Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance 9781442685079

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
Introduction: Inheritance and Disinheritance in the Novel
1. Owenson’s ‘Sacred Union’: Domesticating Ireland, Disavowing Catholicism in The Wild Irish Girl
2. The Nation’s Wife: England’s Vicarious Enjoyment in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels
3. Ghostly Dispossessions: The Gothic Properties of Uncle Silas
4. The Englishness of a Gentleman: Illegitimacy and Race in Daniel Deronda
5. A Battle of Wills: Solving The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
6. E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey and the Legacy of Sentiment
7. Heredity and Disinheritance in Joyce’s Portrait
8. Elizabeth Bowen and the Maternal Sublime
9. Good Graces: Inheritance and Social Climbing in Brideshead Revisited
10. Maternal Property and Female Voice in Banville’s Fiction
Index

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TROUBLED LEGACIES: NARRATIVE AND INHERITANCE

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Contents

EDITED BY ALLAN HEPBURN

Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

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Contents www.utppublishing.com

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© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9110-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Troubled legacies : narrative and inheritance / edited by Allan Hepburn. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9110-9 (bound) 1. Legal stories, English – History and criticism. 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. 3. Inheritance and succession in literature. 4. Real property in literature. 5. Law and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. I. Hepburn, Allan PR878.L43T76 2007

823′.8093554

C2007-901968-4

The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Contents

Contributors vii Introduction: Inheritance and Disinheritance in the Novel allan hepburn

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1 Owenson’s ‘Sacred Union’: Domesticating Ireland, Disavowing Catholicism in The Wild Irish Girl 26 patrick r. o’malley 2 The Nation’s Wife: England’s Vicarious Enjoyment in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels 53 sara l. maurer 3 Ghostly Dispossessions: The Gothic Properties of Uncle Silas 87 ann gaylin 4 The Englishness of a Gentleman: Illegitimacy and Race in Daniel Deronda 109 natalie rose 5 A Battle of Wills: Solving The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 137 carol margaret davison 6 E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey and the Legacy of Sentiment 163 jay dickson

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7 Heredity and Disinheritance in Joyce’s Portrait 191 bradley d. clissold 8 Elizabeth Bowen and the Maternal Sublime maria dibattista

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9 Good Graces: Inheritance and Social Climbing in Brideshead Revisited 239 allan hepburn 10 Maternal Property and Female Voice in Banville’s Fiction jason s. polley Index

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Bradley D. Clissold is Assistant Professor of Modern British Literature and Film Studies at Memorial University. He is currently working on Exchanging Postcards: Vernacular Modernism and the Field of Cultural Production, a book that explores the influence of postcard culture on modernist literature. He is also researching Putting English on the Ball, a critical examination of bowling as a signifier across twentieth-century popular culture. Carol Margaret Davison is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Windsor. She is the author of Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature and the editor of the award-winning Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897–1997. She is currently completing British Gothic Literature, 1764–1824, to be published by the University of Wales Press. Maria DiBattista, author of Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels, First Love, FastTalking Dames, as well as numerous articles, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she also chairs the film studies committee and serves on the women’s studies faculty. Jay Dickson is Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Reed College. He has published essays on Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and James Joyce. He is currently at work on a book about British modernists’ response to the Victorian culture of sentimental bereavement. Ann Gaylin, a Program Officer at the American Council of Learned Societies, taught at Yale University between 1994 and 2005. Her articles

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have appeared in Texas Studies in Language and Literature and Cincinnati Romance Review. Her book, Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. Allan Hepburn, an Associate Professor of English at McGill University, has published articles on Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wharton, Joan of Arc, the culture of driving, opera, and many other subjects. His book, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture, appeared with Yale University Press in 2005. Sara L. Maurer is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is currently at work on a book-length project about narratives of ownership in nineteenth-century English and Irish literature. Patrick R. O’Malley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has published articles on Newman, Hardy, Wilde, and Joyce. His book, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2006. Jason S. Polley completed his doctorate in English literature at McGill University with a thesis on justice and risk in contemporary American fiction by Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Franzen. He is Assistant Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. Natalie Rose completed her PhD in English literature at the University of Toronto, where she now teaches. Her dissertation focused on modalities of gender and nation in novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot.

Growing Internationalization and Family Policies

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Introduction: Inheritance and Disinheritance in the Novel allan hepburn

Inheritances change destinies and instigate stories. This collection of essays by ten literary scholars focuses on the representation of inheritance in British and Irish fiction. Grouped chronologically and thematically, these essays examine novels from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as documents in which inheritance variously signifies national belonging, literary affiliation, class identity, heredity, and kinship. Inheritance implies transmission of property and thus creates the expectation of narrative sequence when possessions move from hand to hand. Stories about inheritance therefore concern the meaning of ownership and genealogy, both of which can be disturbed by the disinherited or those who refuse their inheritances. As many essays in this collection argue, inheritances are cultural as well as material. Writers, for instance, choose their literary forebears as a way of declaring affinities and asserting authority. Nations, too, such as Ireland, can reject the cultural imperatives of colonizers in order to establish independent lineages and legacies. ‘Inheritance’ in this volume means, in the first instance, personal bequests of property and estates, but that meaning expands to include the inheritance of national traditions, the conscious choice of literary ancestors, and the nature of dispossession and disinheritance. Troubled Legacies is not, of course, the first work of criticism to identify the interrelationship of inheritance and novelistic discourse. Although scholarship on the entanglement of money and narrative exists, no single critical book surveys the continuity between inheritance and narrative.1 Other scholars have taken up inheritance as a trope in detailed readings of single authors. In a study of Honoré de Balzac, Janet L. Beizer concentrates on the father as the guarantor of

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genealogy: ‘The problem of paternity is tightly knotted into the Balzacian text, appearing in varying patterns of heredity, succession, paternal tyranny, orphaned and illegitimate children, filial transgression, and parricide’ (5). The effects of literal inheritances – including repudiation of fathers and the doubtfulness of legitimacy – appear in Père Goriot, Cousine Bette, and Le Colonel Chabert, although these motifs recur throughout Balzac’s novels. Working in the British tradition rather than the French, Goldie Morgentaler sorts out the jumble of ideas about hereditary bonding between children and their parents in Charles Dickens’s novels. She emphasizes the ‘dramatic possibilities of heredity’ (22) that alter human nature and social relations in David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, and other novels. Drawing upon nineteenthcentury historiography that characterizes history as a burden, Bernard Semmel relates personal inheritances to cultural benefits in the novels of George Eliot. Semmel argues that attachment to the nation allows individuals in Eliot’s fiction to move beyond the self to a ‘communal solidarity’ (6), in which one is heir to the past whether one wants to be or not. In the course of the nineteenth century, inheritance increasingly takes on connotations of hereditary transmission. In Tess O’Toole’s study of Thomas Hardy’s novels, the ‘fascination with hereditary resemblances’ (24) and characters who duplicate history, sometimes against their will or against their knowledge, forms the principal object of study. Each of these critical works concentrates on one author’s preoccupation with genealogy and its implications for inheritance.2 In a more broadly conceived discussion of time in narrative, Patricia Drechsel Tobin claims that a structural consistency underlies family lineage and narrative chronologies, so that nineteenth-century characters ‘inherit their legacies and meet their destinies in novels where spacious familial accommodations are always guaranteed by patrilinear consistencies between beginning and end, past and future’ (37). Last wills and testaments confirm the continuance of the family, even when challenges by orphans, interlopers, and villainous relatives threaten to disarrange the seamless transmission of property. Franco Moretti similarly identifies the coming-into-an-inheritance as a mode of closure for the English novel, but not its continental counterparts (205). Moretti argues that the happy ending, derived from fairy tales, institutes the natural fitness of individuals to inherit – the Cinderella story of those who appear to be low-born but turn out to be gentry in disguise – as when Tom Jones, a gentleman raised as a commoner, takes possession of Paradise Hall in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Moretti,

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however, is not entirely right. Inheritance in the English and Irish traditions inscribes sequence and consequence into narrative, though not always as a happy ending. The position of inheritance at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a plot determines whether inheritance concerns disruption or restitution of lineage. In Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Five Orange Pips,’ a curse accompanies a legacy. Estates and jewels wreak havoc on those who become their custodians. Inheritance, too, has its terrors. Inheritance plots usually involve a tangible form of property: a family portrait, a set of diamonds, a country seat. In the sense that inheritance necessitates the transfer of property, novels interrogate the ideology of ownership as an inherent legal right, with ramifications for both personal and national belonging. Fictional narratives often conclude that property ownership is an insoluble puzzle. In ‘The Five Orange Pips,’ one of the stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, an heir solicits Holmes’s help to solve a double crime. The heir’s uncle and father both die under mysterious circumstances. ‘In this sinister way I came into my inheritance,’ the heir laments (Doyle 110). His retired father possessed a ‘handsome competence,’ and his uncle amassed ‘a very considerable fortune’ in Florida (105). Yet the combined fortunes that the heir acquires do not compensate for the loss of his uncle and father. Property neither helps nor protects him. He dies under doubtful circumstances by drowning in the Thames one stormy night. In this story, legacies bear a taint that cannot be expiated; it can only be passed along in a genealogy of fatalities, as if property itself mortally afflicts its possessor. Heritable property harms or destroys consecutive generations even as that property remains, however precariously, within the family. The will to possess property, inseparable from the necessity of transmitting property, consumes those who live by its principles. All legacies are troubled, in the sense that they promise happiness in material or financial form and regularly deliver, in fiction at least, complication and unhappiness. By evolving incidents out of the primary matter of inheritance – a death, a will, a fortune, a usurper, a conflict, another will, a second death, a new heir, a fresh dilemma – property perpetuates itself. The sequence of events varies, but narratives of inheritance are de facto bracketed by death. Property requires its stories as much as stories require property. Property, by definition, must be alienable from its possessor, and bequests are one means by which alienation takes place. Other means

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include dowries, settlements, auctions, and sales, but these forms of disembarrassing oneself of property do not necessarily involve a death. John Stuart Mill contends in The Principles of Political Economy that ‘the ownership of a thing cannot be looked upon as complete without the power of bestowing it, at death or during life, at the owner’s pleasure: and all the reasons, which recommend that private property should exist, recommend pro tanto this extension of it’ (223). Property needs to be sold or transferred in order to prove that it is property. Mill goes so far as to claim that bestowal completes ownership as the necessary development in a sequence. Within fictional narratives, property is subject to theft, loss, or transformation as proofs of the logic that alienability alone completes ownership. However property is obtained, ownership exacts obligations. Inheritance in particular, because it allows little choice of ownership, creates complications that do not arise with the purchase of a material object or estate. A testator may create conditions that inhibit the enjoyment of property. Or it is possible to inherit property or traditions that cost more than they are worth. An estate might be encumbered with debts and commitments that the heir accepts as part of a legacy. Obligations towards property can exceed the capacities of the legatee to pay or otherwise perform his responsibilities. In the nineteenth century, the transmission of property, especially large country estates, came charged with duties to support siblings, widows, and younger brothers, in addition to maintaining the property itself. Obligations to parents were legally enforceable. ‘In principle,’ Toby L. Ditz explains, ‘a life-tenant was entitled only to the income from an estate; but in fact, almost all settlements also granted the main heir some powers to mortgage, lease, or even sell peripheral land. These limited powers gave the heir managerial flexibility, but their primary purpose was to empower him to raise sums for his wife’s maintenance (jointure) and for his younger children’s portions’ (31). Obligations to immediate and extended families could spread to three or more generations at a time. Heirs took over entire households – servants and dependants – in addition to assuming whatever debts were attached to the property. In nineteenth-century Ireland, the landed gentry dealt with so many encumbrances that Lord Dufferin, who sold up in 1874, quipped, ‘an Irish estate is like a sponge ... and an Irish landlord is never so rich as when he is rid of his property’ (qtd in Foster 377). Property could be entailed, meaning that a landed estate could not be disposed of at the pleasure of any one possessor because the line of succession had been

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predetermined, typically via primogeniture. Inheritances thus created vast inequalities within families for the sake of keeping estates intact while purporting to protect the well-being of successive dynastic generations who derived their wealth from the property. In terms of succession, sons were preferred over daughters, and eldest sons were favoured above others. Depending on the standing of the family and the size of the property in question, younger children, not in line to succeed, could go to work elsewhere as clergymen or governesses. Moreover, the transfer of family property was connected to critical life events such as marriage, retirement, and death. At such moments, disagreements between fathers and sons sometimes interrupted the planned, patrilineal transmission of goods and property. Narratives of inheritance thus touch intimately on family relations and the authority of the father. More often than not, inheritance defines the will of the father as the intentional structure of lineage that is worked out and worked through narrative. Attitudes towards wealth and bequests vary by class. According to a social historian who studies wealth in nineteenth-century England, ‘so long as any rich man leaves more than one descendant, his wealth is divided up rather than kept intact’ (Rudinstein 138). In other words, the quickest way to dissipate accumulated wealth is to have more than one child. Abiding by the property-based concept of primogeniture, the very wealthy remain rich from generation to generation by not dividing their estates among offspring. By contrast, the Victorian middle classes, whose wealth derived directly or indirectly from industry and commerce, managed more equitable distributions of property. In Victorian England, ‘the middle class practised partible inheritance, disposing of wealth to various family members rather than bequesting it to one’ (Green 217). These class-based attitudes towards inheritances compete with each other in fictional representations. Julia Wright points out that ‘improper inheritances of aristocratic property are central to gothic novels from the first of the genre’ (80), which suggests that such narratives move towards the restitution of usurped estates. Inheritance among the middle classes, by comparison, may favour distribution of wealth to the deserving, the upstanding, and the inoffensive. Especially in novels, tensions between classes are worked out through just or unjust inheritances and the moral reasoning that motivates the naming of heirs. From its inception, the English novel as a genre appears to extol the virtues of property ownership. In a supreme example of Protestant

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thrift and enterprise, Robinson Crusoe, cast up on a deserted island, retrieves silver and gold from the shipwreck and stashes this loot in a cave. It is hard to imagine what good money will do Crusoe because he is, or imagines himself to be, alone on the island. Money, after all, regulates social interactions as transactions. Furthermore, during his long years of absence, Crusoe grows exceedingly well-to-do because he leaves his plantations in South America under the stewardship of a friend, who invests Crusoe’s profits against the possibility of his return. As a genre, the novel juxtaposes the value of property and the imperative to own with moral rectitude and human qualities. Whereas Robinson Crusoe valorizes the investment practices of the emerging middle classes in the early eighteenth century, a novel such as Tom Jones more ambiguously reflects the uncertainty about moral worth and its relation to class. According to Jo Alyson Parker, the eighteenthcentury novel arbitrates competing claims to legitimacy, especially between the emerging mercantile classes and the landed aristocracy. In novels by Fielding, Richardson, and Austen, ‘the issue of inheritance customarily plays an important role in resolving conflicts over the grounds for moral and, by extension, literary authority. The landed estate maintains its representational significance as a traditional sign of moral authority’ (Parker 94). Tom Jones’s genteel birth coexists with his experiences of adversity as a low-born character. In a novel such as Pride and Prejudice, ‘real worth’ may reside with Darcy and the upper gentry generally, without inevitably excluding the moral worth and humanity of characters such as Mr and Mrs Gardiner, who are in trade, and Elizabeth Bennet (Parker 109). The inheritance plot masks conflicts among property entitlement (Parker 10), insofar as Elizabeth Bennet cannot inherit Longbourn, the family house, because she is a woman and the property is entailed on the male line. Elizabeth’s marriage to Mr Darcy demonstrates the two storylines concerning inheritance in the novel. Denied her birthright because of patriarchal prerogatives, a situation that intimates Austen’s critique of those prerogatives, Elizabeth nevertheless marries into Darcy’s considerable estate, a situation that confirms the author’s acceptance of patriarchal prerogatives (Parker 96). The split in novelistic representation between aristocratic and patriarchal right to property and the claims laid to property by the emerging middle classes underlies eighteenth-century gothic narratives. In The Castle of Otranto, frequently referred to as the first English gothic novel, a usurped kingdom is restored to its legitimate heirs through

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supernatural means. The pattern of usurpation and restitution, or dispossession and repossession, can be traced through subsequent gothic novels: The Italian, Melmoth the Wanderer, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. At the querulous centre of the gothic, however, remains some doubt about the legitimacy of aristocratic inheritance as a natural right. In many gothic narratives, the consolidation of property through strategic marriages releases the noxious odour of incest. Parker suggests that, even in so un-gothic a novel as Pride and Prejudice, the proposed alliance between Mr Darcy and his cousin Anne de Bourgh, a pallid and unhealthy young lady, carries the taint of ‘inbreeding’ that threatens the ‘moral vigor’ of the gentry (Parker 108). Indeed, incest becomes the novelistic mark of improper inheritances. Michael Minden, discussing the dual impulses of incest and inheritance that motivate the Bildungsroman, suggests that nineteenth-century German narratives of personal development typically avoid rivalries between generations of men. Sons ‘inherit, materially, spiritually or both, from fathers and father figures. This is the masculine circularity which corresponds to the feminine one grounded in the love of the mother’ (Minden 3). Likewise in the English gothic tradition, the narrative of legitimate inheritance posits that the son who emerges from disguise takes the place of the father. Legitimacy means that the recognized son and heir carries on the traditions of the father. To keep property within the family, the son is frequently confronted with the spectre of incest through marriage to a close female relative. The gothic represents the terrors that legitimacy causes. Whether gothic or realist, the novel promotes versions of cultural and national inheritances. To own property is to participate in a national economy and to acquire the advantages that national belonging confers. Especially in nineteenth-century novels, property ownership functions within the dual framework of personal and national heritages. This conception of inheritance derives from Edmund Burke’s articulation of national identity in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a text cited by several essayists in this collection to underscore the structural logic that unites property ownership with national entitlement, or to underscore that inheritance is a conventional and conservative, not a natural and inevitable, phenomenon. Using inheritance in both its ordinary and its metaphorical sense, Burke claims that Englishmen assume civil ‘liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to use from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity – as an estate specially belonging to the people of this

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kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right’ (33). Thus, the crown, the peerage, the House of Commons, the franchise, and protected rights of Englishmen are not alienable, because they are an estate belonging to the people as a common inheritance. Property justifies law in this formulation, not vice versa. Just as they are received from ancestors, entitlements are meant to be transmitted to future generations as legally defended expectations. Yet Burke’s formulation of inheritance ignores the disenfranchised. Throughout the nineteenth century, Catholics, women, Jews, the Irish, and people without property did not participate in this entailed inheritance. Englishmen might come into a national inheritance according to Burke, but other constituencies are thereby excluded. As Burke intimates, inheritance and disinheritance imply a relation between expectation and events cast in the framework of the law. Novels invoke the law and its apparatus (affidavits, courts, verdicts, and wills) with surprising frequency as a means to safeguard the integrity and meaning of property. The provisions in a last will and testament can alter the course of events irrevocably for those who inherit and those who do not. Self-interest thus motivates those who wish to understand their position with regard to the law, especially those who anticipate inheriting. A will binds inheritors to property, which always involves the future of that property. Inheritance, as a duty, stretches indefinitely forward in time. It does not release the living from the clutch of the dead and the past. In this sense, a will provides a template for the future disposition and meaning of property. To apply narrative terms to the discrepancy between intention and execution, a will is a fabula (a story prior to its mode of telling) and the trajectory that property takes in the hands of heirs is a sjuzhet (the way the story is told, in what temporal sequence, and by whom). The maker of a will asserts that the story of a bequest should go one way, but the story rarely follows the testator’s prescriptive demands. Human desire and connivance intervene to change the direction of the will. The number of novelistic representations of writing, reading, and probating wills – the finding of the lost will in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, or Grandcourt’s disinheritance of Lydia Glasher and her children in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda – rather distorts historical facts about will-making. In 1841, for instance, only 10 per cent of the English and Welsh population made a will (Owens 84). That figure remains relatively consistent across the nineteenth century.3 Furthermore, only

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people with more than £5 worth of goods were required to have a will. Lunatics, criminals, and the excommunicated could not make wills, which helps to explain the frequency with which characters in nineteenth-century novels are coerced into insane asylums or are kept locked in a room of a lonely country house. Deemed insane, they were cast beyond the system of inheritance. In a further limitation, the 1837 Wills Act forbade children under the age of twenty-one from making wills; prior to that legislation, children could make a testament to dispose of personal property, including stocks, cash, and movables, but they could not create a will to dispose of real estate. In fact, the difference between a ‘will’ and a ‘testament’ derives from the legal distinction between personal effects (cash, stocks, shares, leasehold property) and real estate (freehold property and buildings). Many Victorian will-makers put off the task of writing their last wills and testaments until their dying hours. In a study of testators in the industrial city of Stockport, Alastair Owens estimates that ‘most wills were made close to death, with nearly half of testators performing this act within three months of dying and nearly a fifth within one week’ (91). The deathbed has a privileged place in the Victorian imagination because so many lasting decisions about inheritance happened on, or in the vicinity of, that baleful site. Wills consolidate the obligation to own, rather than affirm the putative freedoms of futurity. Legal terms, such as ‘waste,’ ‘jointure,’ ‘coverture,’ ‘freehold,’ and ‘enjoyment,’ situate novelistic discourse in relation to property and law. The novel, as a capacious genre, documents instances of legal inadequacy, especially when human cunning exceeds the reaches of the law. Ruthless interlopers usurp inheritances or disregard wills. Heathcliff consolidates property in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights through strategic marriages aided by the legal reinforcement of wills. Heathcliff encourages Cathy to marry sickly Linton, specifying that Cathy will not inherit should Linton die: ‘There is no clause in the will to secure it so; his property would go to me; but, to prevent disputes, I desire their union, and am resolved to bring it about’ (Brontë 215). In Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife, Lord Holchester, who begins life as a solicitor and ends as a peer, threatens to cut his second son, Geoffrey, out of his will unless he marry ‘a sensible woman’ from ‘good society’ (178), a condition impossible to meet because Geoffrey is already married. Lord Holchester dies before he can initial several codicils that would leave his son an income; his death is announced even while his will is brandished at

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his bedchamber door for a signature that would confirm his changed intentions. As Brontë’s and Collins’s novels illustrate, wills have the capacity to resolve tensions or escalate them. Setting boundaries of acceptable action and behaviour within narrative, the law sanctions the male owner of property to bequeath legacies as he sees fit, according to personal fancies and assessments of character, not according to just provision for every child. Inheritance is not a pleasure, but a threat, a means to keep recalcitrant children in line through the legally enforced discipline of frustration and renewed promises. Wills reinforce intra-familial cruelties and preferences through appeals to the law. A legal will presupposes the authority of the possessor of property or money to bequeath that property, a civil right of ownership that extends even beyond death, for a short while at least, until property is settled in a successor’s hands. In a similar manner, novels appeal to legal codes to reinforce their truth value. Recourse to the law clears up the ambiguities of a narrative situation. Flipping this principle on its head, fictional narratives document the ambiguities of the law through instantiation of odd, even sui generis, predicaments. Collins’s Man and Wife hinges on a loophole in Scottish marriage laws that declares a man and woman married if they give out to other parties that they are married, or even if they exchange consent without the publishing of banns, let alone having a ceremony over which a minister officiates.4 Novels therefore complicate the meaning and application of laws governing inheritance. Even when laws set the parameters for narratives of inheritance and disinheritance, novels demonstrate the ramifications that legal principles have on the representation of individual lives and quandaries. In narratives that concern an antagonism over property, the law is applied in what are alleged to be just causes. The appearance of wills within these novels therefore invites questions about the exact relation between narrative and law. The law ‘corrects’ plotted events, just as plotted events trouble the application and verifiability of the law. Wills create categories of acknowledged inheritors and the disinherited. The law does not necessarily favour kinship in matters of inheritance. Wills and inheritance laws were unknown in ancient Greece and most other ancient civilizations. The idea of a written bequest evolved from Roman law. Wills that distribute property were ‘resurrected [in Europe] after feudalism through the influence of the Church’ (Chester 11). They are, therefore, an occidental and relatively recent legal mech-

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anism that coincides with the rise of capitalism. Furthermore, they rely on the technology of writing. Unlike the oral expression of wishes, a written document has the advantages of being kept secret and being transmissible across time. Whereas an oral declaration of wishes expires with the last breath of the living, a written document, because of its transmissibility, sustains the right to possess and bestow property that extends beyond death. The right to bestow and to inherit are inevitably tied to the capitalist right to property. Inheritance is necessarily secondary to that right. Theories of property ownership confront the problem that nothing inherent in objects or land proves possession. One can proclaim, ‘this acreage is mine’ or ‘this house belongs to me,’ but acreage and house are, ultimately, alienable because ownership does not inhere in the things themselves. To compensate for this paradox, John Locke argues in Two Treatises on Civil Government that property rights spring from nature and are therefore inviolable. In the section called ‘Of Property’ in the second treatise, Locke claims that, ‘though the things of Nature are given in common, man (by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of property’ (213). Labour – not appropriation, not occupation – entitles one to claim property. After Locke, thinkers on property suggest that ‘the laws of property ... are conventions which men obey because it is to their common interest to do so’ (Schlatter 240). According to David Hume, the promotion of self-interested, individual happiness benefits the general welfare and happiness of civil society. Ownership is not contingent on labour, Hume argues, since labour itself does not prevent the appropriation of others’ possessions. Property is an ideologically determined ‘right,’ not a natural one, as Locke would have it. This paradox of ownership extends to the giving away of possessions. Sir William Blackstone opens the second book of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9) with a discussion of the unnaturalness of property and wills: ‘there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow-creatures from a determinate spot of land because his father had done so before him; or why the occupier of a particular field or of a jewel, when lying on his deathbed and no longer able to maintain possession should be entitled to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him’ (2: 2). Blackstone touches on some

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firmly held beliefs about property, namely, that property allows one to exclude others, that property distribution is not egalitarian, that owners appeal to precedents to legitimate their claims, and that property exists for the sake of self-interested enjoyment. A bequest is the enactment of an utterance. As Blackstone suggests, the declaration, ‘this is mine,’ establishes and maintains the relation called ‘property ownership.’ On the other hand, if I proclaim, ‘I am king,’ that proclamation does not make me so. Similarly, utterance itself, out loud or on paper, does not guarantee title to property, although, according to property law, uncontested precedent confirms ownership over time. Blackstone intimates, as Mill does after him, that the only proof of ownership is, ironically, the alienability of property from an owner. The disturbing insight that property is an ideological construction, not an inherent right, may give hope to the disinherited. The disinherited also have their stories, and these stories differ from narratives about inheritance. Ronald Chester claims that ‘one English rule derived from Roman law even stated that to cut off an heir “without a shilling” raised a presumption that the testator was legally incompetent to make a will’ (12). This ruling did not hold up in courts of law. Cutting off a descendant without a shilling is defensible, if reprehensible. The disinherited, those forcibly orphaned from the past and from their claims upon legacies, point up inconsistencies in the system of granting heritages. According to John Stuart Mill, children have no automatic claims to an inheritance: ‘Whatever fortune a parent may have inherited, or still more, may have acquired, I cannot admit that he owes to his children, merely because they are his children, to leave them rich, without the necessity of any exertion’ (221). Mill concludes that moderate bequests might stimulate children to productivity, although he further admits that heritages given to descendants depend on assessment of individual character. All that being said, the disinherited are no less moral and no less fated as characters than the inheritors who receive everything. Narrative expands around the disinherited, just as it does around their more fortunate counterparts. Narratives of the dispossessed concern envy and despair, although they sometimes inspire chances for reconciliation. The disinherited may come into legacies later, even if those legacies are not the ones initially sought. In Ivy Compton-Burnett’s 1959 novel, A Heritage and Its History, Simon Challoner schemes to inherit his uncle Sir Edwin Challoner’s estate. His ambition to inherit overrides all considerations of others’ feelings and their legitimate entitlement. Simon confides to his

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brother, Walter, that he has mapped out his future in relation to the estate: ‘I love it as I could never love anything else. Even you are second to it. Wife and child could never be more to me. I shall need them, in order to hand it on to my descendants. That will be their first meaning’ (7). Simon’s dynastic ambitions demote all family relations to secondary importance after the estate itself. Wife and children have meaning only insofar as they fulfil the expectations to continue the tradition of ownership. He longs to take up the duties of possession. The house has been in the family ‘for centuries’ (218), and Simon wants it to remain there. In this regard, Compton-Burnett mocks the aristocratic assumptions of ownership that place property ahead of lives. The expectation of inheritance, exaggerating psychological propensities, stirs characters to machinate in a grotesque, even malignant, fashion. Simon’s father stands in the way of his anticipated inheritance, but when the father dies suddenly, Simon becomes Sir Edwin’s heir apparent. Age matters in this novel. A sexual misadventure – twenty-fiveyear-old Simon impregnates Sir Edwin’s thirty-nine-year-old wife, Rhoda, in a proximately incestuous act – provokes seventy-two-yearold Sir Edwin to disinherit Simon. Sir Edwin then claims Rhoda and Simon’s child as his own and consequently deprives Simon of what he imagined would pass into his hands either as a trust or as a just inheritance. As Ronald Chester writes about the expectation of a legacy, ‘While inheritance is not “natural right,” many perfectly decent people have formed expectations of entitlement to it’ (188–9). Narratives of inheritance and disinheritance accumulate around conjectures about who will inherit what and when. Chester implies that human decency does not forestall expectations even if those expectations are founded on nothing but hope. Expectation, which often solidifies into perceived entitlement, may or may not have anything to do with the wishes or the last will of the person who bequeaths property. Nonetheless, expectation breeds a narrative about the future in which inheritance of some sort must come to pass. A Heritage and Its History ruminates on the justice due to the past and the future as a transmissible legacy. ‘The past and the future are alive. We add to them day by day,’ claims one character, then adds, ‘The present owes homage to them. And we in the present give it’ (35). More cryptically, Simon’s father says, ‘The future must be remembered’ (21). He means that duties to the estate need to be kept in mind. The future should be thought of with regard to the well-

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being of subsequent generations. The inheritance plot requires working through the disruption to transmission, in the future, by restitution of genealogy. Simon’s father means that the future has a conjurable history that evolves in tandem with property. Property marks time. The opposite is not true. Time does not change the property in A Heritage and Its History: ivy that obstructs a window at the opening of the novel still obstructs the window twenty-five years later. The property remains in the hands of the Challoners. But Compton-Burnett creates a different order of time that unfolds in relation to property. Characters’ ages are slipped in as asides, leaving the reader to calculate relative changes in the temporal frame of the novel. On occasion, time in the narrative bounds forward. Years, even decades, pass between chapters. A significant death and a funeral occur between chapters 2 and 3; Simon and Rhoda have their sexual adventure between chapters 5 and 6. Important events occur elliptically, in a time zone outside narrative presentation. Still, the characters remain unfazed by their destiny written into the patterns of time. Hamish, by marrying an older woman, repeats with a variation his biological father’s liaison with Rhoda. In the cyclical momentum of time, the future appears as a convenience against which disaster can be measured. ‘We shall go on and on in the same way’ (60), says Simon. Simon’s five children tease that they will end up one day in the workhouse or an orphanage, both parallel institutions to the big house that Simon longs to inherit. The children fear nothing from the future because they conceive it as bleak, an extension of their miserable lives under Simon’s roof. He cannot bear to eat meals with his children, so he banishes them all to another floor of his small house. Whereas Simon as a young man, before his dispossession, conceives of the future as continuous with the past, his children think of the future as a decline. The narrative of inheritance gazes towards the future as the time when possession – or dispossession as the case may be – will come to pass. Such narratives are structured by anticipation, not the actual possession of property but the longing to possess. Expectations arise, as in the case of Simon Challoner, because of patrilineal kinship. Whereas Simon is a nephew, his son Hamish, legally claimed by Sir Edwin as his own child, is a son and therefore a direct heir. Yet Sir Edwin claims everything as his due. Although the life-tenant of the estate bears responsibility to his dependants, Sir Edwin demands that everything on the estate be rendered unto him as his property, including the illegitimate child Hamish. The owner of

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property exercises his enjoyment of property maliciously, by concentrating all possessions and people into his personal holdings. The malevolence that motivates Compton-Burnett’s characters glints just beneath the surface of their urbane repartee. Their grammatically compact and elegant syntax covers fathomless reserves of wickedness. Simon underestimates the connivance of his uncle, who is, as the possessor of property, a manipulator of others’ covetousness. ‘I am not a man who must live a life based on inheritance,’ claims Simon when he loses his expectations of gaining the estate; ‘I should be ashamed to be’ (106). As the father manqué of the heir, Simon refashions himself as ‘a humbler person, displaced, dispossessed’ (107). Hamish echoes this sentiment, with a difference. Not having been told the secret of his illegitimate birth, Hamish falls in love with his half-sister, Naomi, whom he believes to be his cousin. Forbidden to marry Naomi, Hamish says to Sir Edwin, ‘You might as well say you disinherit me, if I live the life that is my own’ (151). Sir Edwin evilly reminds Hamish that he is still master in his house and will bestow his property as he sees fit. To the end of his days, Sir Edwin manipulates his heirs by promising and withdrawing his estate. Whereas Simon is humbled by dispossession, Hamish takes up the mantle of dispossession voluntarily. In the end, Hamish inherits the estate from Sir Edwin and bequeaths it to Simon and his family. Simon moves back into the big house that he always coveted and reconciles his years of dispossession with the resurrection of his dynastic plans. Time seems not to have altered the course of events, except to make Simon suffer before taking up his duties on the estate. The time of property is simultaneously cyclical, ambiguous, and permanent. The narrative rewards Simon and his schemes by returning him to his childhood home with an unobstructed right to bestow the estate on his eldest son, Graham, who manifestly does not want it. Simon, caught up in the convictions that ownership causes him to cherish, cannot imagine anyone, especially his eldest son, not wanting what he possesses, which perpetuates the cycle and system of ownership. Novels have their own genealogies. They speak to and revise each other, sometimes over decades or centuries. The essays in this volume suggest that genealogies of the novel are indissociable from genealogies in the novel. When genealogical time is interrupted through accident or death, novelistic representation uses inheritance to configure the problems of time, paternal authority, and family kinship.

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The first cluster of essays in Troubled Legacies specifically concerns the inheritance of cultural traditions and their contribution to national identity. In essays by Patrick O’Malley, Sara L. Maurer, Ann Gaylin, and Natalie Rose, Ireland stands for a dispossessed, even disavowed, national culture and thus contrasts with England as possessor and defender of national heritage. Even in novels that are not often read for their Irish subtexts or subplots, such as Daniel Deronda and Uncle Silas, Ireland asserts its presence – sometimes military or spectral – through Celtic characters. Sydney Owenson’s novel The Wild Irish Girl has resonance across later texts, including John Banville’s Eclipse and Shroud, by virtue of its blending of nation and gender in the figure of the Irish girl. Women do not inherit in the same fashion as men do and therefore regard property differently. Patrick R. O’Malley’s analysis of The Wild Irish Girl assumes that the Act of Union caused Ireland to lose its place in time and tradition through subordination to English government and culture. O’Malley inaugurates a discussion about the entwinement of English and Irish nationhood, figured as husband and wife, that extends to other essays in this volume. As O’Malley shows, Owenson’s novel provides a national narrative about the cancellation of Catholic heritage in Ireland to facilitate a symbolic union between Ireland and England. The urgency with which genealogies are asserted in The Wild Irish Girl enact a series of cultural displacements in order to mask the true parentage of Ireland: papist Rome. Sara L. Maurer discerns the pattern of enjoyment that subtends domestic and national narratives in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels. Vicarious enjoyment of property occurs when a wife takes pleasure in the property that her husband legally owns. Displaced pleasures likewise undergird parliamentary government, as when the prime minister sees the perquisites of his office benefit his wife. All property involves displaced relations of enjoyment, of enjoying one’s property because others take enjoyment from it. Maurer demonstrates that, as property laws affecting women altered in the course of the nineteenth century, Ireland increasingly figured in the English political imagination as a nation that allowed vicarious enjoyment of possession. In a variation on the perils of possession in Victorian fiction, Ann Gaylin argues that Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas applies gothic conventions to demonstrate that possession of the female body is not necessarily an entitlement of women. The human body – the inalienable relation between a person and her physical form – sustains ideas about

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property in Le Fanu’s novel. To frighten an heiress out of her wits deprives her, collaterally, of her property. In Uncle Silas, Maud is dispossessed of her body through fear and dispossessed of her property by her wasteful uncle. Arguing that Le Fanu, under pressure from his publishers, switched a County Cork setting for a Derbyshire setting, Gaylin traces the dispossession and repossession of Maud’s body as an analogue to the dispossession of Ireland. In a realist rather than a gothic vein, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda represents English nationhood as having multiple and mixed genealogies, as Natalie Rose contends. Englishness does not invariably mean a pure bloodline, for the English have mixtures of Norman, Celtic, and other lineages. The designation of heirs in Daniel Deronda appears to legitimate non-English characters, in keeping with the tradition of the English gentleman. Cultural knowledge, not blood, determines Englishness. The inheritance plot of Eliot’s novel brings indirect rewards: Daniel, initially dispossessed of his biological family, recovers his Jewish heritage and moves to Palestine in identification with a nonEnglish tradition. Englishness emerges not by its ties to a mythic past, but from diverse cultural influences viewed from the position of disinheritance. A cluster of essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, E.M. Forster, and James Joyce examines legacies left by Victorian authors and the deliberate rejection of those legacies by modernists. ‘Modernism’ might be defined as a literary practice in which renunciation of inheritances and self-dispossession from the past allow for new, politicized identities to emerge for women, the working classes, and the Irish. Whereas Burke argues for a genealogical transmission of heritable rights, modernists prefer to disrupt genealogy and defy the claims of family over individual identities. ‘Let them die out’ is the rallying cry in E.M. Forster’s novel The Longest Journey, a cry that suggests certain lineages need not continue merely for the sake of continuance. The genealogical imperative of realist narrative – the need to assert cohesion when relationships within a family are threatened by disruptive strangers and outsiders – yields in modernism to more limber relationships and communities than the genealogical model allows. Heirs are not necessarily family members in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or The Longest Journey. Modernists prefer affiliation rather than filiation in the designation of successors. Reciprocally, modernists choose their own ancestors and establish independent cultural genealogies, in the sense that they elect to follow cultural models based on affinity rather than lineage. Hered-

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ity, however, may contradict such claims to inheritance. Heritable traits – the transmission of genetic predispositions – cannot be easily sloughed off and may be received without any awareness on the part of the recipient.5 While rejecting family, one may still resemble them. Carol Margaret Davison situates The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the context of late Victorian fears about the lower classes’ usurping bourgeois prerogatives and pleasures. A gothic narrative, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde indicts the ambitions and crimes of the bourgeoisie, manifest in the lawyer Utterson, who use the law to their advantage. The novella plays on the multiple meanings of ‘will’ to adumbrate the relation between wilfulness and testaments, class and inheritance. The death of Jekyll consolidates Utterson’s will to power at the same time as he is the beneficiary of Jekyll’s last will and promise. The gothic tradition, which Ann Gaylin refers to in her essay on Uncle Silas, is relocated in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to urban spaces. Davison consequently argues that Stevenson’s novel makes use of the gothic to inscribe a political narrative about the disenfranchised working classes in England and the entitlements expected by, and owed to, those classes. Jay Dickson argues that E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey revises Victorian conventions of death and mourning in a modern context. For Forster, who inherited a sum of money from his aunt that afforded him the opportunity to write, legacies have ethical and emotional dimensions. Nevertheless, Forster dismisses sentimentality and lugubriousness as outmoded Victorian conventions in narratives of sudden death. In fact, the death of Rickie’s father in The Longest Journey comes as a relief, since he is a cruel husband and father. His death, as Dickson argues in his essay on Forster, denies Rickie an Oedipal battle with the father, but it also suggests that the legacy of the father is hatred. The astonishing number of sudden deaths in The Longest Journey brings the ethical and emotional imperatives of remembering the dead into dramatic focus. By contrast, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as Bradley D. Clissold claims, engages the scientific discourses of heredity to legitimate Stephen Dedalus’s voluntary disinheritance from Irishness and family. Whereas Maurer and Rose cite Edmund Burke’s statements about cultural inheritance to suggest the ways in which Trollope and Eliot deviate from the conservative plot of entitlement, Clissold cites Burke in the context of Thomas Paine’s outraged response to English inheritances as a form of hereditary despotism. Interpreted against the naturalist strain within modernist Bildungsro-

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mane, A Portrait enacts Stephen Dedalus’s disinheritance from restrictive discourses of colonial, legal, and biological inheritance. The last three essays in this volume concern late modern and postmodern novels with particular emphasis on gender and Irishness. Those who fail to come into an inheritance, in all senses of the term, become the makers of culture. Whereas modernists such as Forster and Joyce advocate a break from the past, later modernists such as Elizabeth Bowen and Evelyn Waugh reconfigure the inheritance plot as cultural traditions that one cannot deny, but that one need not endorse either. The orphan Leopold in Bowen’s The House in Paris asserts that ‘anything from my mother is mine, of course’ (53). The claims laid on the mother’s possessions attest to the tenacity, if not the rapacity, of the dispossessed. Dispossession itself is the substance of narrative, rather than the heritage of national belonging and cultural inclusion that Burke promised. Identity may be circumscribed by property and ownership, but identity arises from cultural legacies. The dispossessed circulate geographically and socially, like the characters in transit in The House in Paris or the social bounders in Brideshead Revisited. As the essays on Bowen, Waugh, and Banville claim, dispossession happens to children, queer men, and women. Faced by disinheritance, the dispossessed fabricate identities and traditions out of what they do not have, but imagine that they might have at some indefinite time in the future. Elaborating on O’Malley’s, Maurer’s, and Gaylin’s arguments about the place of gender in the novelistic inheritance plot, Maria DiBattista demonstrates, in Bowen’s The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart, the danger of relying on mothers to satisfy personal needs. Mothers may, of course, claim no responsibility for their children and leave them nothing whatsoever, either as maternal affection or as ethical legacy. Yet the maternal continues to signify something desired, a legacy that will never be given, or never be given completely. Sexuality, rather than gender, influences the inheritance plot of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a novel that comically dramatizes the divergence between wanting and getting. Charles Ryder is a social climber who maximizes his chances of an inheritance by having sequential sexual relations with Sebastian and Julia Flyte. His ambitions, however, come to nothing, and Charles earns only cultural capital by accepting commissions to paint pictures of big houses. Brideshead Revisited, reflecting on the big house tradition, figures

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Charles not as a proprietor, but as a covetous exploiter of the social opportunities latent in property. Jason S. Polley’s essay on John Banville’s Eclipse and Shroud revisits the implications of female legacies within an Irish context. In a manner that harkens back to Maurer’s point about wives’ vicarious enjoyment of their husbands’ property, as well as Banville’s particular indebtedness to Bowen’s fiction, Polley delineates the process by which women’s identities come into being as property diminishes in significance. Reinterpreting women’s roles, Banville collaterally extends Irish nationhood into an international and post-colonial context. Inheritances trouble the certainty of property and ownership. Interventions in the transmission of property may arise at any point in the history of ownership. ‘This is the heir: come, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours,’ say the vineyard keepers in the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Luke 20:14). As the ten essays in this volume indicate, ownership and inheritance are central to the British and Irish novelistic tradition, as they are central to the British and Irish imagination, wicked, disruptive, and violent though that imagination sometimes can be. As such, these essays encourage a redefinition of the meaning of possession, which may be less firm and more custodial than owners and, especially, heirs conjecture.

NOTES 1 Marc Shell explains the connections between economics and literature in The Economy of Literature (1978), Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (1993), and Art and Money (1995). Numberless studies exist of individual authors and money, including Mark Osteen’s The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (1995) and Grahame Smith’s Dickens, Money, and Society (1968). Critics have a field day with monetary matters in Jane Austen’s and Henry James’s novels, but the scholarship on money is by no means limited to these authors. 2 Articles on inheritance and fiction abound. An exhaustive list would not be possible or especially useful. Two particular articles provide suggestive methodologies and interpretations of inheritance. Dana Luciano, using a queer theoretical framework to analyse Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, claims that ‘Ralph’s legacy to Isabel comprises an imaginative extension of himself through another’ (205). Queer kinship is established

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by Ralph’s bequest. In a searching essay about Wilkie Collins’s novel Basil, Sundeep Bisla extends the meaning of property to include intellectual property and the ownership of copyright. According to Bisla, ‘the proprietary right to literary property regains its own lost inheritance, perpetuity, by being implicitly tied to the perpetual right characteristic of the ownership of land’ (278). Bisla’s proposition that ‘inheritance’ includes the transmission of literary property could be applied to texts other than Basil in order to deepen the sense of literary legacies and intellectual ownership. 3 A.E. Zucker contrasts the ‘genealogical novel’ spanning multiple generations (Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot) with the Darwinian theory of heredity. Zucker concludes that such genealogical novels afford opportunities to satirize heredity as a model for fictional narrative (555). 4 Sir Patrick, a lawyer in Man and Wife, explains the wide variety of ‘Irregular Marriages in Scotland’ (231). Under certain circumstances, an ‘irregular’ marriage might be said to have occurred without parental consent, without a contract, without a ceremony, or even in exceptional cases without consent between the two parties concerned. Sir Patrick quotes a Scottish judge on the matter: ‘“No form or ceremony, civil or religious; no notice before, or publication after; no cohabitation, no writing, no witnesses even, are essential to the constitution of this, the most important contract which two persons can enter into”’ (231). 5 I concentrate on nineteenth-century wills and inheritances in order to suggest discrepancies between fiction and fact. Janet Finch and Jennifer Mason study inheritance in contemporary England and assert that wealth transfer is more, not less, important as a social phenomenon. In 1997, 68 per cent of houses were owner-occupied, double the number of thirty years previously. Thus, inheritance has Burkean overtones, according to Finch and Mason: ‘Under the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s, this connection between home ownership and inheritance was made a political virtue as a way of binding citizens into the economic order of a property-owning democracy’ (2). The distinctive English framing of inheritance laws, which allow testators to name heirs and to divide estates according to personal choices, differs from customs in countries such as France, where inheritances must be divided equally among offspring. English inheritance laws therefore bind certain citizens, but not all, into the economic order of property ownership.

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WORKS CITED Beizer, Janet L. Family Plots: Balzac’s Narrative Generations. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1986. Bisla, Sundeep. ‘The Manuscript as Writer’s Estate: Wilkie Collins’s Basil, Sensation Fiction, and the Early-Victorian Copyright Act.’ Genre 31.3–4 (1998): 269–304. Blackstone, Sir William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 15th ed. Vol. 2. Ed. Edward Christian. 1765–69. London: Strahan, 1809. Bowen, Elizabeth. The House in Paris. 1935. New York: Knopf, 1936. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Ed. Ian Jack. Intro. Patsy Stoneman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. L.G. Mitchell. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP 1993. Chester, Ronald. Inheritance, Wealth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Collins, Wilkie. Man and Wife. Ed. and intro. Norman Page. 1870. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Compton-Burnett, Ivy. A Heritage and Its History. London: Gollancz, 1959. Ditz, Toby L. Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut 1750–1820. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Intro. Richard Lancelyn Green. 1893. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Finch, Janet, and Jennifer Mason. Passing On: Kinship and Inheritance in England. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Foster, R.F. Modern Ireland 1600–1972. New York: Penguin, 1988. Green, David R. ‘Independent Women, Wealth and Wills in NineteenthCentury London.’ Stobart and Owens 195–222. Locke, John. Two Treatises on Civil Government. Intro. Henry Morley. 1689. London: Routledge, 1903. Luciano, Dana. ‘Invalid Relations: Queer Kinship in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady.’ Henry James Review 23.2 (2002): 196–217. Mill, John Stuart. The Principles of Political Economy. Books I, II. Intro. V.W. Bladen. Ed. J.M. Robson. 1848. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. Minden, Michael. The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Morgentaler, Goldie. Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like. London: Macmillan, 2000. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Trans. Albert Sbragia. New ed. London: Verso, 2000.

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O’Toole, Tess. Genealogy and Fiction in Hardy: Family Lineage and Narrative Lines. London: Macmillan, 1997. Owens, Alastair. ‘Property, Will Making and Estate Disposal in an Industrial Town, 1800–57.’ Stobart and Owens 79–107. Parker, Jo Alyson. The Author’s Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the Establishment of the Novel. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1998. Rudinstein, W.D. Men Of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1981. Schlatter, Richard. Private Property: The History of an Idea. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1951. Semmel, Bernard. George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Stobart, Jon, and Alastair Owens, eds. Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, 1700–1900. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000. Tobin, Patricia Drechsel. Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Wright, Julia. ‘Devouring the Disinherited: Familial Cannibalism in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.’ Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity. Ed. Kristen Guest. Albany: State U of New York P, 2001. 79–105. Zucker, A.E. ‘The Genealogical Novel, a New Genre.’ PMLA 43 (1928): 551–60.

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1 Owenson’s ‘Sacred Union’: Domesticating Ireland, Disavowing Catholicism in The Wild Irish Girl patrick r. o’malley

The first tye of nature was dissolved; and from your hands I seemed to have received a new existence. Horatio, in The Wild Irish Girl 221

From its opening, the trajectory of Sydney Owenson’s 1806 The Wild Irish Girl is from dispossession to possession, from cultural disinheritance to the constitution of a new national lineage, figured through romance. As Terry Eagleton has observed, ‘It is on the traumatic moment of disinheritance that [Owenson’s] historical imagination is fixated; and the strategy of each of her Irish novels is symbolically to repair this rupture through the displacing device of marriage’ (179). What I will argue here, however, is that to follow the insistent representation of disinheritance in the novel is to lay bare its ultimately disingenuous claims of that symbolic repair, particularly in terms of religion. That is, in order to ‘solve’ the violence of dispossession that it relates, a violence that makes possible Owenson’s own Anglo-Irish claims to native authority, The Wild Irish Girl must perform its own simultaneous act of dispossession, erasing Celtic Ireland’s Catholic inheritance in order to make it the perfect fantasy bride of Protestant Britain. Like Pygmalion’s Galatea, and like Horatio’s own description of himself in the sentence that stands as my epigraph, Owenson’s ‘Ireland,’ for all of the novel’s appeal to history, has ‘received a new existence,’ forged through the alchemy of art – parentless, historyless, and, precisely because it is abstracted from the specificities of Irish Catholicism, ready to be moulded by the imagination and desires of its Anglo-Irish master.

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The trope of disinheritance emerges at the very beginning of the novel. Horatio, the younger son of the Earl of M——, finds himself accused by his father of economic and sexual dissolution, a charge that he answers with a claim of a self-imposed disinheritance: ‘Abandon me then, I beseech you, as such; deliver me up to the destiny that involves me, to the complicated tissue of errors and follies I have so industriously woven with my own hands’ (5). As self-serving as this particular claim of disinheritance may seem to be (in effect, merely asserting his interest in continuing unchallenged his ‘nocturnal orgies of vitiated dissipation’ [4]), Horatio further slyly quotes scripture for his own purpose. As prologue to his rather histrionic claim of symbolic disinheritance, he adds, ‘in the language of one prodigal and penitent as myself ... “I have sinned against Heaven and thee, and am no longer worthy to be called thy son”’ (5), thus evoking perhaps the most famous of characters who managed to live a life of pleasure and still get his fatted calf. Horatio’s father, however, has different plans and substitutes banishment for disinheritance, sending his son from London to the family’s estate in the province of Connaught in the west of Ireland. ‘If you would retribute what you seem to lament, and unite restitution to penitence,’ declares the Earl in the Introductory Letters, ‘leave this country for a short time, and abandon with the haunts of your former blameable pursuits, those associates who were at once the cause and punishment of your errors. I myself will become your partner in exile, for it is to my estate in Ireland I banish you for the summer’ (6). This rather mild exile by the father swiftly takes on the rhetorical modes of a mock-biblical Fall itself, the primal scene of dispossession: faced with the damply ‘capricious’ weather of Ireland, Horatio invokes Shakespeare’s own allusion to postlapsarian weather, the ‘penalty of Adam’ (18, citing As You Like It 2.1.5). And even in his confessional descriptions of his libertinism, Horatio asserts that ‘the original sin of my nature militates against the hackneyed modes of hackneyed licentiousness’ (9). Already subject to the laws of primogeniture that have privileged his older brother at his expense (and of which his father writes sanguinely), Horatio is temporarily cast out of his erotic Eden and into Ireland. In this novel consumed with the question of origins (Kirkpatrick vii), the Genesis myth provides a convenient framework, yet the novel even extends its obsession with disinheritance a generation further back, subsuming the Earl himself in its seemingly relentless catalogue of inheritances that are somehow less than they should be:

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‘On the recent death of my father,’ the Earl of M—— notes, ‘I found myself possessed of a very large but encumbered property: it was requisite that I should make the same establishment for my eldest son, that my father had made for me; while I was conscious that my youngest was in some degree to stand indebted to his own exertions, for independence as well as elevation in life’ (4). Opening already in the middle of a narrative of squandered inheritance and legacies mortgaged before they are received, the first few pages of The Wild Irish Girl seem strangely belated; even before the novel proper begins, it is mired in the language of debt, of banishment, of paradise already lost. The diminished inheritance of Horatio’s family itself turns out to be the product of an original sin. Horatio knows that his father is an absentee landlord, who ‘delegates English ministers to govern his Irish domains’ (31); he knows as well that those domains came into his family through violence, that they ‘fell to us in the Cromwellian wars’ (32). But what he swiftly learns is that he is directly descended from an English general who murdered an Irish prince, depriving that prince’s descendants of their own hereditary lands. He discovers himself to be, as he breathlessly relates to his epistolary correspondent, ‘The descendant of a murderer!’ and he further comes to the realization that his Irish neighbour in Connaught ‘shelters his aged head beneath the ruins of those walls where his ancestors bled under the uplifted sword of mine’ (42). A narrative of English dispossession thus turns swiftly into a narrative of Irish dispossession. The remediation of this primal crime takes the form of an education in the facts of Irish politics, culture, and society under the tutelage of the Prince of Inismore, of his daughter Glorvina, and of their benevolent chaplain, Father John. As Katie Trumpener has noted in Bardic Nationalism, this aspect of Owenson’s romance narrative becomes a persistent structure of the national tale: ‘Growing to love Ireland, the hero ends the novel by marrying Glorvina, its allegorical embodiment, and settling on “their” joint estate. For the next ten years, the national tale will present increasingly stylized repetitions of this basic plot: the contrast, attraction, and union of disparate cultural worlds’ (141). That union through marriage, what Robert Tracy has aptly called ‘the Glorvina solution’ (10), functions as a putative dissolution of national prejudice, a gesture of reconciliation between Irish and Anglo-Irish, between Connaught and London, between Catholic and Protestant. The bittersweet appeal to affective dispossession represents the translation of history into romance, as the

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competing national and natural claims of Ireland and Britain are reconciled. Concomitant with this romance plot is The Wild Irish Girl’s rewriting of symbolic descent in Horatio’s declaration to the Prince of Inismore that through him he has been reborn, a transfiguration of disinheritance into a new familial line. The Prince himself is a man denied his rightful inheritance by Horatio’s own English ancestors, yet it is not the involuntary dispossessions of history that are most important in this crucial communication, but the voluntary dispossession of culture, the fantasy that a man might choose his own father based not on the dictates of blood but rather on those of affection, thereby recreating himself as a new person, the spiritual heir of a new nation. Writing a letter in a novel made up almost entirely of letters, Horatio seems to grasp the fundamentally literary dimension of his claim. His new identity – his symbolic assertion of voluntary disinheritance – is only metaphorically created by the hands of the Prince; it is literally enacted by the hands of the author, Sydney Owenson, who herself would take on a new identity, that of Lady Morgan, through her 1812 marriage.1 That the ameliorative trajectory of the novel writes national healing as romance, letting the ‘union’ of marriage stand in for the ‘union’ of national interest is not a new argument to critics of this novel. As Joep Leerssen has observed, ‘The ultimate happy ending of a harmonious union in the bonds of wedlock is held up as an example of the political relationship between the two countries: old grievances should be forgotten, worn-out prejudices should be abandoned, and England and Ireland should co-operate in a happy, loving partnership’ (54). Critics have not, however, always agreed on the ideological underpinnings of this allegory. Thus, whereas Ina Ferris has described the end of the novel as enabling ‘a potentially transformative relation of proximity,’ and an ‘unsettling’ of ‘colonial readings’ (‘Narrating’ 288, 297), Mary Jean Corbett has, in contrast, more tendentiously observed that the ending enacts a symbolic rape, ‘a discursive violence of its own, narratively figuring the resolution to the rebellion of 1798 as willing consent on the part of an Irish bride to a forceful English embrace’ (‘Allegories of Prescription’ 101).2 What is missing from most accounts of the overlapping unions of this novel – and what might help us to understand its complicated, even contradictory politics – is an attention to the specific role that Catholicism plays in its ideological vision. In order for the restorative marriage to function allegorically as a remediative undoing of the dis-

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possessions of the past, the novel must, it seems, deracinate Ireland from its Catholic grounding; it must erase any sense of essential Catholicism both from the inheritances of Ireland’s antiquity and from the legacy that it bequeaths to the post-Union nation. Leerssen, for example, posits that The Wild Irish Girl seems to diverge from the traditional Irish national tale (which generally provides ‘a buffer of mediating Irishness between the English point of view and such typical, “real” Irishmen as may voice an authentic, unmitigated Irish outlook’) in that ‘Glorvina ... is exceptional in her heightened nationality’; he further proposes that perhaps ‘the role of mediation is not so much performed by her as by the first-person narrator, Horatio, who stands between the Real Ireland and his private English audience’ (36). True enough, but Leerssen’s analysis assumes that Glorvina can, indeed, be thought of as representing ‘an authentic, unmitigated Irish outlook.’ The text certainly suggests as much, but only at the cost of playing down what would seem to be an important aspect of authentic Irishness; that is, it reconciles its portrayal of essential alterity with its drive towards union precisely by erasing that which would have rendered Glorvina irredeemably exotic: essential Catholicism itself. Indeed, once Horatio actually questions Glorvina about her religious beliefs, she turns out to be as much a rationalist and a Protestant as he. ‘Glorvina approached something closer towards me,’ Horatio tells his correspondent, ‘and in a few words convinced me that on the subject of religion, as upon every other, her strong mind discovered itself to be an emanation of that divine intelligence, which her pure soul worships “in spirit and in truth,” “The bright effluence of bright essence uncreate”’ (187). The progression of citations in this long and rather complicated sentence is telling: ‘in spirit and in truth’ comes from the Gospels (John 4: 23–4), but ‘The bright effluence of bright essence uncreate’ is pure Milton (Paradise Lost 3: 6). From the general scriptures common to Catholicism and Protestantism, Horatio moves (with only a comma and the necessary quotation marks to mark the shift) to the great poet of English Protestantism. Glorvina continues: believe me, my dear friend, the age in which religious error held her empire undisputed, is gone by. The human mind, however slow, however opposed its progress, is still, by a divine and invariable law, propelled toward truth, and must finally attain that goal which reason has erected in every breast. Of the many who are the inheritors of our persuasion, all

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are not devoted to its errors, or influenced by its superstitions. If its professors are coalesced, it is in the sympathy of their destinies, not in the dogmas of their belief. If they are allied, it is by the tye [sic] of temporal interest, not by the bond of speculative opinion; they are united as men, not as sectaries; and once incorporated in the great mass of general society, their feelings will become diffusive as their interests; their affections, like their privileges, will be in common ... ; and, as the acknowledged members of the first of all human communities, they will forget they had ever been the individual adherents of an alienated body. (187–8)

In this most lyrical and most passionate of the passages of the text, Glorvina lays out both a religious and a political theory. Catholicism, the dusty inheritance of an almost forgotten past, will inevitably give way to Protestantism, propelled by the divine law of ‘reason,’ a word deeply resonant of Protestant rhetoric. Ireland needs only to be truly ‘united,’ to be ‘incorporated’ into ‘general society,’ for its unfortunate particularities to fall away. Far from an obstacle to the Act of Union, Irish Catholicism should spur Britain’s civilizing instincts, for it is by the colonizer’s benign rule that Catholicism will necessarily give way to a universal Protestantism.3 At the same time, Glorvina’s theory of inevitable Protestantism also lays the groundwork for the ultimate marriage that closes this novel, as her language of union, affections, and commonality suggest. In fact, The Wild Irish Girl consistently domesticates the tropes of an alien Catholicism into those of a familiar romance. When Horatio tells Glorvina that he is protected by a spell against seduction while he is away from Inismore, she jestingly questions whether it is a Catholic or Celtic protection: ‘Has father John given you a gospel? or have you got an amulet, thrice passed through the thrice blessed girdle of St. Bridget, our great Irish charm?’ (181). Instead, Horatio’s ‘charm’ is a rose that he received from Glorvina: ‘My charm ... in some degree certainly partakes of your religious and national superstitions; for since it was presented me by YOUR hand, I could almost believe that its very essence has been changed by a touch!’ (181). Indeed, Father John has much earlier suggested that ‘the rose is the flower of Love,’ the narrator then noting that the priest was ‘more engaged with the classicality of the idea, than the inference to be drawn from it’ (81). Horatio’s response to Glorvina’s own ironic gesture towards Catholic and Celtic iconography subsumes that iconography precisely into the classical, into the generally European rather than the specifically Irish.

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Even Father John himself seems to be only casually Catholic, as the particularities of religion are simply not that important to either Glorvina or her benevolent priest. Horatio notes with some wonder at the end of the first volume of the novel, ‘though, as an Englishman, I may be naturally supposed to be of the most popular faith, yet for all they know to the contrary, I may be Jew, Mussulman or Infidel; for, before me at least, religion is a topic never discussed’ (85). More than that, however, they are crypto-Anglicans from the beginning. When Horatio begins to critique Irish Catholicism for its superstitious belief in relics, Father John only lightly admonishes him: ‘“Stop, stop,” interrupted Father John, smiling – “you forget, that though you wear the San-Benito, or robe of heresy yourself, you are in the company of those who – “ “Exactly think on certain points,” interrupted I, “even as my heretical self.”’ (154). Father John’s indulgent smile is significant; although he largely professes Catholic beliefs, the stakes involved in the debate are trivial. In fact, Horatio’s further description places the question of Catholicism outside the realm of the novel’s concerns: ‘This observation led to a little controversial dialogue, which, as it would stand a very poor chance of being read by you, will stand none at all of being transcribed by me’ (154). In a set of letters that describe the minutiae of Ossianic scholarship, in a novel that takes the time to provide rigorous footnotes,4 the complete lack of interest in actual Catholic theology here is telling, particularly in a book explicitly dedicated to the question of the relations of Ireland to Britain. Consistently, the novel rejects the specificity of Catholic Ireland and Irish history in favour of a more universalized history, rejects the details of Catholicism for the broad brushstrokes of a generalized paganism. The Wild Irish Girl opens with Horatio’s own English fantasies of Irishness, troped as alterity itself. In addition to his childhood notion that the Irish would resemble ‘an Esquimaux group circling round the fire’ (13), he provides a sarcastic description of his father’s estate, comparing it to a ‘Kamscatkan palace’ (17), and observes a bog that ‘gave me no inadequate idea of Arabia Deserta’ (22). Ostensibly, the novel traces his maturation (along with that of its reader) to an appreciation of the ‘real’ Ireland and a marriage to the fully Irish Glorvina, but it does so by a compensatory and parallel set of cultural displacements, enacted both in the extensive notes that supplement Owenson’s text and in the narrative proper. Again and again, Irish modes, customs, and cultures are uprooted and re-established as the original product of some other place. The notes, for example, inform the reader that the

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common peasant method of wearing a coat ‘is deemed by the natives of the county of Galway a remnant of the Spanish modes’ (23). Further, they quote Walker’s assertion: ‘The women’s ancient head-dress so perfectly resembles that of the Egyptian Isis, that it cannot be doubted but that the modes of Egypt were preserved among the Irish’ (45). Most frequently, the novel finds the roots of ‘native’ Irish customs in classical Greek and biblical Hebrew sources. Thus, the footnotes observe that the ‘custom of retaining the nurse who reared the children ... is still in force among the most respectable families in Ireland, as it is still in modern, and was formerly in ancient Greece, and they are probably both derived from the same origin. We read, that when Rebecca left her father’s house to marry Isaac at Beersheba, the nurse was sent to accompany her’ (39). Another note points out that ‘The Irish, like the Greeks, are passionately fond of traditional fictions, fables and romances’ (106). Not only the notes but the characters of the narrative itself consistently classicize Irish culture. Hearing Glorvina playing upon her Irish harp, Horatio compares it to ‘the Eolian lyre’ (52). And Owenson in a later note observes that ‘clarseach’ (the Irish word for ‘harp’) is a name ‘more in unison with the cithera of the Greeks, and even the chinor of the Hebrew’ (71). Glorvina, tending to Horatio’s injury, is ‘my female Esculapius’ (57), and her prescription that he remain silent is a ‘Pythagorean restraint’ (58). For Father John, the heroes of Ossianic verse are the Irish populace’s ‘Achilleses, their Hectors, and Agamemnons’ (108); he later informs Horatio that ‘the habit of confirming every assertion with an oath, is as prevalent among the Irish as it was among the ancient, and is among the modern, Greeks’ (120). An area of Inismore is, for Horatio, ‘almost a miniature Tempé’ (140), and Glorvina becomes a version of Hero ‘at the altar of the deity she rivalled’ (143). Certain ‘holiday garb’ (93), superstitions about the evil eye (129), the festivals of spring (137), customs of Druidical sacrifice (143), gymnastics and sports (145), dancing (146–7), mythology (152), fountains (153), funerals (183), among other elements of Irish culture, are rigorously Hellenized. By the middle of the second volume of the novel, the notes no longer need to draw an explicit comparison between Ireland and Greece, so consistent has the association become; glossing a description of the garlands of flowers that hang at the portals of the castle of Inismore, Owenson provides a note citing an anthropological text not on Ireland but on Greece (143). Even such a potentially sectarian symbol as the veil, so resonant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British gothic literature of Catholic

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conventual life, is likewise quickly assimilated to a classical mode: ‘In the 15th century the veil was very prevalent, and was termed fillag, or scarf; the Irish ladies, like those of ancient and modern Greece, seldom appearing unveiled’ (48). Indeed, as soon as the narrative begins to trope Glorvina as a (presumably Romanist) nun, it swiftly classicizes the image: ‘she primed up her pretty mouth, and fancied she looked like a nun, when her lip pouted with the smiling archness of an Hebe’ (70). From the very type of the Catholic virgin, Glorvina rapidly becomes the image of the Greek goddess of youth, the erotic charge of her classical incarnation erasing the suggestion of papist celibacy. Ireland simply is, as Horatio observes, ‘the Athens of a certain age’ (176). In proving the aptness of this metaphor, in constructing Ireland as the daughter of Athens – and indeed, of Jerusalem – The Wild Irish Girl marks the central anxiety of its frantic genealogies: that the true parent of Ireland might be thought to be papist Rome. It is that anxiety that motivates the constant slippage from Irish to Attic customs, from what might look like a dangerously native (and Catholic) culture to a domesticated classicality. It may be true, as Corbett has suggested, that ‘the ideological work of the text is not to make a case for effacing Ireland’s difference’ (Allegories of Union 56), but it certainly translates that difference into something more assimilable to a British notion of progress, more tractable to British aesthetic and religious ideologies, less wild.5 The novel’s impulse towards a smoothing out of difference, in particular, its disavowal of Irish Catholicism as an authentic point of distinction between the partners in union, leads to other, more subtle reworkings of cultural inheritance. Owenson, like many a Romantic novelist, sutures other writers’ words to her own with a persistence bordering on compulsion. The Psalms, Shakespeare, Prior, Burke, Young, Spenser, Sappho, Burns, Charles V, Gray, Pope, Goldsmith (Owenson’s distant cousin), Milton, Tasso, Petrarch, Gresset, Nathaniel Cotton, and several anthropologists and historians of Ireland, among others, make cameo appearances just in the first volume of the novel, often as unattributed quotations. Frequently – again, as in many Romantic narratives – those worthies of the literary and cultural past are misquoted, even accounting (for example) for the various versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Often, of course, the discrepancies are slight, seemingly trivial. As You Like It’s ‘the season’s difference’ (2.1.5) becomes in The Wild Irish Girl ‘the season’s change’ (18).6 Paradise Lost’s ‘shape and gesture proudly eminent’ becomes ‘shape

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and feature proudly eminent’ (50). Pope’s ‘Cynthia of this minute’ (from Moral Essays 2, line 20) becomes Horatio’s ‘Cynthia of the moment’ (159). Some of the misquotations are only somewhat more significant: whereas in The Art of Sinking in Poetry, Pope wrote, ‘Ye Gods! annihilate but Space and Time’ (52), Owenson reproduces the sentiments with ‘O Gods! annihilate both time and space’ (179). Romeo and Juliet’s ‘consequence yet hanging in the stars’ (1.4.107) appears as ‘circumstance still hanging in the stars’ (84). And what appears in Thomas Warton’s ‘Grave of King Arthur’ as a feast ‘Girt with many an armed Peer’ (line 2) is ‘Girt with many a valiant Peer’ in Owenson (102). None of this is necessarily unexpected; quotations (and various misquotations) of texts are a staple of Romantic-era novels from Ann Radcliffe to Walter Scott. Further, it is unclear whether these are the ‘mistakes’ of Owenson herself or of her characters. Certainly, Horatio (and, to a lesser extent, his father) is particularly addicted to the apposite quotation, and once his letters give way to the editorial voice in the third-person ‘Conclusion,’ much of the frantic citation ceases. But Horatio is also, apparently, a stickler for details when it comes to literary citation, even from foreign sources. When Glorvina quotes JeanFrançois Marmontel, Horatio indulgently instructs his correspondent: ‘Observe ... this passage was quoted in the first person, and not, as in the original, in the second, and with an air of dignity that elevated her pretty little head some inches’ (118). Glorvina’s rather inconsequential misquotation becomes the pretext for patronization touched with erotics; Horatio suggests that she is, after all, a ‘pretty little’ girl, and her foray into the male field of educated citation is more endearing than instructive. But if Horatio is able immediately to detect a shift in person in a spoken translation of Marmontel, what does it mean that he so frequently slips in his own citations from the standard texts of English literature? In fact, the pattern of misquotation in the novel hints at, generally, a particular ideology of cultural history and, more specifically, an interest in erasing the difference between the alterity of Catholicism and the familiarity of English Protestantism. Indeed, certain misquotations seem far more tellingly inept. What, for example, do we do with Horatio’s (or Owenson’s?) attribution of the line describing a palace’s stones ‘Which, cunningly, were without mortar laid’ to ‘Chaucer’ (19) when in fact it is from Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Bk 1, canto 4, st. 4)? That is, in a novel about the encounter of England with Ireland, of Protestant with Catholic, what can we do with the confu-

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sion of a pre-Reformation Catholic English writer with a Protestant Anglo-Irishman, part of the colonial ruling class, whose castle was burned in an insurrection by his Catholic subjects in 1598? Horatio himself later refers to Spenser’s propagandistic View of the Present State of Ireland (93, 205); what does it mean that he previously misattributes his words?7 For that matter, what does it mean that Glorvina asserts, ‘I dare say that, like St Paul, he will “count it all joy to fall into divers temptations”’ (181), when the quoted line comes not from Paul but from James (1:2)?8 It is James’s epistle that opens up the most explicit debate with Paul over the question of the relative merits of faith and works, one of the central theologies dividing reformed Protestantism from Catholicism. Whereas Paul declares that ‘a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 2:16), James asks ‘What does it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?’ (2:14). James answers his question in the negative: ‘faith, if it hath not works, is dead’ (2:17). Glorvina quotes from one (the more ‘Catholic’) letter, but presents it as being from the other (the more ‘Protestant’). And, ostensibly Catholic though she may be, she quotes from the explicitly (and ideologically) Protestant King James Version of the Bible. That this novel continually misquotes or misattributes its own literary antecedents suggests that far from forthrightly excavating and displaying the historical past, it is in fact engaged in a project of strategically forgetting that past, of shaping it for the practical ideologies of the present.9 Ultimately, the question of whether the misquotations are Horatio’s or Owenson’s is irrelevant; the text itself falsifies the past, presents a fiction as fact. Whatever the motivations individual characters may or may not have for the reworking of history (as it is manifested in the literatures of the past), the novel’s own motivation becomes clearer as it continues: the past must be strategically rewritten in order for The Wild Irish Girl to fulfil its didactic function, to present a sanitized – and Anglicized – version of Ireland for English consumption. Like Horatio, the novel chooses its own fathers and – in choosing them – recreates them in its own image. The source of its obsession with dispossession and the complicated and often violent vicissitudes of inheritance likewise becomes clear: just as Horatio is symbolically dispossessed (‘banished’) in order that he can become the proper heir of the Irish estates, so too does the novel rewrite Ireland’s cultural inheritance, erasing the embarrassing question of Catholic

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alterity, that Ireland might become the proper bride in its union with Protestant Britain. Indeed, in a novel that again and again misquotes sources, it is striking that the Ossian poems play such a central symbolic function, surrounded as they were in the latter years of the eighteenth century with questions of authenticity and historicity. In 1762 James Macpherson had published the first of a series of ‘translations’ of what were ostensibly the poems of the third-century Gaelic warrior-bard Oisín. In fact, the only ‘original’ poems that Macpherson produced ultimately turned out to be translations from his own English verse. As early as Patriotic Sketches, published just a year after The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson asserts that none of the Ossianic poems (including Macpherson’s) are by any means as ancient as some of their adherents claimed: ‘It is now I believe generally allowed by those whose attention has been fascinated by the subject, that the Ossianic poems are not more ancient than the eleventh and twelfth centuries; as many of the terms of language found in them must have been unknown to the early Irish’ (151). By the 1846 edition of The Wild Irish Girl, Morgan observes that ‘German scepticism is now ... to prove that Fingal himself was but a form of public opinion embodied in a Mythe’ (177). Nonetheless, the ‘Ossian’ of The Wild Irish Girl is decidedly Macpherson’s, although Horatio’s citational quirks occur here as well. Whereas the speaker of ‘The Songs of Selma’ observes that ‘memory fails on my mind,’ Horatio’s ‘recollection’ – his own memory – of ‘those exquisitely beautiful lines of Ossian’ gets it somewhat wrong: ‘my mind has failed me’; the ‘blast that roars, lonely, on a sea-surrounded rock’ in the original ‘roars loudly’ in Horatio’s version (202).10 More important, however, it is not only Horatio who recalls Macpherson’s Ossian but Glorvina herself as well. The ‘sources’ of Macpherson’s poems manifest, for Glorvina, authenticity but not ‘taste,’ and the progression from the supposedly ‘native’ Irish Ossian (at least in Father John’s estimation) to Macpherson’s English (and Protestant) ‘translation’ finds its analogue in the progression of the child into maturity; as an infant, Glorvina ‘learned on the bosom of my nurse, and in my father’s arms, to recite the songs of our national bards,’ but ‘almost since I could read, the Ossian of Macpherson has been the object of my enthusiastic admiration.’ In times of distress, ‘I fly to my English Ossian’ (115). The details of the Ossian forgery were not fully discovered until considerably after the publication of The Wild Irish Girl, but the imposition of a British fantasy of Ireland over whatever

