The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain)

THE IDEA OF MUSIC IN VICTORIAN FICTION

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The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction

Edited by

SOPHIE FULLER

AND

NICKY LOSSEFF

© Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.asghate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The idea of music in Victorian fiction. – (Music in nineteenth-century Britain) 1.English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 2.Music in literature 3.Musicians in literature I.Fuller, Sophie II.Losseff, Nicky, 1962823.8'09357 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The idea of music in Victorian fiction / edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff. p. cm. – (Music in nineteenth-century Britain) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7546-0577-9 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Music and literature–History–19th century. 3. Musical fiction–History and criticism. 4. Music–Great Britain–19th century. 5. Music in literature. I. Fuller, Sophie. II. Losseff, Nicky, 1962- III. Series. PR878.M87I34 2004 823'809357–dc22 2003064700 ISBN 0 7546 0577 9

Contents Notes on Contributors General Editor’s Series Preface Preface Introduction Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff I:

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The voice, the breath and the soul: Song and poverty in Thyrza, Mary Barton, Alton Locke and A Child of the Jago Nicky Losseff ‘Cribbed, cabin’d, and confined’: Female musical creativity in Victorian fiction Sophie Fuller Music, crowd control and the female performer in Trilby Phyllis Weliver II:

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27 57

GENRE AND MUSICALITIES

The piano’s progress: The piano in play in the Victorian novel Jodi Lustig

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Female performances: Melodramatic music conventions and The Woman in White Laura Vorachek

105

Indecent musical displays: Feminizing the pastoral in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss Alisa Clapp-Itnyre

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‘Singing like a musical box’: Musical detection and novelistic tradition Irene Morra

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CONTENTS

CONSTRUCTION OF MUSICAL MEANING

The ‘perniciously homosexual art’: Music and homoerotic desire in The Picture of Dorian Gray and other fin-de-siècle fiction Joe Law ‘You might have called it beauty or poetry or passion just as well as music’: Gertrude Hudson’s fictional fantasias Charlotte Purkis The music master and ‘the Jew’ in Victorian writing: Thomas Carlyle, Richard Wagner, George Eliot and George Du Maurier Jonathan Taylor

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Thomas Carlyle and the grain of the voice Karen Tongson

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Bibliography Index

263 287

Notes on Contributors Alisa Clapp-Itnyre is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University East, Richmond. Her book, Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Ohio University Press, 2002), joins her many other publications on music and literature. She has also contributed to the collection The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, edited by Phyllis Weliver (Ashgate, forthcoming). Sophie Fuller is Lecturer in Music at the University of Reading. She is the author of The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States, 1629–Present (London: Pandora, 1994) and co-editor (with Lloyd Whitesell) of Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (University of Illinois Press, 2002), which received the American Musicological Society’s 2002 Philip Brett Award for exceptional musicological work in the field of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender studies. Joe Law is Professor of English, Director of the University Writing Center and Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum at Wright State University (Dayton, Ohio). His publications include books and articles concerning writing centres, writing across the curriculum, Victorian literature and connections between music and literature. He is also Book Review Editor of The Opera Quarterly. Nicky Losseff is Lecturer in Music at the University of York. She is the author of The Best Concords: Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century Britain (New York: Garland, 1994) and articles on subjects ranging from Kate Bush to Bartók. She is also a pianist, specializing in contemporary music. Jodi Lustig has been a professional writer since 1992, publishing critical essays, short stories and popular reviews. Her work has been published in The Dictionary of National Biography, The Michigan Daily and The Berkeley Fiction Review. A doctoral candidate at New York University, her study The Female Sonneteers: Redressing the Tradition is forthcoming.

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Irene Morra currently lectures in the Department of English, University of Toronto. She has recently completed a study investigating the literary/musical phenomenon of established modernist literary figures writing twentieth-century English opera libretti. Charlotte Purkis is a Principal Lecturer in Drama and Performing Arts at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. She has published on German dance history, Austro-American opera and fin-de-siècle European literature, and is currently undertaking interdisciplinary research on eroticism, modernism and the reception of the performing arts in British and German culture. Jonathan Taylor is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University. His teaching and research interests cover the ‘long’ nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on music and literature, nineteenth-century prose and creative writing. He is the author of Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003). He is currently working on a book on Romanticism and science as well as a fictionalised biography of his father. He also composes music. Karen Tongson is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego, and is currently a fellow in residence at the UC Humanities Research Institute. Since finishing ‘Ethical Excess: Stylizing Difference in Victorian Critical Prose from Carlyle to Wilde’ (PhD diss., UC Berkeley, 2003), she has been researching sexual and racial imaginaries in California suburbs. Essays are forthcoming in Social Text and Queer and In Color: Intersections of Race and Sexuality in the Media Arts. She is editing a special issue on lesbian aesthetics for Nineteenth-Century Literature. Laura Vorachek received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and wrote her dissertation on women’s music performance in Victorian literature and culture from the 1860s to the 1890s. She has published articles on Jane Austen and George Eliot. Phyllis Weliver is Assistant Professor at Wilkes University. She is the author of Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Ashgate, 2000) and the editor of The Figure of Music in NineteenthCentury Poetry (Ashgate, forthcoming). She is also an editor for the journal Nineteenth-Century Music Review.

General Editor’s Series Preface Music in nineteenth-century Britain has been studied as a topic of musicology for over two hundred years. It was explored widely in the nineteenth century itself, and in the twentieth century grew into research with strong methodological and theoretical import. Today, the topic has burgeoned into a broad, yet incisive, cultural study with critical potential for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. Indeed, it is largely because of its interdisciplinary qualities that music in nineteenth-century Britain has become such a prominent part of the modern musicological landscape. This series aims to explore the wealth of music and musical culture of Britain in the long nineteenth century (c.1780s–1920s). It does this by covering an extensive array of musicological topics, and situating them within the most up-to-date interpretative frameworks. All books provide relevant contextual background and detailed source investigations, as well as considerable bibliographical material of use for further study. Areas included in the series reflect its widely interdisciplinary aims, and although principally designed for musicologists, the series is also intended to be accessible to scholars working outside of music. Topics include criticism and aesthetics; musical genres; music and the church; music education; composers and performers; analysis; concert venues, promoters and organizations; the reception of foreign music in Britain; instrumental repertoire, manufacture and pedagogy; gender studies; and music in literature, poetry and letters. Although the nineteenth century has often been viewed as a fallow period in British musical culture, it is clear from the vast extent of current scholarship that this view is entirely erroneous. Far from being a ‘land without music’, nineteenth-century Britain abounded with musical activity. All society was affected by it, and everyone in that society recognized its importance in some way or other. It remains for us today to trace the significance of music and musical culture in that period, and to bring it alive for scholars to study and interpret. This is the principle aim of the Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series – to advance scholarship in the area and expand our understanding of its importance in the wider cultural context of the time. Bennett Zon University of Durham

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Preface This book is part of a larger project, grandly entitled ‘The Idea of Music in Literature’, that was hatched over cups of coffee at the Whitgift Centre in Croydon several years ago. More specifically, it has grown out of a session at the 1999 British Musicological Societies’ Conference entitled ‘Fictional Women and the Idea of Music’, consisting of papers from the two of us and Phyllis Weliver, and from a Music and Victorian Literature Study Day we held at the University of Reading in May 2000 (with the help of Christopher Wilson), which included papers by Jonathan Taylor, Karen Tongson and Phyllis Weliver. Phyllis Weliver has been central to the field of music and literature studies and a key figure in this project. She has edited a collection of essays on music and Victorian poetry, The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, which is being published by Ashgate at the same time as this collection. The two books have been planned to complement each other and to provide a launching pad for work investigating the intersections between Victorian literature and the ideas about music that it can be seen to represent. We would like to thank Ruth Solie for her support of the Idea of Music in Literature project, and Rachel Lynch at Ashgate for her enthusiastic approach to this book. Our copyeditor and friend, Jenny Doctor, has made this book very much more polished than it would otherwise have been. She has really been a third editor and it is hard to thank her adequately. Thanks also to all the authors for their hard work and patience. Sophie would like to thank John and Prue for all their support and for making poems and stories, Poulenc, Shostakovich, Britten and the Modern Jazz Quartet such a happy part of growing up, and Elaine, as always, for being there to listen and encourage. Nicky would like to thank her mother Norma for first making literature and music central to her life and Frances for love and support. We also thank each other for making work on this collection the inspiring and enjoyable enterprise we always thought it would be. Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff July 2003

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Introduction The interdisciplinary study of music and literature has been attracting interest from both musicologists and literary scholars for over half a century.1 Most of this work focuses on pieces of music: their relation to formal narrative and other literary structures, text-music relationship in song and opera, or models of interaction between society and the work of art taken from literary (critical) theory. Other scholars have taken a different approach, focusing not on musical works but on literature in which musical practice is described. Several key texts have emerged for the Victorian period. Paula Gillett, for instance, examines the changing position of women musicians in late Victorian Britain by drawing on a variety of social documents including works of fiction.2 Many useful articles and books have uncovered musical scenes by a variety of nineteenth-century authors which may be used as source material for critical studies. Allan Atlas extrapolates descriptions of certain musical practices to illuminate how their representation in the novels of Wilkie Collins informs music history,3 while Patrick Piggott draws our attention to the myriad musical scenes in Jane Austen.4 Our approach is somewhat different and builds on the more overtly critical work of scholars such as Mary Burgan, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Delia da Sousa Correa, Beryl Gray, John Hughes, C. M. Jackson-Houlston, Nicky Losseff, Cynthia Ellen Patton, John M. Picker, Ruth A. Solie,

1 Key texts have included (published Berkeley: University of California Press, unless shown otherwise): Calvin Brown, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1948); Steven Paul Scher, Music and Text: Critical Enquiries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and various essays by Lawrence Kramer in Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984), Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900 (1990); Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (1995); After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture (1997) and Music and Meaning: Toward A Critical History (2002). Other scholars have worked on literature and music for periods other than the nineteenth century, but their work falls outside the remit of this volume. 2 Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: ‘Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges’ (London: Macmillan, 2000). 3 Allan W. Atlas, ‘Wilkie Collins on Music and Musicians’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 124/2 (1999) 255–70. 4 Patrick Piggott, The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen (London: Douglas Cleverdon, 1979).

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Phyllis Weliver and Cynthia Westerbeck.5 This collection of essays aims to address fundamental questions about the function, meaning and understanding of music in nineteenth-century culture and society as mediated through works of fiction. When music is used in nineteenthcentury novels, we may take its appearance as literally or metaphorically as we like. Scenes of music making may be read as incidental music, especially when they are described accurately enough to reconstruct the soundscape of the episode. They may also be a key to a character’s thoughts or hidden emotions – especially in situations where words are forbidden (courtship scenes, for instance) or where music’s greater ambiguity lends the plot added nuance. Often, musical scenes draw precisely on real life, exploiting a contemporaneity which can easily be lost on present-day readers. Fiction is a natural (though not unproblematic) interpreter of cultural meaning, and in our attempts to understand the cultural contexts of music as fully as possible, we may turn to it as a ‘folk’ documenter of music historiography – not in a technical or even accurate sense, but to elicit information about what music meant to its performers and listeners (often also members of the novelists’ own audience). Issues which arise from such investigation include composer reception; representations of instrumental practice; aspects of gender, race, sexuality and class; musical taste; musical style as wordless communicant; issues surrounding nationalism and national identity. All these themes play a part in this collection. Our primary focus is the 5 Mary Burgan, ‘Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, Victorian Studies 30/1 (1986) 51–76; Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002); Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave, 2002); Beryl Gray, George Eliot and Music (London: Macmillan, 1989); John Hughes, Ecstatic Sound: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); C. M. Jackson-Houlston, Ballads, Songs, and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Nicky Losseff, ‘Absent Melody and The Woman in White’, Music and Letters 81/4 (2000) 532–50; Cynthia Ellen Patton, ‘Common Tunes: The Uses of Domestic Music in Victorian Literature and Culture’ (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1994); John M. Picker, ‘The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space and Urban Noise’, Victorian Studies 42/3 (1999–2000) 427–53; Ruth A. Solie, ‘ “Tadpole Pleasures”: Daniel Deronda as Music Historiography’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 45–6 (1998) 87–104, and ‘Fictions of the Opera Box’ in The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood and Sexual Difference ed. Richard Dellamore and Daniel Fischlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Cynthia Westerbeck, ‘Jubal’s Journey: The Musician as Exile in Victorian Literature’ (PhD diss., Washington University in St Louis, 2000).

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Victorian period rather than the whole of the nineteenth century. Inevitably, however, some authors find it necessary to explore beyond the strict boundaries of the dates between 1837 and 1901. For example, both Irene Morra and Jodi Lustig discuss the early nineteenth-century work of Jane Austen, while Sophie Fuller and Joe Law include explorations of Edwardian novels by Galsworthy, Benson and Mayne. The authors whose work is presented here might define themselves individually as musicologists or literary scholars, and thus place different value on the musical parts of the fictional works on which they draw, but the networks of associations between them are striking; several themes re-appear throughout the book, as the following summaries show. Irene Morra and Karen Tongson explore the idea of music as enabling a particular kind of thought. Morra shows that in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes’s superior intellect and complex characterization both manifests itself and is enhanced by his ability to compose, perform and appreciate music. Holmes and other detectives penetrate mystery and ambiguity by discerning and creating order through sound as much as by relying on visual observation. Through his ability to produce and appreciate music, furthermore, the detective preserves a mystery and ambiguity to his own character. As Morra shows, this ability to appreciate music and mystery is not just an additional eccentric characteristic of the detective but is closely linked to novelistic tradition; works by Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James frequently contain protagonists who attempt to unravel or create mysteries of human character and motivation by deciphering or destroying musical performance. Morra suggests that the importance placed upon musical performance and appreciation in the Victorian detective novel demands its reconsideration, placing the genre as a natural by-product of the psychologically realistic novel. Tongson’s essay explores Thomas Carlyle’s use of musical analogies and the idea of music to ‘glorify the imaginative labour of aesthetic judgement and critical writing’. Music is a form of representation that provides a new understanding of the Victorians’ signifying practices, but it is not overtaken by representation’s priorities; rather, Tongson argues, music for Carlyle serves as the model for how to represent. For Carlyle, then, the idea of music is a fiction – the source of a productive fantasy that promotes his ideal profile for the author/composer/creator. In short, his exemplary creative figure, in works such as his essay ‘The Opera’ (1852) and his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840), is the critic himself, the interpreter of ideas who makes aesthetic invention possible with the earnestness of critical intervention.

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By representing music as an affective medium and as the fundament of expressive thought, Carlyle distinguishes the fantastic work of criticism from what he feels is the ephemeral and ‘insincere’ fictions disseminated in novels. In numerous instances throughout his work, he deploys musical analogies and the idea of music to glorify the imaginative labour of aesthetic judgement and critical writing. In exploring the role of the critic, Tongson’s chapter intersects with that of Charlotte Purkis. Purkis turns to the fictional and critical writings of enigmatic figure Gertrude Hudson, for whom listening was a unique form of self-expression, and critical writing as much an act of creativity as fictional. Focusing in particular on Hudson’s book Impossibilities: Fantasias (1897), Purkis explores problems that confront the author in putting musical experiences into words by evoking fantastic ‘realities’ through the mouthpieces of fictional performers and critical personae. Hudson’s work is in many ways unique in the way it draws fiction about music and criticism of music closer together. Her work is viewed as a form of ‘writing on music’ which strives towards erasing the distinction between reading about music and listening to it. Purkis considers writings about interpretation through types of ‘music criticism’ to be one form of fiction, and those about the performance of music, its production and the experience of listening to be others; she interrogates imaginary consequences from these acts. Hudson’s pseudonym Israfel (the archangel of music) explicitly links music and spirituality, providing another echo with Carlyle’s writing: ‘true’ music was not to be sought in performance, replete with its ‘corrupt signs’ and ‘gilded images’, but in the ‘universal heartsong’ which alone had real spiritual value. Nicky Losseff draws upon the idea of the ‘universal heartsong’ in exploring the connection between vocality, voice and spirit. In the writings of George Gissing, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley and Arthur Morrison, as for Carlyle and Hudson, music becomes a vehicle for expressing the ineffable. The soul has long been imagined in terms of ‘riding’ upon the breath, the physical means also of carrying the voice; thus the singing voice can convey the individual soul into the physical world and also open up the larger spiritual world for listeners. The voice signifies the spiritual for two working-class women, the eponymous Thyrza in Gissing’s book of that name (1887) and Margaret in Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). Losseff examines these and other working-class novels for their portrayal of what music-making, amidst urban and industrial poverty, can mean in spiritual and religious terms. By transforming the foetid air of their environments into music, the musicians open up a channel to the divine, but pay heavily for this privileged glimpse beyond the veil with their health and even their lives.

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In the cases of these working-class ‘singers’, the ineffable is to be identified with the spiritual. On the other hand, music in Oscar Wilde’s writings could signify ‘that which could not be named’ in its strictest legal sense – erotic love between men – as Joe Law’s chapter explores. Nineteenth-century writing exploited various codes which would be recognized by knowing readers – the mention of historical male pairings, such as David and Jonathan, and certain words charged with homoerotic connotations. Dorian Gray’s response to suggestions of denied passions ‘touch[es] some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses’ in a way he equates with music, which can never reveal its ultimate secret. Thus music becomes one of the essential strategies for discussing prohibited same-sex desire. Little has been written on the role of music in articulating this new identity; Law’s chapter extends the discussion by exploring music in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and related works. More specifically, it addresses ways music appears at key points in the novel, transgresses gendered expectations and parallels the work of late-nineteenth-century sexologists. Law also takes up Teleny (the pornographic novel attributed to Wilde and his circle, written c1889) and contemporary fiction by Alan Dale, John Bloxam, Count Stenbock, E. F. Benson and Xavier Mayne. The highest compliment Carlyle pays to any written text is to call it ‘song’; the highest praise he gave to an author was to call him [sic] a ‘singer’, by which that author was admitted into the highest category of exemplary persons called heroes. ‘Singing’ for Carlyle thus signifies the idea of the truest music. But singing could also become a vehicle for the ego of a malevolent other, a theme explored by both Phyllis Weliver and Jonathan Taylor. Taylor studies the issues of universal music, and musical ‘mastery’ and ‘servitude’, through an exploration of the writings of Carlyle, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Eliot and Du Maurier, connecting the ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ – the new atonality of Schoenberg (via Wagner and Mahler) – with the emancipation of the Jew. In considering this alongside the phenomena of the demagogue, democracy, ‘universalism’ and emancipation, he concludes that for several nineteenth-century cultural figures, this emancipation leads to the wandering Jew, a parallel figure for the artist. Taylor sums up the issues he explores by drawing attention to the discarded programme for Mahler’s Second Symphony, which ‘stages the apocalyptic universalism of modern music and modern democracy, turning everyone into Wandering Jews who are condemned to walk the earth forever’. A key figure in Taylor’s essay is Svengali from George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), the archetypal sinister mesmerist and malevolent demagogue, who erases and destroys the heroine’s identity, replacing it with his own

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will through amazing performances that Trilby was incapable of producing without his influence. Mesmerism as a theme also runs through the chapters of Morra (who discusses the mesmeric effect of Sherlock Holmes’s violin playing) and Weliver. Weliver uses contemporary theories of crowd control to explore ways in which music was perceived to unify audiences in nineteenthcentury Britain, focusing in particular on how this topic is portrayed in Trilby. Concerned to examine the vocality of Trilby herself, Weliver provides close readings of two scenes in which audiences hear concerts, concentrating on the role of the performer as well as the audience response. While the nineteenth-century music profession acknowledged two models of audience orientation (focused on either performer or work), Trilby proposes a third: that audience behaviour is indebted to contemporaneous, developing theories of crowd psychology. Weliver suggests that the way in which crowds were perceived to function through suggestibility and contagion is similar to audience responses to Trilby’s singing, as is the resulting social upheaval. In the novel, the crowd condition instigates social change which, unusually, is portrayed as positive. This position owes something to the Victorian connection made between music and social improvement. As a result of meshing together various Victorian discourses, a fallen woman is made into an appealing character whom the other characters eventually embrace, in large part because of their immersion in the crowd. However, even as the audience becomes sympathetic to Trilby, an underlying current of unease is expressed, demonstrating Victorian fears regarding the unconscious mind, crowds and the professional musical woman who is able to instigate controversial social change through sensual expression. The ways in which music has been used in fiction to reinforce or challenge gender stereotypes are a concern of several authors. In her exploration of the construct of ‘the woman composer’, Sophie Fuller considers the often subtle ways in which Victorian writers denied creative musical women the quality of greatness. In novels ranging from Elizabeth Sara Sheppard’s Charles Auchester (1853) and Counterparts, or The Cross of Love (1854) through George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni (1864) and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) to E. F. Benson’s Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893) and John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906), she finds women composers and improvisers who despite talent and power are punished for the transgressive act of creating music by dying or losing their music, who are portrayed as having little or no power over their own musical gifts or are presented as figures of fun. It is only in Mona Caird’s ‘New Woman’ novel The Daughters of Danaus (1894) that the reasons for the central character’s

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failure to achieve a successful career as a composer are explored in detail and directly related to her position as woman, wife and mother. Building on (but challenging) work by Losseff,6 Laura Vorachek looks at the way in which the musical activities of Laura Fairlie and Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) both conform to and resist gender conventions. Music as form of communication was established in practice due to its pervasiveness in Victorian melodrama, and audiences could be expected to extend their ‘reading’ of music to other literary genres. While sensation fiction borrows melodramatic music conventions, it presents a more complex portrait of women due to its focus on the discrepancy between surface appearances and underlying reality. Music crystallizes this discrepancy because it had both acceptable and subversive associations. Vorachek shows that in The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863), musical performances enable women to manipulate the construction of ideal Victorian womanhood with regard to sexuality and class status, while seeming to execute its conventions. For Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) depicts ‘the struggle between female agency in musical expression and the feminine passivity and propriety expected by Victorian audiences’. Victorians evoked folk songs as nostalgic reminders of an English way of life that was fast disappearing, but the Mill confronts society’s related nostalgia for pastoral music which honoured not only the English countryside but the rural life of time immortal. Eliot explores the mythologizing of rural life and music within both the pastoral literary and musical traditions; specifically, Clapp suggests that the pastoral, though overtly honouring lower-class life, is clearly an upper-class aesthetic genre capable of being used to exploit actual lower-class embodiments of the tradition. In the Mill, the pastoral musician Maggie is contained by a middle-class, music-making community bent on reducing women to the objects of male gazes. As Clapp-Itntre points out, by evoking pastoral works, such as Handel’s Acis and Galatea and Haydn’s Creation, Eliot reveals class and gender ambiguities that are endemic within the pastoral tradition. Hence, Eliot exposes not only this fictional society’s artificiality, but the fallacies of the pastoral tradition itself. Jodi Lustig examines the piano’s progress as a signifier in key novels from the beginning to the end of the Victorian period. The centrality of the piano reflects its status in the nineteenth century as the primary focus of domestic music-making and as an object of cultural capital in a

6

Losseff, ‘Absent melody’.

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climate where, increasingly, middle-class respectability could be achieved through a display of its visible trappings. Lustig explores the piano’s ubiquitous appearance in the fiction of the period, showing that what it can signify in one novel might suggest its antithesis in another. The piano can ‘perform’ on a structural level in a work, but its formal operations ‘invite a discussion of the content it introduces as well. The instrument comes to represent a set of conventions, codes and ideologies which Victorian culture reifies, and proves the consummate site for authors to stage, contest and shape their construction’. Lustig argues, however, that realist authors do more than use the piano to reflect a material truth. Beginning with Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), it serves as a rhetorical figure that comments on the way language makes meaning. For example, a mystery driving the narrative centres around the identity of Jane Fairfax’s piano donor. The stories Emma spins in the absence of one ‘true’ story threaten the fictive conceit by demonstrating the way in which any story could have an infinite number of ‘truths’ but for the writer, who creates a truth that appears to cancel out all others. Throughout the century, authors draw upon Austen’s use of the piano to comment on cultural and textual operations in their own work. What in Emma reaffirms a conservative ideology that maintains there is a truth that language can communicate becomes, by the end of the century in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), the means to suggest that no such certitude is available in life or fiction. Thus, performative, ideological and constructed aspects of music take on different complexions in different chapters but remain centrally important to almost all the contributions. No chapter offers only the raw data of music’s occurrences in fiction, though this pursuit has in its time proved interesting enough in itself; instead, the fictional works drawn upon by our authors become defined in terms of their musical representations, the novels’ musical subnarratives endowed with semantic content. By offering reflections on music in one of its many reception contexts, we hope to contribute to an enhanced awareness of the culture and sociology of nineteenth-century music. Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff

PART I

Musical identities

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The voice, the breath and the soul: Song and poverty in Thyrza, Mary Barton, Alton Locke and A Child of the Jago Nicky Losseff Music, in its abstract sense, could often be characterized by sage writers as ‘divine’ in the nineteenth century;1 but the power inherent in the notion of music-making was problematized by its situation in one of several contradictory positions.2 ‘True’ music which most nearly approached the divine, in the sense of Carlyle’s ‘universal heartsong’,3 could speak through all ‘sincere’ forms of music making, and it is perhaps in this sense that two working-class fictional singing women – George Gissing’s eponymous heroine Thyrza and Margaret Jennings in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton – can be understood to tap into a long historical tradition of those who, claiming no knowledge for themselves, allow the divine to speak through their agency.4 Thyrza and Margaret, uneducated and singing with unschooled ‘natural’ voices, make no pretence to any kind of knowledge, singing mainly folk or popular or 1 A detailed examination of sage writers’ attitudes to music is offered by Cynthia Ellen Patton, ‘Common Tunes: The Uses of Domestic Music in Victorian Literature and Culture’ (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1994). 2 This can be characterized in brief thus: for women, performance in the home was an ornament; for upper-class men, a debasing activity; for the lower classes, a refining element or a panacea for the ravages of brutal existence; for foreigners, a valid means of earning a living. See Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 19. 3 As expressed in ‘The Hero as Poet’ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859). On Carlyle, see the chapters in this volume by Jonathan Taylor and Karen Tongson. 4 Hildegard of Bingen, bypassing an entire scholarly tradition by claiming divine status for her visions, was one of the earliest whose divine visions are documented. See Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 34–41.

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religious songs, which in terms of repertoire represent their authentic voices, allowing unmediated channels to the divine. Despite the marked differences between Gaskell’s industrial Northern poverty in the mid-nineteenth century and Gissing’s urban London poverty at the end of it, there are intriguing parallels between the experiences of Thyrza and Margaret.5 Their voices distinguish them from their peers and open up social possibilities and responsibilities beyond those to which they were born. When Thyrza sings, her ‘pure sweet tones touched the hearers profoundly; not a foot stirred … the room hushed itself, every hearer spellbound. It was a voice well worthy of cultivation, excellent in compass, with a rare sweet power’.6 On hearing Margaret, Mary Barton ‘held her breath, unwilling to lose a note, it was so clear, so perfect, so imploring’; old Alice simply ‘had her quiet enjoyment of tears’.7 Thyrza and Margaret do both pursue the higher paths revealed by their voices, passing the gift of the infinite on to their listeners, but their act involves both of them in immense sacrifice. It is as if their bodies, the agents that transform air into breath/song, cannot bear the burden of the task: Thyrza dies and Margaret goes blind.8 The ‘divine voice’ trope is so common across cultures and millennia, extending far beyond a narrow European concern, that it would perhaps be surprising were the evidential force of spiritual experience made manifest through any means but song in these novels. However, in both cases, there is an uneasy relationship between religion per se and spirituality: Gissing’s ambivalent attitude to organized religion is manifested through ever-present critique of the Church in Thyrza, and while Christian references pepper Mary Barton, Margaret’s spirituality in itself is veiled. It is the common experiential ground between Thyrza and Margaret which suggests a connection between voice, breath and soul, and I extend this to include the notion of song and the act of singing from two other working-class novels in which both music and 5 P. J. Keating considers the ‘urban’ and ‘industrial’ categories to be the two principal working-class groups; see P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971) especially 1–30. Discussions of works by Gaskell and Gissing by Patricia Ingham highlight the differences of type and also of date; see Patricia Ingham, The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) especially 55–77 and 137–59. 6 George Gissing, Thyrza: A Tale (1887), ed. Jacob Korg (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1974) 44 [hereafter Thyrza]. 7 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848), ed. with an introduction and notes by Edgar Wright (1987; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 39 [hereafter MB]. 8 It is again tempting to draw comparisons with Hildegard, whose body frequently broke down under the strain of divine agency. See Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) 4–9.

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spirituality feature strongly in the narrative and are linked. The first is Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, in which the protagonist lacks the physical means to ‘sing’ but expresses spirituality through the idea of song;9 the second is Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago, in which a reported act of singing suggests that a spiritual experience has taken place during a gap in the narrative.10 Much debate on female vocality has centred on its ‘embodied’ nature as an agent of seduction.11 The female voice has been interpreted in terms of ‘siren’, enchanting men and seducing them into marriage. However, the vocality of neither Thyrza nor Margaret need be read primarily in romantic or sexual ways. The ‘angel-demon’ split in Victorian literature has been characterized as a divide between ‘angelic’ musical heroines, who experienced music in general as links to the divine, and ‘demonic’ women who performed or responded to music seductively.12 This polarization can however be too raw. It is true on the one hand that both women do enchant men by the power of their voices. Thyrza is singing to herself when she initially encounters Walter Egremont, and it is her singing voice rather than her physical beauty which convinces him that she possesses a spirit higher than her modest existence as a trimmer in a hat factory would first suggest. However, Thyrza’s voice is continually characterized by reference to her physical delicacy and her unfittedness for life outside of her sister’s protection. Her tragedy is that she should waste her emotion on Egremont, who is unworthy of her regard and unable to offer her the protection she needs. In effect, Gissing exposes neither a demonized nor demonizing woman, but a pitiful failure of a man whose social class has rendered him hypocritical and exploitative. Further, Thyrza does not see her voice as a means to climbing out of her social class; she loves performance for its own sake, even before finding her ideal listener in Egremont. In Mary Barton, the physically plain Margaret initially attracts Will through the power of her voice; but marriage to a sailor, however physically glamorous, cannot offer her social improvement. Her singing voice is not a tool of 9 Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography (1850), ed. Elizabeth Cripps (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) [hereafter AL]. 10 Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1896), ed. with an introduction by P. J. Keating (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1969) [hereafter CJ]. 11 For instance, see Susan McClary’s discussion of Madonna in Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 148–53; see also Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, Introduction to Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Dunn and Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 3. 12 Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1 and 6–8.

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seduction, but instead reveals a sense of the infinite to her listeners and operates as an unexpected way for her to earn money after the onset of blindness. Indeed, for both women, the men they attract are unequal in some way to the love they inspire. Their voices are first and foremost a personal resource, not a means to marriage or a sop to the male gaze. In any case, their ‘first performances’ are, in Thyrza’s case, to a mixed audience, and in Margaret’s, an all-female one. Thyrza’s is an empowering occasion, in which she relishes interacting in the public sphere of the female gaze as well as the male. Thus, although in real life a singing voice could provide a stepping stone to another social class,13 it does not ultimately do so for either Thyrza or Margaret, and it is not certain that either woman ever sees her gift in those terms.14 Even after Margaret starts earning money from singing, she continues living in the same rooms and eventually marries within her class. In all four novels under discussion here, the power of ‘song’ either opens the soul into a higher sphere or signifies that this has occurred. This type of musical experience is polarized with others. First, it is contrasted with ‘earthly music’ (which may also be sung) that operates in a reductive and degrading way. This might include drunken singing at the public house or in the street as well as other types of street music. Second, it differs from descriptions of middle-class music-making that highlight the gulf between the social worlds and construct an alternative soundscape for the privileged which contrasts with the ‘vulgar clanging’15 of the streets. In every case, this soundscape is linked to the domestic piano, symbol of respectability and affluence.16 The socially privileged Annabel gives Thyrza a brief insight into ‘music she had not imagined’ in the drawing room of Mrs Ormonde’s house, inspiring her to seek out other performances of art music. A cosy evening scene at the home of Mary Barton’s would-be lover, Harry Carson, is depicted through musical activity: one sister is ‘turning over a parcel of new songs, to select what she liked’ while another ‘was copying some manuscript music’ (MB, 238). Alton Locke’s sweetheart Lillian plays captivating airs at the piano (AL, 163). It is not surprising that ‘child of 13

Weliver discusses instances of this (ibid. 47). Here I depart from the interpretation of Cynthia Westerbeck, who suggests that Thyrza’s hopes of entry to Egremont’s social class depend on the successful cultivation of her voice; see Cynthia Westerbeck, ‘Jubal’s Journey: The Musician as Exile in Victorian Literature’ (PhD diss., Washington University in St Louis, 2000) 90–91. 15 Gissing uses this term to describe the sound of the street organ in Thyrza, 111–12. 16 The domestic piano carried a considerable weight of meaning as a symbol. See Nicky Losseff, ‘Absent Melody and The Woman in White’, Music and Letters 81/4 (2000) 535, and the chapters in this volume by Laura Vorachek and Jodi Lustig. 14

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the Jago’ Dicky Perrott’s dreams of affluence centre on the acquisition of a piano (CJ, 131).

Voice, breath, soul The possession of a voice may be something we take for granted. Yet though some ‘find their voices’ early on, others never do. ‘Voice’ can act as a metaphor for authority, for self expression, and as an instrument of empowerment,17 carrying meanings beyond those of speech and language. The singing voice further inflects words already enrobed with music, creating multiple texts within the text through this added semantic layer. Singers might sing without ever knowing what kind of ‘voice’ (of authority, of spirituality) they carry inside their voices-asmusical-instruments.18 Our voices are commonly thought to make ‘us’ – our ‘inner selves’ – heard. Two recent writers on the voice, John Potter and Jonathan Rée, have described the private voice as ‘directly expressive of our personalities and emotions’,19 ‘as vulnerable as your defenceless naked body’20 – a trope linking the voice with ‘inner self’ or soul that has extended from religious and spiritual literature through European philosophy and poetry to ‘New Age’ rhetoric. The eighteenthcentury philosopher Johann Conrad Amman believed that ‘nothing emanates from us which bears a more vivid character of life than the Voice … the breath or Spirit of life resides in the voice, transmitting its light through it’.21 Helmont, whom Rée considers the ‘most systematic theorist of the link between the glory of the voice and the mystery of human life’, considered the voice to be articulated and controlled by our inmost soul, the central Spirit located in the heart.22 The physical means of expelling the voice from the ‘soul’ is the breath, and the relationship between soul, breath and voice has formed 17

Dunn and Jones, Introduction to Embodied Voices, 1. Roland Barthes’ classic investigation into the voice within the text, taking as his point of departure Kristeva’s idea of ‘phenotext’ and ‘genotext’, is published in translation as Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’ in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977). 19 John Potter, ‘Introduction: Singing at the Turn of the Century’ in The Cambridge Companion to Singing, ed. Potter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 1. 20 Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History (London: Flamingo, 1999) 1. 21 Johann Conrad Amman, Dissertatio de Loquela (Amsterdam, 1700); trans. Charles Baker as Dissertation on Speech (London, 1873) 8. Quoted in Rée, I See a Voice, 3. 22 Francis Mercury van Helmont, The Paradoxical Discourses Concerning the Macrocosm and Microcosm, Set Down in Writing by J. B. (London, 1685) vol. 2: 63. Quoted in Rée, I See a Voice, 3. Rée considers, however, that this is a ‘delusion’ (I See a Voice, 6). 18

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the focus of an enormously wide range of spiritual discussion, suggesting that it has held a fascination over millennia and beyond a narrow European concern. Hindus think of the manifested soul in terms of a mediating force, prana, which is not breath itself but rides upon it.23 For Christians reading directly from early Western Aramaic gospels, the meanings ‘spirit’ and ‘breath’ both reside in the same word, ruha.24 Sufic thought also makes reference to life itself riding on the breath.25 Of all revelations, none synthesizes the mediation of the divine and the human voice more than that experienced by the prophet Muhammad, in an act which brought the absolute word of Allah to humans through the medium of the human voice.26

23 The term itself indeed comes from the Sanskrit pra (before) ana (breath): see Sri Nisargadatta, I Am That (Bombay: Chetana, 1991) App. 3; also Ayetra, Prana: The Secret of Yogic Healing (Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1996) 3. 24 Neil Douglas-Klotz, The Hidden Gospel (Wheaton, IL, and Madras: Quest, 1999) 41–2. Douglas-Klotz points out that whenever a saying of Jesus refers to spirit, we must remember that he would have used an Aramaic or Hebrew word. In both these languages, the same words stands for spirit, breath, air, and wind. So ‘Holy Spirit’ must also be ‘Holy Breath’. The duality of spirit and body, which we often take for granted in our Western languages, falls away (The Hidden Gospel, 1). Douglas-Klotz points out that translations of the Bible from the Greek – i.e., those in common use – obscure these meanings. Victorians did not have access to this translation and were still relying on the Greek testaments, but it is notable that several scholars were making attempts to challenge the hegemony of the King James Version through new translations, ‘opening a gap between naive and critical belief’; see Christine L. Krueger, ‘Clerical’ in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 142. 25 Hazrat Inayat Khan, perhaps the best known musician-turned-Sufi, and a prolific writer and teacher, drew a distinction between the perceptible breath, felt by the nostrils as it goes in and out, and mystic breath: the current which carries the air out and brings the air in. ‘This is what the mystic calls nafs, which means ‘the self’ [also often translated as ‘the soul’] … breath … runs from the physical plane into the innermost plane; a current that runs through the body, mind, and soul, touching the innermost part of life and also coming back’. See Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Music of Life (New Lebanon, NY: Omega, 1988) 203–4. More recently Sufi Reshad Feild, writing on the science and art of the breath, maintains that ‘the secret of eternal life is hidden in the moisture on the breath. Both the past and the future are transformed through the present moment, without a conscious human being’; see Reshad Feild, The Last Barrier (1976; Shaftsbury, Dorset, Rockport, MA, and Brisbane: Element, 1993) opening biography. 26 Humans were given an earthly copy of the Qur’an (Recitation) which was already in divine existence. Reciting the Qur’an can never, in theological terms, become a ‘musical performance’; but it is its articulation through a musical, human voice which synthesizes an experience of the sacred with the earthly. See Philip Bohlman, ‘Ontologies of Music’ in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 27. Bohlman recognizes that ‘the concept of the human as vessel for the voice of God provides a common ontological moment – indeed, a remarkable

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Mystics do not have a monopoly over this idea. In a Latin sonnet written in honour of the singer Leonora Baroni, Milton tells her: ‘The music of your voice bespeaks the presence of God. Either God, or certainly some third mind from the untenanted skies is moving mysteriously in your throat – mysteriously moving and teaching mortals how they may gradually become accustomed to immortal tones’.27 For Hegel in 1830, the best and highest way of expressing inner sentiments was by means of singing, wailing and moaning – all sustained vocal sounds that allow the soul to rid itself of feelings that are causing irritation. ‘It is primarily through the voice that people make known their inwardness, for they put into it what they are’, he suggested, thereby elevating the voice to a hegemonic position in the expression of inner emotion.28 For Thomas Carlyle, the idea of ‘voice’ carried connotations beyond the audible, since the hero as a poet – a maker of true Literature – was a ‘Singer’ as well as a ‘Speaker’: ‘All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song’.29 This small number of examples suggests that symbolically, experiences of vocal meaning which lie beyond speech might be read in profoundly mystical ways over extensive historical periods. As Rée has suggested, vocality has had to bear some very heavy symbolic freight. The fact that our voice is carried by our breath means that it is easily taken as a kind of messenger despatched from the soul … the voice is the

metaphysical coupling of God and humans through voice and music’. Even so, I reject his idea that here ‘the sacred becomes the everyday through musical performance’, since for Muslims ‘musical performance’ is too loaded a term to be tenable as a description of Qur’anic recitation. 27 John Milton, ‘Ad Leonoram Romae canentem’ in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957) 130–31. The original reads: Nam tua praesentem vox sonat ipsa Deum. / Aut Deus, aut vacui certe mens tertia caeli, / Per tua secreto guttura serpit agens; / Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda / Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. 28 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ed. and trans. M. J. Petry (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1978) vol. 2: 181. Quoted in Rée, I See a Voice, 60. I use Rée’s slightly altered translation from Petry. 29 For Carlyle, the ‘secular divinity’ of musical expression was contained in poetic discourse. ‘A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inmost harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song’. See Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Poet’, 98–99. Through using ‘Song’ rather than simply ‘Music’, Carlyle was perhaps tapping into a richer tradition than the immediate meaning suggests.

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place where the inner subjectivity of individual spirits intersects with the social and historical reality of human languages.30

The singing voice, then, has been in a unique musical position to merge different worlds of meaning: self-authority, human emotion, and the most slippery of them all, the soul itself. In acting as carrier for both the singing voice and the soul, the breath conveys the individual soul beyond the physical world to the world of the spirit, opening up a glimpse of the divine.31

Environment and the breath Unusually for singers in Victorian fiction, Thyrza and Margaret are working class.32 However, they are set apart from other working-class fictional characters by their ability to sing. Thus, they are doubly figures of exile.33 Unlike middle and upper-class singers, Thyrza and Margaret perform simple songs in public houses and damp rooms. These locations are associated with poverty, and differ significantly from comfortable drawing rooms and concert halls – spaces that function as shrines to High Art. Like all other voices, Thyrza’s and Margaret’s are physically grounded beyond the body: literally, drawn from their immediate atmosphere. In their case, it is the foetid, often diseased air which characterized the poor quarters of Victorian cities. They inspire awe in their audiences at least partly because their common, foul air-source is transformed into a breath of soul’s music. The power to effect this transformation is connected with the singers’ own ‘spiritual location’ in a higher world and not with organized religion or specifically sacred repertoire. Indeed, sacred repertory does not signify true spirituality, but 30 Rée, I See a Voice, 4. Rée goes on to suggest that the ‘heavy freight’ has gone beyond that which the voice might reasonably bear. 31 In Victorian writing, music in general may have been singled out as an expression of the Infinite (Carlyle), a copy of the Will itself (Schopenhauer) – see Jonathan Taylor’s chapter in this book – but more broadly, the voice’s connection with the breath ensured that its status remained apart from that of music in general. 32 Other fictional singing heroines are discussed by Paula Gillett in her chapter ‘Immortal Tones: Woman as Public Singer’; see Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: ‘Encroaching on All Man's Privileges’ (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000) 141–88. 33 The most obvious other ‘poor’ singing heroine is Mirah Lapidoth in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; but Mirah comes from a family of performers of the lower ‘artistmusician class’ (the term ‘artist-musician class’ was coined by Nancy B. Reich in ‘Women as Musicians: A Question of Class’ in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Musical Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993) 125).

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rather seems to stand as a metaphor for organized religion, which, as in real life, might be either a framework for the genuine expression of charitable love or, on the other hand, a fraudulent and hypocritical means to self-aggrandizement. Since early Victorian times, the working-class novel had often enough been characterized by ‘filth, putrefaction, and poverty’.34 Neither Alton Locke nor the inhabitants of the ‘Jago’, born into a stratum of society so base that its vicious poverty was almost inescapable, know anything much of music’s possibilities apart from the noise of itinerant street musicians and hymns in church.35 Although ‘decent’ working-class women like Thyrza and Margaret did not belong to this lowest class,36 foul stench as a feature of the environment characterizes in a way that has no analogy in portrayals of wealthier residences. Gissing, whose experience of poverty was in any case all too real, may have done extensive research to make sure his Lambeth setting was absolutely accurate, but to him, the ‘poisonous breath’ of the town was equated not with specific levels of poverty but with urban and industrial existence itself.37 On the ‘other side’ of the Thames from Thyrza’s Lambeth, the air is ‘autumn-like’, with ‘a foretaste of holiday’ (Thyrza, 51); but in the streets in her own neighbourhood, the hot air reeked with odours. From stalls where whelks were sold rose the pungency of vinegar; decaying vegetables trodden under foot blended their putridness with the musty smell of second hand garments … above all was distinguishable the acrid exhalation from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease. (37)

34

Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, 22. Alton says that his ‘own experience was confined to street music and the chapel’ (AL, 162). Street music may have taken the form described in Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, First Series: Poverty, II: Streets and Population Classified (London: Macmillan, 1902) 82. Booth observes that even in one of the worst (‘Black’) streets, the inhabitants’ amusement is catered for. In this instance, there are two performers, ‘each of whom in turn did feats of skill and strength while his companion turned the handle of the piano’. In the Jago, there were hymns in church, and ‘improving’ singing by the Choral society and brass bands at the East End Elevation Mission (where the really poor never went); but otherwise musical experience seems to have largely been limited to rowdy drunken sing-songs at Mother Gapp’s (CJ, 145). 36 In the late 19th century, Charles Booth categorized the map of London into coloured bands, of which the ‘lowest’ class was depicted black and characterized as ‘vicious, semicriminal’. The children of the Jago would belong to this band: the Jago in ‘real life’ was the Old Nichol, bordering Boundary Street, E2. Alton Locke would have belonged to the dark blue streets, those of ‘chronic want’. In contrast, Thyrza’s Walnut Tree Walk was a pink street, ‘good ordinary earnings’ though Lambeth was as a whole fairly mixed and this represented the top class for the area. Margaret would have belonged to a corresponding class. See Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, First Series, V: Maps (London: Macmillan, 1889). 37 Gillian Tindall, The Born Exile: George Gissing (London: Temple Smith, 1974) 42. 35

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The public house where she first sings acts as a refuge for women who have ‘[grown] thirsty in the hot, foul air of the street’ (Thyrza, 38), though the pub itself is thick with the smoke of pipes (41). Music has already been associated with smell in Thyrza since an encounter with Mr Boddy’s violin, heard in ‘Little Shop with the Large Heart’, replete with dead flies and the strange odour of a perspiring yellow mass which turns out to be (rancid?) butter. For Gaskell too, the characterisation of poverty depended partly on grime and smell, though like Thyrza, Margaret belongs to an upper level within the class of ‘urban poverty’ in which there was no actual want and plenty of dignity. Gaskell preferred to treat working-class characters in such a way as to inspire sympathy rather than distaste in her readers,38 and she is careful to depict old Alice Wilson’s cellar, in which Margaret initially sings, as ‘scrupulously clean’. But the cellar is also damp, and ‘strewed, hung, and darkened’ with bunches of herbs for remedies which ‘emitted no very fragrant odour in their process of drying’ (MB, 15). Old Alice obviously tries her best, but the rankness of her rooms cannot be dispelled. Reticent in describing the squalor of poverty, Gaskell never discusses exactly what flows down the gutter in the middle of the Bartons’ or Margaret’s and Alice’s streets. The closest she ever comes to acknowledging that sanitary conditions among the poor were inadequate is during a discussion of the Davenports’ quarters, where ‘heaps of ashes [covering excrement] were the stepping stones … on which the passer-by … took care not to put his foot’ (MB, 66). Even though Margaret herself does not have to live next to a smell ‘so fetid as almost to knock … men down’, the ‘deserving poor’ still inhabit an olfactory space distinguished from middle- and upper-class habitations by its unpleasantness – and, more importantly, its perceived inherent unhealthiness, since diseases like cholera were associated with bad air rather than bad water until well into the 1860s,39 long after Mary Barton and Alton Locke were written. Indeed, Gissing and Gaskell (and Kingsley, as we explore below) focus obsessively on the element of air, and this has a significant consequence for the way in which we ‘read’ the act of singing. As opposed to hearing an instrument (for instance, Mr Boddy’s violin), listeners to Thyrza’s and Margaret’s performances partake physically of the song: they actually breathe in the singer’s song as she breathes it out. The collective experience is partly what defines the power of the singer’s performance, since the singer is also breathing in the breath of the 38

Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, 55. Lawrence Rothfield, ‘Medical’ in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 175. 39

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audience and the song sustained with the air source that they collectively provide. Perhaps this heightens the listeners’ sense of the singers’ transformatory powers – they are all recycling the same air, but through Margaret’s and Thyrza’s bodies it metamorphoses from the foul air of the environment to the breath of the spirit, nourishing them spiritually as it is reincarnated in song. Music, however, is flimsy, ephemeral stuff, and allows only fleeting glimpses into ‘another world’. After singing for the first time at a ‘friendly lead’, Thyrza can think of ‘nothing but the desire to breath fresh air’ immediately her songs are over. She leaves the public house, but faints on the stairs: a portent of the price she will ultimately pay for the gift of song. Significantly, although Lambeth Walk is only a stonesthrow away from Walnut Tree Walk, where Thyrza and her sister live, their own rooms miraculously take on the odour, from an open window, of ‘a heavy scent of mignonette’ (Thyrza, 34). In contrast, the room inhabited by Totty Nancarrow has a ‘close, musty smell’ (39), and the atmosphere in the rooms of Gilbert Grail and his mother – in the same house as Thyrza – is ‘close; with the odour of the [flowering musk] blended the musty air which comes from old and neglected furniture’ (59). Just as types of music distinguish rich from poor, so do aromas: the Carsons, for instance, engage with music in air ‘heavy with the fragrance of strongly-scented flowers’ (MB, 238). The novel in which music is most consistently the progeny of stinking, poisonous air is Alton Locke. Kingsley’s research for this novel included a visit to a tailor’s homeland, Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey, where he was shocked by the reeking ditches, scum-covered water and swollen carcasses of dead animals almost bursting with putrefaction. These open sewers were the only source of drinking water; the rotting houses were built on piles, directly over the sewers, and the tailors slept ‘with the heavy stench of death rising through the floorboards’.40 Alton’s own ‘voice’ cannot spring from the lungs themselves, since they are diseased beyond hope from his life in a city ‘reeking with human breath [and] … noisome sewers’. His poems and songs are born from the pen, and other than an early performance of one of his own hymns, they only take life through the singing of others: ‘songs’, therefore, not only in the literal but also in the Carlylian sense (‘a musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing’),41 and it is significant that Carlyle was a strong early influence on Kingsley.42 40 Allan Hartley, The Novels of Charles Kingsley: A Christian-Socialist Interpretation (Folkestone: Hour-Glass Press, 1977) 63. 41 Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Poet’, 98. 42 Michael Stapleton, The Cambridge Guide to English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 484.

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Fresh air, and the ‘fresh air’ of beauty, can only be imagined and lived out in his songs. For him, life takes place among the poor wretches who sit stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms, drinking in disease in every breath – bound in their prison-house of brick and iron, with their own funeral pall hanging over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke. (AL, 17)

It is for this reason that he has learnt ‘to be a poet of the people’, an honour ‘surely worth buying with asthma, and rickets, and consumption’. Significantly, Alton’s longings centre on breathing ‘the air of heaven’ once, after which he is happy to die or to ‘sit among beautiful mountains, and sing hymns of my own making’ (17). However, his more direct destiny is the top floor of a tailor’s workshop, where ‘you get all the other floors’ stinks up here as well as your own. Concentrated essence of man’s flesh, is this here as you’re a breathing’ (25). Art-songs are as yet an unknown experience; when he hears the beautiful but vacuous Lillian (with whom he quickly falls in love) singing Italian airs, he says ‘I had no idea that music was capable of expressing and conveying emotions so intense and ennobling. My experience was confined to street music, and to the bawling at the chapel’ (162). Later, Lillian sings one of Alton’s own songs, the first time he experiences a performance of his own work since a hymn episode with his sister: ‘Surprise and pleasure overpowered me’ (163). In delirium, his dreams become bound up with Lillian as the singer of his songs in some heaven: she is the sweetest singer, promising that all men shall speak well of him and ‘you shall write songs, and we will sing them together’ (346). For Alton, the experience of poverty is what drives his songs into being: the urge to ‘give voice’ to miserable city-dwellers who seem otherwise to be without one. Lillian’s singing is sweet, but she understands nothing about the conditions which have engendered Alton’s songs and is too healthy to breathe authentic meaning into them. This symbolizes the point at which Alton leaves his poverty behind (literally and metaphorically) and adopts a life of comfort, which so inevitably kills dreams. His songs of poverty are bred, if not in the bone, then certainly in the lung, and are never meant as drawing-room entertainment. Steered towards cutting out the socialistic passages – the ‘pith and marrow’ – Alton squashes his convictions and stultifies his songs for the sake of popularity, money, patronage and Lillian (182). This misdirected love drains him of his artistic and moral strength. A long illness leaves him too weak to live out his dreams and after a period of delirium, he dies. Ironically, Kingsley himself was to die of pneumonia; his last weeks passed in strange imitation of Alton, days and

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nights being dreamed away in reliving travels to the West Indies and United States.43 Kingsley’s agenda in exploring the phenomenon of poverty through fiction may have sprung from genuine concern, but like Gaskell, he only experienced this life from the outside looking in.44 In contrast, Gissing and Morrison actually lived in poverty and wrote to some extent from the inside – although Gissing descended into it and Morrison ascended out of it.45 An obsessive theme of Gissing’s fiction involves bad air, the constriction or freedom of the breath, and early deaths from respiratory conditions,46 but this may well be connected less with his experience of the quality of urban air per se as with the state of his own breathing. His father’s unhealthy lungs had led to an early death at the age of 42, a circumstance which perhaps justifies Gissing’s own fixation with pulmonary diseases.47 In 1897 he wrote to his brother describing a weakness in his right lung, and two years later was diagnosed with emphysema and chronic bronchitis. In 1902, at the age of only 45, he died of pneumonia.48 Allan Atlas has suggested that Gissing’s negative attitude to the concertina, expressed in Thyrza as well as other stories, had deep psychological roots, its ‘wheezing’ and asthmatic sound reminding him of his own disease.49 If bad air and the constricted breath of sick humans or wheezing and breathy musical instruments indicates misery, then ‘freedom of breath’, equates with the opposite: with fresh air, happiness and singing. For Thyrza, there is no doubt that this is so. Towards the end of her life, she experiences one marvellous day: the air was like a spirit of joyous life … with a breath freeing the brain from sluggish vapours. Such a day London sees but once in half a dozen winters. Thyrza felt the influence of the change. She

43

Brenda Colloms, Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley (London: Constable, 1975)

355. 44 Alan Swingewood points out that Kingsley still ‘gives expression to some of the basic assumptions of the dominant class’ while expressing criticism of social abuses. Alan Swingewood, The Novel and Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) 41. 45 For biographies of Gissing, see Tindall, The Born Exile; Jacob Korg, George Gissing: A Critical Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963); and John Halperin, George Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). There is no full-length biography of Morrison; but see P. J. Keating, ‘Biographical Study’ in his edition of CJ, 11–36. 46 Tindall, A Born Exile, 245. 47 Ibid. 247. 48 Ibid. 16–18. 49 Allan Atlas, ‘George Gissing’s Concertina’, Journal of Musicology 17 (1999) 314. Interestingly, as Atlas points out, Morrison also associated bad lungs with the concertina in his short story ‘Without Visible Means’ in Tales from the Mean Streets (London, 1894).

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breathed more easily … involuntarily she let her voice run over a few notes … If there were always sunlight to stand in and the living air to drink, she might find the life before her in truth as little of a burden as it seemed this morning. But the days would again be wrapped in nether fumes, the foul air would stifle her, her blood would go stagnant, her eyes would weep with the desolate rain … It was as bright a day on the morrow, and she still knew that lightness of heart, that freedom of the breath which is physical happiness. (Thyrza, 466–9)

The moment of Thyrza’s death is preceded by classic symptoms of the constriction of the breath. After ‘a feeling of faintness’, she gives a ‘smothered cry’ – the swan-song of her now-feeble voice – and falls back. Music, religion and the other world For both Thyrza and Margaret, existence is located only partially in the material world. Both women are orphans, lacking a direct family environment, but they do have highly influential and important relationships with grandfather-figures (Mr Boddy and Job Legh) who themselves stand apart from society and whose unusual characteristics reinforce a sense of tribal oddness about the women. Thyrza’s beauty proves to be a fundamental characteristic in the way the world relates her, but, crucially, Gissing does not effect her introduction through physical description. Instead, various characteristics of her and her sister Lydia are discussed by Mr Boddy and a group of their friends. First, Mr Boddy mentions that she still sings her father’s songs and that he taught them to her (Thyrza, 29). Almost immediately afterwards, Lydia’s pious friend Mary says she likes Thyrza well enough, but ‘there’s something – I don’t think she’s as easy to understand as Lydia’ (30). Mary will later admit that ‘something in Thyrza’s complex nature repelled her’ (56). Lydia, whose role is to protect her sister from the harsh world, muses that Thyrza is ‘so beautiful … so weak, always dreaming of something beyond and above the life which was her lot (49–50). Sometimes her mysterious ‘illnesses’ prevent her from going to work (32, 33). Her appearance is described in terms of ‘beauty of rare suggestiveness’ (34) and ‘a subtly morbid physiognomy … all tended to preoccupation, to emotional reverie’ (35). These two threads, the musical and the other-worldly, establish Thyrza’s identity and are drawn upon throughout the novel. Both are manifestations of the exotic, a nineteenth-century topos positioned on the ‘feminine’ side of cultural semiotics.50 In case we have missed the 50 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) 167, 184, 207, 309.

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point in Thyrza, Gissing explicitly links music, the exotic and the occult in a scene at Totty Nancarrow’s. Some factory girls have gone there for tea, and Annie West amuses them with a booklet of ‘Charms, Spells and Incantations;’ on the back was the picture of a much-bejewelled Moorish maiden, with eyes thrown up in prophetic ecstasy; above ran the legend, ‘Wonderfully mysterious and peculiar’. The work included, moreover, ‘a splendid selection of the best love-songs’. (192)

The other remaining great feminine topos, Nature, also plays its part in Thyrza’s psyche. When she sees the sea, she is overcome with the sense of the infinite: Thyrza would not forget this vision of the illimitable sea, live how long she might. She had scarcely heretofore been beyond the streets of Lambeth. At a burst her consciousness expanded in a way we cannot conceive. You know that she had no religion, yet now her heart could not contain the new-born worship. (182)

Thyrza herself links this passion with her feeling for music, but only when she hears ‘High Art’ music from the fingers of Annabel, Egremont’s upper-class friend with whom he was formerly in love and whom he will eventually marry: ‘There was something she played, Gilbert, that told just what I felt when I first saw the sea. Do you know what I mean? Does music ever seem to speak to you in that way?’ (208). Shortly before her death, all these strands are linked together in her in a passage where she is contrasted with the happy, dull, ordinary people … from whom the gods, in their kindness, have veiled all vision of the rising and the setting of day, of sea-limits, and of the stars of the night, whose ears are thickened against the voice of music, whose thought finds nowhere mystery. Thyrza Trent was not one of those. What joys were to be hers she must pluck out of the fire, and there are but few of her kind whom in the end the fire does not consume. (396)

In Mary Barton, Margaret’s spirituality is much more veiled. On the surface, she is quiet, prim, ordinary and constantly plays down her inner life, but during performance it becomes clear that singing is one true key to her innermost being. After Will Wilson has heard her, he compares her to an ‘angel from heaven’, which causes the amused Mary to wonder where and how the wings would be fastened (MB, 227).51 Margaret’s 51 Significantly, it is the male Will who is inspired to think of spiritual matters after hearing Margaret sing, and female Mary whose mind dwells on the physical. This militates somewhat against Alisa Clapp’s claim that Will ‘sees the sexual woman more than the musician’. Alisa Clapp, ‘The City, the Country, and Communities of Singing Women: Music in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell’ in Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the

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home environment is another key to her intimate self. She lives with her grandfather, Job Legh, whose has a peculiar physique and whose eyes absolutely gleamed with intelligence; so keen, so observant, you felt as if they were almost wizard-like. Indeed, the whole room looked not unlike a wizard’s dwelling … the little table was covered with cabalistic books; and a case of mysterious instruments lay beside. (42)

Mary mistakes him for a fortune-teller, but Margaret says he is ‘only fond of such things as most folks know nothing about’. Margaret admits she knows a bit about them too. Mary Barton later reflects that ‘she had that night made the acquaintance of two of the strangest people she ever saw in her life’. Both Margaret and Thyrza suffer from physical weakness which prevents them from interacting in a normative way with society and which makes their inner, veiled world of music so important to them. Thyrza’s music, that symptom of her passionate soul, eventually kills her; as she learns more, her heart, ‘source of music and of love’ (Thyrza, 317) becomes weaker and weaker and she finally dies, unable to achieve union with the soul (Egremont) that she yearns for. As for Margaret, the onset of her blindness coincides exactly with the beginning of her life of professional singing. Straight after telling Mary that she thinks she is going blind, she mentions one thing ‘that serves to comfort’ her. She has been to Jacob Butterworth, the singing weaver, who has told her she has a ‘rare fine voice’ and that she ‘may gain ever so much money by singing’ (MB, 52–3). Her first engagement is for a music lecturer at the Mechanics’ Institute, for which she earns a sovereign, and the next day she has to admit to grandfather Job that she is blind (108–9). During the period when she is often absent from home, doing the rounds with the music lecturer, we are told that ‘the blind Margaret [comes] groping in’ to a room (164). Significantly, at the end of the novel, when Margaret regains her sight, her future relationship with music becomes uncertain. Physical frailty breeds the inner life; inner lives expand through endless reflection, the fostering of the imagination, the cultivation of the spirit, the contemplation of the infinite. There is a link between music and spirituality through inner lives, but what about religion itself? Organized religion and its music are a major presence in all four novels, yet the more tangible frameworks of religious practice, which should operate as ready-made moulds into which the life of the spirit can be poured, are reacted to with ambivalence by characters whose spiritual

Nineteenth-Century City and its Contexts, ed. Debra N. Mancoff and D. J. Trela (New York: Garland, 1996) 121.

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awareness is nevertheless pronounced. Both Gaskell and Kingsley were, on the surface, religious in the conventional sense. Gaskell was married to a Unitarian minister and Kingsley was an Anglican rector, a Canon of Westminster and Chaplain to the Queen. However, Unitarians and Anglicans are doctrinally worlds apart: Unitarians reject both the concept of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. In 1854 Gaskell wrote to her daughter Marianne that the one thing I am clear and sure about is this that Jesus Christ was not equal to His father; that, however divine a being he was not God; and that worship as God addressed to Him is therefore wrong in me.52

In Mary Barton, religious feeling can indeed house true spirituality, but in a devotional spirit rather than through traditionalistic forms. After Margaret has sung ‘The Oldham Weaver’ at Alice’s bidding, she then moves on to sacred song: Suddenly she burst forth with all the power of her magnificent voice, as if a prayer from her very heart for all who were in distress, in the grand supplication, ‘Lord, remember David’ … She stopped; and with tears of holy sympathy in her eyes, Alice thanked the songstress, who resumed her calm, demure manner. (MB, 39)

Scriptural references are scattered throughout the novel. John Barton declares early on that he would rather see Mary ‘earning her bread by the sweat of her brow, as the Bible tells her she should do’ and shortly afterwards cites the parable of Lazarus and Dives (8). In the scene of reconciliation between the murderer John Barton and the father of the murdered youth Harry Carson, Job Legh beseeches Mr Carson to ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us’. Afterwards, Mr Carson understands the meaning of forgiveness and finds himself reading the bible afresh with the interest of a little child (436). Alice scarcely speaks without invoking God’s name, except when she is approaching death: ‘Her talk … bore no more that constant reference to God and His holy word which it had done in health’ (399). Dissenting voice notwithstanding, Mary Barton is an explicitly Christian novel. Nor was Kingsley’s relationship with the Church uncomplicated. Early Victorian Anglicanism provided him with neither a radiant example of Christ’s teachings nor any personal support in the form of a strong and practical faith, and it was only after contact with the

52 Quoted in Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979) 12. Easson also examines the Unitarian question as it relates to Gaskell.

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controversial ideas of F. D. Maurice that he found a means of solving his religious and philosophical difficulties. Maurice’s optimistic and compassionate views of God – a god of Love – were novel, not to say dangerous, in the nineteenth century. Kingsley’s early engagement with Chartism, Carlyle and Maurice gave him the reputation of a rebel, but he was later to modify his views and came to see moral persuasion as the key to social change.53 Muscular Christian socialist, life-long rector of Eversley in Hampshire, co-founder of the Workingman’s College in London and opponent of High Church Anglicanism, Kingsley was keen to promote the role of physical energy in promoting moral strength.54 However, Alton Locke’s physical sickness means that an achievement of ‘a full measure of strength’ can only be established through his conversion to Christian Socialism, attained through the ministrations of the stern and unbending Eleanor.55 Thus, spirituality and religion do become closely linked for him, though not immediately. After his early forays into Chartism, Eleanor helps Alton to ‘see the light’ and he realizes that the final solution to the problem of social inequality will not be achieved by marching or violent means but through Christianity. However, the outward forms of religion inspire nothing in him: Before dinner, we went into the cathedral. The choir had just finished practising. Certain exceedingly ill-looking men, whose faces bespoke principally sensuality and self-conceit, and whose function was that of praising God, on the sole qualification of good bass and tenor voices, were coming chattering through the choir gates; and behind them a group of small boys were suddenly transforming themselves from angels to sinners, by tearing off their white surplices, and pinching and poking each other noisily as they passed us, with as little reverence as Voltaire himself could have desired. (AL, 173)

Organized religion and ‘true’ spirituality bear a similarly troubled relationship to each other in Thyrza and A Child of the Jago. Gissing’s attitude to the Church was complex. He wrote in his Commonplace Book that ‘Religious sentiment, as such, by no means irritates. It is the bad, poor, intolerant uses of it that I cannot endure’.56 Indeed, Gillian Tindall considers that Gissing had ‘too many atavistic yearnings himself to reject entirely the validity of religious fervour’ and that he was ‘probably, like Mallard, the central character in The Emancipated, “one 53

Colloms, Charles Kingsley, 59–63. Styron Harris, Charles Kingsley: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981) xiii. 55 Ibid. xvi. 56 Quoted in Tindall, A Born Exile, 60, from Gissing’s unpublished Commonplace Book. 54

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who had no faith but felt the need of it.” ’.57 He might actually have been closer to Gaskell than first appearances would suggest. She herself was infinitely tolerant of all faiths. Interestingly, it is the spiritual rather than intellectual endowment of the ‘natural aristocrat’ that Gissing appears to have thought more important; there are several heroes and heroines who are ‘mysteriously alien to the class and family from which they have sprung’.58 From what little can be pieced together of Arthur Morrison’s life, it would seem that his attitudes were similar. In 1895, Morrison met the Reverend Osborne Jay, vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch, who had written to him in appreciation after reading Tales of the Mean Streets.59 Jay’s no-nonsense views and practical help to the poor are reproduced in the character of Father Sturt in Jago, and Morrison held Jay in enough respect to dedicate the book to him.60 Jay’s/Sturt’s street religion, generated by a real love for the ‘dregs of humanity’, is contrasted with the well-meaning but misguided Church relief work of the East End Elevation Mission which attracts not the ‘vicious and semi-criminal’ of the Jago but ‘tradesmen’s sons, small shopkeepers … and neat clerks’ (CJ, 53). This dichotomy between, on the one hand, the humbug of organized religion and, on the other, inner spirituality (which relates to the soul but not necessarily to notions of ‘God’) is, as we have seen, reflected in Alton Locke’s experience of sacred music at the cathedral. A similarly figurative use of hymns can be found in both Morrison and Gissing. Characters who are perhaps pious but mean, or who are dishonest but wish to give the appearance of respectability, often sing hymns to achieve the hypocritical pretence. Aaron Weech, a stock Jew-figure of the Fagin type, ‘sang hymns aloud in the back parlour’ of his coffee shop (CJ, 70), but operates a criminal set-up from behind the scenes that sets Dicky Perrott on a downward spiral of crime. After ‘framing’ Dicky and ruining his prospects of a better life, he quotes the words of a psalm to Dicky’s employer: ‘I’m glad to – to do any moral job, so to speak, as comes in my way. “Scatter seeds o’ kindness” you know, as the – the Psalm says, Mr Grinder’ (135). Josh Perrott plans a theft at Weech’s as revenge for setting him up and comments, ‘Won’t ‘e sing a bleedin’ ‘ymn w’en ‘e finds ‘is stuff weeded’ (182); as the theft turns into murder, Josh taunts, ‘Sing a hymn, ye snivellin’ nark!’ (188). In Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn, the pompous Orlando Whiffle – ‘a 57

Ibid. 60. Ibid. 44. 59 Keating, ‘Biographical Study’, CJ, 23. 60 Ibid. 24. 58

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living satire of the Church of which he was a servant, an admirable caricature, far excelling anything that a professed ridiculer of ecclesiasticism could possibly have conceived’61 – whistles a Te Deum during a conversational pause after having denounced the ‘inherent impractability in the nature of the lower classes’.62 In Thyrza, a ‘ragged and filthy’ family whose elders ‘bore the unmistakable brand of the gin shop’ and whose children ‘were visaged like debased monkeys’ go about ‘whining the discords of a mendicant psalm’ (Thyrza, 54). In the same novel, there is also an interesting exchange between the pious Mary who goes regularly to chapel, Mr Boddy and some friends. Mary’s eyes gleam with indignation as she declares: ‘I wouldn’t trust anybody as was a Catholic. I don’t think the religion ought to be allowed’. Mr Boddy suggests that ‘It’s the faith, Mary, my dear … the faith’s the thing. I don’t suppose as form matters so much’ (31). Mr Boddy lodges with Mary’s family. Although Mary herself gives him food, her family’s lack of charity is so acute that they allow him to die of starvation. Mary breaks down in admitting her family’s part in this and says to Lydia, ‘I’ve been bad-hearted. You might well not believe my religion when you saw me acting as I did’ (382). Lydia goes to chapel with Mary simply because she likes the singing. Religious music as well as religion itself can symbolize hypocrisy. Spirituality is unconnected with specifically religious songs. However, in A Child of the Jago, it is during a visit to a church that Josh Perrott and Kiddo Cook experience a fleeting glimpse of the higher world. The visit is unplanned, but despite their reluctance to be there, they find themselves moved to the act of singing, though neither admits to it: And after the benediction, Father Sturt, from his window over the closed shop, saw Josh Perrott and Kiddo Cook guffawing and elbowing one another up Luck Row. Each was accusing the other of having tried to sing. (CJ, 122–3)

Morrison’s narrative is ‘realistic’, presenting the episode as Josh and Kiddo might have seen it (they were ‘not altogether sorry they had come. It was a rest … there was nothing to do, no constant watch to be kept, no police to avoid, and their wits had a holiday’). There is no attempt to look over their shoulders or provide any kind of philosophical gloss on the church-going episode. But despite Josh and Kiddo being used to singing in front of each other in other contexts – since the roaring drunken Jago sing-songs are a regular feature of their lives (CJ, 60, 145, 61 George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn (1880), ed. Pierre Coustillas (1935; facs. repr. Brighton: Harvester, 1985) 25. 62 Ibid. 28.

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174) – they are mutually embarrassed to be heard ‘trying to sing’ in church. What has given rise to singing here is not alcohol but spiritual experience, though this is left out of the narrative. It is as if such a tender moment is so alien to the men’s lives that even the narrating voice cannot find words to utter it. In retrospect the characters are so embarrassed to have revealed so much, they could not admit it happened. In the context of A Child of the Jago, neither the hymn (as a genre) nor the voice are in themselves signifiers of spirituality. But at that moment spiritual experience is articulated by means of religious song. For Josh and Kiddo, the association between religious repertory and a glimpse of a higher world loses any taint of residual hypocrisy because it emanates from Father Sturt. In contrast, Thyrza, Margaret and Alton Locke ‘sing’ with their own culturally authentic voices. Thyrza’s gifts are inherited from her father, Matthew Trent, a uniquely gifted musician according to Mr Boddy: Lambeth’ll never know another like him. He was made o’ music! When did you hear any man with a tenor voice like his? He made songs, too, Mr Ackroyd – words, music, an’ all. Why, Thyrza sings one of ‘em still … It was me as taught her it, to be sure, as I did most o’ the other songs she knows. (Thyrza, 29)

If Matt Trent’s reputation was limited to Lambeth, then at least he remained true to his own culture – that of the back room, the public house, the ‘friendly lead’ – which Egremont’s failure to establish a ‘High Culture’ exposes as self-sufficient and valuable in its own right.63 Margaret also sings with an authentic experience of poverty. Her first song, ‘The Oldham Weaver’ describes the starvation of a cotton weaver, which to those who have seen the distress it describes … is a powerfully pathetic song. Margaret had both witnessed the destitution, and had the heart to feel it; and withal, her voice was of that rich and rare order, which does not require any great compass of notes to make itself appreciated. (MB, 39)

In giving voice to their characters in an ‘authentic language’, the authors allow them to stand outside the boundaries of their class. The music they sing (folk songs, music composed within the family, own compositions, ‘canzonets’)64 takes their listeners beyond social class, which then becomes irrelevant.

63

John Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction (London: Vision, 1978) 101. Margaret ‘knew no modern music’ but ‘poured her rich voice out in some of the old canzonets she had lately learnt’ (MB, 145). This perhaps refers to the canzonets of Haydn, which Gaskell copied into her manuscript music book alongside a conventional enough mixture of pieces (country dances, piano pieces by Beethoven, national airs, arrangements from Gluck and Mozart operas); see Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell, 24–5. 64

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*** In Thyrza, Mary Barton and Alton Locke, songs of spiritual journeys ultimately signal a kind of musical martyrdom. Alton Locke surrenders his lungs to become a poet of the people and eventually dies, having spent his last hours imagining a paradise where ‘the forest shall break forth into singing’ (AL, 388), and writing his final ‘song’ of hope amidst the despair of ‘bleeding lungs and failing limbs’ (388–90). The sacrificial death of Thyrza, whose dreams revolve jointly around marriage to Egremont and performing in public, might actually have saved her from the disappointment of having to surrender her desire for a public life of music. Mrs Ormonde, on hearing that Thyrza is to be married to Gilbert Grail, comments that ‘Her voice is a beautiful thing lost’ (Thyrza, 190); later, the narrator says, Artist’s soul that she had, she never gave it a thought that, if she became [Egremont’s] wife, he might prefer that she should not sing in public. She imagined herself before a great hall of people, singing, yet singing in truth to one only. But all the others must hear and praise, that he might have joy of her power. (399)

The reader might well feel that her voice, now hopelessly tamed through boring vocal exercises and trammelled beyond all individuality through the repertoire of a professional choir, no longer in any case really expresses the true Thyrza. Margaret is a more ambiguous case. As we have seen, professional music-making and blindness are linked throughout the novel. However, Mary Barton ends with her blindness about to be cured, and immediately afterwards comes the news that ‘She and Will are to be married on the twenty-fifth of this month, and he’s bringing her out here [to Canada] next voyage’ (MB, 464). Will is well-meaning, dashing and handsome, but so crass as to offer her a gaudily painted accordion (elsewhere, a symbol of sick lungs) as a present. The likelihood of her continuing to sing professionally as Will’s wife are slim,65 and the prospective trip out to Canada somehow signals the end of her life as a professional singer. In the end, since she is such a true musician, the price Margaret pays for the promise of domestic bliss might well be

65 Most women who earned money from music gave it up after marriage unless their husbands were also members of the artist-musician class; see Reich, ‘Women as Musicians’, 125. Compare this passage with those cited from Thyrza above on the subject of marriage and singing. Clapp takes it for granted that Margaret will cease to sing: ‘Margaret … eventually becomes Will’s wife and (apparently) never sings in public again’ (Clapp, ‘The City, the Country, and Communities of Singing Women’, 120).

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considered very high.66 This ending, which Gaskell’s critics have sometimes seen as inappropriate,67 evades – or at best, fails to critique – the question that novelists writing about music at a later date would tackle head-on: whether or not the ‘true musician’ would find greater happiness through professional music-making or domestic fulfilment.68 Ultimately, neither Gissing, Gaskell or Kingsley can grant their working-class ‘natural aristocrats’ the satisfactions or achievements that are held out in promise. On the surface, it would seem that it is their transgressions from their own culture which are punished, yet this is too facile. It is the idea of music itself that puts them in the position of permanent exile of one sort or another, and this will continue as long as they live lives where music occupies a pre-eminent position. Their choice lies not in being stranded away from their own social class, to whom they do in some sense ‘belong’, but between being stranded in the middle of the physical and spiritual worlds – finally, for Thyrza and Alton, giving up the breath and entering the darker one beyond the veil. This is what Margaret probably prevents when she marries Will. It is not certain that her marriage and the regaining of her sight will necessitate the surrender of music, though as we have seen, there are strong reasons for supposing this to be the case. We cannot know whether such a sacrifice is worthwhile, or whether it is a form of ‘death’ which precludes not only the continuation of musical-spiritual satisfaction on earth but also the spiritual transcendence of death, before which mortality’s perceived terrors shrink away. This in turn offers a more positive subtext for the deaths of both Thyrza and Alton, whose lives have taken them at least half way towards the new ‘life’ their musical selves have yearned towards, and one in which music as a form of deliverance gives a Victorian contemporaneity to St Augustine’s notion of the salvation offered by the ‘new song’.69

66 The theme of the great singer unwillingly sacrificing a career for domestic bliss would appear in many novels of the later nineteenth century but not so early as 1850. See Gillett, Musical Women in England, 141–88. 67 Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987) 85–6. 68 Gillett discusses novels written at the turn of the twentieth century in which female singers chose a performing career over marriage (Musical Women in England, 169–76). 69 That is, Jesus; see Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) especially 27–86.

