VICTORIAN STUDIES
An interdisciplinary journal of social, political and cultural studies published by Indiana University
SPRING 1993
Volume36, Number 3
EDITORIAL BOARD NANCY ARMSTRONG, BrownUniversity NINA AUERBACH, Universitycf Pennsylvania THOMAS COLLINS, Universityof WesternOntario J. F C. HARRISON, Universityof Sussex GARETH STEDMAN JONES, CambridgeUniversity CHRISTOPHERKENT, Universityof Saskatchewan GEORGE LEVINE,RutgersUniversity WILLIAMMADDEN, Universityof Minnesota HARRIETRITVO, MassachusettsInstituteof Technology HELENEROBERTS,HarvardUniversity MICHAELRUSE, Universityof Guelph PETERSTANSKY,StanfordUniversity NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY,Universityof Illinois WILLIAMB. THESING, Universityof SouthCarolina HERBERTF TUCKER, Universityof Virginia FRANK M. TURNER, YaleUniversity MARTHA VICINUS, Universityof Michigan JUDITH R. WALKOWITZ,JohnsHopkinsUniversity JEFFREYWEEKS,BristolPolytechnic MICHAELWOLFF, Universityof Massachusetts
VICTORIAN STUDIES (ISSN 0042-5222) Victorian Studies is publishedquarterlyin autumn, winter,spring,and summerby IndianaUniversity Press,which assumesno responsibilityfor statementsexpressedby authors.Subscriptionrates,in U.S. fundsare:institutions,$40/yr.;individuals,$25/yr. Foreign subscribersoutside the U.S. add $12.50/yr. surface post, $24/yr. air mail post. Single copies are: institutions, $20; individuals,$10. Add $1.75 per single issue for postageand handling. A discount is availableon bulk ordersfor classroomuse or bookstore sales. Address all subscriptionsand businesscorrespondenceto the JournalsDivision, Indiana University Press, 601 N. Morton, Bloomington, Indiana47404. Notice of non-receipt of an issue must be sent within four weeks afterreceipt of subsequentissue. Please notify the Pressof any change in address;the Post Office does not forwardthird class mail. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondenceshould be addressedto the Editor,Victorian Studies, Indiana University, Ballantine Hall, Bloomington, IN 47405. © THE TRUSTEES OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY 1993 ADVICETO CONTRIBUTORS
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VICTORIAN VOLUME36
STUDIES
NUMBER3
SPRING 1993
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DONALDGRAY
Editor JAMESELIADAMS
STEPHENPULSFORD
ANDREWH. MILLER
ManagingEditor
AssociateEditors
JEANKOWALESKI
LAURAPLUMMER
BookReviewEditor
EditorialAssistant
EditorialBoard-
IndianaUniversity
PHILIPAPPLEMAN PATRICKBRANTLINGER MARYBURGAN WILLIAMBURGAN SUSAN GUBAR FREDERICK KIRCHHOFF M. JEANNEPETERSON LEESTERRENBURG PAULZIETLOW
BusinessManager CAROLSIMMONS
Publicationand EditorialOffice:PROGRAMFORVICTORIANSTUDIES,INDIANA UNIVERSITY
VICTORIAN SEXUALITIES A Special Issue
ANDREW H. MILLER Guest Editor
SPECIAL ISSUE: VICTORIAN SEXUALITIES Edited by Andrew H. Miller TABLE OF CONTENTS 269
ANDREW H. MILLER
273
293
JEFFNUNOKAWA
CAMILLA TOWNSEND
315 THAISE. MORGAN
333 JUDITHHALBERSTAM
353 EDCOHEN
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION THE MISER'STWO BODIES: SILAS MARNER AND THE SEXUAL POSSIBILITIESOF THE COMMODITY "I AM THE WOMAN FOR SPIRIT":A WORKING WOMAN'S GENDER TRANSGRESSIONIN VICTORIAN LONDON REIMAGINING MASCULINITYIN VICTORIAN CRITICISM:SWINBURNE AND PATER TECHNOLOGIES OF MONSTROSITY: BRAM STOKER'SDRACULA THE DOUBLE LIVES OF MAN: NARRATION AND IDENTIFICATION IN THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY REPRESENTATIONOF EC-CENTRIC MASCULINITIES
BOOKREVIEWS 377 WalterL. Arstein
QUEEN VICTORIA: A PORTRAIT,by Giles St. Aubyn HEART OF A QUEEN: QUEEN VICTORIA'SROMANTIC ATTACHMENTS, by Theo Aronson BELOVEDAND DARLING CHILD: LAST LETTERSBETWEEN QUEEN VICTORIA AND HER ELDEST DAUGHTER 1886-1901, by AgathaRamm
380 MarcManganaro
CULTURE AND ANOMIE: ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, by ChristopherHerbert
382 ThaisE. Morgan
CONDITIONS FOR CRITICISM: AUTHORITY, KNOWLEDGE, AND LITERATUREIN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, by Ian Small
383 DonaldS. Hair
384 TrevorLloyd
385 MargerySabin
THE LANGUAGES OF PARADISE: RACE, RELIGION, AND PHILOLOGY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, by MauriceOlender,translatedby Arthur Goldhammer POLICING THE EMPIRE: GOVERNMENT, AUTHORITY AND CONTROL, 1830-1940, editedby David M. Andersonand David Kilingray REACHES OF EMPIRE:THEENGLISH NOVEL FROM EDGEWORTH TO DICKENS, by SuvendriniPerera
386 LindaM. Shires
SCHEHEREZADEIN THE MARKETPLACE:ELIZABETH GASKELL& THE VICTORIAN NOVEL, by HilaryM. Schor
388 MartinJ. Wiener
GENTLEMEN CAPITALISTS:THE SOCIAL AND POLITICALWORLD OF THE VICTORIAN BUSINESSMAN, by H. L. Malchow
389 SamuelCohn
THE STRUGGLE FOR MARKET POWER: INDUSTRIAL RELATIONSIN THE BRITISHCOAL INDUSTRY, 1800-1840, by JamesA. Jaffe CLASS, COMMUNITY AND COLLECTIVEACTION: SOCIAL CHANGE IN TWO BRITISH COALFIELDS, 1850-1926, by David Gilbert
390 DavidFeldman
CITIES, CLASS AND COMMUNICATION: ESSAYSIN HONOUR OF ASA BRIGGS, editedby Derek Fraser
392 IowerthProthero
URBANISING BRITAIN: ESSAYSON CLASS AND COMMUNITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, editedby Gerry Keams and CharlesW. J. Withers
392 LynnZastoupil
394 Ed Block,Jr.
395 RichardMaxwell
SCIENCE AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHIN BRITISH INDIA, 1780-1800: THE ROLE OF ANGLO-INDIAN ASSOCIATIONS AND GOVERNMENT, by EdwardW. EUsworth THE VANISHING SUBJECT:EARLY PSYCHOLOGYAND LITERARY MODERNISM, by JudithRyan FROM BOW STREET TO BAKER STREET:MYSTERY,DETECTION & NARRATIVE, by MartinA. Kayman WHATEVERHAPPENED TO SHERLOCK HOLMES?DETECTIVE FICTION, POPULAR THEOLOGY, AND SOCIETY, by RobertS. Paul CRITICAL ESSAYSON SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, editedby HaroldOrel
397 Sue 1Lonoff
THE KING OF INVENTORS: A LIFE OF WILKIECOLLINS, by CatherinePeters
398 JackcZipes
FORBIDDENJOURNEYS:FAIRYTALES AND FANTASIESBY VICTORIAN WOMEN WRITERS,editedby Nina Auerbachand U. C. Knoepflmacher
399 DeirdreDavid
SARA COLERIDGE,A VICTORIAN DAUGHTER: HER LIFE AND ESSAYS, by BradfordKeyesMudge AMBITIOUS HEIGHTS: WRITING, FRIENDSHIP,LOVE-THE JEWSBURY SISTERS, FELICIAHEMANS, AND JANE WELSH CARLYLE,by Norma Clarke
401 JohnMczynard
COVENTRYPATMORE'SANGEL: A STUDY OF COVENTRYPATMORE, HIS WIFE EMILYAND THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE, by Ian Anstruther
402 LauraPl ammer
WILDE'SDEVOTED FRIEND: A LIFE OF ROBERTROSS, 1869-1918, by Maureen Borland
403 Dale K:ramer 404 CynthiaEllen Patton
THOMAS HARDY:HIS LIFE AND FRIENDS, by F. B. Pinion THE SINGING BOURGEOIS: SONGS OF THE VICTORIAN DRAWING ROOM AND PARLOUR, by DerekScott
405 MichaelE)obson
REFORMINGMARLOWE:THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CANONIZATION OF A RENAISSANCE DRAMATIST,by ThomasDabbs
406 JohnMcBratney
CHILDREN'SLITERATURE,20: SPECIAL ISSUE ON RUDYARDKIPLING, edited by FranceliaButler,et al. THE CULTURE SHOCKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING, by W J. Lohman,Jr. THE POETRYOF RUDYARDKIPLING: ROUSING THE NATION, by Ann Parry
408 MichaelH ancher
SIR JOHN TENNIEL: ALICE'S WHITE KNIGHT, by RodneyEngen
409 LaurelE3radley
NAKED AUTHORITY:THE BODY IN WESTERN PAINTING 1830-1908, by MarciaPointon
411
COMMENTS AND QUERIES CONTRIBUTORS
Andrew H. Miller
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
MADEDIFFICULT THEHISTORYOFSEXUALITY ISAN ABSORBINGAND A VEXEDACADEMICSUBJECT,
and propelled by intertwined practical and conceptual problems.1Social historians referrepeatedlyto the "hugeevidentiarygaps and absences"that beset the field (Seidman 55); "the bedroom,"as F M. L. Thompson remarks, "is a largely unrecordedarea"(57). As a result, the few available recordsof private practices and attitudes-the diaries of Anne Lister, Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, and, in America, the diaryof Mabel LoomisToddand the Mosher survey-are called upon to substantiate a wide range of arguments. The more prevalent public sources-advice books, recordsof parliamentary legislation, court records,medical texts-continue to be used but with increasingskepticismabout their relation to the actual sexual activities and beliefs of Victorians.2But, while these practical difficulties are slowly giving way as new primarysources are unearthed, the history of sexuality remains troubledby conceptual problemsregardingthe exact nature of the subject. As more writers, influenced by Foucault'slate writings, have come to see sexuality as a socially constructedactivity, the history of sexuality has been understoodto embracea rapidlygrowingcollection of affiliated topics. FrankMort'scatalogue is conservative:"A history of sex raises a number of expectations. We expect it to cover things like the sex act, procreation,the family,birth-control,motherhood,prostitution,homosexuality.At some level or another we also anticipate the personal or experiential"(4). Beyond this list there lies the increasingbody of work on the interconnections between constructions of sexual identity and beliefs regardingnational and colonial character,on the sexual politics of the public sphere,as well as on Mort'sown subject of medical and moral discourses.3 While sexualityhas been seen in this way to dispersethroughVictorian culture, markingand forming each of its aspects, it simultaneouslyhas become an increasinglyelusive topic. Recent lesbian theory has made this point particularlyclear; as Carol Vance has said, [T]o the extent that social construction theory grants that sexual identities and even desire are mediatedby culturaland historical identities, the object of study-sexualitybecomes evanescent and threatens to disappear.If sexuality is constructeddifferentlyat each time and place, can we use the term in a comparativelymeaningfulway?More to
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the point in lesbian and gay history,have constructionistsunderminedtheir own categories?Is there an "it"to study?(qtd. in Chauncey 6)4
Both these problemswere recognizedby the Victoriansthemselves;as Carol Zisowitz Steams and Peter N. Steams have argued, Victorians, far from "denyingand devaluing the importanceof the sex instinct, . . . assumedits omnipresence and power"(49); at the same time, Victorians recognizedits fugitive nature, resistantto definition, examination, and regulation.Anticipating Thompson's remarksregardingthe unrecordedlife of the bedroom, James Kay wrote that "sensualityleaves no record"(qtd. in Mort 22)-a suspicionwhich only encouragedVictorianwriters(including Kay) to search for its recordsmore energetically.Obscurecodes of interpretationelicit anxious explanations. In a similar fashion, the conceptual flux permeatingthe history of sexualityat the presentmomenthas stimulatedresponsesfromscholarsworking in a wide rangeof disciplines.The currentpowerof the historyof sexualityto engage scholarsderivesfrom public discourseabout sexuality in the midst of the AIDS crisis,from the continuing activity of academicand non-academic feministhistoriansandculturalcriticson issuesof gender,andfromthe increased significanceof social historywithin the historicalcommunity.But the energy of these studiesalso derivesfromthe conceptualflux I have described.Because sexuality is a topic which, in the currentintellectual discourse,escapes easy classification,a rangeof discoursesare being deployedto traceout its nuances; and those discoursesthen must negotiate their own differences,speakingto each other acrossdisciplinaryboundaries,comparingmethodsand conceptual assumptions.Sexualityencouragesmultidisciplinaryventures,and the present Studieswasinspirednot only by a desireto bringtogether specialissueof Victorian some of the best workbeing done on this particularsubjectbut also becausewe recognizedthat the subject,more than many others,offeredan opportunityto considercurrentworkin a rangeof relatedtopics-economics, criminality,the representationof homosexuality,the origins of psychiatrictheory, aestheticism-and througha varietyof methodologies.Of coursethe topicsrepresented in the essaysthat follow do not exhaust those being consideredby critics of Victoriansexuality;the practicaland conceptualdifficultieswith which I began makeeven claimsof representativenessimpossible.While the methodsof some fields, Englishand CulturalStudies most notably,dominatework being done, there remain several topics which have only begun to get the attention they merit:studiesof sexualityas representedby colonial or "hybrid" subjects;studies of lesbianhistory;gay historyin the mid-Victorianperiod;workingclass sexuality; sexualityand art history.Finally,the studyof normativeheterosexuality, as a set of practicesnow made strangeby the sustainedattention to practices hasyet to receivethe examinationit deserves. previouslyconsidered"marginal,"
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Notes 1Among the practical problemsare the institutional and personal resistancesoffered to its study: Mort remarkson "the widely held belief, especially among male academics, that sex is not a fit subjectforseriousstudy"(5); in the valuable"Introduction"to their HiddenfromHistory, George Chauncey, Martin Doberman,and MarthaVicinus describe the more acute difficulties experiencedby those workingon gay and lesbianhistory;and LisaDugganremindsus that, while resistanceto the study of sexuality may appearto be declining, the emergence of controversial new issues-sadomasochism and the sexuality of children, for instance-will encourage their return. 2The scarcityof documentation is felt acutely by those researchinggay and especially lesbian history:"Thoseinterestedin the lesbianpast,"as Chauncey, Doberman,and Vicinus write, "have faced the very practical problem of a relative absence of records concerning same-sex sexual activity"(6). Fora contraryview on the apparentscarcityof archivalmaterialconcering sexual practice,see Estelle Freedmanand John D'Emilio.See Mosherand Degler for the Mosherreport; for the diaries of Todd, see Gay. Finally, the review of literatureby Carol ZisowitzSteams and Peter N. Steams, while it appearsto equate the study of Victorian sexuality with the study of female sexuality, is usefullyskeptical towardpublic sources, as is Seidman'sreview. 3Fora strongcollection of recent essayson nationalismsand sexualities, see Parker;for work particularlyon the Victorian period, see Hyam. The theoretical discussion concerning social constructionism is too extensive to catalogue here; see Padgug for an early and influential statement of the constructionist position; Halperin provides a more recent argument and a valuableset of references.In his review essayon recent workof gay criticismJeffreyWeeks notes the current exhaustion of the essentialism/constructionismdebate; for an attempt to think beyond this impasse,see Fuss,and Butler. 4The argumentswithin lesbian history aroundLillian Faderman'sSurpassingtheLoveof Men underscorethis point: the varying political stakes in defining lesbianism as an affective and romantic relationshipor as a specific collection of sexual and physical acts are clarified (though not resolved) by considering the issue historically. See Vicinus' extremely useful essay, "'They Wonder To Which Sex I Belong"'and Sheila Jeffries,"Does it Matter if They Did It?"
Works Cited Butler,Judith. GenderTrouble.New York:Routledge, 1990. Chauncey, George, Martin Bauml Duberman,and Martha Vicinus. "Introduction"to Hidden FromHistory.New York:NAL Books, 1989. Cullwick, Hannah. The Diariesof HannahCullwick,VictorianMaidservant.Ed. Liz Stanley. New Brunswick:RutgersUP, 1984. Degler, Carl. At Odds:Womenand the Familyin Americafrom the Revolutionto the Present.New York:Oxford UP, 1980. Duggan,Lisa. "ReviewEssay.FromInstincts to Politics: Writing the History of Sexuality in the U.S." Journalof Sex Research27 (February1990):95-109. Freedman, Estelle B. and John D'Emilio. "ProblemsEncountered in Writing the History of Sexuality: Sources, Theory and Interpretation."Journalof Sex Research27 (Nov. 1990): 481-95. Fuss, Diana. EssentiallySpeaking.New York:Routledge, 1989. Gay, Peter. Educationof theSenses,Vol. 1: The BourgeoisExperience,Victoriato Freud.New York: Oxford U P, 1984. Halperin, David M. "IsThere a History of Sexuality?"Historyand Theory 28 (1989): 257-74.
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Hyam, Ronald. Empireand Sexuality.Manchester:ManchesterUP, 1990. Jeffries,Sheila. "Does It Matter if They Did It?"Not a PassingPhase.Ed. LesbianHistoryGroup. London: The Women's Press, 1989. 19-28. Lister, Anne. I KnowMy Own Heart.Ed. Helena Whitbread.London:Virago, 1988. Mort, Frank.DangerousSexualities.London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Mosher, Clelia D. The MosherSurvey.New York:Arno, 1980. Padgug, Robert. "Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History." RadicalHistory Review20 (1979): 3-23. Parker,Andrew, et al., eds. Nationalisms& Sexualities.New York:Routledge, 1992. Seidman, Steven. "The Power of Desire and The Danger of Pleasure:Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered."Journalof SocialHistory24 (1990): 46-67. Steams, Carol Zisowitzand PeterN. Stearms."VictorianSexuality:Can Historiansdo it Better?" Journalof SocialHistory18 (1985): 624-634. Thompson, F. M. L. The Riseof Respectable Society.Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1988. Vicinus, Martha."'TheyWonder to Which Sex I Belong':The HistoricalRoots of the Modem Lesbian Identity."FeministStudies18 (1992): 467-97. Weeks, Jeffrey."The Late-VictorianStew of Sexualities."VictorianStudies35 (1992): 409-15.
Jeff Nunokawa
THE MISER'S TWO BODIES: SILAS MARNER AND THE SEXUAL POSSIBILITIES OF THE COMMODITY
VALUES?FORSAKINGHER THAN SILASMARNER'SSUPPORTFORFAMILY WHATCOULDBESIMPLER
customarytact, Eliot fills the storywith simple maximsand paeanspromoting a life with wives and children, and emphatic caveats about a life without them. A faith in the family she is elsewhere content confiding to the implications of her narrative is here urged, and urged again, as conspicuous doctrine. Pullingout the stops, Eliot poursher formidablebut usuallydiscreet didactic energy into a straightforwardchannel of simple exhortation: "the Squire'swife had died long ago, and the Red House waswithout that presence of the wife and mother which is the fountain of wholesome love and fear in parlourand kitchen" (72); men without women inhabit houses "destituteof any hallowing charm"(73) and filled insteadwith the "scentof flat ale" (73); men without women live in a region barrenof the "sweetflower of courtesy" (121); men without women dwell in a twilight zone of tedium vitae whose only source of light is the memoryof what is lost to them: pass[ing] their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by monotony .. . perhapsthe love of some sweet maiden, the imageof purity,order,and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life in which the dayswould not seem too long, even without rioting; but the maiden was lost, and the vision passedaway,and then what was left to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt ...? (79)
The pains that patient Dolly Winthrop takes to teach the errant weaver the work of raising a child are surelyno greaterthan the pains that Silas Marer takes to promote it. It is hard to imagine how the difference between the wholesome delights of the semi-traditional family life Silas Mamer managesto sustainwith his stepdaughterand the debilitating bleakness of his money love could be remarkedmore blatantlyor more often. The fine calibrations of a moral scale able to weigh with utmost precision the specific densities of characters as various as Mr. Farebrother,Nicholas
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Bulstrode and the Princess Halm-Ebersteinare abandoned for the blunt dichotomy of the primerwhen Eliot comes to assessthe evil of the gold and the goodness of the child: The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeatedcircle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppiewas an object compactedof changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward... to the new things that would come with the coming years,when [she] would have learned to understandhow her father Silas cared for her .. . The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him awayfromhis weaving, and made him think all its pausesa holiday, re-awakening his senses with her fresh life. (184)
Silas Mamer'scommerce with his gold looks less dull in an earlier description,whereits deviationfromthe purityand orderof traditionalfamilial arrangementsvergeson formsof sexualitythat both Victorianandcontemporary championsof those arrangementsapprehendas enemy numberone: It was pleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright faces ... He handled them ... till their form and colour were like the satisfactionof a thirst to him; but it was only in the night ... that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship... at night came his revelry:at night he closed his shutters,and made fast his doors, and drew forth his gold. He . . . felt their rounded outline between his thumb and fingers, and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earnedby the work of the loom as if they had been unbornchildren. (65, 68, 70)
The pleasurethat Eliot's miser takes in this illicit atmosphere("only in the night;""atnight came his revelry;""atnight he closed his shutters,and made fast his doors")resemblesa condensed catalogue of sexual deviance-incest, of course-the "roundedoutlines" which are the object of his nocturnal fondlings are the bodiesof his own children "begottenby his labor"-but also the rangeof perversionsthat surroundthe "secretsin"of masturbation.Eliot's account of the revelryof this "pallid,undersized"man, isolated amongstfull bodied strangers,readslike a case studyof the solitarypracticeand enervating consequences of self-abuseimaginedby nineteenth-centurysexology,consequences which range from bodily debilitation to homosexuality.Intimations of solitary and more than solitaryvices are enfolded in the hard cash whose "rounded"and "resistantoutlines"the miserfondles, outlines and "faces"not only "his own," but also likehis own.' The miser'sself-love suggestsone that dares not speak its name, a love whose definition is glimpsed in the shadow of Sodom (whose eponymic reputation was as active in the nineteenth century as it is now) that hovers over "the city of Destruction"from which the miser is saved when the gold is replacedby the girl: In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction.We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led
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away from threatening destruction:a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward;and the hand may be a little child's. (190-91)2
What is remarkableabout Eliot'spropagandacampaign on behalf of familial proprietyis less the lengths that she goes to in its prosecution, or even the alarmingshapes that threaten it, than the deficiency indicated by the very need for such a campaign in the first place. Her frank efforts to propagatea preferencefor family ties, or, more to our point here, her efforts to propagatean aversion for other kinds of congress, marks a loosening in SilasMarer of the quieter methods by which these things are usually inculcated in her fiction; a loosening whose promiscuousconsequences verge on the regions of perversity;a loosening that we will eventually return to as a crisis of capital.
II The appearanceof improprietythat clings to the miser'sfondlings is an affrontto rulesof properbodily conduct, or moreprecisely,of properbodily contact;a flouting of restrictionsimposedby a not just Victorian standardof proprietyon the body'sintercoursewith others, a challenge to the frequently informalbylawscharged with the work of regulatingsexual relations. Often dwelling outside the annals of official or even explicit dictates, inhabiting instead"the seeminglymost insignificantdetails of dress,bearing,physical and verbal manners,"the rules of bodily proprietyare easiest to observe in their breach (Bourdieu94):3 like the sudden realizationof speed limits prompted by the sound of a siren, properdistances between bodies in and beyond the Eliot novel are typicallymeasuredby what happenswhen those which should not, get too close; when intercoursebetween a man and woman who are not married, or between a man and another man, exceed correct or normal bounds: full scale scandal explodes when Maggie Tulliver spends the night with Stephen Guest, and when Arthur Donnithome does more than that with Hetty Sorrel;a scandal as intense as these is concentrated in the parlor where Dorothea Casaubon saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which filled up all outlines, something which made her pause motionless, without self-possessionenough to speak. Seated with his back towardsher on a sofa which stood against the wall on a line with the door by which she had entered, she sawWill Ladislaw:close by him and turnedtowardshim with a flushed tearfulnesswhich gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond,her bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towardsher clasped both her hands in his and spoke with a low-toned fervour.(355)
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A fearof scenes like this one is presentwheneverbodies that shouldn't engage in such intercourseare left alone in the Eliot novel. "[T]he terrible illumination of a certainty which filled up all outlines" (Middlemarch 634) confirmsa suspicionadmittedearlier,when Dorothea"foundherselfthinking with some wonder that Will Ladislawwas passinghis time with Mrs Lydgate in her husband'sabsence" (355); a suspicion like the one marked by the eyebrowsraisedwhen the otherwise impeccableDaniel Deronda spends too much time alone with Mrs.Grandcourt:"Aftera moment'ssilence, in which Sir Hugo looked at a letter without reading it, he said, 'I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan-you understandme"' (DanielDeronda389). The rumor of improprietythat Sir Hugo and Dorothea Casaubon detect is not confined to unchaperonedintercoursebetween unmarriedmen and women. It attends as well the closeted interviewsbetween men, such as those between FredVincy and Peter Featherstone,who "wouldnot begin the 89). MaryGarthsuspects dialoguetill the doorhad been closed"(Middlemarch that such "loitering"costs Vincy his "manlyindependence"(213); a perhaps related suspicion is cast by the "peculiartwinkle,"in the eye of the old man: "When Fred came in the old man eyed him with a peculiar twinkle, which the younger had often had reason to interpret as pride in the satisfactory details of his appearance"(89). And if the stricturesgoverningbody contact in Eliot are made visible by their violation, their intensity is made vivid by all the care that she takes to prevent their appearancein the first place. The conduct book she keeps of the private interviewsbetween Will Ladislawand Dorothea Brookelabors to demonstratethat no such scene as that between Will and Rosamondoccurs when thesebodies gather:"She gave her hand for a moment, and then they went to sit down near the window, she on one settee and he on another opposite" (442); "Will sat down opposite her at two yards'distance" (298); "He was standingtwo yardsfromher with his mind full of contradictorydesires and resolves"(445); "She moved automaticallytowardsher uncle's chair ... and Will, after drawingit out a little for her, went a few paces off and stood opposite to her" (514-15). The eccentricity of all this detail widens if we consider that it is delivered to the reader,who is privy to these private interviews,and not, say, to Mrs. Cadwallader,who might suspect closer contact between Will and Dorothea from the other side of the closed door. It is as if Eliot worriesthat our suspicion is sleepless enough to imagine all the things she denies here going on in front of our faces;as if she worrieswe might speculate,unless we are told otherwise, that Dorothea gave Will her hand for much more than a moment; as if she worrieswe would surmise,without explicit indication to the contrary,that they standor sit much less than two yardsfromone another;
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as if she worrieswe would suppose,except for her denial, that after drawing her chair, Will doesn'twalk "a few paces off." Eliot compulsivelylodges such affidavitsin the minutia of interviews like these, little logbooksshowing that bodies which may get too close to one another don't. Whatever Grandcourtsees when he surprisesDeronda and his wife alone, Eliot takes pains to show that it is not what Dorothea sees when she comes acrossWill and Rosamond:"What he saw was Gwendolen's face ... and Derondastanding three yardsoff"(DanielDeronda521); Grandcourt himself, when he is alone with Gwendolen prior to their engagement, is "abouttwo yardsdistant"(255); even the somewhatamplerallowanceof body contact allotted to a betrothed couple is carefullymeasured:before they are married,"[Lydgate]touched [Rosamond's]earand a little bit of her neck under it with his lips" (Middlemarch 289). Such precise accountings hold themselves accountable to a sense of proprietyalwayson the lookout for three feet on the floor. If they sometimes seem to aspireto the condition of choreography,they are alwaysbending over backwardto maintain for the bodies that inhabit them a good reputation in the eyes of an unblinking monitor of properconduct. As with the neurosis which seems to exaggerate,but actuallyclarifiesthe ordealsof civility, Eliot's obsessive documentation of adherence to it reflects an endless demand that bodieskeep their properdistances.That such documentation,while obsessive, is delivered without apparentthought, without any sign of conscious intention, makes the conformity of the Victorian novel to the rules of bodily proprietyas automatic as our own. With as little visible resolve as what is disclosed in the straighteningof a wristor a walk, the durationof a handshake or the length, location and depth of a kiss, the body everywherebends to the rigorsof propriety,the body not more at home in the fiction of the nineteenth century than amongst the ways we live now. Conducted unconsciously,the task of enforcing the rules of bodily proprietydrawsupon the defensive industriousnesswe have been trained to associatewith what is unconscious.Eliot'stext develops an elaboratenetwork of impedimentswhich assurethe conformitythat it elsewhere documents in detail, tying hands that shouldn't wander, turning into marble forms not allowed to embrace:"Itwas if [Deronda]saw Gwendolen drowningwhile his limbs were bound" (DanielDeronda389); "It had seemed to [Will Ladislaw] as if they were like two creaturesslowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning" 444). (Middlemarch The measuresthat Eliot's text takes to prevent illicit intercoursedo not merely isolate the proscribedbody; they do not merely restrainthe hand or the lips that would touch it. Such shapes are not simply fettered and
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distanced, they are entirely alteredor even annulled as the meticulouslabors of prohibition are aided by the miracles of metamorphosis.The pressureof proprietyhas alchemical powers:Eliot substantiatesher effortsto deny anything scandalous about the intimacy between Ladislawand Dorothea and between Gwendolen and Deronda by converting the body forbiddento the grasp into an object that one can see, but not touch. Grandcourtmay rest assuredthat his wife has avoided the extremitiesof adultery,not only because Derondais "threeyardsoff"fromher,but also, and more importantly,because she is less a body capable of receiving the licentious graspthan a painting capableof compelling the admiringeye.4"Whathe saw was Gwendolen'sface of anguish framedblack like a nun's, and Deronda standing three yardsoff from her with a look of sorrow"(521). Dorothea feels "helpless"to manifest her affection for Will because "herhands had been tied from making up to him for any unfairness in his lot" (440). But even if they weren't tied, Dorothea wouldn't lay her hands on Will anyway,since all she wants to do is to look at him: "herhands had been tied from making up to him for any unfairnessin his lot. But her soul thirsted to see him" (440). Eliot underwritesthe distance she interposes between bodies that shouldn'ttouch by casting the relation between them as the two dimensional communion of spectacle and audience. Or the body that should not be "grasped"is evacuated altogether: The feeling Deronda endured in these moments he afterwardcalled horrible. Words seemed to have no more rescue in them than if he had been beholding a vessel in peril of wreck-the poor ship with its many-lived anguish beaten by the inescapablestorm. How could he graspthe long-growingprocessof this youngcreature'swretchedness?(521)
Unchaperonedcommunionbetween a marriedwomanand an unmarriedman is defined here as a kind of communication which excludes any hands-on contact; as if that isn't enough, what can't actuallybe graspedanywayis then put at more than arm'slength, put at a distance as remote as a vessel on stormywaters seen from the shore. Eliot's accounts of the conduct of couples who shouldn't touch are sometimeslessprolix than this, but seldomlessbusyabstractingthe prohibited body. Casaubon,for example, abandoninghis wife duringtheir weddingtour, spends time "gropingafter his mouldy futilities" instead (168). That such precautions are doubled-physical or grammatical ("after")distances are imposed which separatebodies who are in any event incapableof touching or being touched-suggests a now familiaranxiety:when it comes to physical intimacy,a single layer of protection may not be enough. As we might well know, a prophylactic urge to deform or make disappeara body who appearssusceptibleto illicit embracesextends beyond the workof GeorgeEliot. Leavingasidefor a moment scenes and suppressions
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closer to home, recall the fate of David Copperfield'sSteerforth when the plaintive wish that his "Daisy"had a sisterputs into play a desirethat it barely missesmentioning for "Daisy"himself.The usualmeansby which homosexual appealbetween men is coveredover even as it is constituted nearlydisappears here; the partitionseparatingsanctioned fromunsanctionedmale intercourse in the exchange between Copperfieldand Steerforth that we are about to encounter is narrowedto paperthinness;the by now well-knownfemalefigure throughwhom a desirebetween men is routinelyroutedreducedto a pretense as bare as the "friend"whose troublesare really our own:5 The greaterpart of the guests had gone to bed as soon as the eating and drinking were over; and we, who had remainedwhisperingand listening half-undressed,at last betook ourselves to bed, too. 'Goodnight, young Copperfield,'said Steerforth.'I'll take care of you.' 'You'revery kind,' I gratefullyreturned.'I am very much obliged to you.' 'Youhaven't got a sister, have you?'said Steerforth,yawning. 'No,' I answered. 'That's a pity,' said Steerforth. 'If you had one, I should think she would have been a pretty,timid, little, bright-eyedsort of girl. I should have liked to know her. Good night young Copperfield.' 'Good night, sir,' I replied. I thought of him very much after I went to bed, and raisedmyself, I recollect, to look where he lay in the moonlight, with his handsome face turned up, and his head reclining easily on his arm. (140)
And again, just as the possibilityof illicit bodily contact gains point, the body vaporizes: He was a person of great power in my eyes; that was, of course, the reason of my mind running on him. No veiled future dimly glanced upon him in the moonbeams. There was no shadowypicture of his footsteps, in the garden that I dreamedof walking in all night. (140)
Where is Steerforth in the moonlit thoughts of the boy who admires "his handsome face turned up, and his head reclining easily on his arm"with an intensity given everything but a name? While the landscape of David's dreamworkis pervadedby this "personof great power,"his body is nowhere to be found there: "No veiled future [even] dimly glanced upon him;""there was no shadowypicture [even] of his footsteps"(140). The line of causalitieswe have been tracing in the work of Eliot and Dickens extends beyond the limits of the Victorian novel. According to Eve KosofskySedgwick'srevisionist history, the inclination to conceal the male body freighted with homoerotic potential takes on the global force of a systematic campaign in the war against figurationwaged by several generations of literarymodernism;in the urge towardsabstractionthat marksmodernism, the strategyof preemptivedisappearancethrough which the likes of
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Steerforth, Mordecai and Dorian Gray are disembodiedexpands to become the general form of a comprehensiveliteraryimperative: Insofaras there is a case to be made that the modernistimpulsetowardabstraction in the first place owes an incalculablepart of its energy preciselyto turn-of-the-century male homo/heterosexualdefinitional panic-and such a case is certainly there for the making, in at any rate literaryhistory from Wilde to Hopkins to James to Proust to Conrad to Eliot to Pound to Joyceto Hemingwayto Faulknerto Stevens-to that extent the "figuration"that had to be abjectedfrom modernistself-reflexiveabstractionwas not the figurationof just any body, the figurationof figuralityitself, but, rather,that represented in a very particularbody, the desiredmale body. (Epistemology 167)
The classic story of an abscondedbody that Sedgwick updateshere exhibits a distinct opposition between power and its victims, a Manichaeanismimplicit in any myth, or hypothesisof repression,whether its culprit is a jealous god or the pressureof a homophobic propriety.On one side there is the body; on the other, a conspiracyto conceal the body.Displacedby plants or planets, or by non-figurativeliterarylandscapeson which nobody, and especiallynot the proscribedphysique, can be seen, the censored body is set against the repressive forces that hide it. If the ruses of propriety that we have been assessing so far cast the prohibited body out of sight, they stop short of infecting that body.Thus the Foucauldianformationthat Sedgwickelsewhere discovers,a "gaymale rhetoric ... alreadymarkedand structuredand indeed necessitated by the historical shapes of homophobia"(165), has nothing at all to do with the concealed corpusthat she disintersin the passageI quoted before,the bodyabstractedby a homophobiaconcernedonly to repress,rather than to constitute or contaminate it, the body that thus retains an illicit purity even when it is spiritedaway.6 It would be imprudent,if not simplyimpossible,to deny the enduring and practicallypervasivevitality of the urge to hide this body.The habit of abstractionthat stretches beyond the Victorian novel, beyond literarymodernism into most contemporaryspheresof representationintrojects,and thus preempts, the efforts of an exteral censor to expunge the body seemingly readyto offer or to receive the wrong kind of touch. Bodies not transformed by the artful wands of sublimation are subject instead to the simpler interventions of a Mrs. Grundyor a Jesse Helms. But even side by side with the perennialeffortto censorthe proscribed body,the forcesof proprietyareconductedas well, and sometimeseven better, through other, more invasive operations;when these forces do not dissolve and displace the body that seems capable of inviting or offering the wrong kind of touch, they take up residencethere. The forcesof proprietyinfiltrate the physiquethey decline to erase-as anybodyknows, who has escapedthe demandfor concealment only to feel in its place a sense of uneasenever quite
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overcome. It is this deeper collaboration between proprietyand the endangered and dangerousbody that we turn to now.
III The boundariesof proprietyare felt along the pulse: no less than the novels they inhabit, the body in Eliot appearsto absorbthe rules governing its conduct. If Eliot'stext takes and gives notice of these rulesin the spectacle of their violation, or in the immense and minute stratagemsit enlists for avoiding this spectacle, the body situated there registers the demands of proprietyin the form of sensations and perturbationsthat arise when they are transgressed,sensations and perturbationsas slight and decisive as the usually barely noticeable aches and pangs and tics that mark our own fear that we have erredfromthe rigorsof the social order.Well beforeAdam Bede punishes Arthur Donnithore for what he does with Hetty Sorrel, even as "[h]isarm is stealing roundher waist,"Donnithore feels the consequence of this act in the form of a vague but effective unease: "alreadyArthur was uncomfortable.He took his armfrom Hetty'swaist"(AdamBede183). When, duringhis courtshipwith Gwendolen, Grandcourtexceeds even slightly the "limit of an amoroushomage",("One day indeed ... he had kissed not her cheek but her neck a little below her ear"),she suffersdistress:"Gwendolen, taken by surprise,had started up with a markedagitation which made him rise too" (DanielDeronda275). Such discomfortand agitation is most visible when it attendsthe scene in Eliot that comes closest to asserting an illicit desire between men, the nervous dramaof intimacy between Daniel Deronda and Mordecai. Just as the rulesregardingbodily proprietyare observedin the Eliot novel only when they areviolated, or in dangerof being violated, the homosexualitythat never quite surfacesas explicit theme is embodied in a homophobic unease-the aversion inspired by Mordecai's "spasmodicgrasps"(487), "eager clasps" (433), his "thin hand pressing [Deronda's]arm tightly" (327): "Deronda coloured deeply, not liking the grasp"(327); "Daniel [rose],with a habitual shrinkingwhich made him remove his hand from Mordecai's"(429). Deronda'saversion desists only when the hands that Mordecai lays on him are disembodied;only when the clutch of Mordecai'sfingers gives way to the "clutch of his thought"(411); "a yearningneed which had acted as a beseeching grasp";a "tenacious certainty" that acts as "a subduing influence"on Deronda (431). This sublimatingtide reaches its height near the end of the novel when the press of the flesh that everywheremarksthe intercoursebetween Deronda and Mordecai is cast as the mere expressionof
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a metaphysicalcommunion, safely routed througha female vessel: "The two men clasped hands with a movement that seemed part of the flash from Mordecai'seyes, and passedthrough Mirah like an electric shock" (640). The discomfortthat such abstractionworksto attenuate arisesagain in the "stronglyresistantfeeling"Derondaexperienceswhen, at the Synagogue, while he is "movingawaywith the rest,"the body next to his unexpectedly breaksranks: he had bowed to his civil neighbourand was moving away with the rest-when he felt a hand on his arm, and turning with the rather unpleasantsensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt to bring,he saw close to him the white beardedface of that neighbour. . . Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling: he was inclined to shake off hastily the touch on his arm (311).
Deronda'scivil neighbor is excessively so: the very remarkingof his closeness marks it as too close, just as the abruptnessof the hand on the arm betrays its deviation from normality. While we are probably inclined to dismiss Deronda'sreaction to this as an instance of his often remarkedpriggishness, Eliot herself casts the "stronglyresistant feeling" that arisesfor him in the face of even an apparentlyslight eccentricity from the conventions of bodily contact as a general response:everyoneis apt to experience the "unpleasant sensation which this abruptsort of claim . . . bring[s]."Eliot'spenchant for declaring the situation of particularcharactersa universalcondition is quite superfluoushere: Deronda'ssensationsare merely the socially arrangedreflex of the male subjectwhen another man'sbody gets even a little too close, the male subject, it hardlyseems necessaryto say,not limited to the literatureof the nineteenth century.After all, such responsescould not be more familiar; they are common to everybodywho is subject to a sense of bodily propriety no less active here and now than in the Victoriannovel. The discomfortthat Arthur Donnithome experiences and the agitation that Gwendolen Harleth suffersare well known to anyone for whom sexual guilt or sexual threat has ever taken formas a feeling of unease;the aversionthat Derondasenseswhen others of his own gender get too close is the experience of every man, in and beyond the Victorian novel. But if these allergic reactions are only too familiar to a culture of unease as much our own as George Eliot's, their precise identity, and the nature of the subject who suffersthem, remainsmysterious.Eliot'sprofile of these things is too shapelessto conform to a simple physicalor physiological definition; too vague to be solely attributedto the body. ("[A]lreadyArthur was uncomfortable";"Gwendolen, taken by surprise,had started up with a marked agitation which made him rise too"; "Deronda[did] not lik[e] the grasp";"Daniel [rose],with a habitualshrinkingwhich made him remove his hand from Mordecai's";"Derondahad a stronglyresistantfeeling.")
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It'snot exactly or exclusively the body that shrinkshabituallyfrom a deviant touch; it's not exactly or exclusively the body that is agitated or uneasy when a hand or a kiss steals past a limit at once informal and excruciatinglyprecise. Nor is it exactly or exclusively the mind that suffers these things. The amorphousexperience markedby Donnithome's discomfort, or Gwendolen Harleth'sagitation, or Deronda's"stronglyresistantfeeling" or "ratherunpleasantsensation"is confined neither to the province of the body nor the spirit. To be subject to such ambiguousunease is to be a subject for whom the labors of apprehensionand the pains of the body are utterly confused;a subject for whom the disturbancesof the mind melt into the diseases of the flesh; a subject for whom the laws of proprietymake two kinds of sense; a subject in whom a spirit that knows the laws and a body that feels them are so mingled that they cannot be distinguished.The subject susceptible to the forces of propriety,the subject whom these forces are able not merely to repressbut to infiltrate,consists not of a body or a mind; it is instead a hybridformationwhere these strainsare crossed. This conflation of abstractconsciousnessand bodily experiencedrives to the point of identity terms usuallymore loosely linked by an atmosphere of analogical sufferingespecially dense in the Eliot novel. What, for the very fact of its frequency,might passfor the usual,even inevitable analogybetween physical and metaphysicaldisease takes on the consistency of an anagogical system in the world of George Eliot: "Notions and scrupleswere like split needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating" 18); "Will'sreproaches... were still like a knife-woundwithin (Middlemarch her"(Middlemarch 652); "Thisman'sspeech was like a sharpknife-edgedrawn acrossher skin" (DanielDeronda512); "His words had the power of thumbscrewsand the cold touch of the rack"(DanielDeronda582); "he'sgot a tongue like a sharpblade, Bartle has" (AdamBede213); "assoon as he took up any antagonism, though only in thought, he seemed to himself, like the Sabine warriorsin the memorablestory-with nothing to meet his spearbut flesh of his flesh" (DanielDeronda307). The subjectof mental duressin Eliot is everywherehaunted by a body in pain, a phantom partnerin sufferingsuch as the one that Maggie Tulliver devises to representall her struggles: a large wooden doll ... which once staredwith the roundestof eyes above the reddest of cheeks ... was now entirely defacedby a long careerof vicarioussuffering.Three nails driven into the head commemoratedas many crises in Maggie'snine years of earthly struggle.(Mill on the Floss78-79)
Such chambersof torturecan be found anywherein an Eliot novel; a parallel universe of physical unease, ranging from medieval extremities of agony, to blander or subtler discomforts, hovers, like the roar on the other side of
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silence, over the ordinaryworld of abstract distress. The rhyme between apprehensionand sensation,"knowledge"and "feeling,"praisedby two Eliots7 as the touch of the poet, is not the markof any single class of consciousness; it is a universalfacility in the works of at least one of them. An honor-destroying revelation "enters like a stab into Bulstrode'ssoul" (Middlemarch 568), and is felt as much by his wife who "needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness,her poor lopped life" (614). Less apocalypticapprehensions are no less linked to bodily trauma;even the normal disappointments of maturityare shadowedby the ruin or amputationof the body:"life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation, as it is by men who have lost their limbs"(Middlemarch 533). What such comparisonsofferwith one hand they take awaywith the other. It is of course in the nature of analogies to confirm the difference between the terms they draw together, and the correspondencethat Eliot habituallyproposesbetween physical and metaphysicalpain is no exception to this rule. Such analogiesworklike the endlesslynewsworthydiscoverythat psychologicalstresstakes tolls on the body rangingfrom colds to cancer;like the less positivist intuition that the slings and arrowsof outrageousfortune, or the push and shove of daily life have more than figurativeforce; like any incidental lifting of what one theorist of the body'spains calls "a Cartesian censorship,"a "rigorouslyenforced separationin the subject between psyche and soma" (Miller 147, 148). The usual link between abstract and bodily discomfortin the Eliot novel dependsupon and reinforcestheir fundamental distinction. But in the subjectwho suffersfor even the smallestsins of impropriety, all differencesbetween mind and body are abolished; in this conventional character,the partialunity of psyche and soma accomplishedby analogygives way to the more astonishing achievement of incarnation. If this character calls to mind a supernaturalconjunction, a word made flesh, it may be as usefully classed amongst the more mundane annals of social reproduction. The subjectwhose ambiguoussensationsenforce the rulesof proprietyin the Eliot novel joins rankswith an arrayof others anatomizedby contemporary investigationsof the body'ssocial construction;the figure,for example,whom PierreBourdieudescribesas the embodimentof the metaphysicalimperatives of a social order: If all societies ... that seek to producea new man through a processof "deculturation" and "reculturation"set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing,physical and verbal manners,the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviatedand practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrarycontent of the culture.The principlesem-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, values given body, made body by the transubstantiationachieved by the hidden persuasionof an implicit pedagogy,capable
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of instilling a whole cosmology,an ethic, a metaphysic,a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as 'stand up straight'or don't hold your knife in your left hand. (94)
The incorporation that Bourdieu describes here, the figure in whom the "fundamentalprinciples of the arbitrarycontent of the culture"are "made body"is like the subject that a range of feminist theory has in mind when it construes the sexed body as the incarnation of an abstractgender system; it is like the subject at the center of Michel Foucault'sinvestigationsof modem power formations,a body who incorporatesthe discursivemarksof the disciplinary proceduresand sexual identifications that inhabit the brave new world he charted.8 These varioussubjectsof social discipline are too variousto admit any effort to lock them into step with one another. The embodiments featured in recent speculationson the social uses of the flesh cannot be neatly collated with the figure who is subject to the rules of bodily proprietyin the Eliot novel: the terms of mind and body that are drawn together in these figures are too disparateto allow it. But both the body made to bear the discipline of a social order and the composite subject made to feel it are beings at the same time carnal and abstract.In every case, the subject'scapacity to absorb the various definitions and demands of the social order depends upon his capacity to be at once spirit and flesh. It is this conjunction, the one that characterizesthe subject of social discipline in and beyond the Eliot novel, that is undone by the miser'spassion in SilasMarner.We turn now to consider how the miser'scommerce eludes both the patternof abstractionwhich prevent violations of the rulesof proper conduct in the Eliot novel from appearing in the first place, and, more crucially,the subjective aversionswhich typically arrestthem when they do. We turn now to consider how the miser'sfondlings, his revelry with the "brightfaces"and "roundedoutlines"of his coins supplyboth an object and a subject capable of resistingwhat normally thwarts the illicit embrace;we turn now to consider how a certain love of money serves the interests of perversityby bafflingall the forces of propriety.
IV In SilasMarer, the love of money becomes the meansof indemnifying the subject and object of improperpassion against the sense of aversion that normallyattacks it, and the force of abstractionthat normallyeclipses it. In the miser's love, the hybrid subject who is vulnerable to the demands of proprietyin the Eliot novel dissolves, and when it does, the social discipline made solid in a such a subjectmelts into air.In the miser'slove, the character
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capable of sensations at once physical and metaphysicalis dismantled, and replacedby a subject entirely corporeal,and thereforeimmune to the amorphous sensations by which the body'scorrect conduct is enforced.9 To chart the avenue of simplificationby which Silas Mamer eludes the dictates of propriety,we need firstto notice how the miserand his money workto formone another.In a condensedversionof the labortheoryof value, accordingto which the commodity'sworth reflectsthe bodily effortreposited there, both Silas Mamer and Silas Mamer cast the miser'smoney as the reproductionof his own body-either his children,or his clones: "Thecrowns and half crowns that were his own earnings"are "begotten by his labour" (70); "He . . . thought fondly of the guineas that were only half earned . . . as if they had been unbor children"(70); "It was pleasant to feel them in his palm, and look at their brightfaces, which were all his own" (65).1°And, conversely,if the money is the reembodimentof Silas Mamer,he, in turn, is the reembodiment of the coins: "like all objects to which a man devotes himself, they had fashionedhim into correspondencewith themselves"(92). The body with which Silas Mamer comes to correspondis invulnerable to sensations of pain or bitternessor unease for the simple reason that it is invulnerableto any sensation at all. "[H]iddenaway from the daylight," the gold is "deafto the sound of birds"-as well as to every other sound;"[it] starts at no human tones" (184)-nor does it start at any other tones. Like Dolly Winthrop'schild who "lookedlike a cherubichead untroubledwith a body"(139), the coins are untroubledby a body,or, more exactly, untroubled as a body, by any sensation-not only those arrangedby "the sound of birds" or "humantones,"but also the more complex ones that cause Silas Mamer's fiance to "shrink"with aversion from him: "didn'tthe gold [ust] lie there after all?"(93). Silas Marer identifies with the coins he adores by assuming a version of their insensibility: "The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web" (184). Just as his money is cast in his image, the miser himself is reformedin the shape of his money. This reciprocityreplenishes the relation between laborerand artifactwhose diminution Elaine Scarrymournsas the cost of"the capitalist economic system": The largeall-embracingartifact,the capitalisteconomic system,is itself generated out of smallerartifactsthat continually disappearand reappearin new forms:out of the bodies of women and men, materialobjects emerge;out of materialobjects commodities emerge; out of commodities, money emerges;out of money, capital emerges. ... In its final as in its first form, the artifact is a projection of the human body; but in its final form,unlike its first,it does not referback to the humanbody becausein each subsequent phase it has taken as the thing to which it refersonly that formof the artifactimmediately
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preceding its own appearance.. The overall work of its successiveforms is to steadily extend the first consequence (capital is, like the solitary pair of eyeglassesor any other made object, the projectedform of bodily labor and needs) and to steadily contract the second: each new phase enables the line of reciprocityto pull back furtherand further from its human source until the growingspace between the artifact and its creator is at last too great to be spanned either in fact or in an act of perception.ll (256-60)
All that Elaine Scarrydeclares lost on the path of abstractionarrangedby the "capitalisteconomic system"is restoredin the miser'sworld, congested with the full complement of two-way traffic between the laborerand even his most attenuated issue. Not only does the miser'smoney returnto him in an "act of perception,"but "in fact":no less than the body that wears them is transformedby eyeglasses,Silas Mamer is changed by the money he adores. But there is more than one difference between the eyes given sight by the artifact of labor that Scarrymentions, and the miser made blind by the tokens of his work. While the artifact that Scarryenvisions reformsthe body, the coins effect the complex character we have noticed before, the character in whom the body and mind are merged.The miser'sblindness is not of the eyes: when Silas Mamer takes on the insensitivity of the coins, he is strippednot of his senses, but rather his sensibility. Here, the composite characterwho experiencesthe aversionsthat arisewhen the rulesof propriety are violated is reduced to the miser's"shrunk[en]"frame (69). A distinction that the novel admitsin the differenceit stagesbetween naturaland adopted fathersappearsagain when the miser'sphysical senses are partedfrom metaphysical ones; the doors of perception are cleansed of their abstractdimensions, extricatedfrom the faculties of metaphysicalapprehensionwith which they are usuallyentangled. And as the miserfalls to sleep in spirit,he awakensto a utopianerotics of pure sensation: "now when all purpose was gone," the "habit of looking towardsthe gold and graspingit with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire"(65). The "thrillof satisfaction" that the coin providesconsists entirely of its "touch";the miser's"phantasm of delight," drawn down from the realm of spirit where phantasms dwell normally, is now no more than the simple matter of "feeling" (68) and "handling"(129) the coins. Justas his "life""narrowsand hardensinto a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that has no relation to any other being" (68), his "revelry"(70) of "immediatesensation" (68) has no relation to anything other than itself. The miser,now an entirely sensuousbeing, is no longer a subject in whom the physical and the metaphysical are merged, the subject who is subjectto the rulesof proprietyin and beyond the Eliot novel. A body-whollybody, the miseris readyto enjoy the revelrythat we noticed earlier,a perverse pleasurethat would sicken others, and again, not just in the work of George
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Eliot. And if the influence that the coins exert on the miser renders him immune to the disciplinaryaversionsto which subjectsare generallysusceptible when they crossthe bordersof propriety,the reciprocalprojection,which casts the coins as the issue of his body, rendersit such a transgressionin the firstplace. SilasMarner'sfairy-taletelling of the labortheory of value reverses the defensive bias by which bodies that shouldnot be touched are abstracted in the Eliot novel. That the "roundedoutlines"the miser handles and feels are those of a body is the outcome of a current countering the general tide in the Eliot novel, a tide which drawsthe desireto touch back into the safety zone of disembodiment. All of this perversityis dispelled when the miser'smoney disappears, and his step-daughterarriveson the scene. The therapyadministeredby the girl who replacesthe coins reattachesthe sensibilityfrom which the miser is freed by the ministrationsof the gold, "reawakeninghis senses with her fresh life": "as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold narrowprison, was unfolding too, and trembling graduallyinto full consciousness"(184, 185). Through his life as a father, Silas Mamer'sfeelings are freighted now with metaphysical capacities; his delight in Eppie consists not simply in sensing her, but also in sensing the need to sense her: "I'dgot to feel the need o' your looks and your voice and the touch o' your little fingers"(226). The abstractionsof sensibilityare affiancedagain to the physicalsenseswhen Silas Mamer leaves off the love of gold, and takes up the love of a girl. While the miser "feels"the gold in one sense only, the "senses"that are reawakened under the influence of Eppie are doubled,consisting not only of the capacity to apprehendmattersof the senses, "the old winter-fliesthat came crawling forth in the earlyspringsunshine"(184), but also of the capacityto apprehend things metaphysical. While the miser'srevelryaccompaniesthe divorce of his senses from abstractsensations,the weaver'srespectabilityemergeswith their remarriage; with this remarriage,the normal, the normalized subject reappears.Silas Marnerforsakesthe eccentricities that renderedhim a strangerin a strange land; "makinghimself as clean and tidy as he could" (183) he enrolls in a remedialcourse on familial respectability,entrustingboth Eppie and himself to the dictates of chapel and hearth. "He had no distinct idea about the baptismand the churchgoing,except that Dolly had said it was for the good of the child" (183-84). Silas Mamer's"new self' (201) is subject to a restraintquite absent for the old one, a reluctance to lay a hand on the body that he considershis "own child." The sense of propriety that slept while the miser fondled "roundedoutlines""all his own" returnshere with a force sufficientto make even the prospect of wholesome body contact unbearable to him. Silas Mamer is compelled to refusethe measureswhich Dolly Winthropor George
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Eliot name, or fail to name, with a compunction matching his own: "Dolly Winthrop told him that punishmentwas good for Eppie, and as for rearinga child without making it tingle a little in soft and safe places now and then, it was not to be done" (185). The squeamishnessmanifested in a circumlocution that avoidseven the mention of touching the body appearsagainwhen the miserdeclaresthat he must avoid any discipline that involves its practice: "'She'dtake it all for fun,' he observedto Dolly, 'if I didn't hurt her, and that I can't do"' (188). After its brief interruption,the regime that enforces the restrictions imposed on touching proceeds now with no end in sight. The laying on of hands that was to "frighten [Eppie] off touching things," is eschewed for other methods to prevent such contact: Silas Mamer, subject now to the restrainthe is charged with imposing, must do what Eliot does with the measuresof distance she takes to prevent the illicit touch of bodies, "mustdo what [he] can to keep 'em out of her way"(188). SilasMarer takesdecisive steps to seal off the channel which enabled the miser'sexemption from propriety,steps to stop the intercourseof gold and bodies that producedboth a physiqueable to avert those sensations, and a physiquethat would allow them to be incited in the first place. The novel puts an end to the intercoursebetween gold and bodies that makes Silas Mamer a purelysensuoussubject, and which casts the money he hoards as a shape susceptible to an illicit touch. At first, the miser's "blurredvision" confuses the gold with the girl, "but instead of hard coin with the familiar resistingoutline, his fingersencountered soft warmcurls"(167). The correction which takes form here as a tactile proof that even the dissolute miser can understand,is expanded as the novel progresses,driving a deeper difference between the gold and the body:not only is the weaver wrong to suppose that the gold is the girl, he is wrong to imagine that the gold becomes the girl. A storyof metamorphosis,in which gold is transformedinto a body, and thus able to preserve its character in translation, gives way to a story of substitution, in which the body merely replaces the gold. This fading of the rumorof transubstantiationtakes place in Silas Mamer'smind: at first, "he could have only said that the child was come instead of the gold-that the gold had turned into the child" (180); finally though, he succumbs to the force of disenchantment, teaching Eppie that he "hadtaken her golden curls for his lost guineas" (204). While this account puts both the models of metamorphosisand substitution into play, it consigns the first to the miser's own dubious perceptions-his taking gold curls for lost guineas is almost indistinguishablefrom mistakinggold curls for lost guineas-while granting the second the irresistiblepower of fact. Eliot works overtime to discredit the affiliation between money and bodies;the differencesthat the miserencountersare the subjectof the homily that we have encountered before:
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The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeatedcircle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward ... to the new things that would come with the coming years,when [she] would have learned to understandhow her father Silas caredfor her .... The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer,deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, re-awakeninghis senses with her fresh life. (184)
With an economy we are entitled to expect from a novelist whose words,no matter how many, always do as much as they can, Eliot encouragesfamily values, and discouragesthe condition that disruptedthem. However briefly: others have labored even more consistently to sustain a familial, a familiar regime of proprietywhose profits and whose losses have only accruedwith the passingof time. PrincetonUniversity
Notes 1On the nineteenth-century construction of homosexualityas a desire defined by the similarity, even the identity, between its subject and object, as a construction which displaces the older notion of inversion, which involved no notion of similarityor sameness between these terms, see JeffreyWeeks 23-32. See also Eve KosofskySedgwick's assessmentof the current ... is now almost universallyheard as referring hegemony of this construction:"homo-sexuality to relations of sexualitybetween personswho are, because of their sex, more flatly and globally categorizedas thesame"(The Epistemology of theCloset 158-9). 2While "the City of Destruction"alludesmost immediatelyto Pilgrim'sProgress,behind that is Sodom. Louis Crompton surveys the ways in which the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrahwere invoked in the nineteenth century to define and wage war againsthomosexual activity (13-15; 258; 275-76; 278-79; 348). See also Sedgwick,Epistemology, 127-28; RobertJ. Corber 85-101; A. D. Harvey 939-48. 3This is of course not to say that such rules are exclusively implicit; they are graspedas well by the formal mechanismsof social power. For a discussionof nineteenth-century legal prosecution of homosexualitysee note 2; for a potent contemporaryexample of the legal codification of homophobia, see the majorityopinion of the SupremeCourt in Bowersv. Hardwick(1986). 4None of this of course denies the erotic investment of the visual that has concerned psychoanalytic theory. See Freud'sdiscussions of scopophilia, Three Essays on Sexualityand "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes";and LauraMulvey 6-18. My concern is to notice that the body'sdisplacementby spectacle in the Eliot novel avertsthe hazardsof impropriety,ratherthan averting the matter of sexuality altogether. 5See Sedgwick, BetweenMen: EnglishLiteratureand Male HomosocialDesire. 6For a critique of such accounts, see Foucault, The Historyof Sexuality,VolumeOne: An Introduction,15-49. 7"Tobe a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it... a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneouslyinto feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge"(Eliot, Middlemarch 183); See also T. S. Eliot. 8Forlucid critical accounts of feminist theorizationsof sex as the incarnationof gender,see Diana Fuss 39-72; Judith Butler, and Foucault'sDisciplineand Punishand Historyof Sexuality.
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Such unifications of body and mind may be noticed at times to work like the analogies we have consideredin the Eliot novel to maintain the distinction between these termseven as it remarks the suspensionof that distinction. The embodimentof social principlesmay be readas an event, where what is fundamentallyor primordiallyabstractis made flesh. 9Forother accounts of intercoursebetween sexuality and capital, see Walter Benn Michaels 29-58; 113-136. 10The various permutationsof the labor theory of value all involve complications which, even apart from the obvious reason for doing so, would reject the conception of the miser's money as his biological issue or his reincarnation.But in its deviation from the contemporary literature on the relation between the body and economic value, Silas Marnerdescribes an importantcurrent within it. The condensation of the labor theory of value, the conception of the coins that the miser earns not as the abstracteffect or measureof his work, but rather as "unbornchildren,"the confusionof the earningsthat he "begets"by his laboras the issuebegotten through another kind of labor, enacts a compulsion to incarnate that appearsin a wide range of Victorian thought. Catherine Gallagher notes that the major political economists of the nineteenth century, as well as their critics, not only regardedlabor as the source of wealth, but also, when calling for a recognition of the superiorvalue of commodities that serve to replenish the body "accorda privileged position to the commodities that are most easily turned back to flesh"(351). The urgeto restorethe commodityto the body is, accordingto Gallagher,manifested as a more radicalidentification of these terms in Our MutualFriend.Here, Gallagherargues,the commodity does not merely derive from and return to the body, the commodity and the body are revealed to be the same thing. An analogousidentification appearsin SilasMarnerwhen the miser casts his money in the shape of a body. For a survey of the history of the labor theory of value, see Dobb. llAs Scarryherself acknowledgeselsewhere in The Bodyin Pain, her readingof the Marxist scenario may be taken to literalizeexcessively the presence of the body of labor in the object of labor (245-46). To that extent, The Body in Pain participatesin, rather than merely describes the bias towards embodiment available in a variety of nineteenth-century considerations of economic value, such as SilasMarner.
Works Cited Bourdieu,Pierre.Outlineof a Theoryof Practice.Trans. RichardNice. London: CambridgeUP, 1977. Butler, Judith. GenderTrouble:Feminismand the Subversionof Identity.New York:Routledge, 1990. Corber,RobertJ. "Representingthe 'Unspeakable':William Godwin and the Politics of Homophobia."Journalof the Historyof Sexuality1 (1990): 85-101. Crompton, Louis. Byronand GreekLove: Homophobiain 19th-CenturyEngland.Berkeley:U of California P, 1985. New York:Penguin, 1985. Dickens, Charles. DavidCopperfield. Dobb, Maurice.Theoriesof ValueandDistributionsinceAdamSmith.Cambridge:CambridgeUP, 1973. Eliot, George. DanielDeronda.New York:Oxford UP, 1988. New York:Oxford UP, 1988. . Middlemarch. . The Mill on the Floss.New York:Penguin, 1980. . SilasMamer. New York:Penguin, 1985. Eliot, T. S. "The MetaphysicalPoets."The SacredWood.London: Faber, 1920. Foucault,Michel. DisciplineandPunish:The Birthof thePrison.Trans.Alan Sheridan.New York: Vintage, 1979.
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. The Historyof Sexuality,VolumeOne: An Introduction. Trans.Robert Hurley.New York: Vintage, 1980. Freud,Sigmund. "Instinctsand Their Vicissitudes."The StandardEditionof theCompletePsychologicalWorksof SigmundFreud.Vol. 14. Trans.JamesStrachey.London:Hogarth Pressand the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,1957. 109-140. 24 Vols. 1953-1974. . ThreeEssayson Sexuality.London:Hogarth Pressand the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953. Vol. 8 of The StandardEditionof the CompletePsychological Worksof SigmundFreud. Trans.JamesStrachey. 24 vols. 1953-1974. Fuss,Diana. EssentiallySpeaking:Feminism,Nature& Difference.New York:Routledge, 1989. Gallagher,Catherine. "The Bio-Economicsof Our MutualFriend."Fragmentsfor a Historyof the HumanBody, PartThree.Ed. Michel Feher.New York:Zone, 1989. Harvey, A. D. "Prosecutionsfor Sodomy in England at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century."HistoricalJournal21 (1978): 939-48. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standardand theLogicof Naturalism.Berkeley:U of California P, 1987. Miller, D. A. The Novel and The Police.Berkeley:U of California P, 1988. Mulvey, Laura."VisualPleasureand NarrativeCinema."Screen16.3 (1975): 6-18. Scarry,Elaine. The Bodyin Pain:The Makingand Unmakingof theWorld.New York:OxfordUP, 1985. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.BetweenMen: EnglishLiteratureandMale HomosocialDesire.New York: Columbia UP, 1985. .The Epistemology of theCloset. Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1990. Weeks, Jeffrey.ComingOut: HomosexualPoliticsin Britain,from the NineteenthCentury to the Present.New York:Quartet, 1979.
Camilla Townsend
"I AM THE WOMAN FOR SPIRIT":A WORKING WOMAN'S GENDER TRANSGRESSION IN VICTORIAN LONDON
ONE JUNEDAYIN 1865, A WOMAN FROMTHE MILEEND SECTIONOF LONDONWROTEA LETTER
to a shoemaker in Shoreditch. "I know Caroline would come and see me often, but you keep her away,as she is very submissive,and you do not care how hard she slaves, like some poor drudgeof a servant. If you loved her you would not allow it.... Since you have had her you have broke her spirit. If the dinner is not ready to a minute, look at the agitated state she is in, frightened almost to death. As I told you last Sunday, I am the woman for spirit."We have Sarah Geals's letter today only because it was preservedin the transcriptionof her trial at the Old Bailey: not long after writing the note, she attemptedto shoot JamesGiles, a shoemaker,and was apprehended. In the course of the proceedingsit came out that she had lived in the guise of a man for over twelve yearsand had been ostensibly marriedto Caroline. After they were discovered by James, who was Sarah'semployer, Caroline marriedhim, and Sarahresumedthe dressof a woman. Relations between all three deteriorateddrasticallyover the next two yearsuntil they finally found themselves in court (Proceedings of the CentralCriminalCourt421-25). Sarah'sstory deserves to be told, not only because it involves acts of daring and determination for which we often commemorate more famous people, but also because it was part of important mid-Victorian cultural changes. Eachof these two motives forwritingrequiresa narrationat variance with that demanded by the other: Sarah'slife, and the issues it raises, must be presentedin at least two differentways if they are to be understoodat all. Her life was a story in which she was the main character,her hopes and her anger speakingeloquently to anyone who has ever wanted to be different,to be courageous.But her life was also part of a largerculturalsystem in which she herself was not the beginning or the end, in which her intentions were almost irrelevant,and her acts significant in myriadwaysbeyond her control.
