Man 24, 42, 399, 549 Darwin, John 157 Daumier, Honoré 321 Davies, Ellis James 393 – Pyrna 393 Davies, Stevie 233 Davy, Humphry 45 – “Discourse introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry” 45 Defoe, Daniel 149, 155, 616 Degas, Edgar 496 Derrida, Jacques 88–89, 538, 541 Dickens, Charles 6, 12–14, 23, 25–29, 31, 36–38, 51–52, 57–60, 62–67, 77, 90–95, 98–99, 131, 150, 153–155, 160–162, 165, 167–168, 195, 206–207, 212, 258, 268, 276, 296–297, 305–320, 357, 368–369, 377, 382, 398, 440, 467, 581, 585, 593, 615–616, 620, 632, 637, 640–641 – Barnaby Rudge 77 – Bleak House 25, 27, 31, 63, 98, 155, 161, 258, 305–320, 467, 616 – David Copperfield 90–93, 207, 305, 308, 313–316, 425, 585, 593, 615–616, 637 – Dombey and Son 154, 161, 310, 313, 315 – Great Expectations 37, 51–52, 57–67, 90–93, 131, 153, 155, 165, 585, 593 – Hard Times 6, 160–161, 195, 276, 632, 640 – Little Dorrit 63, 315 – Martin Chuzzlewit 305 – Our Mutual Friend 28, 161–162, 305, 309, 311 – The Mystery of Edwin Drood 154–156

Index of Names

– The Old Curiosity Shop 165, 308 – Oliver Twist 161, 305, 308, 315, 616 – The Pickwick Papers 63, 161, 168 Dickberry, F. (F. Blaize de Bury) 140 – The Storm of London: A Social Rhapsody 140 Dillingham, William B. 626 Disraeli, Benjamin 28, 77, 149, 151, 153, 160, 165, 178, 189–203, 276, 290, 297, 381 – Alroy 190, 200 – Coningsby, or The New Generation 189–194, 196, 199–201, 276 – Endymion 190, 199 – Henrietta Temple 194 – Lothair 190 – Sybil, or The Two Nations 77, 160, 189–203, 276, 278, 290 – Tancred, or The New Crusade 28, 153, 189–191, 194, 199–200 – Venetia, or The Poet’s Daughter 190, 194 – Vivian Grey 165, 189–191, 193–194, 199–200 – The Young Duke 190, 194 Dixie, Florence 141 – Gloriana; Or, the Revolution of 1900 141 Dixon, Ella Hepworth 130, 515 – The Story of a Modern Woman 130, 515 Dodge, Mary Mapes 614, 616 Dodgson, Rev. C. L.; see Carroll, Lewis Dodgson, Wilfred 353 Dodgson Collingwood, Stuart 353–354 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 582 Douglas, Lord Alfred 463–464, 466–467 – “Two Loves” 466–467 Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert 309, 352, 354 Dowden, Edward 30, 408–409 – “The ‘Scientific Movement’ and Literature” 30 Drysdale, George 129 – The Elements of Social Science 129 Duchamp, Marcel 551 Dumas, Alexandre 87 – The Three Musketeers 87 Eagleton, Terry 126, 209, 214–215, 232, 248–249, 318, 410 Ebbatson, Roger 541 Edgeworth, Maria 197–198 – The Absentee 198 Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) 495–496, 514, 524

663

Einstein, Albert 548, 555, 558, 584 Elgee, Jane Francesca 462 Eliot, George 14, 23–25, 27, 30–31, 38–41, 74, 80, 88, 90–91, 93–94, 98–99, 103–104, 107–108, 114–115, 118, 142–143, 153, 168, 178, 200, 207, 212, 224, 256, 268, 285, 326, 390, 397–414, 417, 420, 435, 438–440, 501, 584, 592, 616, 637, 639 – Adam Bede 36, 39, 93, 98–99, 114–115, 398, 404, 417, 501 – Armgart 398 – Daniel Deronda 23–24, 80, 99, 153, 399 – The Essence of Christianity (transl.) 398 – Ethics (transl.) 398 – Felix Holt 99, 399 – Impressions of Theophrastus Such 103, 390 – Janet’s Repentance 39, 74–75 – The Life of Jesus (transl.) 82, 398 – Middlemarch 14, 24, 36, 39–41, 88, 93, 99, 118, 207, 224, 256, 397–414, 420 – The Mill on the Floss 39, 90–91, 99, 398, 639 – “The Natural History of German Life” 398 – The Radical 399 – Romola 399, 438 – Scenes of Clerical Life 74–75 – Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe 40, 99, 399 – “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” 107–108, 114–115, 143, 398 – The Spanish Gypsy 398–399 Eliot, T. S. 307, 367, 440, 581 – “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 307 Elliotson, John 27, 369 Elliott, Ebenezer 283 Ellis, Havelock 135–136 – Studies of the Psychology of Sex 135 Elmy, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme 123 Elwood, Anne Katherine 142–143 – Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England 142 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 176, 517, 524, 581 Empson, William 362 Engels, Friedrich 139, 159, 201, 275, 279 – The Condition of the Working Class in England 159, 201, 279 Ermarth, Elizabeth 533 Fairey, Wendy 360 Faraday, Michael 29, 381, 384