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‘Cribbed, cabin’d, and confined’: Female musical creativity in Victorian fiction Sophie Fuller

‘We want a new note in English music’, said Charmian in her clear and slightly authoritative voice. ‘The Hallelujah Chorus era has gone at last to join all the Victorian relics …’ ‘I have heard a new note in English music’, observed a middleaged, bald and lively-looking man, who was sitting on the opposite side of the drawing-room in Berkeley Square … ‘How long has this opinion been forming?’ ‘Some months.’ ‘Some months!’ exclaimed Charmian. ‘You’ve kept your new note to yourself all that time! Is it a woman? But of course it can’t be. I don’t believe there will ever be a great woman composer.’ Robert Hichens, The Way of Ambition (London: Methuen, 1913) 1 In the vast history of music there has never yet been an instance of a woman standing great and solitary communing with great musical thoughts and pouring forth immortal melody and harmony in the manner of a Bach or a Beethoven. There have been great interpreters of music among women … But as a creator of great music, woman remains bound, restrained, cribbed, cabin’d, and confined.1 She has never composed the music of the world. V. B., ‘Failures of Women in Art’, The Sketch 21 (1898) 468

Even in Robert Hichens’s novel The Way of Ambition, first published over a decade after the death of Victoria on the eve of the disruption of the First World War, the thoroughly modern character Charmian still adheres to the commonly-held Victorian belief that a great woman composer is an impossibility. Hichens knew the musical world well. He had trained as a musician and followed in George Bernard Shaw’s 1 Many thanks to John Fuller for pointing out that the phrase ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d’ is found in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (act 3, scene 4, line 29).

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footsteps as music critic of The World.2 He moved in musical circles and knew many women composers personally.3 That women could and did work as composers had, of course, been long accepted by concert audiences and readers of novels. But neither critical and popular success nor life-long dedication to their art was enough for their contemporaries or future generations to credit these women with the quality of greatness. During the Victorian period, women ranging from Amanda Ira Aldridge (1866–1956) through Claribel (1830–1869) and Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) to Agnes Zimmermann (1847–1925), were creating music in every conceivable genre and style, building a variety of musical careers with persistence and determination. As well as unearthing the music and careers of such women, I have long been fascinated by the nineteenth-century idea or construct of the ‘woman composer’, a figure hovering on the edge of the popular imagination, seemingly destined for inevitable mediocrity. Women’s own ideas as to what it meant to be a composer who was a woman have unfortunately, along with their manuscript compositions, rarely survived.4 But more important for my investigations are the opinions and beliefs of their contemporaries, of the audiences that they hoped would play and listen to their music. These opinions were fostered in a horizon of expectations that grew from a wide range of pronouncements about women and their abilities. The specific idea of the ‘woman composer’ was fed by audience experiences, journalistic reports and media debates, as well as images and depictions of women creating music in painting and literature. To attempt to build as complete a picture as possible of what ‘woman composer’ meant during this period involves working with a range of sources, from manuscripts and printed scores through diaries and letters, newspapers and journals to short stories and novels. The Victorian period was one of intense debates about women’s rapidly changing roles both inside and outside the home. This included much discussion in newspapers and journals about women’s place within the musical world. As the nineteenth century progressed and increasing numbers of women made their way into public musical life as both amateurs and professionals, as orchestral musicians, piano tuners, 2 Hichens in now best remembered for The Green Carnation (1894), a satirical novel about Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. See Joe Law’s chapter in this volume for discussion of this novel. 3 These included Mary Carmichael (1851–1935), Rosalind Ellicott (1857–1924), Ethel Harraden (1857–1916) and Maude Valérie White (1855–1937) – all of whom set his lyrics to music. 4 The one exception is Ethel Smyth, whose diaries, letters and published memoirs combine to give a clear insight into her self-image as a composer.

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music journalists, teachers and conductors, so the arguments intensified. Time and time again the discussion became fiercest when it focused, as it so often did, on women’s positions as composers or creators of music.5 After all, by the nineteenth century composition had become firmly established as the pinnacle of achievement and ambition in Western art music, with the composer a distinct and powerful figure.6 As scholars such as Christine Battersby or Marcia Citron have shown, there are many reasons, ranging from systemic discrimination to ‘anxiety of authorship’, why women have been excluded from artistic canons, the concept of greatness7 and even from creativity itself.8 An important factor was society’s view of what was feminine and therefore expected from women. Battersby has explained that by the Victorian era: ‘For centuries, male philosophers had described women in ways that made them inferior: as emotional, instinctive, moved by nature rather than by reason, governed by their procreative functions rather than by judgement.’9 What this meant for music was that women were expected to compose works that kept them within the bounds of their allocated sphere and the expectations created by their gender. Compositions such as graceful piano pieces and pretty songs, reflecting what were seen as the essentially female characteristics of their creator, were what the public and critics both expected and accepted. Women’s music should be spontaneous and intuitive, rather than the product of intellect and training.10 The large-scale, complex and ambitious were firmly out of 5 See, for example: ‘The Feminine in Music’, The Musical Times 23 (1882) 521–2; Stephen S. Stratton, ‘Woman in Relation to Musical Art’, Proceedings of the Musical Asssociation 3 (1882–3): 115–46; ‘Women as Composers’, The Musical Times 28 (1887) 80–82, or ‘Woman in Music’, The Musical Standard, illustrated series 6 (12 September 1896) 151–2. 6 For a thorough discussion of the concept of composition, see Stephen Blum, ‘Composition’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001) vol. 6: 186–201. Blum points out that ‘a talent or genius for composition was generally regarded as an exclusively male attribute’. 7 It is worth noting that nineteenth-century writers did not define what they were looking for in a ‘great’ composer, taking it for granted that greatness or genius was instantly recognisable. 8 See Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: The Women’s Press, 1989) and Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). 9 Battersby, Gender and Genius, 72. 10 One of Battersby’s central arguments is in fact that since the Romantic period, genius in Western culture has been allowed and even encouraged to be ‘feminine’ (intuitive, emotional, imaginative) but never actually female. But nineteenth-century writers on British music certainly saw a strong connection between these time-honoured attributes of femininity and femaleness. For further details see Sophie Fuller, ‘Women

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bounds. Women were in fact best left to re-create rather than create. Victorian writers and journalists, such as ‘V. B.’ (quoted at the opening of this chapter), were happy to acknowledge women as successful interpreters while refusing to credit them with the ability to create anything of any importance. My interest in as broad an exploration of the Victorian concept of the ‘woman composer’ as possible has led me to search for ways in which women who created music were represented in works of fiction and how the concept of female creativity was conveyed to readers. Were there authors who explored or even subverted the idea that women were incapable of composing ‘great’ music? Or did works of fiction simply act to reinforce the status quo? By and large, writers seem to have avoided populating their novels with composers, whether male or female. Descriptions of the effects of listening to music and the physical process of making music, as other chapters in this volume show, are both common and important in the Victorian novel, but depicting the creator of or the actual process of creating this non-representational art form seems to have been less appealing. The ‘new note in English music’ discussed at the opening of Hichens’s The Way of Ambition belongs to the novel’s central character, composer Claude Heath. Before he falls into Charmian’s clutches, Heath is wary of fame and composes austere works inspired by religious texts. He is British, middle-class, undemonstrative, has never studied abroad and is therefore far from Charmian’s (and the reading public’s) romantic idea of a composer.11 A novel by George Bernard Shaw, Love Among the Artists, written some 30 years earlier, also has as one of its central characters a British composer who is determinedly unromantic.12 Owen Jack writes elaborate, difficult music, is down-to-earth, brusque and forever speaking his mind (especially when dealing with the musical performances or compositions of young ladies). Heath and Jack are portrayed as having qualities that imply greatness: they have integrity and determination, creating individual and complex works that challenge, and are not always understood by, their Composers during the British Musical Renaissance, 1880–1918’ (PhD diss., King’s College London, 1998) 124–7. 11 Charmian is told that she is disappointed in Heath because, ‘You can’t forget having read the “Vie de Bohême” and having heard, and unfortunately seen, Paderewski when you were a schoolgirl at Brighton’; Hichens, The Way of Ambition, 6. 12 Love Among the Artists was Shaw’s third novel. Written in the early 1880s, it was first published in the United States in 1900 (by Herbert S. Stone and Company), but not published in England until 1914. George Bernard Shaw, Love Among the Artists (London: Constable and Company, 1914).

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listeners. Above all their music has the power to move.13 At the same time Hichens and Shaw depict the daily grind of working as a composer, especially the particular problems of being a British composer within a musical culture that was in thrall to the romantic flamboyance of continental musicians and music making. For example, Heath and Jack both work away from the piano, creating music while not actually playing it.14 Their creativity does not depend on the physical production of music but becomes an intangible, abstract and therefore more intellectual activity. Other novelists, such as Elizabeth Sara Sheppard or George Eliot, created male composers who remained more firmly within the dominant Germanic tradition. In Charles Auchester (1853), Sheppard’s ethereal Mendelssohnian character Chevalier Seraphael commands adoring devotion in all who meet him or hear his music.15 Julius Klesmer in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) is more rooted in the practical realities of life as a working musician but has all the necessary ability and strength of character to suggest genius.16 In this chapter I will examine six fictional female musicians who create music, exploring the ways in which their authors either reflect or confront the Victorian stereotype of the woman composer. These women inhabit a variety of novels (including best sellers, ‘new woman’ fiction and satirical comedy), ranging chronologically from Sheppard’s Charles Auchester (1853) and Counterparts, or The Cross of Love (1854) through George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni (1864) and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) to E. F. Benson’s Dodo: A 13 This is something that the reader of both novels has to take on trust. Neither author attempts more than a cursory description of each composer’s music, although they do describe other characters’ reactions to it. 14 Charmian’s list of things she finds ‘unsympathetic’ about Heath include ‘cropped hair watered down, humdrum neckties, composing away from the piano’; Hichens, The Way of Ambition, 6. Jack’s composing method is described by Shaw in one scene as follows: ‘He hurried indoors, and brought a heap of manuscript music into the room the ladies had just left. He opened the pianoforte and sat down before it; but instead of playing began to write, occasionally touching the keys to try the effect of a progression, or rising to walk up and down the room with puckered brows’; Shaw, Love Among the Artists, 37. 15 Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Charles Auchester (1853); introduction by Jessie A. Middleton (1911; repr. London: J. M. Dent, 1928) [hereafter CA]. 16 Eliot describes Klesmer as follows: ‘One whom nature seemed to have first made generously and then to have added music as a dominant power using all the abundant rest, and, as in Mendelssohn, finding expression for itself not only in the highest finish of execution, but in that fervour of creative work and theoretic belief which pierces the whole future of a life with the light of congruous, devoted purpose;’ George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876; London: Penguin, 1995) 140. For further discussion of this novel see the chapters in this volume by Irene Morra and Jonathan Taylor. The major new study of Eliot and music, Delia da Sousa Correa’s George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave, 2002), appeared too late to be included in the research for this study.

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Detail of the Day (1893), Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894) and John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906). Sheppard’s first novel Charles Auchester is little known today17 although it was widely read when it first appeared and was still in print as late as 1928. Sheppard (1830–1862), who taught music and Latin at her mother’s school, also published several other novels, two collections of children’s stories and three songs.18 A novel about music and musical life set in England and Germany, Charles Auchester appeared anonymously and was promoted by its publishers as a roman à clef, supposedly portraying musicians ranging from Mendelssohn through Berlioz to Jenny Lind.19 Reviewing it in The Athenaeum, Henry Chorley described it as ‘a strange, wild, affected, incongruous Art-novel, – incomplete, incorrect, foolish, extravagant, still displaying feeling without discretion, power without learning, – and a passion for music, rather than a knowledge of it’.20 Sheppard’s musicians are certainly highly romanticized. The narrator, Charles Auchester, is a talented young boy (11 when the story begins) obsessed with music. In the course of his musical studies in both England and Germany he encounters and interacts with the other characters of the story such as the Chevalier Seraphael, the impoverished, angelic diva Clara Benette, or the talented amateur pianist and music benefactor Miss Lawrence. Despite her overblown descriptions of music, music making and musical genius, Sheppard undoubtedly reflected commonly held mid-Victorian beliefs about music and musical life which rang a chord with her many enthusiastic readers. Issues of nationality, class and professionalism are all are subtly explored, as are the restrictions of gender on female musicians and artists. The singer Clara Benette explains why she has not 17 I am very grateful to Phyllis Weliver for suggesting that I look at this text and for fascinating discussions about this and other novels containing female composers. 18 On Sheppard see Jessie Middleton, Introduction to CA vii–xii, and [Harriet E. Prescott], ‘Elizabeth Sara Sheppard’, Atlantic Monthly 10 (1862) 498–502. 19 In her introduction to CA, Middleton provides a list of the musicians that the fictional characters are supposed to represent. Some of her suggestions seem far-fetched, while others (including the suggestion that Seraphael represents Felix Mendelssohn) make more sense. That the characters Charles Auchester and Miss Lawrence represent Charles and Sophy Horsley is supported by Rosamund Gotch in her introduction to Mendelssohn and his Friends in Kensington: Letters from Fanny and Sophy Horsley Written 1833–36 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) 5. 20 Henry Chorley, review of Charles Auchester, The Athenaeum (12 November 1853) 1352. Presumably Chorley did not at this stage know the identity of the author or that she was a woman. It is therefore particularly striking that he chose to describe the book in terms which so clearly reflected contemporary ideas about women’s capabilities and attributes.

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married her benefactor, Lenhart Davy – ‘I do not wish to belong to him, nor to anyone: only to music now’ (CA, 79) – while the dancer Laura Lemark claims, ‘I would sell my soul, if I have a soul, to be a man, to be able to live to myself, to be delivered from the torment of being and feeling what nobody cares for’. (386). Sheppard’s female composer is the 15-year-old Maria Cerinthia, a student at the German music school where the Chevalier teaches and Charles Auchester studies.21 Maria is a singer who is engaged to another pupil at the school, Florimond Anastase, although strongly bound to the Chevalier, who is himself in love with her. Maria’s role as composer is suggested when Charles tells her that she looks ‘too much like a composer to be a singer also’ (228). What Charles or the reader might imagine a female composer to look like is not explained. But the remark suggests that Sheppard herself had a clear visual image of the ‘woman composer’ in mind. Unlike Clara, Maria has allowed love to overtake music. Perhaps because of her submission to these emotions, she has a lack of confidence in women’s abilities: I sometimes think when women try to rise too high, either in their deeds or their desires, that the spirit which bade them so rise sinks back again beneath the weakness of their earthly constitution, and never appeals again – or else that the spirit, being too strong, does away with the mortal altogether – they die. (286)

None of this bodes well for her attempt at composition. She explains to Charles that Florimond playing his violin one star-lit night ‘has given me an idea for a new musical poem, and what is more strange I have halffinished it, and the whole in my mind’ (291). Adhering to the conventional view of women’s capabilities, Charles assumes she will produce ‘some touching memento in wordless lied or scherzo for one-voiced instrument, of a one-hearted theme’ (291) and is amazed to discover that this musical poem will be a symphony for full orchestra. Maria agrees that ‘a woman has never yet dared anything of the kind’ (292). But she is determined and undeterred by the fact that she has had no training, although she and Charles both assume that such a work will never actually be performed. 21 In her attempts to match all the characters in the novel to real-life musicians, Middleton suggests that Maria Cerinthia is modelled on Maria Malibran (CA, viii). This seems far-fetched given the extreme difference in character between the two women. Phyllis Weliver suggests that the character was thought to be modelled on Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, but, again, there is even less to match the two women together other than that they wrote music and knew Mendelssohn. Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 282 fn 48. My thanks to John Fuller for pointing out that a Cerinthian was a first-century follower of the heretical Cerinthius, who disbelieved in the divinity of Jesus and is therefore an apt name for this independent-spirited and transgressive character.

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The transgressive nature of her desire to compose is clearly signalled by Charles’s response to her announcement: ‘Maria, you look very evil – evil as an elf’ (292). As she composes her symphony (not only working away from a piano, but even creating a work that is too complex for her to be able to play on a piano), Maria’s ambition and transgression increase. In another conversation with Charles she tell him that she wants to reign over ‘a new kingdom. No woman has ever yet composed’. When Charles disagrees she explains: Not as I mean. I mean no woman has been supreme among men, as the Chevalier among musicians. I have often wondered why. And I feel – at least, I did feel – that I could be so, and do this. (297)

Despite becoming increasingly ill, Maria does complete her symphony. It is a work described as lovely and masterly but also as suggesting ‘a plaint of spiritual suffering – a hungering and thirsting heart – a plea of exhausted sadness’ (305–6). Charles finds it strangely reminiscent of the Chevalier’s music, an attitude reflecting that of many nineteenth-century reviewers who tended to assume that women lacked true originality and could only produce work that imitated that of men.22 The symphony is performed, although not to an audience, with Maria herself conducting the orchestra. But at the end of the first movement she collapses, dies and is buried with the manuscript of her work. The heavy-handed symbolism of Maria’s fate cannot be ignored. Daring to compose and perform a symphonic work is a clear violation of woman’s place within the musical world. Even though Sheppard creates a world of music in which women play significant roles and allows Maria not only dreams of greatness but concrete artistic success in the creation of the work itself, she cannot allow her or her symphony to survive the transgression. Sheppard’s second novel, Counterparts, or The Cross of Love, was published in three volumes in 1854, the year after Charles Auchester.23 This is a complex tale of thwarted and disappointed love in which the four central characters, Rafe Bernard, Rose de Berri, Cecilia Dudleigh and Herz Savona, create a tangled web of alliances and misalliances. The novel is set in the English northern town of X where Cecilia Dudleigh is a music teacher, Herz Savona a doctor, Rose de Berri a well-bred young lady who paints and Rafe Bernard a well-bred young man who paints 22 See, for example, the review of Ethel Smyth’s violin sonata in which it is described as ‘the clever work of a lady who makes no pretensions to originality, but slavishly follows Brahms’. [Unsigned], ‘Music in Leipzig’, The Monthly Musical Record (January 1888) 10. 23 [Elizabeth Sara Sheppard], Counterparts, or The Cross of Love, 3 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1854) [hereafter C].

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and writes poetry – in particular a hypnotically powerful long work called ‘Stonehenge’. The reader, like the other characters in the novel, is left in no doubt about Cecilia’s musical talents. She plays Bach, Beethoven and Mendelssohn on the piano and sings in a ‘profound contralto’ (C, 1: 61).24 Savona describes her as ‘a woman of genius’ (1: 224). But to Cecilia, these talents involve no creativity. Talking to Savona, who is at work on a book, she says: ‘I am never too tired to sing. I have not to create, not even to combine in singing; as you have in writing.’ ‘What is singing to you, then?’ … ‘What it is to the wind to blow or the flowers to drop their scent: it is no more effort than to breathe.’ (1: 250)

But, perhaps haunted with the memory of Maria Cerinthia, Sheppard does eventually allow Cecilia not only to create music but to survive the composition and performance of her work (although she herself does not actually hear it being played). In a typically dramatic passage, Sheppard describes Cecilia’s act of creation as, lying in her bed, she proposed to herself something to be accomplished. And having given it mental utterance immediately, without delay or warning, rose visions of golden splendour: dreamy faces all light, floating in showers of flowers; dim but glorious forms; flashes of restless radiance insufferable bright: a wild illumination of every faculty. These were hers; but only as to prepare for the result which was not poetry. For they passed, they faded: a purple calm remained, as the sea beneath the tides, the heaven of midnight above the clouds; a lustrous darkness: a space wherein the stars had diffused themselves into that shadow. And then the ideas came down – the seraphs from their light in light, who are known without seeing, felt without hearing: the pulses of silence began to play, and the thousand-toned whole was here, – the one that is manifold as music. (2: 146)

The next morning, Sheppard even allows Cecilia to put pen to paper: She was surrounded by strewings of music-paper, and attempting what she had never achieved before except in her brain; but which she found easy enough now she tried it – to write in score, and to reduce the separate parts. (2: 146–7)

Cecilia’s act of creation, despite the fact that she commits her thoughts to paper, is clearly described as intuitive and instinctual, and as such still safely within a woman’s expected creative sphere. It does not take her the weeks and months or the physical suffering of Maria Cerinthia. Although Cecilia’s music is, like Maria’s, orchestral, it is not 24

Cecilia’s name, that of the patron saint of music, is obviously significant.

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symphonic but dance music, a far less exalted genre and one which lay closer to a woman’s sphere of experience. But even though her music is less ambitious, Cecilia cannot claim it as her own. She knows that Rafe Bernard is organising a ‘ballet’ with a London band and sends him the score, as if from a ‘Monsieur Vertue’. She herself does not even attend the performance of her dances although they are described at great length and have a powerful effect on the other characters. A dim wavering chord seemed to shiver the breathless air: the violins were whispering alone; and for a while alone they whispered. Then wind-notes broke forth, weird and portentous, against the whisper. The flutes and clarinetti, like a choir of birds, shook, shuddered altogether, and then they died: the wind-notes now faltered, and the violins were again alone. Then a pause – with silvery cadence – and the elfin allegro burst forth. Delirious scherzo, whirling, yet timed as the circles of a sphering waltzer, the singular motivo descended, floating forth upon the night. It seemed an improvisation spontaneous and unanticipated; so exactly it accorded with the scene, the fantastic circumstance, the time. The heavy balm upon the air, the solemn distance of the starlight, the pale crescent, the blush of flowers at night when they should be hidden, accorded with the harmonies of perfect beauty which the music had enfranchised from its fairydom. All stood – all listened – all were somehow affected: most strangely some, if strangely all. (2: 181–2)

The ‘Stonehenge’ Mazurka which forms a part of the ‘ballet’ is particularly powerful and closely related to Bernard’s poetry of the same name, linking the two characters in a way that will become significant towards the end of the novel. Sheppard’s description of the piece draws out aspects of Cecilia’s somewhat elusive character: She had poured her whole passion into those notes: the fabulous phantasm but beguiled as a veiling mist upon the mountain: the chords broke pitilessly upon the heart when the brain had received its impression: the pulses answered. It was like the repinings of lost love, – the plaint of wandering fancy. (2: 200)

Sheppard’s references to fairydom and elfin music recall Charles Auchester’s description of Maria Cerinthia as an ‘evil elf’. The association of these women’s music with the supernatural detracts from their own agency in its creation. Nevertheless, despite being incapable of claiming it as her own, Cecilia is as proud as Maria of her work. Although overcome with a characteristic melancholy as she parcels the score up to send to Bernard: This melancholy did not induce her to forego her intention, or to tear open and tear up the sheets: she was still as proud of their

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contents, as ambitious they should be heard, as when they rung their elfin changes in the dim morning, or swept through the brilliant heaven of night for the waking brain. (2: 160–61)

Despite this pride in her achievement, Cecilia does not compose again. She declares to Savona, who finds out that she has composed the dances: ‘I shall not write again’ (2: 169). He tells her that she will but Sheppard does not even hint at the possibility. At one point Cecilia plays some of the pieces on the piano but there is no suggestion that she has any desire to attempt to create more music. The other characters, along with Cecilia herself, seem to feel that there is something improper in her composition. Savona’s first reaction when she tells him she will not compose again is to say that he is glad (2: 169), while Bernard’s reaction to finding out that she wrote the pieces that he admired so much is: ‘She couldn’t; and she wouldn’t if she could’ (3: 153). No-one is surprised that she did not claim authorship or encourages her to continue. Although, unlike Maria, Cecilia survives the transgressive act of composing orchestral music that is played to others (even if only once), she is distanced from its creation, and while music is a defining aspect of her character, composition is not allowed to become a part of her musicality. Although Cecilia Dudleigh is one of the four central characters in Sheppard’s novel, Maria Cerinthia is a fairly minor, although important, figure. There are other minor characters in Victorian novels who compose, such as Catherine Arrowpoint in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). The wealthy and musically talented Catherine plays three instruments but does not sing – a marker of her musical integrity in a world where a woman’s singing voice is so often perceived as the dangerously seductive weapon of the siren.25 Her composition is only mentioned in passing, when her teacher, the composer Klesmer, tells her: ‘You can get on exceedingly well without me: your operetta is on wheels – it will go of itself.’26 Catherine’s main act of transgression, of course, is to marry Klesmer who is her social inferior. Novels in which the central character is a female musician who creates her own music include George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni (1864) and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Meredith’s heroine Emilia Belloni (also known as Sandra) is the daughter of an impoverished Italian violinist who has settled in England.27 At the

25 See for example Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, Introduction to Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Dunn and Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 1–13. 26 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 243. 27 George Meredith, Sandra Belloni: Originally, Emila in England (1864; London: Archibald Constable, 1902) [hereafter SB].

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opening of the novel she is discovered playing the harp and singing in the woods near the home of the socially ambitious Pole sisters. Emila falls in love with their brother Wilfrid, and Meredith weaves their love story together with many other threads, including Emilia’s musical ambitions, her relationship with wealthy Greek businessman and music patron Mr Pericles and her desire for Italy’s freedom from Austrian rule. Throughout the novel, Meredith’s ironic narrative voice subtly but unrelentingly criticizes mid-Victorian sentimentality and belief in civilized values.28 Emilia is a memorable and engaging protagonist, characterized on the one hand by disarming simplicity and innocence and on the other by uninhibited passion. She is an extremely talented and compelling musician who not only sings and plays both the harp and the organ but also composes her own music. When the Poles first hear her she is singing a ‘grand old Italian air’ by Alessandro Stradella (SB, 8), which she follows with ‘a different song from the last: it was not the sculptured music of the old school, but had the richness and fulness [sic] of passionate blood that marks the modern Italian, where there is much dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet anguish’ (9). The Poles’ companion, the music-loving Mr Pericles, does not recognize the song and asks what it is: ‘It is mine’, said the young person. ‘Your music, miss?’ ‘I mean, I composed it.’ … The ladies instantly petitioned to have it sung to them again; and whether or not they thought more of it, or less, now that the authorship was known to them, they were louder in their applause, which seemed to make the little person very happy. (10)

Meredith’s suggestion that her audience might not think so highly of the song when they know that it was created by the singer herself (rather than a well-known composer), is a telling comment on the ways in which audiences choose to value what they hear. His attack on sentimentality continues as he debunks the stereotypically romantic setting of this performance – a moonlit sandy mound under a dwarfed pine in a fir-wood – by contrasting, as he does throughout the novel, the Poles’ fanciful expectations with Emilia’s down-to-earth pragmatism: ‘But surely you feel an inspiration in the place, do you not?’ Cornelia persisted.

28 For scholarly discussion of Sandra Belloni, see Neil Roberts, Meredith and the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1997) 60–67, and Ioan Williams, ‘Emilia in England and Italy’ in Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971).

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[Emilia] looked at this lady as if she had got a hard word given her to crack, and muttered: ‘I feel it quite warm here … ’ (SB, 11)

Emilia plays in the forest because one of the family she is lodging with is ill and would be disturbed by her music. While totally and passionately dedicated to her music, living in it and for it, she is never less than practical about the realities of being a musician – from turning to teaching in order to earn a living through music to her acknowledgement of her need for further training. Through his depiction of Emilia’s attitude towards her art, Meredith makes some of his sharpest attacks on mid-Victorian assumptions about cultural values. Meredith once described Emilia as a ‘feminine musical genius’.29 Despite the undoubted power of her music and performances, all descriptions of her as a genius are qualified in some way. One of the novel’s other musicians, the ‘pathetically well-brushed’ church organist Purcell Barrett (SB, 47), is of the opinion that ‘if a genius, she was an incomplete one’ (338), while an early reviewer described her as ‘genius without culture’.30 These qualifications would seem to hinge on what Meredith depicts as the instinctive nature of her musicality which relates back to his own qualification – she is a woman and her genius can only be feminine, intuitive and spontaneous. Emilia is frustrated by words and expresses herself best through her music, particularly that which she creates herself. At one point she explains the inspiration behind the composition of the song she sang in the fir-wood. The words she used are irrelevant: ‘I got words to suit it as well as I could, from a penny paper, but they don’t mean anything that I mean, and they are only words’ (38). What she had wanted to convey was her passion for Italy’s fight against oppression, but she abandons her attempt to describe these emotions by saying: ‘How I spoil it! My words are always stupid, when I feel’ (39). Instead of words, Emilia feels through music. Sitting in the fir-wood when first troubled by one of Wilfrid’s disappearances, she comes ‘out of a musing fit to find that she had composed part of a minuet for the languid dancing motes in the shaft of golden light at her feet’ (136). Following a train journey after Wilfrid has betrayed her, ‘all of the journey that she bore in mind was the sight of a butcher-boy in blue, with a red cap, mounted on a white horse, who rode gallantly along a broad highroad, and for whom she had struck out some tune to suit the 29 Letter to Janet Duff Gordon (May 1861) quoted in David Williams, George Meredith: His Life and Lost Love (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977) 116. 30 Justin M’Carthy, ‘Novels with a Purpose’, Westminster Review 26 (July 1864), reprinted in Meredith: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971) 130.

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measure of his gallop’ (333). In all such passages, Emilia’s composition is almost involuntary, certainly not described as a conscious intellectual undertaking. She is consistently identified with nature, and not just through performing in a fir-wood. For example, in a discussion with Purcell Barrett about whether music lends itself more readily to sadness or happiness, his examples are of human artistic creations, while she counters with the joyful sounds of animals and birds (336). When describing her father telling stories about escaping from Austrian soldiers in Italy, Emilia clearly identifies music as something that imposes itself on her: I used to sit at my piano while he talked, and I made all his words go into music. One night I did it so well, my father jumped right up from his chair, shouting ‘Italia!’ and he caught his wig off his head, and threw it into the fire, and rushed out into the street quite bald, and people thought him mad … Do you know, I remember, though I was so young, that I felt the music – oh! like a devil in my bosom? Perhaps it was, and it passed out of me into him. (32)

The agency at the opening of this passage (‘I made … ’ and ‘I did it so well … ’) is negated by the description of music as an uninvited devil.31 The closest Emilia comes in the novel to purposefully sitting down to compose music is when she works with the Swinburnesque poet Tracy Runningbrook on an opera. Despite teasing each other and arguing about plots and whether words or music should take primacy, they are ‘perfectly serious about the production of an opera’ (181). Although Emilia’s creativity is depicted as more than the physical production of music through playing or singing, she herself is invariably the musician who performs her music. When the crisis point of the novel arrives and Emilia appears to be completely abandoned and rejected, she loses her voice and can no longer sing. This is depicted as a traumatic and devastating loss of self, although she still feels in music that, more than ever, she cannot control: The rumbling and the rattle of wheels; the cries and grinding noises; the hum of motion and talk; all under the lingering smoky red of a London Winter sunset, were not discord to her animated blood. Her unhunted spirit made a music of them. It was not like the music of other days, nor was the exultation it created at all like happiness: but at least she forgot herself … not that any clear thought filled her brain through that delirious night. The intoxicating music raged there at one level depression, never rising any scale, never undulating ever so little, scarcely changing its barbarous monotony of notes. She had no power over it. Her critical judgement would at

31 This identification of music with the devil is taken up later in the novel in Chapter 55 (‘The Tragedy of Sentiment’) which details Purcell Barrett’s relationship with music.

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another moment have shrieked at it. She was moved by it as by a mechanical force. (SB, 361–2)

Despite the fact that she is still creating music, Emilia’s loss of her voice signals the end of her musical career. She says to her friend Georgiana: ‘My voice is like a dead serpent in my throat. … My voice! I have forgotten music. I lived for that, once; now I live for nothing’ (SB, 408). Meredith cannot allow her a successful musical career through committing her music to paper and enabling it to be performed by others. Her body – that which most clearly identifies her as female – has betrayed her and without her body, her music becomes meaningless.32 Meredith is known to have based Emilia on Emilia Macirone (later Lady Hornby), a talented singer in whose mother’s house he lodged during the early 1850s.33 Little is known about Emilia Macirone although, unlike her fictional counterpart, she published at least one song, ‘The May Gift’.34 By the 1860s there were numerous British women who were publishing songs and piano pieces and plenty who were financially successful enough to support themselves.35 Despite Meredith’s unravelling of sentimental conventions, he does not seem to have thought of allowing his fictional Emilia such a mundane outlet for her genius. His Emilia is to a large extent presented as an improviser or improvisatrice. In its most basic definition the word improvisatrice simply means a female improviser, but by the nineteenth century it had acquired additional layers of meaning. An example of usage given in the Oxford English Dictionary, from William Tucker’s 1886 book Life and Society in Eastern Europe, demonstrates the sexual, predatory overtones accompanying the description of a woman who lets herself go in an extemporized performance: ‘The improvisatrice, the bewitching, supple siren stepped forward’.36 One of the most influential improvisatrices in 32 By the end of the novel, Emilia has found her voice again and leaves England to study in Italy. She reappears in Meredith’s later novel Vittoria (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866). 33 Williams, George Meredith, 29, 46. 34 Lady Emilia Bithynia Hornby, ‘The May Gift’ (Brighton, 1862). She also published In and around Stamboul, 2 vols (London, 1858). I have not been able to trace any connection between this Macirone family (there was another musical daughter Giulia) and the British composer Clara Angela Macirone (1821–1914). On Clara Macirone, see Fuller ‘Women Composers during the British Musical Renaissance’, 108–9. 35 For example, Claribel (1830–1869) or Virginia Gabriel (1825–1877). See Sophie Fuller, The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States, 1629–Present (London: Pandora, 1994) 86–8; 130–31. 36 William James Tucker, Life and Society in Eastern Europe (London: Sampson Low & Co., 1886) 338; quoted in ‘Improvisatrice’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, CDROM version 1.13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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nineteenth-century literature is the eponymous heroine of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807). Although she accompanies herself on a lyre, Corinne is essentially a poet and it is for her improvised words rather than her music that she was to wield influence in the literature of female creativity. An English translation of the novel was published in 1833 with ‘metrical versions of the odes’ provided by L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon, 1802–1838).37 Some ten years earlier Landon had written her own work about a female improviser, the long poem The Improvisatrice.38 Landon’s eponymous narrator is an artist, poet and musician whose genius is qualified by her femaleness: My power was but a woman’s power; Yet, in that great and glorious dower Which Genius gives, I had my part: I poured my full and burning heart In song, and on the canvass made My dreams of beauty visible; I knew not which I loved the most – Pencil or lute, – both loved so well.39

But, although music sounds throughout the poem, like Corinne, the narrator finds her primary form of expression in poetry. Ultimately, due in no small part to these two literary works, the image of the improvisatorice in nineteenth-century Britain was that of a woman extemporising in words rather than music. Yet improvisation has been an essential part of most musical cultures.40 In the Western art music tradition, improvisation has had a varied role to play throughout the centuries. It formed a significant part of performance practice in the eighteenth century, but, as John Rink has explained, after ‘a meteoric rise’ in popularity in the early nineteenth century (when almost every pianist in Europe would feel obliged to include at least one improvised piece of music in his or her public performances), it suffered ‘near-extinction post-1840’.41 Certainly 37 Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807); Corinne: or, Italy, translated expressly for this edition by Isabel Hill; with metrical versions of the odes by L. E. Landon; and a memoir of the authoress (London: Richard Bentley, 1833). 38 The poem first appeared in The Improvisatrice: and Other Poems (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1824). For a fascinating discussion of L. E. L.’s work and its relationship to the Victorian idea of Sappho, see Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) especially 191–209. 39 ‘Letitia Elizabeth Landon’, http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/landon/imp/improvi.htm (accessed 31 August 2002). 40 For a useful introduction to improvisation world-wide, see In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl with Melinda Russell (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999). 41 John Rink, ‘Improvisation, II. Western Art Music, 5. The Nineteenth Century, i.

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reviews of improvised performances in the concert hall are very rare in late nineteenth-century Britain. I have come across just two examples of entirely improvised piano recitals noted in the press of this time and it is perhaps significant that both the pianists were women. There are many ways to explain a possible embracing by women of improvisation once it had fallen from favour with the mainstream musical world. Spontaneity has long been regarded as a female attribute. Maybe, faced with the laborious complexity of the notated musical work, women felt that their talents lay in the spontaneous outpourings that so many commentators assumed were better suited to their limited capabilities. Ellen Peel has argued that de Staël ‘links feminist values to immediacy’ and points out that immediacy finds no better outlet than in Corinne’s improvised performances.42 Was this association perhaps taken up by performers and their audiences in the later nineteenth century? In the age of the new woman was immediacy a defiantly different quality to contrast with the more acceptable process of academic composition? On the other hand, did women perhaps feel a more urgent need to prove that their creative abilities were indeed their own through public demonstrations of their compositional prowess? This seems likely to have been the case in a piano recital given by composer and pianist Marie Wurm (1860–1938) in 1895 at the small Queen’s Hall, London, for which she improvised the entire programme (including a four-part fugue and a four-movement sonata) on themes given to her by an audience including the eminent establishment figures Frederick Bridge and J. A. Fuller Maitland.43 Just over ten years previously, another woman had set out to establish herself as an improvising pianist. On 4 December 1884, in a drawing room in London’s Harley Street, an audience including Algernon Swinburne, Theodore Watts-Dunton and the American ambassador sat Instrumental Music’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, Macmillan, 2001) vol. 12: 117–21. For discussion of the early nineteenth-century piano tradition see Valerie Goertzen Woodring, ‘By Way of Introduction: Preluding by Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Pianists’, The Journal of Musicology 14/3 (1996) 299–337. 42 Ellen Peel, ‘Corinne’s Shift to Patriarchal Mediation: Rebirth or Regression?’ in Germaine de Staël: Crossing Borders, ed. Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger and Karyna Szmurlo (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991) 102. 43 See The Musical Times 36 (1895) 187 and The Monthly Musical Record (March 1895) 65. Wurm was already highly regarded as a composer of notated music. A reviewer of a piano recital, including her own compositions, that she gave in Leipzig in 1886, wrote: ‘Her compositions show her to be possessed of the gift of invention, and great cleverness in the use of form. We have reason, therefore, for stating and believing that she is one of the most talented lady composers now living;’ The Monthly Musical Record (January 1887) 8.

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down to ‘Signorina Marie Corelli’s Pianoforte Improvisation’.44 Although this concert was well received and she followed it with others in London and Edinburgh, Corelli’s career as a pianist was short-lived and she soon turned to writing and publishing best-selling novels. The first of these was A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), an extraordinary supernatural story of spirituality, Chaldean magic and electrical power.45 The nameless heroine and narrator is a successful professional improvising pianist ‘with the prospect of a brilliant career’ (RTW, 8) who has burnt herself out with overwork. The musical talent that has led to her breakdown plays a specific part in her illness: It was at night that the terrors of my condition manifested themselves. Then sleep forsook my eyes; a dull throbbing weight of pain encircled my head like a crown of thorns; nervous terrors shook me from head to foot; fragments of my own musical compositions hummed in my ears with wearying persistence – fragments that always left me in a state of distressed conjecture; for I never could remember how they ended, and I puzzled myself vainly over crotchets and quavers that never would consent to arrange themselves in any sort of finale. (7–8)

Is the narrator perhaps, like Sheppard’s Maria Cerenthia, being punished with illness for daring to strive for public success and greatness? Her search for healing leads her to the Chaldean mystic Heliobas who has found in the power of electricity a potential cure not just for individuals but even for the sicknesses of modern society. Corelli is at pains not to minimize the achievements of the improviser. The narrator explains that people do not know what is meant by improvising. They think it is to take a little theme and compose variations on it – the mere A B C of the art. But to sit down to the piano, and plan a whole sonata or symphony in your head, and play it while planning it, is a thing they do not and will not understand. (RTW, 84)

But at the same time, Corelli minimizes the narrator’s own agency in her art. Heliobas says to her: ‘You compose the music as you play, you tell me. Well, have you any idea how the melodies form themselves in your brain?’ ‘Not the least in the world’, I replied. ‘Is the act of thinking them out an effort to you?’ he asked.

44 Brian Masters, Now Barabbas was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of Marie Corelli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978) 48. 45 Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), 18th edn (London: Methuen,1898) [hereafter RTW]. For further discussion of this novel, see the chapter in this volume by Charlotte Purkis.

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‘Not at all. They come as though some one else were planning them for me.’ (85)

The narrator’s lack of agency is intensified once she has travelled (by means of electricity) to the spirit world where she meets the genderless angel Aeon who promises her that on her return to earth she will ‘possess the secret of unwritten sound’ (191). Her improvisations do indeed become more powerful and beautiful but they are more than ever depicted as originating from outside herself. The insignificance of the individual artist’s agency or will, whether the artist is female or male, is in fact one of the central themes of the book. Heliobas tell the narrators: As far as the arts go, it is a bad sign of poet, painter, or musician, who is arrogant enough to call his work his own. It never was, and never will be. It is planned by a higher intelligence than his, only he happens to be the hired labourer chosen to carry out the conception. (135)

It is interesting however that Corelli makes the two central creative characters in the novel, the narrator and Heliobas’s sister Zara who is a sculptor, both women. While in theory the agency of all artists is called into question, in the course of the novel it is specifically the agency of these two women that is deemed unimportant. While momentarily claiming greatness as a possibility for women, the narrator has unambiguous ideas about their limitations: Even weak women are capable of greatness; and if we do sometimes dream of what we cannot accomplish through lack of the physical force necessary for large achievements, that is not our fault but our misfortune. … We did not ask to be born with over-sensitiveness, the fatal delicacy, the highly-strung nervousness of the feminine nature. (82)

Her focus on women’s weakness echoes that of Sheppard’s Maria Cerinthia. But such ideas also echo Corelli’s own thoughts on women and music, as they were even more forcefully expressed over 20 years later in her pamphlet ‘Woman or – Suffragette’. Here Corelli categorically denies women the possibility of greatness, relegating them to the time-honoured, subservient position of muse: I take the creative gift of Music as a special test of the contrasted capabilities of man’s brain and woman’s, and I find that in that particular sphere of art … woman, apparently, is not meant to shine, except as the ‘light behind’ which illumines the whole. … [Woman] always lacks the grand self-control which is the inward power of the Great musician. She was born to be a creature of sweet impulses – of love – of coquetry – of tenderness – of persuasiveness – and these things, instilled by the unconscious grace and beauty of

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her natural ways into the spirit of man, are no doubt the true origin of music itself – music which she inspires, but cannot create.46

Corelli’s views on women are in many ways confusing and contradictory. Literary scholars have long debated her apparent antifeminism. Annette R. Federico, for example, claims that her novels ‘both embody and resist the search for a particularly feminine aesthetic in the decades before the twentieth century’ and points out that Most of Corelli’s novels focus on women, and they all contain some social commentary about gender equality or proud assertions about woman’s special nature. Corelli’s anger at social injustice is often combined with a transparent desire to romanticize women, to redefine the feminine by evoking women’s physical beauty and spiritual and intellectual independence.47

But despite the narrator’s undoubted spiritual and intellectual independence and her claims for the artistic integrity of improvisation, it is hard to ignore the way in which she becomes little more than the vessel through which the music of a higher being can pass. There was clearly a market for Corelli’s view of female creativity. A Romance of Two Worlds sold extremely well and, like Sheppard’s Charles Auchester, obviously struck a chord with its readers, many, if not most, of whom were undoubtedly women. Corelli presents a view of musical creativity that, in its strong association of music with spirituality, is even more extremely romanticized than that of Sheppard. Although her insistence on the lack of agency in art could be read as a subtle debunking of the concept of the great artist, that her central creative character is a woman brings the question of female creativity to the fore and, despite the narrator’s moments of belief in her own powers, Corelli sends her readers a strikingly negative message. The novel opens with the narrator made ill by the transgressive act of embarking on a professional creative career,48 while her agency and her belief in that agency are gradually diminished as she spiritually awakens. This lack of agency is only intensified by the fact that she is given no name, usually an essential part of establishing an identity as an artist. In contrast to the romanticized way in which Meredith’s and Corelli’s characters create music, the composers of novelists E. F. Benson and John Galsworthy have their feet firmly rooted in the practicalities of a composer’s life and are not necessarily associated with performances of 46

Quoted in ‘Woman and Music’, Musical News (4 May 1907) 443–4. Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000) 93, 94. 48 Zara’s punishment is even more dramatic – she is struck dead by lightening (RTW, 273). 47

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their own music. Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906), the first novel of the ever popular Forsyte Saga, is set in the 1880s and launches the story of the philistine, arriviste Forsyte dynasty.49 One of the members of this family, Francie Forsyte, is a successful composer of popular songs and waltzes.50 While not given to spontaneous outpourings, she is definitely not depicted as a ‘great’ composer but takes on the other accepted role of the ‘woman composer’, creating financially successful and undemanding domestic music, particularly the much-derided drawing-room ballad.51 The Forsytes are proud of her ability to make money and Francie’s ultimate failure as a creative artist is highlighted as Galsworthy, with his deft satirical touch, describes her family’s reaction to her attempts to write ‘great’ music: Once, at a time when emotions were whipped by an attachment – for the tenor of Roger’s life, with its whole-hearted collection of house-property, has induced in his only daughter a tendency towards passion – she turned to great and sincere work, choosing the sonata form, for the violin. This was the only one of her productions which troubled the Forsytes. They felt at once that it would not sell. (MP, 165)

Benson’s composer, the redoubtable Edith Staines, has a very different kind of musical career from that of Francie Forsyte. Edith, as she is portrayed in the first of the Dodo trilogy, Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893), is a highly successful composer, creating large-scale compositions (such as symphonies and masses) that are given prestigious public performances at important venues.52 The novel was a satirical portrayal of the British upper classes, so popular that it had reached a 12th edition just a year after publication. Edith and her music are not 49 John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906), vol. 1 of The Forsyte Saga; ed. Geoffrey Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) [hereafter MP]. 50 I am very grateful to Regula Hohl for first bringing Francie Forsyte to my attention. 51 In A Romance of Two Worlds the character Prince Ivan remarks: ‘The songs that suit modern drawing-rooms and concert-halls, as a rule, are those that are full of sham sentiment – a real, strong, throbbing heart pulsing through a song is too trying for lackadaisical society.’ (RTW, 144). Ironically, the words to the song that he himself has just sung in the novel were set to music by Frances Allitsen (1848-1912), one of Britain’s leading composers of ballads, as the highly successful ‘Prince Ivan’s Song’ in Six Songs (London: Ascherberg, 1889). 52 E. F. Benson, Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893), 11th edn (London: Methuen, 1894) [hereafter DDD]. In this chapter I am only considering the first volume of the trilogy. This was followed by Dodo the Second (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914) and Dodo Wonders (London: Hutchinson, 1921). All three novels were published together as Dodo, An Omnibus (The Hogarth Press, 1986). Edith Staines reappears in the later novels but they move beyond the period under consideration in this chapter.

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romanticized in any way. Her self-confidence is striking and she lets nothing get in the way of her art: ‘I can’t waste another moment’, said Edith. ‘I’m in the middle of the most entrancing motif, which is working out beautifully … Come and hear me play the scherzo later on. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.’ (DDD, 87) Edith was really in earnest whatever she did, whether it was shooting, or music, or playing lawn-tennis. Frivolity was the one charge she could not brook for a moment. (111)

As can only be expected from a satirical novel, Edith is often a figure of fun. Her demands and single-mindedness are the basis of numerous comic moments. In a characteristic passage, she is trying to compose and breakfast at the same time and appears in Dodo’s dining-room holding a plate of poached eggs and a quire of manuscript paper: ‘Dear Dodo’, she went on, ‘you know when I’m composing a symphony I want something more exciting than two poached eggs. … They might do very well for a funeral march or a nocturne, but they won’t do for a symphony, especially for the scherzo. A brandyand-soda and a grilled bone is what one really wants for a scherzo.’ (86)

It might seem that Benson is undermining Edith’s professional achievements by his descriptions of her behaviour and character. But in fact Edith is one of the most rounded and compelling characters in the novel. She shows considerable integrity and goes to great lengths to look after the flighty heroine Dodo. Her engagement with music, whether her own or that of others, is always entirely serious, as shown in a description of her at a performance of the opera Faust: She had before her a large quarto containing the full score, and she had a pencil in her hand with which she entered little corrections, and now and then she made comments to herself. ‘I shall tell Mancinelli of that’, she murmured. ‘The whole point of the motif is that rapid run with the minim at the end, and he actually allowed that beast to make a rallentando.’ (190)

Benson also makes Edith articulate about her position as a composer. She puts forward her own artistic credo as she explains the apparent gulf between her behaviour and the depth of feeling in her works, in response to Dodo’s accusation that she is ‘a jumble of opposites’: ‘Oh everyone’s a jumble of opposites’, said Edith, ‘when you come to look at them. It’s only because my opposites are superficial that you notice them. A Sanctus is only a form of expression for thoughts which everyone has, even though their tastes appear to lie in the music-hall line; and music is an intelligible way of expressing those thoughts … Just because I don’t believe that grilled bones are

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necessarily inconsistent with deep religious feeling, you assume that I haven’t got the feeling.’ (94)

What is more, Benson allows Edith’s music a power (described in thoroughly masculine metaphors) that is unequalled by anything else in the novel, not least in its effect on the otherwise entirely self-obsessed heroine, Dodo: Edith’s music was strongly exciting … Dodo went to the door and opened it softly, and a great tangle of melody poured out and filled the hall. She was playing the last few pages of the overture to an opera that she had nearly completed. The music was gathering itself up for the finale. Note after note was caught up, as it were, to join an army of triumphant melody overhead, which grew fuller and more complete every moment, and seemed to hover waiting for some fulfilment. Ah, that was it. Suddenly from below crashed out a great kingly motif, strong with the strength of a man who is pure and true, rising higher and higher till it joined in the triumph overhead, and moved away, strong to the end. There was a dead silence; Dodo was standing by the door with her lips slightly parted, feeling that there was something in this world better and bigger, perhaps, than her own little hair-splittings and small emotions. (133–4)

Benson modelled Edith on the composer Ethel Smyth. Smyth was apparently flattered, claiming that Staines was the ‘one decent character in the book’.53 As was the case with Meredith and the character of Emilia, it seems that the example of a concrete female musician inspired Benson to create a character with distinctive and acknowledged musical talents, even if she is too ridiculous to be regarded as a great composer. So far, I have discussed women composers who are punished for the transgressive act of creating music by dying or losing their music (Maria Cerinithia and Emilia Belloni), who are portrayed as having little or no power over their own musical gifts (Emilia again, Cecilia Dudleigh and the narrator of A Romance of Two Worlds), or are presented as figures of fun (Francie Forsyte and Edith Staines). The heroine of Mona Caird’s novel The Daughters of Danaus, composer Hadria Fullerton, is another woman whose transgressive acts of musical creativity ultimately lead to failure (although not in this case to illness, death or ridicule).54 But what makes The Daughters of Danaus stand out from the other novels discussed is Caird’s relentless and clear-sighted analysis of exactly why it is impossible for Hadria to become a great composer. 53

Ethel Smyth, As Time Went On … (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1936) 26. Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus (1894), with afterword by Margaret Morganroth Gullette (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989) [hereafter DD]. 54

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By 1894, when The Daughters of Danaus, her fourth novel, was published, Mona Caird was notorious as a radical feminist and who had argued in a widely-read article that the institution of marriage was one of the chief obstacles to women’s freedom and self-expression.55 Although little remembered or read today, The Daughters of Danaus is a vivid example of the ‘new woman’ fiction that was to become such a feature of fin-de-siècle British writing.56 The central theme of Caird’s novel is presented in the opening chapter, when Hadria and her brothers and sister debate Emerson’s view that ‘man makes his circumstance’ (DD, 8). Hadria prophetically argues that there are circumstances in which a great artistic power can be prevented from ‘developing and displaying itself, so as to meet with general recognition’ (11), although in her heart she agrees with her siblings that ‘the will can perform astonishing feats in Fate’s despite’ (17). Over the course of the novel Hadria’s own will, her determination to work as a composer and develop her undoubted musical talent, is with grinding inevitability overwhelmed by what Caird herself described as ‘the forces of tradition and prejudice’.57 The Fullerton family belong to the well-to-do, genteel middle classes. When her sister Algitha moves to London to engage in charitable work, the self-confident and determined Hadria is left behind as her mother’s ‘consolation’ (DD, 44). Her creative work is not taken seriously by those around her and her time and energy are swallowed up by an endless round of social duties, leaving her to compose at night. Acting against all her own insights and beliefs, Hadria eventually accepts the marriage proposal of ‘a brother in Beethoven’ (87), amateur cellist Hubert Temperley, and has two children by him. Despite the perpetual exhaustion of housekeeping and motherhood, she refuses to be resigned or to give up her art, proud that ‘for all their training and constraining and incitement and starvation, I have not developed masses of treacly instinct in which mind and will and every human faculty struggle, in vain, to move leg or wing, like some poor fly doomed to a sweet and sticky death’ (210). Eventually Hadria takes the bold step of leaving husband and children to go and study at the School of Music in Paris, where she is told by the composer Jouffroy: ‘If Madame has a character as strong as

55

Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review 130/2 (1888) 186–220. Two of the best known examples of new woman fiction are Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (1895; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (1893), ed. C. A. Senf (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992). For discussion of The Heavenly Twins see the chapter by Charlotte Purkis in this volume. 57 Quoted in Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Afterword to DD, 510. 56

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her genius, her name will one day be on the lips of all the world’ (317). But the web of tradition and family is still ever present. Her father’s company fails, her mother becomes dangerously ill and Hadria, of course, bound by conscience and loyalty, returns home. She now knows that, without her freedom, she cannot and will not be able to continue composing. One day she rediscovers Futility, one of her old piano pieces: It expressed with great exactness the feelings that overwhelmed her now, whenever she let her imagination dwell upon the lives of women, of whatever class and whatever kind. Futility! The mournful composition, with its strange modern character, its suggestion of striving and confusion and pain, expressed as only music could express, the yearning and the sadness that burden so many a woman’s heart to-day. She knew that the music was good, and that now she could compose music infinitely better. The sharpness of longing for her lost art cut through her. She half turned from the piano and then went back, as a moth to the flame. (466–7)

By the end of the novel Hadria has failed to break through the web that binds her. Yet the reader is left with a devastatingly clear analysis of why she has failed. Both Hadria and Caird are articulate and angry about the impossible situation of a woman who is trying to develop an artistic career. After her disastrous marriage Hadria describes her ‘whole being … burning up with this bitter, this sickening and futile hatred!’ (168). Caird, as narrator, uses even more graphic terms: ‘They had put scars on her soul, as deep and ghastly as ever red-hot irons had marked tortured flesh’ (297). Perhaps most radical is Hadria’s insight into motherhood. In one memorable passage she describes it as the sign and seal as well as the means and method of a woman’s bondage. It forges chains of her own flesh and blood; it weaves cords of her own love and instinct. … A woman with a child in her arms is, to me, the symbol of an abasement, an indignity, more complete, more disfiguring and terrible, than any form of humiliation that the world has ever seen. (341)

But despite the apparently inevitable tragedy of Hadria’s story, Caird clearly conveys her belief that through the sacrificial failures of Hadria and her contemporaries there is hope for other women in the future. Hadria describes a dream she has of a vast abyss, black and silent, which had to be filled up to the top with the bodies of women, hurled down to the depths of the pit of darkness, in order that the survivors might, at last, walk over in safety. Human bodies take but little room, and the abyss seemed to swallow them, as some greedy animal its prey. But Hadria knew, in her dream, that some day it would have claimed its last victim, and the surface would be level and solid, so that people would come and

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go, scarcely remembering that beneath their feet was once a chasm into which throbbing lives had to descend, to darkness and a living death. (451)

The Daughters of Danaus is a gripping novel and the articulate and ultimately life-affirming Hadria is a commanding character. Music fills her life with a force that she is powerless to resist, although her own agency when composing is never called into doubt. Like Emilia in Sandra Belloni, Hadria finds music all around her. As she travels by train to Paris (and to her brief spell of freedom): ‘The rattle and roar grew into a symphony – full, rich, magnificent, and then, with a rush, came a stirring musical conception: it seized the imagination’ (295). She acknowledges that she has ‘a maniacal passion for music’ (87), and it is always under the influence of music that she acts against her better judgement: accepting Hubert’s marriage proposal or embarking on a flirtatious affair. The music that Hadria creates is depicted as radically individual and modern. Hubert shows conventional good taste in music and is painfully shocked by her ‘bizarre compositions’ (166). When she is in Paris, her music is regarded as too eccentric to be published, something which leads her into financial difficulties. It is described by the composer Jouffroy as ‘rebel music, offensive to the orthodox’ (321). In one memorable scene, the supportive Professor Fortescue, who believes that she has ‘real musical genius of the first order’ (267), listens to Hadria playing her own music: The wild power of the composer was not merely obvious, it was overwhelming … Loneliness remained as an ever-abiding quality. There were moon-glimpses and sun-bursts over the scenery of the music; there was sweetness, and a vernal touch that thrilled the listeners as with the breath of flowers and the fragrance of the earth after rain, but always, behind all fancy and grace and tenderness, and even passion, lurked that spectral loneliness. The performer would cease for some minutes, and presently begin again in a new mood. The music was always characteristic, often wild and strange, yet essentially sane. (266)

Hadria’s music, such as the possibly improvised work described above or the piano piece Futility, is shown as representing the facets and complexity of her own character and predicament. Caird clearly implies that Hadria composes such different and commanding music precisely because of her situation as a woman, the situation that will paradoxically mean that she can no longer compose. Even more than Maria Cerinthia or Emilia Belloni, Hadria is first and foremost a composer, rather than a performer. Although there are scenes where Hadria plays her own music, Caird is careful to describe

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manuscript scores as well as long hours of study and hard work. Hadria writes works for piano but also for much larger forces – an oratorio she is working on, for example, becomes a source of tension when she has been too involved with it to provide what Hubert regards as an adequate lunch (161). Like most of the people who surround her, Hubert’s unpleasant sister, Henriette, misunderstands Hadria’s chosen form of musicality, telling her when they meet: ‘You play charmingly. So much native talent. You want good training, of course; but you really might become a brilliant performer’ (119). It seems particularly ironic that a leading feminist literary scholar, writing in the late twentieth century, should likewise misunderstand Hadria’s distinctive talent, describing her as longing ‘to become a concert singer’.58 Although several scholars of ‘new woman’ fiction discuss or at least mention The Daughters of Danaus, none explores Caird’s unusual choice of creative artistry for her heroine or examine the remarkable power of Hadria’s music in all its radical self-expressiveness.59 Without paying attention to these aspects of the novel, the full force of its ruthless analysis of the impact of marriage and motherhood on female creativity cannot be fully understood. Most of the novels I have discussed present the reader with powerful and memorable creative women, all of whom work within the professional musical world: the tragic ‘evil elf’ Maria Cerinthia with her driven determination to create a great symphony; the melancholic Cecilia Dudleigh who creates music that holds others ‘fast in its undulating spell’ (C, 2: 200); the strikingly individual and multi-talented Emilia Belloni; the strangely passionate nameless narrator of A Romance of Two Worlds; the self-confident and entirely successful Edith Staines and the articulate, driven Hadria Fullerton. The music they are portrayed as creating is equally powerful, whether judged by the reactions of other characters or by descriptions of the music itself. But the positions of these fictional women composers are in many ways as contradictory as the positions of the real life women who were their contemporaries. Composers such as Rosalind Ellicott, Ethel Smyth or Maude Valérie White created music that was critically acclaimed and 58 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991) 67. At no point in the novel is Hadria depicted as singing, although it is, of course, through their voices that women have been most easily accepted into the history of Western art music. 59 See, for example, Lyn Pykett, ‘The Cause of Women and the Course of Fiction: The Case of Mona Caird’ in Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Christopher Parker (Aldershot: Scholar, 1995) 128–42, or Ann Heilman, ‘Mona Caird (1854–1932): Wild Woman, New Woman, and Early Radical Feminist Critic of Marriage and Motherhood’, Women's History Review 5/1 (1996) 67–95.

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given high-profile performances, but if they turned to the latest music journal they would find themselves reading that, as women, they were deemed incapable of producing work of lasting value or importance. Nor would they have found a different message in contemporary fiction which, in sometimes subtle ways, reinforced the belief that women’s musical creativity is necessarily limited. Maria Cerinthia, in the earliest of the novels discussed, is very aware that by believing she has it in her to write a great symphony, she is stepping outside the role ascribed to her as a talented female musician. This does not distract from the power of the work she creates but Sheppard can not allow her (or her work) to survive such a transgressive act. While Cecilia Dudleigh survives her one act of composition, she does not create again and is unable to claim the work as her own. Emilia Belloni’s musical talents are acknowledged by all but, despite Meredith’s impressive creation of a character totally immersed in music, she is all spontaneity and impulse, not credited with the ability to work with conscious artistic deliberation. Corelli’s nameless narrator takes such lack of agency a step further. Her dreams of professionalism and success are gradually destroyed as she is made to realize that they are a mere distraction from matters of a higher spiritual importance. Benson’s Edith Staines comes closest to approaching the kind of greatness achieved by the male composers, Owen Jack and Claude Heath, in Hichens’s and Shaw’s novels. She has integrity and determination, creating individual and challenging music that moves her listeners. Nevertheless, the satirical humour in Benson’s portrayal detracts from the possibility of Edith being recognized as a great artist.60 Although she takes herself seriously, most of the other characters in the novel, and therefore the reader, do not. Francie Forsyte is a minor character but an interesting reflection of one particular role that the British woman composer was expected to play by the end of the nineteenth century – that of bestselling creator of light, insignificant music. While in their depictions of creative musical women Sheppard, Meredith, Corelli, Benson and Galsworthy do, to a certain extent, start to challenge the Victorian idea that women are unable to ‘compose the music of the world’ (in the words of the journalist quoted at the opening of this chapter), ultimately they reinforce the status quo. Caird’s novel is

60 The masculinization of Staines foreshadows depictions of lesbian composers in later novels such as Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), and Compton Mackenzie, Extraordinary Women (London: Martin Secker, 1928). It is worth noting that I have not been able to find a twentieth-century British novel whose central character is a female composer until Bernard Mac Laverty, Grace Notes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997).

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different. Like the other composers Hadria Fullerton is portrayed as having the potential for greatness, but in contrast to the others, her failure to become a great composer turns out to be the main focus of the novel. And what is most significant is that both Caird and Hadria explore the reasons for this failure in thorough and illuminating detail, explaining with brutal clarity the social forces that militate against women realising their full creative potential. At one point Hadria is encouraged to find consolation in books, but she retorts: ‘I am oppressed by a sense of the discrepancy between the world that books disclose to me, and the world that I myself inhabit’ (112). Nevertheless, for at least one possible reader the world disclosed by The Daughters of Danaus may have acted not only as a mirror but also as a spur to action. In 1898, just four years after the novel’s publication, Adela Maddison (1866–1929), like Hadria, left her husband and children to move to Paris, study music and further her career as a composer. Unlike Hadria, Maddison did achieve a successful professional career, creating an impressive series of theatre works, chamber music and songs that were performed throughout Britain and Europe.61 While, as Hadria reminds the reader, literature does not necessarily provide an accurate picture of contemporary life nor evidence for a music historian, it can and often does reflect with compelling clarity the way in which images and ideas are reinforced or challenged in particular cultures and societies. And what is more, it can also, as Mona Caird doubtless hoped, act as an agent for change. The depictions of the creative female musicians who inhabit the novels discussed in this chapter help us to understand why the idea of the ‘great woman composer’ was unthinkable for most Victorians. But at the same time, the musical power created for Maria, Cecilia, Emilia, Edith or Hadria suggests to the reader just what such a figure would or could be.

61 For further details of Maddison’s career, see Sophie Fuller, ‘ “Devoted attention”: Looking for Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-siècle Britain’ in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002) 85–7.

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Music, crowd control and the female performer in Trilby Phyllis Weliver From the conductors on trains and tramcars to the conductors of orchestras, the ability to manage and transport groups, both physically and emotionally, was a significant development in Victorian Britain.1 Politicians were especially concerned with managing the people. On the one hand, they feared the mob whose power had so recently been proven in revolutionary France, especially as popular movements like Chartism led to huge social and legal changes at home. On the other hand, politicians wanted to harness the power of united groups for their own causes. Indeed, a charismatic leader might provide a point around which an ever-increasingly diverse country and empire could organize into a homogenous unit. Uniting a group of people was also important to performances in concert halls and opera houses; providing programme notes, opening certain rehearsals to the public, score study, and limiting the distractions of late arrivals and early departures encouraged audiences to focus collectively on the music instead of socializing with each other.2 The process was gradual and not always successful, as seen in periodical articles that labelled the unruly behaviour of audiences as ‘depraved’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘evil’,3 terms also used to describe mobs. In

1 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 320. 2 See Christina Bashford, ‘Learning to Listen: Audiences for Chamber Music in EarlyVictorian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (1999) 25–51; Jennifer L. Hall-Witt, ‘Representing the Audience in the Age of Reform: Critics and the Elite at the Italian Opera in London’ in Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, ed. Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 121–44; [Unsigned], ‘The Education of Audiences’, The Musical Times 3 (1848) 79; Charles W. Pearce, ‘On Listening to Music’, Proceedings of the Musical Association 19 (1892–3) 65. 3 [Letter (unsigned)], The Tonic Sol-fa Reporter (January 1865) 4; [Unsigned], ‘English Audiences’, The Musical Times 26 (1885) 527; [Unsigned], ‘Audience Conversation During Concerts’, The Musical Times 22 (1881) 566.

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George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby, the prima donna’s ability to co-ordinate the audience demonstrates further links between audience behaviour and Victorian crowd theory.4 The diva uses her musical influence to change social attitudes: as ‘fallen woman’, she moves from being ostracized by traditional Victorian society to being embraced and celebrated.5 In part, my argument rests on the novel’s position against aestheticism, a movement whose affectations Du Maurier famously ridiculed in his Punch illustrations of the 1870s and 1880s.6 While Trilby as an anti-aesthetic novel has already been discussed by Jonathan H. Grossman and Dennis Denisoff,7 what has been overlooked is how music helps to rip away social pretence in the novel. Instead of existing only for themselves (as summed up by the aesthetic phrase ‘art for art’s sake’), the diva’s songs are given concrete meaning that has a specific social agenda and that audiences palpably, sympathetically experience in the same way that nineteenth-century crowd psychologists understood the workings of collective behaviour. Just as crowds were seen as instruments of civic upheaval in the nineteenth century, in Trilby it is the collective condition that tears away the intellectual posturing of fashionable society and replaces it with a genuine humanity that embraces the fallen woman.

Mobs, managed groups and musical audiences To understand collective behaviour in Victorian Britain, a consideration of the French revolutionary mob is necessary, not only because it was a type of group activity, but also because other attempts to co-ordinate masses of people were often predicated on avoiding the disorder and perceived bestiality of the mob, replacing it instead with units of people working harmoniously together. Witnessing social upheaval caused by the rioting masses just across the channel had an effect on nineteenth4 George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894), ed. Leonée Ormond, in Everyman series (London: J. M. Dent, 1994) [hereafter Trilby]. For further discussion of Trilby, see the chapters by Irene Morra and Jonathan Taylor. 5 A woman’s ability to lead crowds may have to do with suggestibility being gendered as female in Victorian Britain. See Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 89–98. 6 Leonée Ormond, George Du Maurier (London: Routledge, 1969) 248. 7 See Jonathan H. Grossman, ‘The Mythic Svengali: Anti-Aestheticism in Trilby’, Studies in the Novel 28 (1996) 525–41; Dennis Denisoff, ‘ “Men of My Own Sex”: Genius, Sexuality, and George Du Maurier’s Artists’ in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 147–69. For an argument against the idea of the novel as anti-aesthetic, see Elaine Showalter, Introduction to George Du Maurier, Trilby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) xviii.

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century Britain that cannot be underestimated. As Geoffrey Pearson reports, ‘As late as February 1886 London placed itself on a state of alert to meet revolutionary mob violence: … and the tension reached another climax in the autumn of the following year’.8 In Victorian England, the upper classes perceived the mob as consisting of ‘paupers’, ‘dangerous classes’ and ‘vagabonds’, to use the nineteenth-century terms.9 Such derogatory perceptions were most likely indicators of middle- and upper-class desires to keep lower classes at a safe distance rather than accurate reflections of reality, since George Rudé, E. P. and Dorothy Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm have demonstrated that crowds were actually made up of ‘craftsmen, shopkeepers, and wageearners’ who were motivated by complex desires and a legitimate need for social change.10 Of course, there were also many positive descriptions of labourers whose upright activities and pious beliefs followed middleand upper-class notions of proper behaviour. However, these honest workers might also be contaminated by the ‘dangerous’ poor, or by those who were perceived to be sexually corrupt or religiously negligent.11 Indeed, the masses were positively feared because theories of mental and evolutionary science seemed to provide scientific proof of the degenerative state of collective behaviour and the moral infections that could spread within crowds. What I have been discussing thus far is an historical understanding of the crowd, but it is important to understand that these notions dislodge an ahistorical perception of the crowd that occurred in fin-de-siècle 8 Geoffrey Pearson, The Deviant Imagination: Psychiatry, Social Work and Social Change (London: MacMillan, 1975) 159. For the crowd in Victorian novels, see Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849); Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845); George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). See also John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 9 Pearson, The Deviant Imagination, 148, 151. 10 David Craig, ‘The Crowd in Dickens’ in The Changing World of Charles Dickens, ed. Robert Giddings (London: Vision, 1983) 82; Pearson, The Deviant Imagination, 175; George Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in Popular Protest (London: Collins, 1970) 131–32; Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964) 195–9. E. P. and Dorothy Thompson share Rudé’s orientation toward establishing the legitimacy of working-class crowds, and along with Eric Hobsbawm and Charles Tilly focus on politically-oriented crowds. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962); Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1984); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963); Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Plotz, The Crowd, 3–4. 11 Pearson, The Deviant Imagination, 155, 164.

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Europe and that sparked explanations of crowd behaviour that have continued to the present day in sociological and psychological studies.12 Understanding these physiological and psychological theories is necessary to interpreting the diva’s performance in Trilby. The seminal text in this mode of crowd study, La psychologie des foules (1895), is by the French writer, Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931),13 and grew out of the work of Thomas Carlyle, Hippolyte Taine, Gabriel Tarde, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, among others. Not only did Le Bon’s straightforward concepts and easy-to-follow style earn it a large popular audience at the time, but it also became one of the central texts for subsequent collective psychologists.14 Le Bon’s conclusions are important for my analysis of Trilby: even though Du Maurier’s novel appeared a year before La psychologie des foules, Le Bon’s text mixes systems of knowledge drawn from English scientists with considerations of the French crowd, making the work especially appropriate for elucidating a novel written in English by a Frenchman and set in Paris and England. His theories are also relevant because, although Trilby is set in the 1850s and 1860s, the novel is generally seen to have qualities of the 1890s, when it was written.15 More than a chance gathering of disparate people, Le Bon believed that the crowd has a psychological component since it consists of people who present new characteristics that were ‘very different from the individuals composing it’ (PF, 2). This ‘collective mind’, or the new ‘single being’, is formed by unconscious elements. Indeed, to Le Bon crowds are always unconscious, a notion that he directly opposes to the conscious mind and to reason since, in line with evolutionary scientists, he believed reason to be recent in human development, making unconscious elements the lowest common denominator shared by all human beings. In short, human beings seem most like one another in their unconscious states of being, while conscious elements individuate people, resulting as they do from factors such as education.16 Important for ideas about the ‘collective mind’ are William B. Carpenter’s 12 Plotz identifies the major figures of each movement. Sociological: Robert Park, Neil Smelser, Serge Moscovici, Erving Goffman. Psychological: Boris Sidis, Sigmund Freud. ‘Socio-philosophical’ (Plotz’s term): Elias Canetti, Hermann Broch, Bill Buford (Plotz, The Crowd, 4). See also Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic, Sage Studies in 20th Century History 2 (London: Sage, 1975) 9. 13 Gustuv Le Bon, La psychologie des foules (1895), English trans. as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Viking, 1960) [hereafter PF]. 14 Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, 3, 60. 15 Showalter, Introduction, xiii; Grossman, ‘The Mythic Svengali’, 525. 16 PF, ix, 7–8.

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(1813–1885) influential theories of 1851 and 1852 in which he proposed that thinking could be reflexive since, in entranced states, the will was suspended, but the link between mind and body remained. While entranced, the subject was more susceptible to suggestions made by another person, and this caused reflexive bodily reactions as suggestions were enacted.17 Nineteenth-century reflex physiology stratified the differences between individuals’ reflexivity in a similar way to Le Bon’s ideas about states of consciousness: moral and reflective powers were at the higher end of mental processes and therefore may or may not be possessed by an individual, while lower levels of mental activity were shared by the entire population and tapping into these levels of reflexivity would promote communal activity.18 Put another way, those levels of moral reasoning and abstract logic that differentiate human beings were not only ignored in groups, but to appeal to them would have hindered collective activity. Yet while the crowd personality is different from the conscious personalities of its constituents, the model of a human being’s physiological activity was crucial for understanding collective psychology. More than a conceptual aid, the connection between mind and body in a single person, and that between individuals and social development, was taken in the nineteenth century as a literal explanation of how a social phenomenon like crowd formation is based on individuals’ mental and physical reflexivity. According to nineteenthcentury physiologists like Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), the unconscious works by a process of association. Similarly, in Le Bon’s crowd theory, an external source (the leader) makes suggestions that form clear images in the crowd’s collective mind and which are not necessarily logically connected (PF, 47). Leading a crowd rests not on argument, but rather on a combination of suggestions made by the leader along with his or her ‘prestige’, a quality that Le Bon defines as ‘a sort of domination exercised on our mind by an individual, a work, or an idea’ which ‘entirely paralyses our critical faculty, and fills our soul with astonishment and respect’.19 Le Bon likens this idea to mesmerism, suggesting that because the group is perceived to function like an organic body, dominating the crowd mind is similar to mesmerizing a single patient. Rather than many individuals reacting to the leader, there is a permeability between the people making up the crowd. Therefore, 17 William B. Carpenter, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, &c.: Historically and Scientifically Considered (London: Longmans, 1877) 19. 18 Winter, Mesmerized, 328–9. 19 PF, 127–8.

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just as a germ travels through the constituent parts of the human body, so contamination spreads between members of the crowd. Indeed, Le Bon postulated that thought patterns are shared by the group through the process of ‘contagion’, a term also used by the political journalist Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) to describe the irrationality that spread among masses who campaigned for labour regulations. Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) applied this term in his novel, Coningsby (1844), to explain the inexplicable enthusiasm caught by the hero and his friends for a Conservative campaign that, in rational moments, they denounce.20 The concept of contagion was also used in Victorian Britain in terms of leisure activities: professional men used the word in response to Dickens’s public readings of the murder scene from Oliver Twist. As William Overend Priestly, a Professor of Obstetric Medicine at King’s College, London, cautioned Dickens before the debut in 1868: ‘My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if only one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be a contagion of hysteria all over this place.’21 Significantly, the idea of contagion was not class specific, but rather was a potential danger for all who were involved in a group experience. Contagion was so powerful because it was believed that emotions, ideas and morals could be communicated to large gatherings through a process of mental and physical imitation. Just like the spread of disease, it infected people in ways that the conscious mind could not control. For instance, in La psychologie des foules contagion results in ‘collective hallucinations’ (PF, 23), an idea that Le Bon first developed in La vie (1872). It was founded on a concept of imitation originating with Herbert Spencer’s writings on primitive learning and on Bagehot’s conception of mental unity within government.22 Le Bon uses animal behaviour to illustrate how crowds are influenced by examples that inspire imitation, and this imitation is an ‘effect of contagion’: Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes … A panic that has seized on a few sheep will soon extend to the whole flock. In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly

20 Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby: or The New Generation, ed. Sheila M. Smith (1844; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) 230–31, 243. 21 Dickens to Mrs James T. Fields, 16 December 1868, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (London: [Nonesuch Press], 1938) iii, 687. Quoted in Helen Small, ‘A Pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and a Pathology of the Mid-Victorian Reading Public’ in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 282. 22 Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, 68. See Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867; London: Fontana, 1993).

