Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009

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Neo-Victorianism The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009

Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Neo-Victorianism

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

Also by Ann Heilmann FEMINIST FORERUNNERS

NEW WOMAN FICTION: Women Writing First Wave Feminism NEW WOMAN HYBRIDITIES (co-edited with Margaret Beetham) NEW WOMAN STRATEGIES: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird Also by Mark Llewellyn CONFLICT AND DIFFERENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE (co-edited with Dinah Birch) Also by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF GEORGE MOORE: Gender and Genre METAFICTION AND METAHISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING



THE LATE-VICTORIAN MARRIAGE QUESTION

The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009 Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn



Neo-Victorianism

© Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24113–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


In memory of Hazel Irene Van-Gasse, 1923–2009




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List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction: Neo-Victorianism and Post-Authenticity: On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Appropriation 1 History, literature, and criticism 2 Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the twenty-first century 3 Going forward, looking backward 1 Memory, Mourning, Misfortune: Ancestral Houses and (Literary) Inheritances 1.1 Meta-morphoses: Classical, (early)modern, and neo-Victorian echoes in Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2005) 1.2 ‘My mother not my mother; myself not myself’: The mother (as) text in Sarah Blake’s Grange House (2000) 1.3 ‘Tell me the truth’: Trauma, witnessing, and authorship in Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006) 1.4 ‘There was something unheimlich about it’: Familial/textual legacies and spectral returns in John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) 1.5 Conclusion 2 Race and Empire: Postcolonial Neo-Victorians 2.1 Hybridity and resistance in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) 2.2 Voices across borders: Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008) 2.3 Orientalism and transculturalism: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999) and Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing (2009) 2.4 Conclusion 3 Sex and Science: Bodily and Textual (Re)Inscriptions 3.1 Scopophilia and paratextuality 3.2 Subaltern subversions: Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006) vii


1 8 28 32 33 37

41 47

55 63 66 70 81

91 104 106 110 116


Contents

viii Contents

3.3

4 Spectrality and S(p)ecularity: Some Reflections in the Glass 4.1 ‘[L]ights and shadows moving on the inside of the windows’: Charles Palliser’s The Unburied (1999) and Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows (2002) 4.2 ‘When Alice stepped through liquid glass’: A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009) 4.3 ‘A pure-Victorian half-made window’: Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008) 4.4 ‘[T]here may be some truth in those tales’: John Harwood’s The Séance (2008) 4.5 Conclusion 5

Doing It with Mirrors, or Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic 5.1 ‘Are you watching closely?’: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) 5.2 The conjuror in the closet: Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) 5.3 Simulation and consciousness: Mind travel in Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006) 5.4 Death, resurrection, and cinematography in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (2006) and Steven Millhauser’s ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990) 5.5 Conclusion

120 131 140 143

150 156 163 167 172 174 178 184 190

201 209

6 The Way We Adapt Now: or, the Neo-Victorian Theme Park 6.1 Victoriana World: TV, theme parks, and the object of authenticity 6.2 ‘Memory fatigue’: The great (neo-)Victorian collection 6.3 From Lark Rise to Cranford and back again 6.4 ‘I’m not sure how much of a Dickensian I am really’: The adaptive affinities of Andrew Davies 6.5 Conclusion

211

Notes

246

Bibliography

288

Index

311


213 220 226 236 244


Race, science, and the gaze: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003) 3.4 Reclaiming the (textual) body: Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006) 3.5 Conclusion

2.1

2.2

John Frederick Lewis, The Reception (1873), oil on panel © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / Paul Mellon Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library

101

John Frederick Lewis, The Siesta (1876) © Tate, London 2009 102

3.1 Paperback cover of Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing

109

3.2 Hardback cover of Jane Harris’s The Observations (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

112

3.3 (Paperback) jacket cover of Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud (New York: Random House, 2003), used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

113

3.4 ‘Les Curieux en extase ou les Cordons de souliers’, colour print showing Sarah Baartman ‘on show’ in France. Original engraved by J. Hopner (1814?), reproduced by permission of Museum Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa (Museum Africa Accession No. MA1974–625)

114

3.5 Frederick Christian Lewis, ‘Sartjee the Hottentot Venus, Exhibition at No 225, Piccadilly’ (1811) © The British Library Board (C.191.c16)

115

3.6 Venus Anatomica, Felice Fontana Workshop, Florence, 1780s, painted wax figure © The Semmelweis Museum, Library and Archives of the History of Medicine, Budapest, Hungary

137

5.1 Paperback cover of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion, 2006), reproduced by permission of the Orion Publishing Group

177

5.2 Paperback back cover of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion, 2006), reproduced by permission of the Orion Publishing Group

179

ix



List of Illustrations

This book could not have been written without the encouragement and support of countless individuals. Friends, colleagues, researchers, and students at the Universities of Hull and Liverpool, and at other universities, spurred us on with their excitement and eagerness to share ideas. Many of our thoughts developed in discussion, at conferences, and with students. We particularly wish to thank the MA students who took the modules ‘Hystorical Fictions’ (Naomi Crook, Tristessa Moore, Emma Sanders, Claire Waite), ‘Victorian Afterlives’ (2007–08) and ‘Women’s Writing’ (2008–09), and the Ph.D. students Katy Gledhill, Theresa Jamieson, Nadine Muller and Allison Neal for their enthusiastic and energetic commitment to this new field. The exciting new work in progress, critical and creative, by the next generation of academics is a potent marker of the contribution neo-Victorianism makes to the academy as well as to the popular imagination. Further inspiration came from Diana Wallace, University of Glamorgan; Catherine Wynne (University of Hull) and her paper on Victorian magic; Mel Kohlke, editor of Neo-Victorian Studies at Swansea University; Dennis Low; and many others not named here who sparked off ideas. Sabbatical leave awarded by the University of Hull, and generous research budget allowances at Hull and Liverpool, helped to bring this book into existence. Our work was greatly aided by the courtesy and helpfulness of archives, museums, and publishers, who granted permission to reproduce images: Bloomsbury; the British Library; Doubleday, a division of Random House, New York; Faber and Faber Ltd; Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge; Museum Africa, Johannesburg; Orion Publishing Group; the Semmelweis Museum, Library and Archives of the History of Medicine, Budapest; Tate London; and Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library. Particular thanks are due to: Jonathan Eyers, Bloomsbury Rights Department; Auste Mickunaite and Sandra Powlette at the British Library; Alessandro Conficoni at the Bridgeman Art Library; Nicci Cloke, Permissions Department, Faber and Faber; Emma Darbyshire and Andrew Norman at the Fitzwilliam Museum; Linda Chernis at Museum Africa; Paul Stark, Rights Executive, Orion Publishing Group; Alicia Torello and Carol Christiansen, Permissions Department, Random House; Benedek Varga and Eszter Blahak at the Semmelweis Museum; Laura McLardy at the Tate. We are also grateful x



Acknowledgements

for advice by David Prudames and Chris Sutherns at the British Museum, and Revinder Chahal and Bryony Bartlett-Rawlings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. We wish to express our thanks to Lucie Armitt, Rosario Arias, Alexia Bowler, Katherine Cooper, Jessica Cox, Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Lucy Gallagher, Regenia Gagnier, Siân Harris, Juliet John, Becky Munford, Rina Kim, Emma Short, Jane Thomas, Ellen Turner, Ana Hernández Walta, Clare Westall, Janet Wilson, Paul Young, the Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network, and the Departments of English and History at Indiana University for enabling us to present aspects of our book to: the ‘For Love or Money?’ Contemporary Women Writers Network conference, Bangor University, April 2006; the Senior English Research Seminar, University of Hull, February 2007; the ‘Neo-Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation’ conference, University of Exeter, September 2007; the University of Hull (Inaugural Lecture), April 2008; the ‘Cross-Gendered Voices’ conference, University of Warwick, May 2008; the ‘Heritage and the Victorians’ conference, University of Liverpool and St Deiniol’s Library, June 2008; the ‘Adapting the Nineteenth Century’ conference, University of Lampeter, August 2008; Indiana University, Bloomington, US, February 2009; the English research seminar, Northampton University, March 2009; the University of Malaga, Spain, May 2009; the ‘Echoes of the Past: Women, History and Memory in Fiction and Film’ conference, University of Newcastle, June 2009; the ‘Writing Bodies’ Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network conference, September 2009; and the Women’s and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Granada, Spain, December 2009. Early versions of sections of chapters were published by Mark Llewellyn as ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn 2008), pp. 164–85; ‘[Review] The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror by Simon Joyce’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (2008), pp. 191–5; ‘[Review Essay] On the Turn’ and ‘[Review Essay] “Posthumous Productivity”: Political Philosophy, and Neo-Victorian Style’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:1 (2008/09), pp. 153–8 and 179–86; ‘Neo-Victorianism: On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Appropriation’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, special issue on Engaging the Victorians, ed. Becky Munford and Paul Young, 20:1–2 (2009), pp. 27–44; ‘Spectrality, S(p)ecularity and Textuality: Or, Some Reflections in the Glass’, in Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds), Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 23–42; and by Ann Heilmann as ‘Elective (Historical) Affinities: Contemporary Women Writing the Victorian’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 3:1 (2009), pp. 103–11, and



Acknowledgements xi

‘Doing It With Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige, and The Illusionist ’, Neo-Victorian Studies, special issue on Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and Rewriting the Past, ed. Jessica Cox and Alexia Bowler, 2:2 (2009/10), pp. 18–42. Thanks are also due to our reader for invaluable feedback, and our editors at Palgrave Macmillan: Paula Kennedy, for urging us to write this book in the first instance, Steven Hall and Benjamin Doyle for ready and helpful advice, and to our copy editor Christine Ranft.



xii Acknowledgements

Neo-Victorianism and Post-Authenticity: On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Appropriation

The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy’s personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes to spread through Victorian society, according to an analysis by evolutionary psychologists [in the New Scientist]. Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals’ hunger for power and dominance. Ian Sample, ‘Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people’, The Guardian, 14 January 20091 What better justifies a collection of new essays on an old classic than an acknowledgement of interpretative evanescence? The phrase, ‘the varying experiments of Time’ . . . suggests why criticism always benefits from renewal, but it hardly narrows the field. With few editorial alterations, the text of Middlemarch remains unchanged: the novel withstands the pressures of time, circumstance, and personality. However, its meaning changes both within the culture and within the consciousness of individual readers. It is for each generation to chart the differences that ensure that the novel will not become a relic, but will continue to 1



Introduction

2

Neo-Victorianism

Writing in The Guardian in May 2008, the novelist Zadie Smith paid homage to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) under the article title ‘The book of revelations’. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s declaration that Eliot’s text was ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’,3 Smith outlined the reasons why she disagreed with Henry James’s reference to bulky nineteenth-century novels as ‘large loose baggy monsters’.4 Her article posits that James was wrong in judging Middlemarch as being ‘too much’5 and setting ‘a limit . . . to the development of the old-fashioned English novel’.6 Middlemarch, Smith points out, regularly appears in surveys as the most widely read or most popular English novel, closely followed by Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Smith makes two fundamental comments in her article on the way in which contemporary readers need to reconsider their relationship with and understanding of the Victorian novel. Firstly, she argues that ‘One of the reasons we idolise the 19th-century English novel is the ways its methods, aims and expression seem so beautifully integrated. Author, characters and reader are all striving in the same direction.’7 The Victorian novel is, in Smith’s reading, a book of unity as much as revelation, an inclusive text which forges universal sympathy towards a common purpose. In this sense, it appears to support the New Scientist publication referred to in Ian Sample’s article, with which we started this chapter: Victorian literature unites its readers, now as then. But as these statements also indicate, in different ways, there is a danger in generalizations about what ‘the Victorian novel’ is, and what we think it should be. When we look more closely at what these cultural commentaries and academic narratives of influence, significance, and afterlives are doing, we perceive the ways in which ‘the Victorian’ has become a homogenized identity – even a signifier – in contemporary culture. It is important to question whether Middlemarch, for example, serves as the exemplar representative of the collective Victorian literary experience, or as an individual text, by an individual writer, that is somehow separate from our collective sense of ‘the Victorian’ now. It also connects us to the idea of the enduring influence of the Victorian on the contemporary world, particularly, though not exclusively, in the cultural sphere. As Hugh Kingsmill pointed out in 1932, ‘Had the great Victorians lived under three or four sovereigns, they would be judged on their



exert a pressure on the twenty-first century as vitally as it did in its nineteenth and our twentieth centuries. Karen Chase (ed.), Middlemarch in the Twenty-first Century (2006)2

own merits instead of being regarded as embodiments of an epoch which owes the illusion of its spiritual unity to the longevity of a single person.’8 The unification factor, the idea of how to define ‘the Victorian’ is an essential question to be addressed in a book on neoVictorianism in the twenty-first century, which seeks to read the nature of the Victorian now, and to examine what that enduring influence and afterlife means for contemporary culture, post-millennium. That there should be a Bloomian anxiety of influence9 about our relationship to the nineteenth century is not surprising. Since the Victorians ushered in (proto-) modernity,10 there is a sense in which our continued return to them masks nothing less than our own awareness of belatedness. It is this belatedness, and the strength of our desire for harking back to the Victorian, which informs this book’s exploration of the function of the past in contemporary culture and literature, and the various ways in which the present is negotiated through a range of (re)interpretations of the nineteenth century. Yet belatedness also implies creative impotence, rather than impetus; as Zadie Smith puts it, and this is the second important point of her article: That 19th-century English novels continue to be written today with troubling frequency is a tribute to the strength of Eliot’s example and to the nostalgia we feel for that noble form. Eliot would be proud. But should we be? For where is our fiction, our 21st-century fiction? We glimpse it here and there. Certainly not as often as you might expect, given the times we live in . . . What 21st-century novelists inherit from Eliot is the freedom to push the English novel’s form to its limits, wherever they may be.11 The points raised by Smith, a twenty-first-century novelist who does not herself write in the neo-Victorian mode, draw attention to an ongoing debate within contemporary literary culture: that the Victorian novelist and what he or she represents, aims for, and strives towards is still worth arguing about in, and is indeed relevant to, the twenty-first century, just as it was essential to the self-constitution of the early twentiethcentury modernists, and was at the centre of academic debates in the mid and later twentieth century, when Leavisites and Williamsites12 battled over the terrain of the meaning, politics, aesthetics, and morality found in Victorian texts, and when in the 1980s a new guard such as Catherine Belsey challenged the supremacy of the belief in (Victorian) realism as anything other than an ideological problematic.13 Criticism and reading, present and past, are aligned here in a complex web of



Introduction 3

Neo-Victorianism

interrelations and influences. For readers of and writers on Victorian literature it is refreshing that readers and writers of contemporary literature still feel these currents of difference, are still interested in the dangerous edginess of nineteenth-century fiction, and are energized by the new understandings of both the Victorian period and the contemporary that arise from gazing through this specific historical looking-glass. It is also a reminder of why we need to think about what texts mean as acts of reading, as spaces of intellectual exchange, fundamentally concerned as they are with the ontological and epistemological roots of the now through an historical awareness of then. Victorian literature, one recognizes in reading Smith’s article, still matters, greatly, and the reading of Victorian texts, the re-reading and re-writing of them, and the (neo-) Victorian experience they represent is something that defines our culture as much as it did theirs. This need not be seen as a negative element in contemporary culture, either: the belatedness we are focusing on in this book does not, when creative, playful, metafictional, hold back the writer. Rather, it makes for a revitalized, even pyrotechnic response to the ‘tradition’ still so much represented by the Victorians and the possibilities nineteenth-century fiction always contained within itself for subversion. This Introduction sets out some of the key strands that we see as emerging discourses within the field of ‘neo-Victorianism’. The term has up until now remained loosely defined, and that may be an advantage in the wider cultural sphere, but what we explicitly seek to invoke in our use of the concept is a series of metatextual and metahistorical conjunctions as they interact within the fields of exchange and adaptation between the Victorian and the contemporary. What we argue throughout this book is that the ‘neo-Victorian’ is more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. To be part of the neo-Victorianism we discuss in this book, texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians. Much of the discussion we formulate in the subsequent chapters therefore resides within its own hybrid critical space: drawing on contemporary debates and recent research within Victorian studies and works on or of contemporary culture, the chapters each bring forward a question relating to the aesthetic, ethical, metafictional, and metacritical parameters of their own acts of (readerly/writerly) appropriation. As Cora Kaplan phrases it in relation to Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith, ‘I value most that self-consciousness that insists that I reflect on the complexity of what is at stake at any given point in my own time about my interest in the Victorian.’14 It is