664

Index of Names

Fellion, Matthew 625 Feltes, Norman 63, 168 Ferrier, David 30, 570 Fielding, Henry 255, 406, 616, 620 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 581 Flaubert, Gustave 94–95, 582 – Madame Bovary 95, 314 Fleishman, Avrom 197, 438 Fleming, Sandford 10 Forbes, Edward 27 Forster, E. M. 318, 421 – Aspects of the Novel 421 Forster, John 317 Foucault, Michel 136, 242, 346, 534, 625 Fournier, Charles 139 Fox Talbot, William Henry 55–56 Freedgood, Elaine 164–165 Freud, Sigmund 37, 243, 323–324, 327, 343, 362, 450, 472, 538, 551, 637–638, 640 Frey, Joseph Samuel C. F. 79 Frith, William Powell 504 – Derby Day 504 Fromer, Julie 164–166 Froude, James Anthony 82, 633–634 – Nemesis of Faith 82 Gall, Franz Joseph 35 Gallagher, Catherine 201, 297–298 Gallagher, Jack 157 Galton, Francis 44, 139, 516, 549–550 Garson, Marjorie 541 Gaskell, Elizabeth 99, 131, 160, 165–166, 168, 195, 205–206, 222, 273–287, 296–297, 501 – “Christmas Storms and Sunshine” 273 – Cousin Phillis 99, 273 – Cranford 131, 165, 273 – “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras” 273 – The Life of Charlotte Brontë 99, 222, 205–206 – Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life 160, 165, 195, 273–287, 297 – North and South 160, 164, 166, 195, 273, 276, 278 – Ruth 99, 274, 501 – “The Sexton’s Hero” 273 – “Sketches among the Poor” 273 – Sylvia’s Lovers 273 – Wives and Daughters 99, 274

Gautier, Théophile 438, 462 Gelfert, Hans-Dieter 306 Gide, André 625 Gifford, Emma 530 Gilbert, Sandra M. 131, 152, 208, 213–216, 232–233, 237, 240–241, 244, 248 Gissing, George 43, 94–95, 113, 129–132, 138, 161, 318, 495, 539, 641 – The Nether World 43, 94, 161 – The Odd Women 129–132 – Workers in the Dawn 94 Gladstone, William 178, 506, 568 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 29, 89–90, 175, 177, 179, 398, 438, 593 – Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 89–90, 175, 438, 593 Gogh, Vincent van 9 Goode, John 534, 541 Gosse, Edmund 435, 614, 634, 639 Gosse, Philip 27 – The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea 27 Grand, Sarah (Frances Bellenden Clarke) 43, 90, 125–127, 130, 479–493, 495–496, 507, 514, 524 – Adam’s Orchard 480 – Babs the Impossible 480 – The Beth Book 480, 524 – The Heavenly Twins 43, 90, 125–127, 130, 479–493 – Ideala 480 – Our Manifold Nature 480 – The Modern Man and Maid 480 – “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” 481 – Singularly Deluded 480 – Two Dear Little Feet 480 – The Winged Victory 480 Gray, Maxwell (Mary Gleed Tuttiett) 81 – The Silence of Dean Maitland 81 Greg, Percy 552 – Across the Zodiac 552 Gregory, Lady Augusta 498 Gresley, William 76 Griffith, George 559 – The Angel of the Revolution 559 Grigsby, Alcanoan O. (Jack Adams) 387 – Nequa; Or, the Problem of the Ages 387

Index of Names

Grimshaw, John Atkinson 505 Gubar, Susan 131, 152, 208, 213–216, 232–233, 237, 240–241, 244, 248 Habegger, Alfred 586 Haggard, Henry Rider 132, 150, 152–153, 155–156, 391, 495, 614 – She 156, 391 Hambly, Barbara 393 – The Magicians of Night 393 Hamsun, Knut 602–603 – Hunger 602–603 Hancher, Michael 363 Hanley, Sylvester 27 – History of British Mollusca 27 Hansson, Heidi 347–348 Hardenberg, Georg Philipp Friedrich von; see Novalis Hardy, Barbara 209–210 Hardy, Thomas 13–15, 27–31, 36–38, 41–45, 83, 90, 92, 97, 132–133, 138, 200, 224, 417, 435, 467, 495–497, 501, 506, 512, 516–518, 520–521, 523, 529–546, 614, 616, 641 – “Candour in English Fiction” 497 – The Dynasts 43 – Far from the Madding Crowd 28, 36, 41, 42, 530 – Jude the Obscure 15, 41–44, 83, 90, 92, 97, 132–133, 138, 224, 417, 516–518, 520–521, 529–546, 616 – A Laodicean 41 – The Mayor of Casterbridge 133 – A Pair of Blue Eyes 27, 41–43, 45, 530 – “The Profitable Reading of Fiction” 543 – The Return of the Native 37, 97, 542–543 – “The Science of Fiction” 29 – Tess of the D’Urbervilles 37, 41–44, 97, 501, 506, 512, 543 – Two on a Tower 28, 41–42 – The Well-Beloved 41, 541 – The Woodlanders 41–42, 97 Harvey, Geoffrey 540 Hawkins, Benjamin W. 25 Hay, William Delisle 26 – The Doom of the Great City: Being the Narrative of a Survivor: Written AD 1942 26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 231, 435, 439