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On the one hand, a few flattened pages found in the Sessions papers of London'sCentral Criminal Court have preservedsome of the utterances and recorded some of the experiences of a brave and frightened working woman. The shredsof evidence found in the court paperscan be held up to the light offered by newspapers,city directories,prison records,and studies of artisans in order to try to piece together the life and thoughts of this remarkablehuman being. On the other hand, the same trial transcriptionhas recordeda culturalperformancewhich was sparkedby the public discovery of Sarah, but in which she herself had almost no role. The transcriptcan be placed next to the texts of journalistsand broadsidesin order to study the shifting attitudes towardgender transgressionand class in the mid-Victorian period. Sarah'strial providesan opportunityto studyrepresentationsof crossdressingand genderidentity in her society,while she herselfrecedesas subject. In an effort to underscorethe tensions between two styles in which we write history,I will write about Sarah twice. The differencesbetween our predominantmethodologies are profound,even disturbingif left unspoken. We can write about agency,about an individual'schoices and decisions-and yet render them insignificant if they are divorced from an understandingof cultural production. Or we can present complex cultural analyses and not evince the least interest in people themselves-without which interest there is no need for us to study history. Only in my conclusions do I attempt to reconcile the two approaches,not by fusingthem-for that, I suspect,cannot be done-but by demonstratingtheir importance to each other. Nothing about Sarah'slife or the cultural issues it raisesprovidesa sense of closure.
I. Sarah The story of Sarah'slife opens in 1824, in some section of England remote fromLondon.All that we know of her in the yearsbeforethe shooting comes from the trial transciption-certainly a problematicsource,filtered as it is through the legal apparatus.Held up against other types of historical evidence, however, and viewed from a variety of angles, the transcription allows us to piece together many partsof a puzzle.We must be patient with the evidence, drawingout as much as possiblewithout declaringsure knowledge where we have no right. It was duringSarah'searlyyearsthat someone taughther to use a gun. She also learned to read.She was close to her brotherand remainedin touch with her mother even as an adult. We don't know if she knew her father but she may have learnedher tradeas a shoemakerin a familyworkshopat home, as this was still a common practice at the time. During the 1830s, as Sarah grew up, the averagemanufacturingworkerwas not yet in a mill or factory,
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but in a small workshopor at home. The largestgroup of these workersdid textile outwork;the second largest, the shoemakers,still considered themselves artisans(Thompson234 and Snell). Such categoriesand concepts were rapidlychanging, however, as industrialmass productioncame to rely more and more on unskilled, replaceable labor. The hemmed-in artisans hotly contested such changes through radical movements where they articulated their angerat having their tradegiven over to such groupsas low-paidwomen. Shoemakers were particularly radical in their discussions and protests (Hobsbawmand Scott 86-114): Specific problemsvaried from place to place ... but it is undeniable that the trade as a whole was politicized.Thus a young journeymanexperiencedstrikesand participatedin discussionsof alternate political and economic systems as he acquiredhis skills. [Even] those who ended up in small village shops knew about Jacobinismand carried radical ideas from cities to small towns. (Hobsbawmand Scott 105)
Among their political causes was the need for men to receive a family wage. JamesGiles would later say about Sarah:"Ipaid her regularwages, the same as the men workingthe same capacity.I had no idea she was not a man."He implied what was almost certainly the case: that had he known, he would have rankedher labor as unskilled and paid her less. In the same yearsas Sarahmight have begunto wish that shecould get a family wage, she almost certainlyheard a number of popularstories about famousand infamouswomen who had transformedthemselves into men and thereby earned handsomely.One historian'sreading of The Timesand The WeeklyDispatchin the 1830sand '40shas revealedstoriesof womenwho dressed as men so they could work in the positionsof bricklayer,sawyer,buttonmaker, groom,balladseller,and horsethief (Clark).Severalweresailorsand criminals, and some had popularbroadsideswrittenaboutthem. ("Shedone her duty like a man, did reef and steer we are told" ["Gallant"]).Many songs about such heroines also survivedfrom the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,when cross-dressingwomen had been even more numerous.1 Sometime in the late 1840s, when Sarahwas in her mid-twenties,she began to call herself William Smith and to dressas a man. At that time, she must have moved to London, and may have apprenticedherself to a shoemaker if she had not alreadylearned the trade from her family. We do not know if she arrivedwith Caroline or not. One reporterwould later claim that she had been marriedto a man, but if she ever was, the marriagemust have been brief; it was never mentioned again. Her transformationwas similar to that of most cross-dressersin its timing: when such events were more common, the women had almost alwayschanged their identities between their late teens and mid-twenties,which were the yearswhen they were expected to look out for themselves economically (Van de Pol and Dekker 13).
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We do not know how much of a strain the impersonationwas for Sarah. It would have been especiallydifficult to play "William"with serenity at first, before she had yearsof people'sassumptionson her side: she was less likely to fear discovery by a person who had known her as a man for years and who knew other people who knew her as a man. We do not know if she believed that disclosurewouldbringdown violent retributionfromher neighbors, or cause the loss of her income and status and social niche. Fear of discoverycertainlydid not applyto everybody:her past was not a secret from everyone. Her brotherknew abouther choice and supportedher;possiblyher mother did as well, if a reporterwho mentioned this spoke the truth. And before long, she was definitely living with Caroline, who posed as her wife and clearly knew she was a woman. The two left no written recordof their feelings for each other, but in the letter Sarahlaterwrote to James,she impliedthat althoughhe apparently didn't reallylove Caroline,she, Sarah,certainlydid. They never claimed that they were brother and sister,which would have left Caroline free to marry, but ratherhusbandand wife. Although we do not know if they had a sexual relationship,they lived intimatelyfor over twelve years,and togetherworked out what that intimacy meant, stretching it to include personal and social bonds beyond those which they had been taughtwomen ought to share.They lived together in a small house in Shoreditch, an old industrialarea,known at that time for furniture-makingand silk-weaving.In the 1850s it became massivelyovercrowded,due to displacementcausedby railwayextensions and street widenings. Caroline had to be a resourcefulhousekeeper;Sarah managed to continue to pay the rent so that they could go on living in a place of their own, ratherthan moving into lodgingswhere they wouldhave shared roomswith others. She found workas a "clicker,"cutting out boots and shoes, which carriedhigh status in the shoe industry.Most of her businessfor over ten yearsconsisted of outworkand some shopworkfor JamesGiles, who was a mastershoemakeron Hackney Road, listed as a "wholesaleshoe manufacturer"in the Post Office Directory.He employedseveralmen onsite and more offsite, still a common arrangement.Apparently,Sarah and Caroline were relatively content. While most working-classhusbands and wives did not generally socialize in public together, they went out walking. Jameshimself said, "I knew nothing of their private affairs,or whether they lived comfortably together. I never heard anything to the contrary." Then in Januaryof 1863, Mrs. Giles took to her bed with a severe illness. As many other men of his time had done, Jamesdecided to "borrow" a much needed nurse and housekeeper.He asked William Smith if his wife could come and tend to things. ("Ivery seldom saw Caroline before that, but I proposedfor her to wait on my wife, because it was handy and she could come at once.") Caroline came. Three days later, Mrs. Giles died. Caroline
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returnedhome, but continued to go duringthe day to organizethe household of the bereft James. At some point during the next several months, James discovered that William was a woman, in a way that he apparentlywished to forget:"It was three months after my wife's death that Caroline communicated to me the prisoner'ssex.... I do not know how."We do not know if Caroline let the secret out accidentally,or came to trustJames,or told him on purposeso that she could leave Sarah. Once he found out, however, he discharged Sarah, ordered that she dress as a woman, and insisted that Caroline marryhim. Caroline did so, but they strucka bargainfirst:if Sarah dressed as a woman, James was to set her up in a retail shop, and the two women were to be allowed to spend Sundays together, their traditional day of leisure.Jamesagreedto this, and began by keeping his part. There areseveralpossiblereasonsfor Caroline'sactions. She mayhave thought the new situation would be economically advantageous for both Sarah and herself. She may have feared exposure, or have been threatened by James, who could apparentlybe violent. (She was "frightenedalmost to death" of him, according to Sarah, which was not unreasonable,as he once held Sarah herself until her arms were "blackand blue.") Or she may have been tired of feeling different,wishful of being a real "wife." The next chapter in the adventuresof the trio is quite complicated, and the evidence is not exactly clear.Caroline and Jameswere married,with only Sarah and Sarah'sbrotherin attendance at the wedding. Sarah was set up in a shop on Bow Street. After two years of Sunday dinners at the Giles's-which sometimes went well and sometimes were quarrelsome,according to all parties-James said he decided that Sarah'sretail shop was not profitableenough and should be closed. He felt that he dealt with her kindly: "I saw that she was placed in respectableapartments,and acted to her like a brother."According to the Post Office Directoryof 1863, these "respectable apartments"were apparentlya row of tenements owned by a single landlord. Rooms such as these were often inhabited by prostitutes,who had few economic alternatives. It seems Sarah ended up in the setting she most wished to avoid, boarding in a room crowded with destitute single women. The postscriptat the end of her dramaticletter suggeststhat she was experiencing severe need now that she could no longer earn a man'ssalary:"TellCaroline to bring or send me a few shillings. I will pay her again." Sarah claimed that Giles came to her shop one Sunday morning-as he often did to check her books-and threatened her; she implied that he tried to or did rapeher. "Youknow what I mean,"she wrote. "The affairthat has taken place between us at Bow."Jamesinsisted that the only disturbance that day occurredbetween Sarahand Caroline."Therewas a little disturbance between her and my wife that morning, but I was out.... There has never been any improperintimacy between us." In either event, two days later he
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received an unsigned letter which was clearly from Sarah, a "woman for spirit."In it she saidthat their presenttroubleswereall his fault, and suggested that he give her money (an attempt at blackmail,accordingto James)so that she could emigrate to the colonies, leaving it open to doubt whether she planned to depart with or without Caroline. "I have been thinking of our quarrel,but you were the cause, and not Caroline.... The best thing you can do is supplyme with a few pounds, and I will go to New Zealand,2and then you will be rid of those you have acted so wrong to. I must have an answer to this." Over a month went by and Sarah received no reply. One Monday evening she went to look for Jamesin his shop. He was distributingoutwork to his employees but Caroline, who lived in apartmentsattached to the worksite, came out. Sarah asked the foreman if Giles was in. He heard her voice, emerged,and asked,"WellSarah,what is yourpleasurewith me?"She aimed a pistol at his face. "That,"she answered,and pulled the trigger. The gun was loaded incorrectly,and did not even hurthim. She tossed it down and walked away. She headed for the "respectableapartments"off Mile End Road, a 20 minute walk for someone who knew the bywaysof the EastEnd.Jameshad been thoroughlytraumatized,and it was some time before he pulled himself together to summon a policeman. He gave the officer Sarah'saddress,whereshe was apprehendedwithout difficulty.The policeman said, "I asked her if she knew the charge against her-she said yes, and was quite satisfiedto come any place with me." She was broughtto the Worship Street police station, where she was searched,and a note was made that she was sober. She was arraignedthe following day with James and Caroline present. After James spoke, the justice asked Sarah if she wished to say anything. "No, nothing just at present,"she replied.Latershe did try to make a statement,but then she was silenced. Though the judgemight have decided to try her at the local level, he decided that the case was importantenough to be sent on to the Central Criminal Court. She was brought to Newgate to await trial at the Old Bailey.3The infamousNewgate had been renovated at the end of the eighteenth century,and wasconsideredslightlyless "sinister" than it had been, but the cleaner,more isolated cells could not have calmed Sarah'sfeelings. Records indicate that she had never been tried before for any crime;she could not have known what to expect, although she did know that outside the prison wall, executions still took place.4 Sarah may have received written communicationsfrom Caroline, as the court authoritiessuspected that she had. (We do not know if Caroline could write, but she could certainlyhave dictated a note.) Outside, there was a flurryof talk about Sarah in the East End and elsewhere, as all the major newspapersbrieflycovered her case. It took two months for her case to come up, although legally it should have been called after one. On Wednesday
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morning, September 20, Sarah was escorted to a cell in the neighboring Sessions house which wouldopen into the courtwhen the officialswere ready. She did not have long to wait, as she was called first that morning.Emerging into the Second Court, she saw the presidingjustice, the Recorderof London, and the box filled with jury membersand the balcony for the audience. (It was only five years since the court had stopped charging an admittance fee to the public, as if each Session were a show, and the Old Bailey still had a reputation for providing excellent entertainment [O'Donnell 16].) The chargeagainsther was read.The defensehad had it divided into two separable offenses:"Feloniouslyattemptingto dischargea loaded pistol at JamesGiles, with intent to murder him. Second count: with intent to do him some grievous bodily harm." Jameswas the first witness. He recountedhis story,emphasizinghow hard he had tried to help the prisonerregain her rightfulidentity until she committed the supremeact of ingratitude.He acknowledgedthe evidence of her letter,which he consideredto be in his favor.Duringthe cross-examination, he admittedthat as faras he knew the prisonerhad never mistreatedCaroline. He could not explain why Sarahhad pretendedto be Caroline'shusband. The defense then called two employees of the shop and the police officer who had been summoned.All corroboratedthat the pistol had been loaded incorrectly.This was strange,asJameshimselfhad admittedthat Sarah definitely knew how to use firearms.Then the defense called other acquaintances who had known the prisoner while she was still William, and they warmlyinsisted that she had alwayshad an excellent character.Apparently the efforts of the defense did not make much impressionon the judge: he instructedthe juryas to the gravityof the prisoner'scrime, but added that if they believed she had merely intended to frighten or threaten the complainant, they might find her guilty of the second count only. Sarah and Caroline did not participatein the trial, and Sarah herself never spoke. It would have been unusualto have deprivedher of the opportunity to make a statement, and so it is possible that she chose not to, as she had before. Her presence, however, was clearly felt. Her letter to Jamesand another note were read, and the reporterswere fascinated by her. Caroline probablydid not attend, but she musthave appeareda vital figureto everyone: she had been active in both unions, and even now Jamesdid not have absolute control over her. When askedif she had written to Sarahduringher imprisonment of the last two months, he admitted that she might have. The juryreturned,and pronouncedthe prisonerguilty on the second count only. The judge then sentenced her to five yearspenal servitude.That this was harsh is clear only in context. Later that morning, after Sarah had returnedto her cell, the same judge issued three more sentences: a man who had run over a child and killed her received nine months; a man who had
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killed another man in a fight received twelve; a man accused of rape was released. Sarah was removed to Millbank prison. When the door closed behind her she walked down a corridorof stone, steel, and iron. Her hair was cut as short as it had been when the world believed she was a man. She was weighed, measured,bathed, uniformed,and entered in the great ledger: "SarahGeals--41-single-reads: imperfectly-trade: clicker-convicted: 18 September 1865-Central CriminalCourt-crime: 'Attempting to shoot a person'-sentence: Five PS" (MillbankRegister).5She was brought to her cell, and perhapspresented with her first labor assignment right away.She was going to have to accustom herself to sewing or picking threads from ropes for ten hours every day, separatedfrom the other inmates for the first several months. The new penal servitudesystem requiredan intensely close supervision of time and space, designed to monitor the prisoners'every move so as to encouragetheir reform,ratherthan allowingthem to continue any of their old habits, however small. Labor,meals, and prayerwere organizedto fill every moment of the day, with an hour for walking in circles in a small courtyard.Talking was generally forbidden,but the women found ways to communicate by writing notes on paper meant to light their lamps and by tapping messageson the corrugatediron roofs of their cells.6 According to prison records,most of Sarah'sfellow inmateswere in for larceny;no one else was listed with a masculine trade. On February9 of the next year she was taken to Brixton, where prisonerswere allowed to associate more, the next step for females in the systemof graduatedprivilegesbasedon good behavior. Every three months, the matronsentered a progressreporton the prisoners in their ledger.Sarah'salwayssaid exactly the same thing: "Surgeon'sreport: good. Behavior:good" (BrixtonRegister). She stayed at Brixton longer than most. As the months slippedaway, those who had arrived earlier completed their terms, or were sent on to FulhamRefugefor good behavioror even received"ticketsof leave"allowing for early release. A few sickened and died and more and more went "mad" (there was cholera in the city in the late 1860s, and Brixtonand other female prisons were known in these yearsfor the spreadingof "insanity"among the inmates). On February5, 1869, afterserving three-and-one-halfyearsof her term, Sarah received her own ticket of leave. It was the maximumticket she could have received, issued only to those whose behavior matched the wardens'vision of an ideal prisoner.Apparentlyshe had had no quarrelwith those women. We cannot know where Sarah went on the day she was let out, or what she was thinking: she receded into unrecordedhistory,from which she had only brieflyemergedfor having brokena law.We do, however,have some clues about her personality.We know from the style of her letters that her
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manner was brusque and forceful. Although the court clerk who did the transcriptionprobablycorrectedspelling and grammar,the content and tone must have been her own, for her letters readvery differentlyfrom the rest of the trial transcription.Considerher closing lines, which demonstratea measure of internalizedrespect for James'spower, but even more notably, deep angerand assertiveness:"Thisis not Caroline'sfault but yours,sir.Remember. P.S. Sir: I want the answer."Her letters also indicate that she did not want a wifely role for herself or for the one she loved, as she viewed it as slavery and drudgery.She wanted to do differentkinds of work from that generally assignedto women. Latershe saw herself as being adventurousenough to sail away-perhaps harkeningback emotionally to the songs about women who for generations had gone to sea as men. And later still, she chose to use a gun, conventionally a man's weapon. She herself believed that she was distinctive when she wrote, "I am the woman for spirit."
II. The Performances Once Sarah had been caught and imprisoned,nobody seemed to be able to agreeon what was to be done with her. "Hadshe been a man,"inferred The Times,"doubtlessthe verdict would have been that her intention was to kill, but, as it was, they appearedto have thought that she was not awareof the effect she was likely to produce."The Daily Telegraphdisagreed."It was evident that she was a very violent and determined woman";and it was "in the interestof society"that the judge"feltbound to sentence her to five years' penal servitude."The MorningHerald took an entirely different view and refusedto say that Sarah should be blamed at all: "Therecould be no doubt that she felt disappointment in the loss of the society of her associate and companion, Caroline, toward whom a feeling of affection had been generated" (all comments from the papersof 21 September 1865). Whatever Sarah was thinking or feeling, whatever she had intended to do when she shot at James,appearedquite irrelevantas the dramaunfolded in the courtroomand the papers. Each observercommented from his own perspective, drawingon his own associationsand assumptionswithin a cultural matrix in which Sarah herself was only an infinitesimallysmall point. The woman had committed two transgressionsagainst authority-one in dressingand passingas a man in marriagethough she had been bor female, another in making a violent attack on a man in a higher station. No one, other than the judge, seemed much interested in the latter. Her contemporariesappearto have been interestedalmost exclusively in her cross-dressing, although she was on trial only for her attempted crime of violence. Even when forced to deal directly with the indictment and verdict, they never let
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drop the theme that "Sarah"had been "William"for so many years.Indeed, it is true that until the episode with the gun, genderwas the single transgressive variable in her case. She did not reject the working-classlifestyle of her neighbors,or Christianity,or the concept of respectability.Reactions to the unusual life she had chosen were reactions to the transgressionof gender expectations. Given that all the commentatorssharedan interest in this topic, it is all the more noteworthy that their reactions arose in discordantcacophony. The papersfirst covered the case on July 19, a day after Sarah'sappearance in police court, and then again in September,afterher trial. The paperswith the most affluent readershipwere generally the most condescending, those with readersfrom the aspiringlower middle class the most harshly critical, and those of radical working-classorganizationsor working-classneighborhoods almost sympathetic. In July,the elite PallMall Gazetteplaced a short paragraphabout the case afteran item on a donkeyshow,statingonly that the prisonerhad worked in the "disguise"of a man until she was discovered and discharged."Since then, Geals seems to have consideredherself aggrievedand went the other day to her late employer'sshop and presenteda pistol at him. Fortunatelyit missed its aim."The Timeswas slightly less distanced,allowing the case a long column and including the details of the story. The paper changed James's words a little, adding some moralizingstatements which he never made in court: "I allowed her to come and live at my place. I both felt and acted towardher a greatdeal more like a brotherthan her own brotherhas done." After the actual trial in September,The PallMallGazettesummarizedthe case in a paragraphas short as their first one, this time including the fact that Sarah had been the "pretendedhusband"of Caroline, and adding that when James later marriedCaroline, "it appearedthis annoyed the woman." The Timeswas if anything more condescending, describingSarah as a "spinster" guilty of "fraud": His Lordship,in sentencing the prisoner,told her that the juryhad taken a very lenient view of her case. Had she been a man, accustomedto firearms,doubtless their verdict would have been that her intention was to kill, but, as it was, they appearedto have thought that she was not awareof the effect she was likely to producewith such a weapon and such a charge.
Two paperswith a less elite but still lower-middle-classreadershipof upwardlymobile workersreprintedor expandedon the first article from The Times,but they treated it as a more importantnews item; in September,after the details of the trial were available,hostility began to outweigh condescension in their reports.The Illustrated Times,a weeklywhich sold for 5d, featured and direct language,and which might have been read by less large graphics
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serious clerks as well as by the wives and children of readersof The Times, gave the story its first catchy headline, "Another Female Husband"(thereby also indicating that the case was not unique). In September,the same paper said that the case was "worthyof permanentrecordamong the curiositiesof crime"and that a "morbidjealousy"had induced Sarahto "attemptmurder." The Daily Telegraph,which also appealed to employees on the lower of rungs the middleclass (clerks,engineers,fine needleworkers,and the "small capitalists"addressedin the ads) added an element of slapstickhumor to the complainant'sstatement, reminiscent of the gender confusion in broadsides or plays from an earlierperiod: "My wife being ill, I asked her (the prisoner) to let her wife-no, his wife-come and nurse her. She did come, and stated that she was this woman's (the prisoner's)wife. Shortly afterwardsmy wife died, and then it came to my knowledge that William Smith was not a man, but a woman."
By September all derision in such papershad given way to hostility. The journalistseemed to feel that there was more to fearfrom Sarah and her potential cohorts. Almost all reporters,having seen Sarah at the Old Bailey, commented on her "masculine"physical appearance,but the writer for The Daily Telegraphwent further:"Owing to the singular nature of the case, it must be stated that the prisonerhad the appearanceof a mulatto, was short and stout, and evidently in possessionof a 'verystrong mind."'This reporter later concluded: "Although she had received a very excellent character,yet it was evident that she was a very violent and determined woman, and, in the interest of society, [the judge] felt bound to sentence her to five years' penal servitude."That the writer(or writers)selected the adjectives"mulatto" and "strong-minded"made it almost unnecessaryto say that Sarah was dangerous to society. If any readerswere unmoved by the reference to the class of blacks known to be in the forefrontof revolutions and rebellions in the Caribbean, such people would then have been made nervous by the the allusion to the current term for the strident middle-class women, whose unnaturalintellectual pride cut off feminine sensibilities and caused them to demand rights never meant to be theirs. (If images of hot and lusty people seemed diametricallyopposed to those of cold and stiff women, they were at least similar in conveying a sense of danger.) A very different reception awaited Sarah elsewhere. The radical Newspaperand Lloyd'sWeeklyboth appearedon Sundays.Although Reynolds's in July they reprinted the same article as that found in The Times, they rendered it more important. In Reynolds's,the story appeared in the first edition at the top of the crime page, with the headline, "SingularCase of a Female Assuming Masculine Attire," and in Lloyd's,it was separatedout of the other newspieces from the police courts and made into a full-length
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article: "AttemptedMurderby Shooting: A Woman Workingas a Man."In September,as the editorsfound out more,ratherthan becomingmorehostile, they became more sympathetic. Taking an unusual step, they left the final quarreland Sarah'ssupposedattempt at blackmailout of the story,depicting the shooting incident as the direct result of Sarah'sneed for revenge after James'smarriageto Caroline. They thus allowed her to be a wounded lover rather than a lowly criminal. It was, however, the local papersappearingin Sarah'sold neighborhood, not the self-consciouslyradicalpapers,which went so faras to explicitly sanction Sarah'sdecisions. These newspaperssold for a penny or halfpenny in working-classareas,and some of their readerswould have known Sarah, or "William Smith." Some gave short summariesof the city's news; others were only of local interest. They would have been published by aspiring tradesmenin the neighborhoods,who themselves might have readThe Daily Telegraph,but their content was gearedto the majorityof Sarah'sneighbors. The MorningHeraldand The BethnalGreenTimesadded details which other papershad ignored,such as, "Prisonerwas undefended."The closest attention was accorded in the Shoreditch weeklies. Although the issue died immediatelyin everyother paperand receivedno readerresponse,in Shoreditch it was still being analyzedon July 29, over a week later. In The Shoreditch Advertizer,it was stated that Sarah had been driven to crime after being "deprivedof the woman with whom she passed a lengthened companionObserverreportedthat her friendsassertedin the police ship."7The Shoreditch court that Giles no longer wanted to "pressthe charge harshlyagainst her," that the shooting was not the "resultof premeditation,"and that her "friends would see that she was taken care of." The reporterthen threw in a bit of hearsay that may be a sample of what people in the streets said in order to explain to themselves how people they liked so much could have done something so unusual."Ifreportbe correct,Caroline, who passedfirstfor the prisoner'swife and is said to be a person of excellent character,and is now the prosecutor'swife, is the prisoner'smother.We do not vouch for the truth of this statement."Clearlypeople liked Sarah and wanted to find an acceptable "good"reason for her behavior:daughterlypiety (dressingas a man in order to supporther mother) served well. There was no basis in fact for this theory, as Caroline would then have had to be at least sixty when James, much younger,asked her to marryhim. In September those papers with local working-class readership evinced even stronger support for Sarah. Even papers which had largely reprintedthe articles appearingin The Timesand The Daily Telegraphin July now chose not to. The editorsof TheMorningStarand TheMorningAdvertizer, among others, based their pieces this time on one which appearedin The MorningHerald.It was a long article,"The PretendedMan Case,"introducing
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"SarahGeals, of masculine proportions."It recounted all the details of the story and included in its conclusion the defense'sproposition that, "There could be no doubt that Sarah felt disappointmentin the loss of the society of her associateand companion,Caroline, towardwhom a feeling of affection had been generated,"and also that "all the prisonerhad done was to frighten the prosecutorin order to obtain from him that assistancewhich the letter which had been read indicated." These findings do not indicate that working-classreadershad a uniformly supportiveattitude. The excerpts indicate that some of the language used by such reporterswas the same as that appearing in The Times. The BethnalGreen Timesprinted a long article on Saturdaymuch like the one which had appearedin The MorningHerald,except that either for brevity's sake or because of an editorialpreference,much of the positive commentary at the end was left out. The responsewas not monolithic, but it is important that even The BethnalGreen Timeswas like the other local papers in that it accorded the case seriousconsideration.Whether threatened, or respectful, or both-and most were both-not one working-classpaperof any type was dismissive.Nor did they consider the case ghastly or titillating. Notably, the paperswhich were passed from hand to hand in the poorest areaswere the least critical or condescending.The people who lived on Mile End Road were eager to buy The PennyIllustratedWeeklyNews or The PennyIllustratedPaper, replete with bloody crime stories and scandalizingfacts. When almost every other city paper covered her case, neither mentioned her at all. Apparently the editors did not consider that the details would appearhorrific to people on Mile End. The sharpdifferencesin the interpretationof Sarah'scase stem from the natureof cross-dressing.In her recent work,VestedInterests:Cross-Dressing and CulturalAnxiety, MarjorieGarber argues that cross-dressingis not an attempt to adopt a new identity. Instead,she says, it is in itself a desiredand a necessaryeffect, a liminal state without which culture could not exist: Cross dressingis about genderconfusion ... about the phallusas constitutively veiled ... about the power of women ... about the emergence of gay identity.... All true, all partial truths, all powerfulmetaphors.But the compelling force of transvestismin literature and culturecomes not, or not only, from these effects, but also from its instatement of metaphoritself, not as that for which a literal meaning must be found, but precisely as that without which there would be no such thing as meaning in the firstplace. (390)
Crossing borders makes them visible, borders between symbols make the symbols visible, and a shared culture, after all, is only a shared symbolic imagination. This Lacanian analysis,while useful in explaining why Sarah'scrossdressingwas fascinatingto all reporterswhile her deliberateattempt to shoot
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a man was almost universallyignored,still does not help explain the dramatically differentformsof fascination exhibited. While we might put together a common discoursefrom all the newspaperreportson Sarah'strial, demonstrating the centripetal force of the act of an otherwise obscurewoman, we would still need to explain the reasons that these reportsflatly contradict each other, and why they do so in clusters.These clusters, I believe, mark certain historicallyspecific grouptendencies;social and economic powerwas not evenly distributed,and the responsesto Sarah'scase markedthat uneven distribution.This unevenness was given culturalshape in the emergingselfconsciousness of the middle class. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have suggested,those farmersand townsmen who were more successfulthan others as the IndustrialRevolution progressedgraduallydeveloped awareness of themselves as "middleclass."They wanted a prominent, respectedrole in society to match their economic importance,and they claimed moralpower for themselves by insisting upon the domestic ideal of active, independent men and protected, dependent women. By the 1860s the "respectable"workingclasses, too, had supposedly seizedupon ideasof "manliness"and "femininity,"in imitation of their betters in the middle classes.To the extent that they did so, however, it was not so as to be obedient or becausethey shareda self-understandingwith the middle classes, but because they perceived it to be expedient to their own goals. It is true that marriageand domesticity came to be requiredelements of life more than they had been previously.One historian has documented the transformationof an extensive common-lawpractice into a custom of teaching young girls,"Bettera bad husbandthan no husbandat all" (Gillis). These people were living under conditions of increasinglylimited resources,in the midst of middle-classrhetoric about manly men supportingwomen. Small wonder that the demand for a "familywage"and the exclusion of women from trades,which we saw in shoemakingin the '30s, became generalamong working-classmen. It is not surprisingthat manywomen unableto makeends meet came to espouse marriageand domesticity. Yet they did not do so monolithically. They also protested against their husbands-early on in trade union halls, and continuously at home (Tomes).8Their lives continued to exemplifymore tension within their roles than did the lives of middle-class women, who had more investment in domesticity,both economicallyand psychologically.If, as some have claimed, it was critical for middle-class women at this juncture to join with their husbandsin formulatinga cultureof firmlydistinct manlinessand femininity in orderto ensuretheir identity, it was equally importantfor workingwomen to maintain the ability to alienate themselvesfromsuch a dependent identity if necessaryin orderto surviveeconomically.They fought with men, dressed
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as men to performsome jobs, and even passed as men in their daily lives. Furthermore,although such women must certainly have faced potential and real hostility fromtheir neighborsand co-workers,they also met with remarkable acceptance. Women became their companions. Brothers knew about their actions and approved.Male friendsthought they were greatcompanions even after they found out.9 Far from ruthlessly suppressinggender transgressionamong themselves, many membersof the working classes may have preserveda flexible sense of gender roles in a way that middle-class women never could. A middle-classwoman needed to reinforceher husband'sprestigeand therefore his success by underscoringher own feminine dependency. If a woman tried to take over a man's role, then she must be mad, or a drunkard,or a poor creature taken in by unorthodox feminist ideas. (Thus Sarah'smiddle-class defense attorneypursuedan unproductiveline of questioning. "Wasit stated to you by others that the cause of this extraordinaryconduct was a disappointment in marriageearly in life?"It had not been. Was Sarah'smind affected?No, it was not. Was she prone to drinking?No, she was not. The barristerwas mystified.) A working-classwoman, on the other hand, more often than a middle-classwoman, knew that she needed to defend her ability to survive economically.Many working-classwomen had to discardthe idea of feminine dependency on men when it wasn't economically viable (some may never have embraced it in the first place) and so did not completely accept the idea that one's gender identity was inherently tied to one's body. One social role could be exchanged for another.To such women the idea was at least still worth arguing about and was not automatically laughable or disgusting.It was expedient to keep their options open. To the more economically vulnerableworkingpeople, financial independence from charity was key to their own definition of "respectability." Thus Sarah'sfriendsfromher masculinedayswillingly testified on her behalf and insistedon her respectablecharacter,and reportersfromradicalworkingclass papers eloquently defended her. The headline chosen by the radical Lloyd'sWeeklyis indicative of the emphasisplaced on the laborshe had done for years.Rather than referringto a "FemaleHusband"the article was called "Attempted Murderby Shooting: A Woman Working as a Man." On the other hand, while the genteel middle classes also praisedhard work and the desire for economic independence, the latter was not considered nearly so important in a woman as the preservationof her femininity. They did not consider that cross-dressingshould occur anywhereother than in romances. Thus the judge was unmoved by argumentsthat Sarah was respectable:he instructed the jury as to the gravity of the prisoner'scrime, and after the verdict sentenced her to five years.His sentence was the minimumnecessary
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for her to be removed from local prisonsand sent to an insitution for "penal servitude,"where the judge thought, as did his contemporaries,that moral regenerationcould occur. Those in the courtroomwho were caught in between the laboring and the genteel classes seemed to be harshestof all in their condemnation: the clerks, for example, and some jouralists, who were strugglingon the lower rungs of the middle classes and aspiringto rise, felt most keenly the shame of a working-classwoman failing to live up to feminine dependency. They themselveswere in the position of tryingto emulateas closely as possible the lifestyle of the genteel, and by association,Sarah, grown from the unregenerate masses, might set them back. Such men on the jury found Sarah guilty; such reporterswrote that Sarah must be either mulatto or strongminded, for she was certainlydangerous. Sarah'sobservers,however,werenot only gazingat herfromtheirvarious socio-economicpositionsand viewsof respectability. They werealsogazingwith avid interestfromout the windowsof their respectiveerotic imaginationsand sexual associations.These sexual undercurrentswere plural,not singular,and themselves contributedto the cacophony of interpretation.Sarah, too, must have experiencedher actions as more than a method of supportingCaroline and herself.Garbersuggeststhat Sarah'ssympatheticcontemporariesand modem daybiographersdo women like her a disservicein ascribingtheircross-dressing solely to socio-economic or socio-politicalmotives ratherthan to a basic erotic wish to cross-dress."Thisconflation of economic, professional,and political desireswith sartorialand sexualones, a conflationthat markedthe early yearsof Victorianfeminismand continues in some quarterstoday,wasa wayof the poor,and the unconventional" stigmatizinglesbians,femalecross-dressers, men While who (Garber 135; 45-46). enjoy being men are understoodto experience sexual arousalin wearing,for example, women's undergarments, women who wearmen'sundergarments arenot envisionedas doing so forerotic reasons,but out of a sad and unfortunate(albeit understandable)desire to be men. It is almostimpossibleto find authenticexpressionsof a workingwoman's erotic experiencesin Sarah'stime and place, but it is possiblethat she thrilled to being a woman-seen-as-a-man-who-was-still-a-woman, ratherthan almost pathetically being a would-be man trappedin a female body. It does seem dangerous,however,to ignorethe fact that the womenwereliving in a context of superiormale powerand that thus their"economicand politicaldesires"may well have been mixed with "sartorialand sexual ones" after all. Leonore Davidoff'sanalysisof the 1860s and '70s Londondiariesof ArthurMunbyand Hannah Cullwick,for instance,show a masterwho delightedin his powerover the servantwho laterbecamehis wife,and a servantwho delightedin begriming herselffor the pleasure-and apparentlyincreasedlove-of her "Massa."She dressedas a man when he wanted her to, and she workedon developingher
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biceps so he could measurethem. She was so strong that she could lift him easily and carryhim, and yet she gloried in being in his power.Despite all of this, however,the languageof erotic humiliationnever became Hannah'sonly language,thoughArthurwantedit to. Althoughshe sharedsome of the pleasure, Hannah understoodtheir sexual gamesdifferentlythan her "master."Dirt was more than a symbolfor her: removingit absorbednearlyall of her time. Similarly,Sarah understoodher actions and her sources of pleasure far differently than did James, the first male voyeur in her story. After discoveringthat she was a woman, he insisted on taking Caroline as his own, and on transformingSarahby forcingher to adopt women'sclothing. He was almost certainlytitillated, for he continued to visit Sarahwhen she was alone in her shop on his day of leisure,until they had some sort of violent confrontation. Despite James'sview that Sarah had done something deeply wrong, and that he was rehabilitatingher with clothing and possibly with sexual attention-a view which many others in their society shared-Sarah continued to see herself as innocent and not in need of help. If men and women did not experience erotic liminal "games"in the same way, or even as equally pleasurable, given the differences in their experiences and relative power, it is importantto add that all men did not approachthese things in the same way,either. Outside their sharedmaleness, they, too, came fromdifferentpositions. Here, again, classplaysa critical role. The sexual imaginationsand associationswhich elite men broughtto Sarah's storyseem to have been generallyfardifferentfromthose broughtby working men and they thus shaped differentreactions. That the working-classpapersdid not condemn Sarahdoes not mean that working-classreportersor readerswere simplymore relaxedabout gender bending. When MaryNewall, a contemporaryof Sarah's,attempted in 1861 not only to pass as a man, but also robbedher male employer,the workingclass public deemed that she had gone too far.She had not workedto support herself "respectably"and she had violated a man by putting on his boots and breeches and turning his house "near inside out." While Sarah'scase was passed by, Mary was pilloried far and wide in broadsheets:"The Magistrate said, take her away / And pull off this lady'sbreeches."'lPerhapsit was the violence in Mary'sstory which struck working men (and perhapsworking women). Unlike Munby and other upper-middle-classelite men, writers in the working-classpapersdid not present picturesof dirty,sweating, working women as being especially arousing.After all, dirt in their readers'world was not taboo. Violence, on the other hand, did often appearin associationwith exciting scenes. PerhapsMaryNewall's real claim to notoriety lay in the fact that she brutallymurderedher female self before becoming a man. So that people would believe her dead and not look for her, she covered a poker in bullock'sblood and stuck onto it some of her own hair. It is possible that if
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Sarah had loaded her gun correctly,and aimed it directly at James'sheart or brainor groin,she, too, might have been attackedmercilesslyin popularsong. Perhaps because they had so much actual socio-economic power, middle-classmen found it enjoyable-both arousingand humorous-to transformgirlsinto boys and back again:thus Munbyloved to photographHannah and others in men'sclothing. They took this "game"beyond their encounters with working-classdomestic servantsor prostitutes.As Davidoffpoints out, "The power to create or transformanother human being and in so doing reaffirmupper-middle-classmasculine identity provided . . . the compelling attraction of rescue work as well as the rationalefor the phenomenon of the child bride"(116). But these men also verymuch wantedto remainin control of the charade;they wanted it to be a lark. Munby expressedoutrage in his journal that Mary Newall had laid her plans in all seriousness.The Times portrayedSarah as having been amused, as if it were all a joke, at her first appearancein court in July,but after the trial, when it was clear that it had been no lark, the editors, as we have seen, became more hostile. For many middle-classmen, unlike for most working-classmen, the fascinationlay both in their abilityto transfroma girl'sgenderand back again, and in their ability to play at switching who should performthe dirtiest, hardest work. In the 1850s, for example, yearsbefore Sarah was discovered, Punchpublished a large two-page set of cartoon pictures in mockery of the idea of the bloomer, in which women who wear the new costume take on men's social roles, and men, also in pants, take on women's roles (fig. 1). Significantly,the two sexes do not simply take on the customarytask of the opposite sex within their own station. Rather,most of the women are given the position of upper-andmiddle-classmen: they drive sportycarriagesand walk confidently down the street in snappyclothes and boots. Most of the men, on the other hand, have the jobs of working-classwomen. They scrub on all fours, carryand sell fruits and vegetables;one is even speaking to a woman in a street scene reminiscent of a prostitute soliciting a customer. Sarah'sprosaic and long undiscoveredand uncorrecteddaily life as a man made a mockeryof the assumptionthat this idea was necessarilya joke: thus she made some of her viewers more than a little uncomfortable.
III. Conclusion A variety of other working women from the decade of the 1860s planned to pass as men for the rest of their lives. Sometime in the 1850s, a girl youngerthan 15 arrivedin London dressedas a boy and found work as a cab driver;she went on to passfor yearsas a male (Times15 February1875).11
A Dream."Punch21 (July-Dec.1851):203-04. Figure1. "Bloomeriana.
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In 1861, MaryNewall decided to leave her master.She stole some clothes, and travelled to Yarmouthas a man, where she took lodgings. She was seen smoking cigars and courting her landlady before she was apprehendedfor theft. In 1865, Sarah was tried. Several weeks after her first appearancein court, a servant girl who may have been inspiredby her case decided to run away in boys' clothes and go to sea (MorningHerald19 July 1865). In 1867, Annie Hindle, a male-impersonatingstage figure emigratedto the United States to continue her professionon- and off-stage;years later she actually married a woman (Hellerstein, Hume, and Offen, eds.). Mary Walker, a former sailor, railwayporter,and barman,was arrestedfor begging in 1868 after her disguise was discovered and she was unable to find employment (MorningStar31 March 1868). It is highly unlikely that these women were unique.Two of them were only discoveredbecause their economic circumstancesreducedthem to dependency on institutions,where there could be no secrets:it seems probable that they representedthe tip of an iceberg largely unknown to the middle classes. That most of them were able to find companions who were willing to accept them as mates despite their rejectionof femininity tells us that their culture did not producewomen who uniformlyaccepted the idea that they must marrymen. Many people by the 1860s insistedthat there were no longer any such women as Sarah,no passingcross-dressers; yet somewherein the back of their minds they knew there were, for Sarah and others like her had appeared before them without waiting for permission.Sarah and other cross-dressing women affected genteel fears, impinged on what was said and left unsaid. Sarah and the other cross-dressersof the 1850s and 60s, as silenced as they were, still providedpart of the context for later conflicts that became more vocal. It was shortly after this period that the widespreaddebates emerged over "inverts"and the corruptinginfluences of the "New Woman." But to make Sarah'stale matter,it is not imperativeto state that there were apparentlymany Sarahs;rather,it is imperativeto describethe cultural systemsin which she was enmeshed.Certainlywithout the latter,neither her decisions, nor her punishment,nor the types of attention she received make any sense. Lesscommon is the idea that the culturalanalysesthemselves lose much of their powerif we do not payany attention to what Sarahexperienced, or to what she might have said she was tryingto do. Much of the most cogent recent work on gender transgressionhas deliberatelyomitted such a perspective.12It is true that Sarah'sacts have no meaning without their surrounding culturalsystem. But it is also true that the culturalsystemhas no importance and wouldnever change were it not for Sarah-Sarah stridingrapidlythrough the East End, strenuouslypushing the limits of someone else's definition of the possible.
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Notes 'Of the three hundred plays performedin London between 1660 and 1700, at least 89 contained roles for women wearingmen's clothes. Many of these were about real women. In the 1750s, Hannah Snell even staged a sucessfulreview about her own life as a male sailor priorto her discoveryby the crew. See Van de Pol and Dekker 94. 2The papersof the periodwere filled with advertisementsfor cheap passageon vessels sailing to all destinations. It would be interesting to know why Sarah selected New Zealand. 3These are the facts that all newspaperaccounts of the police court session agree on, which are the only recordsof it available. 4Although Sarahwould not have known this, the firstpersonto be hanged at that site, rather than at Tybur, had been another woman cross-dresser,Nan Hereford,who had been arrested for thieving and executed in 1698 for setting fire to the prison (recorded in O'Donnell 107). The different treatment accordeda woman who could have been perceived as similar to Sarah indicates how significantlyboth reactions to female cross-dressersand concepts of punishment had changed in a century and a half. 5"Readsimperfectly"was the most the keeperswould allow any inmate, most entries stating that they read poorly or not at all. 6There is extensive contemporaryliteratureon the penal servitude system. For a sample in 2: 171. The best theoretical discussion is still to be found in Sarah'speriod see Parliamentary Foucault'sDisciplineand Punish.An excellent new work on the women's prisons is Zedner. 7A week earlier,on July 23, the same paperhad printed a positive and unusualpiece about a woman farmerwho wore bloomers. "People might call her coarse, rude, rough, but she was satisfied that she was right. She knew she was free." 8For a later period and a different perspective, see Ross. For a starting point on studies of women's union activities, even when in conflict with men, see Taylor. 9In addition to Sarah'scharacterreferences,see The Times6 January1830, and 29 December 1839. Both Van de Pol and Dekker, and Wheelwright mention this phenomenon, and both discussedit furtherin their panel presentation"The Battle for the Breeches:FemaleCross-Dressing in Modem Europe,"at the Eighth BerkshireConference on the Historyof Women, Douglass College, 9 June, 1990. 1°Thebroadsheet,"MaryNewall, the Artful Girl of Pimlico"appearsin Hindley'scollection. Arthur Munby heard about her and went to view her at a court appearance.See his journal for 19 November 1861, in Hudson 110. 11ArthurMunby'sfile on women cross-dressersin the Christopher Wren Libraryrefersto this girl. Munby also recordsthe uncovering of an Irishcontemporaryof this girl in Dublin. It is important that his file of clippings is filled mostly with the kind of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century examples mentioned earlier, and with foreign disclosures and articles on exotic girl gymnasts.These two contemporarybread-and-buttercases, similar to Sarah's,were apparentlynot the stuffof typicalarticles.Munbydoes have a handwrittennote giving the names and discoverydates of at least eight women sailorsin the 1860s, but does not give his source or tell anything more about them. Journalentries in 1866 indicate that he may have heard of them in conversationswith formerwomen sailorsthemselves. See Wheelwright 7. 12See,for example,Poovey.Fora studyof high discoursearoundcross-dressing specifically,see Friedli.Severalrelevantarticlesalso appearin the recent collection edited by Epsteinand Straub.
Works Cited Clark, Anna. "Molly Men and Brave Sailor Girls: Gender Transgressionin the late 18th and early 19th Century." "Womanhood and Manhood in the Transition from Plebeian to Working-ClassCulture:London, 1780-1845." Diss. RutgersU, 1987.
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Davidoff, Leonore. "Classand Gender in Victorian England:The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick."FeministStudies5 (1979): 87-141. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. FamilyFortunes:Men and Womenof the EnglishMiddle Class, 1780-1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Epstein,Julia and KristinaStraub,eds. BodyGuards:CulturalPoliticsof GenderAmbiguity.New York:Rougtledge, 1991. Foucault,Michel. Disciplineand Punish:The Birthof a Prison.Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Friedli, Lynne. "PassingWomen: A Study of Gender Boundariesin the Eighteenth Century." Ed. G. S. Rousseauand Roy Porter.Chapel Hill: U SexualUnderworlds of theEnlightenment. of North Carolina P, 1988. "The Gallant Female Sailor."Sabine Baring-Gouldcollection of balladsand broadsides.British Museum,London. Vol. 8 no. 47. Garber, Marjorie.VestedInterests:Cross-Dressingand CulturalAnxiety. New York:Routledge, 1992. Giles v. Geals. 62 Proceedings of theCentralCriminalCourt421-25. Great Britain, 1865. Gillis, John. For Betteror For Worse:BritishMarriages,1600 to the Present.New York:Oxford UP, 1985. Hindley, Charles. Curiositiesof StreetLiterature.[Collection of broadsides.]London:Reeves and Turner, 1871. Hobsbawm, E. J., and Joan Wallach Scott. "Political Shoemakers."Past & Present89 (1980): 86-114. Hudson, Derek. The Lifeand Diariesof ArthurJ. Munby.Boston: Gambit, 1972. London. Public Record Office. BrixtonPrisonRegister.Series H. 0. 8, nos. 167-79 (March 1866-March 1869). . MillbankPrisonFemaleRegister.Series H. 0. 24, no. 14 (1865-1874). O'Donnell, Bernard.The Old Baileyand Its Trials.London: Macmillan, 1951. Parliamentary Papers.21 (1853): 2. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments:The IdeologicalWorkof Genderin Mid-VictorianEngland. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Ross, Ellen. "'FierceQuestionsand Taunts':MarriedLife in WorkingClass London, 1870-1914." FeministStudies8 (1982): 575-602. Snell, K. D. M. Annals of the LabouringPoor: SocialChangeand AgrarianEngland,1660-1900. Cambridge:CambridgeUP, 1985. Taylor, Barbara.Eve and the New Jerusalem:Socialismand Feminismin the NineteenthCentury. New York:Pantheon, 1983. Thompson, E. P. The Makingof theEnglishWorkingClass. New York:Vintage, 1966. Tomes, Nancy. "A 'Torrentof Abuse': Crimes of Violence Between Working Class Men and Women in London, 1840-1875." Journalof SocialHistory3 (1978): 328-45. Van de Pol, Lotte, and Rudolph Dekker. The Traditionof FemaleTransvestismin EarlyModem Europe.New York:St. Martin's,1989. Wheelwright, Julie. Amazonsand MilitaryMaids.Boston: Pandora,1990. Zedner,Lucia. Women,Crime,and Custodyin VictorianEngland.Oxford:Clarendon, 1991.
Thais E. Morgan
REIMAGINING MASCULINITY IN VICTORIAN CRITICISM: SWINBURNE AND PATER
"He is never more present than when no image of him is there. He is a suggestionof a new manner." Oscar Wilde, The Pictureof DorianGray RENEWELLEK CALLSALGERNONCHARLESSWINBURNE"THE OF MODERNCRITICISM IN A HISTORY
first in Englandto apply purely imaginativestandardsto the whole range of literature"(381). He also suggests that Walter Pater became Swinbume's "closestally and rival"in the Britishavant-gardewhich emergedin the 1860s. More recently, Linda Dowling has connected Swinbure and Pater as "the two great Aestheticist writers"who laid the groundworkfor the 1890s (Language 176). Examiningthe "productionof revisionarymasculine discourses" among the male poets and critics associated with Victorian Aestheticism, RichardDellamoraalso links Swinbure and Pater (5). Swinbume'sexploration of a range of sexual "perversities"in his poetry lent support,Dellamora argues,to the homoerotic strain in Aestheticism. In particular,he maintains that Swinbume's Poemsand Ballads,Series1 (1866)-especially such poems as "Anactoria"and "Hermaphroditus"-were crucial in leading Pater "to reconsidersexual politics in his work"(69). However, Dellamora only briefly mentions Swinbume's important role in the line of literary and art criticism that sustains "the tradition of moral-aestheticreflection on desire between males" in the Victorian period (7). The interaction between Swinbure and Pater as leading Aesthetic critics during the 1860s merits further consideration. Equally important, I would suggest, is understandinghow and why these two writers staked out and occupied distinctive terrains for their work in the context of the all-male sexual politics of Victorian Aestheticism. For,as allies, both Swinburne and Pater celebrated androgynousbeauty and evoked homoeroticism in an attempt to reimagine masculinity at the margins of conventional middle-class notions of manliness.1 But, simultaneously, as rivals, Swinbume and Pater reimagined masculinity from different positions, with significantly different results.
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Several critics have establishedthe pervasivenessof a discourseabout homoeroticism in Victorian criticism treating the art and literatureof the ancient Greeks. For instance, RichardJenkynsfinds images and metaphors that "whispersome message that [their author]dares not speak aloud"concering the beauty of the young male body in Swinbure, Pater,Symonds, and Wilde (149). More specific is Dowling'sinquiryinto recurrentwordsand concepts that constitute what she terms the "homosexualcode" that is activated when Victorian critics talk about things Hellenic. Dowling makes the importantpoint that this "hiddenlanguageor code" may differ in its connotative charge depending on the context, say, whether it appearsin a public addressby John Ruskin about the importance of Greek classics in British education, or in an art historical piece by Paterabout the centrality of male friendshipin ancient Greece ("Ruskin's"1). In other words,the "homosexual code" in Victoriancriticismhas a double status:it is at once widely dispersed in the culture (Dowling's examples come from "the dominant discourseof scholarship"[5]) and preciously cultivated by a small "proscribed"group within that culture (1). Due to its mode of existence in between dominant and minoritydiscourses,such a "homosexualcode"-or, more precisely,such a systemof interlockedrhetoricalfiguresandconnotativesubcodes-has a veryprecariousstatus and typically generatesambiguousrepresentations(e.g., the androgyne).2In orderto understandthe provisionalityof and the risk involved in reimagining masculinityin Swinbure's and Pater'scriticism,instead of thinking in terms of a stable and definitelysexuallyoriented "homosexualcode," I proposethat we approachtheiressaysas examplesof an aestheticminoritzingdiscourse.Briefly defined,a minoritizingdiscourseis one in which the solidarity-and the essential alikeness-of a groupthat perceivesitself to be in a minorityposition is presupposedand invoked at the same time as it is being constructedin the discourseitself. In the case of VictorianAestheticism,a groupof male writers, someof whomalreadyhave authoritywithin the dominantculture(forinstance, Tennyson), share varying degrees of interest in homoeroticism,which they expressin their work.As Eve Sedgwickexplainsin regardto identity,undera minoritizingview, "it is [considered] .. the most naturalthing in the world that people of the same gender . . . whose social needs and knowledgesmay have so much in common, should band together also on the axis of sexual desire"("AcrossGender"58). Thus, as male Aesthetes interestedin extending the boundariesof masculinity,Swinbume and Paterfoster a minoritizingdiscourse about art and artists in which male beauty and male-maledesire are validatedand preferredover the heterosexualnorm as the culturalideal.However, as we shall see, aesthetic minoritizingdiscourseis inflecteddifferentlyin Swinbume'sand in Pater'scriticalessays,resultingin the constructionof distinct kinds of alternativemasculinity.
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Equally important to understandingthe enterprise and situation of aesthetic minoritizingdiscourseas practicedby Swinburneand Pater in their criticism is what David DeLaurahas describedas the emergence of "a new kind of reader,susceptibleto [an]... aesthetic/sexual/stylisticsynthesis"based on a shared"homoeroticsensibility"(8). Connecting the trajectoryof Pater's readingto the ambiguoustopics and addressof his writing,DeLauraconcludes that "twodiscernible sets of implied readers"are "appealedto more or less continuously in the key texts" (9). While "Paterovertly addressescultivated ... readersinterested in literature,art, and philosophy,"he also speaksto "a well disposed minority audience 'inside' his largergeneral readership"(8). This minorityaudience consisted of men who had varyingdegreesof interest in the relations of male-male sexual desire possible within the frameworkof masculinity-from homosocial friendshiptinged with homoerotic attraction to male-male sexual contact or "sodomy."3Victorian Aestheticism is thus animated by a politics of sexuality and of gender, in which criticism on art and artists speaks a "double-voiced discourse."4Officially expounding on aesthetic questions to the majorityof readerswho are heterosexuallyidentified gentlemen, these two writersalso talk intimately with a minority group of readerswho are interested in expanding the conventional limits of masculinity and its heterosexualpractices by envisioning ties between the male body and beauty,homoeroticism and culture-in short, by imagining other ways of being a man in Victorian England. Throughouthis criticismand poetryof the 1860s, Swinburnedevelops a double-addressedrhetoric about art and the artist that stems from the dominant discourseof critical judgmentbut refocusesit on gender and sexuality, thereby initiating mid-Victorianaesthetic minoritizingdiscourse.For example, in his review of Charles Baudelaire'sFleursdu rnal (1862), Swinburneusesfamiliaraesthetic standardswhile suspendingthe moralconstraints that traditionallyaccompanythem to justifyas artwhat other Victorian (and many French) critics had declared to be "obscene"and "immoral"topics.5 Describingpoetry in termsof fine visual art, Swinburnepraisesone groupof lyrics for "sharpindividual drawingof characterand form,"and another for its "colour"(3:419-20). His central point of reference in the essay is "drawing":Baudelaireaccomplishesthroughwordswhat "greatFrenchartists"such as J. A. D. Ingreshave accomplishedthrough pencil and oil (422). Addressing the general reader,then, Swinburne establishes in the languageof art criticismthat Baudelaire'sartistryor technique is unimpeachable. But it is the extension of this claim into the stance of art for art'ssake that the majorityof contemporaryreadersrefused:"Hisperfect workmanship makesevery subjectadmirableand respectable"(419). Swinbure throwsinto relief what he knows will be the point of conflict between the moral majority of middle-classVictoriansand the aesthetic programof the emergent British
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avant-gardeby connecting the scandalizingperversitiesrepresentedin the poetry (satanism,prostitution,lesbianism,necrophilia) to the life of the poet himself. In Fleursdu mal Baudelaire"haschosen to dwell mainly upon sad and strangethings-the wearinessof pain and the bitternessof pleasure-the perversehappiness and waywardsorrowsof exceptionalpeople"(419, my emphases). The person of the poet himself, his bodily as well as his artistic practices, becomes the focus of attention: "The writerdelights in problems, and has a naturalleaning to obscureand sorrowfulthings"(419). Paradoxically,according to Swinbume, the unspoken perversitiesof the man Baudelairehave producedan exquisitelybeautifulandphilosophically "weighty"style of writing.The artifactsthat constituteFleursdu malbear"the special mark"of the artist's"keenand peculiarpower"(419). But what is this "specialmark"?Exactlywhere does this "power"come from, and whom does it affect?Such ambiguousoxymoronsas these, strewnthroughoutSwinbure's essay,invite a differentkind of readingbesidesthe aesthetic one signalledby the applicationof analogiesfrom drawingto poetry.This alternativereading would be performedby a small groupof men interestedin the way Swinburne connects the perversitiesof the poems to the perversitiesof the male author. Specifically,Baudelairenot only as a poet but as a man is imaginedhere as engagingin a rangeof alternative(non-heterosexual,extra-marital)practices. At the same time, he is imagined as something other than manly in the middle-class Victorian sense. His book has both "vigorous beauty" and "charm";the poet avoids"roughor hastyhandling"of certainproscribedtopics; his style has a "beautifulgentle"qualityabout it (421, 420, 422). In sum, the characterSwinbure constructsfor Baudelaireis one of masculineandrogyny; it incorporatesqualities culturallyassociatedwith femininity while subordinating them to a fundamentallymasculinefigure.The phrase"vigorousbeauty" capturesthis masculineandrogyny:capableof creatinga style so beautifulthat it could almostbe said to be feminine, Baudelairenonetheless remainsa virile genius, "exceptional"both as an artistand as a man. Aesthetic minoritizingdiscoursein mid-Victoriancriticism expands possibilities for gender identificationsand sexual practicesfor men within a secure frameworkof masculinity.The contemporarymale readerpreparedto entertain such ideas would have been highly responsiveto Swinburne'sAesthetic prose. Indeed, in the essay on Baudelaire,Swinbure providesseveral clues for such a minorityreadershipto follow. One of these occursat the end of the third paragraph:"FromTheophile Gautier, to whom the book is dedicated,he has caughtthe habit of a faultlessand studioussimplicity"(419). As A. J. L. Busst has remarkedin a widely cited study of the figure of the androgyne in the nineteenth-century European imagination, the crossdressedheroine of Gautier'snovel, Mademoisellede Maupin,is "[o]neof the earliestand most importantexamples-and certainlythe most influential-of
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the image of the androgyne"(41). Busst emphasizesthe fictive status of the androgyneas a symbol of aesthetic perfection as well as of sexual fulfillment. "'Revede poeteet d'artiste,'it is the productof pure art... and consequently far superiorto anything that... realityhas to offer"(42). By gesturingtoward this French intertext, Swinbure links the aesthetic programof the mid-century avant-garde-initiated in Franceby Gautier,pursuedby Baudelaire,and now championed in Englandby Swinbure (cf. Clements)-to androgynyas an alternativemode of masculinity.As a figurefor art that transcendslimiting considerationssuch as morality,the androgynesuits the campaignof Gautier and promote art for art'ssake. and, in turn, Swinburneto "epaterle bourgeois" As a figure in which masculine and feminine categories overlap, the androgyne is also suited to an aesthetic minoritizingdiscoursewhich specifically seeks to reconfiguremasculinity.By imaginingthe personaof the Frenchpoet Baudelairefor English readersas a masculine androgyne,whose sexual perversities are transcendedby his aesthetic genius, Swinburneenables "a relaxing of gender stereotypesfor men, allowing them to stretch the boundaries of masculinity"(Weil 1). One of the most savvy readersof Swinburne'swork in the 1860s was the young Pater who, in the essay entitled "Diaphaneite"(1864), develops the constructof the artistas masculineandrogyne,perverseif judgedin moral terms but transcendentlybeautiful if judged by the standardsof art. Critics generally agree that "Diaphaneite"was originallyfielded before an audience of select few:membersof the Old MortalitySociety at Oxford,which included several of Pater'sfriendsand the man with whom he was in love at the time (Levey 101-04; Dellamora 48-61). Pater's approach to the project of reimaginingmasculinity was therefore of necessity differently inflected and aimed than Swinbure's. In effect, Pater was writing not to confront and haranguea largepublic audienceas Swinbure had in his essayon Baudelaire, but to seduce and persuadea small intimate audience of the rightnessof male beauty and male-male desire under the new categoryof "diaphaneite." Thus, whereas Swinburne begins his piece with a diatribe against establishmentcritics-"there [in France],as well as here,"who "seemto have prettywell forgottenthat a poet'sbusinessis"to create art and not "to redeem the age"-Pater starts with an apparentlyneutral, philosophical survey of major "type[s]of character"and then leads to the description of an entirely new type: the diaphanousman (217). The construct of the diaphanousman holds appealacrosshetero- and homosexuality,and is wholly concerned with forging an alternative masculinity for its author and his all-male audience. (This continues to be true of the revised version of "Diaphaneite"as well.) Recalling three traditional types of manliness-the philosopher, the saint, and the artist-at the outset of the essay, Pater turns our attention to the markedlydifferentstyle of manhood representedby diaphaneite. Located in
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between "contrastedtypes of character,"this kind of person appears"colourless," a presence of "evanescent shades" (216). Although he habitually "crossesratherthan follows the main currentof the world'slife," the diaphanous man remains"delicate"and possessedof an "unclassifiedpurity"(216). Unlike the "strenuousmasculineideal"promotedin Thomas Carlyle'sHeroes and Hero Worship(1841), then, Pater'sideal for contemporaryman lies just this side of femininity (Christ 20). Modest in his "desirefor simplicity"and his manner of "indirect self-assertion,"the diaphanous man has a "moral expressiveness"that is morereminiscentof the Victorianideal of womanhood than of manhood (217). Nonetheless, Pater'simaginativeconstructof diaphaneiteremainsvery much a masculine state, and one explicitly attached to a young male body: "Oftenthe presenceof this natureis felt like a sweet aromain earlymanhood" (221). Furthermore,the "threadof pure white light" emanating from the physical presence of the diaphanoustype of man leads the readerback to classicalGreeksculpture,specificallyto the "sexlessbeauty"of statuesof youths and gods (220). Any suspicionof homosexualdesirebehind Pater'schoice of analogy here-the "strange""receptivity"of the diaphanousman compared with the "kindof impotence"and "ineffectualwholenessof nature"represented by the Greek statues (218-20)-is offset by his contextualizationof these details in a philosophicaldisquisitionon universalcharactertypes.Above all, Pater'sessay operateswithin a traditionalphilosophicalrhetoricthat equates "sexlessness"with morality("a moral sexlessness,"220) and beauty with the "ineffectual"("sexless")"wholeness"of the androgyne,whose personcombines the best attributesof masculinityand certain feminine ones into a perfect, "pure white" being.6 Like the imaginary persona Swinbure creates for Baudelaire,Pater'sproposalfor the new charactertype of the diaphanousman challenges his readersto place aesthetic values above moralones. But the rhetorical tactics in these essaysby Swinburneand Pater are As mentioned earlier,there is the confrontationaltone adopted distinct. quite the former and the persuasivetone adopted by the latter. Second, and by equally important,is each critic'sparticularrelation to the politics of Victorian Aestheticism. On the one hand, both "Charles Baudelaire" and "Diaphaneite"participatein an aesthetic minoritizingdiscoursewhose project is to construct an alternative masculinity.Both writersaim to revalorizethe categoryof effeminacy,which is culturallymarkedas negative, by aestheticizing it and thus remarkingit in positive terms.On the otherhand, the aesthetic programsof Swinbure and Paterdo not necessarilyaim for the same discursive effectson either majorityor minorityaudiences.Rather,to take DeLaura's surmiseone step further,we might say that Swinbure and Paterproject and solicit different kinds of readerswithin both majorityand minority groups. These readershipssometimes overlap, but not always.