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might still remain of specifically historical Irish literature is not only the ideological transposition of Owenson’s version of Ossian but also the ideology of her novel itself.11 False history itself does, in fact, attract the narrative’s attention, but only as a sort of bait-and-switch. Horatio jokes: ‘infected by my antiquarian conversation with the Prince and having fallen in with some of those monkish histories which, on the strength of Druidical tradition, trace a series of wise and learned Irish monarchs before the Flood, I am beginning to have as much faith in antediluvian records as Dr Parsons himself, who accuses Adam of authorship, or Thomas Banguis, who almost gives facsimilies [sic] of the hand-writing of Noah’s progenitors’ (88). Light as it is, Horatio’s joke performs an essential function in a novel constructing its own ideological history. The flawed national narratives that Horatio mockingly pays tribute to are specifically Irish, both ‘Druidical tradition’ and ‘monkish history.’ Incorporating within itself a jocular allusion to politically motivated history, the novel decisively relegates it to Irish fantasies of antiquity, leaving its own ideological rewritings of history safely in the realm of reason. And later, the novel explicitly subordinates ‘monkish history’ to ‘Druidical tradition.’ Responding to Horatio’s challenge to the documents of Irish history as ‘Monkish impositions,’ Father John notes that even were that true, ‘Ireland was always allowed to possess at that era, the most devout and learned ecclesiastics in Europe, from which circumstance it received its title of Island of Saints’; nonetheless, Catholic learning according to Father John, is an afterthought of pagan historiography: ‘By them [the monks] indeed many histories of the ancient Irish were composed in the early ages of Christianity, but it was certainly from pagan records and traditions, they received their information’ (177–8). The daughter of the union of a English mother and Irish Catholic father (although one who converted to Anglicanism), Owenson was demonstrably committed to the cause of Catholic emancipation in Ireland (Morgan 2: 266–79; Stevenson 266–8). Daniel O’Connell praised her in 1828, on the eve of Catholic emancipation: ‘There is one name consecrated by a generous devotion to the best interests of Ireland – a name sacred to the cause of Liberty, and of everything great, virtuous, and patriotic – the name of an illustrious female who has suffered unmanly persecution for her talented and chivalrous adherence to her native land. Need I say that I allude to Lady Morgan?’ (qtd in Stevenson 267). Published in the almost immediate

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aftermath of the suspension of habeas corpus that accompanied the Act of Union, The Wild Irish Girl does take some risks. As Owenson’s biographer Mary Campbell has noted, ‘Dublin Castle, the headquarters of government in Ireland, stalk[ed] her down and [kept] a file on her as though she was an Irish terrorist on the run’ (2). Owenson herself recalled in the preface to a later edition of the novel, ‘At the moment “The Wild Irish Girl” appeared, it was dangerous to write on Ireland, hazardous to praise her, and difficult to find a publisher for an Irish tale which had a political tendency. For even ballads sung in the streets of Dublin had been denounced by government spies, and hushed by the Castle sbirri’ (xxv). Moreover, Owenson was keenly aware of the disadvantages she suffered as a woman giving voice to explicitly national and political concerns: ‘as a woman, a young woman, and an Irish woman ... I felt all the delicacy of undertaking a work which had for the professed theme of its discussion, circumstances of national import, and national interest’ (Patriotic ix).12 But none of Owenson’s dedication to Catholic emancipation should obscure the fact that the Irish nationalism that The Wild Irish Girl espouses is predicated upon the erasure of Catholicism, the disavowal of a specifically Irish history and inheritance in favour of an appeal to universal and Protestant truths. As Tom Dunne has suggested, ‘[Owenson] saw Catholic emancipation in a dual historical perspective, as both the culmination of the seventeenth-century “revolution” in favour of civil and religious liberty, and as a necessary guarantee for the permanence of the colonial settlement’ (153). As Owenson would note in her 1807 Patriotic Sketches of Ireland (in an essay supporting civil and political rights for Irish Catholics), ‘Ireland fondly sighs to produce, in all a mother’s pride, those of her progeny, who, uniting the influence of high rank to the powers of opulence, the pure spirit of patriotism to the steady sentiment of loyalty, and the ardent love of freedom to that of rational subordination, might stand forth at once her pride, protection and defence’ (38). Catholic emancipation is to be into the service of the Protestant Ascendancy. Irish ‘freedom’ and ‘patriotism,’ for Owenson, is beneficial only insofar as it will be united to ‘loyalty’ and ‘rational subordination’ to Britain; fortunately, it is seemingly Ireland’s greatest (even strangely maternal) wish to produce just such a combination. Owenson was not above conflating cultural iconographies in the interest of anti-Catholicism. Geraldine Jewsbury, who edited and contextualized Owenson’s letters, autobiographical sketches, and

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diaries into Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, recalls in that work Lady Morgan’s ultimately most famous attack on what she saw of the disingenuous traditions of the Roman Catholic Church.13 She asserted (in Italy in 1821) that the Chair of St Peter was, in fact, inscribed with the ‘wellknown confession of the Mahometan faith: “There is but one God, and Mahomet is his Prophet”’ (Morgan 2: 509). The very symbol of the papacy, the assumed seat of the first pope of the Catholic Church, becomes an artefact of Islam, monotheistic to be sure, but also radically alien to Britain’s – or Ireland’s – experience. Nicholas Wiseman had contradicted Morgan’s account in 1833, but it was not until he was raised to the status of Catholic cardinal during the so-called Papal Aggression of 1850 that his rebuttal (and Morgan’s new articulation of her claims) attracted wide attention. Jewsbury recalls the sensation ‘in all the newspapers and journals of the day; – il faisait le frais of Punch, both in prose, and verse, and illustration, for several weeks; and it was to Lady Morgan a return of the beaux jours of her literary celebrity,’ particularly the celebrity surrounding the publication of The Wild Irish Girl (Morgan 2: 511). Morgan wrote triumphantly in her diary of the controversy: ‘It has had the run of all the newspapers. La petite vieille femme vit encore’ (2: 511). Revelling in her public argument with the very symbol of English Catholicism, Lady Morgan seems to see it as the resurrection of her fame as a drawing-room Glorvina.14 Jewsbury’s characterization of the event is telling: ‘an Irishman could as soon have refrained from hitting a head at Donnybrook Fair as Lady Morgan have abstained from a tilt with a Roman Catholic Church dignitary who had attacked a work of hers, no matter how many years before’ (Morgan 2: 510–11). Like Glorvina, Morgan is troped as simultaneously nationally and naturally Irish, but her essential Irishness takes the form not of Catholicism but of belligerent Protestantism.15 In The Wild Irish Girl, Catholicism (like that that Morgan discovered in Italy) does have some attractions, although it represents attractions that Horatio must resist. He realizes this as he watches Father John at Mass: ‘What a religion is this! How finely does it harmonize with the weakness of our nature; how seducingly it speaks to the senses; how forcibly it works on the passions; how strongly it seizes on the imagination; how interesting its forms; how graceful its ceremonies; how awful its rites. – What a captivating, what a picturesque faith! Who would not become its proselyte, were it not for the stern opposition of reason – the cold suggestions of philosophy!’ (50). Seductive, graceful, interesting, passionate, Catholicism seems to be like a wild Irish girl,

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cut from the same erotic cloth as Eve and Horatio’s imaginary Sultana (34); only ‘reason’ (as in Glorvina’s later exposition of her theological vision) can and must oppose her temptations. In this, Catholicism is similar to Glorvina’s description of the Irish Ossian, which appeals to the irrational emotions but for which ‘my interest is often destroyed, and my admiration often checked, by relations so wildly improbable, by details so ridiculously grotesque, that though these stand forth as the most undeniable proofs of their authenticity and the remoteness of the day in which they were composed, yet I reluctantly suffer my mind to be convinced at the expence [sic] of my feeling and my taste’ (115). Actual Catholicism, as in Morgan’s account of the Chair of St Peter, seems to be a myth, its traditions and beliefs almost indistinguishable from non-Christian alterity. Horatio’s ignorant beliefs that the chieftains of Ireland resemble ‘Esquimaux’ is wrong in terms of Owenson’s cultural nationalism but is not so far off in terms of her fierce sense of religious hierarchy. And specifically Catholic rhetoric becomes, in The Wild Irish Girl, the province of the lower classes, where it is safely contained by humorous indulgence. The old man maintaining the Earl’s Irish lodge, calls for ‘the blessing of the Virgin Mary and the Twelve Apostles ... on her [Glorvina’s] sweet head’ (39). The nurse who assists Glorvina in caring for the injured Horatio declares ‘when she saw the blood spout from our temple – Holy Virgin! she looked for all the world as if she was kilt dead herself’ (58). Catholic language is here simply a linguistic affectation of the lower classes, as it is in Owenson’s memoirs, where she notes of her childhood that ‘These Irish servants of the family were a race by themselves’ (Morgan 1: 67). For Owenson, this fact is particularly evident in their relationship to the nominal ‘O’ or ‘Mac’ prefixes, which indicated native nobility: ‘they frequently made a claim to participate in the affairs of the family, because they believed themselves related to the family ... Thady Connor came lineally, “and that not fifty years ago,” from O’Connor, “king of all Ireland” and Dennis Brian, “if every one had their right,” was the ‘ra’al O’Brian, prince of Thomond.’ She continues, in the one reference to Catholic emancipation in the entirety of the two-volume memoirs that merits an entry in the index: ‘On the passing of the Emancipation Bill, several Catholic gentlemen who had dropped the suspicious cognomen, resumed it, without fear of being suspected to have any intention to resume the estates or principalities along with them’ (Morgan 1: 67).16 Indeed, native Irishness, for Owenson, becomes not a matter of

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blood, or of history, or of religion (any of which would prove problematic for her ideological project of binding it more firmly to English rule), but of style.17 ‘From the earliest settlement of the English in this country,’ a note to The Wild Irish Girl observes darkly, ‘an inquisitorial persecution had been carried on against the national costume’ (38). Another quotes Walker’s assertion that ‘the elegant and accomplished owner of Shanes Castle’ used to wear ‘his beard after the prohibited Irish mode’ (47). With all of their resonance of religious and political oppression, terms of inquisition and prohibition here turn out to apply to the fashions of dress and shaving, and the extent of political dissidence is relegated to the flaunting of outlawed styles. Once difference is disavowed, once the history of repression applies not to religion but to clothes, the tricky details of assimilation to the English and Protestant model vanish. Catholic emancipation can safely be granted, since it will make no difference to the Protestant Ascendancy. The ‘good’ Irish are already proto-Protestants; the malingerers will evolve, as have all pagan societies, in their contact with the enlightened British, and Ireland becomes a playground of tourist delights, a fantasyland of charming and quirky accents, clothes, and hairstyles without the messiness of real resistance to the basic Protestant values and norms.18 Whereas Leerssen argues of The Wild Irish Girl that ‘Ireland is made exotic by the selfsame descriptions which purport to represent or explain Ireland’ (37), I would propose that the classicizing rhetoric that constitutes the text’s construction of ‘authentic’ Ireland in fact performs a reverse double gesture: it creates difference precisely in order to render alterity manageable by eliding Catholicism itself. Indeed, a similar but more violent erasure is enacted at the end of the novel. In the dramatically gothic conclusion, Horatio returns to the chapel of Inismore to declare his love for Glorvina only to find her in the middle of a marriage ceremony to his own father, whose identity as the descendant of the Cromwellian usurper is completely unknown to the prince or his daughter. The shock of the revelation is too much for the Irish Prince, who dies almost immediately: ‘After a long and affecting pause, the Prince heaved a deep sigh, and raised his eyes to the crucifix which hung over the altar: the effusions of a departing and pious soul murmured on his lips, but the powers of utterance were gone ... Religion claimed his last sense of duty, nature his last impulse of feeling; he fixed his last gaze on the face of his daughter; he raised himself with a dying effort to receive her last kiss: she fell on his bosom, their arms interlaced. In this attitude he expired’ (241). The

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prince’s dying gaze moves from the crucifix to Glorvina, from the symbol marking the distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism to the young woman who has, in her reason, moved from the one to the other. Both Father John and Glorvina seem already to be cryptoProtestants; the death of the prince marks the death of any authentic Catholicism in the novel. In her confusion about whether she should marry Horatio, Glorvina relies upon a telling linguistic ambiguity in her appeal to Father John: ‘I have now no father but you – act for me as such!’ The priest’s reply is equally significant; giving her a letter from the Earl of M——, he tells her, ‘This is from one who pants to become your father in the strictest sense of the word’ (244). The ‘strictest sense of the word’ is, of course impossible; Glorvina’s father, the native Irish Prince of Inismore is dead. Faced with that void, both Glorvina and the priest suggest metaphorical fathers in the place of the dead one. Glorvina’s plea depends upon the conventions of specifically Catholic nomenclature, the conventions by which the priest is ‘Father’ John; his own reply, however, disavows that role, stressing the relationships of secular romance over those of sectarian authority. Relinquishing the rhetoric of fatherhood to the Earl, the priest simultaneously lets English romantic values take the place of Catholic ecclesiastical doctrine. In a novel that begins with the distinctions among types of sons, it is particularly significant that it ends by discriminating among fathers, by selecting those who will survive in the new age of Union. As Horatio’s assertion that I have used as an epigraph suggests, disinheritance in The Wild Irish Girl is ultimately less about choosing which son will prosper than it is about choosing which father, which ‘history,’ is most useful to the (romantic, ideological, colonial) interests of the present. Ultimately, the felicitous substitution of the ‘real’ wild Irish girl for the fantasized ‘wild Irish Sultana’ (34) fails to obscure the fact that Glorvina is as much culturally motivated ideological fantasy as the imaginary harem. That Sydney Owenson herself could appear in various gatherings with the nickname ‘Glorvina’ or ‘The Wild Irish Girl’ demonstrates the degree to which Catholicism – or even primarily Celtic descent – is simply irrelevant to her notion of what constitutes authentic Irishness, except as it can be rhetorically or theatrically performed; in her Memoirs Morgan asserted, ‘My father was a Celtic Irishman’ (1: 40), but in fact, while Owenson’s paternal grandfather was indeed Catholic, her paternal grandmother was Anglo-Irish and her mother English. Tom Dunne points out that ‘while her father’s back-

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ground gave her a romantic interest in the west of Ireland, her perspective on it was more that of Longford House, the residence of her Crofton relations, where she stayed while gathering materials for The Wild Irish Girl’ (140). Further, that paraphernalia such as the ‘Glorvina Ornament’ and the ‘Glorvina Mantle’ arose as popular cultural homage to The Wild Irish Girl is tribute to the extent ‘Irishness’ in this fantasy is merely a matter of the right clothes.19 Just as Horatio can cause Glorvina to love him as ‘Henry Mortimer,’ Sydney Owenson could cause liberal Dublin and London society to love her as ‘Glorvina.’ The actual details of Ireland’s colonial history – even its recent history – are uncomfortable facts that the novel ultimately disavows. Corbett, for example, notes that the assumed identity of the ‘earl-indisguise’ is ‘presumably a United Irishman’ (‘Allegories of Prescription’ 92); but whether that is actually the case stays, as she suggests, on the level of presumption, and the failed United Irish rebellion of 1798 remains largely undiscussed in the novel. What would an encounter with the rhetorical or political modes of that history look like? The 1798 Poor Man’s Catechism declared of the Anglo-Irish gentry: ‘The whole of them may be said, within the last century to be the descendants of English ruffians, adventurers whose crimes of obscurity denied them a livelihood in their own country, but were the cruel agents of foreign force or foreign seduction. The origin of nobles in every country is the same, but time and revolutions have concealed their hateful origin’ (qtd in Whelan 47). As for those on the other side of the rebellion, historian Kevin Whelan notes: ‘The loyalists wanted measures “taken to eradicate if possible the whole deluded race – a horrid necessity but everyone here seems convinced of it and that humanity must be out of the question”’ (144).20 That did not, of course, occur, but what did included ‘A vindictive witch-hunt against politically active Catholics, the wave of chapel-burnings in Wexford and elsewhere and the rancorous invective of [loyalist parliamentarian Richard] Musgrave,’ all of which ‘heightened Catholic fears of a protracted Protestant backlash’ (149). This is the history that Owenson’s narrative occludes in order to produce its parable of national and romantic union. As Whelan points out, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, English and Irish notions of the politics of appealing to the past had diverged: ‘In England the past was a stabilising, even a sedating, political presence. In Ireland an appeal to the past inevitably worried old wounds on which the scar tissue had never fully congealed’ (37). For The Wild Irish Girl’s allegory of union to work,

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Owenson must not only unite her English hero with her Irish heroine but also reconcile the two radically different notions of the past; she needs a version of the past to authenticate her vision of ‘true’ Ireland, but the details of the actual past must be disavowed. Ireland must lose its (bloody) historical inheritance in order to gain a (romantic) antiquarian one. In fact, Father John declares that the true Irish are pleased to be ruled from London by the House of Stuart: ‘the moment a Prince of the Royal line of Milesius placed the British diadem on his brow, the sword of resistance was sheathed, and those principles which force could not vanquish yielded to the mild empire of national and hereditary affection ... Nor is it now unknown to them that in the veins of his present Majesty, and his ancestors, from James the First, flows the Royal blood of the three kingdoms united’ (190). In this fantasy of colonial gratitude, the Act of Union only ratifies what was already present in Irish hearts, a natural and national submission to England’s rulers. The messy, even violent, disputations over the seizure of land by the ancestors of the Protestant Ascendancy are relegated to the margins of class consciousness; of the claim that the native Irish, not the AngloIrish, have rights to the land of their ancestors, a note suggests, ‘Although ignorance and interest may cherish this erroneous opinion, its existence is only to be traced among some of the lower orders of Irish, but its influence seldom extends to a superiour rank ... They consider that “The property has now been so long vested in the hands of the present proprietors that the interests of justice and utility would be more offended by dispossessing them than they could be advanced by reinstating the original owners”’ (189). In contrast, as Whelan notes, eighteenth-century ‘Catholic middleman families were obsessed, almost to the point of neurosis, with ancestry, family background and the Cromwellian rupture’ (10). But displacing those grievances – even wrongheaded grievances21 – is a convenient political theory for Horatio, who then dispenses with his tortured reflections on murder to take guiltlessly by law the castle and lands that his ancestor seized by force precisely in those primal Cromwellian battles. It is also a convenient political theory for Sydney Owenson, later to be Lady Morgan. The very form of the narrative reflects the increasing degree of control over the political and religious dissidence that Horatio’s Irish sojourn might have inspired, but does not. The novel begins in a series of letters between Horatio and his father and from Horatio to his correspondent, J.D., Esq., M.P. The novel proper is ostensibly composed of

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letters from Horatio to this same correspondent, but, as Corbett points out, although there is textual evidence that Horatio’s friend responds, no letter from him appears (‘Allegories of Prescription’ 94). The notes, however, more than compensate for the apparent loss of dialogism, responding to and even critiquing the sentiments expressed by the characters of the novel.22 Yet the final pages of the third volume shift abruptly to a third-person ‘Conclusion,’ the voices of the characters rendered subordinate to that of a suddenly omniscient narrator. There is not, it seems, a necessary narrative reason for this sharp change: after all, Horatio could very well relate the climactic confrontation between father and son and the final marriage scene to his English friend.23 But symbolically, the shift is essential. For all of the flirtations with native Irish culture that the novel engages in – for all, that is, of its own wild Irishness – it must ultimately rein in the free play of fantasy in the interest of a decidedly, even defiantly, British closure. There is, however, one more letter that appears within this thirdperson conclusion and, in fact, ends the novel itself: a letter from the Earl to Horatio, the letter that hopes that his union with Glorvina will prophetically prefigure that ‘national unity of interests and affections between those who may be factiously severe, but who are naturally allied ... the consummation of an event so devoutly to be wished by every liberal mind, by every benevolent heart’ (250). The introduction of this letter requires some narrative gymnastics; why, after all, does the Earl leave his ‘almost lifeless son’ (243) at Inismore to return to his estates apparently only to write a long and passionate letter? Again, the symbolic status of the letter outweighs its narrative inconvenience, for this letter, whose bracing language of national union concludes The Wild Irish Girl, is read to Glorvina and Horatio by Father John. It structurally answers and counters the dialogism of the earlier sections of the novel, as the multiple voices of the Introductory Letters have given way to the careful balance of text and footnote through most of the novel and finally to the voice of the Earl, the voice of the father after all, to which nobody can respond. More than that, the conclusion slyly performs its own act of union, the (nominally) Roman Catholic priest merely orating the words of the English, Anglican, landowning lord. Two kingdoms may be united, but it is clear who is to be master. Tracy’s ‘Glorvina solution’ depends upon a strikingly symmetrical model of convergent interest: ‘the intermarriage/assimilation of Irish and Anglo-Irish, of modern efficiency and ancient tradition, of legal right and traditional loyalty’ (10). Yet the novel ends not with symme-

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try but with radical asymmetry. There is but one voice at the end of this novel, and it is the voice of England.24 The Prince, who like any Catholic ‘loves with idolatrous fondness’ (63), must ultimately die for the marriage that takes place to function as the assimilation of a crypto-Protestant Ireland to a benevolently Anglican Britain. The ‘awful asylum[s] of monastic piety,’ whose gradual loss to the ravages of time the prince lamented must indeed be forgotten, ‘mouldering into oblivion with the memory of those they once sheltered’ (63). Similarly, the bloody history of the beginnings of Protestant rule in Ireland – not to mention the 1798 rebellion and its aftermath – must be forgiven and forgotten if the new age of union is to succeed. In the end, this novel demands only a partial and fitful remembrance of the past, remembrance enough to realize that the extent of native Irish poverty is not the inherent fault of its inhabitants, enough to understand that Ireland will be bound more closely to Britain, not less, by the strategic granting of Catholic emancipation. Any closer examination of history can only lead to bloodshed,25 and that is something Owenson is desperate to avoid. With its strange blindness to real difference, suggested by its erasure of Catholic specificity from Irish history and culture, The Wild Irish Girl constructs an Ireland not so much wild as waiting, longing to be tamed by its British spouse. And in that – in cutting Ireland off from the details of its history and its identity – the novel performs its most ideologically significant act of disinheritance.

NOTES 1 The degree to which Lady Morgan would see her changed name as constitutive of a new identity is suggested in the title page of the 1846 London edition of The Wild Irish Girl, which declares the novel to be ‘By Sydney Owenson,’ but ‘Edited By Lady Morgan.’ Following this notion of fundamentally changed identity, I will use ‘Owenson’ and ‘Morgan’ throughout this essay to distinguish between the periods before and after her marriage. 2 Corbett nuances this claim in her return to this novel in Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870, where she notes: ‘Through the workings of its plot, The Wild Irish Girl challenges the founding premises for English sovereignty over Ireland by putting into question the stability of origins, histories, rights, and birthrights; the novel raises, that is,

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4 5

6 7

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Patrick R. O’Malley the legitimacy of English claims to Ireland through the crisis of English identity that it narrates’ (70). Protestantism is not, of course, a unitary institution in early nineteenthcentury Ireland, either theologically or politically; see Whelan (146–54). Nonetheless, The Wild Irish Girl does not distinguish between Protestant sects as rigorously as it does between the generalized Protestantism of its English characters and the specific (but not particularly rigorous) Catholicism of Ireland; Horatio, for example, doesn’t seem to discriminate between what is apparently a vague Anglicanism and the faith of his Cromwellian ancestor. On the relationship between text and paratext in this novel, see Leerssen (56–64). For alternative readings of the novel’s eastern imagery, see Lew and Dennis. Dennis claims that the ‘Eastern imagery clearly also has another ... function: to make Ireland exotically – and erotically – attractive, to the English, and to itself ’ (54). But what is most striking is that Owenson here specifically excludes Catholicism from the exotic and erotic east. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), for example, proves that it was possible to eroticize and critique Romanism, but The Wild Irish Girl (except in its short description of the Mass) rejects this possibility. In the 1846 edition this has mutated again to ‘the season’s changes.’ This ‘error’ is, in fact, silently emended in the 1846 edition (27), which also includes a footnote asserting that Spenser’s description ‘is said to have been borrowed ... from the rural architecture of Ireland, where he obtained such beautiful possessions on the Blackwater’ (28). Yet even as she locates this quotation more firmly in Ireland, Morgan simultaneously normalizes the Protestant occupation. The 1846 ‘corrected’ edition maintains this ‘error’ (299). This is similar to Leerssen’s suggestion that the antiquarianism of the novel lies in its understanding of the past ‘not in its historical development and in its own dynamism, but as an undifferentiated reservoir of “Old Things”’ (68). For these quotations in ‘The Songs of Selma,’ see Macpherson (292). Ossian also appears in Owenson’s earlier (1803) novel St. Clair (43–4), but less as a trope for history and ideology than as a simple mark of sensibility. Owenson’s emphasis. But Ian Dennis offers the caution that in fact there was no significant danger to Owenson other than literary obscurity (49). For an account of Jewsbury’s completion of the Memoirs after Lady Morgan’s death in 1859, see Clarke (24–7).

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14 For example, Stevenson (93–4 and passim) gives a description of Owenson’s assumption of the nickname ‘Glorvina’ while she performed Irish harp music, songs, and dances in Dublin and later in London. 15 Owenson was also not above appealing casually to both anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism in her professional correspondence. An 1806 letter from her publisher Sir Richard Phillips begins, ‘Dear Madam, When you compare me to a Jesuit and a Jew [in reference to his hesitation at contracting for a volume of poetry unseen], you must be acting under the conviction of the slavery in which I am held by your fascinations’ (qtd in Morgan 1: 291). 16 Owenson’s own father had done the opposite, changing his name from MacOwen to Owenson before leaving Dublin for London, where he met the woman who would become his wife and Sydney’s mother (Stevenson 4). From Stevenson’s account, Owenson’s strictly Protestant mother seems to have been obsessed with and repulsed by ‘papist’ names (e.g., Stevenson 8, 18). 17 Similarly, in Patriotic Sketches, Owenson suggests that Irish Catholicism (troped as ‘bigotry’) is more an ingrained habit than a real religion: ‘The peasantry of Ireland are not naturally so bigotted a people as is generally supposed; they are rather coalesced in opinion and sentiment, and attached to particular forms, as belonging to a certain class in political establishment, than jealously united as the professors of any particular sect in religion’ (218). 18 Indeed, by 1862, fifty-four years before the Easter uprising, Geraldine Jewsbury could confidently assure the readership of Lady Morgan’s Memoirs that whatever changes in Irish society Owenson had envisioned had by then felicitously occurred: ‘The topics she discussed in these early works have long been set at rest. Ireland has had her full meed of justice, and she has now, for a long time, enjoyed both a fair field and plenty of favour. The Ireland of Lady Morgan’s days has given place to an Ireland which is fast becoming all that Heaven made it capable of being’ (Morgan 1: 287). In the 1846 ‘Prefatory Address,’ Morgan astonishingly suggests that the ‘true ‘Repeal of the Union’’ (xxiii) would occur when the Catholic Irish gave up the waste of ‘their strong energies ... on the pursuit of an unattainable object [self-governance], whose possession, to judge by past experience, might be a doubtful good’ (xx–xxi) and instead returned to producing humorous tales and happy music. 19 See Stevenson (96–7) on the modish ‘Glorvina’ styles; see also Tessone (174–9).

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20 Quoting a 2 July 1798 letter included in Hamilton 242. 21 See Whelan (54–5) for evidence that does support Owenson’s suggestion that many of those who most aggressively claimed authentic rights to the land by the early nineteenth century were not, in fact, the original owners but rather were a new ‘big-farm class.’ 22 For analyses of the ‘heteroglossic textures’ of the footnotes, see Ferris (‘Writing’ 95–6) and Leerssen (61–4). 23 Even in the earlier St. Clair, which also shifts from an epistolary structure to a third-person conclusion, Owenson seems to have realized that this form should have some justification: in St. Clair, the hero dies, so his letters must stop. It is also striking that the heart of the novel is marked by a series of letters from Olivia (the Irish heroine) as well as from the hero (St. Clair), whereas The Wild Irish Girl, despite its title, never presents Glorvina’s unmediated language; St. Clair ends (as does The Wild Irish Girl) with a letter embedded in the third-person narrative, but in St. Clair that letter is from Olivia to her father. By reversing this structure at the end of The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson marks the later novel’s greater investment in paternal (and colonial) authority. 24 See Kelly for a different reading of the significance of this final letter, one that argues that the ending of the novel advocates a type of progressive reform (94). See also Lew, who reads the earl’s actions at the end as ‘an extraordinarily unlikely act of generous self-effacement’ (61). 25 Whelan has observed that some liberals after the 1798 rebellion pointed out that ‘If over half a million people had been sworn into the United Irishmen, as the government’s own reports claimed, then hardline advocacy of retribution would deluge the country in rivers of blood’ (145).

WORKS CITED Campbell, Mary. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. London: Pandora, 1988. Clarke, Norma. Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love – The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Corbett, Mary Jean. ‘Allegories of Prescription: Engendering Union in The Wild Irish Girl.’ Eighteenth-Century Life 22.3 (1998): 92–102. – Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

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Dennis, Ian. Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction. London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, 1997. Dunne, Tom. ‘Fiction as “the Best History of Nations”: Lady Morgan’s Irish Novels.’ The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence. Ed. Tom Dunne. Vol. 16. Cork: Cork UP, 1987. 133–59. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London and New York: Verso, 1996. Ferris, Ina. ‘Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale.’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.3 (1996): 287–303. – ‘Writing on the Border: The National Tale, Female Writing, and the Public Sphere.’ Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-Forming Literature, 1789–1837. Ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 86–106. Hamilton, Elizabeth. The Mordaunts: An Eighteenth-Century Family. London: Heinemann, 1965. Kelly, Gary. English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830. London and New York: Longman, 1989. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. Introduction. The Wild Irish Girl. By Sydney Owenson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Vii–xviii. Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork UP, 1996. Lew, Joseph W. ‘Sydney Owenson and the Fate of Empire.’ Keats-Shelley Journal 39 (1990): 39–65. MacDonagh, Oliver. States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780–1980. London and Boston: Allen, 1983. Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian. Boston: Phillips, 1851. Morgan, Lady [Sydney Owenson]. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence. Ed. W. Hepworth Dixon and Geraldine Jewsbury. 2nd [rev.] ed. 2 vols. London: Allen, 1863. Owenson, Sydney [Lady Morgan]. Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, Written in Connaught. 1807. Baltimore: Dobbin; Callender, 1809. – St. Clair; or The Heiress of Desmond. London: Harding; Dublin: Archer, 1803. – The Wild Irish Girl. 1806. Ed. and intro. Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. – The Wild Irish Girl. Ed. Lady Morgan. London: Colburn, 1846. Pope, Alexander. The Art of Sinking in Poetry. Ed. Edna Leake Steeves. New York: King’s Crown, 1952. Stevenson, Lionel. The Wild Irish Girl: The Life of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. 1936. New York: Russell, 1969.

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Tessone, Natasha. ‘Displaying Ireland: Sydney Owenson and the Politics of Spectacular Antiquarianism.’ Eire-Ireland 37.3–4 (2002): 169–86. Tracy, Robert. ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality versus Legitimacy.’ Nineteenth Century Fiction 40.1 (1985): 1–22. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Whelan, Kevin. The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1996.

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2 The Nation’s Wife: England’s Vicarious Enjoyment in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels sara l. maurer

Is enjoyment not something which, precisely, cannot be done through the Other? One can answer this by recalling the deep satisfaction a subject (a parent for example) can derive from the awareness that his or her beloved daughter or son is really enjoying something. Zizek 113

While Slavoj Zizek rests his argument for the possibility of interpassivity – the arrangement in which someone else undertakes the task of enjoying for you – on the naturalness of a parental desire to witness an offspring’s enjoyment, one is hard-pressed to find an example of such a desire in the parents who populate Victorian novels. When they manage to live long enough, most fictional Victorian parents work towards making their children’s lives quite miserable. Thus, Rochester’s father arranges his son’s marriage to a woman of questionable morals and sanity in Jane Eyre (1847), Mr Gradgrind strongarms his daughter Louisa into a marriage with the joylessly factobsessed Mr Bounderby in Hard Times (1854), and Mr Osborne promptly disowns his son George for marrying the penniless Amelia in Vanity Fair (1848). Catalysed as it is by the marriage of offspring, such parental disregard for filial enjoyment allows the Victorian novel to hammer home its favourite theme – the demise of marriage as a system of alliances between groups and its reinvention as an affectionate union between individuals. While the old system might ensure the well-being of individual offspring by preserving or enhancing the family property, it certainly did not exist to ensure that any given individual enjoyed that property. Indeed, the tradition of entailed estates

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that gave rise to the tradition of miserable unions among offspring proves that the enjoyment of property in the legal sense often precludes the enjoyment of property in the affective sense, perpetually deferring such an experience to future generations. In Trollope’s novels alone, the number of profligate sons, both aristocratic and middle class, reluctantly exiled by their own fathers (in the Palliser series, this includes George Vavasor, Lord Chiltern, and Everett Wharton) demonstrates the extent to which the parental mandate requires that no one in any generation actually enjoys the family property. Victorian novels delight in exposing the mandate to preserve the family property as an illogical and ungenerous tendency towards hoarding. Vigilant safeguarding of property for future generations is revealed as a useless miserliness, as in Mr Dombey’s obsession with the corporate entity of ‘Dombey and Son,’ which keeps him from enjoying any affectionate ties to his son. Silas Marner’s loss of his gold hoard at the moment he gains a human child is perhaps the most forceful nineteenth-century illustration that the careful guarding of property, rather than being necessary for the family’s sake, is actually the opposite of family altogether. As the usefulness of preserving property is called into question, so too is Burke’s metaphor of the nation as a familial inheritance. The thingness of the nation, with ‘its bearings and its ensigns armorial ... its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles’ (34) might acquire the same air of futility as the closet where Aunt Glegg stores her fine linen in The Mill on the Floss (1860). Guarding her sheets and tablecloths against use, she reserves the household goods for the day of her death, when others might open the closet to discover all she owned but never used (34). In the same spirit that leads Eliot’s novel to expose the futility of preservation for its own sake, Trollope’s Lady Glencora Palliser waxes suspicious of the aristocratic maintenance of estates. Fond of midnight rambles among the ruins of the ancient priory on the grounds of the family estate, she is frustrated by her husband’s refusal to see the romantic value of the crumbling walls. In fact, she can lure her husband to accompany her walks only by telling him that the refectory wall needs repairing. ‘If anything is out of order he has it put to rights at once,’ she complains in Can You Forgive Her? ‘There would have been no ruins if all the Pallisers had been like him’ (283). In attending to the preservation of his property, Palliser shows himself unable to enjoy it, and in her romantic appreciation of the ruins, Glencora shows that enjoyment requires

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a certain amount of destruction. Between these two competing impulses, Trollope works out a delicate division of labour that he sees as creating unity, imagining the somewhat destructive enjoyment of the wife to be the necessary complement to her husband’s more conservative ownership. In the Palliser series, it is this balance that allows not only aristocratic property, but the nation itself, to be both maintained and enjoyed. Trollope’s understanding of consumption as a component of ownership stems from the nuclear family’s relatively modern identity as a unit of consumption. Yet the fact that he works out such an idea on the incontestably aristocratic Palliser alliance is not only the author’s flawed projection of his own middle-class values onto all of his characters. Preserving property simply for the sake of preservation becomes less and less tenable even for the great ancestral halls of England. While such properties had been open to middle-class visitors since before the eighteenth century – proof that portrait galleries, armorial ensigns, and titles really were, to a small extent, national property – the representations of that access changed markedly over the century. Illustrated books that sought to acquaint a mass audience with these national estates, such as Joseph Nash’s Mansions of England in the Olden Times (1839) and William Howitt’s Rural Life in England (1838) and Visits to Remarkable Places (1840), emphasized the communal history of such properties, offering pictures of bygone days when an entire village would gather in a great hall to celebrate Yuletide, or flock to a manorial lawn for Maypole dances. Their depictions highlighted the estates as synonymous with the community able to gather there. Yet as urbanization made great houses more attractive – and more accessible – they became day-trip destinations for larger numbers of people and classes. A popular notion arose that such access should continue to be granted not because the properties were the common buildings of an organic community that should always endure, but because they functioned as instructive monuments to England’s history for those who might otherwise be less aware of the glory of Englishness than were the aristocratic owners of monuments. In this way, the property existed not as a justification in itself, a thing that like the nation must be preserved for itself, but as a symbol that could be appreciated and enjoyed only by those who did not properly possess it. By the 1880s landlords of great estates argued that their ownership was not to their own benefit. ‘Is there a man so abandoned, so idiotic, so utterly lost to the first glimmerings of self-interest that he would

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deliberately be saddled with one of these gigantic structures?’ Arthur Balfour asked in response to proposed taxes on estates. An owner’s only attachment to such an estate, he argued, stemmed from the fact that it was ‘the home which he and his family have lived in perhaps for generations’ (qtd in Mandler 162). On the other hand, the commoners who clamoured for continued access to the houses, collections, and gardens of the aristocracy believed that the objects exercised an improving power on visitors, a pedagogical influence to which the aristocracy was naturally impervious. The assumption on both sides was that the very different relationships to the very same object could potentially draw together owner and enjoyer in an arrangement of vicarious enjoyment. While this historical development does not follow a generational logic, its sense of the affiliation that occurs through the displaced enjoyment of property shares the contours of Slavoj Zizek’s idea that the originary moment of any symbolic order is one of displacement: rather than suddenly believing in a symbolic order, you join it by believing in other people who attach weight to the symbols. Zizek draws on the symbolic national order to illustrate this displacement, pointing out that no one who hears the sentence ‘America bombed Iraq’ will fail to understand the literal chain of individual acts that create the sentence – George Bush picked up the phone, a general passed on commands to a small group of pilots, who climbed into airplanes, and so forth. Everyone, however, who hears the sentence also assumes that it has implications for more than the individuals involved in these actions – that the collective, symbolic meaning will be understood by hearers who assume that other people will understand the sentence as referring literally to two nations, not simply to individuals in a limited chain of command. For Zizek, the parental relation elevates this structure to a truism about the human psyche. However, the Victorian text from which he draws it understands the arrangement to depend not on generational difference, but on a simultaneous difference existing within the social system. Zizek emphasizes that Marx’s theory of an economic community sustained through commodity fetishism depends on what ‘some people think’ about the value and behaviour of commodities. Commodity fetishism works as a rule of economic behaviour not because any one person believes in the supernatural agency of the commodity, but because every person in the system believes that other people in the system do believe in it.

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The second half of the nineteenth century spawned many thinkers who imagined an initial displacement of belief to be what drew people into a common system. In The English Constitution (1867), Marx’s contemporary Walter Bagehot asserts that constitutional monarchy works because the ceremonial element of the monarchy provides a theatrical show of rule for those too unsophisticated to understand the mundane intricacies of a parliament that really rules. ‘The poorer and more ignorant classes ... really believe that the Queen governs,’ he explains, urging his readers to consult with their kitchen-maids for evidence. For Bagehot, the English constitution provides the best of all possible political arrangements, not because he really has much relation to its more ceremonial parts, but because he is able to believe that there is someone else out there, someone much different from him, who is enjoying it for him (25). Bagehot’s attitude towards the ceremonial parts of the nation, which he – as educated citizen with full political rights – must maintain in order that disenfranchised kitchen-maids might enjoy them, is intellectually akin to the idea that the aristocracy must keep its great estates in order that the lower class might enjoy them. Both belief and property are assumed to operate through a certain degree of displaced enjoyment. Trollope’s novels naturalize this arrangement, emphasizing displaced enjoyment as the fundamental requirement of unity – both marital and national. For Trollope the desire for someone who will enjoy property in the owner’s place is the central motivation for unity in almost every one of the minutely detailed marriage plots that drive the six Palliser novels. By merging the marital with the literal politics of Parliament, these plots make visible Trollope’s assumption that the nation itself works on a model of vicarious enjoyment. Trollope understands the legal sense of enjoyment – a term denoting the active experience of one’s right to one’s property – to depend on enjoyment in the emotional sense. By repeatedly telling the tale of courtships intended to culminate in one party’s vicarious enjoyment of what is owned by another, Trollope imagines society as wholly dependent on structures of ownership at a moment when franchise reform makes them increasingly irrelevant. With a cast of recurring characters whose lives revolve around the seasonal changes and political tides of Westminster, the novels link the characters’ desire for a vicarious experience of property with the readers’ assumed desire for a vicarious experience of Parliament, which Trollope understands as the centre of the nation. As I sketch out this connection, I will first look at the psychological texture

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of the successful – not to be confused with the virtuous – owner in the Palliser novels. I will then examine how that psychological structure is sustained by an impulse towards vicarious enjoyment. While such displacement is modelled on the uneven property distribution of the English common law marriage – in which the wife is the enjoyer of the property that the husband legally owns – Trollope also describes it as a fundamental condition of parliamentary government. Finally, I will close with a brief consideration of how, as the movement towards married women’s property laws makes a vicarious structure of exclusive property less possible, Trollope also comes to understand Ireland – often portrayed as the wifely nation within the United Kingdom – as providing a way to preserve the vicarious enjoyment of the British nation. Absent-Minded Ownership, Absent-Minded Englishness The jewel in the crown of the Palliser series, at least for literary critics interested in exploring the contradictions of Victorian property, is The Eustace Diamonds (1873). Its plot revolves around the very bad and very false Lizzie Eustace, who insists that the diamonds given her by her late husband are her own personal property, rather than a part of the estate belonging to his family. In the legal wrangling that follows, Trollope catalogues types of ownership: portable property, which can be transferred at will; paraphernalia, belonging to a woman’s rank, not her person; and the heirloom, which functions only as a symbol of the family and is not property at all. The intricacies of these different types of ownership take even lawyers by surprise, but Lizzie’s insistence on understanding the diamonds as absolute, exclusive, alienable property is read by critics as ‘false, dishonest, heartless, cruel, irreligious, ungrateful, mean, ignorant, greedy, and vile’ (ED 1: 311).1 The coupling of this condemnation with her determination to understand her property in its most atomistic, market-friendly sense has been read – and rightly – as one more symptom of the Victorians’ profound anxiety about new and ever more pervasive forms of alienable property in a world whose stability is imagined to be ensured by the endurance of great estates and the aristocracy they sustain. Critics such as Patrick Brantlinger, Paul Delaney, Juliet McMaster, and Andrew Miller have argued that The Eustace Diamonds articulates with unusual explicitness the general Victorian sentiment that landed property indicates a sort of virtue in its owner that portable,

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alienable property can never impart and frequently disrupts. But while these critiques attend to the ethical register of different types of property, they say very little about how ownership itself is experienced. In Victorian cultural criticism, as in the Victorian novel, the grand elaborations of pressing need, threatened bankruptcy, ruined fortunes, profligate spending, and a world convoluted by the deceptions of a credit economy dominate the world of owned objects, creating an intricate frame around the blank that is actual ownership. Certainly in The Eustace Diamonds, plot interest derives from the twists through which Lizzie’s ownership of the diamonds is challenged, first by her late husband’s family, then by the thieves who make off with the safe in which the diamonds travel, and finally when the diamonds themselves (which have not, as Lizzie fails to mention, been removed along with the safe) are stolen from her personal jewellery box. The developments that ultimately take the diamonds out of Lizzie’s grasping hands succeed in completely drawing attention away from what Lizzie does manage to keep, despite the best efforts of her late husband’s family in The Eustace Diamonds and her homicidal, bigamous, second husband in the next Palliser novel, Phineas Redux (1874). A sizeable estate in Scotland remains hers, and she continues to draw £4,000 a year, building up a bank balance that makes her an attractive – and ultimately elusive – financial ally for the speculating Ferdinand Lopez in the subsequent novel, The Prime Minister (1876). At her lowest point, accused of perjury for lying about the first burglary and sorely fearing that she might be put in jail, Lizzie comforts herself with the idea that ‘They could not take away her income or her castle’ (ED 2: 286). Oddly, this seems because of, rather than despite, the fact that the permanence of her income and real estate remains the stuff of imprecise and contradictory rumours. Lizzie’s ownership of the diamonds becomes more subject to public opinion the more she insists that they are hers alone. The plot then seems to affirm public opinion, taking Lizzie’s diamonds from her just when the gossiping denizens reach a consensus that the diamonds are not, after all, her property. But no such consensus is ever reached about the rest of her husband’s legacy, whose terms remain opaque. ‘When she knew how it was all arranged – as far as she did know it – she was aware that she was a rich woman’ (ED 1: 10). But this awareness is one of dim assurance, not technical mastery: ‘for so clever a woman, Lizzie was infinitely ignorant as to the possession and value of money and land and

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income ... As for the Scotch property, – she thought that it was her own, for ever, because there could not now be a second son, – and yet was not quite sure whether it would be her own at all if she had no son. Concerning the sum of money left to her, she did not know whether it was to come out of the Scotch property, or be given to her separately, – and whether it was to come annually or to come only once’ (11). This inability to know the property is exactly what seems to work to her advantage. Her lack of knowledge allows her to declare a number of relationships to the property without ever exactly lying. She claims that she owns it outright, then that she was made to buy even the furniture in it from her husband’s family, and then that she is in debt already. Resting just beyond narration, the property cannot be taken by anyone. Contrary to Mr Dove’s expert legal opinion that ‘property so fictitious as diamonds’ is ‘subject to the risk of ... annihilation’ (ED 2: 146) while ‘the land at any rate can be traced’ (ED 1: 258), the novel follows its eponymous diamonds on their road to a permanent home: ‘first to Hamburgh, and then to Vienna,’ and finally to ‘the bosom of a certain enormously rich Russian princess’ from whose grasp ‘it was found impossible to recover them’ (ED 2: 353). The fate of Lizzie’s ‘Scotch property,’ by contrast, is never traced with such clarity, and in fact it disappears altogether from the horizon in the next two novels, rendered secure by Lizzie’s distracted incomprehension of it. In this preoccupied failure to grasp the particulars of ownership, Lizzie Eustace is joined by a character at the opposite end of Trollope’s moral spectrum. The enormously wealthy, conscientious, and upright Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium – and by the fifth book of Trollope’s series, Prime Minister of the Realm – shares with the compulsively lying social climber an inability to understand fully the nature of what he owns. Palliser, whose own wealth before he becomes Duke of Omnium is of such a size that ‘he could throw thousands away if he wished it’ swells into a ‘colossal wealth’ when he marries his wife, Lady Glencora (CYFH 242). When the Old Duke passes, Palliser inherits the Omnium fortune, which, we are told, is even greater than the Queen’s fortune. While Palliser considers the happiest days of his life to be those he spends as Chancellor of the Exchequer working abstruse calculations on the decimalization of currency, where it concerns his own family finances, ‘Money mattered nothing. Their income was enormous’ (PM 53). Yet, with a caution much like that which inspires Lizzie’s visions of her impoverished

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condition, he still warns his wife against too much expenditure: ‘I think there should be a limit. No man is ever rich enough to squander’ (90). And while Lizzie cannot grasp the legalities of her property, Palliser cannot even grasp the physicality of his estate. He arrives at the great Omnium estate castle of Gatherum determined to ‘walk about his own grounds,’ only to stand reflecting on the unfamiliarity of it all: he ‘could not remember that he had ever but once before placed himself on that spot’ (160). He takes no offence when the workmen on the estate treat him as an intruder – rather than being a sign of negligence, his distant proprietorship is a sign of how secure he is in his position. In his remote relationship to Gatherum, Palliser emulates his political mentor, the Duke of St Bungay, who demonstrates his own proprietary powers by being ‘a great buyer of pictures, which, perhaps, he did not understand, and a great collector of books which certainly he never read’ (CYFH 251). This logic of distant proprietorship seeps into Trollope’s description of the entire nation. His narrator goes out of his way to explain that he is covering terrain so familiar to the reader as to warrant no descriptive attention whatsoever. Among the intimates that the narrator hails as ‘we, who know the feeling of Englishmen,’ the physical mass of Westminster, the centre of all British political plots, slips out of our field of vision and into unelaborated invisibility (PM 294). ‘Our great national hall’ is to Trollope a mere matter of ‘that more than royal staircase’ and ‘those passages’ (43, 44) that require no great narrative attention because they can go without saying. If we are as unfamiliar with them as Palliser is with Gatherum, or as the Duke of St Bungay is with the contents of his own library, it is proof of the security of our heritage. Trollope’s offhand manner of dealing with them affirms their status as symbols of, in Patrick Brantlinger’s words, ‘the ultimate possession of the public, the unified, taken-for-granted nation-state with its almost equally taken-for-granted empire’ (Fictions 171). Trollope speaks as an Englishman from the very centre of Englishness by assuming that what is English is an experience so assured and familiar that it is always being carelessly re-encountered rather than encountered for the first time. Trollope’s reliance on commonplaces and truths universally acknowledged – what William A. Cohen calls Trollope’s ‘aphoristic rhetoric’ – reinforces the sense that the reader has already come across the very structures of thinking in the novel, and needn’t attend too closely to them. Laurie Langbauer agrees that Trollope’s ‘expression of

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the proverbial is always citational,’ always dependent on some prior utterance of the same truth (99). In this sense, Trollope’s use of repeating characters is equally citational. In the series that bears their name, the Pallisers appear only halfway through the first volume, as distant relations of the heroine, Alice Vavasor. Even this relationship is narrated as having already come to an end, after the betrothed Glencora fails to get Alice to help her to elope with a former lover. Glencora makes an actual appearance in the novel only after the story of her engagement and marriage to Palliser has been told twice, first through the eyes of her spurned lover, Burgo Fitzgerald, and next through the eyes of Alice. Trollope already casually refers to its outcome, even before we meet the primary players, as one in which ‘sagacious heads were victorious, as we know’ (CYFH 190). And we might very well know, anyway, since the coerced courtship of Palliser and Glencora also was narrated briefly in another volume, The Small House at Allington (1861–4), written immediately before Trollope began the Palliser series. Trollope’s serial use of his characters, who are central to some books and only incidental to others, allows the reader to encounter them as a life we already know, even if we are reading only one of the books in the series, out of order. As Phineas Finn sails back to London after a five-year absence in Dublin, he reflects on his old friends, while the narrator briefly catalogues the cast he is sure the reader has already met: ‘Has it not been written in a former book how this Lady Laura had been unhappy in her marriage, having wedded herself to a man whom she had never loved, because he was rich and powerful?’ (PR 1: 14). Fictional characters and national realities are knit together in a narratorial treatment that assumes both to be already well known by the reader; both become a thing to which the reader has a careless proprietary relationship. The opening line of Phineas Redux, for instance, manages its reintroduction of the titular character as an allusion to a public event that might be historical or fictional: ‘The circumstances of the general election of 18–– will be well remembered by those who take an interest in the political matters of the country’ (PR 1: 1). And while the narrator is confident that ‘those who take an interest in the political matters of this country’ have full command of those circumstances, he goes ahead and recaps them for his reader. While Langbauer observes that Trollope’s habits of citation create a sense of the intertextual relation to a social totality, it is a totality that the narrator never seems to expect or even desire that his readers fully grasp. Trol-

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lope’s narrator treats as a matter of course this necessity of reminding readers about what is known. Indeed, the logic of his narration reveals that ‘we, who know the feeling of Englishmen,’ probably have to be frequently reminded of them, because the security of Englishness involves a certain degree of forgetting, a taking-for-granted of English surroundings that can slide into oblivion. The nineteenthcentury reader whom Trollope addresses is revealed to be greatly in need of reminders about what is known about a bewilderingly tangled, not entirely comprehensible political history that is – for that very reason – irrevocably theirs. For Trollope this is not the same thing as the slothful ennui of the rich, whose indolence leaves them unable to become impressed by anything they own – or do not own. Instead, the assuredly English oblivion in Trollope’s novels is the proper mindset of those who are so secure in what is theirs that they can understand it only as a sort of background noise occasionally called to their attention by the presence of someone else, slightly different from them. Frequently the presence of a stranger provides an occasion for Trollope to call attention to his English reader’s sense of membership in the nation. This emerges in his style of the familiar re-encounter with English landscape. ‘It is quite unnecessary to describe Tenway Junction, as everybody knows it,’ the narrator explains, before taking the trouble to detail how that well-known spot might appear to the visiting stranger (PM 519). Likewise, during the first change of government in Phineas Finn (1869), the narrator reassures his readers of their own grasp of English government with the comment, ‘We who are conversant with our own methods of politics see nothing odd in this, because we are used to it; but surely in the eyes of strangers our practice must be very singular’ (121). These strangers’ eyes prompt an explication of the purely ceremonial rivalries and speeches that mark the fall of a government, implying an alien’s interest in the pageant, so that the reader might properly enjoy the ironic intrigues behind it. The Vicarious Enjoyment of the Marriage Plot The thoughtlessness intrinsic in Trollope’s model of owning troubles a narrative of nineteenth-century liberalism in which – in C.B. Macpherson’s familiar formulation – the individual is increasingly seen ‘as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing

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nothing to society for them ... The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual. The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities’ (3). Macpherson’s notion makes sense in a market economy, if one defines proprietorship of one’s person as an ability to contract freely, consciously calculating how best to use the limited resources of the self. This idea of self-ownership, however, bears little resemblance to Palliser’s experience of himself as owner of his property and his abilities: There was such an absence about him of all self-consciousness, he was so little given to think of his own personal demeanour and outward trappings – that he never brought himself to question the manners of others to him ... He could put up with apparent rudeness without seeing it ... And with it all he had an assurance in his own position – a knowledge of the strength derived from his intellect, his industry, his rank, and his wealth – which made him altogether fearless of others. When the little dog snarls, the big dog does not connect the snarl with himself, simply fancying that the little dog must be uncomfortable. Mr. Bonteen snarled a good deal, and the new Lord Privy Seal [Palliser] thought that the new president of the Board of Trade [Bonteen] was not comfortable within himself. (PR 2: 23)

In this passage – as in the character of Plantagenet Palliser himself – Trollope points up the limits of self-possession. Like the ideal man of property, upon whom the aristocratic rationale of government is based, Palliser is above outside influences, dependent on no one but himself for what he possesses. But what exempts him from the calculating entanglements of petty politics is also what makes him a miserable politician. Palliser consistently fails to understand what other people are feeling or to communicate what might motivate his own actions. As the archetype of the secure property owner, Palliser is always the last to hear a rumour or recognize others’ motives, hardly traits to ensure success in a market economy. As a character, however, Palliser never exactly comes to stand for a purely aristocratic relationship to property any more than he comes to embody new market-driven understandings of ownership. While Trol-

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lope’s narrator celebrates Palliser as ‘the truest nobleman in all of England,’ the contours of Palliser’s entire life are shaped by his tendency towards a middle-class work ethic, an absorption in his work. Eschewing the aristocratic activities of gambling, hunting, and flirting, his failures and successes, both personal and political, often stem from the same origin: his preference for the steady grind of parliamentary work over the less clearly defined occupations of the upper class. Glencora comments that he would have been much happier if he had been required to have a profession. Palliser himself counts among the most miserable days of his life the one on which his uncle dies, compelling Palliser to replace him in the House of Lords and to leave behind the Commons chambers, where he had been able to throw himself into his work ‘with the grinding energy of a young penniless barrister labouring for a penniless wife’ (CYFH 1: 246). Palliser’s indeterminate status, as an avowedly aristocratic man whose aristocracy allows him to indulge in his compulsively middleclass habits, reveals the incoherence of middle-class models of selfpossession. Such incoherence can be read in the writings of Samuel Smiles, the Victorian prophet of middle-class self-help and self-ownership, who exhorts his readers to a vigilantly self-monitoring self-possession, the polar opposite of Palliser’s distracted mode of ownership. Yet this middle-class self-possession is already compromised by an engagement that verges on alienation. In his book Character (1871), Samuel Smiles’s celebration of character as the exclusive domain over which every individual might rule unravels when it confronts group economic efforts: ‘Character is property. It is the noblest of possessions. It is an estate in the general goodwill and respect of men; and they who invest in it – though they may not become rich in this world’s goods – will find their reward in esteem and reputation fairly and honourably won’ (qtd in Hadley 12). The first two sentences assert character to be fundamentally structured by ownership, but already the third sentence – which locates the estate of character ‘in the general goodwill and respect of men’ – moves the possession of character out of the realm of the self, and under other people’s domain. By the second clause, character has gone from solid real estate to the stuff of market speculation that so horrified the Victorians. Character, rather than being a thing entirely under one’s own control, is actually a corporate endeavour in which one must give up control in order to be rewarded with ‘the general goodwill and respect of men.’

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Elaine Hadley discusses this passage from Smiles as revealing the way that Victorian moral categories remain tied to the very material rules of property, even in a work that celebrates their independence from material circumstances. And while she is most interested in how the requirements of liberal ‘character’ slide into a minimum requirement for property, she also observes that the language of selfpossession can reveal ‘the presumptive alienation at the core of any sort of possession’ (22). It is not just that the self is something that cannot be imagined to operate consistently according to the rules of ownership; it is that ownership itself can never operate according to the logic of absolute, exclusive control. In the more pithy words of Lord Chiltern, Master of the Brake Hounds, ‘A man’s property is his own in one sense, but it isn’t his own in another’ (PR 1: 122). As a ‘master’ responsible for ‘keeping’ the hounds belonging to another man’s estate, Chiltern is an expert on the arcane ceremonies of property that keep it from ever being a simple matter of absolute ownership. Engaged for most of Phineas Redux in a battle with the Omnium estate over its failure to foster foxes for fox hunting, Chiltern is aligned with a system of property that, instead of allowing an owner to do as he wishes, requires him to keep the property for the pleasure of others. Madame Goesler, in her role as continental observer, comments that Chiltern’s struggles prove only that ‘in this country ... the owner of a property does not seem at all to have any exclusive right to it.’ Chiltern contends, nonetheless, that the Duke of Omnium is ‘bound to find foxes for the Brake hunt,’ even though he takes no part in the hunt himself, and the animals and the hunt do harm to his tenants’ crops and livestock; ‘It is almost a part of his title deeds’ (PR 1: 136–7). Chiltern’s determination to force the nation’s largest estate to contribute to the enjoyment of English sporting types, even if such support proves harmful to the estate itself, has its counterpart in the same book. Representing the Omnium estate after the death of the Old Duke, Palliser engages in a battle to force Madame Goesler to enjoy her legacy from the Duke. She, on the other hand, obstinately refuses the jewels and large sum of money left to her by the Old Duke, just as she once refused the man’s marriage proposal, objecting that it would open her up to accusations of mercenary motives in her friendship with him. Palliser is as incensed by Goesler’s rejection of the legacy as Chiltern is at the Old Duke’s failure to keep foxes for other men to kill. He proclaims Goesler’s refusal as a threat to the entire social fabric,

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arguing that ‘the real owner of substantial wealth could not be allowed to disembarrass himself of his responsibilities or strip himself of his privileges by a few generous but idle words’ (PR 1: 264). However, the inalienable responsibilities and inalienable privileges of property cancel each other out in his logic. He reasons that she cannot refuse the legacy, because ‘the things were her property, and though she might, of course, chuck them into the street, they would be no less hers’ (264). Absurd as it is, Palliser’s formulation gets at the heart of the matter: the property that underwrites an ‘independent’ life is, of course, the thing from which one can never be independent. Perhaps for this reason, when Trollope’s characters find themselves most at liberty, they also find themselves at the brink of suicidal despair. The general cluelessness that attends Palliser’s experience of self-possession is benign compared with the horror that fills characters who are suddenly struck with an acute sense of their exclusive and unlimited self-possession. Lucy Morris, understanding herself to be abandoned by her wayward fiancé, experiences her despair as ‘the wearisome possession of herself ... How bitter to her was that possession of herself, as she felt that there was nothing to be done with the thing so possessed!’ (ED 2: 189). This sensation transcends the specifically female position of needing to be affiliated to a man for basic financial security. Phineas Finn, newly widowed from the wife for whom he left politics and returned to his native Ireland, finds the suddenly widened scope of possibilities for his life horrifying in identical terms. He muses, ‘It is very well for a man to boast that he is lord of himself, and that having no ties he may do as he pleases with that possession. But it is a possession of which unfortunately, he cannot rid himself when he finds that there is nothing advantageous to be done with it’ (PR 1: 9). Phineas recovers from his angst when he is suddenly able to alight on the thought, ‘Did he not owe himself to his country?’ resolving on a life of politics to relieve himself from too intense a sense of his own freedom (9). Lucy, in the end, is also relieved of her sense of self-determination by Frank Greystock’s revived fidelity to his promise of marriage. This sense of relief in owing oneself to one’s country or being able to devote one’s talents to one’s spouse is not identical to the masochistic fantasy of complete loss of volition, a desire to be treated as a piece of property. Neither Lucy nor Phineas desires to slave for husband or country; neither is willing to sacrifice personal ideals in order to create the desired relationship. Instead, both display a sense that they

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themselves are not able properly to enjoy the property they have in their own person, and that they require another person to undertake the task for them. This is most easily understood as a wifely position. Blackstone’s codification of common law corroborates an understanding of the wife not precisely as a piece of property, but as the promise of its enjoyment. Blackstone is careful to distinguish the English wife’s status from that of the wife in ancient Rome, declared to be the absolute property of the patria potestas. In discussing the compensations a court might reward to a husband for wrongs done to the wife, he specifies that these are given to the husband to compensate not for damaged property in the wife, but for ‘the injuries that may be offered to the enjoyment as well as to the rights of property’ (138). In failing to be identical to property herself, the wife instead occupies the vague zone of ‘the enjoyment as well as ... the rights of property.’ Those who parse this wifely position assume it to involve a misery befitting outright slavery. Mary Poovey distinguishes ‘between [male] property owners, on the one hand, and [female] representatives of property on the other’ (75) in an attempt to reach a more nuanced description of women’s status with respect to the category of property. While Poovey calls women ‘the paradigmatic case of human property’ after the abolition of British slavery in 1833, she is more focused on women’s function as a substitute for property, the conjugal accessory that marked middle-class men as possessing the same virtues and qualities as property owners. While she does not cite Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), her assumptions about wives’ ‘metonymic relation to property’ share with Veblen’s scheme a sense that the wife exists as a guarantor of her husband’s status. Poovey attributes to the middle-class wife the adoption of a self-sacrificing ethic that will advertise the husband’s aristocratic rise above the pettiness of the competitive market. Veblen likewise sees the dress and conspicuous leisure of the middle-class wife as an attempt ‘at a second remove’ to emulate the grand performance of leisure undertaken by the master class and their dependants (84). But while true aristocracy, for Veblen, requires wives to exist simply as extensions of their husbands’ already highly visible performance of non-productive consumption, the case of the middle class is less straightforward, requiring an arrangement of ‘vicarious consumption,’ in which a man ‘applie[s] himself to work with the utmost

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assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the time demands’ (83, 81). Both Veblen and Poovey expect that this wifely enjoyment of the husband’s property – which Poovey’s Victorian wife fashions into a domestic haven from the divisive forces of the market, and Veblen’s Victorian wife quite often displays in ‘the high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of the wearer’s comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized women’s apparel’ (181) – will require from the wife a degree of misery, a failure to emotionally enjoy in order to legally perform for the husband’s enjoyment. In contrast to these rationalizations of spectacular wifely suffering, Trollope’s vision of marriage insists, quite literally, on the wife’s genuine affective enjoyment. As Trollope works out the wifely equation in his novel, the wife does not simply promise to the husband the sorts of rewards that, in an earlier, more aristocratic age, might have come with property. Instead, the wife undertakes to enjoy the property, in order to ensure that the man is indeed, its owner. The first novel of the Palliser series, Can You Forgive Her? (1864), centres around heroines struggling towards marriages that might be arrangements of vicarious enjoyment. Alice Vavasor, the vacillating heroine for whom forgiveness is begged in the title, begins to regret her engagement to her flawless fiancé, John Grey, upon the arrival of his letter describing the changes he has undertaken on his own property, Nethercoats, in anticipation of their marriage. Her creeping sense that she cannot possibly enjoy a life in his secluded home in the rural districts of Cambridgeshire leads her to break off the engagement, although she fully admits to still loving Grey. The trials that follow teach Alice that she can, after all, derive true pleasure from her erstwhile fiancé’s property. Grey secretly uses his money to pay the expenses that Alice incurs when she draws on her own income to pay for the electioneering expenses of her cousin, George Vavasor. In fact, Alice promises to marry George because she wishes to be a political wife. Upon her reconciliation with Grey, Alice’s prospects for enjoying his property brighten considerably when he resolves to spend some of it on trying to get into Parliament. One of the last scenes of the novel offers a glimpse of the reformed Alice, primed for a lifetime of marital enjoyment: the stern and unsentimental heroine now weeps for joy over the Sèvres china that she has just received as a wedding gift.

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Alice’s emergence into enjoyment of property upon marriage mirrors the simultaneous crisis in the Palliser marriage. Glencora’s near-adulterous flirtation with Burgo Fitzgerald in the early days of her own marriage is less reprehensible for being a potential violation of the Palliser bloodline than it is for being a complete failure of the division of marital labour into owner and enjoyer. Palliser, in his role as contented and obtusely blind owner, never experiences any jealousy over the fact that his pretty and gregarious young wife was, immediately before their marriage, in love with another man. Dismissing it as ‘all over now,’ he even advises Glencora to attend a house party where Fitzgerald will be present. Palliser’s unperturbed and unreserved forgiveness of his wife’s confession that she still loves Fitzgerald matches Grey’s unreproaching generosity in remaining faithful to Alice’s best interests even after she becomes engaged to another man. Both men’s responses suggest that a woman’s wandering eye is not so far outside the scope of her wifely duties as to make her an unsuitable mate. Instead, the clear division of marital roles in regard to property – the clear separation of owner and enjoyer – lies at the heart of every marital reconciliation. Like Alice, who must be lured back from the seductions of spending her own money on George Vavasor’s election expenses, Glencora must also be cured of her nostalgia for what her enormous fortune might have done to help the debauched and perpetually indebted Burgo Fitzgerald. Such a cure is effected in Europe, where Palliser has taken his wife for a morally and maritally restorative holiday after she confesses to him her persisting love for Fitzgerald. At a casino in Baden-Baden, they happen upon that same man, and she pleads with Palliser, with no sense of self-consciousness, to use his money to help the clearly desperate gambler: ‘Do something for him; – do, do. Unless I know that something is done, I shall die’ (CYFH 2: 368). Palliser understands the plea not as a threat to his marriage, but as proof that he has achieved the marital unity he has been trying for. Glencora now can be reassured that, in their relationship, ‘There was no expenditure that he would not willingly incur for her, nothing costly that he would grudge’ (2: 362).2 The revelation is simultaneous with her conception of the much-awaited heir to the Omnium fortune, the seal of success on the couple’s marriage, which, rather than raising uncomfortable questions about her previous behaviour with Fitzgerald, dispels it altogether.

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While Alice and Glencora illustrate the imperative for wives to enjoy, the series as a whole makes it clear that, as vicarious enjoyer, the wife cannot be the direct owner of the property she enjoys. The marriage of vulgar speculator Ferdinand Lopez flounders on his failure to understand the importance of maintaining this distinction. In an encounter that marks the first sign both of the failure of their marriage and of Lopez’s wealth, Lopez tries to obtain money by asking his wife to write ‘her own letter’ to her father – a letter that he dictates – in which she asks for a share in ‘her fortune.’ She hesitates at even writing the possessive pronoun in connection to the money: ‘‘‘But I have no fortune,” she said. He insisted however, explaining to her that she was entitled to use those words’ (PM 220). Glencora always scrupulously observes the rule of incompatibility between ownership and the enjoyment of property. As the wealthiest heiress in the British Isles in her day, far richer than her husband, Glencora retains legal right to her property through the machinations of settlement. But because she only understands her relationship to that money as attached to her, ‘after some fashion, of which she was profoundly ignorant,’ even this money is subject to the polite fiction that it is under Palliser’s control. During their marriage ‘she had never said a word to him about her money; unless it were to ask that something out of the common course might be spent on some, generally absurd, object’ (53). The pleasure of the absurd object is ensured by her petition to her husband, so that she might enjoy it as an actual owner could not. The novels offer cautionary tales of what happens when marriage fails to adhere to the narrative of the wife as appointed, vicarious enjoyer. In Phineas Finn, Lord Robert Kennedy, the fabulously wealthy, ‘sole owner’ of a manufacturing affair he has inherited from his father, at first shows himself aware of his duty as owner to remain carelessly aloof from his property, which he ‘certainly did nothing toward maintaining’ (82). Yet when he first shepherds Lady Laura Standish around his estate, he reveals a guilty temptation to become utterly absorbed in it: ‘When I come up here and feel that in the midst of this little bit of a crowded island I have all this to myself, – all this with which no other man’s wealth can interfere, I grow proud of my own until I grow thoroughly ashamed of myself’ (159). And after marrying Lady Laura, his shame fails to counterbalance his tendency towards what the narrator calls ‘that great desire to enjoy his full rights, so strong in the mind of

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weak, ambitious men’ (488). When Kennedy’s strict domestic regimen drives Lady Laura to leave him, Kennedy succumbs to an absorption in his own property that is clearly a form of insanity: he becomes ‘desirous ... of starving all living things about the place, – cattle, sheep, and horses, so that the value of their food might be saved ... Even in bed he inquired daily about his money, and knew accurately the sum lying at his banker’s; but he could be persuaded to disgorge nothing’ (PR 2: 101, 103). Kennedy, in his miserly madness, sees himself as having been deprived of the person who could ensure that his property would be enjoyed. The longer Lady Laura stays away, the more agoraphobic the once highly mobile Kennedy becomes, as if unable to separate himself from the property without a proxy who can experience it for him. Unable to leave it, he insists that his estate can be comfortable to no one now: ‘How can a man whose wife has deserted him entertain his guests?’ (1: 87). Without a wife to do the enjoying, Kennedy’s property spirals out of his control. Wives and Parliament Lady Glencora’s reform as enjoying wife is undone when her husband becomes prime minister. His new position suddenly reminds her of the fact that she has money that might be called her own, and she resolves for the first time to spend it. Now that he has reached the highest possible office in the nation, she intends to use the money on securing his political position through social means: ‘The squandering was to be all for his glory, – so that he might retain his position as a Popular Prime Minister’ (PM 90). Her decision reflects a gender asymmetry in the vicarious enjoyment of property. In Trollope’s books women find themselves owners of large fortunes as often as men do, and quite frequently – like men – they yearn for a partner who will help them to enjoy it. Both vulgar Lizzie Eustace and discreet Madame Goesler long to give their money to a man, feeling that the money would be more enjoyable if they could give it to someone who needed it. But such an exchange can never be the simple reverse of a male impulse towards a woman who will vicariously enjoy his property, because legally the money would become the man’s, converting the woman into the vicarious enjoyer of her own property. Lizzie and Madame Goesler, like Lady Glencora, remain the vicarious enjoyers of their own property once they marry. But with their gift – or pretended gift, in the case of Glencora – they convert men into vicarious enjoyers of another sort.

