Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women's Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century 1848930232, 9781848930230

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 8
Introduction......Page 10
1. ‘A Beautiful Translation from a Very Perfect Original’......Page 32
2. Vernon Lee and the Aesthetic Subject......Page 58
3. Edith Wharton and the Artist as Connoisseur......Page 78
4. The Aesthetics od Ownership in Women’s Stories......Page 102
Notes......Page 122
Works Cited......Page 136
Index......Page 146

Citation preview

FICTIONS OF DISSENT: RECLAIMING AUTHORITY IN TRANSATLANTIC WOMEN’S WRITING OF THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Gender and Genre

Series Editor: Editorial Board:

Ann Heilmann Mark Llewellyn Johanna M. Smith Margaret Stetz

Titles in this Series 1 Let the Flowers Go: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton 2 Mary Cholmondeley Reconsidered Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton and SueAnn Schatz (eds) 3 Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country: A Reassessment Laura Rattray (ed.)

Forthcoming Titles ‘The Celebrated Hannah Cowley’: Experiments in Dramatic Genre, 1776–1794 Angela Escott

www.pickeringchatto.com/gender

FICTIONS OF DISSENT: RECLAIMING AUTHORITY IN TRANSATLANTIC WOMEN’S WRITING OF THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

by Sigrid Anderson Cordell

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2010

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2010 © Sigrid Anderson Cordell 2010 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Cordell, Sigrid Anderson. Fictions of dissent: reclaiming authority in transatlantic women’s writing of the late nineteenth century. – (Gender and genre) 1. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. American fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. 3. English fiction – Women authors – History and criticism. 4. American fiction – Women authors – History and criticism. 5. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 6. Women and literature – United States – History – 19th century. 7. Women in literature. I. Title II. Series 823.8’099287-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781848930230 e: 9781848930247 ∞

This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the United Kingdom at MPG Books Group, Bodmin and Kings Lynn.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction: The Muse’s Revenge 1 ‘A Beautiful Translation from a Very Imperfect Original’: Mabel Wotton, Aestheticism and the Dilemma of Literary Borrowing 2 Vernon Lee and the Aesthetic Subject 3 Edith Wharton and the Artist as Connoisseur 4 The Aesthetics of Ownership in Women’s Stories Notes Works Cited Index

vii 1 23 49 69 93 113 127 137

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In completing this project, I was fortunate in the number of advisers, colleagues and friends who offered crucial support and guidance at each stage. Margaret Stetz, whose graduate course at Georgetown University on women in the 1990s inspired this project, has been a friend, mentor and intellectual inspiration throughout the process. My dissertation adviser, Steve Arata, saw me through the initial faltering formulations of my ideas and continue to share with me his insight and expertise. Alison Milbank’s enthusiasm, insight and knowledge of the field helped shape my dissertation and have continued to guide me in my work. I am also grateful to Meri-Jane Rochelson for generously sharing both her discovery of Mabel Wotton’s letters in the Zionist National Archives and her copious research into the dates and details of Wotton’s life. My research would also not have been possible without the many special collections librarians at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, Harvard University’s Houghton Special Collections Library, Colby College and Penn State Library who assisted me in locating key archival materials. In particular, I would like to thank Pat Burdick at Colby College Special Collections for her help with the Vernon Lee Collection. An earlier version of the first chapter appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture in September 2009, and I thank Cambridge University Press for the permission to republish it. I am also grateful to the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis agency for permission to quote from Wharton’s letters at the Beinecke Library. This work was also supported by two Fuerbringer summer research grants from Harvard University. I am indebted to the readers at Pickering & Chatto whose insightful comments were crucial in helping me reshape this project into what I hope is a sharper argument as a whole. I would also like to thank the series editor, Ann Heilmann, for her advice and support in ushering this into print. Writing a book can be a lonely endeavour, and I would never have been able to maintain my perspective without an incredibly smart and dedicated group of colleagues and friends. When this project was still in the dissertation stage,

– vii –

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Robin Field, Suzanne Gigante and Betsy Tontiplaphol read countless drafts, offered useful suggestions, patiently listened to me talk through my ideas and generally made life bearable. Lydia Fillingham has offered key insights and constructive criticisms as the draft developed into a book. I am also grateful to Troy Bassett, whose expertise on the Rider Haggard plagiarism controversy was essential for understanding Wotton’s work in context. Of course, this project might have taken much longer to complete without the motivation and support provided by my family, especially my sons, Nicholas and Spenser, who only need to flash a smile to put the world back into perspective. My parents, too, have been enthusiastic backers of my work, and I deeply appreciate their continuing encouragement. Last of all, my husband, Jeff Cordell, has sustained me throughout this process by sharing both his sharp editorial eye and his sense of humour.

INTRODUCTION: THE MUSE’S REVENGE

In ‘A Lost Masterpiece’ (1894), which appeared in the first issue of John Lane’s avant garde journal, the Yellow Book, ‘George Egerton’ (Mary Chavelita Dunne) offers a parodic view of a male aesthete in the throes of artistic creation. The unnamed narrator travels through London keeping track of his impressions for future literary use, and, as he does so, congratulates himself on his attentiveness to detail, as well as for his ability to recognize beauty in what might otherwise appear a bleak scene. His creative self is ‘very busy’, he announces, ‘now throwing out tender mimosa-like threads of creative fancy, now recording fleeting impressions with delicate sure brushwork for future work’. He imaginatively transforms the scene in front of him, so that even the weather-stained brick joints on the factories become ‘hieroglyphics, setting down for posterity a tragic epic of man the conqueror, and fire his slave; and how they strangled beauty in the grip of gain’.1 For him, London is a place where beauty has been ‘strangled’ and forgotten in the constant struggle for existence and material gain. As he observes the scene, he idealizes what he sees and imagines the scene transformed into a poetic masterpiece. With delight, he recognizes that a ‘precious little pearl of a thought was evolving slowly out of the inner chaos’ that could be developed into a literary work and begins planning to ‘transfer this dainty elusive birthling of my brain to paper’. Not only does he see his future work as one of genius, but also as a philanthropic gesture that will ‘make countless thousands rejoice’ by giving them a work of beauty to brighten their lives.2 Those who are caught up in the struggle for existence will be distracted from their cares by his vision of loveliness. Suddenly, however, his day-dream of literary grandeur is interrupted by the vision of a ‘little woman … hurrying along in a most remarkable way’. The sight breaks his concentration and he cannot ignore the discordant image of purposeful femininity striding along the pavement and ‘dominat[ing]’ the scene and his imagination. Unable to recapture his earlier mood of rapt contemplation, he becomes overwhelmed with a ‘mortal dread of losing my little masterpiece’, which, in turn, causes him to become enraged with the woman ‘who is murdering, deliberately murdering, a delicate creature of my brain’. Although the woman shows no awareness of his existence, he believes that her actions are calculated –1–

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to disrupt his creativity. As he becomes engulfed with hatred for this ‘woman of the great feet and dominating gait’, his embryonic masterpiece evaporates, and he is left only with ‘regret’.3 In this story, George Egerton touches on what I see as two central tropes in fin-de-siècle woman’s short fiction: the self-absorbed artist who sees the world around him as raw material to be absorbed and transformed by his genius and the female muse who, rather than inspiring an artistic vision of beauty, interrupts and rejects the artist’s vision. Even though the woman in this story appears unaware of the aesthete and her role in destroying his imaginative creation, her very presence undermines his self-assured mastery over the situation. Unlike the other figures in the London landscape, rather than acting as an unwitting muse and inspiring him to create, she disrupts his imaginative vision, and he is unable to integrate her self-assured, purposeful figure into his mental picture, and thus his ability to create art dissolves. No longer a budding genius in command of his material, the artist in this and other late Victorian women’s texts is left angry and regretful. This moment in which a male aesthete finds his creative vision disrupted by an uncooperative female muse is not unique to Egerton’s story; rather, these ‘muse’s revenge tales’, as I term them, appear throughout fin-de-siècle women’s short fiction. Furthermore, these tales are not limited to the fiction of British female aesthetes, whose work has been so usefully brought to our attention by Talia Schaffer, Kathy Psomiades, Margaret Stetz and others;4 they also appear in the short stories of American writers such as Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Constance Fenimore Woolson. However, traditional divisions between Victorian and American studies have largely dictated that these two groups of writers be treated as isolated entities, and thus this common thread has gone largely unrecognized. Given the robust exchange of texts and ideas across the Atlantic during this period, this division overlooks the lines of influence that emerged within a transnational reading public. By reading American and British women writers alongside each other, while at the same time remaining attentive to the specifics of national difference, this study excavates a transatlantic dialogue across late nineteenth-century women’s fiction about art, artists and the often parasitic relationship between male artists and their female muses. This dialogue, I argue, is ultimately linked to broader conversations about both aesthetics and the Woman Question. Through these muse’s revenge tales, late nineteenth-century women writers on both sides of the Atlantic dramatized the period’s anxieties about women’s artistic and political autonomy. Whereas late nineteenth-century aestheticism focused on the responses of the observer and claimed that art emerges from artists’ reactions to what they see, women writers created a counter-discourse that portrayed this approach to artistic creation as parasitic. Women’s short fiction

Introduction

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from the period repeatedly features female characters refusing to take a secondary position as model or inspiration for a male artist and instead insisting on the right to tell their own story or create their own art. Through these narratives, women writers worked to reclaim the subject position for the object of the aesthete’s gaze. Overall, this book builds on and extends recent important scholarship on female aestheticism by placing American voices in dialogue with the British ‘forgotten female aesthetes’ (to use Talia Schaffer’s term) that have been the subject of many recent studies. While Victorianists like Schaffer, Psomiades and Stetz have pointed to the ways in which British female aesthetes critiqued and revised mainstream aestheticism, and Americanists like Sharon Dean and Emily Orlando have examined the ways in which American writers like Wharton and Woolson wrote about art and aestheticism,5 no study as yet has put these writers up against one another to uncover a broader conversation about art, artistry and its connections to the Woman Question. This study bridges this gap, offering a transatlantic comparison of women’s short stories from the period which makes visible not only shared concerns over women’s autonomy as both artistic subjects and creators of art, but also the ways in which women writers problematized and participated in a conversation about how art is and should be created. By calling into question male aesthetes’ use of female models in their art, women writers uncovered even more abstract, theoretical questions about the potentially vexed relationship between artists and their raw materials. What, these writers asked, should be the source of artistic inspiration? Is artistic creation inextricable from a parasitic reliance on source material? Are artists adding to what is already there as they transform raw material into art, or is it simply a translation into another medium? Is there an ‘appropriate’ relationship between artists and their sources? It is only by looking transatlantically at the broad range of ways in which women writers on both sides of the Atlantic wrote about the power dynamics of art, artists and their subjects that these central aesthetic questions about the creation of art emerge. The term ‘transatlantic’ is itself fluid, as a recent thread on the Victoria listserv testified when a list member wrote asking for suggestions for a course she was developing on transatlantic women’s writing. In the flurry of responses, it quickly became obvious that there is no consensus about what we mean when we say ‘transatlantic’. Suggestions ranged from accounts of transatlantic tourism to pairings of authors who had connections on the other side of the Atlantic to works that might be fruitfully paired with a transatlantic text.6 Margaret McFadden, whose Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of the Nineteenth-Century Women’s Movement (1999) argues for and excavates a broad range of networks and matrices of connections and influences among women across the Atlantic, points to an additional reason why transatlantic women’s

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writing has received relatively little attention. As McFadden writes, ‘The inherently international character of the nineteenth-century women’s movement suggests one reason why it has not been studied: it was both too obvious and too elusive’.7 In McFadden’s account, the crossings and recrossings of influences and connections throughout the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for the explicit organization of a transatlantic women’s movement signalled by the International Council of Women in 1888. These influences and crossings, I argue, persisted even among women who did not explicitly identify themselves with the women’s movement. Transatlanticism, as I refer to it in this study, operates at three levels. First, many of the women in this study knew one another. Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), in particular, was a central figure with connections to Woolson, Wharton, Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett. However, although Lee and others crossed the Atlantic themselves, this study is not focused on crossings by individual writers, but rather on the ways in which their works, which were published transatlantically, can be said to be in dialogue with each other. This, therefore, is the second and most significant sense in which I am invoking the concept of transatlanticism: these authors’ works crossed borders and were published on both sides of the Atlantic. These writers were often aware of each other’s material, as in the case of Lee and Wharton who met and discussed their work, with Lee even writing an introduction to an Italian edition of Wharton’s first novel, The Valley of Decision.8 Above all, their fiction picks up on common threads, and, as I will show, builds on and develops shared ideas about art. Third, as I will explore in greater detail throughout this volume, in these stories the relationship between the artist and his muse is often mediated through transatlantic cultural misreadings. While critics like Laura Stevens have pointed to the shortcomings of transatlanticism as a concept because of its fluidity, a fluidity through which ‘[s]o many kinds of projects can be grouped under this rubric that it also threatens to lose specific meaning’, I would argue instead that this very flexibility is a strength because it allows us to chart a broader understanding of women’s writing in the period.9 Considering that books and periodicals were published and read transnationally throughout the nineteenth century, we lose sight of a crucial aspect of literary and intellectual influence when we read texts strictly along national lines. It is possible to remain attentive to the ways in which national differences are reflected through genre, style and theme while recognizing how similar concerns within these works echo transatlantic women’s issues. This study focuses on women’s writing within a specific genre: the short story. Although critics have looked at women’s writing at the fin de siècle across a variety of genres, such as the recent work being done on late Victorian women’s poetry, little attention has been paid to the short story as a cultural phenomenon in this period.10 This critical oversight ignores the ways in which the short story

Introduction

5

as a form that could transcend traditional plot structures thus offered a uniquely supple genre in which late nineteenth-century women writers could perform what Jane Tompkins refers to as ‘cultural work’ by re-imagining the plots and possibilities of women’s lives.11 The attractiveness of this genre as a mode for such re-imaginings was enhanced by a concomitant increase in the public demand for short stories. Although by the late nineteenth century the short story had long been in existence as a genre, it gained increased popularity in this period, an increase in popularity that coincided, in Britain at least, with the decline of the three-volume novel that accompanied the decreasing power of conservative lending libraries like Mudie’s. The rise of the short story as a fin-de-siècle phenomenon was further fostered on both sides of the Atlantic by the proliferation of periodicals, such as George Newnes’s the Strand, which focused primarily on short fiction as opposed to serials.12 These journals reached increasingly large audiences as advances in print technology allowed mass production and, according to Richard Ohmann, magazine publishers made the economic decision to concentrate on generating profits through advertising revenues. Within this economic model, advertising revenues could be maximized by offering advertisers the audience of a large readership enticed through low subscription prices.13 Thus, while there is no single reason for the rise of the short story in this period, the dramatic increase in publishing outlets for the genre was fuelled by a combination of advances in print technology, emphasis on mass circulation and the success of journals featuring short fiction. While the short story, according to Dean Baldwin, lagged in Britain until the 1880s and ’90s, the format developed much earlier as a theorized and mainstream genre in the United States.14 As Baldwin points out, as early as the 1830s, American magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book insisted on, and paid highly for, short fiction, and this emphasis became even stronger with the popularity of local colour fiction in the 1870s and 1880s.15 Another reason that the short story gained in popularity earlier in the United States may be that magazines, which tend towards shorter fiction, were always the most hospitable market for untried American writers. Many American authors began by publishing articles and short fiction in magazines because the lack of international copyright protection in the United States until 1891 meant that American book publishers had little incentive to take chances on new, untried authors when they could ‘pirate’ English authors like Dickens and Trollope for free.16 As the Boston publisher Dana Estes pointed out at a Senate hearing on international copyright in 1886, ‘it is impossible to make the books of most American authors pay, unless they are first published and acquire recognition through the columns of the magazines’.17 Under these conditions, writers like Mary Wilkins Freeman, Wharton, Chopin and Jewett established their literary careers by publishing short fiction in periodicals.

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By linking the dominance of the short story in the United States to the fact that magazines presented a more receptive market for new writers is not, of course, to ignore the reality that magazine serialization was often the first place in which novels appeared throughout the nineteenth century. Most major American and British magazines such as the Atlantic serialized novels in their pages, and, as Robert Patten points out, when we look at the three-volume version of a Dickens novel, for example, as the first edition, we are ignoring the novel’s actual first appearance in print in a journal.18 However, as the literary critic Brander Matthews argued in 1884, in the United States the serial story is not the chief concern of the editor of a popular magazine … We have seen the Atlantic Monthly without a serial story for three months at a time. But every number of every American magazine contains at least one Short Story.19

The short story, which included the local colour sketch, was a predominant American form throughout the nineteenth century, and the genre was increasingly fostered towards the end of the century in magazines such as Harper’s and the Atlantic where editors such as William Dean Howells showed a sustained interest in defining and developing it. Alongside such cultural and economic factors encouraging the growth of the genre, the short story was seen as both a popular and cutting edge literary form at the end of the nineteenth century. One aspect of the literary world’s enthusiasm for the genre may have been its association with modernity. Pointing to the preponderance of short stories in magazines such as the Yellow Book, Sally Ledger asserts that ‘The short story was very much a “modern” form at the fin de siècle’,20 and its association with modernity made it attractive for journals desiring to be seen as new or avant garde. Increasingly, the short story as a genre became integral to successful periodical publication in this period; as Winnie Chan puts it in her study of the ways in which short stories were both commercialized and aestheticized in the fin de siècle, ‘At the end of the nineteenth century, the growth of the periodical press made short stories a necessity to any periodical with any aspirations to popularity’.21 The combination of popularity and self-conscious modernity makes the short story both a crucial and an ideal focus for understanding the ways in which women writers of the period took advantage of the genre’s flexibility to describe, revise and imagine possibilities for women’s lives. By writing in a genre that did not have the same generic, and thus plot, constrictions as the novel, writers of short fiction could eschew the traditional novelistic focus on marriage and romance, a move that could be tremendously liberating for women writers. In her introduction to Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords, Ledger points out that when New Women writers wrote in the traditional novelistic format,

Introduction

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they ‘generally remained committed to the aesthetic codes of literary realism and naturalism’, whereas in the short story ‘feminist writers began to push against the boundaries of the dominant generic codes of the nineteenth century’.22 Likewise, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues in Writing Beyond the Ending, the endings of Victorian novels carried significant cultural weight because they limited the imaginative possibilities for picturing women’s lives.23 In other words, whereas traditional nineteenth-century novelistic endings generally limited women’s options to death or marriage, short stories as a narrative form do not require such neatly wrapped-up conclusions. Because their length dictates a certain amount of compression and omission, short stories are more likely to be openended and fragmented, focusing on a moment in a character’s life rather than the totality of that life. As Chan puts it, ‘the “single effect” by which the short story accumulates details toward its conclusion … was also sufficiently vague in deemphasizing plot and elevating the “effect” of aestheticist fiction’.24 The genre’s flexibility allowed women to explore an incident in a woman’s life and to make a suggestion about possibilities without necessarily having to wrap up the story’s ending with a neat, conventional conclusion, as in the case of Sarah Grand’s (Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall) novel The Beth Book (1897), a story of rebellion, artistic development and emerging political consciousness that ends with the heroine joyfully greeting the ‘knight’ who rides up to her front door, presumably to carry her away.25 Along with New Woman writers, most notably George Egerton, who recognized the potential in short fiction for re-scripting women’s lives, the women in this study employed the genre as a means for revising cultural narratives about the relationship between artists and the female models whom they regard as little more than raw material. Of course, the motif of the male artist who considers women only as raw material to be incorporated into his art is not limited to late nineteenth-century short fiction. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1845), for example, features an artist so intent on the process of translating his wife into a painting that he only belatedly notices that she has died. However, fin-de-siècle women’s short stories about artists are unique in the ways that the female muses problematize the theories of art that characterized the aesthetic movement. Specifically, women writers reveal something objectionable in a theory of art that privileges the viewer at the expense of the subject under view while still drawing on that subject to create art. Again and again in the fin de siècle, female writers create images of male artists who demonstrate their genius by interpreting, translating and reflecting the beauty of female models, and again and again the female models push back against being used in this way, thus creating a counter-discourse about aestheticism. These female models, in effect, reject the role of passive model and insist on the right to create their own art or, at the very least, to define themselves in their own way. For example, in Wharton’s ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’, a

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woman who has long been popularly considered the muse of a great poet reveals that she never was the subject of the poet’s art and that she provided intellectual, rather than literal, inspiration for his work. As Laura Saltz has argued, through this act of revelation, she breaks the illusions about her identity as muse and claims the right to explain who she really is.26 This refusal to remain a passive subject for the artist’s genius echoes an emerging feminist sensibility that was gaining momentum at the end of the nineteenth century and came to be known in the last quarter of the century as the Woman Question. This broad term covers a cluster of issues, from suffrage to the right for married women to control their own property. Helen Watterson, writing in the Century in 1895, summed up the broad debate as relating to two main questions: first, the question as to woman’s right to live in the world on the same terms as a man does – to work as he works, to be paid as he is paid, to govern as he governs – to use the world, in short, as he uses it, and to be treated by it as it treats him; and, second, the question as to woman’s competence to do so.27

As Watterson puts it, there are two separate, but linked questions to be resolved by this debate: whether women should be given the same rights as men and whether women were ‘competent’ to exercise these rights. Likewise, Olive Schreiner wrote that the ‘key-note’ of the debate was women’s desire for ‘labor and the training which fits for labor!’ (emphasis in original).28 In this way, Schreiner suggests that the issue of ‘competence’ that Watterson is concerned with could only be resolved once women were given the same training as men. If women did not receive the same training as men, they would never have the chance to prove their ‘competence’. Within the debate over the Woman Question there was, of course, no single solution for resolving the interrelated issues of ‘competence’, access and rights; instead, this debate was connected to a constellation of legal and social issues targeted by early feminists. According to Nicola Diane Thompson in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (1999), the central debates about ‘women’s proper role and status in society’ focused on ‘marriage and divorce laws, women’s property and custody rights, and educational and employment opportunities for women, as well as a vocal debate on female suffrage’.29 The fiercely independent New Woman is perhaps the most visible proponent of early feminism, although, as others have noted, it is impossible to consider New Womanhood as a monolithic identity because the range of issues, causes and political sympathies espoused by particular New Women ranged widely.30 Because the New Woman was broadly caricatured in the press and in fiction, identifying the real New Woman who walked the streets of New York or London versus an imaginative composite is a problematic endeavour, as Angelique

Introduction

9

Richardson and Chris Willis’s The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact (2001) makes clear.31 Despite the wide-ranging nature of the debate, and the multiple sides that women took within it, the common theme – both in the emerging feminist movement and women’s fiction – is the desire for women’s autonomy. I will argue that, just as women were asking for expanded educational, professional and even political opportunities, the women writers within this study, whether or not they identified themselves with the emerging women’s movement, used their fiction to explore the possibilities for women to gain control over their own image by moving from a passive object of the artist’s gaze to an expressive, authorized subject. By focusing on the subject’s experience of, and resistance to, being made into art, these authors invoke and respond to a central tenet of aesthetic thought that privileges the viewer’s response, which is then elevated to an art form itself. In his influential rewriting of Matthew Arnold’s critical imperative ‘To see the object as in itself it really is’, Walter Pater shifted the focus from the object to the viewer by asking, ‘What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me?’32 In other words, the art object itself is less important than analysing and expressing how the critic responds to it. In this way, Pater transforms the art object into an object of consumption whose function is to provoke an effect on the critic, forcing him or her, as Pater famously put it, ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame’.33 In Pater’s formulation, the aesthetic critic regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, by analyzing and reducing it to its elements.34

The aesthetic critic, therefore, must possess a superior level of perception in relation to the aesthetic object, and, thus, by extension, have a greater capacity to be moved by beautiful objects. The critic’s impulse is to break down, analyse and explain what ‘elements’ in the work of art create a heightened response. As Pater explains, ‘What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects’.35 Thus, beauty as an abstract principle was less important to Pater than the ability of the critic to respond to what he as an individual regards as beautiful. Likewise, Oscar Wilde shrinks the difference between critical and artistic practice by emphasizing the viewer’s reaction to and re-articulation of what he sees. According to Wilde, the aesthetic critic or artist interprets what he sees, and it is the process of interpretation, rather than an adherence to the original object, that creates art. These ideas are perhaps most clearly articulated in ‘The

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Critic as Artist’ (1890), in which he asserts that the artistic and critical faculties are equivalent because both create something fundamentally creative out of the material in front of them. Criticism, according to Wilde, ‘works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful’.36 The artistic critic, then, ‘treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation’. In other words, ‘it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvelous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives’.37 He delineates the critic’s artistic function as arising directly from, although not necessarily echoing, the work of art before him or her: ‘To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes’. Because the highest criticism aims primarily to ‘chronicle [the critic’s] own impressions’, the quality of the original materials is unimportant. Drawing on the example of the ‘sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a small country doctor’ out of which Flaubert created Madame Bovary, Wilde concludes that the true artist ‘does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials’.38 This intertwining of consumption and perception in the process of creating, or revising, art reappears in another register in the working life of Henry James, who argued that the artist transforms the elements of everyday life into art. James articulates this view in ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) when he describes the imaginative artist as a constant observer who ‘takes to itself the faintest hints of life, [and] converts the very pulses of air into revelations’.39 James’s realist observes the world and, according to the quality of his or her perception, translates it into art. In this essay, which attempts to outline the novelist’s artistic method, he claims that actual experience is less important than the artist’s impressionability. To illustrate this idea, he points to the hypothetical example of a ‘young lady living in a village [who] has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military’.40 In other words, a true artist need only be particularly susceptible and powerfully imaginative to transform a limited realm of experience into great art. In describing the kinds of experience that an author should strive for, he says, rather than a broad range of experience, an artist should cultivate an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative – much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius – it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.41

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In other words, it is the artist’s impressions of a scene, which he or she translates onto the page, that make art. Rather than attempting to gather experiences, the true artist will work to develop a susceptibility, or ‘immense sensibility’, that will allow him or her to enlarge upon mere suggestion. Within this formulation, artists are not copying the world around them, but rather transforming trace elements and suggestions into art through the medium of genius. A sense of anxiety about the relationship between source material and art – i.e., of the distinction between originality and borrowing from life – comes through in James’s careful delineation in his 1908 preface to the New York edition of The Princess Casamassima of artistically-inspired use of source material. In this preface, James asserts that his art emerges from inspiration that resulted from critical observation, an idea closely akin to the ‘critical faculty’ described by Wilde as that fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary perfection … that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty … and no one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art.42

James thus suggests that it requires an artistic perception that is akin to genius to recognize the potential in ordinary materials and to transform those materials into a superior work of art. James asserts that the inspiration for The Princess Casamassima emerged from ‘the habit and interest of walking the streets’, observing and absorbing all that he saw. He emphasizes his critical observation of what he sees in this way: One walked of course with one’s eyes greatly open, and I hasten to declare that such a practice, carried on for a long time and over a considerable space, positively provokes, all round, a mystic solicitation, the urgent appeal, on the part of everything, to be interpreted and, so far as may be, reproduced.43

As James describes it, everything that he sees has the potential to be ‘interpreted’ and rendered into art, thus transforming the world around him into raw material waiting, or rather, making an ‘urgent appeal’ to be shaped by the artist. Not only can the artist not resist incorporating what he or she sees into art, but the material world appears eager to be included in the artist’s vision. James’s secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, describes the increasing urgency that this habit of observation, interpretation and rendering into art came to acquire in James’s mind: He was perpetually and mercilessly exposed, incessantly occupied with the task of assimilating his experience, freeing the pure workable metal from the base, remoulding it into new beauty with the aid of every device of his craft. He used his friends not, as some completely uninspired artists do, as in themselves the material of his art,

12

Fictions of Dissent but as the sources of his material. He took everything they could give and he gave it back in his books.44

Although the distinction that they are drawing between using his friends as ‘material’ versus ‘sources of his material’ is not self-evident, both James and his secretary carefully differentiate between uninspired borrowing from real life and an inspired ‘remoulding’ of observed life into art. The artistic impulse is the controlling force here, and James is ‘mercilessly exposed’ to a constant drive towards ‘assimilating’ everything around him into art by sorting the beautiful from the ‘base’. An implicit question here is how experience is being defined – is it his own, or that of others? Both James’s and Bosanquet’s description of the artistic process suggests an aesthetic of observed rather than lived experience. By taking ‘everything they could give’ from his friends for his books, James is positioned ever on the outside as the observer who judges and translates all he sees. James describes his own fiction as emerging from the ‘notes’ that were his ‘gathered impressions and stirred perceptions’ of his experience of London. He asserts that the art of fiction is predicated on this habituated mental note-taking: If one was to undertake to tell tales and to report with truth on the human scene, it could be but because ‘notes’ had been from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy: to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognise, to remember, as to perform any act of understanding.45

James thus draws a careful distinction between the deliberation with which he observed life and the type of novelist who journalistically researches life, with the latter artist embodying the belief, as Mary Poovey has recently described Charles Reade as doing, ‘that the ability to animate facts was what made fiction an “art”’.46 In the preface, James emphasizes the difference between making the most of what you naturally observe and intrusive, active inquiry: I recall pulling no wires, knocking at no closed doors, applying for no ‘authentic’ information; but I recall also on the other hand the practice of never missing an opportunity to add a drop, however small, to the bucket of my impressions or to renew my sense of being able to dip into it.47

The artist, therefore, is able to make much of what naturally falls in his or her way, and, James suggests, this is a far cry from a sordid and parasitic search after knowledge. The intentional gatherer of copy ‘pulling [on] wires’ is unable to gather ‘authentic’ information because, presumably, the act of intrusion closes down the possibility of spontaneity. The subjects under observation know they are being watched and thus change their behaviour either to suit what they think the observer wants to see or to flatter their own image of their best selves. Central to the theories of all three of these writers is the Romantic idea that the artist’s response to the world, rather than the beauty or sublimity of the

Introduction

13

world itself, should be valued as art. For the artist to be inspired, of course, there must be an object that provides inspiration, and implicit in these ideas is the notion that the true artist has a more refined sense of what is a worthy source of inspiration. The aesthetic artist must not only create great art out of experience, but must also be a connoisseur of experience itself. As Lee and other woman writers demonstrate, however, this elevation of the artist and the artistic sensibility comes at the expense of the original subject, who is almost forgotten except as a jumping off point for the artist’s creativity. This emphasis on the observer rather than on the model is dramatically undercut in Sarah Grand’s ‘The Undefinable’ (1894), which features a muse who emphatically asserts her independence. In this story, an unusually self-possessed female model visits an artist just as he realizes that his work has lost its original intensity and inspiration. She bluntly tells him that his problem is that he has become too complacent, which has turned him from an artist into a stylist who fails to express character. Pointing to his most recent picture as an example, she declares that Your flesh is flesh, and your form is form; likewise, your colour is colour, and your draperies are drapery, but there isn’t a scrap of human interest in the whole composition, and the consequence is a notable flatness and insipidity, as of soup without salt.48

As she puts it, everything in the painting is recognizable, and thus he succeeds in achieving a level of realism in his work. Thus, he is able to translate what he sees before him directly onto the canvas, and his mastery of technique is evident, but this is not enough to create great art. She asserts that there is no emotional intensity or ‘human interest’ in the way that he portrays his subjects. The model’s candid evaluation is not wholly different from what he had already realized about the painting, but this is the first time that an outsider has penetrated this weakness in his art. In general, her position as model would not grant her the authority to render judgement on his work; rather, he would expect her to be a silent figure for him to project into his art. Unafraid to offer her outspoken opinion, however, she argues that he is a stylist who adds no character and passion to his work, and thus she equates him with the ancient Greeks: ‘Your work at present is purely Greek – form without character, passionless perfection, imperfectly perfect, wanting the spirit part, which was not in Greece, but is, or ought to be, in you’. In her view, ancient Greek art displays a mastery of style and form absent of feeling or passion. In late nineteenth-century London, she declares, what is desired is ‘form and character’ (emphasis in original). In other words, what the artist has lost sight of in his work is a sense of inspiration, ‘that certain something’ that comes from genius; instead, he has relied on his mastery of technique to capture the form and outline of what he sees rather than to convey its spirit.49

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Fictions of Dissent

This rare critical insight into his work, coming from a model whom he would normally expect to treat with condescension, reveals a shortcoming in the artist’s work that has been overlooked by a public that continues to praise his paintings. He is only able to hear and accept such truths from his model because she disrupts the traditional relationship between model and artist; she does not consider him a superior, nor is she anxious to please him. In fact, from the moment of her unexpected and uninvited arrival at his front door, she is highly critical and pushes him to produce stronger, more effective (because more affective) work. By the end of the story, his sense of authority has completely evaporated, and he is anxious to please her and to capture her personality and energy on the canvas. Through the model’s critique, Grand invokes and re-writes Balzac’s 1832 short story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ (‘Le Chef-D’Oeuvre Inconnu’), in which an older painter critiques the work of a younger and more commercially successful artist because it fails to convey a sense of life in its subject. Looking at the young artist’s latest work, he declares, Your good woman is not badly got up, but she doesn’t live. You artists believe that you have done everything when you have correctly drawn a figure and placed each element in its place according to the laws of anatomy! You colour in the lines with a flesh tone that you have made in advance on your palette, being careful to keep one side darker than the other, and because you see from time to time a nude woman who stands on a table, you think that you have copied nature, you imagine that you are a painter and that you have uncovered the secret of God! … Prrr! To be a great poet it is not enough to know the rules of syntax and to make no faults in the language!50 (my translation)

Like Grand’s model, Porbus, the older painter, makes a distinction between correctly rendering a model’s outward form and revealing a fundamental truth about nature. Copying a figure accurately does not make one an artist, he asserts, and it does not give life to what is being expressed on the canvas. One must go beyond an accurate depiction of a model’s figure in order to ‘uncover the secret of God’; instead, a true artist must go beneath the surface. In describing how an artist should go about uncovering the secrets of nature, the critic draws on rape imagery to illustrate his meaning: You draw a woman, but you don’t see her! It is not thus that one is able to force the mysteries from nature. Your hand reproduces, without thinking of it, the model that you have copied … You have never dug deep enough into the privacy of the form, you don’t pursue it with enough love and perseverance in its twists and escapes. Beauty is something severe and difficult that will not be caught like this, one must wait for one’s moment, watching closely, crush it and embrace it tightly in order to force her to give herself up.51 (my translation)

Introduction

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The imagery here explicitly points to masculine mastery over an elusive female whose secrets must be ‘force[d]’ from her. If the artist wants to capture beauty on canvas, he must take an active role in pursuing this ‘severe and difficult’ woman by relentlessly pursuing her, digging deeply and intimately into the secrets of her form, and waiting for the moment to catch her. Once caught, a woman will only ‘give herself up’ as a result of brute force. Overall, the critic’s language describes an inherently violent approach to the masculine artist’s mastery of his female subject. Through her figure of an assertive model, Grand draws on and revises Balzac’s imagery of masculine mastery over the female form. Rather than a violent pursuit ending in dominance, the artistic method advocated by Grand’s model involves an appreciation of and respect for the modern woman. In this way, Grand affirms the necessity of understanding the subject that is central to Balzac’s story, but allows her model authority and autonomy. Beyond the fact that his work lacks energy and inspiration, the artist in Grand’s story also learns from his model that his failure has come from his inability to appreciate the modern woman. By drawing the exterior self of his figures, he has missed both the changes in woman and his complete dependence on her. As she tells him, ‘The mere outer husk of me is nothing, I repeat; you must interpret – you must reveal the beyond of that – the grace, I mean, all resplendent within’.52 In other words, he must strive to understand and then to convey the ‘resplendent’ inner self of the modern woman. His failure to interpret has meant that he has not realized that she, and other women like her, are women ‘with all the latest improvements. The creature the world wants. Nothing can now be done without me.’53 Rather than a threat or a mystery, the model demonstrates, the New Woman is crucial to the modern world. She thus implies that the world cannot continue to progress unless it embraces ‘all the latest improvements’ that she embodies. As she talks and poses, he is suddenly inspired by her and begins a sketch. At once, he realizes that he has so far failed to capture something indefinable in woman, and, ‘consumed with the rage to paint her’, he attempts to capture what he has suddenly realized. However, shortly after he has begun, she leaves, never to return, and he is consequently unable to complete his painting. She has, however, achieved her goal of forcing him to realize that his work is empty and that he has failed to convey the soul of his subjects. After being unable to find her again, he realizes that she was, in effect, telling him that, ‘my countenance you shall not have to perfection until the conceit of you is conquered, and you acknowledge all you owe me. Give me my due; and when you help me, I will help you!’ (emphasis in original).54 In these lines, he conveys that he has learned the muse’s lesson: that he must seek to shorten the emotional or interpretive distance between himself and his models by working to understand them and to convey that understanding in his paintings, rather than simply the outline of what he sees. When he has

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Fictions of Dissent

shifted his relationship to his models, and acknowledged their individuality, as well as his own dependence on them, then they will help him to create superior, interpretive work. Working within the American local colour tradition, Kate Chopin revisits this theme in a different mode in ‘A Gentleman of Bayou Têche’ (1894), a story equally concerned with the politics of representation. This story revolves around an artist named Mr Sublet’s visit to a plantation in the Bayou region of Louisiana in search of local colour. When he asks an Acadian man named Evariste if he can draw a picture of him, Evariste is surprised that Sublet does not want him to put on his best clothes, but rather to appear as though he had just emerged from the swamp. Nevertheless, Evariste agrees to return the next day to be sketched by the artist and proudly tells his daughter, Martinette, what has happened. Equally proud, she brags to Aunt Dicey, a black woman who also works on the plantation. To Martinette’s surprise, Aunt Dicey tells her that she, too, had almost been the subject of a portrait, but refused. In explanation, she describes a visit from Sublet’s son who had come to take her picture. Rather than consent, however, she refused because he was uninterested in letting her determine how she was presented. Instead of giving her a chance to fix herself up and pose for the camera, a gesture that she would have seen as a mark of respect, he asks her to stand next to the ironing board in her working clothes. Judging this as an indication of disrespect and guessing that he wants to portray her as a low-class type, she explains to Martinette that I wants ‘im to come in heah an’ say: ‘Howdy, Aunt Dicey! Will you be so kine and go put on yo’ noo calker dress an’ yo bonnit w’at you wars to meetin’, an’ stan’ ’side f ’om dat I’onin’-boa’d wiles I gwine take yo’ photygraph’.55