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What interestsconstitutethese audiencesand in whatwaysSwinbume's and Pater'scriticismattunes itself to them can be graspedby contrastingthe rhetoricalorientationof Swinbure's defenseof his Poemsand Ballads,Series1 in Notes on Poemsand Reviews(1866) to that of Pater'sextended meditation on the "sexlessbeauty"of young manhood as embodied in classical Greek sculpturein "Winckelmann"(176). Taking a cue from Gautier'sPreface to Mademoiselle de Maupin,Swinbume'sNotes continues the contestation of the middle-classmoralizationof aesthetics that he began in his earlieressay on His stance is thoroughlypolemical.He returnsthe Victoriancritics' Baudelaire.7 "Whatis there now hostility to his poetrywith irony-referring to "Anactoria": of horriblein this?the expressionsof fiercefondness,the ardoursof passionate despair?Are these so unnaturalas to affrightor disgust?"(22); with scorn-re"Treated... as a serious'thing of beauty'... it ferringto "Hermaphroditus": can give no offence but to the purblindand the prurient"(28); and even vituperation-referringto his critics in general:"I will not fish up any of the ephemeralscurrilitiesbornonly to sting if they can, and sink as they must"(18). Dellamora has discussed "the remarkableimaginative mobility" regarding homo- and bisexualityin Swinbume's"Hermaphroditus" (81-83), but I would underlinethe "parodicmetaphorof marriage"and the subversiveportrayalof the veryconcept of sexualdifferencein the text. Arguably,Swinbure's dissemination of the markingsof sexual difference here is too "indeterminate"to supporta construalof the poem as a solely homophilic document.Rather,the "voyeur[istic]" perspectiveof the personagazingat the statue of the hermaphrodite, as well as the determined"iconoclasm"of the sonnet sequence overall as an attackon dominantheterosexualmores,place his poem squarelyagainst the majorityaudience at which Swinbure targetshis polemic in the Notes: "the Englishreader,"as controlledby "the press"and "the pulpit"(18, 32). Swinbure's criticism in Notes is primarilyaddressedto the majority of middle-classVictorian readers.However, Notes invites the attention of a second, minority group of readersas well. From this segment of the public, Swinburne seeks applause for his upholding of aesthetic standardsagainst censoriousmoraliststhrough irony and counter-argument.At the same time, he leaves the door open for those who want to readhis work from a self-consciously homosocial perspective, one that entails homoeroticism and an appreciationof the male body as a "thingof beauty."In Notes,he often combines anti-moralistpolemics with positive valorizationsof the distinctive (male) beauty of the hermaphrodite.For instance, speaking of the special outrage caused, Swinburnecomments: "I knew that belief in the "Hermaphroditus" of sculpture [addressedto minority readers],and that a was the secret body no more attempt or attain it than the present age could of ascetics past age of hypocrites[addressedto majorityreadersas insult and goad,with a knowing nod to the minority]"(27). In the same passage,he twits the self-righteous
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English public by reminding them that cultural history includes not only Praxiteles's Venus but "at once Othello and Hyperion, Theseus and Hermaphroditus"(27)-in other words,not only models of female-feminine beauty but also models of quite differentmale-masculinebeauty:the manly but also the effeminate. Ultimately, Swinburne's discourse on hermaphroditism-in and its defense in Notes-is a localized topic within his "Hermaphroditus" largerdiscourseon perversity,which can be found in PoemsandBallads,Notes, his letters duringthe 1860s, and his flagellationfantasiesin prose. Perversity is the main platform of his aesthetic program,which, owing much to the French avant-garde,Gautier and Baudelaire,but also to Swinbume'sparticular positioning as a poet and a critic in relation to the Victorian art and literaryestablishment,is thoroughlytransgressive.To Swinbume, as to many contemporaneous writers and to many present-day critics, androgyny (in "Baudelaire")and hermaphroditism(in the poetry and criticism) are alike: both serve to make the point, contradominant ideology, that art should be judged on its own terms and that whether it appearsperverseor not from a moral standpoint must be considered irrelevant to the art qua art. Consequently, androgyny and hermaphroditism,as representedin the genius of artists and the beauty of artworks, are for Swinburne interchangeable sites/sights that affordcultured men the opportunityof reimaginingmasculinity. For, what may seem perverse under one light may appear merely beautiful under another. Situated as a secretlypracticinghomosexual,and thereforepersonally invested in homoeroticismas well as professionallyinterestedin artdisplaying male beautyas a critic (see Levey and Inman), Paterwould have been highly receptive to the aesthetic minoritizingdiscoursein Swinbure's writings of 1866. WhereasSwinbume emphasizesthe transgressivenessof androgynyand hermaphroditismas perversetypes of beauty,however, Pater downplaysthe perversitylatent in "strange"art and also in art criticismthat celebratesmale beauty in his next essay,"Winckelmann."Moreover,insteadof confrontation and transgression,which are Swinbure's characteristicmodes as an avantgardistwriterin the 1860s, Paterdevelops a persuasiverhetoricalstrategyfor aesthetic minoritizing discourse:"tact."Elaboratedin his famous essay on "Style"(1888), Pater'sdeployment of tact addressesboth mainstream(heterosexual)and marginal(some homoeroticallyinterested,some homosexual) audiences by embedding celebrationsof male beauty and male-male desire within philosophizing and historicizing statements about art. Unlike Swinburne'sexcited polemics which assault the reader,Pater'ssteady tact persuadesthe readerthrough"abeautifulgentle justice of style"(Swinbume's phrase for Baudelaire)to consider the aesthetic qualities of male beautyand the justifiablepleasuresto be derived from admiringit.
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The representationof the hermaphroditeis a signifiant example of the several ways in which Swinburneand Pater differ in their approachesto aesthetic minoritizing discourse. In Notes, Swinbure rails against those as "obscene":"A creatureat once Victorianswho saw his "Hermaphroditus" foul and dull enough to extract from a sight so lovely, from a thing so noble, the faintest . . . idea of impurity,must be ... below comprehension"(28). The aesthetic point-art transcends sexuality-tends to become lost here amid the vituperation. In contrast, Pater is determined to be heard: "In dealing with youth, Greek art betraysa tendency even to merge distinctions of sex. The Hermaphroditewas a favourite subject ... [a] perfect blending of male and female beauty"(qtd. in Dellamora64; see also 109-16). Besides assuringthe majorityreaderthat the bisexualityof hermaphroditismis perfectly properbecause it belongs to art history,Pater also assuresthe minority readerthat this idealizedhermaphroditismis definitively associatedwith the youthful male (not the female) body. In short, Patermakes it respectablefor either kind of reader-for all readers-to look upon and discussthe superior beauty of classical (male) nude sculpture. On other critical business bound, Swinbure makes a connection between aesthetics and alternativemasculinity;Paterforegroundsit. In Notes, Swinbure insists that when "[t]reatedin the grave and chaste manner as a serious 'thing of beauty,"'the statue of the hermaphroditeremains beyond "such depths of mental sewerage"as those inhabited by his critics (28-29). His languagedepends on an implicit opposition between purity (epitomized by those who understandthe beauty of the hermaphrodite)and filth (epitomized by the majority's"subterraneansloughs of mind" [29]). For his part, although fighting alongsideSwinburnein the battle againstmoralphilistines, Pater does not deign to even acknowledgethe enemies of art but adopts an authoritativestance immediately.The wayhe slips a provocativepassagefrom his earlieressayon "Diaphaneite"into "Winckelmann"offersa representative example of Pater'srhetoricaltactic of tact: The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of the gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness,a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature,yet with a divine beautyand significance of its own. ("Diaphanite" 220; "Winckelmann"176)
In Richard Stein's opinion, "Winckelmann"is "farmore subversive and unorthodox"than the notorious "Conclusion"to the Renaissance(257). This essay has a highly subversive effect because of the double-voicing of Pater'sdiscourse:encouragingthe homoerotic direction of their desire for a minority of men, his rhetoric enlightens a majorityof heterosexuallyidentified readersabout art history,while yet seducingthem into adjacentthoughts of the pleasuresof male beauty. Seemingly less problematicbecause devoid
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of the potential conflict of male and female sexualitiesin the hermaphrodite, the young male nude in classical Greek sculpture has a "sexless"beauty reminiscentof that of the diaphanousman. In this latertext, the "unclassified purity" of actions attributed to the diaphanous man is transferredto the physicalityof the representedmale body:emblem of "moralsexlessness,"it is suffusedwith "a divine beauty."Moreover, just as the diaphanous type of character"crossesratherthan follows the main currentof the world,"so this category of classical Greek art has a "significanceof its own":it embodies a masculinity different-morally and aesthetically,but also, and significantly, erotically and sexually-from the manly Victorian norm. As Kenneth Clark'sThe Nude remindsus, the representationof nude male bodies is canonical in Western art. While discussingWinckelmann's interest in the beauty representedby the sculpturalforms of young men, therefore,Paterremainswithin the limits of an arthistoricaldiscoursefamiliar to all of his Victorian readers.As part of high-serious rhetoric about art, philosophy,and history,Pater'sdescriptionof the "sexless"beautyof the young male body might well be read as nothing more than a scholarlyintervention in, for example, the 1860s debates over Hellenism. Additionally, Pater tactfully emphasizesthe very "moral"qualityof the nudes'"sexlessness"by equating first hermaphroditism(as cited above) and then androgynywith the idealizationof aesthetic form in general. According to the psychoanalytic historian Peter Gay, however, a passage such as this one in Pater's"Winckelmann"must be interpretedas knowingly homoerotic, since it would have been so both for its author and for that minority of his audience who were of "the antique persuasion."Gay maintains that appreciationof the art of classical Greek culture "permitted [homosexually-orientedVictorianmen] to dwell on what obsessedthem, and to be understoodmainly by those equippedto understand[sic]"(239). This view lends furthersupportto the notion of a double-voicedaddressin Pater's writing in particularand in mid-Victorianaesthetic minoritizingdiscoursein general. The homoeroticism in "Winckelmann"can alwaysbe passed off as unintentional, as morally "sexless,"or as merely necessary to accuracy in description within the genre of art historical criticism. To take just one example, it is consonant with both a scholarlyand a minoritizingdiscourse for Paterto observe that Winckelmann'sclose relationshipswith young men provided the necessaryfoundation for his work. "[N]urturedand invigorated by friendships,"the great German art historian was able to understandclassical Greek culture as no one else had before him (175). Like the statues themselves, Pater implies, Winckelmann'smale friendshipswere innocent and beautiful.Consequently,the readerneed feel "no sense of shame"as "he fingers those pagan marbles"(177).
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By contrast, to the minority reader,Winckelmann'sfascination with statues of and his relationships with young men would surely have had a "significance of its own."8 At this point, if we review Swinburne's and Notes, and Pater's"Diaphaneite"and "Baudelaire,""Hermaphroditus," we can see that the aesthetic ideal proposedis consistently "Winckelmann," one associatedwith the male body'sbeautyand with a modalityof masculinity in which appreciation,even desire, for male beauty is regardedas legitimate. This sheds light, in turn, on an importantdifference between the handling of aesthetic minoritizingdiscourse in Swinbure and Pater. Swinbure explores a range of transgressiveperversities,including hermaphroditismand androgynyamong sado-masochism,lesbianism,and necrophilia,as partof his avant-gardistagenda during the early and mid-1860s. But Pater is wholly committed to promoting male beauty,figured by hermaphroditismand androgyny, as an aesthetic ideal, thereby legitimizingit, from the mid-1860s onward. Thus, while Swinbure's "Hermaphroditus"may be male ("his") and/or female ("hers"),Pater is quite clear about how Winckelmann's life work ought to be interpreted;androgyny,which stands for the highest aesthetic state-"divine beauty"-is located in a male body, not a female one: "supremebeauty is rathermale than female"(160).9 Finally,Swinbure and Paterarenot positioned identicallytowardeither the majorityor the minority groupof Victorian readers.What they definitely share, though, is the project of reimaginingmasculinity. Art criticism, oriented as it is to the visual and its interpretation, affordsmultiple opportunitiesfor luxuriatingin and for justifyingdesire for male beauty.The art lover'sappreciationof technically superbrepresentations of beautiful young male figuresbecomes a point of communciation between Swinbume, Pater,and the minority audience. Composed after a visit to the Uffizi gallery in 1864, Swinbume's"Notes on Designs of the Old Mastersat Florence"(1868) addressesthe readerin a leisurelyand intimate mannerthat is strikinglydifferentfrom his stentorious literarycriticism. Swinbure halfapologizesfor his "hastymemorialnotes"on the Uffizi paintings-"For guide I have but my own sense of interest and admiration" (156)-but he is inauguratinga new style of criticism preciselyby adopting this tone. Known as impressionisticcriticism after Pater'selaborationsof it in the Renaissance, Swinbure's "Notes" are "a first-rate piece of pioneering" in aesthetic minoritizingdiscourse (Lang xxxi). Preparingthe way for Pater'stheory of artistic "temperament"in the Renaissance,Swinbure in "Designs"focuses our attention on the author as an aesthetic site/sight. Like his imaginary projection of Baudelaire, Swinbure's portraitsof major artists of the Renaissance mystify the origin and intention of each major oeuvreby opening up a series of unanswered
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questionsabout the men themselves.Most noticeable is the recurrenceof the rhetoric of androgyny,which first appearedin Swinbume's"Baudelaire,"to describethese artists.While Leonardoda Vinci and his paintingsareendowed with an "indefinablegrace and grave mystery"(156), Michelangelo'spieces are said to reflect some "graveand subtle sorrowlatent under .. . [his] life" (158). By raisingdoubts about these painters'practices and what their work could mean, Swinbume appeals to the minority reader, inviting him to entertain an iconoclastic interpretationof Leonardo,Michelangelo, and the other Old Mastersdiscussed in "Designs."As in the "Baudelaire"piece, so here, an equivalence is posited between the love of art and "perversehappiness,""the sorrowand the strangenessof things"(158). Androgynyis a crucialtropein aestheticminoritizingdiscourse.Again and again, Swinbume finds himself attracted to minor paintings by Old Mastersin the Uffizi becauseof the sexuallyambiguouslook of their subjects. For instance, after glancing at two conventional studies of the Holy Family by Filippo Lippi, Swinbume concentrateson some "smallstudiesof separate figures;two of boys, very beautiful.One, schoolboy or choristerseemingly,is seated on a form and clothed in a long close gown; his face, grave and of exquisite male beauty, looking down as if in pain or thought" (166). Like Swinbume'sBaudelaireor Michelangelo, these paintedboys aredistinguished by a special "mark."Emotionally, this mark is consistently identified as seriousnessand sadness ("gravesorrow,""in pain or thought");aesthetically, this mark appearsto be a necessaryaccompanimentof "malebeauty."That Swinbure may be expressinghere not just his feelings for art but his feelings for boys is suggestedby his comparisonof one of the aesthetic figuresto a real "schoolboyor chorister"such as he himself might often have seen at Oxford. Finally, the fact that the paintings Swinbume elects to describe in "Designs"are minor works is in itself significant: their homoerotic import may be titillating, even perverse, but it in no way threatens the artists' canonicity. In short, Swinburne implies that one can love "malebeauty,"as embodied by beautifulboys, and still be a man. In "Designs,"Swinburne'smost intense pleasureas an aesthetic critic is located not in conventional religioustopics such as the Madonna and the Holy Family,but in portraitsof boys and young men. Showing little interest in Filippino's allegorical paintings, for example, Swinbume dwells on a single-figure study: "a beautiful head of a youth bent sideways, with curls blown back and eager joyful eyes . . .; the lips parted with eloquent and vehement expressionof pleasure"(172). This descriptionhas an unmistakeable homoerotic appeal, yet the art critic can plead that he is merely being faithful to his task of taking "notes on the designs of the Old Masters at Florence."In this way, by employing a double-voiced discourse,Swinburne establisheshis art critical credentialsfor a majorityof readers,simultaneously
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as he signals a communality of interest with a minority of readerswho are homoerotically invested in art. Imaginingthe young male body as androgynous,hence of an aesthetic value beyond sex and morality,is central to minoritizingdiscourse in Swinburne and Pater.However, Swinburne's"Designs"indicates a slight nervousness about the masculinity of aesthetic androgyny that distinguishes its rhetoric from that of perverseandrogynyin "Baudelaire."Swinbume seems concerned to underscorethe manlinessof art and the artistin the conclusions he draws about the Italian Renaissance. The most "exquiste"works at the Uffizi, he declares, are those in which "beauty . . . lifts male and female together on an equal level of loveliness" (185). Paintings of beautiful boys and young men by great artistsof the past justifythe idea that masculinity is as perfect-even as desirable-as femininity, but for Swinburne the femalefeminine counter must alwaysbe there. Not so for Pater,as we shall see. In Studiesin theHistoryof theRenaissance(1873), Patergathersseveral of his previous essays on major artists described in Swinburne's"Designs": Leonardo, Michelangelo, Giorgione. The complicated intertextuality that characterizesthe constructionsof alternative masculinityby Swinburneand Pater is epitomizedby the frontispieceto Pater'sbook. This frontispiecemay be readas Pater'sresponseto Swinbure's contributionsto Victorianaesthetic minoritizingdiscourse in the 1860s. Pater chooses a "little drawing in red chalk which everyone will remember,"from the Louvre-a minor work, reminiscent of the paintings Swinburne prefersat the Uffizi (90). Like the classical male nudes whose "moral sexlessness" preoccupies Pater in "Diaphaneite"and "Winckelmann,"this drawingdisplays"a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadowof its own hair ... with something voluptuousand full in the eye-lids and the lips"(90-91). Patersystematicallyalters the details of Swinburne'sdescriptionof the Florentine youth'shead "bent sideways,with curls blown back and eager joyful eyes."An attentive minority readerof art criticism would notice that the Swinbumeian intertext is present here but modified in order to meet Pater'srequirementsof tact. Because the face in is balanced out and so the drawingis "ofdoubtfulsex," its "voluptuous[ness]" does not contradict the aesthetic purityof its beauty. Tact notwithstanding, Pater purposesto celebrate the special beauty of young men, as figured by androgyny,in the Renaissance.In "Designs," Swinburneopened the way to evaluatingmale portraitureexplicitly in terms of the homoerotic attractions it holds for the art critic. In the Renaissance, Pater follows suit, going Swinburneone better in the boldness of his verbal rendition of the beauty of one young man in particular:"[a]mongthe more youthful heads"drawnby Leonardois "the head of a young man, which may well be the likeness of Andrea Salaino, beloved of Leonardofor his curled and waving hair" (91). Here Pater names the love that dare not speak its
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name-or almost, for the beautiful body of the male youth, "which Love chooses for his own,"is transcendedby the beautifulimageof male androgyny here. Rhetorically, sexuality is supersededby aesthetics as improprietyis avoided by art. In this way, Pater succeeds in legitimizingmale beauty and male-male desire, placing both under the sign of Amor in the guise of Ars. Dellamorahas suggestedthat "womanlybeauty"for Pater is summed in the Mona Lisa, Medusa, and Salome, all of which are "sign[s]of up male-male desire in which self-awarenesstakes the form of a rhetoricalwish to be woman"(130). Arguably,however, Pater aims not at imagining menwho-would-be-womanlyin the Renaissancebut men-who-would-be-anotherkind-of-manly.Blurringboundariesof sex and gender, Pater proposesto see a "threadof suggestion"linking the frontispieceimage,"ofdoubtfulsex,"with another drawingby Leonardothat "mightpassfor the same face in childhood, with parchedand feverishlips, but much sweetnessin the loose, short-waisted childish dress,with necklace and bulla,and in the daintily bound hair"(91). Takingall of his work into consideration-paintings of both female and male figures-Pater furthermaintainsthat we may "constructa sort of series"that defines "Leonardo'stype of womanly beauty"(95). But this composite icon, like "diaphaneite"and the "moralsexlessness"of classical Greek statues, is not a "womanly""type"in the conventional Victorian sense. Rather, it is another kind of manliness,one that Paterimplicitlyexalts above the womanliness of women. Although their maneuvers within aesthetic minoritizing discourse differin inflection, therefore,it is surprisingto discoverthat the tactful Pater is actually more active in pushing at the border dividing respectabiliyand homoeroticism than the vehement Swinbume. Moreover, Pater seems at pains to drawour attention to the absolutemasculinityof his aesthetic ideal. In the essay on Leonardo,Pater notes that the frontispiece drawingby the same artist is "still more full of sentiment, but of a differentkind" than the better known series of Madonnas(91). Is Pater implicitlycorrectingwhat he sees as Swinbure's overly conventional (heterosexuallygrounded) reading of beauty in the Old Masters?For,unlike Swinburne,Paterdoes not entertain male-male desire as just one among many transgressiveperversities, and unlike Swinburneagain, Paterdoes not "liftmale and female together on an equal level of loveliness."On the contrary,in Pater'sworld, there is only one kind of true beauty, and it is male.'° Perhaps this preference explains his provisionof only one image-that of youngmale beauty,in the frontispeiceto guide the reader through the Renaissance.It certainly jibes with Pater's remarkthat this little drawingis "stillmorefull of sentiment, but of a different kind"than his Madonnas.Lastly,Pater'scommitment to male beauty and to male-maledesire may be heard in his direct addressto the minorityaudience, the "everyone[who]will remember"minorgemssuch as this "faceof doubtful
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who "ha[ve] examined . . . carefully the drawings by the old
masters"with an eye for the beauties of masculine form and desire (90). For contemporarytheorizationsof sexuality and gender, a nexus of questions about Swinburne'sand Pater'sdifferentialparticipation in what I have termedaesthetic minoritizingdiscourseremains.Eve Sedgwickhas most influentially framed this set of questions under the concept of "the closet" (see especiallyEpistemology 5). To be potentially classifiableas a homosexual or "sodomite,"as Swinbume and Pater were, due variouslyto their writings and to their observedbehavior,was a doublebind in the intensely homosocial but also intensely homophobic cultureof Victorian England.Even the suspicion of homosexualitywas enough to condemn a man not only in the public eye but also to his closest male friends. Witness the case of the openly homosexual artist, Simeon Solomon, friend of both Swinbure and Pater, who, after his arrest for suspected sodomy in a street urinal in 1873, was abruptlydroppedby his sometime patron,Swinburne.In a letter to his friend George Powell (6 June 1873), Swinburne takes his distance from Solomon in particularand homosexualityin general:"I suppose there is no doubt the poor unhappy little fellow has ... done things amenable to law such as ... would make it impossiblefor any one to keep up his acquaintance and not be cut by the rest of the world as an accomplice?"(qtd. in Lang 2: 253). Pater'shandling of his problematicfriendship with Solomon-they were introducedby Swinburne-was distinctively other: he took the risk of continuing their friendshipeven after the sodomy scandal (and despite its close proximityto the Renaissance,which stirredup a scandal of its own). Yet Pater'sposition vis-a-vis homosexuality,Solomon's or his own, remains uncertain: Levey speculates that Pater kept "guardedthe secret of his own emotional urges, possibly never revealing-even to someone like Simeon Solomon-the intensity of his yearning for the ideal male friend"(112). A as"opens up here (Sedgwick, "problematicsof identificiation with/identification Epistemology62). Did Swinburne identify with the minority group of homoerotically inclined male readerswhich he addressedin his aesthetic criticism and poetry,but recoil in horrorat the idea of homosexuality itself? Did Paterlikewise identify with this minoritygroupin his aesthetic criticism, and also invite a special understandingwith homosexuallyactive readers,but stop short of identifying himself as a homosexual because of the strong likelihood of blackmail?11 Whatever is decided about Swinbure's and Pater'ssexuality, it is important to understandthat aesthetic minoritizing discourse may be deployed as but is not necessarily tantamount to a rhetoric of the closet. As Sedgwick comments, homosexual panic, which motivates rhetorics of the closet, is not based on direct or sure evidence of the given subject'shomosexuality. Rather, homosexual panic, or the suspicion and denunciation of
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homosexuality,is a parameterof normative (heterosexual) masculinity.It is "importantnot only for the persecutoryregulationof a nascent minority ... but also for the regulation of the male homosocial bonds that structureall culture"(Epistemology184). Thus, aesthetic minoritizingdiscoursein Swinbume must be understoodas oriented differentlyfrom its manifestationsin Pater. The transgressiveperversities including homoeroticism that are depicted in Swinburne'swork are not equivalent to the full-fledgedlegitimization of homoeroticismand homosexualityin Pater's.Moreover,as can be seen from his letters, Swinbure is not at all committed to the project of legitimizing homosexuality,but ratherto the project of aestheticizingall kinds of sexualities,which in turn formspartof his avant-gardistagenda.Paterstands, albeit very elusively, elsewhere on the entwined but distinct questions of homoeroticism and homosexuality. Given the biographicalevidence, it is likely that Pater appreciatedthe advantages-and also experienced the disadvantages-of using a rhetoric of the closet in his work. A major consequence for contemporarycriticism is that what reads like "the rhetoric of secrecy is not inevitably the expressiveveil of a specifically homoeroticdesire"(Adams 454). Both Swinburneand Paterengage in building a minority audience for their aesthetic criticismwithin the majority audienceof middle-classVictorianreaders.Both Swinbure and Paterreimagine masculinityin termsof male beauty and along lines of homoeroticismas an aesthetic fact. But in sexualpolitics as well as in criticalstyle, Paterremains both the "closestally and rival"of Swinbure in Victorian Aestheticism. ArizonaState University
Notes Researchfor this article was initiated undera Faculty-Grant-in-Aidfrom ArizonaState University (1988). Furtherresearchwas completed under a Visiting Fellowshipat the Yale Center for British Art in 1992. 'On the parametersof mid-Victorianmiddle-classmanliness,see, for example, Manganand Walvin. On the difficultiesthe norm of manlinessposed for a Victorian poet, see Sussman.For a discussion of "not only the immense social authorityof 'manliness'but [the] correspondingly acute contest in defining the norm"in Victorian culture, see Adams. 2Theoretically speaking, a code consists in the recurrenceof phonetic, syntactic, and/or semantic markers.The "homosexualcode" that Dowling has detected in the recurrenceof or a gatheringtogether of keywordsin a range of Victorian texts is more preciselya "hypercode" "varioussubcodes, some of which are strong and stable, while others are weak and transient" (Eco 125). The rhetoricaloverlap of criticism by Swinburneand by Pater,and also some of the points of connotative difference between them, may be understood in terms of their writing within the same hypercodebut foregroundingdifferentconnotative subcodesin that system. I am making a distinction here between what Dellamoracalls "male-maledesire,"which implies sexual orientation, hence sexual identity, and masculinity,which entails a hegemonic
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culturalposition dependent on genderassignment.In textual terms,this means that, for example, the lesbian couple in Swinbure's "Anactoria"does not necessarilysignal the author'scommitment to "male-maledesire"as "acentral imaginativefact"(Dellamora218)-or his commitment to women's interests, either. See my "MaleLesbian Bodies." 4The term "double-voiceddiscourse"comes from Bakhtin'stheory of how languageworksin the genre of the novel. The "active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia determinesthe linguistic profile and style of the utterance to no less a degree than its inclusion in any normative-centralizingsystem of a unitarylanguage"(272). 5Swinbure's review essayon Baudelaireappearedin the Spectatorfor 6 September 1862. On the centrality of Swinbure's criticism and poetry on Baudelaireto the work of Pater, Wilde, Symons, and T. S. Eliot, see Clements. 6Jenkynsreadsthe imageryconnecting light, whiteness and Hellenic sculpturein Pater as a subtext about homosexuality:"ashe slides aroundwithin his cluster of metaphors,a soft insinuating voice seems to whispersome messagethat it daresnot speak aloud"(148). Fora historical and theoretical discussion of the Platonic tradition of the androgyne,including its relation to the figureof the hermaphrodite,see Weil 17-30. 70n the sexual-aestheticpolitics connecting Gautier'sPreface to the androgynousheroine of his novel Mademoisellede Maupin,see Weil 113-42. 8The pederasticstructureof Winckelmann's friendshipswith young men would have been obvious to minority readerssuch as Swinbure who, like Pater, studied Plato with Benjamin Jowett at Oxford. See Jenkyns,and Dowling, "Ruskin'sPied Beauty." 9There continues to be quite a lot of disagreementover the distinction between hermaphroditismand androgynyin criticism today. Compare,for example, Black (the classical Greek ideal of beauty is sexually indeterminate)and Weil ("That androgynyhas often functioned as a conservative, if not a misogynistic,ideal is evident in the ... tradition of dual-sexedbeings that can be traced at least as far back as ... Plato and Ovid" [2]). l°Analyzing the chapteron "Lacedaemon"in Platoand Platonism(1893), Dowling notes the way in which Pater "banishesthe . . . feminine term in the opposition" between Ionians and Dorians ("Ruskin's"4). 11Fallenon hard times after the scandal ignited by his arrestfor sodomy, Solomon did in fact duringthe 1870s sell off some of the letters about flagellation and other perversitieswhich Swinbure had addressedto him from the mid-1860s to the very early 1870s. Consequently, Swinbure took the high moral ground in a letter to EdmundGosse (15 October 1879): "As long as I can feel that I may count... on the steady friendshipof honourablegentlemen, I will not for very shame's sake so far forego my own claim to a sense of self-respect as to fret my heartstrings... over ... [Solomon]who is now a thing unmentionablealike by men and women, as equally abhorrentto either-nay, to the very beasts-raising money by the sale of my letters to him in past years"(Letters4: 107). The strong claims of homosociality ("the steady friendship of honourablegentlemen") and the equally strong pull of homosexual panic ("a thing unmentionable" and "abhorrent")are especially clear here. On Pater'shomosexual liaisons at Oxford and the specter of blackmail,see Inman.
Works Cited Adams, JamesEli. "Gentleman, Dandy, Priest:Manliness and Social Authority in Pater'sAestheticism."EnglishLiteraryHistory59 (1992): 441-66. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "Discoursein the Novel." The DialogicImagination:Four Essays.Ed. and trans., Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson.Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-422. Black, Joel. "The Aesthetics of Gender: Zeuxis'Maidens and the HermaphroditicIdeal."Fragments: Incompletionand Discontinuity.Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman.New York: New York LiteraryForum,1981. 189-209.
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Busst,A. J. L. "The Imageof the Androgynein the Nineteenth Century"in RomanticMythologies. Ed. Ian Fletcher. London:Routledge, 1967. 1-95. Christ, Carol T. "'The Hero as Man of Letters':Masculinityand Victorian Nonfiction Prose." Morgan,Victorian.19-31. Clements, Patricia.Baudelaireand theEnglishTradition.Princeton:Princeton UP, 1985. DeLaura, David J. "Reading Inman Rereading Pater Reading: A Review Essay."The Pater Newsletter26 (1991): 2-9. Dellamora, Richard. MasculineDesire:The SexualPoliticsof VictorianAestheticism.Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990. Dowling, Linda. Languageand Decadencein theVictorianFin de Siecle.Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. . "Ruskin'sPied Beauty and the Constitution of a 'Homosexual Code."' The Victorian Newsletter75 (1989): 1-8. Eco, Umberto. A Theoryof Semiotics.Bloomington:IndianaUP, 1979. Gay, Peter. The TenderPassion,vol. 2: The BourgeoisExperience:Victoriato Freud.New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Inman, Billie Andrew. "Estrangementand Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge."Paterin the 1990s. Ed. LaurelBrakeand Ian Small. Greensboro,NC: ELT, 1991. 1-20. Jenkyns,Richard. The Victoriansand AncientGreece.Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1980. Lang, Cecil Y. Introduction.The SwinburneLetters.New Haven: Yale UP, 1959. l:xiii-l. Levey, Michael. The Case of WalterPater.London:Thames, 1978. Mangan,J. A., and JamesWalvin, eds. ManlinessandMorality:Middle-ClassMasculinityin Britain and America,1800-1940. New York:St. Martin's,1987. Morgan, Thais E. "Male Lesbian Bodies: The Construction of Alternative Masculinities in Courbet, Baudelaire,and Swinburne."Genders15 (1992): 37-57. Genderand Power.New Bruns, ed. VictorianSagesand CulturalDiscourse:Renegotiating wick: RutgersUP, 1990. Studies:A Seriesof Essays.London:Macmillan, 1928. Pater,Walter. "Diaphaneite."Miscellaneous 215-22. . The Renaissance:Studiesin Art and Poetry.Ed. Donald L. Hill. Berkley:U of California P, 1980. Sedgwick,Eve Kosofsky."AcrossGender,Across Sexuality:Willa Cather and Others."Displacing Homophobia:Gay Male Perspectivesin Literatureand Culture.Ed. Ronald R. Butters,et al. Durham:Duke UP, 1989. 53-72. Epistemology of theCloset. Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1990. The Fine Arts as Literaturein Ruskin,Rossetti,and Stein, Richard L. The Ritualof Interpretation: Pater.Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1975. Sussman,Herbert."RobertBrowining's'FraLippoLippi'and the Problematicof a Male Poetic." VictorianStudies35 (1992): 185-200. Swinbure, Algemon Charles. "CharlesBaudelaire."vol. 13. The CompleteWorksof Algernon CharlesSwinburne.Ed. EdmundGosse and Thomas J. Wise. London: Heinemann, 1926. 417-27. "Notes on Designs of the Old Mastersat Florence."The CompleteWorksof Algernon CharlesSwinburne.vol. 15: 154-95. .The SwinburneLetters.6 vols. Ed. Cecil Lang. New Haven: Yale UP, 1959-62. Well, Kari.Androgynyand theDenialof Difference.Charlottesville:UP of Virginia, 1992. Wellek, Rene. A Historyof ModernCriticism,1750-1950. Vol. 4: The LaterNineteenthCentury. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965.
Judith Halberstam
TECHNOLOGIES OF MONSTROSITY: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
I. Once Bitten Twice Shy BYWAYOF AN INTRODUCTIONTO BRAMSTOKER'SDRACULA,I WANT TO TELLMYOWN STORY
about being consumed and drainedby the vampire.Reading Draculafor the first time yearsago, I thought I noticed something about vampirismthat had been strangelyoverlookedby critics and readers.Dracula,I thought, with his peculiar physique, his parasiticaldesires,his aversion to the cross and to all the trappingsof Christianity,his blood-sucking attacks, and his avaricious relation to money, resembledstereotypicalanti-Semitic nineteenth-century representationsof the Jew. Subsequentreadingsof the novel with attention to the connections in the narrativebetween blood and gold, race and sex, sexuality and ethnicity, confirmed my sense that the anti-Semite'sJew and Stoker'svampirebore more than a familyresemblance.The connection I had made began to haunt me; I uncovered biographicalmaterial and discovered that Stokerwas good friendswith, and inspiredby,RichardBurton,the author of a tract reviving the blood libel againstJews in Damascus.I read essaysby Stoker in which he railed against degenerate writers for not being good Christians. My conclusions seemed sound, the vampire and the Jew were related, and monstrosity in the Gothic novel had much to do with the discourseof modem anti-Semitism.1 Towardthe end of my preliminaryresearch,I came acrossa fantastic contemporarynews piece which reportedthat GeneralMills Cereal Company was being sued by the anti-defamationleague because Count Chocula, the children'scereal character,was depicted on one of their cereal boxes wearing a Star of David ("GeneralMills").2While I felt that this incident vindicated my comparisonof Jew and vampire,doubtsbegan to creep in aboutstabilizing this relationship. By the time my doubts had been fully expressedand confirmed by other readers,I discovered that, rather than revealing a hidden agendain Stoker'snovel, I had unwittinglyessentializedJewishness.By equating Jew and vampire in a linear way, I had simply stabilizedthe relationship between the two as a mirroring,but I had left many questions unanswered,
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indeed unasked,aboutthe productionof monstrosity,whether it be monstrous race, monstrousclass, or monstroussex.
II. Technologies of Monstrosity Attempts to consume Draculaand vampirismwithin one interpretive model inevitably produce vampirism.They reproduce,in other words, the very model they claim to have discovered.So, an analysisof the vampireas perversesexualityrunsthe riskof merelystabilizingthe identity of perversity, its relation to a particularset of traits. The comparisonbetween Jew and vampirestill seems interestingand importantto me but for differentreasons. I am still fascinatedby the occlusion of race or ethnicity in critical interpretations of the novel but I am not simplyattemptingnow to bringthose hidden facets to light. Instead I want to ask how the Gothic novel and Gothic monsters in particularproducemonstrosityas never unitary,but alwaysas an aggregateof race,class,and gender.I also want to suggestthat the nineteenthcentury discourseof anti-Semitismand the myth of the vampireshare a kind of Gothic economy in their ability to condense many monstroustraits into one body. In the context of this novel, Draculais otheress itself, a distilled version of all others producedby and within fictional texts, sexual science, and psychopathology.He is monster and man, feminine and powerful,parasitical and wealthy;he is repulsiveand fascinating,he exerts the consummate gaze but is scrutinizedin all things, he lives foreverbut can be killed. Dracula is indeed not simply a monster,but a technology of monstrosity. Technologiesof monstrosityarealwaysalso technologies of sex. I want to plug monstrosityand gothicization into Foucault's"greatsurfacenetwork" of sexuality "in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse,the formationof special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power" (History 105-06). Although Foucault does not talk about the novel as one of these "majorstrategiesof knowledgeand power,"the Gothic novel in my discussion will representa privilegedfield in the networkof sexuality.The novel, indeed, is the discursivearena in which identity is constructedas sexual identity;the novel transformsmetaphorsof otheress into technologies of sex, into machinic texts, in other words, that produceperverseidentities (see Armstrong). Foucault identifies the figuresof "the hystericalwoman, the masturbating child, the Malthusiancouple and the perverseadult"(105) as inventions of sex'stechnology. The vampireDracularepresentsall of these figures, economically condensing their sexual threat into one noticeably feminized, wildlyfertile, and seductivelyperversebody.He is the deviant or the criminal,
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the other againstwhom the normaland the lawful,the marriageableand the heterosexualcan be known and quantified.Draculacreeps"facedown"along the wall of the very "fortressof identity";he is the boundary,he is the one who crosses,and the one who knows the other side. But the otheress that Draculaembodies is not timeless or universal, not the opposite of some commonly understoodmeaning of "the human";the others Draculahas absorbedand who live on in him take on the historically specific contours of race, class, gender,and sexuality.They are the other side of a national identity that in the 1890s coincided with a hegemonic ideal of bourgeois Victorian womanhood. Mina and Lucy, the dark and the fair heroines of Stoker'snovel make Englishnessa function of quiet femininity and maternal domesticity. Dracula, accordingly,threatens the stability and the naturalnessof this equation between middle-classwomanhood and national pride by seducing both women with his particularlyforeign sexuality.3 To claim that Dracula'ssexuality is foreign, however, is already to obscure the specific construction of a native sexuality.Lucy,as many critics have noted, is violently punished for her desire for three men, and all three eventuallyparticipatein a ritualstakingof her vampiricbody.Mina represents a maternalsexuality as she nurturesand caters to the brave Englishmenwho are fightingfor her honor and body.The foreignsexualitythat confrontsthese women is defined in opposition to "normal"sexual functions; this forces the reader to annex "natural"and native sexuality. It is part of the power of Draculathat Stoker mergespathologicalsexualitywith foreign aspect and, as we shall see with reference to the insane Renfield, psychopathology.The vampire Dracula, in other words, is a composite of otherness that manifests itself as the horroressential to dark,foreign, and perversebodies. Dracula the text, like Dracula the monster, is multi-valenced and generates a myriad of interpretive narratives:narrativeswhich attempt to classify the threat of the vampire as sexual or psychological, as class-bound or gendered. The technology of the vampire'smonstrosity,indeed, is intimately connected to the mode of the novel's production.As JenniferWicke has argued,Draculais a veritable writing machine constructedout of diaries, letters, newspaperclippings, and medical case notes: "Dracula,drapedin all its feudalism and medieval gore, is textually completely au courant. Nineteenth-century diaristic and epistolary effusion is invaded by cutting-edge technology... " (470). The processof compilation is similarlycomplex:Mina Harker,as secretary,makes a narrativeof the variousdocuments by chronologically orderingthem and, where necessary,transcribingnotes froma primitive dictaphone. There is a markedsexual energy to the readingand writing of all the contributions to the narrative.Reading, for instance, unites the men and Mina in a safe and mutualbond of disclosureand confidence. After Mina listens to Dr. Seward'sphonographrecordingof his account of Lucy's
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death, she assureshim: "I have copied out the wordson my typewriter,and none other need now hear your heart beat as I did" (235). Seward, in his turn, reads Harker'sdiary and remarks,"afterreadinghis account ... I was preparedto meet a good specimen of manhood"(237). Later,Sewardpasses by the Harkers'bedroom and on hearing "the click of the typewriter"he concluded, "theywere hard at it" (237). Writing and reading,on some level, appearto provide a safe textual alternative to the sexuality of the vampire. But at the same time they producethe vampireas the "truth"of textual labor; he is a threat which must be diffusedby discourse. The novel presentsa body of work to which, it is importantto note, certain characterscontribute.The narrativeepisodesare recorded,tranonly scribed,addended,edited and compiledby fourcharacters-Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward,Mina Harker,and Lucy Westenra.The control of the narrative by these characterssuggeststhat the textual body,for Stoker, like the bodies of the women of England,must be protected from any corruptingor foreign influence. Van Helsing, Lord Godalming, Quincey Morris, Renfield, and Dracula have only recordedvoices in the narrative;at no time do we read their accounts of events. Three of these men are foreigners-Van Helsing is Dutch, Quincey Morris is American, and Dracula is East European.Lord Godalming,we assume,has Englishbloodbut as an aristocrathe is of a different classthan the novel'snarrators.Renfield,of course,has been classifiedas insane and his subjectiveexistence is alwaysre-presentedby Dr. Seward. The activities of reading and writing, then, are crucial in this novel to the establishmentof a kind of middle-classBritishhegemony and they are annexed to the production of sexual subjectivities.Rather than being seen as essential to only certain kinds of bodies, sexuality is revealed as the completely controlled, mass-productionof a groupof professionals-doctors, psychiatrists,lawyers.Writing,or at least who writes,mustbe controlledsince it representsthe deploymentof knowledgeand power;similarly,readingmust be authorizedand censored.When Mina falls under the vampire'sinfluence and he begins to readher mind, she is barredfromreadingthe Englishgroup's plans. Similarly,the Englishmen eliminate Dracula'scontaminatedopinions from the narrative;he has no voice but is read and written by all the other charactersin the novel. By examining Stoker's novel as a machine-text, then, a text that generatesparticularsubjectivities,we can atomizethe totality of the vampire's monstrosity,examine the exact natureof his parasitism,and make an assault upon the naturalnessof the sexuality of his enemies. By readingDraculaas a technology of monstrosity,I am claiming a kind of productivityfor the text, a productivitywhich leads to severalavenues of interpretation.But this does not mean that monstrosityin this novel is constantly in motion. Everynow and then it settles into a distinct form,a propershape, and in those moments
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Dracula'sfeaturesare eminently readableand suggestive. Dracula is likened to "mist,"to a "redcloud,"to a ghost or a shadowuntil he is invited into the home, at which point he becomes solid and fleshly. As flesh and blood, the vampire embodies a particularethnicity and a peculiarsexuality.
III. Gothic Anti-Semitism, 1: Degeneracy Gothic anti-Semitism makes the Jew a monster with bad blood and it defines monstrosity as a mixture of bad blood, unstable gender identity, sexual and economic parasitism,and degeneracy.In this section I want to flesh out my premise that the vampire as representedby BramStoker bears some relation to the anti-Semite'sJew. If this is so, it tells us nothing about Jews but everything about anti-Semitic discoursewhich seems able to transform all threat into the threat embodied by the Jew. The monster Jew produced by nineteenth-century anti-Semitism representsfears about race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire: this figure is gothicized or transformed into an all-purposemonster. By making a connection between Stoker'sGothic fiction and latenineteenth-centuryanti-Semitism,I am not claiming a deliberateand unitary relation between fictional monster and real Jew; rather I am attempting to make an argumentabout the process6f othering. Othering in Gothic fiction scavenges from many discursive fields and makes monsters out of bits and pieces of science and literature:Gothic monsters are over-determined,and open thereforeto numerousinterpretations,preciselybecause they transform the fragmentsof othernessinto one body.That body is not female, not Jewish, not homosexual, but it bears the marksof the constructions of femininity, race, and sexuality.4 Dracula,then, resemblesthe Jew of anti-Semitic discoursein several ways:appearance,his relation to money and gold, his parasitism,his degeneracy,his impermanencyor lack of allegiance to a fatherland,and his femininity. Dracula'sphysiognomyis a particularlyclear cipher for the specificity of his ethnic monstrosity.When JonathanHarkermeets the Count at Castle Dracula in Transylvania,he describes Dracula in terms of a "very marked physiognomy":he notes an aquiline nose with "peculiarlyarched nostrils," massiveeyebrowsand "bushyhair,"a cruel mouth and "peculiarlysharpwhite teeth," pale ears which were "extremelypointed at the top," and a general aspect of "extraordinarypallor"(18). This description of Dracula,however, changes at various points in the novel. When he is spotted in London by Jonathan and Mina, Draculais "a tall thin man with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard"(180); similarly,the zookeeper whose wolf disappearsafter a visit by Dracula to the zoological gardens, describes the
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Count as "a tall thin chap with a 'ook nose and a pointed beard"(145). Most descriptionsinclude Dracula'shard cold look and his red eyes. Visually,the connection between Draculaand other fictional Jews is quite strong.For example, George Du Maurier'sSvengali, the Jewishhypnotist, is depicted as "a stick, haunting, long, lean, uncanny, black spider-cat" with brown teeth and matted hair and, of course, incrediblypiercing eyes (108). Fagin, the notoriousvillain of CharlesDickens'sOliverTwist,also has matted hair and a "villainous-looking and repulsive face" (105). While Dracula'shand has "hairsin the center of the palm"and long, pointed nails, Fagin'shand is "a withered old claw."EduardDrumont, a French National Socialist who, during the 1880s, called for the expulsion of the Jews from France in his newspaperLibreParole,noted the identifyingcharacteristicsof the Jew as "the hooked nose, shifty eyes, protrudingears,elongated body,flat feet and moist hands"(qtd. in Mosse 156). Facesand bodiesmarkthe Other as evil so that he could be recognized and ostracized.Furthermore,the face in the nineteenth century which supposedlyexpressedJewishness-"hooked nose, shiftyeyes,"etc.-was also seen to express criminalityand degenerationwithin the pseudo-sciencesof physiognomy and phrenology."Nineteenth century science," writes Sander Gilman, "tried to explain the special quality of the Jew, as perceived by the dominant Europeansociety, in terms of a medicalizationof the Jew"("Sexology" 87). Degeneration and Jewishness,one could thereforeconclude (or indeed ratifyscientifically),were not farapart.Stokerdrawsupon the relation between degenerationand physiognomyas theorizedby CesareLombrosoand Max Nordau for his portrayalof Dracula. Duringthe finalpursuitof the vampire,Van Helsing,Seward,and Mina carryon a discussionof criminaltypes.VanHelsingdefinesDraculaas a criminal with "achild-brain... predestinateto crime"(361). As Van Helsing struggles to articulatehis ideas in his brokenEnglish,he turnsto Mina for help. Mina translatesfor him succinctly and she even adds sourcesfor the theory Van Helsing has advanced:"the Count is a criminaland of criminaltype. Nordau and Lombrosowould so classifyhim, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind" (361). Since Mina the provincial school teacher mentions Lombrosoand Nordau, we may conclude that their ideas of criminalityand degeneracywere familiarto an educated readershipand not merely a small medical community.As Mina points out, Lombrosowould attributeDracula's criminal disposition to "an imperfectlyformed mind,"or, in other words, to what Van Helsing calls a "child-brain."Lombrosonoted similaritiesbetween the physiognomiesof "criminals,savagesand apes"and concludedthat degenerateswere a biologicalthrowbackto primitiveman (xv). As it developed in the nineteenth century, criminal anthropology focussedquite obviouslyupon the visualaspectsof pathology.Scientistswould
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catalogue and demonstratepropensitiesfor degenerativebehaviorby reading bodies and faces. These practices confirm that racial stereotypingdepends upon the visual.And racialdegeneracy,with its close ties to a social Darwinist conception of human development, also connects with sexual degeneracy.In describingthe medicalizationof sex, Foucaultdescribesa progressivelogic by which "perversion-hereditary-degenerescence" (History 118) became the basisof nineteenth-centuryscientific claims aboutthe dangerof undisciplined sexuality.Sexual perversions,within this chain, ariseout of inheritedphysical weaknesses and lead, potentially, to the decline of future generations. Furthermore,Foucaultclaims, theorizingdegenerescenceor degenerationas the result of hereditaryperversion takes the "coherent form of a state-directed racism"(119). Elsewhere,Foucaultarguesthat modem anti-Semitismdeveloped, "in socialist milieus, out of the theory of degeneracy"(224). During an interview with Alain Grosrichard,Guy Le Gaufey,andJacques-AlainMiller,the subject of vampiresarisesout of a discussionof the nobility and what Foucaultcalls "the myth of blood" (222). In relating blood as symbolic object to the development of racialdoctrinesof degeneracyand heredity,Foucaultsuggests that the scientific ideology of race was developed by the Left ratherthan by the Right. Lombroso,he points out, "wasa man of the Left."Le Gaufey asks: LE GAUFEY:Couldn't one see a confirmationof what you are saying in the nineteenth century vogue for vampire novels, in which the aristocracyis always presented as the beast to be destroyed?The vampireis alwaysthe aristocratand the saviora bourgeois ... FOUCAULT:In the eighteenth century,rumorswere alreadycirculatingthat debauched aristocrats abducted little children to slaughter them and regenerate themselves by bathing in their blood. The rumourseven led to riots. (223)
When Le Gaufey again emphasizesthat this theme develops as a bourgeois myth of that class'soverthrowof the aristocracy,Foucaultresponds,"Modem antisemitismbegan in that form"(223). I have described this discussion at length to show how one might begin to theorize the shift within the Gothic novel from the threat of the aristocratto the threat of the degenerateforeigner,from the threat of money to the threat of blood. The bad blood of family, in other words, is replaced by the bad blood of race, and the scientific theory of degeneracy produces and explains this transition. While neither Le Gaufey nor Foucault determines the role playedby the Gothic novel in producingthese new categories of identity, I have been arguing that Gothic fiction creates the narrative structurefor all kinds of gothicizations across disciplinary and ideological boundaries."Gothic"describesa discursivestrategywhich producesmonsters as a kind of temporarybut influentialresponseto social, political, and sexual problems.And yet, Gothic, as I have noted, alwaysgoes both ways. So, even as Gothic style creates the monster, it calls attention to the plasticity or
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constructed nature of its creation and thus calls into question all scientific and rationalattemptsto classifyand quantifyagents of disorder.Such agents, Gothic literaturemakes clear, are invented, not discovered,by science.
III. Gothic Anti-Semitism, 2: Jewish Bodies/JewishNeuroses I am calling modem anti-Semitism "Gothic"because in its various forms-medical, political, psychological-it too unites and thereforereproduces the threat of capital and revolution,criminalityand impotence, sexual power and gender ambiguity,money and mind, within an identifiableform, the body of the Jew.In TheJew'sBody,Gilman demonstrateshow nineteenthcentury anti-Semitismreplacedreligiousanti-Judaismwith this pseudoscientific constructionof an essentiallycriminalizedand pathologizedJewishbody: The very analysisof the nature of the Jewish body, in the broaderculture or within the culture of medicine, has alwaysbeen linked to establishingthe difference (and dangerousness) of the Jew.This scientific vision of parallel and unequal "races"is part of the polygenetic argumentabout the definition of "race"within the scientific culture of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century it is more strongly linked to the idea that some "races"are inherently weaker, "degenerate,"more at risk for diseases than others. (39)
In Dracula,vampiresare preciselya race and a family that weakens the stock of Englishnessby passingon degeneracyand the diseaseof blood lust. Dracula as a monster/masterparasitefeeds upon Englishwealth and health. He sucks blood and drainsresources;he alwayseats out. JonathanHarkerdescribesthe horrorof finding the vampiresated in his coffin after a good night'sfeed: the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-redunderneath;the mouth was redderthan ever, for on the lips were gouts of freshblood, which trickledfromthe comers of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burningeyes seemed set amongst the swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneathwere bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creaturewere simply gorgedwith blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion. (54)
The health of the vampire,his full cheeks and glowing skin, of course,comes at the expense of the women and childrenhe has vamped.Harkeris disgusted not simplyby the spectacle of the vampirebut also by the thought that when the Count arrivesin Englandhe will want to "satiatehis lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless"(54). At this juncture,Harkerpicks up a shovel and attemptsto beat the vampire-monsterinto pulp. The fear of a mob of parasitesfeeding upon the social body drives Harkerto violence because the parasiterepresentsthe idle and dependent other, an organismthat lives to feed and feeds to live.5
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Dracula is surroundedby the smell or odor of awful decay as though, as Harkerputs it, "corruptionhad become itself corrupt"(265). When Harker and his band of friendsbreak into Carfax, Dracula'sLondon home, they are all nauseatedby a smell "composedof all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood" (265). Similarly, a worker who delivered Dracula'scoffins to Carfax tells Seward, "That 'ere 'ouse guvnor is the rummiest I ever was in. Blyme! ... the place was that neglected that yer might 'ave smelled ole Jerusalemin it" (240). The workeris quite specific: to him the smell is a Jewishsmell. Like the diseasesattributedto the Jews as a race, bodily odors,people assumed,clung to them and markedthem out as different and indeed repugnantobjects of pollution.6 Parasitismwas linked specifically to Jewishness in the 1890s via a numberof discourses.In businesspractices in London'sEast End, Jews were vilified as "middlemen"who lived off the physical labor of English workingclass bodies. In a Spectatoressay entitled "The Dread of the Jew" we find contemporaryreferencesto Jews as "a parasiticalrace with no ideals beyond the precious metals"(see also Jones). Jews were also linked to the spreadof syphilis,to the pseudoscientificdiscourseof degeneration,and to an inherent criminalitythat could be verified by phrenologicalexperiments.The Jewish body, in other words,was constructedas parasite,as the differencewithin, as unhealthy dependence, as a corruptionof spirit that reveals itself upon the flesh. Obviously,the horrorgeneratedby the repugnant,disease-riddledbody of the vampire bears great resemblance to the anti-Semite's "Jewishbody" describedby Gilman as a construction of the nineteenth-century culture of medicine. But the Jewish body does not only bear the burdenof a scientific discussionof "race."In its incarnationsas vampireand madman,the Jew also producesrace as a psychologicalcategory.Race, in other words,may manifest itself as an inherent tendency toward neurosis, hysteria, or other so-called psychologicaldisturbances.While this may seem completely in keeping with the largermotives of nineteenth-century race ideology-the division of humanity into distinct groups-in fact the psychologizationof race has particularly insidious effects. It obscures the political agenda of racism by masqueradingas objective description and by essentializingJewishnesswith relation to particularkinds of bodies, behaviors, and sexualities. Dracula'sblood bond with the insane Renfield providesa particularly powerfullink between his character,the racial and psychologicalstereotypes of Jews, and Gothic anti-Semitism. Seward'sinteractions with the insane Renfield fulfill a strangefunction in the novel; while, one assumes,Renfield should furtherdemarcatethe distance between normal and pathological, in fact, Seward constantly compareshimself to his patient. "Am I to take it," pondersSeward,"that I have anything in common with him, so that we are, as it were, to stand togetherr' (114). Renfield'sfrequentviolent outburstsand
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his habit of eating insects convinces Seward, temporarily at least, that Renfield'sinsanity resemblesrationalityonly by chance. Renfield'sobsessive behavior involves trappingflies to feed to spidersand spidersto feed to birds which he then consumes."Ishall have to invent a new classificationforhim," Seward decides, "and call him a zoophagous(life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorbas many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to of course is a term that achieve it in a cumulative way"(75). "Zoophagous," may just as easily be appliedto Dracula,and so the diagnosismade by Seward on Renfield connects the pathology of one to the other. Gilman shows how nineteenth-century sexologists markedthe Jews as particularlyprone to insanity.Arguingthat the race was inherentlydegenerate and that degenerationwas perpetuatedby inbreeding,Krafft-Ebingand Theodore Kirchhof,among others, suggestedthat, in Gilman'swords, "Jews go crazybecause they act like Jews"("MadMan" 590). We may apply this dictum to Draculawith interestingresults:Renfield is viewed as crazywhen he acts like Dracula (when he feeds upon other lives), and Dracula is implicitly insane because his actions are identical to those that keep Renfield in the asylum.In Stoker'snovel, vampirismand its psychoticformof zoophagy both make a pathology out of the threats posed to rationality by excessive consumption and its relation to particularsocial and sexual habits. The asylum and Carfax,therefore,the homes of madmanand vampire,sit in the heart of London as disciplinaryicons, remindersto the readerof the consequences of over-consumption. In several of his famousTuesdaylessons at Salpatriere,Dr.Jean-Martin Charcot remarkedupon the hereditarydisposition of the Jews to certain nervous diseases like hysteria."Jewishfamilies,"he remarkedduringa study of facial paralysis,"furnishus with the finest subjectsfor the study of hereditary nervous disease" (qtd. in Goldstein 536). In an article on psychiatric anti-Semitism in France at the turn of the century, Jan Goldstein has analysed interpretationsof the Jewswithin the human sciences to show how supposedlydisinterestedand objective studies fed upon and into anti-Semitism. Charcot'spronouncementson the Jewsand hereditarynervousdisease, for example, were often used by anti-Semites to prove the degeneracy of that race. Similarly,Charcot's work on "ambulatoryautomatism"was used by his student Henry Meige to connect the Jews, via the myth of the WanderingJew, with a particularform of epilepsy which induced prolonged somnambulismin the subject. The restlesswanderingsof the Jews, [Meige]seemed to say, had not been caused supernaturally,as punishment for their role as Christ-killers,but rather naturally,by their strong propensityto nervous illness. The Jews were not so much an impiouspeople as a constitutionally defective one. (Goldstein 543)
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The pathology of the Jews,accordingto anti-Semitism, involved an absence of allegiance to a Fatherland,a propensityfor economic opportunism,and thereforea lack of social moralityand, in general,a kind of morbidnarcissism or selfishness. Dracula'sneed to "consumeas many lives as he can," his feminized because non-phallic sexuality,and his ambulismthat causes him to wander farfromhome in searchof new blood markshim with all the signs of a Jewish neurosis.As the prototypeof the wanderer,the "strangerin a strange land," Dracula also exhibits the way that homelessnessor rootlessnesswas seen to undermine the nation. The threat posed by the wanderer,furthermore,is clearly identifiedby Stoker within the novel as a sexual threat.The nosferatu is not simply a standardreincarnationof Gothic's WanderingJew,but rather an undead body, a body that will not rest until it has feasted upon the vital fluids of women and children, drained them of health, seduced them, and transformedthem into a growing legion of pervertsand parasites. In "The Uncanny," Freudwrites about the roots of the uncanny in the lack of place (148). He goes on to reveal the mother'sgenitalia as a primal uncanny place, a place of lack, a site that generatesfearand familiarity.Being buriedalive, Freudsuggests,appearsin fiction as "the most uncanny thing of all" but this fear simply transformsa more pleasurableand familiar fantasy, that of "intra-uterineexistence" (151). The uncanny aspect of the vampire, however, is not reducible to an oedipal scene because "home"in the 1890s was precisely an issue resonating with cultural and political implications. Coming or going home, finding a home, was not simply a compulsive return to the womb; it involved nationalist, imperialist,and colonialist enterprises. "Homelessness"in relation to the Jews became an issue with particularresonance in Englandin the 1890s when approximately10,000 EasternEuropean Jews fled the Tsar'sviolence and arrivedin England (see Holmes). Dracula, of course, has no home and wants no home; he carrieshis coffins (his only permanentrestingplace) with him and nests brieflybut fruitfullyin populated areas.Home, with its connotations of marriage,monogamy,and community, is preciselywhat Draculais in exile from, and preciselywhat would and does kill him in the end. His enemies seek to entrapand confine him, to keep him in one place separatefrom the native population. Mina Harker,the epitome in the novel of all that is good in woman, tells Seward that they must "ridthe earth of this terriblemonster"(235) and Van Helsing pronouncesDracula"abhorred by all, a blot in the face of God's sunshine;an arrowin the side of Him who died for man"(251). Draculalike the Jew and the Jew like the vampireis not only parasiticalupon the community'shealth and wealth, he is sick, nervous, a representationof the way that an unbalancedmind was supposedto produce behavior at cross-purposeswith nation, home, and healthful reproduction.
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The relation between Renfield and the vampire suggeststhat vampirismis itself a psychologicaldisorder,an addictive activity which in Renfield'scase can be correctedin the asylumbut in Dracula'scase requirespermanentexile, or the permanentconfinement of the grave.The equation of vampirismwith insanity implies an essential connection between progressivedegeneracy, hereditaryperversion,and a Gothic science fiction of race. IV. Gothic Sexuality:The VampireSex Dracula'sracial markingsare difficult to distinguish from his sexual markings. Critics have either excluded race from their discussion of his vampire sexuality or have discussed it merely as a function of his strange sexuality.7One critic, Sue Ellen Case, has attempted to locate the vampire within the tangle of race and sexuality.She is interested in the vampire in the nineteenth century as a lesbian vampire and as a markedlyqueer and outlawedbody.She also connects the blood lust of the vampireto the history of anti-Semitism and she opposes both lesbian and Jew within the vampiric form to a reproductiveor maternalsexuality.Case describesthe vampireas "the double 'she' in combination with the queer fanged creature.... The vampire is the queer in its lesbian mode" (9). Of course, vampiric sexuality as it appearsin Draculahas also been described as homoerotic (Craft) and as heterosexual exogamy (see Stevenson). So which is it? It is all of these and more: the vampire is not lesbian, homosexual, or heterosexual;the vampirerepresentsthe productionsof sexuality itself. The vampire, after all, creates more vampiresby engaging in a sexual relation with his victims, and he reproducesvampireswho share his specific sexual predilections. So the point really is not to figure out which so-called perversesexuality Draculaembodies;ratherwe should identify the mechanismby which the consumingmonsterwho reproduceshis own image comes to representthe construction of sexuality itself. Vampiresexualityblends powerand femininity within the same body and then marks that body as distinctly alien. Dracula is a perverse and multiple figure because he transformspure and virginal women into seductresses,producessexuality through their willing bodies. The transformations of Lucy and Mina stress an urgent sexual appetite; the three women who ambush Harker in Castle Dracula display similar voracity. Both Lucy and Dracula'swomen feed upon children: as nosferatu,buried and yet undead, Lucy walks the heath as the "BlooferLady"who lures children to her and then sucks their blood. This act representsthe exact reversalof a mother's nurturance.Crouching outside her tomb, Harkerand his friendswatch horrified as Lucy arrivesfresh from the hunt. "With a careless motion," notes Seward,"sheflung to the ground,callous as a devil, the child that up to now
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she had clutched strenuouslyto her breast,growlingover it as a dog growls over a bone" (223). Lucyis now no longerrecognizableas the virginalEnglish woman who had been engagedto marryLordGodalmingand the grouptakes a certain sexual delight in stakingher body,decapitatingher, and stuffingher mouth with garlic. When Mina Harkerfalls underDracula'sspell, he invertsher maternal impulse.The woman who, by day, nurturesall the men aroundher, by night drinks blood from the bosom of the King Vampire himself: "Her white nightdresswas smearedwith blood and a thin streamtrickleddown the man's bare breastwhich was shown by his tor-open dress"(298). Apart from the obvious reversal of Mina's maternal role, this powerful image feminizes Dracula in relation to his sexuality.It is eminently notable, then, that male but not female vampiresreproduce;Lucy and the three female vampires in Transylvaniafeed from children but do not create vampirechildren. Dracula alone reproduceshis form. Dracula, of course, also produces male sexuality in this novel as a composite of virility,good blood, and the desireto reproduceone's own kind. Male sexuality in this respect is a vampiricsexuality (and here I divergefrom Case'sclaim for vampirismas lesbianism).As critics have noted, the birth of an heir at the novel's conclusion, a baby boy named after all the men who fought for his mother'svirtue, signifiesa culmination of the transfusionscene when all the men give blood to Lucy'sdepleted body.Draculahas drunkfrom Lucy and Mina has drunkfrom Dracula,so paternityby implication is shared and multiple. Little Quincey'smany fathersare the happy alternative to the threat of many mothers, all the Bloofer Ladies who might descend upon children at night and suck from them instead of suckling them. Men, not women, reproducewithin this system;the female body is renderednon-productive by its sexualityand the vampirebody is distinguishedfromthe English male bodies by its femininity. Blood circulatesthroughoutvampiricsexuality as a substituteor metaphor for other bodily fluids (milk, semen); the leap between bad blood and perversesexuality,as Case points out, is not hardto make. Dracula'ssexuality makes sexuality itself a construction within a signifyingchain of class, race, and gender.Gothic sexuality,furthermore,manifestsitself as a kind of technology, a productiveforce which transformsthe blood of the native into the lust of the other-as an economy which unites the threat of the foreign and perversewithin a single monstrousbody. V. Gothic Economies A Gothic economy may be describedas a thrifty metaphoricity,one which, ratherthan simplyscapegoating,constructsa monsterout of the traits
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which ideologiesof race, class, gender,sexuality,and capitalwant to disavow. A Gothic economy also complieswith what we might call the logic of capitalism, a logic which rationalizeseven the most supernaturalof images into materialimagesof capitalismitself. To take a remarkableimage fromDracula as an example,readersmay recall the scene in Transylvaniaat Castle Dracula when JonathanHarker,searchingfor a way out, stumblesupon a pile of gold: The only thing I found was a greatheap of gold in one comer-gold of all kinds, Roman, and British,and Austrian,and Hungarian,and Greek and Turkishmoney, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground.None of it that I noticed was less than three hundredyearsold. There were also chains and ornaments,some jewelled, but all of them old and stained. (49)
This imageof dustyand unusedgold, coins frommanynations and old unwor jewels, immediatelyconnects Draculato the old money of a corruptclass, to a kind of piracyof nations and to the worstexcessesof the aristocracy.Dracula lets his plunderedwealth rot, he does not circulate his capital, he takes but never spends.Of course, this is exactly the method of his vampirism:Dracula drains but it is the band of English men and Van Helsing who must restore. I call this an instance of a Gothic economy because the pile of gold both makes Draculamonstrousin his relation to money and producesan image of monstrousanti-capitalism,one distinctly associatedwith vampirism.Money, the novel suggests,should be used and circulated;vampirismsomehow interferes with the naturalebb and flow of currency,just as it literally intervenes in the ebbing and flowing of blood. Marx himself emphasizedthe Gothic nature of capitalism,its investment in Gothic economies of signification,by deployingthe metaphorof the vampireto characterizethe capitalist:"Britishindustry... vampire-like,could but live by sucking blood, and children'sblood too" (FirstInternational79). The modem worldfor Marxis peopledwith the undead;it is, indeed, a Gothic world haunted by spectersand ruled by the mystical nature of capital: Capital posits the permanence of value (to a certain degree) by incarnating itself in fleeting commoditiesand taking on their form,but at the same time changing them just as constantly. . . . But capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labouras its soul, vampire-like.(Grundrisse646)
While it is fascinatingto note the coincidence here between Marx'sdescription of capital and the power of the vampire, it is not enough to say that MarxusesGothic metaphors.Marx,in fact, is describingan economic system, capitalism,which is positively Gothic in its ability to transformmatter into commodity,commodity into value, and value into capitalism.And, Gothic capitalism,like the vampire,functions throughmany different,even contradictory,technologies. Indeed, as TerryLovell points out in ConsumingFiction, capitalismdemandscontradiction and it predicatesa radicallysplit self-con-
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tradictorysubject. The capitalist subject is both "a unified subject who inhabits a sober, predictable world and has a stable self-identity,"and a self "open to infatuationwith the waresof the capitalist marketplace" (15-16). The nineteenth-century novel, Lovell claims, "is deeply implicated in this fracturewithin capitalism'simaginaryselves"(16). Obviously,the "imaginary selves"of the vampireand his victims exemplify fracturedand contradictory subjectivities: both vampire and victim are figured repeatedly in desiring relations to both production (as writersand breeders)and consumption (as readersand as prey). Vampirism,Franco Moretti claims, is "an excellent example of the identity of fear and desire"(100). He too points to the radical ambivalence embodied within the Gothic novel and to the economy of methaphoricity within Gothic monstrosity.For Moretti, Frankenstein'smonster and Dracula are "totalizing"monsters who embody the worker and capital respectively. Draculais gold broughtto life and animatedwithin monopoly capitalism.He is, as we have discussed,dead laboras describedby Marx.While Moretti finds Dracula'smetaphoricforce to be inextricablybound to capital, he acknowledges that desire unravelsand then confuses the neat analogy.The vampire representsmoney, old and new, but he also releases a sexual response that threatens bourgeoisculture from below. Like Frankenstein'smonster, Dracula'sdesigns upon civilization are read by his enemies as the desire to father a new race. Harker fears that Draculawill "createa new and ever-wideningcircle of semi-demonsto batten on the helpless"(54). More than simply an economic threat, then, Dracula's attack seems to come from all sides, from above and below; he is money, he is vermin, he is the triumphof capital, and the threat of revolution. Harker and his cronies create in Draculaan image of aristocratictyranny,of corrupt power and privilege, and of foreign threat in orderto characterizetheir own cause as just, patriotic, and even revolutionary. In one interactionbetween Harker'sband of men and the vampire,the Gothic economy that Draculaembodiesis forcefullyliteralized.Having broken into Dracula'shouse, the men are surprisedby Dracula'sreturn.In the interaction that follows, the vampireis tured into the criminalor interloperin his own home. Harkerslashes at him with a knife: "A second less and the blade had shorn throughhis heart.As it was, the point just cut the cloth of his coat, making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank-notesand a streamof gold fell out" (323-24). Draculais driven back by Harkerwho holds up a crucifixand then forcedout of the window,but not before"he swept under Harker'sarm" in orderto grasp"a handfulof the money fromthe floor."Draculanow makes his escape:"Amidthe crashand glitterof the fallingglass,he tumbledinto the flaggedareabelow.Through the sound of the shiveringglass I could hear the 'ting' of the gold, as some of the sovereignsfell on the flagging"(324).