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Lizzie, Goesler, and Glencora (as well as Alice Vavasor, in a slight variation on the theme) all yearn to use their money on men involved in government. Such involvement, in the logic of the Palliser novels, is a vicarious engagement for everyone. Women’s longing for a political marriage, almost universal in the Palliser series, at first appears to be their own desire to enjoy vicariously an institution to which they can never belong. But the vicariousness of participation makes it desirable to them. Alongside their restlessness for something more than the staid domesticity of married life is a disdain for the discourse of individual rights that might award them a more legitimately defined place in the political structure. Alice Vavasor, for instance, ‘was not so far advanced as to think that women should be lawyers and doctors, or to wish that she might have the privilege of the franchise for herself; but she had undoubtedly a hankering after some second-hand political maneuvering. She would have liked, I think, to have been the wife of the leader of a Radical opposition, in the time when such men were put into prison, and to have kept up for him his seditious correspondence while he lay in the tower’ (CYFH 1: 111). Lady Laura, who marries Kennedy to keep her hand in politics, also feels that the most desirable aspects of politics are not barred from her current position. And like Alice, she disdains the feminist campaign for individual women’s rights that might make her power less vicarious and more direct: ‘It was her ambition to be brought as near to political action as was possible for a woman without surrendering any of the privileges of feminine inaction. That women should even wish to have votes at parliamentary elections was to her abominable, and the cause of the Rights of Women generally was odious to her; but nevertheless, for herself, she delighted in hoping that she too might be useful, – in thinking that she too was perhaps in some degree, politically powerful’ (PF 127). The disdain of Laura and Alice for the individual rights of property and the franchise are not the conservatism of the ideologically brainwashed, but a recognition of the forms of power that come with the vicarious experience of politics. The women who assist Phineas Finn in his political career best exemplify this sort of power. Including him in parties and dinners where he is able to meet the political lights of London and campaigning to find the penniless Irish MP a paid position in government offices, Laura Kennedy, Violet Effingham, Madame Goesler, and Lady Glencora all shape Finn’s career, showing them-

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selves to have at a distance a power he lacks, even as a member of Parliament. When Madame Goesler lets on to him that ‘a conspiracy had been formed’ by the women in his social circle ‘for forcing upon the future Premier the necessity of admitting Phineas Finn into his government,’ he is reluctant to be the recipient of such help (PR 1: 334). He wants to ask the women to cease their efforts, but ‘the whole subject was one which would have defied him to find words sufficiently discreet for his object’ (335–6). Their vicarious position makes them unanswerable, out of the reach of defined channels of power. The power of vicariousness is not always identical to the social discipline that D.A. Miller understands as operating in The Eustace Diamonds. Miller argues that, in the novel, public opinion alone has the power to keep Lizzie in line, a task at which the police fail, unsure of how to bring their coercion to bear on an upper-class woman. While Miller argues for Trollope’s gradual devaluation of state-recognized power in favour of more social forms of internalized discipline, Trollope’s novels reveal that this is a false opposition. Those in political power already occupy a position easily identifiable as wifely – confined to certain types of action, submissive to a power larger than they are. When Madame Goesler discusses with Finn his political privileges, it becomes apparent that personal agency isn’t necessarily a political privilege at all. After listening to the list of reforms she would carry out, he dryly dismisses her political opinions: ‘It is so comfortable to have theories that one is not bound to carry out.’ Her answer to this is to ask Palliser – at this point a cabinet member – if his masculine office allows him to carry out his political theories. He replies with the honest evasion, ‘I think I may say that I always am really anxious to carry into practice all those doctrines of policy which I advocate in theory’ (PF 404–5). Palliser’s understanding of his service to the country – to be anxious to carry out what one can clearly not carry out by one’s own power – is both an accurate encapsulation of his experience in Parliament and a description of the job that the political wives hold and the aspiring political wives of the Palliser novels long to hold. It is this resemblance that enables government to provide Phineas Finn with the same consolations that marriage to Frank Greystock provides Lucy Morris. Politics itself, it turns out, is no different from the social machinery that a conspiracy of women can work from a distance. Just as Finn finds himself at the mercy of the powerlessness of women, Palliser experiences his term as prime minister as a loss of agency to those over

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whom he is supposed to take precedence. (Trollope notes from the very beginning of his fifth novel that ‘even the sovereign can abdicate, but the Prime Minister of a Constitutional Government is in bonds’ [PM 48].) He understands from the start that he is selected as prime minister not because of his abilities, but because his reputation will hold together a coalition remarkable for its lack of goals or common feeling. But he is horrified at the inactivity of this purely symbolic function. As the figurehead of a fractious coalition, Palliser realizes that ‘there was, in truth, nothing for him to do ... the real work of the Government had been filched from him by his colleagues, and ... he was stuck up in pretended authority, – a kind of wooden Prime Minister, from whom no real ministration was demanded’ (231). In contrast to the earlier days of their marriage when Glencora’s delighted enjoyment of Palliser’s property freed him for the ceaseless activity of Exchequer business, Palliser now seems sunk into a type of enforced enjoyment, while Glencora maintains the busy distraction that used to be his domain: ‘She was always making up the party, – meaning the coalition – doing something to strengthen the buttresses, writing little letters to little people, who, little as they were, might become big by amalgamation’ (229). Her activity, in contrast to his enforced inactivity, leads Palliser to an awareness of his own necessarily vicarious role in the government: ‘It might, in fact, be the case that it was his wife ... with her dinner parties and receptions, with her crowded saloons, her music, her picnics, and social temptations was Prime Minister rather than he himself. It might be that this had been understood by the coalesced parties; – by everybody, in fact, except himself. It had perhaps been found that in the state of things then existing, a ministry could be best kept together, not by parliamentary capacity, but by social arrangements, such as his Duchess, and his Duchess alone, could carry out ... In such a state of things, he of course, as her husband, must be the nominal Prime Minister’ (PM 149). With this revelation, Palliser himself changes character. In contrast to his former role as the unselfconscious big dog, oblivious to the yappings of smaller dogs around him, Palliser as prime minister becomes thin-skinned, easily offended, and sensitive to what he sees as violations of his private property by favour-seekers and hangers-on who crowd Lady Glencora’s entertainments. Understanding himself as vicarious enjoyer – of his wife’s separate property, of Parliament itself – Palliser reverts to the miserable awareness of his own dependence that dogged him in his youth, before his marriage to

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Glencora inspired the Old Duke to settle an independent sum on his nephew. Palliser’s rather absent-minded neglect of Glencora that first marked his independence turns into his reliance on Glencora for sympathy and affection. As a result, he and Glencora do become a rather tender couple. When Palliser grows to feel ‘that a grievous calamity had befallen him when circumstances compelled him to become the Queen’s Prime Minister’ he grows melancholy and begs Glencora, ‘Do not separate yourself from me ... Do not disjoin yourself from me in all these troubles’ (277). Such a plea seems odd, given the fact that his actual problem is that Glencora does not separate herself from him, insisting that she is just as much a part of the government as he is. One of the central crises of the ministry occurs when she promises vulgar social climber Ferdinand Lopez that Palliser will use his influence to ensure his successful candidacy. Lopez uses Glencora’s promise, after he loses the election, to pressure Palliser into compensating him for his election expenses. Word of it spreads to the press, where Palliser is accused of trying to exercise undue influence in elections. Glencora tries to take the blame, pointing out, ‘They couldn’t hang you, you know, because I committed a murder,’ but Palliser insists that he must take the blame for the promise he never gave. ‘You cannot divide yourself from me; nor, for the value of it all, would I wish that such a division were possible’ (PM 369). Called upon to explain the rumours of his misconduct in the House of Commons, Palliser never breathes a word about Glencora, insisting that he was ‘acting not as Prime Minister, but as an English nobleman, in the management of his own property and privileges’ (493). And indeed, his statements are correct, since it is the duty of the English nobleman – a nobleman oddly but thoroughly imbued with a middle-class work ethic – to allow his wife full enjoyment of his property, so that he might get on with other things. The End of Wifely Powers; or, Phineas Finn Is Not the Nation’s Wife In the fifteen years during which Trollope wrote his series, the possibility of vicarious enjoyment through marriage was increasingly called into question in British society. Beginning with the Divorce Act of 1857, which made divorce available outside the aristocracy, and leading up to the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, public atten-

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tion was absorbed in debates on whether marriage did, in fact, create shared interests – whether property owned by the husband was available for the enjoyment of the wife. Feminists circulated stories of wronged wives – usually from the lower classes – abandoned and unsupported by husbands, who still might legally confiscate the women’s wages and property. As Mary Lyndon Shanley points out, marital property laws horrified more than just feminists outraged at women’s conjugal disadvantages. Middle-class merchants, Shanley argues, were equally horrified by the prospect of property that could be enjoyed by one party, but legally owned only by the other. Such an arrangement frequently led to women running up debt in their husbands’ names, for which their husbands then refused to be responsible – since their wives could not legally make a contract for the husband’s property.3 Even feminist Annie Besant adopted this line of argument in her 1878 pamphlet ‘Marriage As It Was’: ‘Many a man’s life is now rendered harder than it ought to be, by the waste and extravagance of a wife who can pledge his name and his credit, and even ruin him before he knows his danger’ (29). In a sentiment that mirrors Alice’s ambivalence about a marital loss of freedom, George Vavasor her cousin and fiancé, explains that marriage is as much a horrifying loss of agency for men as it is for women. He calls marriage a ceremony in which ‘a man should give permission to a priest to tie him to another human being like a Siamese twin, so that all power of separate and solitary action should be taken from him for ever’ (CYFH 1: 311). But as Palliser’s pleas that Glencora not separate herself from him indicate, the imagination of a coherent social structure still depended in a great part upon the sense that affiliation required the different relationships to property that men and women experience. In the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, Parliament showed itself particularly anxious to preserve a difference in gendered relations to property, so that it might also preserve the gendered difference in political participation that property ownership otherwise implied. While awarding women increased rights to claim their own property in some circumstances during marriage, Parliament shied away from granting them the same rights that even a single woman would have in regard to their own property. By giving married women ‘protection, not independence’ the law still insisted that the wife’s experience of property must remain primarily embedded in that of her husband’s (Shanley 130). Trollope likewise seems reluctant to acknowledge changes in women’s legal status. While in their official capacity his

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legislators address issues of franchise reform, Church disestablishment, and Irish tenant right – all were being actively debated at the time – they never tackle in Parliament the very current issues of married women’s property or women’s franchise. Instead, the moment during which Palliser takes public blame for Glencora’s rash political promises stands in for debate on any actual legislation. The narrator notes that during this session all of the galleries are packed, ‘for it was the only matter they remembered in which a woman’s conduct might probably be called in question in the House of Commons’ (PM 492). But given the storm of legislative debate over married women’s property and even women’s franchise at that time, Trollope is wilfully omitting a decade of political debate in which women’s conduct was repeatedly called into question in the House of Commons.4 If such an omission indicates that Trollope is as anxious as Palliser that men and women not be divided, his inclusion in the novels of marriages that fail to cohere around the vicarious enjoyment of property also indicates that he is aware of its approaching obsolescence. In the Kennedys’ catastrophic marriage, Trollope links the literal reengineering of marital property arrangements to the erosion of marriage as a metaphor of national – or international – unity. Trollope’s awareness of the trouble with late-Victorian marriage creates dissonance in his use of the marriage analogy of Anglo-Irish union. This notion of the marriage of England and Ireland, with Ireland acting as bride, is perhaps one of the most familiar and pervasive metaphors by which both nations thought about their political union. However, in Trollope’s novels – acutely attuned as they are to the conflicting desires and ambitions of both parties yoked together by marriage – the use of such an analogy carries extra weight. Such a moment comes in Phineas Finn as Mr Monk and Finn prepare for an investigative trip to Ireland: ‘But if it was incumbent on England to force upon Ireland the maintenance of the union for her own sake, and for England’s sake – because England could not afford independence established so close against her own ribs, – it was at any rate necessary to England’s character that the bride thus bound in a compulsory wedlock should be endowed with all the best privileges that a wife can enjoy. Let her not be a kept mistress. Let it be bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, if we are to live together in the married state’ (PF 551). While the assertion is made without any detectable irony, it possesses unnerving overtones, coming as it does so soon after Lady

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Laura’s revelation to Phineas that her marriage has left her ‘no escape, no hope, no prospect of relief, no place of consolation’ (PF 539). Mary Jean Corbett makes a similar observation about the jarring connotations of this passage, reading the context of the deeply unhappy Kennedy marriage as a straightforward allegory of the afflictions of Anglo-Irish union. Finn’s oddly prolonged and violent involvement in the marriage, however, makes its symbolic value more complex than simple allegory. In Phineas Redux the marriage analogy becomes explicitly violent, when Kennedy, teetering on the edge of madness, rants to Phineas that Laura must return to the house as his wife because she is ‘bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh’ (PR 1: 87). Yet it is Phineas who is the object of Kennedy’s tyranny, not Laura. Even before the Kennedy marriage disintegrates, the coercive atmosphere of the house at Loughlinter elicits from Phineas an uneasy sense that his Irishness implicates him in the abusive marriage plot: ‘What was he, Phineas Finn, an Irishman from Killaloe, living in that great house of Loughlinter as though he were one of the family, striving to kill the hours, and feeling that he was in some way subject to the dominion of his host?’ (PF 326). After he resolves to avoid both spouses, Finn continues to be drafted against his will as go-between for Kennedy and Lady Laura, an odd domestic third to their troubled marriage. His involvement ends only when Kennedy makes an attempt on his life, an act of violence that leads, through a long chain of uniquely Trollopian gossip trails, to Finn’s being literally imprisoned as the prime suspect in the murder of Mr Bonteen, a man who had previously made much of his involvement with the married Lady Laura.5 Finn’s unhappy relationship to the Anglo-Irish marriage analogy does not make him an opponent to Union, by any means. As Irish Secretary in Palliser’s government, he undertakes an active anti-Home Rule campaign, hoping ‘to prove to his susceptible countrymen that at the present moment no curse could be laid upon them so heavy as that of having to rule themselves apart from England’ (PM 92). He pontificates, ‘I would endeavour to teach them that they can get nothing by Home Rule, – that their taxes would be heavier, their property less secure, their lives less safe, their general position more debased, and their chances of national success more remote than ever’ (104). His easy classification of himself as separate from the ‘them’ of Ireland springs from a double division. On the one hand, Finn considers his permanent home to be in England, where he has by this

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time married a non-Irish (and non-British) wife, so that, indeed, Home Rule would not endanger his taxes, his property, or his life. On the other hand, he assumes the rhetoric of the elected representative, who speaks of those he represents as ‘they,’ even though he ostensibly acts as one who shares with ‘them’ an identity and interests. This coincidence of divisions, whereby those most legitimately at the centre of the nation might speak exactly like those who occupy another nation, reveals how the character of Phineas Finn displaces the marriage analogy, embodying in one person the sort of vicarious enjoyment otherwise articulated in marital terms. In Finn, Trollope is able to imagine the anomalous position of Ireland to be fundamental to the English nation, not because it can operate as the metaphorical bride of England, the vicarious enjoyer of English property, but because it can produce an individual consciousness whose internalized strangeness makes even his own experience always seem somewhat vicarious. In other words, Finn doesn’t stand for the Irish wife of the English nation: in himself he is both husband and wife, owner and enjoyer, citizen and stranger. After all, Finn, who progresses from penniless and unknown member for Loughshane to Irish Secretary under Palliser’s government, is never the stranger on whom Trollope so frequently relies to make apparent the otherwise invisible practices of Englishness. When we are first introduced to him, he has been studying English law in London for three years and is already well established among a parliamentary social set. Yet Trollope frequently calls upon Finn’s Irish background to explain his tendency to be of two minds – often at the same time. The Catholic son of an Irish Catholic doctor and a Protestant mother – and Catholic brother to several Protestant sisters – Finn carries within himself the divide that makes his own experience of the English nation always vicarious, even when he occupies the centre. His entrance into the House of Commons is both vicarious and enjoyed at the same time: ‘He was confused, half elated, half disappointed ... He found himself constantly regretting that he was there; and as constantly telling himself that he, hardly yet twenty-five, without a shilling in the world, had achieved an entrance into that assembly which by the consent of all men is the greatest in the world’ (PF 71). His Irishness is repeatedly referred to as causing a profound disconnect – but often a very useful one – that allows him to maintain opposing positions at once: ‘He felt that he had two identities, – that he was, as it were, two separate persons, – and that he could, without

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any real faithlessness, be very much in love with Violet Effingham in his position of man of fashion, and member of Parliament in England, and also warmly attached to dear little Mary Flood Jones as an Irishman of Killaloe’ (PF 354). This is a doubleness that Trollope lets Phineas get away with, even though it is identical to the sort of duplicity exhibited by most of the villains of the Palliser series as well. Like the duplicitous and ultimately exiled characters of George Vavasor, Ferdinand Lopez, and even Joseph Emilius, Finn is a man championed by women, but not quite accepted by masculine English society. Finn’s success in keeping his Irish origins a thing entirely separate from his London existence means that ‘Of those who knew him intimately, not one in twenty were aware from whence he came, what his parentage, or what his means of living’ (PF 253). This is exactly the same position occupied by Emilius, who acquires a new name, religion, and marital status upon his immigration to England, and the English George Vavasor, of whom it is said, ‘Few of his friends knew where he lived ... The people at his lodgings did not even know that he had relatives and his nearest relatives hardly knew that he had lodgings’ (CYFH 1: 121). On the same grounds, Mr Wharton rejects Ferdinand Lopez as a possible son-in-law (PM 31, 33). Much like the crypto-Judaic social climber, who gains his future father-in-law’s grudging acceptance by saving the son of the house from midnight muggers, Phineas also wins the approval of the Standish family by saving son-in-law Kennedy from a late-night garrotting. Phineas is rewarded liberally for his bravery. He stands for Loughton fully endorsed by its retiring member, Mr Standish, thus maintaining his precarious foothold in Westminster, and continuing in both his political and romantic triumphs. Lopez, on the other hand, slides downward after his heroism wins him the hand of Emily Wharton. His financial position plummets. He loses both the election and the possibility of a respected reputation in a parliamentary competition that ends in a blackmail scandal. After the collapse of his plans to emigrate and a proposal of elopement humiliatingly spurned by Lizzie Eustace, he throws himself under a train. That the Irish Phineas Finn is copiously rewarded for exhibiting the same attributes – and even engaging in some of the same actions – as the Jewish Ferdinand Lopez suggests a hierarchy of ethnicities, in which the Irishman can be more successful within English society than can the Jew. Such success depends on the Irishman’s failure to

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assimilate completely. As Julian Wolfreys and Michael Ragussis point out, the successful adoption of English characteristics by Jewish characters always threatens the coherence of English identity: if Englishness can be so easily imitated, it might be revealed to be a thing of fiction, not a genuine product of the nation. Finn’s double identity, on the other hand, never threatens such exposure of Englishness because his duplicitous performances of Englishness are treated as wholly Irish. In Trollope, the Irish advantage is an ability to simulate Englishness, springing from a specifically Irish talent at being two things at once. Trollope unquestionably imagines Lopez’s failure to be rooted in his Jewish heritage, but this flaw is not precisely duplicity. Rather, Lopez’s fatal flaw is an inability to hide the interests and ambitions with which his heritage has (allegedly) inspired in him. Lopez ultimately fails to be something other than he is. On his honeymoon with Emily, he resolves not to discuss the topic of the money he desperately needs, but he finds himself constitutionally unable to keep his resolution: ‘It is easy for a man to say that he will banish care, so that he may enjoy to the full the delights of the moment. But this is a power which none but a savage possesses – or perhaps an Irishman’ (PM 215). Finn unquestionably is that Irishman, whose ability to be both English and Irish in his vacillating behaviour culminates in his appointment to the office of Secretary for Ireland, where it is his obligation to shuttle between Dublin Castle and Westminster. This shuttling in itself seems to be what garners an outsider a permanent place in Trollope’s scheme of the nation. Finn’s wife, Madame Goesler, the only Jewish figure to escape the otherwise relentless anti-Semitism in the Palliser series, also shuttles between London and Vienna, where she attends to property that she owns there. The fact that this property is entirely her husband’s according to English law, and entirely hers according to European law, further secures Phineas’s status as both owner and enjoyer simultaneously.6 It is no accident, then, that Finn feels prompted to speak out on ‘that terribly unintelligible subject, Irish tenant right’ (PF 703), which, in seeking partial property rights in rented land for the Irish tenant, connect, in confusing ways, the role of owner and enjoyer. In taking a stand against his own party in favour of Irish tenant rights, Finn masters the art of vicarious government. He professes a belief in the reform not because he thinks he can get tenant rights, but simply to ‘make them believe that there is

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something in it’ (703). Such a move is not the trick of an outsider about to be pushed to the margins of the text, but a standard move of Trollope’s titular ‘Irish member,’ whose Irish outsider status is paradoxically what makes him a ‘member’ of the nation. Both other and insider at the same time, Finn affirms the anomalous unity that goes into making up the totality of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Pressed up against the ribs of Britain as he is, Finn proves to be the very heart of England, the vicarious enjoyer with his own cabinet office, the outsider whose relish for government can never be dulled by his participation in it, the split self who enables a narration of England as a nation of independent agents who can still experience their own collectivity. This Irish state of mind is, for Trollope, the state of mind in which he hopes to leave his readers. In a series of novels in which the consummation of happy plots – and marriages – tends towards Westminster, Trollope both gives the reader the experience that lies at the centre of the nation and teaches us to understand that our enjoyment of such plots arises from an envy for what we lack. Every book, in detailing the esoteric intrigues of elections, party politics, reform bills, Church disestablishment, and the decimalization of the twelve-penny shilling, instructs us both that ‘It is something to have sat in the House of Commons, though it has been but for one session!’ and puts the shape of that something in our hands (CYFH 2: 43). Yet that shape inevitably dissolves into a bitter longing arising from not having at all. Even as he narrates George Vavasor’s first parliamentary seating, Trollope directly addresses his readers, asking pointedly, ‘hast thou never confessed, when standing [at the gates of the House of Commons] that Fate has been unkind to thee in denying thee the one thing that thou hast wanted?’ (44). Trollope trains his readers in two incommensurable feelings: intimate familiarity with the workings of a government he conceives of as the very heart of the nation, and a sense of its impossible distance from our grasp. These feelings are the two poles of collectivity established by Bagehot’s sense of a nation that depends entirely on two separate populations whose harmony can be preserved by their complete failure to understand the nation they share in the same way. As Trollope contemplates what to him seems like the inexorable progress towards liberal equality among all people, he trains his readers to preserve within themselves the sense of a purely vicarious stake in what they call their own.

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NOTES 1 The following abbreviations are used in this chapter: CYFH (Can You Forgive Her?), ED (The Eustace Diamonds), PF (Phineas Finn), PR (Phineas Redux), PM (The Prime Minister). 2 Of course, the narrator qualifies this description of Palliser’s generous sentiment towards Glencora in the next sentence, explaining ‘But when she asked for a favour, he was always afraid of an imprudence. Very possibly she might want to drink beer in an open garden’ (2: 362–3). Such a qualification suggests Palliser’s trepidation that what Glencora might actually enjoy has nothing at all to do with his property. 3 In fact, Margot Finn’s research on women’s relationships to property emphasizes the strange legal fiction of the law of necessaries – the tradition that endowed women with a unique power to contract for the purchase of their family needs, even while identifying them as individuals with no power to contract. Her work uncovers instances of women appearing on behalf of their husbands in local debts hearings, a practice that rendered the husband only a nominal party in a process in which the wife contracts debt with local merchants because she has no legal power to do so and then appears on behalf of her husband for a crime he has legally committed. 4 Such occasions include the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which made divorce available without an act of Parliament; John Stuart Mill’s 1866 presentation of the Women’s Suffrage Bill to Parliament; the 1869 Municipal Corporations Act, which allowed single, property-owning women to vote in local elections; as well as the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act, the 1874 Amendment to Married Women’s Property Act, and the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act. All of these controversies involved prolonged parliamentary discussion about exactly how women would or would not conduct themselves if accorded new political privileges. 5 Phineas Finn’s imprisonment provides another example of Trollope’s vision of government as a vicarious experience that can be just as confining as wifehood. The problem of how Finn will support himself while he is in Parliament is solved by his imprisonment. Hoping that a paid government position will solve his financial straits, Finn no longer has to worry about his living expenses once he is incarcerated – but both options are identical in leaving him bound and dependent on the state. 6 Annie Besant remarks in her 1879 pamphlet on marriage reform: ‘In Austria ... wives retain their rights over their own property’ (29).

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WORKS CITED Bagehot, Walter. The English Constitution. Ed. Paul Smith. 1867. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Besant, Annie. ‘Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be: A Plea for Reform.’ 1882, 2nd ed. A Selection of the Social and Political Pamphlets of Annie Besant. Ed. John Saville. New York: Kelley, 1970. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Vol 1. Of the Rights of Persons. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Brantlinger, Patrick. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. – The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Cohen, William A. ‘Trollope’s Trollop.’ Novel 28.3 (1995): 235–56. Corbett, Mary Jean. Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Delaney, Paul. ‘Land, Money and the Jews in the Later Trollope.’ Studies in English Literature 32 (1992): 765–87. Finn, Margot. ‘Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760–1860.’ Historical Journal 39.3 (1996): 703–22. Hadley, Elaine. ‘The Past Is a Foreign Country: The Neo-Conservative Romance with Victorian Liberalism.’ Yale Journal of Criticism 10.1 (1997): 7–38. Langbauer, Laurie. Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850–1930. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962. McMaster, Juliet. ‘Trollope’s Country Estates.’ Trollope Centenary Essays. Ed. John Halperin. New York: St Martin’s, 1982. 70–85. Mandler, Peter. The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Miller, Andrew H. Novels under Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

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Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Trollope, Anthony. Can You Forgive Her? 1864. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. – The Eustace Diamonds. 1873. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972. – Phineas Finn, the Irish Member. 1869. New York: Penguin, 1983. – Phineas Redux. 1874. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973. – The Prime Minister. 1876. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. – The Small House at Allington. 1864. London: Dent, 1965. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. 1899. New York: Viking, 1931. Wolfrey, Julian. ‘Reading Trollope: Whose Englishness Is It Anyway?’ Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 22 (1993): 303–29. Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

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3 Ghostly Dispossessions: The Gothic Properties of Uncle Silas ann gaylin

Spectral Bodies Towards the end of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1864 novel, Uncle Silas, thieves enter the bedroom of Maud Ruthyn, the beautiful, young protagonist. They brutally kill her governess, Madame de la Rougierre, asleep in Maud’s bed, then seize the heroine’s jewels. Cowering in the darkness, Maud witnesses the act that would have turned her from an heiress, entitled to vast estates and wealth, into a corpse, dispossessed at once of her property and her life. This scene stages a central preoccupation of the novel: the intricate, and vexed, symbolic relations between being, ownership, and bodies. The fact that the villains are Maud’s relatives – her uncle and cousin – makes their deed more heinous. It also reveals the underlying narrative assumption that inheritance and ownership of property depend upon the control of bodies – by fair means or foul. The sexualized language of the episode intimates that the violation of the governess is symbolic of the violence done or threatened to all rebellious female bodies in the novel.1 Madame de la Rougierre’s death is inordinately bloody. Dudley kills her with a ‘hammer, one end of which had been beaten out into a longish spike.’ When he strikes, she utters ‘an unnatural shriek, beginning small and swelling for two or three seconds into a yell such as are imagined in haunted houses, accompanied by a convulsive sound, as of the motion of running, and the arms drumming on the bed ... a horrible tremor quiver[ed] through the joints and curtains of the bedstead, the convulsion of the murdered woman. It was a dreadful sound.’ After another series of blows, silence: ‘the diabolical surgery was ended’ (415). The substitute body in her bed enables Maud to experience vicariously, spectrally, the terrors of violent sexual-

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ity, since the murderer is none other than Maud’s would-be suitor Dudley. Watching in horror, Maud herself remains undetected, in part because, in contrast to the utterly physical female body being attacked, she herself has become ghostly. Mute and invisible, Maud ‘glide[s]’ away before the criminals can discover her and thus steal from her that most precious of a young lady’s jewels – her virginity – before taking her life (417). The scene re-enacts in an explicit and symbolic form Dudley’s earlier attempts to kidnap the heroine, episodes suffused with sexual overtones (76–81, 84–8). These plots, together with his ‘leer[s]’ and ‘odious grin[s]’ at Maud (37, 251, 254, 307), his comments about her physical appearance (37, 254, 289, 307–8), and his ‘impudent’ attempts to kiss her (246, 287, 308) reveal that Dudley’s interest in his cousin is not purely financial. The transposed murder makes clear that the value of an heiress lies in control of both her material possessions and her body, which, while she is alive, determines the distribution of wealth through her children and, when she is dead, provides proof that the estate should pass to the next heir. This lurid moment in the novel represents the climax of an allegory of possession and dispossession of property, premised upon the ownership of the body. In Uncle Silas, Le Fanu reworks cultural assumptions about the symbolic function of bodies as indices of property, agency, and identity. The novel accounts for a distinct literary inheritance – the eighteenthcentury gothic novel – differently from many of his contemporaries, such as Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins. Uncle Silas rewrites attitudes towards stock figures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic fiction, such as the foreigner and foreign lands (specifically France), the gypsy, and the servant. The novel opens up questions about inheritance, literal and literary, in the nineteenth-century novel and locates them in new forms and settings. Indeed, in Uncle Silas, Le Fanu revises the notion of displacement itself – a staple of gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto (1764) – to explore complex questions of identity, exile, and homeland. For an Anglo-Irish writer whose relationship to his own material, literary, and political inheritance was vexed, these issues take on an intensified significance that manifests itself in the concepts of possession and dislocation. Of Bodies, Owning, and Being Belonging firmly in the ‘Anglo-Irish tradition of “Big House Gothics”’ (Howes 174), Uncle Silas relies upon traditional elements of Gothic

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fiction. Her mother having died years earlier, Maud lives with her reclusive father, Austin Ruthyn, whom she loves and fears, at his gloomy, isolated mansion called Knowl. Austin shuns his younger brother Silas, because he is suspected of having murdered a man at Bartram-Haugh, his Derbyshire home, to avoid paying vast gambling debts. The father dies, leaving Maud the sole heiress of his considerable estates and wealth. To declare his faith in his brother and clear the family name, Austin has appointed Silas as Maud’s guardian, even though her uncle would inherit all of her lands and fortune should she die under age. Silas tries to force Maud to marry his boorish son, Dudley; when she refuses, he attempts to kill her. Replacing the eighteenth-century gothic abbess with a nineteenth-century governess, Le Fanu invents Madame de la Rougierre, the villainess who abets the evil uncle’s scheme to defraud the heiress of her property and her life. The plan miscarries when Dudley mistakenly murders Madame, who, drugged with the potion intended for her charge, has fallen asleep in Maud’s bed. With the help of loyal tenants, Maud flees to her cousin Lady Monica. After recovering abroad from her traumatic adventure, Maud marries one of the executors of her father’s will. The end of Uncle Silas presents Maud as a happy wife and the mother of a little boy. This summary reveals how closely Le Fanu’s narrative seems to follow the conventional gothic pattern. A tyrannical surrogate parent tries to usurp the property of a young heiress; when she resists, he threatens her life. She escapes his control and eventually marries the man she loves. They settle on either his or her estates and re-establish a stable, moral community based on heterosexual union and the reassertion of property rights. The gothic fetishization of property takes final form in its insistence on reclaiming an ancestral demesne – the normative and homely counterpart to the uncanny, haunted castle – and on establishing the heroine as settled in life and settled on land. Thus, Uncle Silas, like most gothic narratives, concerns possession and dispossession. It tells the story of property – usurped, wasted, stolen, regained. At the same time, Uncle Silas represents another kind of possession: being haunted by phantoms. Most gothic fiction plays with this double meaning of possession: the ownership of material objects, land, and money; and its obverse, being possessed by spirits, spectres, ghosts. Gothic heroines, in particular, are prone to being haunted – an occupational hazard, one might say. Seeing ghosts is one step towards becoming a ghost oneself, dispossessed not merely of the estates an evil uncle wishes to claim, but also of the property that constitutes the self: the

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body. The spectral dispossessions in this novel act out the ambiguities of a concept of personal agency and socio-political relations founded in ownership of the body. To be haunted or possessed is to sense one’s changing status from owner to possession. ‘Possession’ by phantoms figures what Katherine Rowe calls ‘the dispossessive conditions of identity, in which the body ... and even its voluntary motions fail to ratify the rights, authority, or propriety of the self ’ (12). Indeed, haunting represents the psychic enactment on the body of an expropriation of tangible and intangible forms of property: estates, money, or rent. If material dispossession manifests itself in the spectral presence of others, it ultimately threatens to turn the heiress into a ghost – a final, fatal dispossession. Uncle Silas records the insidious attempts to dispossess Maud of her estates and property, of her right to life and life story. The narrative turns upon the heroine’s active reclaiming of her belongings, beginning with her body, that possession considered, at least since the end of the seventeenth century, as the individual’s most basic property. In his second Treatise on Government (1690), John Locke asserts: ‘Every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself’ (287). For Locke, the body is the individual’s natural, inalienable property.2 His and related theories of possessive individualism conceive of the self as the proprietor of one’s body and its capacities.3 According to Locke, ownership of the body and control over the land that the individual’s labour has made his own are foundational to the formation of political society whose purpose is the preservation of property (268, 351). Locke’s conception of property, like the king’s two bodies – the body politic and the body natural – renders intangible and symbolically functional what is corporeal. From the seventeenth century on, a sense of self depended upon the concept of inhabiting and owning one’s body (Macpherson 3, 263–4). Such an understanding of selfhood founded in the ownership of property still obtained in the nineteenth century, an era in which property and subjectivity were firmly entwined. Indeed, owning acquired an ontological status in nineteenth-century fiction. For Homo possidens, belongings certified a place in the social and economic order. We recall the ‘hideous solidity’ of the Podsnaps’ silver plate in Our Mutual Friend, a novel that began serialization in 1864, the same year in which Uncle Silas appeared in print. The massive objects attest to Mr Podsnap’s ‘merit and importance’; they, like their owner, ‘take up as much room as possible’ (Dickens 135). Mary Poovey notes how ‘in nineteenth-century Britain, the fundamental criterion of subject status

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– the individual’s capacity to recognize and act on his own interests – was underwritten by another capacity – the ability to possess himself’ (76). Conversely, to lose ‘property is ... a taste of death’ (Nunokawa 7). To own is to be, in the bourgeois order of things. Yet the ghostly hauntings of Uncle Silas challenge this understanding of subjectivity and its representation within the bourgeois tradition of narrative. Like much of gothic fiction, all property in Uncle Silas seems alien and alienable, including the body. The spectral qualities of bodies have political implications for an Anglo-Irish writer, all too aware of the troublesome relationship between individual bodies, their labour, and the ownership and governance of land.4 As Julian Moynahan observes, Le Fanu’s fiction in general displays a ‘willed confusion’ between possession by ghosts and ‘dispossession, as in the loss of property, power, status’ (Anglo-Irish 127). Both those who claim others’ possessions, as well as those whose rightful belongings have been stolen, appear ghostly. Spectres represent at once the menacing presence of others and a ghostly alienation from one’s primal property: the body. The narrative of Uncle Silas explores how inhabiting bodies – and bodies of land – may not necessarily imply owning or controlling them. In this sense, Le Fanu challenges Locke’s assertion that the body is inalienable property by demonstrating that bodies function differently from material possessions, and that one body can substitute for another, as when Madame de la Rougierre replaces Maud in her bed. In Uncle Silas, ghostly dispossessions and uncanny dislocations invite important questions about Anglo-Irish society, specifically its pressing problems of inheritance and ownership. As the title of an earlier version of the novel suggests, the ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess,’ published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1838, is fundamentally a tale of Irish property and inheritance.5 Set in Ireland in the preceding century, the first text makes evident the parallels between the fictional narrative and eighteenth-century abductions.6 In England, stories of actual heiresses stolen from their families and forced to marry their kidnappers were associated specifically with Ireland, considered a land of barbaric behaviour. Although abductors were often Catholics and their victims Protestant, material gain, rather than political or religious strife, motivated such crimes (Kelly 32, 24). Le Fanu’s story might have been inspired by the famous 1743 abduction of a Limerick heiress, Frances Ingoldsby, by Hugh Fitzjohn Massy, the younger son of a powerful rival Ascendancy family, along with other famous abductions of the 1770s and 1780s, the period during

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which the number of incidents reached its height.7 In the various versions of the narrative, the criminals prize the heiress primarily for her property, as the murder scene discussed earlier makes clear. Maud’s tangible assets, rather than the girl herself, comprise Silas Ruthyn’s chief attraction to her and motivate the final abduction narrative within Uncle Silas. Maud believes she is travelling to France to rejoin her cousin Milly, when she is secretly being brought back to BartramHaugh in order to be killed. In most historical abductions, abductees were often raped and forced to wed their captors, but Silas has not succeeded in compelling his ward to marry his son. For Silas and Dudley, then, murder becomes a more drastic, if necessary, means to acquire property and replenish the family coffers. Astute readers of Uncle Silas from Elizabeth Bowen on have recognized the Derbyshire locale of the novel as a displacement of AngloIrish concerns onto an English setting and have interpreted its gothic form as representing the ‘political unconscious’ of Ascendancy Ireland (Bowen 101; Eagleton 187; Howes 178; McCormack 141; Moynahan, ‘Politics’ 44). As numerous critics have also noted, gothic fiction offers an apt means of figuring concerns central to the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish: anxieties about the degeneration of the ruling class, its isolation in the big house, and charges of misuse or usurpation of Irish estates and wealth, especially by absentee landlords (Fitzgerald 16–17; Howes 177–8; Jeffares 132; Moynahan, ‘Politics’ 43–53). Just as eighteenth-century gothic fiction transposes English fears about class, property, and inheritance to France and Italy, Uncle Silas shifts concerns about who will possess Ireland to England, specifically to the county of Derbyshire. Thus, rather than crossing the Italian Apennines, Maud traverses the Pennines in the English Midlands. Not surprisingly in a novel concerned with issues of Anglo-Irish inheritance, the crime besides murder that Silas stands accused of is waste, in the legal sense of that term. To waste is to ‘destroy, injure, impair, damage (property); to cause to deteriorate in value; to suffer to fall into decay’ (OED). Waste represents a crime against another’s property. Austin’s will reiterates the conditions of Silas’s lease of his Derbyshire manor: he is to enjoy ‘the use of the mansion-house and lands of Bartram-Haugh ... on payment of a rent of five shillings per annum ... subject to the like conditions as to waste, &c.’ (134). The nineteenthcentury English legal historian Sir Frederick Pollock defines waste as ‘Any unauthorized act of a tenant for a freehold estate not of inheritance, or for any lesser interest, which tends to the destruction of the

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tenement, or otherwise to the injury of the inheritance’ (285). In Le Fanu’s novel, Silas has been cutting down the trees at Bartram-Haugh, a property that forms part of Maud’s inheritance, and is using the money from the sale of the lumber and charcoal to pay his own debts (300–1). Like the absentee landlords who used income from their estates in Ireland to live luxuriously in England, Silas impoverishes the estate to gratify his taste for opium and delicacies. He gives little thought to the long-term value of the lands of which he possesses only the freehold: a lifetime lease. In The Institutions of the English Government (1863), legal commentator Homersham Cox offers as an example of waste ‘where a person having only a limited interest in an estate in his occupation,’ has ‘wastefully cut down timber, or otherwise injure[d] the freehold’ (500) – precisely the crime that Silas has committed. In his classic analysis of English law, William Blackstone also specifically refers to cutting down estate woods as waste (2: 281–2, 283–4; 3: 223–4). The motive for both crimes that Silas commits – waste and murder – is the same: the desire to appropriate someone else’s property. Like an irresponsible absentee landlord, he disregards succeeding generations’ future claims on the land, as well as his children’s current needs, in order to sate his own, present-day cravings for expensive food, wine, and clothes. For Silas, possession appears to be nine-tenths of the law. Ghosts and Other Gothic Legacies Most obviously, gothic fiction is about the past. The ghosts who haunt gothic protagonists are revenants; they represent a return of prior events that must be acknowledged and accounted for before they and their spectral remains can be put to rest. The gigantic phantom of Alfonso the Good in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto literally and figuratively looms larger than life and kills off usurpers to his throne. In Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), a dead chevalier haunts the heroine’s dreams; his murder must be acknowledged, his identity solved, and his killer punished before Adeline can marry her lover. The nun in Villette (1853) and the seventeenth-century Lady Dedlock of the Ghost’s Walk in Bleak House (1853) are two well-known examples of spectres of the past that haunt present, Victorian protagonists.8 Superficially, Uncle Silas does not deviate from the norm in this respect. The older, narrating Maud reminds us, ‘There is not an old house in England of which the servants and young people who live in it do not cherish some traditions of the ghostly’ (20). Like any proper

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family of ancient lineage, the Ruthyns have their ghosts: the linkman, ‘a lank, dark-faced, black-haired man’ who carries a smouldering torch; and Lady Rachel, who signals her presence by ‘the tapping of her high-heeled shoes, the sweep and rustle of her brocades, her sighs as she pauses in the galleries ... and sometimes, on stormy nights, her sobs’ (20). These spirits appear rarely, but ‘always porten[d] some direful crisis or calamity’ (20). The narrator makes us expect these omens of familial doom, but when they do show up they bother only Madame de la Rougierre. Maud describes them as if she were taking her readers on the great haunted house tour, but they never frighten her. Instead, the most haunting presences in the novel – the ones that disturb Maud’s waking and sleeping hours – are alive. If anything, they are all too present and menacing. And they refuse to go away. Terry Castle observes how gothic haunting is not limited to ghosts of the past, but she draws very different conclusions than a reading of Uncle Silas suggests. Analysing Radcliffe’s narratives, Castle coins the term ‘spectralization of the other’ to describe the condition in which the gothic heroine is haunted by absent loved ones. For Castle, to be ‘haunted’ means to find oneself obsessed by the spectral images of those one loves (234). To love is to see the beloved everywhere, even when he is absent. Castle understands haunting as a desire to deny death. It is an attempt to reconcile our wish for someone not to be dead with our acknowledgement that he or she is dead to us, literally or figuratively (241). In Le Fanu’s nineteenth-century gothic, however, haunting works quite differently. To fear is to be haunted or possessed by spectral images. But Maud fears or stands in awe of the living authorities whom she is expected to love and obey: her father, to a lesser degree, and then her governess and her uncle (Moynahan, ‘Politics’ 50; AngloIrish 127). In contrast to Radcliffe’s gothic, Uncle Silas’s phantoms are those one might secretly wish to be dead: those who threaten Maud’s sense of self and property, her self and self-possession. These commanding figures are ghostly: emotionally distant, absent from the heroine’s life for hours on end, yet appearing suddenly with mysterious demands, inexplicable allusions and pronouncements, threatening gestures, and all too bodily force. These spectres move her to physical and psychological places to which she does not wish to go; they crowd her dreams as well as her daytime hours. Their encroachment on her psychic space – their possession of her mind – reflects a gradual usurpation of her more tangible possessions, leading up to and including her body. Such phantoms confound a neat correlation between

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bodily experience and social and legal definitions of personhood and entitlement. If, according to Castle, ‘to love in [Radcliffe’s] novel is to become ghostly oneself,’ in Le Fanu’s novel, it is fear that triggers a spectral relation to the body for both the possessor and the one possessed (234). Conversely, agreeable people are never spectral. Lady Monica becomes ghostly only when she frightens Maud: ‘this momentary phantom of a grim Lady Knollys, in an instant translated again into kind, pleasant Cousin Monica, with her arms around my neck’ (148). Those we would wish absent we think of as ghostly, as if to deny their materiality would make them less substantial threats. Ghosts populate Maud’s world. From the very beginning of the novel, Maud describes her living father as a spectre: ‘He was now walking up and down this spacious old room, which ... was very dark in that quarter. It was his wont to walk up and own, thus, without speaking – an exercise which used to remind me of Chauteaubriand’s [sic] father in the great chamber of the Château de Combourg. At the far end he nearly disappeared in the gloom, and then returning emerged for a few minutes, like a portrait with a background of shadow, and then again in silence faded nearly out of view’ (2). Maud notes how ‘this phantasm of my father came, and turned, and vanished with a solemn regularity’ (5). Comparing him to the ghostly patriarch in Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Maud connects her father to the world beyond the grave. Even before he is dead, Austin Ruthyn appears insubstantial and enigmatic to his daughter, refusing to explain to her the contents of his will, or the chest whose key he shows her, or the precise meaning of the promise he exacts from her to restore the family honour. He is silent, or issues cryptic warnings; he seems most alive when he is angry or forbidding (104). If the father’s physical and affective presence manifests itself as a threat, it is no wonder that Maud prefers to think of him in less substantial, more phantasmatic form. Maud’s governess appears spectral from the moment she arrives. She repeatedly strikes her pupil as being ‘ghosty’ (51). Madame de la Rougierre materializes one night just after the heroine has been pondering the mysterious ‘visitor’ with whom her father has told her he must travel – the visitor whose name she will soon learn is death. In a novel where the immaterial or abstract and the concrete are constantly described in terms of the other,9 Maud relates how, On a sudden, on the grass before me, stood an odd figure – a very tall woman in grey draperies, nearly white under the moon, courtesying extraordinarily low, and rather fantastically ... Was it really the arrival of

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Already, the girl connects Madame’s ghostliness with an authority over her person and her mind. To control is to possess, to haunt. But this living phantom increasingly takes hold of more than Maud’s nerves, pilfering the household liquor, stealing a pearl cross from her pupil, and duplicating the key to unlock Austin’s desk so that she can read his private papers. The narrative charts how, as authority figures menace Maud’s autonomy and material possessions, they gradually threaten her mental and physical existence. Maud’s possession by spirits is directly proportional to her dispossession of rights, estates, and property. Indeed, Maud’s guardians would altogether alienate her from herself. Silas represents the central ghostly presence of the novel. Embodying the past and its mysteries, Silas’s image and story preoccupy Maud long before she sees him in the flesh. Just as he assumes the title of Maud’s story, so too would this living spectre usurp all her earthly possessions. Publication history echoes narrative events, as the title of Maud’s story reflects Silas’s attempts within the narrative to claim her title to property. The first instalment of the novel was published in the Dublin University Magazine in July 1864 as ‘Maud Ruthyn.’ The next two monthly instalments appeared as ‘Maud Ruthyn and Uncle Silas,’ while the final three instalments reversed the order of characters, placing Silas’s claims to attention before those of the heroine: ‘Uncle Silas and Maud Ruthyn.’ All but the first number include the subtitle ‘A Story of Bartram-Haugh.’ The gradual title changes enabled Le Fanu to meet his London publisher, Richard Bentley’s, stipulation that, for three-decker publication, the novel be called Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (Mangum 223; Hall 59). Although Le Fanu’s story divides its time almost exactly between Knowl (Austin’s home), and Bartram-Haugh (Silas’s dwelling), the final book title reproduces the attempt within the novel to appropriate the heroine’s estate. In the final title, Maud becomes the ghost that Silas would make her into, acknowledged only in the relational noun ‘uncle’ that conjures up her spectral presence, only to dismiss it in the proper noun ‘Silas.’

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Within the narrative, Silas’s first exercise of control over Maud’s private property takes written form, in a coda to the letter he sends her in his new capacity as her guardian. He forbids Maud to speak to her cousin Monica about him and threatens to ban their interaction should she not obey. Maud’s reaction is striking: ‘As I read this postscript my cheek tingled as if I had received a box on the ear. Uncle Silas was as yet a stranger. The menace of authority was new and sudden, and I felt with a pang of mortification the full force of the position in which my dear father’s will had placed me’ (143). Although Maud has yet to meet Silas, already she feels the effects of his authority on her body – a reprimand that takes material form as a tingling cheek. Monica also notes Silas’s ‘supernatural sense’ to reach across the distance and hear their conversations, despite his being sixty miles away (143). Even when absent, Silas and his menacing authority are spectral presences for those who would defy his will. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and again in Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith describes an ‘invisible hand’ that leads the rich to act politically and economically in ways that unintentionally benefit all of society. According to Smith, ‘every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it ... he intends only his own gain, and he is ... led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’ (Wealth 4: ii.9). In contrast to Smith’s inadvertently benevolent ‘invisible hand,’ Silas’s immaterial hand – present here in its scriptural trace – is self-interested and threatens bodily harm. In Uncle Silas, hands work, write, punish, and kill. As in the passage just described, phantom hands in the novel act out problems of ownership, authority, and agency. Rowe considers the spectral hands of Le Fanu’s ghost stories as part of a larger ‘allegory of Irish dispossession and disenfranchisement’ (156). Both Rowe’s and Jonathan Arac’s historical materialist models of haunting analyse the spectralization of economic relations in which servants and other labourers are reduced to ghostly ‘hands,’ a synecdoche made eerily literal in Le Fanu’s tales. Invisible as subjects, workers do not fully own their bodies – bodies alienated from the objects they produce. Describing the worker’s estranged relation to his labour, Karl Marx contends that ‘if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position toward it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him’ (78). Authority figures in

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Uncle Silas are just such alien presences who would master not just labouring bodies but any body with possessions worth stealing. Yet this model works imperfectly in Uncle Silas, where possessor and possessed, the living and ghostly straddle both sides of any psycho-economic equation. Maud is the necessary but alienated hand to Silas’s machinations. She is simultaneously the owner of property and servant to Silas’s wishes. Consequently, she both experiences others as ghosts and becomes spectral herself. When Maud travels to Bartram-Haugh and meets Silas, her reaction reflects the spectral appearance of the possessor to the one possessed. She relates how, When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old man – preternaturally soft ... the aspect smiling, suffering, spectral. It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen him in the flesh. But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me? When I closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a pallor on which I looked with fear and pain, a face so dazzlingly pale, and those hollow, fiery, awful eyes! It sometimes seemed to me as though the curtain opened, and I had seen a ghost. (193–4)

Before having met Silas, Maud was obsessed by stories and pictures of him. She had been conditioned to anticipate their meeting with fear and awe, as well as curiosity. Yet their first encounter, like the many others that follow, intensifies rather than dispels his uncanny effect on her imagination. When Maud realizes she will be murdered, she appears spectral, both to others and in her self-representations (409, 410, 411). Her phantasmatic quality is the penultimate step in becoming a ghost herself, the subject of stories whispered at night, like the mysterious death of the gambler, the locked-room mystery that has never been solved, but that is about to be re-enacted. At the same time, those she fears still appear ghostly, ‘made of smoke or shining vapour, smiling or frowning, I could have passed my hand through them’ (410). In Uncle Silas, living spectres are terrifying for the power they represent – the ability to move people to literal places and psychological states they would rather not go. These include guilt, repressed desire or longing, and, most important, fear. Such affective situations are not easily codified or put into words.

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Fear denotes a lack of self-possession, when will or ego loses control over mind and body; fear turns people into the ghosts of themselves. When, having momentarily escaped from the room in which she is being imprisoned, Maud encounters Silas, they both look ‘appalled’ (410). Appall comes from the old French apalir, meaning ‘to wax pale.’ As this derivation suggests, fear leaches colour from their faces, making uncle and niece as pale as ghosts. Fear paralyses individuals or makes them tremble; it causes them to babble or renders them speechless. A psychic condition, fear registers on the body. Not surprisingly, during her stay at Bartram-Haugh, Maud, a nervous girl, becomes increasingly frantic as she discovers just how unrelenting are the living ghouls that haunt her.10 As the heiress uncovers Silas and Madame’s plot against her property in all its forms – what Locke defines as an individual’s ‘Life, Liberty, and Estate’ – her physical symptoms of mental unease increase (323). She trembles; she faints; she is easily upset by everything and everyone around her. Psychoanalytic accounts describe hysteria as ‘an illness whose symptoms mark a spiritual or mental condition’ (Ender 9). These somatic signs tell a tale to which the conscious mind refuses or is unable to give verbal form. As Peter Brooks notes, ‘The hysterical body challenges the interpreter not only find its story, but to revise conventional stories’ (244). If our original property is our body, and gothic fiction chronicles the threat to all the heroine’s properties, no wonder the imperilled body speaks, when linguistic attempts to question or resist the authoritative narrative of the father figure and his agents are dismissed and treated as mad or childish fancies, as Maud’s are (23, 356–7, 380–1, 389, 407, 410). And if the body is our first possession, then not being in control of our body is the foremost manifestation of not being in control of our other possessions; psychic alienation and material dispossession manifest as bodily symptoms. Maud’s hysteria emphasizes the threat of a final, radical loss of property, the real and material danger to her life. Ghostly possession and mental alienation presage the ultimate alienation from one’s own body: death. But Maud’s hysteria, while acting out the threat to life, limb, and property, cannot extricate her from Silas’s plot. Instead, only when she takes steps to reclaim her body, to restrain the physical manifestations of psychic trauma, does she begin to repossess her life and life story. When the assassins come to her bedroom, Maud feels herself grow ‘all at once resolute and self-possessed’ (414). She discovers the ‘selfcommand’ (366, 400) to keep quiet rather than speak. She regains

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control of body and voice. Instead of acknowledging the knock on the door (413), she melts into the shadows, witnesses her governess murdered in her stead, and ‘glide[s]’ out of the room while the men are stealing her jewels (417). Once outside the house, she finds, ready to help her, the working-class tenants whose loyalty she has earned through acts of kindness rather than bribes or threats. Repossession In his study relating gift-exchange in tribal societies to the production of art in western culture, Lewis Hyde links the ownership of property to agency. He observes that, ‘There is no property without an actor ... and in this sense property is an expression of the human will in things (and in other people)’ (94). He extends the relation Locke establishes between labour and ownership to the concept of agency. Hence, Hyde contends, ‘If we take property to be a right of action and therefore an expression of human will, then whenever a woman is treated as property ... we know that she is not strictly her own person: her will is somewhere subject to someone else’s’ (100–1). Hyde’s statements help us to understand the allegory of possession and inheritance in Uncle Silas. By assuming ownership of her body rather than merely inhabiting it, by making it subject to her own will, not that of others, Maud claims title to the other properties she has inherited from her father. A very real and material power over self and others accompanies inheritance and ownership; it takes narrative form in Uncle Silas. Once free from the haunted house, Maud swiftly ends her narrative of property lost and found. She repeatedly uses the possessive pronoun ‘my’ to inform readers of other characters’ fates. ‘My beloved Cousin Monica,’ ‘Milly, my dear companion,’ ‘my kind friend Meg,’ ‘my dear old friends Mary Quince and Mrs. Rusk’ – each has her tale told by the heiress who has come to repossess, it would seem, not only her body, her property, and her own story, but those of others as well (421). In an almost excessively compensatory gesture, Maud emphasizes how recovery of her inheritance produces in turn her friends’ emotional and material well-being. The heiress’s financial help enables the working-class Meg and Tom to become wealthy landowners in Australia, people of property and propriety. Next, she identifies herself as ‘Lady Ilbury, happy in the affection of a beloved and noble-hearted husband’ – a figure largely absent from the major events of the narrative (424). In her thrifty account, the heroine does not dwell on the conventional conclusion of marriage and children.

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Although authority figures in Uncle Silas deny Maud’s version of events and withhold information from her, the ending of the novel confirms her account and makes the reacquisition of Knowl, her ancestral demesne, coincide with her ability to know all the secret stories that had been kept from her and to tell them with authority. The novel reminds us of the connection between narration and knowledge; the Latin narrare encompasses the verbs to know, to tell, to account for events and people. But Le Fanu’s text takes that association one step further, linking knowledge and its transmission with ownership. To own Knowl, one must possess and understand its secrets. Whereas in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, published four years earlier, the heroine’s narrative is told by those who would protect and own her, in Uncle Silas Maud’s story is one of the many properties, persons, and things she recovers. The first-person narrative voice of this nineteenthcentury novel replaces the third-person voice of most eighteenthcentury gothic fiction. If Silas’s first threat to Maud’s bodily property took written form, Maud’s project of self-authorization and self-possession is finalized through the act of writing down her tale. She claims discursive ownership of her story, the story that was dismissed earlier as childish, hysterical, even mad (380, 410). Yet the ending of Maud’s narrative hardly leaves its heroine or the questions raised by her harrowing experiences settled once and for all. Contrary to the generic expectations of both the explained supernatural and the marriage plot, the conclusion to Uncle Silas slights Maud’s marriage to Lord Ilbury to reiterate instead her possessive relations with other women. Even more troubling, Maud’s tale, rather than putting all ghosts to rest, ends with an evocation of ‘angels,’ those ‘phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape ... [with whom] we may walk ... and hear them speak’ (424). If spirits have become benign rather than threatening, they still exist. As Ilbury’s name suggests, not all events of the past and their ghost stories have been safely interred. Although Dudley vanishes after murdering Madame de la Rougierre, he resurfaces again in Australia, where Tom Brice recognizes him (422). Like the governess’s corpse – secretly buried in the inner court of Bartram-Haugh but disinterred to prove the criminals’ guilt – most events and bodies are but temporarily laid to rest. Finally, the conclusion does not specify the location of the couple’s home. We never learn whether they set up house at Bartram-Haugh in Derbyshire, at Knowl, which has never been precisely situated, or at Ilbury’s family abode, unnamed and unmentioned. After Maud’s journey to and sojourn in the spectral

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gothic castle, the home to which she returns has become singularly immaterial. This phantasmatic location recalls the fact that the setting of the story is a displacement: Derbyshire stands in for County Cork, which is where Le Fanu set the 1838 version of the narrative. But Le Fanu’s geographic switch does more than satisfy his publisher, Richard Bentley’s, demand for a novel with a contemporary English locale, an explanation that convinces most critics of Uncle Silas (McCormack, Le Fanu 140; Mangum 235; Howes 168; Hall 65). Rather, by setting his novel in Derbyshire, Le Fanu challenges a nexus of Victorian political, literary, and cultural narratives about national character that represent England and Ireland in binary terms. In this post-Union formulation, if England is the solid, masculine, civilized partner, Ireland is its feminine, lawless, and uncivilized other (Howes; Whelan; Williams). Political and fictional narratives from 1801 on figure the political union of England and Ireland as the marriage between steady John Bull and a capricious Wild Irish Girl. Published in 1867, just three years after Uncle Silas, Matthew Arnold’s ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ exemplifies the assimilationist argument that figures the cultural and political integration of Britain and Ireland in terms of gender-specific and unequal partners. According to Arnold – and as Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl suggests – the ‘feminine’ Celt, flighty and ‘sentimental,’ brings to the ‘phlegma[tic],’ ‘disciplined’ Saxon qualities of quick perception and keen sensitivity (Arnold 78–9, 80–7), but also threatens to taint the more ‘vigorous race’ (90) with weakness, inefficacy, or corruption (Arnold 96, 130–1; Howes 170–2). For Arnold, the union brings together Saxon English and Celtic Irish; the Anglo-Irish have no visible role in this political and cultural marriage. Le Fanu’s fiction complicates this formula by placing the Protestant Ascendancy at the centre of his narrative and making Anglo-Irish anxieties about inheritance – literal and cultural – paramount. Uncle Silas suggests a more complex relationship that Anglo-Irish writers like Le Fanu had with Britain, as their hyphenated cultural identification implies (Moynahan, Anglo-Irish 13). This identity is split. The AngloIrish are neither fully British nor completely allied with the greater native Irish Catholic population. They are aligned with England’s religious and socio-economic order, yet immersed in a culture both foreign and familiar. Heimlich and unheimlich, the Anglo-Irish embody the uncanny. Uncle Silas plays with this double sense of literal and figurative displacement, where the homely is always also unfamiliar or

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foreign. In doing so, the novel represents an uneasiness about inheriting a home or homeland that is at once familiar and strange. The sympathetic representation of the gypsies, coupled with the rather vague ending of the novel, suggests an Anglo-Irishman’s ambivalence about his relation to England’s ‘internal colonialism’ in Ireland: what it means to inherit, possess, or govern lands with such a troubled history.11 On her journey to Bartram-Haugh, Maud encounters a band of gypsies and admires their ‘liberty’ and ‘independence’ (180). In the larger allegory of Irish disenfranchisement and expropriation, the gypsies – a poor, landless people who live in an uneasy relationship with the country’s other inhabitants – represent the native Irish Catholics, whose relationship to their own land and labour is spectral at best. Maud’s sympathy for and identification with these ‘uncanny neighbours’ anticipates the attempt later to alienate the heiress from her property and denies an easy binary of working-class versus upperclass allegiances (179). Instead, it reminds us that the category of Anglo-Irish itself is riven by multiple identifications. Le Fanu’s Huguenot inheritance complicates his relationship to the native Irish (Fitzgerald 17–18). As Protestant descendants of families who suffered at the hands of French Catholics, Irish Huguenots identified with Irish Protestantism; yet, as the heirs of those subject to persecution, confiscation of property, and exile in the wars of religion, they covertly sympathized with the Irish Catholics, with their similar legacy of dispossession and discrimination (Moynahan, ‘Politics’ 46). By setting central episodes of abduction, imprisonment, waste, haunting, and murder in the Midlands, Le Fanu subverts the construction of Irish national character as the uncivilized other to rational England. Albion in Uncle Silas becomes the foreign other, the place of unruly, even violent behaviour. Rather than having the English lord or absentee Anglo-Irishman meet and marry an Irish woman, thus assuring cultural assimilation and political integration, Le Fanu’s novel has the cultivated, utterly feminine Maud journey to a ‘picturesque and brutal’ Derbyshire. She is the civilizing influence in a landscape filled with fierce strangers, disorderly and uneducated kin, insidious plots, and uncanny returns (295). We have travelled a long way ideologically from the Derbyshire of Pride and Prejudice, in which Pemberley represents the seat of respectability, moral rectitude, and order. Moreover, at the end of the novel, with Maud’s escape to the continent in order to recover from her ordeals in the Derbyshire countryside, Le Fanu overturns not only gothic conventions but also a concept of the English

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homeland as safe, stable, and civilized. Uncle Silas contests assumptions about national character, about homeland and foreign land, and about travel to, sojourn in, and possession of both. If, as John Wilson Foster asserts, ‘the Irish are possessed by place’ (30), then a narrative that concludes without a clearly defined sense of place identifies the problems confronting the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish writer: the location and definition of home and homeland; the ambiguity of reclaiming such uncanny places; the difficulty of exorcising the ghosts of the dispossessed; and the fragility of a fairy tale of religious, political, and national conflict solved through marriage. The conclusion envisions a time when possession will stand not for oppression, but for a present and responsible landowning class. Set in the 1840s, a time of acute political and social turmoil in Ireland,12 Uncle Silas represents the longing that this generation might turn the land into a new Eden, into a ‘sweet green landscape and pastoral hills ... [filled with] flowers and birds, and the waving boughs of glorious trees, all images of liberty and safety’ (424).13 But if specific evil spectres in the novel are put to rest, replaced by more general benevolent spirits who walk with Maud and other gentle folk, the ghosts of present Ireland – the problem of who should inherit, possess, and govern the land – continue to haunt Le Fanu’s readers, both then and today. And the indistinct quality, the spectral presences of Maud’s final vision of her home and homeland, suggest that, at least for now, such peaceable kingdoms are possible only in fiction.

NOTES 1 Earlier in the novel, Maud witnesses another scene of violence against a female body: a tenant farmer strikes his daughter’s head with a cudgel so forcefully that she bleeds (224). Outraged, Maud appeals to her uncle to admonish the man; Silas dismisses the brutal act as befitting such ‘people in that rank of life’ (228). Maud’s sympathy for and care of the injured girl reap benefits in kind: later, Meg helps Maud to escape from BartramHaugh. Uncle Silas repeatedly confounds attempts to align individuals solely by class. 2 Locke specifies that personal property includes the body: ‘By Property I must be understood here, as in other places to mean that Property which Men have in their Persons as well as Goods’ (383). 3 In his Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, C.B. Macpherson distinguishes between Hobbesian and Lockean possessive individualism: ‘To

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Hobbes not only was labour a commodity but life itself was in effect reduced to a commodity; to Locke life was still sacred and inalienable, though labour ... was a commodity’ (219–20). Indeed, Locke’s Anglo-Irish friend William Molyneux cites the Two Treatises in his Case of Ireland (1698) to argue for Ireland’s self-governance (Laslett 15). Although the tract supported the maintenance of Irish Protestant political rights against the attempts of the English Parliament to extend its power, the use of Locke’s argument to promote Ireland’s right to self-governance recognizes the political implications for Ireland of entwining property ownership and labour. Le Fanu’s ghostly fiction intimates the difficulties of asserting political rights when one exists in a spectral, alienated relationship with one’s labour and land. An interim version of the narrative, titled ‘The Murdered Cousin,’ appeared in Le Fanu’s Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, published in 1851. As in the earlier version, the heroine escapes when her female cousin in murdered in her place. In the first two stories, the narrative ends with the protagonist a childless widow – a very different conclusion from the superficially happy ending that Le Fanu creates in the final, novelistic version. The narrator refers to events of ‘less than a century ago’ (Le Fanu, ‘Countess,’ 2). See Barnard, Abduction of a Limerick Heiress, for an analysis of Ingoldsby’s story. In Bleak House, as in Uncle Silas, living phantoms rather than dead ones are the most terrifying. Returning to the Ghost’s Walk at Chesney Wold, Esther fears that ‘it was I, who was to bring calamity upon the stately house; and that my warning feet were haunting it even then. Seized with an augmented terror of myself which turned me cold, I ran from myself and everything’ (586). For example, Maud describes how the possibility of Monica’s guardianship ‘was quite knocked on the head, to revive no more’ (169). The text here figures the abstract in concrete terms, whereas, in other places, it treats the tangible as immaterial. In either case, the violent physical threat to bodies remains. Maud calls herself ‘a nervous child ’ (18; Le Fanu’s emphasis) and repeatedly stresses both her sensitivity and childishness: ‘I was nervous, and growing rather more so’ (29; Le Fanu’s emphasis). For other instances of nervousness and hysteria, see 107, 243, 275, 279, 298, 318, 335, 388. As defined by Michael Hechter, internal colonialism is ‘the political incorporation of culturally distinct groups by the core,’ as an expanding nation subsumes ‘peripheral’ lands (32).

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12 The only two specific dates in Uncle Silas are 1 December 1844, and 30 January 1845 (273, 394). They set the narrative just before the most obvious of these larger socio-historical events: the potato famine, which began in the following year and ended only around 1850. Political problems were also mounting. The Tories, led by Sir Robert Peel (prime minister from 1841 to 1846), placed restrictions on promised social and economic reforms for Ireland. This period witnessed the rise of the Young Ireland movement, associated with the repeal of Union. Catholic Daniel O’Connell, who had been elected to Parliament for County Clare in 1828, campaigned outside Parliament for repeal and organized large popular demonstrations. In October 1843 events reached a climax, when troops were called out to suppress a mass meeting arranged outside Dublin. Although at the time of writing Uncle Silas Le Fanu was a staunch conservative, during the early to mid-1840s he flirted with the Young Ireland movement, which, under Thomas Davis and Gavan Duffy’s leadership, advocated the reconciliation of Catholic and Protestant in the name of Ireland’s common good (McCormack 93–102). As Katie Trumpener notes, political, cultural, and economic exchanges that take place in the peripheries of empire shape subjectivity and literary concerns. 13 With ‘gratitude to the God of all comfort, whose mighty hand and outstretched arm delivered me’ (424), Maud’s biblical tone suggests a prophetic wish, rather than an actuality, for Le Fanu’s Ireland.

WORKS CITED Arac, Jonathan. Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1979. Arnold, Matthew. On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays. Everyman’s Library. 1867. London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1916. Barnard, Toby. The Abduction of a Limerick Heiress: Social and Political Relations in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Maynooth Studies in Local History 20. Dublin: Irish Academic, 1998. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–69. 4 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Bowen, Elizabeth. ‘Preface to Uncle Silas.’ The Mulberry Tree: The Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. and Intro. Hermione Lee. London: Virago, 1986. 100–13. Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Castle, Terry. ‘The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho.’

The Gothic Properties of Uncle Silas 107 The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature. Ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. New York: Methuen, 1987. 231–53. Colley, Linda. ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument.’ Journal of British Studies 31.4 (1992): 309–29. Cox, Homersham. The Institutions of the English Government; Being an Account of the Constitution, Powers, and Procedure, of Its Legislative, Judicial, and Administrative Departments. London: Sweet, 1863. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Ed. and intro. Nicole Bradbury. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1996. – Our Mutual Friend. 1864–5. London: Penguin, 1997. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995. Ender, Evelyne. Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Fitzgerald, Mary E.F. ‘The Unveiling of Power: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction in Ireland, England, and America.’ Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World. Vol. 2, Comparison and Impact. Ed. Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok. Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1987. 15–25. Foster, John Wilson. Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture. Dublin: Lilliput, 1991. Hall, Wayne. ‘Le Fanu’s House by the Marketplace.’ Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 21.1 (1986): 55–72. Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975. Howes, Marjorie. ‘Misalliance and Anglo-Irish Tradition in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas.’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 47.2 (1992): 164–86. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1983. Jeffares, A. Norman. Anglo-Irish Literature. Dublin: Macmillan, 1982. Kelly, James. ‘The Abduction of Women of Fortune in Eighteenth-Century Ireland.’ Eighteenth-Century Ireland 9 (1994): 7–43. Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. ‘The Murdered Cousin.’ Ghost Stories and Mysteries. Ed. E.F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1975. 216–240. Rpt. of Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery. Dublin: McGlashan; London: Orr, 1851. – ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess.’ The Purcell Papers. Vol. 2. London: Bentley, 1880. Rpt in Ireland: From the Act of Union, 1800 to the Death of Parnell, 1891. Gen. ed. Robert Lee Wolff. New York: Garland, 1979. 1–102. – Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh. Ed. and intro. W.J. McCormack. 1864. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981. Laslett, Peter. Introduction. Two Treatises on Government. By John Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

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Locke, John. Two Treatises on Government. Ed. and intro. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962. McCormack, W.J. Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1993. – Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Dublin: Lilliput, 1991. Mangum, Teresa. ‘Sheridan Le Fanu’s Ungovernable Governesses.’ Studies in the Novel 29.2 (1997): 214–37. Marx, Karl. ‘Estranged Labor.’ The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978. 70–81. Moynahan, Julian. Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination of a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. – ‘The Politics of Anglo-Irish Gothic: Maturin, Le Fanu and “The Return of the Repressed.”’ Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature. Ed. Heinz Kosok. Bonn: Bouvier, 1982. 43–53. Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Owenson, Sydney [Lady Morgan]. The Wild Irish Girl. 1806. Ed. and intro. Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Pollock, Frederick. The Law of Torts: A Treatise on the Principles of Obligations Arising from Civil Wrongs in Common Law. London: Stevens, 1887. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988. Rowe, Katherine. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. – The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Whelan, Kevin. ‘Writing Ireland: Reading England.’ Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity. Ed. Leon Litvack and Glenn Hooper. Dublin: Four Courts, 2000. 185–98. Williams, Leslie. ‘Irish Identity and the Illustrated London News, 1846–51: Famine to Depopulation.’ Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality. Ed. Susan Shaw Sailer. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1997. 59–73.