Rather than allowing her to appear to advantage in her best calico dress, the photographer is only interested in seeing her at work, which she sees as evidence that he was going to use her photograph as an example of a low-class working woman. Aunt Dicey’s explanation convinces Martinette that the picture will be used to degrade her father rather than honour him, and she immediately runs home to tell him that he must refuse. Although Evariste agrees, the situation changes when Martinette visits the main house and her father shows up carrying the artist’s son, whom he has just saved from drowning in the bayou. The artist begs Evariste to reconsider having his picture drawn and suggests titling it ‘A Hero of Bayou Têche’. Evariste refuses again because he sees nothing heroic in the human gesture of saving another person from drowning. Finally, the plantation owner resolves the issue by suggesting that Evariste be allowed to title the picture himself. As a result, Evariste assumes collaborative control over the image and determines that he will wear his best clothes and have written beneath it, ‘Dis is one picture of Mista Evariste Anatole Bonamour, a gent’man of de Bayou

Introduction

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Têche’.56 As David Steiling writes, this resolution ‘mediate[s] the inherent differences between local and outsider, observed and observer, between the dominant and the sub-culture – the decision as to who or what is to control the image – must reside in the local, the subject, the sub-culture’.57 By titling the image, Evariste has attained a degree of control over how he will be presented. Although Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse argue that Evariste, who cannot read, ‘will never know whether the outsider keeps his promise, or whether his picture will be framed in such a way as to ironize its caption’, the gesture of collaboration is an unusual one that shows both gratitude and respect to Evariste.58 While Chopin’s story has, rightly, been seen by Steiling and others as an example of an American local colour writer exploring the contradictory relationship between local colour artists and their material, this story fits equally well into a transatlantic dialogue about art and aestheticism because of the ways in which it foregrounds a struggle between the artist and the subject to control the image. Chopin’s story, indeed, broadens the discussion about the ways in which women wrote back against aestheticism in their fiction by pointing to the class, race and gender implications of the aesthete’s appropriation of his subject. Thus, although she is working within a specifically American literary tradition, Chopin connects to and expands the larger transatlantic debate over the potentially vexed relationship between artists and their raw material by drawing attention to the artistic appropriation of culture, class, race and gender. In Wharton’s ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’ (1899), her primary target is the public perception about female muses rather than the artist. As described above, the female protagonist in this story, Mary Anerton, shatters the public perception that she is the muse who inspired a famous poet’s work. The first half of the story recounts the narrator’s discovery of Anerton, followed by his gradual falling in love with her; the second half is composed of a letter from Anerton ending the relationship and revealing the truth about her involvement with the poet. In her letter, Anerton expresses her sadness that the famous poet who everyone thinks was in love with her and was inspired by her was actually only interested in her as an intellectual companion. His sonnet, ‘Sylvia’, which the world believes is based on her, is, in her words, ‘addressed to Woman, not to a woman!’ The poet’s romantic indifference meant that his poems were never addressed directly to her, as, in contrast, several were to the ‘perfectly beautiful’ girl with whom he was briefly infatuated, but whose mind, unfortunately, was ‘all elbows’.59 In this story, Wharton shows an inversion of the rebellious muse. While the public (which is always seen in a negative light in Wharton’s stories) wholeheartedly believes that the poet’s work was directly inspired by his love for Anerton, this is shown to be untrue. It is not the case that his work was entirely without inspirations, as the episode with the beautiful but brainless girl shows, but rather that its foundations were equally abstract and intellectual, and thus divorced

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Fictions of Dissent

from concrete raw materials. As Anerton’s narrative reveals, she does provide a strong, intellectual inspiration for the poet because she understands his work and his ideas, but her despair (and the reversal of the story) comes from the fact that she has never been the traditional muse for him. The intertwining of the poet’s intellectual and physical inspirations comes through most clearly when she describes his infatuation with the beautiful girl: He followed her to Switzerland one summer, and all the time that he was dangling after her … he was writing to me about his theory of vowel-combinations – or was it his experiments in English hexameter? The letters were dated from the very places where I knew they went and sat by waterfalls together and he thought out adjectives for her hair.60

This statement describes the doubleness of intellectual and physical inspiration: while the beautiful girl was embodied in his poems through descriptions of her hair, Anerton comes through equally in the poet’s experimentation with poetic form. While he gazes on the girl’s beauty and describes her in his poetry, he discusses and develops his ideas about poetic form in conversation with Anerton. Instead of inspiring poems about her physical self, she is an intellectual inspiration: I am supposed to have ‘inspired’ them, and in a sense I did. From the first, the intellectual sympathy between us was almost complete; my mind must have been to him (I fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he was never tired of playing.61

As Anerton shows, woman as poetic inspiration is not limited to an idealization of her beauty, but can also be an intellectual inspiration. At the same time, her despair at having been thought of as his muse shows that the reading public is primarily prepared to recognize romantic inspiration. The public’s inability to see her as anything other than a romantic inspiration is a tragedy for Anerton, who was, indeed, in love with the poet, but found her love unrequited. In fact, he never thought of her as anything other than an intellectual equal. Laura Saltz argues that this story ‘offers a pointed criticism of the objectifying vision’ that has led the protagonist, as well as the poet, to ‘construe Mary as muse’. As Saltz asserts, ‘Mary Anerton’s letter constitutes a significant challenge to this objectified version of femininity’.62 In other words, whereas the story begins in the tradition of seeing the female object of the gaze as a direct inspiration for masculine art, Wharton allows Anerton herself to refuse that role as she retells the narrative and shatters the illusion that she is ‘poetry incarnate’. By shattering the illusion, Saltz asserts, Mary becomes her own ‘textual subject’.63 This movement by female muses from object of the gaze to textual subject, and how this movement constitutes a counter discourse on aestheticism in women’s short fiction, is my primary focus in this study. I begin in the first chapter by

Introduction

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looking at the ways in which the dual concerns of literary and gender autonomy intersect in the work of British female aesthetes who, along with many New Women, questioned what they saw as the male aesthete’s parasitic reliance on the female muse. In ‘The Fifth Edition’ (1896), Mabel Wotton, whose short story collection Day-Books appeared in the Bodley Head’s Keynotes series, critiques the canonical version of aestheticism and maps out the period’s major debates over artistic invention, literary property and women’s writing. In this story of a struggle over a misappropriated manuscript, a rising literary star accepts, rewrites and then publishes under his own name a novel written by an obscure spinster; through this narrative, Wotton offers a nuanced critique that reaches beyond the plot motif of plagiarism to question the ethics of the very process of literary invention. As the literary star revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a direct translation of its original author into text, and thus it is suggested that he has committed fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture. The emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton’s fiction, on the potentially parasitic relationship between artists and their source material illuminates concerns about the connection between creative production and a kind of mimesis that is dangerously close to mere copying that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde and James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction. Although this chapter focuses primarily on Wotton’s work, the emphasis in her fiction on the uneven playing field of cultural authority places it in conversation with the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose fiction underscores how women without power or authority are shut out socially, economically and culturally. In the fiction of Wotton and Woolson, opportunity is everything, and the obscure, impoverished women artists in their stories are unable to find a marketplace for their work. The emphasis on cultural authority in their fiction, furthermore, underscores the ways in which marketability and access to publication are determined by cultural gatekeepers whose sense of what is good or worthy is highly subjective and overdetermined. Whereas the male aesthetes in these stories control access to the marketplace, their criteria are determined by standards that exclude outsiders. The next chapter examines how Lee’s work further problematizes the relationship between aesthetic artists and their sources of inspiration through muse’s revenge tales, stories in which the object of the gaze eludes the observer, either through outright rebellion or through the artist’s inability to ‘capture’ it. Where Wotton’s story of repressed women’s voices critiques aestheticism in a broad sense, Vernon Lee’s ‘Lady Tal’ (1892) issues a much more personal critique of Henry James, whose artistic methods come to represent all that Lee finds objec-

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tionable about aestheticism’s relationship to its raw material. I argue that Lee’s critique of James opens up into a larger conversation with the concerns of women’s fiction from both sides of the Atlantic by staging and realigning the conflict between a male artist and his female subject. Lee, like James, modelled her characters on the people she knew, and both authors endured criticism as a result of their artistic practice; this dynamic is ironically mirrored in Lee’s muse’s revenge tales in which artistic or historical figures revolt against the passive role assigned to them by those attempting to render them into art. Rather than a fault in her artistry, as critics such as Vineta Colby have seen it, I read Lee’s ‘clumsy’ reproduction of real life in her fiction, and the personal repercussions that followed, as a deliberate critique of the artist/object relationship in aestheticism.64 Her satiric depiction of a Jamesian figure in ‘Lady Tal’ epitomizes a pattern of disobedience across her work and in her working life that both reproduces and critiques what many New Women saw as a vampiric relationship between the male aesthete and his muse. Just as Lee often refused to pay homage to the luminaries around her, the (often female) subjects within her fiction remain stubbornly elusive for the (often male) artists, historians and authority figures attempting to capture them in metaphorical and literal terms. In other words, women in Lee’s fiction insist on maintaining control over themselves as text: the subject consistently resists being objectified. This chapter concludes by demonstrating how Lee offers a possibility for resolving the tensions over owning women’s stories through a model of collaboration. In the third chapter, I turn my attention to Edith Wharton’s complex negotiations with the relationship between artists and their source material in the creation of art. In Wharton’s early short fiction, she is working through the issues of how artists should draw on the world around them in creating art, as well as the potential for ethical conflict that this artistic practice raises. Although Wharton often assumes the position of connoisseur by attempting to shape and define her readers’ artistic tastes, she shows in her fiction a distinct discomfort with the artist as critic and connoisseur who draws on and critiques the world around him or her. The artists in Wharton’s early fiction point to the numerous ethical dilemmas raised by the creation of art which comments on the world. As Wharton demonstrates, borrowing from the real world in one’s art, and then offering a critique of it, necessarily creates conflict between the objects of one’s gaze and the artist because the way that an artist presents an object in a work of art is almost never in accord with the way that the object sees itself, or perhaps would prefer to have itself seen. In other words, the artist will always be in conflict with the object of his or her gaze because that object is also a thinking subject. Wharton thus creates a conflict within her own fiction: while she points to the unsavoury aspects of artistic production, especially from the point of view of those who are appropriated into works of art, she also asserts that the best art

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is that which interprets what we know and can see in the everyday world. Ultimately, Wharton refuses to reconcile this contradiction; instead, her early short fiction demonstrates that the creation of art is a vexed, but necessarily interpretive, process. In the final chapter, I widen the debate on women’s writing back against male artists by examining the ways in which the clash between male aesthetes as voices of authority and rebellious female muses who refuse to be defined and controlled by male artists relates to a conversation within late nineteenth-century women’s writing over the ability of women to tell their own stories. The rebellious muse as a motif pushes back in gendered terms against a specific strain in aestheticism that privileges the observer over the object under observation. Ultimately, as the fiction that I examine suggests, it is the male aesthete who controls the image by appropriating, defining, commenting on and shaping how the female muse is presented. However, when muses rebel against being the subject of someone else’s art, they claim a right to be their own subject. As I argued earlier in this introduction, the attempt to push back against the appropriative moves of aestheticism echoes broader social demands for women’s equality. Likewise, the figure of the rebellious muse who refuses to allow the male artist to control the image can be linked to figures across American and British women’s fiction who insist on an opportunity to narrate their own stories. By connecting fictional representations of aesthetes who use their cultural authority to determine what story is told about a female character to characters within the fiction of American regionalist writer Mary Wilkins Freeman who, literally, refuse to remain silent and instead demand the right to tell their stories, I make a connection within late nineteenth-century women’s fiction between controlling the image and controlling narratives. Both elements of control, I argue, become sites for conflict in women’s stories, and the ability to control one’s own narrative stands in for the ability for nineteenth-century women to gain greater autonomy over their own lives. An unwillingness to be the silent image within a painting, or the silently suffering character within a fictional narrative, is functionally equivalent to the refusal to remain silent about domestic tyranny, exclusion from suffrage or the inequities of professional and educational opportunities. In this way, this study begins by limning a very specific area of women’s fiction in the late nineteenth century and pointing to a shared motif across transatlantic women’s writing: the trope of the artist who assumes aesthetic control over his subject, but finds himself up against a rebellious muse who insists on projecting a different image. Ultimately, however, I move from excavating this aspect of women’s fiction to making broader claims about how women’s fiction – whether or not it openly engaged in debating the Woman Question – nevertheless engaged in that debate.

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It may seem ironic that women writers would push back against male aesthetes’ incorporation of female muses into their art by incorporating elements of real-life male artists in their own work. Just as the New Woman as a literary and cultural manifestation was (as Talia Schaffer argues)65 a construction more than an accurate depiction of the multitude of New Women who were connected to the emerging woman’s movement, the artists in these stories are partly based on fact, but also creations. As creations, they reflect a host of anxieties and frustrations with the world of art, as well as the cultural hierarchy that situated male artists as the interpreters and arbiters of art. The composite aesthete figures that these women writers created allowed them to explore the ethics and process of creating art, as well as the social and material inequalities common to the art world. By countering the authority of the male artist figure, women writers explored the limits and appropriateness of the relationship between artists and their subjects. They asked whether art can or should move beyond a reflection of the material world; likewise, they asked whether the material world has the right to object to being used as raw material.

1 ‘A BEAUTIFUL TRANSLATION FROM A VERY IMPERFECT ORIGINAL’: MABEL WOTTON, AESTHETICISM AND THE DILEMMA OF LITERARY BORROWING

In a pivotal moment in Mabel Wotton’s short story ‘The Fifth Edition’ (1896), Janet Suttaby, a struggling writer unable to find a publisher for her novel, offers the rising literary star, Franklyn Leyden, her manuscript, telling him, ‘If you really think there is any good in it … it must either go back to the drawer until I have time to polish it, or … you must take it’.1 Miss Suttaby offers almost no explanation for her act, nor does she outline what she expects Leyden to do with the manuscript, so when Leyden accepts, rewrites and then publishes it under his own name, he has not done anything that she has explicitly forbidden. Nevertheless, his appropriation of her work is clearly marked in the text as ethically compromised, especially when Miss Suttaby’s subsequent death from starvation underscores her desperate need for the money that the sale of a novel would have brought. At the same time, the text offers a much more nuanced critique of Leyden’s actions that reaches beyond the ethics of plagiarism and into the realm of literary invention itself; as Leyden revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a parasitical translation of Miss Suttaby herself into text, and he is thus implicated as a fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture. As I will argue, the emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton’s fiction, on what Susan Sontag has termed in another context the ‘shady commerce between art and truth’ makes visible concerns about the connection between inspiration and invention that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Henry James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction.2 In other words, Leyden’s act of literary appropriation echoes and critiques contemporaneous arguments for plagiarism that suggested that improving on someone else’s work – with or without permission – was in itself – 23 –

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a laudable act of artistic invention. In this chapter, I will suggest that apologies for plagiarism both authorize these acts and, as Wotton’s story dramatically demonstrates, reveal a parasitic angle to the aesthetic artist’s claims to improve upon (i.e., make beautiful) the raw material of everyday life. Although there remains much work to be done in excavating the personal and professional details surrounding the life of ‘forgotten female aesthete’ (to use Talia Schaffer’s term) Mabel Wotton (1863–1927), Meri-Jane Rochelson’s recent discovery of Wotton’s letters to the novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill, letters that were filed away under the wrong name in the Central Zionist Archives, has shed considerable light on Wotton as artist and critic.3 Wotton, who remained an obscure writer even after the publication of Day-Books in John Lane’s infamous Keynotes series, was born and lived in London for most of her adult life. Although most of her work is currently out of print, she published numerous novels, short stories and children’s books throughout her lifetime. As her letters to Zangwill reveal, far from a reclusive, starving artist, Wotton was deeply involved in the cultural and social life of turn-of-the-century London. In her letters, she comments on her negotiations with leading publishers of the day, offers advice and criticism of Zangwill’s work, and reveals her connections to prominent theatrical and literary figures, including George Egerton and Dion Boucicault. She was also a close acquaintance of the poet and essayist Alice Meynell, to whom she dedicated Day-Books as a token ‘of gratitude for tenderness’. Although she consults Zangwill on financial and literary matters, she also trusts her own judgement and, at times, rejects his advice about her work. Beyond adding to our biographical and bibliographical knowledge of Wotton, this new evidence of her ties to the literary world, as well as of her insistence on professional independence, invites us to rethink the wider context of her work and to acknowledge the ways in which it was deeply embedded in and critical of contemporary aesthetic debates over the relationship between art and life, literary invention and literary property. Her fiction, like that of Vernon Lee, evinces a deep suspicion of literary realists such as George Moore and Henry James, authors who drew on and dissected women’s lives, transforming real subjects into fictional subjects, thus translating (someone else’s) ‘real’ experience into art.4 Wotton calls into question the ethics of this kind of artistic representation in stories such as ‘The Fifth Edition’ by leaving on the stage the shattered figure of the subject who is left behind. Unlike Oscar Wilde, who complains in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that realism erases the art from fiction, according to Wotton, realism takes the soul out of those who provide its raw material. In Wotton’s story about a male artist appropriating a woman’s manuscript, improving it by interweaving his stylistic ability with his observations of her, and then publishing the manuscript under his name without giving her financial or literary credit, Wotton critiques a host of late nineteenth-century discourses on

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artistic invention. Through Leyden’s gratified sense that he has improved Miss Suttaby’s manuscript, Wotton invokes and revises contemporary arguments in favour of plagiarism, in which it is seen not as an intellectual crime, but, in fact, as an intellectual responsibility when it ‘improved’ (i.e., rendered more marketable) an original manuscript. At the same time, Leyden’s act of using Miss Suttaby’s manuscript as a piece of raw material that he then transforms and commodifies by applying his particular form of artistic genius echoes the late nineteenth-century aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde and James that I laid out in the introduction to this volume. In these theories, the aesthetic artist creates a work of art in the act of responding to and translating elements of the material world into another medium. The artist’s response to and transformation of what he or she sees is in and of itself a work of art. The direct incorporation of Miss Suttaby herself into the manuscript reflects a realist practice that drew on ‘real life’ as raw material and purported to offer a more transparent view of that life. That Leyden is able to appropriate both Miss Suttaby’s novel and Miss Suttaby herself, to ‘improve’ the original manuscript, and to profit by it is also a condemnation of the late nineteenth-century literary marketplace in which aesthetic figures like Leyden held cultural authority, and thus were gatekeepers to publishing outlets that were effectively unavailable to an obscure, unconnected woman writer like Miss Suttaby. Locating Wotton’s work amid a constellation of fin-de-siècle debates over the relationship between art, life and the literary marketplace not only reveals her embeddedness in late nineteenth-century literary culture, but also helps establish a place for her in recent critical conversations about the period. Although Margaret Stetz reintroduced Wotton in 1986 by reprinting ‘The Fifth Edition’ in the journal Turn-of-the-Century Women, Wotton has remained on the outskirts of literary history. Despite appearing in influential anthologies of fin-de-siècle women’s writing, such as Elaine Showalter’s Daughters of Decadence (1993) and Carolyn Christensen Nelson’s A New Woman Reader (2001), as well as in critical overviews, such as Schaffer’s The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000) and Ann Heilmann’s New Woman Fiction (2000), Wotton’s work has received little sustained critical engagement. That her work has hovered on the margins of the critical conversation about women’s writing in the period is due, I would argue, to the fact that we have not known where to place her in that conversation – is she a New Woman, an aesthete, a conservative idealist, an experimentalist? In other words, should we identify her with the seemingly victimized Janet Suttaby or with the arch narrative voice that in telling Suttaby’s story mocks and exposes the parasite Leyden’s charade? One way to begin locating Wotton is to examine ‘The Fifth Edition’ in terms of the larger context of her work and working life and to recognize the nuanced point that story makes about artistic invention and the potentially parasitic rela-

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tionship between art and life. While Heilmann has pointed to the ways in which ‘The Fifth Edition’ can be read as a New Woman story,5 Schaffer problematizes the usefulness of the term in identifying writers from the period by pointing to the still unresolved question of defining the New Woman. Schaffer describes a split in the criticism between inclusivists, who class any writer interested in women as a New Woman, and those who would restrict the label to ‘feminist ideologues’. Schaffer asserts that the pressure ‘to prove [writers] acceptably feminist’ can both lead to over-reductive readings and a tendency to overlook writers who do not pass the litmus test of feminism.6 While Wotton’s work is not overtly political, and thus might not seem to line up with Heilmann’s assertion that New Woman fiction ‘constituted, and conceived itself as, an agent of social and political transformation’,7 Wotton is nevertheless concerned with the (often gendered) social and professional inequities between those who have access and opportunity, and who take ruthless advantage of those opportunities, and those on the margin. At the same time, while Wotton’s work is concerned with women’s lives, it does not neatly line up along feminist lines, and the exploiters in her stories are just as likely to be female as male. Thus, while she is linked to New Woman writing through her vivid portrayals of the powerless and exploited and her critique of the largely male-dominated professional system, I propose moving beyond the question of whether or not she is a New Woman by focusing on the ways that her work targets the inequities brought about by professional, social and financial hierarchies. More specifically, I will argue that Wotton’s fiction illuminates how fin-de-siècle aesthetic theories created vexed dichotomies between inspiration and execution, creation and appreciation, dichotomies that excluded those who did not have equal access to the marketplace. In ‘The Fifth Edition’, Leyden rationalizes his act of plagiarism in such a way that it sounds very much like what I have described as a revisionist strain in aestheticism. Through this connection between plagiarism, revision and aesthetics, Wotton rereads aestheticism, and its emphasis on models of female beauty, as essentially parasitic. Wotton’s work threads together a series of contemporaneous debates related to aestheticism and originality that run through the writings of Pater, Wilde and James, as well as through debates over plagiarism and New Woman critiques of male artists. My analysis of Wotton’s short fiction, in particular ‘The Fifth Edition’ and her neglected story, ‘Amongst Her Following’ (1893), demonstrates how she complicates and challenges her contemporaries’ assumptions about the often vexed relationship between the artist and his or her material. Both ‘The Fifth Edition’ and ‘Amongst Her Following’ question the ethics of invention and inspiration by depicting characters who destroy the subjects on which they base their fictions. At the same time, Wotton defends the autonomy of the artist, even if that artist’s work is simply one’s self. Both stories depict two different types of artists – one a parasitic stylist who translates what he or she sees and one, to

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whom our sympathies are directed, whose art is an expression of the self. Rather than relying on pure invention, the parasitic artists create art by transcribing the experiences of others, claiming that what gives their work value is the effect of critical appreciation and translation. While ‘The Fifth Edition’ satirically targets the male literary aesthete in general, and, as Angela Kingston argues, Wilde in particular,8 that story’s critique does not neatly line up along gender lines (i.e., men exploiting women) because the male dandy figure borrows the life stories of both male and female characters; ‘Amongst Her Following’ further muddies our readings of Wotton’s gender politics by inverting the male and female roles, this time presenting a female artist who destroys her devoted male admirer by acting out his suffering in an improvised recitation. Reading ‘The Fifth Edition’ and ‘Amongst Her Following’ alongside one another reveals Wotton’s awareness of the opportunism underpinning artistic invention, an equal opportunity opportunism practised by both genders in late nineteenth-century literary culture. Wotton’s formulation of artistic invention echoes and revises a host of deeply interconnected ideas and anxieties about literary borrowing. In ‘The Fifth Edition’, Franklyn Leyden’s most obvious ethical transgression is publishing Miss Suttaby’s manuscript – albeit in a drastically revised form – as his own. This act, however, is part of a pattern in Leyden’s working life; his first successful work, Wrecked, was little more than the faithful transcription of a dying man’s life story that ‘he had “tipped” … into manuscript’, faithfully reproducing ‘the weary voice, and the inert hands, lying open on the coverlet’.9 Before publishing Wrecked, Leyden strategically waited until his source was dead, hoping that no one would recognize the parallels in the story. In creating this scenario, Wotton’s story engages with a debate on plagiarism that emerged in the late nineteenth century. In his rewriting of Miss Suttaby’s work and his elaborate self-justifications, Leyden embodies the theories of a disparate group of late nineteenth-century apologists for plagiarism mapped out by Paul K. Saint-Amour in The Copywrights (2003). Although, as Saint-Amour points out, this was not a coherent group of theorists, but rather ‘scattered purveyors of an emerging critique of original genius and literary property’,10 they shared a sense that raw material – in whatever form – is there to be ‘picked up’ and used by whoever is in a position to capitalize on it, regardless of whose idea it may have been originally. According to the pro-plagiarists, it is almost an ethical imperative to take advantage of, and perhaps even build on, material that comes to hand rather than leave it to be forgotten. One aspect of the plagiarism debate emerged in 1887 when the Pall Mall Gazette accused Rider Haggard of plagiarizing portions of both She (1887) and Jess (1887). While there is no direct evidence that Wotton was thinking of the Haggard case when she wrote ‘The Fifth Edition’, she may well have been aware of the controversy, which was featured prominently in the journal’s pages. The

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Pall Mall Gazette, Haggard’s most energetic critic, accused him of heavily borrowing the plot for She from Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean (1827). Perhaps more embarrassingly for Haggard, and closest to the plot of Wotton’s story, the editors also discovered that Haggard had included in Jess some verses by R. C. V. Myers that had appeared fifteen years earlier in the Christian Union.11 In his defence, Haggard asserted that he had been sent the verses by a friend who he believed had written them. As he explained in a letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, after the friend’s death, ‘I put the lines, or rather some of them, into the mouth of Jess, because I knew that my dead friend would have been pleased at my doing so’.12 Since the friend was dead, we have no evidence other than Haggard’s word that this indeed would have been the case. If Haggard’s assumption that the verses were the work of his dead friend had been correct, his appropriation of the verses would have gone undetected. By failing to attribute the lines, Haggard implied that he had written them himself, a charge which he vehemently denied: ‘I have, however, never claimed the authorship of them, and I should have acknowledged it in the book, only to do so would have been to spoil the vraisemblance of the scene’.13 The Pall Mall Gazette was clearly dissatisfied with Haggard’s casuistic argument and countered that ‘Mr. Haggard’s explanation does not strike us as satisfactory. His incorporation of some one else’s verses in his novel without any acknowledgment … seems to us a clear case of literary dishonesty.’ The editor continues by linking Haggard’s defence to broader questions of professional ethics: ‘The adoption of this code – implying as it does that an author is at liberty to beg, borrow, or steal so long as he does not expressly deny that the property is stolen – would … completely revolutionize literary ethics’.14 This debate points to two divergent conceptions of originality: one in which art is created anew by interweaving and building upon existing work and one that values the myth of original genius. The two sides are diametrically opposed – the interweaving camp accusing those who argue for original genius of hopeless naiveté and the original genius camp accusing the interweavers of advocating theft. Robert Macfarlane has noted this dichotomy between ‘originality’ that emerges from rearranging ‘pre-existing materials into novel combinations’ and creation, which brings ‘entirely new matter into being’.15 While this debate was not new to the late nineteenth century, and Macfarlane and others have traced the existence of these two philosophical ideas in earlier periods,16 the form that the plagiarism debate took at the end of the century resonates, I will argue, with fin-de-siècle aestheticism in a way that illuminates a parasitic angle of aesthetic theory. Although in Wotton’s story Leyden has not incorporated a written manuscript into Wrecked, his appropriation of the dying man’s tale raises a similar ethical dilemma about whether art that builds on someone else’s work can be termed original. It is likely that Leyden, who rationalizes his act by reassuring

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himself that ‘everything depended on the fashion of narration’,17 would have enthusiastically seconded the critic Andrew Lang’s defence of Haggard in ‘Literary Plagiarism’ (1887): Not the matter, but the casting of the matter; not the stuff, but the form given to the stuff, makes the novel, the novelty, and the success … no dullard can make anything, even if he steals all his materials. On the other hand, genius, or even considerable talent, can make a great deal, if it chooses, even out of stolen material – if any of the material of literature can be properly said to be stolen, and is not rather the possession of whoever likes to pick it up.18

Through this metaphor of raw materials waiting to be shaped by a superior artist, Lang asserts a view of invention that is closer to an act of revision than of ‘pure’ originality. By ‘casting’ the dying man’s story into a successful novel, Leyden has demonstrated his own particular ‘genius’ – not for invention, but rather for moulding raw materials into marketable commodities. Lang’s point about literary material being available for ‘whoever likes to pick it up’ transfers the burden of proving rightful ownership onto the original producer, who has been too much of a ‘dullard’ to capitalize on his own story. Thinking along much the same lines, when Leyden happens upon Janet Suttaby and reads her manuscript, he realizes that here is the material to be ‘shaped’ into the perfect follow-up to his first piece. Fantasizing that Miss Suttaby might die and leave the manuscript to him, he imagines the critical reaction to this new work edited and published under his name: ‘Naturally, what would strike the critics most would be his extraordinary versatility … There was only one quality which, the reviewers would point out, largely dominated both books; and that … was his enormous sympathy with suffering’. To Leyden’s delight, Miss Suttaby rejects his suggestion that they collaborate on revising the novel and instead offers him the manuscript as a gift. Declaring that she has ‘robbed me of words’, it is in fact he who will rob her.19 When Leyden first begins planning to find a way to make Miss Suttaby’s work his own, and thus cement his reputation by producing a follow-up book that is more powerful than his first, he wonders, ‘Was he not really enthralled of the book as he would have made it, rather than of the book as it actually was?’ In other words, Miss Suttaby’s book, which Leyden sees as both ‘a miserable book’ and ‘a powerful book, because it bore so plainly the impress of truth’, represents raw material to be shaped by his own particular type of stylistic genius.20 Miss Suttaby’s manuscript is ‘powerful’ on its own because it appears to reflect authentic experience, but Leyden can transform it into what the public wants. Among the apologists for plagiarism, there was a shared emphasis on observation, appreciation and revision that I will argue was shared by the aesthetes. Like Andrew Lang in his defence of Haggard, these writers not only defended plagia-

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rism, but argued that plagiarism itself cannot exist because all art is a reworking of old ideas. According to these writers, borrowing literary works is only another form of revising, which is entirely admirable if it can be said to improve on what is already there. The raw materials are there for everyone to share, but it is only the true genius who can transform them into works of art. The writer E. F. Benson articulates this idea of theft as improvement in his 1899 essay ‘Plagiarism’: Uncut diamonds, artistically speaking, may be legitimately taken away from their idiot-possessor, provided the thief will well and truly cut them, thus giving them a new brilliance. This is not a theft, properly speaking: rather it is a duty. It is good that diamonds should be stolen, be they yours, ours, or another’s, provided only – this is essential – that the new possessor exhibits them to better advantage. They may already have been pebbles in some barbarous toilet; it is the artist’s business to steal them thence, and make of them a parure for a queen.21

According to Benson, it is not only the métier of an artist to work with pre-existing materials, but a ‘duty’. Far from morally reprehensible, plagiarism in this light is the ethical course of action to take. The language of theft, and its concomitant implication that the original possessor has untold riches that he or she fails to appreciate or know how to exploit, marks the plagiarist as performing a public good. Benson, who was more a critic of aestheticism than an adherent, later created a fictional character, Lucia, who, along with her dandified sidekick Georgie, is a caricature of fraudulent aesthetic connoisseurship. In order to maintain a veneer of social and cultural superiority, she and Georgie frequently scheme to steal, improve upon and pre-empt the ideas of her rivals, especially Mapp (who is equally interested in showing Lucia up).22 Well-nigh a caricatured embodiment of the pro-plagiarism argument, Lucia, who only pretends to speak Italian and practises piano for hours in secret in order to make it appear as if she can play a piece perfectly the first time she sees it, is not averse to taking another’s idea and improving upon it in order to assert her cultural and social superiority. Lucia, an unrelenting snob, would have agreed with the journalist Edward Wright who asked in 1904, ‘is it not an act of infinite grace for a genius to make perfect the labour of inferior men?’23 According to those who argued that borrowing for the sake of creating superior art was not plagiarism, the practice should only be condemned if it is not done well: ‘Unintelligent theft is theft which does not see and show in the material stolen a higher possibility for its use than that in which it was previously employed. To fail in this is to be convicted of plagiarism.’ Benson claims that an artist must have ‘critical perception’, which is ‘practically the same thing as Originality’, in order to be able to recognize the potential in raw material and to be able to transform it into art.24 Wotton’s parasitic artists reflect this view of originality as a reshaping of existing materials, emphasizing that their talent lies

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in the faculty of ‘critical perception’, which enables them to recognize the potential in apparently ordinary materials. Wright further articulates this view of the artist as creative thief when he writes, Plagiarism is an art in which the finest critical power is exhibited by means of creation. To understand fully another man’s work is to create it anew under the form of an idea, and to embody this idea in another artistic mode is to criticise the original work in the best manner.25

By these terms, borrowing from someone else’s work is not only another form of criticism, but also the highest form of criticism because it reveals a deeper understanding of the original work. Accordingly, in order to be a successful plagiarist, which in Wright’s view requires considerable talent and skill, one must show a more thorough understanding of the original work than did its originator in order to render it into another, presumably superior, form. Wright’s definition of plagiarism calls for both heightened artistic perception and a skill at translation. Wotton offers a much less sanguine view of artistic work emerging out of borrowing and revision than seen in any of the theories discussed above. The pro-plagiarists’ words are so close to Leyden’s view that ‘everything depended on the fashion of narration’,26 in fact, that one could almost read ‘The Fifth Edition’ as Wotton’s rejoinder to the pro-plagiarists. By ending ‘The Fifth Edition’ with the information that Miss Suttaby has died of starvation, while Leyden has reaped fame, money and a successful marriage out of the transaction, Wotton refuses the glib opportunism of the pro-plagiarists and makes literal what is at stake in the debate over artistic originality and literary property. In the world of ‘The Fifth Edition’, losing control over one’s literary property has tangible consequences. It is not simply a matter of an ‘idiot possessor’ who fails to appreciate her riches or have the talent to capitalize on them; in Miss Suttaby’s case, her manuscript represents the artist’s attempt to survive in a marketplace that has thus far rejected her work. As an outsider to this marketplace, she has no means of negotiating it, either by targeting her work for a specific audience that might appreciate it or by revising it in order to make it acceptable. It is thus less the case that Leyden has superior talent or artistic perception, but rather that he has greater access to this market through publishing contacts, an eager public and the insider’s knowledge of literary trends. While Leyden might congratulate himself for turning Janet Suttaby’s ‘pebble’ into a ‘parure’, Margaret Stetz has offered an alternative reading of his editorial improvement of the text. As Stetz puts it, the problem is less with Miss Suttaby’s manuscript than with the conservative, religious weeklies to which she sent her work, which ‘were probably the least promising destinations for her unconventional narrative’. Stetz asserts furthermore that Miss Suttaby might have found a

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publisher on her own had she known to send her ‘unconventional’ manuscript to a publishing firm such as the Bodley Head (which published Day-Books itself ), ‘specializing in volumes by and about “New Women”’.27 Unlike Miss Suttaby, Wotton received such advice from Zangwill, who introduced her to John Lane. Stetz’s reading thus erases Leyden’s sense of superior ability and attributes his success, instead, to opportunity and connections in the publishing world to which the lonely Miss Suttaby did not have access. Wotton’s belief that the originator of an idea deserves full recognition comes through most clearly in her letters to Zangwill in reference to a scheme she had of stimulating his sales through a Zangwill calendar, which she describes in an undated letter as a ‘tear away leaf by leaf [almanac] … each [page] of which bears the date and a quotation’. Wotton conceived of the plan following Zangwill’s admission that his ‘back sales were small as compared with Marie Corelli and Mrs. Caird’,28 and her letters reveal her awareness that his publisher wanted to take over the project and assign it to someone else. She tells Zangwill, I write at once to say please don’t make it a sine quâ non that I should do the calendar. The point is that it should be done, not that I should do it, and if Tuck be cad enough to steal a woman’s idea and then give its embodiment to somebody else, it matters very little, (except to his conscience).29

In these lines, Wotton reveals that she is concerned both that the calendar be published, regardless of who receives credit, and with asserting that she originated the idea. Unlike the pro-plagiarists, Wotton values the originator of an idea rather than the stylist who executes the work itself. Edward Wright and the pro-plagiarists would have vehemently disagreed with Wotton’s view here, declaring instead that The men who first conceive an idea, a situation, a melody, a colour scheme, an effect in sculpture, are insignificant … By discovering the material of art one acquires no right over it. The claim to a title in it rests on incomparableness of form alone.30

Obviously, the idea, as opposed to its form, mattered very much to Wotton. She declares, ‘I hope in any case you’ll make Mr. Tradesman Tuck see that it is not the work but the idea he is asked to pay for. Since calendars first were, anybody might have suggested it of any living author, but nobody ever has.’31 In other words, no one had produced this kind of calendar before, and, although she would obviously have liked to compile it herself, she is more concerned that she receives recognition (as well as financial compensation) for the idea itself. As her letters to Zangwill reveal, and her fiction suggests, Wotton valued both the act of artistic invention, which she saw as springing from an individual’s creativity, and the autonomy accorded to successful artists. Her view on artistic autonomy becomes complicated, however, by the suggestion that she may

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have ‘allowed five ladies to sign articles practically written by herself !’, as Zangwill declares in a 1906 letter to his wife.32 Although we do not have the details of these incidents, and her contributions may have been heavy editing rather than writing, this statement opens up the possibility that Wotton’s ‘exaggerated unselfishness’, which, according to his wife, Zangwill often worried about, may have prompted Wotton to allow herself to be used in a manner closely akin to Miss Suttaby.33 Wotton’s critical view of artistic appropriation in ‘The Fifth Edition’, however, points to another, perhaps more insidious, aspect of literary theft: Leyden’s use of Miss Suttaby herself for material, a motif that draws on and critiques both realist practice and aesthetic theory. Not only does Leyden co-opt the manuscript but, in the process of rewriting it, he draws material from both Miss Suttaby’s text and Miss Suttaby as text: ‘He built upon Miss Suttaby’s foundations, and … his material was Miss Suttaby herself … nothing of what he had observed escaped transmittal’. That Leyden could not have created the new work without having Miss Suttaby as source material is emphasized when the narrator remarks, ‘He could not create. No one seemed to have discovered this as yet, for his critical powers were good, and his receptivity enormous.’34 Leyden’s parasitic reliance on Miss Suttaby both for literal and figurative material puts a more damning spin on the pro-plagiarists’ dismissal of originality because it moves plagiarism beyond the theft of an idea to an appropriation of the individual’s self. Wotton’s depiction of Leyden as an artist whose work has a parasitic, plagiaristic relation to its source material recasts a dominant strain in late Victorian aesthetic theory that runs through the writings of Pater, Wilde and James and that yokes together the ideas of artistic perception, inspiration and translation into a form of revision. As I noted in the introduction, in Pater’s The Renaissance we see the roots of an idea about artistic revision that is key to late nineteenthcentury aesthetic theory. Pater’s influential rewriting of Arnold’s directive ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’35 shifts the emphasis from the art object itself to the critic’s reaction to the object by asking, ‘What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me?’ (emphasis in original). In this way, Pater transforms the art object into an object of consumption whose function is to provoke an effect on the critic, forcing him or her, as Pater famously put it, ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame’.36 The critic’s expression of that subjective reaction to the work of art becomes paramount, and in Wilde’s reformulation of Pater, takes on its clearest revisionist tone by delineating the artistic act as a form of consumption of raw materials in which those materials are shaped through the artist’s interpretation or appreciation. In ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890), Wilde develops this notion by declaring that the critical reaction is a work of art in itself. In other words, the critic experiences

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the work of art and translates that experience into a new work by writing about it. In Wilde’s view, it is the translation (or revision into another form of art) that matters. Criticism, according to Wilde, ‘works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful’. Because the highest criticism aims primarily to ‘chronicle [the critic’s] own impressions’, the quality of the original materials is unimportant.37 In words that sound closely akin to Leyden’s musing whether he is ‘really enthralled of the book as he would have made it, rather than of the book as it actually was?’,38 Wilde tells us that, through the exercise of the true artist’s critical faculty, ‘the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing’.39 It is this aspect of Wilde’s critical theory that moves his aesthetics closest to revision. James presents an explicit preference for the artist’s treatment of a subject, as opposed to the subject on its own, in his 1908 preface to the New York edition of The Spoils of Poynton. In the preface, he describes how he found the ‘germ’ of the novel ‘dropped unwitting’ in an anecdote at a dinner party. In his discussion of the inspiration for his work, he describes most of them as coming from such ‘germs’, or casual hints, which he recognizes as having potential and develops into a complete work. As he puts it, ‘most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as minute and wind-blown as that casual hint for “The Spoils of Poynton” dropped unwitting by my neighbour’. When he encounters a potentially useful germ, it is not helpful, or even desirable, to hear all the details because the way that he will develop it into a story is more artistic than what really happened: ‘Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection’.40 Whereas life piles on unsifted details, the artist has the capacity to sort through them, discovering and developing what is useful and artistic. Life presents the raw materials, he tells us, but artistic discrimination is vital because ‘life has no direct sense whatever for the subject and is capable, luckily for us, of nothing but splendid waste. Hence the opportunity for the sublime economy of art, which rescues, which saves, and hoards and “banks”.’ Life, he asserts, has no artistic vision, and thus cannot be trusted to know what should and should not be included in a work of art. In creating such a work, the talented artist takes the ‘germ’ and leaves the rest of life, and all its clumsy accumulation of details, behind because ‘he alone has the secret of the particular case, he alone can measure the truth of the direction to be taken by his developed data’. In other words, only the artist with ‘a good eye for a subject’ can recognize the potential in a minute hint; furthermore, only the artist can develop that hint into an artistic masterpiece, while leaving behind the imperfect, and certainly inartistic, raw material of life in all its detail.41 As James puts it, rather than incorporating life wholesale into one’s art, the aesthetic artist is always improving on, selecting from and revising its raw materials.

