Research Article
URBAN DEPRAVITY, RURAL UNSOPHISTICATION: HEREDITARY TAINT IN HARDY'S TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES
- Rosanna Nunan
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 289-307
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Critics have used various approaches to explain the paradoxes or inconsistencies evident in the characterization of Angel Clare in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891); however, by examining the social purity movement and its response to increasingly popular theories of degeneration at the fin de siècle, we can understand the interplay of contradictory ideas at work in Angel. The tension between the supposedly modern, secular viewpoints that Angel exhibits in the beginning of the narrative and his unexpected return to a conservative and misogynistic ideology upon Tess's confession of her “fall” puzzles readers, fellow characters, and perhaps even the narrator of the novel itself, who accounts for the alteration as simply the hypocrisy of a man who “was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings” (Hardy 265; vol. 2, ch. 39). Oliver Lovesey suggests that the reason why “Clare somewhat bombastically renounces his father's Christianity, but . . . still stumbles on elements of traditional social morality” and why he “bypasses the resurrection, but cannot negotiate around Tess's ‘unintact state’” is that Tess's “virginity replaces the resurrection in his religion of unbelief” (913–14). Lovesey argues that Angel displaces religious faith in Christ's resurrection onto a material substitute, Tess's virginity, and that the revelation of her lack of virginity then catapults him into a despair akin to the despair of annihilated spiritual belief, “the void of an unbeliever's hell” (924). While I am also concerned with Angel's fetishization of virginity, I believe that it is significant that his obsession with purity extends beyond Tess's virginity to encompass rural space as a whole, a space in which Tess's virginity constitutes but one part. The very capaciousness of Angel's devotion to purity situates him squarely within the environmental binaries characteristic of later theories of urban degeneration.
GEORGE EGERTON'S KEYNOTES: FOOD AND FEMINISM AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
- S. Brooke Cameron
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 309-330
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First published in 1893, George Egerton's Keynotes was immediately popular, selling six thousand copies in its first year alone. Appearing three years later, Laura Marholm Hansson's review effectively singles out what made the text such a tremendous success: each story offered readers a probing representation of woman's “consciousness” or inner world of emotional and sexual passions, subjects unavailable in any “previous work.” Egerton was, of course, the penname for Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, and many of the themes covered in Keynotes were loosely modeled after her own life. The volume was uncompromising in its portrayal of women's desires, or those “notes” from which it takes its title. “[T]here are no signs of girlish prudery in ‘Keynotes,’” Hansson continues, “it is a liberal book, indiscreet in respect of the intimacies of married life, and entirely without respect for the husband” (63). Despite this high praise, Hansson also worries whether Keynotes was not “too good a book to become famous all at once” (61). Her hesitation alludes to the mixed reception among readers and literary critics, for to say that everyone loved Egerton's fiction would be an exaggeration and, more importantly, would miss the cultural work of her appetitive characters. As signaled by the second epigraph, taken from Egerton's “Now Spring Has Come,” Keynotes was full of stories focused on “unconventional” women who “hungered” for both food and love; such libidinal desires were unthinkable – and even unspeakable – in a world where the proper Victorian lady was defined in terms of bodily sacrifice. While some readers certainly disapproved, still others like Hansson, as the first epigraph suggests, welcomed this “independent” turn in women's writing and saw in Egerton's characters a reflection of their own “woman's individuality.”