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4 The Englishness of a Gentleman: Illegitimacy and Race in Daniel Deronda natalie rose

Inheritance is the concept through which the Jewish plot of Daniel Deronda (1876) stands as an ideal corrective to atomized and materialistic English society, as the story of Daniel’s discovery of his heritage recasts the concept as affiliation.1 The cluster of meanings that accrete to inheritance in this context – memory, nation, race, culture, commitment, community, ‘fixed local habitation’ (308) – signifies Eliot’s strongest insistence on cultural continuity and on the location of agency in tradition. Although Daniel Deronda is frequently seen to be ‘canceling its narrative and moral ties with the English past’ (Wohlfarth 208),2 within this matrix of cultural inheritance Eliot also reconfigures Englishness from the position of disinheritance, a position that is circumscribed by allusions to racial and cultural hybridity. As Daniel’s character emerges through his complex and conflicted relationship to English society and before inheritance is openly cast as nationality by Mordecai, disinheritance and illegitimacy call into question the genealogy and boundaries of Englishness. The English inheritance plot and the legal details of ‘resettlements of estates in tail,’ carefully researched by Eliot in correspondence with Frederic Harrison (Letters 6: 110), are opened up to multiple origins and affiliations. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s desire to ‘widen the English mind a little’ (Letters 6: 304) looks both outward to the Jews and inward to its own heterogeneous genealogy. The emphasis on the psychologies and attachments of communal belonging and organic tradition in the Jewish half of Daniel Deronda affirms Eliot’s Burkean conservatism. The Grandcourt-Mallinger inheritance plot also would appear to exemplify a Burkean model of Englishness, insofar as it literalizes the metaphors of inheritance through which Burke explicated English liberty in his Reflections on the

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Revolution in France. The Mallinger entail, under which Sir Hugo has only a life interest in his estates that will be inherited by his nearest male relative (Grandcourt, since Sir Hugo has no sons), illustrates Burke’s description of English liberty as ‘an entailed inheritance ... locked fast as in a family settlement’ (33). Topping Abbey, ‘one of the finest [places] in England, at once historical, romantic, and home-like: a picturesque architectural outgrowth from an abbey, which had still remnants of the old monastic trunk’ (Deronda 140), with its portrait gallery of direct and collateral Mallinger descendants, its family tree documented on an ‘illuminated parchment’ (145), and its coats of arms glowing in ‘rich colours’ in the drawing room (347), similarly exemplifies Burke’s description of English liberty. Like Topping Abbey, English liberty ‘carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles’ (Burke 34). Yet in returning the aristocratic metaphor to an inheritance plot, entail is pitted against the national sympathy that Burke extrapolates from ‘our dearest domestic ties’ (34) to reveal the narrowing and stultifying effects of ‘family settlement’ on English manhood.3 For all Grandcourt’s peremptory, imperial will, his ‘importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land. Political and social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental’ (Deronda 499). Grandcourt’s emotional and political detachment illustrates how inheritance can obviate rather than cement family bonds. It can disconnect an heir from the nation and national events, since, cocooned by income, he has no need to engage with communal concerns or to negotiate with others. The Grandcourtian heir is thus a profoundly anti-social man, as Grandcourt’s pleasure in frustrating others affirms; he is simply a consumer. Grandcourt’s security is challenged, however, as inheritance is characterized by the randomness that forms a moral critique of gambling. His putative inheritances are ‘contingen[t]’ (75). Insofar as he has a ‘chance’ of inheriting Sir Hugo’s baronetcy and ‘if certain intervening persons slightly painted in the middle distance died, he would become a baron and peer of this realm’ (76; emphasis added), he is trading in futures. Grandcourt, after all, does not live to inherit anything. Such a mode of inheritance is inherently degenerative. Grandcourt, ‘one of the first great decadent figures in English literature’ (Wohlfarth 192), is a less than satisfactory heir: ‘It would have been a matter of congratu-

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lation if one who had the luck to inherit two old family estates had had more hair, a fresher colour, and a look of greater animation; but that fine families dwindled off into females, and estates ran together into the single heirship of a mealy-complexioned male, was a tendency in things which seemed to be accounted for by a citation of other instances’ (Deronda 379). The subtly Darwinian terms of the indictment suggest that entailed inheritance is unnatural. Since it is confined to male transmission, Sir Hugo cannot bequeath his estates to his female offspring: ‘the dwindling energy of England,’ Gillian Beer suggests, ‘is related directly to the insistence on descent through the male line’ (200). By contrast, it is Daniel’s role ‘to keep up a cheerful view of posterity and inheritance generally, notwithstanding [Sir Hugo’s] particular disappointments’ (Deronda 271). Sir Hugo’s reconception of inheritance is typical of Eliot’s multivalent deployment of the concept – a multivalence that derives from and explores Burke’s quasiparadoxical appeal to the ‘choice of inheritance’ (Burke 34). As the peer’s complicity in Daniel’s Jewish disinheritance emerges, his habit of undervaluing birth (Deronda 138) appears more and more invidious. As ‘inheritance generally’ stands in contradistinction to entail, however, it might also be understood as another of Eliot’s manifestoes in the novel: a broader cultural understanding of the multiple traditions from which Englishness emerges. Such multiplicity makes good on the exclusions of entailed inheritance. In Burke’s argument, the ‘inheritance’ of English liberty and government ‘from our forefathers’ is described as a continuous, unadulterated, and purely native tradition: ‘Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant’ (31). In Daniel Deronda, Eliot suggests the heterogeneity of ‘the original plant’ of English inheritance while disturbing the organic narrative of entailed inheritance by inserting alien scions into the inheritance plot, linking illegitimacy to racial hybridity. And while the depiction of Grandcourt participates in the larger Victorian redefinition of the gentleman as a moral rather than an inherited identity, the characterization of the putatively illegitimate, Jewish hero also teases those ‘educated’ readers who make ‘small jokes about eating ham, and [show] themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting’ (Letters 6: 301–2) by invoking the enduring idea that the ‘primal, literal, and perpetual meaning’ of a gentleman is, as John Ruskin put

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it, ‘“a man of pure race;” well bred, in the sense that a horse or a dog is well bred’ (564). In two scenes Eliot disturbs familiar narratives of Englishness by introducing secrets about inheritance. The first is the ‘chief epoch’ of Daniel’s life, when, among the scattered rose petals of Topping Abbey’s gothic cloister, the young boy suddenly conceives that he might be the illegitimate son of Sir Hugo Mallinger, sub rosa (138). The historical manor and the Mallinger genealogy are described in the context of the family secret that Daniel thinks he has understood, and their status as symbols of an organic tradition is thereby undercut: the portraits in the gallery reflect no identity for Daniel. The child’s intuition arrives as ‘the presence of a new guest who seemed to come with an enigmatic veiled face, and to carry dimly-conjectured, dreaded revelations’ (141). As the etymological relations of guest and ghost suggest, the official narrative is haunted by another narrative of uncertain relations. In this light, the trappings of inheritance – the estate, the family tree, the heraldic emblems – map a less than organic history of immigration, conquest, and expropriation. The Mallingers are of Norman descent, tracing ‘their origin to a certain Hugues le Malingre, who came in with the Conqueror’ (140); King’s Topping appears to be the fruit of the Conquest, Monk’s Topping the fruit of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The Mallinger or Grandcourt crest of ‘three Saracens’ Heads proper and three bezants’ adds the spoils of the Crusades to this history (140). Gwendolen’s maternal grandfather, Armyn, the West Indian planter, is a more recent player in this colonizing narrative. ‘We are,’ avers Theophrastus Such in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ ‘a colonising people’ (Impressions 146). The gossip Mr Vandernoot is the descendant of another wave of immigration, ‘a man of the best Dutch blood imported at the revolution’ (Deronda 347). The Norman name retains its cachet of difference as race segues into class: Captain Gaskin takes a dipthong as well as orders to become the upwardly mobile Reverend Gascoigne, with a fictive aristocratic origin (23). Later in the novel, Daniel is disgusted when his mother comments airily, ‘The Jews have always been changing their names’ (546), but the authenticity of names is an English as well as a Jewish fiction. In an increasingly mercurial social scene, the Mallinger history does, however, signal a constancy of inheritance. As Catherine Arrowpoint says to her arriviste parents, ‘the land of England has often passed into the hands of foreigners – Dutch soldiers, sons of foreign women of bad character: – if our land were sold tomorrow it would very likely pass

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into the hands of some foreign merchant on ’Change’ (210–11). Norman origins connect the Mallingers to Sir Walter Scott’s depiction of the hybrid origins of Englishness in Ivanhoe, a novel that, as Michael Ragussis and Bernard Semmel have suggested, more obviously stands behind Eliot’s entwinement of the Jews with English culture. Grandcourt is a descendant of Ivanhoe’s oppressive Norman barons as much as he is a contemporary imperialist. After all, he is not even a figure for the correct English gentleman, who, ‘drawing himself up from his bow into rigidity, and seeming to be in a state of internal drill, suggests a suppressed vivacity’ (Deronda 91). Grandcourt, in contrast, is ‘inclined rather to the flaccid’ (91). The ‘yoke’ by which Gwendolen is mastered (364), which echoes the Jewish ‘yoke of oppression’ (454), also has echoes of the Norman yoke of radical English tradition. Burke skirted the issue of the Conquest, Thomas Paine pointed out, because it would mean tracing the origins of the monarchy and the ruling class to a group ‘neither of foreign extraction, nor naturally of English production, [whose] origin must be sought for elsewhere, and that origin is the Norman Conquest’ (91). Mr Burke, wrote Paine, ‘had not boldness enough to bring up William of Normandy, and say, There is the head of the list! There is the fountain of honour! the son of a prostitute, and the plunderer of the English nation’ (118). Attempting to hide the racial antagonism that generated the plot of Ivanhoe (the type of ‘conflict of races’ that Eliot, citing Augustin Thierry and Ivanhoe, praised Harriet Beecher Stowe for depicting in Uncle Tom’s Cabin [Essays 326]), Scott described the Saxon and Norman celebrations of Wilfred and Rowena’s marriage as ‘mark[ing] the marriage of two individuals as a pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races, which, since that period, have become so completely mingled, that the distinction has become wholly invisible’ (498). In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, as Robert Young has detailed, racial theorists and cultural commentators were insisting on the enduring survival of the composite races that made up the progenitors of the English people. The appearance of Grandcourt’s mistress in Cardell Chase and the revelation of his secret family create a second rupture in an idyllic scene of symbolic Englishness. Gwendolen is among the guests invited to Quetcham Castle for a day of roving archery, conceived as an entertaining performance of English heritage. She has thought the idea ‘delightful – equal to playing Robin Hood and Maid Marian’ (Deronda 100), and the characters are ‘agreed that they were playing an extemporized “As you like it”’ (127). Such self-consciousness ironically chan-

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nels the symbolically Saxon archery of Ivanhoe, which in Middlemarch lends metonymic weight to the organic values of Caleb Garth when his children enact Scott’s archery scenes. In Daniel Deronda, in contrast, Scott’s symbol of native resistance has become genteel amusement, with the Saxon freedom fighters being replaced by bored aristocrats and the Green Wood gentrified into a ‘grassy spot called Green Arbour’ (123), an etymological joke on the Norman victory and its legacy of aristocratic privilege beyond the ending of Scott’s romance. The cosy gentility of the two archery meetings domesticates legendary English prowess with the bow, which has become a way for women to show off their ‘grace and power’ (Deronda 84). The chivalric lists where men competed for honour have given way to competition among women for the attention of eligible men. In attesting to the contemporary gentility and femininity of archery, ‘freed from associations of bloodshed,’ the narrator archly observes that ‘the time-honoured British resource of “killing something” is no longer carried on with bow and quiver; bands defending their passes against an invading nation fight under another sort of shade than a cloud of arrows; and poisoned darts are harmless survivals either in rhetoric or in regions comfortably remote’ (84). Even as archery is established as a national symbol aestheticized and depoliticized into cultural bathos, its relation to imperial conquest is avowed. From Eliot’s viewpoint, the aesthetic cannot be purified of history, and, as Gwendolen shortly discovers, poisoned darts may be rhetorical forms but they are neither harmless nor comfortably remote. The landscape of Cardell Chase is punctuated by the Whispering Stones, the geological traces of prehistory modelled on the sarsen stones that Eliot and Lewes saw in Wiltshire (Irwin 315). They are ‘two tall conical blocks that leaned towards each other like gigantic greymantled figures. They were soon surveyed and passed by with the remark that they would be good ghosts on a starlit night’ (Deronda 127). In the afternoon sunshine, Gwendolen is not afraid, but the stones conjure up their own ghost when Lydia Glasher appears, her secret history a seamless emanation of the prehistoric landscape. When Lydia tells her about her illegitimate children with Grandcourt, Gwendolen ‘felt a sort of terror: it was as if some ghastly vision had come to her in a dream and said, “I am a woman’s life”’ (128). The land whispers a counter-narrative to entailed Englishness, a story of illegitimacy and maternal determination more mythic and autochthonous than the archery performance and courtship. Fittingly, the secret that marks the

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exclusions of inheritance is ordinarily hidden in the ‘complete seclusion’ of Gadsmere, where the ‘once entirely rural and lovely’ country is ‘black with coal-mines,’ ‘black roads and black mounds’ (286). Illegitimacy and industry are the dirty secrets of the English inheritance plot, and, since the careful working of mines together with the sale of leases provide Sir Hugo the means to try to buy his way out of part of the entail and secure Diplow for his wife and daughters, both are central to the foundering of the entail.4 Illegitimacy disturbs ideas of organic Englishness not only by shifting the focus onto disinheritance, but also by introducing the idea of hybridity. Before the novel doubles back in fictional time to the moment when Daniel begins to think that Sir Hugo is his father, Eliot establishes Daniel’s ethnicity as a central concern. The opening chapter is framed by questions, beginning with Daniel’s ruminations about Gwendolen (‘Was she beautiful or not beautiful?’) and ending with Gwendolen’s enquiry about Daniel, ‘Is he an Englishman?’ (Deronda 9). Daniel’s lack of resemblance to Sir Hugo or any of the Mallinger ancestors encourages observers to identify him with his putatively foreign mother. According to Mrs Davilow, ‘One would guess, without being told, that there was foreign blood in his veins’ (281). She relates to Gwendolen the gossip about Deronda’s origins: ‘his mother was some foreigner of high rank ... every one says he is the son of Sir Hugo Mallinger, who brought him up; though he passes for his ward’ (281). The mother-and-daughter chat draws into focus an earlier discussion of the insurrection in Jamaica, a topic Eliot uses to establish the wider field of Deronda’s salient sympathy. Grandcourt, referring to the rising in October 1865 at Morant Bay, Jamaica, ‘held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort of Baptist Caliban,’ while Deronda ‘said he had always felt a little with Caliban, who naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song’ (Deronda 279). Implicitly comparing Grandcourt to Governor Eyre, Eliot later comments that should Grandcourt have ‘been sent to govern a difficult colony, he might have won reputation among his contemporaries. He had certainly ability, would have understood that it was safer to exterminate than to cajole superseded proprietors, and would not have flinched from making things safe in that way’ (507). Deronda, in contrast, is a character through whom Eliot attempts to disarticulate the English gentleman from colonial despotism on the grounds of disinheritance. Deronda’s sympathy accords with the characterization of a musically talented child who feels his birth has cast him out of the privileged clan of the

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English ruling class, and it establishes both his consideration for the victims of English colonialism and racism and his identification with them. From an early age, Daniel is marked by a ‘moral eccentricity’ (151) as he refuses the chauvinism written into the Mallinger genealogy. The little boy whose imagination was caught only by the crusading ancestor who ‘had killed three Saracens in one encounter’ (145) grows up to identify with the victims of colonial history, to the bemusement of his schoolmates at Eton: ‘how could a fellow push his way properly when he objected to swop for his own advantage, knocked under by choice when he was within an inch of victory, and, unlike the great Clive, would rather be the calf than the butcher?’ (151). As Eliot reconfigures the English gentleman as a disinherited Daniel, rather than a Grandcourt or a stolidly insular Bult, the figure comes to identify with the oppressed, not the oppressors. The conversation suggests another specific and resonant colonial identification for Deronda: ‘Mrs Torrington was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it were not for the half-breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites had to thank themselves for the half-breeds’ (Deronda 279). Mr Torrington and Grandcourt refer to George William Gordon, the son of a planter and a slave, who became a landowner and a member of the Jamaica House of Assembly and was often fiercely critical of Eyre. In the brutal aftermath of the rising, he was summarily executed on Eyre’s orders. Daniel’s quiet insistence on white responsibility for ‘half-breeds’ draws attention to imperial sexuality and white male power, and situates his acute sense of the ‘wrongs’ of illegitimacy in the context of colonial hybridity. Deronda’s comment colours both his own apparent illegitimacy and that of Lydia’s children. ‘Alien cyons’ are not confined to Jamaica but also open up the English inheritance plot, as illegitimacy and disinheritance bring into question the boundaries of Englishness. For Gwendolen, the hints of Daniel’s foreign background have a particular pertinence, as she immediately identifies Daniel’s mother with Lydia Glasher, whose illegitimate son she might be disinheriting by marrying Grandcourt. As her mother discusses Daniel’s background, ‘[a]n image which had immediately arisen in Gwendolen’s mind was that of the unknown mother – no doubt a dark-eyed woman – probably sad ... A dark-eyed beautiful woman, no longer young, had become “stuff o’ the conscience” to Gwendolen’ (Deronda 281). Daniel’s moral strictures against gambling and profiting at the expense of others trans-

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late into an exposure of the ‘hard, unfair exclusion of others’ that entailed inheritance produces (283), and in making the connection between Daniel and Grandcourt’s son, Gwendolen even assumes responsibility for Daniel’s apparent disinheritance. She begins to consider how ‘Deronda would probably some day see her mistress of the Abbey at Topping, see her bearing the title which would have been his own wife’s ... What she had now heard about Deronda seemed to her imagination to throw him into one group with Mrs Glasher and her children’ (282–3). Daniel himself makes the link once he learns of Grandcourt’s ‘secret’ life, and ‘immediately the image of this Mrs Glasher became painfully associated with his own hidden birth’ (372). Like Daniel’s mother, Lydia Glasher has abandoned her eldest son, although, unlike the Al Charisi, she subsumes her guilt into an allconsuming mother love. ‘A lost vessel’ (Deronda 290), Lydia floats free of the harbour of society, and, like the Al Charisi who punctures the idealism of the Jewish plot, her appearances expose its exclusions. The pointed associations between Daniel and Grandcourt’s son, and between Daniel’s dark-eyed mother and dark-eyed Lydia Glasher, impute to Lydia some of Daniel’s mother’s foreignness and suggest that her second son comes to stand in for, and replace, the putatively illegitimate Daniel in the English inheritance plot. Although Daniel is neither Sir Hugo’s son nor of mixed race, the moral ‘wrong’ (142) of his imagined disinheritance is made good by the eventual inheritance of the Grandcourt estates by Lydia’s illegitimate son. The common assumption is that ‘if Sir Hugo Mallinger could have done as he liked with his estates, he would have left them to this Mr Deronda’ (Deronda 281). The reader, schooled in the suspected ‘wrongs’ done to Daniel by his father and aware of Daniel’s moral superiority to Grandcourt, likely wishes for this outcome, even as Eliot promotes the superior virtues of cultural inheritance. In one sense, the wrong is righted when Grandcourt’s will reveals that his estates will pass to his illegitimate son. Daniel certainly thinks so, countering Sir Hugo’s disgust at the shoddy treatment of Gwendolen by asserting that Grandcourt ‘did wrong when he married this wife – not in leaving his estates to the son’ (613). Sir Hugo, finally ‘master of his estates’ which can be bequeathed to his daughters (611), fully relishes his paternalistic largesse towards Gwendolen and Wessex society at large, entirely confident ‘in Reform as not likely to make any serious difference in English habits of feeling, one of which undoubtedly is the liking to behold society well fenced and adorned with hereditary rank’ (681). But in

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breaking the Mallinger entail, Grandcourt’s death precipitates a profound reconfiguration of English inheritance, which now includes those who had previously been disenfranchised. The Mallinger girls can inherit their father’s property, and illegitimacy and hybridity escape what Deronda labels ‘the extinguisher’ (613). Indeed, Catherine Arrowpoint’s marriage to the Jewish musician Herr Klesmer and her parents’ final decision not to disinherit her cements the trend towards hybrid inheritance, although ‘there’s no blood on either side,’ Lady Pentreath points out, smoothing over the issue of a mésalliance (349). The intimation of hybrid inheritance is sustained if the association of dark-eyed foreign mothers is read through the narrator’s acute ethnographic hermeneutic. Describing ‘The Philosophers’ gathered at the Hand and Banner, the narrator’s keen anthropological eye is able to discern latent Celtic blood in Croop, the ‘dark-eyed shoemaker’ who is ‘probably more Celtic than he knew’ (446). As in Adam Bede, where Adam’s ‘tall stalwartness’ tallies with his Saxon name ‘but the jet-black hair ... and the keen glance of the dark eyes that shone from under strongly marked, prominent, and mobile eyebrows, indicated a mixture of Celtic blood’ (8), dark features in Daniel Deronda may be a sign not necessarily of Jewishness, but of Celticness. Like Adam Bede, Lydia Glasher also has ‘clearly-marked eyebrows’ (290), and she is ‘an Irish officer’s beautiful wife’ (286). The cluster of associations between illegitimacy and foreignness that circumscribes English inheritance and Englishness as inheritance invites us to probe the glancing association of Lydia with Celticness and Ireland. Nineteenth-century ethnographic accounts of the Celts were frequently linked to discussions of Ireland, and, as Thomas Huxley made clear, efforts to distinguish between Celts and Saxons were aimed at interpreting Irish-English relations as racial antagonism. Eliot was an early supporter of Daniel O’Connell, but her fiction is reticent on the subject of Ireland, as Neil McCaw has noted in his provocative reading of Adam Bede as an allegory of English-Irish relations.5 In 1868 Eliot expressed her agreement with a pamphlet advocating the end of the Union written by the positivist Richard Congreve. In a letter to his wife, Eliot writes: ‘All protests tell, however slowly and imperceptibly, and a protest against the doctrine that England is to keep Ireland under all conditions was what I wished to be made’ (Letters 4: 430). Without recourse to notions of racial difference, Congreve dismisses vaunted political solutions to the crisis in Ireland, such as the disestablishment of the Irish Church or land reparation, because they did

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not address the fundamental issue of ‘the national longings of the Irish nation’ (185). ‘The difference of feelings, habits, associations, and history,’ he argues, ‘may make two nations as distant, though contiguous in space, as if they were locally thousands of miles apart’ (190). The claims of Irish nationalism are ‘reasonable and noble,’ and ought not to be bought off by the bribery of material prosperity (187). His argument might therefore stand as a positivist counterpart to Mordecai’s rational-romantic vision of Jewish nationalism in Daniel Deronda. Congreve traces the distinct growth of a rational and well-grounded consciousness that the peculiar life of Ireland must not be merged in that of England ... She has suffered much, and may have to suffer more; but the suffering must not have been in vain. The instinct of self-assertion which has supported her through her long trial must be justified by the event. By some means or other she will vindicate her past resistance as legitimate, and not allow it to be the mere capricious rejection of a higher destiny, as her English conquerors have ever regarded it, and by so regarding it have failed to overcome it. (189)

These arguments resonate with Mordecai’s passionate refutation of Pash’s alignment of progress with the waning of nationalist sentiment, as well as with Klesmer’s harangue on ‘the lack of idealism in English politics, which left all mutuality between distant races to be determined simply by the need of a market’ (205).6 ‘Woe to the men who see no place for resistance in this generation!’ says Mordecai of the supposed anti-national tendency in history (449). Contemporary Fenian activities were making such resistance literal in England itself, and Eliot noted in her transcriptions from the Annual Register the countermeasures the state was taking during the time in which Daniel Deronda is set: ‘arrest of Fenians, September 14th [1865]’; ‘Commission for trial of Fenianism, appointed in the latter part of 1865, still carrying on at the beginning of 1866’; ‘Suspension of the Habeas Corpus twice during the session, in Ireland & again later in the year [1866]’ (Notebooks 353). Although Eliot positions Jewish nationalism in Daniel Deronda as one instance of reviving nationalist feeling alongside Arab, German, and Italian nationalism and Mazzini’s dreams of unification, the references to Irish anti-colonial nationalism in her Notebooks do not surface in the novel. Rather, Eliot keeps her championing of nationalism separate from her critique of British impe-

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rialism. That Catherine Arrowpoint, who first notes the international aspect of English inheritance, refuses to marry a certain Lord Slogan, ‘an unexceptionable Irish peer, whose estate wanted nothing but drainage and population,’ however, intimates that Eliot’s sympathies do not lie with the landed Ascendancy (Deronda 76). Eliot’s letters and notebooks attest to the way that Victorian thinking about race and nation in the 1870s was informed by the Irish Question, and one of the more radical implications of the novel is that its national politics has implications for peoples other than the Jews. Lydia Glasher’s attack on the inequalities of inheritance might suggest the inequalities of the Union, for her inconvenient appearances with her two children, first at the Whispering Stones and later in Rotten Row, where she appears as a ‘vision’ and an ‘apparition’ (517), are tableaux that channel Carlyle’s famous ‘poor Irish widow’ who represents the victims of Mammonism in Past and Present (Carlyle 150–1).7 Eliot associates African slaves and the Irish with the Jews in Impressions of Theophrastus Such. In ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ Theophrastus sees the English treatment of the Jews ‘mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a servile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has been repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose place in the moral scale may be judged by our advertisements, where the clause, “No Irish need apply,” parallels the sentence which for many polite persons sums up the question of Judaism – “I never did like the Jews”’ (Impressions 155). The equivalence subtends the eventual outcome of the inheritance plot, which substitutes Lydia’s son for Daniel,8 and in widening the inheritance plot, Eliot brings inside English tradition identities against which the English gentleman has been constructed: gender, otherness, and legitimacy.9 The suggestion of Celticness is also an intimation of English history. Responding to a letter from Charlotte Carmichael in 1877, Eliot comments that ‘the analogy ... between the Celt and the Hebrew seems to me also not fanciful but real. Both have a literature which has been a fount of religious feeling and imagination to other races’ (Letters VI 438). Although Eliot deprecated her qualifications to write on Celtic topics, her Notebooks clearly suggest the place of the Celts, a race including the Cymric inhabitants of pre-Anglo-Saxon England, in her conception of the heterogeneous cultural genealogy of Englishness. In Daniel Deronda, the multicultural inheritance of Englishness is focused on the Hebrews, to whom, she wrote to Stowe, ‘we western people who have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt, and,

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whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment’ (Letters 6: 301–2). But her interest in racial feeling and racial transmission is not confined to the Jewish half of the novel. While she was extensively researching Jewish history and religion, Eliot was also reading contemporary debates about the origins of the English and English culture. A list of books ‘Read since September’ 1872 in the Notebooks includes Edward Augustus Freeman’s Old English History for Children; Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (which years earlier she had lambasted because Buckle ‘holds that there is no such thing as race or hereditary transmission of qualities!’ [Letters 2: 415]); Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur; as well as a French compendium of Les Romans de la Table Ronde (Notebooks 249–50). Her notes indicate that she was also reading Green’s A Short History of the English People; volumes from the Early English Text Society, such as Havelock the Dane, The Romance of Merlin, Early English Pronunciation, and Skeat’s Reprinted Glossaries; Tennyson’s Idylls of the King; and Burke’s General Armory. Together with the references in the novel to Milton and Scott, this reading list traces multiple origins for English culture, including Anglo-Saxon texts, Saxonist historiography, and Celtic mythology. While Scott’s myth of Englishness forged out of warring Saxon and Norman races proved enormously influential throughout the nineteenth century (Simmons 76), it was not unchallenged. Racial theorists like Robert Knox argued that the Normans never merged with the Saxon people, whom they had simply driven out of the south of England, and that ‘after all, Britain is not so thoroughly a Saxon colony as was thought’ (138).10 In contrast, in the late 1860s English historians challenged the thesis of racial competition and adopted Carlyle’s depiction of the Normans as a Teutonic race. Edward Freeman, for example, stressed that the Normans belonged to the same race as the Teutonic Saxons: ‘as the Danes [in northern France] learned to speak French, they softened their name from Northmen into Normans’ (142–3). In this way, Freeman asserts the racial unity of the English as a Saxon people. Eliot’s essay ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ in Impressions of Theophrastus Such endorses this claim, as Theophrastus ‘virtually’ (145) quotes a historian identified by Nancy Henry and Neil McCaw as J.R. Green, the author of A Short History of the English People (1874). ‘These seafaring, invading, self-asserting men were the English of old time, and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are profiting,’ Theophrastus declares (145).

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Daniel Deronda is less categorical about English fathers. The narrator is sceptical about the possibility of discovering ‘pure English blood’ (446) and notes that ‘We English are a miscellaneous people, and any chance fifty of us will present varieties of animal architecture or facial ornament’ (85–6). Describing the meeting at The Philosophers Club, the narrator discerns that Miller has at least German grandparents and possibly Jewish origins, Croop is of Celtic descent, Buchan is Scottish, and both Pash and Gideon are Jews with different features, leaving only three men who are obviously English. Curiously, by contrasting Englishness to discernible German or Celtic roots, the passage disavows the two races on which contemporary claims about English origins were based. Depending on the theory being advanced, all English people could be seen to have German grandparents, racially speaking (as Freeman and Green argue), or to be more Celtic than they knew (as Luke Owen Pike argues), or both (as Thomas Huxley argues). Looking back further than Scott in Ivanhoe, the Saxonist historiographers at the other end of the nineteenth century argued that the Teutonic invaders of England ‘exterminat[ed]’ the original Celtic inhabitants (Green 11). Unlike other Teutons in Southern Europe who mixed with indigenous peoples, the English, Freeman writes, ‘really became the people of the land in all that part of Britain which they conquered; for they had killed or driven out all the former people, save those whom they kept as mere slaves,’ and ‘there is every reason to believe that our forefathers often brought over women of their own people with them; so that we had English mothers as well as English fathers’ (23). In contrast, Luke Owen Pike argues, on the basis of physiological and etymological evidence, that the Saxon invasions had only a superficial impact on the aboriginal population, and the English therefore remained a Cymric, or Celtic, people. Thomas Huxley cites evidence similar to that of Freeman, who acknowledges that the Saxon invaders ceased their exterminating as they pushed west to Devonshire, but concludes, quite differently, that to describe the English nationality as Anglo-Saxon is ‘simply absurd’ (162). The English, and indeed the Irish, he argues, derived from mixed Saxon and Celtic origins, and, further, the Celts and Saxons belonged to the same race. In Daniel Deronda, Mordecai points out disapprovingly that Jews have mixed with Gentiles ‘as Celt with Saxon’ (450), implying that Englishness is a composite identity. While the visible traces of Celtic or German blood that somehow distinguish Croop and Miller from their English friends would seem to indicate, by contrast, a pure English identity, they

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equally imply that Englishness is the product of thorough mixing. Green’s view that Saxon invaders ‘exterminat[ed] the native Britons’ (11) and Huxley’s discussion of ‘English superseders of the old proprietors’ in Ireland (164) suggest that the ascription to Grandcourt of an understanding that ‘it was safer to exterminate than to cajole superseded proprietors’ (507), speaks to both contemporary colonial politics and the origins of the English people. Furthermore, the declension of superseded proprietors in Daniel Deronda from overt references to Jamaica and towards veiled references to Ireland and England relates to what Gillian Beer describes as ‘a buried history, half myth, half racial recollection, moving beneath the surface of the text’ (196). Traces of an English mythical-racial history and epic past shadow the contemporary action, emerging at moments like Lydia Glasher’s appearance at the sarsen stones, to intimate a cultural heritage wider than entailed inheritance as an antidote to unrooted and desiccated, materialistic and Whiggish English society. The orientation of the novel towards a national past is signalled by Eliot’s shift in location from the provincial Loamshire of her earlier English novels to Wessex, the seat of King Arthur in English legend and the first kingdom in English history. In choosing Wessex as her setting, Eliot follows Freeman, whose Old English History focuses on ‘that state which in the end swallowed up the rest and which grew into the Kingdom of England’ (ix). According to Freeman, Wessex was the site where English identity was forged, ‘a border district, a battle-field of the Briton and the Englishman’ (ix), and the setting therefore stands as a metonym for England. By the 1860s, when the action of the novel occurs, the borders and battles are socially stratified. While English society is ‘well-fenced … with hereditary rank’ (Deronda 681), Offendene is a suitable abode for those ‘in that border-territory of rank where annexation is a burning topic’ (17). Eliot’s references to Wessex are typical of her glancing allusions to a mythical and historical tradition of Englishness, by and large buried under a shroud of bourgeois anxiety. Class appears to supersede race but is conceptualized in the same way, as Sir Hugo’s consideration of Lush as ‘a half-caste among gentlemen’ confirms (476). Daniel’s story and his early inference ‘that there was something about his birth which threw him out from the class of gentlemen to which the baronet belonged’ (144) exemplify the collocation of class and racial exclusions that shape English inheritance. Even in Freeman’s Saxonist work, however, Wessex is a site of British-English hybridity. By the time the English had conquered Som-

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erset and Devonshire and incorporated them into Wessex, they had become Christians and were therefore kinder to the Britons they conquered, ‘so that many of the Welshmen still lived in the land as subjects of the West-Saxon kings. Thus we may be sure that many of the people in Devonshire and the greater part of Somersetshire are really descendants of the old Britons’ (Freeman 66). Freeman admits that ‘there may doubtless be some little British and Roman blood in us,’ but he assures his readers ‘that we have not much of their blood in us, because we have so few of their words in our language’ (23). What words did infiltrate into English were feminine adulterations, ‘the sort of words which the women, whether wives or slaves, would bring in, that is, names of things in household use’ (23). The British are therefore not entirely erased from the story of England. A few Celtic elements survive through the female line, and Freeman gives a historical provenance for the common association between Englishness and masculinity and Celticness and femininity, of which Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) is a famous example. The ‘foreign’ feminine influence, which Eliot, as I have suggested, uses to question the purity of English inheritance, is encoded at the origin of English history. The Arthurian echoes in the stories of Gwendolen and Daniel are signs of such a Celtic inheritance. Eliot turned to Charlotte Yonge’s chapter, ‘Names of Cymric Romance,’ from her History of Christian Names to christen her heroine, who is a latter-day descendant of a long line of mythological Gwens, Gwendolens, and Guinivers. In her Notebooks Eliot quotes at length from Yonge: Gwen is used in Welsh in the double sense of the colour white & of a woman, perhaps for the same reason that ‘the fair’ so often stands for a lady in poetry ... Gwen is considered as the British Venus. The planet is Seren-Wener as a morning star, Gweno as an evening star; nay, it is highly probable that Venus herself may be but a Cymric Gwen. Gwendolen, or the Lady of the bow, or perhaps from Gwendal, white browed, was, it seems, an ancient British goddess, probably the moon. Gwendolen is made by Brut, & by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the daughter of Corineus, Duke of Cornwall, & wife of Locrine, son of the original Brutus. He deserted her for Estrild, a fair German captive, & she made

Illegitimacy and Race in Daniel Deronda 125 war upon him, in the course of which he was killed, & Estrild & her daughter Sabre, or Avern, made prisoners; whereupon, the jealous & revengeful queen caused both to be drowned in the river, thenceforth called Sabrina or Severn, in Welsh, Havern. The Welsh saints give us St Gwendolen or Gwen as the mother of Caradog Vreichfras, the excellent Sir Cradocke of the Round Table. In the Triads and the Mabinogion, Gwendolen is a beauty of Arthur’s court, and in the bardic enumeration of the thirteen wonders of Britain appears the gold chess board of Gwendolen. (446)

Yonge complements Geoffrey’s story with her hope that Sabre/Avern ‘became the lovely nymph who “listened and saved” the lady from Comus and his crew’ (269). Eliot would also have known this Gwendolen from Milton’s Comus (which she quotes in the headnote to chapter 55). In Comus, Sabrina is described as ... the daughter of Locrine, That had the sceptre from his father Brute. She guiltless damsel flying the mad pursuit of her enragèd stepdame Guendolen, Commended her fair innocence to the flood.

(826–30)

Eliot’s use of Yonge’s History thus situates Gwendolen Harleth within a mythic British genealogy. ‘The whole family of Gwens,’ Yonge concludes, ‘were dear to the Cymric race’ (269), and the echo of the Welsh castle Harlech (famous as the home of Branwen in the Mabinogion) in Gwendolen’s surname, Harleth, is not, perhaps, coincidental. Gwendolen’s prowess at archery echoes that of her archetypal namesake, and Yonge’s summary of Monmouth’s history suggests the role that drowning will play for Eliot’s heroine, although she is subjected to Lydia Glasher’s ‘revenge.’ The prophecies and curses that determine national epics are rerouted in the coercive predictions of Mordecai and Lydia Glasher, and Lush’s conception of Grandcourt, in his ‘freak’ about Gwendolen, as ‘something like a man who was fey – led on by an ominous fatality’ (267) inserts Grandcourt in a fated mythic history. The word itself, a Scots archaism that Eliot may have taken from Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (Hardy 131), places Daniel Deronda’s ‘story of English life’ (as Lewes suggested Blackwood advertise the novel [Letters 6: 193]) as a descendant of Celtic romance and national psychodrama.11

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Yonge also points out that the name Gwendolen is related to Guinevere, King Arthur’s putatively adulterous wife. The Morte D’Arthur was reprinted in 1816 and 1858 after languishing in obscurity for several centuries, and was celebrated for being ‘as truly the epic of the English mind as the Iliad is the epic of the Greek mind’ (Gilray). Until the last years of the century, Malory was believed to have been Welsh (‘Malory’) and Arthur understood as ‘a Celtic Messiah’ (StuartGlennie). Yonge identifies Arthurian romance as the production of the Cymric people, and she notes the ‘very remarkable fact that the grand cycle of our national romance and poetry, has been made to centre round the hero of a people whom we have subdued, and were holding in our power with difficulty, at the very time that minstrels were singing the adventure of a leader who had for the longest time kept our forces in check’ (264). J.S. Stuart-Glennie in his article on Arthur in the Encyclopaedia Britannica gives a harsher interpretation of ‘this edifice of fable, under which the Celts strove to hide from themselves the real ruin of their race ... It is a hard saying, but true, that the key to all this is a certain sentiment which is the mark of conquered races. The Celtic genius after this defeat in arms would have revenge in songs.’ He concludes: ‘it is the destiny of some peoples, while buried for ever as a temporal power, because of their irreparable faults, to live on gloriously for the good of all, but only as an idea, an instruction, a legend.’ In drawing on Malory, Eliot participates in the Victorian poetic debates over Guinevere’s guilt. Tennyson, in his Idylls of the King, constructs her according to the more punitive ideologies of Victorian womanhood and judges her far more harshly than Malory, while William Morris offers a ‘Defence of Guenevere’ that provocatively endows the queen with a resistant subjectivity. Eliot uses elements of Tennyson’s reworking of Malory’s Guinevere: for example, Gwendolen shares Guinevere’s ‘vague spiritual fear’ (‘Guinevere,’ Idylls 70), and the ‘poisoned diamonds’ passed on from Lydia Glasher have their counterpart in the ‘ill-fated’ diamonds that Guinevere had thought won by Lancelot for Elaine, which have become ‘a bitterness to me!’ (‘The Last Tournament,’ Idylls 40, 41). Gwendolen also, however, shares the marital misery of Morris’s Guenevere, who was ‘bought / By Arthur’s great name and his little love’ (82–3). The question with which Daniel Deronda opens, ‘Was she beautiful or not beautiful?’ (3), rehearses the debate between Tennyson and Morris as it objectifies Gwendolen, but by the close of the novel the question of Gwendolen’s guilt, her culpability in the death of Grandcourt, is not only ambiguous but even irrelevant, submerged under the subjective issue of conscience.

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Eliot’s reference in her Notebooks to the fourteenth-century sermon on the ‘Ayenbite of Inwit, or remorse of Conscience’ in the Kentish dialect (439), also layers another, later, local, and Saxon epistemology over Celtic romance. English consciousness is both Saxon and Celtic, just as the Celtic myth emerges alongside echoes of and references to Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Homer, a cultural genealogy with which Eliot’s characters are more familiar. ‘It formed my taste,’ says Sir Hugo of his long ‘evaporated’ education in Greek (150). Mr Vandernoodt calls the relationship between Gwendolen and Lydia Glasher ‘a sort of Medea and Creüsa business’ (371). Medea and Creüsa function as a Hellenic analogue to the British story of Guendolen and Estrild. The intimation of a Celtic and Hellenic cultural tradition echoes not only Arnold’s separate praise for Celticism and Hellenism, but also a body of Victorian scholarship that connected the Celts and the Greeks.12 Stuart-Glennie describes the mythical Arthur as ‘monarch, half-philosopher, ruling chiefly by his wisdom and subtlety, and still more a judge than a general over his people. The type is one that belongs essentially to the Celtic mind, more akin to the Greek than any other, and naturally as far removed from the Roman as from the Saxon turn of thought’ (‘Arthur’). Perhaps the most extreme statement of the similarity between the Greek and Cymric peoples is made by Pike, who argues not only that the English remained an essentially Celtic race, but also, by way of comparative philology, that the Cymry were a Greek colony.13 Of ‘Greek wickedness,’ Rex says, ‘one thinks of it as all gone by and done with’ (48). Against the relentless presentism of her English characters, Eliot’s use of Celtic and Greek myth gestures towards a heterogeneous English memory as a vaguer counterpart to the strong outlines of Jewish memory. Daniel Deronda resounds with echoes of the Morte D’Arthur, which tells the story of both the forging of a kingdom and its downfall. Daniel’s story recalls that of Arthur, the Wessex boy raised in secrecy away from his parents who goes on to inherit, unify, and consolidate his kingdom. It also echoes the Saxon tale of Havelock, who inherits his kingdom despite the machinations of his first guardian. It therefore has its roots in English mythology as well as biblical typology in the parallels between Daniel and Moses, Jesus, and the prophet Daniel. Elinor Shaffer further suggests that the ‘sensuous grace of Renan’s Jesus stands behind Deronda, and, behind the Jesus, Renan’s celebrated conception of Celtic poetry, whose character he identified with that of early Christianity’ (273). ‘In this set of identifications, so curious in itself yet so typical of the accomplished syncretism of the nineteenth

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century,’ she argues, ‘we must understand Deronda’ (273–4). And insofar as the emphasis on prophecy and epic determination is, like Renan’s and Arnold’s Celt, ‘react[ing] against the despotism of fact’ (Arnold 344), Daniel Deronda displays its own Celtic consciousness. Daniel’s ‘chivalrous sentiment’ (Deronda 177) harks back as much to Arthurian legend as to the Norman chivalry of Ivanhoe, and that ‘something of the knight-errant in his disposition’ noticed by Hans Meyrick (274) derives from ‘his early pain in dwelling on the conjectured story of his own existence. Persons attracted him ... in proportion to the possibility of his defending them, rescuing them, telling upon their lives with some sort of redeeming influence’ (273). Daniel is a lone knight who rescues damsels in distress, physically in the case of Mirah, about to drown herself, and spiritually in the case of Gwendolen. Until he meets Mordecai and discovers ‘the secret of his own birth’ (161), however, he lacks the ethical fellowship of the Round Table. Concomitantly, Jewish heroism is predicated on the chivalry of English romance because Daniel’s questing nature makes him receptive to Mordecai’s claims: ‘if you like, he was romantic. That young energy and spirit of adventure which has helped to create the world-wide legends of youthful heroes going to seek the hidden tokens of their birth and its inheritance of tasks, gave him a certain quivering interest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a like track’ (439). Though his ability to aid Gwendolen after her husband’s drowning is due to coincidence rather than ‘knight-errantry’ (614), he returns to England after meeting his mother in a ‘classical, romantic, world-historic position ... bringing as it were from its hiding-place his hereditary armour’ (639). As the emphasis on his chivalry implies, the genealogy of Deronda’s Jewishness maps an idealized, culturally rooted English masculinity, reworked from the position of disinheritance. Illegitimacy generates Daniel’s salient sympathy, the pivot that turns refined Englishness towards Hebrew culture. Although Daniel suffers from the ignorance about Jews typical of his culture, ‘scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all his sympathy in griefs of inheritance’ (Deronda 176). This early identification seems to be with the exclusions produced by accidents of birth and is thus of a piece with Eliot’s racial framing of English inheritance. It also looks forward to the reworking of disinheritance as the inheritance of culture and community. Because Daniel is attuned to the more ideal elements of English heritage, rather than to the material rewards of inheritance, he is uniquely poised to be sympathetic to Jewish culture. At Topping Abbey, Juliet Fenn, ‘not thinking

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of inheritance,’ exclaims: ‘You must love this place very much ... So many homes are like twenty others. But this is unique, and you seem to know every cranny of it. I dare say you could never love another home so well’ (362). ‘Oh I carry it with me,’ Daniel replies. ‘There’s no disappointment in memory’ (362). Daniel’s emotional attachment to the Abbey, both as his childhood home and as an embodiment of English history, is echoed by Mordecai’s larger claim about the Jewish national spirit: ‘The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting habitation – lasting because movable’ (453). When Daniel doffs his hat in the stables, converted from the original chapel, the automatic, reflex action is at once a historical, religious, and emotional appreciation. It emphasizes that the conversion has not completely erased the chapel’s ‘aspect of antique solemnity’ (359), which is recognized only by the narrator and the one character unconcerned with the material value of the building and the stud it houses. For Daniel, tradition is inherently valuable: ‘To delight in doing things because our fathers did them is good if it shuts out nothing better; it enlarges the range of affection – and affection is the broadest basis of good in life’ (357). Illegitimacy and disinheritance contest the narrowness and exclusivity of English culture and also involve a rethinking of the English gentleman.14 The sympathies bred by ‘the sense of entailed disadvantage’ give ‘a bias to [Daniel’s] conscience, a sympathy with certain ills’ (Deronda 149) that is manifested in a dissident relation to the institutions that produce the English gentleman. Initially, the abstract identity of the English gentleman appears to replace legitimacy and being ‘a gentleman by inheritance’ (143). Daniel is relieved when Sir Hugo pronounces, ‘I wish you to have the education of an English gentleman’; ‘I should like to be a gentleman ... and go to school, if that is what a gentleman’s son must do,’ he replies (146). The withheld story of Daniel’s origin enables Eliot to investigate the contingency of the English gentleman with tongue-in-cheek openness. Only later does it become clear that Sir Hugo and Daniel are not talking about quite the same thing, and that Sir Hugo’s emphasis on the Englishness of the gentleman is more significant than his ward can understand. The injoke recurs when Daniel approaches Sir Hugo about ‘pursu[ing] a more independent line of study abroad’ (152). Daniel’s love of ‘universal history’ and ‘inward bent towards comprehension and thoroughness’ has bred dissatisfaction with the Cambridge examination system and ‘the conventional advantage of belonging to an English university’ (153, 152). The baronet asks, ‘So you don’t want to be an

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Englishman to the backbone after all?’ (155). Deronda’s response encapsulates Eliot’s refinement of English masculinity: ‘I want to be an Englishman, but I want to understand other points of view. And I want to get rid of a merely English attitude in studies’ (155). Yet pursuing this Arnoldian path cannot compensate for the paralysis produced by Daniel’s keenly felt social exclusion, because it cannot enable the commitment or ‘partisanship’ (Deronda 307) that Eliot sees as central to ‘moral force’ (308). While illegitimacy produces chivalrous sympathy that is open to the claims of Jewishness, that sympathy needs the partiality of Jewishness to be socially effective. Without sympathy, Deronda could not investigate the Jews; without Jewish commitment, Deronda would remain passive. What Daniel comes to call ‘an inherited yearning’ (642) is also, more prosaically, a disinherited yearning. His ‘sensibility to the half-known facts of his parentage made him an excuse for lingering longer than others in a state of social neutrality. Other men, he inwardly said, had a more definite place and duties’ (153). Without a ‘definite place and duties,’ the subject is unmoored, and sympathy becomes self-cancelling: ‘His earlywakened sensibility and reflectiveness had developed into a manysided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course of action ... His plenteous flexible sympathy had ended by falling into one current with that reflective analysis which tends to neutralize sympathy’ (307). Daniel is entirely free to determine the course of his life. He has the funds to do so. He simply needs to ‘exert his will in the choice of a destination’ (402). But the privileges of being an English gentleman do not enable him to find ‘a definite line of action’ (308) because self-realization is not, in this novel, an autonomous act. Rather, race and national belonging enable Daniel ‘to be an agent, to create, and not merely to look on’ (407), as he returns from meeting his mother ‘with what was better than freedom – with a duteous bond’ (637). Through Daniel, Eliot explicitly denies that cultural heritage is ‘external’ to the subject (687), as she glosses Gwendolen’s reaction to Deronda’s news of his newly discovered identity: ‘You are just the same as if you were not a Jew’ (687).15 Yet Daniel also remains the ideal English gentleman, a figure the novel resuscitates from a minority position and, in so doing, both retains the moral charge of disinheritance and sustains the intimations of English hybridity. His qualification of English identity – ’I want to be an Englishman, but ...’ (155; emphasis added) – is matched

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by Mordecai’s qualification of Jewish identity as he imagines his kindred soulmate and ideal inheritor: ‘he must be a Jew ... but ’ (405; emphasis added). Even as the Englishman requires the virtues of Jewish idealism and commitment, so Mordecai’s search for the ideal Jew is represented as a search for an English gentleman: ‘a man who would have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in an embodiment unlike his own: he must be a Jew, intellectually cultured, morally fervid ... but his face and frame must be beautiful and strong, he must have been used to all the refinements of social life, his voice must flow with a full and easy current, his circumstances be free from sordid need: he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew, not sit and wander as Mordecai did, bearing the stamp of his people amid the signs of poverty and waning breath’ (405). As a cultural translator, the English gentleman becomes the ideal nationalist leader of disenfranchised peoples. Mordecai invokes Moses: ‘it is a precious thought to me that he has a preparation which I lacked, and is an accomplished Egyptian’ (563). In a third invocation of Eliot’s ‘but’ principle of identity, Daniel also translates his disinherited dissent, the ‘ideal’ version of Englishness, into his new vocation, and his identity as a Jew is conditioned by his identity as an Englishman. He tells Kalonymos: ‘I shall call myself a Jew ... But I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief and learned of other races’ (620).16 ‘Ah, you argue and you look forward,’ replies Kalonymos, and blesses him. He will not be a second Daniel Charisi, he tells his mother, because ‘the effect of my education can never be done away with. The Christian sympathies in which my mind was reared can never die out of me’ (566). Daniel now insists on his English heritage as he argues with Mordecai: ‘Don’t ask me to deny my spiritual parentage, when I am finding the clue of my life in the recognition of my natural parentage’ (643). Daniel’s Jewishness, therefore, begins to resemble the heterogeneous ideal of English culture. A coherent national identity, Eliot suggests, can be enriched and affirmed by encounters with other cultures and Daniel reassures his mother that ‘it must always have been a good to me to have as wide an instruction and sympathy as possible’ (567). Only in the context of Jewish inheritance can the disinherited version of Englishness take full force, as disinheritance becomes the ground for rethinking national culture and national heroism.

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NOTES 1 See Dianne Sadoff on the novel’s replacement of filiation with affiliation (101–3) and Alexander Welsh on its replacement of fathers with ideology (322–34). Bernard Semmel discusses Eliot’s ‘politics of national inheritance’ in broad terms. Gillian Beer explores the Darwinian issues of causality, predication, sexual selection, and transmission that follow from the multiple discursive domains of nineteenth-century inheritance after Darwin. 2 Eliot’s turn to the visionary Jewish plot is usually taken to be a turning away from Englishness, with Eliot ‘displac[ing] her critical imagination right out of English society’ (David 204). 3 If, as Michael Ragussis argues, Burke’s Reflections sneeringly associates Richard Price with the Jews and ‘reformulates the distinction between the French and the English ... as the distinction between Jews (French) and Christians (English)’ to warn ‘against Jewish proselytism’ (121–2, 125), Eliot can be seen to be pointedly reconfiguring Burkean inheritance as a Jewish ideal. 4 Deirdre David also notes the connection between illegitimacy and industry: ‘Lydia Glasher’s sexual past is shaded among those firs and cedars just as one of the sources of wealth for men of Grandcourt’s class, coal, is hidden in the dark and dirty mines’ (186). She points out that mining was associated with sensuality in the nineteenth century; Eliot makes this link in a letter to John Sibree in 1848 (David 172–3n2, 153–4). Elsewhere in the novel, working-class life in the East End is subordinated to Daniel’s anthropological investigations of Jewish life. See David on the politics of class in the novel. 5 Eliot heard ‘the great man,’ O’Connell, speak in Manchester after he was sentenced at Dublin (Letters 1: 173). 6 Welsh discusses Mordecai as a rationalist (308–9); Anderson emphasizes his romantic nationalism. Mordecai’s universalist validation of Israel as ‘the heart of mankind’ (Deronda 453) gives a specific articulation to the positivist doctrine of ‘the Universal Church’ that obviates ‘narrow and exclusive patriotism’ through ‘the spiritual organization of Humanity, which has to bring all the separate states into connection and to a sense of communion, to raise them above their local interests, and imbue them with a constant consciousness of their relation to the whole race’ (Congreve 206–7). A Jewish nation, however, will fulfil both the local and the universal. 7 William Baker has speculated that in the next novel Eliot planned to write ‘she may have intended to deal either with the Irish problem or

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8

9

10

11

12

13

Catholic-Protestant intermarriage, or both’ (460), based on the notes she took from W.E.H. Lecky’s A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1878) and her reading of Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of the Right Hon. W.H. Flood (1838). Eliot certainly knew one instance of illegitimate Anglo-Irish inheritance. Haight describes the friendship between Eliot, Lewes, and Lady Castletown and her husband, John Wilson Fitzpatrick, ‘illegitimate son of the Earl of Upper Ossory, [who] had succeed[ed] to his father’s Irish estates and had been created a peer of the United Kingdom as the Baron Castletown’ in 1869 (456). It should be noted that young Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt is an ambivalent heir. While his sisters are ‘miniature portraits’ of their mother (Deronda 290), he is cast in Grandcourt’s image: ‘no son at that early age could promise to have more of his father’s physique’ (288). He also appears to have inherited his father’s imperiousness, though not yet refined into the languid laconicism that is Grandcourt’s speciality; the child is pictured ‘bending his blond head over the animals from a Noah’s ark, admonishing them separately in a voice of threatening command’ (290). But his will is not in accord with his father’s; when Grandcourt turns to put his hand on his son’s head, ‘that energetic scion began to beat the friend’s arm away with his fists’ (291). Knox considered the Norman Conquest to be ‘the greatest calamity that ever befell England, – perhaps, the human race,’ producing ‘the government of a dynasty antagonistic of the [Saxon] race’ (329). He argued that the Saxons had ‘merely mingled’ with the Flemish race occupying southern England and, by ‘the law that extinguishes mixed races,’ Saxon blood would have died out from the south were it not for the centralization of London (47–8). When the Normans landed, they ‘found a congenial race, driving with them into northern England the Saxon race’ (135). As Pamela Thurschwell notes, the faculty of ‘second sight’ that characterizes both Mordecai and Gwendolen also began, as an anthropological concept, to characterize the supernatural phenomena of the Scottish Isles in the eighteenth century (90). Eliot shares many of Arnold’s concerns about contemporary English culture. Nevertheless, as Crosby and Wohlfarth show, Eliot does not endorse the criticism of Hebraism that Matthew Arnold expresses in Culture and Anarchy. Baker lists a copy of The English and Their Origin in the George Eliot – George Henry Lewes Library (158). John Fiske sounded a caution about such a mode of proceeding in the field of comparative mythology: ‘We must not always infer that myths have a common descent, merely

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because they resemble each other. We must remember that the proceedings of the uncultivated are more or less alike in all latitudes, and that the same phenomenon might in various places independently give rise to similar stories’ (23). 14 As Neil McCaw argues, ‘In Daniel Deronda the anxiety at the heart of the textual representation of England is represented through a symbolic faceoff between contrasting masculinities. Eliot transposes her profound concern about the state of the nation onto a clash of differing conceptions of masculine identity, one of which is her own Great Man’ (97). The other conception, as both McCaw and Wohlfarth analyse in depth, is the decadent domestic imperialist Grandcourt. 15 The moral force of the Eliot’s argument for the cultural situation or inheritance of the subject is complicated, however, by the construction of ‘ideal’ Jews as secular, disembodied, and different from the vulgar Jews of the East End and Frankfurt that has been analysed by Susan Meyer and Christina Crosby. 16 Amanda Anderson discusses the different nationalisms of Mordecai and Deronda. Anderson analyses Deronda’s ‘reflective dialogism’ (45), which positions him as ‘the self-conscious subject of modern cultural and ethical life’ (51). In a novel that everywhere shows the inadequacy of self-consciousness for defining the subject, however, Daniel’s ‘dialogism’ locates agency between English disinheritance and Jewish inheritance.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Amanda. ‘George Eliot and the Jewish Question.’ Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1996): 39–61. Arnold, Matthew. ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature.’ 1867. Lectures and Essays in Criticism. Ed. R.H. Super. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1962. 291–386. Baker, William. ‘George Eliot’s Projected Napoleonic War Novel: An Unnoted Reading List.’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (1975): 453–60. – The George Eliot – George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. Williams Library, London. New York: Garland, 1977. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge, 1983. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. L.G. Mitchell. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. 1843. Ed. Richard D. Altick. Boston: Riverside, 1965.

Illegitimacy and Race in Daniel Deronda 135 Congreve, Richard. ‘Ireland.’ 1868. Essays: Political, Social, and Religious. London, 1874. 179–215. Crosby, Christina. The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘The Woman Question.’ New York: Routledge, 1991. David, Deirdre. Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels: North and South, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda. London: Macmillan, 1981. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. – Daniel Deronda. 1876. Ed. Graham Handley. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. – Essays of George Eliot. Ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge, 1963. – The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon Haight. 7 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. – George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks. Ed. Jane Irwin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. – Impressions of Theophrastus Such. 1879. Ed. Nancy Henry. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. Fiske, John. Myths and Mythmakers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology. 1873. Boston: Houghton, 1914. Freeman, Edward A. Old-English History. 1869. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1885. Gilray, Thomas. ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica. 9th ed. 1878. Green, John Richard. A Short History of the English People. 1875. London: Macmillan, 1881. Haight, Gordon. George Eliot: A Biography. 1968. London: Penguin, 1988. Hardy, Barbara. The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Huxley, Thomas. ‘The Forefathers and Forerunners of the English People.’ Images of Race. Ed. Michael D. Biddiss. Surrey: Leicester UP, 1979. 159–69. Irwin, Jane, ed. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Knox, Robert. The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations. 2nd ed. London: Renshaw, 1862. The Lay of Havelok the Dane. Ed. Walter W. Skeat. London: Trübner, 1868. McCaw, Neil. George Eliot and Victorian Historiography: Imagining a National Past. Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, 2000. ‘Malory.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica. 9th ed. 1878. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.

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Milton, John. ‘A Masque of the Same Author Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 Before the Earl of Bridgwater Then President of Wales [“Comus”].’ John Milton. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. 44–71. Morris, William. ‘The Defence of Guenevere.’ The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems. 1858. Ed. Margaret A. Lourie. New York: Garland, 1981. 45–53. Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man. 1791. Intro. Eric Foner. New York: Penguin, 1985. Pike, Luke Owen. The English and Their Origin: A Prologue to Authentic English History. London: Longmans, 1866. Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Ruskin, John. ‘Of Vulgarity.’ Rpt. in Great Expectations. By Charles Dickens. Ed. Graham Law and Adrian J. Pinnington. Peterborough: Broadview, 1998. 563–71. Sadoff, Diane. Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. 1819. Ed. Ian Duncan. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Semmel, Bernard. George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Shaffer, E.S. ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. Simmons, Clare A. Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in NineteenthCentury British Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990. Stuart-Glennie, J.S. ‘Arthur.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica. 9th ed. 1878. Tennyson, Alfred. Idylls of the King. Tennyson’s Poetry. Ed. Robert W. Hill Jr. New York: Norton, 1999. Thurschwell, Pamela. ‘George Eliot’s Prophecies: Coercive Second Sight and Everyday Thought Reading.’ The Victorian Supernatural. Ed. Nicola Bown et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 87–105. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Wohlfarth, Marc. ‘Daniel Deronda and the Politics of Nationalism.’ NineteenthCentury Literature 53 (1998): 185–210. Yonge, Charlotte. History of Christian Names. 1863. Rev. ed. London: Macmillan, 1884. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

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5 A Battle of Wills: Solving The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde carol margaret davison

Please completely forget, disremember, obliterate, unlearn, consign to oblivion any notion you may have had that ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ is some kind of mystery story, a detective story, or movie. It is of course quite true that Stevenson’s short novel, written in 1885, is one of the ancestors of the modern mystery story. But today’s mystery story is the very negation of style, being, at the best, conventional literature. Frankly, I am not one of those college professors who coyly boasts of enjoying detective stories – they are too badly written for my taste and bore me to death. Whereas Stevenson’s story is – God bless his pure soul – lame as a detective story. Neither is it a parable nor an allegory, for it would be tasteless as either. It has, however, its own special enchantment if we regard it as a phenomenon of style. It is not only a good ‘bogey story,’ as Stevenson exclaimed when awakening from a dream in which he had visualized it much in the same way I suppose as magic cerebration had granted Coleridge the vision of the most famous of unfinished poems. It is also, and more importantly, [as Stephen Gwynn says,] ‘a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction’ and therefore belongs to the same order of art as, for instance, Madame Bovary or Dead Souls. Nabokov 179–80

From the inception of the gothic in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, its driving theme has been inheritance in both its material and its moral dimensions. The succinctly and specifically identified principal message of that novella, articulated by Walpole himself, that ‘the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the sons to the third and fourth generations’ (5), directly connects the notion of sin with the usurpation of ‘legitimate’ power and property. Thus does the

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gothic, in its engagement with the theme of ‘contested inheritance,’ take up the vexed question of the relationship between ethics and economics. The joint issues of inheritance and disinheritance are likewise central to the ‘female gothic’ wherein eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury women, legally regarded as the property of their husbands in what is repeatedly intimated to be the peculiar institution of marriage, explore the notion of a familial moral legacy and battle against threats of financial disinheritance.1 ‘Urban gothic’ works of the late nineteenth century – such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – combine Darwinian and racial degeneration theory to extend anxieties about ‘legitimate’ inheritance to both an urban and a national level.2 Robert Mighall’s insight that the historical ‘sins of the fathers’ motif is adapted in the urban gothic to insinuate an atavism at the heart of the modern city (51), may be extended to include a barbarism at the heart of the modern nation. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) furnishes a prime and compelling example of the fin-de-siècle urban gothic. Stevenson’s modern ‘bogey story’ cunningly combines such national concerns with the financial inheritance theme by way of the contentious subject of Dr Jekyll’s ‘will,’ a term that refers, simultaneously, to Jekyll’s inheritance and his self-control and volition in the face of primal desires and addictive behaviour as emblematized by the ‘troglodytic’ Hyde (19). Much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stevenson’s novella may be said to stage a battle between a privileged, professional ‘brotherhood’ (especially championed by Utterson) and an upstart, degenerate class threatening to disinherit them (represented by Hyde). In this case and as the representative of a patriarchal brotherhood comprising professional men, Jekyll’s ‘will,’ in the sense of self-control assumes significant symbolic meaning.3 To date, Mr Utterson has been recognized for his obsession with Jekyll’s ‘will’ in the financial sense of that word (Jancovich 46). The ‘whole story’ of the actual and pivotal role played by Stevenson’s mordant, repressed lawyer in the battle over Jekyll’s ‘will’ in both primary senses I have identified has remained largely overlooked or repressed in the critical literature. Various pieces of the puzzle have been astutely identified, but the puzzle – or ‘case,’ as Stevenson narratively conceives it – has remained both unsolved and unresolved. This is, in part, a function of a novella that foregrounds the process of interpretation (Hirsch 236) and is rife with botched

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misinterpretations – many of which are Utterson’s own. It is also the result of a flagrant and sometimes wilful critical repression relating to yet another ‘inheritance,’ namely, the generic inheritance of Stevenson’s crafty gothic detective story that Henry James applauded as ‘a short, rapid, concentrated story, which is really a masterpiece of concision’ (qtd in Linehan 102). While the gothic was often vital in reanimating what Oliver Buckton wittily describes as ‘the corpse of Victorian realism’ at the fin de siècle (38), it was also a strategic generic choice, owing to its unique and canny mode of exploring and exposing dark dreads and desires associated with socially sanctioned taboos. The recuperation of Jekyll and Hyde’s gothic legacy helps to flesh out how that novella gives dramatic utterance to such contemporary national anxieties as the extension of class privileges and racial degeneration and such phenomena as the rise of mass consumer culture and mass immigration. Such a recuperation is also necessary to the unearthing of Jekyll and Hyde’s most strategically devised and long-repressed secret: Gabriel John Utterson not only vies for and successfully obtains Jekyll’s inheritance but is, ultimately, indictable for his murder. The Monster in the Cheval Glass Next, in the course of their review of the chamber, the searchers came to the cheval glass, into whose depths they looked with an involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to show them nothing but the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions along the glazed front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in. Stevenson 50

Virtually from its conception, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been classified as a type of generic anomaly, a ‘monsterpiece’ that transgresses high and low novelistic forms. No early review better epitomizes this interpretation than James Ashcroft Noble’s complaint in the January 1886 issue of Academy about the disjunction between the artistic calibre of Stevenson’s story and its physical appearance as ‘simply a paper-covered shilling story, belonging, so far as external appearance goes, to a class of literature familiarity with which has bred in the minds of most readers a certain measure of contempt’ (qtd in Maixner 203). Much like its protagonist, therefore, Jekyll and Hyde is a transgressive combination of upper- and lower-class elements.

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Indeed, its artistic ‘offence’ as a work of genius in the guise of a market-driven penny dreadful or shilling shocker has, as the famous citation from Vladimir Nabokov that furnishes my opening epigraph illustrates, continued to disturb and confound critics well into the twentieth century. While Nabokov rejects any suggestion that Jekyll and Hyde smacks of moralism or allegory4 or partakes of the ‘lowly’ detective genre, he concedes that this brilliant work of poetic prose is, as Stevenson claimed, a good ‘bogey story.’ Reading it through the lens of the modern mystery story, which he derides as ‘conventional literature’ and ‘the very negation of style,’ Nabokov attempts, albeit unsuccessfully, to distance Stevenson’s novella from that category. Despite his insistence, he fails to account for its detective-style title or structural arrangement. Notably, Jekyll and Hyde’s generic classification has remained critically contentious. In one of the most perceptive essays ever written about the novel, Gordon Hirsch identifies its two main generic threads, namely, gothic and detective fiction.5 He commences his examination by considering Stevenson’s story in the light of John Cawelti’s tripartite detective fiction formula wherein (i) a mystery is presented with several concealed key facts; (ii) an enquiry is made into the mystery by way of a detective-style protagonist; and (iii) the concealed facts are revealed at the conclusion. According to Hirsch, Jekyll and Hyde subverts these established conventions by undermining the ‘idealized type of ratiocinative detective’ (242) and thus of the ‘rationalist, bourgeois assumptions of the genre’ (241). Stevenson’s novella commits further generic transgressions as the ‘criminal is fragmented and the detective implicated in his crimes,’ the latter himself being ‘prey to his own repressions and contradictions’ (242). Stevenson’s novella also resists the traditional closure of the detective genre. In Hirsch’s words: ‘Certainly much is clarified by Jekyll’s statement but questions remain. The book seems to back away from its detective fiction premise that a detective’s masterly exposition of the true story of the crime, or a series of narratives from different perspectives fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle, or the culprit’s “confession” at the end, will enable the reader to feel mastery over the book’s mysteries and permit the reader to work back to some absolute truth, presence, or sense of closure’ (236). On the basis of these substantial formal revisions, Hirsch concludes that Stevenson ‘deconstructs’ the epistemological certainties of the detective novel

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by way of the gothic with its ‘psychological focus and epistemological skepticism’ (241). Hirsch’s insights in this essay are numerous. He astutely identifies the essential elements of the gothic, recognizes, following Cawelti (101–2), that the gothic is incipient detective fiction (Hirsch 241), and he addresses its engagement with the equivocal and fragmented nature of human identity. Further, he undertakes a comparison in the first half of his essay between the two famous gothic alter egos, Victor Frankenstein’s Creature and Mr Hyde, noting that both are ‘quintessential expressions of the gothic genre, representing the return of repressed desire in a partly illegible, sadistic form’ (228). Despite his adept psychoanalytic, genre-based approach, however, Hirsch tends to read Jekyll and Hyde backwards from a post-structuralist era as opposed to forwards from its gothic origins. As a result, he fails to recognize that Stevenson’s novella is a truer and fuller expression of the gothic than he credits it, its thematics of repression being, to a significant degree, textually entrenched. The key, in my view, to reopening The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is to pay greater heed to its gothic inheritance. Only by way of this approach may the two central repressions buried in the text be revealed and their significance fully and clearly explicated – namely, Utterson’s repressed crime and the novella’s repressed anxieties with regard to the working classes. Key to both is an awareness of Stevenson’s typically gothic sleight of hand, whereby the monster functions as a type of mirror or, in Stevenson’s case, a ‘cheval glass’ (50), onto which Jekyll’s inner circle of male friends and, more broadly, fin de siècle society at large project their dark dreads and desires.6 By way of the monster’s uncanny reflection, Stevenson broadens the parameters of criminality, thus violating what Cawelti maintains is the aim of detective fiction – to expose ‘the guilt of a specific individual rather than exposing some general guilt in which the reader might be implicated’ (95; emphasis added).7 In blurring the established boundaries between the ‘gentleman’ and the ‘criminal,’ the ‘lawyer’ and the ‘liar,’ the ‘friend’ and the ‘fiend,’ Stevenson combines detective fiction with the distinctive brand of Victorian gothic, which generally advances a broader social critique.8 Moreover, in that his characters, like Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, generally fail to comprehend the meaning of their monstrous reflections in Jekyll’s cheval glass, Stevenson also shifts the joint burden of criminal detection and inter-

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pretation onto the reader. An awareness of Stevenson’s strategy explains, among other things, the conundrum identified by Hirsch, where Utterson ‘vanishes from the end of the book in an inexplicable way, just as he presumably attempts to grasp the significance of his investigations’ (241). In keeping with the ‘monster in the cheval glass’ motif, not only is Stevenson’s dusty lawyer implicated in the crimes of Jekyll/Hyde (Hirsch 241), but he proves to be a criminal in his own right. Capital Crimes ‘I drive on with Jekyll, bankruptcy at my heels.’ Stevenson in a letter to his wife, qtd in Linehan 81 ‘Why, money’s life to the man.’ Jekyll and Hyde 28

The importance of Gabriel John Utterson of Gaunt Street is signalled in Jekyll and Hyde both by his being the first character to whom the reader is introduced and by the fact that while Stevenson’s tale is composed of a variety of documents, it is principally through Utterson’s eyes that the narrative is refracted. Curiously, in his opening gambit, Stevenson focuses his narrative lens on Utterson himself – not on the public, professional man, as one might expect, given the obsession in Jekyll and Hyde with professional gentlemen and the maintenance of their reputations, but on Utterson in private at home. Much vital information is provided in Stevenson’s brilliantly condensed cameo portrait, but one aspect of Utterson’s character is particularly striking: he places an extremely high premium on both his privacy and that of others. Lauded as a man who ‘in any extremity [is] inclined to help rather than reprove,’ Utterson is further inclined to what the narrator describes as ‘Cain’s heresy’ (7). A synopsis of this world-view – if such it may be called – is provided by Utterson himself, who is reported to have ‘quaintly’ stated, ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way’ (7). In other words, Utterson does not meddle in other people’s affairs and violate their privacy but provides his assistance only when requested. This is true with one noteworthy qualification: the ‘downgoing men’ who seek his aid and in whose lives he participates vicariously and voyeuristically (Hirsch 233) must do so in ‘his [private] chambers’ if assistance is to be granted (7). The professional Utterson must, in all

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instances, be respected, which involves the strict maintenance of the division between public and private spheres. Such, at least, is the pre-Hyde Utterson. Everything changes, however, on the heels of Mr Enfield’s ‘Story of the Door,’ which introduces the naturally complacent, largely detached lawyer to the treacherous and mysterious Mr Hyde, who carelessly and remorselessly runs down a child in the street. This startling incident is instructive in terms of illustrating both Mr Hyde’s dramatic effect on people and their methods of attempting to police him. It also drives the point home that professional reputation is ‘life’ to Mr Utterson and his circle of friends. Mr Enfield and the Edinburgh doctor who assist the child are enraged by the sheer brutality of Hyde’s act and, albeit briefly, actually consider murder (10). Contact with Hyde clearly engenders excessive, uncontrollable emotion. As Mr Enfield recounts his feelings and those of the doctor during the incident, ‘I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best’ (10). The ‘next best’ to murdering Hyde is, curiously, not to contact the police and report the crime but to ‘hit’ him figuratively (in the pocketbook) by way of blackmail with the threat to ruin his reputation and ‘credit’ (10). Accusing the men of making ‘capital out of this accident,’ Hyde duly hands over £100 to the child’s family in compensation (10). Enfield remarks that he has since referred to the place with the door from whence Hyde produced Jekyll’s signed cheque as ‘Black Mail House,’ as he assumes Jekyll must be ‘paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth’ (11). Unaware of the actual association between Jekyll and Hyde, therefore, the blackmailers project the crime of blackmail onto Hyde. Given this projection, Mr Hyde assumes the traditional, uncanny, foreign-yet-familiar role of a gothic monster. He reflects the monstrosity of his pursuers. Failing to recognize that they possess any connection with Hyde and eager to hush up this disturbing incident and its association with a celebrated philanthropist who is ‘the very pink of the proprieties’ (11), Enfield informs Utterson that he has made no further enquiries regarding the place with the door. This does not deter Utterson, however, from engaging in some rather uncharacteristic behaviour, namely, of prying further into the affair by asking Enfield to identify, by name, the man who ran down the child. Ironically, Utterson thereafter commends Enfield’s rule, which dictates that ‘the more it [a situation] looks like Queer Street, the less I ask,’ as ‘a very good rule’ (11). They then strike ‘a bargain’ never to refer to the incident with Hyde and the

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child again (12–13). While repression of the incident is key if professionalism is to be maintained and reputations protected, Utterson’s curiosity is aroused. Utterson, ‘besieged by questions’ about Hyde that pique and ‘enslave’ both his intellect and his imagination, becomes a ‘haunted’ man (16). Privy to information relating to Jekyll’s will – a ‘fanciful’ ‘eyesore’ that raised the ‘indignation’9 of Dr Jekyll’s dear and lifelong friend who refused to draft it (14) – Utterson seems especially plagued by the disjunction between the Mr Hyde who is described in its ‘startling clauses’ (17) as Jekyll’s ‘friend and benefactor’ (14) and a creature Utterson perceives, on the basis of Enfield’s story, to be a ‘fiend’ (14). In the gothic tradition, where the blurring of boundaries between self and Other engenders desire and anxiety, Utterson has difficulty reconciling the idea that this ‘Other’ can be ‘Brother.’ He subsequently spends at least one white night tossing on his ‘great dark bed’ trying to unravel the mysterious association between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (16) and to discover the key to ‘his friend’s strange preference or bondage’ (17). Increasingly obsessed, Utterson experiences dreadful waking visions and nightmares – a type of Hyde phantasmagoria – where he watches as Hyde repeatedly tramples the child or enters Jekyll’s bedroom, where he compels him to do his bidding (16). As his obsession with Hyde gains increasing hold, Utterson undergoes a significant transformation similar to that experienced and later conveyed by Dr Jekyll in his ‘Full Statement of the Case.’ Radically violating his beloved Cain’s heresy, the privacy-respecting Utterson engages in espionage. Convinced that if ‘he could once set eyes on [Hyde] … the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined’ (16–17), Utterson begins to ‘haunt the door’ in the bystreet where Hyde was seen by Enfield: ‘In the morning before office hours, at noon when business was plenty and time scarce, at night under the face of the fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post’ (17). Ironically, Utterson considers, ‘If he be Mr. Hyde … I shall be Mr. Seek’ (17). Thus does the heretofore detached and passive observer become an active player in the cryptic Jekyll-Hyde drama. The image of the once very private lawyer lurking for hours at a stretch in a public doorway attests to a fascinating and disturbing metamorphosis: once a virtual police officer who religiously upheld the distinctions between public and private sphere, Utterson now transgresses that boundary in an almost criminal fashion.

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In a narrative whose characters and episodes frequently function like a house of mirrors – or cheval glasses – Utterson’s experiences with Hyde ‘double’ those revealed by Dr Jekyll in his final ‘Full Statement.’ In fact, Utterson’s process of often bungled detection reveals him to possess, as Gordon Hirsch notes, ‘his own buried life’ (233) and to be ‘as deeply divided as Dr. Jekyll or as any person’ (232). What the myopic Utterson can detect in others, however, he remains blind to in himself. As Hirsch comments, Utterson ‘is an inquiring detective who really does not want to know, a Mr. Seek who does not in fact wish to find’ (233). This point is especially borne out following Utterson’s first face-to-face encounter with Hyde. Projection prevails in this instance, as Utterson – initially described as a man only half human (7)10 – classifies Hyde as a man who ‘seems hardly human’ and has ‘Satan’s signature’ inscribed on his face (19). Returning home from that unsettling event, Utterson, like Enfield in the ‘Story of the Door,’ theorizes a link between Hyde and some repressed disgrace in Jekyll’s past: ‘He [Dr Jekyll] was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace; punishment coming pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.’ And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many that he had come so near to doing, yet avoided. (20–1)

While Mr Hyde, in truly monstrous ‘cheval glass’ form, engenders self-reflexivity in Utterson about his own personal history, the lawyer is ultimately relieved and self-satisfied by the comparison. As David Punter comments, however, Hyde’s significance as ‘the ghost of some old sin [or] … cancer’ in Jekyll’s past, has broader implications that extend beyond Jekyll (245). The fact that the putatively morally upright Utterson – ‘the ultimate respecter of bourgeois moral and legal order in the novel’ (Jancovich 46) – thereafter determines upon the criminal act of investigating Hyde with an intent to blackmail him

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may be lost on Utterson, but it is not lost on the reader. Utterson’s projected conception of Hyde as a ‘creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside’ (21) better describes and reflects Utterson’s own deviously contemplated act of blackmail. This criminal plan is as uncharacteristic of Utterson as his act of lying to Hyde during their first personal encounter. In that episode, in response to Hyde’s query as to how Utterson knows him, Utterson claims that Dr Jekyll provided him with Hyde’s description. To this, Hyde knowingly and angrily responds, ‘I did not think you would have lied’ (18). Notably, given Utterson’s introductory character portrait, one would not have expected Utterson either to spy on other people or to consider blackmail. A great mystery, therefore, surrounds Utterson and his aberrant behaviour: Why, in this situation with Dr Jekyll, will he not let his brother go to the devil – he with ‘Satan’s signature’ (19)11 inscribed on his face – in his own way? Just as Utterson will not recognize his self-division, he is also guilty of ulterior motives that are decisively betrayed by his recorded thoughts and statements about Hyde. Hyde is surrounded by an incredible aura of mystery, especially in his relationship to Dr Jekyll. One wonders how this ‘small and very plainly dressed’ man (17) – a man sartorially ‘associated with the lower classes’ (Kramer 395)12 – possesses a key to the laboratory door of an eminent and wealthy medical doctor. Despite Jekyll’s reference to Hyde in his will as his ‘friend and benefactor’ (14) – clearly a man Jekyll trusts with the keys to his laboratory, an area of his house to which his longstanding friend Utterson has never been granted access (30)13 – Utterson’s actions illustrate that he does not trust the judgment of Dr Jekyll, a friend who, for his part, claims to trust Utterson more than any man alive (23), even more than he trusts himself (31). On the face of it, Stevenson upholds the detective fiction convention established by Edgar Allan Poe that dictates that ‘the detective is a detached eccentric with no worldly stake in the outcome of the action’ (Cawelti 95). Utterson is, for example, openly distressed by Dr Jekyll’s situation both before and after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Utterson seems to be motivated by ‘no worldly stake’ in this instance and to act as Jekyll’s ‘friend and benefactor.’ His thoughts and words, however, seem to be characterized by a specifically financial preoccupation. In combination with the noteworthy and consistent disjunction between Utterson’s purported life philosophy and his actions, three particular episodes support this claim, each centring

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upon Utterson’s meditations about Mr Hyde and what Utterson considers to be Hyde’s obsession with Jekyll’s will. The first occurs during Utterson’s initial encounter with Hyde on the bystreet outside Jekyll’s laboratory when Hyde voluntarily provides Utterson with his Soho address. In reaction to this unsolicited information, the shocked Utterson wonders to himself, ‘can he too have been thinking of the will?’ (18; emphasis added). Utterson’s own concerns could not be rendered more apparent. The second significant episode occurs on the heels of Utterson’s first encounter with Hyde after Utterson theorizes about Hyde’s possible relationship to Jekyll’s past. Figuring Hyde as ‘a thief’ who may steal to Jekyll’s bedside, Utterson further contemplates ‘if this Hyde suspects the existence of a will, he may grow impatient to inherit’ (21; emphasis added). What can only be described as Utterson’s fixation on Jekyll’s will is again in evidence, but what is also notable is the fact that Hyde may not even be aware that such a will exists or that he is the inheritor. Utterson, in stark contradistinction, is fully cognizant of both facts and of the actual amount of that inheritance. Indeed, Utterson seems to have a monomania about the will, a signature characteristic of the traditionally excessive gothic hero-villain. The third episode illustrating Utterson’s obsession with Jekyll’s will is perhaps the most significant in terms of its revelations. It occurs when Utterson accompanies Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard to Mr Hyde’s Soho residence following the brutal death of Carew. Not only does Utterson experience en route an unexplained ‘terror of the law and the law’s officers,’ but upon examining the ‘blackguardly surroundings’ of Hyde’s abode, he privately observes, ‘This was the home of Henry Jekyll’s favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling’ (27; emphasis added). Utterson’s specific reference to the exact amount of Jekyll’s fortune again attests to the lawyer’s monomania. Moreover, reference to the word favourite introduces an element of competition into the relationship between Utterson and Hyde. Conceiving of Hyde as Jekyll’s ‘favourite’ – ‘A person or thing regarded with peculiar favour, one preferred above others’ (OED 1: 972) – lends power to the argument, especially promoted by William Veeder, that a type of ‘Oedipal conflict or sibling rivalry’ exists between Utterson and Hyde (122). A paternal association is certainly suggested by Dr Jekyll’s later statement that he had ‘more than a father’s interest [in Hyde] … [while] Hyde had more than a son’s indifference [to Jekyll]’ (68). This filial relationship is further promoted by Utterson, who conjectures

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that Hyde may be ‘the cancer of some concealed disgrace’ in Jekyll’s past (20). Thus does Utterson position himself as a ‘legitimate’ son of Jekyll’s who is at war with Jekyll’s ‘illegitimate’ son. Utterson’s rhetorical act of linking the concept of ‘favouritism’ to Jekyll’s substantial inheritance, however, provides noteworthy evidence as to the specific object of his battle with Hyde. Although Utterson’s drives and desires in this regard may be subliminal, he appears to be engaged in a serious battle of wills over Jekyll’s will. This would help, in part, to explain Utterson’s intense and reiterated concerns regarding that document (14, 22, 65). Yet there seems to be much more at stake in Utterson’s rivalry with Hyde than a substantial inheritance. The War among My Members Jekyll is a dreadful thing, I own; but the only thing I feel dreadful about is that damned old business of the war in the members. This time it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future. Stevenson, Selected Letters 1886; emphasis added And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. Jekyll and Hyde 60; emphasis added

Especially during the politically dramatic era of the 1790s, while the French Revolution and its aftermath of terror were being played out across the English Channel, the British gothic novel took up the question of socio-political repression and revolution. In the case of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1795), where the idolized, proud, and long-repressed Abbot Ambrosio experiences a ‘personal’ revolution mirrored by mob riots in a public sphere dominated by the notoriously repressive Spanish Inquisition, a clever and strategic parallel was established between the body and the body politic. Almost a century later, Jekyll and Hyde adopts these themes and this structural narrative strategy in order to launch a class critique. Three recent interpretations by Stephen Arata, Patrick Brantlinger, and Robert Mighall foreground the socio-political context and the question of class in Stevenson’s novella and help to set the stage for my class-focused reading. Stephen Arata has persuasively argued that Jekyll and Hyde registers a ‘crisis in bourgeois subjectivity’ (52) wherein Hyde simultane-

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ously emblematizes a bourgeois readership’s worst fears relating to both the degenerate upper and the degenerate lower classes. While Arata notes that ‘a prime source of horror in the tale … [is] that the atavist learns to pass as a gentleman’ (39), he reads Hyde’s moral ‘degeneration’ as a requisite component of his initiation into the role of gentleman. Although one of Arata’s opening gambits involves characterizing Hyde as representative of a ‘marauding and immoral underclass’ (35), he ultimately untethers him from socio-political events involving the lower classes. Indeed, in the course of the essay, he completely loses sight of Hyde’s role as ‘marauder.’ Patrick Brantlinger is somewhat more aware of these events. In his view, Jekyll and Hyde registers an ‘anxiety about the masses and the consequence of mass literacy’ (180). In reference to the Third Reform Bill, which was passed in 1884, Brantlinger notes that ‘the hope that mass literacy would hold back the barbarous anarchy or the criminal degeneracy that the upper classes had always feared the “lower orders” would visit upon society and culture seemed, perhaps, even less realistic than it had in 1867 or 1832’ (179). Within this cultural context, Brantlinger maintains that Hyde threatens ‘a sort of cultural entropy or abjection, the swamps or sewers of mediocrity or vulgarity into which, they [Stevenson, Gissing, and many other late-Victorian intellectuals] feared, excellence – high intelligence; literary and artistic aura – was sinking’ (180). Despite Brantlinger’s compelling, unique, and historically supported insights into Jekyll and Hyde and the class-based literacy question, he does not flesh out his claim that that novella functions as a moral allegory concerning more broadbased anxieties about the lower classes. Albeit compressed, Robert Mighall’s more semiotically focused analysis provides a better reading in this regard. According to Mighall, Hyde’s ‘revolution’ occurs on two fronts – the personal and the political – and both are connected: ‘Hyde’s usurpation of Jekyll through his bid for dominance is a form of revolution in the (political) body, a triumph for the lower orders of his being’ (151). Focusing on the symbolic meaning behind the representation of bodies, Mighall concludes: ‘Stevenson’s tale therefore depicts the disruption of various structures and hierarchies to place bodies, topographically, taxonomically, and chronologically ... Hyde’s usurpation of Jekyll’s “political” body, imagines the empowerment of the savage within civilization, the creature defined by various sciences is uncaged and comes out “roaring.” From Mayhew’s “anthropological” analogies to Jekyll’s revolution in his

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“political” body, the concern has been with the movement of bodies, across the city or across the boundaries of civilization (imagined geographically and physiologically’ (151). Reading the ‘return of the repressed’ dynamic in Jekyll and Hyde as involving the incursion of the ‘savage’ lower classes into a ‘civilized’ space, Mighall identifies Hyde’s principal threat as residing in the fact that he does not ‘know his place’ (151). That Hyde does not ‘know his place’ particularly rankles with Utterson, who regards him as a power-hungry upstart to whom Jekyll mysteriously and voluntarily grants power. Perhaps even more important to Utterson than the fact that Jekyll’s will (his substantial financial inheritance) is at stake, therefore, is the state of Jekyll’s will (his self-control) to which his professional reputation is firmly attached. Hyde’s ‘place’ is clearly key to maintaining the patriarchally supported, class-based status quo of which Utterson conceives himself to be the defender. In order to understand Hyde’s ‘place’ and to unpack the exact nature of what Mighall calls ‘the movement of bodies’ in Jekyll and Hyde, one must return, as Brantlinger does, to the socio-historical context of Stevenson’s novella. As William Veeder and Linda Dryden have noted, late nineteenth-century Britain was characterized by an increasing democratization that spelled the erosion of an old social order (Veeder 117; Dryden 33). The political divide was, to all intents and purposes, narrowing. While the Second Reform Bill of 1867 went forward with Robert Lowe’s controversial declaration, ‘We must educate our masters’ (qtd in Brantlinger 179), the number of ‘masters’ was augmented dramatically two decades later. The passing of the Third Reform Bill in 1884, ‘the single most important legislative action of the second Gladstone ministry … increased the total electorate from 3,150,000 to 5,700,000 … [giving] the vast majority of adult males … the vote’ (Arnstein 151). Of equal importance to Jekyll and Hyde is the fact that while class divisions were widening along economic lines (Dryden 56), the urban location of rich and poor was characterized by a growing physical proximity (104). As Dryden comments, ‘Jekyll’s house, adjacent to the dwellings of “all sorts and conditions of men,”14 is thus a typical West London home of the time’ (104). Such a proximity precipitated fears of social, racial, and moral degeneration, which were advanced in Darwinian studies by Henry Maudsley and Cesare Lombroso, both of whom identified atavistic tendencies in both criminals and the lower classes.