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It is this practice of seeing art and life as raw material to be defined, shaped and interpreted by an expert, in this case an artist-as-connoisseur, that assumes its most insidious role in ‘The Fifth Edition’. Here the relationship between the artist and his materials takes on its most parasitic form. Wotton and other late nineteenth-century women writers on both sides of the Atlantic reversed James’s formulation of critical perception as inspiration by revealing how the (generally male) artist’s use of (generally female) living material affected the muses left behind. These writers thus engaged the gender-inflected question of male appropriation of the female subject, a topic most notably explored in Edith Wharton’s short story ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’ (1899), Vernon Lee’s ‘Lady Tal’ (1892) and Sarah Grand’s ‘The Undefinable: A Fantasia’ (1908) – stories that I have referred to as muse’s revenge tales because of the ways in which the muse resists being passively absorbed into an artist’s work. Writers like Grand and Lee suggest that the male artist’s reliance on women as inspiration often left women as depleted objects. In her work, Wotton problematizes the position of the artist-reviser or connoisseur by showing the depleted objects (male and female) and dramatizing the relationship between art and life, ultimately revealing the parasitic dichotomy between the original artist/subject and the critic/stylist. Whether Leyden’s act can be read as outright theft, plagiarism, realistic appropriation or aesthetic revision, Wotton clearly presents his behaviour as unethical. As Wotton characterizes it, Leyden’s offence arises not simply from his appropriation of Miss Suttaby’s text, but also from his reshaping of the rough materials of Miss Suttaby’s experience. Stetz suggests that Wotton’s story reflects the working methods of writers such as George Moore, ‘who boasted in his memoirs of how he systematically pumped his housemaid for details of her existence, then used these in his fiction … which made the author, though not the servant, rich’.42 In her memoir ‘As I Knew Them’: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way, Ella Hepworth Dixon confirms this view of Moore, writing that he knew nothing of the backstairs … The painful details of Esther Waters – most tragic of stories … had to be laboriously gathered from the person who ‘did for him’ in Danes’ Inn, hired, by the hour, it was said, to reveal the psychology of the toiling classes.43

In this view of Moore, his realism comes less from a sympathetic imagination than from a transcription of the ‘details’ that he gathered from his housemaid. These details were gathered systematically in exchange for payment, although the payments to his informant did not equal the profits that Moore gained from his work. If this is the case, it raises the question of what Moore added to these details to transform them into art.

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Like Leyden, Moore was applauded by critics for his realism and sympathy. For example, in a review of Esther Waters (1894), George Cotterell comments that: Following Esther through her varied experiences – squalid for the most part, and almost unrelieved by any gleam or breath of real gladness – one marvels at the intimate description by which they are all made so intensely actual. Whether Mr. Moore depicts the little cook-and-butler-ruled oligarchy of a better-class kitchen; or the patient toil-worn existence that is lived by suffering women in the houses of the coarser poor … in all he writes with knowledge vivified with sympathy, and sympathy directed to the ends of art.44

Cotterell notices, in particular, the intensity and intimacy of Moore’s writing, which he suggests comes from a sympathetic identification with his characters. Cotterell here explicitly answers the question of what Moore adds to the details to make them art: ‘knowledge vivified with sympathy’. It is this sympathetic quality that, presumably, differentiates Moore’s work from reportage and qualifies it as art. This sympathy is belied by Moore’s callous account of the housemaid in his memoir: I used to ask you all sorts of cruel questions; I was curious to know the depth of animalism you had sunk to, or rather out of which you had never been raised. And generally you answered innocently and naïvely enough. But sometimes my words were too crude, and they struck through the thick hide into the quick, into the human, and you winced a little; but this was rarely, for you were very nearly, oh, very nearly an animal … Dickens would sentimentalise or laugh over you; I do neither. I merely recognise you as one of the facts of civilisation.45

It would seem that Moore’s view of the housemaid reveals that sympathy for ‘one of the facts of civilisation’ is beside the point. His description of his research into, or ‘cruel questions’ about, the servant’s life reveals not only his systematic investigation into the housemaid’s psyche, but the contempt that he felt for his subject. His language describing her ‘animalism’ and ‘thick hide’ reveals the extent to which he saw her as ‘very nearly an animal’: to him, she was an object of research rather than a thinking, feeling subject. In his view, she is neither worthy of the sympathy driving Dickens’s sentimentalization of his characters, nor even of humour, and he views her with clinical detachment. Judging from this brutally honest account, one wonders if Moore was as surprised as Leyden at the critical reaction to his work: as Wotton’s narrator informs us, Nothing amazed [Leyden] so much about ‘Wrecked’ as the number of times he had been told how he had suffered. He could only explain it as a fresh witness to the extreme faithfulness with which he had reproduced that poor chap in Algiers of whom he had made copy.46

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Leyden’s talent for reproducing his subject with ‘extreme faithfulness’ appears to produce what Cotterell describes as ‘knowledge vivified with sympathy’. The public sees this appearance of sympathy as coming from personal experience, and Leyden recognizes the irony of receiving praise for faithfully reproducing someone else’s suffering. From the beginning, Leyden sees in Miss Suttaby undiscovered material that he can capitalize upon in just this way, and, like the true aesthetic connoisseur, congratulates himself for his ability to find ‘attractive’ what would ‘be found uninteresting by most people’. When he first reads her manuscript, he reflects that ‘There was no art about it at all … She had simply obeyed a forgotten mandate, and with perfect literalness. She had looked into her own heart, and written of what she found there, and what she wrote of was a great loneliness.’47 In other words, Miss Suttaby is writing of her own experience and feelings, which do not qualify as art in his mind, although transcribing and shaping the experiences and feelings of someone else, as he did in Wrecked, would. He directs particular derision towards a scene in which a woman whose baby has died goes to bed clutching a bundle of rags. To him, the scene is absurdly maudlin, and only later does he realize that to Miss Suttaby, who has known great loneliness, it was perfectly plausible and she could easily imagine behaving in such a way in a moment of desperation. Leyden’s criticism of the artlessness of writing of personal experience echoes criticism aimed at George Egerton and other New Women writers whose work focused, as Egerton famously put it, on the ‘terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as man liked to imagine her’.48 Rather than submitting to the imagination or observation of an outsider, Egerton imagined women’s art as revealing a more authentic and unsuspected truth about womanhood than would be possible in a work by an outsider who is only imagining what it is like to be a woman. The criticism directed against Egerton that such candid self-expression was tantamount to pornography demonstrates, as Ann Ardis points out in New Women, New Novels (1990), how much the ‘“realer” realism’ – i.e., fiction that reveals ‘“the truth” about human sexuality’ – called for by Moore, Thomas Hardy and Eliza Lynn Linton was not acceptable, and certainly not considered art, when it dealt explicitly with women’s lives and desires told from a woman’s point of view.49 As Wotton dramatizes it, the debate over New Woman fiction versus the masculine ‘new’ realism represents a struggle over narrative authority and calls into question who has the power to tell a woman’s story. Alison Case points out that in much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, narrative authority (as opposed to moral authority) was denied to women. ‘Feminine narration’, she writes, was restricted ‘to the role of narrative witness; that is, by her exclusion from the active shaping of narrative form and meaning’. Thus, a masculine narrator’s ‘mastery’ over the text was demonstrated by providing the ‘form and

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meaning’ of the experiences recounted by the female narrator, as in R. D. Blackmore’s novel Lorna Doone.50 Similarly, Leyden views Miss Suttaby’s manuscript as simply relating the story of her life, whereas he as a male artist can explain its meaning and, in his role as aesthetic connoisseur, uncover its hidden beauty: So far as he knew, the portrayal of a woman had never been done before in the only way in which fidelity is likely to be secured. She had never been drawn first by one who has suffered the actual suffering and enjoyed the actual joys, and then by a second who has noted the visible results. She had never been the joint work of a woman dealing with the subtleties a man could not divine, and of a man writing of what a woman never notices.51

This theory of art inverts Egerton’s idea about women mapping out their own ‘terra incognita’ by suggesting that women are incapable of interpreting and even understanding their experiences. Women can convey the raw emotional intensity of their experience, which are ‘subtleties’ beyond male comprehension in Leyden’s view, but that emotional intensity must be ‘noted’ and processed by a male audience. Leyden believes that adding this extra layer of interpretive distance will add more ‘fidelity’, and hence realism, to a work of art. A woman’s story on its own, Leyden tells himself, is not art, whereas the same story, given meaning by a male ‘objective’ observer, is. In these lines Leyden expresses a view of realism as translation that seems to add a sinister note to James’s view of the artist as observer, especially when Wotton presents us with the literal destruction of Miss Suttaby that ultimately results from these observations. Ironically, Leyden looks to Janet Suttaby to translate him in the same way when he waits expectantly for her to make sense of a vague statement he has made about amateur artists: He was not quite sure what he meant, though he thought it sounded well. But he had often found that women made a beautiful translation from a very imperfect original, and he waited for her answer, knowing it would furnish the keynote to what she believed she had discovered in him.

In her reply, Miss Suttaby draws meaning from Leyden’s empty words, offering the gloss that one must experience ‘duty and self-sacrifice, and conquered longings’ before creating art.52 She thus enacts the implied opposite of Leyden’s working methods; in other words, rather than revising from an inspiring original, Miss Suttaby creates meaning out of meaninglessness. In the process, she expresses a view of artistic creation that directly opposes Leyden’s: to her, art comes from suffering and hardship, whereas Leyden appropriates and stylizes the suffering and hardship of others. Because of his talent in translation, and because of his greater access to the market, Leyden’s rewriting of Miss Suttaby is an immediate success, but it is only when it has reached a fifth edition that he attempts to fulfil his promise to pay her for the manuscript. However, by co-opting her novel and

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erasing her authorial presence in it, Leyden effectively erases the real Miss Suttaby, and in the final scene we learn that she has died waiting for the promised financial compensation. Wotton’s presentation in ‘The Fifth Edition’ of an aesthetic of appropriating and revising female voices offers an inversion of the central idea in ‘Miss Grief ’ (1880) by the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. Although I have found no evidence that Wotton and Woolson were aware of each other’s work, these two stories are so similar in theme, except in the opposite conclusions that they draw, that Wotton’s story reads like an imaginative rewriting of Woolson’s. Woolson (1840–94), grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and a prolific novelist, short story and essay writer, was well acquainted with the difficulties of finding entry into the publishing world, especially when one’s work does not conform to contemporary norms and expectations. For example, in an 1876 letter to Clarence Stedman, she describes being told to avoid the subject of the Civil War and the South if she wanted to remain a contributor to Harper’s. According to Victoria Brehm and Sharon Dean, if Woolson wanted to express her ‘opinions on slavery and Reconstruction, on the growing tendency of the United States to try to forget the Civil War,’ she was forced to ‘encod[e] her opinions’ in her writing in order to get them published.53 In other words, Woolson engaged in an act of self-censorship so as to please her publishers. The narrator of Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief ’, however, is a male author who either has not had to make such sacrifices or has not seen such redactions as significant enough to count as sacrifices. The narrator, who is living in Rome and complacently aware of his literary success, tells us that he is described by others as a ‘quiet young fellow who writes those delightful little studies of society’, a description that underscores the general agreeableness of his literary productions. He begins by announcing that ‘A conceited fool’ is not an uncommon expression. Now, I know that I am not a fool, but I also know that I am conceited. But, candidly, can it be helped if one happens to be young, well and strong, passably good looking with some money that one has inherited and more that one has earned … and if upon this foundation rests also the pleasant superstructure of a literary success?54

The narrator’s candid and assured assertion of his conceit, as well as his easy acceptance of his good luck in being ‘passably good looking’, rich and a success, suggest his sense that literary success is as much his birthright as his good looks. Certainly, he has ‘earned’ some of his money, but he has been able to do so because he has had opportunities. Into the world of the narrator’s comfortable, expatriate existence arrives Aaronna Moncrief, or, rather, Miss Grief, as the narrator persists in calling her after his servant mistakes her name on the first visit. Uninterested in being visited by the shabby elderly female described by his

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manservant, the narrator, like Leyden, is preoccupied with his social life and a romance with a socialite. He repeatedly refuses Miss Grief ’s visits, but when he does finally meet her, he is surprised by the perceptive way in which she praises his work, even reciting one of his favourite passages. Unlike the rest of his public, who unquestionably appreciate all of his work, she reveals a superior insight when she says that she chose to recite that particular passage because ‘Your other sketches are interiors – exquisitely painted and delicately finished, but of small scope. This is a sketch in a few bold, masterly lines – work of entirely different spirit and purpose’ (emphasis in original).55 Miss Grief then confesses that she is an authoress and requests – or rather demands – his assistance with her work on the grounds that he is morally obligated to take pity on her because of his success. The narrator agrees, and, after reading her play, ‘Armor’, is, again like Leyden, immediately impressed by the power of her writing. As he puts it, ‘I had sat up half the night over her drama, and had felt thrilled through and through more than once by its earnestness, passion, and power’. At the same time, just like Leyden, he is also struck by what he sees as the glaring faults of its construction, ‘which were many and prominent’. Again like Leyden, he recognizes that her work is superior to his own because it possesses ‘the divine spark of genius, which I was by no means sure (in spite of my success) had been granted to me’.56 However, the narrator is not nearly so parasitic as Leyden and does not fantasize about appropriating the work as his own. Instead, he intends to help her to revise the manuscript so that it is marketable, and he makes this offer in good faith. As a result, he is shocked to discover that Miss Grief is unable to recognize the flaws that he sees and, further, absolutely refuses to change the manuscript in order to conform to his vision of marketability. As she tells him, ‘There shall not be so much as a comma altered’. Frustrated by her refusal, he asks to see more of her work, which he finds equally brilliant and equally marred by flaws in construction: ‘Here and there was radiance like the flash of a diamond, but each poem, almost each verse and line, was marred by some fault or lack which seemed wilful perversity, like the work of an evil sprite’.57 His language here paints an image of a gem almost completely ruined by ‘some fault or lack’. The image is less of a buried diamond that could be uncovered, but rather of one that has been scratched or ‘marred’ in some way that is perhaps irrecoverable. The ‘evil sprite’ performing an act of ‘wilful perversity’ is to him, of course, Miss Grief, whom he sees as the greatest obstacle to her own work. In this way, she becomes more than the unsuspecting owner of a promising work that the pro-plagiarists describe, but also an active agent in ruining that work. His sense of Miss Grief ’s ‘wilful perversity’ increases as he finds himself unable to convince her to make the alterations that he suggests. Defeated, he retreats with the promise to send the manuscript to publishers on her behalf.

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When the work meets with the expected rejection, the narrator decides to ‘alter and improve’ the manuscript himself without telling the author. He should be able to do this, he tells himself, because ‘Surely the sieve of my own good taste, whose mesh had been pronounced so fine and delicate, would serve for two’.58 It is in this attempt at rewriting that Woolson’s story departs most dramatically from Wotton’s vision of parasitic revision: rather than successfully transforming the manuscript into a polished, marketable piece of work, as the pro-plagiarist argument suggests a true genius should be able to do, the narrator discovers that the work is, in his hands, completely unrevisable. By removing any one element of the work, the entire piece loses its value, and the narrator is forced to admit ‘that either my own powers were not equal to the task, or else that her perversities were as essential a part of her work as her inspirations, and not to be separated from it’.59 Unlike Miss Suttaby’s work, the imperfections in Miss Grief ’s manuscript are inseparable from its brilliance, and thus they cannot be extracted without ruining the work as a whole. Though the works themselves are less autobiographical than Miss Suttaby’s, there is enough of Miss Grief bound up in them that the narrator cannot assume the position of outside observer interpreting and rendering meaning (and thus art) to her work. In their flaws and their perfections, they are hers alone. Whether or not these two stories are consciously intertwined with each other, they echo one another in their depiction of the friendless spinster who seeks out an aesthete as her only entry into the publishing world. Both women are described in terms of their bedraggled appearance, and each narrator, who expects women to dress up in an attempt to please him, is surprised that they do not, as Leyden puts it, change ‘into their best clothes in which to receive guests’.60 Woolson’s narrator, who explains that ‘I have never known a woman who had not some scrap of finery, however small, in reserve for that unexpected occasion of which she is ever dreaming’, is candid about the relationship between personal appearance and literary authority: when he first sees her after reading ‘Armor’, he suppresses his impulse to make a spontaneous gesture of homage to her talent. Instead, he shakes her hand, explaining that, ‘But there! one does not go down on one’s knees, combustively, as it were, before a woman over fifty, plain in feature, thin, dejected, and ill dressed’.61 Both Miss Suttaby’s shabbiness and that of Aaronna Moncrief are contrasted with the careful grooming and wardrobe that accompanies financial success and literary fame. Neither literary success nor material comfort awaits either woman, and, despite their talent, they end their stories obscure, impoverished and dead. Miss Grief enlists the narrator as her literary executor for ‘Armor’, but asks to be buried with the remaining manuscripts. Realizing that he could never improve ‘Armor’, and that its brilliance would be unappreciated by the public, the narrator never again attempts to publish it, but rather keeps it for himself.

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In the case of ‘Miss Grief ’, the narrator attempts to ‘improve’ a woman’s manuscript in order to help her find a publisher, and he realizes that no part of the work can be separated from the whole. Each piece is so fully a part of Aaronna Moncrief ’s imaginative creation as a whole that the narrator cannot extract what he sees as promising and leave the rest behind. Woolson thus suggests that Aaronna Moncrief ’s work is her own, and it cannot be appropriated and revised by an outsider in the way that Leyden does. Instead of polishing an inferior work into a diamond, the narrator is unable to improve on the original raw material, and thus the work will never find a publisher, despite what the narrator sees as its tremendous potential. Had Aaronna Moncrief been willing to alter her work, to recognize the ‘flaws’ that the narrator points out, as Woolson herself did when she censored her writings on the Civil War in order to please Harper’s, she might have found a publisher. However, in Moncrief ’s mind, to have altered her work in order to fit the dictates of the publishing world would have been to distort and ruin it. Woolson’s tale of a literary gem that resists being appropriated and polished into a marketable commodity thus presents an inverse storyline to Wotton’s tale of successful artistic exploitation. In Wotton’s tale, however, the parasitic stylist succeeds in rewriting the work in such a way that it is a publishing success, and perhaps because he is certain of his skill and ability, he is unwilling to credit the original author for the work. Wotton’s ‘Amongst Her Following’, which appeared in Temple Bar in 1893, depicts an even more explicitly destructive act of artistic appropriation. It is the story of Rosamond Travers, a ‘bewitchingly pretty’ girl-reciter, whose brilliance stems from the ‘impromptu, or what pretended to be impromptu’62 quality of her performances. In Rosamond’s hands, recitation, an art form based on memorization and dramatization of set texts, becomes a site for invention. This skill would have had tremendous social and economic value in the late nineteenth century when the craze for public recitations in schools, theatres and private parties inevitably resulted in a desperate search for texts, as well as in a publishing industry that met that need with books such as Harding Cox’s Six Pieces for Recitation (1884) and Aylmer Gowing’s Ballads and Poems for Recitation (1884). The dearth of high quality, unique material with which to impress one’s audience is satirized in a six-part series in Punch from 1887 entitled ‘Mr. Punch’s Manual for Young Reciters’. The opening piece explains that Nothing, as is well known, renders a young man (or for the matter of that, a young woman) so deservedly beloved as the practice of repeating in public, a poem of respectable proportions. Unfortunately the dearth of really effective pieces for recitation obliges many Reciters to repeat themselves as often as their poems, and it is with a desire to remedy this inconvenience, that Mr. Punch has commissioned one of his stud of poets … to knock him off a few sweet little things, which would be likely to ‘tell’ in a drawing room.63

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As David Mayer has pointed out, an entire industry sprang up to meet the demand for recitation materials that Punch parodies above, and this industry produced not only books of dramatic and comedic pieces, but also manuals on elocution and the dramatic arts. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, recitation was increasingly popular, both by professional reciters like Henry Irving in public venues and by amateurs as a private amusement in the home.64 While recitation was based on the memorization and performance of set texts, it also reflected an idea that a dramatic performance of a written text could, literally, enliven it and give it new depth and meaning. In a public lecture in London in 1871, the actor Henry Neville recalled an incident illustrating a skilled reciter’s ability to add emotion to a text: I once heard a lady say she had read ‘Enoch Arden’ often without shedding a tear, but she was so overcome by a clever recital, that she was obliged to leave the room after those harrowing lines, where Enoch, having returned to his native village, found his wife married to another, and, heart broken, looking upon the happy home, ‘beheld …’65 (emphasis in original)

In this instance, the text took on emotional value for the listener when it was transformed from the written to the spoken word. The recitation of ‘Enoch Arden’ gave the poem new meaning for its audience, and thus, one might argue, improved upon the original. This connection between recitation and revision also appears in Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief ’ when Aaronna Moncrief recites the narrator’s work. In this instance, recitation is not only an enlivening of the text, but also an act of interpretation. As he listens, the narrator tells us that his patience in hearing her out comes from ‘a desire gaining upon me to see what she would make of a certain conversation which I knew was coming – a conversation between two of my characters which was, to say the least, sphinx-like’. The narrator senses that the recitation will reveal how Aaronna Moncrief has interpreted his work, and, indeed, when she gets to that section, he realizes that ‘she had understood me – understood me almost better than I understood myself ’.66 Recitation, in this scene, becomes an aesthetic act of interpretation revealing that ‘Miss Grief ’, who meets only failure in the marketplace, is indeed the superior interpreter. In this way, recitation, at which Wotton’s Rosamund excels, becomes another form of aesthetic translation in which the artist, to use the pro-plagiarists’ language, turns a ‘pebble’ into a ‘parure’ by injecting a degree of immediacy and urgency that is unavailable to a written text. This aspect of recitation as revision recurs in ‘Miss Grief ’ when she rejects his suggestions for revising ‘Armor’ and asks, instead, if she can read it to him. In her reading, the text becomes a superior work. Describing the experience, the narrator says, ‘And she carried me along with her: all the strong passages were doubly strong when spoken, and the faults,

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which seemed nothing to her, were made by her earnestness to seem nothing to me, at least for that moment’.67 The act of reading aloud, a dramatic form akin to recitation, works upon the text to transform it, momentarily, into something ‘doubly strong’. In his study of early talking books, Jason Camlot asserts that the phonograph addressed ‘a well-developed Victorian yearning for a technology that would make the reading experience more immediate, that would, in a sense, capture the character and subjectivity of an other without the mediation of the printed page’.68 Although Camlot is referring primarily to the possibility of recording authors reading from their works, this ‘Victorian yearning’ for immediacy could also be satisfied, one might argue, through recitations and readings which embodied and brought out the dramatic or comedic values of a text. The popularity of this form of revision, and the need to provide audiences with a new sensation at each performance, led to an increased need both for appropriate texts and for skilled reciters who could move an audience. Despite the difficulty in finding new and original texts, Rosamond’s ‘genius’ in ‘Amongst Her Following’ comes from never appearing at a loss for material, and her talent for improvisation comes most powerfully into play when a nobleman who has been courting her encourages her to recite at an ‘At Home’ she is holding in Zurich. Sensing that a success might result in a marriage proposal, she draws for material on her own experience as an object of admiration. She launches into a sketch that she entitles Pierrot in Love. To ‘render it more lifelike’, she calls to mind Pierre Meier, a ‘friendless Swiss … music master … cursed by poverty and by a racking cough’.69 Meier, who is devoted to Rosamond, had only the day before found the courage to write her a love note consisting entirely of two lines taken from De Musset70 – an act which unconsciously mimics Rosamond’s own acts of recitation. In this case, Meier’s act is a classic form of borrowing: he does not have the words for what he wants to say, so he borrows them in an act of desperation, which is a far cry from a move to improve on De Musset’s sentiment, as the pro-plagiarists discussed earlier in the chapter would have applauded. Perhaps because it is likely that Rosamond would recognize the lines, or because he does not assume that he could do better than De Musset, this act of borrowing by an impoverished man with little influence does not accord him the kind of cultural authority vested in Leyden’s theft. That night, ill after the exertions of delivering his letter, Pierre agonizes over whether he had got his lines right: ‘What he had intended to tell her was simply a little of what she was to him … Had he said this? or not enough? or too much?’ Obsessed with this uncertainty, he struggles over to Rosamond’s house and witnesses her recitation of his story in which she delights her audience by satirizing Pierre’s inability to express his love. In words that echo her description of Leyden, Wotton writes that Rosamond ‘had never had any powers of invention, but, with the material ready there to her hand, it was not difficult to-night to wax really witty over the

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drolleries of this absurd Pierrot’.71 Rosamond’s performance is striking because it is both recitation and invention; it is performed as a recitation, but draws on a text that she improvises and vivifies with a mental picture of her subject. Pierrot in Love is a spectacular success, but at the moment of her triumph, she looks out in the audience and sees Pierre’s face, ‘drawn and deadly pale … all the piteousness of his outraged love and self-respect, all of which went to make up the man which this dazzling vision of lace and roses had killed, cried to her from out [of ] his sunken haggard eyes’. Too late, Rosamond attempts to atone for her act of satiric translation by adding a few lines about the heartlessness of those who would ‘laugh at the Pierrots of this world’; Pierre dies on the spot, and, unlike Leyden who walks away self-satisfied and unaware that Miss Suttaby has died, Rosamond realizes what her art has cost its subject.72 What this moment of epiphany signifies in terms of the potentially parasitic relationship between art and life is another question. An 1891 cartoon from Werner’s Voice Magazine, entitled ‘Does the Reciter Feel His Part?’, depicts a reciter spent and emotionally overwrought after reciting Thomas Hood’s melodramatic poem ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ (1829). As I have suggested, Wotton, along with other late nineteenth-century women writers, presents the act of literary translation as having the opposite effect – the conduit for the story is not affected, although the subject is irretrievably spent in the process. Just as the vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula sucks out the lifeblood of his victims so as to prolong his own existence, the realists of Wotton’s fiction become what Stetz describes as the ‘literary-realist-as-vampire, sucking out life-stories and leaving corpses behind’,73 thus demonstrating something fundamentally problematic about the nature of artistic invention. In the process of questioning the nature of artistic creation, does Wotton not leave us with a paradox? Is she not also implicated in the ethics (or lack thereof ) of invention in her own work? Can Leyden as vampire-realist really be separated from Wotton herself, the creator of these stories who profits artistically from affectingly depicting the tragedies of Miss Suttaby and Pierre Meier? Likewise, when Wotton compiled a collection of descriptions of well-known authors in Word-Portraits of Famous Writers (1887), was she not also parasitically drawing on others’ work in creating her own? Reviewing the book in the Woman’s World, Oscar Wilde noted both her industry in collecting a wide range of descriptive anecdotes of writers ranging from Chaucer to Mrs Henry Wood and that she ‘has invented a new form of picture gallery’.74 Her compilation of ‘word-portraits’ of authors, in most cases drawn up by other famous authors, both weaves together and stands in contrast to Leyden’s appropriation of Miss Suttaby – editing a non-fiction collection of physical descriptions of artists necessarily entails an appropriation of others’ words and selves, but her careful documentation of sources ensures that the original models are recognizable (as opposed to pre-

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tending that they are the products of her imagination) and that the authors themselves are credited. As Wotton writes in the introduction, by compiling the book she attempts to satisfy readers’ desires to understand literary works more fully by also understanding the personality and individuality of the writer. In her view, every honest literature-lover takes a very real interest in the individuality of those men whose names are perpetually on his lips. It is not enough for such a one merely to make himself familiar with his writings … [for example, one must] pace the Temple gardens with the gentle-faced scholar, before he can properly be said to have made Lamb’s thoughts his own.75

In other words, to understand an author’s works, one must have an understanding of that author’s personality, and that personality can be conveyed, Wotton suggests, both by anecdotes about the author and, perhaps more significantly, by an exact physical description. This attempt to read character through documenting external physical characteristics lines up with trends in Victorian science that made similar attempts, as in the study of physiognomy, phrenology and the criminal anthropology of Cesare Lombroso.76 Likewise, the increased interest in accumulating knowledge about famous personalities through their likenesses can be seen throughout Victorian culture, as, for example, in the literary portraits featured in the Strand and the Academy and in Lawrence Hutton’s considerable collection of death masks.77 While the increasing appearance of photographs of famous personalities in books and magazines can be partially attributed to advances in photographic and print technologies, there appeared a concomitant focus on these technologies as enabling late Victorian readers to study celebrities (and, by extension, their works) through their physical characteristics. By compiling an edition devoted to the ways in which other writers have described famous literary figures, Wotton participates in and expands the late nineteenth-century interest in visualizing celebrities, as well as capitalizing on a trend that literally commodifies celebrities’ likenesses. At the same time, while Wotton is, according to Wilde, inventing a new form in which audiences can gain access to images (in this case, descriptions) of celebrities, she is drawing on, borrowing and presenting verbatim what others have already written. In other words, her original act is impossible without an act of borrowing. Perhaps another way to conceive of this paradox is to acknowledge how it echoes the contradiction that many critics have pointed to in aestheticism’s attempts to claim art as an autonomous realm, despite its inevitable participation in the marketplace as a commodity. Jonathan Freedman, Talia Schaffer and Kathy Psomiades have argued that aesthetes participated in a debate over the possibility or impossibility of, as Freedman puts it, ‘plac[ing] the work of art in

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an ideal world existing beyond or outside the social realm’.78 Psomiades asserts that aestheticism negotiated this contradiction through images of the female form because the dual nature of femininity allows feminine figures to mediate between the aesthetic and economic realms in which art must necessarily find itself, [and] allows for the simultaneous figuration of the category of the aesthetic as subject to market conditions and as inviolable by them.79

Thus, by producing images of the idealized female form, images ostensibly removed from the sordid world of the marketplace, aestheticism found the perfect aesthetic commodity – a saleable item that allowed it to maintain its own pose as removed from that marketplace. In ‘The Fifth Edition’, Leyden’s performed understanding of and sympathy for female interiority allows him to create a highly marketable aesthetic commodity. That performance is drawn from Miss Suttaby’s tragic narrative of a woman deserted by her husband and intermingled with Leyden’s observations of Miss Suttaby herself. Psomiades’s reading of aestheticism hints at a fin-de-siècle anxiety about maintaining this separation between art and the ‘public world of politics and economics’,80 a protesting too much that implies a repressed awareness of the impossibility of maintaining this separation. Similarly, as Regenia Gagnier reads Dorian Gray, Wilde is in part musing on the monstrosity of attempting to divorce art and life.81 As Psomiades points out, The problem with aestheticism, then, is not that it is too private, too closed off from the rest of culture, but rather that its privacy is a cover for an intense and vulgar publicity. In this narrative it is little wonder that Rossetti paintings should resemble … late twentieth-century advertisements for cosmetics.82

As an artist herself, Wotton expresses, and perhaps mourns, the inevitable, and sometimes destructive, appropriation involved in artistic invention. In the contested space of invention in late nineteenth-century art, Wotton does not, and perhaps cannot, imagine a world in which art and its subject can remain integrated. Stetz points to this dilemma in the ‘confused sensibility’ that she describes as tormenting writers in the 1890s, ‘at odds with themselves, advocating total freedom for Art from the tyranny of Life on the one hand, yet bound to Life for their subject matter and inspiration on the other’.83 In this light, Wotton’s work seems to dramatize the vexed question of creating art that is not irrevocably bound up with its source material, as well as inextricably mired in the necessity of producing a marketable commodity. Perhaps another way to think about this question is to invoke Stoker’s text and Mina’s ‘vampiric typewriting’, as Jennifer Wicke has termed it.84 By transforming the disparate accounts of those who come into contact with Dracula

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into a single typewritten text, Mina ultimately helps to contain him, creating a coherent narrative for Van Helsing (another connoisseur, albeit a scientific one) to interpret, while inevitably becoming a textual vampire herself. Andrew McCann has recently pointed to the pervasiveness of vampirism as a trope for late nineteenth-century aestheticism, with vampiric possession standing in for the complex relationship between cultural value and celebrity in the fin-de-siècle literary field.85 Wotton’s own texts seem to transform and contain these vampiric artists while allowing the subjects, if not the last word, then the last glance.