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This incident is overdeterminedto say the least. The creaturewho lives on a diet of blood, bleeds gold when wounded; at a time of critical danger,the vampiregrovelsupon the floor for money, and then his departure is trackedby the "ting"of the coins that he dropsduringhis flight. Obviously, the metaphoric import of this incident is to make literal the connection between blood and money,and to identifyHarker'sband with a differentand more mediated relation to gold. Harkerand his cronies use money and they use it to protect their women and their country:Draculahoardsgold and he uses it only to attack and seduce. But there is still more at stake in this scene. A Gothic economy, I suggested,may be identified by the thriftinessof metaphorand so the image of the vampirebleeding gold connects not only to Dracula'sabusesof capital, his avarice with money, and his excessive sexuality, but it also identifies Dracula within the racial chain of signification that links vampirism to anti-Semitic representationsof Jewishness.The scene vividly resonateswith Shylock'sfamousspeech in The Merchantof Venice: I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,subject to the same diseases... if you prick us do we not bleed?if you tickle us do we not laugh?if you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?(3.1.55-63).
BramStoker was stage managerfor the 250 performancesof The Merchantof Venicein which Henry Irving,his employer,played Shylock and so it is not so strange to find echoes of Shakespeare'squintessentialoutsiderin Stoker's Dracula. But Stoker epitomizes the differences between Dracula and his persecutors in the very terms that Shylock claims as common ground. Dracula'seyes and hands, his sense and passionsare patently alien; he does not eat the same food, he is not hurt by the same weaponsor infected by the same diseases, and when he is wounded, "pricked,"he does not bleed, he sheds gold. In the characterof Dracula,Stoker has invertedthe Jew'sdefense into a damning testimony of otherness.8 The traditionalportrayalof the Jew as usureror banker,as a parasite who uses money to makemoney,suggeststhe economic baseof anti-Semitism, and the relation between the anti-Semite'smonsterJew and Dracula.I have shown that within a certain politics of monstrositythe Jew and the vampire are both degenerate,that they both representparasiticalsexualityand economy, that they both unite blood and gold in what is fearedto be a conspiracy against nationhood. We might interpretMoretti'sclaim that the vampire is "a totalizing monster"in light of the Gothic economy which allows Draculato literalize an anti-capitalist, an exemplaryconsumer and the anti-Semite'sJew. With regardto the latter category,Dracula is foreignnessitself. Like the Jew, his
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function within a Gothic economy is to be all difference to all people, his horrorcannot and must not be pinned down exactly. Marx's equation of vampire and capital and Moretti's analysis of Dracula and gold must be questioned in terms of the metaphoricityof the monster.As Moretti rightly points out, in the literatureof terror"the metaphor is no longer a metaphor:it is a characteras real as the others" (106). The Gothic, indeed, chartsthe transformationof metaphorinto body,of fear into form,of narrativeinto currency.Draculais (ratherthan represents)gold, his body bleeds gold, it stinks of corruption,and it circulates within many discoursesas a currencyof monstrosity.The vampire'ssexualityand his power, his erotic and economic attraction are Gothic in their ability to transform multiple modes of signification into one image, one body, one monster, a totality of horror.
VI. Biting Back The technology of Draculagothicizes certain bodies by making monstrosityan essential component of a race, a class, a gender,or some hybridof all of these. I have tried to show that gothicization, while it emerges in its most multiple and overt form in the Gothic novel, is a generic feature of many nineteenth-centuryhuman sciences and ideologies. Gothic economies produce monstrouscapitalist practice, Gothic anti-Semitism fixes all difference in the body of the Jew, and Gothic fiction produces monstrosityas a technology of sexuality,identity,and narrative.But, I have also tried to make the case for the productivityof Gothic fiction. Ratherthan simplydemonizing and making monstrousa unitaryother, Gothic is constantly in motion. The appeal of the Gothic text then partlylies in its uncanny power to reveal the mechanisms of monster production. The monster, in its otherworldlyform, its superatural shape, wearsthe tracesof its own construction. Like the bolt through the neck of Frankenstein'smonster in the modem horrorfilm, the technology of monstrosityis written upon the body. And the artificialityof the monster denaturalizesin turn the humannessof his enemies.9 Dracula in particularconcerns itself with modes of production and consumption, with the proximity of the normal and the pathological, the native and the foreign. Even though by the end of the novel the vampire is finally staked, the monster is driven out of England and laid to rest, even though monogamous heterosexuality appears to triumph in the birth of Quincey Harker,the boy is as much the son of Draculaas he is of the "little band of men" (400) afterwhom he is named. Blood has been mixed after all; and, like the "mass of material"which tells the story of the vampire but contains "hardlyone authentic document,"Quincey is hardly the authentic
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reproductionof his parents.Monster,in fact, mergeswith man by the novel's end, and the boy reincarnatesthe dead American, Quincey Morris,and the dead vampire,Dracula,as if to ensurethat, fromnow on, Englishness,rather than a purity of heritage and lineage, or a symbol for national power, will become nothing more than a lost moment in Gothic history. Universityof California,San Diego
Notes The writing and rewritingof this essay has consumed the attention of many helpful readers.I need to thank Nancy Armstrongfor readingmore versions of it than she'd care to remember.I also want to thank BarbaraCruikshank,Heini Halberstam,RoddyReid, MartyRoth and Leonard Tennenhouse for suggestionsand criticism. lIn her generally sympatheticbiographyof Burton, Fawn Brodie notes that Burton backed up his accusations against the Jewish population of Damascus with no historical evidence whatsoever, and he simply "listeda score or so of such murdersattributedto Jewsfrom 1010 to 1840" (266)! Burtonwas unable to find a publisherfor his book because the subject matterwas considered too inflammatoryand libellous. When the book did finally appear (posthumously) in 1898, thanks to the efforts of Burton'sbiographerand friend W. H. Wilkins, an appendix entitled "HumanSacrificeamongstthe Sephardimor EasternJews"had been edited out. Wilkins, in addition to editing Burton'swork, was very involved in the debate about Jewish immigration to England in the 1890s. See Wilkins, "Immigrationof Destitute Foreigners,""Immigration Troubles,""Italian,"Alien. See also Stoker, "Censorship,"for the claim that degeneratewriters have "in their selfish greedtried to depravewhere others had striven to elevate. In the language of the pulpit, they have 'crucifiedChrist afresh"'(485). 2The caption notes that the offensive picture of Draculaon the cereal box came from Bela Lugosi's1931 portrayalof him in The House of Dracula.General Mills respondedto the protest by saying that "it had no intention of being antisemitic and would redesign the covers immediately." 3In an excellent essayon the way in which "foreignnessmergeswith monstrosity"in Dracula, John Stevenson claims that the threat of the vampire is the threat of exogamy, a threat of interracialcompetition. 4In "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism," Homi Bhabha describes the way that colonial discourse creates stereotypes as fetishes. This equation between stereotypeand fetish allows Bhabhato discusscolonialism as a discipline, as, in other words, a "non-repressiveform of knowledge"which can sustain opposing views and contradictions.I find Bhabha'sformulationto be veryhelpful in thinking throughthe productive nature of othering and the way othering alwaysalso constructsselves. 5In an anti-Semitic tract called EnglandUndertheJews,Joseph Banister,a journalist,voiced some of the most paranoidfearsdirected against an immigrantJewishpopulation, a population steadily growingin the 1880s and 1890s due to an exodus fromEastEurope.Banisterfearedthat the Jews would spread"bloodand skin diseases"among the general populationand he likened them to "rodents,reptilesand insects."Banister,whose book went throughseveraleditions, made pointed referenceto Jewsas parasitescalling them "Yiddishbloodsuckers" (qtd. in Holmes39-42). 6On blood accusation and its long history, see Albert S. Lindemann. 7On vampiresexuality see Senf, but also Demetrakopoulos,Phyllis Roth; and Wasserman. 8The "poundof flesh"scene in TheMerchantof Venicealso connects suggestivelywith Stoker's Dracula.Shylock, afterall, is denied his pound of flesh by Portia'sstipulationthat "in the cutting
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it, if thou dost shed/ One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods/ Are (by the laws of Venice) confiscate/ Unto the state of Venice" (4.1.305-08). 9In the recent film by FrancisFordCoppola, BramStoker'sDracula,it must be observedthat this Draculawas precisely not Stoker's,not the nineteenth-century vampire, because Coppola turned this equation of humannessand monstrosityaround.While I am claiming that Dracula's monstrositychallenges the naturalnessof the "human,"Coppola tried to illustratehow Dracula's "humanity"(his ability to love and to grieve) alwaysoutweighs his monstrouspropensities.
Works Cited Armstrong,Nancy. DesireandDomesticFiction:A PoliticalHistoryof theNovel. New York:Oxford UP, 1987. Bhabha, Homi. "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism."Literature,Politics,Theory.Ed. FrancisBarker.London: Methuen, 1986. Brodie, Fawn. The Devil Drives:A Life of Sir RichardBurton.New York:Norton, 1967. Burton, Richard.TheJew, the Gypsyand El Islam.Ed. W. H. Wilkins. London, 1898. Case, Sue Ellen. "Trackingthe Vampire."differences3.2 (Summer 1991): 1-20. Charcot, Jean-Martin.Le,ons du Mardi.1889. Paris, 1889. Craft, Christopher."'KissMe With Those Red Lips':Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula."Speakingof Gender.Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York:Routledge, 1989. Demetrakopoulos,Stephanie. "Feminism,Sex Role Exchanges,and Other Subliminal Fantasies in BramStoker'sDracula."Frontiers:A Journalof Women'sStudies3 (1977): 104-13. Dickens, Charles. OliverTwist. 1837. New York:Penguin, 1985. Du Maurier,George. Trilby.New York:HarperBrothers,1894. SelectedInterviewsandOther Foucault,Michel. "The Confession of the Flesh."Power/Knowledge: Writings1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Gordon, Leo Marshall,John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York:Pantheon, 1980. 194-228. .The Historyof SexualityVolume 1: An Introduction.Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978. Freud,Sigmund. "The Uncanny." On Creativityand the Unconscious:Paperson the Psychologyof Art, Literature,Love, Religion.Trans.Joan Riviere. New York:Harper, 1958. 122-161. "GeneralMills Puts Bite on Dracula'sNeckpiece." MinneapolisStarand Tribune17 Oct. 1987: 5B. Gilman, Sander L. TheJew's Body.New York:Routledge, 1991. . "The Mad Man as Artist: Medicine, History and Degenerate Art."Journalof ContemporaryHistory20 (1985): 575-97. ."Sexology, Psychoanalysis,and Degeneration: From a Theory of Race to a Race to Theory."Degeneration:The DarkSideof Progress.New York:Columbia UP, 1985. 72-96. Goldstein, Jan. "The WanderingJew and the Problemof PsychiatricAnti-Semitism in Fin-deSiecle France."Journalof Contemporary History20 (1985): 521-52. Holmes, Colin. Anti-Semitismin BritishSociety, 1876-1939. New York:Holmes, 1979. Jones, Henry Arthur. "The Dread of the Jew."Spectator83 (1899): 338-39. ."Middlemen and Parasites."The New Review8 (1983): 645-54. Kirchhof,Theodore. Handbookof Insanityfor Practionersand Students.New York, 1983. Krafft-Ebing,Richard von. PsychopathiaSexualis:A Medico-ForensicStudy.New York:Pioneer Publications, 1950. Lindemann,Albert S. TheJew Accused:ThreeAnti-SemiticAffairs(Dreyfus,Beilis,Frank)18941915. Cambridgeand New York:CambridgeUP, 1991. of CesareLombroso. Lombroso,Cesare. Introduction.CriminalMan Accordingto theClassifications Ed. Gina Lombroso Ferrero.Science Series. 27. Eds. EdwardLee Thordike and F. E. Beddard.New York:G. P. Putman'sSons, 1911.
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Lovell, Terry.ConsumingFiction.London and New York:Verso, 1987. Marx, Karl.Grundrisse:Foundationsof theCritiqueof PoliticalEconomy.Trans. MartinNicolaus. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1973. .The FirstIntenationaland After. 1864-70. Ed. and Intro. David Ferbach. New York: Random House, 1976. Moretti, Franco.SignsTakenFor Wonders:Essaysin theSociologyof LiteraryForms.Trans. Susan Fischer,David Forgacs,and David Miller. London:Verso, 1983. Mosse, George L. Towardthe Final Solution:A Historyof EuropeanRacism.New York:Fertig, 1978. Nordau, Max. Degeneration.1892. New York:D. Appleton, 1895. Roth, Phyllis. "SuddenlySexual Women in BramStoker'sDracula."LiteratureandPsychology27 (1977): 113-21. Senf, Carol A. "Dracula:Stoker's Response to the New Woman." VictorianStudies26 (1982): 33-49. Stevenson, John. "A Vampire in the Mirror:The Sexuality of Dracula."PMLA 103 (1988): 139-49. Stoker, Bram."The Censorshipof Fiction."The NineteenthCentury47 (1908): 479-87. .Dracula. 1897. New York:Bantam, 1981. Wasserman,Judith. "Women and Vampires:Draculaas a Victorian Novel." MidwestQuarterly 18 (1977): 392-405. Wicke, Jennifer."VampiricTypewriting:Draculaand its Media."ELH 59 (1992): 469-93. Wilkins, W. H. The Alien Invasion.London, 1892. "The Immigrationof Destitute Foreigners."NationalReview16 (1890-91): 114-24. "ImmigrationTroublesof the United States."TheNineteenthCentury30 (1891): 583-95. . "The Italian Aspect." The DestituteAlien in GreatBritain.Ed. Arnold White. London, 1892. 146-67.
Ed Cohen
THE DOUBLE LIVES OF MAN: NARRATION AND IDENTIFICATION IN THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY REPRESENTATIONOF EC.CENTRIC MASCULINITIES
Men had to do fearfulthings to themselves before the self, the identical, the purposiveand virile nature of man was formed. Horkheimerand Adomo
I. Citings/Sitings THE EMERGINGFIELDOF FOR THE LAST DECADEOR SO, ONE PROJECTTHAT HAS DELIMITED
Lesbianand Gay Studies seeks to specify the conditions of possibilitywithin which the category of the "homosexual"emerged into Euro-Americancultures and to explore the effects which this emergence consequently engendered.Whether its originsaresituatedsomewherein the earlymodem period, the sixteenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, the search for an ur-form of homosexuality has constituted a critical part of a contemporaryeffort to destabilize the "naturalness"-if not the "normalness"-of what we might now call procreativeheterosexuality as the unmarkedposition from which all other forms of sexual practice can be understoodas (at best) detours or deviations. Elaboratingthe crucial disarticulationsof sex and gender undertaken by feminist critics and historianson the one hand, and genealogistsof sexuality on the other, recent writings within Lesbian and Gay Studies (including my own) have attempted to examine the multiple determinants which crystallized in and as "homosexuality"in order to illuminate the complex historical processes whereby such categorical denominations are fixed as attributesof persons, acts, and/or bodies. Through such intellectual work, not only has the contemporary "common sense" understanding of human sexualityas readilylocatablesomewherebetween the poles of"hetero" and "homo"been assiduouslychallenged, but the perception that sexuality
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is a separableaspect of post-Enlightenmentsocial formationshas been demonstrated to be analyticallyinsufficient. Perhapsnowhere has this analytic efforthad more impact than in the recent writings in Victorian Studies where scholars influenced by sex and gender critiqueshave augmentedtheir earlierconsiderationsof social determinants like class and status to shift both the domains and methodologies encompassedby this periodizingrubric.Not coincidentally,Lesbianand Gay Studies has flourishedamong those workingon the nineteenth century precisely becausethe hegemonic constellationsof economic, familial,social, and political relations that were articulatedby andas the emergingdominance of the Britishbourgeoisiepivoted so centrallyaroundwhat Michel Foucaulthas labeled the "truth"of sexuality.'Unfortunately,following Foucault,most of us workingon "queer"topics in the Victorianperiodhave focusedour analyses at the level of what we might call "governmental"discourses(in the broadest possible sense) such as law, medicine, education, religion, literature,and the arts,as well as those nineteenth-centurydiscoursesdesignatedas the "human sciences" (biology, sociology, anthropology,criminology,sexology, psychology, etc.). As a consequence, while we have begun to develop a relatively comprehensive sense of the ways in which a privileged range of sexualized meanings and practicessystematicallycoalesced within these discourses,offering subject positions that legitimated the asymmetricaldistribution of power and resources,we have a much more rudimentarynotion of how what I would call sexually "ec-centric"subjects lived out their dis-positions, let alone how they made sense of them.2Moreover,we may have been remissin not adequatelyconsideringthe complex formsof narrativizationthat emerged at the end of the nineteenth centuryas such "ec-centrics"began to articulate the possibilityof identifyingas one who might affirmthe position of a subject whose desire is not directed acrossthe putative oppositions of sex and gender-i.e., as what we currently denominate as lesbian, gay, or queer. In particular,I am now interested in exploring the dynamic between narration and identification as it crystallizedin a number of late nineteenth-century contexts because it gesturestowardsthese contemporarypersonaland political "identities"in as much as they are explicitlyreproducedby the processof narrativizationcolloquiallyknown as "comingout." Hence, I would like to considerhere two autobiographicaltexts written in the 1880s that open "out" onto this contemporarynarrativepossibilityin orderto begin to explore the contrapuntal play between govermentality and creativity through which new possibilitiesfor sexual pleasuresand sexual meaningscoalesced into the stories that we now use to signifywhat it means to desireaffective and erotic intimacies with people of the "same"sex. Beforemoving on to this historicallysituatedanalysis,however,allow me to makea few anachronisticremarksabout"comingout."Since the 1960s,
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"coming out" has served as a rubricfor the processesof self-affirmationand self-definition through which men and women begin to denominate themselves as "gaymen" and "lesbians"in their relations with themselves, their families, friends, loved ones, and communities-processes which have been central to the creation of both gay and lesbian identities and gay and lesbian collectivities. But more than just a process of emergence and nomination, "comingout" is also a way of telling a life story.Indeed, to some extent the "comingout story"becomes the basis for both the productionand reproduction of an identity to which the narratingindividual lays claim precisely by pronouncing this story to be his or her own. We might even say that the conventional understandingof "comingout" as an event precipitatedby an emergent sexual identity is a metaleptic representationof such transitional moments: that the "event"of "comingout" per se is only cognizable within a story which retrospectively fixes a narrative identification, reproducing what I'd call an "identityeffect"by constituting it as the position fromwhich the story both makes sense and gives pleasure. Schematically, the coming out tale is often described as depicting a passagefromthe darkness,ignorance,and repressionof the non-self-affirming "closet" to the colorful, illuminated, self-affirming freedom of gay/lesbian/queer identity. A recent Keith Haring graphic designed to advertise National Coming Out Day makes the implications of this movement clear: in the center of the drawing is a large black rectangle (which symbolically doubles as both the closet and the grave) from which a typically dynamic Haring figure emerges into the boldly colored, vividly alive world of queer identity. Sort of like what happens to Dorothy when she lands in Oz and suddenlythe movie goes into Technicolor.The significanceof this imaginary movement from darknessinto color, however, is not simply one of "conversion," "enlightenment,"or "liberation,"for the transformativeforce of the coming out story is not just prospective but also retrospective.That is, the effective dynamic of the narrative structure gives shape not just to the landscape into which the figure steps but just as prominently to the black box from which the figure has emerged, now retroactively defined both as having a (safe) regularshape and as being (safely) confined to the past. The combination of these temporal shapings, then, is articulated through the subjectposition of the "I"who tells the coming out tale such that this "telling I" can assumehis or her "sexualidentity"preciselyby offeringthe imaginary (somatic) space within and acrosswhich this story is inscribed.3 While coming out was clearly not a possibility available to the late Victorians, it is remarkablethat a numberof men in the period attempted to signify their sense of ec-centricity with respect to the prevailingunderstanding that "sexualinstinct"naturallyand normallydirected desire towardsthe "oppositesex"by retrospectivelynarrativizingwhat they describedas a "dou-
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bleness"within themselves. In other words,as these men sought to represent their heretoforeunrepresentableaffective and erotic experiences, they articulated stories within which their manifest male-ness was overwritten by another narrativetrajectorythat sought to circumventthe binarylogistics of sex and gender. In order to do so, however, it was necessary for them to interruptthose earlier definitions of self-consistent, self-identified "character," inscribed as both a sociological and a narratologicalcategory, which establishedthe standardfor "proper"male subjectivityin the period. Hence, these late-Victorianmen engenderednew possibilitiesfor articulating-if not embodying-sexual and emotional relations outside the naturalizedopposition of sex by imaginingnew narrativemodes that encompassednon-unitary forms of male subjectivity. Moreover, when Freud took up these complex narrativesas he found them in the sexological literatureto which he turned for his earliest accounts of male homosexuality,he used them as a point of departurefor his psychoanalyticprojectpreciselybecausethey emplotted the (temporal) dynamic we now recognizeas a "splitting"within the psyche-a splitting that he believed to be the generalizedcondition of human subjectivity. Freud'sseminal theorizationof sexuality,then, is predicatedupon a set of narrative strategies that were emerging during the last decades of the nineteenth century in texts written by Europeanmen who were strugglingto articulate-in thestoriestheycalledtheirown-experiences, affects,meanings, desires, sensations, and pleasures that their cultures defined not only as non-normative or "unnatural,"but quite literally as "unrepresentable."By focusing on these variousnarrativestrategiesand locating my inquiryat the level of story,I hope to suggestthat those late nineteenth-century representations which renderedmale subjectivityas "split"may also have contributed to the development of those narrativepossibilitiesthroughwhich ec-centric sexualities continue to be affirmed,even today.
II. "Dipsychia,"or Representing"the Evolution of a CharacterSomewhat StrangelyConstituted" When, in 1889, at the age of fifty, the nineteenth-century litterateur and critic John Addington Symondssat down to write an account of his life, he believed that he was engaged in a "foolish"project that was destined to remain unpublished.Yet having previouslytranslatedthe autobiographiesof the sixteenth-centuryItaliansculptorBenvenuto Cellini and the eighteenthcentury Venetian nobleman and playwrightCarlo Gozzi, Symonds felt "it [would be] a pity, after acquiringthe art of the autobiographerthrough the translationof two masterpieces,not to employ my skill upon a rich mine of psychologicalcuriositiesas I am conscious of possessing"(16). Describinghis
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self-reflectiveundertakingin a letter to his friendGrahamDakyns,Symonds foregroundedwhat he believed to be both the (f)utility and the anomalousness of his endeavor: I have begun scribblingmy own reminiscences.This is a foolish thing to do, because I do not think they will ever be fit to publish.I have nothing to relate except the evolution of a charactersomewhat strangelyconstituted in its moral and aesthetic qualities. The study of this evolution, written with the candor and precision I feel capable of using, would I am sure be of interestto psychologistsand not without its utility. There does not exist anything like it in print; and I am certain that 999 men out of a thousand do not believe in the existence of a personality like mine. Still it would be hardly fair to my posterity if I were to yield up my vile soul to the psychopathologicalinvestigators.(16)
To those of us who read Symonds'sMemoirsat the end of the twentieth century, a little more than 100 years after it was first written and less than fifty yearssince it was made accessible to "bonafide scholars"by the London Library(to which it was ultimately bequeathed), his circumspectionmight seem quaintly anachronistic.Todaythe unmentionable aspectsof Symonds's "somewhat strangely constituted" personality, i.e., his erotic and affective intimacies with other men, have long since passedfrom the pages of obscure medico-forensic texts to become the subjects of one of the fastest growing sectors of the mass-marketpublishing industry (Fein). Indeed, even in the few remainingyearsof his own life, as he began to gather case histories for a collaborativeproject with Havelock Ellis-which appearedin English under Ellis'sname as SexualInversion(1897) afterSymonds'sdeath in 18934-Symonds came to realizethat his experienceswere not quite as unique as he once thought them. Nevertheless, Symonds was right in his assertion that "there does not exist anything in print like"his Memoirs,since until the last decade of the nineteenth century,the possibility of conceiving-let alone disseminating-a life story that included experiences of sexual pleasure and emotional connection with members of one's own sex certainly exceeded the representationallimits which defined male "character"simultaneouslyas a narratologicaland as a gendered, social category. By taking up his pen to produce what (in the preface to the manuscript) he tellingly calls "this piece of sterile self-delineation" (29), then, Symondswas quite consciouslyengagingin an activity of self-characterization that moved athwartthe historical and narrativeconstraintswhich had heretofore circumscribedthe possibilities for (his) autobiography.The preface itself, written in May of 1889 and ambiguouslyaddressedto an unforeseen future reader,underscoresthe problem embedded in Symonds'shis-story: Carlo Gozzi called his memoirs "useless,"and published them (as he professes) from motives of "humility."Mine are sure to be more useless than his; for I shall not publish them; and it is only too probablethat they will never be published-nobody's humility
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or prideor pecuniaryinterestsbeing likely to gain any benefit from the printingof what I have veraciouslywritten concerning myself. (29)
Here the discrepancybetween the italicized"I"who "shallnot publish"and the unmarked"I"who has "veraciouslywritten concerning myself' marksout the dichotomy which Symonds'saccount of "a life without action" attempts both to reconcile and to represent. Inscribing a disjunction between the realmsof public "value"(here aligned with utility, morality,pecuniaryinterest) and private "truth,"the text mediates between these loci classiciof the Victorian middle class(es), but in a problematicand hence unprintableway. For,ratherthan privatetruth bearingwitness to-or at least shoringup-the ideological legitimacyof public value, in Symonds'scase the division within his awarenessimplicitly calls into question the nominal self-consistencyof (male) "character"per se. To understandthe context for Symonds'sinterrogatory-if not profoundly "ec-centric"dis-position-we need to recall the extent to which the imbricationof gender and sexuality as "natural"manifestationsof male "character"werecentral to the reproductionof middle-class (male) subjectivity.5Unlike those middle-classmen of the same period who engaged in sexual relations with women outside or beyond the confines of monogamous, procreative, marital intercourse, whose "private"behavior could either be interpretedas a morallyreprehensiblemanifestationof failed "character"or as embodying the contradictions between gender and class character(s)ought to fix, Symondsfoundhimself expectationswhich "proper" faced with a characterologicaldilemma that foregroundedthe irreconcilability of his (sexual) contradictions (see Thomas; Cominos). Indeed, as the nineteenth-century articulationsof class and gender increasinglysought to reproducenormative (middle-class)masculinityby figuringit as that which was antithetical to and necessarilyexclusive of sexual desiresfor other men, they made this exclusionarycriterion the psychological basis for possessing appropriateformsof male subjectivity.Hence, the "veracity"which impelled Symonds's autobiographicalproject also necessitated his interruptingthe prevailing (discursive)standardsthat constituted the unitarymale subjectas the quintessentialpolitical, economic, and sexualagent in orderto encompass Symonds's"propensities,""sensibilities,"and "audacities"within his "own" story (Symonds 54). In a chapter notably entitled "Containing materialwhich none but studentsof psychologyand ethics need peruse,"Symondsintroducesthe terms within which he will "describethe evolution of a somewhat abnormally constituted individual" (61). As this phrase suggests, Symonds implicitly evokes the biologistic naturalizationof ideologicalcategoriesendemic to late nineteenth-centurybourgeoisculturein orderto gesturebeyond them toward "[his]inborn craving after persons of [his] own sex" (63). Indeed, the invocation of "evolution"both here and in the letter to Graham Dakyns cited
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above ("the evolution of a charactersomewhat strangelyconstituted in its moral and aesthetic qualities") indicates how crucial this "biological"conceptualization of "the natural"was for Symonds'spersonal/developmental account, preciselybecauseit foregroundedthe narrativedimension embedded in Darwin'sincreasinglypopular,"scientific"explanation-as its catachrestic deployment in the phrase "evolution of a character"illustrates.6When he moves beyond this largelyrhetoricalusage of "scientific"discourse,however, Symonds explicitly juxtaposesthe biologically inscribedwritingsof the early sexologists ("in short I exhibited many of the symptomswhich Krafft-Ebing and his school recognizeas hereditaryneuroticismpredisposingits subject to sexual inversion"[64]) to the theory of inborn gender "inversion"developed by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, one of the earliest apologists for sexual relations between men, and decides that both are insufficient to representthe (narrative) complexity of his own example.7On the one hand he assertsthat his self-evident literaryproductivityand his success as an intellectual belie the nosological characterizationderivedfromKrafft-Ebingwhich would cast him as "a victim of conceptional neurotic malady"(64). On the other hand, his affirmationthat "morallyand intellectually,in characterand taste and habits, I am more masculine than many men I know who adore women" (65) contradicts Ulrichs's famous claim that "umings"possess a woman's soul trappedin man'sbody (animamuliebrisvirilecorporeinclusa).Hence Symonds concludes: [I]t appearsto me the abnormalityin question is not to be explained either by Ulrichs's theory,or by the presumptionsof the psychologicalpathologists.Its solution mustbe sought far deeper in the mysteryof sex, and in the variety of type exhibited by nature. For this reason,a detailed studyof one subject,such as I mean to attempt, may be valuable. (65)
Positioning himself in relation to Krafft-Ebing'sclassificationsand Ulrichs's apologies, Symonds indicates that the particularitiesevinced through his "study"will serve as a necessarysupplementto the categorizationsdeveloped by those who would invoke the nature embedded in biology either to pathologize or to normalizesexual and emotional intimacies between men. Thus, it is the life history itself as an "evolutionary"narrativerepresenting "the variety of type exhibited by nature" that becomes the occasion for explicating the "abnormalityin question"insofar as this textualization provides the possibilityfor a "deeper"inquirybeyond and behind the limitations of biologically-derived"theories"and "presumptions." In the chapter devoted to the "FirstPeriod of Boyhood, 1851-4," which immediately follows, Symonds tries to elucidate the complexities of his own personalityby offeringexamplesof earlyfantasiesthat retrospectively confirm the trajectoryof his desire for other men as he now "knows"it (i.e., at the point when he undertakeshis autobiography).However, it is only
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through this kind of metaleptic maneuver that Symonds can produce the effect of making such "self-"knowledge his "own"in the first place. For it is by conferringan "originary"legitimacyon these anecdotes as partof a developmental narrativethat he confirmsthe integrityof the narrative'stelling I as an effect of these anterior"causes."Recalling, among other instances, a recurrentdream about "the beautiful face of a young man, with large blue eyes and waving yellow hair which emitted a halo of misty light," a waking obsessionwith a photographof the PraxiteleanCupid, "the impressionsmade by Shakespeare'sAdonis and Homeric Hermes,"and a ratherexplicit sexual wish that "somehonest youth or comrade,a sailor or groom or a laborer... would have introduced me to the masculine existence I craved in a dim shrinkingway"(77-78), he asserts: The love of a robustand manly lad, even if it had not been wholly pure,must have been beneficial to a boy like me. As it was, I lived into emotion through the brooding imagination;and nothing is more dangerousand unhealthy than this.8
Appealing implicitly to the prevailingbourgeoisideology which readilyand unambiguouslyequated social propriety-of both the class and gendered varieties-with somatic and economic well-being, Symonds here "inverts" this cultural logic on his own behalf. Whereas contemporarymedical and moral literature would have universally condemned the "love" Symonds desired as a perniciousembodimentof all that threatened "healthy"middleclass masculinity,Symonds locates the "lived"danger in the imbricationof "emotion"and "imagination"where the latter becomes the displacedsite of the former.Throughthis chiasmus,a space of self-contradictionwas produced "in"and as Symonds's"character"so that he found himself simultaneously conforming with and yet deviating from the class and gender proprieties which ideologically and materially circumscribedhis behavior-if not his subsequent"story": The result of my habitual reserve was that I now dissembledmy deepest feelings, and only revealed those sentiments which I knew would pass muster.Without meaning to do so, I came to act a part, and no one knew what was going on inside me.... Feeling that I was growing and must grow in solitude to an end I could not foresee, which no one could help me shape, and which I was myself impotent to determine, I allowed an outer self of commonplace cheerfulness and easy-going pliability to settle like a crust upon my innerandrealcharacter.... Congenital qualitiesand external circumstanceacted together to determine a mentalduality-or shall I call it duplicity-of which I became awarewhen it had taken hold upon my nature. (81-82, my emphasis)
Structurally,the possibility of Symonds'srenderinghis life as a story necessitates that he constitute his "character"as a divided one, positing the notion of "mentalduality"in orderto explain a mediation between "inner" and "outer,""real"and "artificial,"that not only makessense to the telling I
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but quite literally producesit. In order to constitute a subject position from which the (inner) truth he ascribesto his "deepestfeelings"can be made to coincide both spatiallyand temporallywith the (outer) values that not only abhorredthem but in fact mandated their criminialization,Symonds must rend the consistency of subjectivityas it has been socially constituted so that he can create an opening in the (social) imaginarywithin which his "unrepresentable"feelings and desires can be signified.9Hence, somewhat later in the Memoirs,Symonds reiteratesthe necessity for this conceptual bifurcation even more explicitly: The distinction in my characterbetween an inner and real self and an outer and artificial self, to which I have alreadyalluded, emphasizeditself during this period [his last years at Harrow].So separate were the two selves, so deep was my dipsychia, that my most intimate friendsthere ... have each and all emphaticallytold me they thought I passed through school without being affected by, almost without being aware of, its peculiar vices. And yet those vices furnisheda perpetualsubjectof contemplation and casuistical reflection to my inner life. (95-96)
Coining the word "dipsychia"to describe the subjective experience induced by the all-male world of the public school-an institution which was specifically designed as a factoryfor producingconsistent (bourgeois)male "character"-Symonds indicates that it was the discrepancybetween his "real," "inner"obsession with the schoolboys' "peculiarvices" and his "outer,""ardenial of them that gave rise to the painful tificial,"and yet thoroughly "proper" "distinction in [his] character"(see Gagnier;Cohen Talk35-86). The play here on the word "distinction"seems critical for Symonds'spurpose,since it was precisely by "distinguishing"himself as "outwardly"embodying the virtuous ideals of his class and gender that he "inwardly"distinguished his "character"into "twoseparateselves."Conversely,what binds these "separate selves" together is the narrative which Symonds constructs retrospectively "to describeas accuratelyand candidlyas I was able a type of character,which I do not believe to be exceptional, but which for various intelligible reasons has never yet been properly analyzed"(182). Hence what is at stake in Symonds'sunprintableMemoirsis how to representa "manof no mean talents, of no abnormaldepravity,whose life has been perplexedfrom first to last by passion-natural, instinctive, healthy in his own particularcase-but morbid and abominable from the point of view of the society in which he livespersistent passion for the male sex" (182). The effective solution Symonds offers to the representationalcrisis engendered by his passionate dilemma seems to be: only as a doublelife. Since the "subject"I want to explore in this essay is the "doubleness" which seems to have inhabitedthe representationof male sexualec-centricity written at the end of the Victorian era, it is not my intention to dwell on
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Symonds's text at further length here. I want, therefore, to interrupt my analysis at this point to remarkon what I take to be exemplaryabout this autobiography.By the end of the 1880s, John Addington Symonds had alreadydistinguishedhimself as a man of letterswho was morethan successful enough to supporthimself, his wife, and his children throughhis profession. Hence, when he took up his Memoirshe was thoroughly aware as both a scholar and a professionalauthor that his text transgressedthe conventional boundariesof representability.Nevertheless, he took time awayfrom writing other workswhich could have been publishedand for which he could have been remunerated-as he himselfnotes-in orderto complete the manuscript and then directedthose responsiblefor his estate to ensure its existence after his demise. What was of central concern to him in making these decisions was to provide a veraciousaccount of sexual desiresfor and sexual acts with members of his own sex-desires and acts which had heretofore been unarticulableas part of a life history. Fromour vantagepoint, however,it appearsthat Symondswas rather circumspect about the very issues which would seem to make his autobiographyhistoricallyremarkable.l0There is little if any of what we would today consider "explicit"discussionor descriptionof "sexuality,"as we can find it almost any weekday afternoon on Oprah, Phil Donahue, or Sally JessyRaphael. Hence, what now appearsmost salient about Symonds'stext is not so much its detailed depiction of"homosexual"(or even "homotextual")acts as the representationalstrategiesit usesin orderto addressthem at all. Symonds's notion of "dipsychia"is most critical, since it foregroundsthe necessity for splitting open the dominant characterizationof (bourgeoismale) subjectivity in orderto engendera narrativeaffirmationof sexual and emotional intimacies between membersof the same sex. Indeed, we could perhapsanachronistically nominate Symonds's Memoirsas the first "coming out story," precisely because it inscribeswhat in the rhetoricsof Lacan and Derridawe might call a "dehiscence"of the (male) subjectwhich is suturedmetaleptically by a narrativethat attributesmeaning and value to what had earlierappeared only as unrepresentable(see Lacan 4, 21). Moreover,it simultaneouslyengenders the narrator's"subjectivity"-or the text's telling I-as an effect of this narrativepractice and therebycreatesthe possibilityfor representingthis divided "masculinity"to others, even if only in the distant future.
III. The Case of the ImaginaryVulva Justaboutthe same time that Symondswasworkingon his unpublishable Memoirs,a less famous late-Victorianwas at work writing his own tale of two selves. The autobiographyof this anonymous Hungarianphysician
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appearsas Case 99 in the first English edition of Krafft-Ebing'sPsychopathia Sexualisunder the heading "AcquiredHomosexuality":"III.Degree:Stageof Transitionto Metamorphosis SexualisParanoia.""There it provides a painful of account an "imaginary"splitting within a bourgeois male yet compelling subject-a splitting that effects the complete transvaluation,if not transformation, of the subject's"own"body: "When a respectableman who enjoys an unusualdegreeof publicconfidence, and possessesauthority,must go about with his vulva-imaginary though it be ... what must all this be'? (212). Presentingthe self-descriptionof a middle-agedman, who was married,had fathered five children, had been a decorated military officer, was a well-established physician, and "fe[lt] like a woman in a man's form" (209), the poignant text develops a set of discursivestrategiesthroughwhich it seeks to represent "in" the author'sown person an experience of sexual dissonance which had hitherto been both unimaginable and unrepresentable.While today the designation "transsexual"seeks to convey an experience of gender dysphoriatowardwhich Case 99's unnamedauthorcan only gesture,situating this contemporarynotion of sexual "ambiguity"in proximityto psychological counseling, supportgroups,newsletters,hormone treatments,specialtyclothing stores, and gender reassignmentsurgery,neither this designation nor any of these options were even remotelyavailableto this late nineteenth-century "man."Indeed, so overwhelming is the pathos of his isolated conditionwhich even Krafft-Ebing,the sexual typologerpar excellence, has to admit is "unique"-that it is truly remarkablehe was able to record "his"story at all. Yet having read an earlier edition of PsychopathiaSexualis,the case's unnamedauthorfinds that the presenceof the numerousother "pathological" narrativesin Krafft-Ebing's "Medico-LegalStudy,"coupled with the absence of any depiction comparable to his experience of what he terms "extinguished"masculinity inspireshim to transcribehis own. Sir I must next beg your indulgencefor troublingyou with my communication.I lost all control, and thought of myselfonly as a monster,beforewhich I myselfshuddered.Then yourworkgave me courageagain;and I determinedto go to the bottom of the matter,and examine my past life, let the resultsbe what they might. It seemed a duty of gratitudeto you to tell you the result of my recollection and observation,since I had not seen any descriptionby you of an analogouscase; and, finally, I thought it might perhapsinterest you to learn, from the pen of a physician, how such a worthlesshuman, or masculine, being thinks and feels under the weight of the imperativeidea of being a woman. (215)
This passagefrom the cover letter addressedto Krafft-Ebingilluminates the effects reproducedby the anonymous doctor's ability to narrativize-or, at least, to textualize-his dubiouslygendered "self."The author suggeststhat having had no frameof reference within which he could make sense of the "imperativeidea of being a woman," he considered himself a "monster"in his own mind, a characterizationhe opposes to the loss of that most "mascu-
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line" of attributes,the "lo[ss]of self control."However,on readingan earlier edition of Psychopathia Sexualis,he discoversboth a discourse(medico-forensic pathology) and a genre (the sexual case study) that enable him to recast his self-reflection such that he comes to imagine himself, at least insofaras his story constitutes a "case,"as occupying a gap within Krafft-Ebing'stext. Not surprisingly,then, the autobiographyconformsquite strictlyto the format that Krafft-Ebinghas developed throughout his compendious book. Moreover, it seems crucial that the author's"examination"-in both the self-reflexive and medical senses-is specificallysituated as being inscribed"from the pen of the physician." For it is his identification with the medical (con)text, and its interpellatinganalytic gaze, that providesthe author with the critical vantage point from which he can evaluate and therebyarticulate the significanceof his own experience.The act of textualization,then, is also a practice of transvaluationwhereby the delineated self-representationrecoups the author'stransgressive("monstrous")gender ideation on the side of the "masculine"norm: "Afterreadingyour work [and writing an addendum to it], I hope that, if I fulfill my duties as physician, citizen, father, and husband, I may still count myself among human beings who do not deserve merely to be despised"(215). Thus, by retrospectivelyconsideringhis "past life" and then inscribinghis "recollection[s]and observation[s]"in the shape of a case that serves to supplementthe text from which it formallyderives, the unnamed "physician,citizen, father, and husband"narrativelyinduces the effects of a gender(ed) coherence that simultaneouslyacknowledgesand seeks to remediatethe profounddehiscence in "his"(male) subjectivityfrom which the germ of his "female"self grows. Like Symonds'snarrative,Case 99 offersa historicalperspectiveon the development of the text's telling I that inscribesits putative "identity"in and as the sourceof the account which purportsto describeits unfolding.Yet the workof discursiveproductionhere is much morepronouncedthan in the other text, since the authorof this text also seeks to providea credibleportrayalof the trajectorywhich leadsacrossthe sexualdivide to "his"(fantasmatic)incarnation as a "woman."In orderto performthis "unnatural"explanatorylabor, the authornot surprisinglybeginsby foregroundingthe materialconsequences of his imaginaryactivities: "With a very active imagination-my enemy throughoutlife-my talentsdevelopedrapidly"(203). This sentence, the case's fourth, introducesa paragraphin which the authorexplains that despite his attemptsto "playthe boy,""I must have alreadybeen on the road to become just like a girl"(203). Using a metaphorof spatial displacementto gloss the temporaldistancebetweenhis birthas a malechild and his subsequent"female" incarnation,this formulationembedsthe originof the narrator's storyof gender transformationin the rhetoricalguise of a simile, "to become just ikea girl," semblancethat will subsequently throughwhich he constitutesan "imaginary"
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signifyan earlierstage in "his"development.What the ensuing narrativethen seeks to stabilize,throughits articulationof preciselysuch a teleologicalmovement, is the slippagebetween "becom[ing]likea girl"or "feelinglikea girl,"and "fe[eling]that I was a woman in an man'sform"(207). In orderto markthis shift from cross-sexsimilarityto equivalence,and eventually even "identity," the authorhas recourseto that most famousof nineteenth-centurythreatsto adolescentmasculinity,masturbation: My friendsloved me dearly;I hated only one, who seduced me into onanism. Shame on those days, which injuredme for life! I practiced it quite frequently,but in it seemedto myselflke a doubleman. I cannot describethe feeling; I think it was masculine,but mixed with feminine elements. I could not approachgirls; I feared them, but they were not strangeto me. They impressedme as being more like myself;I envied them. I would have denied myselfall pleasuresif, after my classes, at home I could have been a girl and thus gone out. Crinoline and a smooth-fitting glove were my ideals. With every lady'sgown I saw I fancied how I should feel in it-i.e., as a lady.I had no inclination towardsmen. (205, my emphasis)
By constituting the author's autoerotic relation to himself as the narrativesite of self-transformation,the case foregroundsthe overdetermined dynamic between somatic and imaginaryprocesses.Retrospectively,the author considers his "frequent"masturbatory"practice"as the source of an irremediable"injury"which producessuch a wound to his sense of self that it rendersimpossiblea unitarymale identification. Since his autoerotic relation to his body-and especially to that "part"which (psychoanalytically) purports to cover the (w)hole12-stands
out as the decisive moment in this
story,as the moment in which for the firsttime the narrator"seemedto myself like a double man," it foregroundsthe disparatedimensions of self (-representation) that must be made to cohere in order to reproduce"masculinity" as a stable subjectposition. Here the text's very firstuse of the signifier"man" is modified by the qualifier"double,"not to evoke a "hyper"or "redoubled" masculinity,but on the contraryto suggest that in its "doubling"(unitary) masculinity is in fact lessened-if not negated. While the author professes that the "feeling"of this ambiguous,"double"masculinityexceeds his ability to representit, he gesturestoward it by indicating that it mediates between what would or should otherwiseappearas a mutuallyexclusive genderbinary, masculine/feminine("masculine,but mixed with feminine elements"). Having offeredthis boundary-crossinginterpretation,the text then immediately moves to describe the author'srelations with "girls,"apparentlyusing these interactionswith the "oppositesex" as another index to clarifythe otherwise indescribableexperience of male "doubleness."Although he claims to have isolated himself from"girls"whom he feared,the writerneverthelessprofesses to have experiencedthem as "not strange"since he perceived them as "being more like myself."The rhetorical force of the negation "not strange"thus
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interruptsthe exclusivity of the male/female binary that would "normally" make each side of the opposition "strange"to the "other"-or, given that this was written within a sex/gendersystem that reproducedmale privilege, that would make women "strange"and "other"to men. Yet it is importantto note that the "likeness"assertedby the text is a "likeness"which inheres in the habits that signify not just "generic"femaleness but the femaleness of a particularclass and culture:"crinolineand a smoothly-fittingglove were my ideals."Using women'sclothing-and as we shall see, women'sanatomy-as a metonym for socially inscribedformsof femininity,the writercollapsesthe historicallydetermineddimensions of genderedrepresentationwith "sex"in order to reproducefor himself a position within the very binary that his narrative seemingly subverts.Hence, his disavowal of any erotic attraction towardother men, which might otherwise seem a non sequitur,follows from a cultural logic that necessarily situates all forms of (male) eroticism in relation to this sexual opposition-a logic that is reproducedby the (con)text in which this case appears,the section on "AcquiredHomosexuality"in PsychopathiaSexualis. As the writer continues to examine his life for evidence that would explain his anomalousness,he describeshis firstsexual experiences ("the girl had to treat me as a girl"),his continuing desiresto appearin female attire, his suicide attempts ("on account of unhappy circumstances, I twice attempted suicide"), his success as a military officer ("decorationswere not wanting,but I was indifferentto them"),his marriage("Imarriedan energetic, amiable lady, of a family in which female government was rampant"),the births of his five children, and his subsequentsubmissionto variouspainful neurasthenicailments.Throughoutall this, he assertshis ongoing, if increasingly problematic,identificationsas a man: I was wanting in only one respect:I could not understandmy own condition. I knew I had feminine inclinations, but believed I was a man. (206) Still, I always thought I was a man with obscure masculine feeling; and whenever I associated with ladies, I was still soon treated as an inexperienced lady. (206) [Flor I still believed that I was a depressedman, who would come to himself, and find himself out by marriage.(207)
However, three yearsprior to the writing of his case, the writer succumbed to his intensifying(perhapshysterical?)physicaldisabilities,"whichimpressed [him] as being female or effeminate."The recollected portrayalof this crisis of (male) subjectivityrequiresquoting here at length: But before this terribleattack of gout occurred,in despair,to lessen the pain of gout, I had taken hot baths, as near the temperatureof the body as possible. On one of
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these occasions it happened that I suddenly changed, and seemed to be near death. I sprangwith all my remainingstrengthout of the bath: I hadfelt exactlylikea womanwith libido.Too, at the time when the extract of Indian hemp came into vogue, and was highly prized,in a state of fear of a threatenedattack of gout (feeling perfectlyindifferentabout life), I took three or four times the usual dose of it, and almost died with haschisch [sic] poisoning. Convulsivelaughter,a feelingof unheardof strengthand swiftness,a peculiarfeeling in the brainand eyes, millionsof sparksstreamingfrom the brainthroughthe skin,--all these feelingsoccurred.But I couldnot forcemyselfto speak.Al at onceI saw myselfa womanfrom my toes to my breast;I felt, as before while in the bath, that the genitals had shrunken, the pelvis broadened,the breastsswollen out; a feelingof unspeakable delightcameoverme. I closed my eyes, so that at least I did not see the face changed. My physician looked as if he had a gigantic potato instead of a head; my wife had the full moon on her nates. And yet I was strong enough to briefly recordmy will in my note-book when both left the room for a short time. But who could describemy fright, when, on the next morning,I awokeandfound myselffeelingas if completelychangedinto a woman;and when, on standingand walking,I felt vulvaand mammae!When at last I raised myself out of bed, I felt that a complete transformationhad taken place in me . . . During the last sickness I had many visual and auditoryhallucinations,-spoke with the dead, etc.; saw and heard familiarspirits; felt likea doubleperson;but, while lying ill, I did not notice that theman in me had been The change in my dispositionwas a piece of good fortune which came over extinguished. me like lightning, and which, had it come with me feeling as I formerlydid, would have killed me; but now I gave myself up to it, and no longer recognizedmyself. (207-08, my emphasis)
While it would be possible to readthis narrativeof self-transformationeither as a displayof an underlyingpsychogenicdisorder,as Freuddoes in his famous interpretationof Schreber'sMemoirsof My NervousIllness,13or perhapsas a hallucinogenically induced conversion experience, I would like to focus instead on the narrativestrategiesthe text employs in order to give temporal shape to the cognitive and somatic processes that induce the effects of "femaleness"for the unnamed (male) subject. Initially, the passage foregrounds the narrator'sbody as the site of an intense affective investment, which the previousparagraphhad alreadyglossedas connoting a cross-gender identification, even possibly a form of ("hysterical"?)pregnancy:"Forabout three yearsI had a feeling as if the prostratewere enlarged,-a bearing-down feeling, as if giving birth to something; and, also, pain in the hips, constant pain in the back, and the like" (207). Moving fromthis associative,gendered nexus, the writerindicates that he underwenthydrotherapysessions in order to ameliorate his physical distressand during one of these sessions "it happened that I suddenlychanged, and seemed to be near death."Locating this critical moment of transitionduringan experience of immersion,which also becomes a moment "neardeath,"the storyof transformationconformsstructurallyto the paradigmof Christianbaptism (trans-substantiation?)in which the secularsubject "dies"in orderto be rebornin "the body Christ,"thereby recognizingthat these transformationsare at once profoundlymaterial and metaphysical.Indeed, in orderto narrativizethe kind of bodily metamorpho-
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ses which this text seeks to inscribe,it mustput into abeyancethe ontological and epistemological assumptionsthat ground post-Enlightenmentconcepts of personhood-and concomitantly of genderedsex-in the presumptionof somatic stability. Not surprisingly,then, in representinghis second and ultimate experience of gender transformation,an experience that radicallyreorganizes the gendered qualities he attributes to both his feelings and his anatomy, the author first describes the physiological effects induced by an overdose of hashish as interruptinghis "proper"(i.e., proprietary)identification with and as "his"body: "Convulsive laughter, a feeling of unheard of strength and swiftness, a peculiarfeeling in brain and eyes, millions of sparksstreaming from the brain through the skin,-all these feelings occurred."Abjuring the genitive case to modify bodily parts and attributes, the text depersonalizes physical experience, constituting it instead as a constellation of processes, intensities, affects, and images. Moreover, as the syntax of the description suggests,the usual attributionof agency to the linguistic subject is disrupted here, such that the narrator'sbody becomes simply the locus of inscription within which "all these feelings occurred."Concomitantly, "he"surrendershis linguistic ability altogether:"ButI could not force myself to speak." The "I" who loses the capacity to "force"speech here is the subject unmooredfrom the linguistic determinantsof"gender"and "person" that appear to naturalize his "identity" as a male subject. Hence, this inability to speak, which is significantly not a regression to the infant's "without speech," but rather the performativefailure of articulation, constitutes the narrativesegue into the "male"subject's"female"self-reflection: "All at once I saw myself a women from my toes to my breast; I felt, as before while in the bath, that the genitals had shrunken, the pelvis broadened, the breasts swollen out; a feeling of unspeakable delight came over me." As if inventorying his new properties, the writer surveys and reterritorializes"his" body parts, seeing in them the anatomical features which he as a doctor "knows"to belong to the mappingsof female anatomy. This practice, which, excepting the face, he elaborates further to include "vulva and mammae,"provides the paradigm for his ongoing "female" self-representation. By mobilizing a highly developed, highly idealized, medical knowledge of women's bodies, the writer effects a part-by-part substitution in orderto refashionthe genderedsignifieds he ascribesto "his" somatic signifiers, as the following passages illustrate: I feel like a woman in a man'sform; and even though I often am sensible of the man's form, yet it is alwaysin a feminine sense. Thus, for example, I feel the penis as a clitoris; the urethraas urethraand vaginal orifice, which alwaysfeels a little wet, even when it is actuallydry;the scrotumas labia majora;in short, I alwaysfeel the vulva. And all that that means one alone can know who feels or has felt so. But the skin all over my body
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feels feminine; it receives all impressions,whether of touch, of warmth, or whether unfriendly,as feminine, and I have the sensations of a woman. (209) Everyfour or five weeks, at the time of the full moon, I have the moliment of a woman for five days, physicallyand mentally,only I do not bleed; but I have the feeling of a loss of fluid;a feeling that the genitals and abdomenare (internally) swollen. A very pleasant periodcomes when, afterwardand later in the intervalfor a day or two, the physiological desirefor procreationcomes, which with all powerpermeatesthe woman. My whole body is then filled with this sensation, as an immersedpiece of sugaris filled with water,or as full as a soaked sponge. It is like this: first, a woman'slonging for love, and then, for a man; and in fact, the desire, as it seems to me, is more a longing to be possessedthan a wish for coitus. The intense natural instinct or the feminine concupiscence overcomes the feeling of modesty,so that indirectly coitus is desired. I have never felt coitus in a masculine way more than three times in my life; and even if it were so in general, I was alwaysindifferentabout it. But,duringthe last three years,I have experienced it passively, like a woman;in fact, often times the feeling of female ejaculation;and I alwaysfeel that I am impregnated.I am alwaysfatiguedas a woman is after it, and often feel ill, as a man never does. Sometimes it causes me so great pleasurethat there is nothing with which I can compareit; it is the most blissfuland powerfulfeeling in the world;at that moment the woman is simply a vulva that has devouredthe whole person. (210-11)
In the first passage, the writer's"female"self-representationderives froma one-to-one mappingbetween "analogous"elements of male and female anatomy.While recognizingthat no morphologicalchange has occured, the anonymousdoctor implicitly assertsthat the "visible"facts do not sufficiently account for what (s)he "feels."Moreover, (s)he assertsthat these "feelings" are only "knowable"experientially,positing a counter-empiricismthat supersedes a purelymedical gaze and constitutes authorityon the side of one "who feels or has felt so." The second passagemakesthe parametersof this somatic reterritorializationeven clearer:in orderto assertthe author'sfemale "nature," it invokes a widely accepted,medicallyvalidatedaccount which ideologically interpretsthe physiological changes associated with the reproductivecycle in the human female as evidence of a "intensenaturalinstinct"for reproduction. Yet in so doing it seems to defamiliarizethis "biological"narrativesince in this context these changes "occur"in the absence of a female anatomy. Thus, the text unwittingly illustratesthe convergence of socially and historically inscribedimperativesonto and into the somatic space and time of "the body"-imperatives which its own (authorial) "subject"calls into question. Noting the temporal coordination of his female "cycle"with lunar movements, a conjuncture that metonymically evokes a sense of alignment with the natural order, the writer "physiologically"locates in "himself' a "female"sense of "desirefor procreation,which with all power permeatesthe woman."Here, this assertionof an equivalence between women'ssexual and reproductivedesires conforms to the nineteenth-century notion of "sexual instinct," which Krafft-Ebingamong others propounded.Even so, the text's normative use of "naturalinstinct,"which is opposed to "feminineconcupis-
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cence," also servesto open the conceptualspacefor an affirmationof "female" sexual pleasure.Moreover,the writer'sassertionthat "the desire, as it seems to me, is more a longing to be possessedthan a wish for coitus"refersnot to a desire for sexual relations with men, but instead to a qualitative attitude assumedduringsex with his wife, where "copulationis felt as though it were with a man." Seemingly then, the power of his own gender transformation effects a correspondingmetamorphosisin his wife (at least for him) such that the imperativebinarystructureof sexual "opposition"continues to organize his new mode of embodiment. Concomitantly, he synecdochically evokes the "pleasure"of this "doubly"heterosexual experience-in which the partners are seemingly a "double"man and a "double"woman respectively-by locating it anatomically in the female "part"which (ideologically and medically) purportsto be its origin, a part which then metaleptically confirms the "femininity"of the telling I: "Sometimesit caused me so greatpleasurethat there is nothing with which I can compare it; it is the most blissful feeling in the world; at that moment the woman is simply a vulva that has devoured the whole person." The slippage between the "I"of the first clause, the "it" of the second, and the "woman"and "whole person"of the third marks out the trajectoryof the author'snarrativeperformanceof gender.Moving between the psycho-physiologicalambiguity of the (male?) first person "I,"the objectified "feeling"with which the text imbues the locus of "the body,"and the personification of female desire in the form of a "self'-devouringvulva, this sentence underscoresthe imaginarywork which an unproblematiclinguistic articulation of gender "normally"elides. Indeed, it is precisely this elision that the author must explicitly problematizein order to articulate "his"own storyat all. Hence, in affirminghis sense of"fe[eling] like a double person,"the writernecessarilymoves athwartthe representationalconventions which seek to situate the "singularities"of gender and person in an "identical"grammatical,narrative,somatic, spatial, temporal,and historical locus, thereby fictioning a "different"configuration of (male) subjectivity that marksout the "doubleman." Unlike Robert LouisStevenson'snovel, The StrangeCase of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,however,where the eponymouscharacter's"somatic"transformation can "occur"in the folds of the plot, the success of this narrative endeavor is necessarilymore limited, though not so limited as to prevent its author from "go[ing]about with his vulva-imaginary though it be." Given both the relative anatomicalimmutabilityof his male formand the historical intransigenceof "his"language, the narratingsubject is forced to recognize that he embodies a painful contradiction which he cannot reconcile "in" himself. Whereas his initial sense of being a "double person," had been received as "apiece of good fortune"preciselybecause it markedthe moment
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in which "he"no longercoincided with his earlierrepresentationsof "himself" ("I gave my self up to it, and no longer recognizedmyself'), his subsequent need to re-cognizehis "self' reinscribes"him"within the culture'sdominant sex/gendercodes. Thus although he is able to conceive of his sexual relations with his wife as "lesbian"("Contact with a woman seems homogeneous to me; coitus with my wife seems possible to me because she is somewhat masculine,and has a firmskin; and yet it is more an amorlesbicus"[213]), his understandingthat he might also desire sexual relations with a man leads him to fantasizeabout self-mutilation: Since the anus feels feminine, it would not be hard to become a passive pederast;only positive religiouscommand prevents it, as all other deterrent ideas would be overcome. Since such conditions are repugnant,as they would be to any one, I have the desire to be sexless, or to make myself sexless. If I had been single, I should long ago have taken leave of testes, scrotum, and penis. (209-10)
This one referenceto what could be construedas desire for someone of the "same"sex foregroundsthe limit up against which the writer'sautobiographicalnarrativebutts. So long as (s)he is able to circumscribehis/her "imaginary"identification as a woman within the (con)text of reproductive, monogamous,marital intercourse,the possibilities engendered by this positioning can be experienced as "blissful,""powerful,"or "delight[ful]."However, as soon as these desires lead in the direction of acts that are culturally and religiouslyinscribedas "repugnant,"they interruptthe author'sability to sustain his affirmationof female subjectivity and foregroundits incompatibility with the anatomicalsignifiersof sex. Hence his earlierdeclarationthat "the man in me had been extinguished"now takes on the active force of a wish to expunge the somatic metonyms of (male) "sex"-"testes, scrotum, and penis"-in orderto induce, or indeed, producea null condition: "tomake myself sexless." What follows immediatelyupon this poignantly articulateddesire for taking leave of sex, then, can be read as a lament for the unattainable condition of gender migrationthat the text can no longer sustain: Of what use is female pleasure,when one does not conceive? What good comes from excitation of female love, when one has only a wife for gratification, even though copulation is felt as though it were with a man?What a terriblefeeling of shame is caused by female perspiration!How feeling for dress and ornament lowers a man! Even in his changed form, even when he can no longer recall masculine feeling, he would not wish to be forced to feel like a woman. He still knows very well that, before, he did not constantly feel sexually; that he was merely a human being uninfluenced by sex. Now, suddenly,he has to regardhis formerindividualityas a mask, and constantly feel like a woman, only having a change when, every four weeks, he has his periodic sickness, and in the intervalshis insatiablefemale desire. If he could but awake without immediately being forcedto feel like a woman! At last he longs for a moment in which he might raise his mask;but that moment does not come. (212)
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The shift here from the first person"I"of the precedingparagraphto the emphaticallyreiterated"he"of this passagedenotes the critical gender slippagewithin the subject'sown mode of self-reference.Moving fromthe "I" who would be "sexless,"throughthe oblique"one"forwhom "femalepleasure" and "femalelove" are "useless,"to the "man"whom the "feelingfor dressand ornamentlowers,"to the "he"who is "forcedto feel like a woman,"the author illustratesthe complexity of his contradictoryidentificationswith and disidentificationsfromthe linguisticmarkersof sexualstability.In orderto situate this contradictory"self' within the narrativehe is writing, then, he fixes on the third person pronominalsignifieras the means obliquely to specify "his" nominal genderwhile simultaneouslymaintaininga categoricaldistancefrom it. Indeed, we might consider here that the "mask"he longs to "raise"is as much a productof the limitations inscribedwithin the grammaticalmarkers of "person"that he must employ to articulatehis own story, as it is of the writer'sdiscordantlygendered"feelings."Indeed, I almost wish he could just say as HenryJekylldid in his final statement:"He, I say-I can not say I"(98). At this point it is probably a bit banal to note that Case 99 demonstrates the intense degree of linguistic, grammatical,and narrative work that must be brought to bear in order to produce a story that can articulate the experience of being-or feeling-a "doubleman." It's perhaps even a bit trite to suggestthat if we bracketpsycho-pathologicalevaluations and attend to this discursive labor itself, we can begin to discern how the reproductionof our "normal"(binary)gender categoriesis predicatedon the suppression of this (historical) activity. However, what the self-reflexive "evaluation"of the unnamed doctor, who "mustgo about with his vulvaimaginarythough it may be,"can teach us is the extent to which, in the last decades of the nineteenth century,the desire to rendersuch an ambiguously genderedself-representationas a storynecessitated rending the singular-ness of "person"which "is" its "subject."It may be the case that ontologically speaking the "subject"was split even prior to engaging in this narrative endeavor-that the psycho-pathologywhich engenderedhis "female"identifications were symptoms of subtending endopsychic conflicts, even of an "irreduciblelack of being," that could be retrospectively "explained"by interpretation, including psychoanalytic.Nevertheless, it seems helpful to consider that the act of narrationitself was needed in order to produce the transvaluation which shifted the writer's sense of "monstrousness"and "worthlessness"so that he was capable of articulating (the painfulness of) "his"experience. Indeed, it may even suggestthat our contemporarynotions of split subjectivitypresupposea narrativesituation which can reproducethe spatialand temporal,not to mention "somatic,"coherence of this "imaginary" mapping of the self. To the extent that this "respectable"late-Victorian
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"man,"who "enjoy[ed]an unusualdegreeof public confidence and possesse[d] authority,"transposesthe gridof meaningascribedto "his"bodily coordinates, a grid which "naturally"ought to have located his "identity"securelyon the terrainof bourgeoismasculinity,he demonstratesthe possibilitiesfor fictioning new historical configurationsfor "male"self-representation:possibilities that now appearso "normal"that we have perhapsbegun to take them too much for granted.