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These fairly radical social shifts in the late Victorian era and the fears they generated are powerfully dramatized by way of the gothic in Jekyll and Hyde. What commences as a dangerous and confusing class proximity degenerates into a terrifying scenario where class hierarchy, distinctions, and identities are rendered indistinct and then entirely subverted. Key to Stevenson’s depiction of this unsettling deterioration is a unique yoking of the motif of the house and the Faust theme. While the figure of the house in Stevenson’s novella is an updated version of the gothic’s traditional ‘contested castle,’ a signpost of inheritance and the site of a battle for legitimate power, the Faust theme takes up the question of liberty – a term dear to the Enlightenment’s emancipatory project and the hearts of French revolutionaries intent on realizing a civil society founded on the principles of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ – and the often treacherous dynamic between liberty and slavery. Combining these established gothic conventions, Stevenson figures the battle over both forms of Jekyll’s will as a revolution involving a type of demonic possession and domestic dispossession. In both cases, Hyde – described by Jekyll as an ‘insurgent horror’ (74) – acts ‘like a mob of one’ (Dryden 80), a true rebel against established authority who renders Jekyll unheimlich in the most literal sense of that word. Jekyll not only becomes ‘uncanny’ to his friends and eventually to himself, he becomes – in the light of Freud’s translation of the term heimlich as ‘belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc.’ (222) – ‘unhoused’ as Hyde ultimately assumes total control of Jekyll’s house and laboratory. Jekyll’s identity may also be said to be definitively ‘unhoused’ by novella’s end. His goal, as he describes it, of ‘housing’ the two aspects of himself ‘in separate identities’ (61) proves unsuccessful. According to the documented evidence, during his final days, the doctor’s body becomes the site of a battle for dominance between himself and Hyde, their ‘separate identities’ ending up in confusion. A complex process of terror precedes Utterson’s culminating and uncharacteristic act of directing Poole to break down Jekyll’s laboratory door, thus essentially ‘storming’ the ‘contested Castle’ and laying proprietory claim to what Utterson regards as his rightful inheritance. Stevenson’s gothic narrative commences in a Frankensteinian and Faustian manner with Jekyll’s mixed act of ‘birthing’ Hyde in a process involving, in Jekyll’s words, the ‘agonies of death and birth’ (64). Jekyll is thus ‘rebirthed’ into a ‘younger, lighter, happier …

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[body],’ yet one devoid of ‘an innocent freedom of the soul’ (62). Jekyll initially springs ‘like a schoolboy into the sea of liberty’ (65) and overcomes ‘the restrictions of natural life’ (70). Perhaps more important and dangerous than Jekyll’s ecstatic sense of emancipation through Hyde is the fact that Jekyll believes he remains in absolute control of the situation. When Utterson visits Jekyll and expresses concern over the brutal incident with the child, Jekyll assures Utterson that he ‘can be rid of Hyde’ the moment he chooses (23). Confident claims, assurances, and promises seem fated not to be upheld in Jekyll and Hyde. The subsequent murder of Sir Danvers Carew provides a sobering wake-up call regarding the actual power dynamic at play between Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll is clearly perched on a slippery moral slope. In typical Faustian fashion, his ‘new power’ so tempts him that he falls ‘in slavery’ (64). The once confident master and gentleman becomes enslaved to excessive desires and ‘undignified pleasures’ (64). The ‘sufferings and terrors so unmanning’ (37) that reduce Jekyll to the status of a powerless and imprisoned female gothic heroine, have a destructively transformative impact on the eminent doctor’s health. During his visit to Jekyll’s home after Carew’s murder, Utterson observes that Jekyll is ill and possesses ‘a changed voice’ (30). Jekyll’s comments in his ‘Full Statement’ substantiate the theory that a correlation exists between Jekyll’s degenerating health and Hyde’s ‘takeover.’ Jekyll notes that ‘the powers of Hyde seemed to have grown in the sickliness of Jekyll’ (74). Hyde thus creeps, by stages, into Jekyll, enacting a corporeal invasion. Hyde’s changing attire is similarly indicative of his social aspirations: he sheds his plain clothes (17) for garments ‘of rich and sober fabric’ (56) by the time he encounters Lanyon. While we know these clothes are Jekyll’s, the shift is nonetheless suggestive. Hyde’s incursions are likewise registered in Jekyll’s domestic space. During his first foray into espionage, Utterson notes the distressing fact that Hyde arrives at Jekyll’s laboratory door with key in hand ‘like one approaching home’ (18). Jekyll’s comments in relation to his first transformation into Hyde are also suggestive of dispossession. He feels like ‘a stranger in … [his] own house’ (63). Jekyll’s self-estrangement is thus reflected in his domestic situation. He thereafter grants Hyde ‘full liberty and power’ in his house on the square (65), rendering his abode, in Utterson’s words, an ambivalent ‘house of voluntary bondage’ (38). Not only does Jekyll willingly enslave himself, as Utterson suggests, but Hyde clearly refuses to remain contained in his Soho

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abode. Emancipated and exercised, Hyde proves to be an uncontainable force. In the light of the parallel Stevenson establishes between identity and domestic space in Jekyll and Hyde,15 Jekyll’s degeneration is prophetically signalled by his handsome yet decaying house, which is ‘plunged in darkness except for the fanlight’ (19). Hyde’s Soho hideout, ‘furnished with luxury and good taste’ (28), also bespeaks a lack of total segregation between Jekyll and Hyde that exists virtually from Hyde’s ‘conception.’ The writing, so to speak, is on the wall with regard to both the inevitability and the nature of Hyde’s ultimate takeover. What Jekyll actually refers to as the ‘Babylonian finger on the wall … [that spells] out the letters of … [his] judgment’ (67) occurs when he subsequently appears in an unsolicited fashion unauthorized by Jekyll. In these monstrously transgressive moments, Stevenson articulates the grave anxieties of Britain’s professional patriarchal elite regarding the newly emancipated lower classes, who threaten insubordination. Despite Jekyll’s act of ‘liberating’ Hyde into life, Hyde is a self-actualizing being with ideas and interests of his own. Jekyll’s denial of this and of Hyde’s resentment of both the retained hierarchy between himself and Hyde and the fact that Hyde must commit ‘temporary suicide’ (75) as dictated by Jekyll spell Jekyll’s doom. Stevenson also grants expression in this novella to the British elite’s worst fears. The lower-class ‘Other’ is the emancipated ‘Brother.’ In both his sociopolitical aspirations and immoral, addictive propensities, the purported ‘monster’ called Hyde is but a cheval glass reflection of themselves. As Utterson does with his troubled memory of Jekyll’s wild youth replete with its ‘old sin[s]’ (20), the brotherhood works diligently to repress this association. Hyde’s destabilization of the comfortable association Jekyll draws between psychic identity and physical space in three of this novella’s most unsettling episodes proves to be the most spectacular strategy in Hyde’s revolution. No more intimate location could be chosen to terrorize Jekyll than his bedroom in his house in the square. There Jekyll faces his own worst nightmare when, after retiring to bed in the form of Jekyll, he awakens to find himself in the body of Hyde. Jekyll’s powerlessness is palpable as he relates in his ‘Full Statement’ how he came to recognize his altered state by way of his transformed hand: Now the hand of Henry Jekyll … was professional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw

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clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed clothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde. I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden and startling as the clash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed, I rushed to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked myself; and then, with another bound of terror – how was it to be remedied? (66–7)

The idea that the eminent doctor’s life-giving hand also hides a criminal and racialized life-taking hand ‘of a dusky pallor’16 could not be brought home in a more paralysing manner. Startling as such an episode is when it occurs in the private sphere, it is magnified a thousandfold when enacted in a public space. Hyde’s next strategic move, therefore, takes his revolution up a notch. Subsequent to the murder of Carew and Jekyll’s resolution to redeem his past (71), yet another unwitting transformation occurs as he sits in Regent’s Park. This ‘fall’ from innocence registers the destruction of ‘the balance of … [his] soul’ (71). Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde occurs on the heels of what he describes as the ‘vainglorious thought’ that he is not ‘like … [his] neighbours’ but better than them when he compares his ‘active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect’ (71). This scene provides a suitable and literally spectacular17 reminder of Jekyll’s true nature. It also subjects this criminal to public and police exposure. The exact location of this exposure is of particular significance, given the nineteenth-century history of recreational parks. A former royal park, Regent’s Park in north London was first opened to the public for two days a week in 1845 during the reign of Queen Victoria. Although it was initially and primarily frequented by members of London’s fashionable society who inhabited the new and nearby mansions, Regent’s Park witnessed greater class interaction by the 1880s, when organizations such as the Labour Emancipation League held occasional meetings there. The name of Stevenson’s class invader – Hyde – also calls attention to itself. Like Regent’s Park, Hyde Park has a significant history with regard to Victorian class relations. The long-time favourite resort of the fashionable world, Hyde

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Park became a political meeting place for working people on 1 July 1855, when a demonstration was held against the Sunday Trading Bill. The police subsequently attempted to ban such meetings. On 19 April 1867, for example, a meeting was convened by the Working Men’s Rights Association in Hyde Park to denounce the Second Reform Bill. There, they expressed the opinion ‘That the Parks are the Peoples’ and … claim[ed] the right to the use of them for the purpose of discussing our political wrongs’ (Jones 3). That meeting transpired in an orderly fashion and free speech was thereafter enjoyed at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park (4). That Hyde should stage his incursion in Regent’s Park is fitting, given the changing face of both that recreational space and Hyde Park in terms of class relations during the Victorian era. Jekyll’s extreme reaction to his physical transformation registers the British elite’s fears and anxieties about such interclass commingling. ‘Incident at the Window’ Hyde’s third and most treacherous transformation has yet to be recognized and discussed in the critical literature on Jekyll and Hyde. This incident – recounted in the chapter entitled ‘Incident at the Window’ – is key to Utterson’s dark secret that he is guilty of Jekyll’s/Hyde’s murder. While out on their usual Sunday walk, Enfield and Utterson arrive at the door where Enfield first recounted his story about Hyde. Despite their earlier pact never to refer to Hyde again, the two gentlemen take up that very subject and Enfield informs Utterson that he now knows that the door is ‘a back way to Dr. Jekyll’s’ (39). Stepping into the court, they spy Dr Jekyll sitting close beside a ‘half way open’ window ‘like some disconsolate prisoner’ (39). After Jekyll explains that he cannot invite them in because ‘the place is really not fit,’ Utterson and Enfield agree to converse with Dr Jekyll from the street. As the narrator relates, a shocking incident transpires immediately thereafter: But the words were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of his [Jekyll’s] face and succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below. They saw it but for a glimpse, for the window was instantly thrust down; but that glimpse had been sufficient and they turned and left the court without a word. In silence, too, they traversed the bystreet; and it was not until they

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had come into a neighbouring thoroughfare, where even upon a Sunday there were still some stirrings of life, that Mr. Utterson at last turned and looked at his companion. They were both pale; and there was an answering horror in their eyes. ‘God forgive us, God forgive us,’ said Mr. Utterson. But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously, and walked on once more in silence. (40; emphasis added)

What is particularly striking in this sequence is the narrator’s reference to the ‘expression of such abject terror and despair’ that so shocks Enfield and Utterson. Notably, this nebulous description fails to identify exactly whose expression was seen. Was it Dr Jekyll’s expression or Mr Hyde’s? In the light of the tremendous impact this expression has on its two viewers, only one answer makes any sense: Enfield and Utterson actually witness Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde from their position on the street. Only this vision would answer Gordon Hirsch’s question, ‘Why does Jekyll slam his window shut and retreat to his cabinet with “an expression of such abject terror and despair”?’ (229). Jekyll senses the physiological change but is too late to avert Hyde’s third and most deceptive act of subversion, which exposes Jekyll’s true nature to one of his most intimate friends. This episode affects interpretation of the final episode, when Poole and Utterson storm Jekyll’s cabinet. A very different Utterson is revealed when one considers that the lawyer is aware that Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde. In stark contradistinction to Jekyll, who says towards the end of his ‘Full Statement’ that, despite his hatred of Hyde, he still manages to pity him because he recognizes that Hyde suffers too (75), Utterson is utterly merciless towards him. Despite Poole’s description of Hyde ‘[w]eeping like a woman or a lost soul’ (48), Utterson ruthlessly maintains that the voice they hear begging for mercy is Hyde’s, and he commands Poole to break down the door (48). The identity of the speaker behind the door is extremely confused in this instance. Given the documented evidence that Jekyll’s voice has been noticeably changing over the course of his ‘experiments’ (30), the creature in the cabinet seems to be a literally monstrous combination of both Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll’s reference in his ‘Full Statement’ to his ‘sadly altered’ face (75–6) suggests that he now looks like Hyde and Poole’s description of the man he saw serves as confirmation (45–6); however, the fact that the creature weeps and begs for mercy (48) suggests that its consciousness is Jekyll’s. The fact

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that Jekyll’s will now names Utterson as inheritor lends this claim further support (75). Utterson knows that Hyde would have destroyed such a document (75). While Jekyll has, therefore, remained a true friend to Utterson, the converse cannot be said of Utterson. Despite Utterson’s knowledge that Jekyll is Hyde, his act of breaking down the cabinet door after telling Poole that he suspects murder (46) violates his earlier promise to Jekyll that he would help Hyde when Jekyll was no longer there (24). Like his ‘Brother’ Hyde, therefore, Utterson can be both a ‘friend’ and a ‘fiend.’ This ‘lawyer’ can and often does prove to be a ‘liar.’ Further, Jekyll’s reiterated pleas to Utterson throughout his ordeal to let this ‘private matter’ sleep (23) and thus allow Jekyll to go his ‘own dark way’ (37) are consistently unheeded. In such instances, Utterson again jettisons his cherished ‘Cain’s heresy.’ Indeed, another moment of projection is detectable here, as ‘money seems to be life’ to Utterson, not to Hyde. Utterson seems ‘impatient to inherit’ (21) and, with the full knowledge that Jekyll is Hyde and that breaking down the cabinet door leaves Jekyll no other choice than to commit suicide, Utterson does inherit. Jekyll has no other living long-term friend to whom he may leave his vast fortune (51). Thus does Stevenson uphold the detective fiction convention established by Edgar Allan Poe that the ‘leastlikely person’ assumes the criminal role (Cawelti 93). Utterson nonetheless appears to be a hero of sorts,18 as he keeps his final promise to Poole that he will safeguard Jekyll’s ‘credit’ (51–2). According to Mark Jancovich, ‘The final horror of the story is that, in the hands of Utterson, the episode will probably be repressed and hidden in silence for the sake of decorum: nothing will be learned and the errors of bourgeois culture will be repeated’ (48). In killing Jekyll/Hyde, the friend/fiend Utterson does safeguard both Jekyll’s reputation and his money. Repression remains the order of the day. Utterson’s trademark quality of silence (Gaughan 191) ultimately protects the brotherhood of professional patriarchs. As for Jekyll/Hyde, he is as silent as the grave.

NOTES 1 The female gothic is generally distinguished from the traditional gothic by its centring on a young woman’s rite of passage into womanhood and her ambivalent relationship to contemporary domestic ideology, espe-

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Carol Margaret Davison cially the joint institutions of marriage and motherhood. For more on this subgenre, see DeLamotte. The ‘urban gothic’ is a term coined by Kathleen Spencer who defines it as being eighteenth-century gothic literature imported into a modern, urban setting. The urban gothic, according to Spencer, is boundary obsessed and reconfigures the traditional monster as not only evil but unnatural, with no right to exist at all. On the importance of patriarchy in Jekyll and Hyde, see Veeder. Nabokov stands virtually alone in his denial of Jekyll and Hyde’s role as a moral allegory. Many commentators – both early and late – have interpreted it from this perspective. In a letter to Stevenson written a few months after the novella’s initial publication, John Addington Symonds not only deems it the finest literary work Stevenson had ever written, he also says that, ‘viewed as an allegory, it touches one too closely. Most of us at some epoch of our lives have been upon the verge of developing a Mr. Hyde’ (qtd in Linehan 98). In more recent years, Jekyll and Hyde has been read as an allegory treating various issues. Daniel L. Wright cogently argues that it is an allegory about alcoholism, an argument which I extrapolate on in my forthcoming chapter on Jekyll and Hyde and the tradition of what I call gothic ‘pharmographies,’ writings about the process of drug seduction and addiction. According to Patrick Brantlinger, Jekyll and Hyde allegorizes the consequences of mass literacy. It is important to note that Stevenson actually destroyed the first version of his manuscript and rewrote it after his wife, Fanny, complained that he had written it as if it were a story when it ‘was really an allegory’ (qtd in Linehan 78). In their recent overview of gothic literature, David Punter and Glennis Byron concur with Hirsch’s view of the generic make-up of Stevenson’s novella. In their words, ‘Gothic, as both the full title and many of the chapter headings suggest, here merges with detective fiction’ (226). Arata also highlights a class-based shift in Hyde that positions him as a mirror to Jekyll. In Arata’s view, Hyde transmogrifies from lower to upper class in his shift from being an energetic lover of life to crying and weeping for mercy (39). Gothic and detective fiction, according to Cawelti, share ‘the theme of hidden guilt’ (102). For more on the nature of Victorian gothic, see my essay ‘The Ghost of Genres Past.’ Mr Utterson’s ‘indignation’ over Jekyll’s will lends support to my argument regarding Utterson’s competitive attitude towards Hyde. Utterson’s

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‘indignation’ indicates that he views Hyde as unworthy as Jekyll’s inheritor and sees as ‘wrongful’ Jekyll’s act of overlooking Utterson. In the opening portrait of Utterson, the reader is informed that despite his ‘rugged’ and unsmiling countenance, ‘something eminently human beaconed from his eye’ (7). Hyde is consistently demonized throughout the course of this novella. When he is surrounded by an angry mob after the incident with the child, he is described by Enfield as possessing ‘a kind of black, sneering coolness … really like Satan’ (10). In his ‘Full Statement,’ Dr Jekyll further promotes this association when he calls Hyde ‘My devil’ (69) and a ‘child of Hell’ (73). While Jürgen Kramer points specifically to Hyde’s plain clothes as a signpost of his class, Linda Dryden argues that ‘Hyde’s appearance is sufficiently “other” to associate him with the lower strata of society’ (67). We are apprised of this fact in the chapter ‘Incident of the Letter,’ when the narrator informs us, after Utterson is admitted by Poole into Jekyll’s ‘laboratory or … dissecting room,’ ‘It was the first time that the lawyer had been received in that part of his friend’s quarters’ (30). This occurs after Utterson accompanies Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard to Hyde’s Soho residence subsequent to the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Stevenson’s allusion to Walter Besant’s novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) is apt, given that Besant’s work yokes, like Jekyll and Hyde, the crossing of class boundaries with the theme of transformation. Stevenson’s use of this equation is both clever and consistent. When Lanyon describes Hyde, for example, he refers to ‘the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood’ (56). For an overview of gothic images of race, see Malchow. While the racialization of the poor predates fin de siècle fiction, it is therein retained. According to Linda Dryden, for example, ‘The East End became “Africanized” in the popular imagination’ (84). Monsters have long been associated with spectacle, as they function as signs or portents of moral condition and impending disaster. Even in the etymology of their name, monsters have been associated with spectacle. According to David Punter and Glennis Byron, ‘Etymologically speaking, the monster is something to be shown, something that serves to demonstrate (Latin, monstrare: to demonstrate) and to warn (Latin, monere: to warn)’ (263). Richard T. Gaughan positions Utterson as a hero. Gaughan lauds him for breaking out of the constraining bounds of his profession and embarking

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Carol Margaret Davison ‘on a journey of discovery that involves both his intellectual and imaginative sides’ (192). Gaughan claims that Utterson becomes more human over the course of the narrative (195), and he praises him for acting ‘against the dictates of the conventional order … [by withholding] evidence from the police (e.g., his handling of Hyde’s letter to Jekyll exonerating him of all blame in the Carew murder) and … [avoiding], at the very end, calling in the guardians of public order when he breaks into Jekyll’s study and discovers Hyde’s body’ (194). As I explain in the body of the essay, Utterson’s illegal actions and his silence shield ulterior motives. Paradoxically, Utterson’s ‘unconventional’ actions are undertaken in order ultimately to uphold the conventional, patriarchal order that he regards as being under class threat.

WORKS CITED Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Arnstein, Walter L. Britain Yesterday and Today: 1830 to the Present. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1996. Besant, Walter. All Sorts and Conditions of Men. 1882. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Buckton, Oliver S. ‘Reanimating Stevenson’s Corpus.’ Robert Louis Stevenson Reconsidered: New Critical Perspectives. Ed. William B. Jones Jr. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2003. 37–67. Calder, Jenni. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study. London: Hamilton, 1980. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1976. Cole, G.D.H. and Raymond Postgate. The Common People 1746–1946. 1938. London and New York: Methuen, 1981. Davison, Carol Margaret. ‘The Ghost of Genres Past: Theorizing the Gothic in the Victorian Novel.’ Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies 6 (2003): 23–40. – ‘“Houses of Voluntary Bondage”: Gothic Pharmographies and Marie Corelli’s Wormwood: A Drama of Paris.’ Gothic Studies: forthcoming. DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of NineteenthCentury Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Dryden, Linda. The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2003.

Solving The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 161 Foss, Chris. ‘Xenophobia. Duality, and the ‘Other’ Side of Nationalism: A Reading of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.’ Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 40 (1994): 63–76. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Uncanny.’ 1919. An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Volume 17. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1962. 217–56. Gaughan, Richard T. ‘Mr. Hyde and Mr. Seek: Utterson’s Antidote.’ Journal of Narrative Technique 17 (1987): 184–97. Hirsch, Gordon. ‘Frankenstein, Detective Fiction, and Jekyll and Hyde.’ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde After One Hundred Years. Ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988. 223–46. Jancovich, Mark. Horror. London: Batsford, 1992. Jones, Leslie. ‘Hyde Park and Free Speech.’ www.speakerscorner.net/docs/ freespeech.html 1976–7. 8 July 2004. 1–4. Kramer, Jürgen. ‘Multiple Selves in 19th Century British Fiction.’ Proceedings Anglistentag 1992. Ed. Hans Ulrich Seeber and Walter Göbel. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. 388–96. Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk. 1795. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Linehan, Katherine, ed. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Norton, 2003. Maixner, Paul, ed. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1981. Malchow, H.L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Nabokov, Vladimir. Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York and London: Harcourt, 1980. Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Edition. 1971. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions From 1765 to the Present Day. London and New York: Longman, 1980. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Ernest Mehew. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997. – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 1886. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Veeder, William. ‘Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy.’ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years. Ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988. 107–60.

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Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 1764. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Wright, Daniel L. ‘“The Prisonhouse of my Disposition”: A Study of the Psychology of Addiction in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’ Studies in the Novel 26 (1994): 254–67.

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6 E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey and the Legacy of Sentiment jay dickson

E.M. Forster’s novels, especially The Longest Journey (1907), are at their most modern after the inevitable narrative intrusion of sudden death. Often considered a ‘Victorian’ among early twentieth-century writers, Forster’s fictional works adhere largely to the nineteenthcentury models of marriage and manners by his admitted forebears, Jane Austen and George Meredith (Furbank and Haskell 34–5). Even when his novels concern the tragic, they are narrated from a smooth omniscient perspective that renders them formally indebted to Forster’s magisterial Victorian antecedents. Only in the surprisingly frequent moments of sudden death are formal expectations disrupted in any fashion commensurate with Forster’s modernist contemporaries.1 Forster, as commentators have observed with surprise, repeatedly kills off major characters with little narrative preparation, leaving his other characters bereft and bewildered and the shape of his stories spinning wildly awry. As Allen Warren Friedman notes, ‘The lack of warning or reparation [for the deaths in Forster’s novels] reverses the chronology of events, seems to deny them ordinary causality and climax’ (106). The tortured marriage-plot of Lilia Herriton and Gino Carella that forms the basis for the first third of Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is abandoned altogether when Lilia dies unexpectedly in childbirth, leaving the novel without a clear protagonist. Mrs Wilcox’s death in Howards End (1910) is so little adumbrated that the reader has no idea which character has died in chapter 10, a confusion compounded by the anonymous description of her funeral. Similarly, Mrs Moore’s death is received first as a telegram and a rumour before the omniscient narrator of A Passage to India cares to verify it. So little preparation for death is provided in Howards End

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and A Passage to India that the makers of the film adaptations of these novels, perhaps afraid of confusing mass audiences, supplied missing narrative links.2 Sudden death, as a structural event, is crucial to Forster’s understanding of his novelistic project. I would argue that sudden death functions as Forster’s means of working out his own inheritance from the nineteenth-century British novel and from his own decidedly Victorian antecedents. As Noel Annan reminds us, Forster stood as an inheritor of the intellectual tradition of his direct forebears; both the Forsters and the Thorntons crucially contributed to what Annan calls the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ of Victorian England. Forster’s writing career was literally made possible by the £8,000 left to him in the will of the family matriarch, his great-aunt, the abolitionist Marianne Thornton, upon her death in 1887. This legacy, Forster was to say, represented his ‘financial salvation’ in that it enabled him to travel after his studies at Cambridge and to pursue his career as a writer (Furbank 1: 24). Forster inherited more than just money from his Victorian forebears. His preoccupation with death and commemoration extends beyond financial bequests to the emotional and ethical legacies left after someone’s demise. Forster’s admitted stylistic and financial legacies from the nineteenth century were coupled with his typically modern distaste for Victorian conventions, predominantly those associated with commemorating the dead. This complex inheritance represented for him a kind of double bind, wherein as much as he wanted to accept a literal and figurative patrimony, he also wished to swerve from the desires of the dead – particularly in terms of how they themselves wished to be remembered. The reification of death became Forster’s impossible legacy from the Victorian dead. Thus, at junctures where death intrudes – always dramatically and suddenly – Forster works out his ambivalent relations to a novelistic inheritance. At these junctures, his modernity and his Victorianism come into their most violent contact with one another. And nowhere do we see this more clearly than in his own favourite among his novels, The Longest Journey, where his obsessions with death, mourning, and legacy reach their zenith. Although almost all of Forster’s novels regularly depend upon the convention of the sudden death of a major character to further the plot, there is nothing quite to compare with the death rate of The Longest Journey, which one contemporary reviewer calculated at 44 per cent of

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the major characters (Gardner, Critical Heritage 80). Indeed, many of the initial reviews found the mortality incidence the weakest, and most unbelievable, part of the novel. ‘Critics approve – except for the Queen and the World,’ Forster noted about the publication of the novel: ‘All say “jerky,” “too many deaths”’ (qtd by Heine in Abinger Edition lvii). These criticisms mounted throughout his lifetime so that, as P.N. Furbank claims, to the end of his days Forster would patiently endure ‘hackneyed remarks’ that there were too many deaths in The Longest Journey ‘as if he were hearing them for the first time’ (294). The novel is the least smoothly constructed of all Forster’s novels and the most painfully worked out. At this writing, The Longest Journey remains the only Forster novel not to be adapted for the screen. Certain Forster scholars, including his earliest proponents, have argued that its roughness and implausibility stand as the greatest merits of the novel. Lionel Trilling, who calls it ‘the most brilliant, the most dramatic, the most passionate of [Forster’s] works,’ notes that ‘the book is not a perfect whole, but we feel it does not so much fall apart as fly apart: the responsive reader can be conscious not of an inadequate plan or of a defect in structure but rather of the toomuch steam that blows up the boiler’ (76).3 Perhaps this very lack of his trademark novelistic refinement endeared The Longest Journey to Forster’s own heart. To the end of his life he would reportedly smile when aficionados claimed their fondness for it, and he repeatedly maintained that it was his favourite among his own novels (Wilson 56). He enunciates the link between his affection for the novel and its crudeness in his 1960 introduction to the Oxford Classics edition: The Longest Journey is the least popular of my five novels but the one I am most glad to have written. For in it I have managed to get nearer than elsewhere towards what was in my mind – or rather to that junction towards mind with heart where the creative impulse sparks. Thoughts and emotions collided if they did not always cooperate. I can remember writing it and how excited I was and how absorbed, and how sometimes I went wrong deliberately, as if the spirit of anti-literature had jogged my elbow. For all its faults, it is the only book that has come upon me without my knowledge. Elsewhere I have had to look into the lumber-room of my past, and have found in it things that were useful to be sure; still I found them, they didn’t find me, and the magic sense of being visited and of returning the visit were absent. (Abinger Edition lxvi)

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The disruption of his usual Austenian framework by this mysterious ‘spirit of anti-literature’ made writing this book the most natural for Forster; something seemed to well from his unconscious that struck at the heart of his intentions for the novel. Elizabeth Heine, perhaps the most exhaustive and authoritative critic of the novel, reflects that by ‘anti-literature’ Forster almost certainly means ‘the number of sudden deaths’ (lvi), and this claim would seem substantiated not only by the critical reception of The Longest Journey but within the text itself. Rickie Elliot warns his Cambridge friends that he is about to regale them with the story of his life, which he can tell comfortably because ‘[a]ll the people are dead, too’ (23). This statement stands almost as the summation of his life so far. One friend answers that Rickie may talk away, because if he bores them ‘we have books’ (23). The narrator’s humorous note at this juncture – ’The reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it’ (23) – suggests that The Longest Journey itself, during this narrative of how Rickie’s parents so suddenly and inexplicably died, is not ‘a book’ in the traditional sense. Rather, it stands as the antithesis to the kinds of Victorian book with which Rickie’s friends distract themselves. The Longest Journey thus becomes ‘anti-literature’: the deliberate flouting of narrative expectation through the repeated vehicle of sudden death. The most famous example of this occurs with the simple declarative sentence that begins the fifth chapter: ‘Gerald died that afternoon’ (51). In previous chapters, Gerald has been presented as the very picture of health and physical activity, almost the antithesis of the pallid and frail Rickie Elliot. Indeed, Gerald possesses such vitality that he threatens to usurp the role of protagonist from Rickie almost as vigorously as he bullied the young man in public school years earlier. Whereas Rickie has only hazy plans for his own future, Gerald is nothing if not ambitious, with plans for a career in the military and marriage to Agnes Pembroke. He seems the very model of a Victorian boy’s adventure hero, with all the requisite attributes: aggressiveness, physical superiority, ingrained anti-intellectualism, financial and connubial aspirations, and an almost imperialistic self-confidence. He stands poised to wrest control of the plot from the seemingly unworthy Rickie, but the single sentence announcing his death sends the narrative trajectory careering unexpectedly in other directions. Gerald’s death is wholly devoid of any Hardyesque overtones of divine retribution; we are told simply, ‘He was broken up in a football match’ (51). Gerald’s dying moments veer from the traditional Victo-

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rian deathbed because of his inability to accede to a transcendent vision, as happens, for example, in Dickens’s novels (Stewart 183).4 Although Gerald’s passing lacks any transcendent meaning for Gerald himself, his physical ‘smash-up’ precipitates a shattering of Agnes’s mores and beliefs. She reacts to Gerald’s death with shocked disaffection: ‘Life, which had given them no warning, seemed to make no comment now,’ the narrative explains of Agnes: ‘The incident was outside nature, and would surely pass away like a dream’ (56). The pro forma bereavement of her servants (‘They had not liked Gerald, but he was a man, they were women, he had died’ [52]) prompts Agnes to question what, exactly, her own reaction should be: ‘For many minutes she sat at the foot of the stairs, rubbing her eyes. An obscure spiritual crisis was going on. Should she weep like the servants? Or should she bear up and trust in the consoler Time? Was the death of a man so terrible after all?’ (57). Agnes’s last question points to the great dilemma of the novel. Although any sudden death leaves trauma and sorrow in its wake, its sheer rate of incidence in The Longest Journey renders any individual instance of it a trivial and inevitable part of existence. Death comes not as the end, but as a disorienting rupture, a moment of ‘anti-literature’ that voids any sense of narrative teleology to modern life. The survivors are left with the challenge of finding significance in death and with the question as to whether it is indeed so ‘terrible’ after all. When Emily Failing challenges Stephen Wonham to explain what happens to the souls of the dead children at the railway, he cannot respond, then angrily suggests that she build a bridge at the crossing to mitigate the likelihood of the children’s deaths. ‘Then the child’s soul, as you call it,’ Stephen fulminates, ‘– well, nothing would have happened to the child at all’ (104). This call for the improvement of the Cadover estate, however, does not really answer the asked question: modernization would seem to have its limits at the threshold of the spiritual. Forster’s task is to arrive at a more satisfying explanation of what happens after death and to find a means for the survivors to make narrative sense from these ‘anti-literary’ ruptures with their own past. In The Longest Journey, he finds this explanation not in the religious or mythological continuance of the individual soul after death but rather in the endurance of the dead’s influence on the living through the legacies they leave behind. As I stated above, the centrality of the idea of legacy to Forster’s fiction derives from his awareness of his tremendous debt to his own

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ancestors, the Thorntons. Forster acknowledged this debt in writing his 1956 biography of the clan’s matriarch, his beloved ‘Aunt Monie.’ Marianne Thornton stands as Forster’s great memorial to his ancestors, but he firmly refuses to follow their own habits of commemoration, which he jocularly castigates. Of Marianne’s ‘Pronouncement’ relating the 1814 deathbeds of her parents, Forster writes, ‘The Pronouncement is not merely wordy: it is far removed from us in spirit. [Marianne’s father, Henry Thornton] was ill. He died. His family and his friends were with him. Why cannot his daughter leave it there – keeping the rest in her heart?’ (64–5). Forster objects to the lugubrious length of Marianne’s professions of bereavement, even though they are quite typical for her era: ‘On goes her sad narrative, gently, relentlessly, as if the spirit of the age, which adored deathbeds, was speaking through her lips. Nothing is insincere, nothing strained or in bad taste, but on it goes’ (66). If Forster finds the transmission of their sentiment to modern audiences difficult, ‘not through lack of material, but superabundance’ (69), he still heartily applauds the conviction of the underlying emotion: ‘The twentieth-century observer has to remind himself that inside all this cocoonery of words there was love, there was pain. It was the technique of the age and of a section of the middle class; it lasted, as far as my own family were concerned, into the 1850’s. After that the technique of mourning shortens; it is now very brief and some sensible people cut out mourning altogether. With it they cut down pain, which has practical advantages, and with pain they cut down love. People today love each other from moment to moment as much as ever their ancestors did, but loyalty of soul, such as the elder Thorntons possessed, is on the decrease’ (69). Forster’s nostalgia for the generosity and surety of the Victorian Thornton sentiment, despite his disavowal of the sentimentality of their expression, characterizes Marianne Thornton. Indeed, Forster sees himself as the recipient of the former quality rather than the latter. After the death of Marianne’s beloved nephews in the 1850s, the author tells us with relief, ‘The threnody which began over the elder Henry Thornton in 1815 ends at last.’ The next sentence begins with the announcement of the accession of Forster’s father, ‘Eddie,’ as Marianne’s favourite, as if to suggest this particular branch of the Thorntons will outlive the family’s maudlin tendencies towards bereavement (234). Eddie Forster’s inheritor, the author of this biography, warns his readers that he will not linger over deathbeds or sickness, despite the tendencies of his great-aunt and her siblings to do so (164).

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Marianne Thornton attests to the magnanimity of the eponymous subject, and that of her family, without following the lugubriousness of her rituals of commemoration. Forster rejects ritualized and endless melancholia as his tainted and unacceptable inheritance. As a modern, he lays claim instead to the Thorntonian generosity of spirit – what Forster aptly names ‘the loyalty of the soul’ – that animates Victorian writing, notwithstanding maudlin excesses of expression.5 Forster finds this legacy as important as ‘Monie’s’ literal and liberal legacy of £8,000, which allowed him first to attend Cambridge, then to travel abroad to find inspiration, and finally to write. ‘Whether – in so stormy an age as ours – this is a reputable sequence I do not know,’ he writes, ‘[b]ut I am thankful so far, and thankful to Marianne Thornton; for she and no one else made my career as a writer possible, and her love, in a most tangible sense, followed me beyond the grave’ (325). The biography thus stands as a modern meditation on the inheritance of death itself from the Victorians: it rejects Victorian melancholic deathbed prose in favour of the true Thorntonian generosity of the heart that animates it to its excessive ends. The real heritage, the only one of any value in Forster’s opinion, passes through the spirit rather than through the blood. In his 1939 credo, ‘What I Believe,’ Forster argued for ‘an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky,’ which he believed ‘represent[s] the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos,’ as a new kind of marker for human identity, superseding any other divisions based on birthright (73). His novels demonstrate the importance of this reconsideration of the rights and definitions of lineage predicated on emotional temperament. Margaret Schlegel, for example, inherits Howards End because of her sympathy with Ruth Wilcox’s beliefs in the importance of home and heritage; Evie Wilcox claims, on the contrary, that her mother’s will must be invalid because, she says, ‘Mother believed so in ancestors too – it isn’t like her to leave anything to an outsider, who’d never appreciate’ (104). The narrator of Howards End makes it clear, however, that Evie and her family are the ones who do not appreciate the property as their mother did: ‘To them Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she had sought a spiritual heir’ (102). Ruth Wilcox’s belief in her ancestors manifests itself not, as Evie and her family believe, in the patrilineal rights of material property, but rather in the maternal spirit of nobil-

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ity and generosity. This ancestral voice goads Ruth Wilcox first to separate Charles and Aunt Juley in the conclusion to the third chapter, and then to ensure that Aunt Juley is given shelter and succour within the house. Generosity compels Margaret to ask her husband to use Howards End as a refuge for her pregnant sister, even though this use is denied her through Mr Wilcox’s improper evocation of Ruth Wilcox’s name (322). The novel pivots around the competing claims of the patrilineal inheritance of property (explicitly claimed by the Wilcoxes) and the maternal claims of spirituality and sensitivity (unwittingly staked by Margaret), with the result that Margaret is finally recognized by the Wilcox paterfamilias, Henry, as the rightful heir to Howards End. Much as Forster himself announced his creative debt to Marianne Thornton’s munificence, Margaret finds soon after the funeral that Mrs Wilcox’s death ‘had helped her in her work. She saw a little more clearly than hitherto what a human being is, and to what he may aspire. Human relationships gleamed’ (107). Margaret can rightfully lay claim to this sentiment even before Ruth Wilcox’s death, which is why Ruth recognizes her as a kindred spirit. By the end of the novel the actual material inheritance of the house represents only the Wilcoxes’ ultimate need to recognize Margaret’s kinship with dead Mrs Wilcox. Although Margaret comes to this recognition as a mature adult, Rickie Elliot is only fifteen when The Longest Journey opens. He has no sense of what his legacy from the dead or the past might be. The Longest Journey stands as Forster’s most extended and strenuous analysis of the relations between the living and the dead in that the war over cultural and spiritual legacies is enacted not so much between people, as in Howards End, as within the protagonist’s own soul. As other commentators have suggested, Forster’s novel fits squarely in the trend of rebellious Bildungsromane that gripped British writers during the decade after the publication of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh in 1903.6 The crucial difference, however, between Rickie Elliot and his fictional brethren (including Butler’s Ernest Pontifax, Bennett’s Edwin Clayhanger, Maugham’s Philip Carey, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, and Lawrence’s Paul Morel) is that Rickie’s father is dead before the action of The Longest Journey commences. Other Edwardian Bildungsromane largely structure themselves around the struggle between father-figure and son, in keeping with the iconoclasm of the post-Victorian age. The usual death of the father in these narratives suggests the triumph of the new century over the bour-

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geois and hypocritical values of the preceding era. In Rickie’s case, his despicable father has already died: as the novel begins, he stands possessed of his father’s monetary legacy but has gained no moral victory over a patriarch who passed away before the Oedipal battle could be openly engaged. When one friend expresses his joy that Rickie hates his father, as if expecting narrative possibilities from this antipathy, Rickie’s other friend Stewart Ansell replies, ‘But his father’s dead. He will say it doesn’t count’ (22). The novel suggests that Rickie’s hatred nevertheless does count, and that Rickie will have to struggle with the held-over values of the previous century not through open war with his father, but rather indirectly through his relation to the dead. Rickie must puzzle out the significance of his Elliot legacy by eventually discovering the need to discard it outright in favour of claiming his maternal inheritance of sensitivity and human feeling, what Forster in Marianne Thornton terms ‘the loyalty of the soul.’ Such a gesture is typical in Forster’s work, where invariably the reluctance to articulate feeling is camouflaged by a reliance on all the hideous apparatus of Victorian sentimentalism. Nowhere does this become more evident than through instances of bereavement. In Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, rigid Harriet Herriton firmly believes that her family should go into mourning for her sisterin-law, Lilia, despite having cut the woman off entirely during her lifetime for marrying Gino Carella: ‘She had been detestable to Lilia while she had lived, but she always felt that the dead deserved sympathy and attention’ (104). In Howards End, the narrator describes the Wilcox family’s grief for Mrs Wilcox in vague, mawkish terms, as if to suggest that their grief is an affected formality assumed because of social expectation. Although Henry Wilcox believes he suffers ‘acutely’ after his wife’s death, he cannot remember his wife’s ‘even goodness’ in any particular detail: ‘just the unvarying virtue, that seemed to him a woman’s noblest quality ... Year after year, summer and winter, as bride and mother, she had been the same, he had always trusted her. Her tenderness! Her innocence! The wonderful innocence that was hers by the gift of God’ (93). His children also remember their mother through the Patmorean stereotypes of Victorian familial roles: ‘Their grief, though less poignant than their father’s grew from deeper roots, for a wife may be replaced; a mother never’ (97). The narrator even suggests that the Wilcoxes take a positive delectation in their professions of grief, explaining that, when-

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ever Henry is about to eat during this period, ‘his eyes would fill with tears, and he would lay down his morsel untasted’ (93). Elaborate protestations of grief distance the Wilcoxes from whatever they might really feel. When Ruth’s pencilled will deeding Howards End to Margaret Schlegel surfaces, the Wilcox men focus on the validity of the calligraphy to avoid the disturbing implications of Ruth’s actual wishes: ‘[Henry and Charles] did not make the mistake of handling human affairs in the bulk, but disposed of them item by item, sharply ... It is the best – perhaps the only – way of dodging emotion. They were the average human article, and had they considered the note as a whole, it would have driven them miserable or mad. Considered item by item, the emotional content was minimized, and all went forward smoothly’ (102). Although emotion can be feigned behind ostentatious mourning, the irruption of true feeling into their clockwork lives cannot be countenanced. They can consider only the Wilcoxian material facts of the will, which they can reduce ‘item by item’: they cannot countenance that Ruth’s inheritance must be torqued towards the spiritual rather than the monetary. In A Passage to India, Ronnie Heaslop, cut of the same bourgeois English cloth as the Wilcoxes, must similarly focus on the expectations of society in mourning his dead mother to avoid confronting the upsetting ramifications of her death. Disturbed because he quarrelled with Mrs Moore before her fatal trip home, he is briefly concerned with the problem of ‘What does happen to one’s mother when she dies?’ (286). Ronnie dodges unpleasant implications of this question by decisively concluding, ‘Presumably she goes to heaven, anyhow she clears out’ (286). Just as the Wilcox family parcel out material facts one item at a time, translating feeling into material form, Ronnie Heaslop plans to make a public commemoration for his mother: ‘In due time he and his half-brother and sister would put up a tablet to her in the Northamptonshire church where she had worshipped, recording the dates of her birth and death and the fact that she had been buried at sea. This would be sufficient’ (286). The question of ‘sufficiency,’ then, is not so much one of private feeling but of public material display, a holdover from the great Victorian era, when funerals functioned largely as displays of conspicuous consumption. David Cannadine calls the Victorian celebration of death ‘not so much a golden age of effective psychological support as a bonanza of commercial exploitation. The elaborate funerary and mourning rites were more an assertion of status than a means of

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assuaging sorrow, a display of conspicuous consumption rather than an exercise in grief therapy, from which the chief beneficiary was more likely to be the undertaker than the widow’ (191).7 Forster regarded such specious funerary gestures as both emotionally and morally insufficient, as he makes explicit in his 1922 essay ‘Our Graves in Gallipoli.’ Outraged at Winston Churchill’s attempts to raise money to exalt the memory of the war dead, he decries the lack of expenditures for more pressing human concerns: ‘England cannot spare a penny for anything but her heroes’ graves’ (44). Forster dislikes ostentatious mourning of the Heaslop-Wilcox variety because it diminishes the true memory of the dead. Victorian-style bereavement, in Forster’s view, is an almost masturbatory indulgence that has nothing to do with retaining connections to the past, but concerns rather keeping up appearances for one’s neighbours and one’s self. As he writes in the 1920 essay ‘The Consolations of History,’ ‘To pity the dead because they are dead is to experience an exquisite pleasure, identical with the agreeable heat that comes to the eyes in a churchyard. The heat has nothing to do with sorrow, it has no connection with anything that one has personally known and held dear. It is half a sensuous delight, half a gratified vanity’ (194). After Gerald’s death Rickie Elliot stands as the truest exemplum of this observation. His surprisingly violent bereavement over Gerald expresses a kind of self-indulgence, a continued luxuriation in his sentimental fantasies surrounding Gerald and Agnes. Gerald’s unanticipated demise allows a kind of apotheosis to the love narrative he has constructed about the two, lending to it an imprimatur of tragic grandeur. To Rickie’s mind, his own attempts at short-story writing seem sorry stuff in comparison. ‘Who wants visions in a world that has Gerald and Agnes?’ he wonders (65). Instead of looking to the future – creating his own unprecedented narratives of love and emotion – Rickie chooses instead to look backwards by fantasizing about this clichéd tragedy that seems lifted from the pages of a Victorian popular romance. ‘And so Rickie deflected his enthusiasms,’ the narrator explains. ‘Hitherto they had played on gods and heroes, on the infinite and the impossible, on virtue and beauty and strength. Now, with a steadier radiance, they transfigured a man who was dead and a woman who was still alive’ (65). The ‘transfiguration’ stands as a willed attempt at Rickie’s own artistic self-creation. Despite his self-abnegating protests before the greatness of Gerald’s memory, Rickie’s real office is the promotion of

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himself as the magnificent mourner. After Rickie’s sentimental outburst over Gerald’s death, Agnes deems him ‘greater than they supposed’ (57) and then later feels attracted to him. Stewart Ansell notes that Agnes comes to love Rickie ‘partly to replace another man whom she lost two years ago’ (87). Agnes herself bears this out during her first tryst with Rickie in the dell: ‘She was sitting down with his head on her lap. He had laid it there for a moment before he went out to die, and she had not let him take it away’ (80). As Stewart remarks, the ellipses in the narrator’s syntax suggest that Rickie has become Gerald’s substitute in Agnes’s eyes (182). Rickie himself comes to realize, to his professed puzzlement, that his efforts at glorifying Gerald through grieving have mysteriously effected the opposite result. ‘The devil must have planned it,’ he decides; ‘They had started so gloriously; she had been a goddess both in joy and sorrow. She was a goddess still. But he had dethroned the god whom he had glorified equally. Slowly, slowly, the image of Gerald had faded’ (71). Once the dominated schoolyard victim, Rickie becomes his tyrant’s supplanter by abasing himself to Gerald’s memory. From the beginning of the novel, Rickie conflates the roles of victimizer and victim. As his family history recounted to his Cambridge friends early in The Longest Journey makes evident, Rickie remembers his mother with great sympathy, yet he also finds her complicit in his father ’s patriarchal tyranny. She protests ineffectually against Rickie’s being sent to private school, and she remains incapable, at least in Rickie’s memory, of launching any effective defence against her husband. Mr Elliot’s brutality against his wife even carries with it the suggestion of eroticism. When Rickie, ‘hearing high voices from his father’s room,’ inadvertently comes upon the two together in the first of many primal scenes, Mr Elliot is beating his mother. Like Agnes in the cruel clutches of Gerald, Mrs Elliot does little to ward off ‘the stick of the invalid,’ but rather acquiesces to its power (28). Mrs Elliot’s compliance with her husband’s cruelty adds to her eventual appearance of emotional coldness, suggested by her apparent inability to mourn. After the sudden passing of Rickie’s father, ‘She was much happier, she looked younger, and her mourning was as unobtrusive as convention permitted,’ and, as she exults in her financial freedom, the narrator notes that ‘more and more did her black dress seem a mockery’ (29). Despite her previous subjugation under her husband’s despotism, this refusal to grieve his death renders her, in her son’s eyes, little better than Mr Elliot. Indeed, for at least a

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moment, when she asserts her authority by insisting that Rickie wear his jacket out of doors, Forster suggests that, to Rickie’s thinking, one arbitrary figure of unreasonable authority has merely substituted for another. Rickie’s first and only refusal to obey his mother’s wishes results in the overthrow of this new protective ‘tyrant’: ‘He did not catch cold,’ the narrator explains. ‘But while he was out his mother died. She only survived her husband eleven days, a coincidence which was recorded on their tombstone’ (30). Garrett Stewart has suggested a causal link between Rickie’s defiance and his mother’s death, since he finds ‘no other explanation ... given for her demise’ (183). Given the horrifying results of this rebellion against his ‘real’ mother, Rickie would not likely defy her replacement. During their first tryst in the dell, Rickie lays his head on Agnes’s lap, and she folds ‘him in her arms,’ as if to suggest he is just a babe to be dandled lovingly (82). Indeed, Agnes eventually asserts her phallic maternal authority over Rickie’s career by guiding his efforts in publishing. She cajoles him into renouncing this career when it produces little income, then manoeuvres her husband into his position at Herbert’s school. Agnes unquestionably subscribes to the Edwardian culture, represented by Rickie’s Elliot side, which eschews absolutely private sentiment. ‘She belonged to the type – not necessarily an elevated one – that loves once and once only,’ the narrator comments: ‘Her love for Gerald had not been a noble passion: no imagination transfigured it. But such as it was, it sprang to embrace him, and he carried it away with him when he died’ (215). The ultimate perishability of her feelings even for Gerald are implied when we are told that the flowers she planted at his grave have died, ‘and she had not liked to renew them’ (280). Indeed, when their infant daughter dies, Rickie finds Agnes surprisingly unaffected: ‘She had got over the tragedy: she got over everything’ (203).8 Rickie comes to realize that although he and Agnes found union through their public sanctification of Gerald’s memory, their widely varying private emotional responses to death actually highlight the gulf between them. Indeed, Rickie eventually recognizes through Agnes’s unwillingness to speak about his dead mother that the two women stand further apart than he had previously assumed: He valued emotion – not for itself, but because it is the final path to intimacy. [Agnes], ever robust and practical, always discouraged him. She

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was not cold; she would willingly embrace him. But she hated being upset, and would laugh or thrust him off when his voice grew serious. In this she reminded him of his mother. But his mother – he had never concealed it from himself – had glories to which his wife would never attain: glories that had unfolded against a life of horror – a life even more horrible than he had guessed. He thought of her during these earlier months. Did she bless his union, so different to her own? Did she love his wife? He tried to speak of her to Agnes, but again she was reluctant. And perhaps it was this aversion to acknowledge the dead, whose images alone have immortality, that made her own image somewhat transient, so that when he left her no mystic influence remained, and only by an effort could he realize that God had united them for ever. (182)

The passage not only highlights Agnes’s true differentiation from the emotional world represented in Rickie’s mind by his mother, but also suggests that this other world might actually compensate for the inadequacies of Rickie’s marriage. While Agnes’s lack of any spiritual or emotional depth prohibits her leaving any ‘mystic influence’ upon Rickie, his mother’s image retains its ‘immortality’ and mystery. The mention of Mrs Elliot’s hidden narrative of suffering and illicit love suggests the importance of the maternal heritage awaiting Rickie that has thus far lain latent and ignored. Although the alternative narrative to Rickie’s origins may be suppressed, both by Emily Failing and by the text of The Longest Journey itself, that story ultimately surfaces to explain both Mrs Elliot’s death and Rickie’s and Stephen’s lives. This narrative, occupying the beginning chapter of the third and final section, signals a dramatic irruption in the text. Whereas to this point the novel has studiously swerved from moments of genuine sentiment, favouring instead the socially acceptable venue of sentimentalism for the ‘heroic’ dead, Mrs Elliot’s love affair with Robert injects a depth of feeling into her life that had previously been lacking. Rather than disdain strong feeling, Robert chooses to revel in its potency and generative capabilities. Significantly, he woos her by extolling the virtues of manure, which, although traditionally an emblem of abjection and revulsion, becomes in Robert’s vision ‘no longer dirty stuff, but a symbol of regeneration and of the birth of life from life’ (248). Although her husband practically throws Mrs Elliot into Robert’s arms by treating the matter as ‘French comedy of the best type’

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(253), their love affair would seem to have less to do with the artificiality of that genre than the earthiness and mythos of fable: Robert dies not only drowning, but with his hands behind his back in an ultimate gesture of self-sacrifice. Mrs Elliot returns from the affair in Scandinavia determined to live out the remainder of her life in Victorian conventionality: ‘When her lover sank, eluding her last embrace, she thought, as Agnes was to think after her, that her soul had sunk with him, and that never again should she be capable of earthly love. Nothing mattered. She might as well go and be useful to her husband and to the little boy who looked exactly like him, and who, she thought, was exactly like him in disposition’ (257). Mrs Elliot avoids being Agnes’s true predecessor, however, by denying the cultural ethos of emotional suppression. She achieves this through the legacy of Robert’s sudden death (which is, at least chronologically, the first in the novel): the birth of the child Stephen, who forever ‘altered her life.’ ‘She could still love people passionately,’ the narrator explains of Mrs Elliot after Stephen’s birth, ‘she still drew strength from her heroic past’ (257). Her love for this remnant of her great love has the effect of reviving her emotional life, keeping it distinct and apart from her husband’s control: ‘Her second child drew her towards her first. She began to love Rickie also, and to be more useful to him. And as her love revived, so did her capacity for suffering. Life, more important, grew more bitter. She minded her husband more, not less; and when at last he died, and she saw a glorious autumn, beautiful with the voices of the boys who should call her mother, the end came for her as well, before she could remember the grave in the alien north and the dust that would never return to the dear fields that had given it’ (258). To love becomes another offshoot of Robert’s legacy to Mrs Elliot. Ultimately, this legacy holds more meaning for her than even the money she inherits from her husband. The ‘dust’ of his body, gone to feed the fields of the ‘alien north’ recalls, in sacerdotal cadences reminiscent of the ‘alien corn’ in the Book of Ruth, the manure of which Robert had spoken that brought about growth and regeneration. Mourning revitalizes the emotional awakening that she experienced through Robert’s earthly love, connecting her with it over the gulf left by the violent rupture of his death. Robert’s death fertilizes Mrs Elliot’s emotional world, allowing her to refashion her relations with her husband and children. In this, Robert recalls the dead pagan soldiers at Cadbury Rings, whose corpses, according to Mrs

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Failing cause the splendid proliferation of her mangel-wurzels (140). The intrusion of Robert’s death and its simple and genuine bereavement offer Rickie, as well as the reader, a model for emotional and imaginative growth. The possibilities for the dead to enrich the lives of their survivors – if, and only if, they can grieve for them sincerely, avoiding the pitfalls of sentimental excess – repeats throughout Forster’s fiction. ‘The last word – whatever it would be – had certainly not been said in Hilton churchyard,’ the narrator of Howards End explains after Mrs Wilcox’s death: ‘She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick movements of man. In Margaret’s eyes Mrs. Wilcox had escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly, her own way, and no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin, lowered with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must have withered before morning’ (107). Margaret’s epiphany after Mrs Wilcox’s death goes to the heart of the new relationship between the dead and the living that Forster proposes throughout much of his work. Death may come suddenly and unexpectedly, but it must not be ignored as if it were simply marking off the inexorable passage of human history. The dead must also not be forgotten or altered through the false lens of sentimentality. Rather, Forster’s works propose a manner of bereavement heretofore unexplored in the British novelistic tradition. In Aspects of the Novel, Forster’s study of this tradition, he gives an example of the basic, paratactic progression of events, which he calls ‘the story’: ‘The king died and then the queen died.’ As an illustration for the ‘plot,’ the higher and more sophisticated causal connection of events in narrative form, he writes, ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ (86). His own novels carry this logic to the next step, wherein the king’s death does not quite kill the queen, but irrevocably alters her relation to the past and, through that, to the present. Forster’s reverence for the ‘loyalty of the soul’ exhibited by his Thornton ancestors suggests that this sophisticated relation to the dead is not modern per se, but rather has been overwhelmed by the sentimental tendencies of nineteenth-century British culture. His work unearths and encourages this tradition in order for the further development of the ‘inner life’ (as he terms it in Howards End) to be one day

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successfully integrated into the greater social world of empire and action, to the benefit of the former. In the assumption of this almost Lawrentian prophetic stance, in this insistence upon re-forging British emotional habits and abilities, Forster markedly veers from his avowed novelistic forebears, Austen and Meredith – even though he tries to effect such a revolution strictly through the psychological and emotional aspects of their tradition, the novel of domestic comedy. His model for a work of mourning ‘healthier’ than the false melancholia openly mocked in his fiction allows him a means of moving towards the future while simultaneously, and necessarily, ‘working through’ what the past has signified.9 Nowhere in Forster’s novels does this become more clear than in the conclusion of The Longest Journey, which enacts this arduous cultural reclamation on the most intimate of levels: the family. If the first two sections of the book record Rickie’s conspicuous failure to escape assimilation into the repressive and hypocritical traditions of his father, the ‘Shropshire’ section relates Rickie’s salvation through his laying claim to his mother’s rich emotional legacy. Both the ‘Cambridge’ and ‘Sawston’ paths towards emotional intimacy prove ultimately unsatisfying for Rickie: the academic bonhomie of Ansell and his circle have signified sterility to him, while marriage to Agnes and immersion in her world of restrictions have drained his spirit from him. If these represent the only possible binarisms (one homosocial, the other heterosexual) for finding union in Rickie’s patriarchal culture, he must necessarily locate an alternative logic if he is to achieve a more satisfactory means of emotional fusion with another. In contrast to Cambridge and Sawston as bastions of suburban life, Rickie finds ‘a third type of existence’ in the bucolic Wiltshire landscape (168). The vehicle for this new possibility of union becomes the genius loci of Wiltshire: Stephen Wonham, the legacy of Mrs Elliot (and of Robert) made flesh. Stephen’s physical vitality and aggression originally mislead Rickie into assuming, when Mrs Failing maliciously reveals their blood relation to him, that Stephen is actually his father’s heir. Indeed, Rickie finds that Stephen reminds him much of Gerald, the senior Mr Elliot’s spiritual descendant: ‘[Stephen] was more genial, but there was the same brutality, the same peevish insistence on the pound of flesh’ (115). When Mrs Failing first tells Rickie that Stephen is his halfbrother, his reaction is of horror, as if he were repulsed by the impurity of the class connection and terrified of the threat of usurpation of his

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father’s (and Gerald’s) inherited mantle. ‘He was gazing at the past,’ Forster writes, ‘which he had praised so recently, which gaped ever wider, like an unhallowed grave. Turn where it would, it encircled him. It took physical form: it was this double entrenchment of the Rings. His mouth went cold, and he knew he was going to faint among the dead’ (142). According to cultural codes of gendered conduct, Rickie’s reaction is overtly sentimental, therefore effeminate. ‘He was almost hysterical,’ the narrator informs us, as if Rickie were collapsing before the virility and masculinity of his new-found blood relation. Later, at his wife’s behest, Rickie acts more in keeping with the repressive code dictated by Sawston mores by denying all relations with this threatening usurper. When Ansell later informs Rickie at the Sawston School that Stephen is his mother’s child rather than his father’s, Rickie swoons again, but the difference this time is startling. Rickie’s subsequent changed consideration of his half-brother and of his mother’s memory indicates that this faint is not intended as a sign of sentimental weakness, but rather as a catharsis of genuine sentiment that sets Rickie in a new direction. ‘Something had changed,’ the text explains, ‘He had journeyed – as on rare occasions a man must – till he stood behind right and wrong. On the banks of the grey torrent of life, love is the only flower. A little way up the stream and a little way down had Rickie glanced, and he knew that she whom he loved had risen from the dead, and might rise again. “Come away – let them die out – let them die out.” Surely that dream was a vision! To-night also he hurried to the window – to remember, with a smile, that Orion is not among the stars of June’ (268). The understated tone of this epiphany differs significantly from the extravagant strains of the one in the Pembrokes’ bower after Rickie witnesses Gerald kiss Agnes. Rickie has progressed to a new maturity wherein he has gained access to a sincerity of feeling. In doing so, despite the Sawston School’s insistence upon producing men by anesthetizing the male capacity for sentiment, Rickie has discovered a redefinition of what masculinity (‘as on rare occasions a man must’) entails. ‘Let them die out’ applies not only to the diseased Elliot lineage, but to the very restrictive and proscriptive patriarchal culture it represents. Rickie’s catharsis also enables him to know what it means to love – not according to the sentimental clichés of late nineteenth-century culture, but rather according to the dictates of the heart and the ‘heroic past.’ If his undergoing a marital journey with Agnes has ful-

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filled the promise of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lines from ‘Epipsychidion,’ from which the novel derives its title (‘With one sad friend, perhaps a jealous foe / The dreariest and longest journey go’), his discovery of his dead mother as ‘the Beloved,’ as he now refers to her, also achieves the utopian promise of Shelley’s poem. As in the poem, Rickie, in the last section of The Longest Journey, attempts to find the spirit of his Beloved in the body of another, making possible what John Colmer calls ‘Stephen’s symbolic transfiguration into an image of his dead mother’ (78). Stephen (the mother’s avatar) and Gerald (the father’s) are revealed to him now as sharing only a physical similarity; while Stephen shares Gerald’s bodily robustness, he enjoys a healthiness of spirit and mind the dead man woefully lacked.10 Stephen’s status as an illegitimate child raised in the countryside and brought ultimately to his inheritance recalls the plots of Fielding and Burney, and thus the abiding traditions of the English novel. As the descendant not of Rickie’s father but of his mother, he stands not as the usurper of a patrilineage but as the walking reminder and confirmer of Rickie’s emotional maternal heritage – the legacy of the British novelistic tradition. Rickie plans to live with his half-brother because his mother had wished it; to do so would be to carry out her wishes on this earth, and thus ensure ‘that the Beloved should rise from the dead,’ as he explains to Herbert (267). In the original drafts for this portion of the novel, Rickie actually explains his dream to Stephen in greater depth: ‘“‘Come away!’ said a voice to my mother. ‘Let them die out!’ – and I saw Orion. And I can bear to die out now.” His voice rose prophetically. “I have seen just a little way up and down the generations, and I know there is a purpose in the little tiny corner of the world that I have touched. I stand with my face to the night. But it is not really darkness, for those I have loved are handing the torches on. She has risen from the dead and she will rise again. All that I say leads back to her resurrection. Kiss me, forgive me. Nothing greater could happen to me – not even a child of my own”’ (Abinger Edition 384). In this passage, transfigurative love for Stephen more than adequately compensates for Rickie’s inability to procreate. He learns from ‘the generations’ that what one may achieve and bequeath depends more upon the emotional than upon the material or the genetic. This unpublished passage emphasizes the undeniably eroticized aspects of Rickie’s finding his ‘Beloved’ reborn in his fraternal relations: ‘He put his arms around Stephen and kissed him ... He could not think the matter out. He only

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knew that his mother had risen from the dead.’ Although Forster tones this eroticism down considerably in the published version of the chapter – Rickie asks Stephen to shake his hand – the implications of one man leaving his wife for another man cannot be dismissed, even if the plan seems to be to conduct such relations on the platonic level. ‘I see your game,’ Stephen angrily replies to Rickie, ‘You don’t care about me drinking, or to shake my hand. It’s some one else you want to cure – as it were that old photograph [of Mrs Elliot on the mantlepiece]. You talk to me, but all the time you look to the photograph’ (274). Rickie sadly admits to himself the displacement of erotic energies involved in this scheme, acknowledging that he has turned Stephen into ‘a symbol of the vanished past,’ and longs instead to be back with Stephen in Cadover ‘riding over those windy fields, to be back in those mystic circles, beneath pure sky. Then they could have watched and helped and taught each other, until the word was a reality, and the past not a torn photograph, but Demeter the goddess rejoicing in the spring’ (274). Rickie, accordingly, attempts to meet Stephen on the latter’s own purely physical level, rather than on the emotional plane where their love originated. While travelling together with his half-brother back to Cadover, Rickie even believes he has succeeded in this effort: ‘His health was better, his brain sound, his life washed clean, not by the waters of sentiment, but by the efforts of a fellow-man’ (286–7). The attempt to ground their emotional conjugation on the plane of physical reality, however, is doomed to failure. Rickie’s idea of living together in the woodland seems as idealized and nebulous as his talk of photographs and Orion. Emily Failing’s repeated injunctions to Rickie to ‘beware of the earth’ may be seen as a caution for Rickie not to mask the base facts of what earthly existence with Stephen will entail. Not only are the two men barred from actually procreating, but Rickie seems unaware of Stephen’s inability to curb his bodily appetites. Although Rickie warns his brother that ‘surely it is wrong that your body should escape you’ (284), he is unable to hold Stephen to his promise not to drink. Finding his brother drunk and passed out on the railroad tracks, Rickie himself is killed in his successful attempts to prevent his brother from being run over by an oncoming train. This last of the sudden deaths has proven to be the most disruptive for readers, who have had great difficulty reconciling Rickie’s death with the themes of the novel. Mrs Failing, true to her name, tries to

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obtain the last word by posthumously pronouncing Rickie ‘one who has failed in all he undertook; one of the thousands whose dust returns to the dust, accomplishing nothing in the interval’ (303). Critics concur. Philip Gardner speaks for many when he terms Rickie’s death ‘a kind of immolation – the death of the weak allowing the survival of the strong’ (‘E.M. Forster’ 173).11 Stephen’s survival serves as a kind of Darwinian selection of the fittest, wherein the ability to thrive and beget life supersedes the emotional sensitivity Rickie repeatedly extols. Rickie’s self-sacrifice would then become the consummation of his masochistic tendencies, his utter self-abnegation before what Freud called ‘the great parental authority of Destiny’ (69).12 Rickie’s attempts to break away from patriarchal definitions of male behaviour would all be for nought, in that his emotional fantasies stand as nothing before the punishing wheels of the train, which recalls the metaphor of the ‘elaborate wheels’ of modern industrial and imperialist culture that ‘pinched’ Rickie ‘now and then’ at Sawston (185). Rickie’s death, then, would seem a failure to buck his proscriptive cultural dictates of masculine and emotional behaviour. According to this reading, the last word would indeed be Emily Failing’s, echoed in Herbert Pembroke’s thoughts to himself after Rickie’s death: ‘Of course death is a terrible thing. Yet death is merciful when it weeds out a failure. If we look deep enough, it is all for the best’ (309). For this reason perhaps, other critics have branded not only Rickie Elliot but The Longest Journey in its entirety as Forster’s failure. Certainly during the Edwardian decade, most protagonists in British Bildungsromane triumphed against the perceived narrowness of Victorian culture. Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out proves an exception, since the protagonist Rachel Vinrace also dies after accomplishing her Bildung. Sudden death not only weeds out a failure but identifies one as well. Rickie’s violent demise indicates that his project, conceived upon ‘maturing,’ is ultimately untenable. According to many critics, the novel cannot recuperate from this final rupture and thus represents the ultimate disaster wrought by Forster’s ‘anti-literature.’ The very meaning of ‘failure’ comes under close scrutiny within the text of The Longest Journey, as if to prepare us for any such epitaphs pronounced upon Rickie. Although the Pembrokes and Jacksons pronounce Stewart Ansell’s career ‘a failure’ (225), Stewart himself finds that striving more than compensates for failing: ‘It was worthwhile to grow old and dusty seeking for truth though truth is unattainable, restating questions that have been stated at the beginning of the

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world. Failure would await him, but not disillusionment’ (192). Indeed, although Rickie dies admitting his failure to his aunt, his illusions and aspirations outlive his own mortal frame in the person of Stephen. Rickie’s self-sacrifice becomes not the gesture of a failure, but rather of a true hero. Rickie’s death redefines the term ‘hero.’ Previously in the novel, ‘heroism’ signified a want of empathy, the missing trait that Rickie’s society finds essential in great men. As Mrs Failing explains to Agnes, ‘the chief characteristics of a hero are infinite disregard for the feelings of others, plus general inability to understand them’ (112). If Stephen lives to inherit the earth and people it with his issue, it is only through Rickie’s sacrifice. Yet to inherit from the dead entails a recognition that everyone dies sometime. The cyclicity of death and life is represented in Stephen’s picture of the Demeter of Cnidos; Demeter is ‘mourning the loss of her daughter Persephone, kept by Pluto in the underworld for six months of every year; with her return comes the rejoicing of the earth mother and spring’ (Abinger Edition 421). Rickie may reject the Victorian idea that life succeeds death, yet he also inherits from his mother the notion that death succeeds life. He bequeaths his own legacy to Stephen: ‘let them die out.’ By the conclusion of the novel, Stephen is mindful of his debt to the dead. Although Stephen previously disparaged spirituality – he voraciously reads pseudo-Darwinist tracts on atheism – Rickie’s death alters his outlook considerably. His earlier credo coincides with Emily Failing’s ideal of the antipathetic hero: ‘Here am I, and there are you. The rest is cant’ (287). But the narrator remarks, ‘the rest was not cant, and perhaps Stephen would confess as much in time’ (287). He does admit this as the novel closes. His half-brother’s sacrifice has made possible not only Stephen’s survival, marriage, and begetting of child, but also his financial security as he plans to reap the profits of Rickie’s short stories. Indeed, the whole future would seem to be Stephen’s, yet he remembers whose legacy has made this possible: He was alive and had created life. By whose authority? Though he could not phrase it, he believed that he guided the future of our race, and that, century after century, his thoughts and his passions would triumph in England. The dead who evoked him, the unborn whom he would evoke – he governed the paths between them. By whose authority? ... He had always been grateful, as people who understood him knew. But this evening his gratitude seemed a gift of small account. The ear was deaf,

E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey 185 and what thanks of his could reach it? The body was dust, and in what ecstasy of his could it share? The spirit had fled, in agony and loneliness, never to know that it had bequeathed him salvation. (310–1)

Rickie cannot do much on this earth with the maternal inheritance of sympathy. Yet by dying and passing this inheritance along, he makes Stephen’s future possible. Just as Forster insists in Howards End that Mrs Wilcox’s legacy is more than the materiality of a house, so too do we find that Rickie has more to leave to generations than just physical issue. In dying, Rickie has shown his half-brother the means of bridging the rupture left in the narrative of modern life by the violence of sudden death. Sense can be made out of such a rupture, and life can continue, only if we are mindful of our debt to the ‘heroic past’ and do not hide our feelings for it or mask it through sentimental aphorisms passing themselves off as the genuine article. Rickie, in this way, can make his legacy felt on the earth. As Stephen’s epipsychidion, he will attain the perfect union with another for which he had searched all his life. Although readers might feel uncomfortable with the masochism inherent in a novel whose ‘happy ending’ requires the death of its protagonist, Forster’s emotional logic dictated that the narrative violence of sudden death, and the reconsideration of its significance, was the only possible means of realizing the promise held by his famous epigraph to Howards End, ‘Only connect.’ For Forster, ‘connection’ is possible only on the ideal level of sentiment, and then only in the face of transformation brought about by the violence of modernity. Throughout his novels, reconciliation and understanding occur when unexpected death transforms human relations: Gino Carella’s baby in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Mrs Moore in A Passage to India, Leonard Bast in Howards End. Although Forster writes near the close of Howards End that ‘it seemed impossible to Margaret that healthy life should reemerge’ from the ‘turmoil and horror’ climaxed by Leonard’s death, she comes to realize that ‘there was hope this side of the grave; there were truer relationships beyond the limits that fetter us now. As a prisoner looks up and sees the stars beckoning, so she, from the turmoil and horror of those days, caught glimpses of the diviner wheels’ (345). For Forster, sudden death allows the necessary recognition of the insuperable rupture from the past, but it also allows the transfiguration in human relations that makes possible the promise of the Austenian domestic comedy, the eventual ‘wedding’ of attracted souls.

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P.N. Furbank claims that Forster resolved early in his life to make his stand by the sentimental (E.M. Forster viii). Forster nevertheless was determined that human relations had significantly changed since the nineteenth century, to the point that a recognition of the changes to sentiment was inevitable. Two years before the publication of The Longest Journey, he wrote self-deprecatingly to Robert Trevelyan, ‘What I want, I think, is the sentimental, but the sentimental reached by no easy beaten track – I cannot explain myself properly, for you must remember (I forget it myself) that though “clever” I have a small and cloudy brain, and cannot clear it by talking or reading philosophy’ (Selected Letters 1: 83). The Longest Journey explains this theory not through philosophy but through fiction. The ideal of sentimental accord, which Forster takes as his own inheritance from the nineteenth-century domestic comedy, can be attained only through a recognition of the violent exigencies of modern life that inevitably separate him from the previous era and transform the conditions of that ideal. Forster recognizes his own legacy from the Victorian novel by admitting both what has died and what yet survives.