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contagious, which explains the suddenness of panic. Brain disorders, like madness, are themselves contagious. (PF, 122–3)

Given the denigrating juxtaposition between emotions and brain disorders, it is worrying that contagion is also given a specifically musical configuration by Le Bon: Contagion is so powerful that it forces upon individuals not only certain opinions, but certain modes of feeling as well. Contagion is the cause of the contempt in which, at a given period, certain works are held – the example of ‘Tannhäuser’ may be cited – which, a few years later, for the same reason are admired by those who were foremost in criticising them. (PF, 125)

Although this sudden preference for the opera might simply be attributed to fashion, Le Bon relates it to ‘modes of feeling’, suggesting that as one person begins to be affected emotionally by Wagner’s music, it will spread to the wider public; the nation’s audience members will influence each other not through an educational process of music appreciation, but at the physiological level. In other scientific writings, this imitation took on a specifically pathological hue. For example, Athena Vrettos documents how the interchangeable terms ‘neuromimesis’ or ‘nervous mimicry’ were given by Sir James Paget in 1875 to a condition whereby organic disease could infect those who viewed, read about or listened to someone either actually suffering from the disease or realistically reproducing it on the stage, in fiction or in art. In the case of the theatre, cases were reported of audiences breaking out with symptoms of disease that they saw portrayed on stage.23 This process of imitation occurs through suggestibility and reflexivity in the same way that nineteenth-century scientists discussed the activity of crowds, hypnosis and insanity.24 23 Sarah Bernhardt’s performance of La dame aux camélias in Moscow (1881) and the audience’s imitation of the character’s tuberculosis became a subject of medical debate. See Gabriel Tarde, ‘Foules et sectes au point de vue criminel’, Revue des deux mondes (15 November 1893) 367; George Frederick Drinka, The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady and the Victorians (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984) 152. Quoted in Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, 81, 202. Trilby has links with La dame aux camélias, as I discuss in Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 247, 258. 24 Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, 81–4. The connection with insanity is through folie à deux, or the transference of delusional ideas between an active partner who suffers from hereditary insanity and a passive partner of limited intelligence who is not insane. Other terms for this condition in the late nineteenth century were ‘infectious insanity’ and ‘insanity by contagion’. For the coining of folie à deux, see the work of two French psychiatrists, Charles Lasègue and J. Falret in ‘La folie à deux (ou folie communiquèe)’, Annales Medico-Psychologiques 18 (November 1877), trans. Richard Michaud, original title, American Journal of Psychiatry (suppl.) 121 (October 1964) 1–23; cited in Terry Castle, ‘Contagious Folly: An Adventure and its Skeptics’, Critical Inquiry 17 (1991) 742, 762–3. See also Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, 68–72.

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In contrast to the retrograde notion of the crowd, the idea that groups could be managed rested on the notion that through responsible leadership and education the virtues of morality, temperance and religion would be encouraged in the masses and, simultaneous with individuals’ improvement, the nation would prosper. The poor, after all, were the workforce of industrial England and it was necessary to harmonize them into a productive mass. On many levels, Victorian society attempted new methods of grouping and training people in order to rehabilitate them, and these corrections rested on the idea of behaving in accord with societal norms. For instance, it is no accident that new, mid-century methods of managing lunacy moved away from physical constraint to ‘moral management’, or training the mentally ill to behave in ways that were considered normal.25 Indeed, Michel Foucault documents that new systems of managing groups ranged in postEnlightenment Europe through prisons, hospitals, schools, factories and army camps.26 Enforcement resulted from modes of surveillance, such as school examinations that served to observe, classify and rank individual progress. Emphasizing the individual’s rational decision to learn certain behavioural norms in order to rise in evaluative systems, the method was believed to be more effective than enforcing submission through coercion and punishment.27 Similarly, audiences and musical ensembles in Victorian England were formed into manageable units that acted like other nineteenth-century systems of group management, not least because behaviour was advocated that was not only homogenising, but which also aimed to raise the soul and quality of life of each participant. During the height of Chartism, for example, the ‘sight-singing mania’ of 1841–c1844 began to use working-class music-making for what middle-class philanthropists hoped would be a newly effective mode of moral reform, rather than music simply being an activity for its own sake. Victorians did indeed make a strong connection between music and social improvement from at least the 1840s to 1914.28 Dave Russell’s Popular 25 See John Conolly, The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints (London: Smith, 1856); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1985; London: Virago, 1998). 26 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; New York: Vintage, 1995) 170–84, 314. 27 Ibid. 170–84, 314. 28 Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) 17, 22–4. ‘Sight-singing mania’ is John Spencer Curwen’s term (cited in Russell, Popular Music, 22). The sight-singing movement was most often known at the time as ‘music for the million’. Mainzer’s sight-singing textbook was even entitled Singing for the Million (ibid. 24). The combined efforts of

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Music in England provides a particularly fine analysis of the topic in terms of contemporaneous political activity; he suggests that the association of music with social reform resulted from the trepidation with which reformers viewed industrial workers who formed large communities that were ‘intemperate, ill-educated, ill-disciplined and increasingly prey to the public house and the singing-saloon’.29 The connection between these fears and those regarding the mob is obvious, and Victorian reformers sought a solution in introducing recreational activities such as singing in choirs or attending affordable concerts that offered moral instruction while also providing an alternative leisure activity to the pub. However, musical groups had a latent power, as demonstrated in the fact that some ‘musical crowds’ (audiences and, notoriously, some bands in competitive festivals), could and did turn unruly if they were thwarted in desires for encores or to win competitions.30 Since audiences sometimes demonstrated bad behaviour, concert venues frequently responded with attempts at group management. For instance, Manchester concert managers in the late 1840s attempted to apply rules that would solve the problem of the ‘impropriety and disturbance occasioned by impatient departure’: they left five minutes between the penultimate and final numbers, and then firmly closed the doors for the remainder of the programme.31 Indeed, this rule was probably meant to accommodate fashionable members of the audience who were more concerned with avoiding the rush for the doors than with hearing the educators such as Sarah Glover, Joseph Mainzer, John Hullah and John Curwen not only brought music to the masses through innovations in teaching sight-singing using fixed doh (in the case of Mainzer and Hullah’s ‘sol-fa’) or moveable doh (Curwen’s ‘tonic sol-fa’, based on Glover’s system), but they also emphasized moral reform and religion, helped the temperance movement, and attempted to smooth over class conflict. See Russell, Popular Music, 22–4; Bernarr Rainbow, ‘Music in Education’ in Athlone History of Music in Britain, vol. 5: The Romantic Age: 1800–1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley (London: Athlone, 1981) [hereafter The Romantic Age] 29–45; Derek Hyde, New-Found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-Century English Music, 3rd edn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) 86–139. 29 Russell, Popular Music, 24. 30 For the ‘encore nuisance’, see [Unsigned], ‘Audience Behavior at Sims Reeves’s Ballad Concert, Oxford’, The Musical Times 13 (1869) 639; [Unsigned], ‘Sims Reeves, the Encore Nuisance and Audience Behaviour at a Ballad Concert in Liverpool’, The Musical Times 17 (1875) 137; Hall-Witt, ‘Representing the Audience’, 136, 141. For working-class etiquette problems, see Russell, Popular Music, 30. For brass bands as volatile, see Clifford Bevan, ‘Brass Band Contests: Art or Sport?’ in Bands: The Brass Band Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Trevor Herbert (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991) 117. 31 ‘Education of Audiences’, 79. While it is hard to believe that all concerts in Manchester applied this rule, the author does not specify which concerts he refers to, other than that this practice ‘has long been a habit at their [Manchester] concerts’ (79).

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full programme. Such is the conclusion of an article on ‘English Audiences’ in The Musical Times of 1885: ‘An amusing feature of these [the Hallé’s] Concerts is the Northern frankness with which the occupants of the shilling seats express their disapproval of the stampede which invariably sets in amongst the stall-holders about half-an-hour before the close of these Concerts.’32 What is unusual in musical audiences as compared to other nineteenth-century groups and methods of social ordering is that it is the upper classes who must be trained, indeed restrained, from their ‘stampede’, while the lower classes, those that could only afford the ‘shilling seats’, attempt to correct this lack of etiquette. This role reversal can be explained by the fact that there were differing reasons to attend concerts in nineteenth-century Britain. In what seems an excellent analysis if taken as constructing the broad parameters from which a more nuanced understanding can occur, Jennifer L. Hall-Witt divides the orientation of opera-going audiences in the second quarter of the century into those for whom opera was an ‘event’ and those for whom it was a ‘work’.33 Whether music critics as a specific audience subgroup also applied these descriptions to other types of musical performances has yet to be uncovered. Although audiences were of course not so rigidly polarized, it seems a good starting point for defining the general orientation of audience members, especially as fictional audiences, as in Trilby, are characterized similarly. As Hall-Witt explains, musical ‘events’ grew out of an eighteenth-century practice of writing music for a specific performance. In other words, a composer did not necessarily expect the entire piece to be performed again. Because composers expected solo performers to ornament the written melodic line, it was only at the performance that the piece truly reached completion, even earning for diva Maria Malibran (1808–1836) the honorific of ‘composer’ for particularly inventive embellishments.34 Eighteenth-century audiences were also performers in the event, contributing to the event through encoring, conversing, audible approbation or criticism during the music-making, or simply viewing each other and thereby making the audience itself part of the attraction. In contrast, the idea of a ‘work’, 32

‘English Audiences’, 527. Hall-Witt, ‘Representing the Audience’, 137. She derives her idea of ‘event’ from Carl Dalhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 9; Lydia Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 100–101, 113, 118, 121, 222. 34 Court Journal (8 May 1830). Quoted in Hall-Witt, ‘Representing the Audience’, 140. 33

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which developed slowly in the early part of the nineteenth century, emphasized allegiance to the printed score, making the work permanent, repeatable and separating it from notions of social context.35 It also encouraged the audience to orient itself to listening to the composition and to appreciating it through analysis of structure instead of by focusing on the star performer. Hall-Witt notices that both types of audiences occur during the second quarter of the nineteenth century: the audience who went to the London opera to hear specific singers and/or to socialize was linked with the fashionable upper class (who primarily patronized Italian opera and French grand opera), and, during the same time period, the other type of audience comprised middle-class ‘amateurs, musicians, and connoisseurs’ who listened attentively and analytically to the composition, usually by an Austro-German composer.36 Despite reports as late as 1881 about the ‘unseemly conduct of persons who, in spite of tacit remonstrances from those around them, will persist in holding an animated conversation during the performance of music, both at the Opera and in a concert-room’,37 it is important to realize that those audience members who attended music as an ‘event’ were not always inattentive. Sometimes they were truly engaged in the performance, although with a different focus than that desired by music critics and educators. Hall-Witt documents that aristocrats did indeed frequently listen attentively at operas in the 1840s, but that they simply listened for different things: they engaged more with the performer and performance technique than with the work. This would still make for a quiet, collective audience experience. However, listening to star performers was not normally acknowledged as a viable form of music appreciation by serious music lovers in Victorian Britain. The concept of what music should be within nineteenth-century society relies on the notion of a unified value system, shared between all who are present at a concert. This concern demonstrates that audiences were perceived to contribute to the music as ‘event’ or as ‘work’, and that it mattered whether they listened most to performer or to composition. Therefore, the notion of a cohesive, collective experience goes beyond just drawing together the audience members into a silent whole; both audience and performers should share the same ideal. One reason for this might be that Victorian music journalists and educators believed that an audience able to appreciate musical structures and therefore to value good compositions would encourage a higher level of music to be played in 35

Hall-Witt, Representing the Audience’, 137–41. Ibid. 127, 130. 37 ‘Audience Conversation During Concerts’, 566. 36

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Britain.38 This demonstrates that the notion of Britain as a musical nation rested on compositional and programming excellence, not on performance. This view was so predominate as almost not to need mentioning, except for the fact that this orientation neglects to consider where performers sit in this paradigm and where music-loving audiences are situated who focus on the ‘wrong thing’. These opposing ideas of what to privilege in music set up a tension during the nineteenth century that novels like Trilby explore, while also bringing up particular issues for the female performer. In an event-based paradigm, her interpretative gifts, personality and appearance are important to her success as performer, while in prioritising the work the performer labours for the composer, providing the vehicle for his expression. The former has its own set of problems (voyeurism) as well as assets (the singer as proto-feminist, creating and expressing vocally – she literally has her own interpretative ‘voice’). When discussing the performer in relation to the work, however, the performer is frequently criticized in music journals and by some musical characters in literature for introducing notes that are not in the score.39 This raises questions of whether the performer is a serious musician, while also bringing up issues of ego and stereotypes such as the temperamental caprice of stars.

Trilby Du Maurier’s novel acknowledges the competing orientations toward music that were present at London concerts, but it finally privileges what seems a third model: as sensations roused by certain virtuosi overwhelm the conscious minds of the audience members, the novel layers theories of crowd control with the behaviour of music audiences, suggesting that a truly collective response by the audience only occurs when a performer’s virtuosity acts as a stimulus to the listeners’

38 ‘Education of Audiences’, 79. Michael Musgrave points to the Crystal Palace orchestra concerts and Manchester’s Hallè Orchestra as providing the high standard of performance and range of repertoire that were most responsible for the development of and progress in the standards of British music performances, at least through the 1870s. After that date, London began to see more innovative orchestral programming outside the Crystal Palace, as in the Richter concerts, the London Symphony concerts, and Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall concerts. Michael Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 67, 73, 117–24. See also Francis Hueffer, Half a Century of Music in England, 1837–1887 (London: Chapman, 1889) 14–15. 39 See George Eliot, Armgart (1871) in The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New (1874; Cabinet edition, Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1879) 78–84; ‘English Audiences’, 525–6; Hyde, New-Found Voices, 15.

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unconscious minds and induces a state similar to mesmerism.40 Simultaneously, the novel expresses potentially problematic notions about the nature of professional women and music, because Trilby herself is mesmerized when she sings and has no knowledge of her success. In brief, Trilby tells the story of an artist’s model in late 1850s bohemia who befriends three British artists (Billee, Taffy and the Laird) while they are all living in Paris. Svengali, an extraordinary musician if a repugnant character, also frequents bohemia. It is through Svengali’s impromptu performances with the artists that we discover Trilby to possess a magnificent voice, but to be tone deaf. She and Billee fall in love and plan to marry, but in an echo of La dame aux camélias, Billee’s mother asks Trilby to leave her son because of the model’s fallen state. The engagement broken off, Billee returns to England and the griefstricken Trilby turns to Svengali to relieve her neuralgia through mesmerism. Unknown to her, the musician takes the raw materials of Trilby’s voice and teaches her to sing while she is mesmerized, until she emerges in the 1860s as ‘La Svengali’, a brilliant diva celebrated across Europe. Eventually, the three artists attend a performance and, to their surprise, discover that Trilby is La Svengali. It is not until years after the deaths of Svengali, Trilby and Billee that the secret of La Svengali’s success is revealed: she was mesmerized. While Jonathan Taylor’s interesting discussion of Trilby in this volume focuses on Svengali as ‘mob’ leader through his mesmerising Trilby and his conducting, I explore the solo performer as the focus of the audience and its leader. I have argued elsewhere that based on late Victorian mental science, Trilby actually does contribute to her performance, even though the male characters in the book believe Svengali to have taken advantage of her – a belief that Taylor agrees with.41 In this essay, I am interested in the two scenes where audiences hear concerts. The first occurs while Billee is at a London private concert at which the top musicians of the day perform. The second happens in Paris when Billee attends La Svengali’s performance and discovers her to be Trilby. The private concert sets up the two main types of response to music current in Victorian Britain, as centred on the performer or on

40 While nineteenth-century discussions of crowds, somnambulism and hypnotism compared the workings of the unconscious mind in these states to mesmerism, these phenomena are not the same as mesmerism. Rather than the crowd being mesmerized, they simply experience an unconscious state where the individual will is replaced with the suggestions of the crowd leader, as was also thought to occur with mesmerism. 41 See Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 245–74.

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compositional structure. It is one of the Saturday-night concerts of the London season held at the aristocratic Cornelys’ ‘palace on Campden Hill’.42 The frivolity of the high-ranking party guests is sharply satirized as they stroll around talking outside while ‘Bach was being played inside’ (Trilby, 191). Even those who concentrate on the music are ridiculed for affecting a musical knowledge: ‘Signor Giuglini and the wondrous maiden Adelina Patti sang the “Miserere” out of Signor Verdi’s most famous opera – to the delight of all but a few very superior ones who had just read Mendelssohn’s letters (or misread them) and despised Italian music, and thought cheaply of “mere virtuosity”, either vocal or instrumental’ (190). This orientation against ‘mere virtuosity’ is exactly the focus of most serious nineteenth-century musicians, yet these blue bloods are made to seem superficial because their supposed superiority rests on expressing fashionable opinions, rather than a genuine intellectual or emotional response to the music. The passage is also noteworthy for the fact that the audience members retain their sense of individuality and personal opinion instead of being taken over by the music. These audience members are ‘posing’, a term that Jonathan H. Grossman defines as falsifying one’s own identity. Trilby’s stance against aestheticism relies in part on seeing through aestheticism’s posings, a word associated with the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 since the Marquis of Queensbury accused Wilde of ‘Posing as Somdomite’ [sic]. Grossman suggests that Victorians used the label ‘poser’ to mean attitudinising, or ‘overlaying and perhaps corrupting an essential identity’, and that Wilde’s transgressions went beyond the sexual to include the artificial in the intersections between art, identity and the body.43 Similarly, those audience members who despise Italian music in Trilby demonstrate their pretensions by their physical posturing as they rebuke the delight of the others through ‘the listlessness and carelessness’ of their ‘bored resignation to the Signorina Patti’s trills and fioritures’ (Trilby, 191). This attitude is contrasted to that which they assume when violinist 42 Trilby, 189. It is possible that the character’s name is inspired by the famous late eighteenth-century Mrs Teresa Cornelys, who gave concerts, balls, masquerades, promenades and charity ‘Subscription Assemblies’ in her London mansion on what seems to be a weekly basis. See Mrs Cornely’s [sic] Entertainments at Carlisle House, Soho Square (Blackburn: Bradford, c1840). For Joachim playing at Frederic Leighton’s private concerts, which similarly privileged instrumental repertoire, see Michael Musgrave, ‘Leighton and Music’ in Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity, ed. Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn, Studies in British Art 5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) 295–314. My thanks to Christina Bashford and Rachel Cowgill for these references. 43 Grossman, ‘The Mythic Svengali’, 534–5, 526.

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Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) and pianist Clara Schumann (1819–1896) play Bach: For these two – man and woman – the highest of their kind, never let you forget it was Sebastian Bach they were playing – playing in absolute perfection, absolute forgetfulness of themselves – so that if you weren’t up to Bach, you didn’t have a very good time! But if you were (or wished it to be understood or thought you were), you seized your opportunity and you scored; and by the earnestness of your rapt and tranced immobility, and the stony, gorgon-like intensity of your gaze, you rebuked the frivolous. (190–91)

The ‘superior’ audience members’ demeanor communicates pretensions to understanding what ‘good’ music is and how to listen to it – a posture which is ridiculed by the narrator’s choice of simile: ‘gorgon-like intensity’. Therefore, although Joachim’s and Schumann’s performances are oriented toward the composer, those audience members who profess similar values are actually treating the concert as an ego-centered ‘event’, assuming that the audience performs certain opinions as much as the musicians perform music. Moreover, these passages exemplify a change in what music meant: the fact that these aristocrats aim toward superiority by posing as intellectually responsive to music demonstrates both an awareness of what serious musicians privileged and, even more interesting, that this matters to these listeners. They attempt to set themselves apart from previous upper-class ways of listening to music, but are simultaneously satirized for their affectations. While the audience members in Trilby are not necessarily aesthetes, posing is indeed criticized since their physical attitudes are meant to establish their identity as cultured, a posture that overlays their inability to truly understand Bach. This is important because critics who focus on the novel as anti-aesthetic miss the complexities of music’s position. For instance, Grossman suggests that Du Maurier creates Svengali as an artist figure parallel to Wilde: the musician is ‘somehow fundamentally not merely a corrupt and demonic hybrid, but a dangerous poser from his first trick performance on a little flute to his phoney construction of Trilby as a singer’.44 However, this comparison misses the significance of the different types of music portrayed in the novel. If the lens is shifted from the performers and their repertoire to the response of the audience, we see that the narrator criticizes specific personalities who respond to art as an opportunity to model a fashionable attitude in view of their peers. Similarly, Svengali’s desire to be ‘the master’ musician (Trilby, 46) can be denounced as an egotistic orientation, but this does not 44

Ibid. 536, 534.

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necessarily lead to a similar critique of the music-making. Rather, audiences respond to Glorioli, Svengali and La Svengali with surprise, their pose is stripped away and an identity located beneath social attitudinizing is unmasked. The moment when the private concert audience finally forms a collective group occurs upon the arrival of the fictitious singer, Glorioli: He could sing both high and low and soft and loud, and the frivolous were bewitched, as was only to be expected; but even the earnestest of all, caught, surprised, rapt, astounded, shaken, tickled, teased, harrowed, tortured, tantalised, aggravated, seduced, demoralised, degraded, corrupted into mere naturalness, forgot to dissemble their delight. And Sebastian Bach (the especially adored of all really great musicians, and also, alas! of many priggish outsiders who don’t know a single note and can’t remember a single tune) was well forgotten for the night; and who were more enthusiastic than the two great players who had been playing Bach that evening? For these, at all events, were broad and catholic and sincere, and knew what was beautiful, whatever its kind. (Trilby, 193)

While in the previous examples the audience members were able to retain their affectations, everyone is seduced by Glorioli’s performance. The orientation toward repertoire is forgotten as the sensations that Glorioli arouses grab the listeners despite their normal dissembling. Glorioli affects his audience in the same way that La Svengali will do, but he is conscious while he sings and he performs without the aid of another person. Therefore, when his female counterpart sings gloriously but unconsciously because she is mesmerized, is taxed to her physical limit, and finally dies, several nineteenth-century tropes about ideal women are apparent: the passive, alluring beauty whose sexuality and talents are carefully contained and literally unconscious. This invites a consideration of the gendered issues that are apparent in a woman’s ability to co-ordinate a group of people, a topic that seems especially important as women were speaking more often in public in late Victorian Britain for women’s rights to higher education, the professions, suffrage, and for legislation such as repealing the Contagious Diseases Act.45 How did popular novels represent influential women who stepped in front of mixed-gender audiences to motivate social reform?

45 Many Victorian women spoke in front of mixed-gender audiences for campaigns: Josephine E. Butler (1828–1906) spoke for the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of Contagious Diseases Acts, Mary Carpenter (1807–1877) and Elizabeth Raynor Parkes (1829–1925) for the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) for the admission of women to the medical profession.

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In Trilby, La Svengali influences the audience like a crowd, but in a departure from most nineteenth-century treatises of crowd psychology the effect is made to seem positive rather than pathological. This emphasis on Trilby as an effective leader relies on an orientation of the audience toward the performer instead of the musical composition. Demonstrating that La Svengali is the focus, the diva debuts in Paris with a nursery rhyme at the beginning of the concert and again after the interval, perhaps precisely because nursery rhymes are a genre in which there is no danger of the composer overcoming the performer.46 Indeed, the reaction of the audience to each nursery song is so immense precisely because of the singer’s performance, not because of either the original melody or the text. As the narrator relates after the second of these nursery songs: And this heartrending tragedy, this great historical epic in two dozen lines, at which some five or six thousand gay French people are sniffling and mopping their eyes like so many Niobes, is just a common old French comic song – a mere nursery ditty, like ‘Little Bo-peep’ – to the tune, We won’t go home till morning, Till daylight doth appear.47

The sense of the performance as a ‘heartrending tragedy’ and a ‘great historical epic’ comes solely from La Svengali’s ability to suggest these images and emotions, not from qualities inherent in the music or text. Given the explosion of boundaries between self and other that is evident in Victorian crowd theory, it is important that the audience is not reduced to a puerile or pathological state by La Svengali’s rendition, but rather that they experience the text as a tragedy or an epic – genres that exist at the higher end of literature’s hierarchy. Rather than palpably reproducing Trilby’s chronic neuralgia or themselves becoming promiscuous, the audience responds mimetically to the programmatic 46 La Svengali sings the nursery song, ‘Au clair de la lune’; Schumann’s ‘Es grünet ein Nussbaum vor dem Haus’ (1840); Gounod’s ‘Chanson de printemps’ (1860); another French nursery song, ‘Malbrouck s’en va-t’en guerre’; and Chopin’s ‘Impromptu in A flat’, sung as a vocalize. Although the narrator calls the repertoire ‘incongruous’ (238), there are real-life precedents. Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) sang Chopin mazurkas as vocalizes and Liza Lehmann (1862–1918) composed and performed songs for and about children. As Sophie Fuller writes: ‘In many of Lehmann’s songs these two categories [for and about children] seem to be purposely blended, producing work both about and for children which was nevertheless enjoyed and consumed by adults as well … Many of the collections set poetry written in a child’s voice using a deliberately simple musical language, but this does not imply that they were performed by children.’ Leonée Ormond, endnote to Trilby, ed. Ormond, 405–6; Sophie Fuller, ‘Women Composers During the British Musical Renaissance, 1880–1918’ (PhD diss., King’s College London, 1998) 232–5. 47 Trilby, 250.

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narrative that Trilby weaves into the music and which is as noble as her personality. However, the novel does not then suggest that the best music is oriented toward virtuosity. La Svengali’s performance does not debunk the narrator’s earlier statement that Joachim’s and Schumann’s solos came ‘as a well-deserved humiliation to all virtuosi who play so charmingly that they make their listeners forget the master who invented the music in the lesser master who interprets it!’ (Trilby, 190). There is no sense of reversing what people should ideally listen to in music. Rather, what makes La Svengali’s performance stand apart from most other virtuosi singers is that her voice seduces the audience in the same way that mobs are influenced by leaders. This creates a third model, different from rationally engaging with either ‘event’ or ‘work’. It privileges the unique qualities of her voice and its ability to induce a collective hallucination and so to tap the unconscious minds of her listeners. Voice is emphasized over melody, text and musicality as what influences the audience. For example, the diva sings ‘Au clair de la lune’ three times, changing her rendition each time, but not the notes or the words. The first time, it is the singer’s instrument, its timbre and intonation that have an impact on the audience, making them weep with ‘tears of sheer delight’ (Trilby, 243). Through her singing, La Svengali elicits not an intellectual but a sensory response. As she continues to sing, she adds dynamics, expressiveness and different timbre, but voice always matters more than the notes: Every separate note was a highly-finished gem of sound, linked to the next by a magic bond. You did not require to be a lover of music to fall beneath the spell of such a voice as that; the mere melodic phrase had all but ceased to matter. Her phrasing, consummate as it was, was as simple as a child’s. (245)

With each note magically linked to the next, the importance rests not on the cohesive phrase, but rather on single notes and moments of expression. Indeed, embellishment is emphasized two paragraphs later when the narrator enthuses, ‘It was the apotheosis of voice and virtuosity! It was “il bel canto” come back to earth after a hundred years’ (245).48 The emphasis on a musical voice as drawing together a crowd is not specifically a part of crowd theory, but the experiences of the audience in Trilby are. La Svengali’s music elicits a reflexive response, making the audience respond collectively as musical sensations tap into their

48 Bel canto: an Italian style of singing from the 17th and 18th centuries that included virtuosic embellishment.

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unconscious minds in exactly the same way that Le Bon explains crowd behaviour, not least by overturning critical faculties so that elements of the unconscious predominate. Everyone in this audience ‘made up of the most cynically critical people in the world’ (245) responds similarly to La Svengali, whether they are not music lovers or whether they are music celebrities: Gounod is in hysterics and Berlioz writes his praise of La Svengali in a serious of twelve (fictitious) articles. Only a thinly disguised Wagner (Herr Blagner) is outraged by her ‘mere virtuosity’ because: this monstrous development of a phenomenal larynx, this degrading cultivation and practice of the abnormalismus of a mere physical peculiarity are death and destruction to all true music; since they place Mozart and Beethoven, and even himself, on a level with Bellini, Donizetti, Offenbach – any Italian tune-tinkler, and balladmonger of the hated Paris pavement! (254)

The hyperbolic language and the egotism of Herr Blagner make it clear that the narrator is positioned against this sort of diatribe. It is strange to have professional musicians and those lacking a musical ear responding to music in the same uncontrollably engaged way, unless the explanation for this event is rooted in crowd theory, where it is premised that collective behaviour is governed by unconscious responses rather than conscious elements resulting from education. Tapping into the unconscious unifies people through what was considered the lowest common denominator of humanity, and this group regression is mirrored by the specific images that La Svengali introduces. When she performs her final number, Chopin’s ‘Impromptu in A flat’, the vocalize calls up a shared childhood and racial past: The sight of birds and bees and butterflies and frolicsome young animals at play – all the sights and scents and sounds that are the birthright of happy children, happy savages in favoured climes – things within the remembrance and reach of most of us! All this, the memory and the feel of it are in Trilby’s voice … and those who hear feel it all, and remember it with her. It is irresistible; it forces itself on you; no words, no pictures, could ever do the like! (251)

First, the passage suggests that everyone shares a memory not only of nature, but of ‘happy childhood’ and ‘happy savages’. The focus on childhood is also emphasized since nursery songs figure as part of La Svengali’s repertoire and because her phrasing is described as ‘simple as a child’s’ (245). Juxtaposing childhood with ‘happy savages’ specifically makes sense given nineteenth-century scientists’ frequent practice of understanding a species’ development (phylogeny) through the model of an individual’s growth (ontogeny), and also of exploring how evolutionary processes might be condensed within an individual’s life

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cycle.49 Moreover, La Svengali’s singing not only reminds the audience of childhood and a primitive racial past, but responsiveness to beautiful music was frequently explained by Victorian music aesthetics in evolutionary terms.50 Herbert Spencer, probably the most influential writer on the development of society and knowledge in mid-Victorian Britain, was particularly influential in these theories, having written an article in October 1857 on ‘The Origin and Function of Music’ that triggered debate for the rest of the century. Spencer’s basic premise was that vocal sounds originally occurred through ‘reflex action’ (muscles contracting in response to strong emotion and then releasing through sound), a process that produced dynamics, timbre, pitch, intervals and rhythm in proportion to the intensity of feeling.51 This physiological basis of expression, combined with processes of association, resulted in explanations of how sympathy occurred. In short, as others produce sound, we physically remember what emotions initiated such sounds: ‘Thus these various modifications of voice become not only a language through which we understand the emotions of others, but also the means of exciting our sympathy with such emotions.’52 In terms of physiological associationism, La Svengali’s singing similarly triggers the listeners’ embodied memory of primal emotions, both resulting from and also creating a sympathy with the emotions she expresses. Second, the scene is written to describe a collective response: the vocalize is given a single programmatic meaning and the audience responds to the music with shared images, not by engaging rationally with musical structure. Rather than the composer, the singer stimulates this shared response as the narrator writes that Chopin ‘may have meant something quite different’ (Trilby, 251) from the images that she conjures up. No one can resist experiencing these ‘sights and scents and sounds’, and so the unconscious ability to respond to and recreate sensory impressions dominates the conscious elements, bringing everyone together in their collective response of remembering a shared racial past and thinking in what was considered a retrograde process. Significantly, La Svengali’s ability to communicate concrete images that 49 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983; London: Ark, 1985) 105–6. 50 See Herbert Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’ (1857), repr. in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Longman, 1858); Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London: Smith, 1880); James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics (London: King, 1874); Stephen Banfield, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’ in The Romantic Age, 458–64; Bennett Zon, Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 120–78. 51 Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, 359–63. 52 Ibid. 368.

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flow together without logical connection are qualities that Le Bon links to effective leaders. The suggestions contained in these images also function not dissimilarly to the crowd, which was perceived to respond reflexively, uncontrollably, to the leader’s suggestions, resulting in often revolutionary action. Similarly, the specific images that Trilby awakens contribute to social change: they reshape the audience’s perception of a fallen woman. Most of the images combine elements of Trilby’s own story (child-like innocence, beauty and laughter that ends in death) with representations of idealized femaleness where sexuality is safely contained by child-like, virginal or maternal images. These songs concretely communicate and emphasize Trilby’s innocent character. There is only one brief mention of a fallen woman: the ‘terrible’ tragedy of Marguerite of the Faust legend, which the audience responds to with ‘poignant sympathy’ (Trilby, 242–3, 251, 253). What it means to be fallen is therefore represented in such a way that the audience becomes not critical but sympathetic. The songs also turn around attitudes toward posing and naturalness. For instance, the narrator had explained previously about Trilby’s modelling that she ‘could be naked and unashamed – in this respect an absolute savage. She would have ridden through Coventry, like Lady Godiva – but without giving it a thought beyond wondering why the streets were empty’ (77). The same innocence and chastity is portrayed in her songs, as is her sense of a natural world existing before social pretensions. Trilby may therefore model, or ‘pose’, but her lack of affectation is contrasted to a society that dissembles and criticizes, especially in terms of women’s sexuality. It takes La Svengali’s programmatic virtuosity to infect the audience with a palpable sense of her naturalness, for deconstructing the idea of what it is to pose as well as to be fallen. Her performance is a means of stripping away affectation and moral judgement through a physiological sympathy engendered by suggestibility, sensation and collective hallucination, resulting in a breakdown of ego barriers that infects the larger community with Trilby’s naturalness, causing them to change their perceptions of her character. This response is quite distinct from the influence of Glorioli’s or Svengali’s solos. While both of the men also tap the audience’s reflexive emotional response and unite them, they create general emotions instead of the concrete and biographical images of La Svengali’s performances. Moreover, by performing a vocalize and giving it a specific programmatic meaning, the novel seems to propose an alternate idea about music than that given to it by Walter Pater: ‘All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the

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understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.’53 In La Svengali’s virtuosity, matter is distinguishable from form, for Chopin might have ‘meant something quite different’. By giving music representational qualities, it is made mimetic and capable of communicating a social agenda, which also tears down aestheticism’s orientation of ‘art for art’s sake’. Because the audience response is a collective hallucination, the text legitimizes its plot by rooting itself in contemporary science, but then it twists theories of collective psychology to its own purposes. While Trilby is one of the ‘dangerous poor’ who might contaminate others because of her sexual and religious freedom, her performance is actually depicted as engendering health since her singing instantaneously cures Billee of his strange emotional numbness (Trilby, 243). Yes, she communicates what might be perceived as a moral contamination since the audience embraces her, a fallen woman, but because the narrator portrays Trilby sympathetically this action does not seem to result from a dangerous corruption. The novel uses contemporaneous theories regarding the performer’s powerful moral and emotional influence upon an audience, but it shifts the perceived result of this power from illness to health. Because crowds were considered such retrograde phenomena as to rely entirely on the quality of the leader’s suggestions to determine their character as noble or savage, rather than on the crowd members’ own rational reflections, we see that La Svengali is portrayed not as a perpetrator of mob violence, but rather as an influential leader who brings needed social change. For Le Bon, leading the crowd by suggestion, stimulus and sensation instead of by reason serves as a warning and observation about the present social situation. He describes the fin de siècle as progressing toward a racial past, toward an instinctual, violent state that has descended rather than advanced on the ladder of civilisation. In contrast, Trilby is praised by all of society by the novel’s end, and the images that are awakened in the crowd’s mind include glimpses of ‘Elysium’ and Olympia (Trilby, 246) alongside memories of a racial past that is noteworthy for its child-like innocence instead of its savagery. However, Svengali’s use of mesmerism complicates the issue as the effects of public performances of mesmerism were considered so dangerous by the French medical community that mesmeric performances in theatres were outlawed in Bordeaux in 1888.54 But while Svengali mesmerizes Trilby, La Svengali’s suggestions 53 Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877) repr. in Essays on Literature and Art, ed. Jennifer Uglow (London: Dent, 1973) 51. Original emphasis. 54 Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de siècle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) 197–202.

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do not actually mesmerize the audience, nor do the suggestions result in panic or destruction, as occurred in France in the 1880s when women and children were trampled by a stampeding audience who believed a performing mesmerizer’s suggestions that the theatre was aflame.55 Rather than the audience responding with unruly behaviour, La Svengali controls her audience so adroitly as to refuse encores without engendering the subsequent rebellion that frequently occurred in Victorian concerts, instead receiving applause, flower tributes, fiscal support and adulation. She is appreciated and fêted where she had been ostracized, criticized and banished. Similar to the mobs that Le Bon credits with being a necessary force for destroying one civilisation before birthing a better society, La Svengali’s audience is used to enact a shift in social attitudes, but this shift reforms instead of destroying. Trilby is one of many nineteenth-century novels that sympathetically treat the figure of the fallen woman and which were subject to debate because of their very refusal to be silent about a social problem that many Victorians would rather have ignored. However, the novel is unique in using music as a tool for eliciting societal change on this particular issue and that, combined with the use of crowd theory, complicates how we read the diva. While Trilby is linked to canonical novels like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) in its sympathy toward the sinner if not the sin,56 it is also associated with popular thrillers feared by the watchdogs of Victorian culture for their ability to elicit a sensational response and therefore to influence readers in ways that were similar to the suggestibility of mobs.57 Trilby is set during the height of sensation fiction, a genre that concerned Victorian critics because it produced affect rather than having the narrative style or content of high art. Instead of readers being raised through the morally-uplifting thoughts of high art, it was feared that they would be reduced to animal-like responses through sensations. Particularly 55 Edgar Bèrillon, ‘Hypnotisme utile et hypnotisme dangereaux’, Revue de l’hypnotisme 3 (1888) 2. Quoted in ibid. 197. 56 For other sympathetic treatments of fallen women, see Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1839) and Bleak House (1852–3); Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870) and The New Magdalen (1873); Anthony Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton (1869–70) and An Eye for an Eye (1878–9); George Gissing’s The Unclassed (1884); George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894); Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). For morally-justified rejections of fallen women, see Mrs Henry Wood’s Pomeroy Abbey (1878) and the more ambiguous treatment in East Lynne (1861). See also George Watt, The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Tom Winnifrith, Fallen Women in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: Macmillan, 1994). 57 See Small, ‘A Pulse of 124’, 265; Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, 97; Winter, Mesmerized, 320–31.

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worrying were plots that repeatedly focused on sexually-active women, making them into sensual beings who rebelled against social convention.58 Trilby similarly focuses on a seductive, sociallytransgressive woman who is appealing not only for her eroticism but also for her warm camaraderie. Du Maurier’s novel plays with competing notions of sympathy toward Trilby on the one hand and fears of sensation on the other, not least because while Trilby’s characterisation is affectionate and innocent, the plot focuses on successful mass-manipulation through sensation, rooting this in the discourse of crowd psychology and combining it with a musical virtuosity that not only appealed to the populace, but was in itself sensational. A woman is therefore portrayed as influencing social change through sensation rather than the conscious mind, a mode of influence that Victorians were at best uneasy about. In the novel, this unease is demonstrated not only through the use of crowd theories, but also by the narrator’s attributing La Svengali’s musical success largely to Svengali’s mesmerism, instead of to Trilby. However, as upper-class British society applauds Trilby, racing to claim her as British, plot and characterisation come together: she is represented as gaining acceptance in a culture that had previously censured her promiscuity, thereby ultimately demonstrating sympathy with the fallen woman. Yet even in the acceptance and celebration of Trilby, we cannot forget the nervous quality of this depiction. Yes, she is an influential female musician, but because the novel both acknowledges ‘normal’ audience responses to music and then places the responses that she elicits as completely outside the bipolar paradigm, she is made not only exceptional, but almost fearfully so because of the means by which she instigates change. As individuality and rationality give way to crowd dynamics and the retrograde unconscious, we see not only the fears of a society regarding unified groups, but also fascination and trepidation regarding the sensations aroused by a beautiful musical woman, especially when the powerful influence over the unconscious mind was then used to address, en masse, controversial social problems.

58 Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992) 20–25.

PART II

Genre and musicalities

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The piano’s progress: The piano in play in the Victorian novel Jodi Lustig The appearance of Jane Fairfax’s ‘large-sized square pianoforté’ in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) inspires what may be the title character’s most colossal blunder.1 In a staggering display of the ‘novelistic imagination’ D. A. Miller ascribes to her, Emma assumes the married Mr Dixon has sent Jane the piano, inadvertently betraying their illicit affair.2 The piano’s true benefactor remains a mystery until novel’s end, leaving Emma ample opportunity to expand and elaborate upon the story she imagines it represents. When Frank Churchill identifies himself as the rightful source of the piano, the narrative tension Emma’s misreading creates is resolved. Emma’s story must give way to the story. Seventy-five years after Emma, a piano incites another crisis in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). In this case, the origins of the piano in Jude’s opening scene are not in question; it has the distinction of being ‘the only cumbersome article’ in the schoolteacher Phillotson’s possession.3 The crisis ostensibly involves the piano’s destination: ‘The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary lodgings just at first’ (JO, 47). Hardy resolves that dilemma immediately, however, suggesting that Phillotson’s ‘cumbersome’ piano may serve instead to pose not a physical but a metaphysical crisis of origins. For materially, Phillotson’s possession of 1 Jane Austen, Emma (1816), ed. Ronald Blythe (1966; New York: Penguin Books, 1985) 227 [hereafter Emma]. Technically, of course, Emma is not a Victorian novel; however, as this paper will demonstrate, its reach, especially the reach of its piano plot, extends well into the Victorian era and beyond. 2 D. A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 177. 3 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895), ed. C. H. Sisson (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) 44 [hereafter JO].

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the piano is indisputable. Metaphysically, his ownership is in doubt. The same passage that so precisely establishes the time and place of the transaction that brings the piano into his possession reveals ‘he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house’ (47). The pianos in Emma and Jude raise questions about the way language operates within the novel form. When Frank Churchill is named the rightful donor of Jane’s piano, the claim is meant to communicate an irrefutable truth that nullifies all other explanations. Yet how does it produce that conviction in the reader? Why does this fictional explanation feel truer than Emma’s equally fictional imaginings? How does Austen ensure that the ‘right’ story prevails? Similarly, in Jude, Phillotson’s piano could not be more thoroughly accounted for, but this accounting does little to confer the full meaning the word ‘possession’ is meant to communicate. The following exploration of the piano in the Victorian novel considers how the piano in one text comes to signify its antithesis in the other. My primary concern is the piano’s performance on the structural level, but as its presence in works by Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy will demonstrate, the piano’s formal operations invite a discussion of the content it introduces as well. The instrument comes to represent a set of conventions, codes and ideologies which Victorian culture reifies, and proves the consummate site for authors to stage, contest and shape their construction.4 The piano ‘conquered more of Europe than Napoleon’.5 Italy lays claim to its birthplace, Germany and France are among its first manufacturers, but from as early as 1770, ‘it became fashionable to identify the new instrument as quintessentially English’,6 making the piano’s popularity a point of national pride. Crafted by hand and with no standardized parts to implement mass-production, the instrument remained expensive for most of the nineteenth century; however, by the 1850s, a hire purchase system was in place, making it affordable to 4 By no means do I intend to present the texts discussed in this paper as representative of Victorian literature in its entirety. 5 Dieter Hildebrandt, Pianoforte: A Social History of the Piano, trans. Harriet Goodman (New York: George Braziller, 1988) 3. See also Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954); Rosamond E. M. Harding, The Piano-forte: Its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1973); Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and James Parakilas, Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 6 Ehrlich, The Piano, 17.

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modest households.7 Pianos were on prominent display at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and by the 1870s, a children’s book could pose the question, ‘What musical instrument is now seen in almost every household?’ with confidence that readers would answer, ‘the pianoforté’.8 To Victorians headily embracing the promise of new prosperity and technological innovation, Max Weber’s pronouncement, ‘in its whole musical essence the piano is a domestic instrument of the bourgeoisie’, would hardly have seemed condemnation.9 The piano proved a valuable form of ‘cultural capital’ in a climate where, increasingly, middle-class respectability could be achieved through a display of its visible trappings rather than by lineage.10 As the Pall Mall Gazette put it: ‘Fashion in a town mansion, respectability in a suburban cottage, alike demand it.’11 The piano quickly became the emblematic object of upper and middle-class daughters who learned to play the instrument as an ‘accomplishment’ illustrating their grace and their family’s gentility.12 Informal performances given in the semi-public areas of the home, the bastion of middle-class culture, allowed players to fashion themselves for prospective suitors as the paragon of Victorian womanhood, the domestic helpmeet who becomes known as the ‘Angel in the House’.13 Within this patriarchal context, the performance that might have appeared immodest for a proper lady became an overwhelmingly feminine act, a service performed for the enjoyment of others. Part of the enjoyment included the visual pleasure the player and piano offered as 7

Ibid. 98. Ibid. 92. 9 Quoted in Hildebrandt, Pianoforte, 1. Ehrlich notes: ‘Max Weber’s claim that by 1800 the piano was already “a standard commercial item produced for stock” identifies an important transition but is misleading in two ways. Pianos were not yet “standardized” in any meaningful sense. Without a degree of standardization, not only were costs high, but it was impossible for purchasers … to distinguish good from bad.’ (Ehrich, The Piano, 42). 10 Pierre Bourdieu uses this term to refer to aesthetic tastes that operate as markers of class, which the piano most definitely does. See Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1984; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 11 Quoted in Ehrlich, The Piano, 43. 12 The tradition of female accomplishments did not originate with the piano’s appearance, of course. In the nineteenth century, however, an increasing number of people had the means to take on the forms of the upper classes. See Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: ‘Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges’ (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 13 The moniker comes from Coventry Patmore’s 1854 long poem of the same name, but is undoubtedly used as a popular catch phrase for the domestic ideal more often by Victorianists of our day. 8

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decorative objects themselves; the aesthetic appeal of piano performance was largely responsible for its popularity. Unlike instruments such as the violin, the piano was thought to run little risk of inadvertently exposing its players in unflattering poses.14 In performance the player and piano alike became subject to the male gaze, which Richard Leppert argues, gained an added dimension when accompanied by sound, ‘because music, both as social practice and sonority, was thought to possess sensual power. It was understood to act with dangerous immediacy on the sensate body. The “musical” gaze was supercharged with sexuality, producing an “interest” simultaneously encoded with pleasure and anxiety’.15 Paintings from the era figured the piano as a site steeped in eroticism; women play in provocative poses and flirt with their instructors. The erotic exchange between performer and audience in the drawing room, however, was both heightened and contained within the confines of bourgeois ritual, paradoxically legitimizing the expression of these feelings at this site by incorporating them into a formal social structure. The piano represents a curious mix of the everyday and the sumptuous. Almost prosaically material, valued for reasons quite outside of its practical purpose, and absolutely immaterial, used to produce the most esoteric of art forms – music: the instrument represents the ‘perfect principal contradiction of bourgeois society’.16 At one end of the spectrum, manufacturers maximize their product’s efficiency by selling pianos that double as sewing tables. At the other, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones designs an elaborate piano for Broadwood. Perhaps this is why the piano can perform the ideological work it does in Victorian fiction. Straddling both the economic and artistic realms, the realist novel presents a similar contradiction.17 For its language to signify, the objects it describes must be able to confer meaning, one reason the development of the novel form is often tied to

14 Paula Gillett gives an interesting account of the prohibition on female violin performance in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England that argues the taboo is based in gendered constructions of the instrument and not directly related to the bodily positioning it is frequently attributed to. See Gillett, Musical Women in England, chapter 4: ‘Women and the Devil’s Instrument’. 15 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 64. For more on the gaze, see Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 16 Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 155. 17 A few words on my discussion of realism: I am following Ian Watt’s example in not capitalizing the term, for much the same reason. See his discussion in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957).

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the rise of a mercantile economy, which at its fundamental level necessitates a similar belief.18 At the same time, as it can never represent ‘the thing itself’, novelistic language must persuade the reader to accept the fictional world portrayed on its own imaginative terms, independent of the material reality the language appears to represent. Walter Pater suggests the contradictory tasks are best reconciled in a different medium when he writes, ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’, for ‘in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form’.19 He proposes that unlike representational art forms, music just is. It communicates nothing but itself and refers to nothing outside of itself.20 In this Pater echoes a dominant strain in nineteenth-century musical discourse. For example, in his 1870 essay ‘Beethoven’, Richard Wagner writes, ‘Music does not represent the ideas contained in the phenomena of the world; it is itself an idea’.21 Wagner later introduces the concept of ‘absolute music’ that Edward Hanslick adopts to refer to music’s capacity to transcend material existence in a ‘free play of pure form’.22 A debate about the nature, political ramifications and even the existence of ‘absolute music’ continues to the present day.23 We may be reluctant to concede that musical meaning is performative, and indeed constructed by the listener. It is therefore unsurprising that the piano’s progress in the Victorian novel seems to foreground the question of music’s ability to ‘perform’ ideally. The appeal of the transcendence that ‘absolute 18 See Watt and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) for the social and political history of the novel. 19 Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877) reprinted in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974) 55. 20 See Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). The first chapter, ‘Does All Art Aspire to the Condition of Music?’, deconstructs Pater’s musical metaphor. See also the chapter ‘Is There Any Musical Equivalent for Realism?’ in Christopher John Ballantine, Music and its Social Meanings (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1984). 21 Quoted in Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Late Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) 34. For further discussion of Wagner, see the chapter in this volume by Jonathan Taylor. 22 Quoted in Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’ in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999) 494. 23 The discussions of Hanslick’s absolute music and the concept of autonomous art in general are legion with some of the most compelling critiques appearing in the field of feminist musicology. Janet Wolff’s forward to Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) offers a succinct account of the issues surrounding the debate. See also Cusick, ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’, and Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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music’ promises lies in a fundamental belief of capitalist culture, the ‘theoretical existence of autonomous individuals free of social construction and social influence’.24 It forms an essential part of post-Romantic theories of artistic autonomy as well – ‘the belief that there exists a content beyond convention, a reality beyond representation’.25 The reluctance to concede that music is what we make of it comes from the fear that in place of transcendence there is nothing but ourselves. Beginning with Sense and Sensibility (1811), Jane Austen’s novels reflect the piano’s role as a popular courtship site throughout the century. Marianne Dashwood, the Bennet sisters and Emma are but the first among many fictional heroines who count piano playing among their accomplishments. Austen’s dramatizations illustrate an important advantage piano performance has over other accomplishments. As Arthur Loesser wryly notes, unlike other accomplishments, it can ‘be best shown off while actually being accomplished’.26 While technical skill may be developed in private, performances have an immediacy that cannot be found in crafts admired after the fact. The gatherings in which performances are given invite a greater degree of interaction between members of the opposite sex and provide a socially sanctioned medium to communicate feelings the interaction may inspire within the bounds of propriety. Austen capitalizes on this: while Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby forge their passionate connection at the piano, the ‘air in which their voices had been joined’ gestures decorously towards the baser joinings the two might share were they not bound by the rules of propriety.27 In Emma, Jane can blush at the teasing she receives from Frank Churchill when the discussion is ostensibly about the piano and not her affections directly. The instrument provides a means to discuss and evaluate the erotic feelings the music encodes by recasting them as a response to the music itself.28 Willoughby’s and Brandon’s contrasting responses to Marianne’s piano performances give dramatic form to two conflicting strains of musical ideologies in nineteenth-century culture. Willoughby’s musicality is dangerously attractive, sensuous, exciting, the feelings he arouses in Marianne almost fatally potent, qualities traditionally conceived as the feminine in music, like the sirens, a seductive force 24

Cusick, ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’, 495. Hal Foster, ‘The Expressive Fallacy’ in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985) 60–63. 26 Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, 268. 27 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), ed. Ros Ballaster (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) 73 [hereafter SS]. 28 See Patrick Piggot, The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen (London: Douglas Cleverdon, 1979), for an extensive look at Austen’s depictions of music. 25

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simultaneously desired and feared.29 Music itself is considered feminine, ‘associated with the body and female generativity’,30 and women are taught to relate to it primarily on a bodily level, as an activity to perform. By singing with Marianne, Willoughby aligns himself further with the feminine in music, as one way to render music fit for males was to abstract it according to principles of Enlightenment reasoning into a science governed by rules and laws.31 The first time Colonel Brandon hears Marianne play the piano, his reaction literally maintains the social order of the party gathered. He alone listens to Marianne play ‘without being in raptures’ (SS, 30), in itself a sign of moderation and restraint. In contrast to those expressing ‘raptures’ – Sir John (‘loud in his conversation with the others while every song lasted’) and Lady Middleton (who repeatedly asks Marianne to play a song she has just finished), ‘the compliment of attention’ Brandon pays Marianne is compliment indeed (30). That his ‘pleasure in music’ does not amount ‘to that extatic delight which alone could sympathize’ with Marianne’s marks him as her proper object choice before she even begins to understand her own needs; it embodies the masculine ideal.32 In Emma, Austen uses Emma’s response to Jane’s piano performance to contest the status of such definitive judgements about musical sensitivity and preference. When Emma says ‘my own playing is just good enough to be praised, but Jane Fairfax’s is much beyond it’ (Emma, 239), her statement is constructed to question the extent to which her feelings for Jane have come to influence her interpretation. She has already allowed that she regards Jane with ‘a dislike so little just … that she never saw Jane Fairfax the first time after a considerable absence, without feeling that she had injured her’ (180). Emma’s deliberation puts her narrative authority into question and amounts to Austen’s admission of language’s inherent 29 Renée Cox Lorraine, ‘Recovering Jouissance: Feminist Aesthetics and Music’ in Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 4. See Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science, and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2000), for a discussion of the anxieties as played out on female characters figured as ‘angels’ or ‘sirens’. 30 Leslie C. Dunn, ‘Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet’ in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 57. 31 See Leppert, Sight of Sound, and Gillett, Musical Women in England, for more on nineteenth-century music education and gender. On scientific discussions about music: Jamie Croy Kassler, The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830: A Catalogue of Writings, Lectures, and Inventions, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1979). 32 The debate about Brandon’s worthiness usually centres on the degree to which critics believe these ‘masculine’ ideals are privileged over the sensuously ‘feminine’ aspects of music.

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instability. Emma’s construction of fiction upon fiction exposes the contingency Austen describes in Pride and Prejudice: ‘truth is truth if you believed it while you were saying it and believe it now’.33 Austen ultimately uses the story of Jane’s piano to authorize an ideally signifying language that D. A. Miller calls ‘transparent communication’ for its capacity to approximate a one-to-one correspondence between word and object.34 However, that transparency is achieved only after Austen’s characters struggle through a series of misperceptions that dispute the very notion that such a construct can exist. The narrative Emma constructs about the origins of Jane’s piano illustrates this kind of struggle. In much the same way as Emma might never discover the one true story, the novel could theoretically continue on without ever authorizing one explanation over another, leaving the reader confounded forever. The piano introduces a number of possible narratives into the text: Jane, the fallen woman betrayed by a married man; Jane, the poverty-stricken governess forced to serve below her station; Jane, the invading temptress preying on unsuspecting men – these are but a few Austen puts into play.35 But by offering a full disclosure of the piano’s true origins, one that happens to restore the character and novel alike to a state of utter propriety, Austen banishes all alternate readings from the text. The prospect of illicit sexual activity, poverty and duplicity is replaced with proof that the only thing preventing the truth of the piano from being discovered has been the absence of the kind of transparent communication that the revelation of Frank Churchill’s and Jane Fairfax’s relationship represents. The piano serves as a rhetorical device that re-establishes the dominion of conservative bourgeois values within the fictional universe and, arguably, among those who validate them by accepting Austen’s vision.36 33 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), ed. Tony Tanner (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) 93–4. 34 Miller, Narrative and its Discontents, 40. 35 It does not seem surprising that the readings Austen eliminates from Emma appear in fiction later in the century. Charlotte Brontë’s poverty-stricken governess shares more than her first name with Jane Fairfax. Brontë seems quite deliberate in establishing that Jane Eyre’s piano playing skill is only adequate as befits her role as governess. Of course, this also enables her to appear far less affected than her rival, Blanche Ingram. See Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847; London: Penguin, 1986). 36 It is generally present-day materialist critics and champions of the modernist response to realism who focus on the ideological implications of reception. While I think it crucial to deconstruct the ideologies embedded within fiction, in Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) Harry E. Shaw observes how ideological bias can sometimes suggest that every reader who allows a fictional conceit to affect them without contestation is a naïve reader, to the point of being unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.

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The piano plots of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8)37 seem to echo those of Sense and Sensibility and Emma, perhaps in order to interrogate the ‘cruelly genteel’ (VF, 714) social system Austen presents as the natural order. Like Marianne Dashwood, Amelia Sedley retains her piano through her family’s loss of station. Its temporary fall from her possession parodies the piano mystery in Emma: Amelia thinks her piano has been anonymously returned to her by the man she loves, George Osborne, when it has truly been restored by William Dobbin, the man who loves her. Though the circumstances have been modified slightly (after all, the origins of the piano are mysterious to Emma not Jane), Thackeray uses the piano to expose the conventions it maintains in Austen’s fiction. Amelia’s piano plot reveals the seemingly effortless journey of an Austenian heroine towards marriage to be an extraordinarily well crafted literary and cultural production. The economic imbalance between the genders that necessitates the marriages to which the courtships lead is mystified as a complementary meeting of positive qualities of mind.38 Amelia’s piano playing pointedly fails to correspond to the inherent emotional sensitivities of a Marianne Dashwood or a Jane Fairfax, and the revelation of the piano’s true benefactor fails to transfer Amelia’s feelings from Osborne to Dobbin. It strikes her with ‘inexpressible pain and mortification, too, that it was William who was the giver of the piano and not George, as she had fancied’ (VF, 691). Thackeray uses the piano to critique the propriety that masks the sexual economy of the bourgeois marriage as well. Becky Sharp’s initial fault, after all, is her refusal to present her piano playing as a decorative art. Becky’s demand, ‘Give me money, and I will teach them’ (VF, 51) dares to reveal that she will use her musical skills to make money, a vulgar admission in itself made worse by intimating that female accomplishments are nothing more than a form of currency used to bring material gain. Her story questions whether Austen’s Jane Fairfax avoids Becky’s fate for no other reason than that in Austen’s work, few characters of ‘a pleasing person, good understanding, and warmhearted, well meaning relations’ (Emma, 177) are ever anything but virtuous, and as such, worthy of a husband with the means to buy her a piano. The seductions Becky conducts at the piano suggest that despite the encoding of sexual desire in fiction and its absence from discussion 37 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8), ed. J. I. M. Stuart (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) [hereafter VF]. 38 For more on the way fiction operates in conjunction with the shifting marital ideologies of the early nineteenth century, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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in polite society such seductions in fact took place. Bourgeois marital ideology does differ from the aristocratic ideal by valuing qualities of mind over lineage, but the institution is still maintained through the transmission of capital from one generation to the next through heirs whose paternity can only be ensured by the regulation of female sexuality. Becky’s scandalous pianistic exploits reflect the very real fact that the piano becomes an increasingly unstable signifier as the century progresses. What in the early decades of the century reasonably communicates certain economic truths about its purchasers no longer does in Thackeray’s day. As the instrument becomes more popular and affordable to a wider range of social classes, it loses its cachet among the gentility and leads to the ‘devaluation of piano-playing skills as currency in the upper-class marriage market’.39 Ultimately, Vanity Fair exposes what convention conceals, critiquing a middle-class culture in which female ambition may exist but is never a dire threat, in which materialism may run rampant but can always be neutralized or invested with true virtue, and in which women and men not only prove to be in harmony in their desire for marriage, but in their recognition of what the true virtues and duties of that state entail. In its place Thackeray offers what he considers a more realistic reflection of Victorian life. Female accomplishment is demystified, ambition is no longer couched in virtue and virtue is no longer expressed in a corresponding sensitivity displayed at the keys of a piano. In the same years as Vanity Fair’s publication, Charles Dickens uses the piano to consecrate the very same domestic ideologies Thackeray satirizes. In David Copperfield (1849–50), the moment Dickens places Agnes Wickfield at the piano marks her as David’s future wife.40 Agnes’s accomplishments have been cultivated only for the pleasure of others; when David meets her she plays the piano for her father, ‘sat by him, and worked and talked, and played some games at dominoes with him’ (DC, 288), already fully engaged in the role her gender prepares her for. She proudly calls herself her father’s housekeeper, and despite his sporadic misgivings about whether it is fair to keep Agnes around solely to provide for his own happiness, neither she nor he question whether such selfless devotion should be expected of her for long. The sudden effusions from David’s adult self pointedly disrupt the narrative to enable Dickens to identify Agnes as David’s future wife and offer benediction to the virtues she embodies: ‘I hear her beautiful calm voice, 39

Gillett, Musical Women in England, 99. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50), ed. Trevor Blount (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) [hereafter DC]. 40

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as I write these words. The influence for all good, which she came to exercise over me at a later time, begins already to descend upon my breast … I feel that there are goodness, peace, and truth, wherever Agnes is’ (288–9). That the piano is the instrument of choice for wives becomes clear when David asks Traddles if his wife Sophy ‘doesn’t sing to the guitar’; he responds, ‘Oh dear, no!’ she ‘knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters’ and ‘sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they’re out of spirits’ (667). The reason Traddles can speak of her ‘with loving reliance’ (667) is unmistakable. Her accomplishments may be decorative, but they are not merely decorative, as they may have been before she married. As a wife, she uses them only as tools that might help her fulfil her adult responsibilities.41 The piano’s association with the domestic ideal allows Dickens to use other instruments to communicate the inferior forms of femininity displayed by David’s first wife, Dora, and Rosa Dartle. The two characters represent different expressions of the same flaw; Dora is incapable and Rosa unwilling to embrace the selflessness the role requires. Mary Burgan suggests Dora plays the guitar because the piano proves too difficult for her to master.42 While this contention is in keeping with Dickens’s depiction of the character and his views on female performance in general, Dora’s guitar communicates more than her girlish simplicity. It becomes a means for her to evade her fundamental wifely duty. She plays and sings French ballads that celebrate the virtues of irresponsibility when she cannot bear to hear talk about ‘being poor, and working hard’ (DC, 604). As Dora coos songs ‘generally to the effect that, whatever was the matter, we ought always to dance’ (454–5), David is left to wonder how he ‘could best make’ his ‘way with a guitar-case through the forest of difficulty’ (608). The singularity of Rosa Dartle’s harp playing marks her as similarly flawed. No one but Steerforth’s mother has heard Rosa perform for the past three years, and only under duress does Rosa agree to sing for

41 In Charles Dickens and Music (London: C. H. Kelly, 1912; repr. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970), James Thomas Lightwood suggests David is actually more pleased to have a guitar-playing wife in Dora, which I find doubtful, in light of the context, discussed in the next paragraph. 42 Mary Burgan, ‘Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’ in The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music, ed. Nicholas Temperley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 42–67. See also P. A. W. Collins, ‘Dickens and the Education of Girls’, Dickensian 57 (1961) 86–96. Burgan writes, ‘Dickens is apt to portray domestic piano playing as childish’ (54), to which I would add that while Agnes’s piano playing might appear childish by our standards, Dickens makes a crucial distinction between selfishness and the selfless but childish ‘Angel of the House’ Agnes represents.

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Steerforth and David, the male audience for whom such accomplishments are traditionally cultivated. David finds ‘something fearful in the reality’ of her performance: ‘It was as if it had never been written, or set to music, but sprung out of a passion within her, which found imperfect utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched up again when all was still’ (DC, 496). The ‘fearful reality’ suggests hers to be a dangerously ungovernable form of femininity beyond the reach of culture. Unwritten and ‘never set to music’, the sounds she makes are unintelligible to David because they do not conform to social structures he recognizes. Her passion comes from within and serves no purpose but to bring herself pleasure, the most fearful of feminine realities. The anxiety created by the prospect of musical females getting lost in their own emotions finds expression in phrases such as Edmond de Goncourt’s famous reference to the piano as the ‘lady’s hashish’ and in fears linking piano playing to hysteria or neuroses in women.43 Music’s affective capacity is acknowledged as a dangerous force, and great effort is expended in encouraging women to use music to redirect themselves toward worthy ends. Through sixteen printings, the Reverend H. R. Haweis’s Music and Morals assures the public that music has performed this task at least as long as women have played the piano: That poor lonely little sorrower, hardly more than a child, who sits dreamily at her piano … Ah! What heavy burden seems lifted up, and borne away in the dusk? … The angel of music has come down; she has poured into his ear the tale which she will confide to no one else, and the ‘restless, unsatisfied longing’ has passed; That domestic and long-suffering instrument, the cottage piano, has generally done more to … bring peace and happiness to families in general, and to young women in particular, than all the homilies on domestic virtues ever yet penned.44

Rosa’s independence renders hers an illegitimate form of femininity that Dickens must ultimately banish from the text. She may resemble ‘an angel for a little while’, but finally she represents a ‘fierce little piece of incomprehensibility’ (DC, 497) because there is no place for a woman who cannot maintain a selflessly angelic disposition indefinitely in Dickens’ fictive universe. In a broader sense, the pianos in David Copperfield suggest the novel will behave conventionally. The protagonist will ultimately fulfil his desires. In spite of any evidence to the contrary, one proper reading of the events contained within the

43 Leppert, Sight of Sound, 201. See Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, for discussion of the associations made between music and neuroses in the Victorian era. 44 Quoted in Gillet, Musical Women in England, 4.

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novel will prevail, and the marriage which offers closure to the text will reconcile the opposing tensions within it.45 George Eliot’s use of music and musical metaphor extends far beyond what she stages at the piano in The Mill on the Floss (1860),46 but in that novel, she draws on the instrument’s symbolic resonance to legislate a broader field of experience suitable for novelistic representation and challenge the conventions that have come to govern the form.47 The narrator’s playful critique of Stephen’s and Lucy’s ‘Duet in Paradise’ illustrates Eliot’s understanding of bourgeois courtship practice and the novelistic conventions that perform its mystifications: Surely the only courtship unshaken by doubts and fears must be that in which the lovers can sing together. The sense of mutual fitness that springs from the two deep notes fulfilling expectation just at the right moment between the notes of the silvery soprano, from the perfect accord of descending thirds and fifths, from the concerted loving chase of a fugue, is likely enough to supersede any immediate demand for less impassioned forms of agreement. The contralto will not care to catechise the bass; the tenor will foresee no embarrassing dearth of remark in evenings spent with the lovely soprano. In the provinces, too, where music was so scarce in that remote time, how could the musical people avoid falling in love with each other? (MF, 474)

The musical metaphors suggest an ideal communion between the musical couples the hyperbole mitigates. ‘Mutual fitness’ fulfils expectation ‘just at the right moment’; ‘the perfect accord of descending thirds and fifths’ and ‘the concerted loving chase of a fugue’ propose 45 For more on the narrative function of marriage in fiction, see Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), and Evelyn J. Hinz, ‘Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Marriage Plots and their Relationships to Genres of Fiction’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 91 (1976) 900–913. 46 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. A. S. Byatt (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) [hereafter MF]. 47 Eliot’s use of music in her prose and poetry has received the most critical attention of the authors discussed here. Most recently, Phyllis Weliver considers Eliot’s music and female musicians in Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction and in this volume. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre’s chapter offers a discussion of Eliot’s use of the pastoral genre in Mill on the Floss. Earlier studies of Eliot and music include Beryl Gray, George Eliot and Music (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Alison Byerly, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), as well as her article ‘ “The Language of the Soul”: George Eliot and Music’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 44 (June 1989) 1–17; and Karen Mann, The Language that Makes George Eliot’s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). The major new study of Eliot and music, Delia da Sousa Correa’s George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave, 2002), appeared too late to be included in the research for this study.

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that musical courtship offers a state unattainable to those who must relate to each other through words alone. Yet Maggie’s incursion upon the ‘Duet in Paradise’, in which Stephen literally sings the part of Adam in Haydn’s The Creation, suggests that the idyllic communion he and Lucy supposedly share is maintained by nothing more than the absence of another woman. The disruption Maggie creates intimates that the many paradisiacal duets in Victorian fiction secure their romantic couplings primarily because the hero or heroine never has more than one suitor at a time and never has to grapple with conflicting inner desires. Eliot draws upon theories of evolutionary biology and linguistic development that align music with pre-cultural experience, representing a more authentic, primordial form of communication to characterize the ‘mutual fitness’ of the musical courtship as a myth of origins from which her fictional lovers and the reading public are forever estranged.48 The theories repeat a traditional distinction between nature and culture, which Eliot suggests Victorian social forms have effaced or failed to acknowledge. Unlike the heroine whose desires are portrayed as purely social constructs or desires that social constructs can override, Eliot offers Maggie Tulliver two suitors, neither one capable of fulfilling her needs, and at least two conflicting systems of desire, one determined by culture, the other by nature.49 The asymmetrical configurations that occur when Maggie, Lucy, Stephen and Philip gather at the piano, in spite of their number and genders having the superficial makings of two conventional couples, announces that the Mill will resolve neither the erotic nor narrative tensions incited within. The unspoken and unwilled conversations in which Stephen and Maggie engage at the piano serve as Eliot’s call for a marital ideology and novelistic form that can accommodate the desires they express. Thomas Hardy follows Eliot in using the piano to challenge the ideologies it represents and authorize a broader field of content for literary representation.50 In Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), when

48 See Weliver, Musical Women in Victorian Fiction, for a study of scientific discourses on music in relation to Victorian literature. On Darwinian theory in Eliot, see Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). 49 It is usually the degree to which readers believe Eliot legitimates sexual desire that determines their response to Stephen Guest. Eliot does give Stephen a particularly wilful sexuality, but it does not appear to me that this is meant to discount the character entirely. 50 Other works on Hardy and music include John Hughes, Ecstatic Sound: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Hughes’s work ‘presents itself less as a study of the representation of music in Hardy’s fiction and poetry simply, than as one that explores the connection between music and emotion within his work. The aim thereby is to approach Hardy’s abiding concern with individual expression,

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Gabriel Oak tells Bathsheba Everdene, ‘You shall have a piano in a year or two – farmers’ wives are getting to have pianos now’,51 Hardy relates an historical truth about the piano’s ubiquitous presence in England towards the latter half of the century and immediately confers Victorian heroine status upon Bathsheba by furnishing her with a heroine’s signature object. Yet Gabriel’s revelation suggests that the middle-class ideal the instrument has come to represent may be inimical to rural life. By offering her a piano, Gabriel would seem to offer a life in which she will have the leisure time to play. However, Hardy’s description of the piano implies that the marital ideal the instrument typifies is incompatible with the life she leads. The ‘new piano, which was an old one in other annals, looked particularly sloping and out of level on the warped floor before night threw a shade over its less prominent angles and hid the unpleasantness’ (FFMC, 144). It has no place in Bathsheba’s home because she does not recognize the sexual division of labour that consecrates the home as the domain of her gender. She refuses to relinquish her role as bailie to Gabriel and remains outdoors so much of the time that her piano remains unused, even in her courtship with Maybold. The instrument becomes no more than a sign that middleclass conspicuous consumption is a habit she emulates well: ‘I wonder what a farmer-woman can want with a harpsichord, dulcimer, pianner, or whatever ‘tis they’d call it?’ the maltster marvels, ‘She’ve bought all but everything new’ (FFMC, 155). In the end, Bathsheba’s piano exposes the class bias of the Victorian domestic ideal; at the same time it grants Hardy the authority to represent the class and culture Bathsheba comes from by offering the representation in a recognizable form. It is not until The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), however, that Hardy uses the piano to challenge the notions it introduces to the narrative outright.52 Lucetta’s piano should mark her as a well-bred, upper-middle-class woman of a marriageable age, but both she and the piano have come too late in the tradition for either to signify properly. Too much of Lucetta’s sexual history is known for the trappings of maidenhood to efface her true status for the reader. However, in offering different characters differing access to that information, Hardy presses and his recurrent themes – time, community, and love – through this connection’ (2). See also Byerly, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature; C.M. Jackson-Houlston, Ballads, Songs, and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose (Aldershot: Ashgate; 1999); and Joan Grundy, Hardy and the Sister Arts (London: Macmillan, 1979). 51 Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), ed. Ronald Blythe (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) 79 [hereafter FFMC]. 52 Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), ed. Martin Seymour-Smith (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) [hereafter MC].

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the reader to appreciate that the language describing Lucetta’s history may in itself constitute its meaning rather than the acts that the language relates. Unlike the piano in Emma, which ensures that the language within its fictive universe communicates transparently, Lucetta’s piano serves as the means by which Hardy questions whether language can in fact achieve transparency by pointing to the gap between narrative ‘facts’ and the words used to describe them. Lucetta’s piano represents a femininity embodying the bourgeois ideal, in stark contrast to the femininity suggested by Elizabeth-Jane. Elizabeth-Jane has struggled to take on the habits befitting her rise in station as Henchard’s step-daughter; her inability to ‘get beyond a wretched bit of Latin’ (MC, 223) makes it unlikely that she will ever be able to negotiate successfully the marriage-market in the way Lucetta’s piano suggests she can. Elizabeth-Jane’s inability to fashion herself into a proper young lady seems evidence of her possessing an inalterable core which, unlike Lucetta, is beyond the reach of culture. However, Elizabeth-Jane’s origins complicate any oppositions Lucetta’s piano may be construed to put into play. For if Lucetta’s femininity has been tainted by her previous liaison with Henchard, then Elizabeth-Jane’s has been tainted by her mother’s liaison with Newson. Ultimately, Lucetta’s piano can communicate only itself because the notions of female identity it introduces to the text are in perpetual contestation. The implications of this instability play out on the thematic level. Lucetta’s piano performs the antithesis of its operation in Emma. While Jane’s piano casts doubt on her sexual purity only when its origins are in play, Lucetta’s piano communicates her sexual purity only when its origins remain in play. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy uses Phillotson’s piano to dismantle further the conceits that maintain the Victorian novel. When he stages Sue and Jude’s first meeting after her marriage to Phillotson at the piano Phillotson owns, Hardy indicates that the marriages which traditionally reconcile the narrative tensions in Victorian fiction perform no such reconciliations in his fiction. Jude is already long-married and abandoned at this point in the text, his marriage having incited more tensions than it resolved; and Sue’s marriage has occurred roughly at the novel’s midpoint, suggesting it will not resolve any tensions either, even before she meets Jude at the piano. The many courtship scenes set at the piano in earlier novels add to the irony of the meeting, for Phillotson’s ownership of the piano has failed to render it emblematic of his marriage; if he and Sue have engaged in any courtship rituals at all, Hardy has chosen not to dramatize them. Instead, by situating the first meeting between Jude and Sue after her marriage at Phillotson’s piano, in the school where Sue and Phillotson both work, Hardy indicates that whatever the piano has come to edify in Sue and Phillotson’s marriage

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and whatever the marriage has come to edify in and of itself does not account for all that either the piano or the marriage can signify. Pointedly, in the text Jude grasps Sue’s hand ‘just as he had done before her marriage’ (JO, 262). Jude and Sue effectively participate in a courtship ritual which Sue’s marriage would seemingly prohibit. The piano appropriately serves as one of the few sites where Sue engages in physical contact willingly. As her struggle to reconcile her sexual and emotional needs appears to arise from her inability to transcend the moral strictures placed on female sexual behaviour, the piano’s codified role in courtship renders it a legitimate space for a woman to allow an ‘unpremeditated instinct’ (296) to escape unexamined. Like a proper Victorian heroine, Sue can dare to touch Jude only under the veil of propriety the piano affords. The act proves ironic, in that she can do it only when married to another man, and tragic, in that Hardy intimates Sue’s real problem to be the oppressive dynamic of sexual interaction culturally codified for her gender: marriage renders her ‘licensed to be loved on the premises’ (323). ‘What tortures’ her ‘so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally! – the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a manner whose essence is its voluntariness!’ (274). Hardy refuses to allow the reader to believe that Sue’s aversion to wifely submission is a response to the man and not the patriarchal power structure by portraying Sue as similarly conflicted in her relationship with Jude. She can only submit when she fears that Arabella will reclaim him. Phillotson’s ‘cumbersome’ piano reveals as much about how the novel will behave as it does about the character who owns it. The instrument implicates him in a marriage-plot before the text has indicated that a marriage-plot will follow; his gender suggests he is ill suited to his role within it. It is not only that the piano is considered a feminine instrument: the type of marriage brought about by the courtships staged there may be the only legitimate goal for a Victorian heroine, but no more than an incidental part of a male protagonist’s more expansive narrative journey. The fact that there is only one name in the title, Jude, suggests that the narrative trajectory of the novel will centre around the aspirations and desires of the title character. Yet the initial preoccupation with Phillotson’s piano signals that Jude’s journey may be infinitely more complex than that of the traditional protagonist precisely because his desires will not be the only ones contained within the narrative. In short, Phillotson’s piano proves cumbersome for burdening him with aspirations that are misplaced, unfulfilled, and inconstant. He buys the piano before he has a permanent home to house it in, without sensing that his enthusiasm to learn to play the instrument will fade

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within a year, and without the awareness that it represents an extravagant purchase to make in the midst of such uncertainties. That these aspirations will ultimately put his desires into direct conflict with Jude’s only adds further evidence that the novel will not behave according to the conventions of the traditional Victorian novel nor validate the bourgeois values it reifies. Phillotson’s ‘possession’ of the piano illustrates that the prosperity of bourgeois culture is not simply available to anyone willing to work hard, that the domestic ideal requires a large income and a wife who neither has the need nor the desire to work outside the home, and that the practice of encouraging the lower classes to refine their coarseness by appreciating the music of their peers is absurd if not potentially detrimental.53 As Phillotson’s questionable ‘possession’ of the piano indicates, language in Hardy’s universe does not operate as transparently as it does in Emma; yet Hardy draws on the piano plot’s structural function in Emma to interrogate the status of the language in Jude. Unlike Emma, who prefers her fictions to Austen’s truths, Jude wants only to find a story he can believe in. As a child he discovers that ‘events did not rhyme quite as he had thought’ (JO, 57); he searches desperately to satisfy ‘the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on – to cling to – for someplace he could call admirable’ (65) and turns to a successive number of forms in the hopes of finding a stable truth to ‘anchor on’. One of the first is a grammar he imagines will ‘turn the expressions of one language into those of another’ by an ‘aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal completeness’ (71). He hopes for an incontrovertible system that will operate without fail upon every conceivable language in perpetuity, a process Hardy likens to a ‘law of transmutation’ (71). In other words, Jude looks to language – literally – as a medium that might function in a manner orderly enough to facilitate the easy conversion of one language to another. His desire proves Hardy’s ironic commentary on the prospect of finding ‘transparent communication’ within his novel. Hardy offers the narrative that Jude constructs in response to the hymn sung by Sue at Phillotson’s piano as an interrogation of the interpretative process, resembling that which Austen performs with Emma’s piano narrative although to a different end. Like Pater, Jude believes music has the capacity to communicate truths untouched by the imperfections of the real world he inhabits. When Jude first hears the hymn at the choir at Melchester, it strikes him as ‘a strangely emotional 53 See Gillett, Musical Women in England, chapter 2: ‘Music and “Women’s Mission” in Late-Victorian Philanthropy’ for discussion of the philanthropic efforts of the middle class involving musical refinement.