4

this ‘self-consciousness’ about our own subject positions that we, too, see at the heart of what neo-Victorianism in its more defined, theorized, conceptualized, and aesthetically developed form offers to readers. This is what distinguishes contemporary literary and filmic neo-Victorian culture from other aspects of contemporary culture which embrace historical settings but do not involve themselves to such a high degree in the self-analytic drive that accompanies ‘neo-Victorianism’. In light of the Victorian returns it performs, the concept of ‘neo’Victorianism offers an interesting angle on the metafictional mode we consider so essential to the genre. The term ‘neo-Victorian’ has been adopted in academic studies in favour of the earlier ‘post-Victorian’ (presumably because of its potential ahistoricity) and ‘retro’/’faux-Victorian’, which imply an overt nostalgia for the period.15 This popularity is marked not only in creative but also critical terms with a growth in studies on the contemporary endurance, even reinvigoration, of our fascination with the Victorians. That there is a need for a definition of a term that has a growing number of articles, books, and even a journal devoted to it16 is made manifest in one recent collection on the theme. In Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, and Catherine Waters’s Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns (2008), footnote 5 of the editors’ introduction (by Judith Johnston and Catherine Waters) problematizes the prefix ‘neo’ as follows: 5. The term ‘Neo,’ when used in conjunction with a political movement, implies a desire to return to the political beliefs of that movement’s past (for example, Neo-Fascism) and a desire for the reinstatement of earlier, and often conservative, values as opposed to more radical change. Margaret Thatcher’s NeoVictorianism [sic] – her call for a return to ‘Victorian values’ – might be interpreted in this way. However, used in conjunction with a genre, the implication is rather a new, modified, or more modern style, as in Neo-Gothic for instance.17 The determination to provide a precise (and positive) definition of neoVictorianism in this note is clear and it is no doubt essential when one is marketing this term as one half of one’s book’s title. But it cannot really mask the fact that there is a noticeable uneasiness in providing a working understanding of ‘neo-Victorianism’ in this definition, which might be compared here to the more confident assertion by Robin Gilmour in 2000 of six very clear categories of Victorian ‘uses’ in contemporary fiction.18 As researchers and readers in the fields of both Victorian literary studies and contemporary fiction, we are concerned



Introduction 5

Neo-Victorianism

with reclaiming the significance of that prefix ‘neo-’, so that it is more than a short-hand indication of style, period, or costume in relation to a specific text or film. What we argue in this book is that just as not all narratives published between 1837 and 1901 are Victorian, so all fictions post-1901 that happen to have a Victorian setting or re-write a Victorian text or a Victorian character do not have to be neo-Victorian; indeed, we would argue that many of them cannot be identified so precisely because they fall quite clearly into the category of historical fiction set in the nineteenth century rather than being texts about the metahistoric and metacultural ramifications of such historical engagement. To suggest that all neo-Victorian texts – literary, filmic, (audio)visual – are progressive (politically, culturally, aesthetically, literarily), and always represent the ‘new, modified, or more modern style’, just because they appear ‘in conjunction with a genre’, is problematic. There are plenty of texts that might fit these broader terms of neoVictorianism by genre alone but which are also inherently conservative because they lack imaginative re-engagement with the period, and instead recycle and deliver a stereotypical and unnuanced reading of the Victorians and their literature and culture; as Christian Gutleben notes, there is a danger in the balance between correcting ‘historical injustice’ and what can be ‘construed cynically as the compliance with the hegemony of the politically correct’.19 This is a significant issue because the divide between parody and innovation, pastiche and reinterpretation is an important demarcation that separates genres on the border between neo-Victorian texts and historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. These are crucial distinctions to make when discussing a genre that has the potential to descend into cliché or to be seen as pushing against received assumptions within the larger cultural sphere. Writing on her blog ‘The Little Professor: Things Victorian and academic’, the US literary academic Miriam Elizabeth Burstein sums up satirically all the preconceptions we have of the nineteenth century and the erroneous (and comic) slippages that historical fiction about the Victorians (as opposed to neo-Victorianism within our definition) can run into: [T]here are no rules for neo-Victorian novels. Never fear! The L[ittle] P[rofessor] comes to the rescue! 1. All middle- and upper-class Victorian wives are Sexually Frustrated, Emotionally Unfulfilled, and possibly Physically Abused. If they’re lucky, however, they may find Fulfillment with a) a man not their husband, b) a man not their husband and of the Laboring



6

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

Classes, c) a man not their husband and of Another Race, or d) a woman not their, er, husband. Christians may be Good, as long as they are not evangelicals. Evangelicals, however, are Bad, and frequently Hypocritical. All heroes and heroines are True Egalitarians who disregard all differences of Class, Race, and Sex. Heroines, in particular, are given to behaving in Socially Unacceptable Ways, which is always Good. All heroes and heroines are Instinctively Admired by members of Oppressed Populations. Any outwardly respectable man will a) have frequent recourse to Prostitutes, b) have a Dark Secret, and/or c) be Jack the Ripper. There must be at least one Prostitute, who will be an Alcoholic and/or have a Heart of Gold. If the novel is about a prostitute, however, she will have at least one Unusual Talent not related to her line of work. All children are subject to frequent Physical, Emotional, and Sexual Abuse. Nevertheless, they will grow up to become Sensitive and Caring Adults. Any novel based on an actual Victorian literary work must include considerable quantities of Sex. There must be at least one scene set in a Wretched Slum, which will be very Dirty and Damp. The novelist must make the prose more Antique by eliminating all Contractions and using Period Slang (whether or not it is actually appropriate). Finally, the novel’s publicist should use the adjective ‘Dickensian’ at least once.20

The Little Professor’s list is naturally meant to be ironic and necessarily blurs the distinctive intellectual elements to be found in the more complex paradigms of neo-Victorian fiction which seeks to advance an alternative view of the nineteenth century for a modern audience. Yet it does hold some truths and is an apt summary of much of the material published in the sub-genre of historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. While the list offers stereotypes in its portrayal of the kinds of character and plot lines used in neo-Victorian fictions, this is echoed in the fact that, as Gutleben has pointed out in Nostalgic Postmodernism, so much of contemporary historical fiction about the Victorian period is ‘conservative’21 in its aesthetics when arguing against long-established clichés about the ideas and fixations of the Victorians themselves. This



Introduction 7

Neo-Victorianism

kind of fiction often appears to be driven by a desire to illuminate and occasionally even ‘correct’ aspects of the Victorian age, or the Victorians’ attitudes to the specifics of sex, gender, and erotic relationships.22 The popularity of such fictional re-encounters with the Victorian is undoubted; one has only to think of the recent success of the novels of Sarah Waters and the subsequent TV adaptations to see the economic and cultural ‘bestseller’ status of such works. What this introductory chapter seeks to do is raise some issues concerning the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of such creative and cultural re-engagements with the Victorian, before leading on to an outline of the discussions presented in the subsequent chapters. Ultimately, this book is an analysis of a range of cultural encounters with the Victorian from 1999 to the present. Its core question is: why does contemporary literature and culture repeatedly initiate returns to the nineteenth century?

1 History, literature, and criticism While the last twenty years have seen a growth in the literary and cultural phenomenon now termed neo-Victorianism, it is necessary to remember that the birth of the genre in its broadest definition was itself almost simultaneous with the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1901. Indeed, chronologically speaking everything after that key date is in an essential manner post-Victorian (though not neo-Victorian), even if it was only really with the work of authors like Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) that a conscious articulation of the desire to re-write, re-vision and challenge the nineteenth-century’s assumptions and dominance came about.23 Books such as A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize winning dualtime narrative Possession: A Romance (1990) and more recently still the popularity of Waters’s work in both print and via adaptations for TV have illustrated a continued fascination with, if not fixation on, the Victorians and their relationship to us. One might even suggest that this obsessive return to the past is part of a Derridean reaffirmation of our shared cultural heritage.24 But these works, while they pay a kind of homage to the period even as they seek to provide new angles on its events, repressed desires, and more unusual lives or experiences, very rarely present a critique of our own enduring attraction to the materialist and expansionist cultural hegemony of nineteenth-century Britain in the popular imagination and public memory.25 Even those texts which do seek to assert a more critique-driven perspective on the colonial, repressive, and suppressive mindset of the age of empire often fail



8

to address or negate the impulse to interrogate our ongoing obsession with that prolonged and continuous historical moment which ‘began’ (for want of a better term) in 1837 (for want of a better starting point), and ended alongside the chronological cessation of Victoria’s own life on 22 January 1901.26 This simultaneous attraction to and abjection from the Victorian, however, does merit further investigation, particularly in the contexts of those texts which seek to analyse our sustained need to reinterpret the Victorians and what they mean to us. There have been a number of recent studies which have looked at aspects of the neo-Victorian from specific perspectives. Diana Wallace’s The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (2004)27 takes the historical fiction genre more generally as a context for thinking about issues surrounding women’s authorship during the twentieth century, and rewritings of the Victorian are discussed alongside Regency romances and other historical time periods. Building on Wallace’s work but taking a more precise focus, Jeannette King’s The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005)28 again takes the issue of women’s writing and Victorian debates about women’s rights and reads these through the revisioning lens of contemporary feminist authors. Joined most recently by Tatiana Kontou’s Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (2009),29 these three texts might be read as a collective statement on the importance of women writers to neo-Victorianism and the significance of neo-Victorian ideas and approaches to contemporary women’s writing. Taking a broader approach to the neo-Victorian, Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007)30 covers a range of twentieth-century adaptations and appropriations of the Victorians from the Bloomsbury Group’s rebellion against their parents’ generation through to recent films which provide a sense of the Victorian ‘view’ on realism and interpretation, while Christine Krueger’s collection Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (2002) usefully focuses on the functionality of our encounters with the Victorian in film and literature but also through the reporting of crime, architecture, and home furnishings.31 Similarly broad in her approach is Cora Kaplan in Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007),32 which provides a set of case studies, including Jane Eyre, biographies and fictions about Henry James, and a postcolonial reading of Jane Campion’s The Piano as a means of approaching the Victorians as they continue to influence the contemporary. While these texts and others mentioned elsewhere in this introduction and throughout this book provide a sense of the diversity and flexibility of the



Introduction 9

Neo-Victorianism

neo-Victorian as a creative form and a place for critical interpretation, it is noticeable that there remains a tension about the definition of this field, and that there is continuing evidence of the rather selective and self-perpetuating notion of a neo-Victorian canon.33 This is a danger inherent in the nature of adaptation and appropriation, but here it is not just that the same Victorian texts appear to be reworked, rewritten, and revisioned by contemporary writers but also that critical work generates a sense of the neo-Victorian as identifiable within a small set of writers and texts. What we argue in this book is that the definition of the neo-Victorian requires greater conceptual clarification, and that in strengthening such an interpretative terminology we should also be alert to and open about the growing number of texts that can be associated within such a definition’s parameters. Given the current and increasing popularity, both cultural and academic, of the field, this appears to be an appropriate moment to reflect more on the subject of neo-Victorianism as an intellectual and cultural mode, and explore some of the ways in which we might come to think about the historio-aesthetic strengths of the neo-Victorian at the same time as raising some questions about the ethical aspects of the genre. By aesthetics here we are referring primarily to the decisions made by both writer and reader to use contemporary fiction as a means of (re)encountering the nineteenth century, while ethics is used in the sense of the intellectual and cultural meanings and impact contained within or consequential to that aesthetic choice; what David Andress terms ‘an ethical approach to history [which] involves the viewing of people in the past as “ethical subjects” – entitled to the same consideration for their actions and perspectives as we would hope to receive for our own.’34 This ethical inflection to our approach towards fiction in general has been characterized by Kenneth Womack as a means of explaining ‘the contradictory emotions and problematic moral stances’ involved in the ‘character of contemporary hermeneutics’.35 More importantly, it coincides with a historiographic return to the ethical in history writing: as Peter Mandler recently put it, The imaginative capability of history is closely connected to its ethical capability. One of the purposes of historical time travel is to transport our modern selves into alien situations which allow us to highlight by contrast our own values and assumptions. Sometimes it is easier to examine complex ethical questions honestly and openly in an historical rather than in a contemporary setting, the distancing involved in taking out some of the heat of the moment without



10

Introduction 11

Mandler, like several historians, also notes contemporary culture’s propensity to return to the past, to engage in this ‘historical time travel’, as part of a mainstream movement back to the pre-modernist period. Another historian, Jonathan Clark, claims that ‘[p]ostmodernism is the most theoretically expressed version of a rejection of the historical. This rejection is a consequence of the way in which postmodernism has set itself against what it takes to be “modernist” ideas of truth and objectivity, replacing what it sees as a set of grand narratives claiming objective authority with a diverse pattern of localized narratives and fluid identities.’37 What Clark’s discussion does not recognize is that this contemporary fragmentation of narrative structure at the level of the historical narrative has been mirrored in contemporary fiction’s attempt to return to the ostensible security of coherent narrative structures and textual order as represented by the nineteenth century. It is the coinciding nature of these historiographic trends with fictional developments, as ethics and aesthetics intersect, that we want to explore here. Peter Widdowson argued in an article of 2006 that it has become a ‘truism’ that British contemporary fiction is dominated by historical novels, even suggesting that there is now a specific genre called ‘re-visionary fiction’ in which works re-write or ‘write back to’ ‘canonic texts from the past’. Widdowson ‘speculate[s]’ on reasons for ‘this modern penchant for historical fictions’ and comments that at ‘the more cynical end of the spectrum . . . popular pastiches serve to satisfy people’s persistent craving for “a good read” on the old grand scale’. One reason for this return, he suggests, might be ‘the enormity of present reality’ and ‘novelists[’] despair of finding adequate forms of representation for it’, or that ‘the past’s presence in the present determines the nature of that present’ (another truism), or even that it’s ‘just one more aspect of postmodernism’.38 In the context of these other options, it is not so easy to take the first version, that of the ‘good read’, so straightforwardly as one of the factors that appeal to readers in the market for neo-Victorian fiction. To take one prominent recent example: Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) is the story of Sugar, that prostitute with the ‘Heart of Gold’ (her mother takes the ‘Alcoholic’ option) cited by the Little Professor. Despite the fact that the plotline and indeed the character of Sugar are unbelievable – perhaps that is the



disengaging entirely contemporary values and attitudes. In this aspect history asks us not to lose ourselves in the past but to view the past from our own standpoint; in fact, one of its functions is to help us define our standpoint more clearly.36

Neo-Victorianism

point – the novel is of interest here because of the way in which it seeks to undermine readers’ confidence in the aesthetic purpose of the neoVictorian novel as a form. It does this by having no real conclusion, and with the story gradually fading out at perhaps one of the more exciting moments of the entire text, as Sugar, having already managed to save the girl’s mother from imprisonment in an asylum, kidnaps the girl to whom she has acted as governess, from the father who was once Sugar’s exclusive customer. The idea that a novel with that kind of summary of the final pages could ever reach a satisfying conclusion is beside the point. More intriguing and interesting than what happens to the characters in the novel is what happened to the novel’s readers on reaching this conclusion. It is precisely the lack of an ‘ending’ about which readers complained. In his collection The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories (2006), a text in part written to supply, though not to satisfy, the concluding material expected by readers of his novel, Faber points out in his ‘Foreword’ that readers wrote to him to demand satisfaction; one ranted: ‘How dare your book end with us not knowing what happened to Agnes! And where did Sugar take Sophie off to anyhow? Novels aren’t supposed to just stop! Novels aren’t like real life. Novels are supposed to have satisfying tight endings.’39 Faber’s response to this is a neat conflation of readers’ faith in the reality of his characters and an odd justification that he was trying to emulate something about the Victorian mode of publication itself: Sugar has been denied privacy all her life, I would say, and by the end of the novel she has earned the right to make her own way in the world, unscrutinised by us. And isn’t it fun, at the end of a book, to be challenged to do what the Victorians were obliged to do between instalments of serialised novels: construct what happens next in our imaginations? (xvi) Faber’s argument is, of course, flawed in suggesting that the ending of a neo-Victorian novel is trying to emulate the relationship that developed between reader and text during the serialization of a publication in the Victorian period: for George Eliot every limit might well have been both a beginning and an ending, but for her readers the final chapter of a novel was, as far as we are concerned here, just that: final. And yet the Victorian novel itself is full of examples of endings postponed and readers left wondering: would Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) be the same novel without that concluding yet inconclusive ‘Farewell’ from Lucy