665

Heidegger, Martin 536, 539 Heilmann, Ann 17, 481, 487, 489, 491, 508, 512, 514–516, 518, 520, 523 Hemingway, Ernest 114, 581, 591 Henley, William E. 425–426, 445–446 – Deacon Brodie 445–446 Henson, Eithne 541 Henty, G. A. 150, 155 Hepworth, Dixon Ella 130, 515 – The Story of a Modern Woman 130, 515 Herschel, John 29 Hicks, Thomas 529 Higgins, Clement 326 Hobsbawm, Eric 1, 151, 157 Hobson, John A. 158–159 Homans, Margaret 233 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 463 Homer 348, 633 – The Odyssey 633 Hood, Thomas 283 Hopkins, Anthony G. 157 Howells, William Dean 111 Howitt, Mary 142 Howitt, William 142, 274 Hudson, William Henry 139–140 – A Crystal Age 139–140 Hughes, R. E. 215 Hughes, Thomas 294, 326 Hughes, Winifred 345 Hunt, Leigh 309 Huntington, John 560 Hutcheon, Linda 54, 472 Hutter, A. D. 377 Hutton, Richard Holt 32, 407–408, 410, 425–426 Huxley, Thomas Henry 7, 26, 29–31, 39–41, 45, 81, 139, 398–399, 549–550 – “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and Its History” 39 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 318, 467 – À rebours 318 Ibsen, Henrik 314, 316, 498 Ingelow, Jean 362–363 – Mopsa the Fairy 362–363 Ingham, Patricia 537 Irving, Henry 566 Iser, Wolfgang 436–437, 543

666

Index of Names

Jacobus, Mary 541 James, Henry 13, 15, 24–25, 38, 87–90, 96–97, 104, 107–113, 118, 207, 268–269, 333–334, 345, 401, 408–409, 495, 524, 557, 559, 581–595, 614 – The Ambassadors 104, 583 – “The Art of Fiction” 96, 107–111 – “The Author of Beltraffio” 583 – The Bostonians 524, 583 – Daisy Miller 582 – “De Grey: A Romance” 582 – “The Figure in the Carpet” 583 – The Golden Bowl 583 – “The Last of the Valerii” 582 – The Portrait of a Lady 97, 110, 582–583 – The Princess Casamassima 583 – Roderick Hudson 582 – The Tragic Muse 87, 90, 268 – The Turn of the Screw 583 – Watch and Ward 582 – What Maisie Knew 15, 109, 207, 581–595 – The Wings of the Dove 583 James, William 582 Jameson, Frederic 94, 519 Janauschek, Fanny 317 Janet, Paul; Pierre 37 Jarrell, Randall 625 Jay, Elisabeth 74, 83, 206 Jefferies, John Richard 103, 549, 559 – After London 103, 549, 559 Jewsbury, Geraldine 82, 178, 376 – Zoe 82 Johnson, Lionel 507 Johnson, Samuel 255, 263 – Dictionary of the English Language 260 – The Vanity of Human Wishes 255 Jones, Alice and Ella Marchant 387 – Unveiling a Parallel 387 Jones, Anna Maria 17, 423, 491 Jonson, Ben 255, 311 – Bartholomew Fair 255 Joyce, James 318, 409–410, 498, 504, 559, 584, 630 – “The Dead” 498 – Ulysses 613, 626 Juvenal 255 – Satires 255

Kant, Immanuel 6 Kaplan, Cora 16 Kavanagh, Julia 142 – English Women of Letters 142 Kay, James Phillips 279 Keats, John 99, 312, 463 – “To Autumn” 312 Keble, John 8, 75 Keen, Suzanne 542 Kelly, Richard 363 Kennedy, Grace 74 – Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Story 74 Kerridge, Richard 542 Kettle, Arnold 195, 201, 276, 640 Kincaid, James 359, 537 Kingsley, Charles 27, 155, 195, 206, 276, 289–303, 434, 633 – Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet 195, 276, 297–298 – Apologia Pro Vita Sua 302 – At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies 291 – Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore 27, 291 – Hypatia 434 – “Letters to the Chartists” 290 – Politics for the People 290–291 – The Saint’s Tragedy 290 – The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby 291 – Westward Ho! 291, 301 – What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean? 302 – Yeast: A Problem 276, 289–303 Kingsley, Henry 361 Kipling, John Lockwood 617, 619, 623–624 Kipling, Rudyard 91, 132, 150, 152, 154–155, 495–496, 613–627 – “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” 614, 616–618 – Barrack-Room Ballads 613 – Captains Courageous 613, 618 – The Day’s Work 613 – Departmental Ditties 613 – From Sea to Sea 617 – “The Gardener” 615 – “The Janeites” 615, 626 – Jungle Books (1894, 1895) 615, 626, 618, 625–626 – Jungle Book (1897) 614 – Jungle Play 618