A “WHITE BOY . . . WHO IS NOT A WHITE BOY”: RUDYARD KIPLING'S KIM, WHITENESS, AND BRITISH IDENTITY
- Alisha Walters
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 331-346
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Rudyard Kipling's final novel, Kim (1901), begins with an intriguing – if paradoxical – description of the eponymous Kim, or Kimball O'Hara: he is an “English” boy with an Irish name and Irish parentage who speaks “the [Indian] vernacular by preference” (1). While the narrator hastens to reassure the reader that Kim is both “white” and “English,” Kim is also “burned black as any native” and speaks his supposed “mother tongue,” English, in an “uncertain sing-song” (1). If we are to take Kipling's assertion at face value, that Kim is, indeed, “English,” then certainly this is a kind of Englishness that is divorced completely from the racially pure ideals of Anglo-Saxon whiteness that were privileged by many racial theorists earlier in the nineteenth century. As an Irish Celt, Kipling's protagonist is always already at a layer of remove from ideals of pure Englishness, but Kipling renders Kim's racial identity even more complicated in the text. The manuscript of Kim gives us some telling clues about the contexts that inform Kipling's peculiar descriptions of “burned black” whiteness in his finished novel. While the published text baldly declares that “Kim was English. . . . Kim was white” (1; ch. 1; emphasis mine), parts of the manuscript are much less certain of this fact, as that document asserts that Kim “looked like a half caste” (Kipling, Kim o’ the ‘Rishti n. 3). And while Kipling ultimately removed this explicit link between Kim and Eurasian bodies in the opening of his published text, this disavowal is neither complete nor convincing throughout Kim. For instance, in the novel, the narrator later describes a “half-caste woman who looked after [Kim . . . and] told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister” (1; ch. 1). While this woman is not, in fact, the boy's aunt, Kim's near-familial tie with her underlines the intimate connection between him and the hybridized subjects of empire. Indeed, Kim demonstrates ideological and affective links to non-white Others and to people of mixed race, and this connection between whiteness and racial hybridity is of central importance to Kipling. If Kim is tenuously white, then he can only perform this whiteness in immediate proximity to racial hybridity, with which whiteness is ideologically contiguous in this text. As I contend in this paper, Kim reveals the under-examined links between early twentieth-century ideas of white British identity and descriptions of imperial miscegenation. In Kim, “White” and “English” emerge as a vexed pair of signifiers that reveal unprecedented traces of racial and national hybridization.
“MISS X,” TELEPATHY, AND AFFECT AT FIN DE SIÈCLE
- Susan Zieger
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 347-364
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In his book Apparitions and Thought-Transference: An Examination of the Evidence for Telepathy (1895), Frank Podmore relates what might at first seem a humdrum occurrence of settling into bedtime reading. The diary he has transcribed, of a woman he calls D, records on January 6th, “Tried several books . . . finally took to ‘Villette.’” But D’s choice was not completely autonomous. She was clearly influenced by her friend, “X.” As Podmore wrote, “From Miss X's diary it appears that she willed D to read The Professor,” which he notes, portentously, was “also by Charlotte Brontë.” X got luckier – or honed her skills – a few weeks later, when D recorded “Sonnets by E.B.B. 10:30 p.m.” and “In Miss X's diary, written at about 10 p.m., appears the entry, ‘Sonnets viii-ix., E.B.B.’” Assessing the records, Podmore found X's influence over D's literary taste to be “presumably telepathic” (122–23). Although the phenomenon was sensational, the circumstances surrounding it were decidedly mundane, ranging from bedtime reading to hearing X's piano-playing at a distance of miles, and meeting specific people at certain times. At a second glance, the phenomenon remains humdrum. Gauri Viswanathan has described how the institutionalization of Theosophy created reality effects that routinized its mysticism, rendering it ordinary (7). Similarly, though psychical research studied the numinous, its institutions ensconced it in bureaucracy, making it mundane. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Britain, the oddly interesting-yet-boring phenomenon of thought-reading became a cultural activity that ranged between scientific research, domestic pastime, and popular entertainment. Could people read each other's minds? If so, how was it done? Thought-reading arose to compete with Spiritualism, the practice of contacting the dead through séances. Its most mysterious public persona, and one of the more intriguing historical figures of the period, was Podmore's aficionado of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the presumed telepath known as Miss X.
“DREAMING TRUE”: EMBODIED MEMORY, TRANSUBJECTIVITY, AND NOVELTY IN GEORGE DU MAURIER'S PETER IBBETSON
- Matthew Trammell
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 365-379
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In Confessions of an EnglishOpium Eater (1821), Thomas De Quincey famously describes the mind as a palimpsest upon which inscribed memories are never truly lost to the passage of time. These memories, especially of childhood, lurk under the conscious surface of the mind, waiting to be rediscovered during intervals of intensified desultory memory that are made possible for De Quincey by opium-induced dreaming. Opium is utilized during these dreams as a perception-altering technology; memories of childhood are not only recalled while under the influence of the drug, but are revivified in a way that extends beyond the dreamer's normal mental capacity. The formulation of dreaming as a state in which memories buried under the palimpsest of time were retrieved and “relived” was important to a wide array of philosophers, medical doctors, and psychologists over the course of the long nineteenth century, culminating in Freud's seminal