12

Snowe? The point raises important questions about how contemporary neo-Victorian readers think the Victorian realist mode worked. Faber’s text disappoints them because it does not live up to their expectations of a (neo-)Victorian novel; they feel intellectually and financially conned because they have bought into a version of the Victorian that the author seems to play along with only to renegotiate the terms of the contract in the final pages. Where Faber’s comment is most interesting, then, is in its implicit association of contemporary readers with the customers for Sugar’s sexual favours in the novel. In this statement, Faber makes a direct link between Sugar’s ‘earning’ of her keep through physical prostitution and a writer’s earning of his/her keep through providing a kind of textual relief through the neo-Victorian story. Readers are, Faber seems to suggest, addicted, in spite of Bloomsbury’s modernism and the postmodernist approaches to be found in much contemporary fiction, to the standard formula of beginning, middle and end, with that final word being and providing an appropriate sense of conclusion.40 NeoVictorian fiction does, of course, often fall into the trap of providing us with that tying up of everything in a neat little package, and readers drawn to Faber’s novel no doubt thought that for their investment (both financial and time-wise) in his 800+ page text they would get neatness, finality, and the concluding moment, so unlike to what we find in life. Faber’s version of the neo-Victorian, though, seems to be driven by the desire to provide a version of escapism defeated. As such, it offers a different kind of aesthetic and ethical choice on the part of both author and reader; Faber’s ethical stance is an odd mixture caught between the aesthetics and the associated pleasures of telling a good story and the moral implication of keeping a distance from the ‘reality’ of the characters within it. In that sense, Faber plays on the historian’s dilemma and that of the Victorian novelist too. It is no accident, as Peter Mandler notes, that while nineteenth-century French historians like Jules Michelet and Jacques-Nicolas-Augustin Thierry were developing a national historical narrative, ‘the English were not behindhand in devising a popular, romantic history, although, because it came first out of the cultural marketplace rather than the State or the academy, it took the form not of the textbook but of the novel. Thierry’s acknowledged master, upon whose style and method he closely modelled his own, was [Walter Scott,] the author of those great fictional epics of English history, Ivanhoe (1819) and Kenilworth (1821).’41 Narrative, historical or fictional, is united in its desire to tell the story, and history is a story always, as Richard Evans notes, ‘written, consciously or unconsciously, from the perspective of the present’.42 But when fiction looks backward,



Introduction 13

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it does so in a necessarily different and more playful manner than the factual. The clues to Faber’s narrative game with historical hindsight and fictional rootedness are there from the outset as he plays with the reader’s understanding of perspective, chronology, and the idea of what the neo-Victorian novel is about. The opening lines capture this stance perfectly: Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but these stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether.43 Readers who fail to pay heed to this warning about the ‘truth’ within the text simultaneously ignore the fact that this is a hint from the very beginning that what we are not going to get is a classic imitation of the reader’s own ideas about Victorian realism. We are emphasizing the reference to the reader’s ideas here precisely because the aesthetic decision to read and engage with a neo-Victorian novel often seems prompted by a desire to have Victorian length, plot, and character but without the ‘difficulties’ of Victorian language and circumlocution concerning issues of the body and sexuality; in other words, the desire is often for a contemporary novel which begins with the phrase ‘Part One: 1861’ or some other signifier of a supposed textual and temporal shift from the present day of the reader to the fiction of the Victorian, which is actually little more than a fabrication to mask a novel that is an extension of the contemporary rather than historical realism. Faber’s play with time continues a few pages later when the narrative voice deflates our expectations that anyone in this novel is going to conform to rule 5c in the Little Professor’s list: ‘Of Jack the Ripper she need have no fear; it’s almost fourteen years too early’ (7). In The Apple these games continue: in the opening story, ‘Christmas in Silver Street’, for example, we read: ‘Do not be scandalised by Sugar’s age. The age of consent for girls is twelve. In two years from now [1874], it will be raised to thirteen.’ (4) These celebrations of the text’s own artificiality to be found in its knowing asides to the reader blur the moment of the narrative with the historical foreknowledge that cannot really (or should not) be negated by the belated contemporary. These readerly addresses are open to the interpretation that one of Faber’s concerns is to highlight and



14

pinpoint the very inauthentic nature of his text, to play with the concept of omniscient authorial knowingness in order on the face of it to collude with readers even as he conspires against their desire for an ‘unreal’ ending. Games-playing of this kind also, however, poses fundamental intellectual questions about the ethical standpoint of the author and reader in relation to the notion of temporality and the ‘knowable’ nature of an historical period. Such acts draw our attention to the (meta)fictionality of the narrative and create that playful sense of shared alertness about the nature of the fiction. It is such encounters at the metafictional and metacritical levels that we focus upon in the following chapters. Just as Susan Barrett’s 2005 novel Fixing Shadows is about the pinning down of the historical moment in a photographic record, so it has to be recognized that for all the possibilities of imaginative reinvention to which the Victorians can be subjected there is nevertheless such a thing as a Victorian experience that cannot always be recast into a neoVictorian story of difference; this is precisely where the issue of the prefix of the genre’s title raises both expectations and questions about the construction of a ‘neo-Victorian’ perspective. In what sense can a text which postdates the period concerned by over a century claim a direct inheritance from within that literary lineage? This might be misread as taking the generic signifier as too specific, but whereas ‘historical fiction’ encompasses within its title a notion of the fictional imagination, neo-Victorianism is potentially able to be interpreted as offering a different sense of the historical imaginary, and one which can be seen not only as imitating or mimicking an earlier style or mode, but also as seeking to inherit its position and in some senses displace its precursor. The issue of narrative endings, then, becomes a focus of neo-Victorian novelists’ attention, possibly because of the sense in which their work seeks to prevent a notion of periodicity and textual closure. Fixing Shadows, indeed, provides an articulation of the very problem of conclusion for which Faber only partially desires to provide an answer: So now we have arrived at the final chapter and must, therefore, contrive a proper conclusion for our story. And it is surely required that we aim high at this point, rounding all (the deserving, at least) with happy endings, as secrets are revealed, the lost found and the parted reunited. And if such loose-end-tying should be considered banal, then at the very least we should stoop to a more general moral: a satisfactory ending should leave the reader with a sensation of either well-being, all’s right with the world, or hope, all’s potentially right with the world.44



Introduction 15

Neo-Victorianism

One need only think of the ending of Middlemarch for an example of this, or, indeed, David Lodge’s comment in his reworking of the Victorian industrial novel, Nice Work (1988), that ‘all the Victorian novelist could offer . . . were: a legacy, a marriage, emigration or death.’45 In many cases, it seems that the neo-Victorian novelist cannot offer any other alternatives and thus the neo-Victorian marks a return to the classic form of the nineteenth-century novel in a way that, structurally at least, seems often to negate the experiments of the modernist movement. Like Woolf’s Lily Briscoe, contemporary novelists have their vision, but they must follow the lead of George Eliot in drawing it all together in the end. Such an interpretation also has wider significance for our understanding of the nature of postmodernist experimentation itself as that desire for a ‘good read’ supersedes narrative innovation, fragmentation, and the invention of new forms in order to return to the potential certainties, satisfactions, and comforts of a more traditional mode of representation. The tying up of not-so-loose ends and the sense of finality to the text’s conclusion also bear comparison with the genre in which much neo-Victorianism locates itself and to which it is particularly suited: detection. Most historical fiction can function quite easily in this genre, but it works especially well in the Victorian case partly because it was during that period that detective stories really emerged. The association between detection and historical fiction per se inevitably rests in the similarities in the gathering of evidence and the search for the new (and hopefully correct) interpretation of that material. It also allows the narrative to stray into the deeper and darker recesses of Victorian society; as Julie Sanders indicates, ‘[t]he Victorian era and its active underworld would seem to offer a very specific example of these kinds of social and cultural contradictions and this may in part explain the ongoing fascination with appropriating the modes of nineteenth-century fiction more generally in contemporary writing.’46 Sanders makes specific reference to the popularity of the 1860s, and it is to one contemporary novel set in that decade that we now wish to turn briefly to illustrate how some of the best neo-Victorian work seeks simultaneously to tell a ‘good story’ and throw into question in productive ways the very nature of the neo-Victorian enterprise on aesthetic and ethical grounds. Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006) by D.J. Taylor is a book that seeks to explore far more within its neo-Victorian mystery framework than the contortions a sensation novel plot seem to provide. Indeed, Taylor’s title subtly addresses the nature of neo-Victorian fiction and its relationship to the Victorian precursor text. So many neo-Victorian fictions



16

are rewritings of the Victorian that the issue of what is ‘kept’ or what remains of the specifically ‘Victorian mystery’ becomes of fundamental importance. As a term, ‘kept’ also implies something about part of the self-conscious awareness of the text’s belatedness, its re-reading and challenge to the earlier literary inheritance. Taylor signals this through the recycling of the names and plotlines of Victorian novels in his text – sometimes in the most unlikely ways. But part of his meaning in such literary-historical homage must surely lie in the metafictional idea that all neo-Victorian fiction is in some sense appropriating the aesthetic framework and even the literal characteristics of the original texts. Sanders points out that the various forms of appropriation and adaptation contain an element of ‘commentary on a sourcetext. This is achieved most often by offering a revised point of view from the “original”, adding hypothetical motivation, or voicing the silenced and marginalized. Yet adaptation can also constitute a simpler attempt to make texts “relevant” or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the processes of proximation and updating.’47 In the case of neither Faber nor Taylor are things as clear-cut as this statement might suggest, unless we take their making the Victorian (or Victorian texts) ‘easily comprehensible’ as part of an ironic comment on the notion of appropriation as an aesthetic mode. Taylor’s use of Victoriana in his novel is excessive to the extreme and almost promotes the text as literally devouring the literature from which it is born and on which it feeds. This consuming approach to the Victorian intertext posits the way in which the narrative ethics of the neo-Victorian are complicated via the ‘theft’ (read appropriation) of the structural fabric and textual characteristics from the ‘original’ nineteenth-century novel. Just as Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White defeats our longing for the closure that is culturally perceived as characteristic of the Victorian (and especially the neo-Victorian) realist novel, so Taylor appears to pre-empt the desires of two distinct types of readership: the reader of contemporary fiction (who may have little sense of the adaptation of character identities from Victorian texts) and the reader (often professionalized, one imagines, as a Victorianist or literary academic) who will acknowledge these points of reference and may, at some moments in the narrative, be led astray (or prevented from being led astray) by assumptions associated with the signifiers of the nomenclature Taylor employs. There are thus two levels of reading, identified by the respective awareness they prompt of the use being made of the Victorian text; for each reading experience, there is a distinct and differing knowledge of the act of appropriation. We recognize that an assertion



Introduction 17

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about divided readerships, between the ‘ordinary’ reader and the more ‘knowledgeable’ critical reader, is potentially controversial. This differentiation into diverse reading experiences and the emphasis on the ‘knowing’ reader, however, is prompted by the games-playing of the novels themselves, and underlies the argument of the chapters which follow. It is a position we see as essential to the identification of the metafictionality at the core of the neo-Victorian modus operandi. Cora Kaplan has recently posited the idea that ‘[h]owever much the Victorian world, refracted through its imaginative writing, acts as a foil for arguments about culture and politics today, it is the rediscovered joys of Victorian literature that draws modern novelists back to the nineteenth century’.48 This ties in well with a statement by Byatt, whose Possession might be seen as the beginning of the late-twentieth-century vogue for the neo-Victorian, that ‘[i]t may be argued that we cannot understand the present if we do not understand the past that preceded and produced it . . . But there are other, less solid reasons, amongst them the aesthetic need to write coloured and metaphorical language, to keep past literatures alive and singing, connecting the pleasure of writing to the pleasure of reading.’49 Taylor’s novel problematizes this entire relationship by promoting the possibility that there is an aesthetic question to be asked about what lies beneath our almost parasitic fascination with the continued return to the Victorian narrative – historical and literary – even as that period’s story grows increasingly distant from our own. As a biographer of Thackeray among others, Taylor draws our attention to the potential pitfalls in providing contemporary readers with what they want from a neo-Victorian novel; his nostalgic version of the postmodern, to adapt Gutleben’s terminology,50 can be read as exploring the ways in which different readers respond to and seek different things from a contemporary Victorian text. Kept has two epigrams which play with the Victorian/modernist, and by implication postmodernist, nexus: the first, from M.R. James, reads: ‘Please to remember that I am a Victorian, and that the Victorian tree cannot but be expected to bear Victorian fruit’,51 while the second is from Marcel Proust and is more enigmatic: ‘Beneath the signs there lay something of a different kind.’52 Combined, these two statements highlight the intermediary nature of the narrative that is about to unfold. Presented as a kind of mid-Victorian detective story (the events take place between 1863 and 1866 and are therefore set in the heart of the decade of sensation fiction), the narrative ensures that we must pick up numerous clues beyond those of the plot itself. Thus, just as characters’ names seem to demand to be over-read, so place names inflect



18

an all-too-knowing narrator/author: Tite Street features prominently (although in reality it would be three decades later when the resident of number 34, one Oscar Wilde, would make the address more prominent still), and a passage with Dickensian overtones ends with a character ‘skipping girlishly away in the direction of Somers Town’,53 no doubt partly a play on the surname of the heroine of Bleak House, given that an Esther figure is a key character in Kept; Waters does the same with the connotations attached to the use of Cheyne Walk in Affinity and it has become something of a stock trick in neo-Victorian texts. The identification and assertion of locations out of time (that is, allusions to places where the historical and literary significance comes after the date of the scene described) is again something which reflects on a sense of belatedness (characters and plots are caught out by a framework of interpretation that will happen later) and dislocation found in the neo-Victorian textual play. (We discuss this theme of locations out of time in more detail in Chapter 1 in relation to the notion of the ancestral home.) Like Faber, Taylor appears determined to break the illusion of the ‘Victorian’ nature of this mystery at key moments, among them the passage dividing parts four and five which is an extract from a country house guidebook that alludes to the history of Easton Hall, East Anglia, right up to 1942. The breaking of the neo-Victorian illusion is, of course, also an assertion of that illusion, for the guidebook entry itself is a fabrication. This illustrates precisely the way in which a negotiation is being set up between the periods, the fact that the author ostensibly allows an ethical dimension to enter into the narration that reasserts the fictional nature of the historical narrative and which inevitably insinuates a need for readers to recognize that the aesthetics of appropriation are derivative and fabricated. This conceit, which involves, for example, for a heroine from Margaret Oliphant’s fiction, Miss Marjoribanks, to be written to ‘C/o Mrs Browning, 18 Wimpole Street’, underlines that what is ‘kept’ in this narrative is the pretence of both Victorian fiction and a neo-Victorian reality founded on historical evidence. It also provides a neat reflection on the overlap between fact and fiction in so many neo-Victorian novels – the introduction, for example, of real-life personalities from the period, usually and especially Victorian writers. Here, fictional and factual individuals are blurred to the extent that the text cannot help but highlight the ways in which the derivative nature of neo-Victorianism consumes the figures it seeks to emulate. This naturally brings forward certain aesthetic and ethical questions about the appropriation of ‘real’ Victorian lives into creative texts, and the nature of authenticity in this process. Using historical figures as if they



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were merely characters in a fiction, or rather the potential for treating the historical past as if it were a fictional narrative does undermine certain aspects of history as a lived experience. Appropriating the dead writers of the nineteenth century in ways that imply they are only figments of a shared cultural imagination opens up new possibilities but also additional dimensions and tensions in relation to the authentic as presented in the neo-Victorian text. Like the biographer as a graverobber, some neo-Victorian fictions deliberately confound the distinction between reality and imagination, lives lived and lives created. One might cite here the flourishing of Henry James novels at the turn of the millennium, or as Kaplan puts it, ‘this fin de siècle flowering of Jamesiana’.54 In the case of James, of course, this is particularly ironic, given that one of his most well-known short stories, ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888), is about precisely this kind of literary grave-robbing. The invocation of factual personalities in fiction has long posed problems for both writers and critics. As the American writer Jonathan Dee states: ‘The appropriation of genuine historical figures – people who actually lived – as characters in fiction is an act of imaginative boldness that, through simple attrition, readers of contemporary fiction have come to take entirely for granted.’55 If this is the case, then historical fiction in many senses ceases to serve one of its primary functions in re-imagining the past, by obscuring or fabricating evidence rather than providing accountable biographical narratives; a more detailed discussion on a related theme follows in Chapter 3’s elaboration of the series of fictional and non-fictional accounts in recent years of the life, death, and posthumous narrative of Saartjie Baartman. Taylor’s use of literary figures as side-characters in his novel presents just such a complex encounter between historical fact and historical fiction. The issue for Taylor’s text, however, is not his invention of new fictional identities to interact with these real-life figures, but rather the way in which all Victorian identities become part of an intricate web of fiction, and the blurring of the line between the statements that there was a poet called Elizabeth Barrett Browning and there is a fictional character called Miss Majoribanks. In an article entitled ‘Flexing the Imagination’, James Harold explores this core issue of the accurate or authentic within an ethical context of historical imagining. As Harold notes, ‘the difference between morally praiseworthy and morally blameworthy attempts at fictive imagining has to do not only with the fidelity of the imagining, but with the motives of the imaginer.’56 The tension here is something that Harold perceives as integral to the form of historical fiction precisely because