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composition’ that ‘moved him exceeding’ (JO, 252). As he begins ‘musing on its composer, and the reasons why he composed it’, he ventures: What a man of sympathies he must be! Perplexed and harassed as he himself was … how he would like to know that man! ‘He of all men would understand my difficulties’, said the impulsive Jude. If ever there were any person in the world to choose as a confidant, this composer would be the one, for he must have suffered, and throbbed, and yearned. (252)

By turning his thoughts from the piece to its composer, he has already conceded that the hymn does not have the power to move him innately, but has been constructed to produce the emotions he experiences. However, Jude merely transfers his hope for an ideal relationship between the hymn and the truth it communicates onto the composer, concluding that the ‘emotional composition’ of the piece directly reflects the emotional composition of its composer. What Jude discovers is that the man he believes a ‘hungry soul in pursuit of a full soul’ (252) has written ‘The Foot of the Cross’ with little else in mind but the desire for profit. When the composer says, ‘Ah well – other people have said so too’ (253), he reduces Jude’s response to but one of many. Rather than discovering an incontrovertible truth, he discovers there could well be an infinite number of contingencies. Through Jude, Hardy impels his readers to appreciate that interpretation can be shaped by the interpreter. Jude has ‘harmonizing eyes’ that become ‘forcible eyes’ (123), and the strength of his feelings for Christminster allows those eyes, ‘when he passed objects out of harmony’, to ‘slip over them as if he did not see them’ (125). Like Emma, Jude learns that his perceptions are contingent: ‘What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real’ (130). However, Austen exposes the gaps that can open up between her narrative ‘facts’ and Emma’s fictions, only to close them emphatically with the predominant narrative ratified by everyone within and without the novelistic universe. Hardy exposes the gaps between his narrative ‘facts’ and Jude’s fictions without offering a similar reassurance that his narrative ‘facts’ are either stable or, like Austen’s, morally superior to the fictions Jude creates. Instead, the ‘defective real’ Hardy offers challenges the hegemony of the values that communicate the harmonious vision of the traditional novel: Christminster does not offer opportunity for the betterment of all, marriage does not inherently confer happiness, all women are not born submissive and sexual desire does not abide by the laws of culture. He asks his audience to engage in a critique of what Adorno calls ‘the deceptive moment’ in interpretation, the sense of being ‘in accord with, accepted

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and reconciled by all,’ a moment that ‘fulfill[s] men in themselves, to train for consent’ within bourgeois culture.54 As Austen resolves the narrative crisis posed by Emma’s misperceptions at Jane’s piano, it seems only fitting that Hardy should return Jude to Phillotson’s piano to discuss the implications that the composer’s revelation has on Jude and the narrative he inhabits. What proves remarkable to Jude is that the piece still moves him. When Sue plays he concludes that ‘her rendering of the piece, though not remarkable, seemed divine as compared with his own’ (JO, 262), with little awareness that his feelings for Sue may influence his interpretation, a point his visit to the composer should have made clear. In fact, both Jude and Sue seem poised between being able to appreciate the subjective experience of hearing the song rendered in and of itself – something approximating ‘absolute music’ – and finding that impossible to do with knowledge of its suspect origins. Neither Sue nor Jude can allow that their feelings for each other may not only affect the way in which they respond to the hymn as played in the other’s presence, but the way in which they respond to each other. Sue can say, ‘It is odd … that I should care about that air; because – ’ (JO, 262), without ever having the chance to reveal what her response might have been without Jude’s prompting. After he has perhaps provoked her into saying something she may not have said otherwise, she admits, ‘I am that not that sort – quite’ only to have Jude presume by ‘that sort’ she means ‘not easily moved’ (262). Finally, in spite of her claim that she ‘didn’t quite mean that’, Jude announces almost triumphantly: ‘O, but you are one of that sort, for you are just like me at heart’ (262). The conversation suggests not only that Jude and Sue may have misread each other, but that the conversation is predicated on the ability of each to rewrite the dialogue of the other in order for there to be any communication whatsoever. That each character can carry out this exchange without ever conceding his or her own ‘truth’ to the other’s – or any awareness that such a discrepancy may exist – suggests that Hardy believes experience itself to be determined by an individual’s subjectivity, not simply the language with which that individual describes it. By having Phillotson reveal later on in the narrative that he was eavesdropping on this entire scene, Hardy asks readers to govern their own interpretations by the same limitations; 54 Quoted in Daniel C. Melnick, Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1994) 9. Melnick’s study deconstructs terms which modernist authors borrow from the aesthetics of music and proved invaluable to my work on Hardy.

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they can only form their impressions from the material the author makes available. In The Great Web, Ian Gregor writes: ‘In Jude, Hardy was still committed to a fiction which pressed for a conclusion even though it was to be a conclusion shaken to the core of contraries’.55 I would add that Hardy uses the trope of the piano – which has come to stabilize the contraries in much fiction pressing for such a conclusion – to propose that every effort to contain and stabilize the narrative ultimately fails to efface the evidence of the containment. It is the reading public’s desire for a conclusion that creates the effect as much as anything deployed within the text, and it is this that makes Phillotson’s piano most cumbersome: the piano, like everything else in representation or life or language, has a history that may or may not be available for interpretation. As Jude and Sue sit at it with their hands touching, Hardy demonstrates that the marriages meant to contain the tensions, sexual and narrative, of Victorian culture do not perform such acts inherently. The piano may signify a culture that celebrates domesticity, ridicules it, or ponders something else entirely, all dependent on the specifics of each representation and the reader who interprets it. When Hardy writes of Jude and Sue, ‘indeed, when they talked on an indifferent subject, as now, there was ever a second silent conversation passing between them’ (JO, 263), he introduces the prospect of a third and a fourth silent conversation as well. As his depiction of their spoken conversation reveals that language often communicates little more than itself, the offering of additional systems only suggests that any effort to communicate succeeds primarily because those engaged in the effort require it to do so. Jude’s reaction to Sue mirrors that of the novel’s audience; for they, like Jude, will be moved according to their own dictates, regardless of what the text may suggest about the prospects of transparent communication trying to make events rhyme in the face of an illogical nature. In the Victorian novel, the piano offers a point where woman meets man, nature meets culture and art meets artifice; its role in determining these categories comments on the construction of subjectivity in the largest sense. For every attempt to discern the female from the male, the natural from the artificial and the innovative from the derivative can be construed as an effort to use language to ascribe an empirical truth to what left unnamed and unclassified might remain indeterminate and inexpressible by any means. As earlier writers within the realist tradition use the piano and musical performance to comment on the ideologies 55 Ian Gregor, The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1974) 233.

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and codes they communicate, Hardy finds music an effective art form to lend stability to his own. However, even the best representation of a musical performance can never reproduce the experience, because language renders it into a different medium altogether. Hardy finds no better means for suggesting that language functions only because those who use it require it to operate in a way that can communicate experience.

Female performances: Melodramatic music conventions and The Woman in White Laura Vorachek He put the length of the room between himself and the enchantress, and took his seat by the grand piano, at which Lucy Floyd was playing slow harmonious symphonies of Beethoven. The drawingroom at Felden Woods was so long, that, seated by this piano, Captain Bulstrode seemed to look back at the merry group about the heiress as he might have looked at a scene on the stage from the back of the boxes. He almost wished for an opera-glass as he watched Aurora’s graceful gestures and the play of her sparkling eyes; and then turning to the piano, he listened to the drowsy music, and contemplated Lucy’s face, marvelously fair in the light of that full moon … the glory of which, streaming in from an open window, put out the dim wax-candles on the piano.1

In this passage from Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, the piano music played by Lucy Floyd sets the tone, the ‘drowsy’ and ‘slow harmonious symphonies’ reflecting the peaceful and happy domestic scene, in much the same way the musical accompaniment in a melodramatic stage play would alert the audience to the mood of the scene. Braddon reminds us of this connection with the narrator’s comment that Bulstrode looks at Aurora ‘as he might have looked at a scene on the stage from the back of the boxes’. He is a spectator of this domestic scene, but the reader also watches Aurora from a distance, reflecting this spectatorial position. Like Bulstrode, who wishes for an opera-glass with which to better observe the scene, we too are voyeuristically enjoying the view. Providing the musical accompaniment and thereby contributing to the domestic harmony is, appropriately enough, Lucy who has been educated to be the ideal Victorian woman. Beethoven’s symphonies would not typically be characterized as ‘slow’. 1 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (1863), ed. Richard Nemesvari and Lisa Surridge (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998) 93.

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But Braddon presumably wanted to introduce the particular atmosphere suggested by ‘slow’, ‘harmonious’ and ‘drowsy’ music as well as the concept of high cultivation evoked by the name Beethoven. This ideal woman at the piano is contrasted with ‘the enchantress’ at the other end of the room, an opposition emphasized by Bulstrode’s deliberate contemplation of each. This binarism hints at a love triangle between Bulstrode, Aurora and Lucy, and thus the music also accompanies the tension underlying this happy scene. Lucy loves Bulstrode and suffers in silence as she watches him fall in love with Aurora, who is unaware of her cousin’s feelings. Lucy’s perfection and silent suffering earmark her as the heroine of a melodrama, destined to be cruelly used by the villain and rescued at the last minute by the hero. But the heroine of this sensation novel is the enchantress, Aurora Floyd, suggesting a crucial difference between melodrama and sensation fiction – in sensation fiction not everything is as it appears. While the similarities between melodrama and sensation fiction are often noted, the similar use of music in each has been overlooked. Melodrama is characterized by excessive emotion, flat character types, a focus on plot at the expense of characterization and exaggerated expressions of right and wrong. As its name implies, it also relied heavily on musical accompaniment. For much of the first half of the nineteenth century, only the patent theatres were allowed to present drama with spoken dialogue due to grants from Charles II in 1660 giving to two royal favourites, Killigrew and Davenant, exclusive rights, which came to belong to the companies at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Incorporating music in the form of songs and instrumental accompaniment provided the minor theatres with a means to skirt this restriction, since lyrics could convey meaning verbally and instrumental music could convey meaning non-verbally to the audience. Additionally, it served to convey action to audience members who were far from the stage, with poor sight lines. In theatres like Convent Garden and Drury Lane, the large size and poor acoustics meant that ‘only show and noise reached the uttermost corners’.2 Thus melodrama was well suited to the patent houses as well as the smaller minor theatres which had good views but were required by law to include music.3 Melodrama was not devoid of spoken dialogue, however; music accompaniment and a certain number of songs were enough to satisfy the authorities.4 The genre continued to be popular after restrictions on spoken dialogue were lifted in 1843 with the Theatrical Regulation Act. 2 3 4

Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: H. Jenkins, 1965) 52. Ibid. 52, 61. Ibid. 53.

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Melodrama’s cousin, sensation fiction, is a subgenre of the Victorian novel, so classified by literary critics to account for the novels of the 1860s that deal with the violent crime, adultery and bigamy lurking under the surface of proper middle-class domestic life. These works are characterized by coincidence, mystery, suspense, moral ambiguity and, most famously noted by Kathleen Tillotson, by secrets.5 Influenced by Gothic mysteries and Dickens’ crime novels, as well as by melodrama, the genre was also influenced by the bigamy trials of the period, by divorce law reform, such as the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, and by crime reporting in tabloids of sensational murders. Additionally, Jonathon Loesberg argues that sensation fiction, concerned with identity and its loss, was a product of ambiguous attitudes toward class structure in the years leading up to the Second Reform Bill of 1867.6 Most critics of melodrama, when addressing the use of music, point to modern cinema, skipping over nineteenth-century authors’ attempts to incorporate it for similar effect. Nor have critics of sensation fiction addressed its musical references in the context of melodrama.7 I contend that for both genres music was a recognizable convention, a sign that made certain scenes and actions legible to the audience. Music in sensation fiction has only recently begun to receive attention, in a chapter within Phyllis Weliver’s Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction and in articles by Allan Atlas and Nicky Losseff.8 While Weliver focuses on music in relation to Victorian theories of identity formation, Atlas 5 See Kathleen Tillotson, ‘The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen-Sixties’, Introduction to The Woman in White, ed. Anthea Trodd (Boston: Houghton, 1969) ix–xxvi. 6 See Jonathon Loesberg, ‘The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction’, Representations 13 (1986) 115–138. The Second Reform Bill redistributed Parliamentary seats and more than doubled the electorate, giving the vote to many working-class men in towns. 7 See, for example, Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) and Christine Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987) 5–39. Little critical attention has been paid to the music that scored melodramatic stage plays, with the exception of David Mayer’s work; see David Mayer, ‘The Music of Melodrama’ in Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976, ed. David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharrati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 49–63. One reason for this might be a patronizing attitude toward the music because the composers were relatively anonymous. 8 Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Allan W. Atlas, ‘Wilkie Collins on Music and Musicians’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 124 (1999) 255–70; Nicky Losseff, ‘Absent Melody and The Woman in White’, Music and Letters 81/4 (2000) 532–50.

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and Losseff examine how music history and Wilkie Collins’ novels mutually inform each other.9 Both melodrama and sensation fiction rely on plot contrivances, playing on feeling – emotional sentiment in the former and bodily sensation in the latter – and employing music to heighten drama and identify characters.10 Melodrama’s use of music to convey meaning thus provides a springboard for the examination of music in sensation fiction. But sensation fiction departs from melodrama’s clear-cut morality, its ‘world of certainties … world of absolutes’.11 Complex characters replace the flat stereotypes of melodrama, and moral ambiguity replaces defined notions of right and wrong. This departure extends to melodrama’s use of music to convey non-verbal meaning as well; music in sensation fiction has multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings. The piano replaces the full orchestra in domestic melodramatic scenes in sensation fiction and characters, most often female, must play their own accompaniment.12 This troubles the traditional Victorian conception of the separation of private and domestic spheres.13 The 9 Weliver notes that Victorian mental scientists such as William Hamilton ‘thought identity was partially formed through performative actions, like playing the piano’ (Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 111). Atlas reviews musical attitudes expressed in Collins’ novels and letters and finds him representative of the conservative musical taste in the nineteenth century. Losseff argues that musical scenes and examination of cultural associations of composers provide a sub-narrative of Laura Fairlie’s ‘descent into a private hell’ (Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, 532). 10 The ties between melodrama and sensation fiction are numerous. Many sensation novels were adapted for the stage; the two most popular adaptations were of East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret. Collins wrote stage melodrama including The Frozen Deep (1857), The Red Vial (1857) and a stage adaptation of the novella No Thoroughfare, which he co-authored with Charles Dickens in 1867. Mary Elizabeth Braddon acted on provincial stages from 1857–60, when melodrama was still popular fare. According to Robert Lee Wolff, Braddon acted under the stage name Mary Seyton and appeared in melodramas by such popular dramatists as Tom Taylor and Edward Bulwer Lytton. For a discussion of the roles she played, see Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York: Garland, 1979) 45–54. The structural similarities between the two genres are enumerated in Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational” about the “Sensation Novel”?’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982) 4–5, 12–13. 11 Booth, English Melodrama, 14. 12 Melodramatic stage plays were most often supported by a full orchestra, but on tour or when funds were low they were reduced to one or two instruments, usually a piano, for musical accompaniment (Mayer, ‘The Music of Melodrama’, 55). 13 Historians such as Martha Vicinus, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, and literary critics like Elizabeth Langland, have demonstrated that, despite cultural representations to the contrary, the boundary line between spheres was permeable. See Vicinus’s Introduction to A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women

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private music of the drawing room retains an element of the public music of the theatre in that the musician takes the stage. Ironically, in removing to the private middle-class lives of its characters, music leaves the orchestra pit. Female performances are in full view, enacted for the reader and characters alike. I suggest that music’s performative nature enables the depiction of different models of femininity that are lurking beneath the construction of ideal Victorian womanhood. Sensation fiction complicates this female stereotype by revealing a discrepancy between appearances and reality, and music is an apt means of communicating this to the reader since it too carried contradictory meanings in the nineteenth century. Many contemporary intellectuals argued that music was a moral and spiritual influence, and thus an appropriate pastime for the angel in the house. John Ruskin believed that music was ‘the first, the simplest, the most effective of all instruments of moral instruction’.14 Rev H. R. Haweis similarly stressed the benefits of music, arguing that music provides an emotional outlet for women, thereby maintaining domestic harmony: ‘That domestic and long-suffering instrument, the cottage piano, has probably done more to sweeten existence and bring peace and happiness to families in general, and to young women in particular, than all the homilies on the domestic virtues ever yet penned.’15 However, other nineteenth-century intellectuals noted that music had a sensual, even erotic side, indicating its sexual possibilities as well. In The Descent of Man Charles Darwin contends that vocal music is a pre-linguistic means of conveying strong emotions in courtship. Furthermore, ‘women are generally thought to possess sweeter voices than men, and as far as this serves as any guide, we may infer that they first acquired musical powers in order to attract the other sex’.16 Thus Darwin links music to sex drive, notably in women, suggesting a sexual rather than spiritual source for musical pleasure. While music is prominent in sensation fiction from Mary Elizabeth Braddon to Mrs Henry Wood, I will focus on Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), as it is exemplary of this genre’s incorporation of melodramatic musical conventions. In this novel, musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) ix–xix; Davidoff’s and Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Preess, 1987); and Langland’s Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 14 John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air (London: Smith, Elder, 1869) 59. 15 Rev H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals (1871; New York: Harper & Brothers: 1876) 104. 16 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), 2nd edn (1874; New York: D. Appleton, 1922) 585.

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performances allow characters to manipulate ideals of gender and sexuality while seemingly executing their conventions.17

Music in melodrama Music is utilized in melodrama to convey to the audience mood and the moral value of characters. Depending on mood in a play, composers pieced together stock works: agitatos, ‘slows’ (for serious situations), ‘pathetics’, ‘struggles’, ‘hornpipes’, ‘andantes’.18 From Michael Booth’s survey of melodramatic scripts, we see that music was used to express everything from pain and disorder to joy and remorse, from astonishment to confusion.19 Characters had identifying music for their entrances and exits which became standard for character type: ‘an ominous rumble of the contrabass for the villain, a trumpet fanfare for the hero, flute trills for the heroine, and a ribald guffaw from the bassoon for the comic.’20 Music also propels action in melodrama. According to David Mayer, ‘music is an affecting and effecting device to underline and emphasize the emotional content of a play’s action, to further concentration, very probably masking the improbabilities that we so often recognize in melodrama, and maintaining momentum of the play’s headlong rush from sensation to sensation, from crisis to emotional crisis’.21 Thus music keeps the plot moving from event to event, not giving the audience time to question its logic. Similarly, Peter Brooks suggests that music functioned in melodrama the way that myth functioned in pre-modern literature, its patterning investing the plot with ‘inexorability and necessity’.22 However, contemporary comments on music in melodrama contest twentieth-century theories of its effectiveness in propelling the plot. The description of a melodrama by ‘Our Eye-Witness’ in All the Year Round (1860) indicates how music could function as a cover for improbabilities: ‘The Dumb Guide, with one of the opportunely discovered swords in each hand, tackles both his enemies at once, and 17 I extend this argument to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–2) and Aurora Floyd in my forthcoming dissertation Instruments of Desire: Women’s Musical Performance in Victorian Literature and Culture. For additional discussion of The Woman in White, see Irene Morra’s chapter in this volume. 18 Mayer, ‘The Music of Melodrama’, 51. 19 Booth, English Melodrama, 37. 20 Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967) 121. 21 Mayer, ‘The Music of Melodrama’, 51. 22 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 14.

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accommodates them with every kind of up stroke, and all sorts of fancy strokes, keeping time to the music all the while.’23 While the music in this scene likely maintained the play’s momentum and heightened tension, the author’s tone demonstrates that it did little to mask the absurd plot. Braddon likewise suggests that Victorian audiences were not so swept away as Brooks and Mayer imply. In Aurora Floyd, a sea captain attends a nautical melodrama at an East End theatre, and he is disgusted with its lack of reality, including ‘the proportion of horn-pipe-dancing and nautical ballad singing gone though, as compared to the work that was done’.24 The use of music to propel the plot was likely transparent to nineteenth-century audiences. As these functions indicate, music was descriptive in melodrama, taking equal place with language in conveying information to the audience. The efficacy of this form of communication was a matter of debate during the nineteenth century. The author of the prefatory remarks to Samuel Arnold’s The Woodman’s Hut (1814) contends that ‘music is not more remote from nature than the blank verse or the rhymes of tragedy, and if it [melodrama] err [sic] in having too much action, it has a counterbalancing advantage in not being clogged by excess of speech; in fact the music supplies the place of language’.25 Toward the end of the century the naturalness of this supplantation came into question. Percy Fitzgerald writes in The World Behind the Scenes (1881): Still flourishes that mysterious music which always strikes in when melodramatic emotion is waxing strong. What more natural, when the lion-hearted sailor (who is so droll all through, so ready at the cry of female distress), when he engages in that truly terrific combat, at unprecedented odds – seven to one – what more natural than that his feelings should be translated by hurried and agitated music, by fiddle and gallopade of bows? Again, what so natural as that when smugglers, or robbers, or captives trying to make their escape should, when moving lightly on tiptoe past the unnatural tyrant’s chamber, be kept in time by certain disjointed and jerking music, with a grasshopper or robin-red-breast rhythm? Again, what more desirable than that when the greyhaired Count in the braided frock, whose early life will not bear much looking into, turns to the villagers, and, in tones that seem to come from the region of his boots, says that ‘Adela is indeed his chee-ild!’ – what so becoming as what is called ‘A chord!’ of starling character, making listeners jump from their seats? Still more in keeping is that slow, agonizing strain which steals in when all the guests are

23

‘Our Eye-Witness “Sitting at a Play” ’, All the Year Round 65 (21 July 1860) 354. Braddon, Aurora Floyd, 458. 25 Quoted in Booth, English Melodrama, 38–9. 24

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crowding into the drawing-room, with horror and consternation in their countenances, and gather slowly about the lady in white, whose father, husband, lover, or brother has just disappeared, or been shot in a duel, or absconded. Sad uplifting of hands – characteristic grouping, and effective tableau, as the drop-scene comes down slowly to the agonizing music, closing in all decently!26

Excess of speech has been replaced by an excess of music. Fitzgerald’s satiric questions, ‘what more natural?’, ‘what so natural?’ signal that he finds musical accompaniment extremely artificial. Nevertheless, his ironic look at the use of music in melodrama indicates that its formulae were firmly entrenched and therefore legible to the audience. I contend that music as a form of communication, descriptive of scenes, characters and plots, was an established convention due to its pervasiveness in melodrama, and Victorian audiences could be expected to extend their ‘reading’ of music to other art forms.27 These melodramatic musical conventions all appear in sensation fiction. While authors do not have stock mood pieces at hand, they create the same effect by reference to well-known composers, types of music (symphonies, fantasias, ballads, etc.) or, at the very least, the tempo of music being played. As characters must be at the piano to play their own accompaniment, their entrances and exits are not often coupled with music, but they themselves do still come to be associated with musical themes. Notably, the music women most often perform in sensation novels is instrumental, or for unaccompanied voice, like

26 Percy Fitzgerald, The World Behind the Scenes (London, 1881; reprinted, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972) 312–13. 27 According to Michael Booth, the notion that theatre audience composition moved from working-class domination to middle-class patronage in the nineteenth century is ‘a serious over-simplification’: ‘Even before the 1860s thoroughly respectable middle-class audiences were attending Charles Kean’s seasons of Shakespeare, gentlemanly melodrama, and refined comedy at the Princess’s Theatre in the 1850s, stimulated in part by the Queen’s patronage of Kean at court theatricals in Windsor Castle and her regular attendance at the Princess’s’; Michael Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 9, 7. Jane Moody similarly contends that middle-class withdrawal from theatre-going during the nineteenth century has been exaggerated, ‘for who was reading all those theatre reviews and buying scenes and characters from juvenile drama otherwise?’; Jane Moody, ‘The State of the Abyss: Nineteenth-Century Performance and Theatre Historiography in 1999’, Journal of Victorian Culture 5 (2000) 124. And, I would add, who was reading journalistic and sociological depictions of melodramatic stage plays which appeared in periodicals with a middle-class readership such as All The Year Round? Deborah Vlock argues that the Victorian public read novels ‘through the lens of popular [melodramatic theatrical] performance,’ and ‘their reading skills were cultivated in the theatre’; Deborah Vlock, Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 3, 91.

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melodramatic incidental music. And, as we will see, music is also used to heighten tension in dramatic moments and to propel action. This brings up an interesting paradox. On the one hand, the piano in the nineteenth-century had both class and gender associations; it was a legible sign of middle-class respectability, economic status and womanhood. Moreover, women’s piano-playing traditionally carried with it associations of domestic harmony. On the other hand, the sexual scandals that lurk beneath that domestic harmony are the source of sensation fiction’s thrills. Women’s piano-playing becomes emblematic of sensational moments in this genre. Thus, music’s function as marker of middle-class respectability and indicator of dramatic tension are not always compatible.28 Rendering empirical knowledge questionable, sensation fiction suggests we cannot rely on surface impressions, including those produced by music. Unlike Weliver, who argues that sensation novels ‘depict fear of domestic, amateur music, and end in ways that validate this anxiety’, I suggest that Collins and other sensation fiction authors embrace the complex meanings available in women’s domestic music-making.29 This is best exemplified by looking at the characters who embody this contradiction in their performances at the piano.

‘Let the music speak to us’: Emotional resonance in The Woman in White In The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins presents us with the prescribed

28 Winifred Hughes titles the first chapter of her book, The Maniac in the Cellar, ‘The Sensation Paradox’. She defines this paradox as ‘the violent yoking of romance and realism’ which ‘strains both modes to the limits, disrupting the accepted balance between them’; Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) 16). The paradox to which I refer is the specific instance of women’s piano-playing. 29 Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 100. The political nature of sensation fiction has long been under debate, with critics such as Winifred Hughes and Thomas Boyle contending that it is subversive, while critics such as Ann Cvetkovich and Phyllis Weliver argue it is conservative. See Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar; Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York: Viking, 1989); Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction. Lyn Pykett, however, contends that sensation fiction offers no coherent range of perspectives on gender, sexuality, class, marriage and the family due to the shifting perspective of the narration which does not align the reader with any one view; Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992) 81.

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ideal Victorian woman.30 Laura Fairlie is ‘fair’, ‘delicate’, ‘sensitive’ and ‘nervous’, ‘truthful’, ‘innocent’, ‘simple’ and ‘childish’ and having, of course, acquired all the appropriate feminine accomplishments, ‘plays delightfully’ (WW, 41–4, 28). Additionally, her beauty ‘fills a void in [her lover, Walter Hartright’s] spiritual nature’ (41). Marian Halcombe sums up her half-sister’s character best, saying, ‘in short, she is an angel’ (27). Laura’s ideal womanhood is highlighted by contrast with Marian who, in addition to having masculine facial features and enjoying masculine pastimes, doesn’t ‘know one note of music from the other’ (28). We are given a demonstration of Laura’s musical ability when, on Walter’s first evening with the family at Limmeridge House, he asks her to play. The ‘heavenly tenderness of the music of Mozart’ completes the ‘peaceful-home picture of the drawing room’ (47, 46). Laura performs her role as the Angel in the House, bringing a spiritual repose to the home with her playing. Her identifying theme music is Mozart, an appropriate choice as mid-nineteenth-century music critics ‘tended to dwell on [his music’s] purity, beauty and sweetness’, all characteristics that Laura shares.31 Furthermore, Losseff argues that within the context of the novel, Mozart’s music comes to symbolize ‘order, sanity, and simple happiness’. She suggests that the ‘little melodies’ that Walter, an uninformed listener, loves to hear are likely a sonata, the form of which has been theorized by nineteenth- and twentieth-century musicologists alike as reflecting ideals of social order including paradigms of masculinity and femininity.32 Thus Laura’s choice of music reinforces the domestic order enacted by her performance. Losseff suggests a tension inherent in this domestic happiness, since Walter is ‘reading’ Laura’s choice of music in his narration of the scene and the reader is unaware of Laura’s intent. But, as Losseff herself points out, Walter is an uninformed listener who does not recognize that Laura is playing a sonata. While it seems unlikely that Walter is imposing this reading on Laura’s musical choice, it is more likely that Collins, an informed listener, has chosen music to underscore domestic harmony in this scene.33 However, looking at this in the context 30 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860), ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) [hereafter WW]. 31 Stanley Sadie, ‘(Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1st edn, ed. Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980) vol. 12: 724. 32 Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, 540, 541. 33 See Atlas, ‘Wilkie Collins on Music’, Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, and Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1952), on Collins’ musical knowledge. Losseff notes that ‘although Laura chooses her own repertory, and is

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of melodramatic musical conventions, I argue that the meaning of Mozart’s music is not static. Mayer notes that musical ‘themes [in melodrama] are stated, repeated, quoted … for reasons of sentiment, subliminal association with other actions or characters, or for deliberate irony or mockery, transposed in major and minor keys, varied in tempi and volume, and above all, performed in various combinations … to give the play colour and variety and bold or subtle shifts in mood’.34 As we shall see, Laura’s theme is repeated for these reasons, but when shifting in mood, it also shifts in meaning. The signification of Mozart’s music varies in a short period of time from traditional, genderappropriate domestic harmony to meanings not often associated with the ideal Victorian woman – sensational discovery and sexual expression. The ‘sense of peace and seclusion’ Laura creates with her initial performance is soon to be disrupted (WW, 47). Laura’s music-making soon accompanies the sensational unraveling of a mystery connected with her family. Marian peruses her mother’s letters in hope of finding some clue to the identity of the woman in white who stopped Walter on the road to London, and calls Walter in from the terrace where he has been walking with Laura. While Laura continues to walk, Marian reads from a letter about the new pupil who has come to Limmeridge: ‘Four days ago Mrs. Catherick came here to see me, and brought her only child with her, a sweet little girl about a year older than our darling Laura – ’ As the last sentence fell from the reader’s lips, Miss Fairlie passed us on the terrace once more. She was softly singing to herself one of the melodies which she had been playing earlier in the evening. (WW, 48, emphasis added)

Collins begins the gradual revelation of the woman in white’s identity, hinting that the similarities between Mrs Catherick’s daughter Anne and Laura extend beyond their ages, by drawing Marian’s and Walter’s attention, as well as the reader’s, to Laura at this moment. Her singing

in some sense thus responsible for articulating her own musical “voice”, it is not she who interprets her own choices for the reader’ (‘Absent Melody’, 539). While I would agree that we see Laura’s first musical performances through Walter’s lens, the latter performances related by Marian do not vary significantly. Such a uniform presentation of her performances in a novel that emphasizes personal knowledge and perspective through its use of multiple narratives indicates that we can read Laura’s performances as unmediated by narrator, though not by culture. Atlas similarly argues that the views expressed by Collins’ narrators and characters ‘are strikingly consistent’ and ‘echo those offered privately in his letters’ so may be interpreted as his own (‘Wilkie Collins on Music’, 256). 34 Mayer, ‘The Music of Melodrama’, 51.

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echoes the music she had played on the piano earlier, reinforcing the association between Laura and Mozart and accompanying her entrance into the scene in a melodramatic fashion. But it also lends an eerie tone to the scene by providing a muted accompaniment to this sensational discovery. Interestingly, Laura’s theme, which initially signaled domestic harmony and peace, here signals the immanent disruption of that harmony by the discovery of the woman in white’s identity. The unveiling of the woman in white’s identity is carefully staged around the drawing-room piano. Marian sits ‘on a low chair, at one side of the instrument’ absorbed in her reading (WW, 47). ‘The piano stood about half way down along the inner wall. On the side of the instrument farthest from the terrace, Miss Halcombe was sitting with the letters scattered on her lap, and with one in her hand selected from them, and held close to the candle. On the side nearest to the terrace there stood a low ottoman, on which [Walter takes his] place’ (47–8). Walter and Marian are placed on either side of the piano; its presence as a centrepiece for their conversation is a mute reminder of the domestic harmony created by it a few moments ago, as well as of the music played – Laura’s theme. As Marian continues to read from the letter, coming to the part where Anne vowed as a child always to wear white, she ‘paused, and looked at [Walter] across the piano’ (50). The evidence mounts that the woman Walter met on the road to London is Anne Catherick. When Marian reads from the letter of the likeness between Anne and Laura, Walter ‘start[s] up from the ottoman’ beside the piano before Marian can read the name of the person Anne resembles (51). The resemblance between the two women hints at one of the secrets of the novel, the identity of Anne’s father, and prefigures the plot to fake Laura’s death so that her fiancé, Sir Percival Glyde, will inherit her fortune. Thus the piano, emblematic of domestic harmony, ironically accompanies the prelude to the coming action of the novel, the disruption of the happy group at Limmeridge – creating dramatic tension through this incongruence. This scene of sensational discovery is brought to a close with the piano. As Laura comes in from the terrace, Marian says, ‘Come in, Laura; come in, and wake Mrs. Vesey [Laura’s former governess] with the piano. Mr. Hartright is petitioning for some more music, and he wants it, this time, of the lightest and liveliest kind’ (52). Walter has not, in fact, requested more music. That Marian frames her command to Laura in this manner suggests that appealing to her sense of social responsibility, providing domestic entertainment, is sure to gain acquiescence. Thus the female musician’s dual roles of entertainer and melodramatic accompanist overlap congruously, resolving the tension created in this prelude. Upbeat music signals the end of this rather

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ominous scene. Marian’s comment about the kind of music Walter wants ‘this time’ also indicates the sombre tone of the music Laura was playing and singing previously to accompany both domestic harmony and sensational discovery. This sombre music comes to signal the expression of Laura’s sexual desire and love for Walter. After this eventful scene, in the close intimacy of their student-teacher relationship, Walter’s love for Laura grows. Not a day passed, in that dangerous intimacy of teacher and pupil, in which my head was not close to Miss Fairlie’s; my cheek, as we bent together over her sketch-book, almost touching hers. The more attentively she watched every movement of my brush, the more closely I was breathing the perfume of her hair, and the warm fragrance of her breath. It was part of my service, to live in the very light of her eyes – at one time to be bending over her, so close to her bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching it; at another, to feel her bending over me, bending so close to see what I was about, that her voice sank low when she spoke to me, and her ribbons brushed my cheek in the wind before she could draw them back. (WW, 54)

As Walter describes it, teaching water-colour painting is a sensual, sexually charged pursuit with the senses of touch, sight, smell and sound all engaged. Tantalizingly, Laura’s ribbons brush his cheek which has been hovering close to hers. The smell of her hair, which had sexual associations for many Victorians; her breath, which suggests kissing; the sound of her voice, sinking lower as she bends ‘so close’ to him, registering her somatic response to his presence; and his desire, so palpable that the thought of touching her bosom as he bends over her makes him tremble, all combine in an erotically charged proximity facilitated by his art.35 Collins suggests less directly that Laura’s art is equally erotically charged. Walter’s narrative continues: ‘My natural fondness for the music which she played with such tender feeling, such delicate womanly taste, and her natural enjoyment of giving me back, by the practice of her art, the pleasure which I had offered to her by the practice of mine, only wove another tie which drew us closer and closer to one another’ (54). The parallel Walter makes between his art and hers, closely following his description of the physical intimacy afforded by painting, suggests that music similarly affords these pleasures. Thus music allows the woman to facilitate sexual arousal. The reader is left to infer what the pleasures of physical intimacy are in this case, perhaps indicating 35 For a discussion of the complex meanings associated with the image of women’s hair in the Victorian period, including sexuality, see Elisabeth G. Gitter, ‘The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 99 (1984) 936–54.

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that this is inexpressible according to nineteenth-century middle-class convention. Laura’s ability and enjoyment in giving pleasure with the practice of her art – a multi-sensual erotic experience, based on Walter’s description of painting lessons – departs from constructions of middleclass women as sexually apathetic; yet, because it is performed in the drawing room and is a sanctioned feminine accomplishment, it lies well within the bounds of this ideal. Music further gives Laura the language to express that which would otherwise be inappropriate: her love for a man other than her fiancé. On Walter’s last evening, Laura plays ‘some of those little melodies of Mozart’s, which [he] used to like so much’ and asks him to ‘take [his] old place’ in the chair near the piano, indicating the habitual performance of these songs. This time, however, ‘she kept her attention riveted on the music – music which she knew by memory, which she had played over and over again, in former times, without the book’ (107). Laura attempts to hide her agitation by concentrating on playing, but Walter ‘knew that she was aware of [his] being close to her, by seeing the red spot in the cheek that was nearest to [him], fade out, and the face grow pale all over’ (107). His proximity allows him to read the somatic expression of her agitation, as her low voice revealed to him her attraction during drawing lessons. He is also able to interpret the sonoric expression of her feeling. Under cover of the music and in the close physical intimacy afforded by the piano, they are able to exchange a few words in private. Laura tells Walter, ‘ “I am very sorry you are going”, … her voice almost sinking to a whisper, her eyes looking more and more intently at the music; her fingers flying over the keys of the piano with a strange feverish energy which [he] had never noticed in her before’ (108). While Laura attempts to hide how she feels by staring ‘intently’ at the score, her playing belies her emotional state. She performs the Mozart piece rapidly, giving a melodramatic variation to this theme – earlier described as ‘peaceful’ and ‘tender’ – associated with her love for Walter and thereby highlighting her agitation. Laura verbalizes this when she tells Walter, ‘Don’t speak of to-morrow … Let the music speak to us to-night, in a happier language than ours’, ‘happier’ because of its associations with their pleasure in each other’s society (108). She is unable to conceal her agitation, however. ‘Her lips trembled – a faint sigh fluttered from them, which she tried vainly to suppress. Her fingers wavered on the piano; she struck a false note; confused herself in trying to set it right; and dropped her hands angrily on her lap’ (108). Her performance reflects her emotional state, her confusion and anger at the situation. While the music allows her emotional expression, it also affords her the means of maintaining control. As Walter leaves the piano at a hint

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from Marian, Laura ‘touched the keys again with a surer hand’. She regains her composure when he leaves her proximity and is determined to play. ‘ “I will play it”, she said, striking the notes almost passionately. “I will play it on the last night” ’ (108). Her determination to play the piece on Walter’s last evening indicates its emotional significance as well as her limited agency in this situation. Laura plays ‘almost passionately’ as the music allows her to maintain command of her emotions. As Losseff notes, ‘playing “by heart” ’ on Walter’s last night ‘might have witnessed her losing control completely, whereas in following the notation she can confine herself to follow the imprisoning “orders” of the score’.36 Despite this emotional restraint, her performance conveys strong feelings: She played unintermittingly – played as if the music was her only refuge from herself. Sometimes, her fingers touched the notes with a lingering fondness, a soft, plaintive, dying tenderness, unutterably beautiful and mournful to hear – sometimes, they faltered and failed her, or hurried over the instrument mechanically, as if their task was a burden to them. But still, change and waver as they might in the expression they imparted to the music, their resolution to play never faltered. (WW, 108–9)

She repeats her theme music, the Mozart melodies, varying the tempo yet again. ‘Peaceful’ at its first occurrence, ‘feverish’ at its second, the music is now both melancholy and ‘mechanical’, tempo and expression imparting meaning to the audience and reader. Performing the piece softly, ‘dying’ and ‘mournful’, she communicates her sorrow at loss of love. The ‘happier language’ of music does not speak to all in the audience, however, suggesting the ability music gives women to subvert gender stereotypes without raising alarm. Lyn Pykett notes that in sensation fiction: the heroine/villainess … may be presented as the object of a public gaze within the text, or the scene may be staged directly for the reader. In such scenes the female body becomes a sign (or system of signs) which is imperfectly read, or misread, by the characters within the text, but which is legible to the narrator, and hence to the reader – even if what is legible is finally the sign’s elusiveness.37

I suggest that music as a sign functions in a similar way. Laura’s performance is deeply expressive of passion and sorrow for the loss of a lover – transgressive emotions in that he is of a lower class status and she is already engaged to another – yet is misread as evening 36 37

Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, 543. Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, 97–8.

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entertainment by other characters. The lawyer, Mr Gilmore, writes: ‘Miss Fairlie played to us in the evening – not so well as usual, I thought’ (WW, 113). His straightforward and uninsightful comment indicates that he had no suspicion of the musical communication between Laura and Walter, despite her noticeable agitation, and was unaware of the eroticism in her performance, ‘her fingers touch[ing] fond[ly]’ and ‘tender[ly]’. Therefore, music can be a private communication between those who know how to read it. The privacy afforded by musical language allows Laura to communicate other inappropriate feelings without breaching the rules of propriety. When her fiancé, Sir Percival Glyde, comes to stay at Limmeridge, Laura selects a different sort of music. Marian notes in her journal: ‘She went to the piano, choosing new music of the dexterous, tuneless, florid kind. The lovely old melodies of Mozart, which poor Hartwright was so fond of, she has never played since he left. The book is no longer in the music-stand. She took the volume away herself, so that nobody might find it out and ask her to play from it’ (WW, 148). With Walter gone, Laura takes care that their theme music is not repeated, indicating the emotional resonance of the Mozart melodies and the inappropriateness of music signaling her love for Walter occurring now. This ‘new music’ is an appropriate theme for her relationship with Sir Percival, signifying her attitude toward him. It is ‘tuneless’, or unmelodious, and therefore the converse of the music representing Laura’s love for Walter, and this term also connotes being out of agreement, which accurately reflects Laura’s desire to be released from her engagement to a man she does not love. According to Losseff, the ‘new music’ signals ‘the fragmentary, the aphoristic, the unspoken, the melody that cannot actually be heard and never comes to completion, the love of masks, the play of genders – that form a complete antithesis to the idea of “Mozart” ’.38 While the identity of the composer is a matter of debate among critics, all agree that Collins was not fond of this ‘new music’, a sentiment suggesting that strong antipathy is latent in this situation.39 38

Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, 546. Harvey Peter Sucksmith, in ‘Explanatory Notes’ to Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), suggests that the ‘dexterous, tuneless, florid’ (608) music may refer to Wagner, a composer for whom Collins ‘conceived a violent dislike’ (Robinson, Wilkie Collins, 156). However, Losseff convincingly argues that the composer was more likely Robert Schumann, since the only piece of Wagner’s piano music that had been published at the time of the novel, Sonata in B flat major, Op. 1 (Leipzig, 1832), was more classical than his later works (Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, 543–7). Furthermore, according to Atlas and Losseff, Collins was even more vocal in his letters about his dislike of Schumann than Wagner; see Atlas, ‘Wilkie Collins on Music’, 256–7, and Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, 544. 39

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Although Laura never plays Mozart on the piano again after Walter leaves, the music continues to appear as a silent refrain conveying meaning to the reader through her bodily expression. While in conference with Mr Gilmore on the subject of marriage settlements, he asks her how she would like to leave her property in a will. She replies that she would like to leave it to Marian, but ‘Not all of it’, she said. ‘There is some one else, besides Marian – ’ She stopped; her colour heightened; and the fingers of the hand that rested upon the album beat gently on the margin of the drawing [by Walter], as if her memory had set them going mechanically with the remembrance of a favourite tune. (WW, 128)

Her fidgeting, the somatic expression of her body, completes the sentence for her. Her blush, her hand on the drawing given her by Walter and her fingers beating out the notes of ‘a favourite tune’ – the Mozart that is their song, no doubt – indicate that she is thinking of Walter. Thus the music scores a performance that is legible to the reader. Her memory physically manifests itself in the action of playing music, which is conjoined with her expression of desire for Walter. As Weliver points out, ‘learning to play keyboard instruments was frequently used as an example in associationist psychology, which proposed that the mind stored simple ideas derived from sense or introspection that were then linked in chains to form complex ideas’.40 Laura’s unconscious physical movements demonstrate how strongly she associates her performance of Mozart with her feelings for Walter. Thus, while she may have acquiesced to her engagement to Sir Percival, this action implies that her heart still belongs to Walter. This vestige of independence is enacted in the only means available for her to express it – musically. The issue of Laura’s agency is a contested one. Weliver argues that Laura’s playing suggests ‘her strong personality through a virtuosity that violates class norms’ because her repertoire includes Mozart and the ‘dexterous’ music by an unidentified composer.41 Furthermore, Laura shows ‘an adroitness in manipulating how she uses music’ which demonstrates an ability ‘to manipulate courtship relations with men’.42 Losseff likewise indicates that Laura communicates through her performances, but argues that she is constrained by her class status. Thus, ‘Laura’s piano, though owned by family rather than husband, belongs not to her but to Limmeridge, and in generating music solely 40 Phyllis Weliver, ‘Music and Female Power in Sensation Fiction’, Wilkie Collins Society Journal 2 (1999) 46. For a fuller discussion of Victorian theories of associationist psychology, see Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, chapter 2. 41 Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 100. 42 Ibid. 105, 106.

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through it, she speaks from within a gilded cage’.43 She further suggests that although it might be unusual for a non-professional musician to be represented wholly in terms of art music, Collins did have the relatively unusual advantage of being able to draw on a real-life example of an ‘amateur’ pianist of real talent … [Therefore] we should look beyond the kind of repertories that young ladies usually drew on for evening entertainment in teasing out the nascent threads of Laura’s musical activities.44

Moreover, high art composers such as Mozart did compose piano pieces that were within the range of unskilled amateurs. I would suggest then that Laura’s agency comes not from her skill level, as Weliver argues, but from the ways in which she uses music to convey her transgressive thoughts and feelings to Walter and to the reader. She may ‘speak from within a gilded cage’, as Losseff points out, but her message is not sanctioned by it. Laura is able to use musical conventions to her advantage, communicating with her lover both somatically and sonorically, thereby subverting the stereotype of the ideal woman by expressing sexual desire.

Musical villainy and sexual subtext: Count Fosco Laura is not the only sensually transgressive musician in the novel. We also see Count Fosco play, performances which initially effeminize him and contribute substantially to the novel’s melodramatic aspect. Critics of music in sensation fiction touch on Fosco only tangentially, focusing instead on the high art music played by Laura.45 However, examining music in the context of melodrama allows for a cohesive reading of all the musical performances. As I have argued elsewhere, male musicians in Britain were feminized or foreign or, as is the case with Count Fosco, both.46 An Italian living in exile, Fosco is both effeminized and demonized by his musical abilities. At Blackwater Park, Marian and Laura observe him singing Figaro’s famous song in the Barber of Seville, with that crisply-fluent vocalisation which is never heard from any other than 43

Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, 535. Ibid. 45 See Atlas, ‘Wilkie Collins on Music’; Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’; and Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction. 46 See Laura Vorachek, ‘ “The Instrument of the Century”: The Piano as an Icon of Female Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 38–9 (2000) 26–43. 44

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an Italian throat; accompanying himself on the concertina, which he played with ecstatic throwings-up of his arms, and graceful twistings, and turnings of his head, like a fat St. Cecilia masquerading in male attire. (WW, 205)

Like his penchant for sweets and small animals, music marks Fosco as feminine. Although the concertina, one of the most popular domestic instruments in the Victorian period, was typically associated with the working classes by the end of century, in the 1850s and 60s it was more commonly found in the drawing-rooms of the upper and middle classes.47 Thus Fosco’s instrument in this scene contributes to his domestication. His choice of an aria from Rossini’s opera marks his first association with that composer. Recognized by contemporaries in the first half of the nineteenth century as the greatest composer of his time, Rossini appeared ‘the indolent raconteur, the gourmet, the spirit of an elegant Second Empire Salon’, a description which has certain resonances with the lazy, gluttonous, cultured and intelligent Fosco.48 Marian’s characterization of Fosco as a woman in drag seems to belie the threat he poses to her and Laura. Like Laura, Fosco is able to use music to project a socially acceptable image of himself to others. But Fosco’s musical knowledge also suggests a more menacing side to his character. Marian writes in her journal: After dinner, [Fosco] took Laura by the hand, and asked her if she would be ‘so sweet as to play to him’. She complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one side; and he gently beat time with two of his yellow-white fingers. He highly approved of the music, and tenderly admired Laura’s manner of playing – not as poor Hartwright used to praise it, with an innocent enjoyment of the sweet sounds, but with a clear, cultivated, practical knowledge of the merits of the composition, in the first place, and of the merits of the player’s touch, in the second. (WW, 260–61)

The ‘serpent’ that rests on Fosco’s belly and the contrast with Walter suggest his evil nature. Walter’s ‘innocent enjoyment’ of Laura’s playing suggests a prelapsarian appreciation of music, while Fosco’s ‘clear, cultivated, practical knowledge’ of both music and musicians renders him all the more sinister with its devilish, postlapsarian associations. Thus, too much knowledge of music is a bad sign, a prevalent attitude 47 Allan W. Atlas, The Wheatstone English Concertina in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) 7. 48 Phillip Gossett, ‘Rossini, Gioachino (Antonio)’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: MacMillan, 2001) vol. 21: 755.

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in the nineteenth century, which ‘emphasized the moral superiority of the amateur musician over the crassness of the professional’.49 While Fosco’s musical skill contributes to his characterization as a villain, it also aids him in his villainy. As their situation at Blackwater Park worsens, Marian writes letters to the only two men she and Laura can appeal to for protection, their lawyer and their uncle, and gives them to Laura’s maid to be delivered. That evening, when Fosco hears Marian has no letters for the post, he ‘sat down at the piano; and played the air of the lively Neapolitan street-song, “La mia Carolina”, twice over’ (WW, 286).50 This is almost certainly a sign to Madame Fosco who, after a quick cup of tea, leaves the room. Before Marian can follow her, the Count stops her, first with a request for a cup of tea, and a second time with music. He stopped me again – this time, by going back to the piano, and suddenly appealing to me on a musical question in which he declared that the honour of his country was concerned … – And, without waiting for a word of assent or dissent on my part, looking me hard in the face all the time, he began thundering on the piano, and singing to it with loud and lofty enthusiasm; only interrupting himself, at intervals, to announce to me fiercely the title of the different pieces of music [selections from Rossini’s ‘Moses in Egypt’] … The piano trembled under his powerful hands; and the teacups on the table rattled, as his big bass voice thundered out the notes and his heavy foot beat time on the floor. There was something horrible – something fierce and devilish, in the outburst of his delight at his own singing and playing, and in the triumph with which he watched its effect upon me, as I shrank nearer and nearer to the door. (286–7)

In this passage, Fosco appears at his most threatening and dangerous. No longer an effeminate musician, his performance reveals him to be ‘hard’, ‘loud’, ‘fierce’, ‘powerful’, and ‘devilish’, with both his ‘bass voice’ and his playing ‘thundering’ in the room. Both ‘horrible’ and ‘triumph[ant]’, as villains usually are when menacing the innocent heroine, Fosco intimidates Marian, who shrinks ‘nearer and nearer to the door’ in an attempt to escape, and his disruptive effect on domestic harmony and tranquility is seen in its representatives, the ‘trembl[ing]’ piano and ‘rattl[ing]’ teacups. The music he chooses contains dramatic chords accentuating the vocal part and ominous rumbles, an appropriate accompaniment for villainy. As Frank Rahill notes, Rossini was ‘famous for his musical storms and noisy crescendos’.51 The threat 49

Atlas, ‘Wilkie Collins on Music’, 267. I have been unable to trace this song in any of the song indexes or library catalogues I have searched. 51 Rahill, The World of Melodrama, 126. 50

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he poses to the tranquility of the piano and teacups suggests a veiled threat to Marian as well. Fosco’s admiration of Marian and Madame Fosco’s fierce jealousy suggest a sexual undertone to this scene.52 It is perhaps fitting that this ambiguously gendered character is sexually attracted to Marian, the other ambiguously gendered character in the novel. But as Losseff points out, while Fosco’s musicianship feminizes him, he is firmly constructed as ‘an “effeminate” man. … He never loses his relationship with the prescriptive power of the word and the patriarchal order, since his is always texted music’.53 Interestingly, she notes this in conjunction with the previous scene, when Fosco comments on Laura’s performance, rather than with this scene, in which he plays music specifically denoted as texted. The text of Fosco’s last selection, ‘Prayer of Israelites, at the Passage of the Red Sea’, accompanies the scene in Rossini’s Moses in Egypt in which the Israelites pray for aid as they stand seemingly trapped at the edge of the Red Sea, tensions mounting as the Egyptian hordes advance. According to the libretto, the Egyptians are advancing because Moses’s sister Miriam has chosen God and her people over the man she loves, the Pharaoh’s son; he then orders the Egyptians to chase the Jews, a scorned lover exacting his revenge. Thus Fosco’s choice of music both sets and reflects the tone of the scene, innocence threatened by evil, and furthers the sexual subtext by hinting that a rebuffed sexual attraction underlies the threat. This music is again associated with Fosco toward the end of the novel, when Walter goes to his house in St John’s Wood to glimpse the man for the first time. Walter first hears Fosco and then sees him. ‘The magnificent melody of the Prayer in Rossini’s “Moses”, sung in a sonorous bass voice, rose grandly through the suburban silence of the place. The front garden gate opened and closed. The Count had come out’ (WW, 527). This music precedes and identifies Fosco for Walter, as he recognizes ‘the deep ringing voice which Marian’s description had made familiar to me’ (527), much like the way music identified the villain for an audience at a melodramatic play. Recalling Mayer’s point that musical ‘themes [in melodrama] are stated, repeated, quoted … for reasons of … subliminal association with other actions or characters’, Fosco’s theme not only identifies him, but reminds us of his musicosexual aggression against Marian even while she is safely out of his reach. This scene marks the transition in the novel from private music to public. Walter is familiar with Fosco’s singing because Marian has made 52 The threatened violence in this scene is realized not long after, when Fosco reads and writes in Marian’s journal, an act which D. A. Miller refers to as a ‘virtual rape’ D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988) 162. 53 Losseff, ‘Absent Melody’, 548, emphasis in original.

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her journal public to him, ‘read[ing] to him from the manuscript’ while he takes notes (401). And it is when the Count leaves the privacy of his own home, singing his theme song, that Walter is able to identify him. Thus music is an identifying agent not only for the audience but for characters as well. As the novel comes to a close and characters are restored or punished accordingly, music plays its final accompaniment to a sensational scene of discovery. The plot leaves its private, domestic footings and becomes one of political intrigue with the entrance of ‘The Brotherhood’, an Italian political secret society. Correspondingly, music also enters a public space, the opera hall, and is performed by professional musicians. Walter follows Fosco to a performance of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia at the opera, bringing Pesca in the hopes that his friend will recognize the Count. Walter sees Fosco soon after entering, but waits until the end of the first act to put Pesca to the test. The music and the libretto at the end of this act combine to create a tense mood of heightened emotion and expectation. This emotional trajectory parallels that of the novel, thereby creating resonances with the musical accompaniment in melodramatic fashion.54 The reader is in a state of heightened expectation, awaiting Pesca’s recognition of Fosco, as the audience expects Gennaro’s death. Reader and audience are each disappointed, but then rewarded with something more dramatic and sensational: Fosco recognizes Pesca and is visibly afraid of him, and Lucrezia saves Gennaro’s life. The public recognition alerts an unidentified foreign operative to Fosco’s identity and results in his death, closing the book on his villainy. Both Laura and Fosco use music to convey sexual feelings, performances which defy melodramatic formulae by presenting a heroine with sexual agency and a villain who is effeminized by his instrument choices, among other things. While conforming to some gender conventions (Laura plays voiceless instrumental music and Fosco is associated with operatic texts), these characters both complicate the simple stereotypes of melodrama and render the novel’s moral ambiguous. However, Collins characterizes music performance as a specifically feminine form of agency with a specifically sexual subtext, albeit only flirting with impropriety. Thus Laura is able to express herself within the middle-class conventions of domestic music without 54 In the final scene, Lucrezia begs her husband Alfonso not to kill Gennaro who, unbeknownst to all but her, is her son from a former marriage. Alfonso refuses, believing that Lucrezia is in love with Gennaro, and has her administer the poisoned wine. After Alfonso departs, Lucrezia begs the skeptical Gennaro to drink the antidote. He finally drinks it and escapes unharmed.

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causing anxiety. As this novel suggests, music’s performative nature demonstrates that the seemingly fixed category of gender also can be orchestrated. Although borrowing from its musical conventions, melodrama’s world of certainties and absolutes does not exist in sensation fiction.

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Indecent musical displays: Feminizing the pastoral in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss Alisa Clapp-Itnyre The sun was really breaking out, the sound of the mill seemed cheerful again, the granary doors were open, and there was Yap … It was irresistible: Maggie tossed her hair back and ran downstairs … and was quickly out in the yard, whirling round like a Pythoness and singing as she whirled, ‘Yap, Yap, Tom’s coming home,’ while Yap pranced and barked round her.1

Victorians evoked folk songs as nostalgic reminders of an English way of life that was fast disappearing. They also borrowed another genre besides folk balladry that created nostalgia for the rural past: the pastoral. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) confronts society’s nostalgia for rural music, examining pastoral music which honoured not only the English countryside but the rural life of time immortal. Eliot explores the mythologizing of rural life and music within both the pastoral literary and musical traditions. Specifically, Eliot suggests that the pastoral, though overtly honouring lower-class life, is clearly an upper-class aesthetic genre capable of being used to exploit actual lower-class embodiments of the tradition. Here, the idyllic pastoral musician Maggie is contained by a middle-class, music-making community bent on reducing women to the objects of male gazes. Eliot’s novel depicts the struggle between female agency in musical expression and the feminine passivity and propriety expected by Victorian audiences.

This essay is drawn from the author’s book, Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Cultural Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), appearing in this volume by kind courtesy of Ohio University Press. 1 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 1979) 79 [hereafter MF]. For additional discussion of The Mill on the Floss, see Jodi Lustig’s chapter in this volume. The major new study of Eliot and music, Delia da Sousa Correa’s George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave, 2002), appeared too late to be included in the research for this study.

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With the epigraph quoted at the beginning of this article, the novel immediately positions Maggie as a pastoral musician whose inspiration from the sunshine, the sounds of the mill and the barking dog is reinscribed into the aesthetic pleasure of unrestrained dancing and singing. By depicting Maggie in this way, Eliot invokes a literary trope begun in classical pastoral literature and absorbed by the British pastoral tradition, in which the pastoral subject wanders about in a natural utopia instinctively invoking music to express emotions. Specifically, Eliot grapples with the way music is depicted within the pastoral literary tradition inherited most directly from the Romantics. The novel’s main challenge to this tradition is to cast the pastoral character as class-bound and female. As a child, Maggie expresses music as unreserved, personal displays of emotion, but as she grows up she will confront the sociallyconstructed images of music held by her upper-middle-class relations and friends: that of an aesthetic found in the home, not in nature; a learned art aligned with class wealth and education, not an instinctive art; and a type of formal, heterosexual entertainment, not a private, individual outpouring. Ironically, her relations most often reveal such constructs by invoking pastoral works and conventions supposedly about an authentic, natural life. All of these constructs force the woman musician either into the role of a domestic prima donna as exemplified by Lucy or, for the woman without musical education, into Maggie’s role of silent object of song and male voyeurism. Eliot’s anxieties concerning the pastoral ideal and its music are apparent because she cannot sustain Maggie’s unique minstrel identity. As Maggie realizes the educational dimensions of music as a social accomplishment and the sexual dimensions of music as a performed art, she loses her pastoral aestheticism. Abandoning her role as private singer, she eventually resigns herself to being the public object of the pastoral song, first to Philip in the Red Deeps and then to Stephen at Lucy’s home. One of Maggie’s tragedies, then, is that she loses her own sense of music as an instinctive, innocent form of emotional release. Rather, she is drawn into the world of the Deans, the Guests and even the Wakems, who use music to impress and seduce. In the process, Eliot exposes not only this fictional society’s artificiality, but the fallacies of the pastoral tradition itself.2

2 Any discussion of music in The Mill on the Floss must first acknowledge the debt owed to two classic studies: William J. Sullivan, ‘Music and Musical Allusion in The Mill on the Floss’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 16 (1974) 232–46, and Beryl Gray, George Eliot and Music (New York: St Martin’s, 1989) chapter 2. Sullivan traces Maggie’s ‘moral and emotional development’ (232) through the novel’s musical allusions, while Gray creates a paradigm of the ‘Fall’ with Stephen as the seductive bass.

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‘Coarse voices much out of tune’: Music and the pastoral tradition In writing pastoral fiction, Eliot worked within an ancient tradition in which music held a little-recognized, prominent role. The recurring yoking of pastoralism and music began with Greek mythology and the talents of such pastoral instrumentalists as Pan and Orpheus. The English readily absorbed the pastoral tradition of Virgil and Horace, as evidenced by Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), in which the shepherd Colin Cloute relies on his horn pipe to accompany his verses; Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), in which Amiens and Jaques sing pastoral ditties in the Forest of Arden; and Marvell’s ‘The Mower’s Song’ and other pastoral poems. Even in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve sing reverential hymns in praise of their Maker from their pastoral bower (1674 edn, Book 9, lines 196–7).3 In all of these cases, certain class and gender distinctions become clear. Though created by middle- and upper-class poets, the pastoral world is inhabited solely by lower-class shepherds who are paradoxically free from work and worry, their utopian world lacking class conflict and poverty. As William Empson points out, ‘pastoral though “about” is not “by” or “for” ’ the lower class; further, the ‘essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings … in learned and fashionable language’.4 And often these ‘strong feelings’ in ‘fashionable language’ take the form of music. Further, pastoral songs are almost always love songs about women, either praising their beauty or bemoaning their hardheartedness. Romantic poets reworked the pastoral tradition.5 Turning to nature for inspiration, they found music, too. In the simplest sense, nature had its own music – birds, the wind – which would inspire their poetic My study looks beyond the immediate thematic value of musical allusion in the novel to examine the historical context of the pastoral convention in which musical works become emblematic of their society. Maggie’s aesthetic development is less a personal growth than a representative social awareness of class and gender biases found in one of the most ideal aesthetic traditions: the pastoral. 3 See Harold E. Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) particularly chapter one, for a thorough study of the pastoral tradition in English literature. 4 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1968) 6, 11. 5 The traditional form of pastoral ended in the early eighteenth century. Like Abrams and other critics, I will be using the term ‘pastoral’ in its modern sense as ‘any work which represents a withdrawal from ordinary life to a place apart, close to the elemental rhythms of nature’; M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1988) 128.

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imagery. They also continued the tradition of pastoral minstrels, such as Wordsworth’s shepherd ‘Michael’; Coleridge’s Bracy the Bard (in ‘Christabel’); and Keats’s Pan (in ‘Hymn to Pan’), Hyperion, and Porphyro (in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’). Women appear in the midst of musical love-making (as in Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘Love’) and some are even agents of musical expression. Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray and Solitary Reaper, and Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Lamia are all first cast as extensions of the natural world who are then made to sing. But this trope exists simply as a brief, undeveloped image of a female singer. Eliot relies extensively on the Romantic tradition in her novels.6 She tends to favour the uninhibited Romantic musician: for example, in Scenes from Clerical Life Catarina uses the piano to vent her emotions.7 In her letters Eliot objects to the expertise of music which distracts, and extols the possibility of ‘divine music [which] positively triumphs over the defects of execution’.8 Instinctive playing is more important than learned expertise. Other letters, however, show Eliot’s concern for the execution of music: ‘I am very sensitive to blunders and wrong notes, and instruments out of tune’.9 From Venice, she writes Charles Lee Lewes that ‘the singing here (by itinerant performers in gondolas) is disgraceful to Venice and Italy. Coarse voices much out of tune make one shudder when they strike suddenly under the window’.10 Eliot struggles with the 6 For other readings which place Eliot within (and in contrast to) a Romantic tradition, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) especially 460–62, 496; and for a specifically Wordsworthian tradition, Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 120–52. 7 In Eliot’s ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story’ from Scenes of Clerical Life, Caterina’s musical ability is both useful and emotive. It gives her standing with the Cheverels who had wondered what she could ‘be good for’ (ch. 4) and even Caterina realizes her purpose in the household: ‘I always sing when I am wanted to sing’ (ch. 5). But musical outpouring also gives her agency – it is ‘the one thing in which she ceased to be passive, and became prominent’ – as she uses it as a personal, emotional outlet: ‘It was always a relief to her to sing’ (ch. 10). Devastated by Captain Wybrow’s engagement to another woman, Caterina throws ‘herself at once into the impetuous intricacies of that magnificent fugue’ from Handel’s Messiah (ch. 13). Further, she is temporarily restored to health with music from Orfeo and Eurydice, as an ‘active power was reawakened’ in her (ch. 20). George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 8 George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (1954; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) vol. 1: 13, 2: 191. 9 Ibid. vol. 3: 177. 10 Ibid. vol. 7: 294.

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dichotomy between music’s natural sublimity and music’s reliance on proper execution to achieve such sublimity. As part of an elite, educated class trained in music, Eliot’s sensitivity to musical execution competes with her Romantic desire for a more ‘natural’ musical approach. In essence, Eliot’s dichotomous feelings regarding music exemplify the innate dichotomy of pastoral music, at once representing rustic natural music, and yet clearly written by trained musical experts. The ‘pastorale’ in music includes any dramatic, vocal or musical composition depicting pastoral characters or setting, or in other ways connoting a rural atmosphere.11 Originating in antiquity with the pastoral songs of such poets as Theocritus, and first appearing in music sources with the troubadour songs of medieval times, the tradition escalated in Renaissance Italy with pastoral dramas, whose popularity spread to France and eventually to England. By the eighteenth century the tradition included such works as Bach’s ‘Pastorella’ for organ (c1710), Vivaldi’s La quattro stagioni (‘The Four Seasons’, 1725) and Handel’s Pifa (‘Pastoral Symphony’) from Messiah (1741). Pastoral dramatic works included Handel’s serenata Acis and Galatea (1718, rev. 1732), Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), and Haydn’s oratorios Die Schöpfung (‘The Creation’, 1796–8) and Die Jahrzeiten (‘The Seasons’, 1799–1801). Romantic composers continued this tradition, developing music with self-acknowledged evocations of natural settings and sounds as a sub-genre of programme music. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (1808), subtitled ‘Pastoral’, is only the first in a long line of Romantic pastoral music: there is also Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843), Liszt’s Les préludes (1849–55), and Smetana’s Má Vlast (1872–9), to name only a few. Operas such as Weber’s Der Freischütz (1817–21) and Bellini’s La sonnambula (1831) also employ pastoral settings. Notably, despite the rustic pretence, in most performances of these works, the audience members were all typically from the middle and upper classes. Eliot’s extensive knowledge of music enabled her to invoke pastoral works throughout her fiction. Her letters reveal her familiarity with Haydn’s The Creation, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (1832), and Bellini’s La sonnambula.12 Eliot drew upon this knowledge and the literary pastoral legacy in The Mill on the Floss, rewriting it with a pastoral musician, Maggie, a woman living in an historically defined rural society. Yet Eliot’s own anxieties about natural 11 Geoffrey Chew, ‘Pastoral’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001) vol. 19: 216. 12 For reference to the Haydn, see The George Eliot Letters, vol. 1: 268; to the Gluck, see vol. 2: 191; to the Donizetti, see vol. 4: 92 and 266; and to the Bellini, see vol. 5: 143.

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musical gifts and about the display of such instinctive emotions, especially by a woman in a patriarchal world, frustrate her attempt. She honours both the ‘natural’ qualities of untrained musical performance and an educated musical tradition reliant upon convention and domesticity. In the process, she reveals the incompatibility of the natural and the academic music traditions, which in turn exposes the myth of the pastoral tradition. As a result, she cannot sustain her pastoral subject – especially a woman with such conspicuous agency: by Book Six Maggie reverts to being only the object of love songs. Music in general is not ultimately seductive to Maggie, as has often been argued;13 rather, she becomes increasingly aware of how it is constructed by polite society and the pastoral tradition.

‘The Nutbrown Maid’: Maggie’s pastoral childhood As Phyllis Weliver observes, ‘Maggie, attracted to music from childhood and eschewing public performance as an adult, does not love music for social uses such as encouraging courtship. Rather, music taps into her imagination and personal, passionate expression’.14 Indeed, from early childhood, Maggie is associated with a natural, instinctive love of music. Just as the patriarchal society in which she lives attempts to subdue all her wild instincts,15 so too does it attempt to suppress her musical instincts because they are so unseemly. As her mother complains, she’ll ‘sit down on the floor i’ the sunshine an’ plait her hair an’ sing to herself like a Bedlam creatur’, all the while I’m waiting for her downstairs’ (MF, 60). As quoted at the start, Maggie overcomes her anger at her mother and Aunt Glegg by running outside and ‘whirling like a Pythoness and singing’ (79). In both instances, musical release is associated with 13 Sullivan argues that music is a subversive temptation to Maggie to which she completely falls in Book Six (‘Music and Musical Allusion’, 235). Likewise, both Haight and Levine describe her musical interest in terms of ‘susceptibility’; Gordon S. Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965) 341; George Levine, ‘Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss’ in George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George R. Creeger (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970) 115. Phyllis Weliver, too, argues that music ‘inspires forbidden passion in her as a woman’; Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 184. I argue that Maggie’s struggle with the educated musical aesthetics of Lucy and Stephen in Book Six is less a seduction by music than a realization that society casts music as seductive, a subtle but important difference. 14 Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 189. 15 For a feminist exploration of the patriarchal world in which Maggie lives, see Kristin Brady, George Eliot (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992) 94–107.

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insanity (‘like a Bedlam creatur’) or witchery (a Pythoness was a woman possessed by a god or spirit).16 Maggie sings when she is emotionally out of control. Natural emotional states propelled the classical pastoral subject as well, but Maggie’s extreme emotionalism threatens social propriety. Maggie’s overly-imaginative approach to music is contrasted with Tom’s ever-literal one, as in this Christmas scene: There had been singing under the windows after midnight – supernatural singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom’s contemptuous insistence that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the church choir; she trembled with awe when their caroling broke in upon her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. (MF, 224)

Music creates supernatural, spiritual imagery for Maggie. Of course it is all in her head, as Tom realistically reminds her.17 But she will not be daunted at this point. Music will continue to inspire Maggie’s imagination. Reading a spiritually stimulating work by Thomas à Kempis, she felt a ‘strange thrill of awe’ pass through her ‘while she read, as if she had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor’ (383). Maggie’s reading confirms her distinct approach to sound: ‘Blessed are those ears which hearken not unto the voice which soundeth outwardly, but unto the Truth which teacheth inwardly’ (383). Maggie is inwardly inspired by music and thus immune to the outward, worldly concepts of technique, class and visibility which are a part of the aesthetic experience of those around her. For example, on a visit to the Pullets, Maggie begs to hear her Uncle Pullet’s musical snuff-box. The circumstances of this ‘concert’ are critical: the families have just discussed Tom’s schooling while Maggie 16 Gilbert and Gubar argue that Maggie’s satanic side eventually leads to her unconscious murder of Tom at the end (see The Madwoman in the Attic, 491–4), while Nina Auerbach reads Maggie in terms of a Gothic demon or witch; see ‘The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver’ in Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 230–49. Weliver also examines the angel/demon dichotomy of Maggie’s personality: the novel explores ‘the Victorian polarization of women’s use of music for either religious ecstasy (“angel”) or physical attraction (“demon” or “siren”)’; though ‘child Maggie glimpses heaven through music’s beatific effects’, the ‘adult Maggie is led into danger partly because of her primitive emotional responses to Stephen’s music-making’ (Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 189). 17 Homans shows Maggie’s reading of the printed word also to be more symbolic and less literal in her childhood (see Bearing the Word, 122–33).

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commits another faux pas – dropping her cake on the floor as she gazes at a painting. Maggie’s lack of education and personal propensity for aesthetic absentmindedness thus set the stage for the snuff-box episode: Perhaps the suspense did heighten Maggie’s enjoyment when the fairy tune began: for the first time she quite forgot that she had a load on her mind – that Tom was angry with her; and by the time ‘Hush, ye pretty warbling choir’ had been played, her face wore that bright look of happiness, while she sat immovable with her hands clasped (MF, 154)

The music has once again transported Maggie beyond worldly matters. Trouble starts immediately after the song, however, since Maggie’s display of affection causes her to spill Tom’s drink.18 Her emotions are at odds with this society of proper etiquette and conformity. The musical piece itself adds another layer of imagery about emotional women trying to conform in society. In ‘Hush, ye pretty warbling choir’ from Handel’s Acis and Galatea, a chorus of birds – denoted by the accompanying semiquaver flute melody – stirs up Galatea’s emotions and she tries to quench their music: ‘Your thrilling strains awake my pains, / and kindle fierce desire. / Cease your song, and take your flight, / Bring back my Acis to my sight.’ Notably, her emotions are explicitly sexual (‘thrilling strains’, ‘fierce desire’).19 Gradually her emotions are mitigated by her own refrain ‘hush’, emblematic of the social pressures not only on little girls to remain docile and silent but also on young women to remain sexually restrained. Etiquette is important to the Pullets because they define their class status by it. They further prove their status by buying luxuries like musical snuff boxes which the Tullivers cannot enjoy; certainly Mr Pullet enjoys the social position such a possession gives him with ‘his neighbours in Garum’ (MF, 154). The tune that the snuff box plays contributes to class tensions. Overtly a pastoral piece extolling the virtues of the simple, natural life of two lovers, Acis and Galatea, first performed in 1718, is a dramatic ‘serenata’, a work written for a specific occasion, in this case to celebrate the royal birthday of the Duke of Chandos. Despite the pastoral pretence of the song, wealth and status

18 For a discussion of Maggie’s and Tom’s roles of ‘feminine passion and masculine repression that are the extremes of sex-role conditioning’, see Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 126. 19 George Frideric Handel, Acis and Galatea: A Serenata for Soprano, 2 Tenors, and Bass Soli, SATB, and Orchestra, vocal score ed. Joseph Barnby (c1880; Sevenoaks: Novello, 1974).

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have as much to do with this fictional musical concert as with the original musical occasion. The older Maggie gradually becomes aware of the class distinctions associated with the music she enjoys. First, she realizes that her family perceives her as ‘quaintly’ pastoral, specifically equating her with the rural maid described in ballads: ‘No’, said uncle Pullet, who took intense interest in the ladies’ conversation … ‘Though there was a song about the “Nutbrown Maid” too – I think she was crazy like – crazy Kate – but I can’t justly remember.’ ‘O dear, dear!’ said Maggie, laughing but impatient, ‘I think that will be the end of my brown skin if it is always to be talked about so much’. (MF, 493)

Now, as an adult, Maggie realizes that others perceive her differently, associating her brown skin with the lower-class, rural women idealized in ballads but not valued in real life. One eighteenth-century version of ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’, for instance, praises the maid’s beauty above the high-born and wealthy: The Country Maid, In Russet clad, Does many a time surpass, In Shape, and Air, And Beauty rare, The Court or Townbred Lass.20

In Thomas Percy’s version of the ballad, found in his Reliques (1765), however, the ‘Not-browne Mayd’ [sic] is the daughter of a baron who proves faithful to a ‘banyshed man’ and in the end is rewarded by the revelation that he is an ‘erlys son’.21 Overtly a song challenging a rigid class system, it ultimately reinforces upper-class honour and same-class marriage. Whether the ballad’s heroine is lower-class or upper-class, in either case the implication for Maggie is to label her ‘rustic’ and foreshadow her exclusion from a different-class (namely upper-class) union. Gradually, Maggie begins to realize a connection between music and class status: when Mr Tulliver meets financial disaster, there ‘was no music for her anymore – no piano, no harmonised voices, no delicious stringed instruments with their passionate cries of imprisoned spirits sending a strange vibration through her frame’ (MF, 378). This description suggests both Maggie’s symbolic associations of music with the harmonies and passionate vibrations of her childhood, as well as a 20 John Edmunds, ed. A Williamsburg Songbook (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964) 107–8. 21 Thomas Percy, Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765; London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1906) vol. 1: 303–15.