2 VERNON LEE AND THE AESTHETIC SUBJECT

Despite her reputation as a brilliant conversationalist and talented essayist, Vernon Lee hovered on the fringes of the late nineteenth-century literary scene throughout her career. In 1881, alongside a description of her energetic attempts to gain entry into ‘London literary society’, she told her mother that it was ‘merely a thing shewn to me through a grating’.1 This sense of being an outsider became amplified three years later when she was snubbed by many in the Pre-Raphaelite circle who had recognized themselves as objects of ridicule in her first novel, Miss Brown (1884). In 1891, she again bemoaned her outsider status, this time in relation to her literary, rather than social, success when she told her mother that ‘I am decidedly an unsuccessful author, well known but not read’ (italics in original).2 One striking reason for Lee’s exclusion from the late nineteenth-century artistic scene has been identified as her clumsy realism, as in the case of Miss Brown, and, by extension, the way that realism offended people who might otherwise have been useful to her either socially or professionally. According to Christa Zorn, ‘In [Miss Brown], Lee mixed fact and fiction (or should we say, art and life?) in such an unambiguous way that she offended the aesthetic sets around Oscar Wilde and the Rossettis’.3 Again, in 1892, she sacrificed a valuable friendship with Henry James by hewing too closely to the original in her unflattering portrait of a psychological novelist in the short story ‘Lady Tal’. James, who himself had often been accused of drawing too closely from life in his work, was deeply offended by the story and subsequently told his brother William to ‘draw it mild with her on the question of friendship. She’s a tiger-cat!’4 As many critics have pointed out, Lee frequently drew on those around her in her work, a practice that has largely been viewed as a failure of artistry and originality. Vineta Colby, for example, critiques what she reads as Lee’s ‘misguided attempts at realistic fiction’, saying that ‘Lady Tal’ also suffers from ‘the same clumsy literalness’ that was present throughout Miss Brown. Colby describes Lee’s incorporation of a Jamesian character and its bitter aftermath as part of a pattern of artistic clumsiness through which she inadvertently made enemies of the very people who might have been useful to her.5 According to Colby, – 49 –

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Fictions of Dissent When writing about a society that she knew at first hand, Vernon Lee suffered lapses of the creative imagination that gave so much vitality and color to her [non fictional work] … Her imagination, which soared when she confronted the past and its vestiges in modern-day Europe, sank dismally in the immediate present.6

Colby, like many other critics, praises Lee’s essays, while dismissing her fiction as flawed because of what she sees as a lack of imagination; in other words, the fault of her fiction is that it is not fictional enough. Rather than a fault in her artistry, however, I read Lee’s ‘clumsy’ adherence to real life in her fiction, and the personal repercussions that followed, as a critique of the artist/object relationship in aestheticism. In this chapter, I will argue that her satiric depiction of a Jamesian figure in ‘Lady Tal’ represents a pattern of resistance in both her work and working life that underscores, in a specifically gendered way, aestheticism’s vexed relationship between art and life. Lee’s direct incorporation of the world around her, and the anger it inspired, mirrors a consistent theme in her fiction of artistic or historical objects of study who literally revolt against the passive role assigned to them by those attempting to render them into art. In this way, Lee negotiates between the Arnoldian imperative to ‘see things as they really are’ and Walter Pater’s, Wilde’s and James’s privileging of the observer. Seen through this lens, the incident with Henry James is less striking for the way that she alienated a potential mentor than for the central place this irreverence plays in her oeuvre. Just as Lee often refused to pay homage to the luminaries around her, the (often female) subjects within her fiction remain stubbornly elusive for the (often male) artists, historians and authority figures attempting to capture them in metaphorical and literal terms. In other words, women in Lee’s fiction insist on maintaining control over themselves as text. As I will demonstrate, however, in ‘Lady Tal’ Lee ultimately moves towards reconciling these tensions by suggesting a collaborative model of artistic production. This collaborative model echoes the emphasis on reciprocal exchange that she articulates in her non-fictional theoretical texts on both the literary craft and psychological aesthetics. As she suggests in ‘Lady Tal’, asserts in The Handling of Words (1923) and demonstrates in her gallery experiments with Kit AnstrutherThomson, meaning is produced through collaboration rather than a one-sided reading of an objectified other. Throughout Lee’s work, she consistently shows interest in reclaiming the subject position for the object of the historical or artistic gaze. As Kristin Mahoney has recently argued, in Lee’s work, objects, which would normally be targets of consumption, are re-situated within their historical context, thus acknowledging their ‘historical otherness’ and ‘grant[ing] the object a separate and distinct identity’.7 In this way, Lee’s attention to an object’s historical context re-infuses a sense of individual identity into objects of art. Drawing on nineteenth-century economic theory, Mahoney asserts that Lee was thus negotiating an ethical

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compromise between Paterian ‘historical spectatorship’,8 which focused on the consumer, and John Ruskin’s and William Morris’s attention to the producer, by attending to the context and individuality of the object itself. Mahoney points out that Lee repeatedly grants artefacts within her fiction agency in this way; I would argue, however, that this pattern moves beyond art objects, and that her critique is as much about aestheticism’s relation to gender as a practice and as a theory as it is about economics. Through her disobedient subjects, Lee both authorizes the muse’s rebellion and reveals the outrage that it provokes. In Lee’s work, the object of the gaze is constantly in revolt against the artist, and this revolt is tied to a broader critique in late nineteenth-century women’s fiction of the female muse’s subject relationship to the male artist. By repeatedly staging and realigning the conflict between male artists and their female subjects, Lee is building on what I have termed the ‘muse’s revenge’ tradition. Across Lee’s fiction, female subjects refuse their assigned roles and often provoke outrage and frustration from those looking to them as raw material. As I will suggest, these enraged responses can be traced back to the period’s anxieties over the relationship between artistry and originality, as well as to the gendered tensions that ran alongside it. By granting her subjects an extra degree of autonomy through the muse’s revenge motif, Lee aligns herself with the work of other finde-siècle women writers. Like Wotton, Lee was not actively involved in debating the woman question (at least, not until she was ‘converted’ in the late 1890s by Charlotte Perkins Gilman).9 As Sondeep Kandola puts it, ‘Lee’s New Woman credentials are riddled with contradiction’.10 Like the other women writers in this study, Lee’s work shows a concern about the gendered relationship between male artists and their female subjects; again and again, Lee turns the spotlight on the problematic relationship between the observing male artist and the object of his gaze (who, in turn, becomes the subject of his work), either to expose the artist’s dependence on his subject, despite his claims to cultural authority, or to show the vampiric relationship that develops as the art object takes on a life that is denied to its real-life subject. In a similar way, throughout Lee’s fiction, female subjects refuse their assigned roles and Lee grants them latitude to rebel while revealing the hostility such rebellion often engenders. As I have argued throughout this work, in this way Lee and other late nineteenth-century women writers problematized a strain in aestheticism that privileges the viewer’s response and elevates that response into a work of art of its own. By questioning the viewer’s (or artist’s or critic’s) authority, Lee and others recast the aestheticism of Pater, Wilde and James as parasitic and make a claim for the authority of the subject. Thus, writers like Lee used the figure of the rebellious muse to turn objects of art back into subjects. In this way, Lee revisits the slipperiness of the artistic subject and relates that slipperiness to the question of gender. Dennis Denisoff points to the gender implications in Lee’s novel

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Miss Brown and argues that the novel centres on ‘The subjugation of women within aestheticist circles’, as well as on the role of the woman as a ‘passive subject’, which he sees as ultimately resolved in the novel through ‘same-sex female relationships, a channel of empathy that male-privileging assumptions tended not to address’.11 Inseparable from the rebelliousness of the subject in Lee’s work is a critique of the observer, especially the observer who believes that he understands the object of the gaze better than anyone else, including the object itself. This sense of superiority accords with the aesthete’s belief that he has exceptional insight into the beautiful, and the artists, historians and patriarchs in Lee’s fiction assert that they have the unique ability to decide what is beautiful, artistic or right. For example, as Zorn has pointed out in her discussion of Lee’s rewriting of Pater’s The Renaissance in her ghost story ‘Amour Dure’, Lee is revising Pater’s privileging of the observer, the one who ‘gathers history through the heightened sensitivity of the artist whose temperament is mystically linked to the aesthetic critic’.12 Zorn argues that in this story, and in its dialogue with Pater’s work, Lee reveals the mythologized woman – both the Mona Lisa of The Renaissance and the Medea of ‘Amour Dure’ – as more of a projection of the anxieties and concerns of the male historian than an individual being interpreted. Like the aesthete who believes he is the first to discover and appreciate overlooked beauty, the historian in ‘Amour Dure’, Spiridion Trepka, thinks that he alone understands and has access to the true story and character of Medea, a woman vilified by history, and thus he is going to rewrite the history that has grown up around her: ‘it seems to me’, Trepka announces, ‘that I understand her so well; so much better than my facts warrant’. Trepka glories in the sense that he is the first to understand Medea’s story, ‘as if [he] were the greatest historian of the age’.13 Ultimately, however, Medea replicates a pattern across Lee’s fiction: she escapes his intellectual grasp, and her ghost uses him to exact revenge on her enemies. Rather than achieving a rare understanding of and communion with his subject, Trepka, as the story reveals, dies mysteriously of a stab wound while carrying out her bidding. In the translation from life into historical text, Trepka fails to capture his subject, primarily because his assumption that he has a superior insight into this woman from the past blinds him to the reality of her character. Trepka’s inability fully to grasp his subject echoes Lee’s assertion in Euphorion (1884), a collection of essays on the Renaissance, that the past is always slippery and out of reach. In visiting the Italian cities of Florence, Venice and Siena, cities that she describes as altered only by ‘decay’, we may ‘receive impressions of the past so startlingly life-like as to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the present’.14 The sense that we are fully in tune with the past, especially that of the Renaissance (an object of much historical interest in the fin de siècle), however, is an illusion:

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It seems as if all were astoundingly real, as if, by some magic, we were actually going to mix in the life of the past. But it is in reality but a mere delusion, a deceit … We can … handle the weapons, the furniture, the books and musical instruments; we can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance world; but when we try to penetrate into it, we shall find that there is but a slop of solid ground beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and painted wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy; and that when we try to approach to touch one of those seemingly so real men and women, our eyes find only daubs of paint, our hands meet only flat and chilly stucco.15

In other words, having contact with an object does not necessarily mean that one can understand it, or, by extension, be completely immersed in it in such a way that one gains superior insight into it. Instead, what seems to be an understanding of someone or something else is only a ‘delusion’ informed or ‘perspectived … by our fancy’, and thus actually a projection of our own ideas rather than a true insight into the other. Attempting to assert that closeness, i.e., trying to ‘touch one of those seemingly so real men and women’, reveals instead the slipperiness of the subject. Lee’s critique of the artist’s sense that he or she can have a complete understanding, or even mastery, of another relates to a broader critique of the parasitic relationship between art and life. As I have shown in the case of Mabel Wotton, and as I will show in the work of Edith Wharton, fictions by fin-de-siècle women writers on both sides of the Atlantic are preoccupied with the question of who controls the image that gets presented or the story that gets told, and for this reason I have argued that this is a transatlantic concern. Lee addresses this question most directly in ‘Lady Tal’, the story that led to her alienation from James. In this story, which models itself on the Atalanta myth, a Jamesian artist, Jervase Marion, undertakes to study Lady Tal, a socialite whom he considers as a potential subject for a novel. Marion, whose self-image centres on the belief in his skill as a detached observer, approaches the study of Lady Tal in the same way in which he habitually collects raw material to transform into art in his psychological novels. Over the course of the story, however, his sense of superior understanding evaporates as he finds himself unable to comprehend this character who, in fact, seems to understand him much better than he understands himself. Through Lady Tal’s resistance (both conscious and otherwise) to Marion’s attempts to capture her character, Lee exposes and problematizes the working methods, and the relationship to the female subject, of the type of aesthetic realism that formed the cornerstone of James’s art. This story is thus both a critique of the detached observer who sees life primarily as raw material to be turned into art and a satire of the dangers of such an attempt as the observer loses control over his material and finds that he is the one being observed. As I will demonstrate, Lee ultimately resolves this tension in ‘Lady Tal’ by imagining a collaboration

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between the artist and his muse that promises a reciprocal, and thus mutually beneficial, exchange that will, Lee suggests, lead to a more authentic representation of both subject and object. Through a shifting narrative point of view, Lee signals right from the outset of ‘Lady Tal’ that this is a narrative in which there is an unstable relationship between the observed and the observer. Through shifts in control between the two, Lee rejects a fixed point of view, presenting instead multiple narrative points of view that transfer the viewing perspective and give equal space for the object of study to return the spectator’s gaze. In this way, the narrative point of view mirrors the story’s plot in which an aesthete struggles to maintain his detached, objectifying view of a dynamic female who refuses to be defined according to his terms. Right from the outset, Lee frames the narrative in such a way that it disrupts the conventions of a stable narrative viewpoint, thus setting the stage for the unnarratability, and thus uncontrollability, of the central character. The story begins with the spectacle of a party of tourists and expatriates in Venice who are assembled in a prominent socialite’s sitting room, which opens onto an old church that stands opposite. Rather than the group looking out the window at the church, ‘The church of the Salute … stared in at the long windows’.16 Furthermore, the church does not just look in the window, but stares, as though studying the group. This scene thus inverts the usual narrative perspective because the conventional object of study, the church, has become the spectator peering at the group inside the house. Lee thus indicates at the outset that this story will reverse the usual relationship of spectator to spectacle. This narrative move echoes Lady Tal’s revelation later in the story that she has been aware all along that Marion has been using her as a study when she cuts through his writerly mystique and tells him that ‘you know you are writing a novel about me, that’s what makes you so patient with me and Christina [her novel], you’re just walking round and looking at me –’.17 Furthermore, the story opens with a double frame for the narrative point of view, which adds to the slipperiness of the narrative. An unfigured narrator views and describes the church as it appears to look in on the roomful of people. After establishing the mise en scène, the narrative is next filtered through one more layer: that of Marion, who ‘lolled back’ observing the party, both of it and apart from it. Like the church, he studies the scene from a distance. As he scans the room, he mentally sums up each figure with a dismissive aside: he describes ‘the old peeress, her head tied up in a white pocket-handkerchief, and lolling from side to side with narcoticised benevolence’; ‘the depressed Venetian naval officer who always made the little joke about not being sick when offered tea’; and the ‘American Senator … one hand in his waistcoat, the other incessantly raised to his ears as in a stately “Beg Pardon?”’.18 By maintaining the third-person point of view, but focalizing the scene through Marion’s eyes, the narrative perspec-

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tive remains slippery as the story begins. As the narrative point of view pans the room, we are seeing the scene through Marion’s eyes, but he is not controlling our gaze, thus, ironically, becoming a Jamesian reflector figure. At the same time, Marion’s comments about each of the guests reveal just as much about him as they do about those around him because they tell us that he is an observer who is in the habit of labelling and categorizing what he sees. Thus, through both characterization and style of narration, this is a story in which a master narrative is impossible: just as Marion is unable to maintain his ascendant position as objectifier, Lady Tal asserts her right to determine her own subject position. In this way, as in Lee’s other fiction, we see her depicting women as texts and playing out the struggle over owning that text. Lee creates in Jervase Marion a Jamesian artist figure who attempts to borrow from life, and, as in so many of Lee’s stories, finds his plan blocked by a disobedient subject. Lee makes it explicit that she is modelling Marion on James when she writes that he was ‘an inmate of the world of Henry James, and a kind of Henry James’.19 Ironically, Lee’s unflattering characterization of James the realist observer in ‘Lady Tal’ derives from her own real-life observation of him. Their relationship began as a mentoring one in much the same way that James mentored other women writers, such as Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose short story ‘Miss Grief ’ I discussed in the previous chapter. James encouraged Lee in her work and praised Euphorion in a 21 October 1884 letter, calling it, ‘a prodigious young performance, so full of intellectual power, knowledge, brilliancy’.20 As Lee wrote to her mother on 11 July 1884, James ‘takes the most paternal interest in me as a novelist, [and] says Miss Brown [her first novel] is a very good title, and that he will do all in his power to push it on’.21 Quickly, however, their relationship deteriorated, and it can be argued that the reasons were just as much aesthetic as personal. Although Lee’s letters reveal that the two continued to meet on friendly terms and discuss her work, James was unimpressed by Miss Brown and delayed responding to the novel, which Lee had dedicated to him ‘for good luck’. James was embarrassed by the dedication and described the novel to Grace Norton as ‘disagreeable and really very unpleasant’.22 When James at last wrote to Lee about Miss Brown, he explained that her moral attitude had stood in the way of a realistic treatment of aesthetic society: You are really too savage with your painters and poets and dilettanti; life is less criminal, less obnoxious, less objectionable, less crude, more bon enfant, more mixed and casual, and even in its most offensive manifestations, more pardonable, than the unholy circle with which you have surrounded your heroine.23 (italics in original)

James’s critique of her realism, and what he saw as an imperfect relationship between art and life in her work, became a point of personal outrage in 1892 when she parodied him in ‘Lady Tal’. 24

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Notably, James’s anger at Lee over ‘Lady Tal’ points to the two elements of literary borrowing that I have argued are central concerns for the women in this study: drawing on the original too closely in creating a realistic work of art and aesthetics as a revision or rearrangement of raw material. In terms of drawing too closely from the original, James resented Lee’s depiction of him, although accounts of their relationship suggest that the appropriation went both ways. According to Merete Licht, Lee’s depiction of James in ‘Lady Tal’ may have been in return for his unflattering depiction of her and her half-brother, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, in The Princess Casamassima.25 This is not the first instance in which James was accused of drawing on recognizable figures in his work, such as when his brother, William, accused him of having drawn a ‘portrait from life’ of a mutual acquaintance in The Bostonians (1885–6). In this case, James vehemently defended himself by responding in a 14 February 1885 letter that ‘I have done nothing to deserve [this accusation] … I absolutely had no shadow of such an intention … [the character] Miss Birdseye was evolved entirely from my moral consciousness, like every other person I have ever drawn’.26 Despite these claims, however, many see him as having drawn heavily on those around him in his novels. Furthermore, as critics have pointed out, James not only reworked material from the world around him in his writing, but he also revised the work of other writers. As Talia Schaffer asserts, for example, James’s relationship to the novelist Lucas Malet involved a complex nexus of rewriting, which culminated in The Sense of the Past, which relies heavily upon Malet’s novel The Gateless Barrier.27 Likewise, as Adeline Tintner points out, James rewrote Lee’s 1886 ghost story ‘Oke of Okehurst’ as ‘The Way It Came’ (1896), which Tintner sees as far superior to the original: ‘Whereas Vernon Lee’s tale is long, artificial, redundant and overdrawn, James’s tale is such a concise masterpiece that he made almost no changes in his revision for the New York Edition’.28 Putting the merits of the story aside, James’s revising of others’ work, especially that of his female contemporaries, is part of a pattern that Schaffer points to as a rewriting of ‘female aestheticism’ that was part of a broader aesthetic appropriation of female culture by Wilde, Beerbohm and others.29 Although female aesthetes were often the targets of this appropriation, it also lines up with a more general theoretical bent in aestheticism, an appropriative bent perhaps best expressed by Wilde in ‘The Decay of Lying’ when he asserts that Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.30

In these lines, Wilde expresses both the idea that art should draw upon life and that art (or ‘beautiful style’) represents an improvement on the original that puts

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it in a separate, superior sphere. On the one hand, ‘Lady Tal’ may simply have been Lee’s attempt to get back at James for including her and her brother in The Princess Casamassima. However, the coincidence of her depicting a figure whose art is drawn only too obviously from life, along with the pattern of characters who refuse their position as muse throughout Lee’s work, suggests something much more pointed and complex is at work in Lee’s treatment of these themes. The ironies of Lee’s borrowing of James in her parody of James’s borrowing from life multiply in her admission that she used – in fact, relied on – the people she knew as sources for her fiction. Soon after the publication of Miss Brown, she wrote to her mother of her frustration at not finding another social set in England to observe and of her worry that she would never be able to write another novel if she did not find some more people to study. Bemoaning the difficulty of finding entry into a new social set, and feeling that she is ‘a billiard ball which has got into a pocket’,31 she explains that, ‘Now, you see, it is quite impossible to write another novel (having used up the only set I knew) on such terms as these’.32 Her conversations with James, as reported in her letters, centred on the question of gathering experience in order to improve her fiction. As she wrote to her mother, James told her that ‘if I continue observing, within ten years I ought to have written as fine a novel as ever was … He says his plan through life has been never to lose an opportunity of seeing anything of any kind; he urges me to do the same’.33 By following James’s advice, Lee’s own work becomes implicated in the aesthetic practice that she parodies in ‘Lady Tal’ and which she describes in her early essay ‘The Portrait Art of the Renaissance’. In this essay, she asserts that art comes not from ‘the plain human being’; rather, that being ‘merely affords the beginning of a pattern which the artist may be able to carry out’.34 In other words, art must emerge from copying from life, but what makes it artistic or beautiful is the way that the artist revises or completes the ‘pattern’ that life has begun. Through Marion’s attempts to study Lady Tal as a possible character in a novel, Lee engages directly with James’s theories on the novelist’s art. Marion is so accustomed to studying and classifying everyone around him that, upon his arrival in Venice, where he is determined to take a rest, he has to work actively at ‘not letting himself be dragged off into new studies of mankind and womankind’. When he encounters Lady Tal, however, he quickly finds himself seduced by ‘the demon of character study’.35 As I pointed out in the introduction to this volume, James wrote extensively on the practice of ‘taking notes’ as one lived and turning those notes into art. According to James, the true artist is always paying attention to the world around him or her, but it takes artistic talent to transform lived experience into art. Perhaps in response to claims that he was using people only as raw material for his work, he wrote in the preface to the 1908 New York edition of The Princess Casamassima that

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Fictions of Dissent I recall pulling no wires, knocking at no closed doors, applying for no ‘authentic’ information; but I recall also on the other hand the practice of never missing an opportunity to add a drop, however small, to the bucket of my impressions or to renew my sense of being able to dip into it.36

In these lines, James emphasizes his practice of ‘never missing an opportunity’ to take note of whatever he saw and experienced. In other words, he describes a practice of heightened perception and analysis in the course of his life, a practice that he explicitly contrasts to a deliberate search for experiences and information. In James’s formulation, the search for information cheapens it, whereas a true artist is always alive to the possibilities that present themselves in the ordinary course of life. Likewise, Marion ‘had an aversion of such coarse methods of study as consist in sitting down in front of a human being and staring, in a metaphorical sense, at him or her’.37 Marion, like James, is constantly on the alert and is constantly studying those around him, but he is never obvious or intrusive about it. The distinction that both James and Marion draw suggests not only that ‘staring’ and ‘knocking at … closed doors’ is ‘coarse’, but also that it compromises the artistic quality of the material, perhaps because the objects of study will inevitably become aware that they are under scrutiny, a circumstance that might alter how they choose to present themselves. In this sense, James’s and Marion’s objection to a deliberate search for information connects back to the issue of aesthetic control: once the object knows that it is being studied, it begins to shape how it presents itself. Thus, the interpretive role becomes shared as opposed to remaining entirely in the hands of the aesthetic artist. Marion’s adherence to this aesthetic code leads to a detachment from the world around him as he is forever in the position of observer, and he sees this as a duty that he, as an artist, must undertake because he ‘was fully convinced that to study other folks and embody his studies in the most lucid form was the one mission of his life’.38 Seen from this point of view, life is less to be experienced than stashed away for future use. At the same time, his years of study have led to his success as a psychological novelist, which is fundamental to his sense of self. Marion’s sense of himself as artistic interpreter of the world around him slips as he finds himself unable to master, or even fully to comprehend, Lady Tal’s character. As a result of his years ‘of experience (or was it not rather of study?)’, Marion believes that he understands the character of those around him so well that he can readily classify them as types. As Marion looks around the room in the opening scene, the narrator tells us that ‘all the people in the room were strangers to Marion: yet he knew them so well, he had known them so long’.39 In other words, he has spent so long studying people just like those around him that even strangers are immediately familiar. Right from the outset, however, Lady Tal is presented as an ambiguous character who eludes Marion’s narrative

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control. As is his habit, when he first meets her, he is determined to see her as a type. The narrator tells us that Marion knew the type well … This great strength, size, cleanness of outline and complexion, this look of carefully selected breed, of carefully fostered health, was to him the perfect flower of the aristocratic civilization of England. There were more beautiful types, certainly, and, intellectually, higher ones (his experience was that such women were shrewd, practical, and quite deficient in soul), but there was no type more well-defined and striking, in his eyes. This woman did not seem an individual at all.40

Despite his claims to psychological insight, Marion thus reveals that he reads Lady Tal’s character primarily through her appearance, which he considers immediately legible. Because she physically conforms to his idea of the ‘perfect flower’ of an English aristocrat, especially in her beautiful skin and imposing height, it is impossible for him to imagine her as an individual. Her outward appearance, which signifies both health and breeding to him, also suggests much to him about her character: she is ‘shrewd’ rather than ‘intellectual’ and ‘deficient in soul’. Although he is determined to see Lady Tal as a ‘type’, and thus clearly definable, however, Marion quickly discovers that he is unable either to slot her into any of his preconceived categories or to understand his own behaviour in relation to her. His first attempt to construct a conventional narrative of her as a lonely woman tragically alienated from her husband is, as a friend tells him, ‘right in one way, and wrong in another’. When he learns that Lady Tal is a widow who, according to her late husband’s will, stands to lose her fortune if she remarries, he becomes momentarily caught up in the general speculation about her future plans, but then he attempts to dismiss her as merely ‘a young woman six foot high looking out for a duke’. This summing up is almost immediately belied by Lady Tal’s apparent indifference to finding a new husband. Because he is frustrated with his inability to understand her, he sees her behaviour as evidence that she manipulates those around her by symbolically ‘playing on a gong and crying: “Does anyone feel inclined to solve a riddle?”’.41 Despite himself, Marion spends the rest of the story trying to figure out this ‘riddle’. Marion is not the only character in the story unable to characterize Lady Tal. ‘Lady Tal’, in fact, is replete with narrators competing to tell her story for her. Lady Tal’s assumption of independence and seemingly eccentric and contradictory behaviour clearly fascinate her observers, tempting them to create narratives to explain her. As soon as Lady Tal exits the stage in the opening scene, the multiple narrators rush in to tell the story of this rich and attractive widow who appears tantalizingly unwilling to declare her intentions. Each viewer searches for an appropriate label to define her – flirt, fortune hunter, mistreated widow

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– and each narrator has a stake in explaining her. The challenge that Lady Tal appears to set forth is the mystery of her true character because, as she later explains to Marion, she follows her own inclinations rather than consulting social conventions. The struggle to understand Lady Tal’s narrative also takes place over Lady Tal’s literal narrative – i.e., the manuscript that she has written. Just as in Wotton’s ‘The Fifth Edition’, the aesthetic and intellectual questions in this story emerge through the creation of an actual novel, or, in this case, two novels: Lady Tal’s novel, which Marion is reluctantly drawn into editing, and the hypothetical novel that he is planning to write about her. By helping rewrite her novel, Marion tries to convert what he sees as the confusion of Lady Tal into an orderly and conventional narrative that conforms to his ideas of art. However, she realizes this and accuses him of ‘put[ting] all your own ideas into poor Christina [the novel], and you just expect me to be able to carry them out … You think of that novel just as if it were you writing it’.42 At the same time, planning out his own novel about Lady Tal is another way for Marion to assert control over this puzzle and to appropriate it for his own. Lady Tal, however, ultimately resists this appropriation through her awareness of his plans. One aspect of her character that Marion finds particularly mystifying is what he sees as a disjunction between the novel she has written and the woman herself. At one point, the narrator remarks that Marion ‘was trying to make out how on earth this woman had come to write the novel he had been reading’. What confuses Marion is that, in the novel, he finds ‘the indications of a soul’, something which he suspects Lady Tal lacks and which his idea of the English aristocratic type dictates that she should be wholly without. To Marion, the novel makes a kind of sense, but not when he considers it as written by her; as he says, ‘There was nothing at all surprising in the novel, the surprising point lay in its having this particular author’.43 In studying Lady Tal, Marion not only finds that her narrative eludes him, but also that her inscrutability paves the way for a humiliating loss of psychological control. Despite his determination not to become involved in character study while in Venice, nor to read any manuscripts by amateur novelists, he finds himself doing both of these things, seemingly at Lady Tal’s behest. Just as he is unable fully to understand this woman, he is equally mystified by his inability to resist her: he reflects angrily that ‘It was the sense of having been got the better of, and in a wholly unintelligible way, which greatly aggravated the matter’. He describes her behaviour as though she is deliberately trying to tempt him and admits that he is ‘incapable of coping with his own detestable weakness and Lady Tal’s terrible determination’. The narrator tells us that he wonders ‘Why on earth, or rather how on earth, had he let himself in for all this?’44 As he loses control over his own self as text because he becomes too interested, too involved, he loses the

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detached objectivity that allows him to study those around him dispassionately, a characteristic that he sees as essential to the novelist’s art: Indeed, if Jervase Marion, ever since his earliest manhood, had given way to a tendency to withdraw from all personal concerns, from all emotion or action, it was mainly because he conceived that this shrinkingness of nature … was the necessary complement to his power of intellectual analysis; any departure from the position of dispassioned spectator of the world’s follies and miseries would mean also a departure from his real duty as a novelist.45

Marion has fashioned his life, and his emotional retreat from the social world, in terms of this idea of impersonal artistic ‘duty’ on the part of the ‘dispassioned spectator’. By becoming interested in Lady Tal, ostensibly as a ‘psychological problem’,46 despite himself, Marion irretrievably loses his position as detached, unemotional observer because he has lost control over his relationship to the object of his study. This loss of control of the observer ties the story to its mythical antecedent, although it rewrites the ending. The mythical Atalanta, who is, in Bulfinch’s retelling, ‘boyish for a girl, yet too girlish for a boy’, has been told that marriage would be her ruin.47 Lee draws a parallel early in the story between Tal, whose full name is Lady Atalanta Walkenshaw, and the mythical Atalanta by emphasizing her gender ambiguity: Marion hears Lady Tal before he sees her for the first time and notices both her femininity and masculinity. He notes that ‘The voice was a woman’s; a little masculine and the more so for a certain falsetto pitch’.48 Furthermore, just as the mythical Atalanta believes that marriage will be her downfall, Lady Tal stands to lose her fortune if she marries because of the terms of her late husband’s will. When suitors flock to the mythical Atalanta, she sets forth an impossible challenge in order to discourage them: each suitor must race against her on foot, and if he is unable to overtake her, he is to be killed. Despite this threat and her reputation as a powerful runner, a crowd of hopeful men show up on the day of the race. One observer, Hippomenes, looks upon them all as fools until he actually sees Atalanta and falls immediately in love with her. When she has vanquished all of the other suitors, he challenges her, and, with Venus’s help, outruns her in the foot race by throwing golden apples in her path. Atalanta is distracted by the golden apples and runs to pick them up, thus losing the race. While the mythical Hippomenes ultimately vanquishes Atalanta, and thus wins her hand in marriage, Marion fails to vanquish – or, within the economy of this story, come to a superior understanding of – Lady Tal. Lee emphasizes the connection between the two stories through a scene in which Lady Tal pressures Marion into carrying several bags of oranges and lemons for her on her way to visit the sick. Rather than proving master of the situation, Marion finds himself in the ridiculous position of running after the

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escaping oranges as they fall out of the bag. Whereas the mythical Hippomenes ultimately gains mastery over Atalanta and gains her hand in marriage, Marion never gains the upper hand in his relationship with Lady Tal. Lady Tal definitively declares ownership of her own narrative by ending their literary mentorship and by revealing to Marion that she knows that he has been using her as a character study all along. She declares that he has unjustifiably encouraged her to believe that she is a better writer than she is, and that he will never read another novel of hers, ‘now that you’ve made all the necessary studies of me for your novel!’ (emphasis in original). By exposing his motives and asserting authority over Marion as an object of study, she reverses the mentor/mentee relationship and undermines his narrative control. Lady Tal’s inscrutability and Marion’s inability to master his muse result, as so often is the case in Lee’s work, in anger and frustration: ‘He had been a fool, a fool, he repeated to himself. Not, as he had thought before, by exposing Lady Tal to disappointment and humiliation, but by exposing himself ’.49 Musing over Lady Tal’s abrupt decision to finish her novel on her own, he chastises himself for losing self-control so far as to become involved: Had he not long ago made up his mind to live contemplative only of external types …? Marion felt depressed, ashamed of his depression, enraged at his shame; and generally intolerably mortified at feeling anything at all, and still more, in consequence, at feeling all this much.50

Rather than maintaining the position of superior, detached observer, Marion is ‘enraged’ and humiliated to find that he has become genuinely interested in Lady Tal. He consoles himself that he has always seen her through her novel and reflects ‘how infinitely finer that novel was than herself ’.51 Marion’s inability to assert control over Lady Tal’s narrative is echoed throughout Lee’s oeuvre through characters who, despite their sense that they possess unique insight, cannot ‘capture’ their literary, artistic or historical subjects. The slipperiness of the muse takes on its most literal form in two stories in which artists are unable to capture some essential quality in their muse. As her fictional artists try again and again to capture that element, it becomes increasingly clear that, within Lee’s aesthetic, art cannot sufficiently comprehend, and in many cases live up to, life, especially when the female muse is too dynamic to be caught in this way. Two ghost stories in which this idea features prominently are ‘Dionea’ (1890), in which a sculptor attempts to model the features of a real-life avatar of Venus, and ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1886), in which an artist struggles to capture on paper the wife of a Kentish country squire. In both cases, the artists are frustrated by their inability to recreate what they see as essentially beautiful in these characters. As the sculptor in ‘Dionea’, who becomes increas-

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ingly obsessed with his model, struggles to convey her beauty in a sculpture, the narrator marvels, How strange is the power of art! Has Waldemar’s [the artist’s] statue shown me the real Dionea, or has Dionea really grown more strangely beautiful than before? … Do you remember … all the bosh of our writers about the Ideal in Art? Why, here is a girl who disproves all this nonsense in a minute; she is far, far more beautiful than Waldemar’s statue of her. He said so angrily, only yesterday52

This passage invokes the distinction between what Lee terms in the introduction to Euphorion ‘the old squabble of real and ideal’,53 meaning a distinction between art that captures exactly what it sees versus art that selects and idealizes its subject. Lee’s scepticism about this division comes through most clearly in her essay on ‘The Portrait Art of the Renaissance’ (1883) where she argues that the division between the real and the ideal is ‘one of the most tangled questions of art-philosophy’. Lee concludes in this essay that beauty comes through most clearly in a combination of realism that remains faithful to the original object but draws on the idealizing tools of selection through materials and representation.54 Watching Waldemar struggle to mould Dionea’s beauty, the narrator becomes more aware of it. However, it is not through seeing a beautiful representation of Dionea that translates, or even idealizes, her beauty; rather, her beauty stands out more strongly in stark contrast to the statue’s failure. Despite the artist’s talent and determination, he is unable to convey her beauty in another medium. Likewise, explaining his inability to complete a portrait of Mrs Oke, the artist in ‘Oke of Okehurst’ shows a friend a book full of sketches that he made of her in a desperate attempt to capture ‘her beautiful, wide, pale eyes … that exquisite curve of shoulders and neck and delicate pale head that I so vainly longed to reproduce’. His description of his attempts to ‘reproduce’ her on the canvas bleeds into his attempts to gain aesthetic and psychological insight: ‘I pursued her, her physical image, her psychological explanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days’.55 His language of pursuit and passion implies a determined chase after his subject, both like that of a hunter on the scent of a stag and of a lover searching after a beloved. His quest for her ‘physical image’ and ‘psychological explanation’ also hints that his subject is deliberately trying to evade capture. Lee splits up the artistic and romantic frustration in ‘Oke of Okehurst’ through two characters trying to possess the same woman: in addition to the artist who cannot manage to convey Mrs Oke’s beauty on paper, her husband is unable to establish an emotional connection with his wife. Both tales end in acts of violence that are directly connected to the elusiveness of their subjects: in ‘Dionea’, the frustrated sculptor kills himself and his wife’s dead body is found among the charred remains of his workshop. In ‘Oke of Okehurst’, while the artist becomes increasingly baffled both by his inability to

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capture Mrs Oke on paper and his inability to convince her to humour her husband, the obsessed husband shoots his wife when he imagines that she is cheating on him by carrying on an affair with a ghost. Angela Leighton has pointed to the ways in which ghosts in Lee’s stories are not only embodiments of the past, but also objects of desire for their viewers: ‘Her own fictional ghosts have no designs on their readers’ or victims’ beliefs; rather, it is the readers and viewers who have designs on the ghosts’.56 Similarly, the artists all have ‘designs’ on their subjects, but those subjects remain just out of reach and, inevitably, the (female) original remains superior to the artistic recreation. By pointing to the frustrating inability of these artists to capture their subjects, Lee appears to invert Wilde’s and James’s aesthetic dictums that art creates something more perfect and beautiful than what exists in real life. As these stories reveal, the slipperiness of the subject is not simply a source of frustration for the aesthetic observer; instead, the frustration is associated with violence, a violence that might be said to represent Lee’s most pointed critique of the power dynamics inherent in the artist/subject relationship. In other words, when the male artists in her fiction are unable to master their subject, they turn to violence. Thus, Lee’s critique of the aesthetic observer often goes beyond the failure of artistry by revealing an act of violence against the disobedient subject. The slipperiness of the subject, and the anger it provokes, are doubled through two disobedient characters in ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ (1896), a story that Margaret Stetz reads as expressing veiled sympathy for Wilde in his imprisonment.57 In this fairy-tale-esque story, which initially appeared in the Yellow Book, both the mythical snake lady and the prince refuse to be controlled. Prince Alberic is the grandson of a vain and self-involved duke, who is uninterested in his grandson except as he gratifies his vanity. In an initial act of disobedience, the child Alberic, who has been kept in seclusion, lashes out when the duke orders the removal of his favourite tapestry, which depicts a mythical snake lady. The prince’s disobedience originates out of a conflation of art and life; in his isolation, all that he knew of the ‘real’ world came from the tapestry hanging in his room. As Lee writes, Alberic had grown so accustomed to never quitting the Red Palace and its gardens, that he was usually satisfied with seeing the plants and animals in the tapestry, and looked forward to seeing the real things only when he should be grown up.58

Like the people in Plato’s cave, Alberic has only seen a representation of the natural world rather than actual plants and animals. Because he does not have a point of comparison, he is satisfied to wait until he is an adult to see ‘the real things’. When the tapestry is removed, he begins to ‘pine away’, until his annoyed grandfather sends him into exile in a remote castle, where, contrary to his grandfather’s

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intention to punish him, he discovers a ‘growing sense that he was in the tapestry, [and] that the tapestry had become the whole world’.59 In other words, his exile returns him to the tapestry’s world, which he sees as real, although this time it is within the natural landscape. While in exile, he meets the ‘real life’ incarnation of the snake lady and she becomes his confidante and benefactor. The duke’s counsellors, each of whom tries to bribe Alberic for his loyalty, become enraged when he rejects their influence in favour of that of the snake lady. The prince’s disobedience takes on sexual overtones when he refuses to comply with the duke’s increasingly frantic insistence that he marry. Instead of marrying, the prince is content with the snake lady’s nurturing company. Therefore, rather than suffering in his exile, the prince has regained what his grandfather tried to take away; likewise, the more that his grandfather and his counsellors attempt to control Alberic, the more he eludes their grasp. Even after the duke brings Alberic back home in order to exert greater pressure on him to marry, he continues to escape his influence. The grandfather becomes so incensed by his inability to control the prince that he locks him up, without realizing that he will never be able to control him as long as he has the company of his pet snake, who is actually the snake lady. It is not, however, Prince Alberic alone who slips away from his grandfather’s control in this tale, and his disobedience is mirrored through the figure of the snake lady, who both inspires the prince’s disobedience and is disobedient in her own right. In this way, Lee’s slippery muse is doubled through two figures who both rebel against a defining narrative and are punished for that rebellion. Furthermore, the snake lady’s disobedience ultimately inspires the greatest anger and violence. The story begins with the language of violence towards the snake lady as the narrator relates ‘The first act of hostility of old Duke Balthasar toward the Snake Lady’:60 i.e., when he removes the tapestry hanging in the prince’s chamber. When she later approaches the prince in exile, she tells him that she appears before him against his grandfather’s and his friends’ wishes and that therefore he must keep her visits a secret. She (and her influence) eludes the grandfather and his counsellors, and her gifts and company prove sufficient for the lonely Prince Alberic, who refuses to marry. In the final scene, the duke and his counsellors turn their rage towards the snake when they find it sleeping peacefully in the prince’s chamber. As the counsellors descend upon it, they cry out angrily: ‘The snake! The devil! Prince Alberic’s pet companion!’ In a final act of frenzied anger, the jester, ‘with a blow of his harlequin’s lath, had crushed the head of the startled creature; and, even while he was struggling with him and the Jesuit, the Dwarf had given it two cuts with his Turkish scimitar’. When the snake is dead, they find instead ‘the body of a woman, naked, and miserably disfigured with blows and sabre cuts’.61 This act of violence destroys both the snake and the prince, who dies two weeks later.