Coda When, in the opening paragraphsof his ThreeEssayson theTheoryof Sexuality(1905), Freuddeftly prises apart the "biological"notion of "sexual instinct"which had heretoforecircumscribedboth the discourseson human sexuality and the mappingsof human anatomy,it is no coincidence that he immediatelyturs to the example of male sexual inversionto make his point. Drawingupon the sexological writingsof Krafft-Ebing,Moll, Moebius,Havelock Ellis, Block, and Hirshfeld among others, Freud uses the discrepancy between the social configurationsof gender and the sexual permutationsof desire to prove "the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together"(14). Yet more significant than the claim that male homosexuality does not constitute a violation of natural law in Freud'sfurther suggestion that it providesa structuralparadigmfor all formsof human subjectivity:not only does he find that "allhuman beings are capableof makinga homosexual object-choice," but he asserts"[they]have in fact made one in the unconscious"(11). With this declarationFreudgeneralizedthe doublenesscharacteristic of those late nineteenth-century writings which sought to represent ec-centric forms of male sexuality so that it takes on by the end of the twentieth century the status of a theoretical given: we are all now heteronomonous,heterogeneous,split subjects.Yet even as this understanding has been diffusedthroughoutthe most pop psychological interpretations of human experience-for example, in the current rage for acknowledging the "innerchild"-it is still the case that the representationsof nonnormative forms of subjectivity necessitates the (re)productionof narrativesthat can articulateour many selves into a more or less coherent story.By focusing on two late-Victorian autobiographical narratives of ec-centric masculinity, then, I hope to have suggestedthat the shapeswhich these stories take have their own historyand that by examining this historywe may come to a clearer sense of the ways we use such stories to make and make sense of what we come to know as the real. For, like those who one hundred years ago could only narrativelygesture toward experiences that today appear regularlyon
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daytime TV, it is only by taking the engenderingeffects of these narratives seriously that we will be able to imagine and embody new possibilitiesfor how we move through and transformour live worlds. RutgersUniversity
Notes 1Needless to say, Foucault'swritings-and especially The Historyof Sexuality-have been "seminal"for both Victorian Studies and Lesbianand Gay Studies. On "sexuality"and "truth," see 53-73; on bourgeoissexuality, see 115-31; on "the homosexual,"see 43. For a discussionof the implicationsthat Foucault'sworkpresentsto Gay Studies,see my "FoucauldianNecrologies." 2I use the adjective "ec-centric"here to gesture towards the sexual positionings of those individualswho are circumscribedby, and yet profoundlyout of alignment with, the historical "centerings"of their cultures.Fora theoreticalelaborationof this concept see my "AreWe (Not) What We Are Becoming?"Froma different(ly)genderedperspectiveTeresaDe Lauretisprovides a similargloss. 3I use the phrase"tellingI"throughoutthis essayto gesturetowardthe historical imbrication of narrationand identification. In particular,I would like to suggestthat the "imaginaryformation" which Lacan "identifies"as the "I"in his famous "MirrorStage" essay is always already inscribedin narrative,as the developmental aspectsof that essay itself illustrate.I would like to suggest,moreover,by this formulation,that the positioning of the "I"as the location fromwhich and within which the (narrative) "subject"coheres conversely foregroundsthis "I"as an effect of narrativeitself. 4For accounts of the controversy generated by Sexual Inversion,see Phyllis Grosskurth's biographiesof both Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds;see also Weeks, "Havelock Ellis"and ComingOut, 57-67; and Calder-Marshall. 5Symonds himself uses the qualifer "eccentric"to denominate his situation in a letter to Edward Carpenter, 29 December 1892. I thank Scott McCracken for bringing this to my attention. 6On the increasing popularity of "evolutionary"explanations and rhetoric, see Jones; Houghton 209-13; and Halliday. For an excellent, albeit brief, genealogy of the social uses of "evolution"-especially as they are opposed to "revolution"-see Williams 103-05. 7On Ulrichs's place among the early apologistsfor sexual relations between men, see Kennedy; Herzer;Ferayand Herzer.On "sexualinversion,"see Chauncey. See also Halperin 151. 8In the case history written by Symonds himself which appearsin SexualInversionas Case XVII, Symonds presentsa much clearerversion of this "craving": About the age of 8, if not before,he became subject to singularhalf-wakingdreams.He fancied himself seated on the floor among several adult and naked sailors,whose genitals and buttockshe contemplatedand handled with relish. He called himself the "dirtypig" of these men, and felt that they were in some wayhis masters,orderinghim to do unclean service to their bodies. (284) 90n the transformationsin the legal and moral classificationsof sexual relations between men, see my "Legislatingthe Norm." '0Indeed,in a note addedto the manuscriptonly two yearsafterit was firstwritten, Symonds himself remarksthat if he had "studiedthe cases of sexual inversion recordedby Casper-Liman,
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Ulrichs, and Krafft-Ebing"earlier, "I should not have dealt with my personal experience so diffusely"(182). l1The first English edition which appearedin 1892 was a translationby Charles Chaddock of the seventh German edition. Since I neither read German nor have access to the earlier German language editions, I haven't yet ascertained in which edition this case first appears. However, the first German edition appearedin 1886 and the second in 1887, so this case must have been written between then and 1892. 12Fora recent example of the polemics engenderedwithin and aroundpsychoanalysisby the "is the penis the phallus?"controversy,see "The Phallus Issue." 13Freud'sreading of the Senatsprasident's autobiographyappearsas "Psycho-AnalyticNotes on an AutobiographicalAccount of a Case of Paranoia."Case 99 is in fact a much less developed, much more "clinical"self-renderingthan Schreber's,containing almost none of the elaborated imageryand fantasythat marksthe latter.Hence it would be less amenableto the kind of analytic readingthat Freuddoes to prove that "homosexualwish-phantasy"bearsan "intimaterelation" to the kind of "paranoia"Schrebermanifests.
Works Cited Boone, Joseph A., and Michael Cadden, eds. EngenderingMasculinity:The Questionof Male FeministCriticism.New York:Routledge, 1990. and Obscene.London: Hutchinson, 1972. Calder-Marshall,Arthur. Lewd, Blasphemous Trans.CarolynFawcett.New York:Zone, Canguilhem,Georges.TheNormaland thePathological. 1989. Chauncey, George. "FromSexual Inversion to Homosexuality."Salmagundi58-59 (1982-83): 114-46. Cohen, Ed. "Are We (Not) What We Are Becoming?'Gay' 'Identity,' 'Gay Studies,' and the Disciplining of Knowledge."Boone and Cadden, 161-76. . "Legislatingthe Norm: From Sodomy to Gross Indecency."SouthAtlanticQuarterly. 88.1 (Winter 1989): 181-218. . Talkon theWildeSide:Towardsa Genealogyof a DiscourseonMale Sexualities.New York: Routledge, 1993. Cominos, Peter. "LateVictorian Respectabilityand the Social System."InternationalReviewof SocialHistory8 (1963): 18-48, 216-50. De Lauretis,Teresa. "EccentricSubjects:Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness."FeministStudies16 (1990): 115-50. Derrida,Jacques.Positions.Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Ellis, Havelock, and John Addington Symonds. SexualInversion.London: Wilson, 1897. Fein, Esther."BigPublishersProfitas Gay LiteratureThrives."The New YorkTimes6 July 1992. D1. Feray,Jean-Claude,and ManfredHerzer."HomosexualStudies and Politics in the 19th Century: KarlMariaKertbeny."Journalof Homosexuality19 (1990): 23-47. Foucault,Michel. The Historyof SexualityVolumeI: An Introduction.Trans. Robert Hurley.New York:Vintage, 1978. Freud,Sigmund. "Psycho-AnalyticNotes on an AutobiographicalAccount of a Case of Paranoia." The StandardEditionof the CompletePsychologicalWorksof SigmundFreud.Vol. 12. Trans. JamesStrachey. London: Hogarth, 1958. 2-68. 24 vols. 1953-74. . ThreeEssayson the Theoryof Sexuality.Trans.JamesStrachey. New York:Basic, 1962. in Britain,1832-1920. New York: A Historyof Self-Representation Gagnier,Regenia. Subjectivities: Oxford, 1991. Grosskurth,Phyllis. HavelockElis. London: Allen Lane, 1980.
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. JohnAddingtonSymonds.London:Longmans,1964. Halliday, R. J. "Social Darwinism:A Definition." VictorianStudies14 (1971): 389-405. New York:Routledge, 1990. Halperin, David. One HundredYearsof Homosexuality. Herzer,Manfred."Kertbenyand the Nameless Love."Journalof Homosexuality12 (1985): 1-26. Trans.John Cumming. Horkheimer,Max, and Theodor W. Adoro. Dialecticof Enlightenment. New York:Continuum, 1972. 33. Houghton, Walter. The VictorianFrameof Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. Jones, Greta. SocialDarwinismand EnglishThought:The InteractionbetweenBiologicaland Social Theory.Brighton:Harvester,1980. Kennedy, Hurbert.Ulrichs.Boston: Alyson, 1988. SexualiswithEspecialReferenceto ContrarySexualInstinct: Krafft-Ebing,R. von. Psychopathia A Medico-LegalStudy.Trans. Charles Chaddock. Philadelphia:Davis, 1893. Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in PsychoanalyticExperience."Ecrits.Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:Norton, 1977. 1-7. "The Phallus Issue."differences4 (1992): 1-224. Rowbotham, Sheila, and JeffreyWeeks. Socialismand theNew Life.London: Pluto, 1977. Stevenson, RobertLouis.The StrangeCase of Dr. JekyllandMr. Hyde.New York:Bantam, 1985. Symonds,John Addington. TheMemoirsofJohnAddingtonSymonds.Ed. PhyllisGrosskurth.New York:Random, 1984. Thomas, Keith. "The Double Standard."Journalof the Historyof Ideas20 (1959): 195-216. Weeks, Jeffrey.ComingOut: HomosexualPoliticsin Britain,from the NineteenthCenturyto the Present.London: Quartet, 1977. ."Havelock Ellis and the Politics of Sex Reform."Rowbotham 139-85. Williams, Raymond.Keywords:A Vocabularyof CultureandSociety.New York:OxfordUP, 1976.
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BOOK REVIEWS
Queen Victoria: A Portrait, by Giles St. Aubyn;pp. xvii + 669. New York:Atheneum, 1992, $29.95. Heart of a Queen: Queen Victoria's Romantic Attachments, by Theo Aronson;pp. xii + 272. London: John Murray,1991, £16.95. Beloved and Darling Child: Last Letters Between Queen Victoria and Her Eldest Daughter 18861901, edited by Agatha Ramm;pp. x + 290. Stroud, Glos. and Wolfeboro, NH: Alan Sutton, 1990, £20.00, $39.50. WHENQUEENVICTORIADIEDIN 1901,IT WASWIDELY
taken forgrantedthat she had servedas an altogether appropriatesymbolof personalmorality,of bourgeois domesticity,of imperialgrandeur,as well as of royal longevity and societal continuity. At the same time, it was generallyassumedthat duringher almost four decades of widowhood she had remained a nonpartisan head of state who took increasinglyless interest in day-to-day politics and who participatederratically at best in the ceremonial life that had been central to her earlyyearsand that was to become the defining role of Britain'smonarchyduringthe twentieth century. Once Victoria'spost-1861 political letters were publishedduring the 1920s and her personal letters began to be published during the 1930s (and her more intimate letters to her eldest daughterduring the 1960s), biographersnecessarilybecame increasingly awareof how complex the Queen's personality truly was, with what keen attention she followed events at Westminsterand Whitehall, and how blatant her behind-the-scenes partisanshipcould be. The impact of such revelations of new evidence can be followed in the successive major biographiesof the Queen, those by Sidney Lee (1902), Lytton Strachey (1921), E. F Benson (1935), Elizabeth Longford (1964), Cecil Woodham-Smith (1972), and Stanley Weintraub(1987). Strachey,who "went
out to curse and stayed to bless,"focused on the first half of her reign, and Woodham-Smith did not live to complete her projectedpost-1861 volume. During this past generation, Lady Longford'sVictoria,R.I. has therefore served as the definitive life. Stanley Weintraub's"IntimateBiography"seemed to be designed primarilyto emphasizethat the Queen's feet were fashioned of clay ratherthan of marble. He, in turn, inspiredDavid Cannadine to denounce Victoria as a woman inordinately selfish, self-indulgent, "callous, insensitive, obstinate, outspoken, capricious, and bigoted,"a "monster"who presidedover "a court regimen at once tyrannical and tedious, unbearable and unreal" (The Pleasuresof the Past [1989]). How does Giles St. Aubyn'slengthy new biography fit into this pattern?A long-time masterat Eton College, St. Aubyn is an experienced historian and biographer.Because his earlier works include a life of Victoria'seldest son, EdwardVII: Princeand King (1979), and her firstcousin, the Duke of Cambridge, TheRoyalGeorge(1964), St. Aubyn bringsto his task an enviable familiaritywith the nineteenth-century royalfamily and with day-to-daylife in court society. Like earlierbiographers,he identifies a successionof Victorias. For St. Aubyn there were six: the "frustrated prisoner of Kensington Palace" (1819-37); "the PartyQueen" (1837-40); the devoted bridewho struggled to maintain her political independence (1840-42); the faithfulwife ( 1842-61); the shattered and secluded widow (1861-74); and finally the Empressof India, Grandmotherof Europe,and popular icon (1874-1901). As St. Aubyn concedes, Lady Longford'salmost thirty-yearold work remains "the envy and despair of those who venture to follow her" (623), and in most respectsit must remainthe standardbiography. St. Aubyn may provide a more balanced account than does Lady Longford of the Queen as mother and matriarch,as educatorand matchmaker,yet the mechanical manner in which, in his later chapters, he follows the personalfortunesof the Queen's nine children and thirty-seven grandchildrenproves unwieldy. At the same time, he remainsfully awareof the paradoxesthat defined Victoria'spersonality:the puritanical journal-keeperwhose religious outlook was broadlyecumenical and who deploredsabbatarian restrictions;the monarch who insisted that "We women. .. are not fitted to reign"(219) and who yet felt uncomfortablewhenever she was not surrounded by cabinet despatch boxes; the commonsensical observer who fell under the romantic spell of gypsies
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and Scottish Highlanders,of EmperorNapoleon III, Benjamin Disraeli, and the Indian "Munshi" (teacher), Abdul Karim. As St. Aubyn concedes, "consistency was never her strongest point" (143). Comparedto LadyLongford'smildly critical sympathy and Weintraub'snear-debunking,St. Aubyn's emerges as the most happily balanced of modem portraits-distorted neither "by idolatry"nor "by malice" (1). The great difficulty faced by any biographerof the Queen is that she lived so long, was related to and acquainted with so many people, and took a direct interest in so many domestic legislative measures and ministerial appointments and in so many foreign and imperialdisputes,that even a long biographyseems to oversimplifycomplex matters.None of the Queen's biographersthus far has been a professional historian of Victorian society, politics, or religion, and a numberof St. Aubyn'sdicta on matters of broad importand of narrativedetail are open to dispute. For example, during the early Victorian era, "the philosophy of laisser faire was made an excuse for doing nothing" for the poor (222). The author appearsto forget both the Old Poor Law and the New as well as the successivefactoryacts, mines acts, and public health acts of the 1830s and 1840s. There are other slips. Garibaldidid not free Sicily in 1849 (249); if there had been a dependable "Whig majority"in the House of the late 1850s (304), then the ToryLordDerbycould not have remainedprime minister for a year-and-a-half;if the voters had indeed agreed with the Queen about Gladstone in 1885 "byrejectinghim at the polls"(456) then Salisbury would not have been compelled to resign as primeministera month afterthe election and Gladstone would have been unable to form his Third Ministry. The chief weaknessof the work is not, however, the occasional errorof fact or interpretation.Rather, it is the lack of either footnotes or endnotes. Although St. Aubyn has provided his readerswith a sensitive ten-page bibliographicalessay,an excellent bibliography,seventy-fourwell-chosen and well-reproducedillustrations,and a superiorindex, he does not-unlike Longfordor Weintraub-identify (except by occasional implication) the precisesourceof any quotation or disputableconclusion. It seems a great pity that a book that is often both thoughtful and sensible should lack the accoutrementsof sound scholarship.In that respect, Theo Aronson's Heart of a Queen representsa minimal improvement, in that Aronson does attributesome of the evidence he
cites to particularbooks even as he eschews all page numbers.Even morethan St. Aubyn, he has become a successful and generally reliable popularizerof modem Europeanmonarchicalhistory,and the work under review drawson such earlierbooks as Queen Victoriaand the Bonapartes(1972), Victoriaand Disraeli(1978), and Grandmamaof Europe(1973). Aronson's ambitions are far more limited than St. Aubyn'sin that he tells the readerfrom the start that with Victoria's"otherroles-political, imperial, constitutional, matriarchaland domestic-I have not concerned myself"(xi). His sole purpose is to focus on the Queen's "veryviolent feelings of affection" (xi) towardthe six men who "treatedher as a woman first,a queen second"(xii): LordMelbourne, Prince Albert, Napoleon III, John Brown,Benjamin Disraeli,and Abdul Karim,the "Munshi"from Moslem India. When one considersthat Victoria'smost personal letters to Brown, Disraeli, and the Munshi were all burnedafter her death, it remains remarkable how much evidence for all six "romanticattachments" has survived. What Aronson has done, in effect, is to provide (within loose chronological order) a long essay on each of the six men basedon a thoroughexamination of publishedletters and relevant secondary works. Because of his criteria of selection, the romantic streak that historians like Longfordand St. Aubyn have discered in Victoria's makeup becomes in this work the predominant theme, and the hard-headedcommonsensical"bourgeois" monarch almost fades from view. Aronson writes with genuine flair and his conclusions are persuasiveif, for the most part, unsurprising.Thus we are told once more about the aging Melbourne for whom the teen-aged Victoria became (in David Cecil's words) "at once his sovereign, his daughter, and the last love of his life" (22) while she was attractedin turn by his appearance,his urbanity,and his political wisdom, as well as by "the melancholy of his domestic tragedies and the piquancy of his sexual adventures"(15). In her yearsof widowhood, Victoria was to memorialize "Albert the Good" as "Albert the Dull," but-Aronson reminds us-for Victoria there had been something of the exotic about the "warm,sympathetic, deeplysensitive and highly romanticyoung man" whom she marriedin 1840 (51). Necessarily he never became a typical Englishman,but despite the differences in their temperaments-Victoria being farmore emotional, possessive,and egotistical than he-their marriagewas for the most part a happy one. "PrayGod never to let me survivehim"
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(86) she pleaded in 1856, but she did by nearly four decades, the years preoccupiedbriefly (1871-73) by the exiled French emperorand for a longer time by Benjamin Disraeli, John Brown, and the Munshi. Disraeli, Aronson concludes, "combinedthe urbanity of LordMelbourne, the gentleness of Prince Albert, the flamboyance of Napoleon III, even the unorthodoxy of John Brown. He was part mentor, part lover" (195). The story of how Disraeli'scourtship drew the Queen out of her years of relative seclusion has often been told. So (in Tom Cullen's The EmpressBrown[1968] and morebrieflyin Chapter Fourof Dorothy Thompson'sQueen Victoria:the Woman,theMonarchy,and thePeople[1990]) has the story of Victoria'sabsorptionwith the Highland servant whose "truest,best and most faithful friend" (221) Victoria became. Unlike St. Aubyn, who dismissesas "ludicrous"(423) Victoria'sgriefon Brown's death, Aronson would seem to have a more appropriate appreciation for the all-importantroles that Brownhad long played-though not, Aronson ultimately concludes, as spiritualistmedium, as secret husband,or as lover, in a physical sense. Her devotion to Abdul Karim during her final yearshas been less written about, and Aronson considers Victoria'slast great emotional attachment to have been the oddest of the six. That the head of state of the world's greatest empire "should have been in thrall to a lowly-born, semi-literate, singularly unappealing impostor"(249) may have demonstrated thrice over the Queen's lack of racial bigotry,but Aronson can do little more than concur with Victoria'ssecularand religiousadvisers(as well as her children) that she was "quite mad on this point" (247). That on a greatmany mattersof state the Queen could be eminently sane, well-informed, realistic, and even trenchant is demonstratedby Belovedand DarlingChild,the final volume of a six-volume series printing significant portions of the correspondence between the Queen and her Berlin-based eldest daughter,known in her final years as the Empress Frederick.The editorial laborscarriedon by the late Roger Fulfordfor the earliervolumes are here completed in equallyskillfuland insightfulfashionby Dr. Agatha Ramm, whose numerous earlier historical works include a four-volume edition of the Gladstone-Granville correspondence(1952, 1962). Although many of the letters exchanged by the Queen and her favorite epistolary confidante involved the births, weddings, and deaths of their innumerable relations, Dr. Ramm reminds us that
"German,Britishand internationalpolitics were the stuff of life ... for both writers"(1). As the Empress Frederickobserved in 1890, "It is impossibleto lose one's interest in the affairsof this countryand in the cause of peace and progressin the rest of the world" (118). Whereasthe firstvolume in the seriescovered but fouryears(1858-61), Dr.Ramm'spublishershave allotted her only 268 pages to deal with fifteen. In consequence, numerousimportantletters have been omitted, only briefexcerptsareprovidedfromothers, and on a numberof subjectsthe appetite is whetted rather than sated. The correspondencereminds us, however,that even in her last yearsVictoriaregarded herself, with reason, as very much more than a political cipher, and that her eldest daughter-even after four decades as member of the German royal family-remained devoutly Anglophile. Invariably she referredto the British as "we,"and even as she lay dying from cancer she was knitting socks for the British troops fighting against the Boers in order to advance Britain's"mission in the spreadand establishment of civilisation" (243). In her letters, the Queen's private opinions on people and events are never in doubt. Thus Prince Bismarckwas "the wicked man" (54) and his son Herbert"that horridcreature"(96). LordRandolph Churchill, "if he sobers down, is extremely clever" (29-30). On Charles Stewart Parell's political downfall in 1891, she observedthat "it is satisfactory to see wickednesspunishedeven in this world"(117). The future wife of George V, Queen Mary, was "a particularlynice girl, so quiet and yet cheerful and so very carefullybrought up and so sensible" (134). LordSalisbury'ssecond ministry(1886-92) was "the best Government of the century"(147). She deeply deploredthe Dreyfuscase: "It is the greatestdisgrace to France and the army which could take place" (235). She was equally unhappy with the SpanishAmerican War:"No doubt Cuba was dreadfullymisgoverned,but that does not excuse America and the principle is dreadful.They might as well say we governed Irelandbadlyand they ought to take possession of it and free it" (213). Queen Victoria, who paid a triumphantvisit to Dublin just nine months before her death, was certain that she and LordSalisburyknew farbetter how to govern Irelandthan either the Americansor William EwartGladstone:"He thought no one but himmost self could settle the Irish question-a unfortunate delusion" (36). For Victoria's eldest daughterGladstone remained"agreat Englishman," and she mournedhis death in 1898 (215). "Icannot
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say that I think he was 'a great Englishman,"'her mother responded. "He was a clever man, full of talent, but he never triedto keep up the honourand prestigeof Great Britain.He gave awaythe Transvaal, he abandoned Gordon, he destroyed the Irish Church and tried to separateEnglandfrom Ireland and to set class againstclass.The harmhe did cannot easily be undone. But he was a good and very religious man" (215). The verdicts of the Queen may not on every subject anticipate those of our day, but they remind us that, if on some matters she proved selfish and obstinate and unreasonable,on others she showed herself to be knowledgeable, empathetic, shrewd, and farseeing. Her reservesof physical energy held out until her final days, and the last of almost 3,800 letters to her eldest daughterwas written in her own hand scarcelytwo weeks beforeVictoriadied. As she murmuredon her deathbed,"Idon't want to die yet. There are several things I want to arrange." WALTER L. ARNSTEIN Universityof Illinois Culture and Anomie: EthnographicImaginationin the Nineteenth Century, by Christopher Herbert; pp. x + 364. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, $48.00, $16.95 paper. INCULTUREANDANOMIE:ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINA-
tion in the NineteenthCentury,ChristopherHerbert finds in a varietyof nineteenth-centurytexts salient examples of the emergent anthropologicalconcept of "culture."He points attention to the modem privileging of the "culture idea" as a "manifest truth unsullied by historical contingency,"but notes the idea's "peculiarlyambiguousstatus in the discourse of our century":for example, it is invoked as an "overridingprincipleof authenticity"while also denigrated as an indicator of artificiality (1-2). In his opening pagesHerbertforcefullyinsiststhat we view the culture idea, in all its tenuousness,as having its origin in nineteenth-centuryexperience.In his careful reading of texts embodying and producing that experience he finds "culture"to be at its origins not a manifest empirical "discovery"but a jumble of often discordant"habitsof thought" (4). Herbertbegins by focusingon the chief characteristicof the cultureconcept as delineatedby Edward Tylor in 1871 and made a central assumptionof anthropology since: that of "culture"as a "complex whole,"the beliefthat "thisarrayof disparate-seeming
elements of social life composesa significantwhole" (5). Herbertincisivelypointsout that this assumption servedinstitutionalends:a culture'swholenessimplies its systematicity,which in turn impliesits readability. The recognitionof a culture'sholistic essence, then, makes brilliant readingsof culturepossible (6). It is along these lines that he convincingly ties together Tylor,MarcelMauss,Claude Levi-Strauss,Ruth Benand edict, FerdinandSaussure,E. E. Evans-Pritchard, CliffordGeertz. From the beginning Herbert insists on bringing to the fore what he calls the "epistemologicalanxiety" at the heart of discourse on culture (12). He notes, for one, the unresolvedrelation between the surfaceempiricismof social science and the need, as inscribedby Durkheimand other foundersof social science, to transcend mere facts and plunge into "deeperrealities"(14). Throughoutthe book Herbert exposes the historical and deeply socialized precedents for such seeming dichotomies and in the process illustrateshow inextricably intertwined these concepts are. Perhapsthe most fundamentalof origins of the culture concept is the nineteenth-century rebuttal of the "mythof a state of ungoverneddesire"(29), the eminently Wesleyannotion of "desire"in an evil world "expanding . . . potentially without check" (31). The overt responseto freedesireemergingfrom the Wesleyan rhetoric is a theory of social control (35). Culture in this sense becomes interpretedas "restraint"on primitivedesire,and Herbertconvincingly demonstratesthe prevalenceof this rhetoricas it proceedsfromWesley to early social science: "anomie" is Durkheim'scorrelate,in fact, for individual desire that needs to be restrainedby collective culture (69). But emerging from this rhetoric is the inter-relatedbut competing notion of desire not as absence, or "originalsin" as Wesley would have it, but as itself a systemof "symboliclinkages"that exist only "in a fully social matrix"(50-1). Herbert culminates his first chapter with a reading of Arnold's Cultureand Anarchyas a text that seminally prefigures the anthropologicalnotion of culture as "complex whole" and symbolicsystem (55-6). The subsequentchapters, with varying success, tease out of various Victorian texts the complex and often contradictory facets of the emerging notion of culture. The second chapter is a lengthy and overly complicated but convincing reading of nineteenth-century political economy as a kind of proto-anthropologythat refutesthe originarychar-
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say that I think he was 'a great Englishman,"'her mother responded. "He was a clever man, full of talent, but he never triedto keep up the honourand prestigeof Great Britain.He gave awaythe Transvaal, he abandoned Gordon, he destroyed the Irish Church and tried to separateEnglandfrom Ireland and to set class againstclass.The harmhe did cannot easily be undone. But he was a good and very religious man" (215). The verdicts of the Queen may not on every subject anticipate those of our day, but they remind us that, if on some matters she proved selfish and obstinate and unreasonable,on others she showed herself to be knowledgeable, empathetic, shrewd, and farseeing. Her reservesof physical energy held out until her final days, and the last of almost 3,800 letters to her eldest daughterwas written in her own hand scarcelytwo weeks beforeVictoriadied. As she murmuredon her deathbed,"Idon't want to die yet. There are several things I want to arrange." WALTER L. ARNSTEIN Universityof Illinois Culture and Anomie: EthnographicImaginationin the Nineteenth Century, by Christopher Herbert; pp. x + 364. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, $48.00, $16.95 paper. INCULTUREANDANOMIE:ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINA-
tion in the NineteenthCentury,ChristopherHerbert finds in a varietyof nineteenth-centurytexts salient examples of the emergent anthropologicalconcept of "culture."He points attention to the modem privileging of the "culture idea" as a "manifest truth unsullied by historical contingency,"but notes the idea's "peculiarlyambiguousstatus in the discourse of our century":for example, it is invoked as an "overridingprincipleof authenticity"while also denigrated as an indicator of artificiality (1-2). In his opening pagesHerbertforcefullyinsiststhat we view the culture idea, in all its tenuousness,as having its origin in nineteenth-centuryexperience.In his careful reading of texts embodying and producing that experience he finds "culture"to be at its origins not a manifest empirical "discovery"but a jumble of often discordant"habitsof thought" (4). Herbertbegins by focusingon the chief characteristicof the cultureconcept as delineatedby Edward Tylor in 1871 and made a central assumptionof anthropology since: that of "culture"as a "complex whole,"the beliefthat "thisarrayof disparate-seeming
elements of social life composesa significantwhole" (5). Herbertincisivelypointsout that this assumption servedinstitutionalends:a culture'swholenessimplies its systematicity,which in turn impliesits readability. The recognitionof a culture'sholistic essence, then, makes brilliant readingsof culturepossible (6). It is along these lines that he convincingly ties together Tylor,MarcelMauss,Claude Levi-Strauss,Ruth Benand edict, FerdinandSaussure,E. E. Evans-Pritchard, CliffordGeertz. From the beginning Herbert insists on bringing to the fore what he calls the "epistemologicalanxiety" at the heart of discourse on culture (12). He notes, for one, the unresolvedrelation between the surfaceempiricismof social science and the need, as inscribedby Durkheimand other foundersof social science, to transcend mere facts and plunge into "deeperrealities"(14). Throughoutthe book Herbert exposes the historical and deeply socialized precedents for such seeming dichotomies and in the process illustrateshow inextricably intertwined these concepts are. Perhapsthe most fundamentalof origins of the culture concept is the nineteenth-century rebuttal of the "mythof a state of ungoverneddesire"(29), the eminently Wesleyannotion of "desire"in an evil world "expanding . . . potentially without check" (31). The overt responseto freedesireemergingfrom the Wesleyan rhetoric is a theory of social control (35). Culture in this sense becomes interpretedas "restraint"on primitivedesire,and Herbertconvincingly demonstratesthe prevalenceof this rhetoricas it proceedsfromWesley to early social science: "anomie" is Durkheim'scorrelate,in fact, for individual desire that needs to be restrainedby collective culture (69). But emerging from this rhetoric is the inter-relatedbut competing notion of desire not as absence, or "originalsin" as Wesley would have it, but as itself a systemof "symboliclinkages"that exist only "in a fully social matrix"(50-1). Herbert culminates his first chapter with a reading of Arnold's Cultureand Anarchyas a text that seminally prefigures the anthropologicalnotion of culture as "complex whole" and symbolicsystem (55-6). The subsequentchapters, with varying success, tease out of various Victorian texts the complex and often contradictory facets of the emerging notion of culture. The second chapter is a lengthy and overly complicated but convincing reading of nineteenth-century political economy as a kind of proto-anthropologythat refutesthe originarychar-
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acter of desire and constructs "a model of society as a self-enclosed system of symbolic equivalences in which the grand principle of order is exchange rather than control" (301). Here Herbert gives excessively comprehensive coverage to the economic writings of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Walter Bagehot. In a more stirring third chapter, Herbert reads the much-neglected early nineteenth-century missionary ethnographies of the South Pacific and there finds deeply contradictory articulations of "culture" that will marklater anthropology.Forexample, he examines the conflictual interplay between the notion of "savages"as "types"of free desire-which will linger in later evolutionary anthropology-and the emerging commitment to an ethnographic mode that, through intensive inculcation into native languagesand customs, compels sympathywith the "other" and, ultimately, a conception of "savage" society as "an integral semiological system" (301). Herbert here persuasively argues that missionary fieldwork represents"an extravagantly risky experiment with modem modes of thought" that signiflater "professional" icantly anticipated ethnography (156). Herbert'sfourth chapter lays out in fascinating detail his case for regardingHenry Mayhew'sLondon Labourand the LondonPoor (1851-61) as a potent and telling example of a text that chartsthe modem interpretivereadingof culture.Like the missionaries, Mayhew exhibits ambivalence over his subjects of study: on the one hand, he characterizesthem as alien emblemsof desire,the civilized world'sparallel to savages (208); on the other hand, Mayhew's thickly descriptivetext both forcesrecognitionof the veryexistence of the poorupon conventional Victorian society and begins to conceive of the world of the pooras a "complexwhole"with its own coherent and hence quite interpretable institutions (213, 227). Mayhew'sstudyof the poor'schoice of idiosyncratic clothing and spicy foods, Herbert stunningly argues,demonstrateshow desire,originallyperceived as "a phenomenon alien to and invasive of social life," comes to be understoodas "a social formation, a collective rather than an individual dynamic and one transmittedentirely along circuitsof highly specific symbolic forms"(234). In the fifth chapter Herbert,in order to register the "immediate impact of the culture thesis upon popularimagination"(253), tums to the novel, focusing specificallyon Anthony Trollope'sDoctorThore.
HerbertinterpretsTrollope'sbook as a "novel of culturalsymbolism"which runscounter to then-prevailing fictional modes,with its de-emphasisof character "depth"and its attention to "socialsurface"(266). He readsDoctorThorneas a "concertedattemptto reconstruct fictional discoursealong the lines of cultural analysis"(266), and more pointedly sees the novel's ultimaterefusalto championthe ethic of "younglove" over the "dictatesof culture"(285) as an eminently anthropologicalrealizationof "thesymboliccharacter of culture"(291): "personality," anchoredin desire,is a "tight mesh of human symbolism"which "mustbe learned"(295). At the end of the chapter Herbert insightfullysuggeststhat what readersfound lacking in the novel, "depth,"wouldbe madeup forin modem imaginativeethnographyfromFrazer(with his metaphors of the sub-stratumof primitive experience) to Geertz (with his emphasisupon hermeneuticdepth). In the brief conclusion Herbert emphasizesthat his book is not an attempt at a seamless and totalizing history of ideas but, rather, is limited and provisional. He cannot provide "proof'for the veracity of his claims because "truth"(he pays homage to Nietzsche) is always itself a trope. Proof is not required, but readersmight ask whether his selection of texts sufficiently accounts for the culture concept, even as defined by him. What about, for example, the range of American discourse on "culture"?Also, why devote seventy-five pages to the relation of political economy to desire and make no reference to Marxist theory? And why omit a chapter on British anthropology of the second half of the century? Why address literature'scontribution with an analysis of one less-than-prominent novel and omit discussion of literarynaturalismand novels of social reform?The freight that Herbert's carefully chosen texts are made to carry gives to them an over-determinedquality. Nonetheless, this is a successful and important book. Through a fairlybrilliant series of readingson telling cultural documents, Herbert strongly makes the case for and does good work toward plumbing the historicalroots of the culture concept. His welding of literarymethod, anthropologicalperspective, and historical intent is impressiveand ought to have a formidableimpactnot only upon Victorianistsand historiansof anthropology,but upon all those interested in the relation between literary and social scientific discourses. MARCMANGANARO RutgersUniversity
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Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century, by Ian Small; pp. x + 155. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, £35.00, £11.95 paper,$49.95. HOW WAS AESTHETICCRITICISMPOSITIONEDAMID
the diverse, often conflicting cultural discoursesin England from the 1870s through the 1890s? More specifically,have literaryhistoriansbeen right to see Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde as "marginal"to the debatesabouttruthand authoritywhich preoccupied the later Victorians(131)? In PartI of Conditionsfor Criticism,Ian Small offersan insightfulsurveyof the configurationof knowledgeacrossseveraldisciplines duringthe last three decadesof the 1800s in England. His ultimate purposeis to account for the phenomenon of aestheticor so-calledimpressionisticcriticism, above all as practiced by Pater and Wilde, whose works he treats in detail in Part II. Overall, Small persuasivelydemonstratesthe three main theses of the book: the interdependence of criticism with other fields of thought; the uncertain "nature of intellectual authority"from the 1870s through the 1890s in England;and the importanceof understanding the "criticalstances"of Paterand Wilde in terms of the largerhistorical context (5, 89). Small begins his argumentby dismissingthe full range of contemporarycritical theories for asking "irrelevant"questions about the nineteenth century which, "underthe rubric of some general political concern, simplyfalsifythe past"(5). Instead,he proposes to apply the methodology of the sociology of knowledge (e.g., the ideas of BernardBarber)to the situation of British criticism after mid-century.Because the practicingcritic had "no simple and stable concept of literaryor pictorialart to drawupon,"he turned to a variety of other domains of thought for "principles of validation" and hence "intellectual authority"(19). In chapters two and three Small examines the epistemologicalshifts occuringin six disciplinesfrom which later Victoriancriticismdrewsome of its central assumptions: economics, historiography, and sociology;aesthetics, psychology,and biology.While specialists in any of these areas might find Small's observations too general, scholars of literatureand the history of art will find his close readingsof key texts from these differentfields informativeand suggestive. Small'scontinuing point is that the "many competing explanations of human behavior"generated by thinkers in the later Victorian period had the effect of placing the truth-valueof any single one
of them into question, thereby undercuttingtraditional paradigmswithout replacing them by any commandingmodel (40). Closely related to the seismic upheaval going on in later Victorian thought generally was the alteration in the status of the individual writer.For example, the prestige accorded to Thomas Carlyle was largely based on his activity in several areasof culture at once. Likewise, "art critics and literary critics, such as John Ruskin, could write freely on economics or politics in the 1860s, but could not do so" by the 1880s, when a widespread"crisis"in intellectual authority had set in (43). Small locates a series of "compelling symmetr[ies]" operating across the disciplines at this time: as positivism rocked the authority of previous analyses in economics and sociology, so aesthetics looked to psychology which, in turn, looked to biology for a firm epistemological ground (53). Furthermore,Small argues that the extensive transformationsin later Victorian ideas are connected to the supplantationof the "man of letters" and the "sage"-always generalists-by the new figure of the "professional,"whose critical opinions received institutional backing (21). This cultural formationdevelops in a particularlyinteresting way at the intersection of psychology and aesthetics. JamesSully's theory of art as a site for "the highest conceivable qualityand quantityof human pleasure" emphasizesthe "impression"or effect of the artifact upon individualsensations and feelings (72-73). As Small explains, both Pater'sprefaceto Studiesin the Historyof the Renaissance(1873) and Vernon Lee's critical essays (in Juvenalia[1887]) reveal how "the impressionisticcriticismof the Aesthetic movement absorbedand utilized . . . the conceptual framework and terminology of psychology"to bolster its own authority(78). A defense of Pater's and Wilde's works is the terminusad quemof Small's book. At the outset of chaptersfourand five, he throwsdown the gauntlet: "the critical practiceswhich characterizeAestheticism are not the isolated changes, nor its main protagoniststhe idiosyncraticfigures, which many literary historians have taken them to be" (91). Rather,the "iconoclasm"of Paterand of Wilde must be understoodin termsof their respective positionings within the later Victorian ferment of ideas (93, 112). Thus, Pater's "rennaissance"revolutionizes the practice of art criticism in the context of changes in historiography,psychology,and aesthetics itself. The project of Marius the Epicureanand
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Platoand Platonismalike is to "redefine""the forms of intellectual authority,"specifically "to rehabilitate individual authority" and to counteract the increasing presence of "an institutional authority based on a scholarly consensus"(95). Pater deploys "allusion,quotation, and citation" to relativizemyriad intellectual authorities, thereby advancing "his own authority"(97-98, 111). Comparablyresourceful,Wilde opposes the discourse of the late-Victorian professionalcritics by reviving the earlier tradition of the sage writers.In contrast to previous studies on Wilde's populism (e.g., Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Market-Place [1987]), Small maintains that Wilde was engaged in "a strategicreaction against"the equation of "intellectual value with scholarlyseriousnessand with the restrictedpracticesof academicinstitutions"in plays such as An IdealHusbandas well as in his critical essays and the novel, Pictureof DorianGray (113). In short, Wilde's aestheticism was much more than a pose: it was a refusal"to be marginalized"by the new statusquo. Yet can we "simply"bracket the role of sexual orientation in the critical stances adopted by Pater and by Wilde, as Small would have us do? One of the problematicaspectsof Conditionsfor Criticismlies in Small's adamantrefusalto consider issues of sexuality and gender as relevant to these writers' "attitudesto all forms of authority"(92). Given his interest in the historicalconditions for criticismand also his reiterated emphasis upon the value of the individual, Small's rejection of the findings of gay criticism (e.g., RichardDellamora,MasculineDesire: The Sexual Politics of the Victorian Avant-Garde [1990]) and of gender studies more generally seems puzzling.It will severely limit the usefulnessof his book for many readers.Another noteworthy peculiarity about Small's argument is the way in which he employs terms from contemporarycritical theories (e.g., Foucault's"disciplinesand practices"and from French feminism), all the while "jouissance" protesting that such theories can only produce"bad history"(5). In this sense, Small'sbook instances the very problemof intellectual authorityfor our time. THAISE. MORGAN ArizonaState University The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, by Maurice Olender, translatedby ArthurGoldhammer;pp. xiii + 193. Cambridge,MA and London: HarvardUniversity Press, 1992, £23.95, $29.95.
WHAT LANGUAGE DID ADAM AND EVE SPEAK IN
paradise?For most people, the question is academic, which means that it provides job opportunitiesfor scholars, while the answer is of no concern or consequence to anyone else. Maurice Olender demonstrates,however,that the question was not an idle one in the nineteenth century, and that the answers proposed to it shaped European thinking, not only about language,but about religion, history, mythology, and indeed all the human sciences. Moreover, from the 1870s on, the answers to that question "embarkedon new ideological and political careers outside philology" (12). One glimpses the consequences of those answers if one goes beyond 1892-the terminusad quemof Olender'sstudy-and thinks of the motivating ideas behind events Olender only alludesto: the arrestof Captain Dreyfus,the horrors of the Nazi regime in Germany. By thus mentioning "the role that certain philosophical and historical traditions may have played in the development of ideologies and policies that gave rise . .. to violence" (19), Olender gives a sense of urgency, of consequence, to his own more modest aim: "to investigate the work of selected scholars in order to bring out the forces underlying discussion of the terms Aryan and Semite up to 1892" (19). The subtitle of the original French edition of this book is Aryenset Semites,un coupleprovidentiel, and it points to a scholarly invention-"the mythical figures of the Hebrew and the Aryan, a provhad momentous idential pair" (x)-that consequences in Europeanhistory. This invention grew out of questions about origins, and though speculation about the origin of language may have seemed fruitless by 1866-the year in which the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all further discussion of the subject-the appeal of origins was undiminished, largely because questions about origins are really questions about one's present state and its claims to legitimacy or authority, power or prestige. So speculations about first things simply shifted from attempts to find the original human language to (what was considered to be) serious scientific inquiry into the sources or relations of languages and civilizations. It was Sir William Jones who gave the question of origins a new life with his Indo-Europeanhypothesis, with the result that comparative philologists, in Olender's memorable picture, "ambled about the garden of languages gathering linguistic roots" (15-16). Scholars called the inhabitants of this garden various names, but the label "Aryan" is the one of
383
Platoand Platonismalike is to "redefine""the forms of intellectual authority,"specifically "to rehabilitate individual authority" and to counteract the increasing presence of "an institutional authority based on a scholarly consensus"(95). Pater deploys "allusion,quotation, and citation" to relativizemyriad intellectual authorities, thereby advancing "his own authority"(97-98, 111). Comparablyresourceful,Wilde opposes the discourse of the late-Victorian professionalcritics by reviving the earlier tradition of the sage writers.In contrast to previous studies on Wilde's populism (e.g., Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Market-Place [1987]), Small maintains that Wilde was engaged in "a strategicreaction against"the equation of "intellectual value with scholarlyseriousnessand with the restrictedpracticesof academicinstitutions"in plays such as An IdealHusbandas well as in his critical essays and the novel, Pictureof DorianGray (113). In short, Wilde's aestheticism was much more than a pose: it was a refusal"to be marginalized"by the new statusquo. Yet can we "simply"bracket the role of sexual orientation in the critical stances adopted by Pater and by Wilde, as Small would have us do? One of the problematicaspectsof Conditionsfor Criticismlies in Small's adamantrefusalto consider issues of sexuality and gender as relevant to these writers' "attitudesto all forms of authority"(92). Given his interest in the historicalconditions for criticismand also his reiterated emphasis upon the value of the individual, Small's rejection of the findings of gay criticism (e.g., RichardDellamora,MasculineDesire: The Sexual Politics of the Victorian Avant-Garde [1990]) and of gender studies more generally seems puzzling.It will severely limit the usefulnessof his book for many readers.Another noteworthy peculiarity about Small's argument is the way in which he employs terms from contemporarycritical theories (e.g., Foucault's"disciplinesand practices"and from French feminism), all the while "jouissance" protesting that such theories can only produce"bad history"(5). In this sense, Small'sbook instances the very problemof intellectual authorityfor our time. THAISE. MORGAN ArizonaState University The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, by Maurice Olender, translatedby ArthurGoldhammer;pp. xiii + 193. Cambridge,MA and London: HarvardUniversity Press, 1992, £23.95, $29.95.
WHAT LANGUAGE DID ADAM AND EVE SPEAK IN
paradise?For most people, the question is academic, which means that it provides job opportunitiesfor scholars, while the answer is of no concern or consequence to anyone else. Maurice Olender demonstrates,however,that the question was not an idle one in the nineteenth century, and that the answers proposed to it shaped European thinking, not only about language,but about religion, history, mythology, and indeed all the human sciences. Moreover, from the 1870s on, the answers to that question "embarkedon new ideological and political careers outside philology" (12). One glimpses the consequences of those answers if one goes beyond 1892-the terminusad quemof Olender'sstudy-and thinks of the motivating ideas behind events Olender only alludesto: the arrestof Captain Dreyfus,the horrors of the Nazi regime in Germany. By thus mentioning "the role that certain philosophical and historical traditions may have played in the development of ideologies and policies that gave rise . .. to violence" (19), Olender gives a sense of urgency, of consequence, to his own more modest aim: "to investigate the work of selected scholars in order to bring out the forces underlying discussion of the terms Aryan and Semite up to 1892" (19). The subtitle of the original French edition of this book is Aryenset Semites,un coupleprovidentiel, and it points to a scholarly invention-"the mythical figures of the Hebrew and the Aryan, a provhad momentous idential pair" (x)-that consequences in Europeanhistory. This invention grew out of questions about origins, and though speculation about the origin of language may have seemed fruitless by 1866-the year in which the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all further discussion of the subject-the appeal of origins was undiminished, largely because questions about origins are really questions about one's present state and its claims to legitimacy or authority, power or prestige. So speculations about first things simply shifted from attempts to find the original human language to (what was considered to be) serious scientific inquiry into the sources or relations of languages and civilizations. It was Sir William Jones who gave the question of origins a new life with his Indo-Europeanhypothesis, with the result that comparative philologists, in Olender's memorable picture, "ambled about the garden of languages gathering linguistic roots" (15-16). Scholars called the inhabitants of this garden various names, but the label "Aryan" is the one of
384
consequence for Europeanhistory.The languageof Aryans was soon contrasted with another fundamental grouping, the so-called Semitic languages, which included Hebrew and Arabic. The metaphor for such grouping was often the family, but that metaphor, with all its relatively benign connotations, gradually gave way to race, and the word "race"became more powerful as it shifted in function from description to a determinant of characteristics, thinking, and behaviour. "Aryanand Semite: 'two twins' at the origin of civilization"(13). We glimpsein this formulationyet another version of a myth, the recurringstory of brotherswhose charactersdiffer sharply,but whose destinies are intertwined(providentially,in the view of many in the nineteenth century). This particular pair seemed to explain the cultural heritage of Europe. Olender sums up the values and virtues attached to each: "The Aryansbringthe West mastery over nature, exploitation of time and space, the invention of mythology,science, and art, but the Semites hold the secret of monotheism-at least until that fateful day when Jesuscomes into the world at Galilee" (14). These virtuesdarken,and the contrast hardens,when the Aryans are identified with openness, receptivity, initiative, and progress,while the Semites (increasinglyidentified with Jews) are consideredconservative,intolerant,exclusive, and static in their society. The dangerousracistimplicationsof the terms are alreadyin evidence. There is no space in a short review to do justice to each of Olender's chapters, and a reviewer can only say how usefulthey are, largelybecauseOlender takes each thinker seriously,and takes him on his own termsand in the context of his times. Here the readerwill find a clear and full account of the thinking of J. G. Herder,ErnestRenan, Max Muller,Adolphe Pictet, Rudolph Friedrich Grau, and Ignaz Goldziher.English-speakingreaderswho know only Renan's Life of Jesus (perhaps through Browning, who read it and reacted to it) will find here a rich context for that book, and readers for whom the history of moder languagestudybegins with Saussure should read the chapter on Pictet, who was Saussure'steacher and the link between him and an earlierRomantic generation of German and French writersand philologists. Olender might easily have narrowedhis focus by dealing with the ideas whose horrendousconsequenceshave been only too apparent in Europeanhistory, but his aim is "to restore some of the complexity of the work of Herder, Renan, and Goldziher"(17). This is a short book-
the text runsonly 142 pages-but it is an important and useful one. DONALD S. HAIR Universityof WesternOntario Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830-1940, edited by David M. Anderson and David Killingray;pp. xii + 260. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1991, £29.95, $69.95. THE IDEALPOLICEMEN, FORTHECONTRIBUTORSTO
this volume of essays, are those to be found in the Piratesof Penzance:they recoiled from violence (and certainly did not carryguns), they policed by consent, and they chased "real criminals" instead of interferingwith the efforts of the working class to conduct "collectivebargainingby riot"(81). It is fair enough to take this as an ideal;only a very fortunate society can be policed by P.C. Plod. But, as a general rule, the authorsgo on to write as if the reason the societies about which they write failed in the ideal had something to do with the fact that they were under imperial rule. James Sturgis'svery sensible account of Hamilton, Ontario, where police worked under a Liberalgovernment which saw drinkingas mildly sinful behaviour that became much, much worse when it was a Conservative who poured the drink,tests and destroysthis explanation.The Hamilton police force faced the same problemsas those discussedin the other essaysin this volume, and yet the imperialgovernments at Ottawa and Westminsterseem to have nothing to do with the storySturgis tells. The essaysdo not cover all of the policies and practices that were a function of the way imperial goverments usedpolice. There is nothing about the workof penetratingpolitical movements,peacefulor revolutionary,although imperialpolice forces obviously did it, and there is very little about controlling crowdswithout killing people, even though this was the original reason for establishingpolice forces. The collection covers a wide geographicalrange: Canadian, South African, and Kenyan problems each get two papers, and Australian, Gold Coast, Indian, Irish, New Zealand, Sudanese, and West Indian police forces get one each. Geography,however, does not bring out the differences between a survey of a long period, like Howard Johnson's account of the nineteenth-centuryWest Indies after emancipation,and Albert Grundlingh'sstudyof the eight importantyears after the defeat of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. The papers offer little reference from one colony to
384
consequence for Europeanhistory.The languageof Aryans was soon contrasted with another fundamental grouping, the so-called Semitic languages, which included Hebrew and Arabic. The metaphor for such grouping was often the family, but that metaphor, with all its relatively benign connotations, gradually gave way to race, and the word "race"became more powerful as it shifted in function from description to a determinant of characteristics, thinking, and behaviour. "Aryanand Semite: 'two twins' at the origin of civilization"(13). We glimpsein this formulationyet another version of a myth, the recurringstory of brotherswhose charactersdiffer sharply,but whose destinies are intertwined(providentially,in the view of many in the nineteenth century). This particular pair seemed to explain the cultural heritage of Europe. Olender sums up the values and virtues attached to each: "The Aryansbringthe West mastery over nature, exploitation of time and space, the invention of mythology,science, and art, but the Semites hold the secret of monotheism-at least until that fateful day when Jesuscomes into the world at Galilee" (14). These virtuesdarken,and the contrast hardens,when the Aryans are identified with openness, receptivity, initiative, and progress,while the Semites (increasinglyidentified with Jews) are consideredconservative,intolerant,exclusive, and static in their society. The dangerousracistimplicationsof the terms are alreadyin evidence. There is no space in a short review to do justice to each of Olender's chapters, and a reviewer can only say how usefulthey are, largelybecauseOlender takes each thinker seriously,and takes him on his own termsand in the context of his times. Here the readerwill find a clear and full account of the thinking of J. G. Herder,ErnestRenan, Max Muller,Adolphe Pictet, Rudolph Friedrich Grau, and Ignaz Goldziher.English-speakingreaderswho know only Renan's Life of Jesus (perhaps through Browning, who read it and reacted to it) will find here a rich context for that book, and readers for whom the history of moder languagestudybegins with Saussure should read the chapter on Pictet, who was Saussure'steacher and the link between him and an earlierRomantic generation of German and French writersand philologists. Olender might easily have narrowedhis focus by dealing with the ideas whose horrendousconsequenceshave been only too apparent in Europeanhistory, but his aim is "to restore some of the complexity of the work of Herder, Renan, and Goldziher"(17). This is a short book-
the text runsonly 142 pages-but it is an important and useful one. DONALD S. HAIR Universityof WesternOntario Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830-1940, edited by David M. Anderson and David Killingray;pp. xii + 260. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1991, £29.95, $69.95. THE IDEALPOLICEMEN, FORTHECONTRIBUTORSTO
this volume of essays, are those to be found in the Piratesof Penzance:they recoiled from violence (and certainly did not carryguns), they policed by consent, and they chased "real criminals" instead of interferingwith the efforts of the working class to conduct "collectivebargainingby riot"(81). It is fair enough to take this as an ideal;only a very fortunate society can be policed by P.C. Plod. But, as a general rule, the authorsgo on to write as if the reason the societies about which they write failed in the ideal had something to do with the fact that they were under imperial rule. James Sturgis'svery sensible account of Hamilton, Ontario, where police worked under a Liberalgovernment which saw drinkingas mildly sinful behaviour that became much, much worse when it was a Conservative who poured the drink,tests and destroysthis explanation.The Hamilton police force faced the same problemsas those discussedin the other essaysin this volume, and yet the imperialgovernments at Ottawa and Westminsterseem to have nothing to do with the storySturgis tells. The essaysdo not cover all of the policies and practices that were a function of the way imperial goverments usedpolice. There is nothing about the workof penetratingpolitical movements,peacefulor revolutionary,although imperialpolice forces obviously did it, and there is very little about controlling crowdswithout killing people, even though this was the original reason for establishingpolice forces. The collection covers a wide geographicalrange: Canadian, South African, and Kenyan problems each get two papers, and Australian, Gold Coast, Indian, Irish, New Zealand, Sudanese, and West Indian police forces get one each. Geography,however, does not bring out the differences between a survey of a long period, like Howard Johnson's account of the nineteenth-centuryWest Indies after emancipation,and Albert Grundlingh'sstudyof the eight importantyears after the defeat of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. The papers offer little reference from one colony to
385
another,or fromone authorto another;for instance, William Morrison discusses the approach of the North West Mounted Police to the problemsof the Klondike in the 1890s in much the tone that an uitlanderwould have applied to the Boer authorities at the same time, but drawsno comparisonbetween the difficultiesof runningthese two mining communities. Passingreferencesare made in several papers to the extent that the Irish rather than the English pattern of policing was a major influence in the colonies; RichardHawkins'svery usefularticle about the Royal IrishConstabularycould have served as a model by which other contributorscould have been guided in these referencesto the Irishsystem, but it is not taken up in this way. Understandably,there is no articleaboutpolicing in Britain at the time, and yet the references to Britain-such as Killingray'sstatement that "the model in mind"for those organisingthe Fante civil police "wasan Englishcounty force"-do leave open the question of what the English police of the time could do. In practice they behaved very much like the Mombasapolice describedby JustinWillis: they tried to avoid involvement in labourproblems(and eventually were more successfulabout this than the Mombasapolice), and they regardedsome breaches of the law as regrettablelapsesthat could be ignored until they caused some sort of visible trouble. It is obviouslyvery difficult to document the way policemen get along with people who earn their living by breakingthe law, because the relationship usually depends on a bit of bribery and a bit of blackmail;Willis indicates the conditions that lead to police complicity with law-breakersbut does not provide details of police discipline to show what happened as a result.Peter Robb, in the courseof an essay that does more than most to show how police work fitted into the general frameworkof government, does raisethe question of corruptionin Bengal and Bihar,and he presentsa pictureof a police force that would have been seen, by London standards (though probably not by Los Angeles or Chicago standards),as out of control. The response to this corruptionwas greater moderisation, in the sense of makingthe police force morelike the civil service. Whether the unsatisfactory nineteenth-century police force was an early result of imperialrule, or whether it was the productof conditions before the imperial takeover, is too large a question for even Robb'sfairly ambitiouspaper. More generally,these papersreston the idea that there was something unusual about police forces in
the BritishEmpire,without looking very hard to see what happens elsewhere. Perhaps members of the Indian Civil Service did go home to villages guarded by P. C. Plod; most people, even when free from imperialrule, live somewhere less idyllic. TREVOR LLOYD Universityof Toronto Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens, by Suvendrini Perera;pp. xii + 164. New York:Columbia University Press, 1991, $39.00. REACHESOF EMPIRESKILLFULLY DISPLAYSTHE SUB-
merged, if not preciselyhidden, social fact that imperial profits feed the moral as well as the vicious designs of Victorian fiction. The ocean, in Dombey and Son, representsan expansive, fluid escape from the mechanized tyranny of the railroad,but ocean and railroadbelong to a single imperialsystemwhich the Victorian novel not only accepted but, Suvendrini Perera argues, actively participated in constructing:"it is not only that the novel would be a different form without empire, but that empire is unimaginable in its particularform without its processing and legitimation in the novel" (7). Like Patrick Brantlinger in Rule of Darkness (1988), Perera pushes British imperial mentality back into the early,supposedly"innocent"Victorian period. Her spotlight is trained less on neglected imperialistdocuments than on the mainstreamdomestic novel: Persuasion,North and South, Dombey and Son, VanityFair,JaneEyre.In her re-reading,the very domesticityof these novels constitutes the form of their imperialistcollusion: "the moral superiority of Englishdomesticlife not only vindicating but warranting and even necessitating its nationalmission abroad"(46). She sees marriageplots typicallyworking to marginalizeand moralize empire, with the morallyrefinedwomen (Anne Elliot, MargaretHale, Florence Dombey,Jane Eyre) sanctifyingthe imperial exploits of the men (Wentworth,Thornton, Walter Gay, Rochester), while imperialprofitsprotect a domestic space for progressivevalues to prosper.Although incomplete sub-plots and rhetorical disruptions suggest anxieties about imperial violence, the novels ultimately overcome this disorder through their resolveddomestic plots. In JaneEyre,for example, the burning of the colonialized victim, Bertha Mason, clears space for the English heroine's triumphant feminist marriage.When a text cannot exorcise the crimes of empire from the English domestic
385
another,or fromone authorto another;for instance, William Morrison discusses the approach of the North West Mounted Police to the problemsof the Klondike in the 1890s in much the tone that an uitlanderwould have applied to the Boer authorities at the same time, but drawsno comparisonbetween the difficultiesof runningthese two mining communities. Passingreferencesare made in several papers to the extent that the Irish rather than the English pattern of policing was a major influence in the colonies; RichardHawkins'svery usefularticle about the Royal IrishConstabularycould have served as a model by which other contributorscould have been guided in these referencesto the Irishsystem, but it is not taken up in this way. Understandably,there is no articleaboutpolicing in Britain at the time, and yet the references to Britain-such as Killingray'sstatement that "the model in mind"for those organisingthe Fante civil police "wasan Englishcounty force"-do leave open the question of what the English police of the time could do. In practice they behaved very much like the Mombasapolice describedby JustinWillis: they tried to avoid involvement in labourproblems(and eventually were more successfulabout this than the Mombasapolice), and they regardedsome breaches of the law as regrettablelapsesthat could be ignored until they caused some sort of visible trouble. It is obviouslyvery difficult to document the way policemen get along with people who earn their living by breakingthe law, because the relationship usually depends on a bit of bribery and a bit of blackmail;Willis indicates the conditions that lead to police complicity with law-breakersbut does not provide details of police discipline to show what happened as a result.Peter Robb, in the courseof an essay that does more than most to show how police work fitted into the general frameworkof government, does raisethe question of corruptionin Bengal and Bihar,and he presentsa pictureof a police force that would have been seen, by London standards (though probably not by Los Angeles or Chicago standards),as out of control. The response to this corruptionwas greater moderisation, in the sense of makingthe police force morelike the civil service. Whether the unsatisfactory nineteenth-century police force was an early result of imperialrule, or whether it was the productof conditions before the imperial takeover, is too large a question for even Robb'sfairly ambitiouspaper. More generally,these papersreston the idea that there was something unusual about police forces in
the BritishEmpire,without looking very hard to see what happens elsewhere. Perhaps members of the Indian Civil Service did go home to villages guarded by P. C. Plod; most people, even when free from imperialrule, live somewhere less idyllic. TREVOR LLOYD Universityof Toronto Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens, by Suvendrini Perera;pp. xii + 164. New York:Columbia University Press, 1991, $39.00. REACHESOF EMPIRESKILLFULLY DISPLAYSTHE SUB-
merged, if not preciselyhidden, social fact that imperial profits feed the moral as well as the vicious designs of Victorian fiction. The ocean, in Dombey and Son, representsan expansive, fluid escape from the mechanized tyranny of the railroad,but ocean and railroadbelong to a single imperialsystemwhich the Victorian novel not only accepted but, Suvendrini Perera argues, actively participated in constructing:"it is not only that the novel would be a different form without empire, but that empire is unimaginable in its particularform without its processing and legitimation in the novel" (7). Like Patrick Brantlinger in Rule of Darkness (1988), Perera pushes British imperial mentality back into the early,supposedly"innocent"Victorian period. Her spotlight is trained less on neglected imperialistdocuments than on the mainstreamdomestic novel: Persuasion,North and South, Dombey and Son, VanityFair,JaneEyre.In her re-reading,the very domesticityof these novels constitutes the form of their imperialistcollusion: "the moral superiority of Englishdomesticlife not only vindicating but warranting and even necessitating its nationalmission abroad"(46). She sees marriageplots typicallyworking to marginalizeand moralize empire, with the morallyrefinedwomen (Anne Elliot, MargaretHale, Florence Dombey,Jane Eyre) sanctifyingthe imperial exploits of the men (Wentworth,Thornton, Walter Gay, Rochester), while imperialprofitsprotect a domestic space for progressivevalues to prosper.Although incomplete sub-plots and rhetorical disruptions suggest anxieties about imperial violence, the novels ultimately overcome this disorder through their resolveddomestic plots. In JaneEyre,for example, the burning of the colonialized victim, Bertha Mason, clears space for the English heroine's triumphant feminist marriage.When a text cannot exorcise the crimes of empire from the English domestic
386
setting, as in Dickens's EdwinDrood,the novel becomes unfinishable. This line of argumentextends the challenge to English moralism initiated more than twenty-five years ago by Raymond Williams when he indicted the marriage between property and virtue in the English tradition from country-housepoetry to Jane Austen. In The CountryandtheCity (1973) Williams called attention to how the "universal"moralvalues of the English tradition rest on a social foundation of exploited labor all but removed from sight in the literature. But while Williams gave the Victorian novelists (especially Dickens) credit for makingthis social reality visible, Pereraaccuratelyobserves the half-hiddensocial fact of imperialismthat even Williams was slow to recognize:English wealth, in the Victorian period, increasinglydependedon Britain's growing global possessions;the new marriagesbetween this propertyand virtue exploited groupsof people whose foreignnessmade them even moreeasily marginalizedthan the English poor. PererasupplementsWilliamswith a rosterof less Anglo-centric guides: EdwardSaid (director of the Columbia dissertationfromwhich the book evolved), TerryEagleton, Michel Foucault, Pierre Macherey, Gayatri Spivak, FredricJameson,Homi Bhaba,Benita Parry, David Musselwhite,plus manyothersfromthe entire "rangeof oppositional cultural practicesfrom AfroAmerican studies, feminism, and Marxism to deconstruction"(13). The advantages of this ample backing appear in Perera'sassuredproceduresand brisk prose, free of laborious theoretical self-justifications. But there are also disadvantages to enjoying so much contemporaryacademic support for her method of "reading non-collusively" (1). While Perera announces her intention to "challenge" and "destabilize" (11) established readings of Victorian fiction, Reachesof Empireevokes virtually no earlier literary establishment to destabilize (hardly a peep from commentary before 1970 is audible here), and ecumenical affiliation with so many different kinds of "revisionists"further blunts the force of what once were fighting words. Perera intelligently executes the moves of revisionist criticism in currently orthodox academic style; the limitations of the book in a sense reflect the drawbacks of coming of age at a time when "reading non-collusively" has become a new conformity. Perera is best as an astute interpreterof telling details, like the allusions to Dick Whittington in Dombey and Son, that contribute to a "triumphal
myth of mercantilism"(72). Yet her drive to align the novels ideologically with the most "consolidated" (and therefore ideologically offensive) version of their designs leads her to expropriateall the details of violence, guilt, and conflict in the novels for her own oppositional argument, without adequate weighing of the variabledegreeof irresolution in the books themselves.Her approachsucceedsbetter with Dombeyand Son than with Northand South, where imagesof Englishstrikesand Irishstrikebreakers, mutiny at sea and accidental murderat home, plainly implicate even the virtuousheroine in a system of recurrentviolence beyond what her marriage can resolve. In regardto JaneEyre,Pererapeculiarly labels the final status of the imperialistmissionary, St. John Rivers, a "triumph"(85), presumablybecause of Jane'srhetoricaltribute to him (after news of his death). Yet Charlotte Bronte'spowerfullycritical vision of the life-denyingand ultimatelyself-destructive energies that drive the imperialistmartyr count for more in the total portraitof St. John Rivers than Jane's eulogy. Jane'striumph seems to require many sacrificial deaths: the imperialistmissionary, St. John Rivers, no less than Bertha Mason (and Helen Bums). To be offendedonly by sacrificeof the colonializedfigureshowsmorepartialityof judgment than does the novel itself. In the conclusion to Reachesof Empire,Perera invokesRaymondWilliamsin defenseof "affiliation" and "solidarity"with the exploited as legitimate motives in literaryhistoryand judgment.But in the very passage from Politicsand Letters(1981) quoted by Perera,Williams also cautions against reducing either literary or historical understandingto merely "currentmorality."Williams'sconsciousness of this dangerinformsthe exploratoryand self-criticalspirit of his inquiries into the social basis of literature. Reachesof Empireshows how hard it is to retain that spiritonce "oppositional"criticismsettles into established practice. MARGERY SABIN WellesleyCollege Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell & the Victorian Novel, by Hilary M. Schor; pp. vi + 236. New Yorkand Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 1992, $29.95. ADDRESSING ELIZABETH GASKELL AS SCHEHEREZADE