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very literal economic fact: only financially secure families can afford pianos. Thus Maggie is learning that music can no longer be solely an internal pleasure when it is socially constructed along class and gender lines. She finds herself like the Petrarchan pastoral subject who must renounce the unattainable beloved and achieve ‘purification of his love through selfdenial’.22 But her music is not a referent for an external love but the love itself, and so she must deny it. In the Red Deeps Maggie expresses the desires she is repressing, turning within this pastoral setting to an uninhibited male performer – Philip Wakem – saying: ‘I was never satisfied with a little of anything. That is why it is better for me to do without earthly happiness altogether … I never felt that I had enough music – I wanted more instruments playing together – I wanted voices to be fuller and deeper. Do you ever sing now, Philip?’ (MF, 428). Maggie wants more voices and turns, not inward as she once did, but to a literal, male musician. Though some readers view Philip as Eliot’s ‘most successful mentor and rescuer’,23 I would argue that Philip’s support of Maggie becomes suspect when one considers that he is the first person who, albeit unconsciously, reveals to the adult Maggie that her approach to music is unconventional. For example, as ‘pastoral’ musician singing in this natural setting, he is the first to sing love songs to the adult Maggie, placing her as object, not singer, of these songs: after all, he never asks her to sing with him. Philip sings ‘Love in her eyes sits playing’, which is sung by Acis about Galatea in Handel’s serenata. The lyrics clearly show the objectifying of the woman’s body: Love in her eyes sits playing, And sheds delicious death; Love on her lips is straying, And warbling in her breath, Love on her breast sits panting, And swells with soft desire No grace, no charm is wanting, To set the heart on fire.

Galatea has become the object of Acis’s gaze, from her eyes, to her lips, to her breast. Hearing this song, Maggie learns that music is not something that exists solely inside her own head, where she alone can yearn for ‘fuller and deeper voices’, but is a referent to many worldly elements, like sexuality and display. A second message Philip sends is that he has the technical expertise of a fashionable musician trained in society’s music rooms: he can sing a Handel aria, not just a rustic folk song. His middle-class opportunities jar with those of the poverty-

22

Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes, 21. Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone, 1963) 54. 23

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stricken Tullivers who could not afford musical training for their daughter: Maggie could never sing such a difficult piece because she has no training. Like the juxtaposition of Tom’s schooling with the snuffbox, this incident further reminds readers of Maggie’s lack of proper education, especially since Philip’s song is one he sang at King’s Lorton school which Tom – but not Maggie – was allowed to attend. Maggie can only recognize her technical deficiencies and act the part of a silent object of love songs.

‘Middle-Class drawing rooms’: The leisured music of Lucy, Stephen and Philip Describing Maggie going to live with Lucy, Virginia Woolf noted that Maggie is ‘driven beyond the home world she knew and loved, and forced to set foot in middle-class drawing rooms where young men sing all the summer morning’.24 Woolf’s odd focus on the musical drawingroom denotes the highly important location of Maggie’s aesthetic epiphany. During the few weeks of Maggie’s visit, chronicled in Book Six, the drawing room becomes the site of clashing ideologies between Maggie’s pastoral aestheticism and the musical sophistication of her upper-middle-class relations. Eliot reveals the latter’s deeply entrenched elitist aesthetics which are evident even before Maggie arrives. Lucy’s and Stephen’s elitist approach to music is first established when the nearly engaged couple sings Haydn’s duet about love, ‘Graceful Consort’ from The Creation based on Milton (MF, 474–5). The scene overtly evokes a pastoral utopia, as Stephen and Lucy call themselves ‘the Adam and Eve unfallen – in Paradise’ (474). Yet Eliot’s version conflicts with the traditional pastoral Garden of Eden for several reasons. First, Haydn’s opening recitative situates the duet in a spiritual context: ‘Our duty we performed now, in offering up to God our thanks.’ Stephen suggests singing this ‘recitative, for the sake of the moral’ (474), but only the words from the aria itself are actually included, and these focus on sexual bliss: ‘With thee delight is ever new, / With thee is life incessant bliss’ (475). The narrator highlights the resulting sensualism, suggesting that any music is enough to inspire love – ‘how could the musical people avoid falling in love with each other?’ (474): spiritual hymns can become secular love songs. Haydn’s pastoral music evokes a beautiful natural world, the lyrics describing the ‘morning dew’, ‘breath of ev’n’, ‘sav’ry fruit’ and

24

Quoted in Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism, 188.

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‘fragrant bloom’. But Eliot carefully highlights the clear gender and class social constructs found even in this generalized, idealized portrait. For instance, Haydn’s lyrics evoke Miltonic expressions of male-female domestic roles, with Adam singing ‘Thy guide I’ll be’ while Eve sings ‘all I am is thine’. Stephen reinforces the submission of women: ‘You will sing the whole duty of woman – “And from obedience grows my pride and happiness” ’ (474). This ideology, which Lucy takes for granted, will ultimately clash with Maggie’s uninhibited behavior. Likewise, the singers themselves disrupt the utopian appeal of the scene by their selfconscious awareness of their artistic performances. Stephen criticizes Philip’s ‘indifferent voice’ in Philip’s absence, while Lucy speaks of Stephen’s voice not being low enough for the part and teases him about his tendency to drag the tempo. Both comprehend the technical difficulties of the piece; indeed, both must have had training in order to sing this difficult number. At the point in the song that Eliot highlights by quoting text – ‘With thee delight is ever new’ – the allegro tempo is complicated by semiquaver runs, and the range is challenging for the soprano (calling for a high Ba) and deep for the bass (with a low Aa).25 When Stephen moves on to Raphael’s great song, ‘Great Beasts’ recitative no. 22 and air no. 23, in which he narrates the creation of the animals, the scene again emphasizes the upper-middle-class setting, evident in everything from Stephen’s fine training, which allows him to deliver the deep notes with ‘admirable ease’, to the fine chiffonnière that provides a hiding place for a dog (MF, 475). In short, though the scene is couched as simple, natural music-making in the garden, performing the actual music requires training and technical expertise. Once Maggie arrives, Lucy, Stephen and even Philip continue their privileged habits with Maggie as an auditor. For instance, Lucy continues to stress the performance quality of their music soirées, positioning herself as director: ‘Let us have some music. … Give us the duet in “Masaniello” ’, she tells Stephen and Philip (531); ‘Come, come … music, music!’, when they fall into discussion (532); and ‘O, play something the while, Philip. … What is that you’re falling into?’ (533). When Philip begins ‘to play very falsely’ it is Lucy who looks ‘at him in astonishment’ (535). When not singing or playing accompaniment, she acts her role of domestic hostess, involved with ‘her bobbins’ and giving Stephen flirtatious, ‘laughing, admiring looks’ (534). Stephen continues to make the scenes of music into forums for flirtation and seduction – except now Maggie is the object of his attention. His approach is not emotive, like an Arcadian shepherd; 25 See Franz Joseph Haydn, The Creation: An Oratorio, vocal score arr. by Vincent Novello (New York: G. Schirmer, 1946).

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rather he uses his musical abilities for display, the musical interludes as opportunities to flirt, and his eyes as a means of catching Maggie’s eyes.26 The actual music is inconsequential to him, as suggested when he allows a manuscript of Balfe’s Maid of Artois to roll insignificantly onto the floor during one of their chance meetings (519). Eroticism is created by visual stimulus: ‘He only wished he dared look at Maggie and that she would look at him, – let him have one long look into those deep strange eyes of hers’ (519). For her part, Maggie ‘could look at Stephen [when others were around] – which for some reason or other, she always avoided when they were alone’ (517). Stephen’s focus remains primarily on Maggie throughout the musical soirées, and they communicate with their eyes, not their voices. That Stephen is still aware of the technicalities of music, however, betrays some of his sexual rapture: ‘He [would] even ask her to play his accompaniment for him … and lecture her on hurrying the tempo, which was certainly Maggie’s weak point’ (517). Most of the time, however, Stephen is glad to keep Maggie silent, as rapt auditor. His songs, such as ‘Shall I wasting in Dispaire / Die because a woman’s fair?’, objectify women, and he performs them ‘with saucy energy’ (534). Maggie herself appears far from indifferent as well, being ‘borne along by a wave too strong for her’ (534). Stephen flirts and Maggie responds in a natural, emotional manner. Unlike Stephen and Lucy who perform the roles of accomplished musician and enraptured lover, Maggie’s response is spontaneous and genuine. In contrast to Stephen’s technical and physical power play, Philip appears to be a sort of rustic musician whose music is an outpouring of feeling: Philip had brightened at the proposition, for there is no feeling … that does not find relief in music … and Philip had an abundance of pent-up feelings at this moment, as complex as any trio or quartet that was ever meant to express love and jealousy and resignation and fierce suspicion all at the same time. (531)

Obviously these feelings stem from the uncomfortable sexual tensions between Maggie and Stephen of which Philip is suspicious. Unlike Maggie, however, Philip betrays no ‘improper’ emotions when saying about music, ‘O yes’, he said, seating himself at the piano, ‘it is a way of eking 26 Note how my reading of Stephen differs from Weliver’s, who argues that he, like Maggie, is overcome by emotion. Weliver evokes evolutionary biology: by charming Maggie, he ‘duplicates Darwin’s investigation of sexual selection among animals’ (Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 192), and he ‘would go with the Law of Attraction after trying to resist it’ (ibid. 200). I read his actions as more socially constructed and deliberate.

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out one’s imperfect life and being three people at once – to sing and make the piano sing, and hear them both all the while – or else to sing and paint’. (531)

Philip emphasizes some of the issues involved with an elitist approach to music: music creates something visual because of the self-conscious performative element, that of hearing oneself sing and play. By emphasizing music as acting and camouflaging the emotions he had shared in the Red Deeps, he aligns himself with the aestheticism of Lucy and Stephen. While Philip’s love for Maggie is sincere, he still communicates it through word-play and innuendo. Singing a Bellini aria, he says to Lucy: ‘It’s from the Sonnambula – “Ah! perchè non posso odiarti”. I don’t know the opera but it appears the tenor is telling the heroine that he shall always love her though she may forsake him’ (533). Philip connects with the opera through the emotion of one of its songs – not the artifice of opera-going – and only Maggie understands his covert meaning: ‘Her ears had been open to what he was saying, and when he began to sing, she understood the plaintive passion of the music’ (533). The music may recall to Maggie their ‘pastoral’ romance but now, in the drawing room of the upper class, they are restrained by etiquette and class distinctions. After all, Philip has learned how to hide his feelings, expressing them only through operatic allusions; further, his ability to sing such a technically challenging operatic piece aligns him with Lucy and Stephen, while Maggie listens from across the room.27 Throughout these music scenes, various pastoral operas are discussed or sung. Though all operatic selections have thematic value within the text, as discussed by both William Sullivan and Beryl Gray, their intertextual value lies in the gender and class ideologies that they bring to the novel, imperiling the idealism of ‘pastoral music’. For instance, Irishman Michael William Balfe’s The Maid of Artois (1836)28 – the score of which Stephen brings to Lucy – parallels the novel with its intricate love triangle: two lovers, Jules and Isoline (the Maid of Artois), and a Marquis in love with Isoline. Significantly, the opera is propelled by class tensions, pitting two lower-class lovers first against this powerful Marquis, who has Jules banished for wounding him during a 27 Vincenzo Bellini, La Sonnambula: An Opera in Two Acts, libretto by Felice Romani, vocal score trans. Natalia Macfarren (New York: G. Schirmer, 1901). 28 Alfred Bunn, Libretto to Michael W. Balfe: The Maid of Artois: A Grand MeloDramatic Opera in Three Acts (New York: John Douglas, 1847). Beryl Gray explains the opera’s relevance to the novel as ‘its dominant memory motif: [the heroine] Isoline’s mistake was to think that she could sacrifice a future that followed naturally from the past’, as does Maggie (George Eliot and Music, 124). I am grateful to my friend Sarah Hamilton who found the libretto for me.

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duel (Act 1), and then against a cruel slave-driver, Synnelet, who holds Jules as a slave (Act 2). After Isoline arrives, dressed as a man, and aids in Jules’s escape, the lovers flee to Nature (a desert). Unlike a typical pastoral, however, Isoline and Jules are rescued from the natural world, in which they surely would have died, and are reabsorbed into the classbound society of the Marquis, who allows them to marry. Social structures are more powerful than Nature’s, and upper-class domination, represented by the Marquis, can banish or reunite members of the lower class at will. Stephen’s gift of this score to Maggie (we never know if it reaches Lucy’s hands) thus emblematizes the displacement of such class-complicated pastoralism onto Maggie’s situation. Masaniello, ou La muette de Portici (1828), which Lucy requests Stephen to sing, is by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber and involves, appropriately, a brother-sister relationship. Like The Maid of Artois, it also pits royalty against commoners, this time fishermen. A fisherman Masaniello has a mute sister Fenella, who is imprisoned by Alphonso, son of a Duke. This situation leads to overt class war as Masaniello rallies his fellow fisherman to rise up against Alphonso (reflecting the 1647 uprising of the Neapolitans against their Spanish oppressors).29 In the process both Masaniello and Fenella are killed, effectively crushing the revolution and the lower classes. Also significant is that the part of the mute Fenella is expressed by pantomime throughout. This silent role is notable in an opera where everyone else is singing. Her silence is analogous with Maggie’s situation, for Maggie never sings as an adult either. The texts have contained both Fenella’s and Maggie’s musical voices, leaving them to express passion only by pantomime and as observers. Philip’s aria, as we have seen, derives from Bellini’s La sonnambula, an opera also involving a subdued female protagonist, Amina. Amina’s sleep-walking threatens to destroy her reputation and thus her marriage to the wealthy landholder Elvino, for she sleepwalks right into the bed of another man, Randolpho. Her sleepwalking involves an awkward lack of self-control in which she unconsciously becomes the object of others’ scopophilia, just as Maggie’s emotional loss of control when experiencing music betrays her for all to see.30 Further, the idyllic atmosphere of the peasant community is marred by a class system which authorizes Elvino to annul his engagement to Amina and immediately

29

Ibid. 46. On the other hand, Showalter suggests the significance of this operatic choice to be that Maggie ‘struggles to “dull her sensibilities”, to subdue her longing’ – to become like this sleepwalking woman (A Literature of their Own, 129). Still, she not merely sleeps but walks, thus calling attention to herself by this nonconformity. 30

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offer it to another woman.31 In short, these class and gender tensions not only betray the pastoral utopias of all three operas, but disturb the pastoral ‘bliss’ professed by Lucy, Stephen and Philip.

‘The music was vibrating in her still’: Maggie’s loss of pastoral aestheticism For pastoral, lower-class Maggie, who once danced outside in the sunshine, the Deans’ wealthy music room is a startling reality. From the first, Lucy presents music to Maggie as if it were a gourmet dish: ‘I mean you to have quite a riotous feast of [music]. I mean you to get up your playing again, which used to be so much better than mine when we were at Laceham’ (MF, 483). Maggie is quick to distinguish her own sentimental, yet technically limited, musical enjoyment: You would have laughed to see me playing the little girls’ tunes over and over to them, when I took them to practice … just for the sake of fingering the dear keys again. But I don’t know whether I could play anything more difficult now than ‘Begone, dull care’! (483)

Maggie has innate musical love and talent, as Lucy recognizes, but this talent has gone uncultivated: as Homans points out, Maggie’s music, though cast as natural, ‘must be paid for’, and is a luxury she couldn’t afford ‘before her visit to Lucy’.32 Maggie can only satisfy her hunger for music by playing tunes for the younger girls. Music fills an emotional need for her: I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music. At other times one is conscious of carrying a weight. (496)

Sullivan writes that however ‘pleasurable and emotionally satisfying music is for Maggie, it remains, because of her psychic make-up, a temptation for her as well’.33 In contrast, I would argue that for Maggie,

31 Philip says that ‘the tenor is telling the heroine that he shall always love her though she may forsake him’ (MF, 533). However, after Elvino has sung this sentiment, he quickly becomes engaged to another women, replacing Amina with the duplicitous Lisa. Thus Elvino’s aria may suggest a continuity with the impassioned pastoral minstrels such as Colin Cloute, but the power he wields, gained from his gender and social status, betray him. 32 Margaret Homans, ‘Dinah’s Blush, Maggie’s Arm: Class, Gender, and Sexuality in George Eliot’s Early Novels’, Victorian Studies 36/2 (1993) 173. 33 Sullivan, ‘Music and Musical Allusion’, 235.

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music is a life-giving necessity of natural instinct and freedom. Neither is it a form of display; importantly, every time she has sung or played, it is alone. For instance, she only plays the piano once in the novel, when Lucy and Stephen have gone out riding. Then, she is able to sit down at the piano alone, and find that the old fitness between her fingers and the keys remained and revived, like a sympathetic kinship not to be worn out by separation – to get the tunes she had heard the evening before and repeat them again and again until she had found out a way of producing them so as to make them a more pregnant, passionate language to her. The mere concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie, and she would often take up a book of Studies rather than any melody, that she might taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of intervals. Not that her enjoyment of music was of the kind that indicates a great specific talent: it was rather that her sensibility to the extreme excitement of music was only one form of that passionate sensibility which belonged to her whole nature and made her faults and virtues all merge in each other. (MF, 514)

Many key ideas about Maggie’s music are revealed in this passage: that it is personal and she must play alone, not perform in front of others and be seen by them; that it is instinctive, not trained, and she creates her own music to express herself; that it is the fundamentals of harmonization, the ‘primitive sensations of intervals’, that inspire her, not the intricate frills; and that music is a ‘passionate language’ to her, not a mere technical exercise. These qualities are in direct contrast to the technical show that Lucy and Stephen put on. Like an Arcadian shepherd, Maggie revels in private, primitive, emotional music-making. Hers is not the visible, superficial, flirtatious music of the drawingroom. But Maggie gradually becomes conscious of Lucy’s and Stephen’s different aesthetics, as when she hears Stephen sing music by Henry Purcell: Had anything remarkable happened? … She had been hearing some fine music sung by a fine bass voice – but then it was sung in a provincial amateur fashion, such as would have left your critical ear much to desire. And she was conscious of having been looked at a great deal in rather a furtive manner from beneath a pair of wellmarked horizontal eyebrows, with a glance that seemed somehow to have caught the vibratory influence of the voice. Such things could have had no perceptible effect on a thoroughly well-educated young lady with a perfectly balanced mind, who had had all the advantages of fortune, training and refined society … The music was vibrating in her still – Purcell’s music with its wild passion and fancy – and she could not stay in the recollection of that bare lonely past. (MF, 494–5)

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But Maggie is not ‘a thoroughly well-educated young lady with a perfectly balanced mind, who had had all the advantages of fortune, training and refined society’, and thus only the omniscient narrator can recognize the ‘provincial amateur fashion’ of Stephen’s singing. Maggie credits Purcell’s music for her wild state, but of course it is also the owner of the ‘fine bass voice’ and eyes ‘beneath a pair of well-marked horizontal eyebrows’ who creates these feelings. Sexual emotions enter her consciousness for the first time; further, she is now aware of music as a forum for ‘furtive’ glances. She realizes that ‘perfect renunciation at the very threshold of her youth’ of love and music is impossible (495). At the same time, as happened when Philip sang, Maggie loses her position as the pastoral singer-subject. Rather, she is cast as an object of love songs due to Stephen’s male voyeurism: he watches her as he sings so that music is suddenly being gauged by the visible effect on her. But Maggie’s responses are too emotional for the propriety of the drawing room. Attempting to fit the model of a proper lady, she sits and sews as the others play the piano and sing. But she cannot restrain her emotional responses to the music and the erotic glances from Stephen. Though ‘Maggie always tried in vain to go on with her work when music began’, nevertheless when Philip and Stephen sing the duet from Masaniello, ‘she soon threw her work down … When the strain passed into the minor she half started from her seat with the sudden thrill of that change. Poor Maggie! She looked very beautiful when her soul was being played on in this way by the inexorable power of sound’ (532). Everyone notices Maggie’s awkward behavior: Stephen stands so as to look at her, Philip notices the ‘strong influence’ she is under and even Lucy cannot resist kissing her. Maggie’s reaction is out of place in this proper, conventional social scene, yet so typical of her own reaction to music: ‘her eyes dilated and brightened into that wide-open, childish expression’ (532) much as they did when, as a child, she was described as mad and possessed. The last musical encounter occurs when the trio is singing a song from The Tempest,34 and Stephen leaves the music to fetch Maggie a footstool: Stephen … lift[ed] the footstool with an entreating look at her, which made it impossible not to return a glance of gratitude … and once looking nothing could prevent that mutual glance from being delicious to both, as it had been the evening before. It was but an

34 For a discussion about who composed The Tempest (Purcell probably only wrote one song) and which songs are being sung in Eliot’s scene, see Gray, George Eliot and Music, 137. For differing reasons, both Gray and Sullivan agree the song is ‘See, see the Heavens smile’ (ibid. and Sullivan, ‘Music and Musical Allusion’, 246).

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ordinary act of politeness in Stephen; it had hardly taken two minutes; and Lucy, who was singing, scarcely noticed it. But to Philip’s mind … the change in Maggie’s face, which was plainly reflecting a beam from his [Stephen’s], seemed so strong a contrast with the previous overwrought signs of indifference as to be charged with painful meaning … He was beginning to play very falsely under this deafening inward tumult, and Lucy was looking at him in astonishment, when Mrs. Tulliver’s entrance to summon them to lunch, came as an excuse for abruptly breaking off the music. (MF, 534–5)

And the music never commences again. This last scene is paradigmatic of the trends found in all of the previous scenes. The story, based on Shakespeare’s play, is an important component, since The Tempest is another famous pastoral in which the upper-class invaders are successful not only in subduing the rustics (represented by Caliban) but in completely disavowing pastoral life and leaving. After all, in The Maid of Artois, the rustics are helped by the Marquis; in Masaniello, the fishermen rise up against the upper class; and in La sonnambula, the rural life is reaffirmed in the end. The last aesthetic statement to be made about class hierarchies is thus a troubling one. Not only does it foreshadow Stephen’s subduing of Maggie, but it reaffirms the elitist approach to aesthetics: trained musical skill may easily ‘conquer’ rustic appreciation and ability. Secondly, the passions stimulated by music and by love which have been blurred all along are now differentiated: Maggie and Stephen look at one another – a visual stimulus – though he is not singing and no musical registration has been made on Maggie. The resulting sexual passion, not the musical passion, now overwhelms Maggie, severing her from her natural passion for pure music. Further, sexual tensions are more conspicuous when performers and listeners are in full view of each other, and Philip sees the passionate glance between Stephen and Maggie. His and Maggie’s closeness arguably ends at this moment. As he stumbles on notes, Lucy, the perfectionist, notices. Maggie, having never had the education to be able to join the other three in this opera, thus becomes the object not only of Stephen’s gaze, but of Philip’s and even Lucy’s. It is significant that the musical scene is broken up by a return to polite society – a call to lunch. The social world completely engulfs Maggie at the very moment when she has broken with her past: her love for Philip, for natural simplicity, for innocent musical pleasure. Unconsciously she joins Stephen’s world of seduction, visible betrayal and elitism. The old Maggie is gone, and it is only a matter of time before she falls in a highly visible way from this social world in which she cannot sustain herself. The musical encounters end here but their implications resonate with

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Maggie’s climactic boat ride with Stephen. This can be read as yet another overtly pastoral encounter, but by now Maggie has been socialized to see herself not as a rustic musician, but as the silent object of sexual desires. That is, by her very consciousness of polite society’s class and gender roles, she forfeits her uninhibited agency to a middleclass male. Her trip with Stephen is not an innocent ride through nature but, in society’s eyes, a sexual encounter complicated by class transgressions. Neither Maggie nor Stephen even invoke music, since it is now superfluous as a socially constructed backdrop to love-making. When Maggie becomes conscious of her new role, it is too late to turn back. This inability to reconcile the pastoral and elitist approaches, once merely to musical encounters now expanded to life encounters, leaves her broken for the rest of the novel until, as critics suggest, a benevolent nature ultimately ‘rescues’ her in the flood.35

Conclusion In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot exposes the gender and class biases of the pastoral tradition in music and literature. She does so by depicting a ‘true’ pastoral subject, Maggie, whose feminine power and lower-class status are antithetical to the pastoral musical world constructed by her rich, educated relatives. In the first place, Maggie’s knowledge is purely instinctive; lacking an education, even a musical one, she is thus contrasted with the middle-class Philip, Lucy and Stephen, all of whom have enough technical expertise to sing difficult arias from operas and oratorios. Secondly, her instinctive love of music leads her to express it in unseemly displays of dancing and, later in life, to emotional outbursts. After all, music for Maggie is an internal, personal stimulant. Those around her are not aroused purely by the music in a personal way; their 35 Such is Ian Adam’s view: a treacherous Nature reaffirms its charitableness by answering Maggie’s prayers ‘with the flood that reunites brother and sister’; Ian Adam, ‘The Ambivalence of The Mill on the Floss’ in George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute, ed. Gordon S. Haight, and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (London: Macmillan, 1982) 135. However, Philip Fisher reads the river’s power as a test of Maggie; Philip Fisher, Making Up Society: The Novels of George Eliot (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981) 68. Barbara Hardy writes off any power of Nature as outside the scope of the book: the novel prepares us for ‘the struggle between the energetic human spirit and a limited and limiting society: such struggles are not settled by floods’; Barbara Hardy, ‘The Mill on the Floss’ in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Hardy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970) 47. Weliver contextualizes the novel’s ending within Darwinian Nature: ‘As animals survive based on their ability to adapt to their surrounding environment, Maggie perishes partially because her personality and morals … are unacceptable to her own community’s behavioral codes’ (Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 203).

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stimulation comes in the form of sexual attraction to those in the room and thus music is always linked to an external stimulant. This situation most often casts women as sexual singing divas soaring up and down the scale (as with Lucy) or, for those unable to display their singing thus, casts them as listening object of male singing (as with Maggie). These phenomena are emphasized and complicated by the subtexts of the novel: operas and oratorios, though overtly pastoral, display class hierarchies and female suppression (either ‘hushed’, mute, or somnambulist). Pastoral music and the ‘indecent’ displays associated with it are thus a complicated arena, especially for the woman performer. By feminizing the pastoral, Eliot exposes some of its most harmful hypocrisies.

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‘Singing like a musical box’: Musical detection and novelistic tradition Irene Morra To successive generations Holmes has been not merely the bestknown of fictional detectives but the quintessence of the species: detection in the public mind is a deerstalker, a meerschaum pipe, and an ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’.1

The Sherlock Holmes tales generally enjoy a reputation for representing a golden age of detective fiction.2 Despite their status within the genre of detective fiction, however, they are rarely accorded the critical respect or attention enjoyed by the works of Wilkie Collins or Edgar Allan Poe, works more often than not cited as pioneering predecessors to the form manifested by Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales. This is doubtless due to the immediate identification of the tales with the detective genre, rather than with the more respected Romantic prose tradition with which Poe and Collins are usually associated.3 Detective fiction is often perceived as

1 Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1976) 140. 2 This is confirmed not merely by critical assessments such as those by Ousby, but also by numerous artistic, musical and cinematic representations of the character and/or tales of Sherlock Holmes. Philip A. Shreffler’s collection documents enthusiasm for the mysteries by such diverse figures as Theodore Roosevelt, T. S. Eliot, and Marshall McLuhan, among others; Philip A Shreffler, ed., The Baker Street Reader: Cornerstone Writings about Sherlock Holmes (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1984). The recent English television mystery series, Murder Rooms, attests to the continuing fascination with the character and characteristics of Holmes; the series reinvents the context and contents of the original tales, placing them in a fictionalized context in which the ‘character’ of Arthur Conan Doyle takes on the role of Watson, and that of Dr Bell the role of Holmes. Although the mysteries can be reinvented, it would seem that the character of Holmes is capable of transcending his fictional context to embody the figure of the classic detective in various narrative and cultural situations. 3 General histories of detective fiction tend to agree with Julian Symons’ assertion that Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Moonstone is judged as the first detective novel’ and that ‘the first

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being affiliated with a popular taste for distilled plots that present puzzles and describe sensational or macabre events. As a result, the detective tale – unheard of at the time of Poe’s work – has come to be differentiated by critics, readers and writers from a more ‘serious’, implicitly superior prose tradition. This differentiation is to some extent justified: given its constant presentation as the unravelling of a mystery by a superior mind, detective fiction lends itself more easily to defining distinct narrative formulae. Nonetheless, the treatment of such expected conventions need not necessitate a separation from the ideals of more consciously ‘serious’ literary writers. Indeed, as a few notable studies have attested, the Holmes narratives demonstrate a complexity of tone, descriptive detail and characterization which differentiates them from works bent only on satisfying expected criteria.4 detective stories were written by Edgar Allan Poe’; Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel – A History (Middlesex: Penguin, 1985) 50, 34. Such assessments, particularly in regard to Poe, have tended to be tempered with an equal, if not greater assertion of the literary value of the works: ‘Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story. He also virtually invented the English short story itself’; Martin Priestman, Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure in the Carpet (London: Macmillan, 1990) 36. While Collins’ works are still to some extent marginalized in literary studies for their interest in sensationalism or the grotesque (or, perhaps, for their fated association with the more celebrated novels of Dickens), they have nonetheless lent themselves recently to more specialized genre and theoretical studies. Since William H. Marshall’s self-declaredly ‘first attempt to deal extensively and exclusively in the literary art of Wilkie Collins and the part that it played in the development of the English novel’, in Wilkie Collins (New York: Twayne, 1970) 5, collections such as those of Nelson Smith and Lyn Pykett have given equal and often simultaneous consideration to the detective and more identifiably ‘literary’ elements of Collins’ novels; Nelson Smith and R. C. Terry, eds, Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments (New York: AMS Press, 1995); Lyn Pykett, ed., Wilkie Collins (London: Macmillan, 1998). 4 As Priestman argues, the tales seem to have inspired two critical traditions: ‘lugubriously tongue-in-cheek following up of minor inconsistencies about dates and names which accounts for the bulk of Holmesian literature’ and, ‘more critically respectable, those which concentrate on the archetypal Holmes formula – focussing either on famous “methods” or on the romantic scientific blend which accounts for Holmes’s overall appeal as a personality’; Priestman, Detective Fiction and Literature, 74. Relatively few consider the tales within a critical literary context: Pasquale Accordo, The Infernal Holmes: Dante in Baker St.: Essays on Dante’s Inferno as Reflected in the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Shelburne: The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1999); William D. Jenkins, The Adventure of the Detected Detective: Sherlock Holmes in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ (Connecticut: Greenwood, 1998); Trevor H. Hall, Sherlock Holmes: Ten Literary Studies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1970); John A. Hodgson, ed., Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Essays (Boston: St. Martin’s, 1994); Harold Orel, ed., Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992); Priestman, Detective Fiction and Literature. The Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok collection remains a unique manifestation of an overtly theoretical interest; Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

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This literary ‘seriousness’ is no more apparent than in Doyle’s use of musical imagery and reference to characterize his detective. While Holmes’s musical abilities are accepted as mere eccentricities by Watson and his implied reader, they in fact clearly validate a relationship between the tales and the novelistic tradition.5 The equation of musical ability with the ability to determine, if not completely understand, the actions and emotions of others, is characteristic of many nineteenthcentury novels which use musical imagery and reference in their complex depictions of a character’s mental, moral and spiritual identity. A close examination of the presentation of Holmes’s abilities only demonstrates the extent to which popular readings and interpretations of the character have failed to do justice to his literary origins. The stories offer a complex characterization of the detective in terms of his ability to compose, perform and appreciate music. Through musical composition and uniquely individual performance, Holmes achieves a simultaneous distance from society and a greater understanding of his milieu. Through musical interpretation, he re-establishes an expected moral and social order. Given the psychological and descriptive importance generally accorded to music in the nineteenth-century novel, the tales emphasize that far from being an additional eccentric characteristic of the classic detective, the ability to appreciate and perform music for the purposes of understanding, concealing and revealing character places him quite firmly within his contemporary novelistic tradition. One of the primary requisites of detective fiction is the presence of an eccentric detective figure who maintains a distance from the social concerns of others to achieve a greater objectivity of observation. While Holmes can speak on such esoteric subjects as medieval pottery, Stradivarius violins, the Buddhism of Ceylon and the warships of the future,6 he deliberately fosters an ignorance of the more sociallyaccepted subjects of literature, philosophy, astronomy and politics.7 This

5 The importance of Holmes’s musicality has been all but ignored by critics, with the notable exception of Guy Warrack in Sherlock Holmes and Music (London: Faber and Faber, 1947). Even Warrack, however, tends to view detective fiction as essentially distanced from the more ‘serious’ Victorian novel. 6 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The End of the Islander’ in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories (New York: Bantam, 1986) vol. 1: 171–2 [hereafter title of story or novel followed by volume and page numbers from this edition]. 7 Holmes likens his brain to an attic which might become excessively cluttered (A Study in Scarlet, 1: 12). Despite this, he later contradicts his assertions of ignorance when he quotes Goethe, Flaubert, Thoreau and Tacitus. As a result of the many contradictions which emerge between the tales, there is some justice to an argument that discussions of Holmes’s character should be restricted to a single tale at a time. Given the consistency

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singularity is mirrored in his showing such ‘an eccentricity and irregularity in his life’ as to be addicted ‘to music at strange hours’ (‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, 2: 385), and his apparently deliberate lack of personal involvement in emotional concerns. He dismisses Watson’s decision to marry, for example, with the argument that love ‘is an emotional thing’ and that ‘whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which [he places] above all things’ (The Sign of Four, 1: 204–5). This ‘eccentricity and irregularity’ and selfimposed emotional distance for the purposes of ‘cold reason’ have come to define the necessary qualities of a classic detective hero. Protagonists as diverse as Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe all suggest an indebtedness to Holmes’s evident studied indifference and eccentricity. Despite the prominence of the Holmes tales, however, they are by no means the first manifestations of this eccentric, distanced, detecting protagonist. Dickens’ Bleak House, written in 1852, over thirty years before Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, expends a considerable amount of time both presenting and parodying in the figure of Inspector Bucket what later came to be the apparent expectations of a literary detective. Bucket’s air of cool efficiency is a necessary veneer for anyone capable of close analysis and detection: Thoughtful Mr Bucket is; as a man may be with weighty work to do; but composed, sure, confident. … Not in the least anxious or disturbed is Mr Bucket … he eyes the baronet … with that observant gravity of yesterday, in which there might have been yesterday, but for the audacity of the idea, a touch of compassion.8

This apparent detachment from immediate emotional context is similarly suggested by Poe’s Dupin, who is a recluse, Collins’ Sergeant Cuff (The Moonstone), who demonstrates a greater interest in roses than people, and Dickens’ later Night-Inspector (Our Mutual Friend), who is so oblivious to the grotesqueness of his surroundings as to shelve his books ‘as studiously as if he were in a monastery on top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the back-yard at his elbow’.9 These authors all suggest that the efficiency of their detectives depends upon their absorption in interests deemed marginal by the majority, and upon their with which Holmes’s relationship to music is presented in the tales, however, I feel that my more comprehensive discussion is justified. 8 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–3), ed. Norman Page (London: Penguin, 1971) 780. 9 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–5; London: Penguin, 1985) 66.

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preserving an emotional distance from the crimes and intricacies of the society they investigate. Curiously, however, while the Night-Inspector and Cuff display eccentric enthusiasms and an apparently requisite distance from social interests, they are not consistently successful in their pursuits. By the end of Our Mutual Friend, the Inspector is left only to recognize ‘that he never had been so gravelled’.10 He is treated with a superficiality in the narrative which matches his detection abilities; he is interesting only as a curious example of a man sufficiently detached from conventional emotional expectations as to embody the apparent requirements of his profession. Most unusual is The Moonstone, which, despite its common status as the first detective novel, fails to define and establish a central detective figure. Ezra Jennings determines the manner in which the stone was stolen; Sergeant Cuff returns only to reveal the guilt of Godfrey Ablewhite and to admit, ‘I completely mistook my case. How any man living was to have seen things in their true light, in such a situation as mine was at the time, I don’t profess to know’.11 Neither Cuff’s eccentric interest in roses nor Jennings’ exotic background and knowledge proves sufficient to allow either detective to unravel fully the truths of their investigation. In their depiction of limited detectives, both Dickens and Collins seem to imply that a successful detective cannot be defined by an eccentricity, an objective approach or a reliance on analytical ability alone. Cuff does not possess any expert, obscure knowledge of various cultures, sensation literature or scientific curiosities. His detective work is therefore supplemented by that of Jennings, whose tragic background, exotic ‘gipsy-complexion’, ‘extraordinary parti-coloured hair’ and obscure medical knowledge ensure his isolation, pensiveness and consequent ability as a similarly limited detective.12 As Cuff suggests when he excuses himself for having mistaken the case because of his ‘situation’ at the time, the most important ability of the detective is to imagine the truth from observed phenomena. Holmes’s greater success does not merely depend upon visual evidence or his specialized knowledge. He consistently shows that a successful detective must be capable not merely of examining events objectively, but of interpreting evidence with an interest in and understanding of the abstract. Holmes must therefore possess a knowledge, mastery and enthusiasm for the intangible. 10

Ibid. 832. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868; London: Penguin, 1985) 491. 12 Ibid. 417. The novel suggests that Jennings is also limited because he is not afforded the benefit of first-hand observation; this is particularly vital in a tale which places such careful emphasis on the importance of recognizing the subjectivity of all narration. 11

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Perhaps nowhere more than in the ‘serious’ novel of the nineteenth century is musical imagery and reference so consistently applied to differentiate the tangible from the metaphysical, and the truth from superficial appearance. In musically-referential novels by Eliot and Hardy, the ability to offer unique musical performance is often equated with the ability to escape from mundane trivialities of social existence, and thus to communicate and commune with a less tangible, implicitly more relevant, spiritual reality of self and the world. This capacity is manifested strikingly in Svengali from George Du Maurier’s Trilby, doubtless the most famous of nineteenth-century fictional musicians, and clearly a descendant of more complex novelistic villains and troubled protagonists.13 Although Svengali is ‘about as bad as they make ‘em’ when ‘walking up and down the earth’, when he is ‘playing Chopin on the pianoforte’ or even ‘playing “Ben Bolt” on that penny whistle of his’, he is ‘as one of the heavenly host’.14 The beauty of Svengali’s performance is such that those listening and observing him temporarily not only forget their virulent hatred of him, but transform him into a benign spiritual messenger. Because the novel clearly emphasizes the thoroughness of Svengali’s villainy, it implies that his ability to evoke spiritual beauty through musical performance involves a diabolical knowledge and mastery of the metaphysical. Svengali is the ultimate nineteenth-century representation of the mysterious novelistic protagonist, communing through music with an otherwise unreachable reality. This communication through music is similarly, if considerably more subtly, evoked in the otherwise very different Daniel Deronda.15 Among other things, Eliot’s novel is concerned with exposing the rigidity of social structures and expectations, and emphasizing the importance of self-discovery. Music is associated consistently with the expression of deep feeling, and the articulation of a fundamental self.16 Given the novel’s interest in English 13 George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894; London: Penguin, 1994). For further discussion of Trilby, see the chapters by Jonathan Taylor and Phyllis Weliver in this volume. 14 Ibid. 38–9. 15 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1874–6; London: Penguin, 1980) [hereafter DD]. 16 Numerous studies have examined the importance of music, particularly voice, in the novel. Shirley Levenson’s study is one of the first, and to some extent still one of the most thorough; Shirley Frank Levenson, ‘The Use of Music in Daniel Deronda’, NineteenthCentury Fiction 24/3 (1969) 317–34. Beryl Gray’s study takes a more comprehensive approach in its examination of the representation of music in three of Eliot’s novels, in George Eliot and Music (London: Macmillan, 1989), while Karen B. Mann offers a more aesthetic contextualization for her discussion of the idea of ‘harmony’ in the novel; Karen B. Mann, The Language that Makes George Eliot’s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1983). Like Alison Byerly, Gillian Beer identifies voice quality and vocal performance as central to the novel’s characterization of ‘musical’ characters and their moral standing;

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social attitudes towards Jews, it is significant that the only truly musical Christian in Daniel Deronda is Catherine Arrowpoint, who chooses to marry Klesmer, a ‘felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave, and the Semite’ (DD, 77). Unlike the Jewish characters, the other Christians either fail to appreciate the importance of music or are not musical themselves. This is less a social failing than it is a moral one; the novel constantly emphasizes that ‘the capacity to hear and then respond indicates a complex relationship between self and world’.17 Just as important to this complex relationship is the capacity to perform musically: ‘The moral value that Eliot assigns to music … allows us unmediated access to a character’s soul, because the voice is taken as an authentic representation of the self.’18 Thus, when Gwendolen performs ‘a favourite aria of Bellini’s’ competently, Klesmer reacts against the performance as a moral outrage; the music which Gwendolen sings is ‘beneath’ her and makes ‘men small as they listen to her’ (79). Although Klesmer is frequently contradictory and abrupt, when he performs, he has ‘an imperious magic in his fingers that [seems] to send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer, and compel the strings to make a quivering lingering speech for him’ (80). In his performance, Klesmer reveals and articulates a hidden emotional being which emphasizes the separation between social appearance and inner self. This representation of the revelatory power of musical performance is significant, given the novel’s overall concern with the conflict between self and social expectation, prejudice and convention. When Gwendolen hears the music, she demonstrates her own potential for growth; she is lifted into ‘a desperate indifference about her own doings, or at least a determination to get a superiority over them’ (80). This susceptibility to musical performance foreshadows Gwendolen’s future conflict between selfish desire and her intuitive knowledge of right action. Indeed, Eliot consistently indicates that those characters capable of ‘giving voice’ to their true selves through music, or of perceiving the articulation of that self in the performance of another, are implicitly more aware of their personal identity and of fundamental moral truths. Musical ability need not always suggest growth, self-discovery or a superior morality; Svengali is a perfect manifestation of an Alison Byerly, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). See also the chapters in this volume by Sophie Fuller and Jonathan Taylor. The major new study of Eliot and music, Delia da Sousa Correa’s George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave, 2002), appeared too late to be included in the research for this study. 17 Mann, ‘The Language that Makes George Eliot’s Fiction’, 71. 18 Byerly, Realism, Representation and the Arts, 134.

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uncomplicated villain. Nonetheless, even Svengali conforms to a frequent novelistic tendency to portray those with ‘real’ musical ability as communicating with hidden truths or with truths that cannot be articulated within a conventional social environment. In Desperate Remedies, for example, Hardy’s desperate and mysterious steward Manston makes his own organ, admitting that he plays for his ‘private amusement only’; he has ‘never learnt scientifically’, and ‘only [knows] what [he] taught himself’.19 Just as Klesmer creates a ‘lingering speech’ for himself, Manston extemporizes ‘a harmony which [meanders] through every variety of expression of which the instrument [is] capable’ (DR, 138).20 While Klesmer creates his own music, that music is still constructed within musical conventions; it is a fantasia, it is titled and it provides ‘an extensive commentary on some melodic ideas not too grossly evident’ (DD, 79–80), conforming to a certain improvisatory and harmonic tradition being encouraged at the time by composerperformers such as Liszt. Manston, however, has not allowed his musical instincts to be tempered by musical education. It is therefore fitting that his composition reveals a more tormented, mysterious nature than that of Klesmer.21 In his performance, Manston reveals, promotes and paradoxically attempts to console his social isolation and individual torment; his performance and lack of interest in social, implicitly universal musical tastes, point to dangerous self-absorption and distance from society.22 Their differences notwithstanding, Klesmer and Manston 19

Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (1871; London: Penguin, 1998) 137 [hereafter

DR]. 20 John Hughes offers an intriguing argument for a parallel between the relative selfindulgent freedom of Manston’s composition and the structure of the novel itself: ‘The improvisatory virtuosity of which Manston is master here … [is] inward with the formal and stylistic qualities of the novel itself’; John Hughes, Ecstatic Sound: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) 37. Some differentiation must be made, however, between intended audience. While Manston appreciates Cytherea’s presence, he plays out of an inward compulsion, rather than a need to perform, and confesses to having opened the organ-case that afternoon ‘to commence soothing [himself] at once’ (DR, 137). If Hardy intends the improvisatory scene to comment upon his own novelistic tendencies, he is deliberately drawing attention to his ‘performance’. He suggests a greater calculation, rather than impulsive instinct, to his creation, and thus a ‘musical’ tendency more akin to that of Klesmer with his ‘melodic ideas not too grossly evident’ than that of Manston. 21 While Manston is ultimately mysterious and sinister, Klesmer’s difference is defined by his status as an archetypal genius, rendered more exotic by his being a ‘felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave, and the Semite’ (DD, 77). 22 A future study might do better justice to the implications of these depictions in the context of Phyllis Weliver’s discussion of a Victorian scientific interest in the ‘magnetized or somnambulistic patient’s musical performance [as] a tool for accessing and understanding the unconscious mind in nineteenth-century Britain’; Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science

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share an enthusiasm for individual, singular musical performance which enforces the social distinction already determined by their birth, class or temperament. Their use of performance to articulate inner depths, and thus an awareness of social superficiality, enforces their desire and ability to participate in another, apparently intuited, metaphysical reality. This novelistic representation of the powerful suggestiveness of musical performance clearly influenced the creation of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes claims that his ‘life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence’. The ‘little problems’ presented by his cases ‘help [him] to do so’ (‘A Case of Identity’, 1: 251). When he is not working, Holmes is overcome by ‘reactions of lethargy during which he [lies] about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table’ (‘The Musgrave Ritual’, 1: 528). Given the grotesque and dangerous nature of his work, the fact that Holmes finds an escape from ‘commonplace realities’ in his cases suggests that he perceives in them greater personal significance than is appreciated by Watson. Holmes’s extreme reaction to the absence of work distances him from the ordered, regular society appreciated by Watson and his fictional readers, and implies an appreciation for a less tangible reality, unacknowledged or unrecognized by others. This appreciation is further suggested by Holmes’s highly individual violin-playing, which he identifies as another means by which he may achieve the kind of escapism enabled by his cases. His eccentric solo improvisation inspires a personal reordering of reality; the music he plays is of his own devising and rarely conforms to traditional cultural expectations. His abilities upon the violin are therefore ‘remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments’. When left to himself, he will ‘seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air’. Instead, he will lean back in his armchair, close his eyes ‘and scrape carelessly at and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 71. Such a discussion would be particularly relevant in relation to Manston, who voices the ‘abnormal utterance’ (DR, 71) of passion apparently allowed by his mesmerized, musical ‘state’. Weliver notes that ‘the mesmerizer was usually male and the patient female, thereby setting up a paradigm of mesmerism in keeping with Victorian gender ideals where the conscious man seemed to control the unaware, unconscious and passive woman’; Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 72. In Desperate Remedies, however, Manston has mesmerized himself into a state of passion with his own musical performance. At the same time, he exercises a deep influence on Cytherea such that she is reduced to ‘the state in which woman’s instinct to conceal has lost its power over her impulse to tell’ (DR, 140). Manston is thus both the mesmerized and the mesmerizer; the novel can be seen as inviting the consideration of an external, masculine, mesmerizing force which translates Manston’s ‘unconscious’ wishes onto another and influences her into a recognition of sympathy with his desires.

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the fiddle which [is] thrown across his knee’. Sometimes the chords are ‘sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they [are] fantastic and cheerful’. For Watson, the chords ‘clearly’ reflect the thoughts which possess Holmes, ‘but whether the music [aids] those thoughts, or whether the playing [is] simply the result of a whim or fancy, [is] more than [Watson can] determine’ (A Study in Scarlet, 1: 13). Like Klesmer and Manston, Holmes reveals a depth of emotional and mental preoccupation which he does not express in conventional language, but articulates in unique musical performance. This performance both reveals and conceals his character; its singularity and intensity suggests Holmes’s greater depth, but the incomprehensibility and unfamiliarity of the musical sounds render that depth impenetrable to Watson. This ability to reveal and conceal character is apparently restricted to those possessed of a firm musical mastery. Klesmer’s performance, while individual, is framed within sophisticated but understood notions of musical harmony. This mastery suggests a simultaneous understanding and willingness to challenge musical conventions. Klesmer is equally able to perform music for which he lacks respect, but which conforms to notions of social respectability. His singular performance is preceded by a duet that demonstrates his ability to recognize and cater to sociallydefined musical expectations. Similarly, Manston’s composition, while singular, offers ‘the completeness of full orchestral power’. Although he professes to be self-taught, Manston is equally capable of playing familiar, culturally-recognized works; he infuses ‘something from an oratorio’ with his powerful sadness (DR, 138) and easily modulates from that work into Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (140). The ‘compositions’ of the music-master and the self-taught organist are therefore not to be seen as crude manifestations of untethered minds. Instead, their juxtaposition with the relative emotional power of familiar works merely reveals an instinctive mastery and surpassing of social musical expectation. The novels equate this mastery with a higher awareness of an unseen ‘truth’. As a result, the association of musical individuality with a knowledgeable disregard for conventional tastes can offer potentially subversive implications. In his musical mastery, Holmes resembles less the popular, one-sided Svengali (with whom he might be compared generically as a manifestation of ‘popular’ fictional tastes) than the more complex Klesmer and Manston. Although his violin improvisations are ‘wild’, his other performances demonstrate that this wildness is deliberate, informed by a personal musical understanding rather than any lack of skill upon the instrument. At the same time as he expresses an implicit isolation in his music, Holmes can ‘play pieces, and difficult pieces’, and at Watson’s request he will play ‘some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and

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other favourites’. Indeed, Watson ‘might have rebelled’ against the ‘exasperating solos had it not been that [Holmes] usually terminated them by playing in quick succession a whole series of [Watson’s] favourite airs as a slight compensation’ (A Study in Scarlet, 1: 13). The ease with which Holmes plays culturally-acceptable music (all the more acceptable for its difficulty) implies his understanding of the ‘commonplace’, ordered world from which he attempts to escape in his improvisatory moments. By not conforming to its apparent restrictions Holmes, in his improvisatory moments, is seen to withdraw from a society whose conventions and expectations he fully understands and chooses to surpass. Recognisable musical mastery therefore prevents ‘singular’ characters from being dismissed as crudely uneducated or inadvertently unconventional. Instead, it suggests their simultaneous indifference to conventional expectations and their musical equality, if not superiority, to the skills of the more socially complacent. The musical singularity of Holmes, Klesmer and Manston is equated with their troubled desire to escape the ‘commonplace’. Each character is capable of performing within conventional musical expectations, and can therefore manifest a conformity with the social order from which he seeks escape. The fact that their performances are constantly touched with the mark of musical mastery, however, suggests the overall ability of the characters to comprehend and surpass conventional expectations. This ability to understand and to ignore social expectations implies a greater affinity with those apparently restricted by social conventions. The Holmes tales, for example, are replete with characters defined and limited by their social roles, but Holmes is able to interact with a variety of classes and personalities. He perceives the interest of a situation according to its intellectual, rather than social merit, and treats the cases of such varied clients as the King of Bohemia, a hydraulic engineer and an impecunious female music-teacher. He maintains a consistent professional distance in his interactions with these clients, again demonstrating indifference toward anything other than the ‘escape from the commonplace’ that he perceives in the case. When this apparent indifference is considered in the light of Holmes’s success, it becomes apparent not only that he is willing to disregard social prejudices of class and station, but also that he possesses a superior understanding of numerous, if not all, aspects of human nature and organization. This understanding further enables Holmes to slip out of his defined persona into disguise, and to assimilate himself within various social groups. Such deception necessitates the manipulation of the perceptions of others, a capability manifested not only in Holmes’s physical

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disguises, but also in his music. When Watson returns home in The Sign of Four, Holmes invites him to lie on the sofa: He took up his violin from the corner, and as I stretched myself out he began to play some low, dreamy, melodious air – his own, no doubt, for he had a remarkable gift for improvisation. I have a vague remembrance of his gaunt limbs, his earnest face and the rise and fall of his bow. Then I seemed to be floated peacefully away upon a soft sea of sound until I found myself in dreamland, with the sweet face of Mary Morstan looking down upon me. (The Sign of Four, 162–3)

Holmes’s proficiency at putting Watson to sleep with his music suggests a complete awareness and command of musical influence. The fact that his music invites Watson’s pleasantly romantic dream implies that Holmes has detected Watson’s feelings for Mary Morstan, despite his own indifference to such interests. Furthermore, it suggests that Holmes is able to manipulate those feelings so that Watson can awake ‘strengthened and refreshed’ (163). Weliver offers an intriguing examination of the use of music and harmony as central metaphors for mesmerism in science, literature and popular culture.23 Given the prevalence of mesmerism in the contemporary imagination and the scientific enthusiasms of both Holmes and his creator, it is no wonder that Doyle should have had his detective effectively evoke the effects of mesmerism with his music. Holmes’s command of music and its attendant abilities is such that he in fact later ‘mesmerises’ himself by ‘droning’ music to soothe his ‘ruffled spirits’ and enable himself to approach events more efficiently (‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’, 1: 692). In so doing, he evokes comparison with Manston, who is equally capable of influencing others and invoking inward consolation through musical performance,24 but is unable to temper that tendency as Holmes does, with concern for a greater personal and social good. In a brief episode of Bleak House, Dickens prefigures Doyle’s definition of the classic Victorian detective according to musical abilities and sensibilities. Inspector Bucket enters the house of the Bagnets under the pretence of searching for a second-hand ‘wiolinceller, of a good tone’. He endears himself by participating eagerly in the fife performance of the youngest son. He then agrees to sing, and in so doing ensures his favourable reception. Through this deception, Bucket guarantees that he is later able to arrest George; he uses his knowledge and understanding

23

Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 60–71. In another instance of musical influence, Manston succeeds in obtaining an incriminating letter by disguising and conforming himself to the appropriate social level of the postman; significantly, he does this by joining in the chorus of a drinking-song. 24

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of both music and human nature to observe and deceive for the purposes of detection. In this episode, Dickens offers what is an encapsulation of the musical, perceptive and deceptive abilities of many Victorian protagonists in the figure of a professional detective. Indeed, novels as diverse as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Beach of Falesá and The Portrait of a Lady can be read as existing in a similar detective tradition to that of Sherlock Holmes as a result of the importance with which they equate musical mastery with intuition, deception and control. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for example, Rochester is able to deceive Jane, Blanche, his servants and Mason at different moments.25 He is also able to detect and comprehend the disguises of others. He is aware of Jane’s depression, he understands Blanche’s hypocrisy and he comprehends the superficiality of those with whom he keeps society. Significantly, the power of Rochester’s voice is frequently noted in the novel; he possesses a ‘powerful bass’ voice into which he throws ‘his own force’ to find a ‘way to the ear through the heart’.26 His musical ability, first experienced by Jane at his moment of deception with Blanche, implicitly reinforces his ability to perceive, influence and disguise. Like Rochester, Madame Merle in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady is unconventionally influential; she does not understand and manipulate Isabel with protestations of female sympathy, but ‘draws’ Isabel to her by playing the piano with skill, feeling and ‘a discretion of her own’: her playing ‘showed skill, it showed feeling … When it was finished [Isabel] felt a strong desire to thank the player’.27 This manipulative ability to disguise motivations and character is perhaps most strikingly manifest in the figure of Case, the trader in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesá. Case understands the susceptibility of the natives to superstitious belief and succeeds in controlling and deceiving them by concealing Tyrolian harps in the forest, claiming the sounds to be supernatural and asserting his unique interpretative authority.28 In contrast, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights provides an interesting explication of this presumed ability in its marked absence of musical reference.29 Heathcliff makes his arrival in the great-coat of Mr 25

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847; London: Penguin, 1986). Ibid. 209. Ousby argues that the relationship between Jane Eyre and the Holmes tales is such that the setting and situation of ‘The Cooper Beeches’ ‘are reminiscent of a stream of Gothic governess fiction which had begun with Jane Eyre’; Ousby, ‘Bloodhounds of Heaven’, 166. 27 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; London: Penguin, 1997) 172. 28 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Beach of Falesá (1893), repr. in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1979) 101–69. 29 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; New York: Bantam, 1989). 26

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Earnshaw. He struggles to such an extent that he succeeds in crushing Hindley’s fiddle to pieces. Given the importance with which musical ability is associated with perception and understanding in other Victorian novels, this wilful destruction of the potential instrument of ‘detection’ foreshadows Heathcliff’s masterful ability to manipulate emotions and actions and to prevent others from understanding and defining his character. Many Victorian novels further suggest that musical interpretative sensibility is as important to defining the apparent depth and perceptive abilities of a character as is the ability to perform musically. In Collins’ The Woman in White, Count Fosco’s ability to commit crimes ‘too ingenious for an Englishman’ is foreshadowed by his apparently greater understanding of operatic performance. When attending a performance of Lucrezia Borgia, Fosco is able to assert his superior interpretative abilities to such an extent that the audience follows his lead in applause and he can declare, ‘Yes! yes! these barbarous English people are learning something from ME. Here, there, and everywhere, I – Fosco – am an influence that is felt, a man who sits supreme!’.30 In contrast, Dickens’ David Copperfield is incapable of discriminating between the value of Agnes’ sweet performances on the piano, Dora’s meaningless ballads and Rosa’s harp played with ‘fearful’ power. As a result, he falls susceptible to all three influences. Similarly, in Eliot’s Middlemarch, Lydgate is unable to recognize that the superiority of Rosamond’s execution is a result of her training, rather than inherent musical sensibility. Rosamond renders her master’s performance ‘with the precision of an echo’, and Lydgate is ‘taken possession of and [begins] to believe in her as something exceptional’.31 While Fosco’s superior interpretative ability ensures his manipulative success, both David and Lydgate suffer as a result of their inability to detect appropriately character in musical performance. Given this equation between musical interpretative ability and understanding the truth of situation and character, it is not surprising that throughout Doyle’s stories, Holmes demonstrates an ability not merely to ‘deduce’ facts from his keen observations, but to allow truths to reveal themselves through the reflection allowed by music. This reflection can be enabled not only by his own solo improvisations, but also by superior concert performances. Holmes speaks of a ‘scarlet 30 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860), ed. Julian Symons (London: Penguin, 1985) 590. For further discussion of this novel, see the chapter in this volume by Laura Vorachek. 31 George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2; London: Penguin, 1994) 161.

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thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life’ and his duty to ‘unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it’. He then declares his intention to attend a concert, leaving Watson to meditate upon ‘the many-sidedness of the human mind’ (A Study in Scarlet, 33). As Holmes’s enthusiasm suggests, however, there is no real dichotomy between musical meditation and detection. When faced with a ‘three pipe problem’ in ‘The Red-Headed League’, Holmes again attends a concert: ‘there is a good deal of German music on the programme, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is introspective, and I want to introspect’ (‘The Red-Headed League’, 1: 241). At the concert, he sits ‘wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music’. His ‘gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes’ are as unlike those of ‘the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive’: In his singular character the dual nature alternately asserted itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. … When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music at St. James’s Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom he had set himself to hunt down. (243)

By attending the concert, Holmes exercises a contemplative side which implicitly allows him not merely to regain the energy which he expends in his labours of ‘extreme exactness’, but to supplement that exactness with a greater understanding of events. Holmes therefore follows his expressions of enthusiasm for music with statements of fact about the mysteries he is investigating. He speaks of going off to ‘violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex us with their conundrums’ (243). Immediately after the concert, he is able to tell Watson that a great crime is being committed, then lies back in the cab ‘humming the tunes which he had heard in the afternoon’ (245–6). Holmes perceives a simultaneous order and abstraction in music that allows him better to comprehend and systematize the apparently ‘irregular’, disordered events and emotions he investigates. Arguing that ‘one’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature’, Holmes implicitly finds in music the means through which to achieve this broadening: Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague

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memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood. (A Study in Scarlet, 34)32

Holmes’s reliance upon concert music and personal musical improvisation at moments of deductive crisis suggests his effort to stimulate ‘vague memories’ of implicitly universal truths. This stimulation allows him to avoid limiting his investigation to visual observation and rational analysis. By ‘broadening’ his ideas to encompass both concrete and metaphysical ‘Nature’, Holmes can better understand the role of the apparently disordered events with which he is faced, and thus achieve a successful interpretation of fact. Holmes’s comments suggest that music can both reveal and inspire the natural motivations of humankind; in so doing, they reflect numerous novelistic descriptions of occasions in which musical performances allow for the revelation of truths. Jane Austen’s novels, for example, frequently contain social situations in which musical performances permit disclosures or reflections about amorous feelings.33 In later novels, music itself inspires revelation. When Little Billee hears Trilby sing, ‘something [melts] in his brain, and all his long-lost power of loving [comes] back with a rush’.34 As we have seen, Klesmer’s performance lifts Gwendolen into momentary indifference with regard to her personal anxieties (DD, 80). In Desperate Remedies, Cytherea is moved by the powerful organ-playing of Manston: ‘The power of the music did not show itself so much by attracting her attention to the subject of the piece, as by taking up and developing as its libretto the 32 Eliot’s novels demonstrate a particular interest in the theories of evolution and music articulated by Spencer, Darwin and Sully. Weliver offers a brief overview of these theories (Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 167–79), and discusses their varying representation and relevance in The Mill on the Floss (ibid. 184–205), Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda (ibid. 206–44). Holmes perceives in music an older, implicitly more natural and fundamental expression of truth. While his association of this tendency with Darwin’s theories in some measure reflects Eliot’s interest in theories of evolution and music, these theories are in no way discussed, taken up or more fully explored in the Holmes tales. This is doubtless due in large part to the necessity of the detective tale to maintain action and suspense, rather than to dwell on psychological depictions of character and philosophical speculation. That Doyle uses Darwin in this passage to emphasize the importance to detection of his character’s musical appreciation nonetheless demonstrates an affiliation with the novelistic interest in music, character and evolution shown consistently by Eliot. 33 For instance, in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), Colonel Brandon immediately gains Marianne Dashwood’s approval when he expresses moderated appreciation for her singing; in Pride and Prejudice (1813), Darcy reveals his interest in Elizabeth Bennett in his attentiveness towards her while she plays at the piano; and in Persuasion (1818), Anne Elliot is given occasion to hope of Captain Wentworth’s jealousy toward her cousin at a concert. 34 Du Maurier, Trilby, 193.

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poem of her own life and soul.’ Cytherea is so affected that ‘new impulses of thought came with new harmonies, and entered into her with a gnawing thrill’ (DR, 139). These novels depict situations in which performance permits the provocation and revelation of hitherto unacknowledged or unrealized emotions. This revelation need not always be self-reflexive, however; Austen’s novels particularly demonstrate that performance occasions can allow musically-educated characters to observe or intuit the thoughts or purposes of others. When Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax sing a duet, for example, Emma falls into ‘a train of thinking’ about Knightley’s possible interest in Jane.35 Lush is sufficiently skilled in interpreting the musical modulations of Grandcourt’s voice as to know that when he utters a speech ‘in subdued, inward, yet distinct tones’, he is expressing ‘a peremptory will’ (DD, 162). Similarly, when Gwendolen sings, Klesmer is able to detect a ‘self-satisfied folly about every phrase’ which mirrors Gwendolen’s character (79). Such detection is not limited to an understanding of character; once Wiltshire interprets successfully the sound of Case’s Tyrolean harps, for example, he is able to revisit and reinterpret earlier ‘clues’ to understand the full method and deviousness of Case’s actions.36 Despite the potential for musical performance to inspire reflection, the truth revealed through such reflection need not be specific to particular characters or events. As Mirah observes, ‘some feelings are like our hearing: they come as sounds do, before we know their reason’ (DD, 259). Indeed, the ability to appreciate music characteristically allows for a revelation of feeling and understanding which can conflict with rational analysis or observation. With Klesmer’s composition, Gwendolen’s ‘inward sob of mortification’ is turned ‘into an excitement’ that removes her attention from petulant self-absorption (80). Her reaction mirrors Klesmer’s articulated goal that music should offer ‘cries of deep, mysterious passion’ and a ‘sense of the universal’, rather than making ‘men small as they listen to it’ (79). Music simultaneously expresses universal and individual truths. While musicians can therefore ‘help to rule the nations and make the age as much as any other public men’ (284), the means by which this rule is achieved is far less definable in rational terms. Only those who are able to interpret and appreciate music appropriately are capable of recognizing the implicitly greater order apparent in musical construction and expression. Given this metaphysical connotation to full musical appreciation, it is not surprising that Holmes, with his complex musical abilities and 35 36

Jane Austen, Emma (1816), ed. Ronald Blythe (London: Penguin, 1985) 235. Stevenson, The Beach of Falesá, 152–3.

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enthusiasms, can rely upon more than the ‘cold reason’ that he himself invokes as fundamental to his deductions, or the visual observation upon which Cuff and the Night-Inspector depend. Holmes’s enthusiasm for music suggests that the ‘poetic, contemplative’ nature stimulated by musical experience and expression is just as essential to his success as his obscure knowledge and rational abilities. When he is visited by Miss Violet Smith, Holmes nearly falls ‘into the error of supposing that [she was] typewriting’ as a result of his observation of her ‘spatulate fingerends’. He does not fall into this error, however, because he is able to perceive that while spatulate finger-ends are common to both professions, ‘there is a spirituality about the face … which the typewriter does not generate. This lady is a musician’ (‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’, 1: 728). Holmes is able to observe this spirituality, because instead of relying merely upon objective observation, he allows himself to be open to the possible revelation of less rational truths. That Holmes equates spirituality with musical endeavour further emphasizes his appreciation for the revelatory potential of music. Given Holmes’s willingness to appreciate the revelation of truth through the intuition, imaginative reflection and spiritual stimulation allowed by music, it is difficult to regard the detective as a mere caricature or specimen of astounding logical abilities. In his playing of the violin, Holmes demonstrates an ability to intuit and influence character, to render his own character enigmatic and to elevate his thoughts beyond the concerns of ‘commonplace existence’. Such abilities certainly contribute to the portrait of an insightful, socially distinct and highly individual character, capable of assimilating himself within society when necessary. Most importantly, they help to depict the complexity of an individual so consistently capable of deciphering the truth. Holmes is thwarted only once; significantly, the person who succeeds in this deception is a former opera singer.37 Retired from the operatic stage, Irene Adler maintains her professional excellence by singing at concerts, presumably having chosen to enact her operatic influence on the drama of her life, rather than on the stage. Although her musical skills are never alluded to in the tale beyond the fact that she had sung at La Scala and the Imperial Opera of Warsaw, her skills at deception and detection match those of Holmes. Once fooled by Holmes, she is able to deduce who had deceived her, to observe and address him in disguise, and to anticipate and foil his next actions. Such natural capacity for detection contrasts significantly with the efforts of Watson:

37

See ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, first published in The Strand (July 1891).

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despite close observation of his friend, the doctor is doubtless never successful in his attempts to solve cases, because he is never entirely capable of understanding the nature of the character he attempts to emulate. The tales imply that one must possess a mastery of musical interpretation in order to understand the truths that music reveals and the deceptions that others exercise. Watson is incapable of anything more than close rational observation, a fact confirmed by his incomprehension of Holmes’s violin improvisations, his lack of interest in the concert performances and his lack of musical inclination or talent. Given the extent to which the ability to perform and appreciate music is equated in the tales with the ability to dissemble and detect truth, it is vital that the only character to succeed in both detecting and thwarting the intentions of Sherlock Holmes should implicitly possess similar musical skills. Holmes’s violin-playing is frequently assimilated with his enthusiasms for opium and monographs, all of which contribute to defining his eccentricities. A closer examination of the tales, however, reveals a particular equation of Holmes’s abilities to perform, improvise and interpret music with his powers not merely to detect fact, but to comprehend the language of a broader Nature. In his ability to listen to and appreciate the import of music, Holmes is better able to understand the ‘full diapason’38 within man and thus come to his startlingly ‘natural’ conclusions. In so doing, he resembles less the now-forgotten detectives of Baroness Orczy or Arthur Morrison39 than the intensely psychological and reflective protagonists of Brontë, Hardy and Eliot. That this fact has gone unacknowledged is due to the assumed inferiority of a literary form which is seen to be dependent upon distinct narrative formulae. While Holmes is portrayed as possessing the intuitive sensibilities of a Klesmer, he is restricted from manifesting the full extent of these sensibilities by 38 ‘From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony / This universal Frame began: / From Harmony to Harmony / Through all the compass of the Notes it ran, / The Diapason closing full in Man’; John Dryden, ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’, John Dryden: A Selection of His Finest Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 11–15. 39 Baroness Orczy’s most famous detective is doubtless The Old Man in the Corner, one of the earliest ‘armchair detectives’. First published in magazines, the first and second series of these tales were published as The Old Man in the Corner in 1909 (modern edn, New York: Dover, 1980). Another of her protagonists, notable primarily for her status as one of the first professional female detectives, is Lady Molly of Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910; New York: International Polygonics, 1981). Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt was created to replace Holmes in The Strand, following Holmes’s apparent demise at the hands of Professor Moriarty. Morrison published four volumes of Hewitt tales (modern edn as Martin Hewitt: Investigator, Westport: Hyperion, 1975). However, he ceased writing detective fiction early in the twentieth century, although in the 1930s he became a prominent member of the Detection Club.

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his defined role as a detective of crime, rather than as an inadvertent detective of human nature and motivation. These limitations notwithstanding, it is essential to recognize in the Holmes stories a concentrated presentation of various means in which music has been used in Victorian novels to depict the need to conceal, understand and order the complexities of human motivation and understanding. With this understanding, the falsity of the limitations imposed upon the appreciation of the detective genre can be exposed, and the function of the ‘musical’ Victorian detective explored more fully.

PART III

Construction of musical meaning

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The ‘perniciously homosexual art’: Music and homoerotic desire in The Picture of Dorian Gray and other fin-de-siècle fiction Joe Law The publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890 stirred considerable controversy. While most objections were couched in rather vague terms, the anonymous reviewer for the Scots Observer (probably Charles Whibley) provided more definite clues concerning the reasons for his displeasure, writing that the novel was of primarily ‘medico-legal’ interest and suitable for ‘none but outlawed noblemen and telegraph-boys’. This pointed allusion to the previous year’s Cleveland Street scandal1 indicates how clearly some readers perceived a homoerotic subtext in the work. Wilde responded with a letter to the editor of the paper, claiming he had deliberately kept the atmosphere of moral corruption surrounding Dorian ‘vague and indeterminate and wonderful’. As a result, he explained, ‘each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them’.2 Wilde’s text never names same1 Investigation of petty thefts at the General Post Office led to the discovery that several telegraph boys employed there were working in a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street (shut down by the police in July 1889). That autumn the North London Press reported that Lord Arthur Somerset and the Earl of Euston were among the patrons of the establishment and hinted of a government cover-up to shield Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales. Somerset fled the country, but Euston sued (successfully) for libel. Subsequent trials and calls for a government investigation kept the Cleveland Street affair in the newspapers until late May 1890, only a few months before the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. For a full account, see Colin Simpson, Lewis Chester and David Leitch, The Cleveland Street Affair (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), or H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1976). 2 Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt, 2000) 439.

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sex desire, of course, but some readers continued to find it there. In 1895, responding to Wilde’s charge of criminal libel, the Marquess of Queensberry cited the novel in his plea of justification, where it was described as an ‘immoral and obscene work’ intended by the author and ‘understood by the readers thereof to describe the relations intimacies and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural habits tastes and practices’.3 Subsequent readers have agreed with the assessment – albeit much more approvingly in recent years – placing Wilde’s only novel at the head of a self-conscious tradition of the ‘homosexual novel’.4 Over the past three decades much attention has been given to the emergence of homosexuality as a category of sexual identity at the end of the nineteenth century. In the well-known formulation of Michel Foucault, ‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’.5 The identification of this new ‘species’ had been gradual, complicated no doubt by the difficulty of speaking or writing directly about it. As the sin not to be named among Christians (‘peccatum illude horrible non nominandum inter christanos’), it scarcely could be identified; moreover, sodomy was a capital offence in Britain until 1861, when the maximum sentence became life imprisonment (the minimum term of imprisonment was 10 years). The subject became much more public in 1895 when, under the terms of the Labouchère amendment to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years, with hard labour.6 With that trial and conviction came a more narrowly 3 H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Dover Publications, 1962) 326. 4 See, for instance, Joseph Bristow, ‘Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Gross Indecency’ in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992) 53, and Claude J. Summers, ed., The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and their Works, from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), particularly Summers’ entry on Wilde (746) and Michael N. Stanton’s ‘The Novel: Gay Male’ (519). 5 Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1980) 43. 6 For a concise summary of laws applied to sodomy in the nineteenth century before the Labouchère amendment, see Chris White, ed., Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 1999) 25–6. The Latin tag used to render the act ‘unspeakable’ was long-established legal phraseology. In his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England, Sir William Blackstone praised ‘the delicacy of our English law which treats it in its very indictments as a crime not fit to be named; “peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum” ’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1769) vol. 4: 215–16. The first parliamentary mention of ‘the too horrible vice which is not to be named’ apparently occurred in the so-called Good Parliament of 1376. See H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid History of

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– and more publicly – defined notion of male homosexuality. As Alan Sinfield puts it in The Wilde Century, the modern homosexual emerged at the time of Wilde’s trials, when ‘the entire, vaguely disconcerting nexus of effeminacy, leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence and aestheticism, which Wilde was perceived, variously, as instantiating, was transformed into a brilliantly precise image’.7 The availability of that image made it easier to identify others (and oneself) as a member of this group, thereby accelerating a process already in place when Wilde was put on trial. Because public discussion of same-sex desire was not merely prohibited but liable to prosecution, writers had already begun to develop strategies by which they could encode this discussion. At a distance of a century and more, these texts must be read carefully. As Linda Dowling warns, this code ‘assumes a discontinuous and constantly shifting relationship to the discourse of the dominant group’.8 Still, a number of topics recur frequently enough to identify them, with some confidence, as constituting a ‘code’ likely to be recognisable to a knowing audience: references to passionate male pairings through the ages (David and Jonathan, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Hadrian and Antinous); mention of such relatively recent figures as Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Winkelmann; and the employment of words that, in certain contexts, could be charged with homoerotic connotations (e.g. curious, morbid, shame, Greek, Hellenic). Few readers looking for signs of such interests in The Picture of Dorian Gray would be disappointed. Calling the novel ‘a virtual theme park’ for homosexual passions, Jeff Nunokawa finds ‘all the usual suspects’ represented.9 Little has been written, however, concerning the role of music in articulating this new identity. This chapter is intended to extend the discussion in that direction by exploring the significance of music in The Picture of Dorian Gray and in the fiction of several of Wilde’s contemporaries. Music or the idea of music is stressed at key points in the action of

Homosexuality in Britain (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970) 36. Writing in 1832, Humphry W. Woolrych asserted that the phrase originated with the beginnings of Christianity: ‘At the coming of Christ the Pagans were unusually given up to such practices, and the apostles strongly commended their converts not even to mention those as well as other indecencies’ (reprinted in White, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality, 65, emphasis in original). 7 Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 3. 8 Linda Dowling, ‘Ruskin’s Pied Beauty and the Constitution of a “Homosexual” Code’, Victorian Newsletter 75 (Spring 1989) 7. 9 Jeff Nunkowa, ‘Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, American Imago 49/3 (1992) 311.