NOTES 1 Brian May approaches Forster’s ‘modernism’ as a matter of ironic narrative stance rather than formalism. To this May somewhat confusingly contrasts Forster’s ‘Edwardian’ mythicist sympathies, despite the fact that Forster himself would have used the terms ‘Victorian’ and ‘modern’ to define literary history, not the term ‘Edwardian.’ 2 In his 1984 film version of A Passage to India, director and screenwriter David Lean inserts a scene wherein Mrs Moore first gasps and then dramatically collapses on board the steamer en route to England as the ‘ou-boum’ inside her head thunderously resonates on the soundtrack. Even less faithful to the original text, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Howards End includes scenes of Ruth Wilcox declining in her hospital bed as her husband and Margaret Schlegel gather near her. 3 Richards writes that The Longest Journey ‘has the rawness and crudeness and violence we should expect in the work of a very young writer. Those who have not realized the intensity of the dissatisfaction behind Mr. Forster’s work would do well to read it’ (916). Recent critics come to similar conclusions (Kaplan 208; Royle 24). Unless indicated otherwise, all references to The Longest Journey are from the Random House edition (1962).

E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey 187 4 Stewart argues: ‘While still transacting the down-played functions of death in fiction, Forsterian irony sloughs off not only the grandeur but the adequacy of death as an opening to disclosure’ (184). Stewart’s claims are useful for considering how Forster disrupted conventions of death from the perspective of dying characters. His argument falls short, however, in its analysis of what the effect of death is on the surviving characters, how, for instance, Forster handles the mourning process. Stewart’s contention – ’Refusing to die even under the virulent irony of Forster’s pen, British fiction’s by-now canonical death scene nevertheless surrenders its moment ... Nothing turns on it’ (192) – is inadequate as a template for the effects of bereavement that proliferate throughout Forster’s oeuvre. 5 Forster suggests that ‘Monie’ herself tended towards a more concise writing style as the twentieth century approached, as if the onslaught of modernism were undeniable, even for her. ‘The subject matter is important,’ he writes of her letters from the 1860s, ‘but isn’t her style improving? Isn’t there from the 60’s onwards, a terseness and brightness which were lacking in the long leisurely epistles from Battersea Rise?’ (Marianne Thornton 230). 6 Forster, along with fellow modernists, considered the publication of The Way of All Flesh a key moment in twentieth-century literature, primarily for its development into fiction of the Oedipal crisis defined by Freud: ‘Shakespeare was subconsciously aware of the subconscious, and so were Emily Brontë, Herman Melville, and others. But conscious knowledge of it comes only at the beginning of the century, with Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, and only becomes general after 1918 – partly owing to Freud’ (‘English Prose’ 275). 7 For more about the history of conspicuous Victorian bereavement practices, see Morley and Jalland. 8 In an earlier draft, Forster describes at greater length the emotional gulf separating Agnes and Rickie after their daughter’s death: ‘There seemed nothing to do but to exchange comfort, and then bravely to return to life. But soon the man perceived that they could not exchange comfort, because his sorrow was far more terrible, far more complex than hers, and she would never understand it. He did not dare phrase it even to himself’ (Abinger Edition 353). 9 Jesse Matz analyses Forster’s unpublished memoir, begun in 1922 as a letter to the dead Mohammed el Adl, as an attempt to sustain a very different kind of melancholia for his dead lover – what Matz calls a melancholy realism. This melancholy realism resists the sentimentality that Matz

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believes Forster associated with a completed work of mourning for the dead. Matz argues that this new technique of writing about death departs from inherited, Victorian ideas about grieving. 10 The difference becomes more explicit in the omitted ‘Meredithian’ chapter, which, according to Forster, explained what he was ‘driving at’ in The Longest Journey. (See Forster’s undated letter to Edward Joseph Dent, probably written in late April 1907 [Selected Letters 1: 87].) In this chapter, which originally was placed after chapter 12 of the published version, Stephen quarrels with the authorities in Salisbury after Rickie leaves the inn and escapes into the forest, where he removes his clothes and communes with nature. Stephen’s uninhibited naturalness contrasts with Gerald’s priggishness in that Gerald disguises his own beautiful body with clothes (Abinger Edition 332–7). 11 Several critics make similar points (Rosencrance 63; Kaplan 208). 12 Freud writes: ‘In order to provoke punishment from this last representative of the parents, the masochist must do what is inexpedient, must act against his own interests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world, and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence’ (‘Economic Problem’ 169). Stoll conjectures that ‘Gerald has prepared Stephen in another way, too: the self-loathing which characterizes Rickie’s relationship with Gerald/ Agnes anticipates his eventual mutilation and self-sacrifice for Stephen’s sake’ (244).

WORKS CITED Annan, Noel. ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy.’ Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G.M. Trevelyan. Ed. J.H. Plumb. London: Longmans, 1955. 241–87. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Life of Nikolai Leskov.’ Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. 1955. New York: Schocken, 1969. 83–110. Cannadine, David. ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain.’ Mirrors of Mortality: Studies of the Social History of Death. Ed. Joachim Whaley. New York: St Martin’s, 1981. 187–242. Forster, E.M. Abinger Harvest. 1936. London: Arnold, 1965. – Aspects of the Novel. 1927. San Diego: Harcourt, 1955. – ‘The Consolations of History’ (1920). Abinger Harvest. 159–61. – ‘English Prose between 1918 and 1939’ (1944). Two Cheers for Democracy. 272–84.

E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey 189 – Howards End. 1910. New York: Random, 1989. – The Longest Journey. 1907. New York: Random, 1962. – The Longest Journey: The Abinger Edition of E.M. Forster. Vol. 2. Ed. and intro. Elizabeth Heine. London: Arnold, 1984. – Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1956. – ‘Our Graves in Gallipoli’ (1922). Abinger Harvest. 30–2. – A Passage to India. 1924. San Diego: Harcourt, 1984. – Selected Letters. 2 vols. Ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983–5. – Two Cheers for Democracy. 1951. San Diego: Harcourt, 1979. – ‘What I Believe’ (1939). Two Cheers for Democracy. 67–76. – Where Angels Fear to Tread. 1905. New York: Random, n.d. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Economic Problem in Masochism’ (1924). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 19. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. 159–70. – ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). Standard Edition. Vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 243–58. Friedman, Alan Warren. ‘Forster and Death.’ The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon. Ed. Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. MacNiven. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1987. 103–13. Furbank, P.N. E.M. Forster: A Life. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Furbank, P.N., and F.J.H. Haskell. ‘Interview with E.M. Forster.’ Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1958. 23–36. Gardner, Philip. ‘E.M. Forster and “The Possession of England.”’ Modern Language Quarterly 42 (June 1981): 166–83. – Ed. E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1973. Jallan, Pat. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Kaplan, Carola M. ‘Absent Father, Passive Son: The Dilemma of Rickie Elliot in The Longest Journey.’ Twentieth-Century Literature 33.2 (1987): 196–210. Matz, Jesse. ‘“You Must Join My Dead’: Forster and the Death of the Novel.’ Modernism/Modernity 9.2 (April 2002): 303–17. May, Brian. ‘Modernism and Other Modes in Forster’s The Longest Journey.’ Twentieth-Century Literature 42.2 (1996): 234–57. Morley, John. Death, Heaven, and the Victorians. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1971. Richards, I.A. ‘A Passage to Forster: Reflections on a Novelist.’ Forum 78.6 (1927): 914–20.

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Rosencrance, Barbara. Forster’s Narrative Vision. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Royle, Nicholas. E.M. Forster. Plymouth: Northcote, 1999. Stewart, Garrett. Death Sentences: Ways of Dying in British Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Stoll, Rae H. ‘“Aphrodite with a Janus Face”: Language, Desire and History in Forster’s The Longest Journey.’ Novel 20.3 (1987): 237–59. Trilling, Lionel. E.M. Forster. 1943. New York: New Directions, 1965. Wilson, Angus. ‘A Conversation with E.M. Forster.’ Encounter 9.5 (1957): 52–7.

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7 Heredity and Disinheritance in Joyce’s Portrait bradley d. clissold

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) counters the hackneyed inheritance plot of the traditional English novel by offering in its stead an iconoclastic disinheritance plot. In accord with modernist sensibilities, Joyce’s protagonist resists and divests himself of inherited aesthetic forms, social practices, and familial traits. Beneath the surface of Joyce’s novel of youthful rebelliousness lies a rich discursive subtext of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas about heredity, a subtext that is capable of reaccentuating well-known textual events and opening up lesser-analysed details of the novel. This naturalist subtext becomes clearer when Portrait is reread against May Sinclair’s novel of development, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), a novel that inherits much of its own significance through interpretive contrast with Joyce’s. In light of these considerations, I suggest that theories of evolution and contemporary discourses of legal and scientific inheritance, which influence Mary Olivier’s sense of herself in the modern world, are also the hidden shaping forces at work in Stephen Dedalus’s development as modern artist and individual subject. The word ‘inheritance’ refers broadly to a variety of transmissions – including material, biological, aesthetic, cultural, and psychological – that pass, consciously and unconsciously, from a predecessor to a designated successor. My argument depends on such conceptual flexibility because Stephen’s struggle with the authority of the Church, aesthetic literary influences, and Ireland’s colonial status, all structurally resemble and become inextricably linked to his Oedipal efforts to avoid becoming like his father. The etymological root of words like ‘heredity,’ ‘inherit,’ and ‘heir,’ as well as their connection to cognates such as ‘adhere’ and ‘inherent,’ reveal how the vocabulary of heredity

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has been – often unwittingly – appropriated by and incorporated into various political, scientific, legal, and aesthetic discourses. Ultimately, issues of heredity, inheritance, and disinheritance provide an interpretive framework to re-explore Joyce’s formal experimentation, Stephen’s motivations for his rebelliousness, and aspects of the Irish colonial context in Portrait.1 To designate Joyce’s Portrait a novel of disinheritance requires that the classic English inheritance plot, which it staunchly refutes, be accepted as part of a continuing, pervasive, and influential novelistic tradition. Speaking to what he perceives as a dominant and stable ideological narrative convention of the English novel from Tom Jones (1749) to Great Expectations (1861), Marxist critic Franco Moretti argues that ‘the recognition-inheritance pattern, virtually non-existent in European narrative, is instead the most typical form of the English happy ending’ (205). Such claims, however reductive, provide a contextual springboard for my reassessment of Joyce’s Portrait that depends on shifting the concept of disinheritance from being a passive act (to be disinherited) to an active one, where the disinherited individual is also the agent of his own disinheritance (to disinherit oneself).2 Tropes of legal and biological inheritance, as well as family blood ties, in Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, The Return of the Native, and Great Expectations verify Q.D. Leavis’s observation of ‘the new scientific interest in heredity characteristic of Victorian literature, and a corresponding new interest in what determines conduct’ (55–6).3 Jo Alyson Parker defines the archetypal structure of the inheritance plot as follows: ‘at the outset the protagonist, deprived of his or her rightful inheritance, must embark on a quest for security and position; by the end, he or she has been revealed or recognized as the proper heir and has come into wealth – or, at least, an elevation in social position’ (11). For Parker, the inheritance plot ‘is based on a notion of continuity, not radical change’ and serves a ‘conservative agenda’ by restoring the dispossessed to their due positions and re-establishing proper lines of descent. The English propensity to produce fictions that reinforce such ‘[f]airy-tale justice’ finds its source in the English Revolution and aristocratic feudal authority (Moretti 205). For the landed aristocracy of the seventeenth century facing the dislocations of industrialized modernity, it was important to recover lost origins and restore hereditary rights, to pass from generation to generation the wealth and moral prerogative that sustained their positions, especially in the face

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of bourgeois social and economic mobility. Edmund Burke epitomizes this conservative strain in his reaction to the French Revolution: ‘The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers’ (27–8).4 By appealing to and rhetorically employing a vocabulary of inheritance, posterity, and succession as a counterpoint to revolutionary usurpation, Burke reasserts the authoritative principle of transmission: a return to the traditions of a hereditary monarchy and hereditary allegiances. He also establishes the hereditary discursive practices that will frame subsequent discussions of Irish politics, aesthetics, and national identity. ‘You will observe,’ he writes, ‘that from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity – as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right ... We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors’ (29). His political pamphlets effectively align traditional British values with conservative politics and issues of biological and legal inheritance. The ‘sacredness of an hereditary principle of succession’ is distinctively neoclassical in its according of proper place to individuals, and Burke’s argument is implicitly organic in his call to regenerate deficient parts of the constitution through its unimpaired parts (19). In effect, he employs a rhetorical strategy that links the biological concept of inheritance with the legal one of precedence in order to argue that political succession is part of a natural order and ‘the pedigree of our liberties’ (28). In like fashion, the inheritance plots of early English novels reinscribe the sense of rightful inheritance and legitimacy, the supposed cornerstones of British society. Indeed, inheritance plots often provide solutions to narrative problems by tying up loose ends and resolving conflicts. As a result, they play an indispensable role in the tradition of early realist fiction because they offer narrative closure as well as a legitimate return to established order. Such camouflaged foundational narratives cannot disguise their indebtedness to classic fairy tales; ‘invariably in these novels, genteel birth will out – as clearly as it does when the princess feels the pea’ (Parker 12). Nor was this fairy-tale

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structure of the inheritance plot lost on Joyce, who purposefully evokes the tradition in the clichéd opening lines of Portrait and then immediately undercuts the contingent genre expectations with an ellipsis that trails off into dislocated images of, among other things, bed-wetting and threats of graphic physical punishment: ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo’ (3). In Portrait, disinheritance is not only Stephen’s goal in his bid for independent modern subjectivity, but also Joyce’s formal and thematic goal. Stephen Dedalus’s attitude towards inheritance and filial piety is much more reminiscent of Thomas Paine’s advocacy for individual freedom in The Rights of Man, where he argues against Burke: ‘There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist ... any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controuling [sic] posterity to the “end of time”’ (12). This rhetorical battle using the shared vocabulary of inheritance reveals the extent to which little understood mechanisms of descent functioned culturally and ambiguously to support opposing views on social revolution. The question became whether inheritance was natural and common to all, or whether, as it manifested itself in political traditions, it was a form of arbitrary control, imposed rather than inevitably determined. The very model of inheritance – still scientifically unproven – that Burke adopts in his political tract is the same one that Paine counters in his polemical response when he labels adherence to ancient traditions ‘hereditary despotism’ (19). For Burke, hereditary succession and the principle of inheritance constitute the British way of life past, present, and future, whereas Paine categorically dismisses any outmoded concept of descent if it results in the denial of individual rights and freedoms: ‘Those who have quitted the world, and those who are not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can exist between them; what rule or principle can be laid down that of two non-entities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and who never can meet in this world, the one should controul [sic] the other to the end of time?’ (13–14). The answer to Paine’s rhetorical question – as any late nineteenth-century naturalist would argue – is the ‘obligation’ of inherited genetic traits and environmental conditions. Unfortunately, contemporary theories of evolution and heredity, while having powerful sway over social and cultural attitudes, were

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not grounded in empirical science. As a result, an aura of mystery surrounds issues of inheritance and biological determinism from the midnineteenth century until well into the twentieth. Goldie Morgentaler begins her study Dickens and Heredity with the enabling disclaimer that ‘The mechanics of heredity, the laws that govern it, the way it works to produce resemblance and the implications of genetic transmission have only become known [scientifically] in the twentieth century’ (ix). However, even today genetic testing remains highly speculative, providing information that is read in terms of probabilities and possibilities, but not certainties. Doubt about inheritance keeps Stephen Dedalus optimistic about his future; the disjunction between what is popularly believed and what can be actually proven opens a space to alter and resist the modes of inheritance. The Bildungsroman as a genre also unwittingly locates itself amid emerging theories of hereditary transmission and conceptual modes of inheritance because it positions the protagonist’s life as a text to be read.5 Coincidentally, nineteenth-century scientists such as Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel studied developing organisms as texts constituted from an accumulated past, while the Bildungsroman charts a protagonist’s development through significant experiences as they reveal and shape individual character: ‘O, he’ll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly’ (Joyce 33). As novels of formation, Bildungsromane selectively focus attention on events that teleologically lead to the emergence of selfhood and individual identity. With Portrait, this final state of personal realization is left open ended. Stephen’s decision to leave should be read as the first step in that realization because it alters the determining force of locale. In a sense, all such works record the shaping moments of modern subjectivity and therefore engage in the nurture versus nature debate.6 Novels of development tend, however, to highlight the socialization of individual protagonists for the simple reason that significant life events are narratable via observation, whereas hidden genetic processes are not. From the perspective of a reading public, hereditarily fated characters have less dramatic potential and act as pessimistic reminders that free will and choice may not exist. At the same time, theories of evolution, literary-scientific movements like naturalism, and investigations into heredity all call into question the human concept of individuality. Evolution sees the supposed individual as merely a link in the chain of evolutionary descent and environmentally determined natural selection; naturalism argues

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that individuals are not unique, but are bound and shaped by the complex influence of biology and environment; and theories of heredity attempt to explain and predict – again using the analysable textuality of the individual – the transmission of mental, physical, and personality traits from generation to generation. In other words, to paraphrase Herbert Spencer, the concept of individuality has no meaning scientifically because it is impossible to determine where interconnected individualities, influenced by the same factors, begin and end. In Portrait, Stephen similarly struggles to assert the boundaries of the individual modern subject in the face of deterministic pressures. His development is a battle against ‘the tyranny of his organisation’ – a dilemma that Spencer foregrounds in The Principles of Biology (1864): ‘If a strawberry-plant sends out runners carrying buds at their ends, which strike root and grow into independent plants, that separate from the original one by decay of the runners, must we not say that they possess separate individualities; and yet if we do this, are we not at a loss to say when their separate individualities were established?’ (286). In the novelistic tradition, the representation of the growth of the single life in the Bildungsroman is a philosophical search to determine individuality that is at once conscious of and in conflict with such biological distinctions. The future-oriented development of the protagonist in the Bildungsroman, coupled with the scientific view of the individual as a nexus of deterministic forces and a carrier of a composite past, generates productive tensions in naturalist fiction. The modernist experimentation with form and the corresponding subjective representation of character via free, indirect speech, narrated stream of consciousness, and interior monologue exaggerate these tensions. May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier In a 1918 article for The Egoist, May Sinclair places the stream of consciousness techniques employed by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage within a literary genealogy of naturalist works, including Joyce’s Portrait: ‘I too thought, like Mr. Beresford, that Miss Richardson has been the first to plunge. But it seems to me rather that she has followed independently, perhaps unconsciously, a growing tendency to plunge. As far back as the eighties the de Goncourts plunged completely, finally in Soeur Philomène, Germinie Lacerteux, and Les Frères Zemganno ... Miss Richardson has not plunged deeper than James Joyce in his

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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (‘Novels’ 57). Having read Portrait by the time she began work on Mary Olivier, Sinclair recognized Joyce’s novel as a predecessor in both narrative technique and genre. The close parallels between Sinclair’s novel and Joyce’s begin with the highly impressionistic opening sections of their respective works. Sinclair follows Joyce’s attention to childhood mnemonics in alliterative and phrasal repetition and in the influences of parental authority, most notably by establishing the setting of naïve, early memories in the parental bedroom: The curtain of the big bed hung down beside the cot. When old Jenny shook it the wooden rings rattled on the pole and the grey men with pointed heads and squat, bulging bodies came out of the folds on to the flat green ground. If you looked at them they turned into squab faces smeared with green. Every night, when Jenny had gone away with the doll and the donkey, you hunched up the blanket and the stiff white counterpane to hide the curtain and you played with the knob in the green painted iron railing of the cot. It stuck out close to your face, winking and grinning at you in a friendly way. (Mary Olivier 5)

In both opening passages, the authors offer uncontextualized memory fragments of developing sensory perceptions: the first conscious impressions of individual environmental experience. What Joyce does for the male-protagonist Bildungsroman in early British modernism, Sinclair does for the female-protagonist counterpart. Although Sinclair’s novel follows Mary Olivier into middle age, the ending is as indeterminate as Joyce’s. Whereas Stephen sets out on a journey of self-discovery to the continent in the final pages of Portrait, Mary turns inward to authenticate her individual identity at the close of Mary Olivier. Joyce deals with politics, social structures, and religious practices in turn-of-the-century Ireland; Sinclair deals with similar influences in the British context; and heritability underpins the search for identity of both protagonists. Identity may be a product of free decision-making and idiosyncratic experience or of deterministic forces like biology and environment beyond an individual’s control. Not only does Sinclair’s Mary Olivier capture the struggle to develop an independent modern consciousness from a female perspective at the turn of the century, but her novel also signals the extent to which

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this struggle for identity was threatened, compromised, and often guided by popular notions about deterministic inheritance. Joyce, for instance, does not refer to heredity as explicitly in Portrait as Sinclair does in Mary Olivier. Yet reading Portrait through Mary Olivier reveals just how much contemporary ideas about inheritance informed and textured the construction of Joyce’s novel of development. As Sinclair’s protagonist wrestles with the forces of patriarchy embodied in the family’s traditional gender roles and institutionalized religious practices, she turns for answers first to the philosophical writings of Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel, and then to contemporary theorists of evolution and heredity. Lindley Vickers, a temporary love interest, piques Mary’s interest in issues of heredity when he tries to explain who she is and why: ‘Women,’ he said, ‘are wonderful. I can’t think where you come from. I knew your father, I know Dan and your mother, and Victor Olivier and your aunt ... They don’t account for you.’ ‘Does anybody account for anybody else?’ ‘Yes. You believe in heredity?’ ‘I don’t know enough about it.’ ‘You should read Haeckel – The History of Evolution, and Herbert Spencer and Ribot’s Heredity. It would interest you ... No, it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t interest you a bit.’ ‘It sounds as if it would rather.’ ‘It wouldn’t ... Look here, promise me you won’t think about it, you’ll let it alone. Promise me.’ (326–7)

Vickers abruptly changes his mind about recommending these writers to Mary because he knows her family history. It includes her Aunt Charlotte’s insanity, her brother Roddy’s heart disease, her Uncle Victor’s suicide, and her father’s and brother Dan’s alcoholism – all conditions that nineteenth-century scientists like Theodule Ribot, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Maudsley argued were inheritable (Raitt 224). In Heredity (1875), for example, Ribot argues that mental state, disease, and personality traits are heritable: ‘Nay, even if with the evolutionists we recognize in heredity a force which not only preserves, but which also creates by accumulation, then not only is the character transmitted, but it is the work of fate, made up bit by bit, by the slow and unconscious but ever accumulating toil of generations’ (qtd in Raitt 223–4). In The History of Creation (1868), Ernst Haeckel argues,

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with a similar broad certainty, that ‘the will is never free, but is always determined by external and internal influences. These influences are for the most part ideas which have been either formed by Adaptation or Inheritance, and are traceable to one or other of these two physiological functions’ (qtd in Raitt 223). Far from helping Mary to understand herself, the scientific thinkers of the day on heredity torment Sinclair’s protagonist with possible fates and forceful, yet unsubstantiated, views about inheritance. Mary’s own response, ‘I don’t know enough about it,’ summarizes the state of knowledge on heredity during the period from 1879–1900, which incidentally covers the years of Stephen Dedalus’s life in Joyce’s novel (c. 1880–1903).7 However, Mary is convinced that ‘There must be something in heredity ... “If there is I’d rather face it. It’s cowardly not to”’ (Mary Olivier 331). The collection of books she reads provides her with a spectrum of contemporary thought concerning lineal descent: ‘Herbert Spencer’s First Principles, the Principles of Biology, the Principles of Psychology; Haeckel’s History of Evolution; Maudsley’s Body and Mind, Physiology and Pathology of Mind, Responsibility in Mental Disease; and Ribot’s Heredity’ (331–2). For Mary, each writer’s conviction belies the speculative nature of his hypotheses: ‘Maudsley was solemn and exalted in his desire that there should be no mistake about it. “There is a destiny made for man by his ancestors, and no one can elude, were he able to attempt it, the tyranny of his organisation”’ (333). She further states, ‘You could see why Ribot was so excited about his laws of Heredity: “They it is that are real ...”’ (332). Mary struggles with contradictions between theories of inheritance because her future identity is at stake. It is one thing to struggle against the systemic patriarchy of late Victorian and early twentiethcentury society; it is quite another to rail against the fatalistic entrapment of biological determinism. These theoretical discussions have personal implications for Mary: Is she destined to inherit the insanity that plagued her aunt? Is her heart similarly defective? Is she genetically predisposed to alcoholism or even suicide? Would she ‘go like’ them (Mary Olivier 334)? ‘According to Darwin, it didn’t seem likely that anything so useless as insanity could be inherited at all’; on the other hand, ‘according to Maudsley and Ribot, it seemed less likely that sanity could survive. To be sure, after many generations, insanity was stamped out; but not before it had run its course through imbecility to idiocy, infecting more generations as it went’ (332). Within both of these hypotheses, however, choice and independent agency

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cease to play a role in future development. Mary recapitulates her predicament using ‘net’ imagery to articulate her despair and feelings of imprisonment: You had been wrong all the time. You had thought of your family, Papa and Mamma, perhaps Grandpapa and Grandmamma, as powerful, but independent and separate entities, in themselves sacred and inviolable, working against you from the outside ... You had thought of yourself as a somewhat less powerful, but still independent and separate entity, a sacred, inviolable self, struggling against them for completer freedom and detachment. Crushed down, but always getting up and going on again; fighting a more and more successful battle for your own; beating them in the end. But it was not so. There were no independent, separate entities, no sacred, inviolable selves. They were one immense organism and you were part of it; you were nothing that they had not been before you. It was no good struggling. You were caught in the net; you couldn’t get out. (333)

While this reflective preoccupation with hereditary destiny is only one of the many interpretive frames Mary uses to understand her place in the world, it comes to dominate her perspective. Her intellectual mentor, Mr Sutcliffe, dismisses the pursuit: ‘You don’t mean to say you’ve read this horrible stuff?’ (336). When pressed to say whether or not there is any truth in these claims about heredity, he acknowledges the speculative nature of such investigations: ‘you know as much as I do’ (336). As a result, everyone, especially their actions and character traits, appears ‘caught’ in ‘the net of flesh and blood’ (406). Fittingly, when Mary broaches the subject of heredity on two occasions, men dismiss the issue. On the surface these responses appear to be protective gestures, but such gestures also serve to protect the privilege of patriarchal authority that the discourses of heredity uphold. Moreover, Mary’s repeated use of the net metaphor explicitly recalls Stephen Dedalus’s famous pronouncement, ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets’ (Joyce 220). Inherited traditions and genetics entrap the modern subject as it aspires to autonomy. The noted double sense of the word ‘by’ meaning simultaneously to fly ‘around’ and ‘with the aid of’ in the context of inheritance suggests the problem of escaping deterministic destiny. Just before Stephen leaves Dublin, he professes

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melodramatically and independently, ‘I go ... to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ (276); ironically, however, he does so while his mother is packing his ‘new secondhand clothes’ – an image that conveys the inability of ever fully escaping a deterministic past (275).8 A Portrait of Naturalism Stephen is Émile Zola’s ‘experimental novelist,’ representing, exploring, and testing the weight of the two deterministic principles of heredity and environment. For Zola, ‘the determinism of living beings’ is something that will eventually attain the certainty of chemistry and medicine, but it begins as the offspring of doubt (17). The interpretive key to his 1880 naturalist manifesto, however, is his conviction that ‘Determinism dominates everything,’ coupled with the repeated admission that the specific nature of this determinism remains a scientific mystery (18). Zola articulates the poles of speculation: ‘Without daring, as I say, to formulate laws, I consider that the question of heredity has a great influence in the intellectual and passionate manifestations of man. I also attach considerable importance to the surroundings’ (19). He champions ‘determined facts,’ but accepts the present state of unsettled determinism, confident that in the future science will develop into a more advanced state to confirm what the ‘experimental novel’ currently investigates. Stephen’s experimental bias towards nurture means that the principles of determinism must be inversely proportional such that a rejection of the bonds of heredity will focus greater attention on environment, something that Stephen can control as it exerts control over him. Stephen’s situation is best represented by Zola’s claim that ‘In our experimental novel we can easily risk a few hypotheses on the question of heredity and surroundings, after having respected all that science knows today about the matter’ (52). In the post-naturalist literature of modernists like Joyce, protagonists are forced to fight inheritances that stifle individual expression. While exploiting the tenets of naturalism, these works also reveal the unresolved status of naturalist principles. Because of that status, Stephen achieves the confidence necessary to overcome the paralytic, self-fulfilling prophecy of hereditary entrapment. A complex tension therefore structures Portrait on the level of narrative and metanarrative, a tension that dwells on problems of inheritance. Joyce inherits an unresolved naturalism from his literary

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predecessors, and that naturalism sets the stage for Stephen’s struggle to escape the controlling forces of authority in his life. This struggle is highly modernist in its revolutionary impetus, as the novel thematically and allegorically follows the protagonist’s efforts to escape his naturalistic destiny. In Portrait, Stephen takes Pascal’s wager as it applies to heredity. If his destiny is predetermined by genetic transmission, then he cannot control its course. In fact, it is useless even to fight such determinism. However, if environmental factors, not genetics, are determining his behaviour and future options, then he can control his life to the extent that he can control his environment. Without concrete knowledge, though, Stephen cannot know whether nature or nurture is the predominant factor or even the degree to which they play a combined role. Therefore, according to the logic based on the payoff matrix of these two possibilities, it stands to reason that Stephen should attempt to change his environment. If environment is not the controlling condition for human destiny, then he has lost nothing; on the other hand, if it is the controlling condition, he has gained everything, most notably control over his own future. In a world of increasing relativity, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when scientific facts were being destabilized and called into question, the only hope for the modern subject is the hope generated by taking such a bet. Stephen’s departure from Dublin at the end of the novel involves a physical rejection of his environment and a conceptual rejection of heredity as an ideology. In a sense, Stephen disavows turn-of-thecentury speculations on heredity in order to explore the depths of his personal agency. As he prepares to leave Ireland, his diary entries become inflected by this rejection of the past as a controlling force: ‘The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future’ (Joyce 273). He has seen in his father’s life a preview of his fate and is bent on avoiding it: ‘Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes. – A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past’ (262). For Stephen from an early age, not surprisingly, ‘Any allusion made to his father by a fellow or by a master put his calm to rout in a moment’ (80). Stephen challenges his artistic genealogy by symbolically creating an alternative familial lineage in terms of traditional patterns of inher-

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itance. These acts of defiance dovetail structurally with his attempt to escape the biological determinism of his genetic make-up. Standing on the steps of the University College Dublin Library, Temple bluntly asks Stephen, ‘Do you believe in the laws of heredity?’ (Joyce 250). As if he has not heard, Stephen leaves the question unanswered. He resembles Maudsley in ‘Body and Mind,’ who admits that, when it comes to definitive statements about theories of hereditary transmission, ‘we are not yet in a position to say positively’ (365). Temple’s question may be unanswerable, but the entire novel documents Stephen’s struggle to understand if and how the laws of heredity affect his development as a modern artist. As a neophyte author-figure, he finds himself writing in and out of inherited traditions of British literature. As a young artist, Stephen fails to produce much work of lasting value. His juvenilia consist of a failed attempt to write a poem about Parnell after the Christmas dinner fiasco; a revisionist poem about his encounter with Emma at Harold’s Cross, which ends with a fictional kiss withheld in reality; and a somewhat strained villanelle that pointedly berates Emma almost ten years later for her ‘ardent ways’ (Joyce 73–4, 240–3). Stephen’s choice of the villanelle and Joyce’s inclusion of the entire poem in the text of the novel sets up the aesthetic shift to the idiosyncratic diary entries that close the novel. The villanelle, originally a sixteenth-century French verse form, was made current by English decadent poets, including Austin Dobson, Ernest Dowson, Sir Edmund Gosse, William Henley, and Oscar Wilde, who were bent on disrupting didactic Victorian literature in the final decades of the century. By writing a villanelle, Stephen follows a poetic trend instead of developing an independent style. He commits his personal vision to a highly deterministic and rigidly fixed form. Stephen’s use of the form becomes all the more significant when he abandons this fashionable poetics for the subjective diary fragments that signal his emergence as an individual artist. When Stephen makes his decision to leave Dublin for Paris – severing familial, nationalist, religious, linguistic ties – he breaks his aesthetic ties to Victorian England and finds a characteristically modernist voice in his writing.9 While none of these textual incidents are new to Joycean scholarship, they reveal Joyce’s concern for issues of heredity and disinheritance, matters that have received limited critical attention to date. Stephen’s artistic growth is clearly linked to his colonial status and is contingent upon his Jesuit education; the ways in which Joyce’s narrator and Dedalus describe these influences, however, highlight the

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shared rhetoric of authoritative heredity at work in seemingly diverse experiential domains. The peer-driven push to revive the Irish language, for instance, provides Stephen with an opportunity to express his desire not to be indebted to the past and the blood lines that precede him: ‘My ancestors threw off their language and took another ... They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made?’ (Joyce 220).10 For Stephen, even cultural inheritance implies hereditary indebtedness; accordingly, it is a debt he refuses to pay and a bequeathed obligation he cannot respect. His linguistic struggle comes to a head in the celebrated scene when he meets with the dean of studies and engages in a discussion about word origins. For the dean, a coneshaped instrument for pouring liquids into containers with small openings is a ‘funnel,’ whereas for Stephen it is a ‘tundish’ (203–4). On the surface the difference between the two words figures the split between traditional English and Anglo-Irish usage. Consequently, Stephen reflects on the colonial shadow cast over him in Ireland. He suffers from an inherited anxiety of status experienced through language: ‘– The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language’ (205). However, he later checks the etymology of ‘tundish’ only to discover that it is ‘English and good old blunt English too’ (274). Stephen cannot depend on a fixed sense of linguistic lines of descent to focus his efforts at disinheritance, but neither can he fully escape the colonial context and, more important, the appropriation of a vocabulary of heredity that sets the terms for interrogating such colonial anxiety. This recurring tension goes beyond mere etymology and the politics of empire; in fact, it problematizes Stephen’s struggle with identity as he tries to establish to what degree antecedent factors determine identity. In a sense, his struggle is against the controlling authority found in various accepted common laws – laws of heredity, property, and poetry – that govern self-construction. His battle is metaphorically with the great champion of British common law, Sir Edward Coke, who, paradoxically, established the basic legal rights of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the Crown and the Church, as well as

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the principle of precedence. The concept of common law as a jurisprudence shared by all and applicable to all theoretically grants individuals a form of legal democratic security. In the most abstract sense, precedence re-establishes an antecedent example or standard, however enlightened, against which to measure subsequent analogous instances. It therefore serves a controlling function, determining how an agent or power acts in the future, and it conforms paradigmatically to the hereditary pattern of descent between parent generations and offspring. Accordingly, while this legal system maintains a stable judicial order benefiting the individual, it also regulates inheritance. Coke declares, ‘No man can institute a new kind of inheritance not allowed by the law,’ and his legal pronouncement similarly resonates prohibitively in the fields of heredity and aesthetic practices (qtd in Byrne 472). In fact, such comprehensive views of legal inheritance derive and retain much of their rhetorical force from similar all-inclusive claims made by scientists studying biological inheritance. In ‘Body and Mind’ (1870), Henry Maudsley argues, ‘No one can escape the tyranny of his organization; no one can elude the destiny that is innate in him, and which unconsciously and irresistibly shapes his ends’ (qtd in Raitt 223). The laws of heredity lend credence and a vocabulary to the laws of legal inheritance and precedence. Again Coke proves useful when he states, ‘Whatsoever may be inherited is an hereditament’ (qtd in Byrne 443). His legal terminology is borrowed and draws attention to the shared Latin root hereditas, which also underpins the discursive practices of scientific inquiries into ancestral descent. Stephen’s acts of disinheritance evoke Coke’s legal distinction between corporeal and incorporeal inheritance and extend that distinction to the difference between transmissions of material objects and hidden mental characteristics from parent to offspring. Legally, this means the difference, respectively, between real property such as lands, tangible possessions, or wealth (real money), and non-tangible privileges such as advowsons, dignities, offices, annuities, tithes, easements, and franchises. With incorporeal hereditaments, the immaterial honours, titles, and rights of the father are inherited by the son, much like the invisible transmission of inherited genes: automatically and with no criterion of merit or act of choice. Stephen’s trip to Cork with his father foregrounds his dilemma concerning material and biological inheritance. He finds himself seated in a railway carriage bound for the county of his father’s people to sell

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family property. In essence, Stephen, as the eldest male offspring, is brought along on the trip to bear witness not only to his father’s celebrated homecoming, but also to his own material disinheritance. Simon’s financial mismanagement forces him to sell the property that is Stephen’s birthright according to the laws of primogeniture. Taking the night train to Cork – a train that is cheaper than the daytime passenger trains – Stephen senses his shift from childhood to adulthood: ‘As the train steamed out of the station he recalled his childish wonder of the years before ... But he felt no wonder now. He saw the darkening lands slipping past him, the silent telegraphpoles passing his window swiftly every four seconds, the little glimmering stations, manned by a few silent sentries, flung by the mail behind her and twinkling for a moment in the darkness like fiery grains flung backwards by a runner’ (Joyce 92). Using free, indirect style, Joyce’s narrator describes images of loss, ‘passing,’ and intervening distance nuanced by Stephen’s perspective and vocabulary. The landscape is charged with symbolic meaning wherein the discarded ‘mail’ (male) and the fading lights of the train stations along the route stand in for Stephen’s disappearing childhood. As he is forced to confront the stark realities of the adult world, he feels his ‘dispossession’ doubly (92). Simon Dedalus’s penury coincides with Stephen’s rejection of his parentage and the entailments of his biological inheritance. He attempts to leave behind his past at the same time as his father tries to relive his and make Stephen part of the legacy. However, the oral history that Simon relates to his son during the train ride fails to register with Stephen as an inheritance worth preserving: ‘He listened without sympathy to his father’s evocation of Cork and of scenes of his youth, a tale broken by sighs or draughts from his pocketflask whenever the image of some dead friend appeared in it or whenever the evoker remembered suddenly the purpose of his actual visit. Stephen heard but could feel no pity’ (Joyce 92). Stephen distances himself emotionally from his father’s recollections. Simon’s intermittent drinking and histrionic pauses are part and parcel of the inheritance that Stephen refuses. To express sympathy or show pity requires an affinity of feelings, an expression of likeness with the father-figure that he resists. Simon exacerbates these Oedipal tensions by bragging that his son has yet to best him. Stephen feels embarrassment and foreboding because his father’s actions seem his responsibility and potential future. After trying to cover his father’s case of delirium tremens at

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breakfast, he reflects, ‘One humiliation had succeeded another: the false smiles of the market sellers, the curvettings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirted, the compliments and encouraging words of his father’s friends. They had told him that he had a great look of his grandfather and Mr Dedalus had agreed that he was an ugly likeness. They had unearthed traces of a Cork accent in his speech’ (Joyce 99). Simon’s drinking companions search Stephen for family likenesses. The vocabulary of inheritance, ‘One humiliation had succeeded another,’ ‘likeness,’ and ‘unearthed traces,’ betrays Stephen’s principal concern, which is more profound than mere shame. Simon’s fellow barflies insist, presumably to Stephen’s delight, that he is ‘not his father’s son,’ because Stephen does not flirt with the opposite sex (100). Relentlessly, Simon draws Stephen back into the proper line of descent by identifying him as a usurper of the father’s past glories, when he declares, ‘By God, I don’t feel more than eighteen myself. There’s that son of mine there not half my age and I’m a better man than he is any day of the week’ (100). One of the drinking companions articulates the underlying Oedipal threat informing the father’s belittlement of the son: ‘Draw it mild now, Dedalus. I think it’s time for you to take a back seat.’ This unsolicited advice prompts Simon to sing his own praises even more and to challenge his son directly: ‘I’ll sing a tenor song against him or I’ll vault a fivebarred gate against him or I’ll run with him after the hounds across the country as I did thirty years ago along with the Kerry Boy and the best man for it’ (101; emphasis added). Even before this defensive assertion of parental rivalry, Stephen struggles to maintain an identity separate from his father. The careful organization, simple diction, and sentence structure of his transcribed thoughts reveal his vigilant attempt to prevent a blurring of personalities: ‘I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria’ (98). The interchangeability of his and his father’s names in the final two sentences indicates the difficulty of asserting individuality. In like fashion, the reference to Victoria as another term in this transposable triad of names focuses attention on the problematic environmental imposition of the British in Ireland: an unwanted legacy, an unwanted, hereditary queen. The defining moment of the trip occurs as Stephen is forced to endure his father’s nostalgic return to Queen’s College, the university he attended in his youth. Pathetically, Simon asks to see the anatomy

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theatre so that he can search for the desk in which he carved his initials for posterity. Stephen refuses to participate in this self-indulgent recovery of the family past, remaining in the background, ‘depressed more than ever’: ‘On the desk before him he read the word Foetus cut several times in the dark stained wood. The sudden legend startled his blood’ (Joyce 95). Stephen has an epiphany at the sight of the ‘dirty’ word connected to sexuality, birth, death, and Catholic prohibitions concerning abortion. The supposed depravity implicit in the word bespeaks the depravity of his mind: ‘to find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind’ (95; emphasis added). The word foetus reminds Stephen of the sexualized riot of his thoughts, and invokes an imaginary scenario stronger than any of his father’s previous stories. The father, whose moocow story made such an impression on Stephen as a young child, is displaced as a dominant influence by an alternative ‘legend’: ‘A vision of their [the absent students’] life, which his father’s words had been powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of the words cut in the desk’ (95). When his father finally discovers his carved initials – identical to those of his son – the blush is still on Stephen’s face and his thoughts are elsewhere. He feels no connection to his biological father. Instead, he locates likeness outside the hereditary line of descent. Accordingly, the word foetus resonates with issues of heredity because it at once connotes genetic continuity, as the unborn child is already marked by hereditary traits and also suggests an aborted break in the lineage. This moment marks a turning point in the novel and in Stephen’s life. His subsequent rebellion results from his struggle to escape the biological determinism that his father’s existence represents. Thereafter Stephen is obsessed with usurping his father’s authority through surrogate father-figures like the priests of the Church whose designation as ‘fathers’ initially recommends them, but when he abandons the Church, all that remains is his own, independent, mythologizing authority.11 Rewriting the Laws of Disinheritance Disinheritance of the eldest male heir in Stephen Dedalus’s day was not unheard of; it occurred in rare instances. Writing in 1895, Evelyn Cecil claims, ‘Eldest sons do not habitually lay themselves out with a kind of prurient perverseness to cross their father’s path, and thrust every conceivable cause of friction into the family agreement. Were

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they actuated by no higher motive, a feeling of family pride, and desire to avoid scandal and gossip, would generally exercise a wholesome restraint’ (204). It is in the best interests of both parties involved – father and son – to maintain the familial relationship in appearance if nothing more. By the time Stephen travels to Cork, his father has forfeited his material inheritance. In doing so, he undermines family pride. To disinherit means to treat the excluded heir as if he had predeceased the bequeathing figure. Stephen’s figurative death scenes throughout the novel are attempts to bring this state of affairs into being – a dissolution of the bonds of inheritance. Stephen acknowledges and rejects his privileged position even as he considers his brothers’ and sisters’ fates; quite arbitrarily, ‘All that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest’ (Joyce 176), and all of this had been prearranged by inherited patriarchal kinship structures. It may seem peculiar to identify Stephen Dedalus as a victim of patriarchy, but he is just as much locked into determined roles as eldest male as the rest of his siblings, male or female. Primogeniture, the patriarchal legal authority ensuring that men retain control of inheritable estates and properties, excludes women from political power by denying them the necessary requirements of property ownership and material wealth. It also entraps male offspring, including the supposedly privileged eldest.12 By the time Stephen is old enough to inherit his father’s property legally as the eldest son, there is virtually nothing of material value left. All of it has been either pawned or sold, with the exception of the family portraits, reminders of the biological inheritance that threatens Stephen’s aspirations. His attempts to separate himself from family, especially the lineage of his father, are efforts to be disinherited from his father’s will – in both senses of the word. Even the title of the novel gestures in this direction as scholars such as Hugh Kenner have documented: the indefinite article ‘a,’ rather than the definitive ‘the,’ indicates that this ‘portrait’ represents one malleable perspective among many. Indeed, the history of portraiture is inextricably linked to familial descent. Before the invention and democratization of photography, portraits visually preserved important relationships with the past. The best portraits were those that most closely resembled their subjects and, by extension, mimetically immortalized physiognomic lineage. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, for example, portraits prove that family members look alike across centuries and generations. Family portraiture not only supplies a visual record of

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descent, but the portraits themselves become heritable fetishistic objects that position descendants vis-à-vis prestige, wealth, luxury, and privilege. In Portrait, the Dedalus family frequently changes its accommodations in order to stay ahead of people to whom Simon owes money. With each move, the Dedaluses carry the family portraits with them. Over the course of one such move, the family’s misfortunes and worsening financial state are registered in the description of household space and the location of the portraits. The narrator notes that, ‘Uncle Charles dozed in a corner of the half furnished uncarpeted room and near him the family portraits leaned against the wall’ (Joyce 68). The sleeping uncle and the dyspeptic father represent the continuation of the Dedalus line, which extends from the figures in the portraits, through the father and uncle, to Stephen. Sitting ‘on a footstool beside his father listening’ (68), Stephen heeds the implications of patrilineal descent implicit in the narrative description and in his father’s talk of enemies: ‘He felt that he was being enlisted for the fight, that some duty was being laid on his shoulders’ (68). Stephen fights against such indebtedness and deterministic portraiture.13 Family portraits, as framed representations, contain energies and animosities. Their closed-off, formal boundaries function in opposition to the Bildungsroman tradition by negating character development and circumscribing future growth. Metaphors surrounding portraiture reveal what is at stake in Joyce’s passing reference to the Dedalus family portraits. Portraits ‘capture’ an individual’s identity as a fixed, trans-historical signifier; individual subjects are ‘positioned’ passively by the artist on a two-dimensional canvas and defined for posterity. In the words of Dorian Gray, ‘There is something fatal about a portrait’ (Wilde 117). The represented physiognomy of the subject stands in mimetic relation to the actual person, just as that person’s portrait subsequently stands in mimetic relation to the lines of ancestors and successors once it is placed among other family portraits. These ‘relations’ can be read visually and historically; they index deeper, underlying hereditary relations that remain invisible to the human eye, but that are nevertheless threateningly controlling. Portrait is Stephen’s selfportrait, his attempt to remove himself from patrilineage and to generate a fictive genealogy that eliminates inherited authority, including the authority of genetic transmission. Although Simon Dedalus’s disinheritance of Stephen is neither vindictive nor based on the son’s lack of merit, it does highlight an issue

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of consanguinity that torments Stephen. His greatest fear is that the very laziness and incompetence that have occasioned his material disinheritance is blood inheritable, and he wishes to defy this legacy. In one case of hereditary foreshadowing, Stephen usurps his father’s role as provider after he claims his ‘exhibition and essay prize’ money (Joyce 102). With £33 in his pocket, he temporarily heads up the family. He tells his mother, father, brother, and cousin, ‘We had better go to dinner’ (103). His father echoes Stephen: ‘Well, I suppose we had better’ (103). Simon assumes a position with the rest of the family following Stephen’s authoritative lead: ‘He [Stephen] walked on before them with short nervous steps, smiling. They tried to keep up with him, smiling also at his eagerness’ (103). Stephen’s windfall, however, quickly leads to financial mismanagement. He dismisses the dinner expense, ‘It doesn’t matter about the dearness,’ and goes on an elaborate shopping spree: ‘parcels of groceries and delicacies,’ theatre excursions, ‘squares of Vienna chocolate,’ bedroom renovations, tram rides, and ‘presents for everyone’ (103–4). He even ‘drew up a form of commonwealth for the household by which every member of it held some office, opened a loan bank for his family and pressed loans on willing borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making out receipts and reckoning the interests on the sums lent’ (104). Stephen’s controlling activities effectively eliminate, albeit temporarily, his sense of indebtedness to his family and intentionally place them in his debt, but these altered relations are very short-lived. The son who usurps the father’s place in the family confirms his status as his father’s son when he loses everything. Stephen seemingly inherits his father’s inability to manage finances. His bankruptcy ends with a ‘sensible loss,’ returns his household to ‘its usual way of life’ (Joyce 104), and recalls Simon’s earlier bankruptcy, which Stephen remembers in detail from childhood. On the back of his father’s ‘second moiety notices,’ which are legal notices in bankruptcy proceedings (Gifford 163), Stephen tries to write a poem about Parnell (73). He is unable to produce a poetic work honouring his father’s fallen king, using as his material support a symbolic document of disinheritance addressed directly to Simon and indirectly to Stephen via patrilineal succession. The entire episode leading to Stephen’s bankruptcy becomes charged with the naturalist dilemma that he lives. Subsequently, as he ponders his alienation and difference from his family, he does so using a vocabulary of heredity: ‘He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them in the mystical

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kinship of fosterage, fosterchild, and fosterbrother’ (105). Stephen envisions his own orphaning, something that will facilitate his exiled liberation from blood ties and hereditary transmissions, not to mention the environmental influences of Dublin society. Joyce’s protagonist soon becomes wary of any suggestion that forces beyond his control exist within him. At one point, the ordained director of Belvedere College asks Stephen if he has a vocation: ‘Stephen parted his lips to say yes and then withheld the word suddenly’ (Joyce 170). The priest repeats the question without the word vocation, ‘I mean have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire to join the order. Think’; Stephen answers, ‘I have sometimes thought of it’ (170). The priest repeats the question without the word ‘vocation’ because he fears that Stephen is too young to understand it. On the other hand, Stephen cannot label his desire to join the order a ‘vocation’ because he is attracted by the ‘secret knowledge and secret power,’ the confessional access to ‘the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts ... of women and of girls’ (170). The priest’s command to ‘think’ about a vocation undermines the very concept of vocation as a predetermined calling that requires no thought and eliminates choice: ‘the sacrament of Holy Orders ... imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark that can never be effaced’ (173). As much as Stephen is perhaps superficially reluctant to lie to a priest about having a vocation, he is also reluctant to admit that things like vocations, based as they are on hidden inner compulsions, can exist at all. Such an admission would recognize the existence of an ineluctable form of determinism within him. Just as Stephen avoids answering Temple’s question about heredity – in part because he doesn’t know and in part because he wants to repress thoughts about his genetically determined future – he must avoid answering the priest’s question about vocation because it would foreground the greatest threat to his individuality. The Church offers Stephen an impersonal, identity-less role, complete with a predetermined script. He rejects this role, just as he rejects the potential hereditary script assigned to him by his family, because structurally and consequentially they amount to the same thing. Recognizing this struggle for independence from all things hereditarily inflected, Stephen’s confidante, Davin, challenges the disinheritor for being ‘[a]lways alone’ and a ‘born sneerer’ (Joyce 218): ‘I can’t understand you ... One time I hear you talk against English literature. Now you talk against the Irish informers. What with your name and

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your ideas ... Are you Irish at all?’ (219). Even the language Davin uses enters the nature versus nurture debate as he labels Stephen a ‘born sneerer,’ suggesting that he has, figuratively speaking at least, an innate contempt for all things Irish and English – the two most influential factors affecting a person living in colonial Dublin. Stephen doesn’t deny this charge, because he cultivates this demeanour. However, he does offer to show Davin his family genealogy to prove his Irish roots: ‘Come with me now to the office of arms and I will show you the tree of my family’ (219). On the surface Stephen’s desire to confirm his ancestral lineage confuses matters even more, since he is preoccupied with escaping these life-shaping associations. By calling attention to his blood-line and by revealing his disconnection with its deterministic influence, Stephen exposes the Burkean, organic metaphors of roots and family trees to be functional in only a figurative, rather than a literal and therefore deterministic, way. Set against the tyrannies of biological and material inheritance, Joyce’s Portrait reveals a complex disinheritance at work in the Bildungsroman tradition that is fundamental to the growth and emergence of individual identity. The constant changes in family finances and living space introduce Stephen, as a child, to the all-important concept of mutability: ‘For some time he had felt the slight changes in his house; and these changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world’ (Joyce 67). In spite of his introduction to the possibilities of change, most of Stephen’s early perceptions, aesthetic and otherwise, inevitably stem from songs and stories his father passes on to him. During the Christmas dinner argument over the fall of Parnell, Stephen watches his father’s improvised performance to gauge his own response: ‘Stephen, seeing and hearing the hotelkeeper through his father’s face and voice, laughed’ (27). Appropriately, Stephen sees and hears ‘through his father’s face and voice’ because they are, through heredity, a version of his own face and voice, a living portrait of inheritance. By the end of the novel, Stephen has attempted to replace his biological father’s influence with surrogate fathers in the Church, then with the mythological figure of Daedalus, his adopted progenitor. Once he abandons thoughts of the immutability of his blood inheritance, Stephen is left with ‘a new wild life ... singing in his veins,’ which he gambles does not carry the fateful genetic coding of his father and his father’s ancestors (185). Recycled literary forms and pernicious cultural influences give way to Stephen’s own first-person narration as he asserts himself

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independently as an artist and individual through his diary entries. His journey of self-discovery and self-assertion begins as soon as he realizes that he is not necessarily genetically or environmentally committed to a predetermined inheritance. For Stephen Dedalus, as for Mary Olivier, the modernist narrative of development is shaped by and becomes the product of efforts to come to terms with the claims of naturalism and Ribot’s fundamental question: ‘Is the I, the personality, the constituent element of the individual, transmissible by heredity’? (qtd in Raitt 220). Indeed, issues of inheritance are inextricably entwined with the quest for personal identity found in the Bildungsroman tradition, and in Portrait Stephen actively explores Ribot’s question by disinheriting himself from the bonds of legal, biological, and aesthetic succession.

NOTES 1 Other critics have addressed Joyce’s fiction in relation to colonial and post-colonial theory; see Attridge and Howes, Cheng, Duffy, and Nolan. 2 Alternatively, Terry Eagleton describes the dislocations of ‘post-colonial’ Ireland – as viewed from the perspective of the imperial metropolitan centre – as a form of denied inheritance: ‘the “no-time” and “no-place” of the disregarded colony, its fractured history and marginalized space, can become suddenly symbolic of a condition of disinheritance which now seems universal’ (298; emphasis added). 3 For studies that focus specifically on the relationships between Darwinian evolutionary theory (the ‘development hypothesis’) and literary representation, see Beer, Henkin, Carroll, and Levine. For discussion of the role played by ‘extinction discourse’ in the Irish colonial context, see Brantlinger. For a close reading of Darwinian discourse at play in Joyce’s fiction, see Bowers. 4 In much the same way as I am positing Burke’s Reflections as a starting point for investigating the pervasive use of a vocabulary of inheritance and heredity – that was still in its infancy and little understood, yet nevertheless brought to bear on agonistic issues of modernity, revolution, and the assertion of identity – Seamus Deane begins Strange Country by calling Burke’s Reflections a ‘foundational text’: a text from which ‘a whole tradition can be derived’ and ‘one that allows or has allowed for a reading of a national literature in such a manner that even chronologically prior texts can be annexed by it into a narrative that will ascribe to

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5

6

7

8

9

10

them a preparatory role in the ultimate completion of that narrative’s plot’ (1). Both Joyce’s Portrait and Sinclair’s Mary Olivier are more accurately Kunstleromane, because each follows the growth of struggling artist figures trying to come to terms with their artistic destiny. For a more nuanced account of how the generic protocols of the classical Bildungsroman are rearticulated in a colonial setting and serve to sublimate the various forms of homosociality and homoeroticism that supply Stephen with possible modes of colonial resistance and self-knowledge, see Gregory Castle’s essay ‘Homoeros and Colonial Bildung.’ According to Moretti, there is a strong symbolic link between youth and modernity which resulted in the evolution of the Bildungsroman tradition in literature at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘Youth is, so to speak, modernity’s “essence,” the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past’ (5). Youth and its narrated development, Moretti argues, allow European cultures to negotiate the dynamism and instability of modernity. These dates correspond with Joyce’s biographical chronology: Clongowes Wood College (1888–91); Belvedere College (1893–8); University College (1898–1902); Paris (1902). The image of second-hand clothes dovetails nicely with the works of Irish cultural theorists (Castle, Deane, Kiberd) who view modern Irish nationalism as an inescapably hybridized state of identity formation. For a similar discussion of the self-conscious dialectical pull of aesthetic association and autonomy as it relates to literary representations of Irish national identity in the works of James Clarence Mangan and James Joyce, see Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature. See also Deane, Strange Country. For readings of the transformative power of Irish cultural representations in a post-colonial context, see Lloyd, Ireland After History, and Gibbons. Arguably, Stephen’s admiration for Byron and complete dismissal of Tennyson provides another example of his flouting of expected lines of literary descent. For an analysis of the way Joyce’s fictional works critique Irish revivalism (as well as anthropological imperialism), yet ultimately help to redefine Irish nationalist identity against idealized misrepresentations of Irish life and culture, see Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival. For other studies that call into question the complicity of Anglo-Irish revivalist movements with imperialist agendas and investigate the role of Irish literary representation in destabilizing any authentic sense of national Irish-

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ness that is not at once conflicted, hybrid, and constructed, see Deane, Celtic Revivals; Kiberd; Lloyd, Anomalous States. 11 David Lloyd similarly argues that the displacement of actual and inadequate surrogate fathers in Portrait generates a ‘perpetual tension … between the desire for self-origination, to produce oneself as if without a father, and the awkward knowledge of indebtedness to what precedes and influences the subject’ (Nationalism 162). 12 Primogeniture lingered legally until 1926 in England and was commonly practised in most of Ireland as the preferred system of inheritance. Celtic tribes in ancient Ireland also practised ‘tanistry,’ by which the tribe elected an heir apparent during the chief’s lifetime. In tanistry the most vigorous male, not necessarily the eldest son, stood first in line of succession. 13 When Stephen complains to the rector of Conglowes about his unfair pandying by Father Dolan, he must walk past the portraits of saints that line the hallway leading to the rector’s office: ‘It was dark and silent and his eyes were weak and tired with tears so that he could not see. But he thought they were the portraits of the saints and great men of the order who were looking down on him silently as he passed’ (Joyce 57). In a symbolic gesture, Stephen defies the traditional authority represented in the portraits by moving beyond their downward-looking guardianship to assert himself against the arbitrary authority of Father Dolan.

WORKS CITED Attridge, Derek, and Marjorie Howes, eds. Semicolonial Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge, 1983. Bowers, Paul. ‘“Variability in Every Tongue”: Joyce and the Darwinian Narrative.’ James Joyce Quarterly 36.4 (1999): 869–88. Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. J. Pocock. 1790. Cambridge: Hackett, 1987. Byrne, W.J. A Dictionary of English Law. London: Sweet, 1923. Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Heredity and Disinheritance in Joyce’s Portrait 217 Castle, Gregory. ‘Homoeros and Colonial Bildung in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ Quare Joyce. Ed. Joseph Valente. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998. 157–82. – Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Cecil, Evelyn. Primogeniture: A Short History of Its Development in Various Cultures and Its Practical Effects. London: Murray, 1895. Cheng, Vincent. Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Deane, Seamus. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest UP, 1987. – Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1997. Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern ‘Ulysses.’ Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. New York: Verso, 1995. Gibbons, Luke. Transformations in Irish Culture. Cork: Cork UP, 1996. Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Henkin, Leo. Darwinism in the English Novel 1860–1910. New York: Russell, 1963. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. New York: Penguin, 1993. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Leavis, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis. ‘Dickens and Tolstoy: The Case for a Serious View of David Copperfield.’ Dickens the Novelist. London: Chatto, 1970. 34–117. Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. – Ireland After History. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1999 – Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Maudsley, Henry. ‘Body and Mind.’ Otis 364–9. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. New ed. Trans. Albert Sbragia. London: Verso, 2000. Morgentaler, Goldie. Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like. New York: St Martin’s 2000. Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. Otis, Laura, ed. Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

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Paine, Thomas. The Rights of Man. 1791. London: Dent, 1915. Parker, Jo Alyson. The Author’s Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the Establishment of the Novel. Dekalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1998. Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000. Sinclair, May. Mary Olivier: A Life. 1919. New York: New York Review of Books, 2002. – ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson.’ Egoist 5 (April 1918): 57–9. Spencer, Herbert, ‘Principles of Biology.’ Otis 285–89. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. New York: Oxford UP, 1981. Zola, Émile. ‘The Experimental Novel.’ 1880. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. B.M. Sherman. New York: Haskell, 1964. 1–54.

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Anything from my mother is mine, of course. Bowen, The House in Paris 53 We have everything to dread from the dispossessed. Bowen, Bowen’s Court 455

We might indeed, as Elizabeth Bowen admonishes us, have everything to dread from the dispossessed, but we also have much to hope of them. No one clung to this hope more anxiously or wrote about this dread more disturbingly than Bowen herself. In the 1930s, a decade Bowen once sadly inventoried as ‘a catalogue of calamities’ (HP 73), she wrote two novels, The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart, that testified to the depth of her knowledge of the dispossessed.1 It was a knowledge partly born of personal experience of her country and class, partly the shared acquisition of the modern, interwar generation of writers. In its collective impact, such knowledge took the form of a genealogical impasse. Novelists from Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E.M. Forster to later modernists such as Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote of their time and social prospects with all the mixed emotions of those consciously addressing the last of their line. Such anxiety about succession shadowed hopes for the future even at the dawn of the new, confidently modern century. Conrad and Ford published a novel in 1901 so sardonic about the prospects of a continuing human tradition that The Inheritors promised by their title came from the fourth dimension. Conrad and Ford described this triumphant

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breed as a ‘race clear sighted, eminently practical, incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical traditions; callous to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable and immortal’ (9–10). Other authors were less extrasensory and supra-terrestrial in envisioning lines of succession. Their vision of the modernist future did not encompass such a totalitarian liberation from ethical traditions, art, and the body’s subjection to pleasure and pain. Yet for them, too, the modernist determination to make everything, including human relationships, new was often baffled by the question of who would inherit their vision of a transformed humanity and ensure that it would survive the tumult and hazards of change. It was a question whose answer often entailed imagining new forms of moral or spiritual kinship. Edward Said, noting the prevalence of ‘childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths and unregenerately celibate men and women’ in the world of high modernism, argues that modernists were intent on forging ‘new and different ways of conceiving human relationships ... that would substitute for those ties that connect members of the same family across generations’ (17). But what Said terms ‘relationships of affiliation’ often seem less replacements, than creative adaptations of the family ties that bind and secure a human patrimony. The modern novel abounds in portraits of iconoclastic artists and radical individualists, but the rebel sons or daughters of modern fiction find themselves unexpectedly drawn to the fretful benefactors and dazed parents who yearn to bestow on deserving heirs the moral and material goods in their keeping: Forster’s Mrs Wilcox, eager to bequeath Howards End to its spiritual legatee; Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay, whose legacy is vital to the fruition of Lily Briscoe’s spinster art; Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, a father who offers his home and extends his heart to a potential spiritual heir; and Waugh’s Tony Last, whose name proclaims a family doom and the general fate of his tribe. To this modernist preoccupation with genealogical impasse Elizabeth Bowen brings a distinct personal authority and, as we shall see, a singular solution. She was the first woman in her family to inherit the family estate, Bowen’s Court, but the last to inhabit and otherwise enjoy possession of it. In Bowen’s Court, her scrupulously researched, at times acidic, and commendably unguarded history of the family and its material and social vicissitudes, she is the family chronicler whose final subject is, alas, herself: ‘So Henry VI died, and I as his only child

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inherited Bowen’s Court. I was the first woman heir; already I had changed my father’s name for my husband’s. We had no children’ (BC 448). But even writing as the last of her line, Bowen, with her deep imaginative and emotional investment in place, contemplates the trans-generational life that abides not so much between as within its walls: ‘What runs on most through a family living in one place is a continuous, semi-physical dream. Above this dream-level successive lives show their tips, their little conscious formations of will and thought. With the end of each generation, the lives that submerged here were absorbed again. With each death, the air of the place had thickened: it had been added to. The dead do not need to visit Bowen’s Court rooms – as I said, we had no ghosts in that house – because they already permeated them. Their extinct senses were present in lights and forms’ (451). As if to consecrate this belief that all genuine inheritances materially absorb and preserve the life they sponsor, the book ends with the revivifying word ‘alive’: ‘There is a sort of perpetuity about livingness, and it is part of the character of Bowen’s Court to be, in sometimes its silent way, very much alive’ (459). Bowen’s insistent recourse to words, images, and structures of persisting life suggests a lingering, altogether reasonable anxiety that her inherited world is in imminent danger of succumbing to the onslaught of war, the erosion of time, financial reverses, all the misfortunes that beset and can defeat the staunch, but limited, human will (HBL 109). Sometimes this will can exert itself grammatically, in the sheer persistence of a grammatical tense that defies the verdicts of history. Bowen’s Court, as Maud Ellmann observes, ‘stands as a funerary monument to Bowen’s Court the house, razed to the ground in 1960,’ yet in her 1964 reissue of this book, Bowen decided ‘to preserve descriptions in the present tense, as if the building were still standing’ (Ellmann 42–3). Bowen’s Court is a work of the Second World War and its aftermath, when extinction – of life, of property, of a family line – could no longer be decently contemplated as merely a personal or local catastrophe.2 It should be read along with and against Bowen’s contribution to The Heritage of British Literature, initially published as a slim stand-alone book in 1942, then reissued with essays by other writers in 1953. The burden of her argument there is that the English novel is a ‘living ... part of the British heritage’ and ‘has helped to build up her heroic Today’ (HBL 109). Both works articulate a general doctrine of familial and cultural inheritance that was forged in the 1930s, a time of deep social unsettlement and widespread economic dispossession.3 The

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importance, as well as pathos, of The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart, derives from that unsettlement. These major novels of the 1930s had proposed, tested, and confirmed, with different degrees of certainty, Bowen’s conviction that there is ‘perpetuity about livingness.’ They are fictions of inheritance that would help to fortify Bowen’s belief in a tradition that survives whatever particular devastations might be visited upon it. Both novels centre on bastard or orphaned children alternately unsure of, and insistent on, their rights as inheritors within an established, if imperilled, familial line. Because they are children, we have even more to dread from them, especially if they are – and insist on remaining – innocent. Such adamant children are the favoured progeny of Bowen’s own surprisingly renegade imagination. Surprisingly, because her own prose and narrative postures are so studied and sedate, infused throughout with an irony available only to the most dispassionate adult minds. Nevertheless, her loyalties are with the disenfranchised and guiltless, yet always dangerous, young. Angus Wilson, a sympathetic but shrewd critic of her work, notes that Bowen had ‘one of the principle features of the great romantics – a total connection with her own childhood, and, by an imaginative force, with many other kinds of children’ (9).4 That connection and force incited her genealogical dread even as they fed her hope. The innocent, Bowen contends in one of her fiercest defences of culpable innocence, refuse to countenance ‘the system of our affections’ and so must ‘exist alone’: ‘Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet – when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round’ (DH 106). A political allusion seems to lurk in this final reference to victims strewn all round, making us wonder whether nations, too, might be similarly ‘innocent’ in building their ‘heroic To-day.’ Or perhaps these victims are the casualties of the effort, endorsed by Said, to create new ‘institutions, associations, and communities whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by biology but by affiliation’ (17). What is undeniable is that victims are strewn all round both novels, although The House in Paris, the earlier work, is the more scrupulous in documenting the carnage. It is a novel riddled with apocalyptic metaphors and knotted, tormented sentences, a novel written, it often seems, in a mood of controlled hysteria,5 some of it often slyly humorous, but much of it grim, even murderous. The atmosphere of the sick-

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room, in which many of the intergenerational exchanges in the novel take place, permeates the story until the last pages, when its feverish vision is exposed to a disinfecting light.6 The object of such close and cloistered attention is Leopold, a child at once disowned and clutched too fiercely. His leonine name anticipates and reflects the fierceness of his need for the mother who relinquished him. As the novel opens, he is in Paris, visiting not a house, but the house in Paris where his mother first met his father, where his father killed himself, and where he now hopes to be reunited and restored to the mother he has never known. He finds there another child in transit, Henrietta, who will initially act as impertinent spectator of the household drama playing out before her; Mme Fisher, an invalided, life-exhausted sibyl, darkly telling fortunes and revealing the septic past to the children brought to her bedchamber; and her daughter Naomi, his mother’s friend and, once, his father’s fiancée, who, despite the double betrayal that led to Leopold’s birth, acts to bring about the reunion of mother and child. Leopold, in the singleness of his innocent purpose, enters the novel dangerously full of the bastard-avenger’s apocalyptic will: ‘he wanted to crack the world by saying some final and frightful thing’ (HP 22–3). What infuriates him is the mystery surrounding his own birth, a mystery inflated to unnatural proportions by the tactful but miscalculated consideration of his adopted family and by the suggestive panoply of his adopted home, Rome: ‘To have been born became to be on the scale of emperors and popes, to be conspicuous everywhere, like the startling white Vittorio Emmanuele monument. He was, in fact, full of the bastard’s pride’ (23). This is an early instance of the narrator’s ability to enter into the bastard’s pride – the most frightful, yet superb form of emotion the dispossessed might feel – and to reproduce its logical and syntactical contortions. Bowen is a writer prone to awkwardness, and it is often difficult to tell how much of her tangled prose is expressive of psychic distress, how much faithful to the dense tangles of morally complex feelings, how much indebted to modernist obscurantism.7 Still, we may be sure that for a writer of Bowen’s deliberate cadences, a phrase as oddly constructed as ‘to have been born became to be’ is the product of conscious and purposeful effort. The question is then: why labour in the service of the clumsy and maladroit? Surely it must be that in such ungainly, pained expression Bowen seeks to alert us that Leopold is bewildered by the grammar of being itself. Legitimate children seldom speak in such overwrought

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terms of their own origins, but then they are not baffled and vexed by the conjugations of that fatal infinitive: to be born. Later we learn that Leopold has shaped his perplexity into another awkward question he holds in keeping for his mother: ‘What made me be?’ (65). To the grandeur of Leopold’s existential solecisms, Bowen opposes the more prosaic comedy of his actual circumstances.8 Leopold has been raised by the Moodys, Americans whose hearty republicanism is reflected in the educational regime they design for him. Leopold, rummaging through the handbag Naomi has carelessly left unattended, finds a letter detailing the enlightened principles that guide the Moodys: ‘We feel that, apart from the circumstance of his birth, Leopold’s heredity (instability on the father’s side, lack of control on the mother’s) may make conduct difficult for him, and are attempting to both guard and guide him accordingly ... We do not consider him ripe for direct sex-instruction yet, though my husband is working towards this through botany and mythology’ (HP 31). There is something disarming as well as dreadful in the Moodys’ affable ‘we,’ at once editorial and royal executive. Behind that pronominal united front they proclaim their intention to guard Leopold against the disruptive outcroppings of heredity and instinct generally. There is also inadvertent but high humour in this letter, but Leopold, its accidental reader and explicit subject, does not respond to it. His is, understandably, a humourless reading, one that leaves him feeling that he has been ‘tricked into living’ (36). His bastard’s pride, always quick to take offence, is now given an actual object, and he immediately retaliates with his most vivid apocalyptic fantasy: ‘If he could have been reembodied, at that moment a black wind would have rushed through the Villa Fioretta, wrenching the shutters off and tearing the pictures down, or an earthquake cracked the floors, or the olivey hill about the villa erupted, showering hot choking ash. Let them develop themselves. I will not go back there’ (36). What a satisfying fantasy for a bastard to entertain! Reincarnation becomes less a path to spiritual refinement than a way to avenge what Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle call the ‘genealogical injustices’ (44) committed against him.9 In his revolt against the natural and human forces that supposedly conspired against him at his birth, Leopold shows himself his mother’s child. We later learn that she once expressed a similar, though less angry wish that ‘the Revolution would come soon; I should like to start fresh while I am still young, with everything that I had to depend on gone’ (87).10 The Moodys, then, might be right about mother and son

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– both are prone to a ‘lack of control’ in their desire to ‘start fresh’ and to develop themselves without either the comforts or the burdens of their inherited world. Leopold’s own development occurs, of course, along less spectacular lines, this being a novel, not a romance of bastardy. Its precipitating turn concerns a non-event, the failure of his mother to come to the house in Paris, which ends part 1 of the novel. Bowen, heir to the modernist fascination with those ordinary, unsolicited moments in which the meaning of life unexpectedly declares itself, seizes upon this nonoccurrence as the narrative and moral crisis of Leopold’s young life. Bowen declared her belief in the psychological as well as narrative momentousness of the uneventful as early as 1931 in Friends and Relations. There she described, with astonishing matter-of-factness, how moral revolutions may slip into the hollows of the unremarked everyday: ‘Today proved to be one of those weekdays, vacant, utterly without character, when some moral fort of a lifetime is abandoned calmly, almost idly, without the slightest assault from circumstances. So religions are changed, celibacy relinquished, marriages broken up or there occurs a first large breach with personal honour’ (Friends 88). The House in Paris reflects this awareness that moral revolutions are often undramatic, indeed, often unprovoked in their choice of crisismoments. This awareness inspires one of Bowen’s most vivid narrative and moral aphorisms: ‘But fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat’ (HP 82). Creeping fate, lurking in the darkest corners and unfrequented interstices of time, manifests itself in the form of what does not happen – Leopold’s long cherished meeting with his mother. This crisis, which ends the first and begins the second section of the novel (imposingly titled ‘The Past’), is met with admirable calm: ‘Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected’ (HP 65). Upon this psychological axiom, Bowen constructs her own narrative syllogism: ‘So the mother who did not come to meet Leopold that afternoon remained his creature, able to speak the truth ... by her not coming, the slate was wiped clear of every impossibility; he was not (at least that day) to have to find her unable to speak in his own, which were the true, terms’ (65). This elevation of the mother into an exalted figure for truth sounds quite grand, and it is, but it is also true that wiping the slate clear of every impossibility involves Bowen in a risky, if ultimately productive, forfeiture of actuality, the primary tenet of narrative realism. It is a forfeiture gladly suffered in exchange for the truth latent in what remains

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still possible. The possible, in this narrative transaction, assumes the value of a deferred or withheld inheritance, the truth about the past that time ought to have bequeathed but either would not or could not. This projected truth is the child’s birthright, one that can come to Leopold only through the mother’s communications. What makes the maternal language so precious, so worthy of preserving as a birthright, is that it is believed to be a language incapable of falsity and deception: ‘So everything remained possible. Suppose it had all been possible, suppose her not only here today in the salon but being as he foresaw, speaking without deception as he had thought she would. There is no time for the deception of her being grown-up’ (HP 66). His mother’s non-appearance thus has the effect of suspending, rather than rousing, Leopold’s apocalyptic will. He is imaginatively left contemplating an idyllic realm in which there exists only the mother’s truth and his need of it: ‘Actually, the meeting he had projected could take place only in Heaven – call it Heaven; on the plane of potential not merely likely behaviour. Or call it art, with truth and imagination informing every word. Only there – in heaven or art, in that nowhere, on that plane – could Karen have told Leopold what had really been’ (65–6). On this exalted plane – let us call it, after its presiding genius, the maternal sublime – Leopold hopes to come into his rightful inheritance, which is the truth of his own coming to be. Neil Corcoran hears echoes of the Gospels, particularly Matthew 18:3, informing ‘this astonishing narrative conceit and its projection of the figure of “Heaven’’’ (Corcoran 87). Leopold, for whom such a conceit is not astonishing but rather is taken for granted, early in the novel asserts, with a child’s bratty certainty, ‘Anything from my mother is mine, of course’ (HP 53). Not anything, surely. Perhaps only Heaven. What we can declare legitimately his is the mother’s discourse, which Roland Barthes deems the most trustworthy, as the most tender, of languages (159).11 The narrator has very strict ideas about how this maternal bequest should be communicated: ‘Talking to a very young clever person, you do not stick at hard words; on the other hand, you do not seek mystery. In the course of that meeting that never happened, that meeting whose scene remained inside Leopold, she would have told what she had done without looking for motives ... This is, in effect, what she would have had to say’ (HP 66–7). The qualification signalled by ‘in effect,’ suggests the narrator’s own scrupulousness in relating the mother’s story, a communication that does not literally take place and seems to be produced under compulsion (‘would have had’). The story we are