in an 1851 letter to her about serializationin Household Words,Charles Dickens both flirts with and manipulates this "exotic" fabulist, this author of
386
setting, as in Dickens's EdwinDrood,the novel becomes unfinishable. This line of argumentextends the challenge to English moralism initiated more than twenty-five years ago by Raymond Williams when he indicted the marriage between property and virtue in the English tradition from country-housepoetry to Jane Austen. In The CountryandtheCity (1973) Williams called attention to how the "universal"moralvalues of the English tradition rest on a social foundation of exploited labor all but removed from sight in the literature. But while Williams gave the Victorian novelists (especially Dickens) credit for makingthis social reality visible, Pereraaccuratelyobserves the half-hiddensocial fact of imperialismthat even Williams was slow to recognize:English wealth, in the Victorian period, increasinglydependedon Britain's growing global possessions;the new marriagesbetween this propertyand virtue exploited groupsof people whose foreignnessmade them even moreeasily marginalizedthan the English poor. PererasupplementsWilliamswith a rosterof less Anglo-centric guides: EdwardSaid (director of the Columbia dissertationfromwhich the book evolved), TerryEagleton, Michel Foucault, Pierre Macherey, Gayatri Spivak, FredricJameson,Homi Bhaba,Benita Parry, David Musselwhite,plus manyothersfromthe entire "rangeof oppositional cultural practicesfrom AfroAmerican studies, feminism, and Marxism to deconstruction"(13). The advantages of this ample backing appear in Perera'sassuredproceduresand brisk prose, free of laborious theoretical self-justifications. But there are also disadvantages to enjoying so much contemporaryacademic support for her method of "reading non-collusively" (1). While Perera announces her intention to "challenge" and "destabilize" (11) established readings of Victorian fiction, Reachesof Empireevokes virtually no earlier literary establishment to destabilize (hardly a peep from commentary before 1970 is audible here), and ecumenical affiliation with so many different kinds of "revisionists"further blunts the force of what once were fighting words. Perera intelligently executes the moves of revisionist criticism in currently orthodox academic style; the limitations of the book in a sense reflect the drawbacks of coming of age at a time when "reading non-collusively" has become a new conformity. Perera is best as an astute interpreterof telling details, like the allusions to Dick Whittington in Dombey and Son, that contribute to a "triumphal
myth of mercantilism"(72). Yet her drive to align the novels ideologically with the most "consolidated" (and therefore ideologically offensive) version of their designs leads her to expropriateall the details of violence, guilt, and conflict in the novels for her own oppositional argument, without adequate weighing of the variabledegreeof irresolution in the books themselves.Her approachsucceedsbetter with Dombeyand Son than with Northand South, where imagesof Englishstrikesand Irishstrikebreakers, mutiny at sea and accidental murderat home, plainly implicate even the virtuousheroine in a system of recurrentviolence beyond what her marriage can resolve. In regardto JaneEyre,Pererapeculiarly labels the final status of the imperialistmissionary, St. John Rivers, a "triumph"(85), presumablybecause of Jane'srhetoricaltribute to him (after news of his death). Yet Charlotte Bronte'spowerfullycritical vision of the life-denyingand ultimatelyself-destructive energies that drive the imperialistmartyr count for more in the total portraitof St. John Rivers than Jane's eulogy. Jane'striumph seems to require many sacrificial deaths: the imperialistmissionary, St. John Rivers, no less than Bertha Mason (and Helen Bums). To be offendedonly by sacrificeof the colonializedfigureshowsmorepartialityof judgment than does the novel itself. In the conclusion to Reachesof Empire,Perera invokesRaymondWilliamsin defenseof "affiliation" and "solidarity"with the exploited as legitimate motives in literaryhistoryand judgment.But in the very passage from Politicsand Letters(1981) quoted by Perera,Williams also cautions against reducing either literary or historical understandingto merely "currentmorality."Williams'sconsciousness of this dangerinformsthe exploratoryand self-criticalspirit of his inquiries into the social basis of literature. Reachesof Empireshows how hard it is to retain that spiritonce "oppositional"criticismsettles into established practice. MARGERY SABIN WellesleyCollege Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell & the Victorian Novel, by Hilary M. Schor; pp. vi + 236. New Yorkand Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 1992, $29.95. ADDRESSING ELIZABETH GASKELL AS SCHEHEREZADE
in an 1851 letter to her about serializationin Household Words,Charles Dickens both flirts with and manipulates this "exotic" fabulist, this author of
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Mary Bartonand LizzieLeigh,who tells stories that are, perhaps, just too close to home. As editor he commands her to tell tales; as man he is seduced by them; as fellow toiler in the same marketplace,he patronizesher to announce his position, while complimenting her as a gentleman author might be expected to do. With this anecdote of female author and male editor and author in the Victorian sexual/textual marketplace,Hilary Schor compactly raises several of the importantquestions which she then explores in her fine studyof Gaskell'smajorfiction. How does a female novelist find a voice? How does she negotiate her own anxieties and those of a male authorial club as she assumesthe privilegesand responsibilities of a public voice? Moreover,what does she do to her inherited literary forms to write an alternative fiction?Drawingon the workof American, French,and British feminism and on theories of ideology and figuration by the Marxist Pierre Macherey, Schor puts forwarda compelling and richly-detailedargument about the evolution of the heroine's plot through Gaskell'sfiction and the evolution of Gaskell herselfas female author.Schor'sbook thus offers of a a double-plot-it is at once a bildungsroman female survivorof the Victorian literarymarketplace and a close reading,attentive to issuesof genderand genre, of a series of texts (Mary Barton, Ruth, Cranford,Northand South,Sylvia'sLovers,and Wives and Daughters).As one of two feminist studies of Gaskell'scareer,and as a collection of acutely perceptive readingsof her fiction, Schor'sbook should earn well-deservedpraise. In the past, Gaskell has been treated as a sympathetic observer of the human cost of industrial progressin Northern England, as a recordersecond to Engels or Mayhew of the filthy living and working conditions of mid-centurylaborers.At the same time, she has often been faulted either for her seemingly wrenched insertions of class strife into domestic fictions or for taming that very strife by producing a marriage plot with a federal express delivery of concord. Both of these assessments involve serious misreadings. If Eliot's organicism and Dickens's vision of chance connectedness have been interpreted and explained to satisfaction, Gaskell's blend of melodrama, romance, sociological observation, fantasy, and realismhas not found many eloquent advocates. While, most recently, Catherine Gallagher and Rosemarie Bodenheimer have helped us read Gaskell'sindustrialfiction in especially provocative
ways, no critic is as open to the dialogic play in all the fiction as is Schor. Hilary Schor arguesthat Gaskell'sgreatest contribution lay in her politicizing the romance plot. Rather than scorning the heroine's progresstoward marriageas merely preserving cultural norms or as policing transgressivefemale desire, Schor maintains that the private plot, the romance plot, is both the site of radical generic change and of political critique. At the same time, she does not neglect women's transgressive moments in the public sphere, as when Mary Barton searches for evidence and testifies on behalf of Jem or when Margaret Hale negotiates between masters and men. Rather, Schor illustrates how the public invasion of the private and the private invasion of the public are inextricably connected-and even dependent on each other. She is thus convincing in her treatments of MaryBarton,Ruth,and NorthandSouth.However, she is also especially suggestive about a number of scenes across Gaskell's works which concer relocating the most private relationship of all, the mother/child relationship. Schor notes those times when the public male takes on the nurturant role, from Job Legh's adoption of his dead daughter's nightcap as he cares for his grandchild in Mary Barton,to Peter Jenkyns'sparadingcross-dressedas his single sister Deborah in Cranford,while using a pillow to representa child. Schor also discussesthe insertion of the private realm into the public one: the many scenes where children interruptelders as they engage in non-domestic activity and the problematic use of the mother/child model as a way to rewrite paternalismtoward workers. But the test case for Schor's own plot must be Cranford,which does not concern a romance in the traditional sense. Rather, this pastoral celebrates a predominantlyfemale ruralcommunitypoised for its last moments of survival before succumbing to the economic necessities of the industrial city nearby. Schor reads it brilliantly, I think, as a revision of Pickwick,as a tale about female empowerment,and as a highly self-conscious text about reading and writing, social units, audiences, and the kinds of compromisenecessaryto succeed in readingcommunities and in communities that are based more overtly in economics.What seems at firsta test chapter, then, becomes the best window to all others. The only quibble that I have with Schor'sbook, a methodologicalone, is anticipatedby Schor herself in the chapter on Ruthwhere she warns that "one wants to resistthe impulseto readall novels as telling
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the story of their own writing"(76). At times, particularlyin her unplumbeduse of formalistlanguage about narrative,a vagueness intrudeswhich threatens to thematize each novel as a stage of Gaskell's career. This generality oversimplifies the multidiscursiveand multi-materialinsertion (and reinsertion) of the Victorian female author into the ever-changingliterarymarketplace.It thus treatsthe career, if not the texts, a bit too exclusively in psychological/narrativeterms, instead of in the richly veined sociological terms toward which the book seriouslygestures. Quibbling aside, however, Schor has producedan ambitious,carefullyexecuted study of a centrally importantwoman novelist. LINDA M. SHIRES SyracuseUniversity Gentlemen Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman, by H. L. Malchow;pp. xii + 423. Stanford:StanfordUniversity Press, 1992, $47.50. THIS WORKOFFERS,THROUGH"MINI-BIOGRAPHIES"
of fourhitherto obscureMembersof Parliamentwho were also successfulbusinessmen,a novel look into bourgeoissocial relationshipsand culture in Victorian England. Focusing on the interconnections between their domestic, commercial, and political careers, H. L. Malchow puts flesh on the bones of a number of widely discussedgeneralizationsabout the trajectory and significance of upper-middleclass Victorian experience. From a large sample of nearly 3000 individuals active in national public causes in the period 186585 the author selected over 200 businessmen for statistical examination. From this group he picked four for close study-all foursuccessfulbusinessmen and Membersof Parliament(and all leaving behind sufficient documentation). Samuel Holland, a Liverpool-bor owner of Welsh slate quarries,entered parliament late in life as a Liberalrepresentative of his adopted Welsh locality; William MacArthurmoved from a successfulbusinesscareer in Ulster to the City of London, becoming Lord Mayorand a Tory Memberfor Lambeth(and Methodism); Robert Fowler, an evangelical London banker, moved from Quakerism to the Church of England, became also a Lord Mayor and then the City's M.P.; John Holmes grew up in a Scottish textile business, came young to London with the business, and was returned for Hackney, rising to become secretary to the Board of Trade under
Chamberlain. If less than major political figures, these men were all more than mere division-fodder. Each played a significant role in a number of the causesand principledpressuregroupsthat abounded in this era. Holland was Vice Presidentof the Central Association to Stop the Sale of Intoxicating Liquorson Sundays, MacArthurthe parliamentary spokesmanfor Methodism in general and the campaign to annex Fiji in particular,and Fowler the parliamentaryvoice of the Aborigines' Protection Society. Holmes became a crusaderfor armyreform. All four lives are both interesting in themselves and typical in many ways, not only of others in the sample of 200-plus businessmen-activists, but of that protean abstraction,the Victorian bourgeoisie. Such an approach is of course to some degree arbitrary.In many ways "joiners"in causes were an atypical subsetof businessmenin general-more religious, more earnest, and more affluent. And businessmen were a small minorityof all "joiners";most of the author'soriginal sample apparentlydid not have business interests. Even within this subset of businessmen-activists,the initial principlesof selection play a large role in shaping the conclusions; other selections could have yielded a somewhatdifferent composite picture. As Malchow notes, the provincial industrialistsof the English North and Midlandsare absent;similarly,only one of these four did not move his permanent residence to London. In such a selection the power of the metropolisinevitably looms large. Nonetheless, all selections are partial, and this one is no more so than others that might be made. Careful not to claim too much for its four lives, GentlemenCapitalistspersuasivelyadvancesa number of general propositionsabout the functions of public activity and the trajectoryof middle-class lives in the Victorianera. Most obviously,it deepens the sort of argumentsmade throughoutthe recent Cambridge Social History of Britainfor the pervasiveness and centrality of associational activity in this period. More specifically,it illuminates the social and psychological functions voluntary philanthropic and political associationsperformedfor their memberssuch as providingnew forms of status and new sorts of community more suited to an unprecedentedly mobile society-over and above their formal purposes of effecting governmental and social change. Malchow concludes that middle-class pressure groups (and, he might have added, philanthropic societies) have been too purelyjudgedon their success (or more usually, lack of success) in effecting
388
the story of their own writing"(76). At times, particularlyin her unplumbeduse of formalistlanguage about narrative,a vagueness intrudeswhich threatens to thematize each novel as a stage of Gaskell's career. This generality oversimplifies the multidiscursiveand multi-materialinsertion (and reinsertion) of the Victorian female author into the ever-changingliterarymarketplace.It thus treatsthe career, if not the texts, a bit too exclusively in psychological/narrativeterms, instead of in the richly veined sociological terms toward which the book seriouslygestures. Quibbling aside, however, Schor has producedan ambitious,carefullyexecuted study of a centrally importantwoman novelist. LINDA M. SHIRES SyracuseUniversity Gentlemen Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman, by H. L. Malchow;pp. xii + 423. Stanford:StanfordUniversity Press, 1992, $47.50. THIS WORKOFFERS,THROUGH"MINI-BIOGRAPHIES"
of fourhitherto obscureMembersof Parliamentwho were also successfulbusinessmen,a novel look into bourgeoissocial relationshipsand culture in Victorian England. Focusing on the interconnections between their domestic, commercial, and political careers, H. L. Malchow puts flesh on the bones of a number of widely discussedgeneralizationsabout the trajectory and significance of upper-middleclass Victorian experience. From a large sample of nearly 3000 individuals active in national public causes in the period 186585 the author selected over 200 businessmen for statistical examination. From this group he picked four for close study-all foursuccessfulbusinessmen and Membersof Parliament(and all leaving behind sufficient documentation). Samuel Holland, a Liverpool-bor owner of Welsh slate quarries,entered parliament late in life as a Liberalrepresentative of his adopted Welsh locality; William MacArthurmoved from a successfulbusinesscareer in Ulster to the City of London, becoming Lord Mayorand a Tory Memberfor Lambeth(and Methodism); Robert Fowler, an evangelical London banker, moved from Quakerism to the Church of England, became also a Lord Mayor and then the City's M.P.; John Holmes grew up in a Scottish textile business, came young to London with the business, and was returned for Hackney, rising to become secretary to the Board of Trade under
Chamberlain. If less than major political figures, these men were all more than mere division-fodder. Each played a significant role in a number of the causesand principledpressuregroupsthat abounded in this era. Holland was Vice Presidentof the Central Association to Stop the Sale of Intoxicating Liquorson Sundays, MacArthurthe parliamentary spokesmanfor Methodism in general and the campaign to annex Fiji in particular,and Fowler the parliamentaryvoice of the Aborigines' Protection Society. Holmes became a crusaderfor armyreform. All four lives are both interesting in themselves and typical in many ways, not only of others in the sample of 200-plus businessmen-activists, but of that protean abstraction,the Victorian bourgeoisie. Such an approach is of course to some degree arbitrary.In many ways "joiners"in causes were an atypical subsetof businessmenin general-more religious, more earnest, and more affluent. And businessmen were a small minorityof all "joiners";most of the author'soriginal sample apparentlydid not have business interests. Even within this subset of businessmen-activists,the initial principlesof selection play a large role in shaping the conclusions; other selections could have yielded a somewhatdifferent composite picture. As Malchow notes, the provincial industrialistsof the English North and Midlandsare absent;similarly,only one of these four did not move his permanent residence to London. In such a selection the power of the metropolisinevitably looms large. Nonetheless, all selections are partial, and this one is no more so than others that might be made. Careful not to claim too much for its four lives, GentlemenCapitalistspersuasivelyadvancesa number of general propositionsabout the functions of public activity and the trajectoryof middle-class lives in the Victorianera. Most obviously,it deepens the sort of argumentsmade throughoutthe recent Cambridge Social History of Britainfor the pervasiveness and centrality of associational activity in this period. More specifically,it illuminates the social and psychological functions voluntary philanthropic and political associationsperformedfor their memberssuch as providingnew forms of status and new sorts of community more suited to an unprecedentedly mobile society-over and above their formal purposes of effecting governmental and social change. Malchow concludes that middle-class pressure groups (and, he might have added, philanthropic societies) have been too purelyjudgedon their success (or more usually, lack of success) in effecting
389
their official aims; too little appreciatedhas been their "transformingsocial function" which lay particularly "in the way they point towardsthe fusion of the commercialwith the landed, professionaland higher bureaucraticelites in the earlytwentieth century"(353). Thus this study of the joining behavior of businessmen presents a portrait of the Victorian bourgeoisie as it moved toward homogenization, metropolitanization, and gentrification, toward merger in a new single national elite taking shape out of the flux of accelerated economic and demographic change. Malchow questions, however, whethersuch social processesshould be seen in terms of the "hegemony"of traditionalelites and values, as opposed to a more genuinely mutual merger into a new elite with its distinctive values, and (following in particular the recent arguments of Martin Daunton), whether one can attribute to them any negative economic effects. The "hegemony"argument is probably unresolvable, and the economic question is never addressedhere until the conclusion, remainingsomewhattangential to the predominantly socio-political focus of a book whose chief, and considerable,value lies in its "thickdescription" of a number of significant but hitherto-unappreciated Victorian lives. MARTINJ. WIENER Rice University The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800-1840, by James A. Jaffe;pp. xii + 228. Cambridgeand New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, £30.00, $49.50. Class, Community and Collective Action: Social Change in Two British Coalfields, 1850-1926, by David Gilbert;pp. x + 293. Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1992, £40.00, $72.00. BOTHJAMESJAFFE'SSTRUGGLEFORMARKETPOWER
and David Gilbert'sClass Communityand CoUective Action are nominally books about English coal miners. They are also books that attempt to supplant orthodox neo-Marxist interpretations of industrial conflict. Here, however,the resemblanceends.Jaffe's book is a dazzlingreinterpretationof class conflict in the mines that lays waste to the tired old saw that early strikeswere the defense of traditionalcustoms against marketrationality and capitalist reorganization of the labor process. His work is convincing, well-documented, and pregnant with ramifications
for social history and the related social sciences. Gilbert'sbook is a lame attempt to use "community" to explain differencesin working-classradicalismbetween Welsh and Nottingham coal mining villages. Disorganizedin its argument,weak in its theory,and incomplete in the documentation of its arguments, Gilbert'sbook will be of interestonly to South Wales or Nottingham specialists. First, in praise of Jaffe. Jaffe uses the history of industrialconflict in coal mining in the Northeast of Britainfrom 1800 to 1840 to addressthe class basis of labor conflict in the era of the early industrial revolution. He arguesconvincingly that these struggles were not abouteither primitiveor Bravermanian reorganizationof the labor process. It is well known to coal historians that the labor process in mining was largely untouched by capitalist reorganization until Taylorismand the twentieth century. Before then, workerswere largelyleft to hew coal in whatever manner they saw fit, and workerssustainedsignificant autonomy over the micro-structurationof their day. Where Jaffediffersfrom prevailing wisdom is to furtherargue that conflicts did not involve workers defending traditional moral economies against the incursions of capitalist markets. In fact, the coal operatorsthemselves were the primarybarriersto the operation of marketforces;this forced the unions in some (but not all) cases to act as agents of market extension. Jaffe begins by tracing the extensive secondary literatureon the history of the cartellizationof the earlyEnglishcoal industry.Coal companiesattempted to maintain their profit marginsin the face of high fixed costs by restrictingoutput to raise prices. Coal deliveries were legally restrictedin the City of London;productionlimitswerealsoenforcedby extensive employerorganizationat a regionallevel. Guaranteed high prices loweredpressureon firmsto obtain economies in the cost of production. Capitalist market inhibition also extended to labor relations. Companies attempted (although, as Jaffenotes, less successfully) to eliminate labormarketsin mining by binding laborto particularestablishments.Companyhousing was the most widespreadof these devices. Equally important,in this setting, was the use of annual contracts to legally commit workersto particularmines for a year at a time. The critical bargainingissue of this period was employer attempts to lessen worker mobilityduringcontract renegotiationtime by making exit prohibitivelydifficult for workers.This involved the immediateeviction fromcompanyhousing
389
their official aims; too little appreciatedhas been their "transformingsocial function" which lay particularly "in the way they point towardsthe fusion of the commercialwith the landed, professionaland higher bureaucraticelites in the earlytwentieth century"(353). Thus this study of the joining behavior of businessmen presents a portrait of the Victorian bourgeoisie as it moved toward homogenization, metropolitanization, and gentrification, toward merger in a new single national elite taking shape out of the flux of accelerated economic and demographic change. Malchow questions, however, whethersuch social processesshould be seen in terms of the "hegemony"of traditionalelites and values, as opposed to a more genuinely mutual merger into a new elite with its distinctive values, and (following in particular the recent arguments of Martin Daunton), whether one can attribute to them any negative economic effects. The "hegemony"argument is probably unresolvable, and the economic question is never addressedhere until the conclusion, remainingsomewhattangential to the predominantly socio-political focus of a book whose chief, and considerable,value lies in its "thickdescription" of a number of significant but hitherto-unappreciated Victorian lives. MARTINJ. WIENER Rice University The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800-1840, by James A. Jaffe;pp. xii + 228. Cambridgeand New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, £30.00, $49.50. Class, Community and Collective Action: Social Change in Two British Coalfields, 1850-1926, by David Gilbert;pp. x + 293. Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1992, £40.00, $72.00. BOTHJAMESJAFFE'SSTRUGGLEFORMARKETPOWER
and David Gilbert'sClass Communityand CoUective Action are nominally books about English coal miners. They are also books that attempt to supplant orthodox neo-Marxist interpretations of industrial conflict. Here, however,the resemblanceends.Jaffe's book is a dazzlingreinterpretationof class conflict in the mines that lays waste to the tired old saw that early strikeswere the defense of traditionalcustoms against marketrationality and capitalist reorganization of the labor process. His work is convincing, well-documented, and pregnant with ramifications
for social history and the related social sciences. Gilbert'sbook is a lame attempt to use "community" to explain differencesin working-classradicalismbetween Welsh and Nottingham coal mining villages. Disorganizedin its argument,weak in its theory,and incomplete in the documentation of its arguments, Gilbert'sbook will be of interestonly to South Wales or Nottingham specialists. First, in praise of Jaffe. Jaffe uses the history of industrialconflict in coal mining in the Northeast of Britainfrom 1800 to 1840 to addressthe class basis of labor conflict in the era of the early industrial revolution. He arguesconvincingly that these struggles were not abouteither primitiveor Bravermanian reorganizationof the labor process. It is well known to coal historians that the labor process in mining was largely untouched by capitalist reorganization until Taylorismand the twentieth century. Before then, workerswere largelyleft to hew coal in whatever manner they saw fit, and workerssustainedsignificant autonomy over the micro-structurationof their day. Where Jaffediffersfrom prevailing wisdom is to furtherargue that conflicts did not involve workers defending traditional moral economies against the incursions of capitalist markets. In fact, the coal operatorsthemselves were the primarybarriersto the operation of marketforces;this forced the unions in some (but not all) cases to act as agents of market extension. Jaffe begins by tracing the extensive secondary literatureon the history of the cartellizationof the earlyEnglishcoal industry.Coal companiesattempted to maintain their profit marginsin the face of high fixed costs by restrictingoutput to raise prices. Coal deliveries were legally restrictedin the City of London;productionlimitswerealsoenforcedby extensive employerorganizationat a regionallevel. Guaranteed high prices loweredpressureon firmsto obtain economies in the cost of production. Capitalist market inhibition also extended to labor relations. Companies attempted (although, as Jaffenotes, less successfully) to eliminate labormarketsin mining by binding laborto particularestablishments.Companyhousing was the most widespreadof these devices. Equally important,in this setting, was the use of annual contracts to legally commit workersto particularmines for a year at a time. The critical bargainingissue of this period was employer attempts to lessen worker mobilityduringcontract renegotiationtime by making exit prohibitivelydifficult for workers.This involved the immediateeviction fromcompanyhousing
390
of all workerswho failedto renewtheircontracts,and the moving of the negotiation date to mid-winter, when geographicalmobility would impose the greatest hardshipson miners'families. Workersnaturally opposedboth these initiatives.Jaffecompellinglyargues that union attemptsto removehousingfromthe employment contract and schedule renewals in the warmseason was an attemptto extend marketrationality to the laborcontract. Jaffe would also note that the miners were not radical free-marketeers either. No one proposed eliminating annual contracts, nor did the miners support the importation of workersfrom other regions or letting capitalistsratherthan workersmake job assignments. Jaffe correctly characterizesearly industrialrelations as conflicts within a framework of informal collective bargainingover the distribution of immediate economic advantages for each party.This is a compelling materialistanalysis that eschews orthodox Marxist categories in favor of economism and common sense. Gilbert wants to explain the greater radicalism of miners in South Wales relative to Nottinghamshire, by contrasting two villages, Ynysybwl and Hucknall. For Gilbert, the critical concept is "community,"a word he uses very holistically. Unfortunately,despite an entire theoretical chapteron definitionsof community,which he never invokes in the historicalnarrative,communityseems to mean the entire social structureand culture of a village. As such it veers into descriptive tautology. This tendency is reflected in the book'sorganization into chapters on South Wales, Ynysybwl,Nottingham, and Hucknall (as opposed to chapterson the analytical reasons why Ynysybwl differed from Hucknall, etc.). Non-parallelism allows him to dodge providing evidence to support his theories. Thus the presenceof an agrariangentry in Hucknall supposedly contributed to moderation in Nottingham. However,becausethere is no similardiscussion of upper-classorganizationin Wales, we cannot assess the legitimacy of his claim. Other factorsweakening radicalism in Nottingham are greater inter-occupationalmixing, the weaknessesof lodges, the greater presence of non-conformist Protestantism, and greatercontinuity between the liberal and labor parties in the Midlands.Some of these claims are undoubtedlycorrect. However,which ones matter cannot be assessedwithout some sort of analytic parsingout. Strangelyfor a book on industrialconflict in coal mines, the coal companies make no appearance
whatsoever.There is virtuallyno mention of workplace dynamics,skill mixes or occupationalmixes on the shop floor, employerinitiatives, or the dynamics of collective bargaining.The emphasis is primarily on the "strength of community." Undoubtedly, South Wales miners had a strong sense of workingclass identity and community.However,didn't their foremen and supervisorslive in the same towns? Where did the victims of the riots and strikeswhich are the productof a supposedcommunal gemeinschaft-live, work,and go to church?It is hard to tell a crediblestoryof conflict without tracingthe history of both sides. The relative merits of these two books can be easily seen in their discussions of religion. Gilbert shows the moderatingeffects of religion by identifying the presence of conservative denominations in his region (often yearsbeforethe strikeswith which he concerns himself) and noting employerfinancing of some chapels.Jaffedoes all of the above. However, he also attempts to correlate actual regional and temporaldifferencesin union movements with parallel developmentsin the church. When he finds no correlation,he rejectsculture-drivenexplanationsof union ideology. (He also adds an ingenious new explanation, linking religion to unionism solely throughshort-termneeds to recruithighly educated leaders.) By actively attempting to separatecorrect from incorrect historical accounts, Jaffe moves us past global fuzzinesseslike "community"into concretely identifying the exact factorsthat lead to observabledifferencesin workermobilization. SAMUEL COHN
TexasA & M University Cities, Class and Communication: Essays in Honour of Asa Briggs, edited by Derek Fraser;pp. xi + 264. New Yorkand London:HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1990, $94.95, £30.00. IN THE POST-WARDECADESTHE HISTORIOGRAPHY
of nineteenth-century Britain has become democratic. The writings of Asa Briggs have played a substantialrole in this process. He has made pioneering and enduring contributionsto urbanhistory and to labourhistory,to the history of popularpolitics as well as to the study of material culture. As DerekFraserpoints out, Briggs'sworkhas been about "voters,customers,workersand passengers"as well as "rulers,magnatesand clergymen"(6). His contribution has also been distinctive. He has sought to integrateeconomic, social, and political history,but
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of all workerswho failedto renewtheircontracts,and the moving of the negotiation date to mid-winter, when geographicalmobility would impose the greatest hardshipson miners'families. Workersnaturally opposedboth these initiatives.Jaffecompellinglyargues that union attemptsto removehousingfromthe employment contract and schedule renewals in the warmseason was an attemptto extend marketrationality to the laborcontract. Jaffe would also note that the miners were not radical free-marketeers either. No one proposed eliminating annual contracts, nor did the miners support the importation of workersfrom other regions or letting capitalistsratherthan workersmake job assignments. Jaffe correctly characterizesearly industrialrelations as conflicts within a framework of informal collective bargainingover the distribution of immediate economic advantages for each party.This is a compelling materialistanalysis that eschews orthodox Marxist categories in favor of economism and common sense. Gilbert wants to explain the greater radicalism of miners in South Wales relative to Nottinghamshire, by contrasting two villages, Ynysybwl and Hucknall. For Gilbert, the critical concept is "community,"a word he uses very holistically. Unfortunately,despite an entire theoretical chapteron definitionsof community,which he never invokes in the historicalnarrative,communityseems to mean the entire social structureand culture of a village. As such it veers into descriptive tautology. This tendency is reflected in the book'sorganization into chapters on South Wales, Ynysybwl,Nottingham, and Hucknall (as opposed to chapterson the analytical reasons why Ynysybwl differed from Hucknall, etc.). Non-parallelism allows him to dodge providing evidence to support his theories. Thus the presenceof an agrariangentry in Hucknall supposedly contributed to moderation in Nottingham. However,becausethere is no similardiscussion of upper-classorganizationin Wales, we cannot assess the legitimacy of his claim. Other factorsweakening radicalism in Nottingham are greater inter-occupationalmixing, the weaknessesof lodges, the greater presence of non-conformist Protestantism, and greatercontinuity between the liberal and labor parties in the Midlands.Some of these claims are undoubtedlycorrect. However,which ones matter cannot be assessedwithout some sort of analytic parsingout. Strangelyfor a book on industrialconflict in coal mines, the coal companies make no appearance
whatsoever.There is virtuallyno mention of workplace dynamics,skill mixes or occupationalmixes on the shop floor, employerinitiatives, or the dynamics of collective bargaining.The emphasis is primarily on the "strength of community." Undoubtedly, South Wales miners had a strong sense of workingclass identity and community.However,didn't their foremen and supervisorslive in the same towns? Where did the victims of the riots and strikeswhich are the productof a supposedcommunal gemeinschaft-live, work,and go to church?It is hard to tell a crediblestoryof conflict without tracingthe history of both sides. The relative merits of these two books can be easily seen in their discussions of religion. Gilbert shows the moderatingeffects of religion by identifying the presence of conservative denominations in his region (often yearsbeforethe strikeswith which he concerns himself) and noting employerfinancing of some chapels.Jaffedoes all of the above. However, he also attempts to correlate actual regional and temporaldifferencesin union movements with parallel developmentsin the church. When he finds no correlation,he rejectsculture-drivenexplanationsof union ideology. (He also adds an ingenious new explanation, linking religion to unionism solely throughshort-termneeds to recruithighly educated leaders.) By actively attempting to separatecorrect from incorrect historical accounts, Jaffe moves us past global fuzzinesseslike "community"into concretely identifying the exact factorsthat lead to observabledifferencesin workermobilization. SAMUEL COHN
TexasA & M University Cities, Class and Communication: Essays in Honour of Asa Briggs, edited by Derek Fraser;pp. xi + 264. New Yorkand London:HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1990, $94.95, £30.00. IN THE POST-WARDECADESTHE HISTORIOGRAPHY
of nineteenth-century Britain has become democratic. The writings of Asa Briggs have played a substantialrole in this process. He has made pioneering and enduring contributionsto urbanhistory and to labourhistory,to the history of popularpolitics as well as to the study of material culture. As DerekFraserpoints out, Briggs'sworkhas been about "voters,customers,workersand passengers"as well as "rulers,magnatesand clergymen"(6). His contribution has also been distinctive. He has sought to integrateeconomic, social, and political history,but
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he has done so outside of the Marxist framework which informs the work of other post-warpioneers such as Eric Hobsbawmand EdwardThompson. Of course,Briggs'soeuvreextendsbeyondthe confines of the nineteenth century,most notably in his It is, then, appropriatethat one Historyof Broadcasting. section of this volume is devotedto "communication." In it Donald Read chartsthe rise and fall of Sir RoderickJonesat Reuters.Jonestook control of the company in 1916 with the covert backing of the British government.But his too-cosy dealingswith the governmentled to his unwillingresignationas managing directorin 1941. The relationshipsbetween governarealsothe subject ment, information,andpropaganda of MarielGrant'sessayon the National Health Campaigns of 1937-38. Here the government'stendency to relyon unofficialbodiesis seen fromthe perspective of Whitehall. Two furtheressaysdeal with film. Peter Keating explores the unhappy relationshipbetween Britishnovelistsand the earlyfilm industry,and Peter StanskywritesaboutHumphreyJenningsand, in particular,his 1941 propagandafilm, FiresWereStarted. Stansky'sessay is an evocative vignette of the left intellegentsia.He vauntsJennings'spatriotismand humanity,and applaudshis celebrationof the heroic and stoic virtuesof the Britishpeople in wartime. The remainder of the book concentrates on Briggs'sfirst interests,urbanpolitics and social relations and, with the exception of K. S. Inglis'sessay on First World War memorialsin Sydney and Melbourne, it deals centrally with Britain in the nineteenth century.The essays vary in quality and ambition. However, one of the local studies is particularlywelcome. JamesTreble'sstudyof skilled labour in Glasgow between 1880 and 1914 provides a tightly-argueddemonstrationof the way the history of a particularcity can also illuminate problemsof wide significance in labourhistory-a trulyBriggsian virtue. Treblearguesthat skilled workers'experience of severe cyclical unemploymentbetween 1907 and 1910, and the campaign of the Unemployed Workers'Committee establishedby GlasgowTrades Council, advanced a radicalizedworking-classunity in the city. The experience of unemployment, he suggests, established a countervailing force to the endemic sectionalism of skilled workers. Another Briggsiantheme-urban government and politicsis the subject of W. Hamish Fraser'selegant survey of municipal idealism from the civic gospel of early Victorianevangelicalsto turn-of-the-centurymunicipal socialism. Strong on Scotland, the essay is weakeron municipalsocialism in London. But Ham-
ish Fraser'sconclusion fits the capital, too: namely, that in the pre-war decade, among voters of all classes, the municipal ideal was smothered by the rising burdenof rates. Of the four remaining essays two are of particular importance and, in this context, are even poignant as they illustrate, in different ways, how historians are beginning to move away from the frameworkwhich informed Briggs'sown work. The challenges come from two sources:one substantive, the other theoretical. The first is addressed by Richard Price in his bold essay, "Does Victorian England make sense?"Here Price attempts to synthesise a wide range of new writing on the period and on the preceding century. This work, Price claims, undermines the specificity of the Victorian period and, still more, its characterisation as an epoch which witnessed the triumph of the middle class. Price emphasises the continuities from the eighteenth century to the 1870s in religion, in the economy, in social structure, in the composition of the elite, in the conduct of politics, and in the administration of government. He concludes that "Victorian England makes little sense except as a stage within a broader period that stretched from the late seventeenth century to the late-nineteenth" (166). As for theory, the editor's introduction notes that Briggs'swork exemplifies the view "that if we wish to understandthe political processes at work, then we must first clarify the social and economic relations" (5). But it is precisely this procedure which has been increasingly challenged over the last decade by historians who have been drawn to the history of political languages and of symbolic representations,not as reflections of social interests but as the elements which defined social and political forces. These currentsare not to be found here. But John Belchem's brave essay, "Beyond Chartist Studies," attempts to rescue Chartism for social history and for a class-basedinterpretation at that. He attempts to bring together social relations and Chartist ideologyby placing Chartist political economy at the centre of the movement and by regarding its mass support as a response to changes in the labour process. This is thought-provoking but too little buttressedby evidence. It will take more space than Belchem has here to reunite convincingly the social and the political histories of the early Victorian working class. Clearly,then, the periodisationand the analytical framework which has informed much of Asa
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Briggs'swork is now being called irito question but this development scarcely diminishies his immense contribution to the historiograpily of Victorian England. Irrespectiveof particularinterpretations, his most lasting contributionhas be;en to promotea movement which, as Tom Paine miight have put it, has opened the field of Victorianhist:oryto "members unlimited." DAVIDFELDMAN
Universityof Bristol Urbanising Britain: Essays on Cla,ss and Community in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Gerry Kears and Charles W. J. Withers;;pp. 117. Cambridge and New York:CambridgeIJniversity Press, 1991, £25.00, $44.50. THISISANINTERESTING COLLECTION of ANDLIVELY( five papers,with an introductionby the editors.The contributions addressan interesting; range of issues and all combine theoreticaldiscussion with empirical detail, so as to establishnew perspec:tives in relation to general issues in historical ge-ography. Gerry Keams, in a not very substantial chapter, looks initially and briefly at the relatic onship between health, poverty, and disease, but then concentrates on analyzingthe attitudesof Mayhewr,Chadwick,and Dickens, all of whom, he argues,treaited class in biological terms.Bill Bramwelllooks at publicspace and working-classcommunities in Birmtingham.Taking M. J. Daunton's article, "Public P1; ace and Private Space: The Victorian City and the. Working-Class Household"(in The Pursuitof Urbar n History,edited by D. Fraserand A. Sutcliffe [1983]), as a focus, he argues convincingly that a concentration on occasional, colourful,and larger-scaleevents-like disturbances, wakes,fairs,and celebrationsi-is misleading. These were untypical and relativelyeasy to suppress and thereforedisplayedan unusuald(egreeof change, whereasa focus on everyday,mundane life revealsa eat problemshe greatercontinuity. However, the gr< emphasisesin reconstructingstreet 1ife and community attachmentsmean that his empirical basisseems ratherlimited and insufficientto illiastratehis assertions on participationin communal life. CharlesWithers'svaluablechapt(erarguesagainst simplistic notions of homogeneous iimmigrantcornmunities and culture as universallyshared.Withers emphasises instead divisions within migrant groups (in this case, Gaelic Highlandersini urban lowland Scotland), as well as class divisioris between immigrantsand hosts. Andrew Blaikie surveysmiddle-
class attitudes to prostitution and working-class illegitimacy,again in Scotland. He arguesthat middie-classmoralistsand reformersfailedto makeheadway in changing these phenomena because they failed to explain the events of industrialisationin terms of economic relationships,choosing to concentrate instead on urbanisation.Further,they conceived of prostitutionas a matterof individualmoral failings,and failed to recognise that in their middleclass ideal "familymodel"the value of female chastity and motherhooddependedon the withdrawalof women fromproductivelabour.HumphreySouthall, in a very interestingpiece, stressesthe greatmobility of the workingpopulation,especiallyartisans.Using mainly autobiographies,he analysestheir actual experience of tramping, while arguing that long-distance urban mobility was an essential factor in the development of popularpolitical movements. An attempt is made to give the volume overall coherence, particularlyin the introduction, which usefully analyses different theoretical approaches. Given the disparate nature of the contributions, however-on migration,community, and diseasethis is not really successfulbeyond a general recognition of the importanceof historical investigation to the social sciences, as well as a conviction of the inadequacyof statistical analysesof spatial segregation or occupational structureand the need to examine attitudes, cultural practices, and shared meanings. The shared meanings of sufferersfrom disease or prostitutionare not examined, while the assertionsregardingthe constant movement in and out of towns arenot reflectedin the studiesof Gaelic Highlanderimmigrantsor Birminghamworkingpeopie. The central importanceof class divisions, subordinationof labourto capital, and inseparabilityof class and community are regularlyaffirmed,but do not figureprominently in the actual analyses.Here it would be worth examining the view that the chief basisof local neighborhoodcommunitieswasnot the big bourgeoisieor uppermiddle class, whose field of operationwas widerthan the town, or the very mobile labouringpopulation, but sections of the lower middle class, whose main form of propertywas connected to working-classhousing and who were more tied and committed to the town. IORWERT PROTHERO Universityof Manchester Science and Social Science Research in British India, 1780-1880: The Role of Anglo-Indian Associations and Government, by EdwardW. Ells-
392
Briggs'swork is now being called irito question but this development scarcely diminishies his immense contribution to the historiograpily of Victorian England. Irrespectiveof particularinterpretations, his most lasting contributionhas be;en to promotea movement which, as Tom Paine miight have put it, has opened the field of Victorianhist:oryto "members unlimited." DAVIDFELDMAN
Universityof Bristol Urbanising Britain: Essays on Cla,ss and Community in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Gerry Kears and Charles W. J. Withers;;pp. 117. Cambridge and New York:CambridgeIJniversity Press, 1991, £25.00, $44.50. THISISANINTERESTING COLLECTION of ANDLIVELY( five papers,with an introductionby the editors.The contributions addressan interesting; range of issues and all combine theoreticaldiscussion with empirical detail, so as to establishnew perspec:tives in relation to general issues in historical ge-ography. Gerry Keams, in a not very substantial chapter, looks initially and briefly at the relatic onship between health, poverty, and disease, but then concentrates on analyzingthe attitudesof Mayhewr,Chadwick,and Dickens, all of whom, he argues,treaited class in biological terms.Bill Bramwelllooks at publicspace and working-classcommunities in Birmtingham.Taking M. J. Daunton's article, "Public P1; ace and Private Space: The Victorian City and the. Working-Class Household"(in The Pursuitof Urbar n History,edited by D. Fraserand A. Sutcliffe [1983]), as a focus, he argues convincingly that a concentration on occasional, colourful,and larger-scaleevents-like disturbances, wakes,fairs,and celebrationsi-is misleading. These were untypical and relativelyeasy to suppress and thereforedisplayedan unusuald(egreeof change, whereasa focus on everyday,mundane life revealsa eat problemshe greatercontinuity. However, the gr< emphasisesin reconstructingstreet 1ife and community attachmentsmean that his empirical basisseems ratherlimited and insufficientto illiastratehis assertions on participationin communal life. CharlesWithers'svaluablechapt(erarguesagainst simplistic notions of homogeneous iimmigrantcornmunities and culture as universallyshared.Withers emphasises instead divisions within migrant groups (in this case, Gaelic Highlandersini urban lowland Scotland), as well as class divisioris between immigrantsand hosts. Andrew Blaikie surveysmiddle-
class attitudes to prostitution and working-class illegitimacy,again in Scotland. He arguesthat middie-classmoralistsand reformersfailedto makeheadway in changing these phenomena because they failed to explain the events of industrialisationin terms of economic relationships,choosing to concentrate instead on urbanisation.Further,they conceived of prostitutionas a matterof individualmoral failings,and failed to recognise that in their middleclass ideal "familymodel"the value of female chastity and motherhooddependedon the withdrawalof women fromproductivelabour.HumphreySouthall, in a very interestingpiece, stressesthe greatmobility of the workingpopulation,especiallyartisans.Using mainly autobiographies,he analysestheir actual experience of tramping, while arguing that long-distance urban mobility was an essential factor in the development of popularpolitical movements. An attempt is made to give the volume overall coherence, particularlyin the introduction, which usefully analyses different theoretical approaches. Given the disparate nature of the contributions, however-on migration,community, and diseasethis is not really successfulbeyond a general recognition of the importanceof historical investigation to the social sciences, as well as a conviction of the inadequacyof statistical analysesof spatial segregation or occupational structureand the need to examine attitudes, cultural practices, and shared meanings. The shared meanings of sufferersfrom disease or prostitutionare not examined, while the assertionsregardingthe constant movement in and out of towns arenot reflectedin the studiesof Gaelic Highlanderimmigrantsor Birminghamworkingpeopie. The central importanceof class divisions, subordinationof labourto capital, and inseparabilityof class and community are regularlyaffirmed,but do not figureprominently in the actual analyses.Here it would be worth examining the view that the chief basisof local neighborhoodcommunitieswasnot the big bourgeoisieor uppermiddle class, whose field of operationwas widerthan the town, or the very mobile labouringpopulation, but sections of the lower middle class, whose main form of propertywas connected to working-classhousing and who were more tied and committed to the town. IORWERT PROTHERO Universityof Manchester Science and Social Science Research in British India, 1780-1880: The Role of Anglo-Indian Associations and Government, by EdwardW. Ells-
392
Briggs'swork is now being called irito question but this development scarcely diminishies his immense contribution to the historiograpily of Victorian England. Irrespectiveof particularinterpretations, his most lasting contributionhas be;en to promotea movement which, as Tom Paine miight have put it, has opened the field of Victorianhist:oryto "members unlimited." DAVIDFELDMAN
Universityof Bristol Urbanising Britain: Essays on Cla,ss and Community in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Gerry Kears and Charles W. J. Withers;;pp. 117. Cambridge and New York:CambridgeIJniversity Press, 1991, £25.00, $44.50. THISISANINTERESTING COLLECTION of ANDLIVELY( five papers,with an introductionby the editors.The contributions addressan interesting; range of issues and all combine theoreticaldiscussion with empirical detail, so as to establishnew perspec:tives in relation to general issues in historical ge-ography. Gerry Keams, in a not very substantial chapter, looks initially and briefly at the relatic onship between health, poverty, and disease, but then concentrates on analyzingthe attitudesof Mayhewr,Chadwick,and Dickens, all of whom, he argues,treaited class in biological terms.Bill Bramwelllooks at publicspace and working-classcommunities in Birmtingham.Taking M. J. Daunton's article, "Public P1; ace and Private Space: The Victorian City and the. Working-Class Household"(in The Pursuitof Urbar n History,edited by D. Fraserand A. Sutcliffe [1983]), as a focus, he argues convincingly that a concentration on occasional, colourful,and larger-scaleevents-like disturbances, wakes,fairs,and celebrationsi-is misleading. These were untypical and relativelyeasy to suppress and thereforedisplayedan unusuald(egreeof change, whereasa focus on everyday,mundane life revealsa eat problemshe greatercontinuity. However, the gr< emphasisesin reconstructingstreet 1ife and community attachmentsmean that his empirical basisseems ratherlimited and insufficientto illiastratehis assertions on participationin communal life. CharlesWithers'svaluablechapt(erarguesagainst simplistic notions of homogeneous iimmigrantcornmunities and culture as universallyshared.Withers emphasises instead divisions within migrant groups (in this case, Gaelic Highlandersini urban lowland Scotland), as well as class divisioris between immigrantsand hosts. Andrew Blaikie surveysmiddle-
class attitudes to prostitution and working-class illegitimacy,again in Scotland. He arguesthat middie-classmoralistsand reformersfailedto makeheadway in changing these phenomena because they failed to explain the events of industrialisationin terms of economic relationships,choosing to concentrate instead on urbanisation.Further,they conceived of prostitutionas a matterof individualmoral failings,and failed to recognise that in their middleclass ideal "familymodel"the value of female chastity and motherhooddependedon the withdrawalof women fromproductivelabour.HumphreySouthall, in a very interestingpiece, stressesthe greatmobility of the workingpopulation,especiallyartisans.Using mainly autobiographies,he analysestheir actual experience of tramping, while arguing that long-distance urban mobility was an essential factor in the development of popularpolitical movements. An attempt is made to give the volume overall coherence, particularlyin the introduction, which usefully analyses different theoretical approaches. Given the disparate nature of the contributions, however-on migration,community, and diseasethis is not really successfulbeyond a general recognition of the importanceof historical investigation to the social sciences, as well as a conviction of the inadequacyof statistical analysesof spatial segregation or occupational structureand the need to examine attitudes, cultural practices, and shared meanings. The shared meanings of sufferersfrom disease or prostitutionare not examined, while the assertionsregardingthe constant movement in and out of towns arenot reflectedin the studiesof Gaelic Highlanderimmigrantsor Birminghamworkingpeopie. The central importanceof class divisions, subordinationof labourto capital, and inseparabilityof class and community are regularlyaffirmed,but do not figureprominently in the actual analyses.Here it would be worth examining the view that the chief basisof local neighborhoodcommunitieswasnot the big bourgeoisieor uppermiddle class, whose field of operationwas widerthan the town, or the very mobile labouringpopulation, but sections of the lower middle class, whose main form of propertywas connected to working-classhousing and who were more tied and committed to the town. IORWERT PROTHERO Universityof Manchester Science and Social Science Research in British India, 1780-1880: The Role of Anglo-Indian Associations and Government, by EdwardW. Ells-
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worth;pp. xv + 220. New Yorkand London:Greenwood Press, 1991, $47.95, £38.00. THIS BOOKTACKLESAN INTRIGUINGSUBJECTBUT
with less than satisfactoryresults.The author'sintent is to make clear the social and political context in which science and social science researchdeveloped in British India. Insofaras the focus is on individual and groupattemptsto foster greaterawarenessof the merits of science among the general public and administrativeelites, the book is interestingand informative. When it comes to larger theoretical issues-especially those political ones raisedby the scholarsof colonial discourses-the analysisis weak. Ellsworthdoes best when outlining the effortsof earlyBritishofficialsand civilians to introducescientific researchinto BritishIndia.Usuallythey encountered resistance, often in the form of official reluctance to expend funds on activities with as yet unknownbenefits.Consequently,in India(asat home in Britain) voluntary associationssprungup in the earlynineteenth century,with mostgroupshavingthe goal of enhancing the status of science in the minds of the educated public and officialdom. Generally these science associationswere mixed-raceones and served as one mediumby which scientific principles and discoveries were transmitted to the Westerneducated elite who began to emerge in India during the mid-nineteenth century. As Ellsworth notes, there is a close connection between these scientific associationsand the first generationof Indian social reformersand nationalists: examples include Ram Gopal Ghose of the Bethune Society in Bengal, and DadabhaiNaoroji and M. G. Ranadeof the Bombay Students'Literaryand Scientific Society. Political issues influenced the nature and course of scientific researchin India, as Ellsworthrightfully points out. Decisions to conduct an accuratetrigonometrical surveyof India and to establish a meteorological observatoryin Kolabawerebasedlargelyupon the political need for specific scientific information that wouldstrengthenBritain'shold over the subcontinent. Likewise, official interest in the geology of India grew with the introductionof rail transportin the mid-nineteenthcenturyand the recognitionthat local coal deposits would reduce the cost of steam power dramatically.Botanical researchin India was no less skewed by the needs of empire:from nearly the start,official Britishinterestin plant biology was dominated by the concern to improve or introduce the cultivation of commercial crops that would increase revenues to the state or, in the case of cotton
during the American Civil War, reduce British dependence on unstablesourcesof vital raw materials. There is something disturbinglynaive, however, about Ellsworth'sanalysis. At times he seems too close to his nineteenth-century sources, as when he uses Mountstuart Elphinstone's term-"the Tartars"-to denote the Qing dynasty in China (13). This becomes moreproblematicwhen the discussion shifts to motives. Too often contemporaryaccounts of British effortsare presented here in a largelyuncritical fashion. Elphinstone and John Malcolm, we are told for instance, "energetically accumulated knowledge [of India] so as to understandthe land and the people they ruled"(13); the sourcesfor this bald statement (which begs furtherdiscussionof the kinds of knowledge accumulatedand for what purposes) are a letter by Elphinstone and a book by Malcolm. In the next chapter Ellsworthcites verbatim, and without comment, partsof an officiousletter from Governor-GeneralLord Auckland to JamesR. Martin, congratulating the latter on his efforts to survey,and thereforeimprove,the health of the Calcutta populationduringthe 1830s. In these and other instances, the author seems rather too ready to accept official British accounts at face value. Related to this problem is the author'sutter neglect of the growingscholarly literatureon colonial discourses.While this reviewer is one of those who has grownwearyof all the discussionof imperialprojections and/or representationsof the Other, Ellsworth does himself a great disservice by not even addressingsome of the importantissuesraisedby this school of analysis.The intriguingways in which European intellectuals not only gathered information usefulfor imperialpurposesbut also imposeddistorted fields of meaning on colonial societies has been suggestively exploredby variousscholars,including EdwardSaid in his pioneeringstudy,Orientalism(1978) and Berard S. Cohn in "TheCommandof Language and the Languageof Command"(SubalternStudiesIV [1985]). A critical discussionof the role of science in this Europeanprocessof establishingintellectualmastery over regions such as South Asia would have greatlyenhanced this book. As is, many readerswill find limiting, if not simplistic,Ellsworth'scritical examinationof the mannerin which the aimsof science were corruptedby special interests in India, such as the Europeanplanterswho made sure that botanical researchwas largelydevoted to commercialcropsthat benefited themselves. LYNNZASTOUPIL RhodesCollege
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The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism, by Judith Ryan; pp. viii + 267. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991, $29.95. THE VANISHINGSUBJECTOFFERSA USEFULBUT PAR-
tial insight into the complex relation between empiricist psychology and literaryproductionbetween roughly 1873 and the mid-twentieth century. The book takes a comparativeapproach.It is composed of an introductorychapter on "The New Psychologies" and studies of fifteen separate authors from Walter Pater in the nineteenth century to Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil in the twentieth. Each of the foursections into which the fifteen studiesaredivided defines its focus by a subtitle: "A Mass of Sensations" (for Pater, Huysmans,Rilke, and Alice James), "The Perpetual Field" (for Henry James, GertrudeStein, and Franz Kafka), "Salvaging the Self" (for Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler,Joyce, Doblin, and Broch), and "Daylight Mysticism"(for Proust,Woolf, and Musil). Of most use to the Victorian scholar will be the introductory chapter,the essayon Pater,and the succinct conclusion. Other chapters,however,particularlythose on twentieth-century British authors, provide a useful context for understandingthe transition from the Victorian period to Modernism. ProfessorRyan'sfocus on British,American, and Continental authors provides a useful corrective to some previous critical works that focused on one nation's development of psychology and its impact on that particular nation's culture (Susan Leigh Star's Regions of the Mind [1989] or Anne Harrington'sMedicine,Mind and the Double Brain [1987]). The drawbackof a broad focus like Ryan's is the potential for superficiality,which this volume doesn't totally avoid. The introductorychapter is a good primer on empiricist psychologies from roughly the 1860s to the 1890s. It should be used with care, however, by the non-specialist reader for whom its sometimes casual referencesand summariessuggestit was written. Because the Nouveau Larousseignores Herbert Spenceras an empiricist,for instance, ProfessorRyan does too, along with other key figures in British empiricist thought. The Germans, Franz Brentano and Ernst Mach, on the other hand, are her chief exemplars,along with the American WilliamJames. She tracesempiricistpsychologyto German roots in Wilhelm Wundt and notes the contemporaryconcern with psychology by citing the popularwriter,
Paul Bourget,whose Essaysin Contemporary Psychology (1883) shows that "it was taken for grantedthat psychology was in some sense identical with literature" (6). Ryan also makes some interesting but scarcely original connections between empiricist psychologyand the impressionistpainters.The concentration on German-and then American-empiricist thinking, however, makes her minimize the strong empiricist tendencies in nineteenth-century Britain. Despite her acknowledging the work of Berkeley,Locke, and Hume, it remainsa puzzlewhy she overlooksother figureslike Charles Darwinand T. H. Huxley,who was an avid interpreterof Darwin, Berkeley,and Hume. The chapteron Patertreats the authorof Studies in the Historyof the Renaissanceand Mariusthe Epicurean as a purveyor of proto-empiricism. Ryan points to how the emphasis on sensory experience in Marius anticipates the contrast with Joris-Karl Huysmans'sAgainst the Grain, and notes-as have many before her-that Mariusis a possible subtext forJoyce'sPortrait.But she also includes in her study Rilke's The Notebooksof Malte LauridsBriggeand Henry James'sThe GoldenBowl, a helpful benefit of the book's comparative approach. A hint of how Ryan has to fight to maintain her thesis and the centralityof her chosen psychologistsoccursearlyin this chapter.Here she finds it necessaryto state that "the Conclusion to Pater'sRenaissancewell precedes the majorelaborationsof empricistthought in Ernst Mach or William James.Nor can there be any question of influence by the impressionistpainters"(2526). ProfessorRyanthen asks,rhetorically:"Howdid Pater come to develop these remarkably'modern' ideas at such an early stage?"(26). She answersby pointing to the work of H. L. Mansel, but a more proximatestimulusmight be found in T. H. Huxley's enormouslypopularessay "On the Physical Basisof Life" (1868), a defense of empiricist psychology if ever there was one. One cannot argue with the chapter'sfinal claim that Mariusis "surelyone of the most ambitious and remarkableearly attempts to portraythe dissolving self of empiricismin fiction" (37). One can only wish that ProfessorRyan had more thoroughly contextualized Pater in his own intellectual milieu. The chapterson importantEuropeanand American writers help argue the book's principal point, that empiricistpsychologyunderminedthe stability of the subject, and that literary artists sought to respond to this challenge in a variety of complex ways. Among the better chapters are those on
395
Schnitzler,Hofmannsthal,and Musil. Also engaging are the chapterson Alice James,GertrudeStein, and VirginiaWoolf. The conclusion of the book is a valuable retrospective summaryand a glance at some of the forces that made for the interaction between empiricist psychologyand literaryproduction,an interactionto which ProfessorRyan successfully calls attention, even if she does not settle the relationwith complete success. "In the ambience of the turn of the century, when a proliferation of magazines disseminated worksof every genre and almostevery creativewriter tried his hand at criticism or essays, the symbiosis between literaryand culturalproductswas quite extraordinary"(224). Well and good, but not more than many a Victorian scholar has known at least implicitly since the WellesleyIndex and similar research tools opened the pages of Victorian periodicals to wide-ranging and comparative research interests. Asserting that there is no mere transportationof "empiricist thought into literary language" (230), ProfessorRyan'sbook strugglesto makesense of some of the possible relationsbetween empiricistpsychology and literary production. Her call for "a more differentiatedand above all a more historical view of what happened in literatureover the sixty years I have been consideringhere [1880-1940]" (231) is a hint that many of these relationsare still a long way from being differentiated. EDBLOCK, JR. MarquetteUniversity From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection & Narrative, by Martin A. Kayman;pp. viii +269. New York:St. Martin'sPress, 1992, $45.00. Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes? Detective Fiction, Popular Theology, and Society, by Robert S. Paul; pp. 305. Carbondaleand Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, $24.95. Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, edited by HaroldOrel; pp. xiii + 290. New York:G. K. Hall; Toronto and Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992, $40.00.
plicate the identificationbetween the police and the novel. Thus, instead of "a prioricontributions to a repressive system of control," detective novels are "symbolicand formal explorations in the representation of the mysteriousterritoriesof society and of the psyche which cannot be captured within the narrativestrategiesof literaryrealism,scientific positivism and contemporarylegal structures"(10). Kayman discusses EdgarAllan Poe and Wilkie Collins in these terms,as well as a rangeof less-often-treated books;his book concludes with a ratherenthusiastic assault on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. If I understandKaymancorrectly,Holmes is unlike most previous fictional detectives in that he does institute or embody a repressive system of control (though Kaymanalso enjoys pointing out the ways in which Holmesian omniscience is ersatz, not so much repressiveas faked). Moreover,Doyle'skind of fiction has blocked our ability to see earlierdetective stories for what they are (we have inadvertentlyrewritten them in Holmesian terms). Doyle/Holmes is thus doubly the villain in Kayman'smonograph. FromBow Streetto BakerStreetis stuffed full of things. Before we even get to Bow Street there are substantial excursuseson exchange and secularization in Gawainand theGreenKnight,and on the end of romance in Le Morted'Arthur;next comes a discussion of the development of English law, ending in an exploration of relations between law and equity. These early sections suggestsome of the book's difficulties,as well as some of its virtues.Kaymanhas read a lot. He seems to want everything he has read to be visible. He quotesexcessively fromother critics, though not slavishly. He makes smart comments about a wide range of texts, but it's not invariably clear that he needs to dwell so elaboratelyon some of these texts. He is unpedanticbut a showoff.There is a constant effort to give us the big picture ("in sum"is one of Kayman'sfavorite phrases);there is a constant sense of blockage,of Kaymanslowingdown, or going off on another digressive path when he really doesn't need to. I feel most comfortablewith the book when the sustained readings support the overall thesis directly,least comfortablewith it when Kaymanappearsto be crammingin some good ideas for which he just didn't have any other possible
FROMBOWSTREETTO BAKERSTREETIS A LEARNED
storage place.
and polemical commentary on nineteenth-century detective fiction. Unlike those recent critics, such as D. A. Miller, who have tried to map the work of Michel Foucault onto mysterystories of one sort or another, Martin Kaymanwants to weaken or com-
Some salvageworkis necessary.What shouldone read in this book if one is interested in its largest claims but not in every cranny of Kayman'sslightly over-capaciousargument?I would recommend the first ten pages (which serve as an introduction);
395
Schnitzler,Hofmannsthal,and Musil. Also engaging are the chapterson Alice James,GertrudeStein, and VirginiaWoolf. The conclusion of the book is a valuable retrospective summaryand a glance at some of the forces that made for the interaction between empiricist psychologyand literaryproduction,an interactionto which ProfessorRyan successfully calls attention, even if she does not settle the relationwith complete success. "In the ambience of the turn of the century, when a proliferation of magazines disseminated worksof every genre and almostevery creativewriter tried his hand at criticism or essays, the symbiosis between literaryand culturalproductswas quite extraordinary"(224). Well and good, but not more than many a Victorian scholar has known at least implicitly since the WellesleyIndex and similar research tools opened the pages of Victorian periodicals to wide-ranging and comparative research interests. Asserting that there is no mere transportationof "empiricist thought into literary language" (230), ProfessorRyan'sbook strugglesto makesense of some of the possible relationsbetween empiricistpsychology and literary production. Her call for "a more differentiatedand above all a more historical view of what happened in literatureover the sixty years I have been consideringhere [1880-1940]" (231) is a hint that many of these relationsare still a long way from being differentiated. EDBLOCK, JR. MarquetteUniversity From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection & Narrative, by Martin A. Kayman;pp. viii +269. New York:St. Martin'sPress, 1992, $45.00. Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes? Detective Fiction, Popular Theology, and Society, by Robert S. Paul; pp. 305. Carbondaleand Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, $24.95. Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, edited by HaroldOrel; pp. xiii + 290. New York:G. K. Hall; Toronto and Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992, $40.00.
plicate the identificationbetween the police and the novel. Thus, instead of "a prioricontributions to a repressive system of control," detective novels are "symbolicand formal explorations in the representation of the mysteriousterritoriesof society and of the psyche which cannot be captured within the narrativestrategiesof literaryrealism,scientific positivism and contemporarylegal structures"(10). Kayman discusses EdgarAllan Poe and Wilkie Collins in these terms,as well as a rangeof less-often-treated books;his book concludes with a ratherenthusiastic assault on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. If I understandKaymancorrectly,Holmes is unlike most previous fictional detectives in that he does institute or embody a repressive system of control (though Kaymanalso enjoys pointing out the ways in which Holmesian omniscience is ersatz, not so much repressiveas faked). Moreover,Doyle'skind of fiction has blocked our ability to see earlierdetective stories for what they are (we have inadvertentlyrewritten them in Holmesian terms). Doyle/Holmes is thus doubly the villain in Kayman'smonograph. FromBow Streetto BakerStreetis stuffed full of things. Before we even get to Bow Street there are substantial excursuseson exchange and secularization in Gawainand theGreenKnight,and on the end of romance in Le Morted'Arthur;next comes a discussion of the development of English law, ending in an exploration of relations between law and equity. These early sections suggestsome of the book's difficulties,as well as some of its virtues.Kaymanhas read a lot. He seems to want everything he has read to be visible. He quotesexcessively fromother critics, though not slavishly. He makes smart comments about a wide range of texts, but it's not invariably clear that he needs to dwell so elaboratelyon some of these texts. He is unpedanticbut a showoff.There is a constant effort to give us the big picture ("in sum"is one of Kayman'sfavorite phrases);there is a constant sense of blockage,of Kaymanslowingdown, or going off on another digressive path when he really doesn't need to. I feel most comfortablewith the book when the sustained readings support the overall thesis directly,least comfortablewith it when Kaymanappearsto be crammingin some good ideas for which he just didn't have any other possible
FROMBOWSTREETTO BAKERSTREETIS A LEARNED
storage place.