20

the imaginative action involved on the part of both writer and reader draws them into an assessment of the text on the basis of how it matches an ‘accurate’ notion of the period, character, or situation: ‘Questions of accuracy and ethics are conjoined whenever the character depicted in a narrative represents . . . an actual (living or historical) person . . . in a way that purports to be accurate. And most historical fiction . . . does aspire to accuracy’.57 It might be argued that this ethical debate is more central when the time period being explored is historically closer to the readers’ lived experience. Just as Lytton Strachey noted that ‘[t]he history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it’,58 so one might posit the idea that the attempt towards accuracy and its contingent authenticity is also in a problematic alignment in the case of contemporary encounters with the Victorian period. Although he does not dwell in detail on the issue of the blurring between fictional and factual characters, the following comment from Harold does bear relevance for the case of James Wilson’s The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense (2001), a text of interest here because of its treatment of the real-versus-fictional ‘character’ dynamic. Harold writes: An inaccurately imagined character is not just an aesthetic failure . . . it may also be a moral failure, when the imagined character represents either an actual person or a token of some actual type such that there is some obligation to the actual person or group being fictionally imagined that the imagination be true to life.59 Wilson’s novel confounds the distinctions between real and fictional individuals and in so doing takes biographical speculation about the lives of individuals from the Victorian period and moves beyond it. Julie Sanders sums up the text accurately as containing a ‘sexually aggressive element . . . [which] is part of the novel’s wider investment in exploring the sexual undercurrents and repressions of the Victorian era’.60 The fact that the ‘sexually aggressive element’ is portrayed in relation to a character adopted from a Victorian narrative (Walter Hartright from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, 1860), who commits a sexual attack on a character from the same story (Marion Halcombe), is but an example of how contemporary writers use nineteenth-century texts as an imaginative repository. What is more ethically questionable is the fact that Wilson’s novel speculates on this sexual attack as a result of the influence of J.W.M. Turner, the subject of the biography Hartright has been commissioned to write. The gradual descent into madness of the central protagonist of the novel is thus drawn into an analogous



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relationship with the ‘insanity’ of the real-life Turner. This does raise ethical questions, and also aesthetic issues concerning the relationship between text and reality, and the appropriation of an historical identity for the purpose of blurring the boundaries between fiction and fact, literature and life. While Wilson begins his ‘Note on Sources’ with the standard disclaimer that ‘[t]his is, of course, a novel not a work of non-fiction’,61 what is suggested in his book goes beyond the issue of the factual site of literature and the fictional site of history, and instead posits the idea that all lives are textually fair game. Patently, this is not the case. But it appears as if one aspect of the neo-Victorian is about underlining the historical relativity and quasi-fictiveness of the Victorians to our own period, even as it simultaneously exploits the possibilities that chronological distance provides; in authorially claiming authenticity such textual games at the same time throw into relief their own ethical ambiguity. As Wayne C. Booth indicates, plays with the past are a dilemma for those dealing with both the fictional and the factual: ‘[h]istorical novelists always deliberately or unconsciously violate known facts about the past, to make the fiction go, and narrative historians (too often?) do the same, to make the history go.’62 This is partly what Booth terms ‘an author’s invitation to duplicity’63 and it is this kind of ‘invitation’ that authors of neo-Victorian texts often seem to proffer to different readerships and for different reasons. This also raises a question about what we do as readers and researchers in this field: Hartright in Wilson’s novel is very much portrayed as the scholarly biographer-detective, seeking out evidence, hunting down the ‘dark clue’ of the novel’s title, and generally performing a researchactive role. Such textual layering proves a key dynamic of Taylor’s narrative, too, and acts as an invitation to readers to follow the lead of the narrative and become textual detectives in their own right. The objective of such detection, as we have seen above in relation to Taylor’s novel, is often literary critical, involving the tracing of the canonical threads within the narrative. As Sanders has pointed out, ‘[a]daptation both appears to require and to perpetuate the existence of a canon, although it may in turn contribute to its ongoing reformulation and expansion.’64 Much neo-Victorian fiction attempts to undertake this ‘reformulation and expansion’ and does it well, but nevertheless there remain two main types of appropriation of relevance here that Sanders categorizes as embedded texts and ‘sustained appropriation’.65 In the case of the latter, Sanders asks, is it ‘homage or plagiarism?’,66 and the question is an important one on both aesthetic and ethical levels. Just as it has been noted of Byatt’s spoof Victorian poetry/poets in Possession



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that ‘[t]hese “recreational” fictions are never pure ventriloquism . . . They rely on their readers’ awareness that they are reading from the vantage point of the modern era’,67 so it appears that the higher end of neo-Victorianism seeks to illuminate its own trickeries in the process of seeking to articulate a ‘Victorian’ voice, or character, or plot, or standpoint. It might be argued that this sets up an artificial ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural divide between literary fiction and its popular culture equivalent; and the divide is clearly there. It would be false to suggest that texts which merely rewrite Victorian novels in contemporary ways are doing anything other than a straightforward pastiche: meeting a market demand but not necessarily adding anything new to our understanding of how fiction works, what that fiction can do, or possibly what it cannot do. In the case of Kept and The Crimson Petal and the White it is arguable that what Taylor and Faber are doing is deliberately to undermine the faith that a neo-Victorian novel can meet the great expectations of a contemporary reader eager to have a completely new take on those sexually repressed Victorians. Instead, both texts suggest the parasitic limitations of that approach and also the impossibility of the reading punters (to adopt a deliberately double-edged term) achieving satisfaction. Adding a slightly different take on the issue, Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night: A Confession (2006) relates to the general theme here because of its ‘Editor’s Preface’ and its extensive and elaborate paratextual apparatus of footnotes and bibliographies. Cox has the undated Preface signed by ‘J.J. Antrobus, Professor of Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction, University of Cambridge’.68 The notion of ‘Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction’ is something which might appeal to us precisely because it underlines the fictionalization of the factual within this and many other neo-Victorian narratives; even Antrobus’s name is a trick, possibly derived as it is from the Latin for front (anterus) and the Italian for hollow (buso) – the professor is here a ‘hollow front’ to the fiction, a pun on the concept of authenticity as much as a dig at neo-Victorian criticism’s competing terminologies of the ‘neo’, ‘faux’, ‘retro’, and ‘post’ prefixes. Cox’s prefatory statement thus raises multiple questions: how can a text be post-authentic, something quite different from the idea of being beyond authentication? And is not this an important part of the ethical and aesthetic problem embedded within the neo-Victorian project: that contemporary novelists cannot, strictly speaking and no matter how much they desire to do so, write a Victorian novel? What is the relationship between the Victorian and its prefix? In what sense can these texts align themselves, even as historical fictions, into this position?



Introduction 23

Neo-Victorianism

It is in this respect that the neo-Victorian presents a very distinct case in the broader genre of historical fiction. There are not many references to a neo-Roman, neo-Classical, neo-medieval, or neo-Renaissance fiction, yet neo-Victorian has stuck and as a genre will continue to stick with us. More importantly, what do such a title and such a genre say about contemporary fiction and its place, even its questionable rootedness, in the contemporary world? Attempts have been made elsewhere to combine these elements in an assessment of how the neo-Victorian relates to the contemporary. As Sanders comments: the Victorian era proves in the end ripe for appropriation because it throws into sharp relief many of the overriding concerns of the postmodern era: questions of identity; of environmental and genetic conditioning; repressed and oppressed modes of sexuality; criminality and violence; the urban phenomenon; the operations of law and authority; science and religion; the postcolonial legacies of the empire. In the rewriting of the omniscient narrator of nineteenthcentury fiction, often substituting for him/her the unreliable narrator we have recognized as common to appropriative fiction, postmodern authors find a useful metafictional method for reflecting on their own creative authorial impulses.69 While there can be little doubt that elements of this assessment are correct, especially the reference to contemporary authors’ ‘own creative . . . impulses’, the first part of the analysis seems also to do precisely what so much of contemporary neo-Victorian fiction does: that is, blur the distinctions between us and those no-longer-Othered Victorians. Are the Victorians like us? Do we seek to be like the Victorians? In both cases the answer is likely to be a resounding ‘No’. So why this continued and perpetual return to the fictional realms of the Victorian, as both readers and writers? Can the relationship be understood, in the words of Kaplan, as based in the very fact of aesthetic, ethic, and cultural difference and similarity, the sense that ‘[t[he Victorian age is at once ghostly and tangible, an origin and an anachronism’?70 Perhaps most interestingly, recent fiction has started to conceptualize this ghostly indebtedness to the Victorians. To take just two texts that reached particular prominence in 2007, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip: both novels were longlisted, then shortlisted, and alternated as favourites to win the Man Booker Prize. More importantly, both texts are attempts to re-negotiate a settlement which is hospitable towards and distant from our Victorian pasts. While



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McEwan’s novella provides an account that bears relation to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (begun in 1849 but published in 1867) in its focus on the ramifications of the belated 1950s version of the Victorian honeymoon experience, Jones’s novel about racialized tension and postcolonial civil war draws explicitly on Dickens’s Great Expectations. The use of Arnold in the McEwan text is less direct than in his deliberately unbelievable, unaccountable, and anachronistically volatile insertion of the poem into a moment of crisis in Saturday (2005). Yet the fact that the text haunts, ghosts, and demands reinterpretation in both of his most recent texts suggest something about this post-Victorian landscape in which we live; indeed, as we discuss in more detail in Chapter 4, there is an increasing relevance about the spectrality trope and the idea of haunting in neo-Victorian literature and criticism.71 It is not easy to theorize this in the case of Saturday and On Chesil Beach: is McEwan’s indebtedness and need to open his texts to the cultural idea(l)s of Arnold part of a more general social mo(ve)ment or is it an individualized interpretation? What is it about Arnold that is being utilized here, and does that use have the potential to make us rethink our relationship to the nineteenth-century text? In the case of McEwan’s use of Arnold in Saturday, what remains most fascinating is the series of misappropriations that he establishes in relation to the authorship of the text. In an ultimately clichéd way, ‘Dover Beach’ ‘speaks’ to the violent criminal, Baxter, and prevents the rape of the young woman reading the text; however, this young woman is insistently identified as the poet by the criminal: ‘You wrote that. You wrote that.’72 Is Baxter’s refrain here a comment by McEwan about his lack of knowledge concerning Victorian poetry (unlikely) or an ironic swipe at the way in which texts now float free of their authorial attribution and are open to manipulation, misattribution, misappropriation, because the chronologies of literary time have somehow ceased to function? More fundamentally, what does it mean to do this to Victorian texts, and are they any longer Victorian or neo-Victorian texts when it is done? Mister Pip presents a more direct and open engagement with the (mis)uses of Victorian literature in the contemporary international context. The novel’s (un)easy conflation of the nineteenth-century fictional text by Dickens with the text we read, however, might be interpreted as a comment not only on the enduring influence of the Victorian novel on world literature, specifically in its status as a landmark Bildungsroman, but also as an underlining of a continued desire to understand and reinterpret such narratives within more global, intellectualized, and also, importantly, emotionalized parameters. The concluding lines of Jones’s novel



Introduction 25

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Neo-Victorianism

The Mr Dickens I had known also had a beard and a lean face and eyes that wanted to leap from his face. But my Mr Dickens used to go about barefoot and in a buttonless shirt. Apart from special occasions, such as when he taught, and then he wore a suit. It has occurred to me only recently that I never once saw him with a machete – his survival weapon was story. And once, a long time ago and during very difficult circumstances, my Mr Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us. For a brief time I had made the mistake of forgetting that lesson. In the worshipful silence I smiled at what else they didn’t know. Pip was my story, even if I was once a girl, and my face black as the shining night. Pip is my story, and in the next day I would try where Pip had failed. I would try to return home.73 Interestingly, what seems to be desired in and through Mister Pip is not the potential for a postcolonial critique of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61) but a re-assertion of the themes of emotional authenticity and sincerity within individual human relationships. It might be no coincidence, then, that these very same themes are now coming forth into a series of new debates within Victorian studies too, and that feeling and the affective are re-entering critical discourse on this period. But Mister Pip is a strange hybrid of the postcolonial and the Victorian. At the novel’s end we are left with the question of whether the narrator, in reinventing Dickens and in rereading incessantly his novel Great Expectations as somehow a text personal to her, has been strengthened or conned; what does it really mean for her to have her own ‘Mr Dickens’? For is not that final longing to ‘return home’ little more than nostalgia in its older sense, a kind of cultural sickness that distorts the mind rather than liberating its potential? If the narrator always has her voice, why must she read herself as ‘Pip’, indeed what does it mean for Pip to be her ‘story’? This odd and in some senses traumatic moment of the text demands a different kind of criticism, for Mister Pip is neither a Victorian nor neo-Victorian text but lies in a different sphere as both critique and appropriation, acknowledgement and challenge, the colonizing and the postcolonial moment. What we need to be initiating is a debate about



indicate a power in the nineteenth-century story that leads ultimately to a reductiveness of the twentieth-century heroine’s lived experience:

how this text ‘fits’ into the critical and creative landscape, and how its rereading and re-visioning of the Victorian needs in itself to be reinterpreted within the multiple cultural moments it (re-)enacts. Mister Pip, then, like many other recent neo-Victorian fictions, is a text which both reads and must be read in new ways. The question that arises, then, is what exactly we (and Zadie Smith) want the twenty-first-century novel to be and to do? Is it to be mere mimicry or pastiche: the Victorian novels the Victorians themselves would have written had they lived now (a dubious proposition in its own ways)? Or is there a deeper aesthetic and ultimately ethical choice to be made here about the kinds of narrative that continue to appeal, the comfort we still desire, from the classic realist mode? Perhaps what this search for endings really signifies is the fact that we have not been able to bring the Victorian narrative to a conclusion yet? From a cynical point of view there is of course the unavoidable fact that there is a neo-Victorian market sales corollary: just as the adaptation of a classic Victorian novel for the TV ensures increased sales, especially of the TV-tie-in, so sales for contemporary novels feed into the purchase of rights for the adaptation which in turn, when broadcast, leads to increased sales for the contemporary novel (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of related themes). Historical fiction sells, and Victorian historical fiction sells better than most. But beneath the neo-Victorian fiction resides the question: what does it mean to appropriate the Victorians to suit our needs? Is the recitation of Arnold in McEwan’s Saturday a neo-Victorian moment? McEwan’s use of Arnold raises that more fundamental problem of how we use the Victorian literary and cultural heritage that surrounds us without undermining the distinctive, important, and definitive differences between the periods. Is the neo-Victorian merely a serviceable form that we can manipulate to satiate our appetites for stories with closure unlike real life, or is it for the exploration of themes that continue to dominate our political and social lives that can be projected backwards onto our forebears in an attempt to find resolution or to pass the blame? Just as the Victorian novelists sought a textual resolution for the industrial problems in their new cities, perhaps we seek a textual salvation in mimicking them as a salve to our (post)modern condition? Neo-Victorianism, like other historical fiction, might prove right the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s comment that ‘all history is contemporary history in fancy dress’,74 and perhaps neo-Victorian texts are contemporary fiction in funny costumes. In the end, however, the ethical question, like the aesthetic one, lurks at the margins, or in the footnotes, of our appropriations.