Index of Names

– Just So Stories for Little Children 613, 615 – Kim 91, 154, 613–627 – Life’s Handicap 613 – Light that Failed 613, 616, 618 – Many Inventions 613 – “Mary Postgate” 615 – “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” 621 – Mother Maturin 613 – Plain Tales from the Hills 613 – Puck of Pook’s Hill 613, 615, 622 – “Recessional” 624 – Rewards and Fairies 615 – Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown 615, 617 – Stalky & Co. 613, 625, 626 – Traffics and Discoveries 613 – “The White Seal” 614 Knoepflmacher, U. C. 632 Knox, Robert 154 – The Races of Men 154 Korzeniowski, Apollo 598 Korzeniowski, Józef Teodor Nałęcz Konrad; see Conrad, Joseph Kramer, Dale 537, 540 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 136 – Psychopathia Sexualis 136 Kreisel, Deanna K. 541 Lacan, Jacques 637 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 6, 483, 513, 524, 631 Lamb, Charles 175, 357 Landor, Walter Savage 435 – Imaginary Conversations 435 Lane, Mary E. Bradley 387, 393 – Mizora: A Prophecy 387, 393 Lang, Andrew 107–111, 118, 361 – “Art of Fiction” 109–110 Langland, Elizabeth 314, 541 Lang-Tung 390 – The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 390 Lankester, Edwin Ray 44, 156, 550 Lavater, Johann 34 Law, Jules 310 Lawrence, D. H. 315, 318, 409, 504, 637, 638 Le Gallienne, Richard 426 – George Meredith: Some Characteristics 426 Lean, David 51, 60–67 Lear, Edward 357 Leavis, Francis R. 198, 199, 345, 409, 560, 592

667

Lee, Jennie 317 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget) 96, 432, 516 Lenin, Wladimir Iljitsch 159, 548 Lennon, Florence Becker 353 Leslie, John 174–175 Levenson, Michael 348 Levine, George 31–33, 186, 410, 531 Levy, Amy 80 – Reuben Sachs 80 Lewes, George Henry 27, 38–41, 98, 144, 268, 317–318, 326, 397–398 – “The Course of Modern Thought” 38 – Problems of Life and Mind 40 – Sea-Side Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, the Scilly Isles, and Jersey 27 Lewis, Matthew 342 – The Monk 342 Liddell Hargreaves, Alice 353–355, 357, 361 Liddell, Henry 355 Lindner, Christoph 164–165, 167 Linné, Carl von 6 Linton, Eliza Lynn 82–83, 497 – “Candour in English Fiction” 497 – The True History of Joshua Davidson 82 – Under Which Lord? 83 Livingstone, David 102, 155 Llewellyn, Mark 17, 508 Lloyd, Constance 463 Lloyd, John Uri 393 Lloyd, John 393 – Etidorpha 393 Lodge, David 213, 535, 537 Lombroso, Cesare 35, 156, 450 Longfellow, Henry 463 Loomba, Ania 157, 159 Lovell-Smith, Rose 362 Ludlow, John 290 Lukács, Georg 15, 181, 196 Lumière, Auguste and Louis 56 – The Arrival of a Train 57 Lyell, Charles 6, 26, 381, 384 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 11, 633 MacDonald, George 355, 358 Mackay, Robert 39 Macmillan, Alexander 356, 361 Macovski, Michael S. 234 Makdisi, Saree 153–155 Mallett, Philip 540 Mallock, W. H. 83

668

Index of Names

– A Romance of the Nineteenth Century 82–83 Malthus, Thomas Robert 7, 158 – Essay on the Principle of Population 7 Manet, Édouard 496 Mann, Thomas 529, 532 – The Magic Mountain 529, 532 Manning, Maria 343 Mannington, Katherine 515 – The Yellow Aster 515 Mansel, H. L. 38, 100, 116, 341, 344 Mansfield, Katherine 410, 507 Mantell, Gideon A. 27, 41 – The Wonders of Geology 27, 41 Marcus Aurelius 433–434, 437 Marquess of Queensberry 465 Marryat, Frederick 112, 150, 155 Marsh, Joss 81–82 Martin, Valery 457 – Mary Reilly 457 Marx, Eleanor 134 Marx, Karl 6, 139, 159 Mason, Emma 233 Matlack Richards, Anna 363 – A New Alice in the Old Wonderland 363 Maudsley, Henry 38, 41, 43–44 – Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings 43–44 Maurice, F. D. 290 Maxwell, James Clerk 26, 41 Maxwell, John 338 Mayhew, Henry 94, 201 – London Labour and the London Poor 94, 201 Maynard, John 301 Mayo, Robert 425 McAleavey, Maia 348 McCrindell, Rachel 76 – The Schoolgirl in France 76 McEwan, Ian 318 – The Children Act 318 McFall, Frances E.; see Grand, Sarah 480 McFarlane, Brian 53 Meredith, George 88, 91, 92, 99, 109, 111, 115, 415–429, 487 – The Adventures of Henry Richmond 92 – Celt and Saxon 417 – Diana of the Crossways 417 – The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative 109, 111, 115, 415–429