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Wilde’s novel, often in conjunction with other comments that readers have found suggestive of homosexual desire or behaviour.10 Dorian Gray is immediately associated with music. The opening chapter includes Basil Hallward’s account of his first contact with Dorian at Lady Brandon’s gathering, which begins with an inarticulate exchange of glances: ‘When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself’ (DG, 11). Then, when the flighty hostess introduces Dorian, she can think to describe him only as a musician: ‘Quite forget what he does – afraid he – doesn’t do anything – oh, yes, plays the piano – or is it the violin, dear Mr. Gray?’ (12). When Dorian is first seen in person (chapter 2), he clarifies her vague description, for he is ‘seated at the piano, with his back to them [Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton], turning over the pages of a volume of Schumann’s “Forest Scenes”. “You must lend me these, Basil”, he cried. “I want to learn them. They are perfectly charming” ’ (17). Music is invoked still more significantly in the fateful encounter that follows between Dorian and Lord Henry Wotton. ‘In his low, musical voice’, Lord Henry outlines his belief that ‘if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream’ then the words would be able to ‘return to the Hellenic ideal’ (20). Then follows a comment on the deleterious effects of self-denial, concluding with words readily compatible with a homoerotic reading: ‘You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rosered youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame – ’ (20). Dorian’s reaction is described in explicitly musical terms: The few words that Basil’s friend had said to him … had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words? (20–21) 10 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890; rev. 1891), ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988) [hereafter DG]. The revised edition is cited throughout.

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No matter how one reads the novel, this passage represents the crucial moment in Dorian’s development. Those who find in it a coded reference to same-sex desire would undoubtedly note the presence of such words as Hellenic, curious and shame. The last is especially telling, since shame was a term particularly associated with homosexuality at the time (‘In Praise of Shame’ was one of the poems by Lord Alfred Douglas entered in evidence at Wilde’s trials). In describing Dorian’s reaction to Lord Henry’s evidently perceptive comment, Wilde draws – then erases – a distinction between words and music. Whereas music is said to be inarticulate, words are represented initially as ‘clear, and vivid, and cruel’ in their definiteness. However, Lord Henry’s words are also said to ‘have a music of their own’. Wilde’s strategy here seems of a piece with Foucault’s description of silence on the subject of sexuality. Silence, he writes, is ‘less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say’.11 Likewise, there is no binary division between articulate words and inarticulate music at this key point in Wilde’s novel. They exist simultaneously, so that words carry musical sensation as well as lexical meaning. Wotton’s influence on Dorian continues to be cast in musical terms. In chapter 3, Lord Henry takes pleasure in recalling having sat opposite Dorian at his club, ‘the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow … ’ (DG, 33, Wilde’s somewhat suggestive ellipsis). Dorian’s infatuation with the actress Sibyl Vane is also the result of Wotton’s manipulation: ‘It was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray’s soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her’ (49). Also musical in its effect is the strange book Wotton sends him, the book Dorian later says has ‘corrupted’ him: ‘The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad … a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming’ (98). In response to this book, Dorian undertakes a series of interests, including a venture into exotic musics, ending with his weariness with all of it. Then he ‘would sit in his box at the Opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to “Tannhäuser”, and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul’ (105).

11

Foucault, An Introduction, 27.

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Wotton is not alone in exercising a dubious influence associated with music. Near the end of the novel, when Dorian has murdered Basil Hallward and needs assistance in disposing of the body, he turns to Alan Campbell. In a brief passage – constituting the only detailed information provided about any of Dorian’s fatal friendships with young men – readers learn that Campbell is an excellent musician, playing violin and piano better than most amateurs, and that music is the central feature of his friendship with Dorian: ‘It was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together – music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished … They had met at Lady Berkshire’s the night that Rubenstein [sic] played there, and after that used to be always seen together at the Opera, and wherever good music was going on. For eighteen months their intimacy lasted.’ When that intimacy ends, people observe that Campbell has changed; he now ‘appeared almost to dislike hearing music, and would never himself play’ (129). In the penultimate chapter of the novel, in a scene that mirrors their first encounter in chapter 2, Lord Henry and Dorian meet for the last time, again discussing their philosophies of life in the presence of music. This time Lord Henry asks Dorian to play Chopin to him, specifically a nocturne. After Dorian complies, Wotton comments: ‘How lovely that thing you are playing is! I wonder did Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping round the villa, and the salt spray dashing against the panes? It is marvellously romantic. What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative! Don’t stop. I want music to-night. It seems to me that you are the young Apollo, and that I am Marsyas listening to you.’ Eventually Wotton says that Dorian has made an art of his life: ‘I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! life has been your art. You have set yourself to music’ (164–5). For readers familiar with the life of Wilde, the emphasis on music in the novel is surprising, since nothing in the many biographies of the writer indicates any particular interest in music. In fact, E. F. Benson claims that Wilde had little ‘aptitude’ for music: ‘Oddly enough, though he had so keen and just a sense of the music in spoken or written words, he had absolutely no sense of music itself, being practically unable to distinguish one tune from another.’ Benson goes on to write dismissively of Wilde’s references to music: ‘But, as the apostle of beauty in all its forms, he was bound to profess an appreciation of music, and his total ignorance of it did not prevent him from speaking of the “passionate, curiously coloured fantasies of Dvoˇrák”: the phrase pleased him, for Dvoˇrák seemed a likely person to write curiously coloured music and he embodied it in one of his dialogues.’ Benson also mentions that Wilde

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wrote ‘of those to whom life wears a changed aspect because they have listened to one of Chopin’s nocturnes’.12 The references to Dvoˇrák and Chopin both appear in the first section of ‘The Critic as Artist’, one of the four pieces published together as Intentions (1891). Cast in the form of a witty dialogue between characters called Gilbert and Ernest, ‘The Critic As Artist’ is one of Wilde’s most important discussions of aesthetics. A closer look at the comment involving Chopin proves instructive, for it is more carefully qualified than Benson’s paraphrase indicates. Shortly after Gilbert has offered to play the music of Dvoˇrák for Ernest, he confesses, After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, has passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.13

This ‘curious piece of music’ is not necessarily a Chopin nocturne – Benson may be conflating this passage with Dorian’s final appearance at the piano, which it certainly resembles14 – and the comment is clearly meant to refer to the power of music in more general terms. Later, discussing the nature and value of criticism, Gilbert returns to music, saying that it is ‘the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret’ (TCA, 1129), a statement wholly consistent with Ernest’s earlier disinclination toward music because ‘it is too indefinite’ (1109). As on many other occasions in both The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Artist as Critic’, Wilde’s characters take up ideas the author himself had been dealing with as early as his years at Oxford. His Oxford notebooks, for instance, record the view that music is ‘the essentially modern art as sculpture was the essentially Greek art’, contrasting the Greek dislike of the indefinite with modern art’s direct appeal to the emotions.15 The editors of the notebooks have traced this 12 E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep-Show (1930; London: Hogarth Press, 1985) 242. 13 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, centenary edn (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1999) 1110 [hereafter TCA]. For further discussion of ‘The Critic as Artist’, see the chapter in this volume by Charlotte Purkis. 14 The similarity should not be surprising. Both The Picture of Dorian Gray and the first section of ‘The Critic as Artist’ were published in July 1890 in Lippincott’s Magazine and The Nineteenth Century, respectively. 15 Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand, eds, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 139.

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particular passage to John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (1873).16 (The last chapter of this book contains a defence of Greek love widely believed to have cost Symonds the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1876.) In another passage, Wilde associates ‘music and poetry – the sense of the infinite, and the scientific spirit of criticism’ with modern life,17 in this instance using language the editors trace to Walter Pater’s ‘Winkelmann’ (1867, eventually incorporated into The Renaissance).18 This cluster of names – Symonds, Winkelmann, Pater – allies music, specifically the abstract idea of music, with men in whose lives and works homoerotic desire plays a key role. In ‘The Artist as Critic’ and in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the association of music and secrecy – particularly with unidentified sin and a secret life – is even more suggestive. Gilbert elevates music because it cannot reveal its ‘ultimate secret’, and Lord Henry considers it a ‘blessing’ that music is not an imitative art. Most striking of all is the invocation of music in connection with Dorian’s crucial reaction to Lord Henry’s reference to dreams that might ‘stain [his] cheek with shame’. Taken together, this set of associations indicate that music – or, more precisely, the idea of music – is intended to suggest more than itself. As a nonverbal medium, music may evoke emotions but it cannot speak. As such, it is readily cognate with a condition that was not to be named. At the same time, The Picture of Dorian Gray draws on popular attitudes toward music that are often reflected in the fiction of the period. First, music-making was conducted along clearly defined gender lines, and domestic musical performance – particularly playing the piano – was a distinctly feminine activity. In fiction, a woman’s behaviour at the piano might provide an occasion for judging her character according to how well she fulfilled established expectations.19 Dorian’s appearances at the piano, on the other hand, are inappropriate according to this view, marking him as effeminate. Richard Leppert indicates that the association of music and effeminacy was already well established as a ‘recurring trope’ in eighteenth-century conduct literature, offering a statement from John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education as an early instance of the prevailing attitude toward a young man’s studying music: ‘Musick … wastes so much of a

16

Ibid. 193. Ibid. 140. 18 Ibid. 193. 19 For a concise survey of recent scholarship concerning music and female musicians in Victorian texts, see Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 2–4. 17

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young Man’s time, to gain but a moderate Skill in it; and engages often in such odd Company, that many think it much better spared.’20 Leppert also suggests that in eighteenth-century England keyboard instruments (except the organ) were thought unsuitable for men, and he provides a striking illustration of the formation and transmission of that viewpoint. Writing to his son, John Berkenhout recalls how he had once been observed playing the harpsichord: ‘As two gentlemen were passing the window, I heard one of them exclaim, – “I hate to see a man at the Harpsichord!” I had never before annexed the idea of effeminacy to that instrument; but from that moment, I began to be of that gentleman’s opinion.’21 That attitude clearly prevailed in the following century as well. Society Clown (1888), the reminiscences of George Grossmith, records his family’s disapproval of his boyhood piano playing,22 and James T. Lightwood, looking back from the vantage point of 1912, recalls that it was not thought ‘the correct thing for a gentleman to play the piano’.23 Likewise, in her memoirs Mrs C. S. Peel observes that ‘gentlemen [who] also sang … were in high favour, but play the piano gentlemen did not, that being considered a task only fit for ladies and professional musicians’.24 Men who do play the piano or some other instrument are frequently represented as a source of moral danger. Burgan observes that the great male virtuosos are often described in demonic terms and represent ‘a sexual source for sublime musical rapture’.25 Moreover, these musicians are often foreigners, sexual predators who use music to obtain a mysterious hold over their female auditors. Phyllis Weliver, who comments that the conjunction of music and mesmeric power is a recurring characteristic of foreign villains in late Victorian fiction,26 explores the complex connections among gender, foreign musicians, theories of the unconscious, and ‘mental science’ and personality formation reflected in later Victorian novels. Music, which bypasses the ‘rational’ for the unconscious, gives the mesmerist/performer great 20 Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 17–18. 21 Ibid. 123, emphasis in original. 22 See Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: ‘Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges’ (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 5. 23 See Mary Burgan, ‘Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, Victorian Studies 30/1 (1986) 60. 24 Ibid. 59. 25 Ibid. 66. 26 Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 59.

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power over his passive female listener, allowing him not only to seduce her but to maintain his control over her.27 These attitudes also inform references to music in The Picture of Dorian Gray. A number of passages already cited cast Lord Henry Wotton as musician and mesmerist, with Dorian as his subject. Also evident is the connection of music and the unconscious. Although the notion of the musician as seductive foreigner is less important in the novel, it, too, is addressed, somewhat breathlessly, by Lord Henry’s wife Victoria: ‘I have simply worshipped pianists – two at a time, sometimes, Harry tells me. I don’t know what it is about them. Perhaps it is that they are foreigners. They all are, ain’t they? Even those that are born in England become foreigners after a time, don’t they?’ (DG, 40–41). As for the danger of such foreigners, it might be recalled that Lady Wotton eventually runs away with a man who plays Chopin ‘exquisitely’ (162). Although an English gentleman was not expected to display any proficiency in performance or perhaps even an appreciation or understanding of music, those same characteristics were often catalogued in the emerging body of writings describing homosexuals (variously labeled inverts, Urnings, Uranians, unisexuals and similisexuals). In The Intermediate Sex (published in 1908 but incorporating earlier material), Edward Carpenter announces a clear association between music and homosexuality: ‘As to music, this is certainly the art which in its subtlety and tenderness – and perhaps in a certain inclination to indulge in emotion – lies nearest to the Urning nature. There are few in fact of this nature who have not some gift in the direction of music – though, unless we cite Tschaikowsky [sic], it does not appear that any thorough-going Uranian has attained to the highest eminence in this art.’28 In Sexual Inversion (1901) Havelock Ellis mentions – though without necessarily endorsing – an even larger claim: ‘As regards music, my cases reveal the aptitude which has been remarked by others as peculiarly common among inverts. It has been extravagantly said that all musicians are inverts; it is certain that various famous musicians, among the dead and the living, have been homosexual.’ He also cites two other studies, one claiming that 60

27 See especially ibid., chapter 2 (‘Harmony and Discord in the Self: Music, Mesmerism and Mental Science’), which explores these connections in depth, as well as the discussion in chapter 4 of John Jasper, a non-foreign musical mesmerist from Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 28 Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908), reprinted in Edward Carpenter: Selected Writings (London: GMP Publishers, 1984) vol. 1: 235, emphasis in original.

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percent of inverts are musicians and the other that 98 percent of male inverts are ‘greatly attracted’ to music.29 Of particular interest in this context is one of the earliest studies of homosexuality, Uranisme et unisexualité (1896) by Marc-André Raffalovich.30 Raffalovich, for a time a member of Wilde’s circle in London, devotes a brief section of his book to a discussion of ‘Musique et Inversion’. After pointing out that a connection between music and sexual inversion is often remarked upon, he cautions that it is easy to be deceived by taking coincidence for cause and effect. Despite his own caveat, Raffalovich permits himself a good many remarks, including this comment: ‘One knows the sympathies, the passions inspired by choristers, by young musicians, young singers, and even by older ones. Many people are not prepared to distinguish between the musician and his music, between the man and the sensations or emotions he excites. More than one has been seduced, held, taken up again, by the music of a rather mediocre fellow.’31 He observes later that any man between the ages of 15 and 40, having an aptitude for music (and good looks) can make a successful path for himself in the world of the inverts.32 Finally, Raffalovich casually reveals a bit of the code used in that world: ‘I ought to say, parenthetically, that in certain coteries the word musical, like the word artistic, appears to have become a synonym of pederast or a circumlocution to indicate a submission to all those pleasures, all the sexual caprices or their practice.’33 29 Sexual Inversion, originally a joint venture between Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds (whose name did not appear on the title page), was published in England in 1897 as volume 1 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex – and quickly seized by the police as ‘obscene’. The text cited here comes from the 1901 edition, reprinted as Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York: Random House, 1942) vol. 1, part 4: 295. 30 Marc-André Raffalovich, Uranisme et unisexualité: étude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel (Lyon: A. Storck; Paris: Masson & Cie., 1896). All translations by Joe Law (this book has never been translated into English). 31 ‘On connaît les sympathies, les passions inspirées par les enfants de chœur, par les jeunes musiciens, les jeunes chanteurs, et même par les vieux. Tant de gens n’ont pas appris à distinguer entre le musicien et sa musique, entre l’homme et les sensations ou les émotions qu’il éveille. Plus d’un a été séduit, retenu, repris, par la musique d’un individu presque quelconque;’ Raffalovich, Uranisme et unisexualité, 186. 32 Ibid. 187. 33 ‘Je dois dire, entre parenthèses, que dan certaines coteries le mot musical comme le mot artistique semble être devenu synonyme de pédéraste ou une périphrase pour indiquer une soumission à tous les plaisirs, tous les caprices sexuels ou leur pratique;’ ibid. 188. Evidently the perceived connection between homosexuality and being ‘musical’ was not limited to a single coterie. Recalling a discussion of the Dublin Castle homosexual scandals of 1884 (referring to the charges as ‘offenses which cannot specified’), T. M. Healy records that Joseph Biggar, his fellow Irish Nationalist MP, asked him, ‘Have you noticed that all those blackguards were musical?’ To Biggar, Healy says, ‘to be “musical” was almost a

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This link between music and same-sex desire figures in other fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At times, the remarks summarized above, together with elements of The Picture of Dorian Gray, seem to provide a model for episodes within that fiction. Perhaps the most remarkable example occurs in Teleny, a pornographic novel usually attributed (though with little evidence) to Wilde and his circle. Evidently written around 1889–90 (the time of the composition and magazine publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray), Teleny circulated in manuscript for several years before Leonard Smithers published a limited private edition of the work in 1893. In his prospectus for that edition, Smithers draws attention to the recognized role of music in the world of the invert: ‘The subject [of the ‘Urning, or man-loving-man’] was treated in a veiled manner in an article in a largely-circulated London daily paper, which demonstrated the subtle influence of music and the musician in connection with perverted sexuality.’34 In Teleny, the handling of the subject is scarcely subtle; in place of silence or mere suggestion, the writer(s) of this work explicitly lay out those connections. In the opening chapter, the narrator Camille Des Grieux describes his first encounter with the Hungarian-born concert pianist René Teleny, who is taking part in a charity concert. The meeting begins with an exchange of glances reminiscent of that between Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray, and it continues with a musical performance that is transformed into a sexual act. After the exchange of looks Teleny begins to play ‘a wild Hungarian rhapsody’. To explain the unsurpassed power of the ‘sensuous element’ in that form of gypsy music, Des Grieux stresses its exotic character, beginning with its unfamiliar harmonic system. ‘These melodies begin by shocking us, then by degrees subdue, until at last they enthrall us. The gorgeous fioriture, for instance, with which they abound are of decided luxurious Arabic character.’ When Des Grieux’s listener interrupts this analysis to object that he knows nothing of music, he is told that ‘you cannot disconnect [Teleny] from the music of his country; nay, to understand him you must begin by feeling the latent spell which pervades every song of Tsigane’ (Teleny, capital offence’; T. M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day (London: T. Butterworth, 1928) vol. 1: 195. The continuing familiarity of the euphemism is evident in such things as the title of Philip Brett’s article tracing the emergence of gay and lesbian musicology: ‘Are You Musical?’, The Musical Times 135 (1994) 370–76. Brett also notes the connection between music and homosexuality made by Carpenter and Ellis in ‘Musicology and Sexuality: The Example of Edward J. Dent’ in Musicology and Sister Disciplines: Past, Present, Future, ed. David Greer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 420–21. 34 Quoted in Teleny: A Novel Attributed to Oscar Wilde, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1984) 5, emphasis in original [hereafter Teleny].

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25). Thus it is no surprise when, his formal analysis of the music concluded, Des Grieux says that Teleny ‘in beauty, as well as in character, was the very personification of this entrancing music’. Like Raffalovich’s invert, Des Grieux is uncertain whether to attribute his attraction to ‘the composition, the execution, or the player himself’. Those three coalesce as Des Grieux finds in the music a series of visions, including such figures as Hadrian lamenting the loss of Antinous and ‘the gorgeous towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, weird, beautiful and grand’ (26). The music ‘seemed to be murmuring in my ear with the panting of an eager lust, the sound of thrilling kisses’, and the musical experience becomes ever more insistently sexual: My whole body was convulsed and writhed with mad desire … But suddenly a heavy hand seemed to be laid upon my lap, something was hent and clasped and grasped, which made me faint with lust. The hand was moved up and down, slowly at first, then fast and faster it went in rhythm with the song. My brain began to reel as throughout every vein a burning lava coursed, and then, some drops even gushed out – I panted – (26–7)

Nothing could illustrate more clearly that Burgan’s assessment of the foreign virtuoso as ‘a sexual source for sublime musical rapture’ might apply to male, as well as female, listeners. As a pornographic work, Teleny must be set apart from other fiction of the time considered here. No book written to be sold above the counter would treat any form of sexuality so explicitly, of course, yet this lurid treatment, written for (and by) a specialized readership, provides a rare undisguised look at the perceived connection between music and homosexuality. At many times, transparent disguise was the preferred mode, and the expectation that a reader would see a homoerotic element in some references to music is evident in two comic novels published in 1894. Music makes only a brief appearance in The Dancing Faun by Florence Farr (1860–1917).35 Teasing readers with a series of surprises and reversals of expectations, Farr gradually reveals George Travers’s elaborate scheme to gain money from the Kirkdale family. As the novel opens, Travers, who has been delivering epigrams with ‘charming languor’, is led to the piano by Lady Kirkdale, who tells him, ‘I am sure you are devoted to music; you have the musical physiognomy’ (7). She is watching closely, for her ‘suspicions had been aroused by the violent friendship her young son [Stephen] had conceived for George Travers’ (9). As her daughter Lady Geraldine accompanies herself in a song, Travers stands behind her, ‘his hand resting on her brother’s shoulder’ 35 Florence Farr, The Dancing Faun (Boston: Roberts Brothers; London: Elkin Matthews and John Lane, 1894) (DF, 5), [hereafter DF].

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(14). The song over, there is more conversation, including a reference to Travers’ ‘exquisite taste in furnishing’ (15). After Travers and Stephen Kirkdale leave together, Lady Kirkdale consults her worldly friend Mr Clausen, who delivers this opinion: ‘He is the sort of danger Stephen is bound to encounter sooner or later’ (17). As these passages indicate, Farr draws heavily on the stereotypes already becoming associated with homosexuality. Although the spectre of homosexuality raised in these opening pages is quickly exorcized – readers soon learn that Travers is secretly married to an actress, in whom he intends to interest Stephen Kirkdale – it is initially raised by Lady Kirkdale’s reference to ‘the musical physiognomy’ of the character in question and sustained with a scene of music making. Moreover, it is evident that readers are expected to make that association. The Green Carnation by Robert Hichens (1864–1950)36 makes much more extensive reference to music and its importance to his two central figures, Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reginald Hastings (‘Lord Reggie’), who are clearly modeled on Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, respectively.37 Like other writers, Hichens quickly links music with dubious pleasures, in this case via one of Amarinth’s pronouncements: ‘Sin has its harmonies and its dissonances, as music has its harmonies and its dissonances. The amateur sinner, the mere bungler whom we meet with, alas! so frequently, is perpetually introducing consecutive fifths and octaves into his music’ (GC, 32). Despite the musical sophistication suggested by Amarinth’s knowledge of these basic rules of harmony, both he and Lord Reggie are represented as having distinct limitations. Both play the piano ‘in an easy, tentative sort of way, making excess of expression do duty for deficiencies of execution, and covering occasional mistakes with the soft rather than with the loud pedal’ (70–71). Lord Reggie is the more musically proficient of the two, and, during the course of a week-long house party in Surrey, he composes an anthem he hopes will be sung at the service on Sunday. He uses the text ‘Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely; thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks’. Although he says it sounds like something written by Esmé – a clear allusion to Wilde’s Salome – he

36 Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation (1894; reprinted Chicago: Argus Books, 1929) [hereafter GC]. 37 Hichens became acquainted with Douglas during a trip to Cairo in 1893–4, and Douglas introduced him to Wilde upon his return. A thoroughly trained musician (he studied piano and organ at the Royal College of Music), Hichens succeeded George Bernard Shaw as music critic of The World in 1894, a post he held for three years. On Hichens, see also the chapter by Sophie Fuller in this volume.

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identifies the source. ‘I had no idea that the Bible was so intensely artistic’, he adds, thereby dropping yet another of the code words likely to be recognized by knowing readers (GC, 82). Although the resulting piece of music is evidently amateurish, characterized by ‘tonic and dominant chords, and diatonic progressions’, the composer considers them ‘most subtly artistic. He would like to have written in the Lydian mode, only he could not remember what the Lydian mode was, and he had forgotten to bring any harmony book with him’ (86). When the curate is persuaded that the anthem should be sung, the choristers are assembled at the house for a rehearsal. A striking – and somewhat disturbing – episode follows. As Lord Reggie teaches the music to the boys, he quickly wins them over (by the end of the evening, they are said to be ‘hopelessly in love with’ him). Two boys in particular are singled out, the pretty Jimmy Sands, who will sing the solo, and Tommy Locke, the son of one of the other guests, who is watching the rehearsal. While Tommy’s mother looks on from the verandah, experiencing a sense of unease she cannot quite identify, she half listens to a running monologue spoken by Amarinth about the tyranny of the word natural and his hatred of it: ‘A man is unnatural if he never falls in love with a woman. A boy is unnatural if he prefers … dreaming over the white naked beauty of a Greek statue to a game of football under Rugby rules … We must be good naturally. We must sin naturally’ (GC, 124–5). Against the background of the continuing rehearsal, Amarinth’s words strike an uncharacteristically serious note in this comic work. It darkens the otherwise absurd end of the evening as the boys sing the words Amarinth has written for ‘Three Blind Mice’, particularly if one hears in them an echo of Sir Henry Wotton’s words to Dorian Gray: Rose-white youth, Pas-sionate, pale, A singing stream in a silent vale, A fairy prince in a prosy tale, Ah! there’s nothing in life so finely frail As rose-white youth. (138)

In contrast to the two preening dilettantes of Hichens’s satire, musical characters are treated with great seriousness in Studies of Death: Romantic Tales (1894). Most of these stories by Stanislaus Eric, Count Stenbock (1860–1895), have a distinctly homoerotic element, usually involving an attraction between an adolescent and an older man. As the title suggests, death figures prominently in almost all the stories, often coming about when the affection of one or the other is withdrawn or otherwise thwarted. Some stories bear titles drawn from classical antiquity (such as ‘Hylas’ and ‘Narcissus’) that would be sure to

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resonate with certain readers, and in several of the stories music figures prominently in the cluster of ideas surrounding the characters.38 The most striking link between homoerotic attraction and music occurs in ‘The True Story of a Vampire’, in which an eccentric baroness recounts the story of her family’s encounter with a vampire. This Polish family, living in Styria, consisted of a father and two children – his daughter Carmela (the narrator) and son Gabriel. The beautiful Gabriel is best described, she says, by invoking ‘the Greek idea of the Faun’ (TSV, 126). Gabriel loves animals, who are drawn to him, and he has a remarkable native ability to play ‘every conceivable musical instrument’, including those he has made for himself out of reeds and sticks.39 The vampire is Count Vardalek, a stranger offered hospitality because he has missed a railway connection and then invited to stay on indefinitely. The narrator describes him as ‘rather tall, with fair wavy hair, rather long, which accentuated a certain effeminacy about his smooth face. His figure had something … serpentine about it’ (132). Gabriel and Vardalek are drawn to each other immediately. After dinner, Vardalek goes to the piano and plays ‘a Hungarian csardas – wild, rhapsodic, wonderful’. Gabriel’s reacts powerfully to the music – ‘his eyes dilated and fixed, his form quivering’ – and soon joins in the music-making. Vardalek’s response, ‘spoken in a very sad voice’, is pity: ‘Poor child! you have the soul of music within you’ (137–8). Gabriel and Vardalek become inseparable, and the narrator notes that Vardalek appears tired and worn away from the boy but rejuvenated in his presence. Late one night, the narrator hears Vardalek playing a Chopin nocturne, sees a somnambulistic Gabriel enter the older man’s room, then overhears Vardalek speak these words: ‘My darling, I fain would spare thee; but thy life is my life, and I must live, I who would rather die. Will God not have any mercy on me? Oh! oh! life; oh, the torture of Life!’ Here he struck one agonised and strange chord, then continued playing softly, ‘O Gabriel, my beloved! my life, yes life – oh, why life? I am sure this is but a little that I demand of thee. Surely thy superabundance of life can spare a little to one who is already dead. No, stay’, he said now almost harshly, ‘What must be, must be!’ (143–4, emphasis in original) 38 Stanislaus Eric, Count Stenbock, ‘The True Story of a Vampire’ in Studies of Death: Romantic Tales (1894; facs. edn New York: Garland Publishing, 1984) 126 [hereafter TSV]. 39 In The Intersexes: A History of Simisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (Naples: The English Book Press, 1909), Xavier Mayne [Edward Irenæus Prime Stevenson] writes that ‘the Uranian is likely to be passionately fond of children and animals; they are frequently surprisingly attracted to him as if by some mystic understanding’. See White, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality, 105.

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After Gabriel leaves the room, Vardalek continues to play ‘and although he did not play loudly, it seemed as though the strings would break. You never heard music so strange and so heart-rending!’ (144). Gabriel soon wastes away from a mysterious disease with no evident organic cause. When he dies, Vardalek simply vanishes. Many of the details of the baroness’s tale echo those in several of the works discussed already: the seductive lure of music, particularly music with exotic associations (here, as in other instances, of Hungarian origins); the use of Chopin’s music, particularly the nocturnes, to evoke the hidden sorrows or secret sins of the player;40 the ability of seemingly inarticulate music to communicate some message; the sexually inflected response to music. In the fiction discussed thus far, homoerotic feelings are either explicitly expressed (as in Teleny) or seem to be implied by the author. Another example illustrates how this set of associations can continue to affirm these feelings even as characters deny them. The Challoners (1904) may well have had some autobiographical significance for its author, E. F. Benson (1867–1940).41 Brian Masters points out several parallels between the life of the author and his main character.42 Like Martin Challoner, Benson was the son of a clergyman (the Archbishop of Canterbury) and felt totally unable to please his father. Writing after his father’s death, Benson gave the name Martin – the name of the favourite Benson son, who had died as a very young man – to the main character of the novel. Masters speculates that ‘in some indirect way [Benson] was seeking to make amends to his father for the disappointment he knew he must have been, by fusing the beloved, the perfect Martin with the dunce, the imperfect Fred’. Masters adds that 40 The choice of composer and genre may be significant as well. Jeffrey Kallberg devotes a chapter of his 1996 book on Chopin to the widespread nineteenth-century perception of the nocturne as a ‘feminine’ genre. After noting that later nineteenth-century critics ‘obsessively disparaged music that they associated with femininity and effeminacy’, Kallberg quotes a number of dismissive comments concerning Chopin’s Nocturnes, all couched in gendered terms, including statements by writers who were enthusiastic admirers of Chopin’s other music; Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) 42. In a later chapter, Kallberg examines the ‘changing image of Chopin as an androgynous, hermaphroditic, effeminate, and/or pathological being’ (ibid. 70) that began to develop around the composer during his life. Distinctly ‘sodomitic or pederastic meanings … emerged unambiguously only around 1900’, though Kallberg finds ‘hints of the possibility of such meanings’ as early as 1875 (ibid. 82). The emergence of these meanings is, of course, contemporary with the texts being considered here. 41 E. F. Benson, The Challoners (London: William Heinemann; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1904) [hereafter TC]. 42 See Brian Masters, The Life of E. F. Benson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991).

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although Benson longed to feel he had earned his father’s love as his brother Martin had, he was, on some level, aware that ‘Martin, had he lived, would have needed to escape his father’s love as Fred had done’.43 Something of this curious dynamic is evident in even a brief synopsis of The Challoners. Martin Challoner is an extraordinarily talented pianist, but his father can find no value in art of any sort except as an ancillary to worship. Eventually, he is persuaded to allow Martin to study music in London with the Russian pianist Karl Rusoff, who is one of the leading musicians of the day and customarily does not take students. Martin works briefly with the demanding Rusoff, who is overwhelmed by the young man’s talent and soon arranges his London debut. Martin has a great success, but complains of a headache when the concert is over. Within days, he is dead of typhoid. This ending – which is very nearly as abrupt as this précis makes it seem – suggests that it is problematic to see Martin’s experience simply as a therapeutic reshaping of Benson’s unresolved feelings about his own father. The novel could be used, however, to illustrate Masters’s conclusion that Benson was ‘wary of sex, distrusted it, feared it, and probably in the end avoided it. To him, self-control was all, and disinterested affection the noblest of the instincts’.44 Noble instincts of exactly this sort are evident in Rusoff. The love he feels for Martin is thoroughly sublimated but unmistakable. Their first meeting is even somewhat reminiscent of the first encounter of Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray.45 After hearing Martin’s brilliant performance of Brahms’s Paganini Variations, Rusoff offers to take Martin as his pupil and then gives him a strictly moralized version of the same programme Lord Henry had outlined for Dorian: Work, and live also. Do not forget that any experience in life, so long only as it is not sensual, – for whatever is sensual blurs and deadens the fineness of any gift, – gives richness and breath to your power in music. Live, then; live to your utmost and your best. Do not be afraid of anything. Neither the bitterest sorrow that the world holds nor its most poignant joy can bring you anything but good, so long as you embrace it willingly, passionately. But shun a sorrow or a joy, and you are clipped, maimed, blinded. (TC, 110)

43

Ibid. 159–60. Ibid. 252. 45 Benson alludes clearly to The Picture of Dorian Gray early in The Challoners. As Martin’s father thinks of his son’s interest in art, the phrase ‘All Art is perfectly useless’ comes into his mind. He recalls having seen the words in a book belonging to his son, and ‘a rapid glance at it on that occasion had justified its confiscation and a few words to Martin on the subject’ (TC, 62). This phrase is, of course, a slight misquotation of the concluding aphorism of the Preface to Wilde’s novel: ‘All art is quite useless.’ 44

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Though avoiding excessive sensuality, Rusoff’s rooms in London, ‘furnished with a certain costly simplicity’, recall the opulence of Wilde’s interiors. The Persian rugs, the French writing-table, the gilt and morocco of fine book bindings and the Steinway in a rosewood case designed by Morris are lovingly catalogued, and the ‘reproductions of Greek bronzes found at Herculaneum’ on the mantelpiece would probably signal specialized interests to some readers (229–30). Rusoff’s reactions to Martin are still more telling, this time recalling Basil Hallward’s initial glimpse of Dorian: ‘The lad’s personality, never so vivid as when he was at his music, was beginning to cast a sort of spell over his own’ (231). When Martin arrives for a lesson, ‘Karl’s face lighted up as he saw him. He himself was unmarried and rather lonely in the world till this child of his old age had come to him, who should be, so he told himself, the crown of his life’s work, and illuminate the dull world long after he himself was dead, with the melodious torch that he had helped to light’ (234). Although Martin begins his lesson superbly with a piece of his own composition, his subsequent performance of one of Schumann’s Novelletten is lifeless.46 As Rusoff goes to the piano and plays the Schumann himself, he knows, though he cannot see Martin behind him, how the young man must be looking at him. The reaction Rusoff imagines is readily compatible with a sexual reading of the scene: ‘those wide-open black eyes, finely chiselled nostrils swelling and sinking with his quickened breath, mouth a little open, and the whole vivid brain that informed the face lost, absorbed’ (240). 46 If the language of sexual ambiguity did not develop around the music (and person) of Robert Schumann as it did with Chopin, there were nevertheless suggestions that the music was not sufficiently masculine. Writing in 1844, Carl Kossmaly was critical of Schumann’s Blumenstücke, Op. 19, finding in them ‘the soft [das Weiche, also “effeminate”], the rapturous, the tender, lyrical, almost womanly character of the Fieldian cantilena’ (quoted in Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries, 34, Kallberg’s annotation). Schumann himself might have accepted the characterization of ‘womanly’; at the time he was composing this music he wrote to Simonin de Sire that his style was becoming ‘lighter and more feminine’, and to Clara Wieck he described the Blumenstücke as a set ‘of little things … assembled in a pretty way’; both letters quoted in Peter Ostwald, Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 146. Lawrence Kramer observed that the construction of a piece of music out of miniatures follows ‘a traditionally “feminine” paradigm’; Lawrence Kramer, ‘Carnaval, CrossDressing, and the Woman in the Mirror’ in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 306. This can be applied not only to the Blumenstücke but also to the Waldszenen (admired by Dorian Gray at his first appearance) and to the Novelletten (of which Rusoff has the measure). Moreover, Schumann’s well-known creation of a pair of alter egos (Eusebius and Florestan), together with his eventual insanity, has resulted in a discourse of mental instability that was at the very least compatible with the emerging model of homosexuality as pathology.

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After the lesson, Rusoff tells Martin, ‘drink from every spring but one, and drink deep’. Martin asks for clarification, initially thinking Rusoff means love. However, Rusoff says he did not mean that, adding: ‘My God, if that had been granted to me, … I too might have been great. But I never fell in love … But missing that, I never, no not once, parodied what I did not know’ (247). At that point, the text becomes remarkably explicit: Martin looked at him with that direct lucid gaze Karl knew so well, level beneath the straight line of his eyebrows. His smooth brown cheeks were a little flushed with some emotion he could not have put a name to. Slight injury was there, that Karl could possibly have supposed him bestial, the rest was clean modesty. ‘I am not beastly’, he said, ‘if you mean that’. ‘I did mean that’, he said. ‘And I beg your pardon’. Martin stood up. ‘I think you had no right to suppose that’, he said. ‘No, I had none. I did not suppose it. I warned you, though.’ A tenderness such as he had never known rose like a blush into his old bones, tenderness for this supreme talent that had been placed in his hands. ‘I only warned you’, he said. ‘I looked for burglars under your bed, just because – because it is a boy like you that this stupid world tries to spoil. Aye, and it will try to spoil you. Women will make love to you. They will fall in love with you, too.’ (TC, 247)

A moment later, Martin adds, ‘I don’t see how one can care – really care – for music and live grossly … Yet people appear to manage it. And mawkishness makes me feel sick’. Although the final comment is said to be ‘added with apparent irrelevance’, Rusoff understands it, thinking to himself, ‘somebody has been trying to pet him’ (248).47 Immediately after this episode, Benson confirms the love relationship between Martin and Stella Plympton, which had been suggested earlier, and they are soon engaged. Despite that, the remaining episodes involving music stress the link between Martin and Rusoff, none more powerfully than the occasion of Martin’s London concert. Martin experiences a terrible lapse at the beginning of the first piece on the programme (Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes), stopping completely after 47 Masters quotes two passages from which it might reasonably be inferred that bestial was the term Benson and his brother used to refer to homosexuality. One is an entry from A. C. Benson’s diary, recording that he and Fred had ‘discussed the homo sexual [sic] question. It does seem to me out of joint that marriage should be a sort of virtuous duty, honourable, beautiful and praiseworthy – but that all irregular sexual experiences should be bestial and unmentionable’ (Masters, The Life of E. F. Benson, 244–5). The other is Benson’s The Life of Alcibiades (1928), in which he tells his readers that ‘Athenian love was by no means as bestial as we are prone to think it’. However, Masters adds that privately Benson commented that Alcibiades ‘had the morals of a Satyr’ (ibid. 252).

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the first measure. During the ensuing silence, Martin sees his teacher’s anguish and begins again, playing only for him: At the end of the slow thema he paused, looked up at Karl and smiled nearly to laughing-point at him, pushed back the plume of hair that drooped over his forehead, and – played … Once or twice between the variations he brushed back his hair again; once he looked up at Karl, with the brilliant glance his master knew and loved, asking with his eyes, ‘Will that do? Will that do for you?’ before he went on … Full of artistic triumph as Karl’s life had been, never before had it mounted and soared so high as now, when not he, but his pupil, held the hall enchained. (TC, 321–2, emphasis in original)

When the piece is over, Martin is concerned only with Rusoff’s approval: He had played, as David played before Saul, in order to drive from his master’s face the demon of agony that he had seen there. And he looked not at Stella [his fiancée], not at Lady Sunningdale [his benefactor], not at Frank and Helen [his twin sister and her fiancé], nor did his eyes wander over the crowded rows, but straight at Karl, … still asking him, ‘Did I play it well?’ And when Karl nodded to him, he was content … (322–3)

The swiftness with which Benson dispatches Martin after this debut is stunning. The symptoms of his illness are first evident at the end of the concert, making it tempting to connect the two, as if the public exposure of Martin’s musical abilities proves somehow fatal. Psychologically, Benson may have reached a sort of impasse as well. Despite his having paired Martin and Stella, Benson repeatedly demonstrates the powerful bond between Martin and Rusoff, sometimes (as in the passages above) suggesting a strong erotic element. If, on some level, Benson recognized that the socially sanctioned relationship was less convincing than the proscribed one, the death of Martin may have been the simplest solution to his dilemma. The final novel to be examined here is something of an anomaly in that homosexual desire is the central issue rather than a subtext. More anomalous still, this love is allowed to flourish. Not even the pornographic, pansexual Teleny, narrated by a moribund Des Grieux, seems able to posit a world in which the homosexual can live securely. However, the two protagonists are happily paired at the conclusion of Imre (1906). This story of an Englishman’s love for a Hungarian army officer was written by Edward Irenæus Prime Stevenson (1868–1942), a wealthy American expatriate, and published privately in Naples under the name Xavier Mayne.48 More tract than novel, it contains hardly any 48 Xavier Mayne [Edward Irenæus Prime Stevenson], Imre: A Memorandum (Naples: The English Book-Press, 1906; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1975) [hereafter Imre].

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action, consisting almost entirely of the dialogue of two male characters, including some lengthy autobiographical narratives concerning their discovery of their sexual nature. Music figures significantly in the life story of each man. Indeed, it is music that brings them together at the beginning of the text. Oswald, the English narrator, is attending an outdoor military band concert and asks a man seated near him if he knows the name of the leader of the band. ‘From music (that open road to all sorts of mutualities on short acquaintanceships) and an art of which my neighbour showed that he knew much and felt even more than he expressed – from music, we passed to one or another aesthetic question; to literature, to social life, to human relationships, to human emotions. And thus, more and more by unobserved advances, we came onward to our own two lives and beings’ (Imre, 13). During this conversation, Imre tells the narrator he has ‘just lost, so to say’ one of his friends, a man ‘who is almost as much a music-fiend as I am!’ That ‘lost’ friend has recently married and been transferred to China (20–22). Imre, however, says he approves the marriage (though perhaps for a surprising reason), ‘exclaiming in a sudden, enthusiastic retrospect … “how she sings Brahms!” ’ (23, ellipsis in original). A signal event of the fourth or fifth day of their friendship is ‘making a long inspection of Imre’s pleasant lodging … and of his music-library’ (29). Eventually Imre tells Oswald something of his boyhood, including his interests: ‘And I wanted to study art. I didn’t care what art … music, painting, sculpture, perhaps music more than anything’ (39–40, ellipsis in original). Oswald soon determines that Imre’s interest in art and architecture is genuine but nothing in comparison to his love of music: But he was a most excellent practical musician; playing the pianoforte superbly well, as to general effect, with an amazingly bad technic of his own evolution, got together without any teaching; and not reading well and rapidly at sight. Indeed, his musical enthusiasm, his musical insight and memory, they were all of a piece; the rich and perilous endowment of the born son of Orpheus. His singing-voice was a full baritone … smooth and sweet, like his irresistible speaking-voice. He would play or sing for hours together, quite alone in his rooms, of an evening. He would go without his dinner (he often did) to pay for his concert-ticket or standing-place in the Royal Opera. (51–2, ellipsis in original)

In the second section of the book, Oswald decides to reveal his sexual nature to Imre and begins by recounting his gradual recognition of that nature. Along the way, he has studied classic and modern works of art and literature, learning from them of ‘the Over-Friendship, the LoveFriendship of Hellas – which meant that between man and man could

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exist – the sexual-psychic love’, a phenomenon he recognizes in the works of certain writers and sculptors (110). In addition, he finds it in music as well: ‘I had half-divined it in the music of a Beethoven and a Tschaikowsky before knowing facts in the life-stories of either of them – or of an hundred other tone-autobiographists’ (111). The most remarkable reference to music and its association with homosexuality occurs as Oswald tells Imre of his earlier undeclared love for another man, a man who turns away from him in disgust after inadvertently learning of Oswald’s nature. Reacting much like Alan Campbell in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oswald abandons all aspects of his life that he had shared with his friend, including music: Above all did my aversion to music (for so many years a peculiar interest for me) – become now a dull hatred, … a detestation, a contempt, a horror! … super-neurotic, quintessently [sic] sexual, perniciously homosexual art – mystery – that music is! For me, no more symphonies, no more sonatas, no more songs! … No more exultations, elegies, questions to Fate of any orchestra! … Nevermore! (Imre, 144, all ellipses in original)

Coherence gives way as Oswald transfers his own self-loathing to the threatening sexual ‘mystery’ he finds in music. What emerges from the verbal incoherence, though, is perfectly clear: music and homosexuality are inextricably linked. Oswald’s narrative provides a striking illustration of Foucault’s claim that ‘the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood. … Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality’.49 Like the actual case histories so pervasive in the medical and legal discourses invoked by Foucault, this fictional one shows that the subject’s sexuality pervades his consciousness, that, for him, his sexuality is constitutive of identity. Especially remarkable in this case is the certainty with which Oswald equates the ‘mystery’ of music with homosexuality, even to the extent of attempting to repudiate his own sexual nature by repudiating music. This equation is, of course, a powerful indication of the significance of music in the formation of that identity, a significance that is amplified when one considers that Imre is a piece of exemplary fiction celebrating that identity. If the circumstances of publication prevented the other writers considered here from making the connection between music and homosexuality quite so explicitly as Stevenson does, they never fail to associate them. The very consistency with which they do so suggests that the significance of music in the formation of many a ‘case history’ – 49

Foucault, An Introduction, 43.

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whether actual or fictional – should be investigated more thoroughly. For the first readers of this fiction, the texts might reflect, confirm or even help create these emerging sexual identities. As today’s scholars continue to examine the complex ways in which these processes unfolded, they, too, should look closely at the role of music in writings and lives in this era. Perhaps, as Wilde’s Gilbert remarks, ‘Music can never reveal its ultimate secret’. However, as an inarticulate medium with the power to stir and trouble while it seems to communicate some indefinite message, music is an ideal emblem for that which could not be named but would be recognized by those who shared in it.

‘You might have called it beauty or poetry or passion just as well as music’: Gertrude Hudson’s fictional fantasias Charlotte Purkis During a violin recital by virtuoso Lyona Testore, related in Gertrude Hudson’s short story ‘Episode Extraordinaire’, Tom, a 19-year-old student describes his reaction to her playing in terms of the suspension of his ‘spirit’s consciousness’. Defining this moment as ‘like a divine electric shock’ and the music as ‘not like any other music I have heard’, the character continues in imaginary dialogue with readers – taking particular care to distinguish them from Philistines in conjecturing that: You might have called it beauty or poetry or passion just as well as music (and what the Philistines might have called it I don’t know!); its divine personality – hers – danced along the whole snowy range of the arts, laughing mockingly at us from each peak. For her tone had the warmth and light and colour, and the eloquence of madness, and the beauty of herself.

Subsequently, Tom is unable to converse with his cousin Celia, who assumes he has ‘not sufficient intelligence to appreciate good music’ during the interval which he defines to himself (and readers) as ‘that blessed period when Israfil is silent’.1 This brief extract from the interrelated episodes Hudson published as Impossibilities: Fantasias (1897) reveals the crux of her thinking about music. It is a key passage not least because here Hudson makes the only direct reference of the book, and indeed of all her writing, to the Archangel of music which inspired her pseudonym – Israfel. The passage 1 Israfel Mondego, Impossibilities: Fantasias (London: H. Henry and Co. Ltd., 1897) 99–100 [hereafter IF]. The spelling ‘Israfil’ here would seem to be deliberate. There are no errors elsewhere in the book. It may match Sarah Grand’s usage in The Heavenly Twins, discussed below.

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is also crucial for two other reasons: first, it identifies in a single moment a clear formulation of music’s power over the listener; second, the explanation of this moment points to the existence of another layer of discourse through which Hudson simultaneously constructs a vision of herself as a writer on music. On the one hand, Tom’s attempt to explain what happens to him when listening to music suggests that music is an analogue for ecstatic spiritual experience necessarily beyond words, hence the need for other analogues – ‘beauty or poetry or passion’. On the other hand, his explanation demonstrates how the meaning of music is dependent upon interpretation by both performers and listeners. Only performers capable of imprinting themselves onto music in a state of ecstatic ‘madness’ can reveal meaning to listeners who must themselves be equipped to respond from their innermost soul. The way that music was thought to have a personality as a result of the performer’s communication of the ‘beauty of herself’, alongside the reference to an imaginary reader apparently seeking to describe the experience, presupposed just such a correlation between performer and receiver. As a result, in Impossibilities as a whole, both types of interpretative role are explored as creative, and in places constructed as interchangeable. Hudson was one of few women writers of her time who explicitly theorized the nature of writing at the same time as telling stories.2 The narrative focus of the seven interconnected prose pieces that make up Impossibilities is the representation of musical experience. The emphasis on criticism within this theme exemplifies the second reason why the ‘Episode Extraordinaire’ moment is so crucial to understanding Hudson’s relationship with music. By mirroring her own critical-creative literary mission in her interrogation of literary practice, through fantasizing about its potential to construct ways of uniting with musical experiences bodily and synaesthetically, Hudson incorporated a metatextual autobiographical voice into her fiction.

Impossibilities (1897): Intentions, outline and reception Hudson’s fascination with the reception of music through its associations for and with characters was by no means unique in late 2 Ann Heilmann discusses ‘the use of meta-fictional elements’ in the works of some New Woman writers of the 1890s that ‘are peopled by artists struggling to find time and space for their work, who reflect on their conception of what (feminist) art should/could look like’; Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) 67.

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Victorian literature, but what was unusual was that she formulated and expressed her engagement through different types of prose. As only one of her books was ostensibly fiction, it is thus unlikely that Hudson would have considered herself a ‘fiction writer’. Since her writings also demonstrate a profound scepticism with the established socio-cultural role of ‘music critic’, it is also unlikely that she would have considered herself a critic, although in much of her writing in which she invokes herself she depends upon the designation.3 Hudson’s writing is provocatively situated at the boundaries of established literary fields. This is apparent not only from similarities between her stylistic approach and those of a number of contemporary creative and critical writers,4 but from the ways in which, in several of her stories, characters make this explicit by debating the nature and purpose of such boundaries. The degree of her success at avoiding classification was reflected in a rather negative review of Impossibilities in The Academy. Critical aspects are treated as essential even though the review is published in the magazine’s ‘fiction supplement’ section: This book is a little literary lark. But the jest is rather one-sided. No real human being, with passions, temper, and a will, can limit himself in all the emergencies of life to the vocabulary of the concert-platform. If his creator insists on so restricting him, he becomes automatic, incredible.5

Impossibilities was Hudson’s first book publication. As a whole the collection falls into the category of ‘fiction’ because a story element predominates over passages of intellectual reflection on music. The main characters are all active in the world of music-making as critics, writers, poets, recitalists performing music, or poetry to musical accompaniment, and there is a painter inspired by music. The tone adopted is one of an episodic rendering of a set of experiences. Early on in the book Hudson comments: ‘A plot … is as terrible as a tune. Divine

3 A notable example of this is an article which is in part a self-parody, ‘The Music Critic (A Depreciation)’ in Ivory, Apes and Peacocks (New York: M. P. Mansfield and A. Wessels; London: At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1899) [hereafter IAP]: ‘I yearn to be a musical critic’ (227); ‘The critic is hopelessly prosaic and incurably modern … Of all tired hedonists, surely the critic is the weariest! He really ought not to be permitted to criticise habitually, he ought to have every other week off – a blessed rest for his overworked appreciative faculties. And, indeed, I should be delighted to take his place. I am eminently suited to it, for I combine in one insufferable personality the savage brutality of the journalist and the cynical flippancy of the litterateur. So does the critic!’ (232). 4 For example, Ada Leverson, Ouida, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Una Ashworth Taylor, Alice Meynell, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. 5 [Unsigned], ‘Impossibilities: Fantasias. By Israfel Mondego. (Henry and Co.)’, The Academy 51, fiction supplement (19 June 1897) 18, 20.

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orchestration is the only thing admissible.’ She goes on to target John Lane’s influential Bodley Head series in this connection saying that this ‘is the fact that the “Keynotes” have failed to grasp, but they as a rule do not understand counterpoint’.6 The chapters are in some respects free-standing, but there are a large number of deliberate yet subtle crossreferences, perhaps Hudson’s ‘counterpoint’. Although the last chapter has a subtitle – ‘Encores’ – the connections between chapters are insufficient to assume a musical patterning of the ‘rondo’ or ‘theme and variations’ types. The most useful analogy is Hudson’s own reference to the book as a ‘dream’.7 In terms of the book’s form, this designation matches not only the drifting, stream-of-consciousness atmosphere of the text, but also its haphazard mapping of internal links; in terms of its content, the dream comparison suits its future-oriented tendencies. The opening and penultimate chapters – ‘Orpheus in Hades’ and ‘Rhapsody’ – are constructed on the theme of Orpheus in the underworld and frame four intervening pieces: ‘Buggins at Bayreuth’, ‘The King’s Daughter’, ‘Episode Extraordinaire’ and ‘Fantaisie Impromptu’. The conclusion, ‘Two Fine Flowers of Celticism (Encores)’, features an Orphic denouement.8 In ‘Orpheus in Hades’ (chapter 1), we are introduced to Tristram Delamor, a pianist and composer engaged to Dolly Girner, who likes cycling. During discussions of music and poetry in his music room, he also flirts with writer Beatrice Logrolyan, ‘a charming little girl, Celtic and capricious’, the sister of Leo, a poet. She has just had an essay on contemporary musicians turned down, but Tristram believes she is the only person capable of recognizing his ‘Divinity as Artist’ (IF, 11). Tristram visits Mark Markby, a successful musical critic. The rest of the chapter takes place at Dolly’s family’s ‘At Home’ where Tristram takes up with another woman, a reciter, Jeanne Rossignol. She performs a Leo Logrolyan poetic transcription accompanied by Tristram at the piano, after which he escapes with Markby. They despair of the whole ‘At

6 This is a slightly confusing observation since George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893), which had initiated the series, also downplayed plot, invoking music as a metaphor for exploring the emotional motivations of women characters in a series of moments. 7 At the end of ‘Rhapsody’, Orpheus, speaking in the first person while standing at the gates of Nirvana asking for admittance as a journalist, declares: ‘I have written a dream called “Impossibilities” ’ (IF, 157). 8 Hudson’s fascination with the Orpheus legend is likely to be linked to Impossibilities’ interests in 19th-century poetry. John Purkis discusses how ‘to “descend into the underworld” is to plunge into the depths of the mind, and to try to listen to its strange and difficult utterances’ and how for several such poets ‘the abyss is the source of creativity – or potential creativity’; John Purkis, The World of the English Romantic Poets (London: Heinemann, 1982) 149.

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Home’ experience, making reference to the decadence of the Romans and the Greeks and suggesting that the occasion was, for them, the ‘Hades’ of the chapter’s title. Next morning, Jeanne continues to pursue Tristram, calling to collect her mislaid sheet music. She creeps up on him playing Brahms and recites a Leo Logrolyan ‘Rhapsody’: All my thoughts fly on lightning wing To thee – and sing and drift and dream In moving music of the sweetest stream That springs as fire from the cold keys to thee, Incarnate west wind of the wild Tone sea, My Lord the King!

To the question, ‘And what do you call that?’, Jeanne answers ‘Orpheus’ (IF, 33), using Leo’s ‘Rhapsody’ as a link to Hudson’s penultimate Orphic story, ‘Rhapsody’ (chapter 6). This chapter’s epilogue also refers forward to ‘Fantaisie Impromptu’ (chapter 5), when Brother Ambrose, making his only appearance, hears ‘the magic torrent’ of Chopin’s piece of the same name ‘from the open window of a cell’ (37). ‘Buggins at Bayreuth’ (chapter 2) is a first person narrative describing being in Bayreuth. The narrator is an audience member rather than a critic, and the text reads in places like a diary or letter. There is commentary on all types of Wagnerites as the narrator asks, ‘Is Wagner a passion or a fashion?’ and identifies with them. There is a reference to Phil May, who ‘alone could do [the Wagnerians] justice’ – a character who appears again as the first person narrator of the following chapter. The chapter reads as if Hudson herself is writing as ‘Israfel’, rather than any of the characters, although it would make sense if it were Phil May. There is a strong association between the pseudonym and this chapter in its epigraph, lines from Swinburne’s ‘The Triumph of Time’ (Poems and Ballads, 1866): An armed archangel, whose hands raise up All senses mixed in the spirit’s cup.9

In ‘The King’s Daughter’ (chapter 3), a passage Phil is writing from a piece called ‘The Incurable Wound’ is quoted, referring to ‘the problem of Wagner’ and thus to Nietzsche. It reads like one of Hudson’s own essays: There must be a solution to the problem of Wagner. But there is none in this life. And the wonders of our own diction, glowing with crimson life, burning with tawny passion, dying in a purple haze of tears wherein shines steadfast the star of self-satisfaction, foretells a brilliant future, as the ardent sunset the glorious tomorrow. (IF, 73)

9 IF, 40. On p. 48 the second line is cited again in discussing the conductor Mottl’s direction.

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This seems to be a clear reference back to the Bayreuth experience and expresses sentiments at the heart of Hudson’s whole artistic mission. Bizarrely in ‘The King’s Daughter’ we are told that Phil May has a housekeeper called Mrs Buggins. This chapter introduces two new characters, pianists Max and ‘The Russian’, and brings back Beatrice, Markby and Leo for further discussion about music criticism. Beatrice and Phil go on a bicycle ride and continue their conversations by the light of the moon. ‘Episode Extraordinaire’ (chapter 4) begins with Tom Vallay at a lesson with his piano professor, who eulogizes on the importance of reading literature – Swinburne, Heine and Rossetti – in order to develop artistic temperament. Tom has overdone this with the result that ‘he is [sic] too much colour, he has not enough sense of form’ even for Chopin (IF, 95). Later he compares Lyona’s playing to Swinburne’s line, ‘A delight that repels, a desire that reposes’, and feels ‘absolutely subjected to its personality’ (100). There is also a reference to the Orpheus theme when he is asked to accompany Lyona for the next month: ‘I would tour with you through Hades, with pleasure!’(102). Tom develops a deep erotic passion for Lyona and her music, so much so that he desires to paint her, not as Orpheus (as had already been done and was, he feels, too depressing), but as a succession of other male icons: Vanderdecken, Elagabalus and ‘above all, as Tristan, with those lines of Logrolyan’s at the foot of the picture: “The mouth is music …” ’ (112). ‘Fantaisie Impromptu’ (chapter 5) is an essay on Chopin, but begins with a reflection on Elagabalus, ‘whose purple robe has descended down the centuries on Chopin’.10 The spirit of Chopin’s composition and of the essay is summed up in the observation that Chopin ‘is the most subjective of all the composers; he can be induced to express almost anything’ (IF, 122). Explicit links between Romantic music and literature are made as Chopin is compared to Shelley. The connection between music and eroticism is also emphasized, asking: ‘Of what use is love but as a soul for art?’ The relevance of this chapter for understanding the collection as a whole is revealed in the comment: ‘Chopin’s beauty is ever troubled. L’amour de l’impossible is shed through all his soul of music’ (123). In addition, there is a clear link to the Swinburne quote pertaining to Israfel from chapter 2: ‘Chopin has many things in common with Swinburne. I always feel that the B minor sonata is the musical equivalent to the “Triumph of Time” ’ (127–8). The sentiments of ‘Fantaisie Impromptu’ underpin ‘Rhapsody’ 10 Elagabalus was a Roman Emperor (204–222) and high priest of a phallic-oriented cult who liked to dress as a woman, was also bisexual and a ruler of megalomaniacal tendencies.

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(chapter 6), the most dream-like section of the book. In the first person, Orpheus narrates a sociable stroll through Hades ‘with the person I love best’, described as ‘a man of intellect and passion’ seen ‘whenever I look into clear windless water, or perchance gaze into a mirror’ (IF, 136). Hades is a desirable location with roads which are very good for cycling. It is the place ‘where Chopin wrote all his nocturnes’ (135), where ‘Grieg wrote nearly all his things’ and where dwell other such ‘lovers of the impossible’ and ‘pursuers of the unattainable’ – who are ‘very much alive’ and who worship Buddha (137). Orpheus’s mission is to reach Nirvana and to be admitted as an artist. ‘Myself and I’ converse until Buddha allows Orpheus across the river, where he encounters Eurydice. Orpheus is a pianist, who also writes from the standpoint of ‘sheer vacuity of intellect’. He ‘has already attained the nirvana of mediocrity’, defined by Eurydice as ‘that divine summit of journalism’ (149). Following Orpheus’ recital on the ghost of a piano, Buddha challenges his use of ‘tone-words’, building up to a final confrontation at the gates of Nirvana. There Orpheus claims, as the author of Impossibilities, to be more than a journalist. Unfortunately, Buddha dismisses this as rubbish, saying he should have stayed at home to write it. The concluding ‘Two Fine Flowers of Celticism (Encores)’ deals in the consequences of this rhapsodic journey, linking back to the identification of musical experience with spiritual ecstasy. The protagonist is a painter without a name, depicted as losing ‘consciousness with the thought of music’ . He goes to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde for inspiration when he cannot complete his painting (IF, 163). The twin themes of spirituality and silence within musical experience from ‘Episode Extraordinaire’ resurface: As he heard the divine first orchestral sighs of ‘Tristan,’ he shivered – they held a spirit. As the music rose, passion of love, passion of death, he saw the face, the mouth of music. His soul dilated, intoxicated with beauty, as the last dying molten notes stretched passionate arms to silence. (165)

The artist returns to work, ‘possessed of music’ (166). In part 1 of this chapter, ‘Prelude Passione’, the artist’s work is a portrait of music referred to as ‘languishing Orpheus’, represented as a woman because the painter has told us ‘music is feminine’ and ‘music became his only picture’ (161). Back in ‘Episode Extraordinaire’ a connection had been made between Lyona and Orpheus: Lyona … was never happier than when she was understudying Orpheus. A great painter had painted her as Orpheus in Hades, in the grey underworld where the blood-red poppies raised listening heads as he passed … She had that irresistible strange beauty known in modern art – a face that seems made to rouse passion. (110–11)

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Part 2 of this chapter, ‘The Death of Albine’, had been anticipated in ‘The King’s Daughter’ where Beatrice advised Phil to ‘beware of adjectives’ in his writing: ‘Many writers poison their style with superabundant sweetness of those flowers of speech, like Albine in [Zola’s] “La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret”, who committed suicide by asphyxiating herself with the perfume of flowers’ (IF, 89). The portrait we had thought to depict a female Orpheus is received by Albine’s lover as that of a man: ‘Pretty, but looks an awful beast … I don’t believe in fellows who don’t cut their hair’ (167). Albine, described as ‘decadent in her tastes’ (169), does not specify gender, but thinks of the image as an ‘opiate poppy … The hair is the gold poppy of dreams. The mouth is the red poppy of sleep. The face is the white poppy of death’ (167). The ‘original of this portrait’, now referred to as ‘he’, is a musician who ‘had a theory that music is an audible flower’ and attempted to ‘transcribe the perfumes of flowers into music’ (167). Albine is turned into a Eurydice figure, seduced by the musician’s flower arranging at his recital. She calls to ‘Thanatos’ – ‘intoxicated with death himself’, she imagines him leading ‘her softly to the grey sweet underworld … where sleep is king’ (171). In reinscribing the Orphic journey of ‘Rhapsody’ in this way, Hudson seems to be suggesting that readers, like the characters in this ‘encore’, might envisage themselves merging with the archetypes she has explored. Readers are prepared for this challenge by the final words of Orpheus to Eurydice: ‘I am absolutely self-centred; it is indeed a grand thing to be in love with yourself. For you may idealize yourself in many forms … you may put yourself in Hades as Orpheus … O! There’s no limit to your possibilities’ (156). Notable in Hudson’s Impossibilities is her referencing of fashionable aestheticist literary interests, indicated by epigraphs from other writers that suggest influences of those writers’ ideas. As well as the Swinburne references already mentioned, the book as a whole is prefaced with the introductory verse from Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). This choice might have been Hudson’s way of drawing attention to her deliberate eclecticism: When ‘Omer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre, He’d ‘eard men sing by land an’ sea; An’ what he thought ‘e might require, ‘E went an’ took – the same as me!

The first and last chapters are headed with quotations from Oscar Wilde.11 Although on one level Wilde had little to say specifically on

11 ‘The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history’ (IF, 2), quoted from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); in The

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music (and compared to the attention he gave to the other arts, nothing at all to contribute to discussion of compositional strategies), his notion of criticism as a creative act was without a doubt a huge influence on Hudson. This is apparent from the fact that ideas and approaches from Ernest’s and Gilbert’s debate in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (Intentions, 1891) can be traced directly in Impossibilities.12 One example, where music is a reference point, is Wilde’s concern that the lowly status of the critic may continue ‘because the best he can give us will be but an echo of rich music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form’.13 Furthermore, the origin of Hudson’s title even becomes apparent from Ernest’s musings on the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser: It speaks to me of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life, or the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions that man has not known, and so has sought for. Tonight it may fill one with that … Amour de l’Impossible, which falls like a madness on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so that they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain.14

In his dialogic essay, Wilde posed provocative questions about the orientation of current critical tendencies by projecting a new identity for criticism of the future. This ‘highest criticism’ should share in the function of literature, creating ‘from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvellous’, in effect then turning the role into a creative one and leaving ‘nothing for the critic to do’. There is a very close relationship between Hudson’s view and Wilde’s manifesto as propounded by Ernest: Criticism of the highest kind … treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It does not confine itself … to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final … for the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful

Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, new edn (1966; London and Glasgow: Collins, 1983) 165. ‘This is the golden book of spirit and sense, / The Holy Writ of Beauty; he that wrought / Made it with dreams and faultless words and thought’ (IF, 160), quoted from Wilde’s comments on Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1877); [signed notice], The Speaker (22 March 1890) in Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Seiler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1980) 233. 12 Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ in Complete Works, 1009–59. For further discussion of Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’, see the chapter in this volume by Joe Law. 13 Ibid. 1026. 14 Ibid. 1029–30.

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thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives.15

When in Hudson’s ‘Episode Extraordinaire’ Tom and Lyona discuss the relative status of music-making and criticism, their conversation is redolent of Wilde’s ‘Critic as Artist’ thesis. For Tom, who perceives the critic and the musician as ‘natural enemies’, making music substitutes for the inadequacy of words. He concurs with Lyona that reading and writing are very problematic activities in the musical sphere. Lyona declares how she actively dislikes reading about music and much prefers making it: ‘I hate reading … When I play, I can choose my own sentiments more or less, I can subject the significance of the music to my pleasure: but when I read, I have to take whatever the author gives me’ (IF, 115–6). She does, however, concede that if she were to take up writing she might override this problem and provide herself with ‘sympathetic literature’, that is, things she would herself care to read about music (116). Lyona’s view of the critical writer thus comes over as less hostile than Tom’s. For her, critics dominate her time because ‘this is the age of the executive artist … Creation is the lowest branch of activity, execution is several grades higher, criticism is the crown’. In keeping with the futuristic bent of the entire collection, the conversation concludes with a tantalizing suggestion: ‘The artist shall consort with the critic at the millennium, not till then’ (117), revealing that the current context is not one in which this is yet feasible. The Impossibilities stories reveal how Hudson took on the challenge of Wilde’s declaration that the critical act was inherently creative. Throughout the book, she seems to goad her readers to engage with difficulties that are thrown up when confronting existing conventions. The ways her characters revel in grappling with these difficulties convey her fantastic suggestions of routes to aestheticized ways of living. Hudson’s frequent recourse to terms with enigmatic associations, such as ‘the impossible’ and ‘the unattainable’, together with the designations of many of her writings as ‘fantasias’, is typical not only of an aesthetic striving to express what seems beyond reach, but also of aesthetic revelling in the sensations provoked by such a pursuit in the absence – the assumed improbability – of consummation. In this spirit, although ‘the unattainable’ is evoked as being tantalizingly close (for example, in ‘Rhapsody’, the way that one might simply bicycle off into the underworld), the realizations Hudson presents are curiously incomplete. There is a sense that her fantasies cannot become realities, and this

15

Ibid. 1029.

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serves to bind the reader back into the paradox of what is impossible. Perhaps this is what The Academy critic found unconvincing when defining the stories as, ‘a series of tales in which no one character is for a moment alive, in which nothing particular happens, in which no person loves, suffers, or even dies’. Although the review conceded that stylistically the book was interesting, referring to ‘Mr. Mondego’s … clever juggling with words, together with some startling effects in the juxtaposition of preciosity and slang’, it concluded rather negatively: ‘the author probably has amused himself more than the result of his freak is likely to amuse anybody else’.16 Arguably, today Impossibilities is less of interest for scenarios and characterizations intended for contemporaries who might appreciate its aestheticist bent. Its interest now lies rather in the way its conversations serve as vehicles for revealing, both explicitly and implicitly, thoughts about the nature of music and creative impulses inspired by its reception. Yet, Hudson’s work is not only stimulating as historical curiosity; it is also a provocative exemplification of proto-postmodern musicological interests. This is because the overriding concern is how to interpret – discuss, describe, represent, depict, re-enact, and perhaps ‘embody’ – music using words, not only within fiction but also in other forms of writing, specifically music journalism and travel memoirs. Hudson’s articles from a range of journals were subsequently collected for re-publication in Ivory, Apes and Peacocks (1899), Musical Fantasies (1903), Travel Pictures (1904) and Lotus Leaves (1908). This nonfiction work is fascinating, both for the way in which musical reflection overlapped with travel writing and for revealing how, for Hudson, all forms of narrative about music involved crossover between perceived realities and projected fantasies. The fact that Hudson published no more fiction after Impossibilities does not mean that that mode of writing ceased to be relevant to her concerns. The limited critical interest and rather negative reception of this collection may have influenced her decision to concentrate on nonfiction. Her later writing, with which she achieved a higher profile, continued to address many of the same ideas about music raised in these stories and followed through aspects of the stylistic experimentation. Reviewers preferred these writings to Impossibilities, though focusing on form and style at the expense of content and message. In 1899, for example, The Dome carried an advertisement for Ivory, Apes and Peacocks which cited The Dundee Courier’s view that ‘the book is altogether a delight … Ruskin might have written some of it, and its

16

[Unsigned], The Academy (12 June 1897) 20.

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literary art is about as fastidious as Pater’s … Very rich, very delicate, and very unusual’.17 Furthermore, in 1900 a reviewer in the American journal The Dial called Israfel ‘that pleasantly fantastical essayist and virtuoso of iridescent phrases’ and identified ‘him’ as ‘essentially a stylist, an executant of brilliant verbal fantasias’: ‘Readers who care for “Israfel” … will like this … very much’.18 In the same year The Chord quoted from The Glasgow Herald that Ivory, Apes and Peacocks was ‘undeniably clever and interesting’.19 In The Academy’s review of Musical Fantasies in 1903, Hudson was again praised for her deployment of language, described as ‘florid, rhapsodic, dithyrambic’.20 Despite this emphasis on literary style, the themes running through Hudson’s work of the late 1890s, as much as her mode of expression, revealed the continuation of that productive dialogue between nonfictional critical writing and fiction which had initially been constructed in Impossibilities’ deliberate mixture of prose, poetry, drama and fantasy.

Contextual links 1. Literary genre At the turn of the twentieth century, the types of writing that Hudson worked with – fiction, critical writing, travel memoirs and autobiography – were all undergoing revaluation in contemporary practice and debate. Analysis of experimentation with literary genre is integral to the way this period tended to be identified as transitional between Victorianism and the twentieth century, with the result that genre innovations came to be regarded as prophetic of Modernist notions of realities as ‘subjective fictions’.21 In an early retrospective of the aesthetic and intellectual life of the period, which dominated historical perception for a considerable time, Holbrook Jackson summarized the contemporary view as optimistic with respect to the future: ‘Everybody, mentally and emotionally, was running about in a hundred different directions’ with the ‘rising 17

The Dome 2/4 (January 1899) 79. [Unsigned], ‘Ivory Apes and Peacocks’ [sic], The Dial 29 (1 July 1900) 18. 19 ‘Advertiser’, The Chord 3 (Lady Day, 1900) iv. 20 [Unsigned], The Academy and Literature (14 November 1903) 542. 21 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds, Modernism: 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1976) 27. Jayne E. Marek comments that ‘there may be important connections between modernist innovations and qualities that have often been seen as “female” attributes’; Jayne E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism: ‘Little’ Magazines and Literary History (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1995) 16. 18

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generation’ feeling ‘as though it were stepping out of the cages of convention and custom into a freedom full of tremendous possibilities’.22 Helmut Gerber later discussed how, during this period, the short story in particular ‘reflected the impact of many extraliterary forces that made for experimentation and change’. He cited the example of Arthur Symons’ Spiritual Adventures (1905) in considering musical influence, commenting how their semi-autobiographical nature placed them ‘like Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, on the borderline between the short story and the essay’.23 More recently Lyn Pykett has discussed the redefinition of fiction both in terms of ‘a stratification, fragmentation and diversification’ of the literary market, in which the ‘enormous increase of journals and newspapers was particularly significant’, and in terms of the feminization of fiction. On the one hand, there were ‘New Woman’ writers experimenting with ‘impressionistic, allegorical, and visionary forms in their attempts to represent female interiority’; on the other, there was a masculine backlash causing the ‘appropriation of the discarded feminized form of domestic realism’.24 Male aesthetes and women writers who were variously definable as ‘New Women’ or ‘female aesthetes’, according to the degree of their self-conscious politicization and their orientation within the sphere of high art, favoured the short story, essay and poem over that major literary form of Victorian commercial success, the three-decker novel. Elaine Showalter has suggested that many of these women authors have been overlooked due to both this preference and to the publication of their work predominantly in little magazines.25 That fiction was a powerful tool with which to shape manifestos for change was apparent from widespread negative reaction, both critical and popular, to women’s literary voices, associating the New Woman with the ‘Decadent’.26 Margaret Stetz has discussed how much of the female side of the debate about aestheticism was ‘lost’ because of its appearance in magazines, commenting that feminist pronouncements are most often

22 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: Grant Richards, 1913) 31. 23 Helmut Gerber, ed., The English Short Story in Transition (New York: Pegasus, 1967) xii. 24 Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1995) 71. 25 Elaine Showalter, ed., Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-siècle (London: Virago, 1993) viii. 26 For a full discussion of distinctions between the terms ‘New Woman’, ‘Decadent’ and ‘female aesthete’, see Talia Schaffer, ‘The Women’s World of British Aestheticism’, chapter 1 of The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London: The University Press of Virginia, 2000).

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‘embedded in fiction rather than in the more obvious vehicle of essays’.27 Hudson’s subtitle for Impossibilities – Fantasias – identifies it with aestheticism. Talia Schaffer regards the fantasia as one of two dominant modes of aestheticist writing that attracted women: [Aestheticism] relied heavily on formalist experimentation, and it imagined other realms for female identity, realms that could range from the unconscious to the geographically and temporally remote.28

Schaffer points to the desire of many women who identified themselves with aestheticism to describe what was supposed to be indescribable; they situated this desire in ‘the unreal space of “dream” or “fantasy” ’ wherein ‘authors found themselves free to depict a wide range of behaviours’ and ‘to create alternative visions of women’s lives’.29 The rhetoric used in fantasias also signalled that ‘the story was adrift in time and space’. Bizarrely, alongside her anti-naturalistic exploration of the underworld, Hudson’s domestic setting of much of Impossibilities in ‘idealistically charming drawing rooms’ was also typical of the fantasia, because of aestheticism’s concern for beautiful objects. By employing the mannerisms of staged drawing-room conversation in both the outdoor and indoor scenes of Impossibilities, Hudson also entered the territory of contemporary dramatists, specifically the tragi-comic Wilde and Strindberg. She did so by combining realism with parodistic hints of the newly fashionable, quasi-psychological posturing, in particular through chameleonic gendered positionings of her key characters. Hudson thus worked more dramatically than narratively, as Wilde had done a few years earlier in constructing his heroine Salome as a type. On the one hand, he presented a textual image of a masculinized femme fatale, and on the other, a meta-textual representation of the (male) artist’s soul. Hudson’s stance reveals, once again, her homage to Wilde’s theory of creative criticism written just before Salome – specifically his suggestion that ‘the method of the drama is his … He may use dialogue … that wonderful literary form’. ‘By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood’.30 Schaffer has discussed how the other dominant mode of writing in 27 Margaret D. Stetz, ‘Debating Aestheticism from a Feminist Perspective’ in Women and British Aestheticism, ed. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999) 30. 28 Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, 49. 29 Ibid. 50–51. 30 Wilde, Complete Works, 1046.