Introduction 27

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Neo-Victorianism

In the following chapters, we explore the diverse range of generic and cultural uses to which the neo-Victorian has been put in the period 1999–2009. We begin with a chapter which locates itself around ideas of memory, mourning, and inheritance. Chapter 1 explores the interrelationships between ideas of collective trauma, loss, and familial or cultural heritage across both textual and narrative forms (the use of fictional autobiography; journals; manuscript; patchwork texts; diary entries and so on) that return us to nineteenth-century and Gothic writing, and also involve the portrayal of distinctly maternal legacies of identity and meaning. Using feminist and psychoanalytic theoretical perspectives, this chapter explores the novels Misfortune (Wesley Stace, 2005), Grange House (Sarah Blake, 2000), The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield, 2006), and The Ghost Writer (John Harwood, 2004). Here the belatedness of the neo-Victorian text is prominent because of the novels’ engagement with concepts of allusion, rewriting, narrative (de)construction, and the fabric of language and its hold over identity, especially in relation to issues of memory and heritage. Each text is concerned with the notion of inheritance and ancestral destiny, often coupled with the need to instigate a new discourse of the historic for the nineteenth-century/contemporary periods’ interrelationship across familial narrative threads. Frequently it is the domestic location of the family home that serves as an important link to the generational past of the protagonists, and this in itself marks out the potential for a core sense of the matrilineal nature of the inheritances at risk. But these domestic spaces are also regularly configured as spaces of reading, writing, and narration that serve as metahistorical and metanarrative points of fixity through which the central characters receive and deal with traumatic historical narratives, and in which they come to understand that the very act of storytelling and (self)narration in relation to the historical past serves as a cathartic moment of traumatic unveiling so essential to providing a resolution. Drawing on the theme of trauma, Chapter 2 turns attention to issues of inheritance and neo-Victorian spaces as configured through notions of the postcolonial. ‘Postcolonial Neo-Victorians’ seeks to problematize the use of Victorian Orientalism and the postcolonial conceptualization of subalternity through the examination of a range of geographic and temporal locations. From 1830s India in Amitav Gosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) through to early twentieth-century Egypt in The Map



2 Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the twenty-first century

of Love (1999) by Ahdaf Soueif and Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing (2009) via Laura Fish’s reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Strange Music (2008), our discussion scrutinizes these writers’ interrogations of the politics of race, slavery, empire, and oppression. Using the established work of postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, particularly on the nature of the subaltern’s speech, we position these texts as a creative challenge to and engagement with such theoretical positioning. The Empire and imperial identity were crucial to the Victorians’ sense of their individual power and collective purpose. What we explore in this chapter is the way in which contemporary writers aim to reinterpret the identity politics of imperialism through giving voice not only to the colonial subject but also to writers and thinkers within the imperial elite. As such, the creative acts of reimagining serve as potent and important reminders of the complexities of terminologies, identities, and subjectivities. From the sense of the domestic as a scene of historical trauma and global political contexts, Chapter 3 moves the focus of the discussion onto the interrelationships between the themes of sex and science, most often located in the body of the female. The politics of bodily identity and misappropriation in conjunction within emerging scientific discourses in the nineteenth century serves as the backdrop for an exploration of the cultural, social, and political renegotiations of science and sexuality as they are investigated in recent female-authored neoVictorian texts. Thinking through the concept of the (female) body as a site of textual and sexual inscription, this chapter focuses on Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006) and relates its central metaphor of the body as (book/skin) binding to Victorian pornographic paradigms. In our problematization of the nineteenth century’s own textual, physical, and scientific inscriptions of the classed, gendered, and raced body, we follow through contemporary reconstructions of the period’s invasive gaze at the body of woman via Starling’s text and two other novels, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003), a neo-nineteenthcentury novel set in the 1810s, and Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006), the tale of a servant–mistress relationship in the mid-Victorian period. Chase-Riboud’s narrative is placed into the context of a spate of recent non-fictional resurrections of the story of Saartjie Baartman, ‘the Hottentot Venus’, but is also read through an interconnected web of theoretical perspectives which incorporate issues of objectification, scopophilia, and the pornographic gaze, in order to inspect the appropriation of a range of nineteenth-century cultural, sexual, and bodily moments and the resonances such appropriation carries today.



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From the looking-glass of self-observation and the lens of the scientist in Chapter 3, we move to an exploration of glass as a specific neoVictorian trope in Chapter 4. This chapter focuses on the spectral and the s(p)ecular by examining the idea of glass in the Victorianist Isobel Armstrong’s work as a means of reading the use of glass motifs in a selection of neo-Victorian fictions as a reflection on Victorian issues of faith. For example, Jem Poster’s 2002 novel Courting Shadows, which concerns the restoration of an ancient church during the 1890s, has as its central image the decaying façade of the pre-Victorian place of worship, thus providing a useful metaphor for one of the themes of neo-Victorianism’s project of looking backward. Grounded as they are in a post-religious age, many contemporary novels pay little attention to the dominance of religious modes in the nineteenth century and instead focus on the more spiritualist concerns of the later Victorian period. It is this emphasis on ‘ghosting’, by which we mean both the endurance of the past in the present and the attempt to somehow represent spectral experience of that past in the way of a late-Victorian séance that provides the focus for this chapter. Using Charles Palliser’s The Unburied (1999), a story which deploys the device of a mediaeval manuscript to lure us away from more contemporaneous events, and Poster’s novel, in which the restorer of the church actually inflicts damage on the ancient fabric of the building and the surrounding community, we examine how these texts chart the potential dangers of falling into an (a)historical reading of the present in the context of the Victorian period; in other words, the dangers in looking back when one should be thinking within the present. We follow this with discussions of Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book (2009), and Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008). Both novels draw on the image of glass as a central feature in their elaboration of the themes of faith and belief in the Victorian period on the one hand (Hore) and the historical looking-glass of the imaginary on the other (Byatt). Our final text in this chapter, John Harwood’s The Séance (2008), reveals another aspect to the play at work in neo-Victorianism. In placing emphasis on the idea of the spectral manifestation as trickery or as a subversion of the belief in both historical accuracy and rationalism/scientific scepticism, Harwood positions his mid-Victorian characters within nineteenth-century debates about the role of faith in an emergent secular approach to issues of human experience, perception and identity. Whether or not the ghosts and spectres discussed in Chapter 4 demonstrate an authentic sense of the Victorians’ willingness to believe in something beyond this world, Chapter 5, ‘Doing It With Mirrors, or



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Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic’, makes clear that their fascination with magic, illusion, and the possibilities of trickery for both entertainment and more metaphysical reasons is also at the core of many neo-Victorian texts and films. As a form of historical fiction, the neo-Victorian is partly driven by illusion and fabrication, but when working at the highest levels of sophistication, it also serves a selfconscious purpose of highlighting the nature of the ‘trick’ or game being played with readers, viewers, and critics. Using Patricia Waugh’s definition of metafiction as a starting point, this chapter explores the specific parameters of the term within its relationship to neo-Victorianism. Drawing on the history of late-Victorian magic in order to illuminate parallels between the conjuror and the contemporary author or director, we argue that combining such Victorian narratives of stage illusion with more contemporary theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and the concepts of simulation and hyperreality allows us to access the multiple levels of metatextual play provided by a number of recent narratives: Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999), Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006), Neil Burger’s film The Illusionist (2006), adapted from Steven Millhauser’s ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990), and Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige (2006), based on Christopher Priest’s eponymous novel of 1995. Our argument resides in the interpretation of the trope of the trick and how it always returns us to a self-reflection on the nature of our engagement and desire in relation to the neo-Victorian (literary/filmic) text. Our final chapter broadens out some of the key themes discussed in terms of literary engagements with the (neo-)Victorian by examining how neo-Victorianism functions in the mainstream marketplace through different media. ‘The Way We Adapt Now, or the Neo-Victorian Theme Park’ outlines the recent furore over the creation of ‘Dickens World’, a theme park based on the works of Victorian England’s most popular novelist, which has illustrated in an uncomfortable way the means by which reinterpretations of Victorian writers or writing can all too easily descend into the realms of farce. This concluding chapter therefore interrogates the nature of a more general cultural appropriation of the Victorian within the broader sense of TV, film, theatrical and ‘heritage industry’ adaptations of the nineteenth century. It thus picks up on some of the themes of previous chapters by suggesting ways in which literary and ‘high’ cultural appropriations of the nineteenth century intersect and differ from the popular imaginary and its conceptualizations of the ‘Other’ Victorians. Issues discussed include contemporary TV and film adaptations, the concept of the ‘Victorian’ theme-park as an enduring visual, architectural and adapted landscape within twenty-first-century understandings



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of heritage; and popular (mis)encounters with the Victorian text such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 musical version of The Woman in White directed by Trevor Nunn. The aim of this chapter is to think about the ways in which the neo-Victorian project in wider cultural terms runs the risk of fulfilling one of its earliest critiques as presented in Brian Moore’s 1975 novel The Great Victorian Collection, where it is a materialist commodity culture (often in relation to pornographic Victoriana) that becomes the defining feature of a post-war, Disneyfied notion of the nineteenth century. Specific neo-Victorian adaptations explored in the course of the chapter, in addition to those outlined above, include the BBC’s Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford, Bleak House and Little Dorrit. The final part of the chapter takes Andrew Davies’ most recent work on Dickens and Waters as a case study of the interrelationships between adaptations. Informed by Linda Hutcheon’s book A Theory of Adaptation, what lies at the heart of this analysis is the concept of the palimpsestuous nature of adaptation, the interlocking and interpenetrating engagements between adaptations not only of the same text but also texts of the same period that invoke a sense of heritage Victoriania or televisual nostalgia.

3 Going forward, looking backward As the discussion of our final chapter indicates, we are concerned here with neo-Victorianism in its widest adaptive and appropriative impulses. But we read these different textual paradigms through very clear criteria which emphasize the need for critical inflection, metafictional play, and an awareness of the creative possibilities of the genre. Ultimately, this book is about the conjunction, difference, and similarity between two distinct historical periods: the nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. As Victorianists we are fascinated by the ways in which contemporary culture seeks to return us to, develop us from, and connect us with our Victorian precursors. The fact that these connections are established through such a diverse range of genres, styles, media, and political or theoretical viewpoints means that the vibrancy of Victorian studies as a discipline can be usefully aligned with the contemporaneous emergence of the ‘New Victorians’. Wherever possible, therefore, we connect our discussion of contemporary cultural debates and modes with similar trends in Victorian studies itself. Neo-Victorianism represents a wide range of experimentations, and traditions, and this book aims to provide an analytical framework for reading a genre whose influence seems likely to continue its growth over the coming years.



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Memory, Mourning, Misfortune: Ancestral Houses and (Literary) Inheritances

When my mother died, a year or so back, it fell to my brother and me to clear her house. . . . She had a dual existence, tough and job-oriented during the day . . . while at home . . . she was closer to Miss Havisham . . . My mother lived in her memories. Day-to-day events were considered in relation to past experience . . . When the house was burgled and she lost some treasures . . . she mourned not so much for the objects, but for that part of her own past world which had gone . . . She needed memory to define herself . . . When we made a bonfire in the back garden and burned the cheque stubs, we committed her to the flames almost as certainly as, at the cemetery, we had lowered her coffin into the ground. Steven Rose, The Making of Memory (1992)1 ‘Hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences.’ Their symptoms, [Freud] suggests, are ‘residues and mnemic symbols of particular (traumatic) experiences’, symbols which function in the patient’s psyche like public ‘monuments and memorials’ . . . The history of feeling that narrative or visual Victoriana seeks at once to memorialise and renew for the modern reader . . . has something in common with the overemotional response to historical trauma that Freud described . . . It might be an association too far to align the writer or reader of modern Victoriana with Freud’s hysteric, yet his urban analogy catches something about . . . Victoriana’s 33



1

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Neo-Victorianism

In its parodic performance of belatedness3 neo-Victorian fiction is engaged on reconfiguring the painful reminiscences of Freud’s and Breuer’s fin-de-siècle hysterics4 into cultural memorials of nostalgic desire, postmodernism’s intertextual playfulness, or postcolonial ‘rememory’ (Toni Morrison’s concept of the communal remembrance of collective trauma).5 Loss, mourning, and regeneration are prototypical preoccupations of the neo-Victorian novel, which often revolves around the re(dis)covery of a personal and/or collective history and the restitution of a family inheritance through the reconstruction of fragmented, fabricated, or repressed memories: a retracing and piecing together of the protagonist’s roots which reflects, metafictionally, on the literary ‘origins’ of the neo-Victorian genre and the narratological traditions it seeks to reshape. That the processes of anamnesis bear resemblance to the creative labour of authorship, are even constitutive of it, is signalled through narrative form in these texts: fictional autobiography; a journal which in the course of the narrative is shaped into a manuscript and by its close is ready for publication or is indeed published; a patchwork of texts, fictional and factual. Historical and contemporary identities, narrators, voices, letters, diary entries, recollections, reflections, dreams, and documentary sources all blend together, mimicking the narrative devices, structures, and collage techniques of nineteenth-century and Victorian realist and Gothic literature, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) to Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Just as the protagonists set out to retrieve their fractured pasts, so the novels themselves typically invoke what Cora Kaplan, in invocation of Freud, calls the ‘mnemic sybols’ and affective-psychological monuments of Victorian fiction: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) – the story of the orphan girl made good and the emergence of a feminist consciousness, collectivized through the narrator’s address to the reader; Bildung initiated and ruptured by originary tales and surrogate families which prove to be illusionary; unreliable narrators, hysteria, and the complexities of adult–child relationships governed by desire, fear, and fantasy. These texts and their epic characters and plots feature prominently in the neo-Victorian fictional imagination.



affective relationship to the past and to its compulsive recycling of Victorian material and discursive culture. Cora Kaplan, Victoriana (2007)2

And not only in the fictional imagination: it is surely no accident that biologist Steven Rose begins the titular chapter (‘Making Memories’) of his neuroscientific study on memory with a personal reminiscence of his mother and a reference to that Victorian literary paradigm of a life worn out in its obsessive-compulsive focus on the past, Miss Havisham. The legacies of a Miss Havisham character play a significant role in many neo-Victorian novels, and are of pivotal importance to three of the texts explored in this chapter. Memory, mourning, misfortune: one of the most abiding and recurring plots in neo-Victorianism is that dealing with a misplaced, hidden or disrupted legacy, a ‘missed fortune’. Like the Victorian novelists themselves, contemporary writers from Charles Palliser (Quincunx, 1989) and A.S. Byatt (Possession, 1990) onwards have been preoccupied with the development of broken lineages which their texts set out to recover and heal, in a manner evocative of the relationships drawn up in literary histories, highlighting the connections between the neo-Victorian novel itself and the Victorian precursor text. But this is often not a simple matter of delineating the bonds between the nineteenth-century Urtext and contemporary fiction; it is more complicated because that very relationship reveals multiple perspectives on the present’s concepts of history and also the fundamental sense of mourning exhibited in post-millennial literature that consciously seeks to echo the certainties and formalism of the classic Victorian novel while simultaneously adding new perspectives on both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The core texts of this chapter – Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2005), Sarah Blake’s Grange House (2000), Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), and John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) – are therefore concerned with inheritances in a broad sense that encompasses ideas about realism, factual accuracy, literary fantasy, and the portrayal and development of a hybrid nineteenth-century/contemporary language of the historic. While this new language offers the potential articulation of the hidden pasts of the nineteenth century, here we explore the theoretical and aesthetic motives and motifs behind the attempt to reconstruct a sense of familial/literary/canonical inheritance from the Victorians themselves. The central metaphor of (dis)inheritance and mourning in these novels is the ancestral home: a house haunted by past tragedy and dominated by a dead or dying woman; a feminized space which in the imagination and memories of those exiled from it represents a lost Eden, but which constitutes itself as dangerous and disputed territory for the protagonist: a site of alienation, betrayal, extreme disillusionment, ferocious sibling rivalry, harrowing family collapse, even mortal



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combat. The house – that material testimonial to the family’s past, its idiosyncrasies, sorrows, and secrets – has its spiritual counterpart in the library (in the novels usually a female-governed space) which safeguards familial records, while connecting personal history with the collective history of ideas and the literature of past ages. Abandoned or demolished at the end, the house and its library embody womb and tomb in one: a maternal legacy for both male and female heirs, an heirloom concealed within and recovered through books and manuscript materials, which, passed from one generation to the next, threatens to repeat itself until it is laid to rest through a quasi-Freudian talking and writing cure by the protagonist who finds the courage to lay claim to an identity born from traumatic history. The reconstruction of the past through reading, writing, and re-narration assumes not only part of the life, but becomes the life of the hero/ine, who attains a deeper level of self-knowledge through and in the story s/he records, and through which s/he confronts the demons in her or his own life: a metaphoric re-enactment of the neoVictorian novel’s self-constitution through its Victorian referents. Thus in Grange House seventeen-year-old Maisie Thomas decides to write a memoir of her father in order to come to terms with his death, and in the process discovers his love of a woman other than her mother, the mysterious Miss Grange who always presided over their family holidays. In a dream the story of the tragic lovers merges with Maisie’s sense of affinity with the woman she now believes to be the mother of a half-sister; the diary with which Miss Grange entrusted her assumes the shape of a book authored by herself, the book Miss Grange has been urging her to write: That night I dreamed such wildness – of two lovers who rowed out into the middle of a black lake and drowned there while I watched them sink. . . . I felt myself falling down, away down, into a soft darkness . . . I sensed a woman falling beside me . . . she held her hand to mine and uttered my name. But I had the peculiar sensation that I was reading a book all the while . . . and I was strangely aware even while I dreamed that the story I was reading was a story I had written[.]6 The novel ends with Maisie’s recovery of her lost sister (a reclamation with a twist) and her publication of her family story as a legacy for her own children. Likewise, Margaret Lea, in The Thirteenth Tale, finds that in the course of listening to, and composing the official biography of, the enigmatic writer Vida Winter, she is subsumed into her story of sibling love



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and sibling violence: ‘I listened to her story, I wrote the story, when I slept I dreamt the story, and when I was awake it was the story that formed the constant backdrop of my thoughts. It was like living entirely inside a book.’7 Having become one with the story, Margaret emerges reconciled to her past and a writer in her own right. Misfortune, too, enacts a slippage between literature and traumatic experience. The novel returns us both to Victorian and classical culture by having the hero recover from his gender/identity crisis through acting out popular forms of eighteenth and nineteenth-century balladry and adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a model for his autobiographical narrative: ‘I was breathing life into the book, and the book was breathing back out through me’.8 Story-telling, listening (bearing witness), and writing are acts of catharsis which redeem the past and, by releasing the family ghosts and salvaging the haunted house for literature, bring about a profound transformation of the protagonists’ lives.