– “Essay on Comedy” 111, 115, 415, 417, 422–424 – Modern Love 100, 416 – The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 91, 92, 100, 417, 424 – Shaving of Shagpat 417 Meyer, Stephenie 231, 568 – Twilight 231, 568 Meyer, Susan 215–216, 242, 248, 250 Michaels, Walter Benn 587 Middeke, Martin 439 Mighall, Robert 575, 577 Mill, James 5 Mill, John Stuart 5, 6, 44, 123, 129, 158, 176, 185, 399, 512, 513, 516–517 – On Liberty 44, 158, 512 – Principles of Political Economy 158 – Subjection of Women 123, 399, 512, 513 – Utilitarianism 158 Millais, John Everett 326, 332 Miller, Andrew 164–165, 269 Miller, D.A. 377 Miller, J. Hillis 184, 216, 231, 234, 256, 306, 410, 472, 473, 541–542, 602, 604 Monet, Claude 96, 610 Montefiore, Charlotte 79 – Caleb Asher 79 Moers, Ellen 214 Moore, George 94–95, 113, 495–510 – Ave 495 – A Communication to My Friends 498 – Confessions of a Young Man 507 – A Drama in Muslin 497 – Esther Waters 495–510 – Hail and Farewell! 495 – The Lake 498 – Literature at Nurse 94, 497 – A Mere Accident 497, 503 – Mike Fletcher 496 – A Modern Lover 497 – A Mummer’s Wife 94, 497, 503 – “A New Censorship of Literature” 497 – Spring Days 496 – The Untilled Field 498 – Vain Fortune 498 More, Hannah 73 – Coelebs in Search of a Wife 73 Moretti, Franco 90, 576 Morgan, Rosemarie 540–541

Index of Names

Morris, William 102, 140–141, 185, 432, 436, 495, 549, 558 – News from Nowhere 102, 140–141, 549, 558 Morrison, Arthur 161 – A Child of the Jago 161 Morton, Thomas 497 – Speed the Plough 497 Mudie, Charles Edward 12, 63, 95, 497 Muggeridge, Malcolm 633, 640 Muller, Max 381, 384, 388 – On the Stratification of Language 388 Munch, Edvard 610 Murray, John 55, 189–191 – The Family Library 55 Myers, F.W.H. 37 Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) 95 Najder, Zdzisław 598, 605 Natov, Roni 360 Nayder, Lillian 348 Newman, Cardinal John Henry 8, 75, 289, 291, 302, 434 – Apologia Pro Vita Sua 302 – Callista 434 – Loss and Gain 194–195 Nichols, Mike – The Graduate 64 Nicolls, Mary Ellen 416 Nietzsche, Friedrich 435, 584 Norberg, Catherine 347–348 Nordau, Max 5, 156, 550 Norton, Caroline 123, 129, 142 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) 175, 179, 231, 604, 607 Oliphant, Margaret 97, 100–101, 116, 142, 344, 345 Literary History of England 142 – “Sensation Novels” 344 Orwell, George 560, 631 Osteen, Mark 159 Ouida (Marie de la Ramée) 36 Owen, Richard 25 Owen, Robert 139, 385 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) 76, 193, 197–198 – The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale 193–194 – The Wild Irish Girl 76–77, 196–198

669

Paget, Francis 76 Paladin-Müller, Frederik 358 – The Fountain of Youth 358 Paltock, Robert 393, 558 – The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, A Cornishman 393, 558 Parkes, Bessy 142, 398 Pater, Walter 13, 15, 90–92, 96–97, 113, 431–444, 462, 470, 503–504 – Appreciations 431, 436 – Greek Studies 431 – Imaginary Portraits 96, 431, 432 – Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas 15, 90–92, 96, 431–444, 503 – Plato and Platonism 96, 431 – The Renaissance 96–97, 431–433, 435, 438, 440, 504 Patmore, Coventry 124 – The Angel in the House 124 Paul, Kegan 417 Pauwels, Louis 393 – The Morning of the Magicians 393 Peacock, Thomas Love 416 Peel, Sir Robert 191–192 Pinney, Thomas 618 Poe, Edgar Allan 316, 521 Polanyi, Karl 157 Poovey, Mary 162 Potter, Sally 52 Poulet, Georges 330 Pound, Ezra 581 Prichard, James C. 36 Proctor, Richard 28 – Essays on Astronomy 28 Proust, Marcel 409, 437 – Cities of the Plain 437 Pusey, Edward 8, 75 Pykett, Lyn 346 Queen Victoria 1, 55, 128, 151, 189, 361, 373, 583, 624, 630 Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas (A. T. Q. C.) 114, 506 Rackin, Donald 357, 359, 363 Radcliffe, Ann 207, 342 – The Mysteries of Udolpho 207, 342 Randall, Don 625 Randolph, Edmund 81