The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Alongside the theorization of ‘dream science’ in psychological and medical contexts, the Victorian literati provided their own contributions in both sensation novels and realist fiction. Reciprocally, as has been discussed in much recent work within Victorian studies, well-known characters and scenes from contemporary literature were often used to illustrate dream theories, neurological conditions, and philosophical conceptions of the self in scholarly journals and medical textbooks. The most fantastical literary treatment of dream space as a wholly separate realm within which the dreaming subject can fully recover and even surpass the sensations associated with earlier memories occurs in George Du Maurier's oft-overlooked Peter Ibbetson (1891). Over the course of the novel, the titular narrator reveals (inconsistently and in sometimes contradictory ways) dream space to be a world in which the habitual reliving of childhood events is an endlessly satisfying, novel, and strangely embodied experience for the protagonist and his lover, while also possessing connections to human evolutionary precursors and the afterlife. In Peter Ibbetson, habit is not the deadening enemy of novelty and experience that is so often portrayed in contemporary interpretations of Victorian literature. Rather, habit qua the mental technology of “dreaming true,” a form of intense, consciously-directed dreaming practiced by the novel's central characters, is paradoxically portrayed as a method by which the freshness of sensation associated with an original event can be endlessly recreated and even surpassed within a dream of that event. Contrary to twenty-first century depictions of dreams as events that help the subject to become habituated to emotional stresses, Du Maurier presents dreaming true as a practice that intensifies rather than inures the dreaming subject's emotional relationship to vivid or traumatic childhood events (Hartmann 2). Inherent in this reading is a radical formulation of the relationship between habit and novelty as understood in the late Victorian novel, revealing the generative power of habit that is disclosed within dream space.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI'S GHOSTS, SOUL-SLEEP, AND VICTORIAN DEATH CULTURE
- Stephanie L. Johnson
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 381-402
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Ghosts haunt Christina Rossetti's poetry. Amidst the lyrics, devotional poems, and children's verse, poems about ghosts and hauntings recur as material evidence of Rossetti's fascination with spectral presences. That fascination poses a particular interpretive puzzle in light of her religious convictions and piety. We might be tempted to identify the recurring ghosts as just another nineteenth-century flirtation with spiritualism – the spiritualism by which her brothers William and Gabriel were intrigued, attending séances and testing the validity of communications from the dead. Rossetti, however, clearly dismissed spiritualism as false belief and a means to sin. We might also be tempted to divide Rossetti's poetry into the secular and the sacred and to categorize the ghost poems as the former, yet much recent criticism on Rossetti has argued successfully for the pervasiveness of her religious voice even in works that seem not to be religious. Finally, in seeking to hear a religious resonance, we might be tempted to interpret her ghosts as representative of the Holy Ghost, yet that interpretation could only be asserted at the expense of the poems themselves; as narrative poems, most of them involve ghosts of dead lovers, desired by the living for themselves – not as experiences of God's presence. Rossetti's use of ghosts within short narrative or dialogic poems of the late 1850s and 60s concerning human desire for lost love invites closer inspection, especially when such poems overtly treat her religious beliefs.
SEX IN UTOPIA: THE EVOLUTIONARY HEDONISM OF GRANT ALLEN AND OSCAR WILDE
- Lindsay Wilhelm
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 403-424
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In his provocative polemic “The New Hedonism,” Grant Allen mounts a passionate defense of fin-de-siècle aestheticism by proposing a modern ethic – the titular “new hedonism,” which he borrows from Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, rev. 1891) – that fully synthesizes aestheticism's insights with up-to-date scientific knowledge. At first glance, Allen seems an unexpected ally for Wilde, in part because few literary historians have explored the link between the two contemporaries. Many modern-day scholars of Allen's work (including Peter Morton, Bernard Lightman, William Greenslade, and Terence Rodgers) have tended to focus on his popular science writing, his elaborations on Herbert Spencer's evolutionary theories, and his controversial “New Woman” novels The Woman Who Did (1895) and The Type-Writer Girl (1897). Those who do connect Allen and Wilde, such as Nick Freeman, often draw the relationship into focus through the two writers’ shared interest in libertarian socialism rather than their overlapping philosophical and aesthetic concerns (111–28). Yet, as we can begin to see in the epigraphs, the association that Allen made between evolutionary progress and the “beautifying of life” echoes one of the most significant claims of Wilde's earlier, dialogic essay, “The Critic as Artist.” “Aesthetics,” Wilde's speaker, Gilbert, enthuses, “like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change” (“The Critic as Artist” 204). Allen's survey of human evolutionary history reminds him, too, that our cultural and artistic achievements are all that lift us “above the beasts that perish” (382). For both writers, then, aestheticism's commitment to beauty, “self-development,” and the emancipated pursuit of pleasure entails potentially sweeping consequences for the future evolution of humankind. Allen's vocal support for Wilde – which Allen expressed privately in letters as well as publicly in his 1891 article “The Celt in English Art” – was not simply a convenient political alliance, but an integral part of Allen's complete program for sociocultural improvement.