1.1 Meta-morphoses: Classical, (early)modern, and neo-Victorian echoes in Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2005) The complex relationship between literature, a lost matrilineage, sibling interaction, and authorship is explored in carnivalesque detail in Stace’s novel about Rose Old, daughter of Geoffrey Loveall of Love Hall. The titular ‘Miss Fortune’ (79) is heiress to a large estate coveted by greedy relatives with Dickensian depravities. Rose’s ‘misfortune’ resides in the secret carefully guarded by her parents until her late teens that, having been rescued from a dumping site, she is neither their biological offspring, nor indeed a girl. In his lifelong mourning for his sister Dolores, who died at the age of five when he was seven, Geoffrey denies anatomical facts and conceives of the newborn picked up on the wayside as a reincarnation of his beloved Dolly. Rose is named after the Loveall coat of arms, the rose and briar intertwined, invoking both his composite genders and the family myth of forbidden love united in death, memorialized in the tomb (a copy of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus) that a previous Loveall heiress erected for her brother/husband in the grounds of the estate. In his tragicomic version of his real-life contemporary Byron’s incestuous desire,9 Geoffrey never leaves the nursery for long, and until his death in middle age seeks comfort in his sister’s walk-in doll’s house, which recreates Love Hall in every detail and even contains a miniature version of itself that Geoffrey believes harbours the spirit of his lost Doll/y: a hall of mirrors emblematic of his fixation with the past and resistance to engaging with any reality beyond that of his inner life. This internal




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world was shattered like their previously indestructible house of cards when Dolly died falling off a tree; Geoffrey ‘spent the rest of his life recovering, unable to understand that he wasn’t to blame’ (27). In one of many intertextual allusions to Byatt’s Possession the dead ‘Dolly keeps a Secret’:10 Dolly’s Nutcrackers, the key to the siblings’ book of riddles, Nuts to Crack, remains hidden in her tree of death. When many years later it is recovered accidentally, Geoffrey is finally able to solve the puzzle they had attempted to answer before her death and which had defied him all his life: an optical illusion, in which seemingly random inkblots, when viewed from a particular angle, assume the shape of a tree. The recuperation of The Nutcrackers coincides with the beginning of Rose’s desperate quest for his true origins: the ‘key’ to his inheritance, as much as to Dolly’s death, is a tree, in his case the family tree of the Lovealls. As Rose’s adoptive mother Anonyma Wood (her name another pun on the semiotics of trees), first governess then wife of convenience to Geoffrey, discovers in her painstaking analysis of a female mystical poet’s manuscript collection held in the Loveall library, Mary Day was the pseudonym of Marguerite d’Eustache, the third, run-away, wife of ‘Bad Lord Loveall’, Geoffrey’s grandfather. The broken family lineage is restored when a popular ballad reproducing Rose’s childhood story of a baby’s miraculous rescue from a waste ground is traced back to the man who as a boy had been charged with disposing of the newborn. The mother of the infant, who died of her botched attempt at abortion, is revealed to be Bryony Day, Mary Day’s granddaughter. Rose, it emerges, is, and always has been, the legitimate heir of Love Hall. This plot of the loss and recovery of an inheritance is embedded within a set of literary references which constitute a second legacy, in which Rose’s psychological quasi-intersex condition is represented on the page as intertext (biologically male, he is raised as a female, and develops an ‘intermediate’ identity expressed in adulthood in his conjunction of ‘female’ dress and male facial hair). From early adolescence onwards Rose seeks an answer to the enigma of his life in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A painting representing the birth of Hermaphroditus in his enforced union with Salmacis11 sets the scene for Rose’s later flight to Turkey and immersion in the lake named after the nymph. From the vantage point of the elderly narrator looking back on his life, this was the moment of transformation which, in his enactment of the classical myth, enabled him to accept his doubly-gendered self. His ‘rebirth’ as a compositely gendered subject is preceded by the collapse of his identity as daughter and heiress of the Loveall estate, a crisis that culminates in an hysterical illness during which he works through traumatic memories of



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sexual abuse suffered on his journey by reciting passages from popular women warrior ballads about female cross-dressers such as ‘The Rose of Britain’s Isle’, ‘The Banks of the Nile’, ‘The Female Rambling Sailor’, ‘The Young Sailor Bold’, ‘Lisbon’, ‘The Silk-Merchant’s Daughter’, ‘The Female Drummer’ (303, 304, 339).12 While in the ballads gender imposture is motivated by women’s desire to reunite with their lovers and lead a life of adventure, Rose is driven by the need to find a resolution to his hybrid sense of gender. As Dianne Dugaw has illustrated, female warrior ballads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extolled the feisty, valiant, and eminently successful heroine, who combined ‘manly’ (assertive, aggressive) and ‘womanly’ (loyal and virtuous) qualities in equal measure, thus reflecting the ‘hermaphroditic ideal’ of the time. Nineteenth-century versions, by contrast, often displayed a more ambivalent approach to the cross-dresser, who was represented as more timid and inherently feminine, and whose masquerade was therefore fragile and easily uncovered.13 This also proves to be the case for Rose, albeit with a twist: dressed female, he attracts sexual attention, and when revealed to be a man is subjected to assault, as a result of which he realizes that it was ‘impossible for me to travel in my real [women’s] clothes, so I took to disguise’ (313, emphases added). Stace thus queers the already gender-bending ballads by creating a male protagonist whose cross-gender attire constitutes no act of transvestism, manifesting at it does his childhood conditioning, but who finds himself forced to ‘cross-dress’ in the conventional costume of his sex. At the same time he problematizes the popular celebration of gender transgression as an exhilarating and pleasurable experience (any potential threat of which is defused by marriage in the ballads) by highlighting the violence which attends the exposure of (sexual) deviance (Rose’s victimization suggests that male heterosexual posturing, especially of the predatory pack mentality type, conceals repressed homosexual desires). The authentic sources reproduced in the novel are doubly fictionalized in that they form the backdrop of Rose’s recovery process, which is recounted by a different – unambiguously female-gendered and female-sexed – first-person narrator (Frances Cooper, the daughter of the English archaeologist in whose Turkish home Rose finds a refuge), while simultaneously drawing on Stace’s stage persona John Wesley Harding’s 2005 song cycle performed by Love Hall Tryst.14 Stace’s postmodern play with classical and modern historical sources, broadsheet ballads, popular culture and song is further complemented by his narrator’s parodic self-positioning in relation to the work of eminent eighteenth and nineteenth-century British authors: Henry Fielding,




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Jane Austen, and particularly Samuel Richardson are dismissed for their convoluted naming policy (79), while Laurence Sterne’s metafictional digressions in Tristram Shandy (1759) and William Makepeace Thackeray’s puppet master device in Vanity Fair (1848) are co-opted as a model for the narrator’s reflections on his literary strategies and authorial performance. Thus he ponders the dramatic mise-en-scène of himself as first-person narrator in part 2 (‘I Am Reborn’), justifying his prior third-person narration in part 1 (‘Anonymous’) as a reflection of his narrated (infant) self’s as yet unselfconscious state. Repeated references to the time lapse between narrated and narrating selves and textual addresses to the reader (which are then revealed to have been directed at the narrator’s son)15 serve to maintain the illusion of a fictional autobiography; yet the text also draws on Anonyma’s and Frances’s journal entries. The autobiographer’s claim that he will deal ‘only in the truth . . . as I witnessed it’ (77) and that ‘I am not going to die in my story’ (77) is further destabilized by the Appendix, which – as in D.J. Taylor’s Kept discussed in the Introduction – offers a ‘Guidebook to Love Hall’ involving a description of Rose’s grave (522). The visitors’ guide to the stately home and its list of paintings depicting the central characters is more evocative of Virginia Woolf’s modernist mockbiography Orlando (1928) than of the devices of Victorian fiction, and indeed Rose’s life spans an impressive 98 years from the late Regency to the First World War. The Victorian age is simultaneously framed and sidelined by the picaresque (as one reviewer remarked, ‘almost symphonic’)16 sweep of the story. Thus Rose comes to a full understanding of his origins on his eighteenth birthday, the year after Victoria’s ascent to the throne, but no mention is made of the new Queen, emerging Victorian values, or any historical events. While Victorian literature features peripherally – the wicked relatives recall Dickensian figures, and Geoffrey’s withdrawal to a nursery where time stands still is reminiscent of Miss Havisham’s selfimmurement in Satis House – popular broadsheets originating in early modern traditions and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are of greater importance to the self-constitution of the hero than any specifically Victorian literary or historical referents. With the exception of Victoria, one of the ‘good’ Rakeleigh relatives, who is cast as a socialist Quaker and philanthropist worker in London’s East End, an early-Victorian forerunner of the fin-desiècle New Woman with cropped hair and potential lesbian proclivities, none of the characters displays a plausible Victorian persona. Anonyma and the younger generation – Rose and his closest friends and lovers, Sarah and Stephen Hamilton and Frances Cooper – enjoy manifestly millennial, not Victorian, sensibilities, sexualities, psychologies, and vocabularies.



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Misfortune has much in common with contemporary trans/gender novels like Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002), a text which also embeds the coming-out story of its hermaphroditic hero within the quasi-magicrealist framework of a family saga rooted in brother–sister incest. Rather than being conceived as a pastiche of Victorianism, Misfortune parodies the neo-Victorian imagination in its numerous echoes of Possession. Rose’s feminist scholar mother Anonyma, who likes nothing better than sequestering herself in the library, bears distinct affinity to Maud Bailey, with whom she also shares the analytical close-reading skills with which each unpicks her favourite poet’s lines in their quest for hidden messages. The objects of their scholarly desire, Mary Day and Christabel La Motte, are both mystic poets who create dreamlike, androgynous myths and utopian worlds, Day’s Feminisia resembling La Motte’s realm of Melusina. There is no Roland Michell figure, but in Misfortune too a poet’s letter is purloined by a male scholar, Anonyma’s bookbinder father, from whom she inherits her passion for the enigmatic Mary Day. As in Byatt’s novel, the maternal lineage is restored in the discovery of the protagonist’s direct biological descent.

1.2 ‘My mother not my mother; myself not myself’: The mother (as) text in Sarah Blake’s Grange House (2000)17 A more multifaceted and perilous maternal legacy is the subject of Blake’s Grange House and Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale. Here too the protagonists are abandoned children, whose lives are profoundly affected by dysfunctional parental and sibling ties, and who must negotiate a precarious sense of self against the backdrop of past and present family trauma played out over their bodies. In contradistinction to Misfortune, this does not involve uncertainties about their gender but, rather, a complex and multi-layered exploration of the mother–daughter dynamic in relation to questions of (self-)authorship. Each text depicts a young woman’s quest for her familial, personal and emerging professional identity through her relationship with an older woman, a writer, whose life, unravelled through multiple stories, reveals the origins and concealed familial bonds of the heroine herself, enabling her to take control of her life and write herself into being in the textual reconstruction of the m/other (the mother as other and as self). Both novels invoke pairings of subversive women characters from Victorian literature, whose spectral echoes serve to refract and deconstruct the identity of the older woman in her interaction with the younger: Miss Havisham and Estella in Great Expectations, Jane and Bertha in Jane Eyre, the two Cathys of Wuthering




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Heights, the governess and her charges in The Turn of the Screw, the three sisters in (Wilkie Collins’s 1860) The Woman in White, Mariana and the Lady of Shalott in Tennyson’s eponymous poems (1830 and 1832). In Grange House the uncanny site of obsessive-compulsive disorders resulting in family tragedy is again the ancestral home, an embodiment simultaneously of mother, womb, and text: ‘this place at once familiar and always strange’, as Maisie Thomas calls Grange House on her annual vacation return at the start of Blake’s novel (4). The smudges on the walls of Miss Grange’s (previously her mother Cassie’s) bedroom, so evocative of the handprints of a ghostly infant in the first of her stories, are the visual markers of family dysfunction, the imprint of trauma on the maternal body reproduced in each generation, and visited on the daughters, literal and adoptive, whose names are written into the texture of the building. In Miss Grange’s story Widow (Cassie) Grange, in a state of acute distress, filled an entire wall of the house with the names of the Irish women whom she had delivered of babies, and the names of all the baby girls to whom she gave life (63): affirmation of a maternal line of descent, or memorial of the survivors, those who through flight alone were able to escape the national catastrophe? Maisie herself finds the names of the second generation of Grange women, Susannah and Amalie (Nell: Miss Grange), carved into the window pane of the latter’s attic room. The dates that accompany the names, 1847 and 1848, are more than mere signifiers of the women’s years of birth: coincidental with the publication dates of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and reminiscent of Catherine Earnshaw’s names carved into the wood in Emily Brontë’s novel, these dates also signpost the root cause of their Irish-born mother’s profound depression and harrowing sense of guilt: the Great Famine of 1845–49, to which she sacrificed her first-born, already tubercular, son, whom, by the insistence of her own mother, she left behind on her exodus from the homeland. Cassie spends a lifetime attempting to come to terms with her sense of loss: ‘I saved myself, but I left myself behind’ (65). The Grange women’s lives follow a seemingly endless cycle of repetition when Cassie, mourning the loss of her husband Rorie, is overcome by the memory of the earlier trauma after the arrival of an unknown nephew from Ireland; she soon becomes obsessed with the irrational conviction that Hayden Gilroy is her cast-off son returned from the dead to wreak revenge on the living. When Hayden and Susannah fall in love, disaster ensues: in Miss Grange’s Gothic version of the story Hayden, Bertha-Rochester-like, drags mother and sister/lover to their death with his plunge from the roof of the burning house struck by



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lightning. Miss Grange’s diary tells a more tragic sequence of events: here Hayden, having left Grange House and Susannah after Nell’s disclosure of their sibling relationship, fatally misunderstands the girls’ brother George’s reference to ‘our sister’ being ‘with child’ (314): George means Nell, but Hayden, horrified at the thought of a child being born from his incestuous union with Susannah, throws himself off the quarry where they both work, and George dies in the attempt to save him. Tragedy also befalls the next generation: Nell’s (aptly named) daughter Perdita, the product of her passionate love affair with Maisie’s father, is lost; Miss Grange is haunted by her inability to remember what happened after the birth of her child to result in her death and is forever compelled to return to the nominal signifier of Perdita, her grave. The novel starts with the tragic death, presumed suicide, of a pair of lovers; the young woman, Halcy Ames, Maisie’s best friend in childhood, at the close of the novel turns out to have been Susannah’s daughter. ‘Myself, my sister, my mother . . . Ourselves, the very haunting. Ourselves the very house’ (222): Miss Grange’s lamentation about the eternal reproduction of maternal destinies is represented textually in the triadic structure of the stories told. We are presented with three versions of Widow Grange’s antecedents, and of Susannah, Nell and their lovers; three different sets of diary entries; three central narrators, authors and writers (Nell, Maisie, and Susannah); three stories of Maisie’s birth; and even three different mothers (Mrs Thomas, Nell, Susannah). It is this cyclical repetition by variation and daughters forever turning into their mother’s (or mothers’) echoes (307) that Miss Grange enjoins Maisie to bring to an end by ‘finish[ing] it [the story] – so it will not repeat’ (225). As Cassie’s and Miss Grange’s lives indicate, the Freudian talking cure in itself18 is a beginning, but not sufficient to bring about a resolution. Nell’s and Susannah’s chronicling of events, in the form of stories, diaries, and a book of mementos, has been powerless to disrupt the return of the pattern: with Halcy’s death, Miss Grange tells Maisie, ‘the old story of Grange House was repeated once again . . . Someone must write the next story to replace the old . . . I pass it on . . . To you. To write it’ (91). A different kind of Miss Havisham, Nell seeks not revenge but an ending which leads to a new beginning: ‘write us anew . . . Start up the story . . . and carry us forward’ (225). This new story which encapsulates the old but moves into a new direction is the book we read: a coming-of-age text which provides an account of two years in Maisie’s life, beginning and ending with two deaths, each of which affects her profoundly: her childhood friend Halcy and her father’s, and Miss Grange and her mother’s. Not coincidentally