670

Index of Names

– Mostly Fools: A Romance of Civilisation 81 Rappaport, Erika 163, 165 Ray, Gordon 325 Reade, Charles 36, 101, 326, 438 – The Cloister and the Hearth 438 – Hard Cash 36, 101 Reade, Winwood 81, 550 – The Martyrdom of Man 550 – The Outcast 81 Reid, Marion 123 Renan, Ernest 82 Rhodes, Cecil 151 Rhys, Jane 152 – Wide Sargasso Sea 152 Ricardo, David 158 Rice, Ann 568 – Interview with a Vampire 568 Rich, Adrienne 209, 214, 512 Richards, Thomas 163 Richardson, Angelique 491, 523–524 Richardson, Benjamin Ward 11 – Diseases of Modern Life 11 Rigby, Elizabeth 214 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray 254 Rivers, W.H. 37 Roberts, Lord 392 Robinson, Henry Crabb 175 Robinson, Ronald 157 Ross, Robert 461 Rossetti, Christina 361–363 – Speaking Likenesses 362–363 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 416, 361 Rossetti, William Michael 416 Rowe, John Carlos 587, 594 Rushdie, Salman 625 Ruskin, John 9, 96–97, 124, 173, 185, 297, 357, 403, 431, 433, 461–462, 581 – Fors Clavigera 96 Rutherford, Mark 81, 634 Said, Edward 149, 151–152, 167, 301, 625 – Culture and Imperialism 301, 625 Saint-Simon, Henri de 139 Sala, George Augustus 326 Sand, George 484 Satchel, John 73 – Thornton Abbey: A Series of Letters on Religious Subjects 73–74

Saussure, Ferdinand de 584 Savage, Eliza Mary Ann 634 Schopenhauer, Arthur 435, 503, 529, 531, 533–536 Scott, Sir Walter 79, 189, 196–197, 348, 438 – The Antiquary 196 – The Heart of Midlothian 438 – Ivanhoe 79, 438 – Old Mortality 196 – Rob Roy 438 – Waverley 438 Scott-Elliot, William 392 – The Story of Atlantis 392 Seeley, J. R. 82 – Ecce Homo 82 Sedgwick, Adam 28 Senf, Carol 490, 576 Sewell, William 77 – Hawkstone 77 Shakespeare, William 29, 79, 127, 348, 351, 387, 438, 471, 517, 539, 614 – Hamlet 438, 566 – Merchant of Venice 79 Shaw, George Bernard 390, 498, 637 – Back to Methuselah 390 Shawe, Isabella 254 Shelley, Mary 29, 30, 102, 470, 554, 559 – Frankenstein 29, 30, 102, 470, 554 – The Last Man 559 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 99, 177, 190, 224 Sherwood, Mary Martha 74 – The History of the Fairchild Family 74 Shiel, Matthew Phipps 549, 559 – The Purple Cloud 549, 559 Shorthouse, Joseph Henry 438 – John Inglesant 438 Showalter, Elaine 131, 138–139, 214–215, 345–346, 410, 541, 551–553, 556, 576, 577 Shute, Edith 353 Shuttleworth, Sally 24, 33, 35, 411, 594, 639 Sim, George 161 – How the Poor Live 161 Simpson, James Young 27 Sinclair, Catherine 76, 357 – Beatrice; Or, the Unknown Relatives 76 – Holiday House 357 Sir David Wilkie 368 Skene, Felicia 195

Index of Names

– The Inheritance of Evil, or The Consequences of Marrying a Deceased Wife’s Sister 195 Smiles, Samuel 131, 158 – Self Help 131, 158 Smith, Adam 5, 158 Smith, Albert 326 Smith, William Henry 12, 497, 503, 507 Smollett, Tobias 316, 616 Smythe, George 191 Snow, Charles P. 26 Southey, Robert 177, 357 – “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them” 357 Spencer, Herbert 7, 38–41, 81, 83, 135, 398, 434, 550, 622 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 126, 151–152, 215–216, 625 Sprigge, Samuel S. 356 – The Methods of Publishing 356 Stanley, Henry Morton 102, 155 Stephen, Harriet Marian Thackeray 254 Stephen, Leslie 189, 254, 409 Stevenson, Robert Louis 30, 37, 102, 109, 110–111, 115, 118, 138, 150, 152, 155, 166, 168, 348, 417, 425, 445–460, 470, 490, 495–496, 551, 555, 571 – “The Beach of Falesá” 166, 446 – Catriona 446 – Deacon Brodie 445 – The Ebb-Tide 446 – “A Humble Remonstrance” 109–110, 115 – Kidnapped 446 – The Master of Ballantrae 446 – St. Ives 446 – Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 30, 37, 102, 109, 138, 445–460, 470, 490, 551, 555, 571 – Treasure Island 155, 166, 446 – Weir of Hermiston 446 Stoker, Bram 35, 156, 453, 495, 551, 559, 565–579 – Dracula 35, 156, 314, 453, 551, 559, 565–579 – The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland 566 – The Jewel of the Seven Stars 567 – The Lady of the Shroud 567 – The Lair of the White Worm 566–567 – The Mystery of the Sea 567 – The Snake’s Pass 567