and polemical commentary on nineteenth-century detective fiction. Unlike those recent critics, such as D. A. Miller, who have tried to map the work of Michel Foucault onto mysterystories of one sort or another, Martin Kaymanwants to weaken or com-
Some salvageworkis necessary.What shouldone read in this book if one is interested in its largest claims but not in every cranny of Kayman'sslightly over-capaciousargument?I would recommend the first ten pages (which serve as an introduction);
396
Chapter Three, "Police,"for its comments on the relation between French and English systemsof policing (68-69); and Chapter Four,with its speculative account of "the functional failureof the Reform ideal of the visible eye" (95). Chapter Five, "The Romance of the Detective," is valuable for its comments on the shift from an ideal of visibility in a police force (i.e., to be effective, police should be seen) to an ideal of invisibility,and for its accounts of several early detective or police stories:Richmond (1827), The Recollections of a Policeman(1849), Mrs. Paschal'sThe Experiencesof a LadyDetective(1861), and Anna Green's X.Y.Z. (1883). Chapter Seven, "Sensation,"is interestingespeciallyfor its commentary on Collins's The Moonstone(1868). Much in these sections of Bow StreetsupportsKayman'sclaim that pre-Holmesiandetective fiction enacts a variety of relations to "repression,"ranging from uncritical endorsementof surveillanceto a considerablymore skeptical attitude toward it, embodied in what Kayman calls "criticalphantasy"(73). Collins emergesas one of the book'sheroes; the other hero of Bow Streetshould be Poe, but Chapter Six, "Monsters,"largelyon Dupin, is a problem.Kayman attempts a sustained analogy between Bentham's work on evidence and Dupin's;the fictional detective, like the philosopher,articulatesa synthesis between the scientific and the poetic, proposing by this means a theory of fictions, that is, of fiction's relation to the real. The entry of Bentham into the argument is timely, though one wants to hear more about the connection between this Bentham and the Bentham of earlier chapters in Bow Street,the one immortalizedby Foucaultas inventor of that ultimate surveillancedevice, the Panopticon. To put the point another way, are we to associate Bentham with Foucauldian surveillance or with "criticalphantasy"?Or is Bentham a kind of crossroadsbetween these two quite distinct alternatives? "Monsters"brings the readernear to this and other useful questions;however, the categoryof the monstrousnever proves all that illuminatingas a means towardansweringthem. This chapterconvinces me, at least, that Dupin should never be mixed up with Sherlock Holmes, that if these two detectives depend on theories of the real, they are theories of fundamentally differentsorts. I have a further comment on Kayman'sBow Street,but since it concerns Holmes specifically, it will best be made after a brief considerationof the other two books under review. Robert Paul'sWhateverHappenedto SherlockHolmes?is a genial piece of
amateurworkby a professoremeritusof ecclesiastical historyand Christianthought at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.Paul must have read W. H. Auden's "The Guilty Vicarage"at a receptive moment; like Auden he is (rightly) convinced that detective storieshave somethingto do with theology. He browsesthroughan extraordinarynumberof detective stories (most of them twentieth-century) in search of corroboration;he does not discover much of explicitlytheological interest. It's regrettablethat he has so little to say about UmbertoEco'sTheName of the Rose,which not only situates itself directly in a Holmesian line but offers a sustained and subtle commentaryon Paul'schosen subject. CriticalEssays on Sir ArthurConan Doyle has a self-explanatorytitle; except for the introduction,all the work has appearedbefore. There is recent work on Holmes and (mostly) late-nineteenth- or earlytwentieth-centuryworkon other Doyle productions, including a wonderful exchange of letters between Doyle and Max Beerbohmon the former'sallegedly faulty historical sense. As for the recent material:I would particularlyrecommend Paul Barolsky'sessay on Holmes as fin-de-siecle aesthete and Lydia Fillingham'son "Threatsto the PrivateSphere in A Studyin Scarlet."Fillingham is particularlyinstructive in juxtaposition with Kayman, partly because she is strong on British bureaucracyin the 1880s (Kaymanconcentrateson earlierperiods),partlybecause of the way her analysismakes Holmes himself seem relativelymarginal;she focusesinsteadon Mormonism, the position of women, Doyle's renunciation of Catholicism (take note, Robert Paul), German secret societies, and the Irish question. These apparentlymiscellaneous topics are brought into conjunction brilliantly.A Studyin Scarletcomes to seem fascinating, especially that second half which most of us rush through. Kayman debunks Holmes, Paul somewhat vaguely theologizes him, Fillingham comes as near to ignoring him as one could while writing an essay aboutone of Dr.Watson'sthrillingnarratives.I agree with Barolsky'sanalysis of Holmes as aesthete, but it's not meant to bear too much weight. There are some wonderful,ambitiouscritiquesof Holmes that do not appear in Orel's anthology; I was surprised that they were missing until I came across this passage in the volume'sintroduction:"A currentvogue for semiotic studies may serve to document the assertion that critics with specializedintereststend to write for one another rather than for the general public. As one example, The Sign of Three:Dupin,
397
Holmes,Peirce,edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, poses more difficulties as a critical approach than it ever successfullysolves" (17). Orel has a tendency to make casual remarkswhich are either brilliantlyilluminatingor ignorant,depending on how one takes them (e.g., "Scott, after all, did not invent the historical romance"[21]); his crack at The Sign of the Three is unequivocally ignorant. Orel's allergy to semiotics has discouragedhim not only from including any remarksby Eco, author of the smartest (and most commercially successful) Holmes pastiche ever, but has also led him to ignore Carlo Ginzburg'sessay on "Clues,"the most ambitious, not to say successful,attempt to locate Holmes in a meaningfulhistoricaland culturalcontext. Kayman, too, thinks little of Ginzburgor has not read him. I will end this review by wondering if "Clues" might cause him to revise his evaluation of Doyle's detective, to see the storiesin which Holmes appears as allegoriesof a knowledgewhich is more like a kind of guessworkor diagnosis than a form of repressive or faked omniscience. RICHARD MAXWELL ValparaisoUniversity The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, by Catherine Peters;pp. xiii + 498. London:Secker & Warburg,1991, £20.00. FORA CENTURY,WILKIECOLLINS'SLIFESEEMEDTO
harbor impenetrable secrets. Kenneth Robinson's 1951 biographyestablishedthe basicsof his upbringing, work habits, friendships,travels, ill health, and addiction. But the details of his sexual adventures and of his two unorthodox liaisons seemed likely to remain enigmatic. Then, in 1988, William Clarke's The SecretLife of WilkieCollinsbroughthis relationship with Caroline Graves out of the shadows and opened up the Martha Rudd connection. This big new book continues the processof disclosure.Catherine Peters narrateswith well-qualified assurance, baring information on Wilkie (as she calls him) and on his mother,his brother,and his mistressesthat her predecessorsmissed or underrated. She refutesJohn Millais'ssensational account of Wilkie'sfirstencounterwith Caroline:"She was not, duringthe 1850s, the mesmericallycontrolled, highborn mistress of a poker-wieldingvillain" who escaped, screaming,into Wilkie's path. The daughter of a carpenterand widow of a clerk, Caroline (actually Elizabeth) Compton Graves lived with her mother and child in his neighborhood,"ekingout a
precariousexistence keeping a marinestore, the midVictorian equivalent of a junk shop and low-grade pawnbroker"(192). He probablymet Martha Rudd too while she was working. A Norfolk shepherd's daughter,she had gone as a servant to an inn beside the railroadterminusnear Yarmouth,where Wilkie went in 1864 to sail and research settings for Armadale.His middle-classmother, Harriet Geddes Collins, had also struggledto supportherself. In her twenties she had hoped to become an actress but, dissuaded by an Evangelical minister, she trained instead to become a governess and taught until, at thirty-two, she married.Over thirty years later she wrote about her past in an autobiographical"novel"; Wilkie tried to edit it and probably appropriated details from it for plots of his own. But Peters has not merely done detective work and leg-work,poringover registries,manuscripts,and letters, tracing her subject's travels in and out of London, and then drawing qualified conclusions. She has sharpened and in some cases altered the image of the public and private Wilkie Collins. Though this clarifiedCollins will not startle readers of Robinson'sand Clarke'sbiographies,they will see him more directly in the company of women, as a playwright,and as he saw himself. "King of Inventors" was the publisher George Bentley's term for Wilkie, coined in 1863. Peters extends it beyond the construction of plot, to the constructionof identity. "All his life, Wilkie Collins was haunted by a second self," she begins her biography,and if the dopplegangerthesis tends to fade later, the dualities of Collins's life do not. He was famously resistant to marriage,yet became the domesticated head of two households whose members lived in bourgeoisif illicit comfort,creatinga de facto family network. He remained self-conscious about his appearance(the bulging forehead,outsizedhead, and tiny extremities) yet also delighted in dressing outrageously (he dined out in tweeds and broadstripedshirts). Concerned about health to the point of hypochondria,he lived as a sexual and culinary bon vivant, inviting the onset of illness; Peters suspects that a venereal infection, probablycontracted in 1855, triggeredthe "rheumaticgout" or Reiter's disease that could make his eyes resemble "bagsof blood"(149-50). Socially nonchalant and personally untidy, he went at his workwith increasingconcentration as his talent and his readershipdeclined; in his fifties and sixties, when illness did not stop him, he would write twelve hours a day. These traits appear to imply a divided self, but Peters'sstudy argues
397
Holmes,Peirce,edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, poses more difficulties as a critical approach than it ever successfullysolves" (17). Orel has a tendency to make casual remarkswhich are either brilliantlyilluminatingor ignorant,depending on how one takes them (e.g., "Scott, after all, did not invent the historical romance"[21]); his crack at The Sign of the Three is unequivocally ignorant. Orel's allergy to semiotics has discouragedhim not only from including any remarksby Eco, author of the smartest (and most commercially successful) Holmes pastiche ever, but has also led him to ignore Carlo Ginzburg'sessay on "Clues,"the most ambitious, not to say successful,attempt to locate Holmes in a meaningfulhistoricaland culturalcontext. Kayman, too, thinks little of Ginzburgor has not read him. I will end this review by wondering if "Clues" might cause him to revise his evaluation of Doyle's detective, to see the storiesin which Holmes appears as allegoriesof a knowledgewhich is more like a kind of guessworkor diagnosis than a form of repressive or faked omniscience. RICHARD MAXWELL ValparaisoUniversity The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, by Catherine Peters;pp. xiii + 498. London:Secker & Warburg,1991, £20.00. FORA CENTURY,WILKIECOLLINS'SLIFESEEMEDTO
harbor impenetrable secrets. Kenneth Robinson's 1951 biographyestablishedthe basicsof his upbringing, work habits, friendships,travels, ill health, and addiction. But the details of his sexual adventures and of his two unorthodox liaisons seemed likely to remain enigmatic. Then, in 1988, William Clarke's The SecretLife of WilkieCollinsbroughthis relationship with Caroline Graves out of the shadows and opened up the Martha Rudd connection. This big new book continues the processof disclosure.Catherine Peters narrateswith well-qualified assurance, baring information on Wilkie (as she calls him) and on his mother,his brother,and his mistressesthat her predecessorsmissed or underrated. She refutesJohn Millais'ssensational account of Wilkie'sfirstencounterwith Caroline:"She was not, duringthe 1850s, the mesmericallycontrolled, highborn mistress of a poker-wieldingvillain" who escaped, screaming,into Wilkie's path. The daughter of a carpenterand widow of a clerk, Caroline (actually Elizabeth) Compton Graves lived with her mother and child in his neighborhood,"ekingout a
precariousexistence keeping a marinestore, the midVictorian equivalent of a junk shop and low-grade pawnbroker"(192). He probablymet Martha Rudd too while she was working. A Norfolk shepherd's daughter,she had gone as a servant to an inn beside the railroadterminusnear Yarmouth,where Wilkie went in 1864 to sail and research settings for Armadale.His middle-classmother, Harriet Geddes Collins, had also struggledto supportherself. In her twenties she had hoped to become an actress but, dissuaded by an Evangelical minister, she trained instead to become a governess and taught until, at thirty-two, she married.Over thirty years later she wrote about her past in an autobiographical"novel"; Wilkie tried to edit it and probably appropriated details from it for plots of his own. But Peters has not merely done detective work and leg-work,poringover registries,manuscripts,and letters, tracing her subject's travels in and out of London, and then drawing qualified conclusions. She has sharpened and in some cases altered the image of the public and private Wilkie Collins. Though this clarifiedCollins will not startle readers of Robinson'sand Clarke'sbiographies,they will see him more directly in the company of women, as a playwright,and as he saw himself. "King of Inventors" was the publisher George Bentley's term for Wilkie, coined in 1863. Peters extends it beyond the construction of plot, to the constructionof identity. "All his life, Wilkie Collins was haunted by a second self," she begins her biography,and if the dopplegangerthesis tends to fade later, the dualities of Collins's life do not. He was famously resistant to marriage,yet became the domesticated head of two households whose members lived in bourgeoisif illicit comfort,creatinga de facto family network. He remained self-conscious about his appearance(the bulging forehead,outsizedhead, and tiny extremities) yet also delighted in dressing outrageously (he dined out in tweeds and broadstripedshirts). Concerned about health to the point of hypochondria,he lived as a sexual and culinary bon vivant, inviting the onset of illness; Peters suspects that a venereal infection, probablycontracted in 1855, triggeredthe "rheumaticgout" or Reiter's disease that could make his eyes resemble "bagsof blood"(149-50). Socially nonchalant and personally untidy, he went at his workwith increasingconcentration as his talent and his readershipdeclined; in his fifties and sixties, when illness did not stop him, he would write twelve hours a day. These traits appear to imply a divided self, but Peters'sstudy argues
398
something different: that over time, Wilkie built a life which could connect what his society disjoined or denied. She also elucidates the interconnections between his work as novelist and dramatist.Without claiming that his playshave unsuspectedmerits,she adds details on production, staging, audiences, and revenues that may persuadescholars who discount his melodramasto take a closer look at their achievement. (Clergymendid not appearas principalcharacters, much less marryformerprostitutes,until The New Magdalenran at the Olympic, with a young FrankArcher playingJulianGray.) About his fiction, Petersis less notable. She cites fresh sources, like HarrietCollins's manuscript;she emphasizesissues of identity and doubling, as have many critics beforeher; and she makes a strong case for studying a little-known late novel, The Law and the Lady. But she skims over topics that a theorist might develop, for instance, the replacement in his fiction of the slum or Gothic castle, as "haunt[s]of modem evil," with "rawnew villas" and "the scaffolding of the half-built"(119). Perhaps,though, the genre of her study predisposesher to read his life more closely than his texts. Peters does not direct her work to academics. This is an accessible,plainly-writtenbook for a heterogeneous public. Citations are tucked discreetly into endnotes and refermoreoften to periodsources than to recent criticism and scholarship.Nonetheless, The King of Inventorsshould become required readingfor all Collins scholars.If (unlike his novels) it does not disclose all secrets, it still leaves its subject'slife far less mysterious. SUELONOFF HarvardUniversity Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, edited by Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher;pp. vi + 373. Chicago and London:Universityof Chicago Press,1992, $27.50. AS NINA AUERBACHAND U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER
point out in the introduction to their important collection of Victorian fairy tales and fantasies, women writerswere less prone to be nostalgic about their childhood than such male authors as George MacDonald,Lewis Carroll,and J. M. Barrie.Indeed, "changes in the market place empoweredsome astonishingly bold and innovative writing by women" (2), and their tales possess a distinctly critical
attitude toward Victorian norms and mores that endow them with a twofold appeal:they are, in fact, revealing "documents"of their times as well as unique fantasiesthat attest to the imaginativepowers of their authors. Thanks to the fine efforts of Auerbach and Knoepflmacher,we can now appreciate the double aspect of these tales that have been collected in one volume for the first time. Given the remarkableproductivity of women who wrote fairytales and fantasiesduringthe Victorian period,Auerbachand Knoepflmacherwerefaced with a difficulttaskof selecting appropriatetales and organizingtheir materialso that the narrativeswould have meaning and appealfor contemporaryreaders. In each instance they have succeeded admirably. Most of the tales selected for this volume were first published between 1867 and 1879, and they have never been reprinted together in a book dedicated to comparing the unique contributions Victorian women made to the fairy-talegenre. Since the style and themes of the narrativesdiffera greatdeal, Auerbachand Knoepflmacherhave wiselydividedthem as follows: 1) RefashioningFairyTales:"The Sleeping Beautyin the Wood"and "Beautyand the Beast" by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, "The Brown Bull of Norrowa"by MariaLouisaMolesworth,and "Amelia and the Dwarfs"by Juliana Horatia Ewing;2) Subversions: "Nick" by Christina Rossetti, "Christmas Crackers"by Juliana Horatia Ewing, "Behind the White Brick" by Frances Hodgson Burnett, "Melisande" and "FortunatusRex & Co." by E. Nesbit; 3) A FantasyNovel: MopsaThe Fairyby Jean Ingelow; 4) A Trio of Antifantasies: Speaking Likenessesby Christina Rossetti. Each part is precededby an extensive commentarythat sets the tales in their historicalcontext and elucidates the narrativestrategiesconceived by the women to question and subvertthe dominant male code of their times. For instance, Auerbach and Knoepflmacher demonstrate in Part One that Ritchie, Molesworth, and Ewing recast traditional folk tales to tap into mythic female sources.In Part Two they gather tales that subvertall generic ties to show how women exulted in imaginative freedom. Part Three is devoted entirely to a fairy-talenovel by Ingelow because it is an unusual type of female that shows the potential of a little girl bildungsroman to become the powerfulruler of a nation of fairies, while her male traveling companion returnsgratefully to domestic tranquility.In Part FourAuerbach and Knoepflmacherexplain how and why Rossetti took perversedelight in turningVictorian cheerful-
398
something different: that over time, Wilkie built a life which could connect what his society disjoined or denied. She also elucidates the interconnections between his work as novelist and dramatist.Without claiming that his playshave unsuspectedmerits,she adds details on production, staging, audiences, and revenues that may persuadescholars who discount his melodramasto take a closer look at their achievement. (Clergymendid not appearas principalcharacters, much less marryformerprostitutes,until The New Magdalenran at the Olympic, with a young FrankArcher playingJulianGray.) About his fiction, Petersis less notable. She cites fresh sources, like HarrietCollins's manuscript;she emphasizesissues of identity and doubling, as have many critics beforeher; and she makes a strong case for studying a little-known late novel, The Law and the Lady. But she skims over topics that a theorist might develop, for instance, the replacement in his fiction of the slum or Gothic castle, as "haunt[s]of modem evil," with "rawnew villas" and "the scaffolding of the half-built"(119). Perhaps,though, the genre of her study predisposesher to read his life more closely than his texts. Peters does not direct her work to academics. This is an accessible,plainly-writtenbook for a heterogeneous public. Citations are tucked discreetly into endnotes and refermoreoften to periodsources than to recent criticism and scholarship.Nonetheless, The King of Inventorsshould become required readingfor all Collins scholars.If (unlike his novels) it does not disclose all secrets, it still leaves its subject'slife far less mysterious. SUELONOFF HarvardUniversity Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, edited by Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher;pp. vi + 373. Chicago and London:Universityof Chicago Press,1992, $27.50. AS NINA AUERBACHAND U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER
point out in the introduction to their important collection of Victorian fairy tales and fantasies, women writerswere less prone to be nostalgic about their childhood than such male authors as George MacDonald,Lewis Carroll,and J. M. Barrie.Indeed, "changes in the market place empoweredsome astonishingly bold and innovative writing by women" (2), and their tales possess a distinctly critical
attitude toward Victorian norms and mores that endow them with a twofold appeal:they are, in fact, revealing "documents"of their times as well as unique fantasiesthat attest to the imaginativepowers of their authors. Thanks to the fine efforts of Auerbach and Knoepflmacher,we can now appreciate the double aspect of these tales that have been collected in one volume for the first time. Given the remarkableproductivity of women who wrote fairytales and fantasiesduringthe Victorian period,Auerbachand Knoepflmacherwerefaced with a difficulttaskof selecting appropriatetales and organizingtheir materialso that the narrativeswould have meaning and appealfor contemporaryreaders. In each instance they have succeeded admirably. Most of the tales selected for this volume were first published between 1867 and 1879, and they have never been reprinted together in a book dedicated to comparing the unique contributions Victorian women made to the fairy-talegenre. Since the style and themes of the narrativesdiffera greatdeal, Auerbachand Knoepflmacherhave wiselydividedthem as follows: 1) RefashioningFairyTales:"The Sleeping Beautyin the Wood"and "Beautyand the Beast" by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, "The Brown Bull of Norrowa"by MariaLouisaMolesworth,and "Amelia and the Dwarfs"by Juliana Horatia Ewing;2) Subversions: "Nick" by Christina Rossetti, "Christmas Crackers"by Juliana Horatia Ewing, "Behind the White Brick" by Frances Hodgson Burnett, "Melisande" and "FortunatusRex & Co." by E. Nesbit; 3) A FantasyNovel: MopsaThe Fairyby Jean Ingelow; 4) A Trio of Antifantasies: Speaking Likenessesby Christina Rossetti. Each part is precededby an extensive commentarythat sets the tales in their historicalcontext and elucidates the narrativestrategiesconceived by the women to question and subvertthe dominant male code of their times. For instance, Auerbach and Knoepflmacher demonstrate in Part One that Ritchie, Molesworth, and Ewing recast traditional folk tales to tap into mythic female sources.In Part Two they gather tales that subvertall generic ties to show how women exulted in imaginative freedom. Part Three is devoted entirely to a fairy-talenovel by Ingelow because it is an unusual type of female that shows the potential of a little girl bildungsroman to become the powerfulruler of a nation of fairies, while her male traveling companion returnsgratefully to domestic tranquility.In Part FourAuerbach and Knoepflmacherexplain how and why Rossetti took perversedelight in turningVictorian cheerful-
399
ness inside out to question the arbitrarynature of punishment in her society. At the end of their book, Auerbach and Knoepflmacher include helpful biographical sketches and a short bibliographyfor further readings. While their collection is not a comprehensive selection of all the fairy tales and fantasies written by women during the Victorian period-nor is it intended to be-they provide enough of a representative selection and drawso many importantparallels to other writersthat their book can be consideredto cover the key featuresof this unusualfantastic literatureby women in the Victorianperiod.Fortunately, they do not try to transformthe Victorian women into contemporary"feminists"in their analyses of the tales. Rather, Auerbach and Knoepflmacherare more intent on demonstratingthe sophisticatedunderstandingthat these Victorian women writershad of their oppressedsituation and how they took pleasure in transgressingsocial codes and defying proscription through their writing. As a result, the "forbiddenjourneys"offered to us by Auerbach and Knoepflmacherare worth the taking and provideus with glimpses into realms that still need re-visiting. ZIPES JACK Universityof Minnesota SaraColeridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays, by BradfordKeyes Mudge; pp. xvii + 287. New Haven, CT:YaleUniversityPress,1989, $30.00. Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, LoveThe Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle, by Norma Clarke;pp. x + 245. London and New York:Routledge, 1990, £30.00, £8.95 paper,$17.95. THE VICTORIANWOMAN WRITER,ACCORDINGTO
these studies, was a profoundlyunsettled creature. Driven either to devise strategiesthat enabled her to gain professionalrecognition without losing patriarchal approbation (Mudge's reading of Sara Coleridge),or to abandonambitionforpublicrecognition in favor of anonymous publication and private letter-writing (Clarke's view of the four women whose lettersand lives she studies),she seemsto have enjoyed little authorityover her own mind, her own body-indeed, her own life. Mudge and Clarke, armedwith the feminist criticism of the last twenty yearsthat has profoundlychanged the way in which we view nineteenth-centurywomen writers(primarily the work of Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar,and MaryPoovey), plausiblysee their
women subjectsconstrainedby codes of female propriety.But both, I think, tend to overdo things, and, as a consequence, decline to complicate the relatively unproblematical model of the Victorian woman writerunable to flex her intellectual muscles in a culturalarena dominated by male performance. Without question, Mudge's book is admirable for its impeccable research and scholarly accounting of how Sara Coleridge enacted a textual transformation of her father from reckless Romantic poet to virtuous Victorian Sage. Paying thorough attention to Sara Coleridge's essays, her introductions and appendices to the editions of Coleridge's work published from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, and her private letters and memoirs, Mudge quite wonderfully links literary history, political unrest, and family dramain an image of illness and cure. Dedicated to the rehabilitation of her father's reputation and the establishment of his "genius," Sara Coleridge concocts a remedy for what Mudge terms "a variety of illnesses." Coleridge's notorious neglect of his family is alleviated by his intellectual brilliance; his renovated status as "pundit"provides correction for the social ills of the 1830s; and "remaking the Coleridgean genius" affordshis daughter "the opportunity for intellectual labors normally denied 'clever' women" (101). Sara Coleridge "cures"her father of his paternal irresponsibility, Victorian patriarchy of its nasty habit of denying intellectual women a decent forum for their talents, and herself of guilt for being a "clever" woman. In sum, as Mudge observes, she worked for seventeen years to transform "a fragmentary and miscellaneous corpus into a respected body of literaryand philosophical writings,"and to rehabilitate the "flawed Romantic Rebel . . . the negligent husband, irresponsible parent, and confirmed plagiarist"into an eccentric and enigmatic "man of genius" (175). In makinghis argument,Mudgescrupulouslyunfolds the value and context of Sara Coleridge'seditorial work:for example, he deems her 1847 edition of the BiographiaLiterariaas more reliable than the copy-text providedby the original 1817 edition, and he situates her seventy-five page introductionto the three-volume Essayson His Own Timesvery nicely in the 1850 context of Wordsworth'sPreludeand Tennyson's In Memoriam.The dutiful Victorian daughtereffectively blots out the father'sdissolution and covers it with her editorial mission of paying "filialattention"to a jumbleof fragmentaryand fragmented texts.
399
ness inside out to question the arbitrarynature of punishment in her society. At the end of their book, Auerbach and Knoepflmacher include helpful biographical sketches and a short bibliographyfor further readings. While their collection is not a comprehensive selection of all the fairy tales and fantasies written by women during the Victorian period-nor is it intended to be-they provide enough of a representative selection and drawso many importantparallels to other writersthat their book can be consideredto cover the key featuresof this unusualfantastic literatureby women in the Victorianperiod.Fortunately, they do not try to transformthe Victorian women into contemporary"feminists"in their analyses of the tales. Rather, Auerbach and Knoepflmacherare more intent on demonstratingthe sophisticatedunderstandingthat these Victorian women writershad of their oppressedsituation and how they took pleasure in transgressingsocial codes and defying proscription through their writing. As a result, the "forbiddenjourneys"offered to us by Auerbach and Knoepflmacherare worth the taking and provideus with glimpses into realms that still need re-visiting. ZIPES JACK Universityof Minnesota SaraColeridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays, by BradfordKeyes Mudge; pp. xvii + 287. New Haven, CT:YaleUniversityPress,1989, $30.00. Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, LoveThe Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle, by Norma Clarke;pp. x + 245. London and New York:Routledge, 1990, £30.00, £8.95 paper,$17.95. THE VICTORIANWOMAN WRITER,ACCORDINGTO
these studies, was a profoundlyunsettled creature. Driven either to devise strategiesthat enabled her to gain professionalrecognition without losing patriarchal approbation (Mudge's reading of Sara Coleridge),or to abandonambitionforpublicrecognition in favor of anonymous publication and private letter-writing (Clarke's view of the four women whose lettersand lives she studies),she seemsto have enjoyed little authorityover her own mind, her own body-indeed, her own life. Mudge and Clarke, armedwith the feminist criticism of the last twenty yearsthat has profoundlychanged the way in which we view nineteenth-centurywomen writers(primarily the work of Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar,and MaryPoovey), plausiblysee their
women subjectsconstrainedby codes of female propriety.But both, I think, tend to overdo things, and, as a consequence, decline to complicate the relatively unproblematical model of the Victorian woman writerunable to flex her intellectual muscles in a culturalarena dominated by male performance. Without question, Mudge's book is admirable for its impeccable research and scholarly accounting of how Sara Coleridge enacted a textual transformation of her father from reckless Romantic poet to virtuous Victorian Sage. Paying thorough attention to Sara Coleridge's essays, her introductions and appendices to the editions of Coleridge's work published from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, and her private letters and memoirs, Mudge quite wonderfully links literary history, political unrest, and family dramain an image of illness and cure. Dedicated to the rehabilitation of her father's reputation and the establishment of his "genius," Sara Coleridge concocts a remedy for what Mudge terms "a variety of illnesses." Coleridge's notorious neglect of his family is alleviated by his intellectual brilliance; his renovated status as "pundit"provides correction for the social ills of the 1830s; and "remaking the Coleridgean genius" affordshis daughter "the opportunity for intellectual labors normally denied 'clever' women" (101). Sara Coleridge "cures"her father of his paternal irresponsibility, Victorian patriarchy of its nasty habit of denying intellectual women a decent forum for their talents, and herself of guilt for being a "clever" woman. In sum, as Mudge observes, she worked for seventeen years to transform "a fragmentary and miscellaneous corpus into a respected body of literaryand philosophical writings,"and to rehabilitate the "flawed Romantic Rebel . . . the negligent husband, irresponsible parent, and confirmed plagiarist"into an eccentric and enigmatic "man of genius" (175). In makinghis argument,Mudgescrupulouslyunfolds the value and context of Sara Coleridge'seditorial work:for example, he deems her 1847 edition of the BiographiaLiterariaas more reliable than the copy-text providedby the original 1817 edition, and he situates her seventy-five page introductionto the three-volume Essayson His Own Timesvery nicely in the 1850 context of Wordsworth'sPreludeand Tennyson's In Memoriam.The dutiful Victorian daughtereffectively blots out the father'sdissolution and covers it with her editorial mission of paying "filialattention"to a jumbleof fragmentaryand fragmented texts.
400
The problem with Mudge'sreading,however, is that he assumes rather too readily and coherently that Sara Coleridge unambiguouslywished to have another kind of writing life, another literaryvoice. Reading Mudge's often moving account of Sara Coleridge'sphysical and psychological breakdowns, characterized by her unbreakable addiction to opium, her multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, and her appalling experience of breast cancer (the treatment was more opium and large doses of codliver oil), one cannot deny a tragic conjunction of splendid intellect, wounded psyche, and anguished body. But at the same time one cannot necessarily attributeall this miseryto a monolithic prohibition against female authorship in the public sphere, which is what Mudgetends to do. To be sure,Victorian patriarchy had a problem with smart women (how else to deal with their minds but to term them "masculine"),but Mudge inclines to the simple and simplifying image of androcentricculture looming, Brocklehurst-like,over "female authorship."However tough the toll, Victorian women writers enjoyed some authority within a patriarchal culture (one thinks of George Eliot for a start and three of the four women who are the subject of Norma Clarke'sbook). That Mudgeshies fromcomplicationis borneout by the occasional contradictionsthat dot his reading of SaraColeridge'slife: in claiming,forexample,that she had never "been encouragedto compose, much less publish, expresslyfor her own personal and intellectual satisfaction"(145) he forgetshis own fascinating account of her young womanhood in the Southey household where she was strongly encouraged to develop her intellectual talent. In a rather too-neat model of contestation, he sees her writing as a set of "complicatedstrategies"designed to manage the transgressionof female authorship.Certainly, her writing was this, but it was also messily inconsistent-marked by traces of her intellectual ambition, her fear of feminist movements, and by a privilegeddistaste for lower-classsocial unrest. Sara Coleridge'seditorial services to her father certainly affirm Norma Clarke's observation that most Victorian women writers "had too much invested in loyalty to fathersof every kind (biological, spiritual,cultural)"(81). Less scholarlythan Mudge because she is not concerned with a conscientious examination of editorial labor, Clarke is primarily biographical in her approach.She sees the private letter as an "artefact,"bound by its own laws, traditions, and "truths,"and she links the letters and
lives of four smartwomen in order to trace an "underlyingdynamic-broadly speaking,the incompatibility of literaryambition and wifely duty"(14). A literaryjournalist (MariaJane Jewsbury),a novelist and publisher'sreader (Geraldine Jewsbury),a famous poet (Felicia Hemans), and a wife (Jane Carlyle) emerge from Clarke'skeen attention to their letters as fiercely polemical about women's education, sharply professional about publication, and wittily tart about marriage. AmbitiousHeightsis especially good in its attention to the complex mix of a public female bemoaning the difficultyof a writinglife (a processwhereby the woman writer'sautonomy is disclaimedand she is presentedas helpless in the male public sphereof publication), the dominant critical refusal to acknowledgethe sheer hard work involved in being a writer if a woman, and the historical actuality of that existence. Clarke'sanalysisof Felicia Hemans's careershows this complex mix very well. As Clarke observes,for twenty yearsHemans saw almost a volume a year of poetry throughthe pressand earneda lot of money, yet critics ignored this aspect of Hemans's "real life," thereby demonstrating"their loyalty to her and to the values which her poems upheld.The invisibilityof the workinvolved in writing poems was a crucial determinant of their 'womanliness"'(33). Where Clarke falters, sad to say, is in her organization, or lack thereof. Wishing, perhaps,to avoid an uninteresting division of her material into four sections (one for each woman) Clarkeends up with a repetitive, unfocused, and eventually bewildering book. Jane Carlyle, that most vital and incisive of Victorian women, gets more lost in the maze of Clarke'swanderingchapters than the other figures, perhaps because her friendship with Geraldine Jewsbury,I think intended by Clarke as the anchor of the book, goes adrift in the recurringdiscussions of MariaJane Jewsburyand Felicia Hemans. Clarke also goes in for some damaging generalizations, claiming, for instance that "novelistsfrom Richardson onwardshad told literate women, in effect, that they wereall princessesin disguise.The moredistaste they had for work, the more ineptitude they showed when in the presenceof it, the more proofthey gave of royalwomanliness"(124). SurelyRichardsondoes not disparagethe epistolary"work"of literate Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe; and Jane Eyre, a Victorian workinggirl if ever there was one, is literate, womanly,and cheeredby Bronteand her readers for her refusalto become Rochester'spamperedprin-
401
cess. Clarke, like Mudge (albeit in a differentway), tends to simplifythe complex narrativeof Victorian intellectual women into a show-down between brutal patriarchy and enfeebled womanhood. Thank goodness that Victorian patriarchywas rent by its own inconsistencies and that Victorian intellectual women were occasionally tougher than Mudge and Clarke would have us believe. DEIRDRE DAVID TempleUniversity
and the firstof this Victorianpatriarch'sthree wives, the remarkablyintelligent and attractive Emily Andrews,that bringsa rich curiosityto their originsand mating. Anstruther, who has done original research in Patmore family letters and documents (most, it should be said, alreadyavailable in the monumental Victorianmemoirby Patmore'sarchitectfriend,Basil Champneys), is especially good in tracing the intricate affiliationsand irritationsbetween Patmoreand his writer-father,Peter George Patmore, a Regency Coventry Patmore's Angel: A Study of Coventry figure of interest whose connection with Hazlitt as Patmore, His Wife Emily and The Angel in the recipient of the LiberAmorisdrove the son to rewrite the book of love in a differentmode, or rathera series House, by Ian Anstruther; pp. 140. London: of different modes, for his generation. There is exHaggerstonPress, 1992, £17.95. cellent detail on EmilyAndrews'sbackgroundin the WHENA WRITER HASBEEN IDENTIFIED EXCLUSIVELY Congregational intellectual elite of suburbansouth with only one of many works in his or her canon, London (a non-establishment milieu from which then reducedto a cliche in critical referencesto that both Robert Browning and Ruskin emerged), and there is an attractive but entirely unsentimental acwork, then generally ignored for many years except count of the Patmore marriagethat rightly stresses for reheasalsof that cliche ... well, then you can be sure that writer is due for a revival. Coventry PatEmily'sabilities and influence on Patmore and his moresufferedeven in his own day fromthe reductive important literaryfriends, though it somewhat simplifies her relation to Patmore'spoem about a very epithet, authorof TheAngelin theHouse,and he has sufferedfar more in our day. The very name of that different, aristocratic, Church of England couple. workhas, of course,become anathemaof anathemas; (Coventry was a strugglingAssistant-a librariannor has long-standingcontemporaryfascinationwith at the British Museum, Emily an overburdened all things quaint and Victorian succeeded in giving Victorian mother whose spiritual strength would that most terrible angel of domesticity, which his soon succumb to disease and exhaustion; her death would inspireher would-bePetrarchof a husbandas work is thought to praise, even kitsch value. Not her life never did: with a very different, much finer even the eloquence of Mario Praz,who tried many poetry, more convenable to his deeper interests in yearsago to establishthe poem as a period,Biedermeier piece, has succeeded in turning attention from absence, loss, and fulfillment in religious ecstasy.) Anstruther is himself concerned with the reception the name to the work. Like other works of notoriof The Angel and offers an interesting account of its ety-Lady Chatterleyin the American 1950s, The second-wind of popularitylate in the century when Satanic Verses in Muslim 1980s-it has become known only as a name. In such nadirs of reception, growingdiscontent with women'sroles allowed it to take on, in the reaction, a new meaning as a conserfacts-for instance that Patmore'sangel is the spirit vative icon of family values. In describing its lateof love between a marriedcouple, not that of woman confined to the domestic sphere-prevail not at all. century popularity,however, he tends to overstate the unpopularityof the work in its time. But eventually the change comes, and Patmore, It would be unfair to expect this study,which is who certainly offersother reasonsfor feminist critiabout the marriageand the notorious poem, to take cisms in both his life and in his sometimes on the more important critical task, of refocusing Kingsleyan or even Ruskinian preoccupations on Patmore'sentire career:both restoringthe early,very gender issues, seems nevertheless likely to have his turn:no angel himself but unquestionablya writerof interesting (and rathersexuallyexplicit) experimental works that Patmore himself erased from his majortalent and interest.Ian Anstruther'sattractive canon, and placing the often magnificent and very study in biography makes no attempt to elide different poetry of The UnknownEros and prose of Patmore'sdated views on women or child-rearing, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower at the center of but in his account the sneer and easy dismissalare Patmore'swork. But this genial look at his bestgone. Instead, this is a serious study,presented in a known but imperfectlyperceivedwork in relation to (British) popularbiographicalstyle, of both Patmore
401
cess. Clarke, like Mudge (albeit in a differentway), tends to simplifythe complex narrativeof Victorian intellectual women into a show-down between brutal patriarchy and enfeebled womanhood. Thank goodness that Victorian patriarchywas rent by its own inconsistencies and that Victorian intellectual women were occasionally tougher than Mudge and Clarke would have us believe. DEIRDRE DAVID TempleUniversity
and the firstof this Victorianpatriarch'sthree wives, the remarkablyintelligent and attractive Emily Andrews,that bringsa rich curiosityto their originsand mating. Anstruther, who has done original research in Patmore family letters and documents (most, it should be said, alreadyavailable in the monumental Victorianmemoirby Patmore'sarchitectfriend,Basil Champneys), is especially good in tracing the intricate affiliationsand irritationsbetween Patmoreand his writer-father,Peter George Patmore, a Regency Coventry Patmore's Angel: A Study of Coventry figure of interest whose connection with Hazlitt as Patmore, His Wife Emily and The Angel in the recipient of the LiberAmorisdrove the son to rewrite the book of love in a differentmode, or rathera series House, by Ian Anstruther; pp. 140. London: of different modes, for his generation. There is exHaggerstonPress, 1992, £17.95. cellent detail on EmilyAndrews'sbackgroundin the WHENA WRITER HASBEEN IDENTIFIED EXCLUSIVELY Congregational intellectual elite of suburbansouth with only one of many works in his or her canon, London (a non-establishment milieu from which then reducedto a cliche in critical referencesto that both Robert Browning and Ruskin emerged), and there is an attractive but entirely unsentimental acwork, then generally ignored for many years except count of the Patmore marriagethat rightly stresses for reheasalsof that cliche ... well, then you can be sure that writer is due for a revival. Coventry PatEmily'sabilities and influence on Patmore and his moresufferedeven in his own day fromthe reductive important literaryfriends, though it somewhat simplifies her relation to Patmore'spoem about a very epithet, authorof TheAngelin theHouse,and he has sufferedfar more in our day. The very name of that different, aristocratic, Church of England couple. workhas, of course,become anathemaof anathemas; (Coventry was a strugglingAssistant-a librariannor has long-standingcontemporaryfascinationwith at the British Museum, Emily an overburdened all things quaint and Victorian succeeded in giving Victorian mother whose spiritual strength would that most terrible angel of domesticity, which his soon succumb to disease and exhaustion; her death would inspireher would-bePetrarchof a husbandas work is thought to praise, even kitsch value. Not her life never did: with a very different, much finer even the eloquence of Mario Praz,who tried many poetry, more convenable to his deeper interests in yearsago to establishthe poem as a period,Biedermeier piece, has succeeded in turning attention from absence, loss, and fulfillment in religious ecstasy.) Anstruther is himself concerned with the reception the name to the work. Like other works of notoriof The Angel and offers an interesting account of its ety-Lady Chatterleyin the American 1950s, The second-wind of popularitylate in the century when Satanic Verses in Muslim 1980s-it has become known only as a name. In such nadirs of reception, growingdiscontent with women'sroles allowed it to take on, in the reaction, a new meaning as a conserfacts-for instance that Patmore'sangel is the spirit vative icon of family values. In describing its lateof love between a marriedcouple, not that of woman confined to the domestic sphere-prevail not at all. century popularity,however, he tends to overstate the unpopularityof the work in its time. But eventually the change comes, and Patmore, It would be unfair to expect this study,which is who certainly offersother reasonsfor feminist critiabout the marriageand the notorious poem, to take cisms in both his life and in his sometimes on the more important critical task, of refocusing Kingsleyan or even Ruskinian preoccupations on Patmore'sentire career:both restoringthe early,very gender issues, seems nevertheless likely to have his turn:no angel himself but unquestionablya writerof interesting (and rathersexuallyexplicit) experimental works that Patmore himself erased from his majortalent and interest.Ian Anstruther'sattractive canon, and placing the often magnificent and very study in biography makes no attempt to elide different poetry of The UnknownEros and prose of Patmore'sdated views on women or child-rearing, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower at the center of but in his account the sneer and easy dismissalare Patmore'swork. But this genial look at his bestgone. Instead, this is a serious study,presented in a known but imperfectlyperceivedwork in relation to (British) popularbiographicalstyle, of both Patmore
402
the life from which it emerged may now clear the way for a full reconsiderationof his canon in which Patmore'sfallen angel no longer occupies such bad eminence.
the backdropof personalturmoil. Borlandgives us a good sense of the patience and expertise these positions required,as well as the juggling act Ross performed to keep the indiscretion of his friends, and his failing health, from affecting his business. JOHN MAYNARD New YorkUniversity What may make this biographyusefuland interesting is the voice it gives to RobertRoss by quoting his lettersand his contributionsto a numberof pubWilde's Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross, 1869-1918, by Maureen Borland;pp. 319. Oxford: lications, includingthe Academy,the DailyMailLitLennard, 1990, £16.95. erarySupplement,and the letters page of the Times. All of these passagesreveal a man of strongopinion AMONGTHOSEFAMILIAR OSCAR WITH WILDE,ROBERT and loyalty.As Art Editorof the MorningPost, Ross Ross is best known forseveralacts:being Wilde'sfirst answeredhis friends'call to addressthe loss of nahomosexual lover;daringto raisehis hat to the great tional treasuresto foreign buyers, writing that he decadent when the latter was ushered-humilihoped to reach the government'sear and "induceits ated-into bankruptcycourt;and serving as Wilde's membersto considerhow far they can help to retain the worksof art"that were "asymbolof our national literaryexecutor. In her biographyof Ross, Maureen Borlandfocuseson rescuingRossboth fromthis kind culture" (160). For one of Wilde's bibliographers, of derivativeexistence, and fromthe scourgesof past Christopher Milliard-who was also prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws-he offered support, even acquaintancesand critics like Alfred Douglas.Foremost, this account of Ross'slife strives to acknowlthough he knew nothing of "his people or his means,"only that he was "astudentof Wilde'swork" edge Ross'sown accomplishmentsin the literaryand art worlds,and to indicate the largecircle of friends (103). But Borland also manages to show the less that existed beyond his relationshipwith Wilde. familiar side: Ross's sense of humor. In the Daily As Borland'stitle suggests,however,Ross'slife is Telgraph,he quipped that the Lord Chamberlain's ban of theatricalworksthat referto biblical characfinally inseparablefrom his friendshipwith Wilde. This biographyestablishesthroughoutRoss'slife the ters was "the fault of the stupid English law, not same patternof riskand devotion that characterized stupid Mr. Redford"(132). his relationshipwith Wilde, and rendersRoss a kind Despite the centrality of sexuality to many disof martyr.Indeed, Wilde refered to him as "Saint cussions of the decadents, Borland tries especially Robert of Philmore" (65), and as his friend Ada to distance Ross from Wilde here. In the process, Leverson remarked, there was "no trouble [Ross] however, a rather archaic vision of sexuality would not take to advance a friend'sinterest, and I emerges. She suggests that perhaps "it was [Ross's think he rather resented any friend who was not in eldersister]Lizzie'svolatile feminine temperand the actual need of him" (61). Borland'spremise is that over-protectiveness of his mother that first sowed this self-sacrificecurtailedRoss'sown hopes for fame the seeds of Robbie'shomosexual proclivities"(16). and success. And although Borlanddiscusses "the sin of his hoHe was not completely without accolades, howmosexuality" (65) within the context of Ross's ever. Within his professional and personal circles Catholicism, the ambiguityof these referencesgives Ross recognizedboth a valuable piece of art and a the readerpause. Because Borland focuses on Ross's professional risky cause when he saw one. In 1895 he had the foresight to break into Wilde'sstudy and remove all life, her relegationto secondarystatusof his intimate the manuscriptshe could find, protectingthem from relations-with Wilde, with his long-time companthe estate bankruptcysale. The same collector'sacuion Freddie Smith, and with others-sidesteps the men servedhim well within the art community,and very real impact his sexual preference had on his career. After all, much of what Borland calls the broughthim numerousappointmentsand positions. "BitterYears"and "Yearsof Despair"were consumed These, however, were not without scandal. Borland places Ross's various positions-as director of the by Ross's personal and legal battle with Thomas CarfaxGallery,as London Directorof the JohannesCrosland and Alfred Douglas. Douglas, having denounced his own early association with Wilde as burg Gallery of South Africa, and as Valuerof Pictures and Drawings for the Board of the Inland youthfulfolly, crusadedagainstRoss,publiclycalling him "a buggerand a blackmailer"(175), as well as Revenues, his final appointment, in 1912-against
402
the life from which it emerged may now clear the way for a full reconsiderationof his canon in which Patmore'sfallen angel no longer occupies such bad eminence.
the backdropof personalturmoil. Borlandgives us a good sense of the patience and expertise these positions required,as well as the juggling act Ross performed to keep the indiscretion of his friends, and his failing health, from affecting his business. JOHN MAYNARD New YorkUniversity What may make this biographyusefuland interesting is the voice it gives to RobertRoss by quoting his lettersand his contributionsto a numberof pubWilde's Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross, 1869-1918, by Maureen Borland;pp. 319. Oxford: lications, includingthe Academy,the DailyMailLitLennard, 1990, £16.95. erarySupplement,and the letters page of the Times. All of these passagesreveal a man of strongopinion AMONGTHOSEFAMILIAR OSCAR WITH WILDE,ROBERT and loyalty.As Art Editorof the MorningPost, Ross Ross is best known forseveralacts:being Wilde'sfirst answeredhis friends'call to addressthe loss of nahomosexual lover;daringto raisehis hat to the great tional treasuresto foreign buyers, writing that he decadent when the latter was ushered-humilihoped to reach the government'sear and "induceits ated-into bankruptcycourt;and serving as Wilde's membersto considerhow far they can help to retain the worksof art"that were "asymbolof our national literaryexecutor. In her biographyof Ross, Maureen Borlandfocuseson rescuingRossboth fromthis kind culture" (160). For one of Wilde's bibliographers, of derivativeexistence, and fromthe scourgesof past Christopher Milliard-who was also prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws-he offered support, even acquaintancesand critics like Alfred Douglas.Foremost, this account of Ross'slife strives to acknowlthough he knew nothing of "his people or his means,"only that he was "astudentof Wilde'swork" edge Ross'sown accomplishmentsin the literaryand art worlds,and to indicate the largecircle of friends (103). But Borland also manages to show the less that existed beyond his relationshipwith Wilde. familiar side: Ross's sense of humor. In the Daily As Borland'stitle suggests,however,Ross'slife is Telgraph,he quipped that the Lord Chamberlain's ban of theatricalworksthat referto biblical characfinally inseparablefrom his friendshipwith Wilde. This biographyestablishesthroughoutRoss'slife the ters was "the fault of the stupid English law, not same patternof riskand devotion that characterized stupid Mr. Redford"(132). his relationshipwith Wilde, and rendersRoss a kind Despite the centrality of sexuality to many disof martyr.Indeed, Wilde refered to him as "Saint cussions of the decadents, Borland tries especially Robert of Philmore" (65), and as his friend Ada to distance Ross from Wilde here. In the process, Leverson remarked, there was "no trouble [Ross] however, a rather archaic vision of sexuality would not take to advance a friend'sinterest, and I emerges. She suggests that perhaps "it was [Ross's think he rather resented any friend who was not in eldersister]Lizzie'svolatile feminine temperand the actual need of him" (61). Borland'spremise is that over-protectiveness of his mother that first sowed this self-sacrificecurtailedRoss'sown hopes for fame the seeds of Robbie'shomosexual proclivities"(16). and success. And although Borlanddiscusses "the sin of his hoHe was not completely without accolades, howmosexuality" (65) within the context of Ross's ever. Within his professional and personal circles Catholicism, the ambiguityof these referencesgives Ross recognizedboth a valuable piece of art and a the readerpause. Because Borland focuses on Ross's professional risky cause when he saw one. In 1895 he had the foresight to break into Wilde'sstudy and remove all life, her relegationto secondarystatusof his intimate the manuscriptshe could find, protectingthem from relations-with Wilde, with his long-time companthe estate bankruptcysale. The same collector'sacuion Freddie Smith, and with others-sidesteps the men servedhim well within the art community,and very real impact his sexual preference had on his career. After all, much of what Borland calls the broughthim numerousappointmentsand positions. "BitterYears"and "Yearsof Despair"were consumed These, however, were not without scandal. Borland places Ross's various positions-as director of the by Ross's personal and legal battle with Thomas CarfaxGallery,as London Directorof the JohannesCrosland and Alfred Douglas. Douglas, having denounced his own early association with Wilde as burg Gallery of South Africa, and as Valuerof Pictures and Drawings for the Board of the Inland youthfulfolly, crusadedagainstRoss,publiclycalling him "a buggerand a blackmailer"(175), as well as Revenues, his final appointment, in 1912-against
403
accusing him of being an anarchist and a socialist. Ross was repeatedlyforcedto decline invitations and to resignfromposts-as Valuerfor InlandRevenues, for example-to avoid embarrassinghis employers. It is difficult, and perhapsfinally less interesting, to think of Robert Ross divorcedfrom Oscar Wilde. They are bound not only by strong love, at least on Ross'spart,but also by the sharedexperienceof being gay men in an intolerant culture. The distance we feel fromRoss in this biographyis not only a function of Borland'sreticence to grapplewith Ross'ssexuality, but also of the verydistance Rossnecessarilykept froma society too willing to imprisonhim and others for their sexual preference.In part, this explains the shadowyfigureRosscuts in this biography.LikeConstance Holland, Ross was upstagedby Wilde during his life, and continues to remainso, despite scholars' attempts to block the dramadifferently. LAURAPLUMMER
IndianaUniversity Thomas Hardy: His Life and Friends, by E B. Pinion; pp. x + 438. New York:St. Martin'sPress, 1992, $35.00. ANY NEW BIOGRAPHYOF HARDY IS NECESSARILY
read and judged in relation to Robert Gittings's imaginative,often astute two-volumecriticalbiography (1975, 1978) and Michael Millgate'ssober and exhaustive recoveryand measurementof innumerable previously unconnected facts about Hardy'sfamily and life and writings (1982). What can a new biographyoffer?Pinion'sprefaceacknowledgesthe problem, and his subtitle points to his own sense of what is innovative about his approach, an emphasis on Hardy'sfriendshipsthat is manifestedby the presence of a few brief biographies (one to three pages) of people who had an importantpartin Hardy'slife and career-for example, Horace Moule and Leslie Stephen. Other friends accorded this treatment are Henry Bastow (fellow apprentice architect at John Hicks's office in Dorchester), EdmundGosse, Florence Henniker, Frederic Harrison (the Positivist), and T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrenceof Arabia"). However, these sketches contain mostly known information about their subjects,and they don't add to our understandingof Hardy.Pinion furtherdissipatesthe impact of the focus implied by the subtitle by labelling as "friends"(135) people only brieflyassociated with Hardy (R. D. Blackmore,for example), and by implying that Hardy'sfriendships sometimes were curtailedwhen the professionalrelationshipsshifted
(e.g., with Stephen [137]). In short, the subtitle is misleading. The special value of this volume lies not in its content but in its arrangement-what could be termed the totality of chronology.Perhapsto ensure his final draftdid not omit anything,Pinion'smethod seems to have been to write down, in the order of their occurrence,every detail and general condition affecting Hardy,and then to string all his notations together in a narrative, often in non-unified paragraphsand without transition.Much of Pinion's material naturally involves Hardy's personal relationships,his feelings, and the choices he made in life and writing, but Pinion is equally devoted to such matters as Hardy'schance observations about things he had seen, images of nature that struckhis eye, and ideas he had written down in one of his notebooks next to the date-not necessarily uninteresting, but unfiltered and unanalyzed incidental findings. Pinion has gleaned this material from existing biographiesof Hardy;biographiesof other people; Hardy's letters; his, Emma's, and Florence's notebooks and diaries;reminiscencesof Hardy'sservants and associates;and Hardy'spublishedwritings. He seems to note every swim, every journey, every handling of manuscript,indeed every remotelyinteresting detail that appearseven incidentally in the recordshe has consulted-including the ringing of a church bell while Hardy was sketching St. Juliot on his first visit to Corwall; the fact that Emma wrote out the fair copy of Hardy's entry for the "WorldBiographies"series;the heat duringa tour of South Devon; and a newspaperclipping announcing the upcoming marriageof GertrudeBugler (Hardy's favorite stage "Tess"). The effect of this diligent recordingof immense numbersof details is not only to overshadowHardy's imaginativewritings;it blursthe significance of different events in Hardy'slife and effaces the impression of narrative in Pinion's own telling. All the details are presentedin the same even tone, with the consequence that it requiresconsiderable effort to continue to be alert to what one remembersfrom other biographiesas significant moments in Hardy's life. Oddly, this tactic may result in a passableportrayal of a life from the inside, as it were-from a perspective in which one day follows another with absorption in quotidian and mundane concerns, largerthemes being identifiedonly in hindsight.And some of Pinion's observations are distilled by lived wisdom-for example, sensitivity to the likely actualities of Thomas and Emma'slife together, he quiet
403
accusing him of being an anarchist and a socialist. Ross was repeatedlyforcedto decline invitations and to resignfromposts-as Valuerfor InlandRevenues, for example-to avoid embarrassinghis employers. It is difficult, and perhapsfinally less interesting, to think of Robert Ross divorcedfrom Oscar Wilde. They are bound not only by strong love, at least on Ross'spart,but also by the sharedexperienceof being gay men in an intolerant culture. The distance we feel fromRoss in this biographyis not only a function of Borland'sreticence to grapplewith Ross'ssexuality, but also of the verydistance Rossnecessarilykept froma society too willing to imprisonhim and others for their sexual preference.In part, this explains the shadowyfigureRosscuts in this biography.LikeConstance Holland, Ross was upstagedby Wilde during his life, and continues to remainso, despite scholars' attempts to block the dramadifferently. LAURAPLUMMER
IndianaUniversity Thomas Hardy: His Life and Friends, by E B. Pinion; pp. x + 438. New York:St. Martin'sPress, 1992, $35.00. ANY NEW BIOGRAPHYOF HARDY IS NECESSARILY
read and judged in relation to Robert Gittings's imaginative,often astute two-volumecriticalbiography (1975, 1978) and Michael Millgate'ssober and exhaustive recoveryand measurementof innumerable previously unconnected facts about Hardy'sfamily and life and writings (1982). What can a new biographyoffer?Pinion'sprefaceacknowledgesthe problem, and his subtitle points to his own sense of what is innovative about his approach, an emphasis on Hardy'sfriendshipsthat is manifestedby the presence of a few brief biographies (one to three pages) of people who had an importantpartin Hardy'slife and career-for example, Horace Moule and Leslie Stephen. Other friends accorded this treatment are Henry Bastow (fellow apprentice architect at John Hicks's office in Dorchester), EdmundGosse, Florence Henniker, Frederic Harrison (the Positivist), and T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrenceof Arabia"). However, these sketches contain mostly known information about their subjects,and they don't add to our understandingof Hardy.Pinion furtherdissipatesthe impact of the focus implied by the subtitle by labelling as "friends"(135) people only brieflyassociated with Hardy (R. D. Blackmore,for example), and by implying that Hardy'sfriendships sometimes were curtailedwhen the professionalrelationshipsshifted
(e.g., with Stephen [137]). In short, the subtitle is misleading. The special value of this volume lies not in its content but in its arrangement-what could be termed the totality of chronology.Perhapsto ensure his final draftdid not omit anything,Pinion'smethod seems to have been to write down, in the order of their occurrence,every detail and general condition affecting Hardy,and then to string all his notations together in a narrative, often in non-unified paragraphsand without transition.Much of Pinion's material naturally involves Hardy's personal relationships,his feelings, and the choices he made in life and writing, but Pinion is equally devoted to such matters as Hardy'schance observations about things he had seen, images of nature that struckhis eye, and ideas he had written down in one of his notebooks next to the date-not necessarily uninteresting, but unfiltered and unanalyzed incidental findings. Pinion has gleaned this material from existing biographiesof Hardy;biographiesof other people; Hardy's letters; his, Emma's, and Florence's notebooks and diaries;reminiscencesof Hardy'sservants and associates;and Hardy'spublishedwritings. He seems to note every swim, every journey, every handling of manuscript,indeed every remotelyinteresting detail that appearseven incidentally in the recordshe has consulted-including the ringing of a church bell while Hardy was sketching St. Juliot on his first visit to Corwall; the fact that Emma wrote out the fair copy of Hardy's entry for the "WorldBiographies"series;the heat duringa tour of South Devon; and a newspaperclipping announcing the upcoming marriageof GertrudeBugler (Hardy's favorite stage "Tess"). The effect of this diligent recordingof immense numbersof details is not only to overshadowHardy's imaginativewritings;it blursthe significance of different events in Hardy'slife and effaces the impression of narrative in Pinion's own telling. All the details are presentedin the same even tone, with the consequence that it requiresconsiderable effort to continue to be alert to what one remembersfrom other biographiesas significant moments in Hardy's life. Oddly, this tactic may result in a passableportrayal of a life from the inside, as it were-from a perspective in which one day follows another with absorption in quotidian and mundane concerns, largerthemes being identifiedonly in hindsight.And some of Pinion's observations are distilled by lived wisdom-for example, sensitivity to the likely actualities of Thomas and Emma'slife together, he quiet
404
and oblivious to her moods,she jealousand resentful. Nonetheless, there is something to be said for more directive presentationsof importantissues:forexample, to bury the pronouncement that "some time duringthe year [1897] he prepareda detailed plan of The Dynasts"(259) in the middle of a paragraph involving bicycling, a visit fromKipling,and a notebook jotting of a Hardy idea that might reflect an idea of Mill's suggeststhat attractive narrativetension might be gained from employingemphasis in a more conventional manner. Pinion deploys the results of his reading and of his yearsof traveling in Hardycountryand teaching and writing about Hardyto good purposefor someone wanting a cursorynarrativethat constantlyconnects events in Hardy'spoetry and fiction with his family history, events in his life, and the locales in which he lived. The usefulnessof this book in large part is that it brings together in one place both mainline and fringe biographicalresearchon Hardy, and thus represents the condition and range of knowledge about Hardy'slife as of the early 1990s. This is not a trivial merit.
radic accounts of middle-class Victorians' musicmakingand attitudestowardit. This scarcityof data may partlyexplain the weakerpoints of The Singing Bourgeois:its reliance on music publishers'promotional statementsas evidence for the beliefs of those who bought and performedthe songs; its readiness to assumethat nineteenth-centuryhabits of musical consumption were essentially the same in Britain and America;and its use of (often debatable) internal musicalevidence as proofof the ideologicalconvictions Scott locates within the Victorian bourgeoisie.The musical analysis here, in fact, reveals a tension at the heart of Scott's methodology. For all his Marxist-historicistemphasison the ideological content and culturalfunction of the drawingroom ballad,Scott frequentlyresortsin practiceto a familiarkind of qualitative musicologicaljudgment, condemning for example the banality of the "traditional 'amen' decoration" in Sullivan's "The Lost Chord"(144), and the "plainness"and "predictability" of vocal lines in Maria Lindsay'ssacred songs from mid-century (108). Similar criteria, at once sweeping and exclusive, shape Scott's broaderjudgDALE KRAMER ments of Victorian character and society-such as his identificationof the "lackof seriousmusicaleffort Universityof Illinois in the drawingroomsof the majorityof middle-class The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian establishments"(58). Scott's tendency to overstatehis case, though, is Drawing Room and Parlour, by DerekScott; pp. xiv + 242. Philadelphia,PA and London:Open Univermore than balanced by the informationhe marshals here. The SingingBourgeoisdistills into compact and sity Press, 1989, $38.00, £12.95. readableform the development of and the most imINCONTRAST TOTHERECENT OFSCHOLARLY portantfashionsin drawing-roomsong. Scott's chapSURGE interest in the music hall and working-classmusical ters on music publishingand promotion,and on the culture, the Victorian parlor song-or, as Derek widening of opportunities for female composers in Scott more correctlycalls it, the drawing-roombalthe 1850s, are particularlyinteresting, not only in lad-has for the most part remainedin the drawing themselves but also as they suggestavenues for furroom. Books devoted to the middle classes'favorite ther research. And any such research must begin with Scott's extensive, invaluable index of ninesongs have been primarilycollections of music, inviting performance,and only secondarily works of teenth-century British songs, including their oftenelusive dates of publication. historical or musical analysis.Students of Victorian music and of Victorian society in general owe Scott The SingingBourgeoisalso providesa selected list considerablegratitudefor breakingnew ground;his of recordingsof drawing-roomballads,and one item is the firstfull-scaleattempt to examine the complex on that list deservesspecial notice. Scott's own cassette, CelebratedVictorianand EdwardianBallads relationships among ideology, gender, economics, (availablethroughOpen University Press),is an imclass, and the distinctive drawing-roomrepertoire. And so it may be not only naturalbut desirablethat portantcomplementto the argumenthe putsforward The SingingBourgeoisshould promptreadersto agree in his book. Scott is an accomplishedpianist and an with its own conclusion: "Moreevidence is required appealing singer; his performancesof some of the and more researchneeded on the reception and use sturdiestdrawing-roomwarhorsesare idiomatic, unof bourgeoissong" (206). sentimentallyaffectionate, and above all persuasive. Such evidence is difficult to come by; letters, Listening to this recording,it is easy to understand the attraction that these songs held for Victorian diaries,and memoirsprovidesuggestivebut only spo-
404
and oblivious to her moods,she jealousand resentful. Nonetheless, there is something to be said for more directive presentationsof importantissues:forexample, to bury the pronouncement that "some time duringthe year [1897] he prepareda detailed plan of The Dynasts"(259) in the middle of a paragraph involving bicycling, a visit fromKipling,and a notebook jotting of a Hardy idea that might reflect an idea of Mill's suggeststhat attractive narrativetension might be gained from employingemphasis in a more conventional manner. Pinion deploys the results of his reading and of his yearsof traveling in Hardycountryand teaching and writing about Hardyto good purposefor someone wanting a cursorynarrativethat constantlyconnects events in Hardy'spoetry and fiction with his family history, events in his life, and the locales in which he lived. The usefulnessof this book in large part is that it brings together in one place both mainline and fringe biographicalresearchon Hardy, and thus represents the condition and range of knowledge about Hardy'slife as of the early 1990s. This is not a trivial merit.