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As Stetz points out, the web of forbidden love in this story suggests Lee’s sympathy for Wilde, and the prince’s refusal to marry in order to please his grandfather supports the argument that Lee is critiquing heterosexual conventions. At the same time, the story thematically fits into the pattern in Lee’s work of rebellion, which is interwoven, like Prince Alberic’s beloved tapestry, into a web of art and reality. That the attempt to control the subject deteriorates into violence in this way, however, indicates that Lee sees something more insidious at stake in the capturing and containment of the subject. Lee invokes a critique of the aesthete through the grandfather’s single-minded devotion to his own self-interest, and his pose as an artist through the ballets that he produces and stars in. In this way, Lee demonstrates that the aesthete’s use of real people to create ‘great’ art can easily slide into a view of the world as simply existing to mirror and be shaped by one’s own desires. The line between deriving inspiration from the world and demanding that it conform to one’s artistic vision is a slippery one, as Lee suggests. Furthermore, she hints that such a view can lead to violence – whether metaphorical or actual – through the vision of the grandfather’s (and his minions’) violent rage when they are unable to incorporate Prince Alberic and the snake lady into their orchestrated version of reality. The violence in these stories can also have a damaging effect on the artist, however, and just as frequently within Lee’s work these attempts have a damaging effect on the individuals attempting to control their subjects. That is to say, while the subject remains slippery, the person who tries to control that subject also tends to deconstruct in these stories: the historian in ‘Amour Dure’ becomes a victim of his obsession; the sculptor in ‘Dionea’ destroys both himself and, it is suggested, his wife; and the husband in ‘Oke of Okehurst’ dies shortly after killing his wife. Each of these stories illustrates the price of attempting to gain artistic and intellectual – or even personal – ownership of one’s subject. Even when the consequences are less destructive, as in the case of the artist who finds himself unable to catch Mrs Oke satisfactorily on paper, the idea that one can ever command another is repeatedly shown as impossible, if not destructive, in Lee’s work. However, at the same time, her own practice of using real life as copy reveals a deep ambivalence in Lee’s work and working life towards the relationship between art and its sources of inspiration. The paradox that these stories present is the struggle between the artist to convey something that is beautiful and powerful and the subject’s desire for autonomy. It is in ‘Lady Tal’, however, that Lee attempts to reconcile the various artistic paradoxes that she has raised in her work between the rebellious muse and her own incorporation of, and reliance upon, recognizable subjects in her fiction. Unlike her other stories, in this tale she moves beyond the destructive consequences of attempting to master a reluctant subject and, instead, imagines a compromise between the rebellious muse and the mastering artist by suggesting

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that the two might collaborate on a novel that mixes fiction and reality (just as in Lee’s own fiction). In this way, Lee rewrites the tension between resistant muse and mastering artist that she depicts elsewhere in her fiction by imagining a relationship with the potential to benefit both artist and muse by allowing the muse an equal role in shaping the narrative. In the final scene, Marion describes to Lady Tal the transparently biographical novel that he had been planning, and she rejects his idea for an ending that results in the acknowledgement that the male protagonist ‘made an awful old fool of himself ’. She responds, ‘That’s all! … Doesn’t it seem rather lame? You don’t seem to have got sufficient dénouement, do you? Why shouldn’t we write that novel together? I’m sure I could help you to something more conclusive than that.’ Rather than leaving Marion the option of appropriating her suggestions while maintaining artistic autonomy over the story, Lady Tal asserts partial ownership by declaring that ‘We ought to write that novel together, because I’ve given you the ending – and also because I really can’t manage another all by myself, now that I’ve got accustomed to having my semicolons put in for me –’.62 Lady Tal thus not only asserts part ownership in the idea (as opposed to Miss Suttaby in Wotton’s short story who apparently hands her story over wholesale), but she also reduces Marion’s contribution to a purely stylistic one of adding punctuation. The aesthete’s role as shaper of a narrative is thus trivialized to that of stylist and proofreader. Unlike the objects of the historical or artistic gaze in Lee’s other stories, Lady Tal suggests a collaboration in which she would have equal authority to shape the way in which their joint story is told. In Lady Tal’s hypothetical ending to Marion’s novel, the protagonists consider marriage, an ending that mirrors the sublimated romantic relationship that Lady Tal’s and Marion’s collaboration would represent. This collaborative triangulation of desire in which two characters imaginatively participate in a romantic relationship by jointly authoring a romantic text echoes what Jill Ehnenn has asserted drove the collaborations between Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson. During the period when Lee was writing ‘Lady Tal’, she and Anstruther-Thomson were conducting research into psychological aesthetics through a series of gallery experiments in which Anstruther-Thomson would study a work of art while Lee studied Anstruther-Thomson’s reaction. Ehnenn describes the experiments, and the collaborative writing that resulted from them, as a rewriting of hetero-normative ways of looking that ‘privileg[e] a female gaze and appropriat[e] looking as an implicit expression of lesbian desire’. In other words, the female gaze – directed both at the work of art and at the female subject looking at the work of art – reclaims authority for the female spectator, who is also the object. Likewise, their collaborative writing ‘functions as an eroticized site where otherwise unacceptable same-sex desires are sublimated, practiced, and voiced’. As Ehnenn argues, the collaboration between Lee and Anstruther-

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Thomson allows them to rewrite the implicit possession of the female object by the aesthetic male observer by ‘implementing a new and different discourse of looking’ that authorizes the female gaze.63 The subtext of a romantic dynamic between Lady Tal and Marion suggests a collaborative relationship that also sublimates a romantic one – and, in this case, one initiated by the female partner. Although we will perhaps never fully reconcile the implications of Lee’s borrowing of James and other ‘real-life’ figures in her fiction, her incorporation of a Jamesian artist in ‘Lady Tal’ underscores her preoccupation with questions of artistic invention and the problematic relationship between artistry and inspiration. Throughout her work, she explores the questions of aesthetic appropriation discussed above as central to Pater, James and Wilde, and, as I have argued, suggests a collaborative solution to the gendered hierarchy implicit in mainstream aestheticism. In the preface to her treatise on literary craft, The Handling of Words, she discusses the interpretive relationship between the reader and the writer, an interpretive relationship that closely mirrors that of Pater’s observer to its object. She asserts that ‘the efficacy of all writing depends not more on the Writer than on the Reader, without whose active response, whose output of experience, feeling and imagination, the living phenomenon, the only reality, of Literary Art cannot take place’.64 Thus, the text alone cannot constitute a work of art, but can only exist as art in dialogue with the reader’s (or critic’s) response to that text. As I have shown in the first half of this chapter, her fiction reveals a discomfort with the parasitic aspects of aestheticism, a parasitism that takes on a gendered dimension in her writing. Her rebellious muses indicate, above all, her awareness that artistic subjects are more slippery than they at first appear and that they are not necessarily going to remain the conveniently passive objects that aestheticism seems to require. However, as opposed to the aesthetic observer who claims the privilege of interpretation in creating art, this formulation of the interplay between reader and text in the passage above suggests something more collaborative that reflects the reconciliation between observer and muse that is central to ‘Lady Tal’.

3 EDITH WHARTON AND THE ARTIST AS CONNOISSEUR

[N]either the uneducated judgment nor the instincts of the uneducated can ever come to have more than the very slightest value in the determination of what is true or false in art … In material matters, even … has the labourer ever been able to understand a machine … until it has been laboriously explained to him …? How, then, is he to understand a poem, which must always continue to seem to him a useless thing …? Arthur Symons1 I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, & ignorant of the treasures of art & history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, & bring to it all a mind & eye unblunted by custom. Edith Wharton to Margaret Terry Chanler, 8 March [1903]2

In an 1898 review of Tolstoy’s What is Art?, the aesthetic poet and critic Arthur Symons refutes the idea that great art should universally inspire ‘feeling’ in its viewers. The impossibility of this universal standard, he argues, reflects a distinct hierarchy in taste: those with intelligence and discrimination will always and naturally recognize the beauty in art, whereas there is a separate class of people who will never appreciate, or even understand, objects that do not have an obviously utilitarian value. In a letter to her close friend Margaret Terry Chanler, Edith Wharton echoes Symons’s sense that there is an insuperable division between those with taste and those who are ‘completely insensitive’ to beauty. Writing in the midst of one of her many trips to Italy to study and absorb its art and culture, Wharton in this letter sounds very much like the aesthetic connoisseur, full of a heightened, almost painful appreciation of art, a sensibility that is exhausting, but that must be borne in order to allow others to see the value of what she has found. Like the aesthetic artist, she believes that the beauty that exhausts her goes unrecognized by those who are closest to it. Furthermore, as an American, and thus an outsider, she brings to each viewing a fresh perspective that allows her greater insight than those who are accustomed to the works of art that they see every day. In her mind, the art objects in Italy are wasted on those – 69 –

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who cannot appreciate them, and it is her duty, even if it is an exhausting one, to exercise her judgement. Throughout her writing on art, Wharton often assumes the connoisseur’s stance and asserts her superior knowledge and discrimination. This assumption of aesthetic connoisseurship, according to Jonathan Freedman, helped middle class men and women claim authority for themselves … to establish oneself as the arbiter of the aesthetic, devotee of ‘the beautiful’, was to proclaim oneself as a member of an elite whose standing was based on taste and discernment.3

It is this same authority, Freedman argues, that led to the professionalization of aestheticism in the form of the ‘art expert, the person whose job it was to search out and authenticate great works of art’.4 In her writing on art, Wharton is confident that she has an original contribution to make, as she asserts in the introduction to Decoration of Houses (1897): ‘No study of house-decoration as a branch of architecture has for at least fifty years been published in England or America’ (emphasis in original).5 Not only, she implies, has this type of study not been undertaken in fifty years, and thus is overdue for a fresh examination, but what has been overlooked has value that has been unappreciated. Likewise, she assumed a similar stance after discovering a group of Italian terracottas that, in her view, had been misattributed to a seventeenth-century artist, Giovanni Gonnelli. After determining that the terracottas were from a much earlier period and, therefore, much more significant than previously supposed by art historians like Bernard Berenson, she wrote in 1894 to her publisher at Scribner’s, Edward L. Burlingame, that ‘I think the subject cannot fail to be of interest to the public, especially as the terra-cottas are entirely unknown’ (emphasis in original).6 In the Scribner’s article describing her find, ‘A Tuscan Shrine’, she exults in the pleasures of defying the guidebooks and following her own instincts in exploring Italy. In each instance, she assumes the role of educator and connoisseur, schooling her readers’ tastes and introducing them to something new and unappreciated. This schooling of taste, in her view, was a top-down process, in which those with taste and discrimination influence those below them on the cultural scale. In the Decoration of Houses, she explains that The vulgarity of current decoration has its source in the indifference of the wealthy to architectural fitness. Every good moulding, every carefully studied detail, exacted by those who can afford to indulge their taste, will in time find its way to the carpenterbuilt cottage.7

In other words, the wealthy and influential, who have previously been indifferent to the finer points of architectural decoration, have a responsibility to cultivate superior taste because their example will likely disseminate these ideas to others.

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As Sarah Bird Wright has argued, Wharton not only presented herself as a connoisseur in her travel writing, but she deliberately schooled herself in this role through her early unpublished work which shows the ‘possible nucleus’ of her later essays.8 In her correspondence with publishers, she firmly maintained her standing as a serious art critic, as opposed to a dilettante. For example, when Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor at the Century, complained about the serious tone of an article on Italian villas that she had written, she responded by asserting that her expertise compelled her to take a scholarly approach: If I had understood that you wished [for] the ‘chatty’ article on Italian gardens, of which so many have been written, & forgotten, in England & America, I should have told you at once that I was not prepared to undertake the work. From the fact of your asking me to do the series I naturally inferred that you wished for the kind of article which, from experience & training, I was more or less fitted to write, & which has not yet been written in English. I look in vain in any of my other writings for anything which might have suggested to you that I was likely to do a desultory article, & indeed, even did I not lack the aptitude for this kind of writing, I should be puzzled – & I think any other author would – to know how to combine a study of the architectural values of Italian villas & gardens with anecdotes & small-talk9

Wharton suggests that she is offended by Johnson’s assumption that she was an appropriate choice for a ‘chatty’, as opposed to scholarly, article when she describes herself ‘look[ing] in vain in any of my other writings for anything’ that would have given Johnson that idea. Not only is she more fitted, because of her ‘experience and training’ to ‘study the architectural values of Italian villas & gardens’, but she has not the ‘aptitude’, or one might say interest, to do anything else. As in the introduction to The Decoration of Houses, Wharton asserts the originality of her approach, which adds to its value. This connoisseur’s attitude towards art also emerges in her fiction, and it is in her early short fiction that she addresses the ethical problems that are raised when the connoisseur’s eye focuses on other people, especially when that connoisseurship is directed towards creating art. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, in her earliest published work she shows herself highly concerned with the question of understanding and appreciating art, but it is in her early short fiction that she most deeply engages with the theory and process of creating art. Just as I argued is the case in the writings of Oscar Wilde and Henry James, Wharton’s art criticism is closely aligned with the way that she describes the process of creating art: the critic is an artist and great art embodies a degree of criticism. It is, however, from this dual perspective of both creator and appreciator of art that Wharton places the role of the connoisseur in uneasy juxtaposition against that which is appropriated and appreciated. Thus, a paradox emerges in her work: on the one hand, she demonstrates that interpretation and appropriation are central to appreciating and creating great art. In fact, as in the case of

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the terracottas, if we ignore what our superior taste illuminates for us, it is ethically wrong because an object of importance might be overlooked. At the same time, she reveals anxiety about the ways in which interpretation and appropriation turn subjects into objects by robbing them of the right to define themselves. Wharton does not fully reconcile this paradox; instead, as I will argue, she concludes that great art necessarily places exploitation in uneasy coexistence with artistic creation because of the ways in which the artist interprets and communicates the essence of his or her subject, as in her 1899 story ‘The Portrait’. Superior – i.e., illuminating – art requires interpretation and appropriation and cannot be fully separated from a contestable (and dominating) view of the subject. The artist’s or critic’s interpretation is always going to be contested and uncomfortable because the act of interpretation is in itself an attempt to articulate what someone or something really is, an articulation that potentially runs counter to the way that one sees oneself (or would like to see oneself ). A young artist herself, Wharton struggled in her early short fiction with the ethics and the aesthetics of using the raw materials of recognizable everyday life to create art. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, Wharton’s early short fiction reveals an aesthete’s sense that art (and the appreciation of art) reflects a heightened perception and interpretation of raw materials; this theoretical belief about what constitutes great art stands alongside an anxious sense that there is something exploitative about incorporating, and thus capitalizing on, those around us in the process of creating art. In order to demonstrate her interest in the ethical issues surrounding artistic creation, I will outline the ways in which Wharton explored and negotiated artistry’s emergence from and dependence upon raw material. Wharton’s engagement with the issue of art’s relationship to its sources echoes concerns central to the fiction of her contemporaries, including the British female aesthete Ella D’Arcy and the American regionalist writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. Looking at the ways in which Wharton’s work intersects with that of her contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic etches in full relief the central questions that these authors raised about the power dynamics inherent in creating art. Reading Wharton in this way reveals her complex awareness of the artist’s parasitic reliance on real-world models in creating art. Ultimately, in Wharton’s short fiction, creating art is a frequently gendered struggle over interpreting (or defining) the subject in a way that claims to understand the subject better than it understands itself. Wharton’s early fiction repeatedly focuses on the creative process and the relationship between artists and their material. Although Sharon Dean asserts that ‘Wharton does not ask what constitutes art’ and ‘portrays the artist as a recorder rather than a creator’, using the figure of the artist, instead, ‘as a plot device’, other critics, such as Laura Saltz, have pointed to her interest in the transformation from raw material into art.10 In a story such as ‘The Portrait’,

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which I will discuss in greater detail later in the chapter, Wharton emphasizes that the creative act requires both an identifiable subject and an interpretation of that subject that reaches beyond what the subject might admit to or agree is true about him or herself. Like many of the writers in this study, Wharton does not condemn artists who draw on the world around them, but rather expresses uneasiness about the parasitic nature of artistic creation. Wharton thus acknowledges the key role that drawing on the material world plays in the artistic process, as well as the potential objections that the subjects of art may have to being thus incorporated. In this chapter, I focus on Wharton’s early short stories from the 1890s because this is where Wharton as artist and connoisseur can be seen most clearly working through her ideas about the relationship between artists and their material. Notably, Wharton takes the sides of both the artist and the subject in these stories, examining how art is created and how it affects its participants. For this reason, determining Wharton’s attitude towards artists and models can seem a slippery business. In Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (2007), Emily Orlando traces the ways in which Wharton’s fiction explores ‘the likelihood of women’s resistance to their objectification as muses, as works of art, or as sexualized images and icons’. Orlando argues that Wharton’s early artist fiction underscores and critiques the Pre-Raphaelites’ tendency to ‘enshrine’ women in art (and thus equate death and art) and to use art as a means for attaining sexual power.11 Orlando usefully traces Wharton’s echoing and rewriting of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and art and argues that Wharton’s fiction emphasizes the ultimate powerlessness that emerges as women are turned into art. Orlando is right to point to the ways in which Wharton is in dialogue with Pre-Raphaelite artists by revealing their exploitation of female models; at the same time, I would argue that Wharton’s stance towards male artists is more complicated than a condemnation. While she points to the exploitation and the sexual politics involved in artistic creation, she also takes the side of the artist and illuminates both the process of creating art and how that process is reliant on raw materials. Likewise, even in her early fiction, not all of her female muses are ultimately powerless, as Saltz has argued in the case of ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’ in which the protagonist, Mary Anerton, achieves narrative power when she tells her story. As Saltz puts it, when Anerton tells her story, Wharton explores the ‘shift from object to subject … [within] a larger critique of gendered forms of looking and the modes of aesthetic production to which they give rise’.12 Wharton is equally concerned with the question of how life can be transformed into art, as well as what the artist’s stance should be towards his or her materials. Wharton ultimately demonstrates that art must come from an interpretation or appropriation, and whether that appropriative interpretation is ethical or not depends on its humanity and accuracy (as I will show in the case of her story ‘That Good May Come’). While she, as an artist,

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is preoccupied with the process of artistic creation, she acknowledges that the process is exploitative because it capitalizes on others and denies them the right to determine how they will be presented. Ultimately, however, she concludes that to be a great artist, a certain amount of exploitation is inevitable. To consider artistry as a whole in Wharton’s early stories is to see a wideranging consideration of how art is (and should be) created, as well as how it is misused as a tool of power. In this chapter, I am focusing primarily on Wharton’s early fiction, roughly from the appearance of her first published story, ‘Mrs. Manstey’s View’ (1891), up to her first major success, The House of Mirth (1905). During this period, Wharton was developing her craft by focusing on the short story, a form that she saw as her most powerful. In an oft-quoted 1907 letter to her friend Robert Grant, Wharton examines her strengths and weaknesses as a writer and how those weaknesses are related to genre: As soon as I look at a subject from the novel-angle I see it in its relation to a larger whole, in all its remotest connotations; & I can’t help trying to take them in, at the cost of the smaller realism that I arrive at, I think better in my short stories.13

As these lines demonstrate, she felt that her strength as a short story writer was in concentrating on smaller details of character and incident that give a greater sense of realism rather than sacrificing characterization to the broader requirements of a novel’s sprawling structure. In this view, short stories allow for characters to react in revealing ways that have nothing to do with propelling the plot. One of the revealing ‘smaller realisms’ that appears again and again in her short fiction is the moment of artistic creation, and Wharton capitalizes on the flexibility of the short story genre to examine this moment from multiple angles. Examining Wharton’s fictional treatment of the moment of artistic creation reveals that her early artist fiction is fraught with the ethical dilemmas involved in creating art. One of the most basic questions raised by her fiction is the ethics of using recognizable people as copy, a practice that she sees as natural, tempting and invasive. The temptation, Wharton shows, comes from the easy popularity that can arise from featuring (or, sometimes, caricaturing) a familiar and identifiable subject. Her early story ‘That Good May Come’ (1894) traces the agonies experienced by an artist who succumbs to the temptation of selling his artistic rendering of someone’s life. The story begins with a poet lamenting the rejection of his work by the major journals, a list which ironically includes Scribner’s, the journal in which the story itself appeared. As he reviews his work and the literary world’s failure to appreciate it, it becomes clear that his unsuccessful poetry has all dealt with grand themes far removed from everyday life. The first poem that he writes that garners any commercial interest is a ‘squib’ about a prominent society matron’s romantic dalliance. The poem, which he considers beneath his talents, is written in such a way that when he read it to his friends, ‘though no

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names are mentioned, they all knew who was meant’, and he is offended when the editor of a society newspaper offers him $150 for it.14 He turns down the offer, considering it a debasement of his genius for writing highbrow poetry. Later, however, he relents in order to pay for a new white dress for his beloved sister to wear to her confirmation. Although the cause is a worthy, almost saintly, one, he sees the act of publishing a humourous, openly satirical poem as a betrayal of his principles, which both he and his friend Helfenridge denounce. In his mind, the despicableness of using real subjects for his art is driven home even more deeply when he sees the society matron in tears as she watches her own daughter at the confirmation. The revelation of a new, more sentimental aspect that is so different from the society woman whose ‘familiar laugh [would] rattle derisively’ drives him to agony about having made ‘a stepping-stone out of a poor woman’s anguish and humiliation’.15 His ethical dilemma, therefore, has just as much to do with using real people as obvious sources in his art as it does with publishing inferior, comedic verse. Although the poet is tortured by self-loathing for having capitalized on this woman’s mis-step and creating a scandal, Wharton resolves the story in a way that further muddies the ethical waters surrounding the use of recognizable figures in one’s art. While the poet spends the second half of the story berating himself for publishing the poem, his friend Helfenridge attempts to ease his sense of shame at the last moment by pointing out that the society woman had, indeed, left the confirmation ceremony in the company of the man that the poet had paired her with in his poem, proving that, in fact, the speculation about their romantic dalliance was right. As Julie Olin-Ammentorp points out in her study of artistic mentors in Wharton’s early fiction, ‘the choice to profit by his scandalous verse is exonerated’.16 Thus, Wharton seems to suggest that drawing on real material in one’s art, and condemning real people by exposing their weaknesses or sins, is not wrong as long as it is accurate. If the poet had cast suspicion on this woman wrongly, it would have been an unethical act; if he is right, the story suggests, he is performing a public service. The necessity, from a commercial perspective, of harsh social critique, and the ways in which it can become motivated by commercial interests, come through in ‘Expiation’ (1903). In this story, a fledgling novelist writes what she considers a damning critique of ‘the hollowness of social conventions’. Knowing that there is a ‘ravenous call for attacks on social institutions – especially by those inside the institutions!’, and expecting to be denounced by the press as decadent or immoral, she is horrified that, instead, what she saw as a scathing critique is described as a ‘distinctly pretty story’. Not only does she realize that ‘where she had fancied she was calling a spade a spade she had in fact been alluding in guarded terms to the drawing-room shovel’, but she also knows that the book will not sell in great numbers unless the press denounces it. In order to boost

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sales, she convinces her uncle, who is a bishop, to condemn the book from the pulpit. As a result, the book is a tremendous success, and she plans to capitalize on that success by ‘lay[ing] bare the secret plague-spots of society’ in her next book.17 This novelist, perhaps like Wharton whose House of Mirth was to appear two years later and become a phenomenal best-seller, had discovered that one secret to successful novel-writing is drawing directly on ‘society’ for material and depicting it in the worst possible light. The biographical connection between Wharton and the story’s protagonist is strengthened by the title of the novel within the story, Fast and Loose, which is also the title of a novella that Wharton herself wrote when she was fourteen. Wharton revisits the temptation to capitalize on another’s secrets in her novella The Touchstone (1900), but this time she does not suggest an alternative reading of the act that lessens the protagonist’s guilt. The crucial act in the story occurs when a prominent female artist’s letters are published by their recipient after her death in order to finance his marriage. Here, Wharton de-emphasizes the artistic aspect of commodifying someone else’s story by focusing on the publication of private letters in which the artistic value of the letters comes not from the editor and recipient who is profiting from their publication, but from the correspondent’s candour and strength as a writer, as well as from her fame as an artist. The editor has done nothing beyond receiving, arranging and publishing them, thus, literally, creating a new work out of a woman’s words and emotions. While it is true that the letters could not have existed unless he had inspired her to write them, which puts him in a problematic position as both muse and exploiter, the emphasis in this story is on the appropriative act of putting the artist’s private words on public display. In this way, Wharton illuminates the ways in which incorporating someone else into a marketable commodity resembles putting that person up for sale, even when the product is presented as an object of art. Publishing the letters is framed as unethical in this story because they so clearly show that the writer was in love with the recipient and that he did not return her feelings, thus laying bare her vulnerability. Just as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth shrinks from assuring her own security by trading on the compromising letters between Lawrence Selden and Bertha Dorset, the protagonist of The Touchstone agonizes over having profited from exposing what had been meant to be private. As one character puts it, ‘It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the roots – her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t care; who couldn’t have cared … it’s too much like listening at a keyhole’.18 The man who received the letters agonizes over having published them, and he finally confesses it to his wife, in the process expressing his sense that he has been debased through this ignoble action. Although the publication of the letters is a direct sale of the woman writer’s self, as opposed to transforming her into art, it nevertheless points to the same issue because the woman’s soul, words and self

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are seen as something to be capitalized on and used to make money. Because the letter-writer is a woman whose romantic vulnerability has been put on display and sold, Wharton also highlights a gendered dynamic in the transformation of raw material into art. Although Wharton often sympathizes with her male artists, and is just as likely to place females as males into the role of artist, she also points to the ways in which the creation of art is bound up in a commodification, and thus ownership, of women. Not only does art commodify the raw material that is transformed into the art object, but it also makes public what would otherwise remain private. Wharton builds on the idea of the artist as both exploiter and exploited in ‘Copy’ (1901), which tells the story of two artists, one a novelist and the other a poet, who have become so used to searching for copy, even from their own personal lives, that they have trouble distinguishing genuine emotion from that which is generated for artistic effect. Wharton shows that even the artist loses something of him or herself in the process of directing all his or her emotions towards creating marketable artistic productions. The novelist, who suspects that she has lost the ability to feel unless it is in the service of creating an effect, actively encourages her assistant, Hilda, to note all of her emotions in her diary. When Hilda asks to be allowed to hide in order to watch the entrance of the famous poet who has come to visit, the novelist agrees only after considering how useful the scene would be as material to be included in the diary. The suggestion is that Hilda will some day use her diary in a literary project, and the novelist predicts that ‘You’ll make a fortune out of that diary, Hilda’. The probability of the diary being published is increased when Hilda reveals that ‘[f ]our publishers have applied to me already’. Whether the diary is meant as a straightforward memoir of her time with the famous novelist, or as a thinly veiled autobiographical novel of her own, is never revealed. When the novelist asks, ‘Do you take notes of what you feel, Hilda – here, all alone in the night, as you say?’, the implication is that Hilda’s mode of artistic creation is to transcribe her experiences, as well as her responses to those experiences.19 Hilda’s apprenticeship as a fledgling novelist who will create art out of her experiences echoes the literary practice of the novelist in the story, a literary practice that the poet soon reveals he shares as well. The visit, which is initially presented as a sentimental attempt to regain a lost connection, is soon exposed as an attempt to get back his letters so that he can use them in his memoir. In fact, both writers are, initially, primarily interested in capitalizing on their past, a time when they were more capable of experiencing genuine emotion than the present. Reminiscing about the ‘old days’, the novelist sighs for a time ‘When we were real people!’ Explaining what she means by ‘real people’, the novelist says that ‘I died years ago. What you see before you is a figment of the reporter’s brain – a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A

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keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion.’20 For the novelist, artistic success has meant that her sense of self has diminished and is now hardly distinguishable from the way that she is depicted in the press. Her private self has been replaced by ‘a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs’, and thus she has lost the ability to experience emotion, unless it is connected with the profitability of a copyright. Their reliance on memories of their younger selves as raw material becomes more evident as the conversation progresses and they both reveal that they have unwittingly been mining their earlier experiences throughout their work. Reading one of the letters that she wrote to the poet years ago, the novelist says, I had a letter of this kind to do the other day, in the novel I’m at work on now … And, do you know, I find the best phrase in it, the phrase I somehow regarded as the fruit of – well, of all my subsequent discoveries – is simply plagiarized, word for word, from this!21

In other words, what she had seen as a new idea, something that she had formulated out of her subsequent life experience, was something that she knew as a young girl. She has ‘plagiarized’ herself in the sense that she has not invented anything new, but is instead recycling ideas that she had when she was younger and less experienced. Because she had forgotten what she once knew, it is as though the accumulation of life experience has taught her much less than she thought. Likewise, the poet finds the source for one of his sonnets within the letters. Both artists are surprised to find that they have invented less than they previously believed, and had, rather, been borrowing from their own lives in creating their work. In trying to recover each other’s letters for their memoirs, they both imitate melodramatic characters in a love affair and later reveal that they were just acting out their roles as artists, a revelation that confirms their sense that they are now incapable of true feeling. In response to his compliment on her skill in feigning emotion, the novelist responds, ‘Oh, I’m a novelist. I can keep up that sort of thing for five hundred pages!’ All authenticity has gone out of their lives, and they are living entirely through their artistic creations. Sharing memories of their younger selves brings home the emptiness of their current existence; as the novelist admits, ‘how fresh they [the letters] seem, and how they take me back to the time when we lived instead of writing about life’. The poet echoes this sense that the constant generation of emotion, and the search for copy in their daily lives, has depleted them as people when he agrees that the self in his letters reflects a ‘time when we didn’t prepare our impromptu effects beforehand and copyright our remarks about the weather!’22 Unlike The Touchstone, however, Wharton resolves this story by having her protagonists reject the notion of publishing their letters. Although they have used much of the material unknowingly

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throughout their work, they realize that their early, authentic voices are too precious, too private to share with the public in an unmediated form, and the story closes with them burning both sets of letters. As Wharton’s early short fiction shows, not only is the act of creating art out of what is in the everyday world potentially unethical because of the ways in which the artist begins to see the world around him or her primarily as raw material to be taken advantage of artistically and, by extension, commercially, she also reveals the implicit power dynamics on which it depends. As I demonstrated in my discussion of Mabel Wotton, the ability to fashion oneself as an artist depends on opportunity and advantage. Wharton, too, points to the inequities involved in assuming the aesthete’s position and acknowledges the role that influence and opportunity can play in asserting one’s artistic vision. In her first published story, ‘Mrs. Manstey’s View’ (1891), the title character shares with the aesthete the ability to see beauty in what to many would appear a sordid world. Although Mrs Manstey lives in a lodging house in a depressing and overcrowded New York City neighbourhood, she savours the view from her sitting room. As the narrator tells us, Mrs Manstey had ‘the happy faculty of dwelling on the pleasanter side of the prospect before her’.23 This ‘prospect’ would be seen by many as ugly, and Mrs Manstey’s ability to appreciate its beauty fits her squarely within the aesthetic tradition, as articulated that same year by Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray where he declares that ‘Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated’.24 Wharton’s language underscores Mrs Manstey’s artistic sense: ‘Perhaps at heart Mrs. Manstey was an artist; at all events she was sensible of many changes of color unnoticed by the average eye’. Just as Wharton recognized the value of the terracottas in Italy, Mrs Manstey’s ability to perceive that the view ‘was full of interest and beauty’ reflects a superior discrimination.25 Unlike Wharton, however, Mrs Manstey does not have the authority to assert her impression of the view. As a lonely widow living in a boarding house, her aesthetic sense is accorded neither authority nor value, and Wharton emphasizes Mrs Manstey’s lack of influence when a neighbour decides to build an extension onto her house that will obscure the view. In desperation, Mrs Manstey tries to explain to her neighbour the view’s importance, but her powerlessness is underscored by the neighbour’s reaction: rather than seeing her as a sensitive artist, she assumes that Mrs Manstey is crazy and only pretends to reconsider. It is, of course, expedient for the neighbour to see Mrs Manstey as mentally unbalanced because of the money at stake in enlarging her property so that she can house more boarders. In this way, Wharton also points to the potential conflict between the artistic and the profitable. If Mrs Manstey’s artistic vision could have been commodified and sold, she might have received a different reaction. However, that is not the case for Wharton’s character, and, when construction continues, a desperate

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Mrs Manstey takes what she sees as the only action within her power: setting fire to the building in the middle of the night. This act ultimately kills Mrs Manstey, who catches pneumonia and dies believing that she has succeeded and that construction has stopped. The narrator, however, reveals that Mrs Manstey’s act has been ineffective by ending the story with the information that, immediately after her death, ‘the building of the extension was resumed’.26 Donna Campbell reads ‘Mrs. Manstey’s View’, and especially Mrs Manstey’s belief that the view is beautiful, as a critique of the limitations of local colour, a critique that forms part of Wharton’s dismissal of what she describes in A Backward Glance as the ‘rose-colored spectacles’ vision of regionalists like Mary Wilkins Freeman.27 I, however, also see this story as a statement about the difference between power and opportunity in creating art. Because Mrs Manstey is an impoverished woman with little influence and no cultural authority, her appreciation of the view from her window is discounted by those around her as eccentric rather than artistic. As Wharton shows, an impoverished and socially reclusive old woman has little chance of assuming the role of aesthetic connoisseur. The significance of opportunity and authority in asserting one’s position as an aesthete is shown in stark relief in the American regionalist writer Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story ‘The Front Yard’, which was originally published in Harper’s in 1888 and collected posthumously in The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (1895). Woolson, an enigmatic figure who may or may not have committed suicide in 1894, was a prolific writer of short stories, novels, travel essays and poetry. She is perhaps best known as a close associate of James, and, according to Victoria Brehm and Sharon Dean, Leon Edel’s reading of her unrequited passion for James has largely dictated how she has been viewed by literary history.28 Recent criticism, such as that by Brehm and Dean, has done much to re-establish her position as an influential and popular writer whose internationalism makes her an apt pivotal figure between aestheticism and American literary regionalism.29 ‘The Front Yard’ tells the story of Prudence Wilkin, a hard-working native of New Hampshire who spends the rest of her life in Assisi, Italy, after marrying an improvident and dishonest, but also irresistible, Italian waiter who claimed to be ‘all alone in the world’, but actually came encumbered with eight children, his late wife’s grandmother and a disreputable uncle, all of whom expect to be supported by Prudence. A year after their marriage, her husband dies, leaving her to take care of his enormous family. Unlike Wharton, who saw beauty and value in Italian art that was overlooked by those who had lived with it their entire life, Prudence sees in Assisi only ‘indecent old Antiquity’, which to her denotes ‘everything that was old and dirty’, wherever she looks and thus is completely indifferent to Assisi’s picturesque qualities.30 Blind to the beauties of the landscape and the noteworthy architectural features, such as the town’s church, she

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notices only dirt, garbage and unpleasant odours. An implied reason for her indifference to the Italian landscape is the unhappy legacy of her moment of susceptibility when she allowed herself to be swept away by the romantic gestures of her Italian suitor, a moment of susceptibility that led to a life of hardship. In this way, Woolson reveals the bias in aesthetic judgement: when she was still overwhelmed by romance, Italy appeared beautiful to Prudence, but after her disillusionment, she is left seeing it only as the unlovely symbol of her misery and homesickness. Feeling trapped by her responsibilities to her dead husband’s family and the ugliness of her existence, Prudence dreams of transforming the front of her house by removing an unsightly cow-shed and transforming it into a traditional, New England front yard. In her vision of loveliness, not only is the cow-shed removed, but everything that makes it typically Italian is replaced by a New England aesthetic: She saw as in a vision her front yard completed as she would like to have it: the cowshed gone; ‘a nice straight path going down to the front gate, set in a new paling fence; along the sides currant bushes; and in the open spaces to the right and left a big flowerin’ shrub – snowballs, or Missouri currant; near the house a clump of matrimony, perhaps; and in the flower beds on each side of the path bachelor’s buttons, Chiny-asters, lady’s slippers, and pinks; the edges bordered with box.’31

By importing a typically American front lawn, as well as flowers like China asters and bachelor’s buttons that she grew up with in her native New Hampshire, Prudence imagines transforming the foreign landscape that surrounds her adopted home into one that is recognizable and beautiful. Her vision of a New England front yard reflects the ways in which her homesickness creates an aesthetic that is based on what she is accustomed to. The yard that she imagines is neat, orderly and primarily decorative, as opposed to the disorderly, but functional, cow-shed. Although the currant bushes might bear some useful fruit, Prudence’s vision of order and familiarity lacks usefulness, and thus is dismissed by those around her who value the utilitarian. Ultimately, her idea of a decorative front yard is considered of little value to the rest of her family, and her inability to communicate the beauty of her vision echoes Arthur Symons’s lament that labourers would never understand the value of poetry with which I opened this chapter. Although Prudence spends her life in toil, and, thus, according to Symons, should be interested primarily in what is useful, in this case she values the purely ornamental. Not only is she unable to gain support within her family for her dream of a transformed front yard, she is actively hindered in her attempts by the selfishness of those around her. Because Prudence feels a responsibility towards her husband’s family, despite the fact that she has little affection for most of them, she is unable to refuse their repeated requests for her savings. In each case, the relatives