671

Stolte, Tyson 312 Stopes, Marie C. 134 – Married Love 134 Strauss, D. F. 82, 398 Stretton, Hesba 73 – Jessica’s First Prayer 73 Stubbs, Patricia 541 Suleri, Sara 625 Sullivan, Zoreh T. 625 Sussman, Herbert 553, 556, 633 Swedenborg, Emanuel 438, 559 Swift, Jonathan 387, 423, 558, 630 – The Battle of the Books 423 – Gulliver’s Travels 386–387, 558 – A Modest Proposal 630 Swinburne, Charles Algernon 9–11, 96, 416, 432 – “Before the Mirror” 96 Symonds, John Addington 42 Symons, Arthur 432 Tait, Archibald (Archbishop of Canterbury) 199 Tayler, Irene 233 Taylor, Charles 326 Taylor, Frances 77 – Tyborne 77 Taylor, Jane 357 – “The Star” 357 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 36–38, 367, 369–370, 375–377 – In the Secret Theatre of Home 375–377 Tenniel, John 356, 360 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 8, 13, 28, 99, 297, 438 Thackeray, William Makepeace 51, 87, 90, 93, 98, 153, 165, 168, 193, 199, 205–206, 212, 253–271, 305, 321, 326, 440, 584, 616, 637 – Catherine 253 – The History of Henry Esmond 253, 258 – History of Pendennis 90, 91, 98, 253, 637 – The Luck of Barry Lyndon 253 – The Newcomes 87, 253, 268 – Vanity Fair 51, 52, 53, 93, 98, 153, 164, 193, 253–271, 305 – The Virginians 253 Thieme, John 152 Thomas, Donald 353 Thompson, Edward P. 159 Thoms, Peter 367

672

Index of Names

Thomson, James 426 Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin) 26 Thoreau, Henry David 581 Thormählen, Marianne 233–234, 246, 248, 250 Tillotson, Kathleen 208, 278–279 Todorov, Tzvetan 89, 575 Tolstoy, Leo 87 – War and Peace 87 Tomalin, Claire 530 Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth 73, 79, 80 – Helen Fleetwood: A Tale of the Factories 73 – Judah’s Lion 79, 80 Trentmann, Frank 158 Trollope, Anthony 28, 32, 91, 94, 99, 117, 129, 140, 150, 154, 161, 162, 168, 198–199, 268, 321–335 – An Autobiography 94, 99, 168, 199, 321–323, 325–327, 330, 334 – Barchester Towers 32, 117, 324, 327, 333 – Doctor Thorne 321–335 – The Eustace Diamonds 129, 162 – The Fixed Period 140 – Framley Parsonage 326, 332 – The Kellys and the O’Kellys 324 – The Last Chronicle of Barset 329 – The Macdermots of Ballycloran 324 – The Three Clerks 91, 323 – The Warden 32, 324 – The Way We Live Now 28, 99, 161, 164, 327 Trollope, Frances 73, 77, 322, 323 – The Domestic Manners of the Americans 322 – Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits 77 – The Vicar of Wrexhill 73 Tuckwell, William 352 Turgenev, Ivan 582 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 97, 432 Twain, Mark 614, 616, 617 – Huckleberry Finn 616 – The Prince and the Pauper 617 Tyndall, John 26, 29, 32 Veblen, Thorstein 159 Verne, Jules 557, 558 – Around the World in Eighty Days 558 – The Mysterious Island 558 – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 558 Virgil 438 Vizetelly, Henry Richard 95, 110, 497

Walpole, Horace 470 – The Castle of Otranto 470 Wagner, Richard 306, 381 Wall, Cynthia 164 Wallis, Henry 416 Walton, Mrs. O. F. 73 – A Peep Behind the Scenes 73 Walter 135 – My Secret Life 135 Warburg, Aby 440 Ward, Mary Arnold 439 Ward, Mrs. Humphry (Mary Augusta) 81, 83–84 – The Case of Richard Meynell 81, 84 – Helbeck of Bannisdale 83–84 – Robert Elsmere 81 Ward, Mrs. Wilfrid (Josephine) 83–84 – One Poor Scruple 83–84 Watt, Ian 149 Watteau, Antoine 432 Watts, George Frederic 501 – Found Drowned 501 Watts, Isaac 357 – “Against Idleness and Mischief” 357 Weber, Max 41 – Die Entzauberung der Welt 41 Weightman, William 239 Weismann, August 43–44 – Essays upon Heredity 43 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of 256 Wells, H. G. 26, 30, 45, 57, 91, 102–103, 140, 156, 391, 453, 495, 547–563 – A Modern Utopia 139, 140, 385, 547, 559 – Ann Veronica 548 – Anticipations 547–548 – “The Chronic Argonauts” 548, 555–556 – First Men on the Moon 548, 557 – The History of Mr Polly 548 – The Invisible Man 57, 102, 548, 554 – The Island of Dr. Moreau 30, 102, 548, 551, 554 – Kipps 548 – Love and Mr Lewisham 548 – Outline of History 548 – The Time Machine 45, 57, 102, 156, 391, 453, 547–563 – Tono-Bungay 91, 548 – The War in the Air 548 – The War of the Worlds 102–103, 156, 548–549, 557, 559