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female aestheticism was epigrammatic comedy, analysing the work of Ouida (Marie Louise de Ramée) in this connection and showing its influence on male writers, notably Wilde. Schaffer’s summary of Ouida’s key stylistic traits, resulting from her combination of fantasia and drawing-room comedy, is useful in positioning Hudson’s writing on music in relation to literary aestheticist trends: Where the fantasia describes history, the comedy depicted modernity; its characters wear the latest fashions, talk about the most recent gossip, often allude to controversial living personalities, and show themselves ultra-modern in their sensibilities. Thus the figures in the fantasia represented men and women as they supposedly once were, but the drawing room comedy represented men and women as they could be.31

2. Writing about music Hudson’s writing in two 1890s journals in particular – The Chord, edited by John Runciman, and The Dome, of which she was the assistant editor of the New Series32 – provides evidence of the interaction between her ideas, their mode of execution and the development of music criticism. In 1899 The Academy reviewer acknowledged the impact of Hudson’s work for The Dome with the remark: ‘The new musical criticism is full of surprises.’33 At the end of the Victorian era, the field of music criticism split into what Runciman termed the Old and New criticism.34 In ‘The Gentle Art of Music Criticism’ he distinguished these as follows: The distinction between the New and the Old consists not in absolute knowledge on the one side and blank ignorance on the other but, in this: that the adherents of the Old theory conceive of criticism as reporting, while the others aim at the production of literature, with music as its subject matter.35

The roots of the ‘Old’ criticism were nourished by the belief that critics are educated and thus more capable than amateurs of describing compositional methodologies and evaluating performance. ‘Impersonal criticism’ – which did not interfere with the composer’s meaning, present only in the music itself – had been regarded as superior to the ‘avowedly personal’ mission of the new school.36 The Dome and The Chord 31

Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, 56. Both published by The Unicorn Press. 33 [Unsigned], ‘Ivory, Apes and Peacocks’, The Academy (19 August 1899) 172. 34 John F. Runciman, ‘Musical Criticism and the Critics’, The Fortnightly Review 62 (July–September 1894) 171. 35 John F. Runciman, ‘The Gentle Art of Music Criticism’, The New Review 73 (June 1895) 622. 36 Runciman, ‘Musical Criticism and the Critics’, 173. 32

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became sites for the practical application of ideas that went against these views, in particular the notion that criticism was merely concerned with reviewing. Runciman’s view was that ‘the highest kind of criticism, the only criticism which has a permanent value … is the criticism … in which … the writer … recounts the effect of the subject upon his own soul … The critic holds up himself as a kind of mirror’.37 The ‘new’ critic should, according to Runciman, also have a literary gift, because ‘to express personal feeling requires powers similar in kind … to those of the poets and great prose-writers’, whereas writing musical gossip in police-report style did not.38 By 1899, The Chord went so far as to declare that ‘the public has shown a marked preference’ for its kind of writing as against the ‘fatuous, unimaginative, inartistic kind’.39 Earlier that same year, Hudson had referred explicitly to ‘these days of the association of Music and Literature’.40 Several features of Hudson’s writing, however, identify her as belonging only partially within this new criticism camp. In spite of critical traits she clearly shared with Runciman, there were differences between their approaches to representing experience. Runciman wrote from the perspective of a specialist informed by anecdote to bring the topic alive, ruminating, for example, on music and colour.41 Hudson, on the other hand, wrote from the perspective of audience and herself within it. For example, in the first article of her ‘Irresponsibilities’ series in The Dome, she writes about a Chopin recital performed by Paderewski, reflecting on the spirit of the occasion and how ‘our entire being merges into our art-sense’, thereby illustrating reception as an embodied act.42 Impossibilities, which preceded these examples, was a significant staging-post in the development of Hudson’s approach. This can be seen from the way that her experiment in fiction continued to be a formative presence. In a few key moments of Impossibilities, Hudson had fantasized, within specific narrative contexts, about ways of going even further into musical experience than could be achieved through 37

John F. Runciman, ‘Robert Schumann: An Impertinence’, The Dome 3/9 (1899)

234. 38

Runciman, ‘Musical Criticism and the Critics’, 174, 178. As the essay ‘As Others Don’t See Us’, presumably by Runciman, went on to explain: ‘It will be readily admitted by everyone nowadays (though it would not have been admitted five years ago) that the reviewer should know something of art criticism and of literary criticism;’ The Chord 3 (December 1899) 57. 40 Israfel, ‘Chestnuts (A Study in Ivory)’, The Dome 2/4 (January 1899) 33; reprinted in IAP, 206. 41 John F. Runciman, ‘Noises, Smells and Colours’, The Musical Quarterly 1 (1915): 149–61. 42 Israfel, ‘Irresponsibilities, 1: Paderewski (An Afterthought)’, The Dome 3/8 (June 1899) 108. 39

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descriptive representation of music using external referents. She did this by suggesting consequences that might result from the absorption and internalization of music during acts of listening.

Fiction and criticism Impossibilities can be read as a text explaining Hudson’s theory of how music reception could operate at various levels of understanding, from hearing to ‘becoming’.43 Although this theory was imagined through an outcome that merely played with words, the fictional representation of stages and types of reception reflected reception as a process which, ultimately, might liberate itself from words. Hudson’s Impossibilities is ‘about music’ and ‘about writing’. Hudson linked music and writing by creating fiction about criticism and fiction as ‘criticism’. Criticism is explored as a range of activities: reviewing, writing about music, writing inspired by music and writing on music. In the seven stories, Hudson consistently uses the terms critic and criticism pejoratively, often aided by sarcasm. At Bayreuth, for example, Buggins tells us how ‘you may always tell the musical critic by his “God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear; the rest may reason and welcome; ‘tis we musicians know” sort of expression’ (IF, 45). The music critic is ‘a fact to which one cannot shut one’s eyes … a peculiarly obtrusive animal’, by which, Hudson implies, people are taken in, because ‘we pay far too much attention to facts nowadays’. Unless they use their imaginations, such people – critics and the philistines who respect them – will themselves be ‘naturally reduced to facts’ (47). Towards the end of the book, in ‘Rhapsody’, Orpheus and his alter ego briefly discuss the conventions involved in speaking about music, sparked off by the mere mention of Chopin’s Sonata in B minor. ‘Don’t be so technical,’ said myself, fastidiously, ‘it spoils the mise en scene. What on earth – I mean in Hades – is the use of wordpainting Buddha if you’re going to put in a lot of beastly technicalities?’ ‘I’m very sorry,’ I answered meekly … ‘It is so hard to explain oneself without resorting to technicalities.’ ‘Who wants you to explain yourself?’ he asked, crudely. ‘Explanations are abominable. Far too definite; nothing in Hades is ever explained.’ (138)

43 See Wilde, ‘Critic as Artist’, Complete Works, 1041, which discusses how the ‘critical spirit’ of the future might provide the individual with access to ‘the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming’.

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Hades itself, the character of Buddha within it and the plot – the journey to Nirvana – have all just been evoked by associations of actual musical works, suggesting that an alternative way of responding to music is to allow it to paint tone pictures. According to Orpheus, parts of Wagner’s Parsifal are ‘the nearest approach to Nirvana, I know’, and a picture of Buddha is conjured up by the last bars of Schumann’s Fantasie in C major. Composers known in Hades are evoked as physical and spiritual aspects of that state of being which the place symbolizes. Grieg, for example, ‘understands the pursuit of the unattainable’, and his music presents a ‘picture of the Scandinavian sentiment … A glimmering, desolate desert of snow; crystal silence, pierced by a far away golden cry – lost–lost–lost!’. Svendsen, the Slav, ‘has l’amour de l’impossible for his leit motif’ (139). Near the start of ‘Orpheus in Hades’, Markby, a ‘most successful man’, who ‘spends his time in alternate vivisection and manufacture of cloying adulation in a neat paragraph’, defends the ‘Old’ criticism by challenging Delamor: In your last recital, you violated several sacred traditions connected with the works of Chopin. You have a reprehensible tendency to obtrude your personality on that of the master whom you profess to interpret. You impose your own spurious individuality on that of a matchless tone poet. (IF, 16–17)

Delamor’s earlier statement acknowledges the performer as interpreter at one with the music: ‘Mine is the secret of personality … I do not merely play notes. I play on thought and emotion, on every complex chord of beauty and passion’ (5). Later, the pianist comments that he plays Schumann’s Carnaval ‘in my own particular style – of which the maddened pen can convey nothing’ (19), thus hinting that performance may be capable of divorcing itself from the possibility of having any critical act applied to it. In the fantasy world of Impossibilities, and beyond in the contexts of her other work, Hudson was unusual in knitting fiction about music and criticism of music together. Using the same threads in her fictional and non-fictional writing, Hudson embroidered her ideas about criticism with the motif that it is by means of its performance that music lives; the acts of music reception and representation are enlivened because they are released from the domination of composer and score. In her work overall, Hudson proposed a range of models for the interpretation of music using fictional performers, writers on music and other audiences as her mouthpieces, as well as sharing her own responses to living performers and conductors. In Impossibilities, a number of dimensions of Hudson’s investigation into what music is capable of becoming and

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doing to people are encompassed by this theme. In several chapters Hudson explores the interaction between performance and words, describing the act of crafting words and making them perform by featuring the recitation of poetic renderings inspired by or inscribing music. In ‘The King’s Daughter’ we are introduced to these ideas through a critical debate on the nature of originality and what it means to be modern. Phil and Leo are writers depicted as attempting to struggle free from conventions into those new literary territories for which Beatrice Logrolyan is being fêted. Phil presents himself in the first person as ‘a poet decadent’ who combines ‘erotomania with decency’; he cannot find a publisher for his poetry, and so is ‘compelled to pander to the taste of the ignorant mob, and write prose’ (IF, 61). Leo is another unpublished poet who writes in ‘the modern style’ (67). In his view: What we moderns chiefly lack is originality. We are too sensitive to impression. Our minds are like the photographer’s plate. We are too well informed to originate; we are so full of other people’s ideas that we have no space for our own … Passion helps originality, in a measure. For passion has a certain spontaneity of extravagance that instinctively finds fantastic forms of expression … Also, we moderns pay far too much attention to technique. (76)

Leo proposes to Phil that ‘personality’ is the ‘means to success’, although he himself does not possess it and fills the gap with egotism (78). The ensuing scene provides an illustration of this in action: after a bicycle ride, Phil, having mused with Beatrice on the nature of the ‘angelic sex’ and on what it means to be just such a ‘spiritual hermaphrodite’, composes a prose nocturne following her suggestion that he express his thoughts to the moon, a symbol for womanhood equated with music (83–4). From the type of literary representation of musical experience given, acting upon this advice is presented as a means of releasing the critic’s artistic temperament, liberating the character – and implicitly the reader – to think and be different: ‘And lo! I found that to write in this way is mighty easy. And the reverence that I had unto the “prose poets” withered and died’ (89). The emphasis of both the narrative context and the nocturne itself is blatantly erotic: the two lovers lie under the trees at sunset, Beatrice already in mind as ‘a strange passionate theme in the forest symphony’. Through the metaphor of woman as music, the implied act of lovemaking and the nocturne become one: When the shadows lengthened and the fiery sunset lay at the point of death, I watched the coming of Night in the forest. Beautiful as the chord of the seventh was she … She came in the key of E flat with violet shadows. A melody of stars in B flat sparkled out in

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mosaic upon her harmonies, stretching ethereal strings of light across the wide bow of heaven … As the year was at summer, the strings were dominant, the wind softly subjective. (88)

A particularly fascinating dimension of this exploration of new literary methods is the secrecy surrounding Beatrice’s own writing. The fact that she has composed her own literary nocturne is of great interest, considering that Hudson is herself a woman exploring possibilities for writing about music. Before the discussion between Phil and Leo, we have already been told of the publication of Beatrice’s transcription, of music into words, of Grieg’s ‘Ich liebe dich’ in the collection Scarlet Leaves. Yet her poem is not shared with us, being concealed both by a literary device and also, in the plot, by Phil. Phil, to whom the book is passed, ‘politely but firmly refused to read it aloud’ because he is a ‘sensitive man’. Leo reads the nocturne out loud ‘with serenity’, but the reader is denied any more knowledge than Phil’s remark ‘Isn’t it rather?’ (IF, 66). Earlier in ‘Orpheus in Hades’, we gain some insight, but witness only Beatrice’s process, not her product. Beatrice is defiant about not being a music critic, referring to her style in this way: ‘Rapture happens to suit my literary style; I have a copious flow of adjective and an unbridled imagination’ (8). There is one further hint of what Beatrice’s nocturne might be like. Talking about Tristram as a personality, she says: ‘You are in the key of G, you know … You are the incarnation of an Icelandic legend – some beautiful despair for which men cast away life, and love, and honour, to follow into the white death incomprehensible, unattainable.’ Unlike Phil, whose nocturne encompasses Beatrice, Beatrice’s response to Tristram is left, as it were, suspended. Although here she references poetry rather than music, she concludes her reverie: ‘I was only thinking out a paragraph for my nocturne in “Scarlet Leaves” ’ (25). ‘Fantaisie Impromptu’ seems poised to provide an example of critical writing to fulfil the nature of the criticism of the future, as discussed by Tom and Lyona in the previous chapter. However, this chapter tells readers more about their potential role in the critical act than offering a comprehensive analytical model. Crucially, it seeks to identify the type of audience to which Chopin’s music, the subject of this ‘rhapsody’ in words, appeals: It takes a peculiar temperament to interpret Chopin. One that is tired of life and desirous of the unattainable, that has a sense of humour and a good deal of humbug about it … he does not demand intellect so much as a fine sense of colour of his exponents. (126)

According to Hudson, the music itself suggests what this audience – the lovers of the impossible and pursuers of the unattainable – should do

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with it: ‘[Chopin] is more to be felt than to be understood’ (126). Responses from ‘ the decadents’ are criticized by Hudson for the way they have sought out ‘the strangest meanings’, because these meanings are preoccupied with the past – its ‘passionate desires wrought into living breathing dreams’ (127). Hudson’s preferred response to Chopin is curiously imprecise, but its very ambiguity fits with that tendency of Impossibilities merely to suggest rather than to dictate alternative agendas. The tantalizing remark that Chopin’s music ‘dreams of that which never has been, never shall be, never could have been; which to every properly constituted being spells the heart’s desire’ (123) is summed up by the comment: ‘It is impossible to express Chopin’ (129). According to Hudson, the way forward lies within the music itself. Chopin ‘may express himself without limit, without fear of being understood’ (130). The scope of the musician is applauded and the art form praised for its freedom: ‘What perfect scope … for self-expression has the musician! He can say anything, he may say anything … All other arts are chained and shackled – music is free!’ (130). Music then is the model for verbal interpretation: because it is ‘so subjective and sympathetic’, it is the ‘perfect art’ and ‘the listener may interpret it as he will’ (131). This is demonstrated, without any specificity, by the concluding comment of the chapter: ‘Ah! soul of seduction! (It is permitted to weave a cadenza into the last bars)’ (131). In a later article on the piano recital, Hudson explained that when she confronted the ‘cool white tones of the piano’ they defied analysis, causing ‘the ravished pen to pause spellbound on the verge of adjective’, because they were, for her, ‘the essence of music’ (IAP, 197). She also clarified the link between the performance of music and critical interpretation, declaring: ‘Verbal virtuosity is its own excuse, – pardonable as the pyrotechnical tone-journalese displayed toward the end of a recital’ (IAP, 198). Furthermore, in Musical Fantasies she also commented that ‘re-creation … is quite as desirable as creation … as happily we are not all the same … so is it not better to adopt the composition and do your own best by it?’.44 In these examples from fiction and criticism, embracing the possibilities of the critical act, even where these are proposed rather than delivered, prioritized creativity. By exploring the relationship between these two aspects of involvement with music, both in theory and in practice, Hudson revealed her interest in ways of writing on, rather than merely writing about, music. Margaret Miner has identified this as a literary characteristic traceable in Baudelaire, Pater and Symons, which

44

Israfel, Musical Fantasies (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Kent, 1903) 197.

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aimed ‘to superimpose … writing so directly onto music that the two might become fused’ in order to erase distinctions between reading about music and listening to it.45 This drive towards a performative kind of writing is the motivating force behind the content of Impossibilities. Hudson’s later critical work reveals the development of a greater understanding of such writing. For example, in her review of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, she eulogizes his achievements as follows: His words seem just to ‘effleurer’ his meaning in a wholly musical manner … with him, language gains the elusive grace and significance of music … Pater’s prose is of all English prose the nearest akin to music – I do not mean in actual sound, but in spirit.46

Music and the scripting of personal identity Hudson’s construction of a complicated meta-textual exploration of identity through the conversations and activities of her cast of aesthetic types seems intentional. Heilmann has noted the tendency for New Woman fiction ‘like women’s autobiography’ to construct, by doubling or multiplying the character of the protagonist, ‘a collective female identity while foregrounding an individual subject(ivity)’.47 That ambition to become an ‘artist-critic’ of the future, highlighted in ‘Fantaisie Impromptu’, would seem to echo Hudson’s own life in music: We that read between the lines learn strange things. Not till we hold the invisible ink up to the fire of our own passion, and let its fierce radiance shine through, may we decipher the pale, dead characters, and tell the world of love and death! (IF, 124–5)

No historical or anecdotal evidence appears to exist concerning Hudson’s motivation for adopting the pseudonym ‘Israfel’. In a nonfiction source of the period, Arthur Edward Waite’s Israfel: Letters, Visions and Poems (1886), a link is made between Israfel and the notion of the impossible. In an introductory passage, Waite states: ‘We have looked upon the face of Israfel, and it has become to us a mission, a revelation, a high and holy hope. I stand before thee boldly, and declare that having seen Israfel, we are set utterly apart from all the world, and the life that we led in the past is for ever more impossible to us’.48 Waite’s 45 Margaret Miner, Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995) 1–2. 46 ‘Imaginary Portraits (Frozen Music)’, IAP, 254–5, 265. 47 Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 75. 48 Arthur Edward Waite, Israfel: Letters, Visions and Poems (London: E. W. Allen, 1886) 10.

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location of ‘the impossible’ in the future, once the spell of Israfel has been felt, resonates in Hudson’s Impossibilities, in that she links Israfel the spirit to elements of her stories that are future-oriented. The appearances and associations of Israfel in other mid- to lateVictorian literary sources help relate Hudson’s perspectives to ideas about music then in circulation. References in Impossibilities to the archangel from Swinburne’s ‘The Triumph of Time’ point to him as a significant source. It is equally likely that inspiration came from the continuing popularity of Edgar Allan Poe. His poem ‘Israfel’ describes a heavenly spirit, referred to as male, under whose spell other voices become mute: If I could dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody, While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky.49

For Poe, who himself used Israfel as one of his pseudonyms, the figure symbolizes that search ‘however despairingly, to emulate the ideal beauty of the afterworld’ and to connect with it through music.50 Thus, from these sources alone, the name ‘Israfel’ can be equated with the spiritual, carrying associations of poetry, passion and beauty, elements ‘Episode Extraordinaire’ identifies as the core of musical experience. Poe’s emphasis on how mortals would sing more beautifully if they were to enter into Israfel’s celestial state resonates clearly with Hudson’s visions of unattainable, yet pursued, goals, and is consistent with Tom’s ‘suspended spirit’s consciousness’. Such association between real and spiritual worlds had achieved prominence through two popular late-Victorian novels which Hudson probably knew and which incorporated musical aspects in both plots and metaphors. By well-known women authors, each novel developed narrative content from the figure of an angel-poet whose identity is mirrored in character constructions. Marie Corelli’s popular first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), presented spiritual enlightenment as the product of mystic theory. Poe’s poem features explicitly in the thought process of the heroine in what is in effect an episode on a 49 John H. Ingram, ed., The Complete Poetical Works and Essays on Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Frderick Warne and Co., 1888) 98. There were several versions; this one, the last from 1845, was first published in England in The Raven and Other Poems (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1846). 50 Kenneth Silvermann, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1992) 72.

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supernatural journey as she improvises on the piano during a thunderstorm, catching ‘the unwritten music of nature, which always appeals most strongly to emotions that are unspoilt by contact with the world’.51 Also apparently influenced by Poe, Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) features in ways crucial both to plot and underlying meanings the metaphor of the chiming bell, in the introductory ‘Proem’, and the name of ‘Israfil’, in Book IV, ‘The Tenor and the Boy: An Interlude’.52 The Heavenly Twins was a phenomenally successful novel, immediately ‘reviewed, talked of, discussed wherever one went’.53 In ‘Proem’, the Cathedral bells’ chimes affect the Morningquest residents in a multiplicity of ways: functioning as a metaphor for ‘art’ itself, the sound’s meaning becomes complicated by its reception. This sets the tone for the story. When the Tenor, referred to as ‘Israfil’ by Angelica (the female twin and a violinist masquerading as ‘the Boy’) hears the sound after two years of ascetic living, he ‘felt as if the world had stopped, and all the life in it had been resolved into a moment of intense self-consciousness, of illimitable passionate yearning for something not to be expressed’.54 This impact becomes crucial to the way the relationship between the two characters is treated. A strong sense of ambiguity permeates Hudson’s work in that she, like Grand, played with gender, ‘performing’ male and female character parts and concealing herself behind an androgynous identity. Her pseudonym and her literary manner frequently led to the assumption that she was a man, expressed for example in this review of Impossibilities: ‘For the first few pages of the book you wonder whether the writer is quite sane; then you come to the conclusion that he is a genius.’55 Hudson may also have felt freer to express her sense of humour in a masculine incarnation, since, as The Cornhill Magazine commented, at that time women’s humour was ‘frequently suppressed’ whereas in men it was ‘cultivated and fostered’.56 In a review article entitled ‘Music and Literature’, Hudson referred to this dominant trend, commenting on ‘our masculine

51 ‘Death by Lightening’, A Romance of Two Worlds (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1886) vol. 2, chapter 6, 194–5. See also ‘A Symphony in the Air’, vol. 1, chapter 8; and the chapter in this volume by Sophie Fuller for further discussion of this novel. 52 Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (1893); ed. C. A. Senf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 53 Marilyn Bonnell, ‘The Legacy of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins: A Review Essay’, English Literature in Transition 36/4 (1993) 476. 54 Grand, The Heavenly Twins, 371. 55 The Birmingham Gazette, cited in an advertisement in The Dome 2 (Midsummer Day 1897) following 108. 56 Nancy Walker, ‘Susan and Tish: Women’s Humour at the Turn of the Century’, Turn-of-the-Century Women 2/2 (Winter 1985) 50.

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flippancy’ and that ‘women (dear things!) always take themselves too seriously’, complicating these observations by declaring that ‘she’ was ‘one of a despicable minority of the impossible sex’ within the audience (IAP, 270).57 In Impossibilities Hudson’s humour illuminates several discussions about gender, music and interpretation. Tristram is seen through Beatrice’s eyes as ‘looking something between an archangel and a cab-runner’ (IF, 17), having taunted that he is ‘ridiculously effeminate’ as she propounds the benefits of sexual reversal (6–7). Tristram is later confronted by Jeanne, disturbed that ‘she can’t be a thorough woman’ because she has ‘a faculty of abstract appreciation’; he helpfully informs her that she is an angel (35). Hudson’s pursuit of ‘apparently incompatible positions’, shown in her predilection for crossing genre boundaries and her fascination with the hermaphroditic state, allies her with that tendency, discussed in recent studies of British aestheticism, for women writers to have been empowered but yet erased from its history.58 The label ‘fin-de-siècle’ with its overtones of decadence stuck uneasily to women in a period when feminism first gained ground. Socially, the age seemed regenerate rather than degenerate as far as women’s development was concerned: opportunities were ‘to be fought for, boundaries to be re-drawn, categories to be renamed’.59 Schaffer’s and Psomiades’ recent work has traced comprehensively how in the late-Victorian era ‘decadence defined itself against the feminine and the biological creativity of women’.60 Schaffer has gone on to argue convincingly that ‘to conflate decadence with aestheticism’ is to give ‘decadence’s masculinist assumptions and male coterie a disproportionately large role in our critical consciousness’.61 Little factual evidence exists about the life of the enigmatic Gertrude Hudson.62 What is known is that by 1905 she was editing her own music journal, The Acorn, in which she signed some of her own contributions 57 Hudson is discussing a Clifford Harrison recital at the Steinway Hall. Interestingly, in The Lute of Apollo (London: A. D. Innes and Co., 1896), Harrison had written that music ‘not only speaks to us, but it is, in a sense, our own voice. We find in it a perpetual self-expression’ (153); thoughts that are not irrelevant to deciphering Hudson’s critical positioning. 58 Schaffer and Psomiades, Women and British Aestheticism, 1–3. 59 Juliet Gardiner, ed., The New Woman: Women's Voices 1880–1918 (London: Collins and Brown, 1993) 1. 60 Schaffer and Psomiades, Women and British Aestheticism, 198. 61 Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, 6. 62 Some library catalogues confuse her with the American writer James Gibbons Huneker, because he also published an Ivory, Apes and Peacocks and was similarly fascinated by ‘decadence’ and modern music.

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‘G. H’, while also continuing as ‘Israfel’. Unpublished letters from Ethel Wheeler, a member along with Sarah Grand of the literary grouping of ‘The Lyceum Club’ for women,63 disclose that Hudson was probably in her mid-thirties in the late 1890s and hint that she was an occasional visitor to Alice Meynell’s circle, along with Runciman, Wilde and Symons.64 The impact of these connections can be felt in that ‘imaginary portrait’ which Hudson constructs through her writing. This sense of her identity may depend as much on fantasy as reality, on subjective experience rather than objective truth. Yet there are frequent references in Hudson’s non-fiction which point to real sources for her inspiration. As well as the literature she might have read, performances she witnessed are traceable. Yet, Hudson’s responses to music can stand alone, because they provide a significant contribution to ideas about music in late-Victorian Britain: they challenged amateurs to think about listening as self-expression and to live life in the spirit of art. In a provocative article on ‘The Amateur’ published in The Dome (1899), Hudson mused on what made her fellow audience members tick, identifying several different types of respondent: those who love delicate physiological dissipation and the massage of their nerves; those who are curious of exquisite sensations and strange musical effects; those sheep of Fashion who follow their leader whithersoever she goeth; and some few of those finer souls who take music as they would take opium – music is their second life.65

The chapter ‘Rhapsody’ in Impossibilities contains a moment of active drama that relates directly to the key question Hudson would pose two years later in ‘The Amateur’: ‘Does that music which steals on your senses like the perfumes of strange exotic flowers till you feel psychologically sick, – does it produce any effect on the musical amateur?’ After Orpheus tells Eurydice that her possibilities are limitless, Eurydice falls to the ground as she approaches Nirvana, tears handfuls of scented flowers up by the roots and exclaims: ‘I feel as if I were listening to a Dvorˇak symphony’ (IF, 156–7). Her performance does more than represent her emotions; it is an act of embodiment that transforms her life. This moment stands as the climax of Impossibilities’ musical ‘finale’ and informs the ‘encores’ in which flowers become the

63

Founded by Constance Smedley. Paul West, ‘The Dome: An Aesthetic Periodical of the 1890’s’, The Book Collector 6 (1957) 160–69. 65 Israfel, ‘The Amateur’, The Dome 2/6 (March 1899) 258; reprinted in Musical Fantasies, 213. The article is slightly revised for Musical Fantasies: ‘second life’ becomes ‘dream-life’, and ‘amateur’ becomes ‘amateurs’. 64

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sensual means for both creation and reception as they are ‘translated’ into music. In another Dome article from 1899, Hudson clarified this connection between her fictional Eurydice and the amateur listener, elaborating on this metaphor: I think there is a wide field for comment left untilled on the hither side of Criticism, somewhere about Weissnichtwo. Here is a little barren space between professional Knowledge and unprofessional Indiscrimination where the dilettante may sow his folly gladly, and bring his flowers of fancy … to fragrant imperfection.66

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The music master and ‘the Jew’ in Victorian writing: Thomas Carlyle, Richard Wagner, George Eliot and George Du Maurier Jonathan Taylor Music is by no means (as are the other arts) the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of the shadow while music speaks of the essence … Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language which is related to the universality of concepts much as they are related to the particular things.1

In The World as Will and Idea (1818), Arthur Schopenhauer sets up and epitomizes a Romantic idealization of music which will be echoed and developed by writers throughout the nineteenth century. Music, for many of these writers, is necessarily a ‘universal language’ and the ‘master art’.2 In his essay ‘The Opera’ (1852), Thomas Carlyle writes that Many thanks are due to Rowland Cotterill, Maria D. Orthodoxou, John Schad, Marion Shaw, Bryan Cheyette and Phyllis Weliver for their kind help in the preparation of this essay. 1 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, ed. David Berman, trans. Jill Berman (London: J. M. Dent, 1995) 164, 169. 2 Raymond Furness notes the ‘statements allegedly made to Bettina Brentano by Beethoven, namely that music was a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, that it was the sole gateway to a higher world of truth’. These statements demonstrate, he argues, ‘that the Romantic imagination felt the need to extol music as a second – or indeed as the only – religion. The supreme portrayal of the Romantic musician, that lonely figure who believed that music was the key to an invisible world, is Wilhelm Wackenroder’s Berlinger, who knew that the non-representational world of music reflected an ultimate reality’; Raymond Furness, Wagner and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982) 3.

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Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite; we look for moments, across the cloudy elements, into the eternal Sea of Light, when song leads and inspires us. Serious nations … have prized song and music as the highest; as a vehicle for worship, for prophecy, and for whatsoever in them was divine. Their singer was a vates, admitted to the council of the universe, friend of the gods, and choicest benefactor to man.3

Similarly, in his essay ‘Beethoven’ (1870), Carlyle’s celebrated contemporary, Richard Wagner, openly takes his lead from Schopenhauer when he argues that, in music, ‘the individual will … awakes … as the universal Will … The will feels one forthwith, above all bounds of individuality: for Hearing has opened it the gate through which the world thrusts home to it, it to the world’.4 In George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda (1874–6), Gwendolen Harleth seems to experience just such a liberation from the ‘bounds of individuality’ when listening to the musician Klesmer’s piano composition.5 Though she has just experienced a ‘sinking of heart’ in response to Klesmer’s criticism of her own singing, she seems willing to acknowledge that his music possesses what he calls a ‘sense of the universal’: He certainly … [had] an imperious magic in his fingers that seemed to send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer, and compel the strings to make a quivering lingering speech for him. Gwendolen, in spite of her wounded egoism, had fullness of nature enough to feel the power of this playing, and it gradually turned her inward sob of mortification into an excitement which lifted her for the moment into a desperate indifference about her own doings.6

‘Music’, writes Eliot elsewhere, ‘stirs all one’s devout emotions [and] 3 Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Opera’ (1852) in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899) vol. 29: 397. For further discussion of Carlyle, see Karen Tongson’s chapter in this volume. 4 As Wagner writes earlier in the essay, ‘it was Schopenhauer who first defined the position of Music among the fine arts with philosophic clearness … He starts from wonder at Music’s speaking a language immediately intelligible by everyone’; Richard Wagner, ‘Beethoven’ (1870) in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, 1896) vol. 5: 72, 65. 5 On Daniel Deronda, see also the chapters in this volume by Sophie Fuller and Irene Morra. The major new study of Eliot and music, Delia da Sousa Correa’s George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave, 2002), appeared too late to be included in the research for this study. 6 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1874–6), ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 39–40 [hereafter DD]. As Beryl Gray writes, Gwendolen’s own ‘possession of a “sense of the universal” is reflected in her response to the music of others. It manifests itself immediately after Klesmer’s attack on her song’; Beryl Gray, George Eliot and Music (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) 103.

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blends everything into harmony – makes one feel part of one whole, which one loves all alike, losing the sense of a separate self’.7 The problem with all these idealizations is that they also imply certain attendant anxieties. After all, if music is the ‘master art,’ the musician is the master of the master art and is, necessarily, disturbingly powerful. By extolling music so highly, the Victorians are often also acutely aware of, and concerned by, the power they are thus ascribing to the musical practitioner: if music can somehow induce in listeners a loss of the ‘sense of a separate self’ or a liberation from the ‘bounds of individuality’, then composers and performers must wield a dangerously potent form of mastery over others which might easily be abused. The anxiety inherent in such idealizations is that the listener might be losing a sense of separate self only for that self to be replaced by another, more masterful, ego. This is apparent in George Du Maurier’s novel, Trilby (1894), in which the musician Svengali uses mesmerism to turn Trilby into a female version of himself – into, that is, ‘La Svengali’ or ‘his Trilby … who could produce wonderful sounds … and think his thoughts and wish his wishes’.8 Subsequently, through her singing, Trilby transmits Svengali’s mesmeric mastery to her listeners, turning everyone into Svengalis; during La Svengali’s performance at Le Cirque des Bashibazoucks, ‘it was as if she said’ to her audience, ‘I am Svengali, and you shall hear nothing, see nothing, think of nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!’ (Trilby, 213). As Alison Winter notes: In the famous scenes of the novel, Svengali not only ‘conducted’ the heroine, Trilby, in her extraordinary singing performances (of which she was incapable without his influence) but actually erased her … The sinister role of the conductor-mesmerist as a malevolent demagogue in Trilby here involved a far more frightening image of mental control and the destruction of individual identity than had ever appeared earlier in the century.9

Nonetheless, Svengali only makes explicit the fears which are implied earlier in the century by such figures as the apparently benign Klesmer; Svengali’s destruction of Trilby’s individual identity – and substitution of his own – is anticipated by Klesmer’s ability to ‘lift’ Gwendolen out of her restrictive egoism.10 In listening to music, Wagner writes, ‘the 7

Quoted in ibid. x. George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894), with an introduction by Elaine Showalter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 298–9 [hereafter Trilby]. 9 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 339. 10 Like Svengali, Klesmer’s music mastery is a form of mesmeric mastery; Klesmer is also Mesmer. This is made clear by Mrs Meyrick, who declares that Klesmer ‘has magic spectacles and sees everything through them’ (DD, 417). Indeed, mesmerism is not only 8

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spellbound listener … [falls] into a state essentially akin to that of hypnotic clairvoyance [and] … it is in this state … that we belong immediately to the musician’s world’.11 Again, though describing here the hypnotic effect of music in seemingly positive terms, Wagner unwittingly foreshadows the problem with musical mesmerism which Svengali later reveals: by freeing the subject from ‘a sense of a separate self’, the musical mesmerist may merely be imposing his own, more masterful individuality upon that subject. Indeed, as Michael Tanner points out, Nietzsche’s main criticism of Wagner himself is that he ‘turns his listeners/spectators into accomplices. Becoming a Wagnerian is, at least incipiently, becoming like Wagner’.12 In this way, it would seem that the nineteenth-century music master frees listeners from their own selves merely to impose different individualistic bounds, and that the ‘sense of the universal’, or ‘Infinite’ which Schopenhauer, Carlyle, Wagner, Eliot and many others demand from music must be wholly absent from Svengali’s egocentric musicianship. Phyllis Weliver, however, makes an important distinction when she points out that ‘Svengali’s desire to be “the master” musician (Trilby, 46) can be denounced as an egotistic orientation, but this does not necessarily lead to a similar critique of the music-making’,13 and, indeed, the music produced by Svengali and La Svengali is frequently described by Du Maurier in exactly the same Schopenhauerian terms Svengali himself would seem to invalidate. This is clear, for example, in Du Maurier’s description of the effect on Little Billee of Svengali’s performance on ‘the penny whistle’: He had never heard such music as this, never dreamed such music was possible. He was conscious, while it lasted, that he saw deeper into the beauty, the sadness of things, the very heart of them … as with a new, inner eye – even into eternity itself, beyond the veil – a vague cosmic vision. (Trilby, 23–4)

Something similar takes place when La Svengali’s music comes to express ‘a … universal motherhood’ (212, my italics). On both the ‘magic’ in his ‘spectacles’, it is also the ‘imperious magic in his fingers’, given the fact that mesmerism often depended on both the eyes and fingers of the mesmerist. 11 Wagner, ‘Beethoven’, 75, my italics. The association of Wagner’s music with mesmerism has often been made, both in positive and negative terms. Wagner himself may well have initiated this analogy since, as Winter notes, he ‘brushed up on animal magnetism to prepare for writing a number of his operas’ (Winter, Mesmerized, 314–5), and there is evidence of this in the plots of his dramas. 12 Michael Tanner, Wagner (London: Harper Collins, 1996) 18. 13 Phyllis Weliver, ‘Music, Crowd Control and the Female Performer in Trilby’, this volume: 71–72. For further discussion of Trilby, see also the chapter by Irene Morra in this volume.

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occasions, Du Maurier appropriates the discourse of Romanticism in order to define a ‘cosmic’ kind of music, expressing at the same time a Victorian, or post-Romantic, suspicion of the power this pseudoreligious idealization attributes to the musical practitioner. After Svengali’s ‘cosmic’ performance on the penny whistle, his mastery over his listeners is such that he can ‘leer … on his dumb-struck audience’, declaring to them, ‘it was lost, the bel canto – but I found it, in a dream – I, and nobody else – I – Svengali – I – I – I!’ (24). If, as a music master, Svengali can render his audience ‘dumb-struck’ before his egocentric assertions of self, he is able to do so because of the ambivalent view of music itself in the novel, which somehow manages to combine and express both a universal ‘cosmic vision’ and an absolute ‘I’. It is this ambivalent vision of music and, indeed, music mastery which I particularly want to explore in this essay. Music, it seems, often induces a ‘loss of the sense of separate self’ in its listeners only to replace that self with an other self which is somehow both absolutely egocentric and absolutely universal. If, as Winter writes, the musical mesmerist has the power of ‘making … many people into one [self]’,14 this is the universalizing ‘self’ of the mob; by being ‘dumbstruck’, Svengali’s audiences are surely turned into what Carlyle calls in his essay ‘The Nigger Question’ (1849) ‘the big, dumb, universal genius of Chaos’.15 Music here is expressive of the relationship of the demagogue with the mob; as Weliver remarks of La Svengali’s performances, ‘her voice seduces the audience in the same way that mobs are influenced by leaders’.16 Nietzsche’s criticism of Wagner accords with this pattern: Nietzsche accuses Wagner of pandering to the mob when he asks, ‘on whom are [Wagner’s] … effects achieved? On those whom a noble artist should never impress: on the mass, on the immature, on the blasé, on the sick, on the idiots, on Wagnerians!’17 Winter argues that the modern figure of the conductor – one of the most famous of whom was, of course, Wagner himself – is a particularly suspicious figure in this respect. She suggests that ‘the resemblance … conductors bore to problematic figures such as the Napoleonic demagogue and the mesmerist suggests one reason … [why] Britain was slow to accept such an obviously useful technique’.18

14

Winter, Mesmerized, 342. Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Nigger Question’ (1849, rev. 1853) in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 29: 361, my italics. 16 Weliver, ‘Music, Crowd Control and the Female Performer in Trilby’, 74. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1889) in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971) 667. 18 Winter, Mesmerized, 310. 15

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The association of the musical demagogue with Napoleon is part of a bourgeois, Victorian agenda which attempts to other the mob leader; in so many ways, however, the mastery of the conductor and, indeed, of Svengali is not foreign to Victorian Britain, but is actually a summation of modern, bourgeois rule. Indeed, in Carlylean terms, it is the mesmeric mob-master who is identified with the spread of modern democracy, while ‘the Napoleonic demagogue’ would seem to be a contradiction in terms. For Carlyle, it is the Napoleonic hero who is foreign to democratic mastery – the demagogue is neither Napoleonic nor alien to democracy.19 In ‘Shooting Niagara’ (1867), Carlyle cites the unNapoleonic Benjamin Disraeli as an example of the democratic demagogue; he describes him as ‘a superlative Hebrew Conjuror, [who is] spell-binding all the great Lords, great Parties, great Interests of England … [and] leading them by the nose, like helpless mesmerised somnambulant cattle’ towards what Carlyle calls ‘the Niagara Rapids’ of the Second Reform Act (1867).20 This description is strikingly reminiscent of the ways in which Herr Kreutzer, Lord Witlow and Svengali himself describe the mesmeric effects of Svengali’s music on the ruling classes – as Daniel Pick points out, it is certainly possible ‘to detect in the “i” that ends Svengali, direct echoes of … Disraeli’, who provided ‘the most conspicuous instance of … entwined racial and mesmeric imagery … before Svengali’.21 Early on in Du Maurier’s novel, for instance, Svengali sounds like Carlyle’s description of Disraeli when he predicts that, at some time in the future, [He] will go to London … and hundreds of beautiful Englanderinnen will see and hear and go mad with love for him – Prinzessen, Comtessen, Serene English Altessen. They will soon lose their Serenity and their Highness when they hear Svengali! (Trilby, 74)

Later on, Svengali partially realises these aims through Trilby; as ‘Herr Kreutzer, the famous composer’ remarks, ‘I heard … [La Svengali] in St Betersburg … Ze vomen all vent mat, and pulled off zeir bearls and tiamonts and kave zem to her – vent town on zeir knees and gried and gissed her hants’. Again, the ‘young Lord Witlow’ declares that, after La

19 Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the heroes described in Carlyle’s book, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840). In ‘Chartism’ (1839), Carlyle notes that, precisely because they were heroes, Napoleon and Cromwell eventually ‘had to chain democracy under their feet, and become despots over it’; Thomas Carlyle, ‘Chartism’ in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 29: 159. 20 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Shooting Niagara: And After?’ (1867) in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 30: 11, 10. 21 Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) 73, 131.

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Svengali sang in Warsaw, ‘All the fellows went mad and gave her their watches and diamond studs and gold scarf-pins … I gave her a little German-silver vinaigrette’ (170–71). The master-class are mesmerized by Svengali and his ‘wife’ into surrendering the symbols of their power – their diamonds, silver and ‘gold scarf-pins’. Just as Disraeli’s mesmeric parliamentary mastery threatens to destroy the mastery of the ‘great Lords, great Parties, great Interests of England’, Svengali’s mesmeric music mastery undermines the aristocratic and financial power of his listeners, who consequently lose ‘their Serenity and their Highness’. Furthermore, Svengali’s mastery is also destructive of all other music mastery. Not only does he ‘despise … all other musicians, living or dead’, but ‘Svengalismus’, according to Herr Blagner, ‘[is] death and destruction to all true music; since [it] … place[s] Mozart and Beethoven, and even himself, on a level with Bellini, Donizetti, [and] Offenbach’ (Trilby, 41, 221).22 Svengali and Carlyle’s Disraeli use their mesmeric powers to equalize and homogenize everyone alike; in both cases, mesmerism constitutes a form of democratization – the very form of democratization, in fact, which is derided by Carlyle when he writes that ‘certainly, by any ballot-box, Jesus Christ goes just as far as Judas Iscariot’.23 Indeed, in this respect, both Svengali and Disraeli recall Nietzsche’s depiction of Wagner in Nietzsche Contra Wagner. In the same way that Svengali mesmerizes his aristocratic audience and Disraeli turns the old Lords into ‘mesmerised somnambulant cattle’, Nietzsche’s Wagner transforms his individual listeners into mere ‘voting cattle’: ‘one leaves oneself at home when one goes to Bayreuth’, remarks Nietzsche, ‘[and] in the theatre [there] one becomes people, herd female, pharisee, voting cattle, patron, idiot, Wagnerian’.24 For Nietzsche, Carlyle and Du Maurier, the loss of mastery and self-hood implied by music and mesmerism is equated with democracy and democratic mobmastery. It may seem peculiar that Svengali and Disraeli appeal to a discourse of democratization and equalization; after all, they are both said to be asserting an egocentric and autocratic power over those they mesmerize which is seemingly at odds with the notion of democracy. Carlyle 22 ‘Herr Blagner’ is, of course, a pseudonym for Wagner. Likewise, in La Svengali’s performances, ‘it was as if she said: “See! what does the composer count for? … The “Nussbaum” [of Robert Schumann] is neither better nor worse than “Mon ami Pierrot” when I am the singer; for I am Svengali!’ (Trilby, 213). 23 Carlyle, ‘The Nigger Question’, 363. As he writes, to ‘decide by count of heads’, means that ‘the vote of a Demerara Nigger [is] equal and no more to that of a Chancellor Bacon: [and] this, I perceive, will … give the minimum of wisdom in your proceedings’ (ibid. 362). 24 Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 665–6.

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describes Disraeli as ‘the most ambitious of living men [who] … believes in nothing whatever but success’,25 whilst Du Maurier notes that Svengali’s egocentric music mastery is based on ‘his love of himself as a master of his art – the master’ (Trilby, 41). For Carlyle, however, democracy necessarily shares with capitalism an implicit discourse of self-interest. In the Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Carlyle argues that ‘ “enfranchisement” [and] “emancipation” … translated into practical language [are] the cutting asunder of human relations … Let us all be “free” of one another; we shall then be happy. Free, without bond or connection except that of cash payment’.26 For Carlyle, democratic emancipation amounts only to capitalist self-interest; it is the modern, democratic demagogue, who seems to have the support of the people, who really rules for self-interest. Svengali’s music mastery suggests, then, an all-too-familiar democracy based on self-worship, self-interest and capitalism. Svengali’s music is the music of democracy, self-interest, capitalism, equalization, a music which expresses a very different kind of universality to that which Schopenhauer has in mind. If Schopenhauer cannot conceive of such a music, however, this is precisely the kind of music to which Carlyle refers when he writes that ‘this universal big black Democracy … [involves a] multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody from the universal foolish human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever’. The psalmody of democracy is, according to Carlyle, ‘monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos’.27 As far as Carlyle is concerned, the cacophonous and chaotic music of democracy seems to anticipate the ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ to use the famous phrase coined in the twentieth century by Arnold Schoenberg.28 After all, just as Carlylean democracy equalizes and homogenizes everyone alike, Schoenberg’s mid-period atonality theoretically presupposes the absolute equalization and ‘democratization’ of the twelve notes used. Admittedly, Schoenberg himself refuted any such political connections for his later, twelve-note method of composition because of its highly structured form, but the language used to describe all kinds of post-tonal or atonal music often 25 Quoted in T. Peter Park, ‘Thomas Carlyle and the Jews’, Journal of European Studies 20/1 (1990) 10. 26 Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 20: 24. 27 Ibid. 10, 5. 28 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Opinion or Insight?’ (1926) in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 258.

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seems to slip into political metaphor.29 Despite Schoenberg’s protestations, his own use of the term ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ is the obvious example in this respect, and writers on Schoenberg often follow suit, their musical theorizations inevitably shading into, or gesturing towards, the political. According to the pianist and music critic Charles Rosen, for instance, Schoenberg overthrew the traditional ‘tonal hierarchy’; Rosen asserts that ‘it was Schoenberg’s genius to have recognised … the dispossession of the principal means of musical expression [cadential resolution] by the new force of what had been a subordinate and contributing element [undifferentiated tonal space]’.30 By emancipating the dissonance, that is, Schoenberg disempowers the traditional expectation of dissonance progressing to consonance, letting dissonance instead exist freely for itself within twelve-note space – consequently throwing over the ‘old hierarchy’ of harmonic patterns associated with tonality. Despite or because of Schoenberg himself, this is clearly why, as Ben Watson claims, ‘for proletarian modernists, the end of tonality was not tragedy but joy’:31 the emancipation of the dissonance enacts the democratic emancipation of those previously subordinated, such as the proletariat. It also enacts, in some symbolic way, the emancipation of the Jew; after all, Schoenberg was himself a Jew. In a notorious essay ‘Judaism in Music’ (1850), Wagner describes Jewish speech and music in terms of dissonance: We are repelled … by the purely aural aspect of Jewish speech … The shrill, sibilant buzzing of [the Jew’s] … voice falls strangely and unpleasantly on our ears … [Similarly,] however sublime we may care to imagine [the] … musical religious service [of the Jew] … we cannot fail to notice that it has not come down to us in its purity … Who has not had feelings of repulsion, horror and amusement on hearing that nonsensical gurgling, yodelling and cackling which no attempt at caricature can render more absurd than it is?32 29 In 1947 Schoenberg remarked that ‘there are people who call the method of composing with twelve tones “bolshevik”. They pretend that in a “set of twelve tones”, upon which such compositions are founded, since there is no tonic nor dominant, every tone is considered independent, and consequently exerts equal functions. This is wrong in every respect … [The] concept … has nothing in common with “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”, neither with the Bolshevik, fascist, nor any other totalitarian brand’; Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Is it Fair?’ (1947) in Style and Idea, 249–50. 30 Charles Rosen, Schoenberg (Glasgow: Fontana, 1976) 70, 80, my italics. 31 Ben Watson, ‘Backwoods Musicology: Roger Scruton’s Aesthetics of Music’, Radical Philosophy 99 (2000) 5. 32 Richard Wagner, ‘Judaism in Music’ (1850) in Richard Wagner: Stories and Essays, ed. Charles Osborne (London: Peter Owen, 1973) 28–32. Based as it is on a common stereotype, Wagner’s description of Jewish speech is very similar to Du Maurier’s description of Svengali’s voice, which ‘was very thin and mean and harsh, and often broke into a disagreeable falsetto’ (Trilby, 11).

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What seems to concern Wagner most, however, is the dissonance of the emancipated and assimilated Jew, whom he calls the ‘cultured Jew’. For Wagner, the cultured Jew’s contribution to Western music is just as cacophonous as the Hebraic ‘musical religious service’: ‘the Jew’s … creations necessarily appear to us strange, cold, peculiar, listless, unnatural and distorted. Thus the works of Jewish music often produce in us the kind of effect we would derive from hearing a poem by Goethe translated into the Jewish jargon we know as Yiddish’.33 Wagner’s assertions depend, of course, upon an opposition between a genuinely Western musical ‘language’ – the music of what he calls the German Volk (folk), for example – and its appropriation by the ‘cultured Jew’. Likewise, in her essay, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ (1879), Eliot discusses the ‘danger’ posed by the ‘premature fusion [of the English] with immigrants of alien [in this case Jewish] blood’ in terms of its adverse effect on Western – in this case English – language and music: To one who loves his [sic] native language, who would delight to keep our rich and harmonious English undefiled by foreign accent, foreign intonation, and those foreign tinctures of verbal meaning which tend to confuse all writing and discourse, it is an affliction as harrassing as the climate … to hear our beloved English with its words clipped, its vowels stretched and twisted, its phrases of acquiescence and politeness of cordiality, dissidence or argument, delivered always in the wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marred beyond recognition.34

One such ‘ill-rendered melody’ is Klesmer’s ‘fantasia’ in Daniel Deronda, which seems to Gwendolen to be ‘an extensive commentary on some melodic ideas not too grossly evident’ (DD, 39) – and, significantly enough, Klesmer is, of course, part-Jewish. As Wagner writes, The fact that the Jew speaks modern European languages only as learnt and not as a native, makes it impossible for him ever to speak colloquially, authoritatively or from the depths of his being … [Thus,] it is understandably in song … that the offensive peculiarity of the Jewish nature reaches its peak.35

Music, it seems, necessarily exposes the Jew’s ‘offensive peculiarity’, or other-ness to his ‘adopted culture’. Gustav Mahler – a Jew who was born in Bohemia just like Klesmer – points up the opposition between Jewish music and the music of the

33

Wagner, ‘Judaism in Music’, 33. George Eliot, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ (1879) in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1879) 283–4, my italics. 35 Wagner, ‘Judaism in Music’, 27–9. 34

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German Volk in his First Symphony (1885–8). The third movement alternates a canonic funeral march based on the German folk-tune ‘Brother Martin’ (also known as ‘Frère Jacques’) with grotesque episodes which include references to Jewish popular music. Mahler, that is, pits German music against its supposed other – a Jewish Klezmer band, as it is fascinatingly known.36 The D minor tonality of the ‘Brother Martin’ theme is firmly established, while the irregular, ‘Jewish’ interruptions are highly dissonant and exhibit a considerable degree of chromaticism. Nevertheless, the two ideas are gradually superimposed onto each other and thereby combined during the movement – like Eliot’s musician Klesmer, who is partly a ‘combination of the German … and the Semite’, Mahler’s stylized Klezmer band is at once both alien to and indistinguishable from the German Volk. In both Eliot and Mahler, the music master encodes in himself and his music the emancipation and intertwining of the Semitic into the German. Indeed, the opposition between the Germanic and the Semitic that Wagner seeks to uphold deconstructs itself: Wagner was concerned that his own father might just have been Jewish. As Goldman and Sprinchorn note: Like his hero Siegfried, Wagner was troubled … by the uncertainty of his paternity. His putative father was a police actuary who died shortly after Wagner’s birth. Soon afterward his mother married … Ludwig Geyer, an assimilated Jew … Wagner … concluded … that Geyer was his natural father.37

Ironically, Wagner’s attempt to other the Jew is simultaneously an act of ‘Jewish self-hatred’, to use Theodor Lessing’s famous concept.38 His attack on Jewish music is also an attack on his own. After all, if Schoenberg’s ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ somehow enacts the 36 As Shirley Levenson notes, ‘Klesmer … means “musician” in Yiddish’; Shirley Frank Levenson, ‘The Use of Music in Daniel Deronda’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (1969) 317. It also means ‘music’, and refers back particularly to so-called Jewish Klezmer bands or ‘klezmorim’. As Schlomo Hofman states, the word comes from the name given to ‘a performing musician in the German ghettos and in many Jewish communities in eastern Europe. The klezmorim were professional musicians, generally of a high standard, who entertained at such festive occasions as weddings, circumcision feasts and social events … In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they often played the double bass, clarinet and trumpet’; Schlomo Hofman, ‘Klezmer’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1st edn, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980) vol. 10: 108. The clarinet and the trumpet are noticeably prominent in the ‘Jewish’ sections of Mahler’s symphony. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1 in D major, miniature score ed. Hans F. Redlich (London: Ernst Eulenberg, 1964). 37 Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn, Introduction to Wagner on Music and Drama: A Selection from Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, ed. Goldman and Sprinchorn, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Victor Gollancz, 1977) 11–12. 38 Quoted in Furness, Wagner and Literature, 95.

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emancipation of the Jew, this process of emancipation can quite easily be traced back to Wagner’s music. If, in his atonal works, Schoenberg is merely extending Mahler’s erosion of tonality to its logical conclusion, Mahler is, in turn, merely utilizing and extending the extreme chromaticism of such works as Tristan and Isolde (1854–5). As Rosen suggests, ‘simple tonal explanations of certain sections of the later works of Wagner often break down … The new ability, through chromaticism and dissonance, to suspend the clear sense of key in certain passages or even for pages was eroding the lucid hierarchical structure of the triads’.39 The loss of this hierarchical structure is also the loss of what is often called a ‘home’ key, or triad in music; atonal music has no sense of final resolution, no return home. In this sense, atonal and even heavilychromatic music functions as a metaphor for the Jewish Diaspora: the ‘homelessness’ of certain parts of Wagner’s and Mahler’s music also encodes the homelessness of the Jewish nation in the nineteenth century. Eliot’s Klesmer is himself subject to this homelessness; at one point, he denies any nationality and proclaims himself ‘the Wandering Jew’ (DD, 206) – the figure who, according to Schopenhauer, is ‘nothing but the personification of the whole Jewish race’.40 As is observed in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the ‘Wandering Jew [is a] figure in Christian legend condemned to wander by Jesus until his second coming for having rebuffed or struck him on his way to the crucifixion’; various versions of the legend portray the Wandering Jew ‘as a fully-fledged personification of the Jewish people’.41 The force of this figure is seen in the fact that it is not only Klesmer who calls himself ‘the Wandering Jew’, but also Mahler: ‘I am’, he proclaimed, ‘thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian amongst Germans, as a Jew throughout the world. Always an intruder, never welcomed’.42 As modern ‘homeless’ musicians, Klesmer and Mahler are in agreement with Nietzsche who, as Borchmeyer notes, thought that ‘all artists were Wandering Jews’.43 Nietzsche implies that the modern artist is always 39

Rosen, Schoenberg, 38–9, my italics. Quoted in Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. Stewart Spencer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) 204. 41 Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Cecil Roth (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1971) vol. 16: 259–61. 42 Quoted in Deryck Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to his Music (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) 7. Mahler wrote of himself, ‘I am a musician wandering without a lodestar through the desolate night of contemporary music, exposed to all the dangers of doubt and confusion’; quoted in Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler, trans. Inge Goodwin (London: Allen Lane, 1973) 59. 43 Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, 204. 40

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marked by homelessness and Jewishness; indeed, for all his antisemitism, it is Wagner who, in the figures of Kundry in Parsifal (1882) and the Flying Dutchman (1843), arguably portrays the Wandering Jew’s movement – or wandering – between the status of victim or villain to modern artist-hero, and between alienated, Jewish outsider to personification of the (German) Volk. In A Communication to My Friends (1851), Wagner writes: The figure of the ‘Flying Dutchman’ is the mythical creation of the Folk: a primal trait of human nature speaks out from it with heartenthralling force. This trait, in its most universal meaning, is the longing after rest from amid the storms of life … The Christian, without a home on earth, embodied this trait in the figure of the ‘Wandering Jew’: for that wanderer, forever doomed to a long-since outlived life, without an aim, without a joy, there bloomed no earthly ransom; death was the sole remaining goal of all his strivings; his only hope, the laying-down of being.44

As a kind of Wandering Jew, it is certainly clear, then, that the modern music master expresses a version of the ‘Infinite’, the universal, the eternal. ‘The Melodies Eternal’45 that Carlyle and so many others demand from music are encoded within the Wandering Jew, but as eternal damnation, not salvation. When Carlyle suggests that behind the expensive show of the modern Opera-house ‘stalks the shadow of Eternal Death’, this is the shadow of the Wandering Jew – just as it is the Wandering Jew’s music which stares ‘too truly down towards Falsity, Vacuity, and the dwelling-place of Everlasting Despair’.46 Damnation is the other, negative or tragic infinitude, universality and eternity which besets the modern music master, and the Wandering Jew’s eternal damnation, or inability to find salvation, can thus be equated with the modern musician’s inability to posit an absolute and secure tonal homecoming in his/her music. It follows that, by inducing in Gwendolen a loss of ‘the sense of a separate self’, Klesmer’s music is actually turning her into a Wandering Jew as well. What underlies the portrayal of music in texts such as Daniel Deronda and Trilby is the anxiety that, by releasing the self from the ‘bounds of individuality’, modern music might be turning its listeners into Wandering Jews. This anxiety is most obvious in Deronda’s first experience of the synagogue: Deronda hears in this music the possibility of a ‘Day of Reconciliation’ (DD, 311) between religions and races but this day

44 Richard Wagner, A Communication to My Friends (1851) in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 1: 307, my italics. 45 Carlyle, ‘The Opera’, 402. 46 Ibid. 402.

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would surely imply the transformation of everyone into a Wandering Jew, as would, in a sense, Mordecai’s belief in ‘the ultimate unity of mankind’ (628), and even Wagner’s affirmation of a future in which a ‘free mankind [is] delivered from every shackle of hampering nationality’.47 For Eliot, the anxiety implied by the future unity of mankind is that such a unity might slip all too easily into what she calls elsewhere ‘a spirit of universal alienism (euphemistically called cosmopolitianism)’,48 in which there are no homes – no local, religious or national identities – just an alienated multitude of Wandering Jews. Phyllis Weliver points out that in certain Victorian novels, ‘music … provides a social gateway’ through which ‘professional musicians [can] overcome social ostracism’ and otherness; but this acceptance of ‘ostracised “others” ’,49 this erosion of the boundaries between self and other, is also worrying for many nineteenth-century writers, insofar as it might just mean the universal diffusion of otherness. Likewise, Klesmer’s musical dream of ‘a fusion of the races’ (206) is, in truth, born of Klesmer’s own homelessness: his music only possesses a ‘sense of the universal’ because he is a Wandering Jew himself. The universality of Klesmer’s music is that of a ‘universal alienism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’ which has reference to no local or national ‘home’ precisely because he has no local or national home. The converse of this is Vincenzo Bellini’s music, which Klesmer derides as ‘the passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon’ (39); Bellini’s music, to put this another way, possesses a national and empirical identity which is unavailable to Klesmer. As Wagner writes, ‘the Jew speaks the language of the country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as a foreigner … [in much the same way that] the Jewish musician fling[s] together the various forms and styles of all composers and eras’.50 Bryan Magee seeks to rationalize Wagner’s argument: The ghettoes of Western Europe had only begun to be opened in the wake of the French Revolution, and their abolition was going on throughout the nineteenth century. The Jewish composers of Wagner’s day were among the very first emancipated Jews, pastless in the society in which they were living and working … In composing … music … they were turning their backs on a distinctive and entirely different musical tradition of their own. So their art could not possibly be ‘the conscious and proclaimed

47

Richard Wagner, Wagner on Music and Drama, 65. Eliot, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, 281–2. 49 Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 252. 50 Wagner, ‘Judaism in Music’, 27, 33. 48

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unconscious’ [of the Volk] which Wagner believed all great art to be.51

During what Magee calls this ‘transition period’, the Jewish music master is incapable of serving the Volk because he is alienated from it. For Carlyle, the ideal master is he who is his people’s ‘servant … who can suffer from them, and for them; bear the burden their poor spindlelimbs totter and stagger under; and, in virtue of being their servant govern them, lead them out of weakness into strength, out of defeat into victory’,52 but, according to Magee and, by implication, Wagner, the nineteenth-century Jewish music master simply cannot serve his country’s Volk because he is not fully integrated into that country or Volk. He simply cannot be a great music master like Tyrtaeus who, according to Carlyle, served his fellow Spartans by singing ‘of the need of beating back one’s country’s enemies’.53 From a Wagnerian perspective, rather, the Jewish music master is an emancipated servant who serves only himself. In this sense, the Wandering Jew is representative of what Carlyle calls ‘nomadic’54 servitude: the Wandering Jew becomes a model of the self-interested, masterless – and, therefore, homeless – servant Carlyle finds in modern capitalism. In ‘The Nigger Question’, Carlyle writes, for instance, of London’s ‘thirty-thousand … mutinous Serving-maids, who, instead of learning to work and to obey, learned to give warning’, and, because of this, ‘have tumbled from one stage of folly to the other stage; and at last are on the street’.55 These ‘mutinous Serving-maids’ are made homeless, that is, by nomadic capitalism. For Carlyle, the kind of ‘White Flunky’ promoted by capitalism is ‘disloyal, unheroic [and] … inhuman in his character, and his work, and his position … He is the flower of nomadic servitude, proceeding by month’s warning, and free supply-anddemand’.56 The wandering, nomadic, capitalist servant loses any heroic or human identity because his attachment to an other, and thus to a home, is so subject to change; the nomadic servant’s masterlessness means that his potential signification as hero or even human being wanders aimlessly and endlessly. The failure of capitalist, ‘nomadic’ hierarchies to bestow meaning on servants is analogous to the Wandering Jew’s inability to find salvation:

51 52

Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 38–9. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843) in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 10:

91. 53

Carlyle, ‘The Opera’, 398. Carlyle, ‘The Nigger Question’, 364. 55 Ibid. 366. 56 Ibid. 364. 54

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both are caused by a repudiation of absolute, fixed mastery. For Carlyle, the Wandering Jew’s denial of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa is paradigmatic of the denial of all true mastery in the nineteenth century. This is clear from the example of capitalist nomadism he cites in ‘The Nigger Question’ – those ‘mutinous Serving-maids’, whom he describes as ‘hapless enfranchised White Women, who took the “freedom” to serve the Devil with their faculties, instead of serving God or man’.57 Emancipation from fixed, patriarchal mastery is ultimately emancipation from God or Christ, and this, for Carlyle, is the subtext of modern, capitalist and democratic society. Indeed, he posits a Jewish origin for democracy when he recycles, in the Latter-Day Pamphlets, that oft-repeated accusation that the Jews committed deicide: A certain People, once upon a time, clamorously voted by overwhelming majority, ‘Not he; Barabbas, not he!’ … Well, they got Barabbas; and they got, of course, such guidance as Barabbas and the like of him could give them; and, of course, they stumbled ever downwards and devilwards, in their truculent stiffnecked way; and – and, at this hour, after eighteen centuries of sad fortune, they prophetically sing ‘Ou’ clo’!’ in all the cities of the world. Might the world … understand their song a little!58

Once again, the figure of the Wandering Jew is taken as a symbol of the whole Jewish race: in the same way that the legendary Ahasuerus is cursed for repudiating Christ on the Via Dolorosa, all Jews, according to Carlyle, are cursed to be wanderers, stumbling ‘ever downwards and devilwards’, because of the ‘vote’ in which they first condemned Christ to be crucified. Indeed, Carlyle believes that, ever since, this ‘vote’ has continually been replayed in the ‘song’ of the Wandering Jewish race, which therefore constitutes a recurrent reassertion of ‘prosperous Semblances’ (‘old clothes’) over ‘the Supreme Fact’59 of Jesus Christ. For Carlyle, the Jews wander and stumble ‘downwards and devilwards’, endlessly re-echoing the song-vote with which they first denied Jesus’s mastery in a kind of hopeless and godless repetition-compulsion. In this context, the ‘song’ of the Jewish music master is always a negation of meaning and Supreme Fact. The song of the Jewish music master is merely a hopeless repetition of that first act of ‘deicide’ or master-cide of Christ by the Jewish people. When Nietszche argues, then, that all modern artists are Wandering Jews, this is because all artists are somehow implicated in the accusation that the Jews had committed deicide; modern artists merely 57

Ibid. 366. Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, 33–4. 59 Ibid. 33. 58

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repeat the song of the Jewish people over and over again. Wagner writes of a ‘Jewish character actor’ [who] has done away with the poetic figures in Shakespeare, Schiller, and so on, and has substituted creatures of his own. One’s impression is as though the Saviour had been cut out of a painting of the Crucifixion, and replaced by a Jewish demagogue.60

While, for Wagner, the ‘old masters’ expressed worship for the Saviour, the Jewish artist commits a displaced form of deicide by expressing worship only for the self. Indeed, in Carlylean terms, the (capitalist and democratic) self-interest of the artist is a kind of deicide. This conceit is encoded and problematized in the artists in Daniel Deronda, where the Princess Halm-Eberstein’s singing career depends on her ‘escaping from bondage’ to her father by ‘a contrivance which would bend … all to the satisfaction of self’ (DD, 541, 568); her status as a self-interested, capitalist artist is founded on her reunciation of her father’s mastery. The Princess’s career is based, that is, on an act of displaced patricide, or master-cide – after all, it is only after her father has died that, as she says, ‘I had my way’ (543). Likewise, once in London, the Jewish singer Mirah Lapidoth proclaims to Deronda, ‘I want to do something to get money’, a capitalist aspiration which is made possible by her running away from Prague, where, she admits, ‘my heart [had] turned against my father’ (315, 187). By renouncing their fathers’ mastery, both the Princess and Mirah become capitalist nomads or Wandering, musical Jews – this, in fact, is surely the nature of the paternal ‘curse’ under which the Princess labours as her singing career takes her ‘from one country to another’ (540, 537). After leaving her father, Mirah says that everything ‘seemed all a weary wandering and heart-loneliness … I thought of my People, how they had been driven from land to land and been afflicted, and multitudes had died of misery in their wandering – was I the first?’ (189). What is different, though, about these artists is that their status as Wandering Jews is constituted not by renouncing Christ or Christianity, but actually by renouncing the patriarchal mastery of traditional Judaism; in Daniel Deronda, it is the cultured, Westernized Jew who is Ahasuerus. In this, Eliot is unwittingly closer to Wagner than Carlyle. Though, ironically enough, baptized into Christianity, it is the Princess, and not the staunchly Jewish Mordecai, who is the epitome of capitalism’s patricidal-cum-deicidal nomadism. This is not, of course, to claim that Eliot unproblematically condemns the Princess’s renunciation of an oppressive patriarchy, but, rather, that

60

Wagner, ‘Judaism in Music’, 27.

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the Princess’s almost total egocentrism is the ultimate expression of the nomadism which Carlyle finds in capitalist, democratic emancipation. Just as Carlyle argues that ‘ “emancipation” … [is] the cutting asunder of human relations’, so the Princess herself declares to Deronda, ‘when your father died, I resolved that I would have no more ties, but such as I could free myself from’ (DD, 543). Again, just as Carlyle finds capitalist nomadism ‘in every human relation, from that of husband and wife down to that of master and servant’,61 the Princess represents a point of intersection between all of these forms of nomadic relations. The Princess embodies in the text the consummation of capitalist, democratic, pseudo-deicidal emancipation, resisting and rebuffing as she does not only patriarchal mastery, but Christian mastery, Jewish mastery and European racial mastery. It is, then, ironically the female, cosmopolitan, musical Wandering Jew who is a paradigmatic and central figure of modern democratic capitalism. As Borchmeyer notes, for the nineteenth century, ‘Ahasuerus [was] one of the great symbolic figures of the age’.62 Admittedly, Borchmeyer’s emphasis is on the male Ahasuerus – despite the obvious traces of the legend in Wagner’s portrayal of Kundry – but it seems clear that the Jewish artist, whether female or male, is not just marginal to Western society, as Wagner implies in ‘Judaism in Music’, but is also subversively fundamental and central to it. This doubleness is presumably due to the Jew’s ambivalent position in European culture; as Bryan Cheyette observes, Unlike marginalised ‘colonial subjects’ who were, for the most part, confined racially to the ‘colonies’ in the late nineteenth century, Jews were, simultaneously, at the centre of European metropolitan society and, at the same time, banished from its privileged sphere by a semitic discourse.63

Indeed, though Wagner attempts to banish the Jewish from the Germanic, he too undermines such distinctions by simultaneously portraying the Jew as a central figure of ‘European metropolitan society’. He argues that ‘as the world is constituted today, the Jew is more than emancipated, he is the ruler. And he will continue to rule as long as money remains the power to which all our activities are subjugated’.64 In artistic and in general terms, it would seem that, for Wagner, the Jew is the master of ‘the world [as it] is constituted today’. Mikhail Bakunin, an 61

Carlyle, ‘The Nigger Question’, 368. Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, 194. 63 Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 12. 64 Wagner, ‘Judaism in Music’, 25. 62

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anarcho-communist who greatly influenced Wagner, echoes many of his contemporaries by associating bourgeois mastery with Jewish hegemony: ‘the Jews’, he declares, ‘are the exploiters par excellence of all other peoples’ labours’;65 the Jews, it seems, are the echt-bourgeoisie, echtcapitalists and echt-democratic masters. In her essay, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, even Eliot comes close to the anti-semites in this suspicion of the Jewishness of modern mastery: At this moment [1879], the leader of the Liberal party in Germany is a Jew, the leader of the Republican party in France is a Jew, and the head of the Conservative ministry in England is a Jew. And here it is that we find the ground for the obvious jealousy which is now stimulating the revived expression of old antipathies. ‘The Jews’, it is felt, ‘have a dangerous tendency to get the uppermost places not only in commerce but in political life’ … There is truth in these views of Jewish social and political relations.66

This ‘truth’ is represented in both Du Maurier’s Svengali and Eliot’s Klesmer: both encode a fear that the modern artist, democrat, capitalist, liberal, demagogue and bourgeois master are all in some way necessarily ‘Jewish’; that, in fact, democracy and capitalism are Jewish conspiracies. According to Carlyle, the Jewish race is always repeating its song-vote for Barrabas over the ‘Supreme Fact’ of Jesus Christ, just as democracy and capitalism are always symbolically repeating the act of deicide and reasserting masterlessness, or – which is the same thing for Carlyle – the sham-mastery of Jews like Barabbas. For Carlyle, continual deicide, master-cide and the imposition of sham-mastery form the ‘origin, [and] the fatal necessity, of modern Democracy everywhere’.67 In this way, democracy is a continual, ever-repeating pseudo-apocalypse, a continual crucifixion of true mastery, producing in Britain what Carlyle calls ‘a hideous living Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive’.68 Carlyle believes that it is total equality and democratic ‘emancipation’ which allow the sham, non-European master to gain control of a society, because democracy removes from society any kind of Christian, patriarchal, divinely-ordained, heroic, aristocratic, racial and transcendental hierarchy, and substitutes instead an anarchic, ‘apocalyptic democracy’,69 to use a telling phrase of Bruce Robbins. As Carlyle writes, 65 Quoted in Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) 62. Significantly enough, ‘the original Siegfried [in the Ring] was … modelled on Bakunin’; Goldman and Sprinchorn, Introduction, 21. 66 Eliot, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, 282. 67 Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, 22. 68 Ibid. 27. 69 Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction From Below (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) 171.

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Let no man in particular be put at the top; let all men be accounted equally wise and worthy, and the notion get abroad that anybody or nobody will do well enough at the top; that … success in stumporatory is the real symbol of wisdom … and then … decide by count of heads, the vote of a Demerara Nigger [being] equal … to that of a Chancellor Bacon: this, I perceive, will … give the minimum of wisdom in your proceedings … Folly in such million-fold majority, at length … supreme in this earth … Rushing … in wild stampede (the Devil being in them) … fast and ever faster … to the sea of Tiberias, and the bottomless cloacas of Nature: quenched there.70

What Carlyle elsewhere calls the ‘universal cry of Liberty and Equality’71 is, here, the universalism of the apocalypse. The sense of the universal in (La) Svengali’s music mastery, which so reduces the aristocracy to slavery and destroys all mastery, is actually the apocalyptic universalism which Carlyle finds in absolute equality, in absolute masterlessness. After all, in Daniel Deronda, Mirah Lapidoth is called a ‘nightingale’ (DD, 305), while, in Trilby, La Svengali is described as ‘queen of the nightingales’ (Trilby, 270), and it is the song of the nightingale which, in Mahler’s Second Symphony (1895), ushers in the Last Day of Judgement. Indeed, in the symphony’s (rejected) programme, Mahler also envisages the Last Day in terms of the destruction of mastery and of total equality, whereby ‘none is great, none small’. Instead, when ‘the dead arise, [they] … stream on in endless procession’, in which ‘the great and the little ones of the earth – kings and beggars, righteous and godless – all press on [together]’.72 If, for Mahler, this apocalyptic democracy is obviously viewed rather more positively than Carlyle, it is still the case that no heaven is mentioned in the programme – rather, after the graves have burst open, all wander the earth nomadically together ‘in endless procession’.73 In terms of its programme at least, Mahler’s symphony stages the apocalyptic universalism of modern music and modern democracy, turning everyone into Wandering Jews who are condemned to walk the earth forever.

70

Carlyle, ‘The Nigger Question’, 362. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840) in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 5: 203. 72 Quoted in Cooke, Gustav Mahler, 53–4. 73 Ibid. 53–4: my italics. 71

Thomas Carlyle and the grain of the voice Karen Tongson As a point of departure in this essay, I would like briefly to discuss the rich and complex terms that comprise this volume’s title, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. I do this in part because my subsequent reading of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘musical thoughts’ (to paraphrase one of his own notions about music) is part of a larger attempt to articulate anew the relationships among ‘ideas’, ‘music’ and ‘fiction’ in Victorian contexts. Instead of thinking about this volume’s title directively or referentially – as an edict to seek out musical references in fictional works from the Victorian era – I have chosen to explore ‘ideas’, ‘music’ and ‘fiction’ as terms mingling together in intimate proximity for the title of these collected essays, and, most significantly, as inextricably intertwined concepts in Victorian aesthetics. The theoretical framework employed in this essay, which juggles and juxtaposes these terms in peculiar combinations, is in keeping with Carlyle’s own remarks about the roles music and fiction play in cultural discourses.1 Together music and fiction are nothing more than, and at the same time are everything as, proximate ideas in resonance, reverberation and dissonance with one another. By tracing the contours of Carlyle’s ideas about music and fiction, often addressed in negative values (music as silence, fiction as truth), I interpret Carlyle and his works against the grain of his previous critical reception, which casts him as a disbeliever in aesthetics and in the compatibility of music and fiction. Several scholars, most notably Rodger Tarr, have rightly tried to amend exaggerated characterizations of Carlyle’s abhorrence of fiction in particular.2 Likewise, Carlyle’s mistrust of music and musical performance, especially of opera, has acquired the attention of several 1

For additional discussion of Carlyle in this volume, see Jonathan Taylor’s chapter. Rodger L. Tarr, ‘ “Fictional High-Seriousness”: Carlyle and the Victorian Novel’ in Norman and Charlotte Strouse Lectures on Carlyle and his Era, 1982–1985 (Santa Cruz: The University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1985) 27–44. 2

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literary scholars interested in Carlyle’s theories about music.3 A subtlety that has escaped the attention of many, however, is the extent to which Carlyle’s aesthetic criteria for a paradoxically ‘true’ fiction echoes his aesthetic criteria for sincere music, the ‘universal heartsong’ put forth in his 1840 lectures On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. As this essay will reveal, the idea of music is a fiction for Carlyle. Music is the source of a productive fantasy that promotes his ideal profile for the author/composer/creator. In short Carlyle’s exemplary creative figure is the critic himself, the interpreter of ideas who makes aesthetic invention possible with the earnestness of critical intervention. By representing music as an affective medium and as the fundament of expressive thought, Carlyle distinguishes the fantastic work of criticism from the ephemeral and ‘insincere’ fictions disseminated in novels.4 In his essay ‘The Opera’ (1852), and in numerous instances throughout his lectures On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History,5 Carlyle deploys musical analogies and the idea of music to glorify the imaginative labour of aesthetic judgement and critical writing. Music, then, enables criticism to countervail and ultimately modify the idea of fiction itself. The confluence of music, fiction and criticism emerges in Carlyle’s own performance of an aesthetics resembling that of structuralist theorist Roland Barthes’ ‘grain of the voice’. In his famous essay bearing this title, Barthes defines the grain of the voice as a ‘double production of language and of music’.6 Borrowing Julia Kristeva’s term phenotextual, Barthes establishes a provisional framework to consider the multiple ways language and music work on, with and against each other.7 For Barthes, pheno-textual writing about music relies too heavily on the adjective, on ‘the poorest linguistic category’ employed for the purpose of avoiding formal and subjective loss.8 Afraid to lose the emotive significance of any articulation, the ‘pheno song’ (as Barthes 3 See Cynthia Ellen Patton’s ‘For Moments a Good Man: Thomas Carlyle and Musical Morality’, Carlyle Studies Annual 17 (1997) 53. 4 Tarr, ‘Fictional High-Seriousness’, 28–30. 5 Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Opera’ (1852) in Thomas Carlyle’s Works: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, The Ashburton Edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888) 507–14 [hereafer TO]; Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1840), ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin and Mark Engel, The Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 6 Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’ in The Responsibility of Forms (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985) 267–77. 7 Ibid. 269–71. 8 Ibid. 267. Barthes continues, ‘Are we doomed to the adjective? Are we faced with this dilemma: the predictable or the ineffable?’ (268).