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Maisie’s name recalls the heroine of James’s What Maisie Knew (1897): this is a story about the repercussions of adultery and betrayal, and biological and adoptive parenthood, on the mental and emotional development of the child; but here the child is much older, has a very close and affectionate bond with her father, and in the course of the narrative assumes ownership of her life. The threat of a repetition of her father’s mistake – who, in love with a passionate and intellectual woman congenial to him, married one that was neither – is averted when Maisie breaks off her engagement to the businessman of her mother’s choice and chooses the artistically-minded bohemian suited to her. Similarly, as a writer and happy lover, she ‘renews’ the story by realizing Nell’s desire of combining emotional with professional and artistic fulfilment. From the outset Maisie’s ‘wild longing’ (89) for life and Lady-of-Shalottlike sense of confinement are bound up with story-telling and coming to authorship: ‘And I would sit at my window and strain into the dark behind the glass, longing to see through into the heat of my life, into the knowledge that I, too, would possess something at the heart of me to tell’ (11); ‘Let the story begin, I thought impatiently’ (5). Even a moment of intense confusion and fear, when she perceives a spectral Halcy beckoning to her from the garden below, is immediately placed within the context of literature: it is ‘as if a character had reached out a hand from the pages of a book and pointed, direct to me’ (16). Small wonder, perhaps, that Maisie feels a strong kinship with Miss Grange, a writer (7), an independent, if mysterious, woman, the owner of the hotel where her family has spent every summer since her early childhood; and that she is drawn to her further for recognizing in her visionary ability the emerging writer’s ‘capacity to see . . . [t]o imagine . . . and so to recognize the hidden story, the hidden life’ (51). At the start of the novel Maisie has a number of occult experiences: twice the dead Halcy appears to her, each time as a harbinger of death, and when Miss Grange takes her to the woods to show her a grave whose story she wants to tell, Maisie has the sudden vision of a woman in greatest despair digging at the earth with a spoon: this woman, she believes, was Miss Grange’s mother (much later she realizes it was Nell herself). Impressing on Maisie that ‘The best way forward is through the past’ (165), Miss Grange tells her the story of Grange House and the women within it, and after her father’s death sends her extracts from her diary which reveal that they were lovers and had a child together. Maisie returns to Grange House to discover the remainder of the story. Initially elusive, Miss Grange calls her to her rooms on the night of her death, and enjoins her to recover and write her sister Perdita’s story. Maisie



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is to be Nell’s heir and to assume ownership of Grange House. A final part of Miss Grange’s legacy are her notebooks: her diary, which Maisie now reads in its entirety, a book of stories, and a blank book entitled ‘Perdita’: the missing story to be written into existence. Miss Grange’s diary begins as a record of a writer’s apprenticeship, where the young Nell, hardly older than Maisie is now, expresses her professional desire – ‘To be an Author, Reader!’ (149) – and experiments with different modes of writing: memoir, character study (‘Susannah’, 248), fiction (‘An Introduction to the Granges’, 253), drama (‘My Parlor Plot’, 174). As the diary and its story of sibling rivalry progress through the years, a second writer intervenes to contest Nell’s representations and interpretations: Susannah, erstwhile ‘my best reader’ (173), now competes for authorship, prompting Nell to take action, with fatal consequences. Determined that ‘you shall not steal my telling of this tale’ (268), Nell reasserts her ownership of the family story by convincing Hayden that he is their brother, thus precipitating a chain of events which lead to his and George’s death. Her previous diary reflections on the ease with which the recording of memories lends itself to fictionalization may suggest that her mother’s mental confusion and inchoate fears about Hayden’s origins may have been enhanced by Nell in her authorial quest for dramatic action: ‘what is the distinction between what one imagines and what one remembers? How often my memory, or my recording of events, slips the leash – and I wander just a bit further outward – into Possibility – where what Was and what Might Be are twin sisters on these pages’ (173). In the diary Widow Grange is shown talking to Susannah about her concern about her evident interest in Hayden; but we only ever have Nell’s word for what is being said. That the story of her mother’s early life which she tells Maisie clashes with the one Maisie hears from her father indicates Miss Grange’s narrative impetus: whereas in Nell’s story Cassie arrives in America with nothing but the bare clothes on her back, utterly alone, having abandoned her son in Ireland, in Ludlow Thomas’s account Cassie was accompanied by her entire family, parents and two sisters, and there is no mention of any child. In the diary Susannah offers a third interpretation: she remembers her mother showing her baby curls, a spoon, and a wedding ring; this version suggests that she lost a child and husband in Ireland, presumably to the Famine, but she did not abandon her son there, nor was he illegitimate. When after the catastrophe evidence arrives from Ireland to prove that Hayden was not Cassie’s son, Susannah lays the full blame for events on Nell: ‘You see how your imagination did break our house?’ (315). The sisters part ways: Nell moves into the attic, and Susannah below stairs.




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But what, Maisie wonders, happened to Susannah? Like Perdita she, too, must have died. It is only when the woman known to her primarily as ‘Cook’, Halcy Ames’s mother, the woman disregarded by everybody because of her lowly station, who like Miss Grange, however, would always make a ritual of welcoming her to Grange House at the beginning of every vacation, insists on showing her Perdita’s grave that the final layer of the story is revealed. Blake here uses a similar plot device as Waters does in Affinity (1999), when it is only at the end that we discover the prime mover of all action to have been the woman in the shadows, the working-class subject conceived to serve but not to steer even in our contemporary imagination. ‘Cook’ turns out to be Susannah, Perdita’s grave harbours no body, and Maisie learns that the child born to Nell Grange was none other than herself. The woman digging a grave in the woods was her own mother, who, never interested in having a child at the best of times, in her postnatal confusion sought to bury her alive, perhaps in a symbolic gesture of burying her still-born dreams. Susannah intervened in time to rescue the child, and persuaded Ludlow Thomas, whose wife had suffered an hysterical pregnancy, to present Perdita to her as her own. Neither Nell nor Mrs Thomas were ever told the truth: thus both were able to have a relationship with Maisie. In profound shock, Maisie comes to realize that ‘my mother [was] not my mother; myself not myself’ (356). ‘I am your author’, Susannah asserts, claiming Nell’s diary discourse and writerly persona for herself: ‘I wrote the story that brought you from the ground’ (353); ‘It was I gave you life’ (352). It is Susannah who reconciles her with her dying mother, Mrs Thomas, when Maisie, mourning her biological mother, turns away from her adoptive one: ‘Maisie, you had a mother. You had one, and now you would toss her away because of a thing in a book’ (367). Both mothers’ purported ignorance about Maisie’s identity appears implausible. In a conversation with Ludlow Thomas recorded in her diary the pre-pregnancy Nell expresses her consummate lack of interest in marriage and motherhood, referring to the belief in women’s inherent mothering instinct as a social construct (168). Her mental breakdown can be seen both as a ‘Victorian’ continuation of her mother’s story (repeating the mother’s legacy of madness so often explored in Victorian fiction) and as a psychological response to her loss of freedom in bearing an unwanted child. Her choice of Maisie as her confidante, successor and heir at her approaching death may indicate that she always knew who Maisie was but was determined not to embrace motherhood. Similarly, there is much to suggest that Mrs Thomas was always aware of Maisie’s provenance, her hysterical illness being likely to have been a desperate



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strategy to keep a husband whose passion was so evidently invested elsewhere locked into his moral and marital responsibilities. While her father is alive, Maisie is taken aback by her mother’s mimicry of feminine weakness whenever he is in her company (108). On her deathbed, after Maisie has poured out the ‘true’ story of her origins, the dying woman responds not with shock but with a reaffirmation of her love: ‘All your life . . . I did love you’ (374). If Nell’s is the voice of rebellion and rejection, Susannah’s is that of reason and human kindness. Hers is also the voice that challenges our belief in the ‘truthfulness’ and authenticity of the written text. At one point, Nell’s diary explores a crisis in its own representation when she ponders the power of words to express the intensity of emotion as compared to the symbolic value of signs such as the mementos collected in Susannah’s ‘black book’: the train ticket that was never used and which memorializes the day their father died. ‘What were my words after all?’, Nell writes, ‘For every leaf Susannah found and pasted, I’d need to write pages upon pages – and still who would ever know who we had been?’ (161). Ultimately, she concludes, ‘Nothing can represent us – nothing satisfy’ (161). This is reconfirmed by Susannah at the close of the text, in a statement which proclaims the illusionary character of neo-Victorian fiction itself: ‘Nothing speaks correctly for the past. Everything lies’ (372). Everything we know and write of the past is constructed, manipulated, invented, fabricated. What little remains of the past we are unable to see with open, unbiased eyes: ‘They are gone. All of them gone. And you, who are left, who look at me now, . . . hardly see me. . . . You cannot see me, though you look. You see Susannah of the diary . . . And then you see Cook of Grange House.’ When Maisie replies that ‘There is a vast gap between’, Susannah responds: ‘There, then. Look there in the gap. Look there – for me’ (372). This, then, is the legacy of Blake’s novel: the gaps and contradictions between our conceptualization of the Victorian and our construction of the neoVictorian open up the potential for developing a new vision.

1.3 ‘Tell me the truth’: Trauma, witnessing, and authorship in Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006)19 It is precisely this critical ‘space between’, the discrepancy between what we understand the past to be and the way we reconstruct it, with which Margaret Lea, the frame narrator of The Thirteenth Tale, has to grapple in her project of writing the official biography of the bestselling novelist Vida Winter; an undertaking complicated by the fact that the




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author is notorious for her extreme evasiveness, having invented a new biography for every interviewer. While on previous occasions she had used ‘[o]ffcuts from novels and stories, plots that never got finished, stillborn characters, picturesque locations I never found a use for’ (6), now, she insists, the time has come for her to respond to the appeal of the awkward young local reporter who, forty years earlier, had implored her to ‘tell him the truth’ (7). All truth claims notwithstanding, however, everything relies on our ability to ‘look there in the gap’ and perceive the figure in the crack. When Margaret finally begins to gain clarity of insight, the story Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every event identical, in every detail the same – yet entirely, profoundly different. Like those images that reveal a young bride if you hold the picture one way, and an old crone if you hold it the other. Like the sheets of random dots that disguise teapots[.] (349) In contradistinction to Misfortune’s inkblots, which take shape only after disaster has struck, Margaret’s new vision is recuperative, blowing ‘life into the story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began to mend’ (349). Like Susannah in Grange House, Vida Winter forged a new personality out of the ashes of her old life, and like Nell the proximity of death impels her to disclose and pass on her story, not so that it may be written anew, but to ensure that it be written at all. The attempt to write her story herself conjures up so many ghosts that it can only be completed by her spiritual heir, Margaret, the author of a number of biographical studies not of the great but of the forgotten. Again the story of the past – here a past not set in a clearly definable period20 –involves the fall of a house and the cataclysmic destruction of three generations bound together, and devastated, by the deadly intensity of sibling love. The searing force of this bond, literally branded on the flesh, is the mark of trauma which Margaret shares with Miss Winter, whose mutilated hand with its enigmatic stamp in its palm (the imprimatur of the key to the library, which itself is key to the story) acts as the counterpart of Margaret’s scarred torso, the birth and death mark of her conjoined twin who died to give her life. Just as it was Margaret’s essay on an historical pair of writer twins based on the Goncourt brothers21 which prompted Miss Winter’s approach, so Margaret’s initial reluctance is overcome when she witnesses the older woman’s outburst of grief at the memory of her greatest loss, which relates so closely to her own:



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‘I lived at Angelfield . . . I was sixteen . . . There was a fire . . . I lost everything. . . . Oh, Emmeline!’ . . . Now I knew I was tied to the story. I had stumbled upon the heart of the tale that I had been commissioned to tell. It was love. And loss. . . . I recognized the very essence of her: how could I fail to, for was it not the essence of me? We were both lone twins. (52–3) Miss Winter’s fractured speech reflects the impact of traumatic memory,22 stirring similarly painful recollections in Margaret. In flight from the human intimacy that all but destroyed them, both have embraced books and writing as a strategy of survival: ‘a way of filling in the time since everything finished’ (51) in the novelist’s case, a means of ‘tend[ing] the graves of the dead’ in the antiquarian bookseller daughter’s (17). Books are their primary frame of reference; even, as indicated in a (as later transpires, not so) hypothetical dilemma Miss Winter sets Margaret at a critical moment in the narrative, the arbiter of life and death: what would Margaret do, she wants to know, if she witnessed the destruction of world literature at the hands of a maniac and happened to have a shot-gun at her disposal? While failing to respond in the situation, Margaret admits in private to sharing Miss Winter’s murderous preference (241–2). From their first encounter, even in advance of it, books orchestrate the interaction between the two women. In preparation for her visit Margaret familiarizes herself with some of Miss Winter’s best-known novels (the titles of which engage the reader in a metafictional game of detection and recognition, while the author’s name invokes the duplicitous husband of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca).23 As she travels up to Yorkshire, Margaret ponders the fact that she knows the region exclusively through Victorian fiction. And it is Victorian fiction incarnate that she finds in Miss Winter’s library, the chosen location for their appointments. Having arrived early for their first interview, Margaret takes the opportunity to browse the shelves, which contain a quantity of Gothic and Victorian novels: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, (Horace Walpole’s) Castle of Otranto, (Henry M. Milner’s melodrama) The Spectre Bride, Jekyll and Hyde. Clue and framing device in one, these books provide a first indication of Miss Winter’s strategy of hiding by showing. Jane Eyre will figure prominently as a founding text in her narrative,24 and the other novels hint at central aspects of her narrative performance-to-be: fatal attractions between (near) siblings, swapped identities, Gothic illusion and misrecognition, ghostly companions, dual personalities. When Margaret moves on to inspect Miss Winter’s collection of her own works, and fails to spot a copy of her




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most celebrated book, Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation (famous for its missing titular tale), she suddenly becomes aware of an observer’s presence. In parodic-dramatic adaptation of Miss Havisham’s mise-enscène of herself as an allegory of mourning and bride of death in her first meeting with Pip in chapter 8 of Great Expectations, Miss Winter presents herself an ancient queen, sorceress or goddess. Her stiff figure rose regally out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped around her shoulders, the folds of turquoise and green cloth that cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twirls, curls and coils. Her face, as intricately lined as a map, was powdered white and finished with bold, scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her nails, unvarnished, cut short and square like my own, struck an incongruous note. (43) With this extravagant display of Pre-Raphaelite, Gothic and vampiric paradigms of the femme fatale blended with Dickensian markers of age and decay, Miss Winter advertises the performativity of her act as an illusionist. The woman herself remains inaccessible: if on publicity posters she presents startlingly green eyes of ‘perfect inexpression’ (11), which make Margaret wonder whether she has a soul, here she conceals them altogether behind dark sunglasses (43). In the course of subsequent sessions, however, as she moves closer to the heart of her story, her appearance changes dramatically: discarding her hyper-stylized image, she allows her colour to grow out, abandons her false eyelashes, omits all make-up, and finally asks Margaret to cut off her hair until only the white scalp is left. These stages of naturalization bring about a resurrection of bodily authenticity after a lifetime of impersonation. Miss Winter’s gradual return to her ‘original’ self reflects a spiritual cleansing process, which is accompanied by a change in narrative perspective, from omniscient to first-person narration, bestowing a voice to the green-eyed girl that ‘was no more than a sub-plot’ (59) when she was born, but who now holds the strings of the plot. The first time this identity begins to emerge from the shadows is in the ‘Middles’ section of Miss Winter’s dysfunctional family romance. In response to Margaret’s insistence that she be given three verifiable facts as a condition of her acceptance of employment – her real name (Adeline March), place of birth, and a publicly recorded incident from



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her early days (the fire at Angelfield) – Miss Winter imposed in her turn her preferred narrative structure: Beginnings, Middles, Ends. This claim to linearity of narration is of course as much a sleight of hand as is her affirmation of truthfulness: ‘The truth had been there all along’, Margaret later concedes, yet the ‘trick mirrors and the double bluffs’ (350) of its representation mean that ‘only now had I seen it’ (349). Like the garden of Miss Winter’s estate, whose layout she is unable to fathom, the appearance of straight lines serves to conceal the angles (so reminiscent of the asymmetrical architecture and awkward angles of Angelfield)25 without which the ‘true’ story cannot be unearthed: ‘Hedges that looked solid viewed straight on, sometimes revealed a diagonal passageway when viewed obliquely. Shrubberies were easy to wander into and near impossible to escape from. Fountains and statues that I thought I had left behind me, reappeared’ (81). The path to navigate through the maze of the garden – like the library a central site of the family’s self-constitution and dissolution – lies through the ‘understory’, to draw on Nell Grange’s concept in Blake’s novel: the story underlying all the others, which here too is that of the sisters. ‘What is it to have a sister?’, Ludlow asks Nell in Grange House, and receives the reply, ‘A sister is one’s other half . . . she is at once who I am – and am not . . . made visible’ (153). This is constitutive of Charlie’s sadomasochistic relationship with and existential dependence on Isabelle in the second Angelfield generation, and is key to the third-generation story of the twins Emmeline and Angeline, officially the offspring of Isabelle’s marriage to Roland March (who, like Dolly’s father in Misfortune, inverts Victorian literary conventions by departing to the other world at the birth of his daughters), more probably the product of incest (whether brother or father-induced remains uncertain). Like his father’s, Charlie’s mental condition and even life are determined by his compulsive obsession with Isabelle: when she deserts them, George kills himself in the library, dying of septicaemia caused by Isabelle’s torn hair seared into his palm (a legacy visited differently on the third generation in Miss Winter’s mark), whereas Charlie vents his frustration by raping village girls. Like Geoffrey in Misfortune he retires to the nursery after Isabelle is lost to him, having been committed to a lunatic asylum when the girls are in their early teens, and at news of her death disappears to shoot himself in a neglected part of the estate’s gardens. Adeline and Emmeline take the previous generation’s sibling pattern to extremes (the former absorbing all of Charlie’s sadistic energies and the latter all of Isabelle’s sensuality), while being even more exclusively focused on one another and communicating primarily