Index of Names

– When the Sleeper Wakes 548 Wells, Simon 560–561 Welsh, Jane 175 Wesley, John 224, 233 Wheelwright, E. G. 113 Whewell, William 29 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 96–97, 505 White, William Hale 81 – The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Dissenting Minister 81 Whitman, Walt 463, 566 Widdowson, Peter 540–541 Wilberforce, William 73 Wilde, Oscar 13, 15, 92, 96, 107–108, 112–113, 121, 125, 127, 138, 156, 168, 314, 415–417, 424, 432, 452, 461–477, 495, 507, 539, 551, 566, 633 – Ballad of Reading Gaol 464–465 – “The Decay of Lying” 415, 467 – The Happy Prince and Other Tales 463 – Intentions 463 – Lady Windermere’s Fan 314 – The Picture of Dorian Gray 15, 92, 107–108, 112, 125, 127–128, 138, 156, 452, 461–477, 507, 539, 551 – Salome 121 Wilde, Sir William 462, 566 Williams, Carolyn 216 Williams, Raymond 159, 195, 200–201, 410, 540 Wills, W. H. 377 Wilson, A. N. 311 Wilson, Edmund 357, 640 Wilson, Keith 540 Winterson, Jeanette 632 Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas 302, 434 – Fabiola 434 Wollstonecraft, Mary 512, 520 Wood, Claire 307 Wood, Mrs Henry (Ellen) 36, 100–101, 129, 137, 142

673

– East Lynne 36, 101, 129, 137 ‘Wood, Mrs. J.’ (William M. Butler) 387 – Pantaletta 387 Wood, John George 27 – Common Objects of the Country 27 Woodmansee, Martha 159 Woolf, Virginia 52, 87, 89, 103, 214, 318, 345, 351, 354, 362, 409–410, 427, 432, 489, 498, 507, 517, 523, 559, 584 – Orlando 52 – A Room of One’s Own 517 – To the Lighthouse 613, 626 Wordsworth, William 98–99, 177, 224, 306, 311, 316, 620, 622 – The Excursion 98 – Lyrical Ballads 99 – The Prelude 99, 306, 316 – The Recluse 306 Wotton, George 540–541 XYZ 391 – The Vril Staff: A Romance 391 Yeats, William Butler 440, 496, 498 – Dramatis Personae 496 Yonge, Charlotte 76 – The Clever Woman of the Family 76 – The Daisy Chain 76 – The Heir of Redclyffe 76 Young, F.E. 141 – The War of the Sexes 141 Young, Kay 542 Zola, Émile 94–95, 113, 201, 318, 496–497, 507, 582 – L’Assommoir 95 – Docteur Pascal 318 – Nana 507 – Rougon-Macquart 318 – La terre 95

List of Contributors Susanne Bach is Professor of English at Kassel University, Germany. Ute Berns is Professor for British Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Nadine Böhm-Schnitker is Lecturer in British and American Studies (literary and cultural studies) at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein is Professor of English at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. Timothy L. Carens is Professor of English at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, USA. Nils Clausson is Professor Emeritus at University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Doris Feldmann is Professor and Chair of English Literature and Culture at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Ellen Grünkemeier is Interim Professor at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Anna Maria Jones is Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, USA. Stephan Karschay is Professor (Juniorprofessur) at the University of Hamburg, Germany. U. C. Knoepflmacher is Paton Foundation Professor Emeritus of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton University, USA. Norbert Lennartz is Professor of English Literature at the University of Vechta, Germany. Jakob Lothe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. Phillip Mallett is Honorary Senior Lecturer of English at the University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. Simon Marsden is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. Silvia Mergenthal is Professor of English and Literary Theory at University of Konstanz, Germany. Martin Middeke is Professor of English Literature at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine, USA. Rebecca N. Mitchell is Reader in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Timo Müller is Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Culture at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Monika Pietrzak-Franger is Professor of English Culture and Literature at the University of Vienna, Austria. Nora Pleßke is Researcher and Lecturer in English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110376715-040

676

List of Contributors

Joanna Rostek is Professor (Juniorprofessur) of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany. Natalie Roxburgh is Lecturer and Research Fellow in English Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. Dianne F. Sadoff is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. Susanne Scholz is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. David Seed is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. Linda M. Shires is David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English at Yeshiva University, New York City, USA. Carolyn Sigler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth, USA. Adina Sorian is Researcher and Lecturer of English Literary Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Felix Sprang is Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. Julia Straub is Senior Lecturer in North American Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Saverio Tomaiuolo is Associate Professor of English at Cassino University, Italy. Eckart Voigts is Professor of English at the TU Braunschweig, Germany. Anne-Julia Zwierlein is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Regensburg, Germany.