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subsequently told is, we might say, a narrative compromise that can accommodate this new relation to Leopold as heir to, as well as accident of, the past. In the strange exigencies of this narrative ventriloquism, a new narrative grammar is generated. Nothing is more astounding, more compelling, and more original in Bowen’s narrative art than her creative exploitation of the novelistic and psychological properties of the second-person pronoun. Her narrative voice, feeling alternately solitary and exhortatory in the knowledge she must bear, often will appeal to ‘you’ to seek company or offer counsel. The latter usage, as in ‘you do not stick at words,’ is abrupt, but not particularly disconcerting, since the ‘you’ seems impersonally to prescribe an entirely reasonable proposition equivalent in its rhetorical persuasiveness to the French ‘on dit.’ Used in this manner, ‘you’ seems to offer the reader a share in a general, if neglected, novelistic patrimony: the wisdom of the tribe. It addresses the reader with a familiarity that is assumed rather than enforced. This familiarity paradoxically increases the strangeness of the experiences being represented. One of the more arresting of such moments occurs in part 2 of the novel, when the narrator describes a visit of Leopold’s mother, Karen, to a beloved aunt. Karen is not yet a mother, so the truth communicated through her is not yet sublime, only strange. Still, it is strange enough to warrant resorting to the secondperson singular in a manner that is distressingly irregular: ‘It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you know you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively: something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again ... From what you see, there is to be no escape. Untrodden rocky canyons or virgin forests cannot be more entrapping than the inside of a house, which shows you what life is. To come in is as alarming as to be born conscious would be, knowing you are to feel; to look round is like being, still conscious, dead: you see a world without yourself’ (HP 77). Bowen is echoing, in a slightly more vernacular register, Bernard’s famous soliloquy in The Waves, in which he identifies the novelist’s omniscient, extratemporal vision of the real as the perspective gained by viewing the world without a self (Woolf 376). Woolf’s lyricism, however, evokes the novelist’s uncanny powers of depersonalization, while Bowen’s syntax is engaged in the ‘wary business’ of finding new uses for a neglected linguistic patri-

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mony – the second-person pronoun. Here the pronoun ‘you’ is enlisted to puzzle out the perplexing conjugations of ‘to be born’ that so trouble Leopold. The birth the narrator is describing is the birth of a self at once familiar, yet utterly changed. The use of ‘you’ in describing the feeling that such change is not only pending, but unavoidable, aims to reassure us, at this moment of high alarm, that we can actually survive a vision of ‘what life is.’ What makes this vision so alarming, as well as so fragile, is that it is glimpsed at two hypothetical points of supreme, if agonizing, consciousness: being born fully aware and being fully conscious although in every other respect dead. Reading a novel – certainly reading this novel – can be a wary business. Bowen, inheriting and adapting Henry James’s metaphor of the ‘house of fiction,’ presents the novel as a human dwelling that, should we enter and linger to the end, we shall come to know well. Bowen’s insight is to call attention to the tension that attends such projections of consciousness into another plane of existence. About to enter, we gather ourselves up defensively. Something, we feel, is stealing upon us, and we might understandably worry that, on emerging, we might not be quite the same. Indeed, it is arguably the hope of every novelist to steal upon us so that we will never be quite the same again. The second-person singular helps to reconcile us to the novelist’s hope for us. But when ‘you’ expresses the narrator’s urgent personal need – the need to explain, to exonerate, to justify, or simply to include the reader in a distressing, if privileged moment of insight or vision – readers may be left feeling merely stunned. Forster, the most unpretentious of modernists, showed how shocking such narrative appeal could be when he dared to breach novelistic convention to unsettle the armchair reader of A Passage to India. Lulling his readers into thinking that the ‘twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved’ will probably never involve them, Forster suddenly breaks into an expostulation that is half reproach: ‘Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but – Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots’ (202). A moment equally startling rattles The House in Paris. The narrator chronicles the attraction that Karen feels for Max Ebhart, who is engaged to her friend Naomi. Karen and Max resist their feelings for as long as they can, or as long as they want to, but finally act on their passion. The issue of their night of lovemaking is Leopold. Conception, of course, is not so much an unremarked event as an invisible

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occurrence. In recognition of this fine, but important, distinction, Bowen’s language becomes dense with complication and compulsion: ‘Having done as she knew she must she did not think there would be a child: all the same, the idea of you, Leopold, began to be present with her’ (HP 165). Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle rightly note that the you is ‘arguably the strangest word in the entire novel’; its usage, they propose, ‘opens up a gash in the text’ (57). Indeed it does. This textual laceration should startle us into picturing the heaven, or call it art, promised earlier and now finally glimpsed in its full sublimity. Bowen’s maternal language of sublimity is one that dissolves identity into an irresistible moment of identification and direct address. In this sublime moment of dissolution and fusion Leopold becomes both a character in the novel and the reader for whom it is written. In this register and on this plane, ordinary syntax is forgotten or suddenly made irrelevant. ‘While it is still Before, Afterwards has no power, but afterwards it is the kingdom, the power and the glory. You do not ask yourself, what am I doing? You know. What you do ask yourself, What have I done? you will never know’ (HP 166). I transcribe this sentence, although I am not sure who the ‘you’ addressed here might be: is it you, the reader, you Leopold, you the narrator muttering to herself? What the narrator does know and avow is heaven, or as Bowen now identifies it, the kingdom, the power, and the glory of ‘Afterwards.’ It is in this time and place that Leopold can rightly claim that everything from his mother is his, of course. The mother’s Afterwards thus becomes the child’s present, and so Bowen returns, in the third section of the novel, to the ‘fatal House of Paris’ (HP 206) where Before and Afterwards are emotionally confounded. This sly echo of the doomed dynasties of Greek tragedy signals Bowen’s intention to venture beyond the prosaic flatland of the modern realist novel to the very threshold of myth, where what I have been referring to as the maternal sublime – call it heaven or art – can finally, if briefly, materialize. She parodies, but also anticipates, her own idiosyncratic recourse to the ‘mythic method’ famously pioneered by Joyce and recommended by Eliot, in the Moodys’ determination to introduce Leopold to the realities of his own life through heroic paradigms: ‘When the revelation regarding himself must come, what better prototypes could he find than the Greek and other heroes, we feel’ (31). The roster of names in the novel suggests that, in elaborating her genealogical fable, Bowen had other prototypes in mind. Not the Homeric world of heroes or its modern counterpart, Joyce’s

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Ulysses, but Eliot’s The Waste Land and its ancestor romances are the texts infiltrating Bowen’s portrait of social and domestic vastation. Yet in Bowen’s version, the figure of wasted and wasting power is female. Mme Fisher is at once Madame Sosostris, reading her wicked pack of cards, and the female equivalent of the Fisher King, a dying majesty.12 She incarnates the maternal sublime in its malevolent aspects.13 Bowen, commenting on The House in Paris, remarked that Mme Fisher’s sickroom, ‘so full and still,’ was ‘in a terrible way ... a bois dormant’ (Pictures 39). To break the spell Mme Fisher casts over the house Bowen introduces Ray, Karen’s husband and the novel’s figure for what Karen calls ‘the enlightened man.’ To the enlightened man falls the task of delivering the spellbound from the baleful enchantments of their bois dormant.14 Proper names can only suggest, however, the spiritual powers at work beneath and beyond the novel’s realistic surface. Bowen is not a psychological mythographer but a novelist who knows that, in the novel, the sublime and exalted must be figured elsewhere, in their felt effects in human consciousness and everyday life. Here, Bowen’s belief in the radical innocence of children is validated. Children in her fiction are heirs of the novelist’s impudent habits of enquiry and of the novelist’s capacity to enter into the life beyond and outside oneself. The House in Paris traces how quickly children can come into this imaginative inheritance. Its opening pages, for example, humorously dramatize Henrietta’s inability to see the strange inhabitants who occupy this fatal house in Paris as novelistic rather than romantically outlandish characters. Listening to Mme Fisher tell of her ‘r-r-r-romantic’ marriage to Captain Fisher, Henrietta shows herself ‘not ripe for grown-up reflection,’ precisely because she did ‘not wonder how he had treated his wife, or speculate as to the lastingness of his passion for the ironical French governess, never pretty, not from the first young. He had married Mme Fisher. Love is the unchallenged motive for some kinds of behaviour: Mrs. Arbuthnot said: “You will understand some day,” and Henrietta was still willing to wait’ (HP 43). To challenge motive, to speculate on the lastingness of passion, to wonder how husbands treat their wives, wives their husbands, parents their children, friends and relations each other are the wary business of the novelist. Probing these mysteries is the novelist’s métier, both in and out of Paris. Henrietta may be willing to wait to understand such mysteries, but the novel is impatient in her place. Her maturation is only pages away,

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minutes away in novel time. In part 3, when we return to the present and to the moments immediately following the announcement that Leopold’s mother will not be coming, Henrietta becomes the figure through which Leopold finally understands, ‘My mother is not here’; ‘Henrietta became the fact that he could not escape or bear’ (HP 218). She does not endure this figuration passively. Her response is not so much defensive as sympathetic, a response provoked by the spectacle of Leopold’s tears: ‘He wept like someone alone against his will, someone shut up alone for a punishment: you only weep like that when only a room hears’ (219). Henrietta’s heart is that room, ready to hear. At this moment of crisis, Bowen resorts magnificently to the impersonal but inclusive ‘you.’ It is through this ‘you’ that Henrietta suddenly understands the isolation as well as the compulsion behind Leopold’s weeping. But it is also by this ‘you’ that we are alerted to the ripening of child into proto-novelist, teeming with speculations: ‘She had seen the country he had thought he would inherit – her certainty of it had made it little, his passionate ignorance made it great – trees rounded, standing in their own shadow, spires glittering, lakes of land in light, white puffs from the little train travelling a long way. He is weeping because he is not going to England; his mother is not coming to take him there ... He is weeping because he has been adopted; he is weeping because this is the end of imagination – imagination fails where there is no now. Disappointment tears the bearable film off life’ (219). Henrietta comprehends the extent of Leopold’s inheritance at the moment when it apparently is lost to him. When his imagination fails him and he can locate no living now for feeling and hope to animate, Henrietta finds the visionary attitude that sanctifies them both: ‘An angel stood up inside her with its hands to its lips, and Henrietta did not attempt to speak’ (220). This angel who suddenly materializes within Henrietta’s inner being is not Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, whose ‘face is turned toward the past’ (257),15 but the angel of the novel, messenger of feeling to come. Corcoran persuasively makes a case for reading this angel as the ‘protective guardian of desolate children’ (85). As if to confirm this unexpected transfiguration, Henrietta herself begins to cry, shedding ‘tears, from her own eyes but not from a self she knew of, rain on her serge dress’ (HP 220). Such tears can be shed only by a novelist in the making. This rain of tears, which fertilizes the previously barren ground of Henrietta’s heart, prefigures the cold, fine rain that descends upon her, Leopold, and Ray as they take their final leave of the desiccated house in Paris, she making

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her way to her original destination, Leopold and Ray going to a future yet to be decided. All real prospects are scenic in Bowen’s fiction, in keeping with her belief that the sense of space is emotional and thus ideally suited for mapping even the darkest places of the heart. The novel therefore ends, not with a remark, but on a scene that quietly dilates to accommodate the heightened sense of expectation, of coming into his maternal inheritance, that irradiates Leopold’s ‘small set exalted face’ (HP 261). As Leopold and Ray make their way through Paris to the train station, they pause together at the ‘commanding, heroic height above the level of Paris’ (HP 269), where they see, spread out below them, Leopold’s imagined inheritance: the shimmering ‘lakes of land in light’ Henrietta clairvoyantly beheld. As if in answer to Leopold’s question, ‘Is it illuminated?’ the ‘copperdark night sky went glassy over the city crowned with signs and starting alight with windows, the wet square like a lake at the foot of the station ramp’ (269). They both might be, in their silent gaze, on a peak in Darien. This is how the prospects appeared to Bowen in 1935. The outlook seemed less certain by 1938. Bowen’s next novel does not examine a fatal place so much as pronounce, in its title, a terrible judgment: The Death of the Heart. Whose heart? The novel strives to identify, or predict, the heart fated to succumb. Anxiety on this account centres on Portia, an orphan who herself becomes a bequest, the sad legacy of a feckless father to his son. She is begrudgingly inherited by her halfbrother, Thomas, and his restless wife, Anna, who accept her for a oneyear trial. Like The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart encases its domestic drama within the lineaments of medieval lore. The novel is divided into three parts, each one subjecting Portia to the regnant powers of the earth that can corrupt the soul and murder the heart: The World, The Flesh, The Devil. Even as the novel moves towards its conclusion, her ability to withstand such temptations is in question, as is her status as both legacy and legatee. The sardonic Anna, whose own heart has withered, perhaps died, some time ago, coldly assesses Portia’s contested claims: ‘What is she, after all? The child of an aberration, the child of a panic, the child of an old chap’s pitiful sexuality. Conceived among lost hairpins and snapshots of little doggies in a Notting Hill Gate flatlet. At the same time she has inherited everything: she marches about this house like the Race itself. They rally as if she were the Young Pretender’ (DH 246). Perhaps they are right to rally around this child of panic, for Portia does have something of the

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Young Pretender about her, especially in the visionary insistence she brings to the Quayne household. Early on we are informed of her extraordinary visionary power when her brother, Thomas, feels the full ‘force of not being seen; what she did see was the pension on the crag in Switzerland, that had been wrapped in rain the whole afternoon. Swiss summer rain is dark, and makes a tent for the mind. At the foot of the precipice, beyond the paling, the lake made black wounds in the white mist. Precarious high-upness had been an element in their life up there, which had been the end of their life together’ (34). ‘Precarious high-upness’ is a phrase itself precariously poised between neologism and solecism. Such verbal oddities are a linguistic sign that we are in the vicinity of the maternal sublime. The dark rain here, as in The House in Paris, makes a tent for the mind, sheltering a vision of elemental life that exalts the heart. As Portia’s mind descends from visiting the maternal haunts, high up and precarious, in which her heart lived freely, she shows no inclination to re-enter the desolate, empty time of her brother and his wife. The narrator shows a similar disposition to linger a bit longer in the maternal sublime: ‘A whir from Thomas’s clock – it was just going to strike six. Six, but not six in June. At this hour, the plateau must be in snow, and but for the snow dark, with lights behind shutters, perhaps alight in the church. Thomas sits so fallen-in, waiting for Anna, that his clock makes the only sound in his room. But our street must be completely silent with snows, and there must be snow on our balcony’ (35). Just as, in The House in Paris, you produced the oddest moment, our – as in the references to ‘our street’ and ‘our balcony’ – is the uncanniest word in The Death of the Heart. In both instances a pronoun, usually the most unexceptional word connecting us to the world outside our own minds, is suddenly made magnificently strange. Both pronouns not only signal, but precipitate, a sudden access to the maternal sublime in which the ‘perpetuity of livingness’ is realized. Portia’s vision is wonderfully extended, involving as it does not a scenic glimpse of shimmering earth but a complex memory of her last days with her mother. These last days have not perished, however, since they live in the heart. We know this mainly by observing the contrapuntal figure of Thomas, who sits in the midst of his domestic estate ‘so fallen-in.’ His despondency is in agonizing contrast to the exaltation of Portia’s vision of the maternal heights and the glad, if penurious life to be had there. The physical and moral collapse of Thomas upon and into himself is amplified, but also emotionally countered by the collapse of the narrative voice into

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Portia’s, who joins her in contemplating ‘our street’ and ‘our balcony.’ ‘Our’ strangely but undeniably comprehends the mother, Portia, and the narrator in one sublime moment of quiet communion. The strained chatter of the Quayne household knows, feels, sees nothing like this. Nor, if we are honest, do most of us readers, except, of course, in books like this. Such moments and such scenes becalm in the midst of disappointment (Leopold: the mother does not come) or console the displaced and dispossessed (Portia: the orphan subjected to the soulmaking, soul-destroying forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil). They are imaginable only through Bowen’s total connection to her own childhood. Indeed, some readers and critics may find something distressingly regressive about Bowen’s retreat into the maternal language and landscapes fantasized by an imperious innocence, seeing in such transports a refusal of reality itself.16 Bowen writes, however, as if the novel is capacious enough to accommodate many realities. And who is to dispute her? What is legitimately to be disputed is the order of their importance, their claims on our attention and our loyalty. The following pronouncement, which comes near the close of The Death of the Heart, confirms that Bowen’s ‘fidelities’ are usually figured spatially, as topographies of the heart, landscapes of sublimity: ‘One’s sentiments – call them that – one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power. That betrayal is the end of an inner life, without which the everyday becomes threatening or meaningless. At the back of the spirit a mysterious landscape, whose perspective used to be infinite, suddenly perishes: this is like being cut off from the country for ever, not even meeting its breath down the city street’ (298). You may call that mysterious landscape the realm of heaven or art or, as I do, the maternal sublime, where truth and imagination inform every word. But whatever its local name, this territory constitutes, in Bowen’s imaginative domain, the novelist’s true estate, a spiritual possession she must take pains – just how painful her tormented syntax shamelessly proclaims – to affirm, rescue from extinction, and pass on. Childless herself, Bowen was determined that her legacy not perish and that, like Bowen’s Court, it remain, though invisible to the naked eye, very much alive.17 Thus it is that her novels continually revisit that country behind the spirit, to which she summons us in her radically intimate mode of direct address. You realize how near that country actually is when you meet its breath coming down the street or feel it fluttering through the pages of her books.

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NOTES 1 Hermione Lee eloquently argues that the war only ‘confirmed, on a vast scale, Elizabeth Bowen’s personal vision of a denatured and dispossessed civilisation’ (189). That personal vision also found expression in her superb short stories of the 1930s, especially ‘The Disinherited.’ Some abbreviations are used in this essay for citations: The House in Paris (HP); The Death of the Heart (DH); Bowen’s Court (BC); The Heritage of British Literature (HBL). 2 This Bowen acknowledged: ‘I was taking the attachment of people to places as being generic to human life, at a time when the attachment was to be dreaded as a possible source of too much pain. During a time when individual destinies, the hopes and fears of the living, had to count for so little, I pursued through what might seem their tenuousness and their futility the hopes and fears of the long-ago dead’ (BC 454). 3 Neil Corcoran, who rightly points out that dispossession and dislocation are recurrent motifs in the history of Bowen’s Court, contends that Bowen inherited, along with Bowen’s Court, ‘a profound consciousness of the potential for further ruin, and such a consciousness becomes the single most enduring feature of both motive and self-perception’ in her writing (Corcoran 30). 4 That childhood is beautifully rendered in ‘Origins,’ the opening chapter of the unfinished memoir, Pictures and Conversations (3–33). 5 This may be the mood Bowen believes necessary for writing. She possibly speaks through the author St Quentin when he pronounces, ‘To write is always to rave a little’ (DH 10). St Quentin is a cynical, unattractive character, but Bowen does not discredit him as an artist. 6 The hallucinatory and dream-like nature of the novel is the subject of an astute essay by R.B. Kershner called ‘Bowen’s Oneiric House in Paris.’ 7 When Bowen writes of her own childhood or life, as in Pictures and Conversations or in her travel book, A Time in Rome, her prose is quite straightforward and free of the pronominal confusions and indeterminacies that riddle her fiction. This essay attempts to uncover the roots of stylistic obscurantism in her complex vision of the modernist heritage. 8 Jane Miller, in her rereading and shrewd re-evaluation of Bowen and her literary reputation on the occasion of her centenary, offers the most sustained and at the same time relaxed appreciation of the wit and comedy that keep Bowen’s novels ‘unsentimental and free of bombast and inflated emotion’ (30).

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9 Interpreting the novel through ‘the damage of Leopold,’ a damage that encompasses ‘the genealogical injustices committed against Leopold,’ Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle elaborate what they call a ‘traumaturgy of reading.’ ‘Reading in The House in Paris is a kind of wound,’ they write, ‘or, more accurately, a cicatrice: both a wounding and a scar’ (44–5). 10 Jean Radford reads The House in Paris as ‘an historical novel which reflects upon England and Europe between the wars and on the political history of Paris since 1789’ – that is, the political history of Paris since another famous Revolution (39). 11 These issues are elegantly addressed in Harriet Chessman’s ‘Women and Language in the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen.’ Chessman details the ‘radical schizophrenia’ in Bowen’s desire for a ‘true language’ that belongs to the preverbal, if highly sensitive consciousness. ‘Bowen,’ she writes, ‘scatters her novels with female figures who not only resist the narratives they see around them, but who themselves have no language, and who therefore cannot generate other texts. These figures haunt her: they represent the unarticulated and inchoate femaleness which must in some sense be betrayed or at least abandoned, in the very act of entering language to tell stories’ (125). 12 Her daughter Naomi also bears a name whose inner registers haunt the novel. Naomi, which means pleasantness or sweetness, contributes to this genealogy of names a poignant biblical irony: ‘Call me not Naomi (pleasantness) call me Mara (bitterness): for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi when the Lord hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?’ (Ruth 1: 20–1). 13 His emotional rationalism is not as potent, however, as the promise contained in his surname, Forrestier. It is a name that marries the Gallic forestier, origin of the English forester, keeper of the woods, with the Italian forestiero, stranger, immune to a sorceress’s local magic. Hermione Lee calls attention to the novel’s ‘emphasis on foreignness and on the strangeness of international personal relations’ while herself insisting that the concern with foreigners is accompanied by ‘Leopold’s discovery of the foreign power of other wills’ (95, 99). 14 Benjamin grimly describes what this angel contemplates: ‘Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’ (257).

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15 Corcoran, unfailingly alert to the literary ‘ghosts’ inhabiting Bowen’s fiction, also sees her as associated ‘with that earlier Mme in English fiction, Mme Merle in James’s The Portrait of a Lady’ (84). Maud Ellmann compares her to Madame Beck in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (118). 16 One of the novel’s characters, the writer St Quentin, may be without scruples, but he is a novelist and his observations are the last and most trustworthy words on Portia’s visionary, renegade character: ‘I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant – impossible socially, but full scale – and that it’s the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banality. Portia hears these the whole time; in fact she hears nothing else. Can we wonder she looks so goofy most of the time?’ (310). 17 Her final gesture in Bowen’s Court is to remind her readers of the paradoxical time, the living and ‘heroic To-day,’ to which her writing is dedicated. We note again the inviting, confiding ‘you’: ‘Knowing, as you now do, that the house is no longer there, you may wonder why I have left my opening chapter, the room-to-room description of Bowen’s Court, in the present tense. I can only say that I saw no reason to transpose it into the past. There is a perpetuity about livingness, and it is part of the character of Bowen’s Court to be, in sometimes its silent way, very much alive’ (459).

WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse. New York: Hill, 1978. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1977. 253–64. Bennet, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. London: St Martin’s, 1995. Bowen, Elizabeth. Bowen’s Court. 1942. New York: Knopf, 1964. – The Death of the Heart. 1938. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987. – Friends and Relations. 1931. London: Cape, 1951. – The House in Paris. 1935. New York: Knopf, 1936. – ‘Novelists.’ The Heritage of British Literature. London: Thames, 1953. 109–59. – . Pictures and Conversations. Ed. Spencer Curtis Brown. New York: Knopf, 1975. Chessman, Harriet. ‘Women and Language in the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen.’ Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987. Conrad, Joseph, and Ford Madox Ford. The Inheritors. 1901. New York: Carroll, 1985.

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Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Ellmann, Maud. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003. Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. 1924. San Diego and New York: Harcourt, 1984. Kershner, R.B. ‘Bowen’s Oneiric House in Paris.’ Texas Studies in Language and Literature 28.4 (1986): 407–23. Lee, Hermione. Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation. Totowa, NJ: Barnes, 1981. Miller, Jane. ‘Re-Reading Elizabeth Bowen.’ Raritan 20.1 (2000): 17–31. Radford, Jean. ‘Late Modernism and the Politics of History.’ Women Writers of the Thirties: Gender, Politics and History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Said, Edward. ‘Secular Criticism.’ The World, The Text and The Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. 1–30. Wilson, Angus. ‘Introduction.’ The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Vintage, 1982. 7–11. Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room and The Waves. New York: Harcourt, 1959.

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9 Good Graces: Inheritance and Social Climbing in Brideshead Revisited allan hepburn

As Lord Marchmain lies dying in Brideshead Revisited, he wonders aloud what to do with his estate: ‘Who shall I leave it to? The entail ended with me, you know. Sebastian, alas, is out of the question. Who wants it? Quis? Would you like it, Cara? No, of course you would not. Cordelia? I think I shall leave it to Julia and Charles’ (BR 306).1 In the absence of a clear heir, Lord Marchmain manipulates those assembled around him, including his children and his mistress. By speculating about his heirs and calling lawyers to change his will at the last minute, Marchmain preserves his family’s interest in him during his dying days. Julia and Charles seem like a logical choice to inherit because Sebastian is too sodden with drink, Cordelia too pious, Cara too indifferent, and Bridey too obtuse. By intimating that Charles and Julia will inherit, Lord Marchmain tacitly acknowledges Charles Ryder as part of his family even though he is only romantically, not legally, coupled with Julia. The sickbed promise to bequeath the estate to Charles and Julia briefly crowns Charles’s social ambitions. Born into the leisured middle class, Charles has a remote relationship with his eccentric father and seeks surrogate families elsewhere. Charles’s serial affairs with two Flyte children – first Sebastian, then Julia – insert him into the aristocratic Marchmain family by homosexual and heterosexual means. Moreover, when he takes up with Julia, Charles renounces his marriage to Celia Mulcaster and collaterally renounces the property given to him by his father at the time of his marriage. Brideshead Revisited figures a modernist plot of inheritance as a case in which sexual ambivalence enables upward mobility. The novel asks what the middle classes sacrifice to improve their standing in the class system.

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Trading away his country property in the divorce settlement with Celia, Charles gambles on his cultural capital instead of his financial resources or property. He earns his living by painting tableaux of English country houses. Enamoured of the Flyte family’s castle, he possesses it through a series of pictures, which are symbolic forms of ownership rather than tangible ones. His ambitions to inherit having failed when Julia rejects him, Charles lays claim to the house indirectly, and accidentally, by occupying Brideshead as a military encampment during the Second World War. His connection to Brideshead defies the nature of property as individual and material possession and emphasizes instead a modernist anxiety about alienation and dispossession that can be overcome by storming the premises, albeit as a bivouac. Like other late modernist writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Ivy Compton-Burnett, Waugh implies that disturbances to the patterns of inheritance jeopardize traditions of class and status, but potentially allow the cultured middle class to inherit the future. Inheritance and disinheritance regulate Waugh’s comic plots. His first attempt at a novel, burned before completion, ‘was named The Temple at Thatch and concerned an undergraduate who inherited a property of which nothing was left except an eighteenth-century classical folly where he set up house’ (LL 223). The inheritance may be cursed (nothing remains except the folly), yet the quirky bequest inaugurates narrative. In his first published novel, Decline and Fall, Waugh complicates inheritance as a comic event. An unscrupulous guardian cuts off Paul Pennyfeather from his rightful inheritance after he is caught up in an undergraduate prank at Oxford. ‘My whole future is shattered,’ explains Paul, ‘and I have directly lost one hundred and twenty pounds a year in scholarships and two hundred and fifty pounds a year allowance from my guardian’ (DF 44). The tabulation of accounts resembles Waugh’s own financial precariousness while at Oxford. In A Little Learning, Waugh tots up the monetary debts he owed upon leaving university. He claims that he could not ‘afford to live’ (LL 206) on his £100 scholarship, supplemented by £250 per year from his father, so he borrowed from friends and paid them back in instalments. Holding onto money is a hazardous business, Waugh suggests, and debts impinge indefinitely on the future. Waugh often reckons characters by their revenues and expenditures. Their relation to money and leisured habits is tenuous. They cannot pay their way or only barely do so. In Men at Arms, the Crouchbacks have no money to keep up their ancestral estate: ‘Partly in his father’s

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hands, partly in his own, without extravagance or speculation, [Crouchback’s] inheritance had melted away’ (34). Characters count their money and their debts in the present, while counting on their possible inheritances in the future. Waugh exposes debts and incomes with the mathematical precision of an accountant. In Scoop, for instance, the narrator divulges that members of the aristocratic Boot family ‘had about a hundred a year each as pocket money’ (18). William Boot writes a weekly column about wildlife for a London newspaper; ‘the work was of the utmost importance to him: he was paid a guinea a time’ (20). The tallying of funds in Scoop extends to individual holdings and personal standing within the house. The Boots include ‘William who owned the house and estate, William’s sister Priscilla who claimed to own the horses, William’s widowed mother who owned the contents of the house and exercised ill-defined rights over the flower garden, and William’s widowed grandmother who was said to own “the money.” No one knew how much she possessed’ (17–18). Even though character is organized around possession, anxiety about what exactly each character owns allows speculation. Priscilla’s claim to the horses seems to be in dispute. Rights to the flower garden are ‘ill-defined,’ and the possession of furniture without a house to put it in is an ambiguous form of ownership. Mystery disguises the true state of finances. Everyone prefers to believe that the widowed grandmother has endless cash, because she writes cheques periodically to cover the extravagances of Uncle Theodore. She can withhold funds if she wants to, but money by its very nature is something that no one owns. Money has to circulate to prove its value, as the various ups and downs of personal fortunes among Waugh’s characters intimate. In Decline and Fall and Scoop, as in Waugh’s fiction generally, comedy arises because of the uneven distribution of money and the sudden loss of fortunes. Although Waugh never critiques the social function of property and money outright, he mocks the greed and foolishness that money causes. With its keen focus on money and transactions, Waugh’s fiction reflects the uncertain economic conditions of the 1930s: the stock market crash and subsequent depression, massive unemployment, and the gold standard crisis. Joshua Esty argues that financial fluctuations in the 1930s coincided with the ‘assurance that the empire was collapsing whether or not one had ever agreed with the imperial mission’ (8). Economic theory, as postulated by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, emphasized ‘managed capitalism’

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located in a ‘nationally organized marketplace’ (Esty 6, 7). Whereas Keynes focuses on nations and national economies in the regulation of wealth, Waugh upholds wealth and inheritance as personal, and sometimes imperial, rights. While wealth might be derived offshore, such as Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s income from South American brothels, it enhances individual prestige in the metropolis of London. Within the social echelons that concern Waugh, money almost always returns when it has been lost and, by returning, confirms the ‘justness’ of class, especially the aristocracy. In Waugh’s fiction, unlike Keynes’s theories, the system of money reorganizes itself as if by natural, not social, laws. Money moves from hand to hand in innumerable ways in Waugh’s fiction. In Black Mischief, Basil Seal, a cad and a sponger, tries to raise £500 from his mother. When she denies Basil’s request, he steals her emeralds and mooches from his wealthy mistress, Angela Lyne, who writes him a cheque for an unspecified sum. Angela, bored with Basil’s constant begging, says, ‘I thought that just for tonight I’d like to have you not asking for money. Before, I’ve enjoyed making it awkward for you. Did you know? Well I had to have some fun, hadn’t I?’ (BM 175). Basil is indifferent towards Angela, so she commands his attention by taunting him about his reliance on her funds. Although Black Mischief ostensibly concerns a revolution in an African country called Azania, the economic conditions back home in England govern the fate of Azania and the diplomats sent there. When Basil returns to England, his friend Sonia tells him that ‘Everyone’s got very poor and it makes them duller.’ Sonia adds, ‘there was a general election and a crisis – something about gold standard.’ Basil responds, ‘It’s amusing to be back’ in England (248). The rise and fall of fortunes correlate with degrees of amusement, not with suffering or unemployment. Paul Pennyfeather, Basil Seal, and Charles Ryder, among others, trust to turns in fortune or marriages with heiresses to cancel their debts. Economics do not fundamentally interfere with their pleasures. Nor do characters show undue concern about how much money they have, even when tattletale narrators divulge exact financial numbers. Waugh’s characters believe that prospects will improve and money will appear. Plot, as Waugh construes it, concerns the correlation between wealth and social standing. In Decline and Fall, Paul Pennyfeather’s nearmarriage to Margot Beste-Chetwynde would have elevated him to respectability because Margot is ‘very rich’ (188). A vigorous social climber, she subsequently becomes Lady Metroland and appears in

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Waugh’s other novels as a cipher of limitless wealth. Although they do not marry, Margot settles on Paul a ‘personal allowance’ (150) of £2,000 a year. Paul ends the novel with more than he had at the beginning, yet he remains the plaything of others’ whims. Wills and allowances, as the mechanisms by which wealth is shared, regulate narrative in Decline and Fall. Paul’s father establishes the terms of Paul’s future, until that future is interrupted by the unscrupulous guardian. Paul signs a will before his faked death; he is pensioned off – quite alive – to Corfu. In the comic modality of the novel, wills can be broken capriciously. Nonetheless, couples do wed on the expectation of an inheritance, as in the doubtful case of a ‘young man [who] had only married [Miss Gracie] because he thought the old boy [her father] was bound to leave her something’ (92–3). The father leaves Gracie nothing, so the young man abandons her. Economic principles of debt and inheritance are equally present in Brideshead Revisited, although cast within a tragic narrative of war, Catholic conversion, and dispossession. Charles’s quarrels with his father over his allowance result in no supplementary help. Ryder senior gives a diatribe on penury when Charles says he has run short: ‘I’ve never been “short” as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stonybroke? ... On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that’ (BR 63). The synonyms for being ‘short’ accumulate as an avoidance of Charles’s indebtedness. Words, not money, pile up. Mr Ryder has ‘middle-class’ (66) ideas about money, just as he holds to middle-class precepts about dining. He warns Charles that his allowance ‘all comes out of capital’ (27); if he spends capital now, he will deprive his father of income in the present and himself of a legacy in the future. Chastised but not helped by his father, Charles feels the pinch of financial restriction. Going into debt proves Charles’s contempt for his father and for bourgeois thrift in general. Money creates class divisions within families and pushes people to constitute new families. Mr Ryder shifts Charles into a slightly different class by withholding money. He forces Charles to pay his own debts and drives him out of the family home as he has already driven out Aunt Phillipa. Charles’s relation to money and his father situates him among a vaguely defined class of dependants who live off their talent and charm. Debt, in the terms of Brideshead Revisited, is an aristocratic prerogative, not a middle-class one. Rex Mottram, the wealthy Canadian who marries Julia, disdainfully catalogues Lord

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Marchmain’s expenditures: ‘Brideshead and Marchmain House both going full blast, pack of foxhounds, no rents raised, nobody sacked, dozens of old servants doing damn all, being waited on by other servants, and then besides all that there’s the old boy setting up a separate establishment – and setting it up on no humble scale either’ (BR 168–9). Rex announces that Lord Marchmain is £100,000 in debt. Trusting in the rightness of aristocratic privilege, Charles dismisses Rex’s rant as so much dreary information. Charles the poor student wants to dissociate himself from Rex the self-made tycoon. The distinction between the two, however, is slender. Both Charles and Rex aspire to belong to the Flyte family, but they proceed quite differently towards that goal: Rex gauchely by tossing around money; Charles suavely by painting pictures. Notwithstanding Charles’s snobbery towards Rex, Rex is right. Lord Marchmain cannot control the spending of his family and his entourage. On a smaller scale than his father’s expenditures, Sebastian pawns clothes and little objects in order to raise money for liquor (BR 196). Aligned with the aristocracy by virtue of his debts, Charles enumerates items of decor and delicacies that he has not paid for in his Oxford rooms: a Lalique decanter, a box of Partagas cigars, and ‘a dozen frivolous, new books’ (43). He taunts his cousin Jasper about overspending: ‘though I haven’t yet spent quite double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall before the end of term’ (44). As a student at Oxford, Charles demonstrates a will to indebtedness, a desire to make himself dependent on Sebastian for plovers’ eggs and champagne. The narrative of Brideshead Revisited concentrates on acts of exchange, scrimping, and prodigality. Charles sells his decorative Omega screen for £10 (BR 60). He pays his university fees, but, overdrawn at the bank, he starts a school year having spent, as he says, his last £100 ‘and not a penny paid out where I could get credit’ (61). To spend their summer vacation together, Charles and Sebastian buy two third-class train tickets to Venice rather than one first-class ticket for Sebastian alone. En route to Venice, Sebastian and Charles spend everything, ‘save for a few francs, in Paris’ (92). Prices are registered as vital narrative details. Entry into a nightclub costs ten bob per person (111). Brought up on legal charges, Charles is ‘admonished and fined five shillings ... and fifteen shillings costs’ (117). In Paris at art school, Charles remembers that, with ‘the exchange as it was, my allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally’ (166). To gratify his gourmand tastes, Charles leads Rex Mottram to an expensive restaurant,

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eats sumptuously, then allows rich Rex to pay. Charles mocks Rex, but his mockery does not stop him from accepting Rex’s generosity. Getting and spending in Brideshead Revisited make the novel a comedy, at least in terms of the narrative conventions that Waugh establishes in his earlier fiction. The novel, however, is often read as a case of earnest spiritual renewal in a time of doubt and war. When Charles kneels at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed in solidarity with Julia, he accepts the sign of the cross that the dying man makes as an expression of monumental faith, ‘not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition’ (BR 322). Critics treat this act of faith as the chief event in the novel. Extolling Christian faith as a good thing, some commentators praise Waugh’s ‘seriousness’ (Powell 58). In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh pens ‘a Catholic apologia whose dominant mode is that of realism’ (Kennedy 23). The novel tends towards a recognition of ‘ironic providence,’ manifest in Lord Marchmain’s belated show of faith, which ‘precipitates [Charles’s] conversion to Catholicism’ (Patey 225). In Waugh’s opinion, the novel is ‘all about the death bed’ (Letters 206). In his concentration on the deathbed, Waugh repudiates the unsentimental modernist representations of sudden death that Forster offers in The Longest Journey or the cruel curtailment of a young man’s promise that Virginia Woolf depicts in Jacob’s Room. Instead, Waugh recuperates the sentimental and transformative metaphysics of the Victorian deathbed. At that privileged site, material and worldly matters interfuse with spiritual and other-worldly matters. Avoiding the obvious, John Betjeman claims that Waugh’s ‘interest in people is not merely in their income groups, age-groups, their economic status’; these characters also have a spiritual dimension, Betjeman concludes (149). Nor should Charles’s spirituality be overestimated. Brideshead Revisited is not in the ‘vein of social satire’ (Powell 54) that Waugh had mined in early works, but that does not mean that the novel is devoid of satire, specifically satire directed against Charles himself as a social aspirant. Brideshead Revisited can be interpreted as a comedy about social climbing narrated from the point of view of the social climber. Although Charles converts to Catholicism sometime after Julia breaks off their affair and before he returns during the war, his spirituality does not exclude his wish to inherit the estate or curb his ambitions to rise socially. Religion and economic status coexist. The grace that settles over the Flytes, and Charles to some extent, is infused with Charles’s desire to enter the good graces of the Flyte family. Social grace includes charming behaviour. As much as Charles displays good

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manners, enough to return repeatedly to Brideshead by invitation, he depends, too, on the good graces of the Marchmains to accept him into their charmed circle. The subtitle of Brideshead Revisited, ‘The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,’ does not mean that sacred memories cancel profane ones. ‘Sacred’ possibly refers to the memories that Charles cherishes most: recollections of Sebastian ‘in those distant Arcadian days’ (BR 288) at Oxford in the 1920s; recollections of gracious living with Julia at Brideshead in the 1930s while she is still married to Rex. Charles’s conversion is merely hinted at in the novel; the bulk of the novel concerns starry-eyed evocations of Brideshead. Charles’s conversion could be seen as a bid to align himself with the Marchmains and to overcome Julia’s scruple about her faith. Charles’s conversion would allow Julia to see her folly in giving up ‘this one thing’ that she wants ‘so much’ (324), namely happiness with Charles. Becoming a Catholic might make him an acceptable heir to Brideshead. In fact, Sebastian says of his father that he only ‘took to [religion] when he married mummy’ (86). Lord Marchmain has the main chapel at Brideshead redecorated in an Arts-and-Crafts style as a wedding present to Lady Marchmain. Religious observance is one of the duties of the estate, another of the elaborate ‘code[s]’ (40) that govern Sebastian’s life and make him so mysterious to Charles. In order to understand that code and make it his own, Charles converts. If anything, the inheritance of property is a more acute problem in Brideshead Revisited than in Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, or Scoop. Unlike the early comic novels, Brideshead Revisited speculates on the legacies that modernism, specifically the cultural and aesthetic practices of the 1920s and 1930s that vaunted the autonomy of art and the repudiation of tradition, will leave for the post-war period. As a painter and a sophisticate, Charles embodies threatened traditions, but as a military officer, he cannot stop the desecration of landmarks and boiseries. The title of Brideshead Revisited heralds its affiliation with Waugh’s other country house novels (LaFrance 12–13; Churchill 217–28), although ‘revisiting’ Brideshead signifies taking possession as much at it signifies return. Because Charles narrates in the first person retrospectively, and because he pretends to be indifferent to material goods, his possessiveness tends to be obscured in the novel. His first-person narrative should be read ironically, however, as Waugh’s preface to the novel insinuates. Charles’s romanticization of the aristocracy masks the possibility that, through marriage, he ‘might come to own Brides-

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head’ (Wykes 143). Charles asserts ‘proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers’ in the army (BR 11). His metaphors betray a fondness for the rhetoric of inheritance. He calls the inmates of a lunatic asylum ‘the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease’ (10). Inheritances permit ease, a quality that Charles envies and emulates. When he first has sex with Julia during a storm on the Atlantic, Charles resorts to the language of legal entitlement: ‘It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure’ (BR 248). Sex is figured as contractual and proprietary. Something slightly less than an inheritance, a ‘freehold’ designates a property held for the lifetime of the possessor. Charles’s metaphors of deeds and property suggest that Brideshead, metonymically present in Julia, has passed into his hands (Bergonzi 28). Julia’s body is not just a body, but a property that Charles covets and intends to enjoy ‘at leisure.’ In the context of property rights, the term ‘enjoy’ means that Charles has the use and benefit of Julia’s loins without being their titular master. The metaphorical deed of conveyance positions him, at least in his imagination, as the freeholder of Brideshead itself. Both Mr Ryder and Lord Marchmain suspect Charles’s motives. When Charles hurries off to nurse Sebastian, Charles’s father asks, ‘Why exactly is your presence so necessary? You have no medical knowledge. You are not in holy orders. Do you hope for a legacy?’ (BR 72). The other explanation, the one that Charles dare not utter, is that he and Sebastian are in love and are having an affair.2 Mr Ryder’s question exposes Charles’s desire to belong to the Flyte family and to share in their material advantages as a dividend of his sexual liaison with Sebastian. When Charles suggests that ‘every stone of the house had a memory’ of Sebastian (288), he conflates possession of Sebastian with possession of Brideshead. Property and memory cannot be disentangled from each other. Possessive Charles sees people not as themselves, but as representations or objects, as when he thinks of Julia as a ‘preRaphaelite picture’ (277). He displaces feeling into stones or images. He wants to possess each of his lovers metonymically, piece by piece. In this sense, Mr Ryder’s hint that Charles hopes for a legacy is accurate. Charles longs for some tangible, unchanging sign of love. In his displacement of love into material forms, however, Charles dooms his chances of possessing the objects of his love in themselves. Thinking

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over who will inherit his estate, Lord Marchmain toys with Charles’s attachment to what he cannot obtain – love sublimated into architecture. To possess Brideshead would potentially mean a permanent and tangible possession of Sebastian and the past: an inheritance of taste, snobbery, Catholicism, homosexuality, and aristocratic attitudes. Charles takes a keen interest in Brideshead from the first time he sees it, situated at the end of a long vista.3 He is ‘rapt’ in a vision of the house (BR 38). Material aspects of Brideshead, the outward display of wealth that the Flyte family command, convert into magic in Charles’s imagination. He invariably refers to Brideshead as an ‘enchanted place’ (77) that casts a spell over him. Like a family of sorcerers, the Marchmains exude ‘charm,’ a word repeatedly used in the novel to evoke magic and delight. On his first visit to Brideshead, Charles urges Sebastian to throw back the mahogany shutters so that he can take in the richness of ornament, like a tourist who appreciates details in a Royal Trust estate: ‘the mellow afternoon sun flooded in, over the bare floor, the vast, twin fireplaces of sculptured marble, the coved ceiling frescoed with classic deities and heroes, the gilt mirrors and scagliola pilasters, the islands of sheeted furniture’ (39). Agog, he tours the art nouveau chapel, the ‘Soanesque library,’ the ‘Chinese drawing-room,’ and the ‘Pompeian parlour’ (78). He wonders if Inigo Jones designed the central dome of the house. Just as Mr Ryder ‘footles about collecting things’ (41) and exclaims over a ‘terra-cotta bull of the fifth century’ (62), Charles appreciates the nuances of decor and building.4 Charles is indeed his father’s child and, in his curmudgeonly ways and neglect of his own children, becomes more like his father with time. Material things bewitch him. The prospect of inheriting Brideshead calls into question the obligations owed to property and the naming of a rightful heir. Many writers in the 1930s and 1940s re-evaluated the necessity of preserving traditions when culture and property were imperilled by fascism and world conflict. In Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A Family and a Fortune, published in 1939, a godfather leaves £58,000 to his unmarried godson. ‘This beautiful inheritance’ (Compton-Burnett 147), as one character calls it, causes no end of rampant scheming and family consternation, not least because everyone has plans to spend this money on charity, pensions, or improvements to the family house. Similarly, Elizabeth Bowen’s 1949 novel, The Heat of the Day, speculates on those whom war and history dispossess. When Roderick Rodney inherits an estate in Ireland, he realizes the seriousness of what it means to stand in rela-

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tion to the past and the future: ‘gone were virgin dreams with anything they had had of himself in them, anything they had had of the picturesque, sweet, easy, strident. He was left possessed, oppressed and in awe’ (Bowen 352). Even within his dreams, Roderick is cast out of the property that he takes over. By a reciprocal intervention, the legacy of an Irish country house called Mount Morris leaves Roderick possessed by property as much as he possesses the estate. Possession oppresses him, and that oppression juts endlessly into the future in the form of subsequent bequests and the ceaseless obligation to own. Inheritance implies futurity through possession. These modernist novels pose questions about the relation of fiction to tradition – the narrative legacies bequeathed by nineteenth-century fiction – as well as the representation of wealth and inheritance within a plot. If modern fiction is conceived as a break with the past, what do modernists choose to inherit from the past, and what will they leave to their successors? Such questions concern the generic proprieties of the novel. In Compton-Burnett’s and Bowen’s novels, inheritances have a tragic dimension, not only because the transmission of property implies an a priori death, but because inheritance requires the naming of the one fit person equipped to carry on the traditions of possession, whether or not that person sees himself or herself as being up to the task. Heirs owe a tithe to the past and the future. In A Family and a Fortune, everyone talks about the future: ‘Have you given any thought to the future? You clearly have not had time. But will you settle down in your house or will you be too much alone?’ (Compton-Burnett 250). The future bears the burden of deciding where to live, how to derive an income, how to manage solitude. The twenty-eight-year-old Mark, dedicating himself hopefully to the future, thinks, ‘We cannot serve the past ... only fancy that we do so’ (220). The way forward requires some form of disinheritance from the past. In order to negotiate the future successfully, the past must be renounced, according to Mark. In The Heat of the Day, Roderick wonders if he will be ‘the final man’ (Bowen 352) who recognizes that ownership imposes a task impossible to finish. Roderick thinks of writing his will but has only his mother to name as heir. She shows no inclination to care for Mount Morris. Roderick’s dilemma stems from a retrograde bequest (the proprietor who leaves his estate to an older generation rather than a younger), as well as the concomitant issue of whether property should remain exclusively within a family. Set during the war, Brideshead Revisited investigates the meaning of ownership and legacies in extreme conditions. War makes the prospect

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of sudden death and the consequent transmission of property more likely than during peace. Although John Locke’s formulation of the right to property guarantees that property remain in the hands of its possessor, at the moment of inheritance uncertainty intercedes. In theory, ownership ‘is supposed to last forever’ (Nunokawa 84). At the death of an owner of property, his ownership continues in the power to bestow that property on someone else. The power to bequeath demonstrates that property is, in fact, alienable from its possessor. The alienation of property from its owner is mitigated by passing that property to children or relatives. Bequests confirm kinship. Nevertheless, at the moment of transmission, property could end up with a nonfamily member. Lord Marchmain plays on this possibility when he wonders to whom he should leave his estate. As Charles knows, property need not remain within the Flyte family. Paradoxically, narrative arises when owners part with or are parted from their possessions. Inheritance entails a story based on sequential ownership: who will take possession next? The movement of possessions beyond the family is one possible inheritance plot. Another possible outcome is the dismantling of inheritance as a legal entitlement. In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh reacts conservatively to attacks against property ownership in the interwar years. In Work Suspended, for instance, heiress Lucy Simmonds lives on the interest of an inherited £56,000, yet she is ‘convinced that all private fortunes like her own were very shortly to be abolished and all undeserved prominence levelled’ (214). As Waugh knew, early twentieth-century socialists challenged the bias towards family in inheritance laws. In La question de l’héritage, published in French in 1905, socialist Eugenio Rignano claims that ‘the transmission of goods grants to the process of the automatic accumulation of private capital an indefinite continuation. That being so, such legacies favour the excessive imbalance of fortunes and all the disastrous consequences that result’ (25).5 To promote equitable distribution of money and to favour the working classes, Rignano advocates graduated taxes on inheritances. In a 1918 screed against inheritance as a legally protected institution, Harlan Eugene Read claims that ‘the evils of inheritance must disappear proportionately’ (121) with other forms of privilege. Read argues that inheritance creates and protects an aristocracy that clamours after entitlements (123–4). He asserts that inheritance cannot be justified either by legal precedent or natural law. Other economic theorists argue that hereditary transmission of property disadvantages workers

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and removes from the rich the incentive to work. In The Economics of Inheritance, published in 1929, Josiah Wedgwood states that ‘property can quite well exist without the right of bequest being attached to it. And since no one has yet succeeded in finding a satisfactory justification for property that is not the result of personal service, it is certain that the institution of property would stand more securely, if the right of unlimited bequest and inheritance were not attached to it’ (189). Wedgwood thinks that a system of property could exist in which, ‘on the death of their proprietors, all possessions passed to some organisation acting as trustees for the community’ (51). Owners need not have the right to transmit; that right is separate from ownership. Nothing inherent in property makes it private. Lord Marchmain pre-empts these theories to some degree by neglecting his aristocratic duties: ‘I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the Socialists would have me be’ (BR 96). He means that the socialists ridiculed the prerogatives of richesse oblige and stigmatized the idleness of the landowning aristocracy. More pertinent to the status of property in Brideshead Revisited, Lord Marchmain is indifferent to his possessions and already divided from them. Although Waugh laments the decline of ‘ancestral seats’ in the preface to Brideshead Revisited (8), Lord Marchmain views property differently. Hard up for cash, he sells Marchmain House in London. Instead of sticking by traditional household arrangements, he insists that the furniture in an upstairs bedroom be disassembled and reassembled on the ground floor of Brideshead when he arrives from abroad. Possessions are movable and saleable, not fixed and permanent. Lord Marchmain is not visibly nostalgic for the aristocracy and its traditions, in the way that Charles, being from the middle class, is. Possession has meaning in narrative when forces threaten to divide property from owners. In this sense, modernist narratives of inheritance by Bowen, Compton-Burnett, and Waugh demonstrate the perils of transmission. Heirs and surviving generations may not want to take up the burden of the past that is implicated in the burden of possession. Transmission is a point at which the alienation of property and the will to disown the past can occur. Evelyn Waugh, a lover of private property, does not hold with socialist theories of equitable distribution or reform of the institution of inheritance. On the contrary, his characters, like the Boots in Scoop, live in and through their possessions, especially their inherited country houses. Charles Ryder in Brideshead

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Revisited derisively comments on youths like Hooper who are ignorant of ‘history’ yet who are in line to inherit ‘the Future’ (15). Alienated from the past, young men have disinherited themselves. They do not deserve the future, Charles implies, because they lack a proper appreciation of the past. For him, the idea is self-serving. Charles positions himself as the upholder of the past and, thus, as the heir to Brideshead and aristocratic tradition. Charles’s covetousness of property excludes his enjoyment of family inheritance. Mr Ryder, his father, settles an inter vivos gift on Charles when he marries. Charles narrates this information parenthetically to downplay its importance: ‘(My father gave me as a wedding present the price of a house, and I bought an old rectory in my wife’s part of the country)’ (BR 220). Celia converts a barn into a studio for Charles to paint in, then has the place photographed and written up in Country Life. Charles never works there. The property passes definitively out of his hands when he divorces Celia. Using his brother-in-law, Boy Mulcaster, as his lawyer, Charles gives the property to his rival, Robin – Celia’s lover. Boy Mulcaster uses the argument that the children regard the property ‘as their home’ and adds that ‘Robin’s got no place of his own till his uncle dies’ (281), as if Robin’s inheritance were somehow Charles’s concern. Charles easily relinquishes his claim to the property and, by extension, the claim to his patrimony, because it does not enable his social ambitions and because it comes to him as an intrafamilial, legitimate gift. In his narrative, Charles gives no indication whatsoever that he visits this property. It has no appeal for him; he does not enjoy it, in the legal sense of the term ‘enjoy.’ Therefore, he can shed it without a qualm. By doing so, he disavows his father altogether, along with his bourgeois life. While having an extramarital affair with Julia, Charles sees that his future lies in league with her and her fortunes, especially if she divorces Rex and marries him. Throughout Brideshead Revisited, property tends to drift away from men and into the hands of women. Lady Marchmain controls Brideshead during her lifetime, and the house eventually devolves to Julia alone (BR 326). In fact, most of the male characters run away from their possessions and families. Sebastian ends up as a remittance man in Morocco. Lord Marchmain flees to Venice. Charles abandons his family for a two-year painting trip to Mexico and Latin America. In their absences, property falls under female authority. During Lady Marchmain’s tenancy and Lady Julia’s ownership, the presiding genius of Brideshead remains Nanny

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Hawkins, who lives sequestered in her quarters inside the dome. The house is predominantly a female space, one that Charles, whose own mother died in ‘the snow of Bosnia’ during the First World War (83), wants to infiltrate and possess in the recreation of a symbolic, if not an actual, family. To inherit property might legitimate Charles’s claim to belong among the Marchmains. Charles’s love affair with Sebastian – not devoid of pleasures such as nude sunbathing and boozy picnics – gives him an initial footing inside the Flyte family. Homosexuality is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Charles’s subsequent affair with Julia reprises his affair with Sebastian, for the two look alike and speak in the same manner. The weirdness of having an affair with a man, then his sister, should not be underestimated as opportunities to move within the charmed circles of the hereditarily rich. When Lord Marchmain considers leaving the estate to Julia, he does so in conjunction with a forecast of ‘the time when Julia and I should be married and in possession’ (BR 306), as Charles proclaims. In the shuffling of household effects that happens as a result of Bridey’s marriage to Beryl and Charles’s divorce from his wife Celia, Charles observes that Beryl ‘surveyed the place [Brideshead] fairly thoroughly in the days she was there’ (307). Competitive in his will to possess, Charles derides Beryl for comparing Brideshead to ‘various Government Houses she had visited’ (308). Charles knows that Lord Marchmain does not intend to leave the estate to Bridey and Beryl, and he expresses a tiny pang of ‘guilt’ (308) about not informing the hereditary heir of this eventuality. When Bridey tries to make his father accept the presence of a priest to shrive him, Lord Marchmain rejects the priest. The upshot for Charles is a small triumph: ‘I can now confess it – another unexpressed, inexpressible, indecent little victory that I was furtively celebrating. I guessed that that morning’s business had put Brideshead some considerable way further from his rightful inheritance’ (312). Charles often acts evasively. He does not utter the name ‘Brideshead’ throughout the prologue. He neglects to name his wife until well after they have reunited. It is a shock to discover that she is the sister of the much maligned Boy Mulcaster. In a similar fashion, Charles avoids announcing his vested interest in inheriting Brideshead for fear it will compromise his desire. Charles, in short, is a social climber. Reviewers of Brideshead Revisited in 1945 remarked on Waugh’s snobbery and slavish devotion to the aristocracy. An anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement commented that Waugh’s

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‘prepossessions, as a matter of fact, where such things as wealth and privilege are concerned, are of an unambiguously romantic character’ (Stannard 235). Henry Reed, reviewing for New Statesman, mocks Waugh’s kowtowing: ‘A burden of respect for the peerage and for Eton, which those who belong to the former, or who have been to the latter, seem able lightly to discard, weighs heavily upon him’ (Stannard 239). Reed dismisses Charles Ryder’s ‘vulgarity,’ manifest in showing off his ‘savoir faire against that of the lower characters’ (Stannard 239). Edmund Wilson takes Waugh to task for snobbery: ‘the aristocrats become terribly trashy, and his cult of the high nobility is allowed to become so rapturous and solemn that it finally gives the impression of being the only real religion in the book’ (Stannard 246). Nobility is Charles’s true religion, whatever his protestations to the contrary. Snobbery is one aspect of his social climbing. Social climbing depends on a perceived relation between class position and worth. Social climbers think that classes above them have greater intrinsic merit than their own class has. Envy is a mask for the pleasures of perceived difference. To scale social heights, which implies movement, climbers can acquire the manners, references, and vocabulary of the class that they aspire to enter. The penalty for failure is to be branded a snob or a poseur (Latham 12). Nancy Mitford’s cunning, ironic essay, ‘Noblesse Oblige,’ which makes distinctions between upper-class and non-upper-class word choice and pronunciation, caused an outcry when it appeared in 1956 because it fixed class difference within language itself. Yet Mitford offers remedial help to social risers by teaching differences in class markers. Language, grammar, and accent are immediate indicators of class. In a similar vein, Waugh upbraided novelist Henry Green for his ‘proletarian grammar’ and urged him to use ‘gentleman’s language’ (Letters 144). To rise, the social climber acquires taste and cultural knowledge. Lord Marchmain subtly ridicules Charles for not knowing that three painters named Bellini worked in Venice. Shortly after they meet, Sebastian teases Charles about his connoisseurship of wine: ‘I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey – which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend’ (BR 25). In a reversal of the tutor and tutored relation, Charles later teases Rex for liking treacly brandy, a failure of cultural distinction and taste. Over dinner in Paris, Rex and Charles discuss the Marchmains. Charles, in his snobbish disdain of Rex, silently disagrees with his assessments while avidly listening for fresh information about the

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family. Charles pretends that gossip about the Marchmains’ finances does not concern him, but he records it as necessary narrative information. Social climbing requires that certain kinds of knowledge, whether knowledge about which fork to use at dinner or someone’s annual income, be tacit but still known. The social climber treats public information as unmentionable in order to discern who is or is not in the know. Scoffing at Charles’s curiosity about the Marchmains, Sebastian tells him to ‘look them up in Debrett’ (41). Charles, unlike the worldly aesthete Anthony Blanche, is not privy to common knowledge about nobility. Because Charles does not know, he does not belong within the easy circles of the English aristocracy. Social climbing thus demands multiple kinds of imposture. Charles aspires to naturalness in his relations with the Marchmains, an ease that would indicate that he is an aristocrat by temperament, if not by birth. This naturalness is necessary to his social ambitions, which appear everywhere in Brideshead Revisited but are never confirmed by Charles. The social climber’s identity straddles the contradictions and double consciousness that arise from his shifting class position. Eager for knowledge, the climber pretends already to possess it. Eager to belong to an élite, he adopts the habits of that class, including its tastes and cultural referents: the difference among three Bellinis or the taste of Château Peyraguey wine. While acquiring culture, the social climber feigns disinterest in the symbolic value and production of artistic works. The climber learns distinctions and imagines that the class to which he aspires already knows how to distinguish one Bellini from another. Charles exercises snobbishness because he wants to assert his difference from others, especially those he perceives as rivals, such as Bridey and Beryl, who meet over the horrifyingly bourgeois pursuit of matchbox collecting. Uncultivated Bridey slides down the social scale in parallel with Charles’s attempts at ascent. Charles Ryder is an unapologetic hanger-on. His surname identifies him as someone along for the ride, a rider in the sense that he freeloads. Charles exists as a satellite to the Marchmain family, not unlike Adrian Porson, Lady Marchmain’s pet poet, and Mr Samgrass, the Oxford busybody who insinuates himself into the Marchmain household as a chaperon for Sebastian. A hint of competitiveness colours Charles’s prose when he encounters Samgrass at Brideshead. Samgrass claims to be ‘in solitary possession’ (BR 120) of the estate, everyone else being at the hunt. Samgrass reads Proust by the fire – rather, in Samgrass’s words, he spends the afternoon with ‘the incomparable Charlus’ (120).

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The reference to homosexual Charlus recalls that Anthony Blanche frequents Proust’s society in Paris (47). Blanche also knows other gay Frenchmen, including Gide and Cocteau (47, 52). Samgrass, by referring specifically to Charlus, insinuates that he is comfortable with and admires Charlus, just as he knows about and does not disparage the homosexual relation between Sebastian and Charles. Charles and Charlus are, after all, only one letter apart in spelling. Waugh read Proust ‘for the first time – in English of course’ (Mosley 93) in March 1948. Yet clearly Waugh knew about the ‘incomparable Charlus’ while writing Brideshead Revisited in 1944.6 Proust’s influence on Waugh is manifest as early as 1934 in A Handful of Dust. In imitation of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, Waugh entitles chapter 1 of that novel ‘Du Côté de Chez Beaver’ and chapter 6 ‘Du Côté de Chez Todd.’ While reading Remembrance of Things Past, Waugh asked Nancy Mitford about Proust’s Jewishness: ‘If he was a real Jew it would surely be quite impossible for him to know the haute-bourgeoisie, though he might meet the looser aristocracy?’ (Mosley 94). Jewishness, in Waugh’s estimation, limits social access and mobility. References to Proust in Brideshead Revisited recall the social climbers in Remembrance of Things Past who put so much faith in their connections and their chances at social success: Madame Verdurin, Odette, and the narrator Marcel. Allusions to Proust, as Mr Samgrass is aware, can be usefully deployed as comments on Charles’s own social adventures and desire to storm the English nobility. Whether influenced by Proust or not, the idea of social mobility animates many of Waugh’s opportunistic characters. In Vile Bodies, Adam invents a socialite named Imogen for his gossip column: ‘soon Imogen Quest became a byword for social inaccessibility – the final goal for all climbers’ (115). Waugh’s joke hinges on the perceived, if fictitious, social circles that climbers wish to reach. Those circles need not be real in order to dazzle aspirants. Social climbers require only the perception of inaccessible realms to motivate them. As long as some new acme of glamour exists, it must be conquered. If it does not exist, it must be invented. A nuance underlies this satirical point. Waugh’s characters, like most parvenus, do not wish to appear to be social climbers, yet they do want to be in the know. In the case of Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder longs to appear at ease among the sumptuous halls of Brideshead and among members of the Catholic aristocracy, even though he does not have the credentials or fortune that they possess. As far as the reader surmises, Charles’s family does not

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appear in Debrett’s, but the Marchmain family is written up in detail. Class anxiety and a taste for fine art urge Charles to rise, to gain acceptance by the Marchmains. Only they can decide whether to let him enter their world completely. One sudden turn in fortune – the potential inheritance of Brideshead through marriage to Julia – would fulfil Charles’s social ambitions. Inheritance legitimates arrivisme. Charles’s will to rise from the leisured middle class into the even more leisured and landed aristocracy, enabled by a queer relationship, is licensed by queer practices in the 1920s through the 1950s. While living in Berlin in the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood observed young German men who hustled in gay bars for money. They were not homosexuals. For all intents and purposes, they were ‘homosexual for economic reasons’ (Isherwood 156). Especially for Englishmen educated in public schools, queer identity was edged by class consciousness. As Isherwood explains, ‘upper-class homosexuality in England tended to fixate on working-class boys’ in a form of inverted snobbery (104). The dilemma for a character like Charles therefore settles on his middleclass identity. If he casts his gaze at working-class hustlers, he stands to gain nothing from them. If he associates with aristocrats, he may inherit a palace and a fortune. Alan Sinfield claims that ‘cross-class liaisons’ between men in the post-war period ‘disrupt class distinctions’ and problematize ‘personal relationships’ (69). Sinfield concentrates on examples of literary middle-class writers like Isherwood cruising or picking up working-class men. By contrast, Brideshead Revisited concerns a middle-class man whose sights are set on the gentry and who uses homosexuality as an entry into that class. Angus Wilson’s 1952 novel Hemlock and After offers an instructive counterpart to Brideshead Revisited. In Wilson’s novel, a wealthy novelist named Bernard takes up with a series of young men – Terence a décorateur and Eric a book-shop clerk – while remaining married to his wife Ella. Hemlock and After explicitly addresses the issue of queer social climbing. Bernard, who has made a fortune from writing finely spun psychological novels, self-consciously watches young homosexuals on the make. These ‘spivs’ understand the economic advantages attached to an avowal of homosexuality, or at least they understand the potential advantages of cruising men and subsequently blackmailing them. A ‘spiv,’ strictly speaking, is a man who dresses flashily and lives by his wits, often through black-market deals. In Hemlock and After, Wilson uses the term ‘spiv’ with a homosexual connotation. A despicable hustler named Ron attempts to pick up men by flirting and

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leering with what he calls his ‘“lazy smile” and “knock-out look”’ (Wilson 40). To perfect his spivvish attitudes, he practises leers and gestures in the mirror. Queer social climbing is not exclusively the province of lower-class marauders. Bernard moves in a sphere of socially competent, bourgeois spivs. The ‘golden spiv’ (Wilson 101), as the upwardly mobile type is called, displays several characteristics. He is young. He occupies a ‘homosexual borderland between respectability and loucherie’ (101). He lives in this borderland because the law constructs homosexuality as illegal, whereas society treats it as commonplace. Homosexuality in the 1950s was stigmatized, but homosexuals were everywhere. The golden spivs joined together into circles of mutual help and antagonism: ‘They were hard and calculating yet often without enough energy to pursue their calculations. They made among themselves small groups of intimates to provide each other protection against the toughness of society which their own climbing invited. Yet they were so constantly measuring the degree of affection which they could dispense to these chosen intimates without risking the charge of hiding conventionally and therefore ludicrously warm hearts beneath their tarty exteriors, that their deepest intimacies were themselves only shells’ (101). A spivvish attitude that restricts intimacies decreases the liabilities of those who want to get ahead. Terence, who tries to dissociate himself from this circle, cannot. ‘I’m a sort of spiv,’ comments Terence, then adds, ‘like any other artist’ (168). Being an artistic spiv has its rewards. The novel ends with the distribution of Bernard’s estate: he leaves money and property to his family, but he also charitably leaves bequests to his friends, including those with whom he has had homosexual relations. Bernard’s greatest legacy, however, is the conversion of a country house called Vardon Hall into a writers’ retreat. His gifts benefit the public at the same time as they dramatize and legitimate homosexual inheritances. Charles Ryder demonstrates some aspects of the golden spiv. An artist, Charles calculates his social successes by the commissions he receives to paint pictures of country houses. He begins his career by painting murals on the walls at Brideshead, an indirect way of representing his fantasies about the house to its inhabitants and a way of taking possession of the house. Bridey subsequently commissions Charles to do a series of drawings of Marchmain House in London before it is pulled down, a commission that launches Charles’s career. He admits his deficiencies as an artist while extolling the beauties of

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the house he paints: ‘my work had nothing to recommend it except my growing technical skill, enthusiasm for my subject, and independence of popular notions’ (BR 216). A society artist, he paints houses rather than portraits. Charles avoids avant-garde novelties; he vocalizes his dislike of the art nouveau style in the Brideshead chapel. As a traditionalist, he validates the tastes of his clients by depicting and memorializing their properties for them. The artistic representation of property perpetuates ownership in the guise of art, a domain in which economic interest and possession are disavowed. Charles, like his pictures, balances the contradiction of assuming the tastes of a class in order to belong to that class. More arriviste than artiste, he strives for upward mobility. Charles’s artistic career grafts him to a different cultural and social echelon than the one granted him by the middle-class expectations of his art-collecting father. Charles begins his studies at Oxford with latenight discussions about aesthetics conducted among scholarship students and academics in training. To signal his early affiliation with bohemianism, Charles decorates his rooms with ‘a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers’ and ‘a screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provençal landscape,’ which he bought ‘inexpensively when the Omega workshops were sold up’ (BR 29). After meeting Sebastian, however, Charles renounces his ties with both art history as an academic pursuit and avant-garde art as a practice. He gives over ‘popular notions’ of art. He throws off his friendship with Collins, the earnest art historian. He strips the reproduction Sunflowers from his wall and sells his Omega screen. He opts for traditional, figurative painting over expressionist, avant-garde painting. In effect, Charles pretends not to be an artist at all if that term designates someone whose motive is economic. He favours, as Pierre Bourdieu says about the multiple disguises that the art market adopts, ‘the accumulation of symbolic capital. “Symbolic capital” is to be understood as economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognized and thereby recognized, hence legitimate, a “credit” which, under certain conditions, and always in the long run, guarantees “economic” profits’ (75). Charles paints to fulfil artistic needs that hide economic motives. His exhibition of jungle paintings is chiefly praised by society ladies who might want to buy into the notion of the primitive that animates modern culture. The prime minister appears at his gallery opening, a cameo that exponentially increases Charles’s social cachet and symbolic capital. Nevertheless, Anthony Blanche diagnoses

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Charles’s paintings of jungles as ‘t-t-terrible t-t-tripe’ that could have been found in a ‘hothouse at T-t-trent or T-t-tring’ (BR 257). Charles’s art is meant to please, not to satisfy the demands of art per se. His art, like his homosexual and heterosexual dalliances, is the means to other ambitions, not an end in itself: the ever-receding goal of having arrived. If a social climber imagines that some other zone of glamour exists, a zone from which he is excluded, he will never be satisfied with the company that he keeps or the successes that he has. His climbing is defined by its fulfilment sometime in the indefinite future. In the long run, and under certain conditions, pictures of houses will be recognized as an end in themselves, rather than the symbolic capital that they purport to be. Anthony’s damning of Charles’s pictures as so much ‘charm’ (BR 255–9) is a serious charge, one of the few criticisms of Charles or his art that surfaces in Brideshead Revisited. Not only does Anthony Blanche keep a Brancusi statue in his Oxford rooms as evidence of his progressive tastes, he offers an alternative to the insular English aesthetics and class-based snobbery that motivate Charles. When Anthony speaks of artistic creation and ‘the proper experiences of the artist’ (56), Charles does not listen. As a student he makes ‘little pastiches’ (103) for friends; these toss-offs occasionally come to light later and embarrass him. Anthony’s condemnation of charm is not general. He specifically condemns the charm of Charles’s pictures and the charm of the Flyte family: ‘I took you out to dinner [at Oxford] to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you’ (260). Charm is a synonym for ‘safe’ and ‘mediocre.’ From the beginning of his acquaintance with the Flyte family, Charles has voluntarily surrendered to their charm. Sebastian confides that his family is ‘madly charming’ and he fears that they will beguile Charles ‘with their charm’ (38, 39). Charles buys into this definition. He views the Flytes as beguilingly different in their Catholicism and sophistication. The desire to please the rich through painting their possessions ultimately does not work. Anthony’s condemnation of being charmed is a condemnation of the desire to please, and specifically of Charles’s desire to refashion himself as aristocratic while he spivs along, catering to the aristocracy with his artistic wares. In other words, Anthony exposes Charles’s imposture as a social climber.

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Charles’s pictures of houses express his unease about property and acknowledge his unease concerning his own class identity. He paints, as he claims, ‘portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneer’s, a presage of doom’ (BR 216). He is a harbinger of lost property, of possessions alienated from their owners and returned to them in symbolic form as representations. ‘We possess nothing certainly except the past’ (215), Charles concludes. Even that possession is precarious, since the war renders the past a lost patrimony and the desire to inherit something absolute and inalienable a modernist pipe dream. Waugh’s accomplishment in Brideshead Revisited is to register the shift from modern refutation of the past, to a post-war, if not postmodern, nostalgia for what has been forsaken in the rush towards the future. Charles’s paintings of houses, like his damaged murals at Brideshead, record what has been lost over time, as well as what Charles fails to inherit and make his own.

NOTES 1 The following abbreviations are used in citations: Black Mischief (BM); Brideshead Revisited (BR); Decline and Fall (DF); A Little Learning (LL); Men at Arms (MAA); Put Out More Flags (POMF); Scoop (S); Work Suspended (WS). 2 The issue of homosexuality in the novel confounds some critics who prefer not to see it there: ‘The Bildungsroman plot implies Charles’s development and growing maturity: he must move from his immature love for Sebastian, with its implicit homosexual overtones, to his mature but extramarital love for Julia, and finally to the calm satisfaction of his love for God’ (Kennedy 24). Charles’s love for Sebastian is explicit and clearly homosexual. For no clear reason ‘must’ Charles forgo that love. Nor is love of God an inevitable evolution out of carnal passion. A skirmish about the homosexuality of Sebastian and Charles took place between critics David Bittner and John Osborne in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter between 1987 and 1991. David Higdon gives a full and sensible account of criticism about homosexuality in the novel (77–89). Patey also sums up the matter of homosexuality in Brideshead Revisited (241–2). Waugh includes queer characters in many of his novels and knew many homosexuals personally. Homosexual Captain Grimes darts from school to school in Decline and Fall. Ambrose Silk is a ‘cosmopolitan, Jewish pansy’ (POMF 575). Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited calls himself, stutteringly, an ‘old st-t-toat’

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(BR 35), meaning, in the slang of the interwar years, ‘a lecher’ or ‘a fag.’ In a chapter called ‘Two Mentors’ in A Little Learning, Waugh names two gay men as significant influences on his life. Tison Pugh absurdly calls Charles and Sebastian’s relationship ‘a romantic friendship’ (65). Pugh overlooks the representation of sex and sexuality in the novel, which tends towards discretion, as when Charles and Celia make love: ‘She had neat, hygienic ways for that [i.e., sex] too, but there were both relief and triumph in her smile of welcome; later we parted and lay in our twin beds a yard or two distant, smoking’ (BR 219). Sex occurs during the pause of the semi-colon. To ignore sexuality in Charles and Sebastian’s relationship is to ignore Waugh’s characteristic reticence about the direct representation of sex. The 1981 televised miniseries of Brideshead Revisited presupposes that Charles Ryder’s nostalgia for the aristocracy is normative. In this series, Charles’s visits to the Brideshead estate, swathed in sunlight and pictureperfect, reinforce Waugh’s conservative desire not to tamper with the past or its architecture – the legacy of an older and admirable England that was no more or never really existed. The television series, which glamorizes the interwar years, helped to fuel the heritage industry and inaugurated other historical screen dramas in the 1980s: Chariots of Fire (1981); A Jewel in the Crown (1982); A Passage to India (1984); A Room With a View (1986). In an analysis of the Brideshead series, Tana Wollen points out, ‘Through a defunct class and old things, an ambiguous relationship with the past is secured. In an “old country” they have status by virtue of their precedence and because they provide a trail of clues which leads to the present. The old made visible gives a sign of firm anchorage in enduring value, crucial to a stable sense of [national] identity. Made visible, the old provides a symbolic display of high culture’ (192). Waugh had a life-long passion for architecture and decor. McCartney gives a superb analysis of these interests (12–14, 51–8). ‘L’hérédité des biens accorde donc au processus de l’accumulation automatique du capital privé une continuité indéfinie. Par là, il favorise le dénivellement excessif des fortunes et toutes les funestes conséquences qui en résultent’ (my translation). Adolphe Landry edited and arranged Rignano’s work for the ‘Socialist Library’ series. Rignano published this material in Italian before it was translated into French. Wedgwood discusses Rignano in The Economics of Inheritance (246–63). Waugh probably knew something about Proust as early as 1925. On his brother Alec’s advice, Waugh applied to be Charles Scott Moncrieff’s secretary, but Moncrieff did not need anyone (LL 226, 228). Moncrieff was working on his magisterial translation of Proust throughout the 1920s.