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assert that their own need is greater than hers and that her desires are unimportant. When she is unwilling to share her money, they either steal it or manipulate her into giving it to them, as when the uncle pretends that he is dying of a stroke because she refuses to pay his debts. In this way, Woolson emphasizes the ways in which a sense of responsibility to the family, even when the family members are neither blood relations nor loving towards her, leaves Prudence powerless to realize her aesthetic vision. Prudence’s vision is bound up in her American identity because it is the local Italians who cannot appreciate her desire to beautify her surroundings, and she desires to turn her home into the perfect American front yard. In the end, it is an American tourist who sympathizes with her and finances the transformation of her front yard, although even she is unable to understand Prudence’s lack of appreciation of the Italian view beyond the front lawn. As someone who is both a reader of John Addington Symonds’s work, most probably his history of the Italian Renaissance, and travelling with two other Americans sketching the Giotto frescoes in the church of St Francis, the American tourist has developed an appreciation of Italy unburdened by Prudence’s homesickness and sense of betrayal. Wealthy enough to re-landscape Prudence’s front yard and to provide an American nurse, the unnamed female tourist’s experience of Italy seems to be closer to that of Wharton than the frugal traveller that Prudence was when she first arrived, and thus the tourist’s experience and reaction to the country is less overdetermined by a sense of loss. When she first shows Prudence the yard, she believes that Prudence wanted the cow-shed removed in order to have a clearer view of the Italian landscape, and she is surprised to learn that it is the Americanstyle front yard alone that Prudence is interested in. As Prudence bluntly puts it, ‘The truth is, I don’t care much for these Eyetalian views; it seems to me a poor sort of country, and always did’.32 Wharton’s and Woolson’s work thus reveals that the ability to assert one’s tastes depends on a degree of cultural authority that is not universally available, a situation that skews the determination of what will be considered beautiful towards that which appeals to the tastes of those who have access and opportunity. For Wharton, however, the ethical dilemmas revolving around the creation of art are not limited to the authority implied by assuming the role of aesthetic connoisseur, or even to the problematics of commodifying real-life sources by incorporating them into a work of art, as discussed earlier: a darker aspect of the process of creating art emerges in Wharton’s short fiction when the creative act merges with an element of possessiveness. Wharton illustrates the element of possessiveness in the relationship between artist and subject in ‘The Moving Finger’ (1901), in which an artist paints a woman’s portrait that becomes a site of interpretive conflict that, ultimately, relates back to who owns both the image and the woman herself. In this story, both the artist and the model’s hus-

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band, Ralph Grancy, struggle over defining which version of Mrs Grancy not only is the true one, but is also the one that is uniquely theirs. The portrait of Mrs Grancy becomes a shifting signifier as the two men transform their vision of her to meet their ideal. Throughout the story, Grancy and the artist, Claydon, as well as the narrator, believe that they know what Mrs Grancy would have felt or would have wanted, but the story gives very little direct evidence of her feelings, which underscores the extent to which these three male characters are speaking for her through the portrait. When the portrait is first completed, the couple’s friends are amazed by the painting because of the artist’s skill in capturing exactly what the husband loved about his wife. Although some criticize the painting for flattering its subject too much, ‘Claydon, however, had not set out to paint their Mrs. Grancy – or ours even – but Ralph’s’.33 The Mrs Grancy of the painting is not a beautified version, but rather the woman exactly as she appears to her husband. The artist, who has captured the qualities in Mrs Grancy that Mr Grancy loves, consequently falls in love with the image that he has created, a motif that Emily Orlando has connected to the Pre-Raphaelite practice ‘in which female bodies are seduced or “enshrined” in art’, as illustrated in Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, written about her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his relationship to his model and lover Elizabeth Siddal.34 In the poem, Rossetti writes of the artist that ‘He feeds upon her face by day and night / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him … / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’.35 Just as Rossetti’s artist loves the image that he has created of his model more than he loves her as a person, Wharton’s Claydon is more in love with his image of Mrs Grancy than with the actual woman. One character tells another, ‘Claydon had been saved from falling in love with Mrs. Grancy only by falling in love with his picture of her’. However, for Claydon, the painting is the real Mrs Grancy, and when he goes to visit the couple, his attention is fixed on the portrait and, ‘averted from the real woman, would sit as it were listening to the picture’.36 In a crucial sense, the artist has captured his model on canvas for her husband, and the painting has extraordinary symbolic power for Grancy. By owning her image, he believes that he has found a means to hold onto her, even if she leaves him. As he tells her, ‘You’re my prisoner now – I shall never lose you. If you grew tired of me and left me you’d leave your real self there on the wall!’37 For Grancy, just as for the artist, the painting is, in an important sense, more real than the woman herself, especially since the portrait is both a tangible and immobile object. By painting her, the artist has transferred what her husband sees as her essential self onto canvas. In this way, the image of Mrs Grancy is a more secure possession than the living woman who cannot be fixed in place. The painted image is not, as it turns out, fixed in time; or, at least, her husband decides that he does not want it to be, and a struggle ensues after her death

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between the husband and the artist over the ‘real’ Mrs Grancy and how that reality should be reflected in the painting. Five years after his wife’s death, Grancy returns from abroad only to feel estranged from the image in the portrait because it reflects a woman who has not aged alongside him. Rather than preserving his feeling of companionship with his wife, the portrait has preserved her younger outward self and thus estranged her from her ageing husband. Longing for his wife, he realizes that, to him, ‘It’s the picture that is dead, and not my wife. To sit in this room is to keep watch beside a corpse.’ Imagining that his wife shares his idea and feels buried alive in the painting, he asks the artist to age the picture so that he will feel as though she is with him again. Thus, it is his wife as companion that he wants to preserve in the painting, not her beauty, and because of his longing for her companionship, he imagines that she desires what he desires. When he looks at the painting and imagines that ‘I could hear her beating against the painted walls and crying to me faintly for help’, he projects his own desires onto the image in the painting.38 The artist, on the other hand, sees a different Mrs Grancy in the painting, and thus is horrified at being asked to mutilate the image of perfection that he has created. He, too, believes that he has a superior understanding of the woman in the painting, such that the image is also able to communicate her desires to him. He, however, agrees to change the painting after deciding that the image has told him that ‘I’m not yours but his, and I want you to make me what he wishes’.39 Even though the image emphasizes that she belongs to her husband, the artist maintains a belief that he has a superior understanding of and connection to the image that he has created. His sense that he has a finer understanding of the woman comes through again when the husband, several years later, asks him to age the picture yet further. He again complies, but, because the artist feels that he understands the woman better than anyone else, he paints the woman’s face in such a way that it appears that she knows her husband is dying. Defending his actions to a friend, he asserts that ‘it was her face that told me he was dying, and that she wanted him to know it!’ This message from the dead Mrs Grancy to her husband is, ultimately, the catalyst for his death. Grancy leaves the painting to Claydon in his will, and the artist immediately repaints it so that it looks as it did originally. When the narrator confronts him on this, he replies, ‘How could I not? Doesn’t she belong to me now?’ (emphasis in original).40 Because he created and now owns the image of Mrs Grancy, the painter feels that she is his property. Both of these men believe that they own the image of Mrs Grancy, but that image has diametrically different meanings for them. For Grancy, the image reflects the companion with whom he shared his life, whereas Claydon, the aesthetic artist, sees in the painting a perfect image of beauty. The husband’s claim to ownership comes from the companionate relationship that they had when

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married, but Claydon’s feeling of ownership is an expression of proprietorship over an object of beauty. As he tells the narrator, ‘Pygmalian … turned his statue into a real woman; I turned my real woman into a picture. Small compensation, you think – but you don’t know how much a woman belongs to you after you’ve painted her!’41 In the artist’s mind, to have transformed a living person into an object of art confers a degree of ownership. To paint her perfectly – that is, to capture her beauty on canvas – means that he understands what he sees as her core self more deeply than anyone else possibly could, and that understanding makes her his in an essential sense. According to Claydon, this feeling of ownership transcends the bond between the husband and wife, and he asserts that he understands her better than her husband does because he understands her aesthetically: There was one side of her, though, that was mine alone, and that was her beauty; for no one else understood it. To Grancy even it was the mere expression of herself – what language is to thought. Even when he saw the picture he didn’t guess my secret – he was so sure she was all his! As though a man should think he owned the moon because it was reflected in the pool at his door –.42

Grancy’s notion of her beauty, then, is only a reflection of her personality, but the artist believes that he understands something more fundamental and intangible about her because he sees her beauty alone. That understanding confers a superior degree of ownership that Grancy is unable to understand, and thus to resent, because he is not aware of its existence. Though Grancy has the picture during his lifetime, like the man in whose pool the moon is reflected, he does not own Mrs Grancy in the same way that the artist, who can appreciate her beauty, believes that he does. Not only does the artist express a spirit of competition here in his denigration of Grancy’s understanding of his wife, but he also elevates aesthetic understanding of the woman above all else. The most important aspect of her, the artist suggests, is her beauty, and she is not given a direct voice in the narrative that would alter this impression. Mrs Grancy does not exist in her own right for either of these men but rather stands in as an extension of their desires, and that is why the struggle for definition and possession can take place over her image long after she has died. In ‘The Moving Finger’, having Mrs Grancy turned into a work of art is an act of love on the husband’s part, just as asking the artist to age the painting expresses his desperate wish to maintain contact with his dead wife. That act of love takes on an oppressive quality in Wharton’s ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ (1900), a story of a jealous husband who has his wife modelled by a famous sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). As in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, rather than an act of veneration, however, it is a vengeful and destructive act. In this story, which takes place in seventeenth-century Italy, Duke Ercole II, a reserved and scholarly

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man, marries a young, high-spirited woman whom he promptly ensconces in a solitary villa. The duke lives elsewhere and rarely visits his wife, and it is clear that their personalities are incompatible. Their incompatibility, however, does not prevent him from becoming enraged when he learns that his wife may be consorting with a lover whom she sneaks into the house through the crypt below the chapel. The jealous husband has a statue made of his wife and surprises her by appearing with it and insisting that it be immediately positioned directly over the entrance to the crypt, thus ensuring that the lover is trapped. Unsurprisingly, the duchess considers the statue of herself as an object of horror, rather than as a gesture of her husband’s love. After she dies that night (most probably from poison), the statue’s face changes into a look of ‘frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt and agony so possessed a human countenance.’43 As if by magic, the statue has changed to reflect the duchess’s horror at her husband’s action, and she thus, posthumously, rebels against the use of her image as a tool of revenge. The duke exercises physical control over her during her lifetime, but he is unable ultimately to control her image, and in this way his ownership of her is incomplete. Because the grotesque appearance of the statue prompts visitors to inquire as to its history, the story is perpetuated, albeit reluctantly, by a caretaker who claims to have heard the story directly from his grandmother. The duchess’s position as an object to be possessed through the statue is thus doubly reinforced: the duke attempts to assert his control over her by having the statue made and used as a tool of revenge, and the duchess’s story is subsequently a source of gain for the latter-day caretaker who is rewarded for divulging it. As I have shown throughout this chapter, Wharton highlights the ways in which the aesthetic and artistic stance asserts control over the objects that are appropriated through their gaze. Wharton’s emphasis on the impossibility of creating art without entangling oneself in an ethical dilemma comes into even clearer focus when read alongside the work of her British contemporary, Ella D’Arcy. D’Arcy, who was closely linked to the Yellow Book as both a frequent contributor and as an unofficial sub-editor, had an insider’s view of the aesthetic artist, especially in her editorial role, and this figure appears frequently in her fiction. Unlike Wharton, whose fiction often presents a sympathetic view of the artist in a way that highlights the dilemmas involved in creating art, D’Arcy reserves special scorn within her work for the male artist whose genius is inevitably parasitic. In ‘The Elegie’ (published in the Yellow Book in 1895 and republished that same year in Monochromes), D’Arcy traces the fictional history of a musical composition, ultimately emphasizing the tragic story out of which a great artist derived his musical inspiration. The story focuses on a talented, but poor, young composer, Schoenemann, who is determined to marry a count’s daughter. The count, unwilling to wed his daughter to a penniless man much lower on the social ladder, makes the composer promise to wait seven years and

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pursue his career first before returning to marry his daughter. The count is convinced that the composer will lose interest as he becomes absorbed in his work and his life in Paris, which is exactly what happens, even though the composer had been determined to remain devoted to his love, if only to spite the count. In the conversation between the count and the composer, the composer’s outrage at the count’s dismissal of his suit comes just as much from a sense of pride as from his romantic devotion. As D’Arcy presents the composer’s story, it is unsurprising that he has lost interest in the girl when he returns seven years later because this behaviour is part of a larger pattern in his life of using and discarding those around him. His careless attitude towards others helps make him successful, but it is also presented as an inherent flaw in his artistic personality. The narrator reveals that the composer has a habit of dropping his friends when he no longer derives benefit from the relationship: to the friend of the hour he was always passionately and exclusively attached. It is true, these intimacies were seldom of long duration … The moment that Schoenemann discovered that he had passed his friend intellectually, he deliberately threw him aside. He said, and with some show of reason, that friendship being an exchange of mutual benefit, directly one ceases to derive advantage from one’s friend, the friendship by that very reason is dissolved.44

Friendship, in this view, is a partnership whereby both parties contribute to the intellectual development of the other. Seeing friendship, and all of his relationships, in a purely utilitarian light has helped Schoenemann to focus on his work and to succeed, but it has lessened his ability to be genuinely attached to other people. Later in the story, when Schoenemann outlines in more detail his developing theory about friendship and human relationships, he describes his own transformation from seeking someone to love, someone whom he hopes to honour in music, to a more pragmatic attitude towards seeking emotional attachment and passion, which is valuable only in the ways that it gives him raw material for his compositions. As he puts it, when he was younger, I looked upon the whole of life merely as a preparation for love. Then it seemed to me that music itself was but a means of honouring the beloved one. Now I know that life and love too are but steps upward toward the attainment of the highest art, and the passion which seemed so beautiful in youth is only valuable for the deeper and wider emotions it enables us to express.45

In this philosophy, the composer combines both Walter Pater’s conclusion to The Renaissance, where he states that the art object is valuable because of the way that it allows the artist to ‘burn’, and Wilde’s assertion that the critic’s reaction to the object is the source of art.46 In Schoenemann’s case, he moved from valuing

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the original object of his love to considering it unimportant except in so far as it creates an emotional reaction that he can convey in his art. Just as he takes a utilitarian approach to valuing friendship and love in terms of how it will help him artistically, he seeks experiences that will serve him in the same manner. In this way, Schoenemann embodies the constant, deliberate seeker of copy that James derides in the preface to the New York edition of The Princess Casamassima when he contrasts his own approach to absorbing and noting what he sees and experiences to a ‘knocking’ at ‘closed doors’ and demanding ‘“authentic” information’.47 In James’s formulation, the first approach makes one’s art a reflection and amplification of experience, whereas the knocking-on-doors approach is a journalistic search for copy. He implies that the journalistic search is clumsier, and therefore leads to inferior art. In Schoenemann’s case, he stands somewhat between James’s two poles because he takes a deliberate approach to finding experiences that he might amplify. As a child, Schoenemann showed a ‘curiosity to probe sensations’, such as when he ‘persist[s], despite of gathering nausea’ in helping to slaughter a pig. Even though the experience sickens him, it has value because ‘the smoking blood, the shrieks of the victim, had worked upon his mind, and he had composed a little battle-song for piano and fiddle to commemorate the impression’.48 D’Arcy’s evocative language describing the pig’s ‘shrieks’ and the ‘smoking blood’ emphasize the horror of the scene, which for Schoenemann is ultimately little more than an ‘impression’ to be worked into a ‘battle-song’. Experiences, in Schoenemann’s view, are valuable primarily for their potential to be translated into art, and the pig’s agony is useful because it can be translated into music. D’Arcy presents the ultimate moment of emotional dislocation and artistic opportunism at the end of the story when the composer returns home to fulfil his promise to marry. In this episode, Schoenemann’s search for experiences culminates in a valuable piece of copy that he immediately weaves into a new masterpiece. Upon returning home, he discovers that the girl is engaged to somebody else, and his disinterest is replaced by both relief and outrage, the latter of which he intends to vent at the first opportunity. Storming into the castle to confront his former beloved, he, instead, finds the girl dead, and is overwhelmed by an emotional reaction ‘of unexpected thrillingness’. The count views Schoenemann’s intense reaction as proof that he indeed cared deeply for the girl, but Schoenemann’s silence primarily reflects his fear that he will lose the emotional moment before he can translate it on paper. He runs home, interested only in the ‘torrent of music flowing within him … His brain was on fire with the excitement, his soul filled with the fierce joy which only the artist knows, and he in the moments of creation alone’. Consumed by the ‘fierce joy’ of creation, he immediately translates that emotion into a new composition. After composing the piece, he ‘threw himself back in his chair with a smile of supreme content-

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ment … happy, knowing that the work he had just completed was very good’.49 The dead girl is, apparently, forgotten, and the composer is perfectly content with his work. The story as a whole is the tale of how this one piece came to be composed, and the girl is, in the end, only important in so far as she inspires the composer to create. She inspires the right emotion in him for greatness, and she can then be forgotten. The final image of the composer drawing on his reaction to his beloved’s death as a source of artistic inspiration is the culmination within the story of this artist’s constant search for experiences that will provide material for his compositions. Ultimately, the story both condemns the artist’s egotism and celebrates his artistic genius. His interest in the young girl’s death is reduced to her usefulness as source material for one of his greatest compositions, and this makes him a less sympathetic character, but it is also the personality trait that makes him a powerful musician. His musical interpretation, or elegy (as the title suggests), focuses entirely on his reaction to her death, and thus is an embodiment of Pater’s ideas. In this way, D’Arcy’s story underscores one of the dilemmas that Wharton’s work poses: can one create art without speaking for the subject and without appropriating that subject? I would argue that Wharton further muddies the ‘problem’ of the aesthetic gaze by asserting that the process of creating art nevertheless must involve these appropriative and interpretive moves because art is an act of illumination and revelation. Above all, creating art requires an act of interpretation that is inherently hierarchical because the artist assumes the authority to control how the subject is presented, whether or not that presentation agrees with the subject’s own view. As Wharton shows throughout her early short fiction, she saw the creation of fine art as an interpretive process through which gifted artists inevitably reveal considerable insight into their subjects. This view of great art as an interpretive act comes through most fully in ‘The Portrait’, published in The Greater Inclination in 1899. The story begins with a discussion of two competing theories of portraiture. Referring to a successful painter, George Lillo, whose works are currently on exhibit, ‘a pretty woman’ declares that ‘Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!’ because he typically shows his subjects in an unflattering light. Another portraitist explains that Lillo ‘has been denied the gift – so precious to an artist – of perceiving the ideal’. On the contrary, declares their hostess, Lillo’s genius comes from his ability to put aside flattery and uncover the depths of his sitter’s character. In other words, his paintings are powerful precisely because he looks beyond a sitter’s pose to reveal his or her true character. This skill allows him greater depth and insight in his portraits: ‘Your other painters do the surface – he does the depths; they paint the ripples on the pond, he drags the bottom’.50 By this definition, delving into the depths of his subjects’ character makes for greater art, even if it upsets or

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disturbs those who want to be flattered by their portraitist or who feel that their secrets have been revealed. In this way, artistic creation often mirrors Freudian psychoanalysis as the subjects under observation are believed to reveal aspects of themselves that are only legible to the analyst. That one may unwittingly reveal oneself to the artist creates the potential for an anxious power struggle between artist and subject. As the hostess declares, ‘My advice is, don’t let George Lillo paint you if you don’t want to be found out – or to find yourself out’.51 Although such art may be disturbing to those who see themselves reflected unfavourably in it, Wharton implies, it is superior to the superficial flattery that characterizes much society portraiture. This sense that artists demonstrate a superior interpretive ability that surpasses one’s ability to know oneself places Wharton squarely within a gendered debate in late nineteenth-century fiction. Whereas the model in Sarah Grand’s story ‘The Undefinable’ exhorts her artist to work harder to understand his subject, writers like Mabel Wotton questioned the idea that the artist can have a better understanding of the female subject than the subject him or herself. As I have laid out the theories of aesthetes such as James and Wilde, the artist’s construction or interpretation of the material world is paramount in creating art. As Wilde asserts in ‘The Critic as Artist’, creating art is inseparable from the critical act of interpreting or commenting on raw material, whether that raw material is another work of art or an aspect of everyday life. Art is created through the inspired representation and interpretation of what may otherwise appear to be ordinary and go unnoticed. Despite notions of ‘art for art’s sake’, the aesthete recognizes the impossibility, and in fact undesirability, of fully divorcing art from the material world. Wharton, in large part, agrees with this theory, although she also wrestles with its ethical implications. In her undated and unpublished essay, ‘Fiction and Criticism’, Wharton echoes many of the aesthetes’ views on interpretation as art. As she writes, regardless of the subject that an artist has chosen, ‘a story is of value in proportion to the quality of the author’s perceptions (given, of course, the power of putting them into artistic shape)’. She further asserts that ‘the immoral (or at least the harmful) novelist is he who handles a sombre or complex subject without sufficient power to vivify its raw material’.52 In many ways, Wharton here echoes the aesthetes’ view that the core of artistic creation comes from interpretation, which reveals a superior refinement and discrimination. Wharton reserves special ridicule for those who meticulously copy what is before them without putting the details within a moral or interpretive framework. In The Writing of Fiction (1925) she dismisses the artistry of the French realists whose slices of life she sees as giving an ‘exact photographic reproduction of a situation or episode, with all its sounds, smells, aspects realistically rendered, but with its deeper relevance and its suggestions of a larger whole either uncon-

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sciously missed or purposely left out’.53 She equally dismisses the Modernist stream-of-consciousness technique, which she sees as differ[ing] from the slice of life in noting mental as well as visual reactions, but resembles it in setting them down just as they come, with a deliberate disregard of their relevance in the particular case, or rather with the assumption that their very unsorted abundance constitutes in itself the author’s subject.54

Just as in Wilde’s and James’s essays, Wharton stresses the significance of the artist’s interpretation of the object. In her theory of artistic creation, Wharton emphasizes in equal measure the artist’s ability to penetrate the surface, to see what is valuable and might be overlooked. This idea grants considerable value to the object under observation because the emphasis is not on how one reacts to the object, but rather how well one is able to see its quality and capture that quality in another medium. As Wharton writes in ‘Fiction and Criticism’, The ultimate value of every work of art lies, not in its subject, but in the way in which that subject is seen, felt and interpreted. The writer’s temperament, his point of view, his faculty for penetrating below the surface … these are the determining factors in the creation of a work of art.55

In these lines, Wharton sounds very much like Wilde in his formulation of aesthetic response as artistic creation. According to Wharton, one need not seek out noble subjects for art, but must rather have the insight to comprehend the artistic ‘value’ of the subject. Only by looking beneath the surface can one create great art, and reading below the surface potentially puts one in conflict with the subject’s self-presentation. As Wharton presents it in both her fiction and her criticism, the artist’s job is always to interpret, and both the act of presentation and the act of interpretation can have ethical implications. Whereas William Dean Howells wrote in Criticism and Fiction (1892) that ‘good art … is never anything but the reflection of life’,56 Wharton, like the other women in this study, suggests that the true artist moves beyond reflecting what he or she sees by interpreting the subject while representing it in another medium. As she writes in the chapter of The Writing of Fiction on ‘Telling a Short Story’: It has been often, and inaccurately, said that the mind of a creative artist is a mirror, and the work of art the reflection of life in it. The mirror, indeed, is the artist’s mind, with all his experiences reflected in it; but the work of art, from the smallest to the greatest, should be something projected, not reflected, something on which his mirrored experiences, at the right conjunction of the stars, are to be turned for its full illumination.57

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The artist’s goal, then, is not to provide an accurate reflection of life, but rather to imbue his or her depiction of life with the artist’s understanding and experiences. Art is an act of projection rather than reflection. In ‘The Portrait’, the action of the story revolves around the artist’s attempt to paint a corrupt New York political boss. Eager to prove himself as an artist, he finds in the boss a perfect subject for interpretation, and he feels that he understands him. He recognizes that the boss is not evil in a spectacular way, but rather ‘vulgar to the core; vulgar in spite of his force and magnitude; thin, hollow, spectacular; a lath and plaster bogey –’.58 The critic Barry Maine has argued that the artist in ‘The Portrait’ is based on John Singer Sargent, whose fame coincided with the story’s publication. Maine points out that Sargent, much like James in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), advised art students to ‘cultivate an ever continuous power of observation’.59 Portraiture, as Maine points out, represents a negotiation between the artist and the sitter in which the artist expresses his or her interpretation of the sitter’s pose. Maine sees Wharton’s echoing of Sargent’s career as significant because his work is read ‘not as photographic records of the subjects he painted’, but rather as complex psychological portraits.60 The artist’s instinct to reveal the man for what he really is, however, struggles with an equal desire to keep that knowledge from the man’s daughter, who believes in her father’s innocence and integrity. As a result, the artist, Lillo, finds himself unable to paint a damning portrait of his subject because he knows that the girl would be destroyed by seeing that aspect of her father’s character revealed. In this case, Lillo attempts to soften the portrait, and thus betrays his artistic instinct, and, consequently, the painting is a failure, as he and everyone else who sees it recognizes. The public is doubly disappointed in his failure to capture a widely vilified figure, especially when all of his other work shows an unsentimental sharpness in the way that it penetrates character. In this figure of an artist, Wharton suggests both that the artist must have insight into his subjects (whether or not those subjects would agree with the artist’s rendering of their true selves) and that to sacrifice that insight is to weaken the work as a whole. Through Lillo’s discomfort with revealing the crime boss’s real self and the failure of the work that emerges from his act of self-censorship, Wharton points to, but refuses to resolve, the aesthetic paradox that her work presents.

4 THE AESTHETICS OF OWNERSHIP IN WOMEN’S STORIES

Throughout this study, I have argued that American and British women writers used the image of a rebellious muse in their short fiction to push back against an aesthetic stance that focused on the artist’s or critic’s reactions and elevated those reactions to works of art. In their fiction, these late nineteenth-century women writers fashioned female characters who resisted attempts by aesthetic males to use them as raw material to be incorporated into a work of art without the authority to speak for themselves. The rebellious muses in my study have, by and large, refused to be passive objects of beauty and have, instead, agitated for a stake in controlling how they are represented in images. The trope of rebellious female muses, and the questions the stories about them raise about the relationship between artists and their raw material, points to a debate about how art is and should be created. As I have argued throughout, short fiction was a particularly supple form in which to stage these moments of rebellion, primarily because the form allowed women writers to focus in on particular moments of conflict without having to follow the generic conventions of the novel, including the requisite happy or tragic ending. Furthermore, although the short story had been a popular genre throughout the century, the loosening of the stranglehold of libraries like Mudie’s in Great Britain and the explosion of magazines devoted to short fiction on both sides of the Atlantic made the short story a particularly modern and marketable genre in which to re-imagine traditional narratives about women’s lives. Within the short fiction that I have focused on, the debate over creating art takes a specifically gendered form that reflects the burgeoning late nineteenth-century debate over women’s equality. In this last chapter, I will tie together my discussion of the ways in which women wrote about art and aestheticism by looking at what is at stake in these stories. As I will argue here, the attempt by female protagonists to wrest authority from the aesthete is linked to a related struggle over narrative control. In other words, the desire to control one’s image is analogous to the desire to control the narrative about oneself. How one is presented artistically is inseparable from having control over the discourse. I will make this link explicit by exam– 93 –

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ining Ella D’Arcy’s ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’ and Ada Leverson’s ‘Suggestion’, two stories that deal directly with the issue of the aesthete controlling the discourse. The work of art being created in both these stories is not an image on a canvas or a literary text, but rather a woman’s life. In order to underscore what is at stake in this struggle for control, I will conclude by examining Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘A Church Mouse’ (1889), a text that is neither about art nor about aesthetes, but that is nevertheless about a rebellious female protagonist who refuses to be silenced. As this story makes clear, the impulse to silence the female protagonist and ignore her point of view has disastrous consequences for the impoverished and disempowered main character, and it is only when she recaptures the narrative – or, to use the language of this volume, when she becomes a rebellious muse who refuses to collude in the convenient narrative that others have invented for her – that she achieves real security and autonomy. As these three stories show, the need to control the narrative has immediate, concrete consequences for the female characters whose stories are co-opted by the male authority figures in their lives. Ella D’Arcy’s short story ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’, first published in the Yellow Book in 1895 and then republished that same year in Monochromes, draws a direct connection between aesthetic mastery, or connoisseurship, and a female protagonist’s ability to control her own narrative. D’Arcy, who trained as an artist before becoming a writer, was a central figure in the aesthetic movement; not only did she serve as unofficial sub-editor of the Yellow Book, but her fiction appeared in almost every issue and all three of her books were issued by the Yellow Book’s publisher and creator of the Keynotes series, John Lane. ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’ features D’Arcy’s most explicit portrayal of the aesthetic stance towards women, and it is also a rewriting of Henry James’s 1879 story ‘Daisy Miller’. In D’Arcy’s story, a young American girl named Lulie Thayer who is travelling in Germany struggles to present her own version of her character against an aesthete’s reading of her as a flirt and adventuress. The story is told from the point of view of a young English man, Campbell, who believes that he has made an aesthetic discovery when he meets and is attracted to Lulie. In the tradition of the aesthetic connoisseur, he congratulates himself for his discernment in discovering her: It seemed to him that he was the discoverer of her possibilities. He did not doubt that the rest of the world called her plain; or at least odd-looking … Her charm was something subtle, out-of-the-common, in defiance of all known rules of beauty. Campbell saw superiority in himself for recognizing it, for formulating it; and he was not displeased to be aware that it would always remain caviare to the multitude.1

Believing that the rest of the world would be unable to recognize her unusual beauty, he sees himself as not only ‘recognizing’ it, but ‘formulating’ it as well,

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as though he had invented her beauty. He thus wholly takes credit for Lulie’s good looks, which he describes as a delicacy (‘caviare’) that would only appeal to a select few. However, Campbell is unable to maintain his sense of superior discrimination when he confides his discovery to his friend Mayne, another aesthete, who immediately destroys his fantasy by declaring that Lulie’s beauty is obvious. While her beauty may be obvious, and thus common, however, Mayne asserts that her true identity as a jaded flirt, rather than an ingénue, is obvious only to those, like him, with superior insight. Instead of a connoisseur of beauty, Mayne sets himself up as a connoisseur of character, a stance that outranks Campbell’s fleeting authority.2 And, rather than discerning beauty in what would seem ugly to others, Mayne’s expertise lies in his ability to ferret out character flaws in a person who might otherwise appear beautiful and pure. Aesthetic connoisseurship here is used to uncover decadence, and Mayne declares that his position as a worldly outsider who is not romantically interested in Lulie gives him superior insight. For him, his authority comes not from making a new discovery, but from recognizing that she is part of an old and established pattern. Lulie’s candour and adventurousness, which seemed unconventional and a little mysterious to Campbell, are, according to Mayne, only a new version of an old theme: she’s ‘an adventuress, but an end-of-the-century one. She doesn’t travel for profit, but for pleasure.’3 In this reading, seeking out new experiences becomes a damning activity for a young girl who is accompanied in her travels only by another woman, rather than a considerably older and more respectable chaperone. Listening to Mayne’s condemnation of her, Campbell finds that ‘his impressions of the girl were readjusting themselves completely’.4 As Sally Ledger has pointed out, ‘Positioning Thayer as existing as a beautiful object only when mediated through the aestheticizing connoisseur’s gaze, Campbell recoils from her when she takes on an all-too-physical life of her own as a romantic adventurer’.5 When she is no longer an undiscovered (in both the literal and figurative sense) aesthetic object, Campbell finds her sexuality repulsive and declares that ‘she’s a wanton’.6 Some contemporary readers also condemned Lulie for allowing multiple men to kiss her, as D’Arcy points out in a letter to John Lane on 20 August [1895]. Referring to a review in the Speaker, ‘in which my poor Lulie is spoken of as “this shameless hussy”!’, she asks sarcastically, ‘Do tell me what acidulated, maiden-lady, does the reviewing for the Speaker?’7 This line suggests that D’Arcy did not condemn her protagonist and that she saw the fastidious Campbell, as well as Mayne, in the roles of ‘acidulated, maiden-lad[ies]’ because of their puritanical attitude towards Lulie. Lulie’s sexuality is not only the target of both men’s disdain, however, but also a source of attraction for them. Both men spend considerable time together analysing her as a sexual object: Campbell’s interest in her is inseparable from his romantic interest, and, although Mayne

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declares that he is not susceptible to her attractions, he has assiduously tracked her romantic exploits. Like Daisy Miller, part of Lulie’s indeterminacy, at least for Campbell, comes from her American identity, and he admits that ‘he had no standards for American conduct’.8 Mayne, once again, is quick to slot her into a category and declare that her American identity is no barrier to her legibility for him: can it be that she is simply the newest development of the New Woman – she who in England preaches and bores you, and in America practices and pleases? Yes, I believe she’s the American edition, and so new that she hasn’t yet found her way into fiction.9

In this way, she becomes both a common entity and a new discovery by Mayne who is the first to identify the category that she fits into. D’Arcy sparked controversy, especially among readers in the United States, with her version of an American girl who is so innocent that she does not realize that she has lost her innocence. Referring to the story in a letter of 5 April [1895] to John Lane, D’Arcy writes, ‘I wonder if it will be appreciated by the Amur’cans? Should they tell you that no young Amur’can girl ever behaved like Lulie Thayer, refer them to Mr. Le Gallienne, and his Paris experiences’.10 Although it is unclear which ‘Paris experiences’ D’Arcy refers to here, in Richard Le Gallienne’s semi-autobiographical 1896 novel The Quest of the Golden Girl, he describes a similar scenario in which an outwardly sweet American girl’s appearance is belied by her ‘fast’ behaviour.11 The recurrence in this period of the fictional motif of encounters between aesthetes and inscrutable American girls travelling abroad points to two key themes: first, that the unreadable, beautiful American girl presents a site for potential interpretation and illumination by an aesthete; and, second, that romantic inscrutability creates an anxious instability for an aesthetic observer who does not know whether or not he has become an object of romantic conquest himself. While Campbell struggles against his attraction to Lulie in order to maintain his aloofness in light of his friend’s damning characterization, and Mayne never misses an opportunity to dredge up anecdotes of her previous flirtations, neither of them puts much credence in Lulie’s own report of herself. She insists that her past is unimportant and that it does not affect her feelings towards Campbell: I’ve always known a lot of young fellows who’ve liked to take me round; and no one ever objected to my going with them, and so I went. And I enjoyed it, and there wasn’t any harm in it, just kissing and making believe, and nonsense. But I never really cared for one of them – I can see that now, when I compare them with you12

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As Lulie puts it, she understands that her previous flirtations were frivolous only in light of her current feelings for Campbell. Her experience with other men, therefore, is valuable because it allows her to recognize the strength of her current feelings. Whereas Mayne has read all of her interactions with men as evidence that she is impure, she asserts that kissing and flirting are harmless. Furthermore, she argues that she should not be criticized for having felt differently in the past, as she had been convinced of the sincerity of her feelings at the time and could not know that her mind would change. As she tells him, after all, surely, mistakes of that sort are not to be counted against us? I did really think I was in love with Mr. March [a previous suitor] … And how could I know I should love you before I had met you? And how can I help loving you now I have?13

Lulie argues that she should not be condemned for having believed that she was in love in the past, especially when she had no way of knowing that her feelings would change. In her reading of her behaviour, she should be condemned neither for having loved someone else in the past nor for loving Campbell in the present because in both instances she is sincere. Much of the action of the rest of the story involves a struggle between Lulie and Mayne to determine whether Campbell will interpret her advances as genuine or predatory. Having accepted Mayne’s reading, Campbell struggles against his attraction to Lulie and his inclination to believe her and, instead, continues to consider her a fallen woman. Lulie is unable to convince him otherwise, primarily because Mayne steps in with a new damning anecdote whenever Campbell appears to waver: And yet, had it not been for Mayne, Miss Thayer might have triumphed after all; might have convinced Campbell of her passion, or have added another victim to her long list. But Mayne had set himself as determinedly to spoil her game, as she was bent on winning it. He had always the cynical word, the apt reminiscence ready, whenever he saw signs on Campbell’s part of surrender … He did not wish him to fall a prey to the wiles of this little American siren.14

The language here of a game to be won belies the seriousness for both ‘players’. In the end, Lulie commits suicide in a dramatic attempt to prove her sincerity. In the lead-up to this act, Campbell declares that if she really loved him and understood how ‘pure’ love should be she would kill herself. In response, she asks, ‘And suppose I were to … would you believe me then?’ When Campbell grudgingly replies that, ‘Oh … well … then, perhaps! If you showed sufficient decency to kill yourself, perhaps I might’, she immediately lifts a small pistol to her heart, pulls the trigger, and dies. One might read this action as proof of her sincerity, as well as a statement of the intensity of her desire to be believed. However, even this act is discounted, and the story ends with Mayne’s dismissal of her as ‘the most

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consummate little actress I ever met’.15 Thus, the story ends with the aesthete’s interpretation, which entirely discounts Lulie’s own account. The power struggle in this story over defining Lulie’s character suggests how aesthetic authority can be a way of dominating the narrative. For Mayne, whether Lulie is a flirt or a naive young girl is a question of the power of interpretation, and what happens to her is insignificant. To him, her death, while unfortunate, offers a further opportunity for asserting his interpretive authority. Through the tale’s sudden and dramatic ending, and the aesthete’s indifferent attitude towards it, D’Arcy underscores a potentially destructive aspect to the aesthetic one-upmanship that uses women as objects of interpretation that gain significance primarily because they present an opportunity for the aesthete to exercise his genius. The story’s final moments reveal a sinister layer to the aesthete’s need to control the narrative: by refusing to allow Lulie to control how she is depicted, Mayne colludes in destroying her. Thus, D’Arcy presents an image of the aesthete as a destructive figure as he asserts a dominating authority over what he defines and evaluates. While Mayne considers the question of Lulie’s character in terms of authority and aesthetic superiority, for Lulie the desire to control her own narrative is, literally, a matter of life and death. A less dramatic, but nevertheless damning, illustration of the connection between aesthetic expertise and narrative control appears in Ada Leverson’s short story, ‘Suggestion’, first published in the Yellow Book in 1895. Leverson’s story focuses on the subtle ways that a power play over narrative can have a direct and damaging effect on those who cannot assert control over the story. Leverson was a central figure in the aesthetic movement, primarily because of her close friendship with Oscar Wilde and the literary gatherings that she hosted. When Wilde was released after his first trial, she showed her friendship by giving him shelter in her home. However, she was not uncritical of the Wildean dandy figure, and in ‘Suggestion’ she too offers a view of the male aesthete, and aestheticism in general, as seeing the world around it as material to be moulded into works of art. In this case, the work of art is a series of elaborate schemes designed to further the male aesthete protagonist’s self-interest and score points off characters who have not, in his mind, paid appropriate homage to his genius. In the course of critiquing the aesthete’s attitude towards the people who are affected by his plans, Leverson aims an equally powerful critique at a social and economic system that leaves women unprepared for matrimony and with few options for escaping unhappy marriages. Although Leverson, like so many women from the period, would not have identified herself as a New Woman, in this story her critique of the aesthete’s manipulation of real people is bound up in the New Woman critique of marriage. In this witty story, Cecil Carington, a Wildean dandy figure, triumphantly narrates his recent adventures in matchmaking, all the time inviting the reader