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transposes Kristeva’s ‘pheno-text’) manoeuvres to avert the loss of signification by translating ineffable events into musical language. Barthes writes: ‘The musical adjective becomes somehow legal whenever an ethos of music is postulated … Among the ancient Greeks … it was the musical language (and not the contingent work), in its denotative structure, which was immediately adjectival.’9 As a consequence, according to Barthes, language loses precisely what it tries to capture with the adjective, the tool of translation. Music’s ‘grain’, its signifying power, its body, eros and pleasure – a pleasure Barthes derives partly from loss itself – becomes diminished by language’s impulse to codify intangible concepts like music and the feelings it produces.10 While Carlyle and Barthes might make strange bedfellows, the extent to which each thinker is invested in the affective language of musicality as an element of prose composition more than justifies their fleeting encounter in this essay. By acknowledging the coincidences between Barthes’ attempt to ‘shift the fringe of contact between music and language’, and Carlyle’s creation of a critical methodology predicated on affective musical concepts, we can begin to reconsider drastically the relationship between music and fiction in nineteenth-century Britain.11 In many ways, Carlyle’s use of musical analogies fits squarely within Barthes’ model of musical commentary, because it too tries to ‘capture’ musical qualities in order to articulate what is inherently inarticulable about abstract ideas like fiction, heroism and even feeling itself. My reading of Carlyle’s musical analogies departs from Barthes’ reading of the musical analogy by resisting his inevitable dismissal of the musical adjective as something too constitutive in its attempt to avoid representational loss. In contrast, the idea of music in Carlyle’s works does not merely codify the heroic, fictional and national in order to avert our senses from the underlying ineffability of each. Rather Carlyle reveals his investment in music’s ability to push signification to its limits, thus engaging the reader in a vital process of aesthetic judgement central to the work of imaginative writing. As Barthes’ essay culminates in a stunning correlation of fiction, voice, musicality and critical reflection, so too does Carlyle’s oeuvre provide powerful connections between music’s affective verity and a literary realism of fantastic ‘Truths’. Barthes’ conclusion about the ‘grain of the voice’, that ‘the song must speak, or better still, must write’,12 closely resembles Carlyle’s own aesthetic conclusions in works like ‘The Opera’. Carlyle’s implied and 9

Ibid. 268, emphasis in original. Ibid. 269. 11 Ibid. 269. 12 Ibid. 273. 10

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overt comparisons between music and other modes of representation provide a new understanding of the Victorians’ signifying practices. In his writings music is not fully overtaken by representation’s priorities; instead, it serves as the model for how to represent. Through readings of Carlyle’s works, Sartor Resartus and ‘The Opera’ in particular, I hope to acknowledge a previously un-remarked theoretical kinship between fiction and the idea of music in Victorian aesthetics.

The fictional foundations of interpretation in Sartor Resartus To depict Carlyle as an aesthetician even remotely invested in promoting music requires his removal from two common critical contexts: his welldocumented stance as a vehement critic of all arts, and his reputation as a ‘visionary’, regardless of whether or not his vision is ultimately judged as an expression of blindness or insight.13 Both contexts are closely related and, in part, responsible for perpetuating each other. By most accounts, Carlyle either openly abhorred the arts or insisted that he harbored no deep interest in them whatsoever. The Boswell to Carlyle’s Johnson, James Anthony Froude, remarked, ‘he often ferociously insisted that he knew nothing about the fine arts, and wished to know nothing’.14 Carlyle’s anti-aesthetic stance, particularly when it is taken into account by his biographers, is cited as an outgrowth of a metaphysical programme that championed sincerity and depth over a superfluous investment in the trappings of culture. Ironically, Carlyle is regarded as a visionary precisely because in his works he undermines the power of vision in an effort to promulgate a metaphysical perspective of the world, sometimes referred to in shorthand as ‘natural supernaturalism’.15 What we see with our eyes is purely material, a ‘bodying forth’, in Carlyle’s words, of a spiritual truth that lies beneath the phenomenal world.16 Relying solely on the significance of appearances is to invest wrongfully in illusions. To really ‘see’ in Carlyle’s estimation, man must not glance with his eyes to focus on an object’s extrinsic worth, but cultivate his insight so that he might 13 For a provocative, contemporary reading of Carlyle’s ‘visionariness’ vis-à-vis his public oratory, see John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). 14 James Anthony Froude, Life of Thomas Carlyle (London: Walter Scott, 1887) 29. 15 For more on Carlyle’s metaphysical dualism in relation to his rhetoric, see the classic essay by George Levine, ‘The Use and Abuse of Carlylese’ in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) 101–26. 16 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1831–3), ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 166 [hereafter SR].

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render transparent the material form of the object to reveal its intrinsic value. Introduced to the intelligentsia in Sartor Resartus, his only work of fiction, and subsequently echoed throughout the rest of his works, Carlyle’s metaphysical perspective on vision creates a special allowance for illusion’s role in perception and judgement. His admittedly difficult and paradoxical definition of insight leads us to a crucial moment where he articulates a relationship between his metaphysical principles and the work of aesthetic judgement itself. In the words of Professor Teufelsdrökh, Carlyle’s mouthpiece in Sartor Resartus, ‘illusion’ is not the enemy of ‘insight’, but rather its ally in revealing ‘truth’ (SR, 170). Insight creates a different kind of ‘Fantasy’, a necessary symbolic fiction that mediates between the domain of the ‘infinite’ real and the finite material world, in order to express and communicate the former: ‘Thus in many a painted Device, or simple Seal-emblem, the commonest Truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite a new emphasis. For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense’ (170). In another of Carlyle’s typically paradoxical formulations, symbolic fantasy is really the expression of what he asserts is fact. Also referred to as a finely-tuned telescopic vision, insight routes its fantastic function through the profoundest reality of all, the unseen and infinite truth of a ‘universal order’, which we surprisingly learn is not entirely infinite in Carlyle’s account, but time-sensitive and subject to replacement should better judgement dictate its removal (171). The value of symbols expires at the dawn of each new age, according to Carlyle, and we must appoint a ‘Legislator’ of symbols ‘who can so much as tell when a Symbol has grown old, and gently remove it’ (170). This legislator of signs, who closes the chapter on ‘Symbols’ in Sartor Resartus, is not unlike the ideal critical figure Carlyle fashions himself after: one who looks closely at the signs of the times in the interest of replacing the defunct symbols that fail to galvanize a generation – albeit in Carlyle’s case, perhaps not quite as gently as some may hope. Furthermore, this legislator of symbols evaluates not only the cultural relevance and force of each sign, but decides which signs inherently contain the most signifying value. Teufelsdrökh confusingly conflates the ‘worship value’ of various types of symbols, and the result more closely resembles an organic coherence than a hierarchy: ‘Highest of all symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen into Prophet, and all men can recognize a present God and worship the same’ (169). The Artist, Poet and Prophet are fused together not only in Teufelsdrökh’s melodramatic account, but also in Carlyle’s later works. The conflation between types in Sartor Resartus notably anticipates the structure of On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. We should notice,

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however, that the unspoken standout amongst these symbol-makers is not an artist or even a prophet per se, but the symbolic manifestation of the organic unity of all these categories: the legislator of signs himself, the critic. Though possessed of ‘a scientific telescope’ (SR, 170), the legislator of signs’ methodology is far from scientific. He is in many respects an aesthetic judge, a taste-maker whose task is not merely to report what he sees, but to ‘reinterpret’ and, in a paraphrase of Carlyle, to bring artificially nearer the magnificence of the symbolic object.17 The legislator of signs is an aesthetic judge who presides over ‘a small prose domain of Sense’, to echo Teufelsdrökh, who also uses fantasy to help shape that domain. How he transmits and translates the value of the symbol through his own fantastic manufacture of signs in his language is just as significant as what he chooses to communicate. As a result, the ‘small prose domain of Sense’ carved out in Sartor Resartus is prone to verging on the senseless at crucial instances, especially when a symbolic crisis necessitates a justifiable use of rhetorical force to inspire an affective, and thus for Carlyle, effective response. This profile of the ‘legislator of signs’ necessarily prefaces our discussion of Carlyle’s investment in the musical dimensions of critical interpretation, of critical fictions. As the legislator of signs marshals his affective rhetoric to inspire effective critical responses, we begin to mark a crucial if subtle transition from visuality to vocality in Carlyle’s ideas about critical intervention. As we shall see, Carlyle conflates vocality with all of musicality in his work. How do the voice and its grain exemplify a musical value that ultimately transforms the value of illusion itself in Carlyle’s writings?

From visionary to vocalist: Negative style in Carlyle’s critical programme Carlyle’s call for insightful, vehement ‘seers’ in Sartor Resartus and elsewhere understandably contributes to a tendency to focus, if you will, on the author’s relationship to visual culture in the Victorian period. As an avowed enemy of the ‘unveracity in all things’ (TO, 514), Carlyle’s demand for a phenomenological perspective of the world seems to preclude any serious consideration of his investment in music as a non17 ‘Symbols, like all terrestrial Garments, wax old. Homer’s Epos has not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the distance … like a receding Star. It … needs to be reinterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so much as know that it was a Sun’ (SR, 171).

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visual art form. Held suspect for its power to awaken desire in women and rouse the ‘rabble’ to revolt, music would also seem to come into conflict with several of Carlyle’s avowed moralistic stances.18 Yet as Alisa Clapp-Itnyre expertly addresses, Carlyle harboured an interest in the ‘ethereal’ and phenomenological potential of music shared by other Victorian aestheticians.19 Offering a variation on this perspective, Cynthia Ellen Patton has suggested that Carlyle’s opinions about music are surprisingly conventional, and indeed distinctively Victorian, arguing that his belief in ‘the Victorian ideology of musical morality’ is ‘remarkably ordinary’.20 The split between public and private musical amusements comprise a critical crux in Patton’s arguments. In her view, Carlyle detests practically all forms of public musical performance including ‘the pious and anti-theatrical alternative to opera’, oratorio.21 At the same time, he prizes ‘personal music’, a repertoire of meaningful songs chosen by the individual and sung to soothe an agitated mind and spirit. Carlyle enjoys ‘domestic listening’, attentively hearing his wife Jane or other intimate guests play the piano for him in the serene space of the home. Patton points out, however, that he usually preferred his own singing for therapeutic purposes: In using [music] to improve his state of mind and spirit, Carlyle did not only consume the (feminine, domestic) music that his wife and his female friends made for him. In several other letters, he claimed that his own singing had at least equally powerful effects on his spiritual and mental state.22

Without dismissing Patton’s arguments about Carlyle’s highly private, therapeutic model of musical appreciation, I would like to reconsider his approach to music in the public milieu. While I concede that he unabashedly abhorred most forms of public musical performance in the Victorian age, he puts forth another model of public musicality that continues to uphold, in principle, the musical privacy and moral 18 Two recent studies of music in nineteenth-century Britain offer fascinating interpretations of music’s subversive potential, especially as it was carried over into novelistic representations: Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), and Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Cultural Discourse in the Victorian Novel and Society (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002). 19 Clapp-Itnyre, Introduction to Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs, 1–44. 20 Cynthia Ellen Patton, ‘For Moments a Good Man: Thomas Carlyle and Musical Morality’, Carlyle Studies Annual 17 (1997) 53. 21 Ibid. 56. 22 Ibid. 57.

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integrity he so treasures. By analogizing music, in particular the musical qualities of voice, to the personal processes of imaginative interpretation and critical reflection, Carlyle cordons off a highly intimate, yet still quasi-public, space for the consumption and performance of music. The music Carlyle idealizes in his work is not always ‘music proper’, not real songs recorded on sheet music or musical works noted in scores or presented in performances, but rather the music simulated by writing and delivered by the human voice when otherwise not consumed in the private act of reading. Charles Richard Sanders provides an inventory of sounds Carlyle considered antidotes to an otherwise noisy world, ‘the tones of that other music, very difficult of definition’.23 Although it comes as no surprise that he treasured ‘Burns’s songs sung well’, he also regarded ‘listening to Leigh Hunt, Lady Ashburton or Dickens read aloud’ as a soothing alternative, as some other kind of music.24 These preferences intimate that Carlyle prizes ‘voice’ to measure musical, literary and moral worth. Indeed he conflates multiple forms of vocal performance – including lecturing and reading aloud – with what he calls the ‘essence’ of musical performance. As his lectures on heroes attest, Carlyle insists music can be found in nearly all forms of speech: Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent – the rhythm or tune to which the people there sing what they have to say! … Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical – with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chaunt, a song.25

Our attention is called to the ever-important accent, a musical and linguistic feature Carlyle prizes for its natural abundance. As he remarks, everyone has an accent, a local method of expression that associates a song with a particular place and particular bodies. Yet the accent does not limit the song’s communicative range. Instead it makes uniqueness discernible to someone outside a special signifying context as it simultaneously delimits the boundaries of that context.26 Speech as accented song is a process of communication that relies on a mutual recognition forged by difference.

23 Charles Richard Sanders, ‘Carlyle, Poetry and the Music of Humanity’, Western Humanities Review 16 (Winter 1962) 55. 24 Ibid. 55. 25 Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Poet’ (1840) in On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, 71. 26 Ibid. 71.

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Because of its ability to inhabit realms of particularity and communicability, voice becomes the centrepiece of a ‘negative style’, the mode Carlyle employs in his critical interventions. Indeed, vocality emerges as the chosen medium for rhetorical urgency, and urgency spurs on the ‘legislator of signs’ profiled in the fictional Sartor Resartus. Carlyle finds in this musical-verbal medium an ‘organic’ foundation. The voice is not only linked to the organicism of the body – again, we can see here a certain reverberation between Carlyle’s idea of music and Barthes’ grain – but it also renders decipherable one’s regional and personal history in the ‘accent’, a feature with both musical and linguistic connotations. Michael K. Goldberg offers a succinct description of Carlyle’s style based on the negation of style itself: ‘Roughness, organic form, and veracity are Carlyle’s central criteria, not conventional polish, fluency, or grace.’27 We can further look to Ian Campbell’s account of the genealogy of Carlyle’s ‘verbal pointing’ – a style that is both ‘book-derived’ and culled from a ‘tradition of gifted verbalization … in Ecclefechan’28 – to shed further light on vocality’s role in Carlyle’s argumentative strategies. At the heart of Campbell’s essay is Carlyle’s advocacy of a ‘style so transparent, only the meaning should be visible, not the medium by which it is transmitted’.29 Here we are able to discern the consistency in Carlyle’s theories about visuality, illusion and vocality. Vocality becomes an expressive embodiment of the illusory insight espoused by Teufelsdrökh in Sartor Resartus, because it is a kind of articulation that can neutralize the traces of its own construction. Although Campbell argues that Carlyle’s call for a ‘transparency’ of style is somehow compromised by the hyperbolic intensity of his verbal effects, I would suggest that the vocality promoted and performed in Carlyle’s writings allows him to naturalize his style by rendering it as an accented voice, a regionally inherited behaviour. In other words, he regards the verbal, stylistic ‘contortion’ produced by the accent as something unavoidable, as a mere effusion of personality and heritage rather than an affectation. If a style can be seen, it calls attention to its construction and loses its ability to transmit meaning. Thus, voice for Carlyle becomes a medium for insight precisely because the vocal medium is itself unseen, a ‘transparent’ yet powerfully palpable mode for the expression of critical judgements. 27 Michael K. Goldberg, Introduction to On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, lv. 28 Ian Campbell, ‘Carlyle: Style and Sense’, Carlyle Studies Annual 14 (1994) 23. Ecclefechan is the Scottish village in which Carlyle was born. 29 Ibid. 18.

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The trained voice, however, also serves a unique function in Carlyle’s work, because it reconciles his insistence on authenticity with his endorsement of criticism as an activity of fiction-making and illusion. Throughout his works, the highest compliment Carlyle pays to any written text is to call it song. To designate an author a ‘singer’, meanwhile, is to admit him into the higher echelons of exemplary individuals he calls heroes: What we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any … It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him … become musical by the greatness, depth, and music of his thoughts, that we can give him the right to rhyme and sing … and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers, – whose speech is Song.30

Perhaps the most striking culmination of Carlyle’s ideological and aesthetic views linking the heroic figure with fiction, musicality and criticism occurs not in his public lectures On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, but in a lesser known essay ‘The Opera’, first published in The Keepsake in 1852. Carlyle’s epiphany occurs ‘at the London Opera in the Haymarket’ during a performance of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, where he encounters voices made visible in the form of operatic performers. In an essay reviewing the performances on and off the stage, Carlyle uses his critical insight to peer closely at the opera, ultimately sharing his findings with a bombastic vocal force rivaling those of the singers he simultaneously critiques and mourns.

The business of the singer and the business of interpretation: Vocality, visuality and Carlyle’s critical fictions More than anything, ‘The Opera’ makes it apparent that Carlyle does not abhor or even ignore the arts. Rather, he detests the state of the arts in his day, which renders the idealized signifying power of music impotent and sacrifices its ‘infinite’ nature to the vanities of fleeting amusement. As he laments: But here had the Modern Aristocracy of men brought down the divinest of its Arts, heavenly Music itself; and piling up all the upholsteries and ingenuities that other human art could do, had lighted them into a bonfire to illuminate an hour’s flirtation of Chatabagues, Mahogany and these improper persons! (TO, 513)

It is not necessarily the music itself that has gone ‘avowedly mad’,

30

Carlyle, ‘Hero as Poet’, 77–78, emphasis in original.

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according to Carlyle. The tyranny of the spectacle, of visual sumptuousness both on and off the stage, has overtaken the musical performance to such a degree that ‘the Rhythmic Arts’ are reduced to a ‘mere accompaniment’ for scenes of social manoeuvring (510, 512). As the content of Carlyle’s essay attests, the grotesque social spectacle that the eye must digest at the opera leaves little for the ear to delight in, let alone to hear at all. The organic integration of the faculties Carlyle champions in Sartor Resartus and his ‘Heroes’ lectures is placed in jeopardy, and his response is to attempt, by rhetorical force, to fuse the two together again and restore symbolic order. Ironically, he tries to accomplish this with his own histrionic, melodramatic translation of the operatic scene. Although Carlyle finishes the introductory section of ‘The Opera’ with a call for passivity and introspection – ‘Then go to the Opera, and hear, with unspeakable reflections, what things men now sing!’ (TO, 510) – his own sombre response is short-lived, undermined at that very instant by his commanding tone that insists on reflection with exclamatory bravado. Carlyle criticizes the show with a show of his own, with a typically cantankerous and hyperbolically humorous Carlylian tour de force that pushes prose to the boundaries of sense, thus replicating his own image of ‘mad music’ struggling to be heard amid the visual clatter at the opera. As is so often the case with Carlyle’s works, his response to a crisis at the symbolic level extends to a diagnosis of the diseased ‘real’, the ailing cultural climate of England in his day. ‘The Opera’ becomes a forum for Carlyle to express his profound dissatisfaction with the state of humanity, implicitly bound up with the state of the arts. Reinforcing the notion in Sartor Resartus that the spirit of the age depends upon the intrinsic worth of its symbols, Carlyle opens his account with a catalogue of corrupt signs, gilded images signifying extrinsic monetary worth rather than spiritual value: Of the Haymarket Opera my account, in fine, is this: Lustres, candelabras, painting, gilding at discretion; a hall as of the Caliph Alraschid, or him that commanded the slaves of the Lamp; a hall as if fitted-up by the genii, regardless of expense. Upholstery, and the outlay of human capital could do no more. Artists too, as they are called, have been got together from the ends of the world, regardless likewise of expense, to do dancing and singing, some of them even geniuses in their craft. One singer in particular called Coletti or some such name, seemed to me … to be a man of deep and ardent sensibilities, of delicate intuitions, just sympathies … stamped by Nature as capable of far other work than squalling here, like a blind Samson to make the Philistines sport! (TO, 510–11)

Perhaps more striking than Carlyle’s titillatingly detailed recreation of the ornamented visual landscape at the opera is his inclusion of the

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celebrated performer, baritone Filippo Coletti (1811–1894), in his catalogue of images. As surely as the candelabras, gilding and upholstery are meant to signify wasteful, vain expenditure, the singer himself is brandished as an emblem of financial and spiritual waste. Tellingly, Carlyle does not attempt to recuperate Coletti as a man, or even as an individual (his precise name is clearly of no importance in this passage), but rather, as a specific symbol for the admirable attributes of humanity lost in the purchase of the ‘poetic soul’ (511). At several instances, Carlyle repeats the phrase ‘regardless of expense’31 before introducing the performers at the opera by name. Bought by amusement-seekers, humankind and what it stands for according to Carlyle – genius, labour, ‘just sympathy’, the ‘poetic soul’, artistry or, in a word, heroism – has failed to uphold its intrinsic symbolic value and worth. Carlyle’s apostrophe to Coletti underscores this loss and brings into relief the singer’s value as a sign: ‘Never in Nature had I seen such waste before. O Coletti, you whose inborn melody, once of kindred, as I judged, to “the Melodies Eternal”, might have valiantly weeded-out this and the other false thing from the ways of men, and made a bit of God’s Creation more melodious – they have purchased you away from that’ (513). Carlyle counters the illusions produced by the opera’s magnificent but degraded signs with his own fantastic symbols meant to emphasize the lasting and reverberating effects of ‘proper signs’. Patton astutely suggests that Carlyle attempts to recuperate the power of the ‘real’ by placing music at the forefront of his attack on the opera’s cheap sentimentality: Carlyle’s subject, evidently, is far too important for mere sentimentality: it takes all his personal and rhetorical authority to defend music from those who would vulgarize its only-too-realpower. After all, if music can be degraded to the level of a Haymarket Barber of Seville, there remains little but despair for anyone who – like himself, Carlyle says in ‘the Opera’ – understands the true place of music in a nation’s life.32

Without contradicting the spirit of Patton’s claim that Carlyle struggles to uphold an aura of musical ‘truth’, I would suggest that Carlyle’s rhetorical authority does rest in a nostalgic, perhaps even sentimental, appeal. In essence, Carlyle uses ‘The Opera’ to construct a narrative about a lost ‘real’ of an enlightened spiritual past, with music as his protagonist. The hero of Carlyle’s fiction is not the human figure of 31 ‘Such talent, and such martyrdom of training, gathered from the four winds, was now here, to do its feat and be paid for it. Regardless of expense, indeed!’ (TO, 511) 32 Patton, ‘For Moments a Good Man’, 54.

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Coletti, despite Carlyle’s implication that Coletti serves as an appropriate candidate. Rather, music herself (personified as feminine pronouns) is a central figure, the fantastic emblem that the legislator of signs deems worthy of representing the infinite, but all too fragile, real of great nations and great minds. As dizzyingly sumptuous as his visual record of the opera is, Carlyle must deliberately slow down the tempo, the accelerated rhythm to which signs of wealth and decadence are ‘flashed’, because temporal irresponsibility has lead to the loss of sincere signification in his own estimation. He tries to accomplish this by using music as his guiding image, his predicative figure to use Barthes’ terms. In Carlyle’s estimation, music is the ‘rhythmical art’ that dictates the measured pulse of great nations of the past: ‘Serious nations, all nations that can still listen to the mandate of Nature, have prized song and music as the highest; as a vehicle for worship, for prophecy, and whatsoever in them was divine’ (TO, 509). Music, then, first enters into the predominantly visual milieu of the opera as another emblem, as a symbol of judgement lost and potentially regained, and as a figure for a forgotten heroic history of the vates poet, the poet prophet Carlyle speaks of extensively in his ‘Heroes’ lectures. But it is also more than a symbol: Carlyle tells music’s ‘biography’, if you will, fictionally re-enacting her life-story from moments of past glory to madness, using the opera’s visual deception as a foil. Hillary Schor compellingly claims that Carlyle replaces the lies of the conventional realist novel with his own biographical realism: [Carlyle’s essay ‘Biography’] offers a starting-place for a different genealogy of realism, one which in fact releases Carlyle from the world in which fiction is ‘merely’, ‘dangerously’, lies. Instead it makes of the novel a place where meaning – and a higher form of reality – is produced; a place of linguistic creation, of transformation, of the production of the self.33

Carlyle produces a ‘self’ for music in ‘The Opera’ that contrasts its once glorious ‘higher form of reality’, with the contemporary opera’s cheap, gilded fictions. Possessed of a tragic history, music has long since fallen into madness when taken out of its proper context. Strikingly, music once existed harmoniously in a masculine domain as the companion to the vates and as ‘the choicest benefactor to man’ (TO, 509). Fallen from grace, music becomes a hysterical female character. Indeed Carlyle emphasizes music’s waywardness in distinctly feminine terms. She ‘runs about now as an open Bedlamite … bragging that she has nothing to do 33 Hillary Schor, ‘The Stupidest Novel in London: Thomas Carlyle and the Sickness of Victorian Fiction’, Carlyle Studies Annual 16 (1996) 119.

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with sense and reality but with fiction and delirium only; and stares with unaffected amazement, not able to suppress an elegant burst of witty laughter, at my suggesting the old fact to her’ (510). Music’s biographical fall from grace is implicitly attributable to music’s feminine susceptibility to the lure of empty signs. Once Carlyle produces a feminine ‘self’ for music, however, another biographical figure, another reconstituted self, emerges in order to bring music back to her former glory, if only for a fleeting instance. A female ‘bedlamite’ prone to hysterical laughter and senselessness, music in her present condition is relegated to being a ‘character’ in the meta-narrative Carlyle constructs at the opera. Distinguishing himself from the wayward characters of his story is the ‘truth-teller’, the ever-important legislator of signs who, in this instance, assumes the role of a narrator or ‘biographer’. In control of what Schor calls ‘the space of linguistic creation’, the critic assumes a heroic function in ‘The Opera’, by reconstituting the lost ‘poetic soul’ in his own authentic ‘song’, meant to replace the imperceptible music emanating from the stage itself. The fantasy constructed by the critic’s prose attempts to reveal the intrinsic value of the sign, of music as a predicative value, by ‘artificially’ bringing nearer its glorious history in citational echoes. While I am not trying to suggest that Carlyle’s essay on the opera consciously replicates a novelistic structure, I would point out the degree to which Carlyle characterizes music as an art with a narrative, if not precisely a narrative art. To some degree, Carlyle’s aesthetic priorities for fiction and for music are brought together in an analogous aesthetic relationship in this critique. Music is a symbolic vehicle that provides a ‘back story’, a parallel narrative, of heroic national and aesthetic histories long since gone. Music enables the production and proliferation of historical narratives that are fantastic, indeed even fictionalized re-envisionings of that past. What is behind the music, so to speak, is a history that requires a resonant rearticulation if there is to be any hope for Carlyle of reconstituting a heroic spirit such as that evoked ‘in Greek, in Roman, in Moslem, Christian, most of all in Old-Hebrew times’ (TO, 510). The only ‘heroic type’ who can accomplish this feat must himself be a singer in Carlyle’s metaphorical understanding of the term, but he cannot rely on the inherent structure of the musical medium to perform his work for him. Music’s potential does not rest in its lyrical content – much to the contrary, Carlyle makes little distinction between songs with words and instrumental music. As Patton reminds us: ‘[Carlyle] goes on to measure the Haymarket performance implicitly by still other ancient texts without melodies.’34 Despite his attempt to call to mind the

34

Patton, ‘For Moments a Good Man’, 54.

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ancient Psalms of Asaph as an example of true music that stands in contrast to The Barber of Seville, for the most part music functions purely as a representative ideal and aesthetic idea. Music’s importance for Carlyle also rests in its ability to serve as a medium for judgement (or a parable for a lack thereof). If music is a vehicle reconstituting an aesthetically and morally responsible past, the factual ‘reality’ of that past is now a distant fantasy, a kind of fable fulfilling an instructive purpose, running in a narrative parallel to his critique of the opera: ‘To sing it attempt not, for it is impossible in this late time’ (TO, 510). By drawing a correlation between a lost, imaginatively evoked past and an un-performable song, Carlyle emphasizes an intrinsic relationship between fictional re-enactment and musicality in ‘The Opera’. Each are beholden to, and are capable of, representing an authenticity deeply rooted in a narrative of human history – not necessarily the ‘facts’, dates and details of that human history, but rather, the spiritual evocation or intrinsic ‘fantasy’ of that past, which renders certain individuals, nations and moments exemplary. Music and fiction are not poised as enemies struggling for dominance atop a hierarchy of the arts. Though estranged, they essentially operate as one art that Carlyle hopes to recuperate by having each ‘artificially brought nearer’ to the reader and to each other in the ‘small prose domain of Sense’, the legislator of signs’ domain of sense which demands an aesthetic performance of aesthetic judgement. Carlyle tries to bring music and fiction together in a meta-narrative, running counter to that of the operatic background of The Barber of Seville, by singing his old familiar tune and evoking the exemplary sign of loss, the hero. Aside from mentioning the opera’s title, Carlyle recounts little about the actual story unfolding on stage, and instead constructs his own tragic meta-narrative about the ‘strangling of heroisms’ (TO, 513). Remarkably, the loss of heroism is not merely attributable to the social vanities Carlyle parodies, but rather results from heroism becoming unsung in multiple senses of the term. Not only do would-be heroes fail to sing – the image of a throat closed by strangulation certainly punctuates this – but the receivers of the heroic message critically fail to perpetuate the heroic song by echoing it back in a performative act, as Tyrtaeus’s followers once did: Tyrtaeus, who had a little music, did not sing Barbers of Seville, but the need of beating back one’s country’s enemies; a most true song, to which the hearts of men did burst responsive into fiery melody, followed by fiery strokes before long. (TO, 510, emphasis in original)

That Carlyle equates ‘true music’ with heroism is not in and of itself the

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most noteworthy aspect of ‘The Opera’. The extent to which an act of interpretation qualifies as a musical performance and is regarded as the foundation of aesthetic judgement, heroism and writing is remarkable. Carlyle writes, ‘you will find, if you can interpret old words, and see what new things they mean, was always, and will always be, the business of the singer’ (510). For Carlyle, the business of the singer is not to perform actual music, as his representation of degraded professional singers at the opera attests. True singing, in Carlyle’s terms, requires acts of interpretation, revision and implicitly even translation. Carlyle’s descriptive account of how Sophocles and Aeschylus served as heroic singers of the past underscores his belief in the creative and critical function of the writer possessed of what he deems a musical style: Sophocles also sang, and showed in grand dramatic rhythm and melody, not a fable but a fact, the best he could interpret it; the judgments of Eternal Destiny upon the erring sons of men. Aeschylus, Sophocles, all noble poets were priests as well and sang the truest (which was also the divinest) they had been privileged to discover here below. (TO, 510)

A musical style, for Carlyle, would seem to hinge upon a skillful use of rhythm and melody, two musical features he invokes in this passage and earlier on in ‘Hero as Poet’. His uses of these terms, however, do not carry with them any technical standards for evaluating or identifying the quality of the rhythmic and melodic features in these authors’ ‘songs’. His praise is instead based on a very imprecise understanding of these terms, which allows him to use musical attributes to signify whatever qualities actually evade description. The singer’s business conflated with the business of the poet, the priest, the dramatist and essentially all great men according to Carlyle, differs little from the interpretive business of the critic. In particular he seems to reconstruct himself as an exemplary model, the critic as Carlyle as conjurer who insists on vocal resonance as the measure of sincerity and authenticity. Carlyle’s insistence on vocality is inextricably linked to his fundamental faith in the power of imaginative writing to which both criticism and fiction belong. At the same time he advocates resonance he also promotes silence, the province of the written page. Sanders eloquently articulates the contradictions inherent in Carlyle’s treatment of voice and musicality: On the one hand, we have Carlyle the thunderer; on the other the apostle of silence … The tones which he knew best, the tones which he was an expert in dealing with, however, were not the tones of music proper, as much as he enjoyed that art … He associated sounds with what was most important and deep-seated in his mind

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and whole nature; to surrender to hostile sounds was to threaten the citadel in the very center of his being. Moreover, he was a writer and critic of literature, very much interested in the mysterious affinities which exist between the sounds encountered in everyday living and the sounds of words – the sounds which both the prose writer and the poet must have his ear attuned to.35

As Sanders rightly implies, Carlyle’s understanding of the relationship between music and language does not rest in knowledge of ‘music proper’, but relies on an analogical relationship between language and sounds that produces and promotes a stylistic programme for ‘fantastic’ writing. Although music’s value for Carlyle is largely symbolic and seems to reify Romantic idealizations of music as a transcendent, transhistorical aesthetic, bursting forth from unimpeachable figures like Sophocles and Aeschylus, he actually struggles to expose the labour behind an apparent ease of style in aesthetic production by linking music to what he characterizes as the essential work of any imaginative writing – critical thinking. For any style to resound effectively or to ‘sing’ in Carlyle’s privileged terms, it must be anchored to judgements arising after a cultivation of not only the visual, but aural, faculties. In turn, these judgements cannot be conveyed formulaically, but must work affectively on the receiver’s faculties in order to inspire a return to a higher form of veracity which is itself an interpretation, a spiritual ‘fantasy’, a fiction of community that remains otherwise inaccessible. Carlyle’s invocation of David’s psalms in ‘The Opera’ provides an example, in microcosm, of this process of aesthetic judgement. In addition, the author’s conversational appeal to the reader brings into relief not only his own attempts to approximate a vocal style, but also provides us with an example of how he thematizes the grain of the voice in his writing: David … a soul inspired by divine music and much other heroism, was wont to pour himself in song … [He] discerned the Godlike amid the human; struck tones that were an echo of the sphereharmonies … Reader, art thou one of a thousand able still to read a Psalm of David, and catch some echo of it through the old dim centuries; feeling far off, in thine own heart, what it once was to other hearts made as thine? (TO, 510).

In Carlyle’s bid to recuperate the virtues of true heroism in ‘The Opera’, he manages to reconfigure the very acts of making and conveying aesthetic judgements. To judge rightly is to respond with empathy and feeling to an inexact but powerful expression of sense, which by all outward appearances may verge on something senseless; to work at 35

Sanders, ‘Carlyle, Poetry and the Music of Humanity’, 55.

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finding meaning. To impart one’s judgement, meanwhile, is to appeal intuitively to another’s senses by finding fresh meaning in something extant, by reinterpreting ‘old words’ and broken symbols and singing them anew, thus moving men to respond justly. As Carlyle shows us, the grain of the voice can serve as the communicative texture for our critical fantasies, for the untenable truths of our critical fictions.

Bibliography 1. Primary literature a. Signed books and articles b. Unsigned articles c. Music editions and librettos 2. Secondary literature

1a. Primary literature – Signed books and articles Allen, Grant. The Woman Who Did (1895; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Amman, Johann Conrad. Dissertatio de Loquela (Amsterdam, 1700); trans. Charles Baker as Dissertation on Speech (London, 1873). Austen, Jane. Emma (1816); ed. Ronald Blythe (1966; New York: Penguin Books, 1985). _______. Persuasion (1818); ed. D. W. Harding (London: Penguin, 1985). _______. Pride and Prejudice (1813); ed. Tony Tanner (New York: Penguin Books, 1985); ed. Vivien Jones (London: Penguin, 1996). _______. Sense and Sensibility (1811); ed. Ros Ballaster (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). B., V. ‘Failures of Women in Art’, The Sketch 21 (1898) 468. Bagehot, Walter. The English Constitution (1867; London: Fontana, 1993). Benson, E. F. As We Were: A Victorian Peep-Show (1930; London: Hogarth Press, 1985). _______. The Challoners (London: William Heinemann; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1904). _______. Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893); 11th edn (London: Methuen, 1894). Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London, First Series: Poverty, II: Streets and Population Classified (London: Macmillan, 1902). _______. Life and Labour of the People in London, First Series: Poverty, V: Maps (London: Macmillan, 1889). Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Aurora Floyd (1863); ed. Richard Nemesvari and Lisa Surridge (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998).

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Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847; London: Penguin, 1986). _______. Shirley (1849); ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights (1847; New York: Bantam, 1989). Caird, Mona. The Daughters of Danaus (1894); with afterword by Margaret Morganroth Gullette (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989). _______. ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review 130/2 (August 1888) 186–220. Carlyle, Thomas, ‘Chartism’ (1839); in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899) vol. 29: 118–204. _______. ‘The Hero as Poet’ (1840); in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin and Mark Engel, The Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) 67–98. _______. Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850); in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 20 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1898). _______. ‘The Nigger Question’ (1849, rev. 1853); in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899) vol. 29: 348–83. _______. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840); in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 5 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1904); ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin and Mark Engel, The Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). _______. ‘The Opera’ (1852); in Thomas Carlyle’s Works: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, The Ashburton Edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888) 507–14; and in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899) vol. 29: 397–403. _______. Past and Present (1843); in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 10 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899). _______. Sartor Resartus (1831–3); ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). _______. ‘Shooting Niagara: And After?’ (1867); in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899) vol. 30: 1–48. Carpenter, Edward. The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908); repr. in Edward Carpenter: Selected Writings, vol. 1 (London: GMP Publishers, 1984). Carpenter, William B. Mesmerism, Spiritualism, &c.: Historically and Scientifically Considered (London: Longmans, 1877). Chorley, Henry. [Review of Charles Auchester], The Athenaeum (12 November 1853) 1352. Collins, Wilkie. Man and Wife (1870); ed. Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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_______. The Moonstone (1868; London: Penguin, 1985). _______. The New Magdalen (1873); ed. George Woodcock (London: Penguin, 1981). _______. The Woman in White (1860); ed. Anthea Trodd (Boston: Houghton, 1969); ed. with an introduction by Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); ed. Julian Symons (London: Penguin, 1974). Conolly, John. The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints (London: Smith, 1856). Corelli, Marie. A Romance of Two Worlds (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1886); 18th edn (London: Methuen, 1898). Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871); 2nd edn (1874; New York: D. Appleton, 1922). Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge (1841); ed. Gordon Spence (London: Penguin, 1997). _______. Bleak House (1852–3); ed. Norman Page (London: Penguin: 1971). _______. David Copperfield (1849–50); ed. Trevor Blount (London and New York: Penguin, 1985). _______. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (London: [Nonesuch Press], 1938). _______. Oliver Twist (1837–9); ed. Peter Fairclough (London: Penguin, 1981). _______. Our Mutual Friend (1864–5; London: Penguin, 1985). _______. A Tale of Two Cities (1859); ed. George Woodcock (London: Penguin, 1981). Disraeli, Benjamin. Coningsby: or The New Generation (1844); ed. Sheila M. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). _______. Sybil: or The Two Nations (1845); ed. Thom Braun (London: Penguin, 1980). Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, 2 vols (New York: Bantam, 1986). Du Maurier, George. Trilby (1894); (London: Penguin, 1994); ed. Leonée Ormond, in Everyman series (London: J. M. Dent, 1994); with introduction by Elaine Showalter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 1998). Egerton, George. Keynotes (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893). Eliot, George. Armgart (1871); in The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New (1874; Cabinet edition, Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1879) 78–84. _______. Daniel Deronda (1874–6); (London: Penguin, 1980); (London: Penguin, 1995); ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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_______. Felix Holt, The Radical (1866); ed. A. G. Van Den Broek (London: Everyman, 1997). _______. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78). _______. Middlemarch (1871–2; London: Penguin, 1994). _______. The Mill on the Floss (1860); ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 1979); (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). _______. ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ (1879); in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1879) 257–93. _______. Scenes of Clerical Life (1857); ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Ellis, Havelock. Sexual Inversion in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1 (1897); (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1901; repr. New York: Random House, 1942). Farr, Florence. The Dancing Faun (Boston: Roberts Brothers; London: Elkin Matthews and John Lane, 1894). Fitzgerald, Percy. The World Behind the Scenes (1881; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972). Froude, James Anthony. Life of Thomas Carlyle (London: Walter Scott, 1887). Galsworthy, John. The Man of Property (1906), vol. 1 of The Forsyte Saga; ed. Geoffrey Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton (1848); ed. with an introduction and notes by Edgar Wright (1987; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Gissing, George. Thyrza: A Tale (1887); ed. Jacob Korg (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1974). _______. The Unclassed (London: Chapman, 1884). _______. Workers in the Dawn (1880); ed. Pierre Coustillas (1935; facs. repr. Brighton: Harvester, 1985). Grand, Sarah. The Heavenly Twins (1893); ed. C. A. Senf (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992). Gurney, Edmund. The Power of Sound (London: Smith, 1880). Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928). Hardy, Thomas. Desperate Remedies (1871; London: Penguin, 1998). _______. Far From the Madding Crowd (1874); ed. Ronald Blythe (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). _______. Jude the Obscure (1895); ed. C. H. Sisson (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). _______. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); ed. Martin Seymour-Smith (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).

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Harrison, Clifford. The Lute of Apollo (London: A. D. Innes and Co., 1896). Haweis, Rev. H. R., Music and Morals (1871; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876). Healy, T. M. Letters and Leaders of My Day, 2 vols (London: T. Butterworth, 1928). Hegel, G. W. F. Philosophie des Geistes (1817, rev. 1827, 1830); ed. and trans. M. J. Petry as Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 3 vols (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1978). Helmont, Francis Mercury van. The Paradoxical Discourses Concerning the Macrocosm and Microcosm, Set Down in Writing by J. B. (London, 1685). Hichens, Robert. The Green Carnation (1894; Chicago: Argus Books, 1929). _______. The Way of Ambition (London: Methuen, 1913). Hornby, Lady Emelia Bithynia. In and around Stamboul, 2 vols (London, 1858). [Hudson, Gertrude]. Israfel. ‘The Amateur’, The Dome 2/6 (March 1899) 257–60; repr. in Musical Fantasies (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Kent, 1903) 211–15. _______. Israfel. ‘Chestnuts (A Study in Ivory)’, The Dome 2/4 (January 1899) 31–6; repr. in Ivory, Apes and Peacocks (New York: M. P. Mansfield and A. Wessels; London: At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1899). _______. Mondego, Israfel. Impossibilities: Fantasias (London: H. Henry and Co. Ltd., 1897). _______. Israfel. ‘Irresponsibilities, 1: Paderewski (An Afterthought)’, The Dome 3/8 (June 1899) 107–8. _______. Mondego, Israfel. Musical Fantasies (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Kent, 1903). _______. Mondego, Israfel. ‘The Music Critic (A Depreciation)’ in Ivory, Apes and Peacocks (New York: M. P. Mansfield and A. Wessels; London: At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1899). Hueffer, Francis. Half a Century of Music in England, 1837–1887 (London: Chapman, 1889). Ingram, John H., ed. The Complete Poetical Works and Essays on Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1888). Israfel. See Hudson, Gertrude. Kingsley, Charles. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography (1850); ed. Elizabeth Cripps (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). L[andon], L. E. The Improvisatrice: and Other Poems (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1824). Lasègue, Charles and J. Falret in ‘La folie à deux (ou folie communiquée)’,

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Index Abrams, M. H., 131n accordion, 24 Adam, Ian, 148n Adorno, Theodore, 101 Aeschylus, 260, 261 aestheticism, 204–11, 218, 221 Ahasuerus, 240–42 Aldridge, Amanda Ira, 28 Allah, 8 Allen, Grant, 50n Allitsen, Frances, 47n ambiguity, xv, Amman, Johann Conrad, 7 Antinous, 175, 185 Aristogeiton, 175 Armstrong, Nancy, 91n Arnold, Samuel The Woodman’s Hut, 111 Atlas, Allan, xiii, xivn, 15, 107–108, 114, 115, 120n, 123n atonality, xvii, 232–33 Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit Masaniello, ou La Muette de Portici, 142, 143, 146, 147 audiences, xiv, xviii, 28, 57–80, 110–111, 214, 222, 229 Auerbach, Nina, 135n Austen, Jane, xiii, xv, 83–104 passim, 166 Emma, xx, 83–84, 89–91, 98, 100, 101 Pride and Prejudice, 90 Sense and Sensibility, 166n, 88–89 Ayetra, 8n B., V., 27 Bach, J. S., 35, 70, 71, 72, ‘Pastorella’ for organ, 133 Bagehot, Walter, 62 Bakunin, Mikhail, 242–43 Balfe, Michael W. The Maid of Artois, 141, 143, 147

Ballantine, Christopher John, 87n Banfield, Stephen, 76n Baroni, Leonora, 9 Barthes, Roland, 7n, 245–48, 253 ‘The Grain of the Voice’ as idea, 245–62 Bashford, Christina, 57n Battersby, Christine, 29 Baudelaire, 217 Beer, Gillian, 76n, 96n, 156–57n Beethoven, Ludwig van, 23n, 35, 50, 75, 105–106, 195, 225n, 226, 228n, 231 Symphony No. 6 (‘Pastoral’), 133, 160 Bellini, Vincenzo, 75, 157, 231, 238 La sonnambula, 133, 142, 143, 147 Benson, A. C., 192n Benson, E. F. , xv, xvii, 46, 178–79, 189–93 Dodo: A Detail of the Day, xviii, 31–32, 47–49 The Challoners, 189–93 The Life of Alcibiades, 192n Bérillon, Edgar, 79n Berlioz, Hector, 32, 75 Bernhardt, Sarah, 63n Bevan, Clifford, 65n Bible, 187 Biggar, Joseph, 183–84n Blackstone, Sir William, 174n Blackwell, Elizabeth, 72n Bloxam, John, xvii Blum, Stephen, 29n Bohlmann, Philip, 8 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 229–30 Bonnell, Marilyn, 220n Boone, Joseph Allen, 95n Booth, Charles, 11n Booth, Michael, 106n, 108n, 110, 112n

288

INDEX

Borchmeyer, Dieter, 236, 242 Bourdieu, Pierre, 85n Boyle, Thomas, 113n Bradbury, Malcolm, 208n Braddon, Mary Elizabeth Aurora Floyd, 105–109 Lady Audley’s Secret, 108, 110n Brady, Kristin, 134n Brahms, Johannes, 34n, 190, 194, 201 Brantlinger, Patrick, 108n breath, xvi, 4, 7–16, 24, 117 see also singing Brentano, Bettina, 225n Brett, Philip, 184n Bridge, Frederick, 43 Bristow, Josephine, 174n Broch, Hermann, 60n Brontë, Charlotte, xv, 59n, 90n Jane Eyre, 90n, 163 Brontë, Emily, xv, 169 Wuthering Heights, 163–64 Brooks, Peter, 107n, 110, 111 Brown, Calvin, xiiin Buddha, 203, 213–14 Buford, Bill, 60n Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 108n Burgan, Mary, xiii, xivn, 93n, 181, 185 Burne-Jones, Edward, 86 Burns, Robert, 252 Butler, Josephine, 72n Byerly, Alison, 95n, 97n, 157n Caird, Mona, 50n The Daughters of Danaus, xviii, 49–53, 54–55 Campbell, Ian, 253 Canetti, Elias, 60n capitalism, 225–44 Carlyle, Jane, 251 Carlyle, Thomas, xv, xvi, xvii, 3, 9, 13, 60, 225–44, 234–62 Latter-Day Pamphlets, 232, 240 On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, xv, 230n, 246, 249, 252n, 254, 255 Sartor Resartus, 248–50, 253, 255 ‘Chartism’, 230n ‘Shooting Niagara: And After?’, 230

‘The Nigger Question’, 229, 231n, 239, 240, 243–44 ‘The Opera’, xv, 225–26, 246, 248, 254–61 Carmichael, Mary, 28n Carpenter, Edward, 182, 184n Carpenter, Mary, 72n Carpenter, William B., 60–61 Castle, Terry, 63n Chandler, Raymond, 154 Charles II, King, 106 Chartism, 64 Chester, Lewis, 173 Chew, Geoffrey, 133 Cheyette, Brian, 242 Chopin, Fryderyk, 73n, 75, 76, 156, 178, 179, 182, 188–89, 191n, 201–3, 212, 213, 214, 216–17 Chorley, Henry, 32n Christie, Agatha, 154 cinema, 107 Citron, Marcia, 29 Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa, xiii, xivn, xix, 17n, 24n, 95n, 251 Claribel [Charlotte Alington Barnard], 28, 41n Cleveland Street Scandal, 173 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 132 Coletti, Filippo, 256–57 Collins, P. A. W., 93n Collins, Wilkie, xiii, 108n, 151 Man and Wife, 79n No Thoroughfare, 108n The Frozen Deep, 108n The Moonstone, 154–55 The New Magdalen, 79n The Red Vial, 108n The Woman in White, xix, 107–108, 109–27, 164 Colloms, Brenda, 15n, 20n composition; composers, xv, 23, 27–55, 107n, 110, 153, 158, 167, 186–87, 191, 200, 202, 205, 211, 226, 246 Comte, Auguste, 60 concertina, 15, 123 concerts, 57, 65–68, 69, 165–66, 166n, 169, 190, 192, 194, 197, 199, 211, 214, 221n, 251 conductors, 57 Conolly, John, 64n

INDEX

contagion, xviii, 61–63 see also disease Cooke, Deryck, 236n, 244n Corelli, Marie, 44, 45–46 A Romance of Two Worlds, xviii, 31, 44–46, 54, 219–20 Cornelys, Teresa, 70n Correa, Delia da Sousa, xiii, xivn, 31n, 95n, 129n, 157n, 226n Craig, David, 59n critical theory, xiii criticism and critical writing, xv, xvi, 180, 198–223, 246–62 Cromwell, Oliver, 230n crowds, xviii, 57–82, 251 Curwen, John Spencer, 64–65n Cusick, Suzanne G., 87n, 88n Cvetkovich, Ann, 80n, 113n Dahlhaus, Carl, 66n, 87n Dale, Alan, xvii Darwin, Charles, 109, 165, 166n David (Biblical), xvii, 175, 261 Davidoff, Leonore, 108n decadence, 209, 216–17, 221 demagogue, 229–32 democracy, xvii, 231–33, 240–42 Denisov, Dennis, 58 Dent, Edward J., 184n Dickens, Charles, xv, 62, 84, 92–95, 107, 252 A Tale of Two Cities, 59n Barnaby Rudge, 59n Bleak House, 79n, 154, 162–63 David Copperfield, 92–5, 164 Oliver Twist, 62, 79n Our Mutual Friend, 154–55 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 182n No Thoroughfare (with Wilkie Collins), 108n disease, 4, 5, 12, 13–16, 18, 24–25, 62, 72 Disraeli, Benjamin, 62, 230, 231 Coningsby, 59n, 62 Sybil, 59n dissonance, xvii, 232–36 divine, xvi, 3–25, 132, 226, 257 domestic, 251 Donizetti, Gaetano, 75, 231 Lucrezia Borgia, 126, 164

289

L’elisir d’amore, 133 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 28n, 177, 186 Douglas-Klotz, Neil, 8n Dowling, Linda, 175 Doyle, Arthur Conan, xv Sherlock Holmes, xv, xviii, 151–70 The Sign of Four, 154, 162 A Study in Scarlet, 153n, 160, 165–66 ‘A Case of Identity’, 159 ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, 168n ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, 154 ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’, 162 ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’, 168 ‘The Red-Headed League’, 165 ‘The End of the Islander’, 153n Drinka, George Frederick, 63n Dryden John, 169n Du Maurier, George, xvii, 225, 233n Trilby, xvii–xviii, 57–58, 63n, 68–80, 156–58, 160, 166, 227–32, 233n, 237, 243–44 Dunn, Leslie C., 5n, 7n, 37n, 89n Dvoˇrák, Antonín, 178–79, 222 Easson, Angus, 19n, 23n East End Elevation Mission, 11 Egerton, George, 200n Ehrlich, Cyril, 84n, 85n Elagabalus (Roman Emperor), 202 Eliot, George, xv, 31, 84, 156, 169, 225, 228 Adam Bede, 79 Armgart, 68n Daniel Deronda, 10, 31, 37, 156–60, 166, 166n, 226, 234–38, 241–44 Felix Holt, The Radical, 59n Middlemarch, 164, 166n Scenes from Clerical Life, 132 The Mill on the Floss, xix, 95–96, 129–49, 166n ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, 234, 243 Eliot, T. S., 151n Ellicott, Rosalind, 28n, 53 Ellis, Havelock, 183–84n

290

INDEX

Empson, William, 131 English language, 234 Eric, Stanislaus, Count Stenbock, 187 eroticism, eros, 86, 202, 215, 247 exotic, 16–17, 155, 177, 184, 188–89 Falret, J., 63n Farr, Florence, 185 The Dancing Faun, 185–86 Federico, Annette R., 46 Feild, Reshad, 8n fiction as interpreter of cultural meaning, xiv as documenter of music historiography, xiv and insincerity, xvi and its relationship with ‘truth’, xx as ‘music’, 245–62 detective, xv, 151–70 sensation, xix, 79, 80, 105–27 fiddle, see violin Fiedler, Leslie, 95n Fisher, Philip, 148n Fitzgerald, Percy, 111–12 Flaubert, Gustave, 153n folk music, xix, 3, 129, 138, 235 Foster, Hal, 88n Foucault, Michel, 64, 174, 177, 195 French revolution, 58–59, 238–39 Freud, Sigmund, 60n Froude, James Anthony, 248 Fuller, John, 27n, 33n Fuller, Sophie, xv, xviii, 73n, 157n, 186n, 220n, 226n Furness, Raymond, 225n, 235n Gabriel, Virginia, 41n Galsworthy, John, xv, 46 The Man of Property, xviii, 46–47, 54 Gardiner, Juliet, 221n Gaskell, Elizabeth Mary Barton, xvi, 3–25 Ruth, 79 gaze, male, 5–6, 86 gender, xvii, xviii, xix, 27–55, 110–27, 129–49, 180–81, 189, 191n, 202–204, 209–10, 220–21

music as ‘woman’, 257–58 see also women Gerber, Helmut, 209 Gilbert, Sandra M., 132n, 135n Gillett, Paula, xiii, 10n, 25n, 85n, 86n, 92n, 181n Gissing, George, 3–25 Thyrza, xvi, 3–25 Workers in the Dawn, 22 The Unclassed, 79n Gitter, Elizabeth G., 117n Giuglini, Antonio, 70 Gledhill, Christine, 107n Glover, Sarah, 65n Gluck, Christoph Willibald Orfeo and Eurydice, 132n, 133 God, 8, 19, 240, 249 Goehr, Lydia, 66n Goethe, Johann von, 153n, 234 Goffman, Erving, 60n Goldberg, Michael K., 253 Goldman, Albert, 235, 243n Goncourt, Edmond de, 94 Goode, John, 23n Gordon, Janet Duff, 38n gospels, 8 Gossett, Philip, 123n Gotch, Rosamund, 32n Gounod, Charles, 73n, 75 Gregor, Ian, 103 Grand, Sarah, 222 The Heavenly Twins, 50n, 220 Gray, Beryl, xiii, xivn, 95n, 130n, 142, 156n, 226n Great Exhibition of 1851, 85 Greece, Ancient, 175, 177, 179–80, 191, 201, 239, 247 Grieg, Edvard, 203, 214, 216 Grossman, Jonathan, 58, 70–71 Grossmith, George, 181 group behaviour, 57–60 Grundy, Joan, 97n Gubar, Susan, 132n, 135n Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, 50n Gurney, Edmund, 76n Hadrian, 175, 185 Haight, Gordon S., 134n, 139n hair, 117 Hall, Catherine, 108n Hallé Orchestra, 68n

INDEX

Hall-Witt, Jennifer L., 57n, 65n, 66, 67 Hamilton, William, 108n Handel, George Frederick Acis and Galatea, xix, 133, 136, 138 Messiah, 132n, 133 Hanslick, Edward, 87, 87n Harding, Rosamond, 84n Hardy, Barbara, 138n, 148n Hardy, Thomas, 84, 96–104, 169 Desperate Remedies, 158–60, 162, 166 Far from the Madding Crowd, 96–97 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 97–98 Jude the Obscure, xx, 79n, 83–84, 98–103 Tess of the D’Urbevilles, 79 Harmodius, 175 Harradan, Ethel, 28n Harris, Styron, 20n Hartley, Allan, 13n Haweis, Rev. H. R., 109 Haydn, Joseph Die Jahrzeiten (‘The Seasons’), 133 Die Schöpfung (‘The Creation’), xix, 133, 139–40 Canzonets, 23n Healy, T. M., 183–84n Hegel, G. W. F., 8n, 9 Heilman, Ann, 53n, 198n, 218 Heine, Heinrich, 202 Helfand, Michael S., 179n Helmont, Francis Mercury van, 7n Hensel, Fanny, 33n hero, heroic, 245–62 Hichens, Robert The Way of Ambition, 27, 30–31, 54 The Green Carnation, 28n, 186–87 Hildebrandt, Dieter, 84n, 85n Hildegard of Bingen, 3n, 4n Hinduism, 8 Hinz, Evelyn J., 95n Hobsbawm, Eric, 59 Hofman, Schlomo, 235n Hohl, Regula, 47n Holsinger, Bruce, 25n

291

Homans, Margaret, 132n, 135n, 144 homoeroticism and homosexuality, xvii, 70, 173–96, 202n, 203 see also lesbianism Horace, 131 Horsley, Charles, 32n Horsley, Sophy, 32n Hudson, Gertrude, xvi, 221–23 Impossibilities: Fantasias, xvi, 197–223 Ivory, Apes and Peacocks, 199n, 207, 208 Lotus Leaves, 207 Musical Fantasias, 207, 208 Travel Pictures, 207 Hueffer, Francis, 68n Hughes, John, xiii, xiv, 96n, 158n Hughes, Winifred, 113n Hullah, John, 65n Huneker, James Gibbons, 221n Hunt, Leigh, 252 Hyde, Derek, 65n, 68n Hyde, H. Montgomery, 174n hypnosis, 63 improvisation, 42–43, 15, 157–58, 159, 164, 169, 234 see also women and improvisation Inayat Khan, Hazrat, 8n Ingham, Patricia, 4n insanity, 63 instrumental practice, xiv Israfel, Archangel of music, xvi, 197, 201–202, 218–20 Jackson, Holbrook, 208–209 Jackson-Houlston, C. M., xiii, xivn, 97n James, Henry, xv Portrait of a Lady, 163 Jesus, 8, 19–20, 25n, 231, 236, 240, 241, 243 Jew, Jewishness, 157, 225–44 as stock figure, 21 Jewish music, 234–35, 237–40 ‘wandering Jew’, xvii, 236–44 Joachim, Joseph, 70n, 71, 74 Jonathan (Biblical), xvii, 175 Jones, Nancy A., 5n, 7n, 37n Judas Iscariot, 231

292

INDEX

Kallberg, Jeff, 189n, 191n Kassler, Jamie Croy, 89n Kean, Charles, 112n Keating, P. J. 4n, 11n Keats, John, 132 Kempis, Thomas à, 135 Kingsley, Charles Alton Locke, xvi, 3–25 Kipling, Rudyard, 204 Barrack-Room Ballades, 204 Klezmer, Klezmorim: see Jewish music Kossmaly, Carl, 191n Kramer, Lawrence, 191n Kramer, Lawrence, xiiin Kristeva, Julia, 7n, 246–47 Krueger, Christine, 8n Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 42 Lane, John, 200 Langland, Elizabeth, 108n Lasègue, Charles, 63n Law, Joe, xv, xvii, 28n, 205n Le Bon, Gustav, 60–62, 75, 77, 79 Lee, Vernon, 199n Lehmann, Liza, 73n Leighton, Frederick, 70n Leitch, David, 173 Leppert, Richard, 86, 89n, 94n, 180 lesbianism, 54n Lessing, Theodore, 235 Levenson, Shirley Frank, 156n, 235n Leverson, Ada, 199n Levine, George, 134n, 248n Lewes, Charles Lee, 132 Lewes, George Henry, 61 Lightwood, James Thomas, 93n, 181 Lind, Jenny, 32 listening, xvi, 213, 222, 227 Liszt, Franz, 158 Les preludes, 133 literary theory, xiii Locke, John, 180 Loesberg, Jonathon, 107 Loesser, Arthur, 84n, 88 Lorraine, Renée Cox, 89n Losseff, Nicky, xiii, xivn, xvi, xix, 107–108, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 125 Lustig, Jodi, xv, xix–xx, 6n, 129n lyre, 42

M’Carthy, Justin, 39n Macirone, Clara Angela, 41n Macirone, Emilia (Lady Emilia Bithynia Hornby), 41 Macirone, Giulia, 41n Maddison, Adela, 55 Magee, Brian, 238–39 Mahler, Gustav, xvii, 234–36 First Symphony, 234–35 Second Symphony, xvii, 244 Mainzer, Joseph, 64n, 65n Maitland, J. A. Fuller, 43 Malibran, Maria, 33n, 66 Mann, Karen B., 95n, 156n, 157n Marek, Jayne E., 208n Marquess of Queensbury, 174 Marvell, Andrew, 131 Masters, Brian, 44, 189, 192n Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), 107 Maurice, F. D., 20n Mayer, David, 107n, 110, 111, 115, 125 Mayne, Xavier [Edward Irenæus Prime Stevenson], xv, xvii, 188n, 193–94 Imre, 193–95 McClary, Susan, 5n McFarlane, James, 208n McKeon, Michael, 87n McLuhan, Marshall, 151n Meisel, Perry, 87n Melnick, Daniel C., 102n melodrama, 106–27 Mendelssohn, Fanny: see Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix, 31n, 32n, 33n, 35, 70 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 133 Lieder, 160–61 mental processes, 57–80, 153 Meredith, George Sandra Belloni, xviii, 31, 37–41, 46, 49, 52, 54 mesmerism, xvii–xviii, 61, 69, 162, 181–82, 227–29, 231 Meynell, Alice, 199n, 222 Michelangelo, 175 Middleton, Jessie Anne, 32n Mill, John Stuart, 60 Miller, D. A., 83, 90, 125n Milton, John, 9, 139–40

INDEX

Miner, Margaret, 217 Moody, Jane, 112n Moore, George Esther Waters, 79n Morra, Irene, xv, xviii, 31n, 58n, 110n, 226n, 228n Morrison, Arthur, 169 A Child of the Jago, xvi, 3–25 Moscovici, Serge, 60n Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 75, 114–16, 118–22, 231 Muhammad, prophet of Islam, 8–9 Mulvey, Laura, 86n Musgrave, Michael, 68n, 70n music ‘absolute’ music, 87, 102 and the ‘angel/demon’ split, 4 and servitude, xvii as ‘fiction’, xv, 197–223, 243–62 as hidden communication, xiv, xix, xvii, 58, 105–28, 158, 166, 180, 189 as key to character, xiv, 153, 160 as representation, xv, 110 incidental music, descriptions of, xiv of the street, 6, 11 performativity and musical meaning, 87 reception, xx, 198–223 relationship with text, xiii, 7 relationship with the universal, 167, 225–44 teaching, 29, 32, 34, 39, 64–65n, 91, 161, 190–92 musical ability and intellect, xv and class, 3–25 (see also social class) musical experience, xvi, 203 musical mastery, xvii, 156–61, 225–44 mystery, xv myth, mythology, 110, 131 national identity, xiv, 27–31, 32, 38, 39, 47–49, 67, 80, 84, 122–23, 129, 165, 181–82, 188, 229–30, 236, 238, 240–41, 247 Nature, 17, 39, 129–49, 165, 215–16, 220, 257

293

Nettl, Bruno, 42n Newman, Barbara, 3n Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvii, 201, 228, 229, 231, 236, 240 Nisargadatta, Sri, 8n Nunokawa, Jeff, 175 Nye, Robert A., 60n, 62n, 63n Offenbach, Jacques, 75, 231 opera, 66, 67, 245, 254–56, 259 orchestra, 107, 108 Orczy, Baroness, 167 Ormond, Leonée, 58n Orpheus, 200n, 201, 202–204, 213–14 Ostwald, Peter, 191n other, otherness, xvii, 234, 238 Ouida [Marie Louise de Ramée], 199n, 211 Ousby, Ian, 151n Paderewski, Ignacy, 212 Paget, Sir James, 63 painting, 117, 118, 199, 206 Parakilas, James, 84n Park, Robert, 60n Park, T. Peter, 232n Parkes, Eleanor Raynor, 72n pastoral, xix, 129–49 Pater, Walter, 77, 87, 180, 199n, 205n, 208, 209, 217, 218 ‘Winkelmann’, 175, 180 Patmore, Coventry, 85n Patti, Adelina, 70 Patton, Cynthia Ellen, xiii, xivn, 3n, 246n, 251, 256, 258 Pearce, Charles W., 57n Pearson, Geoffrey, 59 Peel, Ellen, 43 Peel, Mrs C. S., 181 Percy, Thomas Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 137 performance, xv, xvi, xvii–xviii, xix, 3–6, 27, 30, 53, 217, 245–46, 251–52, 260 church / religious, 11, 13, 20, 21, 22–3, 39, 101, 135, 187 domestic, xix–xx, 3n, 4, 6–7, 13, 14, 17, 19, 24, 25, 37, 38, 40, 47n, 85–89, 92–104,

294

INDEX

105–106, 108–110, 112–13, 114–27, 129–49, 162–64, 176, 180, 185–86, 188, 251 and gender identity, 126, 176, 180–82, 186–87, 191n and spiritual beauty, 3–25, 156–60, 166, 197, 256 professional, 18, 24, 25, 28, 30n, 36, 41, 42–44, 43n, 47n, 57–58, 60, 63, 65, 66, 106, 108, 108n, 126, 156–58, 160, 164, 165–66, 168, 177–78, 184–85, 190, 192–93, 194, 226, 227, 230–31, 231n, 238, 251–55, 258 and courtship, 83–104, 105–106, 114–22, 134, 138, 139–42, 145, 149, 164, 166, 166n street, 6, 11, 11n, 22 private, 16, 21, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 49, 53, 94–95, 129–30, 132, 145, 148, 158, 158n, 159–62, 191, 194, 201, 220, 251–52 semi–public non professional gatherings, 5, 10, 12, 13, 16, 22–23, 64–65 limitations of performing ability, 84, 90, 92–93, 114, 130, 132, 134, 138–40, 144, 182 see also audiences see also concerts see also listening phenotext, 245–47 piano, pianists, xix–xx, 6, 40, 41, 42–43, 83–104, 105–106, 108–25, 132, 137–38, 142, 144, 145–46, 157, 163, 164, 166n, 176, 178, 180–82, 184, 185, 190–91, 200, 202, 203, 217, 220, 221n, 251 Pick, Daniel, 230 Picker, John M. , xiii, xivn Piggott, Patrick, xiii, 88n Plotz, John, 59n, 248n Poe, Edgar Allan, 151, 154, 219–20 poetry, 42 Potter, John, 7 poverty, 3–25 Priestly, William Overend, 62

Prins, Yopie, 42n professionalism, 32, 46 psychological realism, xv psychology, xviii Purcell, Henry, 145–46 The Tempest (attrib.), 146–47 Purkis, Charlotte, xvi, 44n Purkis, John, 200n Pykett, Lyn, 53n, 113n, 119, 209 Queen’s Hall, London, 43, 68 Qur’an, 8–9 race, xiv (see also national identity) Raffalovich, Marc-André, 183 Rahill, Frank, 110n, 124 Rainbow, Bernarr, 65n reception, xiv, 38 Rée, Jonathan, 7, 9–10 rehearsals, 57 Reich, Nancy B., 10n, 24n religion and religious music, 4, 10–11, 16, 18–23, 30, 100–101 Rink, John, 42 Robbins, Bruce, 243 Roberts, Neil, 38n Robinson, Kenneth, 114n Rome, Ancient, 201, 202 Roosevelt, Theodore, 151n Rose, Paul Lawrence, 243n Rosen, Charles, 233, 236 Rossetti, Christina, 202 Rossini, Gioachino The Barber of Seville, 122–23, 254, 256, 259 Moses in Egypt, 124, 125 Rudé, George, 59 Runciman, John, 211–12, 222 Ruskin, John, 109, 207 Russell, Dave, 64–65 Russell, Melinda, 42n Sadie, Stanley, 114n Said, Edward, 16n Saint Augustine, 25 Saint Cecilia, 35 Sanders, Charles Richard, 252 Sappho, 42n Sayers, Dorothy L., 154 Schaffer, Talia, 209n, 210, 211n, 221 Scher, Steven Paul, xiiin

INDEX

Schiller, Friedrich von, 241 Schoenberg, Arnold, xvii, 232–36 Schopenhauer, Arthur, xvii, 10n, 225n, 228, 232, 236 Schor, Hillary, 257–58 Schumann, Clara, 71, 191n Schumann, Robert, 73n, 74, 120n, 176, 191–93, 212n, 214, 231n Second Reform Bill (1867), 107, 230 secret, that which is and music, xvii, 179, 196 and sensation fiction, 107 see also spirituality senses, 117 sexuality, xiv, 109 and class status, xix Shakespeare, William, 112n, 131, 147, 175, 241 Shaw, George Bernard, 27, 30–31, 54, 186n Shaw, Harry E., 90n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 202 Sheppard, Elizabeth Sara, 31 Charles Auchester, xviii, 31–34, 44, 45, 46, 49, 54 Counterparts, or The Cross of Love xviii, 31, 34–37, 54 Showalter, Elaine, 53n, 58n, 64n, 136n, 143n, 209 Shreffler, Philip A., 151n Sidis, Boris, 60n silence, 203, 214, 245, 260 Silvermann, Kenneth, 219n Simpson, Colin, 173 Sinfield, Alan, 175 singing, xvi, xvii, 3–25, 35, 38, 40–41, 53, 58, 64, 65, 69–80, 93, 111, 112, 115, 117, 124–26, 130, 132, 135, 138, 140, 142, 146–47, 162, 162n, 163, 164, 166n, 168, 183, 185, 187, 194, 219, 226, 229, 241, 244, 251, 255–56 see also breath see also voice Small, Helen, 62n, 79n Smedley, Constance, 222n Smelser, Neil, 60n Smetana, Bedr˘ich Má vlast, 133 Smith, Philip E. II, 179n

295

Smithers, Leonard, 184 Smyth, Ethel, 28, 28n, 34n, 49, 53 social class, xiii, xiv, xvi, xix, xx, 3–25, 32, 59, 64, 66, 79, 85, 91–92, 97–99, 107, 112n, 113, 119, 121, 123, 126–27, 129–49, 161, 182, 230 society and the work of art, xiii, 66–67 Sodom and Gomorrah, 185 Solie, Ruth A., xiii, xivn Sophocles, 260, 261 soundscape, urban, 6 Spencer, Herbert, 60, 61, 62, 76, 166n Spenser, Edmund, 131 spirituality, xvi, 3–25, 45, 46, 65n, 109, 135, 139, 153, 156, 168, 197–98, 203, 219–20 225, 248, 251, 256, 259 Sprinchorn, Evert, 235, 243n Staël, Germaine de, 42, 43 Stanton, Michael N., 174n Stapleton, Michael, 13n Stenbock, Count, xvii Stetz, Margaret D., 210n Stevenson, Robert Louis, xv The Beach of Falesá, 163, 167n Stoneman, Patsy, 25n Stout, Rex, 154 Stradella, Alessandro, 38 Stratton, Stephen S., 29n street organ, 6, 11 Strindberg, August, 210 Sucksmith, Harvey Peter, 120n Sufic thought, 8 Sullivan, William J., 130n, 134n, 142, 144 Sully, James, 76n, 166n Summers, Claude J., 174n Swinburne, Algernon, 43, 201, 202, 204, 219 Swingewood, Alan, 15n Symonds, John Addington, 180, 183n Symons, Arthur, 209, 217, 222 Symons, Julian, 151n Tacitus, 153n Taine, Hyppolyte, 60 Tanner, Michael, 228 Tarde, Gabriel, 60, 63n Tarr, Rodger, 245, 246n

296

INDEX

Taylor, Jonathan, xvii–xviii, 3n, 10n, 31n, 58n, 69, 87n, 156n, 157n, 245n Taylor, Tom, 108n Taylor, Una Ashworth, 199n Tchaikovsky, Piotr Illych, 182, 195 teaching see music, teaching Thackeray, William Makepeace, 84, 91–92 Vanity Fair, 91–92 theatre, 106–107 Theocritus, 133 Thompson, Dorothy, 59 Thompson, E. P., 59 Thoreau, Henry, 153n Tillotson, Kathleen, 107 Tilly, Charles, 59n Tindall, Gillian, 11n, 15n, 20 Toliver, Harold E., 131n, 138n Tongson, Karen, xv–xvi, 3n, 226n Trollope, Anthony An Eye for an Eye, 79n The Vicar of Bullhampton, 79n troubadours, 133 Tucker, William, 41 unconscious, xviii, 60–61, 69, 72, 74–75, 121, 181–82, 200n Verdi, Giuseppe, 70 Viardot, Pauline, 73n Vicinus, Martha, 108n violin, 12, 36, 70–71, 86, 153, 158–62, 164, 165, 168, 169, 176, 177, 178, 197, 220 Virgil, 131 visuality, visual culture, 249–50, 253–62 Vivaldi, Antonio Le quattro stagioni, 133 Vloch, Deborah, 112n voice, xvi, 3–25, 109, 156n, 157, 167, 176, 245–62 see also singing Vorachek, Laura, xix, 6n, 112n, 164n Vrettos, Athena, 58n, 63, 79n Wackenroder, Wilhelm, 225n Wagner, Richard, xvii, 63, 75, 120n, 201–202, 203, 225, 226, 227–29, 231, 233–39, 241

‘Beethoven’, 87 The Flying Dutchman, 237 Parsifal, 214, 237, 242 Tannhäuser, 63, 177, 205 Tristan und Isolde, 203, 236 Waite, Arthur Edward, 218–19 Walker, Nancy, 220n Warrack, Guy, 153n Watson, Ben, 233 Watt, George, 79n Watt, Ian, 86n, 87n Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 43 Weber, Carl Maria von Der Freischütz, 133 Weber, Max, 85 Weliver, Phyllis, xiv, xviii, 3n, 5n, 6n, 32n, 33n, 89n, 95n, 96n, 107, 108n, 113n, 122, 134, 141n, 148n, 156n, 158–59n, 162, 166n, 180n, 181, 181–82n, 228, 229, 238, 251n West, Paul, 222n Westerbeck, Cynthia, xiv, 6n Wheeler, Ethel, 222 Whibley, Charles, 173 White, Chris, 174n, 188n White, Maude Valérie, 28n, 53 Wieck, Clara, see Schumann, Clara Wilde, Oscar, 28n, 70, 71, 173–75, 199n, 204–206, 210, 211, 213n, 222 The Picture of Dorian Gray, xvii, 173–96, 204–205n Teleny (attrib.), xvii, 184–86, 193 ‘The Critic as Artist’, 179, 205–206 Williams, David, 39n Williams, Ioan, 38n Winnifrith, Tom, 79n Winter, Alison, 57n, 61n, 79n, 227, 228n, 229 Wolff, Janet, 87n Wolff, Robert, Lee, 108n women, xiii, 4, 28–29, 32, 215, 221 and desire, 251 and failure, xviii, 27–55 and passivity, xix, 72 and propriety, xix and punishment, xviii and restrictions, 32–33 and the sacrifice of career, 25n, 51

INDEX

and transgression, xviii as objects of ridicule, xviii as performers, 3–25, 27–55, 57–80, 83–104, 105–27, 129–49, 180 composers, xviii, 27–55 feminine side of cultural semiotics, 16–17, 88 improvisers, xviii, 41–42, 66 ‘fallen woman’, xviii, 58, 77, 79 ‘New Woman’, xviii, 209–10, 218, 221 see also gender

Wood, Mrs Henry, Pomeroy Abbey, 79n East Lynne, 79n, 108n Woodring, Valerie Goertzen, 43 Woolf, Virginia, 139 Woolrych, Humphrey L., 175 Wordsworth, William, 132 Wurm, Marie, 43 Zimmerman, Agnes, 28 Zola, Emile, 204 Zon, Bennett, 76n

297