VAMPIRE VERSUS THE EMPIRE: BRAM STOKER'S REPROACH OF FIN-DE-SIÈCLE BRITAIN IN DRACULA
- Ertuğrul Koç, Yağmur Demir
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 425-442
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Much has been said about Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the out-of-tradition exemplar of the Gothic which, perhaps, has had a more pervasive effect on our understanding of life and death, gender roles and identity, and sex and perversity than any other work of the genre. The vampire from the so-called dark ages has become a symbol standing for the uncontrollable powers acting on us and also for all the discarded, uncanny phenomena in human nature and history. The work, however, has usually been taken by the critics of Gothic literature as “a paradigmatic Gothic text” (Brewster 488) representing the social, psychological, and sexual traumas of the late-nineteenth century. Hence, it has been analysed as a work “breaking [the] taboos, [and in need of being] read as an expression of specifically late Victorian concerns” (Punter and Byron 231). The text has also been seen as “reinforc[ing] readers’ suspicions that the authorities (including people, institutions and disciplines) they trust are ineffectual” (Senf 76). Yet, it has hardly ever been taken as offering an alternative Weltanschauung in place of the decaying Victorian ethos. True, Dracula is a fin-de-siècle novel and deals with the turbulent paradigmatic shift from the Victorian to the modern, and Stoker, by creating the lecherous vampire and his band as the doppelgängers of the sexually sterile and morally pretentious bourgeois types (who are, in fact, inclined to lascivious joys), reveals the moral hypocrisy and sexual duplicity of his time. But, it is also true that by juxtaposing the “abnormal” against the “normal” he targets the utilitarian bourgeois ethics of the empire: aware of the Victorian pragmatism on which the concept of the “normal” has been erected, he, with an “abnormal” historical figure (Vlad Drăculea of the House of Drăculești, 1431–76) who appears as Count Dracula in the work, attacks the ethical superstructure of Britain which has already imposed on the Victorians the “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm 356). Hence, Stoker's choice of title character, the sadistic Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the Ottoman Empire in the closing years of the Middle Ages, and his anachronistic rendering of Dracula as a Gothic invader of the Early Middle Ages are not coincidental (Figure 8). In the world of the novel, this embodiment of the early and late paradigms is the antagonistic power arrayed against the supposedly stable, but in reality fluctuating, fin-de-siècle ethos. However, by turning this personification of the “evil” past into a sexual enigma for the band of men who are trying to preserve the Victorian patriarchal hegemony, Stoker suggests that if Victorian sterile faith in the “normal” is defeated through a historically extrinsic (in fact, currently intrinsic) anomaly, a more comprehensive social and ethical epoch that has made peace with the past can be started.
TENDING TO OLD STORIES: DANIEL DERONDA AND HYSTERIA, REVISITED
- Doreen Thierauf
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 443-465
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The appearance of the word ‘dynamic’ on the first page of George Eliot's novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), to describe Gwendolen's unsettled/unsettling glance famously elicited critique from her publisher John Blackwood as well as from an anonymous reviewer at the Examiner, both of whom challenged Eliot's use of scientific jargon that had not yet entered her audience's everyday vocabulary. In line with this often-cited vignette, critics usually understand Eliot to respond thoughtfully and prophetically to late-nineteenth-century scientific trends. In the words of the Examiner reviewer, Eliot's “culture is scientific” (“New Novel” 125), probably more so than any other Victorian novelist's. Studies investigating the reciprocal relationship between Eliot's fiction, particularly Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and nineteenth-century scientific writing suggest her familiarity with notable works by Henry Lewes, Alexander Bain, William Carpenter, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, James Sully, and others. Scholarship of the past three decades has largely focused on Eliot's application of Victorian theories regarding epistemology, evolution, and the relationship between mind and body. However, scholars have not yet fully examined Eliot's utilization of mid-nineteenth-century medical knowledge concerning the female body's proneness to hysteria, a connection that emerges prominently in her final novel.
“A HATEFUL CAWING FROM THE CROWS”: COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN THE CULTURE WARS
- Mischa Willett
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 467-482
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W. E. Aytoun's satirical verse drama, Firmilian (1854), an anti-radical, scattershot missive meant to re-align British poetic tastes by reversing the aesthetic gains made by Romanticism in the decades prior to its publication, has been called “one of the most successful pieces of literary criticism ever written” (Morton 849). Despite its broad ambitions, however, it has often been read as a narrow attack on the individual poets popular during the summer of its appearance, creating a school where one had not existed before, turning the poets Philip James Bailey, Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell and others into “the Spasmodic School.” But, as Charles LaPorte and Jason Rudy suggest, despite a myth that grew up later in the century about Firmilian's mighty power and the Spasmodic stars’ demise, the label hardly destroyed the poets associated therewith. So did Firmilian accomplish its purposes? In what ways can we consider it successful if not?