radic accounts of middle-class Victorians' musicmakingand attitudestowardit. This scarcityof data may partlyexplain the weakerpoints of The Singing Bourgeois:its reliance on music publishers'promotional statementsas evidence for the beliefs of those who bought and performedthe songs; its readiness to assumethat nineteenth-centuryhabits of musical consumption were essentially the same in Britain and America;and its use of (often debatable) internal musicalevidence as proofof the ideologicalconvictions Scott locates within the Victorian bourgeoisie.The musical analysis here, in fact, reveals a tension at the heart of Scott's methodology. For all his Marxist-historicistemphasison the ideological content and culturalfunction of the drawingroom ballad,Scott frequentlyresortsin practiceto a familiarkind of qualitative musicologicaljudgment, condemning for example the banality of the "traditional 'amen' decoration" in Sullivan's "The Lost Chord"(144), and the "plainness"and "predictability" of vocal lines in Maria Lindsay'ssacred songs from mid-century (108). Similar criteria, at once sweeping and exclusive, shape Scott's broaderjudgDALE KRAMER ments of Victorian character and society-such as his identificationof the "lackof seriousmusicaleffort Universityof Illinois in the drawingroomsof the majorityof middle-class The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian establishments"(58). Scott's tendency to overstatehis case, though, is Drawing Room and Parlour, by DerekScott; pp. xiv + 242. Philadelphia,PA and London:Open Univermore than balanced by the informationhe marshals here. The SingingBourgeoisdistills into compact and sity Press, 1989, $38.00, £12.95. readableform the development of and the most imINCONTRAST TOTHERECENT OFSCHOLARLY portantfashionsin drawing-roomsong. Scott's chapSURGE interest in the music hall and working-classmusical ters on music publishingand promotion,and on the culture, the Victorian parlor song-or, as Derek widening of opportunities for female composers in Scott more correctlycalls it, the drawing-roombalthe 1850s, are particularlyinteresting, not only in lad-has for the most part remainedin the drawing themselves but also as they suggestavenues for furroom. Books devoted to the middle classes'favorite ther research. And any such research must begin with Scott's extensive, invaluable index of ninesongs have been primarilycollections of music, inviting performance,and only secondarily works of teenth-century British songs, including their oftenelusive dates of publication. historical or musical analysis.Students of Victorian music and of Victorian society in general owe Scott The SingingBourgeoisalso providesa selected list considerablegratitudefor breakingnew ground;his of recordingsof drawing-roomballads,and one item is the firstfull-scaleattempt to examine the complex on that list deservesspecial notice. Scott's own cassette, CelebratedVictorianand EdwardianBallads relationships among ideology, gender, economics, (availablethroughOpen University Press),is an imclass, and the distinctive drawing-roomrepertoire. And so it may be not only naturalbut desirablethat portantcomplementto the argumenthe putsforward The SingingBourgeoisshould promptreadersto agree in his book. Scott is an accomplishedpianist and an with its own conclusion: "Moreevidence is required appealing singer; his performancesof some of the and more researchneeded on the reception and use sturdiestdrawing-roomwarhorsesare idiomatic, unof bourgeoissong" (206). sentimentallyaffectionate, and above all persuasive. Such evidence is difficult to come by; letters, Listening to this recording,it is easy to understand the attraction that these songs held for Victorian diaries,and memoirsprovidesuggestivebut only spo-
405
amateur (and, often, professional) musicians. Perhaps, after all, we cannot expect the written word alone to captureor account for that attraction. ELLEN PATTON CYNTHIA IndianaUniversity Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist, by Thomas Dabbs; pp. 170. Lewisburg,PA: Bucknell University Press;London and Toronto: Associated University Presses,1991, $29.50, £22.00. WHAT WOULD WILLIAMEWARTGLADSTONEHAVE
thought of that blank-versePere Ubu, Tamburlaine the Great? Or how would Mrs. Oliphant have responded to an unexpurgatedperformanceof Edward II?Fromour own historicalperspective,to juxtapose Marlowe'spornographicspectacles of appetite unleashed, in all their irresponsibleglamour,with images of respectableVictorianscosily muttering"How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!" is to create an innately surreal bathos: the Marlovian playhouse and the Arnoldian study seem to belong in different universes,and few literaryhistorians to date have paused to wonder what the latter might actually have made of the former. In fact, as Thomas Dabbs'ssources make abundantly clear, the century which institutionalizedthe study of English literaryhistory made a great deal of ChristopherMarlowe,not the least impressiveof its creative achievements being the fabricationof two acceptable cover-stories for the secret agent who gave moralityplaysa bad name.Justas contemporary historical fiction refashionedthe licensed pirates of Elizabeth'snavy into stiff-upper-lippedempire-builders, so nineteenth-century scholarship turned the blasphemous,bisexualMarloweof Renaissancehearsay into a didactic moralistfit for inclusion on Civil Service entrancepapers,his playsreducedto so many sermonsaboutthe wickednessof megalomania.This reassuringaccount of the playwright,however, advanced by educatorssuch as Henry Morleyand William Spalding,did not go uncontested,and gradually an alternativeMarloweemerged,most notablyin the writingsof EdwardDowden,Algeron CharlesSwinburne, and J. A. Symonds. To them, Marlowe appeared as a misunderstood Romantic idealist, impatient with conventional restraintson his imagination, heroicallychampioningthe love which in his case dared exhiliratingly to speak its name, and doomed in the best poetic tradition to a tragically early death. It is a symptom of how much we still
inhabit the intellectual worldof the nineteenth century, Dabbs suggests,that these competing versions of Marlowe, the moralist and the Immoralist,continue to fight it out in contemporarydiscussionsof his work and his biographyalike. This is fascinating material, and there is undoubtedlya rich and importantwork of culturalhistory to be written aroundit, but ReformingMarlowe, sadly, isn't it. What Dabbs has instead produced is one of those obsessive, dissertation-like studies so immersedin its subject that it can't see the wood for the trees; indeed this one isn't even wholly reliable when it comes to recognizing individual trees. Although trustworthyevidence for a life of Marloweis nearly as scarce now as it was a hundred years ago, forcing contemporaryhistorians to rely almost as heavily on their own conjectures as did their nineteenth-century forbears,Dabbs wastes most of the firsthalf of his book laboriouslycastigatingMarlowe's Victorian biographersfor lacking access to the few facts uncoveredby subsequentresearchers,driven by a half-articulatedconviction that their resulting errors (such as the fairlyharmlessbelief that Marlowe workedas an actor) constitute evidence of a mendacious plot. In fact the biographiesDabbs cites with such horrorare in general simply following the reasonablyplausibleaccount of Marlowe'slife published more than a century earlier in Gerard Langbaine's An Accountof theEnglishDramatickPoets(1691), and on the whole they hardly seem sufficientlydifferent from the prefatory"LifeSketch" Dabbs offersas the available "truth"on the subject to justify either the space or the moraloutragesquanderedon them here. The remainder of ReformingMarloweought by rights to be far more compelling, but given the unswerving singleness of Dabbs's purpose-to prove that the Victorianswere "biased,"from a twentiethcenturyperspectivecomplacentlyassumedto be "objective"(52)-he only extends the hindsight applied in the first half to Marlowe'sVictorian editors to Marlowe'sVictorian critics, who were according to Dabbs not only factually wrong but ideologically wrong into the bargain. (They were, for example, "obsessedwith supportingcurrent political, social, and educational concerns in their critical interpretations of old literature"[80-81]-how unlike our own enlightened 1990s!) That contemporaryinterpretersshould still share any common ground with these benighted predecessors seems so obviously scandalous to Dabbs, unfortunately,that he never considersquite whyit should troublehim as it doeswhat he appearsto take for grantedis that his readers
405
amateur (and, often, professional) musicians. Perhaps, after all, we cannot expect the written word alone to captureor account for that attraction. ELLEN PATTON CYNTHIA IndianaUniversity Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist, by Thomas Dabbs; pp. 170. Lewisburg,PA: Bucknell University Press;London and Toronto: Associated University Presses,1991, $29.50, £22.00. WHAT WOULD WILLIAMEWARTGLADSTONEHAVE
thought of that blank-versePere Ubu, Tamburlaine the Great? Or how would Mrs. Oliphant have responded to an unexpurgatedperformanceof Edward II?Fromour own historicalperspective,to juxtapose Marlowe'spornographicspectacles of appetite unleashed, in all their irresponsibleglamour,with images of respectableVictorianscosily muttering"How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!" is to create an innately surreal bathos: the Marlovian playhouse and the Arnoldian study seem to belong in different universes,and few literaryhistorians to date have paused to wonder what the latter might actually have made of the former. In fact, as Thomas Dabbs'ssources make abundantly clear, the century which institutionalizedthe study of English literaryhistory made a great deal of ChristopherMarlowe,not the least impressiveof its creative achievements being the fabricationof two acceptable cover-stories for the secret agent who gave moralityplaysa bad name.Justas contemporary historical fiction refashionedthe licensed pirates of Elizabeth'snavy into stiff-upper-lippedempire-builders, so nineteenth-century scholarship turned the blasphemous,bisexualMarloweof Renaissancehearsay into a didactic moralistfit for inclusion on Civil Service entrancepapers,his playsreducedto so many sermonsaboutthe wickednessof megalomania.This reassuringaccount of the playwright,however, advanced by educatorssuch as Henry Morleyand William Spalding,did not go uncontested,and gradually an alternativeMarloweemerged,most notablyin the writingsof EdwardDowden,Algeron CharlesSwinburne, and J. A. Symonds. To them, Marlowe appeared as a misunderstood Romantic idealist, impatient with conventional restraintson his imagination, heroicallychampioningthe love which in his case dared exhiliratingly to speak its name, and doomed in the best poetic tradition to a tragically early death. It is a symptom of how much we still
inhabit the intellectual worldof the nineteenth century, Dabbs suggests,that these competing versions of Marlowe, the moralist and the Immoralist,continue to fight it out in contemporarydiscussionsof his work and his biographyalike. This is fascinating material, and there is undoubtedlya rich and importantwork of culturalhistory to be written aroundit, but ReformingMarlowe, sadly, isn't it. What Dabbs has instead produced is one of those obsessive, dissertation-like studies so immersedin its subject that it can't see the wood for the trees; indeed this one isn't even wholly reliable when it comes to recognizing individual trees. Although trustworthyevidence for a life of Marloweis nearly as scarce now as it was a hundred years ago, forcing contemporaryhistorians to rely almost as heavily on their own conjectures as did their nineteenth-century forbears,Dabbs wastes most of the firsthalf of his book laboriouslycastigatingMarlowe's Victorian biographersfor lacking access to the few facts uncoveredby subsequentresearchers,driven by a half-articulatedconviction that their resulting errors (such as the fairlyharmlessbelief that Marlowe workedas an actor) constitute evidence of a mendacious plot. In fact the biographiesDabbs cites with such horrorare in general simply following the reasonablyplausibleaccount of Marlowe'slife published more than a century earlier in Gerard Langbaine's An Accountof theEnglishDramatickPoets(1691), and on the whole they hardly seem sufficientlydifferent from the prefatory"LifeSketch" Dabbs offersas the available "truth"on the subject to justify either the space or the moraloutragesquanderedon them here. The remainder of ReformingMarloweought by rights to be far more compelling, but given the unswerving singleness of Dabbs's purpose-to prove that the Victorianswere "biased,"from a twentiethcenturyperspectivecomplacentlyassumedto be "objective"(52)-he only extends the hindsight applied in the first half to Marlowe'sVictorian editors to Marlowe'sVictorian critics, who were according to Dabbs not only factually wrong but ideologically wrong into the bargain. (They were, for example, "obsessedwith supportingcurrent political, social, and educational concerns in their critical interpretations of old literature"[80-81]-how unlike our own enlightened 1990s!) That contemporaryinterpretersshould still share any common ground with these benighted predecessors seems so obviously scandalous to Dabbs, unfortunately,that he never considersquite whyit should troublehim as it doeswhat he appearsto take for grantedis that his readers
406
will all share an unexamined and entirely nineteenth-century faith in Progress. ReformingMarlowe might nonetheless make a pleasurable read-as well as a meticulously-researched supplement to Millar Maclure'sMarlowe: The CriticalHeritage(1979)-were its smug hindsight only deployedwith a sense of mischievouspleasure,ratherthan with the ploddingself-righteousness which is the best Dabbs'stone-deaf prose can offer: to be reminded on its last page of Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare (1989) and Samuel Lives(1970) is to recogSchoenbaum'sShakespeare's nize precisely the kind of critical writing one has been pining for throughoutthe book. Characteristically, however, Dabbshas only cited these two studies in orderto complain irrelevantlythat they do not share his own monotonous paranoia-"neither expose to any great degree the enduring influences of Victorian literary theory on English studies today" (140). Alas, there's little intellectual diablerieto be hoped for from a conspiracytheorist-even, apparently, one whose chosen subject is Kit Marlowe. MICHAEL DOBSON Universityof Illinois,Chicago Children's Literature, 20: Special Issue on Rudyard Kipling, edited by Francelia Butler, Barbara Rosen, and Judith A. Plotz; pp. viii + 254. New Haven, CT and London:YaleUniversityPress,1992, $45.00, $14.00 paper. The Culture Shocks of Rudyard Kipling, by W. J. Lohman, Jr.;pp. 299. New York:Peter Lang, 1990, $46.95. The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation, by Ann Parry;pp. 168. Buckingham,Eng. and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1992, $79.00, $27.00 paper. OFTHETHREETITLESUNDERREVIEW, THECHILDREN'S
Literaturespecial issue is the most satisfying.It includes eight articles on Kipling'swritings for children, an essay on illustrationsof the Just So Stories, and reviews. Although the eight articles are not deliberatelyorganizedundera single theme, all speak to a perennial issue in Kipling: the nature of "the Law."John Murray's"The Law of TheJungleBooks" assertsthat the authoritarianismof that code reflects the non-ethical nature of analytical positivism, the legal philosophy popular among Anglo-Indian administrators in Kipling's day. Carole Scott's "Kipling'sCombat Zones"arguesthat in the dystopian "otherworlds"(52) of their education,Kipling's
juvenile protagonists learn to suppress"feminine" emotion in order to masterthe patriarchalcodes of adult imperial and commercial life. In "Stalkyand the Languageof Education,"D. H. Stewart claims that Stalky & Co.'s orality, their joyous weaving together of Latin tags and college argot, reveals the legacy of classical virtues in the education of latenineteenth-centurycivesRomani. Whereas Murray,Scott, and Stewart place instruction in Kipling'sLawwithin a male-dominated, hierarchicalworld,the other contributorsset discovery of adult values within realms more various and inclusive. In "Female Power and Male SelfAssertion,"U. C. Knoepflmacherarguesthat, unlike his often misogynistadultfiction, Kipling'schildren's writingsenact the recoveryof a lost maternalpower as a matrix for efficacious action. Corinne McCutchan's"Puck& Co." sees Puckof Pook'sHill and Rewardsand Fairiesas an interlaced romance whose child's point of view permits the emergence of egalitarian virtues, such as a healing care and compassion,not often met in traditionalromances. In "The TrinityArchetype"Juliet McMasterasserts that, in Baloo's power, Bagheera'slove, and Kaa's wisdom, TheJungleBookspresent, for Mowgli'sbenefit, the unity of the three complementaryvirtues found in the Judeo-Christianand Hindu religious traditions.Judith A. Plotz's"The Empireof Youth" calls Kim "an idyll of imperialism"in which the normally conflicting experiences of intercultural friendship(love) and colonial mastery(the Law) are reconciled in a vision of splendid wholeness (124). In "TheSocratic Pilgrimageof the Elephant'sChild" HowardR. Cell sees in the girl protagonist'sinterrogation of the Crocodile a retracingof Socrates'sjourney towardself-knowledge.In "Just-SoPictures,"an essay set off from those mentioned above, BrianAlderson argues for the superiorityof Kipling's own illustrationsof the JustSo Storiesover those of other artists;where their effortsexploit the storiesfor commercial purposes,his invite the child auditor/reader to play off text against design and commentary to recreate the magic of those tales. All of the essays are fresh and perceptive; Knoepflmacher'sis especially powerful-a ground-breakingwork on gender in Kipling. The Poetryof RudyardKipling,by Ann Parry,represents the first book-length treatment of Kipling's poetry.She is interestednot so much in determining whether Kipling is a "good"or, in Orwell'sphrase,a "good bad poet," but in analyzing"the readingformations which concretely and historically organize
406
will all share an unexamined and entirely nineteenth-century faith in Progress. ReformingMarlowe might nonetheless make a pleasurable read-as well as a meticulously-researched supplement to Millar Maclure'sMarlowe: The CriticalHeritage(1979)-were its smug hindsight only deployedwith a sense of mischievouspleasure,ratherthan with the ploddingself-righteousness which is the best Dabbs'stone-deaf prose can offer: to be reminded on its last page of Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare (1989) and Samuel Lives(1970) is to recogSchoenbaum'sShakespeare's nize precisely the kind of critical writing one has been pining for throughoutthe book. Characteristically, however, Dabbshas only cited these two studies in orderto complain irrelevantlythat they do not share his own monotonous paranoia-"neither expose to any great degree the enduring influences of Victorian literary theory on English studies today" (140). Alas, there's little intellectual diablerieto be hoped for from a conspiracytheorist-even, apparently, one whose chosen subject is Kit Marlowe. MICHAEL DOBSON Universityof Illinois,Chicago Children's Literature, 20: Special Issue on Rudyard Kipling, edited by Francelia Butler, Barbara Rosen, and Judith A. Plotz; pp. viii + 254. New Haven, CT and London:YaleUniversityPress,1992, $45.00, $14.00 paper. The Culture Shocks of Rudyard Kipling, by W. J. Lohman, Jr.;pp. 299. New York:Peter Lang, 1990, $46.95. The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation, by Ann Parry;pp. 168. Buckingham,Eng. and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1992, $79.00, $27.00 paper. OFTHETHREETITLESUNDERREVIEW, THECHILDREN'S
Literaturespecial issue is the most satisfying.It includes eight articles on Kipling'swritings for children, an essay on illustrationsof the Just So Stories, and reviews. Although the eight articles are not deliberatelyorganizedundera single theme, all speak to a perennial issue in Kipling: the nature of "the Law."John Murray's"The Law of TheJungleBooks" assertsthat the authoritarianismof that code reflects the non-ethical nature of analytical positivism, the legal philosophy popular among Anglo-Indian administrators in Kipling's day. Carole Scott's "Kipling'sCombat Zones"arguesthat in the dystopian "otherworlds"(52) of their education,Kipling's
juvenile protagonists learn to suppress"feminine" emotion in order to masterthe patriarchalcodes of adult imperial and commercial life. In "Stalkyand the Languageof Education,"D. H. Stewart claims that Stalky & Co.'s orality, their joyous weaving together of Latin tags and college argot, reveals the legacy of classical virtues in the education of latenineteenth-centurycivesRomani. Whereas Murray,Scott, and Stewart place instruction in Kipling'sLawwithin a male-dominated, hierarchicalworld,the other contributorsset discovery of adult values within realms more various and inclusive. In "Female Power and Male SelfAssertion,"U. C. Knoepflmacherarguesthat, unlike his often misogynistadultfiction, Kipling'schildren's writingsenact the recoveryof a lost maternalpower as a matrix for efficacious action. Corinne McCutchan's"Puck& Co." sees Puckof Pook'sHill and Rewardsand Fairiesas an interlaced romance whose child's point of view permits the emergence of egalitarian virtues, such as a healing care and compassion,not often met in traditionalromances. In "The TrinityArchetype"Juliet McMasterasserts that, in Baloo's power, Bagheera'slove, and Kaa's wisdom, TheJungleBookspresent, for Mowgli'sbenefit, the unity of the three complementaryvirtues found in the Judeo-Christianand Hindu religious traditions.Judith A. Plotz's"The Empireof Youth" calls Kim "an idyll of imperialism"in which the normally conflicting experiences of intercultural friendship(love) and colonial mastery(the Law) are reconciled in a vision of splendid wholeness (124). In "TheSocratic Pilgrimageof the Elephant'sChild" HowardR. Cell sees in the girl protagonist'sinterrogation of the Crocodile a retracingof Socrates'sjourney towardself-knowledge.In "Just-SoPictures,"an essay set off from those mentioned above, BrianAlderson argues for the superiorityof Kipling's own illustrationsof the JustSo Storiesover those of other artists;where their effortsexploit the storiesfor commercial purposes,his invite the child auditor/reader to play off text against design and commentary to recreate the magic of those tales. All of the essays are fresh and perceptive; Knoepflmacher'sis especially powerful-a ground-breakingwork on gender in Kipling. The Poetryof RudyardKipling,by Ann Parry,represents the first book-length treatment of Kipling's poetry.She is interestednot so much in determining whether Kipling is a "good"or, in Orwell'sphrase,a "good bad poet," but in analyzing"the readingformations which concretely and historically organize
407
the practiceof reading"(3). As we might expect, she focuses on Kipling'spolitical poetry, from his early satireson Anglo-Indian life to his between-the-wars jeremiads against British decline. She argues that Kipling is a popularpoet whose lack of critical approvalarisesfromthe implicitchallenge that popular writing mounts against the dominant forms of high literaryculture.A patient scholar,she delineateswell the shifting social and political contexts of Kipling's poetry.She fails, however,to account adequatelyfor his popularity-to define clearly who readhim, why they read him, and how he challenged modernist poetics. According to Parry,"the single most important motivation behind all Kipling'spolitical poetry [was] the absence of what he deemed to be sound views in the nation . . . about the Empire"(81). To fill that void, Kipling urged upon his readers an imperial vision that included not only Britonsand white colonials but the aristocracyand the working class. That vision threatened a middle-classpolitical and literaryelite suspiciousof working-classagitation for political reform.Faced with the cockneyfied toughs of Kipling's Barrack-RoomBallads (1892) and The SevenSeas (1896), these middle-classreadersquailed. The Boer War and World World I intensified the rancorbetween the unofficialpoet laureateof Empire and the liberal political and literaryestablishment. The FiveNations (1903) was disdainedby the liberal press, and The YearsBetween(1919) was largely ignored by critics. But the radicallyconservative Kipling, in tones increasingly bitter and apocalyptic, continued to call for an Empireinvigoratedby "the Sons of Martha," those unrecognized men and women who did the realworkof the worldwhile "the Sons of Mary,"the effete ruling powers, stood idly by. And he continued to be popular. Parryis adept at measuringthe growing divide between Kipling and his liberal enemies. She is less successful at identifying who his fans were. Parry notes that as time went on, Kipling widened his attacksto include not only Liberalbut Conservative leaders.If he never had a largeworking-classreadership, and in the end alienated England'sToryrulers, who continued to buy his books in such largenumbers?Without a securesense of what kinds of readers made up his "readingformations,"it is hard to know which political groups,outsideLiberal-Unionistsand jingoists, his imperialvision galvanized.Parrywrites that Kipling'spoetry "waspart of the attempt by a powerfulgroupto reorganizecultureso as to enclose it within an inclusive imperial nationalism that
sought to create a semblanceof unity acrossclass and party lines" (139). She never defines, however, the composition of this "powerfulgroup,"except to suggest vaguely an affinity between a disaffectedworking class and a radicalRight yearningfor a militarist Empire.In floating the possibilityof this connection, she consistently ignoresKipling'sfearsof an anarchic demos. Finally, Parryfails to elucidate fully the differences between Kipling'spopularpoetryand the dominant literaryformsof modernism.She contends that the distinctionsbetween good (elitist) and bad (popular) poetry"area question of politics not aesthetics" (139). But aesthetics is a factor not so easily dismissed. In "Kipling'sJest" David Bromwich argues that by insisting on cultivating a "public speech" when most poets were experimenting with "anonymous private speech" (RudyardKipling,edited by Harold Bloom [1987], 79), Kipling guaranteed a place for his verse on the critical sidelines. A fuller exploration of that public speech, one which would consider together the political and aesthetic choices Kipling made in his poetry,would yield a more satisfying understandingof his readingformations. The CultureShocksof RudyardKipling,by W. J. Lohman,Jr.,seeks to take a new look at an old issue in Kipling:the waysin which his frequentuprootings from familiar surroundingsin early life shaped his psyche and his art. Lohman'streatment of the subject, however, disappoints.In Section I, his concept of culture shock, a hodgepodge of behaviorism, cybernetics, and functionalism,proves too mechanical to trace tactfully the variety and subtlety of human adjustment to cultural difference. That concept, when applied to Kipling'slife in Section II, distorts the man. Kipling is defined chiefly by the losses and griefshis nomadic life forced on him; little mention is made of the virtues it taught: his openness to children, his magpie ventriloquism,and his zest for farce.The third section, "Kipling'sTreatmentof the Themes," offers a more balanced view of cultural crossings, one that describes its joys as well as its frustrations.However, by crammingtoo many short story titles under each theme-category,Lohmann is driven to thin assessmentof these works. The final section, a discussionof Kipling'snovels, is the weakest; analysis sometimes degenerates here into plot summary.This book would have benefited by a more open engagementwith currentscholarship(his short bibliography lists no work published later than 1969), particularlythat being done in the area of cultural studies. The culturally hybrid Kipling de-
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serves more nuanced treatment than he gets in CultureShocks. JOHNMCBRATNEY JohnCarrollUniversity Sir John Tenniel: Alice's White Knight, by Rodney Engen; pp. ix + 232. Aldershot: Scolar; Brookfield, VT: Gower, 1991, £35.00, $75.00. JOHNTENNIELWASBORNIN 1820.FORALMOSTFIFTY
years of his very long life he was the most powerful political cartoonist in Great Britain;he designedthe best-rememberedillustrationsof the nineteenth century (for Lewis Carroll'sAlice books); but he has never, until now, been the subject of a detailed biography.This long neglect is a last expressionof the cultural inferioritythat shadowed drawing, illustration, and journalismin Tenniel'sday-an inferiority that left him dissatisfied,despite the many honors that eventually came his way. Tenniel's first ambitions were for "HighArt." Had he become a secondrate member of the Royal Academy instead of a first-rateillustratorof his times we would not have had to wait so long for this book. By now our sense of the hierarchyof the artshas relaxedenough for us to take seriouslyTenniel'spopular career.For each palace of art in Victorian England there were thousandsof parlors;and to those parlors, for almost half a century, virtually every week, Punchbroughta new political cartoonby Tenniel, ten inches tall by seven inches wide (sometimes twice as wide)-sufficiently imposing to stop the page-turner,provoke a chuckle or a frown, and contribute yet another image to the imaginationof the upper-middle class. Alice dreamed in pictures by Tenniel; surelymany other Victoriansdid too. Rodney Engen is especially well-qualified to write this book. Tenniel's cartoons, and most of his book illustrations,were publishedby means of wood engravings,which were executed by craftsmen (Joseph Swain, the Dalzielbrothers)literallyalong lines sketched out by Tenniel on a woodblock. Engen's Dictionaryof VictorianWood Engravers(1985) is an invaluable map of the general territory,and he recently published the best account of the career of RichardDoyle, the artistwhom Tenniel replacedon the Punchstaff. Engen builds this Tenniel biographyfrom a selection of famousor characteristicdrawingsand engravings, as well as from various documentary sources.He makes good use of many reminiscences and reviews,most of them publishedlate in Tenniel's
life or afterhis death, and of a single interview that Tenniel gave when he was seventy-five.He also uses many dozens of unpublishedletters housed in libraries from London to Pasadena,as well as in private collections (including his own)-these letters, too, surviving mainly from late in Tenniel's career.Together these documentsconstructthe uneventful life of an industriousand importantbut essentially private person;none reallypenetratesthe reticence and silence that Tenniel would bring even to drunken dinner partieswith his colleagues and friends. Engen suggeststhat a severe loss relatively early in Tenniel's life, the death of his wife within two yearsof their wedding,explainsa morbidmelancholy apparent in several illustrations. Maybe; we know very little about the marriage.But the melancholy of these drawingslooks theatrical,and Engenhimself makesthe case that the stylizedmelodramaof much of Tenniel's work-arguably the core of his success as a political cartoonist-stems from his life-long devotion to the Victorian theater,both in the audience and (as an amateur actor) onstage. Tenniel's feelings may or may not have expressedthemselves in penciled melodrama. Despite his job as a political cartoonist Tenniel was notoriously reserved even about politics, and content to take his marching ordersfrom editorial colleagues.The partyline was fixed at a dinner held in the Punchofficeseach Wednesdayevening. Henry Silver recordedthese events in a diary,and Engen quotes a few times from it-but only frompublished excerpts; presumablyhe was not allowed to quote from the diary itself. Constance Smith preparedan annotated edition of this diaryas her doctoral thesis for Saint LouisUniversity (1987), but it too is under restrictedaccess. When Silver'sdiary is at last published we should know a good deal more than we do now about the genesis of Tenniel'spolitical cartoons. Though Engen keeps his focus on his subject, it would be appropriateto canvass Tenniel's influence on other artists,especiallyother political cartoonists; John Proctor's cartoons for Judy look a lot like Tenniel's for Punch. An American obituary fairly recognized Tenniel's importance in the United States: Tenniel'swork had "suppliedthe inspiration and even the materialsfor many of the craftsmenof the large school of political cartoonists which has since arisen in both Europeand America." Engen is silent, too, about the sexual politics of Tenniel'swork,though much could be said. He does publisha late watercolorof a duskyPygmalionhelplessly embracing a demure, naked, and stone-cold
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serves more nuanced treatment than he gets in CultureShocks. JOHNMCBRATNEY JohnCarrollUniversity Sir John Tenniel: Alice's White Knight, by Rodney Engen; pp. ix + 232. Aldershot: Scolar; Brookfield, VT: Gower, 1991, £35.00, $75.00. JOHNTENNIELWASBORNIN 1820.FORALMOSTFIFTY
years of his very long life he was the most powerful political cartoonist in Great Britain;he designedthe best-rememberedillustrationsof the nineteenth century (for Lewis Carroll'sAlice books); but he has never, until now, been the subject of a detailed biography.This long neglect is a last expressionof the cultural inferioritythat shadowed drawing, illustration, and journalismin Tenniel'sday-an inferiority that left him dissatisfied,despite the many honors that eventually came his way. Tenniel's first ambitions were for "HighArt." Had he become a secondrate member of the Royal Academy instead of a first-rateillustratorof his times we would not have had to wait so long for this book. By now our sense of the hierarchyof the artshas relaxedenough for us to take seriouslyTenniel'spopular career.For each palace of art in Victorian England there were thousandsof parlors;and to those parlors, for almost half a century, virtually every week, Punchbroughta new political cartoonby Tenniel, ten inches tall by seven inches wide (sometimes twice as wide)-sufficiently imposing to stop the page-turner,provoke a chuckle or a frown, and contribute yet another image to the imaginationof the upper-middle class. Alice dreamed in pictures by Tenniel; surelymany other Victoriansdid too. Rodney Engen is especially well-qualified to write this book. Tenniel's cartoons, and most of his book illustrations,were publishedby means of wood engravings,which were executed by craftsmen (Joseph Swain, the Dalzielbrothers)literallyalong lines sketched out by Tenniel on a woodblock. Engen's Dictionaryof VictorianWood Engravers(1985) is an invaluable map of the general territory,and he recently published the best account of the career of RichardDoyle, the artistwhom Tenniel replacedon the Punchstaff. Engen builds this Tenniel biographyfrom a selection of famousor characteristicdrawingsand engravings, as well as from various documentary sources.He makes good use of many reminiscences and reviews,most of them publishedlate in Tenniel's
life or afterhis death, and of a single interview that Tenniel gave when he was seventy-five.He also uses many dozens of unpublishedletters housed in libraries from London to Pasadena,as well as in private collections (including his own)-these letters, too, surviving mainly from late in Tenniel's career.Together these documentsconstructthe uneventful life of an industriousand importantbut essentially private person;none reallypenetratesthe reticence and silence that Tenniel would bring even to drunken dinner partieswith his colleagues and friends. Engen suggeststhat a severe loss relatively early in Tenniel's life, the death of his wife within two yearsof their wedding,explainsa morbidmelancholy apparent in several illustrations. Maybe; we know very little about the marriage.But the melancholy of these drawingslooks theatrical,and Engenhimself makesthe case that the stylizedmelodramaof much of Tenniel's work-arguably the core of his success as a political cartoonist-stems from his life-long devotion to the Victorian theater,both in the audience and (as an amateur actor) onstage. Tenniel's feelings may or may not have expressedthemselves in penciled melodrama. Despite his job as a political cartoonist Tenniel was notoriously reserved even about politics, and content to take his marching ordersfrom editorial colleagues.The partyline was fixed at a dinner held in the Punchofficeseach Wednesdayevening. Henry Silver recordedthese events in a diary,and Engen quotes a few times from it-but only frompublished excerpts; presumablyhe was not allowed to quote from the diary itself. Constance Smith preparedan annotated edition of this diaryas her doctoral thesis for Saint LouisUniversity (1987), but it too is under restrictedaccess. When Silver'sdiary is at last published we should know a good deal more than we do now about the genesis of Tenniel'spolitical cartoons. Though Engen keeps his focus on his subject, it would be appropriateto canvass Tenniel's influence on other artists,especiallyother political cartoonists; John Proctor's cartoons for Judy look a lot like Tenniel's for Punch. An American obituary fairly recognized Tenniel's importance in the United States: Tenniel'swork had "suppliedthe inspiration and even the materialsfor many of the craftsmenof the large school of political cartoonists which has since arisen in both Europeand America." Engen is silent, too, about the sexual politics of Tenniel'swork,though much could be said. He does publisha late watercolorof a duskyPygmalionhelplessly embracing a demure, naked, and stone-cold
409
statue of a woman aloft on a pedestal, her head and torso a bright glare. This image capturessomething of what charges the grand, shining procession of female allegorical personifications that dominate many of Tenniel's cartoons, not to mention his demure Alice. Like Lewis Carroll,Tenniel had no children;together they fathered the quintessential Victorian girl. Alice lives still, but Tenniel illustrated many other books and magazines,which are now largely forgotten;Engendetails them in a list morecomplete than any predecessor.Two important items still escape attention. When Tenniel was thirty-one he designed the engraved title-page and also the decorated cover for the OfficialDescriptiveand Illustrated Catalogueof the Great Exhibition(1851). These imposing tableaux,publishedvirtuallyunder royalauspices at the startof Tenniel'sPunchcareer,announce not only Britannia'sinternationalsupremacybut also Tenniel's vocation as image-makerto the English nation and the British empire. MICHAEL HANCHER Universityof Minnesota Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830-1908, by Marcia Pointon; pp. x +160. Cambridge and New York:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990, £35.00, £14.95 paper,$49.95, $18.95 paper. THE BODY MARCIAPOINTON,IN NAKEDAUTHORITY:
in Wester Painting1830-1908, takes up the ambitious project of mapping the terrain of modem art history with a host of new theoretical approaches based on the writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and others. Focusing on the "heroic"first phase of Modernism, she offers six essays, all concerned in differentways with the representationof the female body-usually nude. The essaysare united by a realizationthat the body is not merely a natural fact, but also is an ideologicalconstructionsubjectto shifting historical forces. Representationsof the body encode not just "universal"ideals of Beautyand Art, but also render notions of the self. When picking works of art, Pointon sticks to a well-establishedcanon of Modernist"masterpieces," including Manet's Dejeunersur l'herbe,Delacroix's Libertyon the Barricades,and Gauguin'sVisionAfter the Sermon.Many feminists would argue, however, that the very concept of "masterpiece"is tainted by myths of progressand mastery.Pointon, while acknowledgingthis position, reassertsthe usefulnessof
the "masterpiece"as a way of focusing on the problems of readership.For,at least within the Modernist tradition,the "masterpiece"is definedby its potential for multiple readings. By returing to works that have inspireda centuryor more of often conflicting criticalcomment, Pointon foregroundsreadingas her primarysubject. In her own text, she is a reader seeking new paths to meaning, and a very critical readerof other critics. The female nude, although virtuallysynonymous with the practice of High Art, has been surprisingly little analyzed as a subject by art historians. The traditional treatment of the female nude as mere academic genre-an effectively neutral artistic subject-has long been discredited.But the popularalternative, formulatedby John Bergerin his Waysof Seeing (1972), is also severely limited. In Berger's critique of Western representations of the female nude, the man-who paints, or looks-aggressively owns the image constructed for his pleasure; the female position is passive, objectified. Pointon goes beyond this active/passivemale/femaledichotomy in search of female pleasure.Her first chapter explores paths toward female empowerment in the act of reading/viewing. In Chapter Two, centering on Thomas Eakins's heroic operating room scene, The Gross Clinic, Pointon uses the ambiguousidentity of the body on the operating table as a way of exploring hidden Oedipal narrativeswithin the discourseof arthistory. She enlists psychoanalytic theory because its embrace of ambiguitycuts against the conventional art historical will toward clear-cut ahistorical "truths." Pointon'sspecific targethere is the recent writingon Eakinsby Michael Fried(Realism,Writing,Disgifuration, in Thomas Eakinsand StephenCrane [1987]). Imitating Derrida'sreadingof Freud,she follows the steps of his argumentsabout The GrossClinicto gain access to the author'ssubjectivity. Ultimately, she argues, Fried'ssupposedlynew argumentsreinforce the same old patriarchalnarrativesthat traditionally control art history. Chapter five, on Renoir's curious, overripe late nudes, also centers on narrativesof mastery.Specifically, Pointon treats the use of autobiographyas a means to control readingsof an artist'swork. Autobiography,in her eyes, can be ratherloosely defined as a combination of "documentary"photos and the artist'sbiography by his son Jean Renoir. Pointon arguesthat the myth of Renoir as the natural man conditions how we read his women: although physically frail, the aged painterof nudes was still inhab-
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statue of a woman aloft on a pedestal, her head and torso a bright glare. This image capturessomething of what charges the grand, shining procession of female allegorical personifications that dominate many of Tenniel's cartoons, not to mention his demure Alice. Like Lewis Carroll,Tenniel had no children;together they fathered the quintessential Victorian girl. Alice lives still, but Tenniel illustrated many other books and magazines,which are now largely forgotten;Engendetails them in a list morecomplete than any predecessor.Two important items still escape attention. When Tenniel was thirty-one he designed the engraved title-page and also the decorated cover for the OfficialDescriptiveand Illustrated Catalogueof the Great Exhibition(1851). These imposing tableaux,publishedvirtuallyunder royalauspices at the startof Tenniel'sPunchcareer,announce not only Britannia'sinternationalsupremacybut also Tenniel's vocation as image-makerto the English nation and the British empire. MICHAEL HANCHER Universityof Minnesota Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830-1908, by Marcia Pointon; pp. x +160. Cambridge and New York:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990, £35.00, £14.95 paper,$49.95, $18.95 paper. THE BODY MARCIAPOINTON,IN NAKEDAUTHORITY:
in Wester Painting1830-1908, takes up the ambitious project of mapping the terrain of modem art history with a host of new theoretical approaches based on the writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and others. Focusing on the "heroic"first phase of Modernism, she offers six essays, all concerned in differentways with the representationof the female body-usually nude. The essaysare united by a realizationthat the body is not merely a natural fact, but also is an ideologicalconstructionsubjectto shifting historical forces. Representationsof the body encode not just "universal"ideals of Beautyand Art, but also render notions of the self. When picking works of art, Pointon sticks to a well-establishedcanon of Modernist"masterpieces," including Manet's Dejeunersur l'herbe,Delacroix's Libertyon the Barricades,and Gauguin'sVisionAfter the Sermon.Many feminists would argue, however, that the very concept of "masterpiece"is tainted by myths of progressand mastery.Pointon, while acknowledgingthis position, reassertsthe usefulnessof
the "masterpiece"as a way of focusing on the problems of readership.For,at least within the Modernist tradition,the "masterpiece"is definedby its potential for multiple readings. By returing to works that have inspireda centuryor more of often conflicting criticalcomment, Pointon foregroundsreadingas her primarysubject. In her own text, she is a reader seeking new paths to meaning, and a very critical readerof other critics. The female nude, although virtuallysynonymous with the practice of High Art, has been surprisingly little analyzed as a subject by art historians. The traditional treatment of the female nude as mere academic genre-an effectively neutral artistic subject-has long been discredited.But the popularalternative, formulatedby John Bergerin his Waysof Seeing (1972), is also severely limited. In Berger's critique of Western representations of the female nude, the man-who paints, or looks-aggressively owns the image constructed for his pleasure; the female position is passive, objectified. Pointon goes beyond this active/passivemale/femaledichotomy in search of female pleasure.Her first chapter explores paths toward female empowerment in the act of reading/viewing. In Chapter Two, centering on Thomas Eakins's heroic operating room scene, The Gross Clinic, Pointon uses the ambiguousidentity of the body on the operating table as a way of exploring hidden Oedipal narrativeswithin the discourseof arthistory. She enlists psychoanalytic theory because its embrace of ambiguitycuts against the conventional art historical will toward clear-cut ahistorical "truths." Pointon'sspecific targethere is the recent writingon Eakinsby Michael Fried(Realism,Writing,Disgifuration, in Thomas Eakinsand StephenCrane [1987]). Imitating Derrida'sreadingof Freud,she follows the steps of his argumentsabout The GrossClinicto gain access to the author'ssubjectivity. Ultimately, she argues, Fried'ssupposedlynew argumentsreinforce the same old patriarchalnarrativesthat traditionally control art history. Chapter five, on Renoir's curious, overripe late nudes, also centers on narrativesof mastery.Specifically, Pointon treats the use of autobiographyas a means to control readingsof an artist'swork. Autobiography,in her eyes, can be ratherloosely defined as a combination of "documentary"photos and the artist'sbiography by his son Jean Renoir. Pointon arguesthat the myth of Renoir as the natural man conditions how we read his women: although physically frail, the aged painterof nudes was still inhab-
410
ited by the irrepressible,naturalforce to create. Instead of accepting this implied equation of his nudes with Nature and Truth,we shouldreadthem in terms of the male will to control nature. Other chapterstake up the "use"of semi-clothed women in allegory-the half-naked Liberty in and the infamous Delacroix'sLibertyon theBarricades naked female in Manet's Dejeunersur l'herbe.The function of allegorywithin Modernismhas been the subject of much recent discussion. Pointon bringsa heightened gender awarenessto readingLibertyas a way of dealing with the continuing history of conflicted interpretations.She discussesManet'spicture as an allegorical, rather than an epic, treatment of modem life. She then defines allegoryin terms of a subversivefeminist project to disruptunitarymeaning and narrativeclosure. Finally, Pointon explores "InteriorPortraits"meaning images inside the womb including medical illustrationsand FordMadox Brown'sTakeYourSon, Sir! (a picture in which the baby is presented in a cloth that encircles him like a womb). She discusses representationsof the female reproductivesystem in terms of the medical discourse of surveillance and control, which serves a male will to appropriatethe woman's power to create. Pointon then shifts her
discussion in a highly speculative manner to the VisionaftertheSermon.EnlistingKristevaand Roland Barthes,Pointon readsGaugin'sVisionas a symbolic returnto the womb. Since the images Pointon interrogates are old pictures of women by dead men, she orients her project toward the present-day viewer. This does not mean that her analysis is completely theoretical and ahistorical. In fact, the author'sproject is more ambitious; her interpretations are enriched by historical documents and discussion of specific contexts. Tensions, however, arise in this difficult synthesis. Arguments are often hard to follow. On the one hand, Pointon uses the "old" rhetorical structuresof logic and sequential argument to dismantle meanings, but then abandons this structure to engage in playful leaps when graspingafter new post-Foucault/post-Lacanreadings. The more psychoanalytical conclusions shed new light on overexposed pictures. But perhaps in keeping with the spirit of a book that emphasizes reading, rather than texts, this light often reflects back the image of the reader-Pointon-more powerfullythan revealing new depths to images. LAUREL BRADLEY The Schoolof theArt Instituteof Chicago
411
COMMENTS & QUERIES
Together of Biology and Physics. Inquiries and proposals should be sent to Dr. Sylvia Hardy, H. G. Wells Society, English Department, Nene College, Moulton Park, Northhampton NN2 7AL, England. The deadline for proposals is 31 October 1994. THE CULTURAL USES OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
BRITAIN.
Kenneth
Johnston,
Joseph Nicholes, and Thomas Prasch invite contributions for a special issue of interdisciplinary essays in the Summer 1994 issue of the WordsworthCircle on Romantic and Victorian references to seventeenth-century political and religious upheavals, includ-
THE ILLUSTRATION ON THE COVER, "Silas Marer, Dolly
ing the Civil War, Cromwell, the Royal Martyr, the Glorious Revolution, and subsequent Jacobitism. Papers dealing with literaryculture are encouraged, but treatments of other arts, history,
Winthrop, and Eppie," (1895) is a photo-etching from the drawing by W. L. Taylor. It originally accompanied the 1895 edition
popular culture, etc., are also welcome, as are all varieties of critical approach. Drafts should be submitted by 1 January 1994.
of Silas Marner (Boston: Estes and Lauriat).
Send essays dealing with English Romanticism to Kenneth John-
THE ILLUSTRATION ON THE TITLE PAGE is Philip Bure-
ston, Dept. of English, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; those dealing with Victorian literature and other arts to
Jones's "The Vampire" (c. 1897).
Joseph Nicholes, Fine Arts Division, Brigham Young Univer-
WITH THIS ISSUE we proudly announce Victorian Studies's entrance into the computer age. Our new electronic mail address
sity-Hawaii, Laie, HI 96762; and those dealing with history and popular culture to Thomas Prasch, Dept. of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405.
is: "
[email protected]" "TENNYSON 92: PROSPECT AND RETROSPECT' will be VICTORIAN STUDIES INVITES SUBMISSIONS for a special
the subject of the Victorian Poetry conference to be held at West
issue, "The Way They Live Now." The issue will focus on
Virginia University on 13-15 November 1993. The keynote
contemporary representations of Victorian Britain in politics, literature, film, drama, advertising, architecture, material culture,
speaker will be W. David Shaw. For additional information contact Dept. of English, 230 Stansbury, West Virginia Univer-
and critical theory. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): the invocation of "Victorian values" in British and American
sity, Morgantown, WV 26506, tel: (304) 293-3107/3100.
political discourse; the renewed uses of Victorian concerns and
THE SOUTHERN CONFERENCE OF BRITISH STUDIES
cultural forms in novels, films, and plays (Kathy Acker, Christine
will hold its 1993 meeting on 10-13 November in Orlando,
Edzard, William Gibson, David Lynch, A. S. Byatt); the use of Victorian social and political history to formulate questions about
Florida, in conjunction with that of the Southern Historical Association. Contact Dr. John L. Gordon, Jr., Dept. of History, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173 for more infor-
contemporary cultural issues (Gertrude Himmelfarb, Martin Weiner); the meanings of current nostalgia for Victorian costume design; the use of the Victorian fin de siecle as a model for the
mation.
end of this century. Submissions should be sent in duplicate to
SHERLOCK HOLMES: VICTORIAN SLEUTH TO MODERN
the journal at Ballantine Hall 338, Indiana University, Bloo-
HERO is the subject for a conference to be held at Bennington
mington, Indiana 47405 by 1 June 1994.
College on 23-26 June 1994. Send requests for conference information to Joseph Cutshall King, P.O. Box 302, North Ben-
THE H. G. WELLS SOCIETY ANDTHE EATON PROGRAM
nington, VT 05257.
FOR SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY STUDIES anOF BRITISH ART was
nounce a joint international symposium at Imperial College, London, on 26-29 July 1995 to mark the centenary of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. Proposals for "The Time Machine: Past,
THE SOCIETY OF HISTORIANS
Present and Future" are invited in the following areas: The Time
regarding any aspect of this field, including prints and drawings, painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, the decorative
Machine as Text; The Time Machine and the Fin de Siecle; The Time Machine and Nineteenth-Century Science; The Time Machine and the International Development of Modem Science Fiction; The Time Machine and Modem Cosmology: The Coming
established during February's annual College Art Association meeting. The Society welcomes those engaged in scholarship
arts, etc. Membership fees are $10.00 for faculty, and $5.00 for graduate students. A check, payable to The Art Institute of Chicago, may be sent to Jack Brown, The Art Institute of
412
Chicago, Michigan Avenue at Adams Street, Chicago, IL
VICTORIAN WORLDS OF WORK is the topic of the 18th
60603. For further information contact the Society's president, Dr. Jody Lamb, School of Art, 436 Seifred Hall, Ohio Univer-
Annual Meeting of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, to be held 8-9 April 1994 at Washington University in St. Louis.
sity, Athens, OH 45701, tel: 1-800-766-8278.
For information contact D. J. Trela, Executive Secretary, MVSA,
THE
Box 288, Roosevelt University, 430 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60605-1394.
INTERDISCIPLINARY
NINETEENTH-CENTURY
STUDIES CONFERENCE, "Re-thinking 'Family Values': Formations, Transformations, Resistances, Dissolutions," will be held
THE URBAN HISTORY GROUP will hold its 1994 Confer-
8-9 April 1994, at the College of William and Mary. Please
ence, organized around the theme "Imaging the City in Literature, Art and Music," at the University of Nottingham, 7-8 April 1994. The conference's aim is to discuss the relationship between
contact Richard Lowryor Deborah Morse, English Dept., College of William and Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 231878795 for conference information.
the city and the creative imagination, and to consider the impact of the imagined city on the evolution of cities in the real world,
VICTORIAN INTERIORS is the topic of the next conference
and on society in the past and present. For further information
of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, to be held at
contact Dr. Stana Nenadic, Department of Economic and Social History, University of Edinburgh, George Square, Edinburgh EH8
New York University on 22-24 April 1994. Conference papers will explore domestic, national, psychological, metaphorical, and narrative aspects of the topic. Interested scholars should contact Dr. Renee Overholser, Ph.D. Program in English, Box 510, Graduate Center CUNY, 33 West 42nd Street, New York 100368099, tel: (212) 642-2210; fax: (212) 642-2205 for conference information.
9JY, tel: 031-650-3839. VICTORIAN POETRY solicits essays for a special 1996 commemorative issue devoted to the work of William Morris, to be guest-edited by Florence Boos. Revaluations or new discussions of any aspect of Morris's poetry will be welcome, of course, but so will papers devoted to other implications of his lifework,
SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF AUTHORSHIP, READ-
especially those which seem relevant to more recent attitudes
ING AND PUBLISHING will meet for its second annual con-
and problems: his concern for the environment, for example; his
ference 14-16 July 1994 at the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress in Washington. For information contact John Y.
utopianism and anarchocommunism; his critique of imperialism; his unconventional uses of generic forms and narrative structures;
Cole, Director, Center for the Book, Libraryof Congress, Washington, DC 20540.
his relationship to predecessors and contemporaries; and his relation(s) to subsequent feminist, materialist, postmodern, and
TIME AND SPACE is the theme of the next annual conference
post-colonial thought. Please submit 15-25 page essays by 15 August 1995 to Florence Boos, Department of English, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242.
of the Southeastern Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, to be held 7-9 April 1994 at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. The conference will consider both public conceptions of time and space that emerged as a result of revolutionary transforma-
A LIST OF MANUSCRIPT
HOLDINGS OF SELECTED
NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS at the Uni-
tions in culture, technology, social relationships, industry, sci-
versity of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Humanities Research
ence, demographics, geography, economics, and politics, as well as private or internalized notions of self in time and space. For information contact Jadviga daCosta Nunes, Art Department,
Center is now available. The list of women writers represented
Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA 18104-5586. THE SOUTHEASTERN NINETEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES ASSOCIATION announces a new essay competition for undergraduates. Essays may deal with any aspect of nineteenthcentury culture, from a wide variety of disciplines. Papers should demonstrate significant research, original thought, a clear and effective prose style, and should be twelve typed pages in length. As many as three awardswill be presented, of$100 for the winner, and $50 for the runners-up. Winner and runners-up will be
in the Robert Lee Wolff Collection of nineteenth-century fiction includes among its over 180 names such significant Victorian writers as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Bronti, Sara Coleridge Coleridge, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Ouida, Christina Rossetti, and Olive Schreiner. This list is available on disk only, in Macintosh MS-Word 4.0/5.0 and MS-DOS Wordperfect 5.1 formats. The price, including postage and tax, is $7.56. Checks should be made payable to The University of Texas at Austin. Orders may be sent to the attention of the Office of the Research Librarian, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, P.O. Drawer 7219, Austin, TX, 78712-7219.
invited to read their essays at the association's annual conference. Send entries to Dr. Jack W. Rhodes, Honors Program, The
THE FOURTH ANNUAL
Citadel, Charleston, SC 29409, by 3 January 1994.
TUTE, "Victorian: The Style of Empire" will be held on 29
DECORATIVE ARTS INSTI-
413
April-1 May, 1994 in Toronto. Organized by the Royal Ontario Museum, The George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art and the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, with the assistance of Christie's Fine Art Auctioneers, this year's Institute will examine the development of style in the mid- to late-Victorian period, with particular interest upon its manifestations in the British Empire. Please direct inquiries to Diane Wolfe, The George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, 111
ian Studies Centre and the History of Art Department, will seek to examine the issue of race on several levels: representation, social theory, and ethnic experience. The conference will include workshop discussions on the intersections between race and gender; problems of definition race and ethnicity; the British and Irish races, and the issue of immigration. A publication of the proceedings is planned. If you would like to offer a paper, please send a title and 1-page abstract to Dr. Shearer
586-8080; fax: (412) 586-8085.
West, Dept. of History of Art, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH. Any correspondence sent between 1 October and
CALL FOR PAPERS for an interdisciplinary conference entitled "The Victorians and Race" to be held 8-9 July 1995 at the
della Madoneta, Castello 5141, Venice, Italy. The deadline for titles and abstracts is 1 April 1994.
Queen's Park, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 2C7, tel: (416)
the middle of December should be directed to Dr. West at Calle
University of Leicester. This conference, sponsored by the Victor-
414
CONTRIBUTORS
rently finishing a book called Gothic: The Technologyof Monsters. Her essay in this essay is forthcoming in an anthology entitled Cultural Politics in the Fin De Siecle. WALTER L. ARNSTEIN is Professor of History and Jubilee Professor of the Liberal Arts at University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. His publications include Recent Historians of Great Britain (1990), Britain Yesterdayand Today (1992), and The Past Speaks: Sources and Problemsin BritishHistory Since 1688 (1993). He is currently at work in topical essays involving Queen Victoria and her world. ED BLOCK, JR., Associate Professor of English at Marquette
THAIS E. MORGAN, Associate Professor of English at Arizona
University, is also Associate Editor for Renascence.Most recently, he served as guest editor for a centerary issue on John Henry
State University, is editor of VictorianSagesand CulturalDiscourse:
Newman (1990). He has also written essays on Walter Pater,
RenegotiatingGender and Power (1990), and is author of "Male Lesbian Bodies: Alternative Masculinities in Courbet,
Thomas Carlyle, and T. H. Huxley.
Baudelaire, and Swinbure," Genders (1992), and "Influence, Intertextuality, and Tradition in Swinburne and T. S. Eliot" in The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne (1993). She is currently researching Victorian masculinities. EDCOHEN, Assistant Professorof English at Rutgers University, is author of Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (1993). He is currently working on a movie of the trials of Oscar Wilde, "Acts of Gross Indecency," and a project on the politics of Immune Discourses, entitled "Common Immunities/Immune Communities." JEFFNUNOKAWA is Assistant Professorof English at Princeton University. His recent publications include "ForYour Eyes Only: Private Property and the Oriental Body in Dombey and Son" in Macropoliticsof Nineteenth-Century Literature:Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism(1991), and "'In Memoriam' and the Extinction of the Homosexual," in ELH (1991). His essay in this issue, "The Miser's Two Bodies: Silas Marner and the Sexual Possibility of the Commodity" is part of a forthcoming book from Princeton University Press. CAMILLA TOWNSEND is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University. She is currently working on nineteenth-century Latin American history, but in past years has concentrated on Victorian London. She is the author of "Refusing to Travel la Via Chilena: Working-class Women in Allende's Chile," in The Journalof Women's History (1993), and "The Guayaquilefia and Guayaquil: Early Republican Women and City Life in Nineteenth-Century Ecuador,"forthcoming in Cultura. JUDITH HALBERSTAM is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She writes about queer theory, gender and horror film, and Gothic fiction. She is cur-
LAUREL BRADLEY is with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose Museum Studies recently included "Drawn into the Pre-Raphaelite Circle: Rossetti's Drawing of Elizabeth Siddie." Her article on "Millais's Bubblesand the Problem of Artistic Advertising," forthcoming in The Pre-Raphaelitesin a European Context will follow her VictorianStudiesarticle on Millais' Cherry Ripe. SAMUEL COHN, Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University, is author of Process of Occupational Sextyping (1985) and When Strikes Make Sense-And Why: Lessons in IndustrialConflict From Third RepublicFrenchCoalminers (1993). DEIRDRE DAVID, Professor of English at Temple University, is author of Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, ElizabethBarrettBrowning,George Eliot (1987), "Children of Empire: Victorian Imperialism and the Role of Women in Dickens and Kipling" in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literatureand Art (1992), and is Associate Editor (NineteenthCentury section) of the Columbia History of the British Novel (forthcoming, 1994). She is completing a book-length manuscript entitled "'Grilled Alive in Calcutta': Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing," which studies the part played by women in the writing of the Victorian colonial and imperial nation. MICHAEL DOBSON, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently published The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (1992). He is currently co-writing ImaginingGloriana: British Nationalism and the Cult of Elizabeth 1, 1603-1990 with Nicola Watson of Northwestern University. DAVID FELDMAN, Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at University of Bristol, is author of Englishmenand Jews: Social Relationsand Political Culture (1993) and co-edited, with
415
G. StedmanJones,Metropolis: LondonHistoriesandRepresenta-
Space in Kipling's Jungle Book," Victorian Studies (1992) and is
tions Since 1800 (1989). He is currently working on Immigration,
andNationality: Settlement a StudyoftheLawandSocietySince1600.
at work on a book on the relationship between identity and race in Kipling.
DONALD S. HAIR, Professorof English at University of Western Ontario, is author of Tennyson'sLanguage (1991).
CYNTHIA ELLEN PATTON is Assistant Professor of English at Mesa State College. Her current research is on domestic music and morality in Victorian literature and culture.
MICHAEL HANCHER, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is the author of The TennielIllustrationsto the "Alice" Books (1985). His recent articles include "Alice's Audiences," in
in Nineteenth-Century EnRomanticism and Children's Literature gland (1991); "'Urgent Private Affairs': Millais's Peace Concluded, 1856," in BurlingtonMagazine (1991); "Bailey and After: Illustrat-
LAURA PLUMMER is a doctoral candidate in English at Indiana University and will be Managing Editor of Victorian Studies for 1993-1994. She has recently published on Washington Irving, and is currently working on her dissertation, "Witness for the Persecution," on criminal trials of the 1890s, including those of
ing Meaning," in Word and Image (1992); and "Tenniel's Allegorical Cartoons," forthcoming in The TellingImage: Explorations
Oscar Wilde and Lizzie Borden.
in theEmblem.
IORWERTH PROTHERO, Senior Lecturer of History at The University of Manchester, is the author of Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London (1979, 1981). His current re-
DALE KRAMER, Professorof English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the editor of Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Fiction (1990), and author of Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles(1991).
search project focuses on artisan labor movements in England and France, 1830-1870; he is also writing, with J. J. Breuilly and P. J. Joyce a book on urban culture in nineteenth-century Hamburg, Lyon, and Manchester.
TREVOR LLOYD, Professorof History at University of Toronto, is author of The British Empire 1558-1983 (1984), and Empire,
WelfareState,Europe(1993).
MARGERY SABIN is the Lorraine Chiu Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College. Her recent work includes The
Dialectof The Tribe:Speechand Communityin Moder Fiction SUE LONOFF is the Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center,
(1987) and "The Suttee Romance" in Raritan (1991). She is
Harvard University. Her publications include "Sex, Sense, and Nonsense: The Story of the Lear-Collins Friendship," forthcom-
currently working on a book about individuality in colonial and postcolonial narrative.
ing in DickensStudiesAnnual.The CollegeReader(1992), an anthology and textbook, was published in 1992. She is currently at work on an annotated critical edition, The Essays (Devoirs) of
LINDA M. SHIRES holds a Guggenheim Fellowship for 19931994 for a project on Victorian literary careers. Associate Pro-
andEmilyBronte. Charlotte
fessor of English at Syracuse University, she is editor of Rewriting
theVictorians: Theory,History,and thePoliticsof Gender(1992). MARC MANGANARO,
Associate Professor of English at
Rutgers University, is the author of Myth, Rhetoric,and the Voice
MARTIN J. WIENER is Professor of History at Rice University.
A Critique (1992). ofFrazer,Eliot,Frye,andCampbell of Authority:
His most recent works include EnglishCulture and the Decline of
He also edited and introduced Modernist Anthropology: From
Fieldwork to Text(1990).
theCriminal:CultheIndustrial Spirit(1981), and Reconstructing ture,Lawand Policyin England1830-1914 (1990). His current
RICHARD MAXWELL, Professor of English at Valparaiso Uni-
justice history.
area of research includes joining cultural history and criminal versity, recently published The Mysteries of Paris and London on novels of city life by Dickens, Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, G. M. Reynolds, W. H. Ainsworth, and others. He is currently editing a book on nineteenth-century book illustration. JOHN MAYNARD is co-editor of VictorianLiteratureand Culture with Adrienne Munich. Professor of English at New York Uni-
LYNN ZASTOUPIL's publications include "Peasant Desertions in Early Colonial Indapur,"Journal of Asian History (1992) and JohnS tuartMill and India (forthcoming, 1994). Assistant Professor of History at Rhodes College, he is researching J. G. Herder's ideas about India, as contrasted to British intellectual interest in India during the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth
century.
versity, his most recent book is Victorian Discourses on Sexuality
andReligion(1993).
JACK ZIPES, Professor of German at the University of Minnesota, is author of Victorian Fairy Tales (1987), and Spells of
JOHN McBRATNEY is Assistant Professor of English at John Carroll University. He has written "Imperial Subjects, Imperial
The WonderousFairy Tales of WesternCulture Enchantment: FairyTale. (1991). He is workingon TheOriginsof theLiterary
m
THE
CTULTRE OF LOVE
Victorians
to
Stephen
Moderns
Ker
"[Althoughtfulandthought-provokingnew book...Mr. Kern believes that our understandingof love and waysof experiencingit are historicallydeterminedratherthan universal,andhe hasset out to writenothing less
.. --iable....
than a history of love in the modern world. He approacheshis subjectthroughrepresentations of love in novels and paintings done between 1847 and 1933...What makesall of this so interesting is the admirablesensitivity and open-mindedness that Mr. Kern brings to his impressivelywide reading.He illustrateshis generalpoints with well-cho-
Unr s
and often delightful instancesfrom the 7hl.sen novelshe considers,and he hasa nice awareness of the crucialrole of style in narrative paintings." -Jack Flam
Available at bookstores orfrom
Wall StreetJournal
Harvard
University PIeSS Cambridge, MA 02138 Calltoll-fee: 1-800-448-2242
57 halftones $34.95 cloth
-
New From St. Martin's Press
VICTORIAN BLOOMSBURY
IDIOTS,MADMENAND IN OTHERPRISONERS DICKENS
The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group S. P. Rosenbaum
Natalie McKnight This study explores Dickens's fascination with prisoners of private worlds and languages, suggestingthathis attitudetowardthesefigureswas influenced by nineteenth-century prison and asylumreforms,holy idiot/wisefool traditions,and his own experienceswith imprisonment.Through such characters,Dickens rebels against limiting Victoriannorms,but his treatmentof these figures is not consistent;sometimeshis own imprisonment in bourgeoisnorms causeshim to marginalizethe very charactershe wishes to celebrate,particularly his femalefools. 160 pp. * ISBN0-312-08596-6*$35.00
"A rational guide to the people, ideas, and significanceof this remarkablegroup of English writers." -American Historical Review "Asubtle and powerfulpictureof the Bloomsbury Group, showing clearlywhat has been vague . . . Rosenbaumis an unparalleledinterpreterof the philosophical as well as the literary traditions absorbedby this group." -Richard Ellmann, Oxford University VictorianBloomsburyfocuses on the intellectual, family and Cambridgeorigins of the Bloomsbury members as seen through their autobiographical and earlywritings. 332 pp. * ISBN0-312-84051-9*$35.00
WOMEN AND Forthcoming from St. Martin's LEADERSHIP IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EDWARDIAN BLOOMSBURY ENGLAND The Early Literary History Lilian Lewis Shiman
Bloomsbury
England in the nineteenth century became a predominantly middle-class society, with new opportunities for men, but new social and economic restrictions on "respectable"women. Shiman describes the emergence of exceptional women from their assigneddomestic sphere into positions of public leadership,advancingthe cause of women'srights. 298 pp. * ISBN0-312-07912-5*$35.00
S. P. Rosenbaum
A
L
Press
of the
Group
EdwardianBloomsburyis a continuation of the literaryhistoryof the BloomsburyGroup begun with Victorian Bloomsbury. It traces the beginnings of the Bloomsburywriters, dealing with works such as Strachey'sSpectatorreviews, E.M. Forster's Howard's End, MacCarthy's dramatic criticism, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf'sessaysand writings,as well as some of the group'searlierefforts. Jan. 1994· 464 pp. ISBN0-312-23909-2 $35.00
-
_
The
Lost
Chord
Essays on Victorian Music
m I -En'3" Iv<
Kc
,Ai -F---iEtD-T
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Edited by Nicholas Temperley A pioneering effort to establish the place of music in the life and literature of Victorian
Y:,X X~^^L
____-6-
M-AYTL
Britainand to establish its value as art. Since
MYCmusic
serious Victorian music is difficult for the reader to locate, the book is 7: - , ''general accompanied by a special cassette recording of to illustrate some of the essays.
AND A LY'TLE MVSYCK.
192 pages, cloth book with cassette $35.00
of
The Robert
Songs Schumann Third Edition
Eric Sams Foreword by Gerald Moore "Sofelicitous is the writing that one is hardly conscious of the erudition and profound thought that have gone into the making of [this book].... invariably stimulating and authoritative." -Gerald Moore Sams examines 246 songs for voice and piano by Robert Schumann. He comments on musical and other aesthetic considerations, provides prose translations, give the key and compass of each song, and identifies musical expressions in Schumann's music that convey verbal concepts. 301 pages, 246 musical examples, cloth $35.00 paper $14.95
The
Songs
of
Hugo
Wolf
Revised and Enlarged Edition
Eric Sams Foreword by Gerald Moore "This is a classic referencefor voice teachers and singers of Lieder." -American Music Teacher "To the English-speaking student this work is a treasure ... it is indispensable to those of us anxious to gain a deeper knowledge of Wolf."-Gerald Moore Eric Sams discusses all 245 songs for voice and piano that were published during the composer's lifetime. For each song he provides a prose translation and a guide to performance. Now in its third edition. 416 pages, 72 musical examples, cloth $39.95 paper $18.95
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Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880 Dorothy Mermin Describes the first great age of women's writing in England. Mermin discusses how women were encouraged to become writers, how they were discouraged and hindered, and what they wrote. The many women entering the mainstream of English literature in this era included the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot,
MargaretOliphant,ElizabethBarrettBrowning, ChristinaRossetti, and HarrietMartineau. Women of Letters 240 pages, cloth $35.00 paper $12.95
and Romanticism
Feminism, Socialism, French
Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine the Combining perspectivesof a historianand a literarycritic, this book makes available an important collection of texts by women in the Saint-Simonian movement. These early feminists were working-class women who organized the first consciously separatist women's movement, in Paris in the 1830s. 384 pages, cloth $39.95 paper $19.95
Flora
Utopian
Tristan, Feminist
Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade Translated and edited by Doris and Paul Beik "Theentries not only illuminate the career of a remarkable woman, but yield insights into the early industrial system of the 1830s and 1840s. " -Library Journal A child of both the French and Industrial revolutions, Flora Tristan (1803-1844) became a bold social critic and political activist. Assuming personal freedoms enjoyed by few women contemporaries, she devoted herself to the cause of universal justice. Tristan traveled widely and tirelessly strived to organize French men and women workers.
Severalof her writingsare here translated into Englishfor the first time. 224 pages, cloth $29.95 paper $12.95
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"Berkmanprobes Schreiner'slife in exquisite detail;her considerable efforthas yielded a rich, complex portrait of an amazingwoman." -New Directions for Women "In her attention to the many differentsides of Schreiner'swork, Berkmanhas given us a fullerlook at both Olive Schreinerand the social, political, and intellectual contexts in which she wrote."--VictorianStudies
The Healing Imaginationof Olive Schreiner BEYOND AFRICAN SOUTH COLONIALISM
Joyce Avrech Berkman $15.95paper,$30.00 cloth
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The CompleteNovels and SelectedWritingsof Amy Levy, l 1861-1889
Edited by MelvynNew
"To write thus at six and twenty is given to very few."-from Oscar Wilde's obituary notice for Amy Levy ^
t" ^ .B fcollections : .~:.'-
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X
_
A talented Anglo-Jewish writer of short stories, essays, three novels, and three of poetry, Amy Levy committed suicide in 1889 at the age of 28. New's critical introduction surveys her work and reconstructs the world of 1880s England to set the stage for this generous selection. Cloth $49.95 Paper$24.95 Throughfull-servicebookstoresor orderwith VISAor M/C toll free: 1-800-226-3822.
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA Gainesville,Tallahassee,Tampa, Boca Raton, Pensacola,Orlando,Miami,Jacksonville
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VICTORIAN STUDIES AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY Operating in conjunction with the journalVictorianStudies,the Victorian Studies Programat Indiana University provides an outside minor for graduatestudents from cooperatingdepartments,offers three assistantshipsand a fellowshipannually,and supportsa programof symposia and lecturesfrom distinguishedvisiting experts in the field. To fulfill requirementsfor a minor studentsusuallymust take 12 to 15 credit hours in graduatecoursesrelevant to the study of Victorian England, offered either by the Victorian Studies Programor by such other departmentsas English, comparative literature, history, art history, folklore, political science, and music.
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for training in editorial methods. An editorial assistantship,an eleven month, half-timeposition, begins each August.Normally the Editorial Assistant succeeds to the position of Managing Editor for a furtheryear. In addition, an appointment is made to the position of Book Review Editor. A Victorian Studies Fellowshipprovidesa yearof financialsupportfor an outstanding student to pursuedoctoral work. Students also may receive financial aid from their majordepartments. VICTORIAN STUDIES CLUB:Special symposia and lectures from eminent vis-
itorsare arrangedfromtime to time. The VictorianStudiesClub for graduatestudents and faculty meets several times each semester in faculty homes to hear papers, to discuss topics of mutual interest, and to meet with visiting lecturers. Formoreinformation abouttheVictorianStudiesProgramwriteto: VictorianStudies, Ballantine Hall 338, IndianaUniversity,Bloomington,IN 47405. Telephone:(812) 855-9533. For a copyof theGraduateSchool Bulletin andapplication forms,writeto: The GraduateSchool, KirkwoodHall 111, IndianaUniversity,Bloomington,IN 47405.
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VICTORIAN STUDIES AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY Operating in conjunction with the journalVictorianStudies,the Victorian Studies Programat Indiana University provides an outside minor for graduatestudents from cooperating departments,offers three assistantshipsand a fellowshipannually,and supportsa programof symposia and lecturesfrom distinguishedvisiting experts in the field. THEMINOR:To fulfill requirements for a minor students usually must take
12 to 15 credit hours in graduatecourses relevant to the study of Victorian England, offered either by the Victorian Studies Programor by such other departmentsas English, comparative literature, history, art history, folklore, political science, and music. FINANCIAL SUPPORT:Victorian Studies offers three graduate assistantships
for training in editorial methods. An editorial assistantship,an eleven month, half-time position, begins each August.Normally the Editorial Assistant succeeds to the position of Managing Editor for a furtheryear. In addition, an appointment is made to the position of Book Review Editor. A Victorian Studies Fellowshipprovidesa yearof financialsupportfor an outstanding student to pursuedoctoral work. Students also may receive financial aid from their majordepartments. VICTORIAN STUDIES CLUB:Special symposia and lectures from eminent vis-
itors are arrangedfromtime to time. The VictorianStudies Club for graduatestudents and faculty meets several times each semester in faculty homes to hear papers, to discuss topics of mutual interest, and to meet with visiting lecturers. Formoreinformation abouttheVictorianStudiesProgramwriteto: VictorianStudies, Ballantine Hall 338, IndianaUniversity,Bloomington,IN 47405. Telephone:(812) 855-9533. For a copyof theGraduateSchool Bulletin andapplication forms,writeto: The GraduateSchool, KirkwoodHall I I , IndianaUniversity,Bloomington,IN 47405.
SPECIAL ISSUE: VICTORIAN SEXUALITIES Edited by Andrew H. Miller CONTENTS JEFFNUNOKAWA
THE MISER'STWO BODIES:SILASMARNER AND THE SEXUALPOSSIBILITIES OF THE COMMODITY
CAMILLA TOWNSEND
"I AM THE WOMAN FOR SPIRIT":A WORKINGWOMAN'SGENDER TRANSGRESSIONIN VICTORIANLONDON
THAiS E. MORGAN
REIMAGININGMASCULINITYIN VICTORIAN CRITICISM:SWINBURNEAND PATER
JUDITH HALBERSTAM
OF MONSTROSITY: BRAM TECHNOLOGIES STOKER'S DRACULA
THE DOUBLELIVESOF MAN: NARRATION IN THE LATE AND IDENTIFICATION
ED COHEN
NINETEENTH-CENTURYREPRESENTATIONOF EC-CENTRIC MASCULINITIES
BOOK REVIEWS, including on DAVID FELDMAN
Cities, Class and Communication:Essaysin Honour of Asa Briggs,
editedby DerekFraser on ForbiddenJourneys:FairyTalesand Fantasiesby VictorianWomen,edited ZIPES JACK by Nina AuerbachandU. C. Knoepflmacher LAURELBRADLEY on
1830-1908
Marcia Pointon's Naked Authority:The Body in WesternPainting