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to delight in the neatness of his machinations. While Ledger has pointed to the main character’s coded homosexuality, I would also underscore the ways in which he manipulates heterosexual romantic norms in order to dominate his household.16 Cecil brings his ‘lovers’ together not out of a desire for romance or out of a sense of the fitness of particular pairings, but rather as a means for maintaining emotional and narrative control over their lives, as well as his own. He dominates the scene by maintaining control over the narrative, and he succeeds in influencing how characters within the story perceive one another by insinuating alternative readings of their actions. In other words, he re-scripts scenes by staging readings that lead his ‘audience’ to misinterpret what it sees and hears. The story’s action is launched by a threat to Cecil’s control over his household. His mother dead and his father distracted by his own affairs, he has assumed the role of both patriarch and matriarch in the Carington household, and he has grown accustomed to controlling his own life. When his father appears on the brink of marrying Lady Winthrop, a domineering and efficient woman, Cecil recognizes that she poses a significant threat to his ability to manipulate his father and manage his own affairs. Deciding that it would be preferable to have a more malleable stepmother, Cecil sets out to displace Lady Winthrop and begins by arranging a dinner party, ostensibly organized by the elder Mr Carington. Cecil directs the scene by establishing the narrative and instructing his sister, Marjorie, to invite Lady Winthrop casually at the last minute in order to ensure that she will arrive late and underdressed. As he describes his coup at the dinner party, he gloats over his unseen role in arranging to humiliate Lady Winthrop: Through a mistake of Marjorie’s (my idea) Lady Winthrop did not receive her invitation till the very last minute. Of course she accepted – we knew she would – but unknowing that it was a dinner party, she came without putting on evening dress. Nothing could be more trying to the average woman than such a contretemps17 (emphasis in original)

Cecil has the advantage in this scene because he knows that the ‘highly suitable and altogether unsupportable’ Lady Winthrop is ‘not one to rise sublimely and laughing above the situation’. Her obvious discomfiture makes her look foolish, and, as expected, she is ‘in a vile temper, displaying herself, mentally and physically, to the utmost disadvantage’.18 Cecil’s version of the scene takes precedence because Lady Winthrop never has a chance to recapture the discourse and explain Cecil’s treachery. Just as Cecil had hoped, Lady Winthrop appears ridiculous and ill-tempered, while the young and docile Laura Edgeworth, Cecil’s choice for a stepmother, sits quietly by his father, a striking contrast of serenity and beauty. Not only does Cecil alter how the assembled guests view Lady Winthrop in this scene, he has earlier begun transforming how his father appears to Laura. Cecil convinces Laura to imagine herself in love with his father by downplay-

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ing his ill-temper and presenting him as a sensitive and caring man. Knowing that the inexperienced and naively romantic young woman will be easily fooled into believing that Mr Carington would make the ideal husband, Cecil uses a cloak of anonymity to woo her in his father’s stead. He first sends her orchids, his father’s favourite flower, with no accompanying card. Because Cecil, the only one who knows the truth, remains silent, Laura misreads the gift as a love offering. Cecil delights in the perfection of his duplicity and gloats that ‘I had sent Laura the orchids, anonymously; I could not help it if she chose to think they were from my father’ (emphasis in original). Next, he gives her a book of Verlaine’s poetry, ostensibly found in his father’s study, which Cecil has ‘turned down at her favourite page’.19 In these ways, Cecil primes Laura to believe that Mr Carington is sensitive, poetic and, what is most important, in love with her before she even arrives at the dinner party. Cecil further ensures the match by convincing his father that Laura is already in love with him, which the egotistical Mr Carington is entirely ready to believe. As a result of Cecil’s machinations, Laura and Mr Carington find themselves married within a short period of time, though they neither like nor respect each other. Unsurprisingly, their marriage soon breaks down, due largely to Mr Carington’s infidelity. Cecil’s delight in the beauty and perfection of his aesthetic prowess in arranging this pairing contrasts with the tangible unhappiness of the other characters whose fortunes have been adjusted to fit his scheme. By focusing on Cecil’s thorough enjoyment of his career as an unscrupulous matchmaker, and how Laura is thus trapped in an unhappy marriage to an ‘irritating, ill-tempered, absent-minded person’,20 Leverson dramatizes the destructive side of the solipsistic dandy who regards other people as an extension of his own desires and amusement. Cecil sees himself as an artist, and the matches he arranges are his masterpieces; consequently, he uses the men and women around him as decorations that complete his idea of romantic perfection. However, although Cecil directs attention to his cleverness, such as when he informs the reader in an aside that the misleading invitation to Lady Winthrop was ‘my idea’, Leverson also presents the unhappy aftermath of his malicious plotting. Unlike many of the rebellious female characters in this study, Laura remains passive and does not oppose Cecil’s plans despite her unhappiness. This nonaction on her part allows the narrative to focus on Cecil’s machinations, their aftermath and his delight. The non-domestic, passive Laura is neither a rebellious feminist heroine nor the Victorian ideal of the angel in the house. Regardless of the provocation, Cecil tells us, she will not initiate a confrontation by rebuking her husband because she has a ‘dislike to physical exertion, and never takes any exercise except waving her hair’. When Mr Carington blames her because the housekeeping strikes him as inadequate, according to Cecil, ‘Laura bears the rebukes like an angel; indeed, rather than take the slightest practical trouble

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she would prefer to listen to the strongest language in my father’s vocabulary’.21 In this off-hand comment meant to emphasize Laura’s laziness, Cecil paints an uncomfortable image of Mr Carington berating his young wife for what he sees as inadequate housekeeping as she passively accepts his abuse. Her unwillingness to stand up for herself does not lessen the reality that she is trapped within a verbally abusive marriage that Cecil arranged for his amusement and convenience. Leverson could relate to the horror of an unhappy marriage entered into hastily. She married Ernest Leverson against her parents’ wishes at age nineteen in order, according to Julie Speedie, to escape her oppressive father. Leverson, like Laura, quickly discovered herself caught in an equally oppressive situation with few realistic hopes of escape. While Ernest was not abusive, he and Ada shared few interests, except gambling, and ‘[a]n active intellectual life became for her one of the chief compensations for an unhappy marriage’. Even after discovering that Ernest had an illegitimate daughter from a previous affair, Leverson refused to consider divorce because she was unwilling to defy society’s unwritten rules and, according to Speedie, ‘had a horror of scandal’.22 This unwillingness to create a scandal meant that she had few options except increased estrangement. Cecil’s description of Laura’s passive indifference towards her husband’s rebukes, along with the elder Mr Carington’s quick return to his philandering lifestyle, suggests a similar level of estrangement. Recognizing Laura’s unhappiness in the marriage, Cecil continues to control the narrative, in part to assuage his conscience. Declaring that he feels slight ‘pangs of remorse’, Cecil tells Marjorie, with characteristic understatement, that ‘I fear [Laura] has had a disillusion’.23 To distract Laura from her troubles, and knowing that she has no means of escape, he decides to continue directing her romantic life by providing her with a diversion in the form of fellow aesthete and artist Adrian Grant, whom he encourages to seduce her. It is perhaps unsurprising that Cecil’s solution to Laura’s marital unhappiness is a romantic attachment to another aesthete, and, in making his plans to improve her situation, Cecil once again discounts Laura’s agency. Rather than suggesting the affair to her, he effectively offers her directly to Grant by presenting her as the ideal mate for a sensitive artistic personality. In this way, he again appropriates the narrative in order to encourage Adrian to pursue the unsuspecting Laura. Adrian has already expressed interest in Laura, so Cecil need not create romantic desire out of thin air as he had to do with Laura and his father. In fact, Cecil and Grant are complicit in plotting to entrap Laura. Together they consider their strategy, and Cecil explains that ‘she is one of those who must be appealed to, at first, by her imagination’. At Cecil’s direction, Adrian will dress as Tristan at an upcoming fancy dress ball, a costume that will appeal to Laura’s romantic sensibility, and Cecil will again remain silent, thus ensuring that Laura will be seduced. Cecil

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will thus provide an erotic distraction for his stepmother, who, as he says with gleeful understatement, ‘is not happy with [my] father’.24 As William Harrison has recently pointed out, ‘Cissy is “Suggestion”’s dowager match-maker’, a role which ‘paradoxically situated him at institutional masculinity’s center’. Invoking Luce Irigaray, Harrison argues that Cecil embodies the traditional, dominant male within a masculine economy that employs women as ‘commodities’ of exchange among men.25 By giving Laura to Grant, Cecil cements his own relationship with the artist and ensures that he, effectively, remains unattached because it is unlikely that Laura would ever be free to marry again. Although Grant is attracted to Laura, Cecil’s machinations have, yet again, more to do with his own self-interest than anyone else’s, and there is a possibility that he, too, is attracted to Grant, whom he describes as ‘a delightful creature, tall and graceful and beautiful, and altogether most interesting’.26 Laura, on the other hand, appears uninterested in Grant, which is why the two men must conspire to find a way to appeal to her. A love affair, according to Cecil, is the only means of consoling Laura for her unhappy marriage. Late nineteenth-century feminists such as Mona Caird and Julia Hawksley pointed out that women like Laura were at a double disadvantage in marriage because, while they were kept ignorant of social realities and their future husbands’ true character, they were asked at a young age to make a choice that bound them permanently to a man who was, in many important ways, a stranger to them. Further, they had been given little education that would prepare them for marriage, sexually or otherwise.27 Cecil’s campaign to convince Laura to marry his father by misinforming her about his true nature mirrors the ways in which young girls were uninformed about sexuality before marriage in the Victorian period. Furthermore, the potential groom was rarely subjected to the same scrutiny in terms of character as future brides. Although they are both equally unhappy in the marriage, Mr Carington and Laura do not have equal choices for dealing with their misery. As Harrison points out, Victorian social law and custom tacitly allowed Mr Carington simply to ignore his wife and continue leading his old life as a bachelor, including returning to his former lover.28 However, Laura has few avenues of escape because she is economically, socially and legally dependent upon her husband. This disequilibrium underscores the late Victorian woman’s vulnerability, and thus echoes the New Woman’s cry for gender equity in marriage. As Mona Caird argues in her essay ‘Marriage’ (1888), in an ideal world women would not be dependent upon their husbands: ‘The economical independence of woman is the first condition of free marriage. She ought not to be tempted to marry, or to remain married, for the sake of bread and butter’.29 In Cecil’s arrangement, Laura will not only remain trapped in her unhappy marriage, but will also be an equally guilty party – thus rendering her vulnerable later if her husband decides to sue for divorce. Under late nineteenth-

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century British law, Laura would be considered far more culpable than her husband. If he chose, Mr Carington could divorce her on the grounds of infidelity, although if she wanted to initiate a divorce a court of law would require her to prove both her husband’s infidelity and extreme cruelty. Cecil’s account of his father’s pettiness (if we are to believe Cecil) suggests that he would be motivated to exact vengeance if he discovered that his wife had ‘betrayed’ him. Furthermore, while late Victorian society might turn a blind eye to a gentleman having an affair, it would condemn a wife who was unfaithful to her husband. If Laura has as great a horror of a scandal as Leverson, she would suffer equally from the social ostracism as from the financial repercussions of a divorce. Such consequences, however, are of minimal concern to Cecil. Through this character, Leverson presents a critique of the vain aesthete whose obsession with creating a masterpiece requires complete control over his subjects, regardless of their own desires. Cecil’s pose is one of urbanity and unconcern, but, just like the authorities in Vernon Lee’s fiction, if he loses control, or is in danger of looking foolish, he lashes out. Rather than simple amusement, behind Cecil’s flippancy lies very real spite, and his campaign to ensure that his father marries Laura rather than Lady Winthrop not only satisfies his desire to maintain control over the household, but also wreaks revenge on a woman who has insulted him. Neither Lady Winthrop nor his father is charmed by Cecil’s pretensions to elegance and sophistication, and they do not scruple to communicate their scorn to him. As he tells his listener, ‘If Lady Winthrop had not spoken of me as “that intolerable, effeminate boy”, she might have had some chance of marrying my father’. Similarly, he is also motivated by petty spite towards his father; closer to the end of the tale, he reveals that on the day that he decided to disrupt Lady Winthrop and his father’s courtship, his father had ‘been disagreeable, asking me with a clumsy sarcasm to raise his allowance, so that he could afford my favourite cigarettes’.30 These lines suggest that he arranges the match between his father and Laura not just so that he can maintain control over the household, nor simply to amuse himself, but also through a desire to hurt his father and Lady Winthrop because they refuse to flatter his vanity. D’Arcy’s ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’ and Leverson’s ‘Suggestion’ draw a clear connection between narrative control and the aesthete’s desire to command a situation by directing it and by providing the final interpretive say. This connection echoes the conflict that I have pointed to throughout this study between the aesthete’s interpretive, commanding view of his subject and that subject’s own desire to control how he or she is presented. Throughout the short fiction that I have examined, there has been a conflict between aesthetic connoisseurship and the very real people who are appropriated by the connoisseur’s appreciative gaze. The short story proved a particularly nimble medium for engaging this conflict because of the ways in which it allows women writers to focus in on a moment in

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an artist’s career in which there is a struggle to control the image. As ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’ and ‘Suggestion’ demonstrate, that struggle for control also works at the level of the narrative: controlling the image or interpretation is tantamount to controlling the story that gets told. The struggle for self-representation that has figured in many of these narratives connects to a broader move within late nineteenth-century women’s writing to gain control over narratives about women. Just as the muse insists on the right to determine how she appears on the canvas or in a literary text, female characters throughout fin-de-siècle fiction insist on the right to tell their stories. As I will demonstrate in this concluding section, Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘A Church Mouse’ reveals the tangible consequences of losing control over one’s narrative.31 This story, which features another rebellious female character who refuses to remain silent despite the attempts by authority figures to disregard her, shows the concrete consequences of the artistic struggles that I have focused on throughout this work. Although Freeman’s story ‘A Poetess’ (1891) directly engages the artistic issues of literary and cultural authority that occupied the writers within this study, she was best known as a regionalist author. That regionalist women’s writing provided opportunities for subverting a dominant narrative has become a truism among feminist critics studying late nineteenth-century American literary culture.32 Fiction by regionalist writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Freeman and Rose Terry Cooke focused on women on the margins who were often ignored and were struggling to eke out a rough existence. Contemporary readers viewed regionalist short stories written by women as ‘quaint’ because of their emphasis on the minute details of everyday life in remote, rural locales. As in other realist texts, the action in a regionalist story generally hinges on an interior, psychological struggle within the protagonist’s conscience over a question that might appear unimportant to some readers, such as in Cooke’s tale ‘Miss Beulah’s Bonnet’ (1880), in which the title character agonizes over whether to commit the sacrilege of attending church meetings in an embarrassingly shabby bonnet or whether she ought to stay away altogether. Nineteenth-century literary critics often dismissed female regionalists because, as Donna Campbell writes in Resisting Regionalism (1997), their fiction focused on ‘tea cup tragedies’ – apparently minor aspects of middle-class life – as opposed to the grander themes of ‘adventure stories, love stories, and “lurid realism”’. Beginning in the 1890s, readers increasingly turned away from the realism of local colour fiction and towards naturalism and the sensationalism of the daily papers because ‘“real life” was more exciting and varied than realism had shown’.33 In recent years, however, feminist critics have examined regionalism’s potential as a politically and socially subversive genre more closely. As Sherrie Inness and Diana Royer argue in Breaking Boundaries: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction (1997), ‘rather than being a conservative genre … [regionalism]

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is actually a genre that offers a forum for social protest’.34 In their introduction to the Norton anthology, American Women Regionalists (1992), Marjorie Pryse and Judith Fetterley point out that regionalist writers like Cooke, Freeman and Jewett ‘shift[ed] the center of perception’, and thus gave a voice to those figures on the margin, ‘provid[ing] the dramatic moment in the fiction, and offer[ing] empathy as a model for the relationship between reader and character’.35 Inness and Royer write that stories by female regionalists focus on characters typically overlooked by American society, such as older, unmarried women and overworked, abused wives, offering ‘a decentered perspective of the dominant culture’s values’.36 The ‘old maid’ or oppressed wife was positioned as central narrator or reflector figure rather than fading into the background behind conventional protagonists with more ‘important’ (i.e., romantic or tragic) stories to tell. Freeman focuses instead on what Elizabeth Ammons describes as ‘the lives of women trapped by poverty and male tyranny’.37 Freeman’s story ‘A Church Mouse’ further explores the necessity for women to assert narrative control in order to open up the private sphere to public view and expose how they have been mistreated and silenced. In this story, Freeman is primarily concerned with the treatment of single, impoverished women, a segment of the population that, as Mimi Abramovitz points out, was often left out of social welfare programmes because they did not conform to the dominant ideals that affirmed ‘true womanhood’ through marriage.38 In this story, Hetty, an impoverished old maid whose long-time employer has recently died, insists that the town allow her to earn her livelihood by working as church sexton, a position that she is barred from because she is female. The town would infinitely prefer to forget about the problem that an old, unmarried woman represents, but Hetty convinces Caleb Gale, one of the town leaders, that he cannot leave her outside in the cold, and instead must let her spend the night in the meeting-house, and she moves herself in. In the ensuing days, she establishes herself as de facto sexton, dismissing the young man who shows up to perform the job temporarily, ringing the meeting-house bell and dusting the pews. Further, because she is living in the meeting-house, she also decorates the space with her own needlework. She thus converts this public space into a semi-public, semi-domestic area, a space that in many ways mirrors the liminal position of women vis-à-vis the public/private sphere within late nineteenth-century society. For several weeks, the townspeople silently tolerate her co-option of the meeting-house until one day they are no longer able to ignore the cooking smells (especially of cabbage) that permeate the building during the service. The selectmen, or town council, bring on a moment of crisis by informing Hetty that she must vacate the meeting-house, and, further, that she must go and live with Miss Radway who, according Caleb Gale, ‘wants to git somebody [to work for her]’. Hetty knows that Miss Radway will overwork her in exchange for a grudging

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living, and flatly rejects this suggestion, stating that she does not ‘like Susan Radway, hain’t never liked her, an [she] ain’t goin’ to live with her’.39 Determined to avoid being moved, Hetty locks herself in the meeting-house and refuses to leave or even to let anyone else in. The entire town gathers round to watch the spectacle of the selectmen attempting to cajole Hetty into coming out. When she resists, and none of the keys in the town prove effective, they are about to break the door down with a crowbar when Hetty appears at an upper window. Insisting upon her right to narrate her own version of events, Hetty heroically leans out of a gallery window and pleads, ‘Jest let me say one word’. This ‘last act of defiance’ impresses itself upon Caleb Gale’s wife who tells Hetty to ‘Say all you want to … an’ don’t be afraid’.40 With the encouragement of the leading female member of the community, Hetty presents her situation in full to the gathered crowd. She explains that Miss Radway is used to havin’ her own way, and I’ve been livin’ all my life with them that was, an’ I’ve had to fight to keep a footin’ on the earth, an’ now I’m gittin’ too old for’t … I’ve always had a dretful hard time; seems as if now I might take a little comfort the last of it.41

The women in the town immediately rally to Hetty’s defence and insist that she be allowed to set up permanent housekeeping in the meeting-house. The story ends on Christmas day with a satisfied Hetty, installed permanently in the meeting-house and having ‘reached what to her was the flood-tide of peace and prosperity … [finding that] All her small desires were satisfied’.42 From the outset of the tale, Hetty resists the traditional rhetorical hierarchy that privileges Caleb Gale’s silencing of her story. Instead, Hetty insists on her right to the role of central narrator and thus forces Gale to recognize her situation. The whole town would prefer to ignore Hetty’s plight, forcing her to accept quietly what grudging charity they choose to dole out, even if that charity involves true hardship for Hetty. Her situation is not entirely hopeless, however, because, according to the tradition of New England towns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the town must provide shelter for her. As the narrator tells us, ‘[t]his little village in which she had lived all her life had removed the shelter from her head; she being penniless, it was beholden to provide her another; she asked it what’.43 Hetty refuses to accept the town’s version of charity, which would leave her dependent on Miss Radway, and instead demands recognition, insisting on the right to describe her distress and to have an audience for her narrative. She further asserts her own market value as potential sexton, a position that would allow her a degree of independence. As Hetty points out, in her eloquent – if rough – manner, there is no reason that there has never been a female sexton beyond tradition and prejudice. As she explains to Caleb Gale,

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I dun’ know what difference that [his having never heard of a female sexton] makes; I don’t see why they shouldn’t have women saxtons as well as men saxtons … Men git in a good many places where they don’t belong, an’ where they set as awkward as a cow on a hen-roost, jest because they push in ahead of women.44

Hetty thus argues that the town’s rules against female sextons are arbitrary and have no direct relationship to abilities. In her view, because they are more assertive, men have traditionally assumed roles for which they are totally unsuited. In Hetty’s formulation, it is not because men are more capable that they have traditionally held positions of responsibility and power, but rather because they have been more aggressive in claiming their right to those roles. In this way, Hetty’s argument echoes John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian approach to women’s rights. In Mill’s treatise The Subjection of Women (1869), he argues that the separation of spheres should depend on ability rather than custom. Mill proposes allowing free market forces, rather than tradition, to weed out the less capable.45 Thus, he writes that What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from … it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled … Whatever women’s services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are most wanted for the things for which they are most fit46

Mill’s argument focuses on the idea that women’s abilities will reveal what they are fit for, and thus there is no point in barring them from certain activities. Market forces will more effectively and productively weed out ability than tradition, which is based on convention rather than a system of trial and error. If women are not fit to perform traditionally male jobs, Mill argues, they will not be hired for those jobs by a pragmatic marketplace. Using similar economic theory (consciously or not), Hetty re-narrates the town’s traditional approach to a separation between women’s and men’s work and exposes its logical flaws. As Hetty points out, the town cannot know whether or not she is capable of performing the sexton’s duties until she tries. The deacon fails to provide Hetty with a philosophical or practical reason for barring her from the job other than that it is how it has always been. He unconvincingly adds that because she is a woman, they will have to pay her lower wages and she will not have enough money to support herself. One reason that the leaders do not want a woman as sexton is that it would violate the strict separation of spheres. However, Hetty’s insistence that they let her try echoes Mill’s assertion that the ‘unnatural generally means only uncustomary’.47 As Hetty points out, whether she is ‘saxton or not’, the town nevertheless must find her somewhere to live,48 thus exposing a fundamental weakness in the

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town’s claim to community spirit. Although the townspeople consider themselves to be righteous and charitable, they are unwilling to bring her into their homes, in part because she has a reputation for being stubborn and independent. In order to disguise their unwillingness to house her, all the townspeople claim that they have visitors, or are about to have visitors, so there is no room for her. Hetty remarks, ‘Everybody’s havin’ company; I never see anything like it’, and her blandly ‘inscrutable’ tone suggests that she well understands that the town’s generosity does not extend to inviting her into their homes.49 Although at other points in the story Hetty is outspoken about asserting her right to shelter within the community, she does not openly accuse the townspeople of selfishness here – she need only point to the facts which alone condemn the town. The townspeople’s unwillingness to bring Hetty into their homes creates a problem for the selectmen in charge because they are unable to imagine an acceptable alternative. Hetty has worked her entire life for little more than the food that she eats, and when the town offers her the option to live with and work for Miss Radway, she refuses to accept her fate. As Hetty knows, this plan is little different from earlier New England solutions to poverty. Before the advent of poorhouses in the early nineteenth century, and in some cases even after, towns relieved themselves of the responsibility for their paupers by auctioning them off to whoever offered to care for them at the lowest cost to the town. Michael Katz has found evidence of auctioning the poor in Rhode Island as late as 1850.50 Katz cites Thomas Hazard, in whose Report on the Poor and Insane in Rhode Island he writes, ‘when stripped of all disguises, selling the poor to the lowest bidder is simply offering a reward for the most cruel and avaricious man that can be found to abuse them’.51 Sarah Smith Emery describes this phenomenon in her memoir, Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian (1879): The nearby town of Newbury, lacking an almshouse to house its indigent, followed the practice of paying families to house the homeless poor. These families were sometimes chosen by auction, with the lowest bidder winning the opportunity to house the poor for pay … In this way most reliable servants for lighter work were often obtained.52

Through the auction system, impoverished townspeople effectively became indentured servants, although their contracts were only for a year at a time rather than for multiple years. According to Katz, auctioning off the poor was most common in smaller communities in which there were not enough poor citizens to justify building an almshouse, although institutions for housing the poor increasingly replaced other modes of relief as the nineteenth century progressed.53 The plight of single women removed from their homes to poorhouses, or other equivalent arrangements, reflects the post Civil War shift in poor laws

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towards greater reliance on institutions. Whereas, in earlier periods, the poor generally remained at home and were given relief by the community in the form of firewood or food, mid-nineteenth-century poor law ‘reforms’ aimed at saving money for the towns (and discouraging all but the most desperate from seeking aid). Reformers advocated the establishment of almshouses where the poor could be congregated under one roof for a relatively low cost.54 Scenes of impoverished women driven from their homes in Freeman’s work testify to the devastating effect that this policy had upon its recipients. In ‘A Mistaken Charity’ (1887), Freeman depicts two ageing sisters, Charlotte and Harriet, who would rather survive on stewed dandelion leaves and occasional gifts of food from their neighbours than be locked away in the ‘Old Ladies’ Home’ that a prominent member of the town, Mrs Simonds, who is ‘bent on doing good’, decides would be the most comfortable place for them to live. In the home, their freedom is circumscribed, and the institution’s rules even dictate what they will wear, including a set of white caps that the sisters despise. As Charlotte tells her sister Harriet, ‘Let us go home. I can’t stay here no ways in this world. I don’t like their vittles, an’ I don’t like to wear a cap; I want to go home … I don’t want to die here.’55 They escape the institution and return to their dilapidated home where, it is to be supposed, they will stay, content with their meagre lot and their independence, until their death. Because they will remain in their home, and in the town, the sisters prevent the community from conveniently forgetting about their existence. By dramatizing the stories of women who were forced out of their homes – and emphasizing the scarcity of their alternatives – Freeman renders them visible. In ‘A Church Mouse’, Hetty solves her own problem by becoming a spectacle that cannot be ignored and insists that the community help her to find a solution. While contemporary readers as well as critics may have dismissed regionalist stories such as this one because of their focus on the lives of ordinary, ‘unromantic’ women, Freeman launches a powerful social critique through the image of Hetty refusing to remain silent. By insisting on being heard, Hetty suddenly appropriates a degree of power over the rhetorical dynamic and reveals the community’s collective shirking of its responsibility. This rejection of silence resembles what Lauren Berlant has identified as ‘Diva Citizenship’, which she describes as an emergence that marks unrealized potentials for subaltern political activity. Diva Citizenship occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege. Flashing up and startling the public, she puts the dominant story into suspended animation … she renarrates the dominant history as one that the abjected people have once lived sotto voce, but no more; and she challenges her audience to identify with the enormity of the suffering she has narrated and the courage she has had to produce, calling on people to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship56

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In acts of ‘Diva Citizenship’, a previously powerless figure creates a spectacle in which he or she can no longer be ignored. Momentarily, all other concerns are ‘suspended’ while the ‘Diva’ insists on, and indeed commands, her audience’s full attention. By making a spectacle of herself and insisting on the right to tell her story, Hetty enlists the aid and sympathy of the rest of the women in the town and resists the plan to make her work for Miss Radway. When Hetty appears at the window of the meeting-house and insists on the right to tell her story, she stages a ‘dramatic coup’ that is backed up by the locked door. Her call for sympathy ‘startl[es]’ the townspeople and forces them to hear her story for the first time. By refusing to continue ‘sotto voce’, she becomes humanized in the eyes of the townspeople who had previously ignored or maligned her. In this story, the audience within the text for Hetty’s act of ‘Diva Citizenship’ consists of the women within the community who witness this event and subsequently recognize the hardship that Hetty’s homelessness has caused for her and band together to resist the selectmen’s unilateral decision to send her to Miss Radway. This act of female community pre-empts that of the male figures whose position within the social, political and religious hierarchy theoretically authorizes them to make these decisions. When the women in the town acknowledge Hetty’s plight and band together to formulate a solution that defies the male authority figures, Freeman echoes the public housekeeping movement as articulated by Jane Addams, Mrs C. F. Peirce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This philosophy of domestic economy (which arose simultaneously with the professionalization of home economics as a scientific field of academic study at the turn of the twentieth century)57 provided a civic, community-building model for ‘cleaning house’ that is echoed throughout regionalist women’s writing. In a 1913 pamphlet entitled ‘Women and Public Housekeeping’, Addams sums up the spirit of this movement: A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping. If American cities have failed in the first, partly because officeholders have carried with them the predatory instinct, learned in competitive business … may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities?58

In other words, this model endorses the notion that the community is responsible for the well-being and morality of the rest of the community; ‘civic housekeepers’ will promote these ideals through nurture.59 Unlike Mill’s pro-market argument for women’s participation in the marketplace, Addams’s more essentialist model rejects the ‘predatory instinct, learned in competitive business’ that would fail to nurture a city’s growth and take into account the well-being of its inhabitants.

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Just as a housekeeper would run a household smoothly and compassionately, Addams argues, these same women are best suited to run a community. The rise of the charity movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the related civic housekeeping movement, coincided with the fundamental change in public attitudes towards charity that emerged in the mid-century. Laissez-faire economics, rapidly expanding industrialization and social Darwinism led to a reduction in the willingness of the body politic to devote public funds towards supporting those who were viewed as among the undeserving poor.60 In many ways, women moved into the public sphere to fill the gap, and the hyper-feminized rhetoric of the public housekeeping movement was, in part, an attempt to deflect criticism that it was improper, from the standpoint of gender roles, for women to engage in politics. Freeman’s ‘A Church Mouse’, and its emphasis on women, poverty and the urgency of public housekeeping, has moved the discussion far beyond the field of art, artists and aestheticism that I have focused on throughout this work. However, as I have argued here, there is a clear connection between the muse’s revenge – or the female model’s resistance to being incorporated into a male aesthete’s artistic vision – and the struggle for control over one’s own narrative that Hetty engages in. To tell one’s own story, or to present oneself on one’s own terms, allows the subject to frame the debate, and thus represents a level of autonomy and authority. As women agitated in the political sphere for the vote and for expanded educational and professional opportunities, the writers of fiction that I have addressed in this study brought that debate to the world of artistic invention by creating female characters who push back against the artistic authorities whose work attempts to speak for them. In this way, the question of who gets to tell women’s stories – artistically and literally – points to the relationship between the artist and his or her raw material. In each case, as I have argued here, aesthetic questions had a broader, political story that women writers were beginning to tell. Considering that many of the women in this study did not align themselves with the women’s rights movement, and in many cases would have vehemently objected to being described as New Women, the decision to read these texts in a political manner argues for an unavoidably intertwined relationship between polemic and art. Whether or not these writers aimed at making a political point in their fiction, especially when that fiction dealt primarily with aesthetic rather than overtly political questions, their work nevertheless makes a powerful case for the potency of literature, or art more generally, to enact political ends. As these works demonstrate, art, in whatever form, contains the potential to embody political realities and transform them from abstractions. By creating a character like Hetty Fifield, through whose suffering the reader is given a glimpse into the plight of a homeless old maid in a New England community,

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Freeman can invite a sympathetic identification that might have been impossible through polemic alone. As the stories that I have analysed in this volume show, creating fictional characters whose situations are dictated by the reality of the cultural, economic and social worlds allows writers like Freeman, Lee and Wotton to, metaphorically, put flesh on the bone of political realities. In fictions that dramatize aesthetic issues that were of particular concern to women, these writers’ work resonates with the African-American author Charles Chesnutt’s deliberate strategy for transforming race relations through literature. As he wrote in his journal in 1880, The negro’s part is to prepare himself for social recognition and equality; and it is the province of literature to open the way for him to get it – to accustom the public mind to the idea; and while amusing them to lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling.61

Whether or not all readers were brought ‘to the desired state of feeling’, the writers in this study used their fictions to push back against aestheticism not only by revealing it as potentially parasitic, but also by granting a voice and agency to the female subjects of Victorian art.

NOTES

Introduction 1.

G. Egerton [M. C. Dunne], ‘A Lost Masterpiece: A City Mood, Aug. ’93’, Yellow Book, 1 (April 1894), pp. 189–96, on p. 191. 2. Ibid., pp. 193, 195. 3. Ibid., pp. 194, 195, 196. 4. See, for example, T. Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in LateVictorian England (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000); K. A. Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); M. Stetz, ‘Debating Aestheticism from a Feminist Perspective’, in T. Schaffer and K. A. Psomiades (eds), Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 25–43; and S. Ledger, ‘Wilde Women and the Yellow Book: The Sexual Politics of Aestheticism and Decadence’, English Literature in Transition, 50:1 (2007), pp. 5–26. 5. See E. Dean, ‘Edith Wharton’s Early Artist Stories and Constance Fenimore Woolson’, in V. Brehm (ed.), Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001), pp. 225–39; and E. Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007). 6. The original posting from 17 September 2006 by D. Maltby is archived along with the responses on the Victoria Listserv website. See ‘Transatlantic 19c. women’s literature/ history’, Victoria Listserv (17 September 2006), at http://listserv.indiana.edu [accessed 15 August 2009]. 7. M. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of the NineteenthCentury Women’s Movement (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), p. 10. 8. Vernon Lee’s letters to Wharton are housed in the Edith Wharton collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. In a letter dated 11 February 1933, an ailing Lee volunteers to help Wharton find an Italian publisher for The Valley of Decision, and Lee wrote an introduction for the Italian edition. Although the Italian edition was never produced, the introduction has been reprinted in M. Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 199–202. 9. L. Stevens, ‘Transatlanticism Now’, American Literary History, 16:1 (Spring 2004), pp. 93–102, on p. 95. 10. The autumn 2006 issue of Victorian Literature and Culture devoted to fin-de-siècle women’s poetry gives an excellent overview of recent work on the subject. See, in particular, – 113 –

114

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Notes to pages 4–8 M. Thain and A. P. Vadillo, ‘Introduction: Fin de Siècle Renaissance: History, Diversity, Modernity’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34:2 (September 2006), pp. 389–403. See J. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For more on this, see W. Chan, The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. xii. R. Ohmann, ‘Diverging Paths: Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism’, in C. F. Kaestle and J. A. Radway (eds), Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, A History of the Book in America, 4 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 102–15, on pp. 102–3. D. Baldwin, ‘The Tardy Evolution of the British Short Story’, Studies in Short Fiction, 30 (1993), pp. 23–33, on p. 23. Ibid., p. 28. Although publishers and authors often referred to companies that took advantage of the lack of copyright protection as ‘pirates’, this term is not strictly accurate because there were no laws to prevent publishers from producing and selling unauthorized works by foreign authors. United States, Cong. Senate, Committee on Patents, International Copyright, Hearing, 28 and 29 January, 12 February and 11 March 1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection [accessed 6 June 2009], p. 53. R. Patten, ‘When is a Book Not a Book?’, Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 4:2 (Spring 1996), pp. 35–63, on p. 39. B. Matthews, ‘Short Stories’, Saturday Review (5 July 1884), pp. 32–4, on p. 33. S. Ledger, ‘Introduction’, in G. Egerton, Keynotes and Discords (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2003), pp. ix–xxvi, on p. xv. Chan, The Economy of the Short Story, p. x. Ledger, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. R. B. DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 1–4. Chan, The Economy of the Short Story, p. xi. S. Grand [F. E. B. McFall], The Beth Book (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897), p. 573. L. Saltz, ‘From Image to Text: Modernist Transformations in Edith Wharton’s “The Muse’s Tragedy”’, Edith Wharton Review (Fall 2003), pp. 15–21, on p. 16. H. Watterson, ‘Open Letters: The Woman Question Once More’, Century, 49:5 (March 1895), p. 796. O. Schreiner, ‘The Woman Question’, Cosmopolitan, 28:1 (November 1899), pp. 45–54, on p. 45. N. D. Thompson (ed.), Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2. To describe the early demands for women’s equality as ‘feminism’ is, of course, anachronistic because the term did not come into use until much later. I am retaining it here, however, because of its usefulness in pointing towards a broad range of issues that later came to be headed under the rubric of feminism. In Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, Thompson has also noted the ‘inherently complicated and conflicted positions’ that Victorian women writers took toward the Woman Question (p. 1) which

Notes to pages 8–14

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

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renders almost impossible the task of labelling any specific stance towards an issue such as marriage as ‘feminist’. For more on this, see, in particular, T. Schaffer’s essay, ‘“Nothing but Foolscap and Ink”: Inventing the New Woman’, in A. Richardson and C. Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 39–52. W. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1893), ed. D. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1980), pp. xix–xx. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. xx. Ibid., p. xxi. Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), pp. 1009–59, on p. 1027. Ibid., p. 1029. Ibid., pp. 1030, 1028, 1027. H. James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Longman’s Magazine, 23 (September 1884), pp. 502–21, on p. 509. Ibid. Ibid. Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, p. 1020. H. James, ‘Preface’ to The Princess Casamassima, The Novels and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition, 5 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), pp. v–xxiii, on p. v. Quoted in M. Licht, ‘Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady: Vernon Lee in The Princess Casamassima’, in G. Caie and H. Nørgaard (eds), A Literary Miscellany Presented to Eric Jacobsen (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1988), pp. 285–303, on p. 285. James, ‘Preface’ to The Princess Casamassima, p. xxi M. Poovey, ‘Forgotten Writers, Forgotten Histories: Charles Reade and the NineteenthCentury Transformation of the British Literary Field’, English Literary History, 71:2 (2004), pp. 433–53, on p. 445. James, ‘Preface’ to The Princess Casamassima, p. xxii. S. Grand, ‘The Undefinable: A Fantasia’, New Review, 11:64 (September 1894), pp. 320– 30, and 11:65 (October 1894), pp. 433–42, on p. 328. Ibid., pp. 329–30, 328. Balzac’s original reads as follows: ‘Ta bonne femme n’est pas mal troussée, mais elle ne vit pas. Vous autres, vous croyez avoir tout fait lorsque vous avez dessiné correctement une figure et mis chaque chose à sa place d’après les lois de l’anatomie! Vous colorez ce linéament avec un ton de chair fait d’avance sur votre palette en ayant soin de tenir un côté plus sombre que l’autre, et parce que vous regardez de temps en temps une femme nue qui se tient debout sur une table, vous croyez avoir copié la nature, vous vous imaginez être des peintres et avoir dérobé le secret de Dieu! … Prrr! Il ne suffit pas pour être un grand poète de savoir à fond la syntaxe et de ne pas faire de fautes de langue!’, H. de Balzac, Études philosophiques (Paris: Furne, 1845), p. 286. In Balzac’s original, it reads: ‘Vous dessiner une femme, mais vous ne la voyez pas! Ce n’est pas ainsi que l’on parvient à forcer l’arcane de la nature. Votre main reproduit, sans que vous y pensiez, le modèle que vous avez copié … Vous ne descendez pas assez dans l’intimité de la forme, vous ne la poursuivez pas avec assez d’amour et de persévérance dans ses détours et dans ses fuites. La beauté est une chose sévère et difficile qui ne se laisse point atteindre ainsi, il faut attendre ses heures, l’épier, la presser et l’enlacer étroitement pour la forcer à se rendre’. Ibid., p. 288.