Special Effects
HENRY LONGUEVILLE MANSEL'S PHONTISTERION (1852)
- Giles Whiteley
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 485-514
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Established in 1859, as a merger of the Whigs, Radicals and Peelites, the British Liberal Party and their ideological forerunners won 15 out of a total of 20 parliamentary elections between 1832–1910. Responsible for passing socially progressive legislation domestically, Victorian liberalism can lay claim to being the most significant political ideology of the period. By bringing together aspects of classical social liberalism and liberal free-market conservatism, this specifically Victorian brand of liberalism enabled Britain to take a place at the center of world affairs. Indeed, by the mid-1850s, the emergence of Victorian liberalism had begun to be seen as something of a political necessity, as demonstrated by Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England from the Accession of James II (1848–61), a foundational text of Whig historicism, in which Lord Charles Grey's 1832 Reform Bill was characterized as the teleological culmination of British history. But while the liberals styled themselves as progressives and their opponents as reactionaries, Whig history has tended to oversimplify the dynamics of this narrative. In this context, Henry Longueville Mansel's closet drama Phontisterion offers a fascinating glimpse into a contemporary Tory response to the seemingly irresistible rise of Victorian liberalism.
Review Essays
VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND THE VARIETY OF RELIGIOUS FORMS
- Mark Knight
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 517-529
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Literary studies is not the only discipline to show a new enthusiasm for religion in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. When Stanley Fish suggested back in 2005 that religion might become the new theoretical center of gravity in the humanities, his declaration was cited frequently and may have proved a little too convenient for those, like myself, who wanted to see a major theoretical realignment in the humanities’ attitude to religion. But, the reality is that Fish is just one of a number of other prominent theorists in the last twenty years or so to have shown a new appreciation for the theoretical resources that religious thought makes available. Although the term religion is understood very differently across thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Sabo Mahmood, Charles Taylor, and Slavoj Žižek, they share a refusal to accept crude notions of the secularization thesis, with its commitment to seeing religion as an irrelevance in the modern world, and are instead determined to see religion as more than just an antiquated ideology that needs to be unmasked.
FORGETTING THACKERAY AND UNMAKING CAREERS
- Amanpal Garcha
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 531-545
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One of the peculiar challenges facing scholars who wish to write about Thackeray's fiction is locating a dominant critical account to argue against. The MLA Bibliography contains a great number of examples of scrupulously argued, compelling research into Thackeray's body of writing, but few if any of them have reached any kind of canonical status as the (or even one of the) interpretive accounts that define how critics understand his fiction. It can seem, for example, that Thackeray is either consciously or unconsciously evaded by many scholars seeking to develop overarching, defining accounts of the nineteenth-century novel. In two works that helped set the terms for decades of critical conversation about nineteenth-century literature – Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and The Novel and the Police (1988) – Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller each give at most a passing mention to Thackeray (he shows up four times in Armstong's book; never in Miller's). In their equally influential bodies of criticism, Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher provide no sustained – or even fragmentary – treatment of Thackeray's work. Moving into the twenty-first century, one would look in vain for a chapter on Thackeray in Amanda Anderson's The Powers of Distance (2001), Sharon Marcus's Between Women, and Alex Woloch's The One vs the Many (2003) – books that have provided us with key terms, issues, and methods to do our work. (To readers of this journal, it might be not necessary to say the following: Thackeray's fiction includes many illustrations of the phenomena discussed by these works – cosmopolitanism, female-female friendship, and minor characters – so his absence cannot be explained solely on this basis.) And to move backwards from the 1980s, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, and Raymond Williams produced pioneering analyses of the links between history, ideology, and Victorian literature, but Thackeray's writing played almost no part in their elaboration of those links, with Hillis Miller focusing on Thackeray only in one short essay and one book chapter among his large body of scholarship and Williams omitting him altogether from The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970).
Front Cover (OFC, IFC) and matter
VLC volume 46 issue 2 Cover and Front matter
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- 16 May 2018, pp. f1-f14
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VLC volume 46 issue 2 Cover and Back matter
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- 16 May 2018, pp. b1-b3
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