Inheritance and Social Climbing in Brideshead Revisited 263 WORKS CITED Bergonzi, Bernard. ‘Evelyn Waugh’s Gentlemen.’ Critical Quarterly 5 (Spring 1963): 23–36. Betjeman, John. ‘Evelyn Waugh.’ Living Writers: Being Critical Studies Broadcast in the B.B.C. Third Programme. Ed. Gilbert Phelps. London: Sylvan, 1947. 137–50. Brideshead Revisited. Dir. Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Prod. Derek Granger. Adapt. from Evelyn Waugh’s novel by John Mortimer. Perf. Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick. Granada Television, 1981. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. and intro. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Bowen, Elizabeth. The Heat of the Day. New York: Knopf, 1949. Churchill, Thomas. ‘The Trouble With Brideshead Revisited.’ Modern Language Quarterly 28.2 (1967): 213–28. Compton-Burnett, Ivy. A Family and a Fortune. 1939. London: Penguin, 1983. Estey, Joshua D. ‘National Objects: Keynesian Economics and Modernist Culture in England.’ Modernism/Modernity 7.1 (2000): 1–24. Higdon, David Leon. ‘Gay Sebastian and Cheerful Charles: Homoeroticism in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.’ Ariel 25.4 (1994): 77–89. Isherwood, Christopher. Conversations with Christopher Isherwood. Ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. Kennedy, Valerie. ‘Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”: Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained?’ Ariel 21.1 (1990): 23–39. LaFrance, Marston. ‘Context and Structure of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.’ Twentieth Century Literature 10.1 (1964): 12–18. Latham, Sean. ‘Am I A Snob?’: Modernism and the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. McCartney, George. Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Mosley, Charlotte, ed. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. London: Houghton, 1996. Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Pugh, Tison. ‘Romantic Friendship, Homosexuality, and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.’ English Language Notes 38.4 (2001): 64–72. Powell, Robert S. ‘Uncritical Perspective: Belief and Art in Brideshead Revisited.’ Critical Inquiry 22.3 (1980): 53–67.

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Read, Harlan Eugene. The Abolition of Inheritance. New York: Macmillan, 1918. Rignano, Eugenio. La question de l’héritage. Intro. Adolphe Landry. Paris: Bibliothèque Socialiste, 1905. Sinfield, Alan. Literature Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. London: Athlone, 1997. Stannard, Martin, ed. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1984. Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. In Evelyn Waugh Omnibus. 1932. London: Heinemann, 1977. – Brideshead Revisited. 1945. London: Penguin, 1962. – Decline and Fall. 1928. London: Penguin, 1937. – The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. New Haven and New York: Ticknor, 1980. – A Little Learning. London: Penguin, 1964. – Men at Arms. London: Chapman, 1952. – Put Out More Flags. In Evelyn Waugh Omnibus. 1942. London: Heinemann, 1977. – Scoop. Intro. Christopher Hitchens. 1938. London: Penguin, 2000. – Vile Bodies. 1930. London: Penguin, 1938. – Work Suspended. London: Chapman, 1949. Wedgwood, Josiah. The Economics of Inheritance. London: Routledge, 1929. Wilson, Angus. Hemlock and After. London: Secker, 1952. Wollen, Tana. ‘Over Our Shoulders: Nostalgic Screen Fictions for the 1980s.’ Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. Ed. John Corner and Sylvia Harvey. London: Routledge, 1991. Wykes, David. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life. New York: St Martin’s, 1999.

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10 Maternal Property and Female Voice in Banville’s Fiction jason s. polley

John Banville’s protagonists are always cerebral men. His ‘underlying dramatic pattern,’ as Joseph McMinn puts it, ‘questions the relation between masculinity and intellectualisation’ (ix). Derek Hand attributes this pattern to an illiteracy within Banville’s work. Hand takes him ‘to task for his representation of women ... they are, and remain, a foreign country and he does not speak the language’ (113). In Shroud, protagonist Axel Vander alludes to Hand when he owns up, ‘In the land of women I am always a traveller lately arrived’ (72). Notwithstanding this proviso, Axel Vander, like Banville himself, has arrived in the land of women and immersed himself in the language of the place. For the past ten years or so, most notably with his adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s play The Broken Jug, and two of his latest novels, Eclipse and Shroud, Banville pays what is by far his closest attention to women. In fact, Eve Reck in The Broken Jug and Cass Cleave, who appears in Eclipse and its sequel Shroud, are the true protagonists of these texts. In contrast to Banville’s other works – to date his fiction includes fourteen novels, a book of short stories, two dramas, and a screenplay – women are no longer muted. In dialogic and novelistic ways, Eve and Cass speak unreservedly. They are freely responsive characters. Whether entrusted with an estate (as Eve is) or disenfranchised from one (as Cass is), each talks because of her particular connection to property. Banville stages the problem of women in the same way as he plays up the problem of men. In this sense, his depictions of gender are correlated. Men, like women and like property, are sites of proliferating and conflicting narratives. Every man, like every conventional woman, is a riddle. Banville dramatically sets up each sex as a social

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construct. His literary representations therefore newly inform our understandings of gender and modes of power. Through The Broken Jug, Eclipse, and Shroud, Banville particularly develops and cultivates an inverse relation between women and estates. Though his female characters actually own property, he shows that they gain an identity as property loses its significance. Property and inheritance circumscribe the female voice in Banville’s fiction. He has always played upon the big house motif, from some of the short stories of Long Lankin, through the ‘baroque madhouse’ (15) in Birchwood, the crumbling castles and homes in the Revolutions Tetralogy (Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter, and Mefisto), the various estates and residences of the Frames Trilogy (The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena), the manor houses and apartments of The Untouchable, and, just recently, the holiday home in The Sea. Yet, in the three texts I examine here, Banville adds to his property trope by making all houses inherited and distinctly female, if not specifically maternal. Among other things, this manipulation of maternal property is a testament to his Irishness. In Irish literature, the identification of property with maternal figures, or women generally, creates a pattern that Banville himself inherits. The benefactor or originator of this female property trope may very well be Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl. Banville revisits this foundational text ironically, so as to give a voice to the eponymous heroine. In Banville’s The Untouchable, for example, Vivienne puckishly calls her husband, Victor Maskell, her ‘wild Irishman’ (165). Protagonist Maskell, an Irish version of Anthony Blunt, is a queer double agent. These revisions – these voices – finally liberate the innocent yet deceptive wild Irish girl (Owenson 172) from the castle of her father and the hand of her suitor’s father. Banville’s inclusion of maternal property, as well as the feminine voices that ensue because of this ownership, undermines standard Victorian conditions of property and inheritance. For Banville, property and inheritance do not entail the domestication and ‘ill effects’ that they do for Nathaniel Hawthorne, most notably in The House of the Seven Gables. Gillian Brown explains, ‘For Hawthorne, inheritance seems in its ill effects to produce conditions resembling female vulnerability to male will’ (110). Nineteenth-century wills and last testaments, at once understood as the legal documents, commands, and desires of the deceased, make the legatee, as Brown puts it, ‘liable to the past’ (108). Particularly for women, this liability, or this being bound to the past and its dead, traditionally results in a ‘loss of iden-

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tity’ (Milton 53). Identity loss stems from the fact that, in nineteenthcentury Britain, women are ‘at the mercy of their husbands’ (52). Following his study of Davidoff and Hall’s examination of over 600 wills from 1790 to 1850, Paul Milton says that this coverture is further compounded by ‘the paternalistic protectiveness of the age’ (53). Jeff Nunokawa, in The Afterlife of Property, boldly nuances this same point: ‘slavery, according to some of its most influential discontents, defines the deep structure of women’s position in Victorian England’ (10). It appears, then, that whether a woman is a widow or not, she is typically confined to quietness, if not to silence, by male coverture. Property and its paternalistic sway mutes any maternalistic or even female voice. Banville reconsiders this traditional hushing in relation to inheritances, within both the Irish literary tradition and the possession of property. Like his return to Sydney Owenson, he revisits Victorian fiction, not to mention historical fiction in general, in order to detail what he inherits and what he rejects in that tradition. Just as his Renaissance science novels illustrate the homelessness of Nicolas Koppernigk (Copernicus) and Johannes Kepler (Kepler), his gothic novel, Birchwood, set in the 1850s, ends with Gabriel Godkin’s silence (171). This voicelessness, especially when it comes to women, is another version of homelessness. Dispossessed drifters, much like silenced women, are a variety of the disinherited. Akin to his constant inclusion of big houses or actual homes, Banville’s texts always incorporate homelessness. When Morrow, from Athena, says, ‘Down-and-outs have always appealed to me’ (56), he, like the majority of Banville’s protagonists, echoes Banville’s own creative interests. Fittingly, in The Broken Jug, Eclipse, and Shroud, Banville gives to hobos, or at least to the homeless, what is probably his most detailed attention to date. In his narratives, his outcasts – tramps or bums or ‘derelicts’ (Athena 220; Eclipse 102) – are always male and they never speak. Whether it is Barbarossa and his precious pipes in Athena (220–3), the nameless fellow in Eclipse (104–5), or the pitied, toothless, and foul-smelling all-purpose beggar in Shroud (153), these homeless ones are also the voiceless ones. They do not even unquestioningly beseech, as does the ‘wheezing beggar’ in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (39), one of the models for the conventional Irish outcast. This parallel between a lack of home and a lack of voice also finds its way into Banville’s dramatic form. In The Broken Jug Judge Adam’s starving, skeletal, and famine-blighted tenants must act in dumb show,

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in lieu of voicing their plight, to the visiting Orangeman, Sir Walter (26–7). As the lessees faint outside his courtroom window, the well-fed and poteen-nourished Adam speaks for the whole swooning lot of them: Don’t mind them, it’s an act they’re putting on. They’re up to every trick, believe you me. They put on rags, and borrow sickly babes, And make consumptives get up from their beds And then come here to make a show of me. No doubt they’ve heard about your visit, sir, And think that I will weaken on that score.

(29)

Banville enhances the irony of these propertyless Irish farmers pleading for assistance from an Englishman by alluding to Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal.’ Historical patterns and ironies thus are inherited but reconfigured by Banville. He re-examines the past in his Irish settings, much as Bowen’s Stella Rodney returns to Ireland in The Heat of the Day or Maskell does in The Untouchable, in order to resolve problematic inheritances. As McMinn points out, Banville draws on the Irish historical landscape in all of his work (6). The only exceptions to this persistent setting are Nightspawn, Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, and, especially, Shroud. The internationalism of Shroud, as well as his continued and increased examinations of homelessness and property, contributes to a postmodern and post-colonial project wherein Banville gives a voice to women and to Ireland. This voice allows both bodies – women, Ireland – to inherit an identity that pays heed to the young James Joyce’s warning: ‘It is a sinful foolishness to sigh back to the good old times, to feed the hunger of us with the cold stones that they afford’ (‘Drama and Life’ 29). The second sex, like the colonized race, is in many ways disinherited. Moreover, in the Irish context, there is a will to break free from an inheritance of suffering. Joyce further claims, ‘Just as ancient Egypt is dead, so is ancient Ireland. Its dirge has been sung and the seal set upon its gravestone’ (‘Ireland’ 125). Bearing this observation in mind, Banville opens new gates for Irishness and femaleness by way of their respective relations to property, ownership, and homelessness. He ironically manipulates these two bodies so as to give to each a voice free from the confinements, laments, and keenings of memory and history. Like the property and stages that they act as entrances to and exits from, gates figure prominently in Irish literature as sites of taking leave

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or taking possession of property. Swinging open only to latch shut, gates speak to a loss of land and of identity. In the Irish landscape, a once-open gate comes to imply a once-independent people. In the work of Banville, however, open gates mean something else. The Untouchable comes to a close with an open gate: ‘Father, the gate is open’ (367). Banville’s screenplay for the film version of Bowen’s The Last September concludes with a slowly twirling tree swing. This adaptation of Bowen’s ‘twang[ing]’ and ‘swinging aghast’ gate (303) smacks of playfulness rather than gloominess. Banville’s version stresses the open over the ominous. The swinging gate and spinning swing suggest the fluidity or malleability of personal identity. Speaking of the last line of The Untouchable, Allan Hepburn states, ‘The gate is open to death. The gate is open to heaven. The gate is open to new identities’ (228). With a figurative and literal gate that clicks open in The Broken Jug and continues swinging through Eclipse and Shroud, Banville’s writing undergoes a transformation that can be read as a movement from (i) bracketing women as property, to (ii) defining women by virtue of their property, to (iii) understanding women and their individual identities without reference to property. In this sequence, property progressively loses its centrality. This step-by-step transition allows Banville’s feminine ‘protagonists’ to escape conventional female confinement. In The Broken Jug, Eve Reck is more or less restricted to two rooms. In Eclipse, Lily, Cass Cleave’s proxy, gains a little mobility, for she moves between the house and the circus. In Shroud, Cass wanders where she wishes. Patricia Parker speaks to the more traditional concerns of this shift from room to world or from private to public: ‘Behind this concern for women’s “wandering,” errancy, or “mooveable” [sic] ways lie anxieties about female sexuality, but, even more specifically, about its relation to property, to the threat of the violation of this private place if it were to become a “common” place’ (105). In Banville’s fiction, this move from room to house to world also relates to, and specifically addresses, issues of privacy, property, and independence. Ownership or non-ownership of property attests to the muting of women as characters. Talking Back in The Broken Jug Irish literature often draws attention to restrictions placed on women. This checking commonly plays itself out in the form of physical confinement. In Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, for instance, Sir Kit’s

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Jewish wife is shut up in the barrack-room for seven years until her husband dies (20), and Miss Isabella is ‘locked up in her chamber’ (26). In The Valley of the Squinting Windows, MacNamara provides a variant to Edgeworth’s trope of female confinement. Upon returning home from Belfast, Mary Cooney inexplicably ‘shut[s] herself up in a room [so] not one can see a sight of her’ (14). In At Swim-Two-Birds, O’Brien also includes an isolation that insinuates female captivity. Recently maddened Sweeney is taken ‘away to a quiet place for a fortnight and a month, to the quiet of a certain room’ (70). He succumbs to this ‘madness’ when he learns of the death of his father, mother, brother, sister, and small son. This loss of family brings to an end the possibility of transmitting property. He is heirless. Therefore, like traditionally restricted women, he cannot bestow property. These conditions of madness may well mirror those of femaleness, for both sets result in seclusion. Self-imposed or otherwise, isolation leads to a loss or at least a restriction of will. Just as madwomen are limited to specific places, like Maureen to Difford Hall in The Beauty Queen of Leenane and the ‘madwoman in the attic’ who ‘pop[s] her golliwog’s head out at the mansard window ... shrieking gibberish’ in Eclipse (12), so women are constrained from moving beyond certain spaces. ‘“Moveability,”’ to use Patricia Parker’s word, implies ‘errancy’ or the transformation of the private into the public or the ‘common.’ As the story typically goes, women, whether young or old, sane or unsound, are private property. This convention is further complicated by the fact that private property and chattels require maintenance. One takes on many duties with the ownership of an estate or a woman. Banville’s adaptation of The Broken Jug takes place at the height of the Irish potato famine in 1846. The dire setting of Ballybog, Ireland, allows Banville to address the restriction and objectification both of the Irish and of women. Making this analogy between gender and country clear, Eve Reck is equated with the shattered pitcher that represents Irish history. Her mother, Martha, makes the comparison explicit: ‘Do you know what was in that jug, my girl? Only your reputation, that was all. Who’d glue that back for you, I’d like to know?’

(35)

Similarly, the pitcher stands for Ireland and inheritance. The widow Martha, in Judge Adam’s courtroom seeking a just compensation for the smashing of her jug, describes the ‘heirloom’ as ‘a beauteous and

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historic thing’ that ‘told old Ireland’s history’ (42). In her lengthy account of its provenance, she finally tells of how the jug has survived the uprisings and revolts of 1798 (43). As an Irishwoman, she understands the pieces of the jug to be her ‘country’s history, broken up in bits!’ (43). In order to determine the perpetrator of this crime, the court must discover who was in Eve’s bedroom, which is where the jug falls, at the time of the accident. There are several complications to this case. Both Eve’s suitor, Robert, and a disguised man are in her room when the jug breaks. Yet Martha sees only Robert. Robert does not know who the other man happens to be. Only Eve knows. The problem, of course, as is made quite clear near the start of the play, is the fact that the masked man is Judge Adam himself. By virtue of her awkward predicament, a position representative of the forced plight of females, Eve refuses to speak. For some reason, she will not reveal the identity of the interloper who gets behind the gate she always shuts by half-past ten (49). For this invasion and Eve’s subsequent silence, Robert threatens to end their marriage engagement (50). And after remarking, ‘A daughter is a mother’s cross,’ Martha adds counsel to counsel by threatening to disinherit her: My girl, there is your dowry for you; take it, And off with it, out of my sight, and house, For in the open air no one pays rent, And you’re an outcast now; and your long hair, That hair that you inherited from me, Will make a rope for you to hang yourself!

(66)

The maternal legacy – a rope of long hair – serves to strangle the next Irish generation. The breaking of the jug, as another legacy, suggests the errancy or the commonness of Eve herself. She, like the jug, is represented as an object in many bits. She is subjected to, or objectified by, what Parker dubs the specific properties of blazon, or ‘the taking control of a woman’s body rhetorically through its division into parts’ (126). Banville exaggerates and manipulates this rhetorical control of women by giving Eve, who is lame, a caliper on her leg. This splint is the acme of her several shortcomings: she is a woman; she is injured; she is disadvantaged; she is inept. Compounding her limitations, she is Irish. Therefore, while his court is under review by Sir Walter, the

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‘cursed Lord Lieutenant’s man’ (13), Judge Adam refers to Eve as ‘damaged goods.’ With his famine-stricken tenants fainting outside his courtroom windows and his position troubled by the fact that he is covertly trying himself at law, guilty Adam takes away ‘poor’ Eve’s personhood: The suitors weren’t exactly queuing up To beg the widow for the daughter’s hand; That withered leg discourages the boys: Round here they want their mares fit in all fours. The trouble is, poor Evie’s damaged goods.

(60)

Not only compartmentalized because of her gender and her limp, Eve is defined and understood as a piece of property – a marketable and movable thing – for the reason that her mother, as Adam explains, ‘is a widow, with a bit of land / That she rents out in rundale’ (40). Though Eve thus is a Protestant, and ‘Prods and papists [are] always a bad mix’ (59), Martha Reck’s maternal ‘rundale,’ or ownership and leasing of land in parcels, makes daughter Eve a valuable parcel for the Irish-Catholic Robert. Adam, in an effort to tarnish Robert’s reputation, while keeping the blame away from himself, additionally commodifies Eve by referring to her as the means to Robert’s ‘cunning plan’ (60). Her property and her hand, a piece of her that stands for all of her, will enable Robert to retrieve the land his father once lost. By way of Robert’s alleged plan, Banville highlights the fact that Robert, like ‘Evie,’ is also nothing more than a thing or a type. Robert is presented as a callous ‘grabber.’ In The Valley of the Squinting Windows, MacNamara, at length, fleshes out this tag: ‘The word “grabber” had not been invented to describe a new class, but rather to denote the remarkable character of a class already in existence. That was their innermost nature, these farmers, to be closed-fisted and to guard with an almost savage tenacity their possessions to which they had already attained. It was notable also that they were not too careful or particular as to the means they employed to come into possession. This was the full answer to the question why so many of them put a son on for the Church. It was a double reason, to afford a means of acquiring still further and to be an atonement in the sight of Heaven for the means they used in acquiring thus far’ (80). Though this grabbing may directly, or at least in part, be a result of the fact that as

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recently as ‘1704 Roman Catholics were deprived of the right to inherit land [in Ireland]’ (Boyce 3), its baseness is far from veiled. Banville also extends this blazonry of Eve and categorization of Robert to Irishness in general. Just as Eve is taken control of by way of her body, and Robert is labelled by his unparticular means of coming into possession, the Catholic tenants in Ballybog (and Ireland in general) are diminished by their monstrousness. In contrast to Kleist’s original play, Der zerbrochene Krug, written in 1804, Banville’s Irish adaptation contains a virtual encyclopaedia of lameness. Ballybog, unlike Kleist’s Dutch village of Huisum, is peopled with peg-legged peasants and tenants. These include bowlegged and flat-footed Joe Byrne (64), Paudeen Joe’s misshapen feet, Old Rattagan’s bunions, Bill Phelan’s mother’s wooden leg, and Mary Mooney’s youngest’s six toes (78). These so-called afflictions are common knowledge and commonplace. And these few people who stand for everyone in the village are grotesque figures identified by their particular parts rather than their distinct personalities. Banal as their deformities may be, they are looked upon and stared at as monstrous. These inhabitants are rendered as things rather than as human beings. As Irish-Catholics, they are supervised and controlled by what D. George Boyce calls ‘one of the most paradoxical aspects of Protestant political thinking’: ‘the willingness to link liberty to the necessity of keeping Catholic power in permanent check and subjugation’ (3). In The Broken Jug, keeping the Catholics in permanent check is Adam’s task. This judge, whose name also resonates with biblical authority, serves as a Unionist mouthpiece, albeit a mouthpiece with judicial power. He brags about this fact directly after Sir Walter reminds the judge that he is Irish: Of course! Who better to keep watch over the Irish? But for all that I am as good a Tory As any true-born, native Englishman.

(57)

The paradox of this subjugation is played up by the fact that Adam, like his subjects, is lame. As is made evident a mere half-minute into the play, he has a club-foot (11). By contrast, in Kleist’s original version, Adam is the only lame character. Banville comments upon the fact that since 1820 the line between religion and politics in Ireland is increasingly hard to distinguish (Boyce 23). His carnivalizations skirt any

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attempt to redraw those lines so as to lament or lash out at past injustice. He knows ancient Ireland is dead. Rather than look back and sing praises to old Ireland, he ironically manoeuvres the image of the past so as to look forward. His alterations of and additions to Kleist’s play also emphasize the double subjection of Irish women. Eve, as well as the fallen gender she stands for and the caged race she is a part of, is not simply rendered subservient. Not merely a broken emblem for the meek, she is alert and forthright, responsive and firm. Banville, who describes his Irish version of this German Lustspiel as a case of a ‘mad sub-editor re-writ[ing] Kleist’ (qtd in McMinn 158), gives Eve an evident voice. This voice ultimately furnishes Eve with a clear choice, a choice that Kleist’s Eve is not allowed. Eve’s new-found feminine voice is a direct result of Banville’s manipulation of the obvious. Though Adam’s guilt is as plain as day to even the most mildly discerning of audiences (of both Kleist and Banville), Banville refocuses attention upon the predicaments of Eve and her sex, instead of focusing on comic, devilish Adam and his acts of injustice. In Banville, the widow Martha Reck, a surname that carries a resonance of both the spoil of wreck and Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, is a landowner. This asset adds to Eve’s depiction as a thing or an item, for she is an evident vehicle or means to the transmission of property. Eve’s mother’s property encourages Robert to grab Eve as if he is picking up an object. However, in Kleist, Eve’s mother is not a landowner; Mistress Martha Krull is the ‘Caretaker’s widow, [and] a midwife now’ (113). Moreover, she herself arranges the ‘match’ between her daughter and the original Rupert (108). Therefore, in the words of Jan Cohn, Kleist’s Eve is an early example of a passive and valued Victorian woman: ‘Modesty and passivity became the conventionally valued characteristics of women, characteristics that guaranteed the absence of the aggressive self-seeking that bourgeois society rewarded’ (128). In Kleist, Eve never transcends this circumscribed value. Even after Magistrate Adam’s guilt is established, by means of the cleft footprints leading from Eve’s window to his courthouse chamber, she remains stuck within the narrow conditions of nineteenth-century womanhood. She is voiceless. To stress this point, after she implores District Judge Walter to save Rupert from his conscription to the wars in the East Indies and it turns out that the draft notice is ‘forged’ by Adam’s hand (Kleist 156), which adds to both Adam’s meanness and Eve’s innocence, she still never truly speaks for herself. Rather, she continues to respect

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the restrictions of her role. Her supplication at the feet of Walter confirms her predictable forgivingness and modesty. This entreaty directly answers Rupert’s ‘My golden girl, my heart’s desire! My bride! / How can you ever in your life forgive me?’ (156). Her final lines in the play reinforce expected female qualities. She shuts herself up: He crept to my bedroom, promising to write, But there made such a shameful proposition, As no good girl would ever dare repeat.

(157)

By contrast, Banville’s Eve overcomes the silence inflicted on her as a condition of her sex. She does not modestly submit herself to quietness, muting herself and the female voice in general. Almost halfway through the play, in an incident absent in Kleist, Banville hints at Eve’s potential brashness. In response to Robert’s lofty plans for her, she equivocally says, ‘I’m glad you had my life planned out for me’ (Broken Jug 34). Banville goes on to remove the ambiguity from her tone and actions. Although likewise duped and blackmailed by Adam and the ‘clumsy forgery’ (82) that mirrors his clumsy gait, Banville’s Eve, unlike her harbinger and namesake, guards her self-respect. She remains upright while asking Sir Walter for help. Furthermore, she shows that she is quite conscious of her status as a thing: Don’t let them send him off to the East Indies! I know he only wants me for the land, But I don’t care, I’ll take him anyway.

(82)

Anything but submissive, she exercises choice. She turns around what Jan Cohn refers to as the necessities of courtship: ‘The courtship period, moreover, reinforced the necessity for women to represent themselves as modest, passive, and submissive – the inverse of those aspects of character that promised men personal success’ (130). Eve limits Robert’s success, while perhaps even putting an end to it. She shuts up Robert and his masculine voice. Her last line is one of only a few in the play that is qualified by a tonal direction. This line is also one of only a few instances wherein Banville is unfaithful to the iambic pentameter form by more than one beat. Interrupting Robert’s ‘Oh Eve, to think you’d do all that for me – ,’ she ‘Bitterly’ rejoins, ‘I did it for myself, not you; remember that’ (83). Eve’s own excising of herself

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from objecthood in twelve beats, is reminiscent of Walter’s insertion of Adam into thingness in fourteen beats: ‘It is the bench that we must recognise, and not the man’ (80). Accentuating these points and Eve’s novel independence, her closing action in the play is a turn away from Robert when he tries to take her hands (83). The dialogic nature of drama opens the gate to Banville’s willingness to immerse himself in the language of women. Once the gate to Eve’s mother’s property is unfastened, the threshold into Eve’s bedroom is crossed and her windows are opened. In the courtroom her voice finally resonates in a reclaiming of subjecthood and justice. The open-endedness of the play gives Eve a voice. Banville’s stagemanaging of the obviousness in Kleist removes Eve from her gendered constraints. Rather than being simply defined and controlled as a piece of property, she is left with her mother and her maternal property. She reinherits her land and inherits her self. Having choices, she turns her back on the audience and on subjection, while at the same time stealing the show. She cashes in on selfhood; she slides into the role of proxy protagonist. Second-Guessing in Eclipse In Eclipse, Banville’s keen attention to the Irish female tradition is apparent from the outset. Just as he manipulates Kleist’s dramatic form in The Broken Jug, Eclipse revisits Elizabeth Bowen’s narrative form and rewrites a vital motif from her work. In fact, Banville’s debts to Bowen are multiple, manifest most obviously in his film script for The Last September, Bowen’s novel about the Troubles in Ireland. In the same way that his screenplay version of her novel integrates a number of carnivalesque additions, such as a telescopic spyglass, a pet monkey, some sex scenes, and a tree swing, the opening of Eclipse adds to a specific scene from Bowen’s The Death of the Heart – the window scene. By inheriting and by making this particular scene his own, he addresses the topic of female untowardness and propriety that pervades Bowen’s work. This sense of legislated personal decorum extends to the expectations of property upkeep. Land, like a lady, must be properly looked after. This theme reflects upon the importance of appearance while suggesting the many deceptions of appearance. The window scene likewise sets the stage for the main themes of Eclipse, namely, deferment, ownership, madness, ghostliness, and girlhood.

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In the third book of Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Portia is almost run over in traffic. This near accident, in the form of a car swerving past her ‘like a great fish,’ occurs right after she suddenly waves her arm ‘at the drawingroom window’ (320). Directly, she explains her injudicious act to her half-brother Thomas, whose quick arm actually rescues her: ‘There was Anna [Thomas’s wife], up there. She’s gone now’ (320). His retort threatens her independence: ‘If you don’t take better care in the traffic, I don’t think you ought to go out alone’ (320). On the other side of the street and behind the window, the affronted Anna is hiding. She cannot believe her foolishness: ‘having been waved to made Anna step back instinctively. She knew how foolish a person looking out of a window appears from the outside of a house – as though waiting for something that does not happen, as though wanting something from the outside world’ (321). Bowen stresses the division between the outside world and the inside world, between street and room. This wall with a window speaks to the difference between wanting and having. The injudicious wave fails to establish a connection between Anna and Portia. Indeed, both female characters, one outdoors, one indoors, are compromised by this window scene. Within Bowen’s narrative each is estimated as unbecoming because either brash or antipathetic. Untowardness threatens Portia’s liberty, while it makes Anna, though seen only by Portia, seem wanting. In Eclipse, Banville’s opening window scene, in contrast to Bowen’s, declines the attempt to paint a true picture of reality. In fact, as Derek Hand says of the windows in Banville’s Kepler, the window scene presents a distorted or refracted version of reality (106). The window scene in Eclipse begins with ex-actor Alexander Cleave, who has just returned to his boyhood home to live alone without his wife, Lydia, for what he calls ‘a brief respite from life, an interval between acts’ (13). While unpacking his car, he turns and looks back at the house and sees what he takes ‘to be [his] wife standing at the window of what was once [his] mother’s room’ (3). He goes on to explain, ‘The figure was motionless, gazing steadily in my direction but not directly at me. What did she see? What was it she was seeing? I felt diminished briefly, an incidental in that gaze, dealt, as it were, a glancing blow or blown a derisive kiss. Day reflecting on the glass made the image in the window shimmer and slip; was it she or just a shadow, womanshaped?’ (3). Moments later, Cleave recounts how he ‘enquired of Lydia what it was she had been looking at’ (4). The meaning of the

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question escapes her. So he gestures as he says, ‘From the window, upstairs; you were looking out at me’ (4). Following what he calls her ‘lately developed’ ‘dulled gaze’ and her ‘swallowing’ intimation of impatience, she relates the fact that ‘she had not been upstairs’ (4). After this they simply ‘stood in silence for a moment’ (4). Cleave constantly crosscuts and weaves back and forth through time while also describing the present in Eclipse, which is set in five parts like the five acts of a play. The slips and slides that make up his narrative method suggest a deferral – a delay or a displacement – that echoes the ghostly and disquieting qualities of his dead mother’s property. Cleave’s account, beset with verbal moves (‘What I took to be my wife’ [3]), disruptions (‘Anyway, as I was saying’ [105]), and distractions (‘I might have been a – ’ [100]; ‘One night when I – ’ [116]), never gives readers a solid footing. In this sense, like Cleave and the ‘queer,’ ‘haunted,’ big, old house that he now inhabits (129), the reader is forever dislocated and surrounded by hints and spectres. Approximating the indirect and unresolved gaze from his mother’s window, ghostliness and intangibility haunt the narrator and his readers. Cleave describes how these echoes are off-putting: ‘So if the purpose of the appearance of this ghost is to dislocate me and keep me thrown off balance, am I indeed projecting it out of my own fancy, or does it come from some outside force?’ (46). According to Bill Brown, these disorientations add to our physical sensations: ‘We might materialize the world around us through habit, but only the interruption of habit will call our attention to brute physicality’ (76). Enhancing this trope of disruption and discovery set forth in the opening of the novel, Lydia’s recently acquired irritation and impatience with Cleave – which seems to be the result of more than his leaving her to go ‘back to what he still calls home, to live with the ghost of his Mammy,’ as Cass, their daughter, hears Lydia explain it over the phone in Shroud (117) – hint at a mental unevenness or imbalance within Cleave. Both he and his physical surroundings, his dead mother’s lofty property, are haunted by distortion, disturbance, and disjunction. These are the reverberations or the death resonances that typically inhabit big, old, willed houses. Cleave, who admits, ‘The house itself it was that drew me back’ (Eclipse 4), begins to see himself ‘as a house walked up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger’ (15). Justifying this intimation of personal incursion, while also showing his metonymic connection to the house, Cleave realizes that ‘the house too has been invaded,

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someone had got in and had been living here, some tramp or fugitive’ (15). Suffering from what he interprets as images, visions, and hallucinations (43), where ‘the actual has taken on a tense, trembling quality’ and ‘everything is poised for dissolution,’ he senses that he is ‘living in the house of the dead’ (49). He attributes the phantoms of this big, shabby, Irish house – as Bowen might describe it (The Last September 46) – to its past. It is the former lodging house wherein Cleave spent his ‘childhood among alien presences and ghostly figures’ (Eclipse 49). Because both of his parents passed away in this boyhood home, he half-seriously sees these ‘hauntings’ as his parents’ posthumous revenge for something he ‘did not attend to properly when [he] had the chance’ (50). When he finally relates that these apparitions are in actuality the shadows, sounds, crumbs, and voices of Quirke, the caretaker of the house, and his daughter, Lily, a pair he first takes to be the ghosts of ‘a woman and an even more indistinct child’ (55), he remarks that the squatting Quirkes ‘have made [him] too into a ghost’ (124). This reflection recalls Lydia’s earlier charge that Cleave has ‘at last become [his] own ghost’ (55). Once he enters ‘the side gate into the garden of the house’ (Eclipse 112), as he always did when a boy, and steps through the ‘lookingglass’ to discover these homeless interlopers at home in his house (112–21), his sensations of ghostliness are replaced by the dreadful conviction that something has happened to his daughter (145, 170). Following his prescience or sixth sense, the second half of Cleave’s chronicle concentrates on the impacts of the living, in the same way that the first half concentrates on the echoes of the dead. After his ‘pause,’ ‘to record the imminence of a great event,’ a solar eclipse with ‘total occlusion predicted, though not for all’ (119), the last half of Eclipse, like the final third of Shroud, specifically focuses on the strengths and voices of living women. Both first-person narrators end by redirecting their weighty, self-reflective meditations, their ‘malad[ies] of selfness’ (Eclipse 90), outward. Cleave’s world is populated by women. These characters include his wife, Lydia; his daughter, Cass; Quirke’s daughter, Lily; the madwoman in the attic; his teenage muse, Dora; and the keening spinster, Miss Kettle. The men, for their part, are basically typed rather than developed: his father the ghost; the psychiatrist who says little; Goodfellow the lewd fool; the strong- and bandy-men at the circus; the strapping autistic fellow; Lydia’s many curiously childlike brothers; and the mightily quaffing hobo. Only Quirke receives any character

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evolution. Quirke’s development, however, is scant, unlike that of his Irish predecessor Thady Quirk in Castle Rackrent. Whereas Thady grows from ‘Honest Thady,’ through ‘Old Thady,’ into ‘Poor Thady’ in Castle Rackrent (Edgeworth 7), Banville’s single-named version of the regional caretaker is chiefly rendered as a clownish, incompetent boob or nincompoop, in ‘the pose of Vaublin’s Pierrot’ (200).1 As Cleave intimates early on, Quirke proves to be little more than a ‘pantalooned palace eunuch’ (Eclipse 80). Perhaps this closer and truer focus on the feminine anticipates Shroud and its preoccupation with Friedrich Nietzsche, who, as Banville himself points out, ‘was brought up in a household of women’ (‘The Last Days of Nietzsche’ 22). In Eclipse, most of these women already possess or come to possess property. In a legacy that Banville inherits from Bowen, these ‘female’ properties are available for occupancy rather than for purchase. For example, in Bowen’s The Death of the Heart Dr Heccomb’s widow lets her property every summer (201). Similarly, in The House in Paris Bowen’s Mme Fisher takes in young women as temporary boarders, and though the matriarch is impoverished, she refuses to sell her wellappointed Parisian home (10). Bowen’s widowed women hold onto their houses. Banville expands this same trope of tenancy. Cleave’s family home was a rooming-house, a home that his mother, once widowed, continues to let. Likewise, Lydia’s ‘family home was a hotel’ (33). Because of male intervention Lydia’s home, the Halcyon, dissolves: ‘The sons got rid of it when the father died, and then there was a fire, and the building was razed and the site sold on’ (38). The sons are never again mentioned, yet Cleave mentions the most important ‘part of [Lydia’s] inheritance’: ‘a big old house by the sea’ (41). She still keeps and occupies this willed property, a property that Cleave finally sees not as his and Lydia’s, but as exclusively hers (211). Property constitutes wholeness in Eclipse. Perhaps Quirke’s character is never fully completed or rounded because he lost his family home through ‘legal finagling of some kind’ (126). This loss occurs even though he has worked for a solicitor since he was fourteen (126), and he is a caretaker who makes Cleave’s mother’s home, with its historic, long-running, and intricate land disputes, its documents, searches, affidavits, and deeds, a hobby of his (79, 22). With irony, in lieu of pathos or even a stab of regret, Quirke calls himself ‘a spoilt solicitor’ (79). Cleave wishes to save Quirke’s daughter, Lily, who is now fifteen, from a similar incomplete fate. He begins to see her as an

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individual, rather than merely a girl: ‘It is not a girl like Lily I am dealing with – it is Lily herself, unique and mysterious, for all her ordinariness’ (122–3). After the insight that he has ‘not mastered the language of Lilyland’ (99), Cleave realizes that Lily is a complete, complex figure. She has her own language, a language, so he insists, worth learning: ‘She is an animate riddle that I have been set to solve’ (123). Lily’s life in Cleave’s home (he lets her and her father stay) and her resultant growth of character comment upon and ironically redirect Victorian conditions of femaleness. Articulating the atmosphere of the Victorian novel and the family plan it helped to devise, Nunokawa points out that ‘a man’s home is his castle, a shelter from the mean streets of the cash nexus, and that a woman – a wife, a mother, a daughter – oversees this estate’ (6). He adds, ‘Marxist-feminist accounts have noticed how the removal of women from the ranks of wage earners during the nineteenth century worked to disguise rather than transcend the economic value of their labor’ (11). Cleave, playing upon these situations, originally pays Lily to tidy up his shabby house. Yet because she does such a shoddy job, he stops payment. He halfexplains this to the visiting Lydia, ‘“I don’t pay her much,” I said. “In fact, since recently I haven’t been paying her at all”’ (Eclipse 133). Her bad housekeeping can be read as a sign of her resistance to being swept into the nineteenth-century identification of women with households. Lily’s lack of labour makes her visible. But Banville does not merely render Lydia noticeable. He allows her to have a voice. This acceptance of female voice really starts at the circus, which Cleave attends with Lily. En route to this travelling show, they unintentionally miss the eclipse when they seek shelter from the sudden rainstorm that accompanies it. Directly, Cleave, as he claims, ‘felt an inexplicable pang of sadness, though for what or whom, I do not know’ (Eclipse 179). They then enter the big top. Lily sees Goodfellow the fool, whom she has just met, onstage. He beckons to her. Almost immediately, she leaps up to join him. Goodfellow grabs her hand. She freezes. Cleave then steps onstage in order to retrieve the statuesque and silenced Lily. In a loud firm voice, he swiftly makes her his deputy daughter when he unpredictably says, ‘My name is Alexander Cleave ... and this is my daughter’ (187). Following hard upon this turn, ‘the last act’ (191) of Eclipse opens with the half-delayed and partial revelation that Cleave’s true daughter, Cass, plunged to her death in Turin around the time of the eclipse. Cleave’s inexplicable

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pang of sadness is explained retrospectively as a moment of clairvoyance or synchronicity, and his naming of a new daughter, as if she were a new heir, seems warranted. After the funeral and a trip to the suicide scene, Cleave decides to bestow his mother’s property on Lily, an exchange he hints at earlier when he admits to seeing his mother’s bedroom as Lily’s (Eclipse 171). He tells Quirke of his intention to transfer his estate. He stresses that the house is to be Lily’s home, not Quirke’s. He continues, ‘There is only one condition ... that she doesn’t sell it. I want her to live here’ (212). ‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter’ in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (175), keeps up the house; Banville, alluding to Joyce’s short story, makes Lily the true heir of property. What is more, Quirke’s daughter’s acquisition of property in Eclipse readdresses Thady Quirk’s son’s acquisition of property in Castle Rackrent. In Rackrent, attorney Jason Quirk is a grabber or, as Edgeworth puts it, a ‘griper’ (41). He gets his father’s master’s property through surreptitious, albeit legal, means. By contrast, Lily Quirke, a fresh female progeny, a newfangled Irish offspring, is far from an opportunist. She lands upon property minus the meanness of her male harbinger. Cleave’s bequest to Lily also comments upon property legislation in nineteenth-century Britain. Milton cites Lee Holcombe’s study of this legislation: ‘the law placed married women in the same category with criminals, lunatics and minors as being legally incompetent and irresponsible’ (53). Lily can be read to stand for all four of these ineptitudes. She is female. She is a minor. She, at least in the beginning, illegally squats on personal property. And Cleave links her with semi-lunacy by describing how she ‘lets her mouth sag in an idiot leer’ (Eclipse 125), while also remarking on how she often holds her mouth ‘crookedly open a little way’ (129). He observes that this practised leer ‘makes her look like a retard’ (129). Cleave’s own inklings of madness, his ‘all kinds of wild ideas, mad projects’ to ‘take in lodgers again’ with Lily (213), not to mention the recurring, ‘frightening red rage that might make [him] do anything’ (157), add further traditional legal impediments to his handling of responsibility. Like the mental unsoundness of his actual daughter, Cass, Alex Cleave’s own mental sensibility, and therefore his legal entitlement, are always in question. In Eclipse, Banville continues to second-guess Victorian patriarchal ideals of the feminine in order to give Lily a voice. The property Cleave intends to confer upon her allows Lily a certain wholeness, not to mention a certain liberty, and the projected personal voice of a proxy

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protagonist. In Shroud, the sequel to Eclipse, Banville develops a different kind of feminine voice. Unlike Eve, who speaks from within rooms, and Lily, who speaks from within a big house, Cass Cleave is not confined to any specific setting or place; rather, her actions develop and define her. Axel Vander, in Shroud, accents the significance of event over venue: ‘the place does not matter, only the moment’ (48). Abandoning the Irish landscape that he conventionally draws from and represents, Banville’s Shroud embodies an international atmosphere. This shift of setting allows Banville to place both Irishness and femaleness within a global and post-colonial context. Listening in Shroud Banville’s recent novel, Shroud, like the chronological relationships of Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar to Justine and Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men to The Woman Warrior, supplements Eclipse. Unlike these other serial novels, however, the content of Banville’s Shroud does not predate the content of Eclipse. Both novels take place in the same threemonth interval (Eclipse 204; Shroud 214). This simultaneity of moment and the clear connection between the novels and their respective narrators contrast with Banville’s other two series, the Revolutions Tetralogy and the Frames Trilogy. For even though he does use the same narrator throughout the trilogy, there are gaps of time, unexplained moments, changes of place, and in one case a protagonist name change between novels. This new clarity between Banville’s works extends to the unencumbered female identity – a self neither hampered nor complemented by property – which he gives to his character Cass Cleave. This independence laid bare attests to Cass’s Irishness, and to Irishness in general. Very early on in what he comes to call his ‘confession’ (Shroud 166), narrator Vander compares himself to a house. Like his narrative precursor, his near anagram Alexander (Cleave), Axel Vander expresses a relation between protagonist and property. With his wife, Magda, gone, he lets household chores pile up: ‘dust lay everywhere undisturbed, a fine, soft, mole-coloured fur, cut through by a pathway maze that marked out the pattern of my widowed life in the house’ (12). Thus, he sees that ‘the margins of [his] world were disappearing, crumbling into this grey penumbra of soft dirt’ (12). Soon after, he comments, ‘The onset of extreme old age as I am experiencing it is a gradual process of accumulation, a slow settling as of soft grey stuff,

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like the dust in the untended house, under which the once sharp edges of my self are blurring’ (14). Unlike Alex, who is drawn back to his mother’s house, and admittedly drawn back by this very maternal property, Axel is drawn away from his and his dead wife’s property, property he feminizes and maternalizes by inexplicably referring to his wife, among other names, as ‘Vander’s Madchen’ and ‘Mutter Vander’ (13). He is compelled to leave his home in Arcady, California, by Cass Cleave. She sends him a letter from Antwerp half-detailing her discovery that he, like Paul de Man, upon whom Banville loosely based Professor Vander, is an impostor with an incriminating, careershattering past. ‘Vander,’ a ‘virtuoso of the lie’ (180), who sees ‘lies [as] life’s almost anagram’ (8), decides to meet Cass, his would-be unmasker, in Turin, where he can also half-heartedly attend an academic conference. Upon arriving in the old world and thinking about all the ‘mute, unmoving objects I had left behind me in the locked house,’ Vander realizes, ‘with inexplicable but absolute certainty, that I would never return there’ (28). In part 2 of his narrative, which recounts his escape from Nazi Germany and his adoption of the name Axel Vander, he relays how homelessness, in this earlier time, frees him. Before speaking of ‘the route of [his] escape’ (Shroud 166), through France and into London, he explains that victimization and loss liberate him: ‘Historians never tire of observing that one of the ways in which tyranny triumphs is by offering its helpers the freedom to fulfil their most secret and most base desires; few care to understand, however, that its victims too can be made free men’ (165). Homelessness authenticates him. ‘Adrift and homeless, without family or friend,’ he continues, ‘I could at last become that most elusive thing, namely – namely! – myself. I sometimes surmise that this might be the real and only reason that I took on Axel’s identity’ (165). Many decades later, after publishing a number of scholarly books and receiving numerous accolades, mostly for what he would call his articulations of ‘the problematics of authenticity’ (165), Vander sticks to the conviction that homelessness, or at least the feeling of it, is one of his defining features. Near the end of his confession, he stresses, ‘I have never belonged anywhere’ (232). This failure to belong also applies to Cass Cleave. Since Banville’s first novel, Nightspawn (1971), Shroud is his only work not specifically staged in a big house or in big houses. Notwithstanding this divergence, the author does mention the Antwerp apartment of the real Vander family, which houses a number of ill-defined

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relations (130). And, as in The Broken Jug and Eclipse, he integrates feminine and maternal property. Shroud includes the ‘narrow little house’ of Lady Laura in Belgravia, where Vander, when first a refugee, is kept ‘for nigh on two years’ (170–2), and the stone country mansion of Lady Laura’s mother, the ‘Dowager Duchess’ (173). Yet Vander openly scoffs at the big house motif. Banville seems to revisit his earlier works here, as he revisited Kleist in The Broken Jug and Bowen in Eclipse. He overtly questions the staginess of big house novels, his own included. This occurs just as the unnamed (and never named) Jew who comes to appropriate the name Axel Vander (thus kicking off his ‘manufactured’ life [210]) stands on the threshold of learning that he has escaped Nazi arrest and deportation. Recollecting the immediate moment after his first knock upon the door of that fated threshold, Vander writes, ‘Presently I heard soft steps within approach the door and stop. Yes, you, my most assiduous reader, will recognise the moment and its image, for I have employed it in many contexts, as the mocking emblem of the human condition: two people standing on either side of a locked door, one shut out and the other listening from inside, each trying to divine the other’s identity and intentions’ (161). The assiduous reader should read this narrative voice as that of both the self-reflective Vander and the equally keen Banville. The setting of Shroud is limited neither to particular rooms nor to entire houses. The narrative makes a virtue of dislocation and dispossession. Once Cass Cleave arrives in Turin from Antwerp, she meets Vander and answers his query as to where she hails from. He replies that it is ‘a grand place, home of many fine and famous poets’ (Shroud 61). Then, remembering his earlier telephone conversation with her, where he ‘could not place her accent; she was not English, and yet an English speaker’ (24), he censures his pompous self: ‘How could I, even on the telephone, have missed that burr, that brogue?’ (61). Not only does he remark and commend her Irishness, but he also individualizes and internationalizes it. Movability and globalism are again stressed when Vander takes Cass to the door of the room once rented by ‘Il grande filosofo’ (68–70), Friedrich Nietzsche. In his review of Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin, a biography detailing Nietzsche’s final months of sanity, Banville notes that he himself, on a stopover in Turin, called at No. 6 Via Carlo Alberto, where the Fino family rented Nietzsche a room (‘The Last Days of Nietzsche’ 24). After this novelistic visit to the only half-opened door of the Fino room, Shroud tilts and distorts particular affinities between the life of

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Cass Cleave and the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Like Banville, whose two plays are adaptations of Kleist, both Cass and Nietzsche are captivated by the German author. A footnote in Banville’s review of Chamberlain’s biography mentions this noteworthy attention of Nietzsche’s: ‘Kleist’s was one of the few names that recur in Nietzsche’s pages’ (25). And Cass, for her part, is dangerously fanatical about Kleist – Kleist, in a pact with Henrietta Vogel, took first her life and then his own in 1811. Vander explains Cass’s risky fixation: ‘Kleist, whose last, fraught hours on earth she had attempted to chronicle in exhaustive detail, was, in her conception of him, as I quickly understood, nothing much more than a harbinger of her’ (204). Vander’s phrasing finesses, substantiates, and personalizes a project that Cleave simply dismisses as another one of his demented daughter’s compulsive fascinations: ‘she had been engaged on a scheme to plot in maniacal detail Kleist’s last three hours on earth’ (165). Both Nietzsche and Cass are ill, but while Nietzsche’s illnesses are many, Cass’s illness is singular. In Eclipse, Cleave never actually names his daughter’s very severe debility. Though he suggests a possible lineage for the affliction either through his uncle (72), or his mother (115), he selfishly indicates that her condition is nothing more than a calculated payback: ‘half the time I think there is nothing at all the matter with her, that her fits and failings, her obsessions, her black days and violent nights, are all no more than a strategy to make me pay for some enormity she imagines I visited on her in the far past’ (71). Vander, on the other hand, does his research. He provides the name of her affliction, Mandelbaum’s Syndrome, notes that it is commonly misdiagnosed as either schizophrenia or epilepsy, and remarks that, in his opinion, it ‘occupies a redoubt three-quarters of the way toward the bad end of the scale between manic depression and full-blown dementia’ (202). Vander’s studied enquiries of her disease facilitate his ability to listen to her. He wants to grasp her every aspect. In contrast to Cleave, Vander allows Cass to have her own voice or, more appropriately, to articulate the reasons for her fugues and their accompanying voices. Distorted correspondences between Nietzsche and Cass include parallels between Cleave and Vander. What Rudiger Imhof says of Banville’s Birchwood is also true here: ‘There are mirrors everywhere, literal as well as metaphorical ones’ (62). Banville twists Nietzsche’s near lifelong and never completed struggle to kill his surrogate father Wagner (‘The Last Days of Nietzsche’ 22) into tropes of the deputy

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daughter and the deputy father in Eclipse and Shroud. Ironically, in the same way that Cleave names Lily as his daughter, Cass designates Vander as her father. Rather than attempt to kill their surrogates with words as Nietzsche does with Wagner, Cleave and Cass restore their substitutes to life. Just as Cleave gives the homeless Lily wholeness and a voice, Cass reinstates Vander’s life by tending to him when he falls ill. She starts caring for Vander while they are in the midst of a love affair that leaves her pregnant. While treating him, she upends their relationship – at least publicly. She redefines their connection by telling Vander’s academic associates that he is her father (Shroud 116). This adoption or self-delegated daughterhood ultimately leads to a greater understanding of Cass as an autonomous and accomplished individual. Cass is no longer merely defined only to be repudiated, and feared, by her father figure. Unlike Cleave, Vander recognizes her as something other than ‘the afflicted one,’ which is analogous to ‘the overly feminine one.’ He learns that ‘the force of her will, and all her considerable intellect, were fixed upon the necessity of keeping reality in order. This was her task, and hers alone’ (Shroud 203). Like Cleave with Lily, Vander conjures up wild plans for himself and Cass. Significantly, these daydreams are not confined to the setting of a specific big house or any house at all. He imagines Cass and himself banishing ‘the interloper Mr. Mandelbaum’ from her mind before they travel ‘everywhere, to Paris, to New York, to Zacatecoluca, to Hy Brasail the Isle of the Blest!’ (209–10). But Cleave, for his part, learns of Cass’s scholarship, internationalism, and identity only after she dies and he and Lydia examine ‘the letters of condolence’ (Eclipse 201). He expresses ignorance and shock: ‘Some of these were from people whose names we did not recognize, in places abroad that we had never heard of, academic institutions, research foundations, libraries. They made another version of our daughter, one I did not recognize: the international scholar; I should have paid more attention to what I always winced at when I heard her refer to it as her work. I could never believe it was anything more than an elaborate pastime, like thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, or Chinese patience, something dull but demanding that would soothe her frantic mind’ (Eclipse 201). Cleave never let himself really know her. He elected to wince rather than to learn, to label rather than to listen. For Vander, Cass truly transforms into, as he puts it, ‘his Cathleen Ni Houlihan, his wild Irish girl’ (Shroud 199). Supplanting his former styl-

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ization of Cass as his ‘irisch Kind,’ his Irish child by way of Wagner’s Isolde (102), he stresses her gender. And, though he knows she is Irish, he also knows she is more than Irish. He sees her and dreams of her in an international context. He knows – and shows – her to be complete. By confining her neither to a race nor to a place, he enables her to utter all of her voices. Because of these voices, Cass, like Lily Quirke and like Eve Reck, is allowed her own choice as she develops into a proxy protagonist. She achieves an identity free from the strictures of property. She inherits herself. Perhaps like traditional ‘Irish ladies,’ who, as Sydney Owenson says in The Wild Irish Girl, ‘seldom appear[ed] unveiled’ (48), she shows that she cannot be completely unveiled. She cannot be objectified, confined, or defined. Akin to Alex Cleave and Axel Vander, both of whom are likewise ‘thrown together from a legion of selves’ (Shroud 153), Cass Cleave is unsolvable. Her veil, her mask, her shroud spell complexity, wholeness. Altogether real, she is that most elusive thing, namely – namely! – herself.

NOTE 1 Jean Vaublin is a near anagram, and thus a near replica, of John Banville. Banville’s fiction commonly includes anagrams of his name: James H. Twinbein (Nightspawn 177); Johann Livelb (Birchwood 115; Athena 17); Faubelin, Vanhoblin, Van Hobellijn (Ghosts 35); and again from Athena, L. van Hobelijn, Giovanni Belli, Job van Hellin, L.E. van Ohlbijn, J. van Hollbein and Jan Vibell (41, 75, 103, 129, 167, 203). Banville places versions of himself within his own texts. In so doing, he shows that identity, like inheritance, is both indistinct and repetitious. Despite the seeming unity imposed by a name or a literary tradition, there is no single, authentic version or canon. Irish literature has taken on a distinct tradition, which exists irrespective of British literature. The Field Day anthologies, as well as the anthologies of Declan Kiberd and of Colm Toibin, canonize Irish literature qua tradition. Just as names and heritages can be manipulated, they can be accepted or rejected.

WORKS CITED Banville, John. Athena. New York: Vintage, 1995. – Birchwood. New York: Norton, 1973.

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The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist. Loughcrew, Ire.: Gallery, 1994. Eclipse. New York: Knopf, 2001. Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1993. ‘The Last Days of Nietzsche.’ New York Review. August 1998: 22–5. Adapt. The Last September. By Elizabeth Bowen. Dir. Deborah Warner. Prod. Yvonne Thunder. Perf. Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Jane Birkin, Fiona Star, Lambert Wilson, David Tennant, and Kelly Hawes. Matrix Films and Scala, 1999. – Nightspawn. 1971. Loughcrew, Ire.: Gallery, 1993. – The Sea. New York: Knopf, 2005. – Shroud. 2002. New York: Knopf, 2003. – The Untouchable. 1997. New York: Vintage, 1998. Bowen, Elizabeth. The Death of the Heart. 1938. New York: Anchor, 2000. – The Heat of the Day. 1948. New York: Anchor, 2002. – The House in Paris. 1935. New York: Anchor, 2002. – The Last September. 1929. New York: Anchor, 2000. Boyce, D. George. Ireland 1828–1923: From Ascendancy to Democracy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Brown, Gillian. ‘Hawthorne, Inheritance, and Women’s Property.’ Studies in the Novel 23 (1991): 107–18. Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1988. Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent. 1800. Castle Rackrent and The Absentee. Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 1994. Hand, Derek. John Banville: Exploring Fictions. Dublin: Liffey, 2002. Hepburn, Allan. Intrigue: Espionage and Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Imhof, Rudiger. Banville: A Critical Introduction. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1989. Joyce, James. ‘Drama and Life.’ Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Ed. Kevin Barry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 23–9. – ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages.’ Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Ed. Kevin Barry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 108–26. – ‘The Dead.’ Dubliners. 1916. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967. 175– 223. Kleist, Heinrich von. The Broken Pitcher: a comedy. Three Plays: Prince Friedrich von Homburg, The Broken Pitcher, Ordeal by Fire. 1821. Trans. Noel Clark. London: Oderon, 2000. 89–158. MacNamara, Brinsley. The Valley of the Squinting Windows. 1918. Tralee: Anvil, 1968.

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McDonagh, Martin. The Beauty Queen of Leenane (and Other Plays). 1996. New York: Vintage, 1998. McMinn, Joseph. The Supreme Fictions of John Banville. New York: St Martin’s, 1999. Milton, Paul. ‘Inheritance as the Key to all Mythologies: George Eliot and Legal Practice.’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 28.1 (1995): 49–68. Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1994. O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. 1939. Toronto: Penguin, 2000. Owenson, Sydney [Lady Morgan]. The Wild Irish Girl. Ed. and intro. Kathryn Kirkpatrick. 1806. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Parker, Patricia. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. New York: Methuen, 1987.

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Index

abductions 91–2, 103, 105n7 Act of Union 18, 30, 31, 39, 45, 49n18, 79, 102, 120, 273 Adam Bede (Eliot) 118 affiliation 109, 220, 222 Anglo-Irish 44, 79, 88, 102–3, 133n8, 204, 215n10 anti-literature 165–7 anti-Semitism 49n15, 82 archery 113–14 Arnold, Matthew 102, 124, 128, 130, 133n12 As You Like It 34, 113 Ascendancy. See Protestant Ascendancy Aspects of the Novel (Forster) 178 At Swim-Two-Birds (O’Brien) 267, 270 Austen, Jane 8, 22n1, 163, 179, 185 Bagehot, Walter 57 Balzac, Honoré de 3–4 banishment 27–8, 287 bankruptcy 202, 211 Banville, John 22 Basil (Collins) 23n2

Beauty Queen of Leenane, The (McDonagh) 270 Benjamin, Walter 231, 236n14 bereavement 168, 171–4, 187n7 Besant, Walter 159n14 Bible 22, 27, 30, 31, 34, 36, 38, 106n13, 177, 226, 236n12, 273 big houses 21–2, 88, 92, 246, 251, 278–9, 284–5, 287 Bildungsroman 9, 20, 170, 183, 195–7, 210, 213, 214, 215nn5, 6 birth 223–4, 228 Black Mischief (Waugh) 242 blackmail 143, 145–6 Blackstone, Sir William 13–14, 68, 93 Bleak House (Dickens) 10, 93, 105n8, 192 Blunt, Anthony 266 body 18–19, 63–4, 87, 91, 98–9, 149–50, 247, 271–2 Bowen, Elizabeth 21, 92, 240, 248–9, 251, 268, 276, 279, 285 Bowen’s Court (Bowen) 219, 220–1, 237n17 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh) 21 Britain 29, 32, 39, 122, 150, 153, 193

292

Index

Broken Jug, The (Banville) 265–6, 267–76 Brontë, Charlotte 11 Burke, Edmund 9, 10, 20, 23n5, 34, 109–11, 113, 121, 193–4, 213, 214n4 Can You Forgive Her? (Trollope) 54–5, 60–2, 64–5, 69–71 Carlyle, Thomas 120, 121 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole) 88, 93, 137 Castle Rackrent (Edgeworth) 269–70, 274, 279, 282 Catholicism 12, 18, 26, 29–36, 40–3, 191, 208, 212–13, 245, 248, 260 Catholics 10, 80, 103, 243, 256, 272–3 Celts 118, 122, 127 charm 248, 260 Chateaubriand, François-René de 95 children 12, 14, 15, 53, 100, 143–4, 197–8, 220, 222–34 Churchill, Sir Winston 173 city 138, 144, 214n2 class 3, 7–9, 20, 54–5, 57, 65, 76, 100, 138–41, 146, 148–55, 158n6, 239–40, 243–4, 251–9 clothes 33–4, 201, 215n8, 244, 288 Coke, Sir Edward 204–5 Collins, Wilkie 11–12, 23n2, 88, 101 Colonel Chabert, Le 4 colonialism 3, 29, 103, 105n11, 115–16, 119–20, 204, 207, 268 comedy 241, 245 commemoration 164, 169 common law 204–5 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 14–17, 219, 240, 248–9, 251 Congreve, Richard 118–19 Conrad, Joseph 219–20 conversion 243, 245–6

country house. See big house Cousine Bette, La 4 coverture 11, 267 Cox, Homersham 93 crime 150, 154 Cromwell, Oliver 28, 42, 45, 48n3 cultural capital 21, 240 culture 18, 109, 117, 204 Daniel Deronda (Eliot) 10, 18, 19 Darwin, Charles 23n3, 132n1, 138, 183, 184, 195–6, 214n3 David Copperfield (Dickens) 4 de Man, Paul 284 death 6, 7, 11–12, 42–3, 66, 81, 89, 99, 101, 126, 147, 163–7, 171–8, 182–6, 187nn4, 8, 209, 243, 245, 250, 266 Death of the Heart, The (Bowen) 21, 219, 222, 232–4, 276–7, 280 decadence 110 Decline and Fall (Waugh) 240, 242, 246 degeneration 138, 148, 151 detective novel 137, 139–42, 145–8, 158n7 Dickens, Charles 4, 10, 53, 54, 88, 90, 93, 167 disappointment 231 disinheritance 3, 10, 15–17, 21, 26–9, 87–91, 96, 104, 109, 111, 115–16, 128–9, 138, 191–2, 207, 210, 213, 221, 235n1, 240, 265, 267 displacement 56–7 dispossession. See disinheritance Divorce Act (1857) 76 Doyle, Arthur Conan 5, 209–10 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) 9, 19, 20 Dracula (Stoker) 138

Index Dublin Castle 39, 82 Dublin University Magazine 96 Dufferin, Lord 6 Eclipse (Banville) 22, 265–6, 269, 276–83 Edgeworth, Maria 269–70, 274 Edwardian period 175, 183, 186n1 Egoist, The 196 Eliot, George 4, 10, 20, 54 emancipation in Ireland 38–9, 41–2, 47 encumberment 28 England 19, 57, 61, 123–4, 231, 242, 257 Englishness 112–15, 129–31, 204, 212–13, 257, 285 enjoyment 6, 11, 18, 53, 55–7, 68, 75, 247, 252 entail 6, 9, 53, 109–11, 115, 123, 193, 239 estates 3, 6–7, 27–8, 55, 61, 66, 71, 90, 110–12, 117, 220–1, 234, 235n3, 239, 244, 246, 248–9, 251, 265, 270 Eustace Diamonds, The (Trollope) 58–60, 74 fabula 10 family 5, 7, 12, 14–17, 110–12, 179, 191, 211, 213, 220, 223, 239, 243, 250, 252 Family and a Fortune, A (ComptonBurnett) 248–9 fathers 3, 7–8, 11, 15, 17, 20, 27–8, 42–3, 100, 122, 132n1, 137, 148, 169–71, 179–80, 183, 191, 199–200, 202, 205–8, 210–11, 213, 239–40, 248, 252, 281, 287 Fenians 119 Fielding, Henry 4, 8

293

‘Five Orange Pips, The’ (Doyle) 5 Ford, Ford Madox 219–20 Forster, E.M. 19, 20, 219, 220, 228, 245 France 23n5, 88, 92, 284 Frankenstein 141 French Revolution 148 Freud, Sigmund 151, 187n6, 188n12 Friends and Relations (Bowen) 225 Fry, Roger 260 funerals 178, 282 future 10, 15–16, 110, 173, 196, 199, 202, 220, 240, 243, 249, 260–1 Galsworthy, John 23n3 gambling 110 genealogy 3–5, 16–17, 19, 34, 109, 112, 180, 202, 210, 224 gentleman 19, 111, 129–31, 142, 148, 151 ghosts 88, 89, 90, 91, 93–9, 101, 104, 112, 114, 145, 221, 278 gold standard 242 Gordon, George William 116 gothic 7, 8–9, 18, 88–9, 91, 92–6, 102–3, 137–9, 141, 151, 157n1, 158nn2, 5, 159n16, 267 governess 87, 89, 96 grabber 272–3 Great Expectations (Dickens) 192 Greece 12, 33–4 Green, Henry 254 grief. See bereavement gypsies 103 Haeckel, Ernst 195, 198–9 Handful of Dust, A (Waugh) 256 Hard Times (Dickens) 53 Hardy, Thomas 4, 166 haunting. See ghosts

294

Index

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 266 Heat of the Day, The (Bowen) 248, 268 Hemlock and After (Wilson) 257–8 heredity 3, 4, 19–20, 191–2, 194–202, 204–5, 210, 224 Heritage and Its History, A (Compton-Burnett) 14–17 heroism 184, 185, 229 hoarding 54 hobos. See homeless Home Rule 79–80 homeless 267, 268, 279 homosexuality. See queerness Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Doyle) 209 House of Commons 10, 76, 83, 193 House of Lords 65 House in Paris, The (Bowen) 21, 219, 222–32, 280 Howards End (Forster) 163, 178, 185, 186n2, 220 Howitt, William 55 Hume, David 13 Huxley, Thomas 118, 122, 123 hybridity 109, 111, 116–18, 123 Hyde Park 154–5 illegitimacy. See legitimacy incest 9 Inheritors, The (Conrad and Ford) 219–20 innocence 222 insanity 11, 198–200, 247, 270, 282 investment 8 Ireland 3, 6, 18–19, 21–2, 26–34, 38–47, 67, 90–1, 102–3, 118–20, 197, 202, 268, 273–4; and tenant rights 82–3, 267–8 Irishness 10, 21, 46, 79–83, 118–22,

204, 212–13, 215–16n10, 266, 268, 270, 273, 283, 288 Isherwood, Christopher 257 Italian, The (Radcliffe) 9 Italy 92 Ivanhoe (Scott) 114, 122 Jacob’s Room (Woolf) 245 Jamaica 116, 123 James, Henry 22n1, 139, 228, 237n15 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 53 jewels 58, 87, 88, 100 Jewishness 10, 81–2, 109, 111–12, 118–22, 128–31, 132n3, 134n15, 256, 270 jointure 6 Jones, Inigo 248 Joyce, James 20–1, 170, 219, 220, 229–30, 268, 282 Keynes, John Maynard 241–2 King Arthur 123–7 kinship 22n2, 209, 211, 220 Kleist, Heinrich von 265, 273–6, 285–6 Knox, Robert 121 Labour Emancipation League 155 Lady Morgan’s Memoirs 40, 43, 48n12, 49n18 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de 195 land 45, 58–60, 91, 103, 110, 205, 272–4 landlord 28 legacies 3–5, 164, 167–8, 258 legitimacy 8–9, 14–15, 16, 109, 111, 114–16, 128–9, 132n4, 148, 181, 223–4 letters 32, 45–6, 71, 75, 224

Index Locke, John 12, 13, 90, 99, 100, 104n2, 104n3, 105n4, 250 Lombroso, Cesare 150 Longest Journey, The (Forster) 19, 20, 245 Macaulay, Rose 23n3 Magna Carta 193 Malory, Thomas 121, 126 Man and Wife (Collins) 11–12, 23n4 Marianne Thornton (Forster) 164, 168–9, 171, 187n5 Marmontel, Jean-François 35 marriage 12, 22, 28–9, 32, 42–3, 47, 53, 57, 62, 67–74, 100, 138, 163, 174, 179, 225, 239, 243–4, 246–7, 282 Married Women’s Property Acts 76–7, 84n4 Marx, Karl 56, 97 Mary Olivier (Sinclair) 191, 196–201, 214 Maudsley, Henry 150, 198–9, 203, 205 Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin) 5, 9 Men at Arms (Waugh) 240–1 Meredith, George 163, 179 Middlemarch (Eliot) 114 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot) 54 Mill, John Stuart 6, 13 Milton, John 30, 34, 125 mirrors 141–2, 145, 286 misers 54, 72 misquotation 34–7 Mitford, Nancy 254 modernism 19, 20, 163, 167, 186n1, 191, 197, 202–3, 220, 223–4, 235n7, 239–40, 246, 249, 261 money 60, 66, 71–2, 90, 93, 142, 143,

295

148, 157, 164, 169, 177, 211, 240, 241–5, 248–53 Monk, The (Lewis) 148 Morris, William 126 Morte d’Arthur, Le 121, 126–7 mothers 21, 114–15, 169–70, 174–7, 179–81, 185, 222–34, 253, 271, 274–6, 278 murder 28, 87–8, 93, 103, 105n5, 139, 143, 152, 153, 159n13 narrative 3, 5, 14, 226–7, 229, 244–5, 255, 265, 285 Nash, Joseph 55 nation 3, 4, 9, 18, 19, 22, 26, 29–32, 55, 57, 61, 63, 67–8, 72, 104, 109–10, 138 nationalism 41, 134n16 naturalism 195, 201–2, 211 Nietzsche, Friedrich 285–7 Norman Conquest 112–13, 133n10 O’Brien, Flann 267 O’Connell, Daniel 38, 106n12, 118, 132n5 Omega Workshop 260 orphan 21 Ossian 32, 33, 37–8, 41, 48n7 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 4, 90 Owenson, Sydney 18, 266, 267, 288 ownership 6, 55–6, 58, 59, 90–1, 100, 240, 241, 247, 249–51, 253, 268–9 Paine, Thomas 20, 113, 194 Paradise Lost (Milton) 30, 34 parents 4, 127, 131, 279 Parliament 57–8, 69, 72–8 Passage to India, A (Forster) 163–4, 172, 185, 186n2, 228 patriarchy. See fathers

296

Index

Patriotic Sketches (Owenson) 37, 39, 49n17 Père Goriot, Le 4 Phineas Finn (Trollope) 79–80 Phineas Redux (Trollope) 59, 63–4, 71–2, 79 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) 138, 210 Poe, Edgar Allan 146, 157 Pope, Alexander 34, 35 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 20–1, 170 portraits 110, 209–10, 259 post-colonial 22, 214n2, 268, 283 postmodernism 21, 268 preservation 54–5 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 8, 9, 103 prime minister 18, 72, 74–6, 259 Prime Minister, The (Trollope) 59 primogeniture 7, 27, 206, 208–9, 216n12 Principles of Political Economy (Mill) 6 property 3, 5, 6, 11–14, 45, 53–4, 58–60, 66, 69, 88, 97, 137, 204–9, 240, 247, 249–53, 265; and character 65–6, 241, 266, 269; in Europe 82; and labour 12, 90, 97; and law 10–14, 20, 92–3, 138; and marriage 12, 18, 53–83, 282; and novel 3, 7, 10, 14; and obligation 6, 249 property, alienable 13–14, 67, 90, 240, 249, 251 property and gender 7, 10, 84n3, 111, 220–1, 265–88 Protestant 7, 30–1, 35–6, 43, 80, 273 Protestant Ascendancy 39, 42, 44–5, 91, 92, 102, 120 Proust, Marcel 255–6, 262–3n6

queerness 21, 22n2, 239, 248, 253, 257–8, 261n2 race 109, 111–24, 120, 123, 138, 139, 220 Radcliffe, Ann 35, 93–5 Read, Harlan Eugene 250 realism 19, 139 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 9, 109–10 Regent’s Park 154–5 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) 256 Return of the Native, The (Hardy) 192 Ribot, Theodule 198–9, 214 Richardson, Dorothy 196 Richardson, Samuel 8 Rights of Man, The (Paine) 194 Rignano, Eugenio 250, 262n5 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 8 Roman law 12, 14 romance 28, 29, 173 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 35 Saxons 114, 121–2, 133n10 Scoop (Waugh) 241, 246, 251 Scotland 59, 60 Scott, Walter 35, 113–14, 121, 122, 125 Second Reform Bill (1867) 150 secrets 112, 115 sentimentality 168, 174, 178, 180, 182 Shakespeare, William 27, 34, Shelley, Mary 141 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 181 Shroud (Banville) 22, 265–6, 269, 278, 283–8 Silas Marner (Eliot) 54 Sinclair, May 191

Index sjuzhet 10 Small House at Allington, The (Trollope) 62 Smiles, Samuel 65 Smith, Adam 97 snobbery 244, 248, 254–7 social climbing 21, 76, 242, 253–61 socialism 250–1 sons 5, 7, 15–17, 27–8, 43, 54, 110, 116–17, 129, 137, 148, 170–1, 174, 205–8, 210–11, 280 Spencer, Herbert 196, 198–9 Spenser, Edmund 34, 35, 36, 38n7 spivs 257–9 St. Clair (Owenson) 48n11, 49n23 Stockport 11 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 113 Sunday Trading Bill 155 Swift, Jonathan 268 Symonds, John Addington 158n4 tanistry 216n12 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 121, 126 testaments. See wills Third Reform Bill (1884) 149, 150 Thornton, Marianne 164, 168–9 Tom Jones (Fielding) 4, 8, 192 Trollope, Anthony 20 Two Treatises on Civil Government (Locke) 12, 90 Uncle Silas (Le Fanu) 18–19 Union. See Act of Union United Irish rebellion (1798) 44, 47 usurpation 8–9, 28–9, 137, 192, 211 Valley of the Squinting Windows, The (MacNamara) 270, 272 Vanity Fair (Thackeray) 53

297

Veblen, Thorstein 68–9 Victoria, Queen 155, 207 Vile Bodies (Waugh) 246, 256 Villette (Brontë) 93, 237n15 violence 87, 104n1, 105n9, 186n3 Voyage Out, The (Woolf) 183 Wagner, Richard 287, 288 Wales 10 war 221, 240–1, 243, 244, 249, 253, 261 waste 89, 92–3, 103 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 230 Waugh, Evelyn 21, 219, 220 Waves, The (Woolf) 227 Way of All Flesh, The (Butler) 170, 187n6 wealth 7, 97 Wedgwood, Josiah 251, 262n5 Where Angels Fear to Tread (Forster) 163, 171, 185 Wild Irish Girl, The (Owenson) 18, 266, 288 wills 4, 5, 10–13, 20, 23n5, 138, 144–8, 151, 243, 266–7 Wills Act (1837) 11 Wilson, Angus 222, 257 women 10, 18, 21, 22, 39, 58–60, 67–9, 96, 101, 111, 114, 116–18, 138, 157n1, 220–1, 252–3, 265–88 women’s rights 73, 77–8 Woolf, Virginia 219, 220, 245 Work Suspended (Waugh) 250 Working Men’s Rights Association 155 Wuthering Heights (Brontë) 11, 192 Zola, Émile 23n3, 201