116 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

Notes to pages 15–27 Grand, ‘The Undefinable’, p. 440. Ibid., p. 435. Ibid., p. 442. K. Chopin, ‘A Gentleman of Bayou Têche’, in Bayou Folk (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1894), pp. 291–303, on p. 295. Ibid., p. 303. D. Steiling, ‘Multi-Cultural Aesthetic in Kate Chopin’s “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche”’, Mississippi Quarterly, 47:2 (Spring 1994), pp. 197–200, on p. 200. J. Fetterley and M. Pryse, Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003). p. 133. E. Wharton, ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’ (1899), in E. Wharton, Collected Stories 1891–1910 (New York: Library of America, 2001), pp. 50–64, on pp. 60, 61. Ibid., p. 61 Ibid., p. 59. Saltz, ‘From Image to Text’, p. 18. Ibid., pp. 17, 18. V. Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 190. Schaffer, ‘“Nothing But Foolscap and Ink”’, p. 39.

1 ‘A Beautiful Translation from a Very Imperfect Original’ 1.

M. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, in Day-Books (London: John Lane, 1896), pp. 147–88, on p. 179. 2. S. Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977), p. 6. 3. For a fuller account of the Wotton/Zangwill correspondence, see M.-J. Rochelson, ‘The Friendship of Israel Zangwill and Mabel Wotton: “Faithfully Yours, Margaret”’, English Literature in Translation, 48:3 (2005), pp. 305–23. Most of the suppositions about dates for the letters that I have included in brackets throughout this chapter come from her meticulous research. 4. For more on the controversy surrounding James’s ‘appropriation’ of Vernon Lee in The Princess Casamassima and her ‘revenge’ in ‘Lady Tal’, see C. J. Weber, ‘Henry James and His Tiger-Cat’, PMLA, 68:4 (September 1953), pp. 672–87; L. Edel, ‘Henry James and Vernon Lee’, PMLA, 69:3 ( June 1954), pp. 677–8; B. Gardner, ‘An Apology for Henry James’s “Tiger-Cat”’, PMLA, 68:4 (September 1953), pp. 688–95; and Licht, ‘Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady’. A more recent account of the vexed questions of biography and art in Lee’s own work can be found in C. Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 111– 17; and Colby, Vernon Lee, pp. 193–8. 5. A. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (New York: St Martin’s, 2000), pp. 157–9. 6. Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, p. 11. 7. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, p. 4. 8. A. Kingston, Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 169. 9. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, pp. 160–1. 10. P. K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 241, n. 37.

Notes to pages 28–32

117

11. My thanks to Troy Bassett for drawing my attention both to this debate in the Pall Mall Gazette and to Andrew Lang’s defence of Haggard in ‘Literary Plagiarism’, Contemporary Review, 51 (1887), pp. 831–40. 12. Anon., ‘The Song of “Jess” and How She Came by It: Mr. Rider Haggard’s Explanation’, Pall Mall Gazette (19 April 1887), p. 5. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. The debate played out in the Pall Mall Gazette in the following anonymous articles: ‘Who is “She” and Where Did “She” Come From?’ (11 March 1887), pp. 1–2; ‘The Song of “Jess” and Who Wrote It’ (24 March 1887), p. 1; ‘The “Strange Cases” of “She” and “Jess”’ (26 March 1887), p. 3; ‘The Song of “Jess” and How She Came by It’ (19 April 1887), p. 5; ‘The Ethics of Plagiarism’ (30 March 1887), p. 3; and ‘Literary and Art Notes, Etc.’ (15 April 1887), p. 3. For a complete bibliography of the plagiarism debate surrounding Haggard’s work, see D. E. Whatmore, H. Rider Haggard: A Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1987), pp. 144–5. 15. R. Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1. For evidence that this debate has not gone away, and that the two sides still sound very much the same, see the recent controversy over Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement. In particular, see J. Shafer, ‘What Did Ian McEwan Do? Nothing Wrong, Say the Big-Shot Novelists’, Slate (8 December 2006), at http:/www.slate.com [accessed 24 January 2007]; and N. Reynolds, ‘The Borrowers: Why Ian McEwan is No Plagiarist’, Daily Telegraph (7 December 2006), at http://www.telegraph.co.uk [accessed 24 January 2007]. 16. In addition to Macfarlane, see F. Tufescu’s Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism: The Triumph of Art over Ego (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2008), pp. 1–8; and SaintAmour’s The Copywrights. 17. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, p. 161. 18. Lang, ‘Literary Plagiarism’, pp. 832–3. 19. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, pp. 175–6, 180. 20. Ibid., pp. 176, 173. 21. E. F. Benson, ‘Plagiarism’, Nineteenth Century, 46 (December 1899), pp. 974–81, on pp. 977–8; also quoted in Saint-Amour, The Copywrights, p. 23. 22. Benson first introduced Lucia in Queen Lucia (1922), but did not introduce Elizabeth Mapp until Miss Mapp (1922). The Mapp and Lucia series includes Mapp and Lucia (1930), Lucia’s Progress (1935) and Trouble for Lucia (1939). 23. E. Wright, ‘The Art of Plagiarism’, Contemporary Review, 85 (1904), pp. 514–18, on p. 514. 24. Benson, ‘Plagiarism’, pp. 977, 974–5. 25. Wright, ‘The Art of Plagiarism’, p. 515. 26. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, p. 161. 27. M. Stetz, ‘New Grub Street and the Woman Writer of the 1890s’, in N. L. Manos and M.J. Rochelson (eds), Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s (New York: St Martin’s, 1994), pp. 21–45, on p. 39. 28. Letter of Mabel Wotton to Israel Zangwill, 7 February [1901], Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, A120/594. 29. Letter of Mabel Wotton to Israel Zangwill, 9 February [1901], Central Zionist Archives, A120/593. Wotton is probably referring to Gustave Tuck of the publishing firm R. Tuck and Sons, which published Zangwill’s Merely Mary Ann in their Breezy Library Series in 1893. R. Tuck and Sons is best known as a producer of highly decorative greeting

118

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Notes to pages 32–41 cards and postcards. Wotton’s several references to Tuck in her letters suggest that Zangwill put her in contact with him as a possible publishing outlet. Although she seems to have been grateful for the opportunity this presented, she did not hold Tuck in high esteem and told Zangwill at one point that ‘Mr. Gustave Tuck will niche himself in my memory as the one stupid Jew I ever met’ (Letter of Mabel Wotton to Israel Zangwill, [1 November] 1901, Central Zionist Archives, A120/590; also quoted in Rochelson, ‘The Friendship of Israel Zangwill and Mabel Wotton’, p. 315). Wright, ‘The Art of Plagiarism’, p. 514. Letter of Wotton to Zangwill, 9 February [1901]. Quoted in Rochelson, ‘The Friendship of Israel Zangwill and Mabel Wotton’, p. 307. Ibid., p. 308. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, pp. 183–4, 159. M. Arnold, Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1869), p. 1. Pater, The Renaissance, pp. xix–xx, 189. Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, pp. 1027, 1028. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, p. 176. Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, p. 1029. H. James, ‘Preface’ to The Spoils of Poynton / A London Life / The Chaperon, The Novels and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition, 10 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), pp. v–xxiv, on p. v. Ibid., pp. vi, viii, v. M. Stetz, ‘Turning Points: Mabel E. Wotton’, Turn-of-the-Century Women, 3:2 (1986), pp. 2–18, on p. 3. E. H. Dixon, ‘As I Knew Them’: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way (London: Hutchinson, 1930), p. 55. G. Cotterell, ‘New Novels’, Academy, 1151 (26 May 1894), pp. 433–4. G. Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (New York: Brentano’s, 1917), pp. 164–5. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, pp. 152–3. Ibid., pp. 153, 172–3. G. Egerton, ‘A Keynote to Keynotes’, in J. Gawsworth (ed.), Ten Contemporaries: Notes toward their Definitive Bibliography (London: E. Benn, 1932), pp. 57–60, on p. 58. A. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). pp. 32, 34, 37. A. Case, Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1999), p. 4. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, p. 183. Ibid., p. 168. V. Brehm and S. L. Dean, ‘Preface’ and ‘Introduction’ to Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), pp. xi–xii, xv–xxvi, on p. xvi. C. F. Woolson, ‘Miss Grief ’, Lippincott’s, 25 (May 1880), pp. 574–85, on p. 574. Ibid., p. 576. Ibid., p. 578. Ibid., pp. 580, 581. Ibid., p. 583. Ibid. Wotton, ‘The Fifth Edition’, p. 162. Woolson, ‘Miss Grief ’, pp. 581, 578–9.

Notes to pages 42–7

119

62. M. Wotton, ‘Amongst Her Following’, Temple Bar, 97 (1893), pp. 417–23, on p. 417. 63. Anon., ‘Mr. Punch’s Manual for Young Reciters’, Punch, 92 (5 March 1887), p. 109. 64. D. Mayer, ‘Parlour and Platform Melodrama’, in M. Hays and A. Nikolopoulou (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St Martin’s, 1996), pp. 211– 34, on pp. 212–13, 230. 65. Quoted in ibid., p. 211. 66. Woolson, ‘Miss Grief ’, p. 576. 67. Ibid., p. 580. 68. J. Camlot, ‘Early Talking Books: Spoken Recordings and Recitation Anthologies, 1880– 1920’, Book History, 6 (2003), pp. 147–73, on p. 148. 69. Wotton, ‘Amongst Her Following’, pp. 421, 418. 70. The poem reads: ‘Si je vous le disais pourtant, que je vous aime, / Qui sait, brune aux yeux bleus, ce que vous en diriez’ (ibid., p. 420), which translates as, ‘If I were to tell you that I love you, however, / Who knows, blue-eyed brunette, what you would say to that’ (my translation). 71. Ibid., pp. 420, 421. 72. Ibid., p. 422. 73. Stetz, ‘Turning Points’, p. 3. 74. O. Wilde, ‘Some Literary Notes’, Review of Word-Portraits of Famous Writers, by Mabel Wotton, Woman’s World (March 1889), p. 280. 75. M. Wotton, Word-Portraits of Famous Writers (London: Bentley, 1887), pp. vii–viii. 76. C. Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1876), trans. M. Gibson, N. H. Rafter and M. Seymour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), for example, documents the physical characteristics of individuals associated with criminals and degenerates. Lombroso’s work was considered invaluable at the time for providing a physical key to identifying criminality. A related study would be C. Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1872), preface K. Lorenz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), in which he argues that physical gestures and characteristics provide evidence of evolutionary links between humans and animals. 77. L. Hutton’s three-part article in Harper’s in 1892 (‘A Collection of Death-Masks’, Harper’s, 85:508–10 (September–November 1892), pp. 619–33, 781–95, 904–17) describes his collection of death-masks and celebrates the accuracy of a death-mask in being ‘absolutely true to nature’ (p. 619). Hutton’s death-masks are currently housed at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. The Strand Magazine included in its inaugural issue in 1891 the first in an ongoing series of ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives’, which began with Tennyson. In 1899, the Academy issued a portrait supplement advertised in its back matter as ‘Consisting of Thirty-Seven Portraits of Old and New Celebrities in Literature’ (6 May 1899), p. 494. 78. J. Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 47. See also T. Schaffer, ‘Introduction’, in Schaffer and Psomiades (eds), Women and British Aestheticism, pp. 1–22, on p. 5. 79. Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, p. 3. 80. Ibid., p. 2. 81. R. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 7. 82. Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, p. 12.

120

Notes to pages 47–55

83. M. Stetz, ‘Life’s “Half-Profits”: Writers and their Readers in Fiction of the 1890s’, in L. S. Lockridge, J. Maynard and D. Stone (eds), Nineteenth-Century Lives: Essays Presented to Jerome Hamilton Buckley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 169–87, on p. 183. 84. See J. Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH, 59:2 (Summer 1992), pp. 467–93. 85. A. McCann, ‘Rosa Praed and the Vampire-Aesthete’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35 (2007), pp. 175–87, on p. 176.

2 Vernon Lee and the Aesthetic Subject 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Letter of Vernon Lee to Matilda Paget, 9 July 1881, in Vernon Lee’s Letters, ed. I. C. Willis (London: privately printed, 1937), p. 74. Letter of Vernon Lee to Matilda Paget, 1 August 1891, in ibid., p. 337. Zorn, Vernon Lee, p. xix. Quoted in Weber, ‘Henry James and His Tiger-Cat’, p. 683. Colby, Vernon Lee, pp. 190, 188, 195. Ibid., p. 190. K. Mahoney, ‘Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption’, Criticism, 48:1 (Winter 2006), pp. 39–67, on p. 39. Ibid., p. 49. Zorn, Vernon Lee, pp. xxix, 3. S. Kandola, ‘Vernon Lee: New Woman?’, Women’s Writing, 12:3 (2005), pp. 471–84, on p. 472. D. Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 43, 45, 48. C. Zorn, ‘Aesthetic Intertextuality as Cultural Critique: Vernon Lee Rewrites History through Walter Pater’s “La Gioconda”’, Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1997), pp. 4–10, on p. 8. V. Lee [V. Paget], ‘Amour Dure: Passages from the Diary of Spiridion Trepka’ (1887), in Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, ed. C. Maxwell and P. Pulham (Ontario: Broadview, 2006), pp. 41–76, on pp. 55–6, 63. V. Lee, Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), p. 20. Ibid., pp. 21–2. V. Lee, ‘Lady Tal’ (1892), in V. Lee, Vanitas: Polite Stories (New York: Lovell, Corvell & Co., 1896), pp. 7–119, on p. 7. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., pp. 7, 8–9. Ibid., p. 11. Letter of Henry James to Vernon Lee, 21 October 1884, in Henry James: Letters, ed. L. Edel, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1980), vol. 3: 1883–1895, p. 50. Letter of Vernon Lee to Matilda Paget, 11 July 1884, in Vernon Lee’s Letters, p. 155. Letter of Henry James to Grace Norton, 24 January [1885], in Henry James: Letters, vol. 3, p. 64. Letter of Henry James to Vernon Lee, 10 May [1885], in ibid, p. 86. For a more detailed account of James’s reaction to Lee’s story, see Weber, ‘Henry James and His Tiger-Cat’, p. 681; Gardner, ‘An Apology for Henry James’s “Tiger-Cat”’, pp.

Notes to pages 55–63

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

121

693–5; Edel, ‘Henry James and Vernon Lee’; E. Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. xv; and A. Tintner, ‘Fiction is the Best Revenge: Portraits of Henry James by Four Women Writers’, Turn-of-the-Century Women, 2:2 (Winter 1985), pp. 42–9. See also M. P. Kane, ‘“A Particularly Impudent Blackguardly Thing”: The Case of Henry James and Vernon Lee’s “Lady Tal”’, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, 6:12 ( July 2001), pp. 77–96; P. Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 102, 108–9, 137; Licht, ‘Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady’; Colby, Vernon Lee, pp. 104–6; and Zorn, Vernon Lee, p. 111. Licht, ‘Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady’, pp. 288–9. Letter of Henry James to William James, 14 February 1885, in The Letters of Henry James, ed. P. Lubbock, 2 vols (New York: Octagon Books, 1970), vol. 1, p. 115. T. Schaffer, ‘Some Chapter of Some Other Story: Henry James, Lucas Malet and the Real Past of The Sense of the Past’, Henry James Review, 17:2 (1996), pp. 109–28, on p. 109. A. Tintner, ‘Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; Or the Phantom Lover” and James’s “The Way It Came”’, Studies in Short Fiction, 28:3 (1991), pp. 355–62, on p. 356. Schaffer, ‘Some Chapter of Some Other Story’, pp. 109–10. O. Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Complete Works, pp. 970–92, on p. 978. Letter of Vernon Lee to Matilda Paget, 9 July 1885, in Vernon Lee’s Letters, p. 175. Letter of Vernon Lee to Matilda Paget, 18 July 1885, in ibid., p. 179. Letter of Vernon Lee to Matilda Paget, 25 July 1885, in ibid., p. 183. V. Lee, ‘The Portrait Art of the Renaissance’, Cornhill Magazine, 47:281 (May 1883), pp. 564–81, on p. 575. Lee, ‘Lady Tal’, pp. 12, 53. James, ‘Preface’ to The Princess Casamassima, p. xxii. Lee, ‘Lady Tal’, p. 55. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pp. 16–17. Ibid., pp. 22, 30, 57. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., pp. 40, 41, 44. Ibid., pp. 35, 33. Ibid., pp. 53–4. Ibid., p. 55. T. Bulfinch, The Age of Fable or Beauties of Mythology, ed. E. E. Hale, 2nd edn (Boston, MA: S. W. Tilton, 1894), p. 171. Lee, ‘Lady Tal’, p. 14. Ibid., pp. 108, 109. Ibid., pp. 111–12. Ibid., p. 256. V. Lee, ‘Dionea’ (1890), in Hauntings, pp. 77–104, on p. 100. Lee, Euphorion, p. 14. Lee, ‘The Portrait Art of the Renaissance’, pp. 564, 576. V. Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1886, 1890), in Hauntings, pp. 105–153, on pp. 143–4, 117.

122

Notes to pages 64–76

56. A. Leighton, ‘Ghosts, Aestheticism, and “Vernon Lee”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 28:1 (2000), pp. 1–14, on p. 2. 57. M. Stetz, ‘The Snake Lady and the Bruised Bodley Head: Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde in the Yellow Book’, in C. Maxwell and P. Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 112–22, on p. 113. 58. V. Lee, ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ (1896), in Hauntings, pp. 182–228, on p. 185. 59. Ibid., pp. 188, 193. 60. Ibid., p. 183. 61. Ibid., pp. 226, 227. 62. Lee, ‘Lady Tal’, pp. 118, 119. 63. J. Ehnenn, Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 67, 62, 61. 64. V. Lee, The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1923), pp. vii–viii.

3 Edith Wharton and the Artist as Connoisseur 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

A. Symons, ‘Tolstoi on Art’, Saturday Review, 86:2232 (6 August 1898), p. 180. Letter of Edith Wharton to Margaret Terry Chanler, 8 March [1903], in The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and N. Lewis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), pp. 77–8. Freedman, Professions of Taste, p. 48. Ibid., p. 54. O. Codman, Jr, and E. Wharton, The Decoration of Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), p. xx. Letter of Edith Wharton to Edward L. Burlingame, 30 July 1894, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, p. 34. Codman and Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, p. xxii. S. B. Wright, Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 15. Letter of Edith Wharton to Robert Underwood Johnson, 4 August 1908, in the Edith Wharton Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency. Dean, ‘Edith Wharton’s Early Artist Stories’, pp. 231, 232; Saltz, ‘From Image to Text’, p. 16. Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts, pp. 11, 28. Saltz, ‘From Image to Text’, p. 16. Letter of Edith Wharton to Robert Grant, 19 November 1907, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, p. 124. E. Wharton, ‘That Good May Come’, Scribner’s, 15 (May 1894), pp. 629–42, on pp. 630–1. Ibid., pp. 638, 641. J. Olin-Ammentorp, ‘Female Models and Male Mentors in Wharton’s Early Fiction’, in I. C. Goldman-Price and M. McFarland Pennell (eds), American Literary Mentors (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999), pp. 84–93, on p. 93. Wharton, ‘Expiation’ (1903), in Collected Stories, pp. 476–98, on pp. 479, 489, 495.

Notes to pages 76–90

123

18. Wharton, The Touchstone (1900), in Collected Stories, pp. 162–233, on p. 192. 19. E. Wharton, ‘Copy’, in Crucial Instances (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), pp. 99–119, on pp. 102, 100. 20. Ibid., p. 104. 21. Ibid., p. 109. 22. Ibid., pp. 116, 117. 23. Wharton, ‘Mrs. Manstey’s View’ (1891), in Collected Stories, pp. 1–11, on p. 2. 24. O. Wilde, ‘A Preface to “Dorian Gray”’, Fortnightly Review, 49:291 (March 1891), pp. 480–1, on p. 480. 25. Wharton, ‘Mrs. Manstey’s View’, pp. 3, 1. 26. Ibid. p. 11. 27. Quoted in D. Campbell, ‘Edith Wharton and the “Authoresses”: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction’, Studies in American Fiction, 22 (Autumn 1994), pp. 169–83, on pp. 169, 172. 28. Brehm and Dean, ‘Preface’ and ‘Introduction’, p. xi. 29. See ibid., pp. xv–xxvi; Brehm (ed.), Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century; S. L. Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); and S. L. Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2002). 30. C. F. Woolson, ‘The Front Yard’ (1888), in The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), pp. 1–49, on pp. 4, 3. 31. Ibid., p. 16. 32. Ibid., p. 48. 33. Wharton, ‘The Moving Finger’ (1901), in Collected Stories, pp. 307–22, on p. 309. 34. Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts, p. 22. 35. Christina Rossetti, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, ll. 9–10, 14 36. Wharton, ‘The Moving Finger’, p. 310. 37. Ibid., p. 315. 38. Ibid., p. 316. 39. Ibid., p. 321. 40. Ibid., pp. 322, 320. 41. Ibid., p. 321. 42. Ibid. 43. Wharton, ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ (1900), in Collected Stories, pp. 234–53, on p. 237. 44. E. D’Arcy, ‘The Elegie’, in Monochromes (London: John Lane, 1895), pp. 11–83, on pp. 47–8. 45. Ibid., pp. 57–8. 46. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 189; Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, p. 1029. 47. James, ‘Preface’ to The Princess Casamassima, p. xxii. 48. D’Arcy, ‘The Elegie’, pp. 63–4. 49. Ibid., pp. 80, 83. 50. E. Wharton, ‘The Portrait’, in The Greater Inclination (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), pp. 229–54, on pp. 229, 230–1. 51. Ibid., p. 231. 52. E. Wharton, ‘Fiction and Criticism’ (n.d.), in The Uncollected Critical Writings of Edith Wharton, ed. F. Wegener (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 293–8, on pp. 296, 297.

124

Notes to pages 91–101

53. E. Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (1925; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 11–12. 54. Ibid., p. 13. 55. Wharton, ‘Fiction and Criticism’, p. 294. 56. W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), p. 23. 57. Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, p. 44. 58. Wharton, ‘The Portrait’, p. 244. 59. Quoted. in B. Maine, ‘Reading “The Portrait”: Edith Wharton and John Singer Sargent’, Edith Wharton Review (Spring 2002), pp. 7–14, on p. 10. 60. Ibid., p. 13.

4 The Aesthetics of Ownership in Women’s Stories 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

E. D’Arcy, ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’, in Monochromes, pp. 165–218, on p. 174. Both Stetz and Ledger have noted the two male characters’ aestheticized readings of Lulie, as well as their competition with each other to ‘master’ her. See Stetz, ‘Debating Aestheticism’, pp. 37–8; and Ledger, ‘Wilde Women and The Yellow Book’, pp. 19–20. D’Arcy, ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’, p. 180. Ibid., p. 181. Ledger, ‘Wilde Women and The Yellow Book’, p. 19. D’Arcy, ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’, p. 185. Letter of Ella D’Arcy to John Lane, 20 August [1895], in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, D214L L265. D’Arcy is here referring to a review that appeared in the 10 August 1895 issue of the Speaker. The anonymous reviewer not only describes Lulie as a ‘hussy’, but also as ‘a type of woman whom even our neurotic century might decline to own as its product’ (p. 162). D’Arcy, ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’, p. 168. Ibid., p. 185. Letter of Ella D’Arcy to John Lane, 5 April [1895], in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, D214L L265. R. Le Gallienne, The Quest of the Golden Girl (London and New York: John Lane and the Bodley Head, 1897). The Quest of the Golden Girl is described as semi-autobiographical in at least two key accounts of the period: R. Whittington-Egan and G. Smerdon’s The Quest of the Golden Boy: The Life and Letters of Richard Le Gallienne (London: Unicorn Press, 1960), which describes the novel as ‘an idealised selection of Richard’s amours’ (p. 301); and by K. L. Mix in A Study in Yellow: The Yellow Book and Its Contributors (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1960) as ‘the romanticized tale of his first love’ (p. 180). D’Arcy, ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’, pp. 213–14. Ibid., pp. 200–1. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., pp. 215, 218. Ledger, ‘Wilde Women and The Yellow Book’, pp. 20–1. A. Leverson, ‘Suggestion’ (1895), in Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence, pp. 38–46, on pp. 38–9. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 40–1, 39–40.

Notes to pages 101–6

125

22. J. Speedie, ‘The Sphinx of Modern Life: Ada Leverson (1862–1933)’, Antiquarian Book Monthly, 15:1:164 ( January 1988), pp. 8–15, on pp. 9, 8 23. Leverson, ‘Suggestion’, pp. 39, 40. 24. Ibid., p. 45. 25. W. Harrison, ‘Ada Leverson’s Wild(e) Yellow Book Stories’, Victorian Newsletter, 96 (Fall 1999), pp. 21–8, on p. 23. 26. Leverson, ‘Suggestion’, p. 43. 27. See M. Caird, ‘Marriage’ (1888), in C. C. Nelson (ed.), A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, Drama of the 1890s (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 185–99; and J. M. A. Hawksley, ‘A Young Woman’s Right: Knowledge’, Westminster Review, 142 (September 1894), pp. 315–18. 28. Harrison, ‘Ada Leverson’s Wild(e) Yellow Book Stories’, p. 24. 29. Caird, ‘Marriage’, p. 196. 30. Leverson, ‘Suggestion’, pp. 38, 45. 31. ‘A Church Mouse’ was first published in Harper’s Bazaar on 28 December 1889 and then reprinted in A New England Nun and Other Stories in 1891. 32. See J. Fetterley, ‘“Not in the Least American”: Nineteenth-Century Literary Regionalism’, College English, 56:8 (December 1994), pp. 877–95; J. Fetterley and M. Pryse (eds), American Women Regionalists 1850–1910 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); and E. Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 33. D. Campbell, Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1997), pp. 5, 55. 34. S. Inness and D. Royer, ‘Introduction’, in S. Inness and D. Royer (eds), Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1997), pp. 1–16, on p. 1. 35. Fetterley and Pryse (eds), ‘Introduction’, in American Women Regionalists, pp. xi–xx, on p. xviii. 36. Inness and Royer, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. Critics disagree over whether to label fiction from this period local colour or regionalist and whether there are significant differences between these terms. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse observe that, unlike in local colour fiction, ‘In the regional text, the narrator does not distance herself from the inhabitants of the region … [and] frequently appears to be an inhabitant herself ’ (‘Introduction’, p. xvii). In effect, Fetterley and Pryse differentiate between stories that ridicule members of an enclosed and exotic society (local colour) and stories that seek to evoke empathy in the reader (regionalist). Marjorie Pryse writes that regionalism, ‘unlike local color … establishes itself as a site of critique’ (M. Pryse, ‘Exploring Contact: Regionalism and the “Outsider” Standpoint in Mary Noialles Murfree’s Appalachia’, Legacy, 17:2 (2000), pp. 199–212, on p. 199). See also Inness and Royer, Breaking Boundaries. 37. E. Ammons, ‘Introduction’, in How Celia Changed Her Mind and Other Stories by Rose Terry Cooke, ed. E. Ammons (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. ix–xxxv, on p. xii. 38. M. Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996), pp. 76–7. 39. M. W. Freeman, ‘A Church Mouse’ (1889), in Fetterley and Pryse (eds), American Women Regionalists, pp. 344–56, on p. 352. 40. Ibid., p. 354. 41. Ibid.

126 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

Notes to pages 106–12 Ibid., p. 355. Ibid., p. 349. Ibid., p. 344. J. S. Mill, ‘The Subjection of Women’ (1869), in Three Essays, intro. R. Wollheim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 427–548, on p. 474. Ibid., p. 458. Ibid., p. 441. Freeman, ‘A Church Mouse’, p. 345. Ibid., p. 347. M. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 14. Quoted in ibid., p. 15. See also Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women, pp. 86–7. S. S. Emery, Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian (Newbury, MA: W. H. Huse & Co., 1879), in History Matters, George Mason University, at http://historymatters.gmu. edu/d/5821 [accessed 16 November 2002], pp. 1–4. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, p. 14. Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women, pp. 155–9. M. W. Freeman, ‘A Mistaken Charity’ (1887), in Fetterley and Pryse (eds), American Women Regionalists, pp. 314–22, on pp. 316, 319. L. Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 223. See S. Leavitt, From Catherine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). J. Addams, ‘Women and Public Housekeeping’ (1913), in University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/rbs/96 [accessed 24 June 2002]. The language of civic housekeeping was fundamentally essentialist and drew largely on the assumption that all women naturally were more caring and nurturing than men. While contemporary feminists have long since found issue with this stance, it reflects, for the most part, the view of woman’s nature held by Freeman. For more on this, see Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women. C. Chesnutt, Selected Writings, ed. S. H. Ferguson (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001), pp. 21–2.

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INDEX

Abramovitz, Mimi, 105 Addams, Jane, 110–11 American identity, 96 Ammons, Elizabeth, 105 Anstruther-Thomson, Kit, 50, 67 Ardis, Ann, 37 Arnold, Matthew, 9, 33, 50 Atalanta (myth of ), 53, 61–2 Baldwin, Dean, 5 Balzac, Honoré de, 14–15 Beerbohm, Max, 56 Benson, E. F., 30 Berenson, Bernard, 70 Berlant, Lauren, 109–10 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 85 Blackmore, R. D., 38 Bosanquet, Theodora, 11–12 Boucicault, Dion, 24 Brehm, Victoria, 39, 80 Browning, Robert, 85 Burlingame, Edward L., 70 Caird, Mona, 32, 102 Camlot, Jason, 44 Campbell, Donna, 80, 104 Case, Alison, 37 Chan, Winnie, 6, 7 Chanler, Margaret Terry, 69 Chesnutt, Charles, 112 Chopin, Kate, 2, 5 ‘A Gentleman of Bayou Têche’, 16–17 Colby, Vineta, 20, 49–50 collaboration, 50, 53–4, 67–8

connoisseurship, 35, 37–8, 48, 69–71, 73, 80, 94–5, 103 Cooke, Rose Terry, 104, 105 Cooper, James Fenimore, 39 Corelli, Marie, 32 Cotterell, George, 36 Cox, Harding, 42 D’Arcy, Ella, 72 ‘The Elegie’, 86–9 ‘The Pleasure Pilgrim’, 94–8, 103–4 Dean, Sharon, 3, 39, 72, 80 Denisoff, Dennis, 51 ‘Diva Citizenship’, 109–10 Dixon, Ella Hepworth, 35 Dunne, Mary see Egerton, George DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 7 Edel, Leon, 80 Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne), 7, 24, 37–8 Keynotes and Discords, 6 ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, 1–2 Ehnenn, Jill, 67 Emery, Sarah Smith, 108 Estes, Dana, 5 Fetterley, Judith, 17, 105 Flaubert, Gustave, 10 Freedman, Jonathan, 46–7, 70 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 5, 21, 80 ‘A Church Mouse’, 94, 104–12 ‘A Mistaken Charity’, 109 ‘A Poetess’, 104 – 137 –

138

Index

Gagnier, Regenia, 47 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 51, 110 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 5 Gonnelli, Giovanni, 70 Gowing, Aylmer, 42 Grand, Sarah (Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall) The Beth Book, 7 ‘The Undefinable’, 13–16, 35, 90 Grant, Robert, 74 Haggard, Rider, 27–9 Hardy, Thomas, 37 Hazard, Thomas, 108 Harrison, William, 102 Hawksley, Julia, 102 Heilmann, Ann, 25, 26 Hood, Thomas, 45 Howells, William Dean, 6, 91 Hutton, Lawrence, 46 idealism (in art), 63, 89 Inness, Sherrie, 104, 105 international copyright, 5 Irigaray, Luce, 102 Irving, Henry, 43 James, Henry, 4, 10, 23, 24, 25, 26, 33, 38, 49–51, 64, 68, 71, 80, 90 ‘The Art of Fiction’, 10–11, 92 The Bostonians, 56 ‘Daisy Miller’, 94 in ‘Lady Tal’ by Vernon Lee, 53, 55–7 The Princess Casamassima, 11–12, 57–8, 88 Spoils of Poynton, 34–5 James, William, 49, 56 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 4, 5, 104, 105 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 71 Kandola, Sondeep, 51 Katz, Michael, 108 Kingston, Angela, 27 Lane, John, 1, 24, 32, 94–6 Lang, Andrew, 29 Ledger, Sally, 6, 95, 99 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 4, 13, 24, 49–68, 103, 112

‘Lady Tal’, 19–20, 35, 49–50, 53–62, 66–8 Lee-Hamilton, Eugene, 56 Le Gallienne, Richard, 96 Leighton, Angela, 64 Leverson, Ada, 94 ‘Suggestion’, 98–104 Licht, Merete, 56 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 37 local colour fiction, 5, 6, 80, 104 Lombroso, Cesare, 46 McCann, Andrew, 48 McFall, Frances see Grand, Sarah Macfarlane, Robert, 28 McFadden, Margaret, 3–4 Mahoney, Kristin, 50–1 Maine, Barry, 92 Malet, Lucas, 56 Matthews, Brander, 5 Mayer, David, 42 Meynell, Alice, 24 Mill, John Stuart, 107, 110 Moore, George, 24, 35–6, 37 Moore, Thomas, 28 Morris, William, 51 muse’s revenge tales, 2, 19, 35, 51, 93–4, 111 Myers, R. C. V., 28 Nelson, Carolyn Christensen, 25 Neville, Henry, 43 Newnes, George, 5 New Woman, 6–7, 8, 15, 19, 20, 22, 25–6, 32, 37, 51, 96, 98, 102, 111 Norton, Grace, 55 Ohmann, Richard, 5 Olin-Ammentorp, Julie, 75 Orlando, Emily, 3, 73, 83 Pall Mall Gazette, 27–8 Paget, Violet see Lee, Vernon Pater, Walter, 9, 23, 25, 26, 33, 50–1, 68 The Renaissance, 52, 87, 89 Patten, Robert, 6 Peirce, Mrs C. F., 110 plagiarism, 23–33, 35, 43, 44, 78 Poe, Edgar Allan, 7 poor laws, 108–9

Index Poovey, Mary, 12 Pre-Raphaelites, 73, 83 Pryse, Marjorie, 17, 105 Psomiades, Kathy, 2, 3, 46–7 public housekeeping, 110–11

Thompson, Nicola Diane, 8 Tintner, Adeline, 56 Tolstoy, Leo, 69 Tompkins, Jane, 5 Transatlantic, 3–4, 53

Reade, Charles, 12 recitation, 42–5 regionalism, 104–5 Renaissance, 52–3, 82 Richardson, Angelique, 8–9 Rochelson, Meri-Jane, 24 Rossetti, Christina, 83 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 83 Royer, Diana, 104, 105 Ruskin, John, 51

vampirism, 45, 47–8, 51

Saint-Amour, Paul K., 27 Saltz, Laura, 7, 18, 72–3 Sargent, John Singer, 92 Schaffer, Talia, 2, 3, 24, 25, 26, 46, 56 Schreiner, Olive, 8 short story (as a genre), 4–7, 74, 93, 103–4 Showalter, Elaine, 25 Siddal, Elizabeth, 83 Sontag, Susan, 23 Speedie, Julie, 101 Stedman, Clarence, 39 Steiling, David, 17 Stetz, Margaret, 2, 3, 25, 31–2, 35, 45, 47, 64, 66 Stevens, Laura, 4 Stoker, Bram, 45, 47–8 Strand, 5 Symonds, John Addington, 82 Symons, Arthur, 69, 80

139

Watterson, Helen, 7 Wharton, Edith, 2, 3, 4, 5, 20–1, 69–92 ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’, 7, 17–18, 35, 73 The Valley of Decision, 4 Wicke, Jennifer, 47 Wilde, Oscar, 9–10, 23, 25, 26, 27, 33, 50–1, 64, 66, 68, 71, 98 ‘The Critic as Artist’, 10, 11, 33–4, 87, 90 ‘The Decay of Lying’, 24, 56 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 47, 79 review of Mabel Wotton, Word-Portraits of Famous Writers, 45–6 Willis, Chris, 9 Woman Question, 2, 3, 8, 21, 51 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 2, 3, 4, 55, 72 ‘The Front Yard’, 80–2 ‘Miss Grief ’, 39–43 Wotton, Mabel, 23–48, 51, 53, 79, 90, 112 ‘The Fifth Edition’, 19, 23–39, 41–2, 47, 60, 67 Wright, Edward, 30–2 Wright, Sarah Bird, 71 Yellow Book, 1, 6, 94, 98 Zangwill, Israel, 24, 32–3 Zorn, Christa, 49, 52