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(Emmeline) or exclusively (Adeline) in twin language. Hester Barrow, the governess engaged by Doctor Maudsley (namesake to the Victorian physician)26 to put the household in order and take charge of the moral and mental development of the twins, recognizes their psychological division along polar lines, with each displaying one set of emotions and behaviours. In her ability to engage with others Emmeline is the more manageable of the two, whereas Adeline represents pure aggression and an autistic disregard for anybody apart from her sister, her wilful destruction of John’s topiary garden being a case in point. There is, however, Hester has opportunity to observe, a repressed personality within Adeline who is struggling to emerge: a ‘girl in the mist’ (180) interested in her environment and responsive to learning. It is this girl whom the scientifically-minded Hester, exceptionally well-read in medical research on twins, proposes to set free. Yet the experiment of physical separation that she instigates with Maudsley proves a consummate failure: instead of developing a sense of independence, Adeline ‘was lost. Absent from herself. Without her sister, she was nothing and she was no one. It was just the shell of a person they took to the doctor’s house’ (184). Adeline is not the only casualty of the experiment: Hester starts to fear for her own sanity when she observes Emmeline playing with Adeline in the garden but minutes later discovers the latter safely under lock and key in the doctor’s house. An unguarded kiss between the scientists leads to Hester’s hasty departure, and the Angelfield régime reverts to chaos and decay. With one significant alteration: Hester’s intervention has awakened the ‘girl in the mist’ to action. It is in the course of Hester’s exposition of her twin theory and her reference to Adeline’s dual personality that Miss Winter draws attention to ‘a little spy’ (168) eavesdropping on the conversation in the garden. This ‘girl within’ now comes to life in the first person (172). It is she who discovers Charlie’s body though she keeps the information to herself. When the roof and ceilings of the house cave in, she consults, and arranges for a transfer of funds from, the family lawyer, who is at a loss to explain Angeline’s miraculous transformation. As Margaret realizes in the course of reading Hester’s diary passed on to her by Miss Winter, this is not Angeline at all: it is the third, hitherto invisible sister, the figure in white (echoing Collins’s constellation of sisters) who, by attacking Mrs Maudsley with a violin in the library, prompted Isabelle’s commitment to an institution; the village boy glimpsed by Hester working alongside John in the garden; Emmeline’s playfellow during Angeline’s confinement; the ghostly presence in the house who moved curtains and books, purloining



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Hester’s diary; the ‘ghost reader’ Hester imagined ‘lean[ing] over my shoulder watching my pen’ (346). ‘Child of rape. Charlie’s child’ (354), she was abandoned in the garden by an unknown mother when she was a toddler, and then adopted by John and Missus and given the name ‘Shadow’. The ‘girl between’ Angeline and Emmeline, she protects Emmeline from Angeline’s jealous rages, but is unable to prevent her spiralling violence, first towards John, who dies when his ladder is tampered with, and finally, in the night of the fire, against Emmeline herself. By then Emmeline is the mother of a child with John’s assistant, Ambrose, who had been rejected by Shadow. Shadow intervenes when Adeline, a raging Bertha Rochester, steals the baby from its cot and attempts to set fire to it in the library, using Shadow’s favourite Victorian novels to kindle the flames. Shadow rescues the child and carries him to safety, leaving the bundle on the doorstep of a house on the edges of the estate whose kindly middle-aged owner she had many times observed through the windows. On her return, finding the twins engaged in deadly combat, she pulls Emmeline out of the library and locks the door shut against the other, burning her hand when turning the key. It is only after regaining consciousness in the garden that she realizes that the sister she saved is Adeline. Like the death of Margaret’s twin, Emmeline’s releases Shadow into life – a legal identity, a name, the right to an inheritance – while sentencing her to permanent emotional purgatory for killing the woman she loved, whom she had symbolically ‘married’ with Isabelle’s wedding ring. As Shadow is known to the villagers and lawyer as ‘Adeline’, the real Adeline becomes Emmeline, who roams Miss Winter’s garden at night, digging the earth, looking for Emmeline, her only language a singsong of inchoate sounds: a tamed Bertha housed in a separate set of rooms; most definitely not the mother to whom Margaret mistakenly introduces Aurelius Love (the awkward young man who had sought to find out the ‘truth’ from Miss Winter decades earlier). Having befriended Aurelius on her reconnaissance trips to Angelfield ruin and heard his account of Mrs Love’s story of his arrival on her doorstep the night of the fire, Margaret has rightly identified him as the Angelfield heir. As a result of his harrowing encounter with ‘Emmeline’, Aurelius comes to terms with his mourning for his missing mother, arriving at the same conclusion as Maisie does at the end of Grange House: ‘Running after my story, when I had Mrs Love all along. She loved me’ (394). His reconciliation with the idea of his fractured maternal origins is accompanied by the discovery of the paternal line: Kate Proctor and her children Tom and Emma, whom Margaret had also encountered




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at Angelfield, are the direct descendants of Ambrose Proctor, the man who fathered Emmeline’s child; in Kate and her children Aurelius has found a family. As in the previous novels discussed in this chapter, a child originally buried is resurrected, a family and inheritance believed lost are recovered. Recovery of a different sort is achieved by Miss Winter and Margaret who, able for the first time to talk about and share their pain, release the pent-up sorrow of a lifetime. Setterfield here draws on Dori Laub’s concept of working through trauma by ‘bearing witness’: because extreme psychic shock ‘precludes its registration’ at the moment of impact, it is only in narrating the experience, and ‘being listened to – and heard’, that ‘the cognizance, the “knowing” of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time.’27 Consequently, Miss Winter’s paroxysm of ‘fossilized’ tears (275) over the death of John, the closest to a father she had known, sixty years after the event, is complemented by Margaret’s grieving for her sister, herself, her clinically depressed mother. This process of mourning completes the story, enabling Miss Winter to die reconciled with her life, while constituting a rebirth for Margaret: birth without guilt. The final section of the novel, the second period of ‘Beginnings’, offers renewal as well as closure, in the style of George Eliot’s ‘Finale’ to Middlemarch (with which The Thirteenth Tale shares its web metaphor): ‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.’28 Miss Winter is dead, Angelfield demolished; but her Yorkshire home, recast as a museum and tourist site, will continue to be looked after by that reincarnation of Angelfield’s benign Missus and John, the housekeeper Judith and taciturn gardener Maurice. Miss Winter’s dual legacy, her life story and its reconfiguration into art, her incomplete ‘thirteenth tale’, ‘Cinderella’s Child’ (the story of her conception and abandonment), are now Margaret’s, who decides to publish the story but to lodge the manuscript of her biography with Miss Winter’s lawyer until Tom and Emma have reached maturity. Having embraced life, Margaret is offered the opportunity of a love relationship with Dr Clifton, Miss Winter’s physician: a contemporary version of the Hester Barrow/Dr Maudsley partnership. Clifton had previously prescribed a dose of Sherlock Holmes to counteract the effect on Margaret of too rich a diet of the Brontë sisters and Collins’s sensation fiction. In sharp contrast to Winter’s Thirteen Tales, where ‘[e]very Happy Ever After was tainted’ (27), all the strands are reconnected, all fractures healed. Here the novel performs



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the nostalgic return to an imaginary paradigm that Christian Gutleben considers constitutive of the neo-Victorian genre, offering us a ‘metaromance which plays with the reader’s romantic longings’ and fulfils them by providing the happy ending29 which the Victorian novel so often eschewed with its highly ambiguous dénouements: Jane Eyre’s closure on the outsider figure, St John; Villette’s resistance to reader expectations of a reunion of the lovers, Great Expectations’ two endings; Middlemarch’s tribute to the countless ‘hidden li[ves] . . . rest[ing] in unvisited tombs’,30 unrecognized, unwritten, forgotten; The Turn of the Screw’s notorious instability of meaning.

1.4 ‘There was something unheimlich about it’: Familial/textual legacies and spectral returns in John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004)31 The readerly desire for (meta)romance, so frequently frustrated in Victorian and satisfied in neo-Victorian fiction, is rendered uncanny in The Ghost Writer, a novel whose textual reconstructions of the Victorian Gothic and in particular the (Jamesian)32 ghost story explore instability thematically, through the collapse of personal and family relationships, within a structure which performs instability generically through an extraordinarily carefully crafted web of inter/intratextual references. The story of mourning and a lost inheritance – the Australian Gerard Hugh Freeman’s quest for his permanently traumatized mother’s and his family’s past in England – is embedded within a patchwork of stories which display the ‘brutal and sharp and heartbreaking’ quality of Vida Winter’s Thirteen Tales.33 In contradistinction to the novels discussed so far, there are no happy endings anywhere, either for the first-person narrator or for the protagonists of his great-grandmother’s tales. Gerard comes into his inheritance only by losing it for ever, just as he himself came into existence only as a result of his mother losing hers. This originary loss is figured pictorially and textually in the form of the photograph of a young woman, unknown yet strangely familiar, and a fin-de-siècle magazine story that the young boy comes across in his mother’s bedroom; and it is her extreme reaction which in turn compels his search for meaning: ‘My mother stood rigid, fists clenched, nostrils flared. Tufts of hair stuck out from her head; the whites of her eyes seemed to be spilling out of their sockets’ (5). The horror embodied by the material reminders of Phyllis’s family – the picture, Gerard will later discover, is of her sister Anne, the story by her grandmother Viola Hatherley – invoke the traumatic as the spectral: petrified by the




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ghost of the past, Phyllis is unable to release herself from its shadow. She never destroys what so markedly terrifies her, nor is she ever able to speak about it; she even withholds the vital information that she had a sister. Just as in The Thirteenth Tale Vida Winter writes novels to keep agonizing memories at bay, so Gerard’s mother fictionalizes a past she can bear neither to forget nor to remember, purloining her grandmother’s stories in her reminiscences about the picturesque country house Staplefield, where she grew up with her best friend Rosalind. As Gerard discovers two decades later, this was a fictive memory, drawn from Viola’s ‘The Pavilion’, the friend in the tale who helps the protagonist avoid an unhappy marriage replacing the factual sister who attempted to murder her. The real Staplefield is a Hampstead house, in Ferrier’s Close, where at the climax of the novel Gerard will encounter his mother’s ghosts. The invented memory assumes authenticity status in the child’s mind, turning into the nostalgic signifier of a lost paradise: ‘my memories, as they truly seemed, . . . became my principal refuge’ from the bleakness of Mawson, formerly ‘Leichhardt’ (‘stiff corpse’), in the dead heart of Australia (15): an emotional desert, the site of buried dreams and of his émigré parents’ death-in-life existence. His mother’s obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder is complemented by his father’s silent withdrawal to a toy world of automated trains without humans to complicate the mechanism and, shortly before Gerard’s eighteenth birthday, his death proper. When, exasperated by the young adult’s insistence to probe her about the past, Phyllis claims that Staplefield burned to the ground (an image which anticipates the ending), Gerard finds himself locked into a grieving process (72) for the loss of his imaginary home. Gerard’s nostalgia for Staplefield is replaced, and rekindled, with the beginning, in early puberty, of a pen-pal relationship with Alice Jessell, whose orphaned and wheel-bound condition following a car accident with fatal consequences for her parents mirrors his own sense of parental abandonment and physical entrapment. This ‘invisible friend’ (15), a veritable Alice in Wonderland (rural England), resident in an institutional home uncannily familiar, whose ‘view from [the] window reminded me constantly of the landscape my mother used to describe’ (23), comes to stand for Staplefield also in her material inaccessibility and her dislocation to the realm of dreams and epistolary ‘word-pictures’ (25): just like his mother with the family home, so now Alice conjures up desires which remain forever unfulfilled. While, in looks and destiny, she constructs herself as a Lady of Shalott figure, it is Gerard who is condemned to leading the lady’s mirror existence, as he progressively isolates himself in



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order to spend all his time on weaving his inner life and longings into the tapestry of his letters. Fulfilment only comes in a dream (29), which prompts a second dream, a memory of himself as a small child with his mother reading to him, crying (30). His unconscious thus having connected together Alice, his mother, and reading in a memory of the past, he re-explores his mother’s room and finds the story he had come across before: ‘Seraphina’, published in The Chameleon (a journal inspired by the Yellow Book and The Savoy) in 1898.34 The story bears disconcerting resemblance to his always curtailed desire for Alice, who will not hear of phone calls or a visit and refuses even to send a picture. Like the mysterious Pre-Raphaelite seductress featured on the ingenious painting which instantly fills Lord Edmund Napier with an intense passion for her possession, ‘she was the woman he had so long sought’ (41), but who eludes any attempt to claim her: every time Edmund steps close to the picture, it dissolves into ‘unintelligible swirls and textures of pigment’ (41) – another version of Misfortune’s fatal inkblots – only to be reborn into tantalizing beauty the moment he moves away. In his ever more frenzied endeavour to capture the dream, Edmund becomes a recluse and ends by committing suicide under the hallucination of entering the frame of the picture finally to embrace the object of his desire. The next day he is found drowned, having jumped off the bridge from which his former abandoned and pregnant lover plunged to her death. The picture now depicts nothing but clouds and fog, with the faintest outline of a woman’s smile barely perceptible in the upper corner. Edmund’s grand passion was never anything more than a grand illusion. While Gerard is unnerved – ‘Seraphina’s resemblance to Alice . . . troubled me’ (74) – he is unable to resist Alice’s textual seduction and becomes her lover by ‘directed dreaming’ (58), shared fantasies of sexual union. Eight years into their epistolary relationship, at the age of 21, he revisits Lord Edmund’s emotionally devastating experience when he travels to London in feverish anticipation of their first actual meeting, to find not a trace of her: neither letters, nor an address, or a phone number, not even a record of her birth. Like the past to his mother, Alice assumes a disturbing spectral quality, an impression intensified by The Turn of the Screw, which he now reads for the first time, recognizing Alice’s surname as that of the ghostly apparition of the fallen governess with paedophile desires: ‘I wouldn’t be able to look at her without thinking of Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel with her dead white face and long black dress’ (75). If it is through acts of writing that Alice was able to establish and construct herself in his imagination, Gerard’s




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reading brings to life terrifying counter-images. Unable to track Alice down, he consults the British Library Reading Room for The Chameleon and finds a second 1898 story by Viola Hatherley, ‘The Gift of Flight’. More disturbing than ‘Seraphina’, this proto-Freudian tale of the uncanny again correlates with his own experiences. Set in the Reading Room of the British Museum, it presents a strange mirror image of his situation; some of his fellow-readers, a wild-eyed man, a veiled lady who watches him obtrusively, appear to have sprung from the story, whose themes offer ghostly, and ghastly, variations on his very anxieties: an ‘ideal’ lover who proves unreliable, the spectre of the past haunting the present, the frightening dissolution of the boundaries between textuality and reality. In the story Julia Lockhart, unhappily married with a small daughter, is grieving for the end of her adulterous relationship with the journalist and poet Frederick Liddell (whose name recalls the real-life model for Lewis Carroll’s character, Alice Liddell, thus linking Julia’s and Gerard’s defective lovers). Frederick is unable to release himself from the spell of his deceased ex-lover, the dancer Lydia Lopez, who died from an accident on the high wire. Lydia’s ominous presence pervades his attic flat, inducing a dangerous fit of vertigo in Julia, who feels drawn to throwing herself off the balcony. She visits the British Museum hoping to find ‘one particular book which would speak directly to her sorrow. It would be like finding a new friend, one whose perceptions were so subtly and delicately attuned to hers as to see further into her heart than she herself was capable of doing’ (80–1); the analogies with Gerard’s own particular friend who exists only in and through writing are manifest. As if in compliance with her wish, a book is delivered to Julia whose bizarre sequence of events is set in motion as soon as she leaves the library. When she returns to the British Museum to recover the clairvoyant book, she finds herself stalked by a terrifying doll child and, in order to escape its deadly grasp, almost precipitates herself over the railings of the gallery. A second attempt at locating the mysterious book leads to her discovery of an account of Frederick’s death with that very day’s date. Desperate to avert a calamity, she hastens to his flat and finds him dazed, evidently in the act of conjuring up Lydia’s ghost; she is attacked by the doll child, a reincarnation of the dead woman, but struggles free and disposes of the doll via the balcony. The spell is broken; in more ways than one. Julia realizes that her dream of flight with Frederick as the ideal companion was an illusion; ‘She left him dreaming of the dead, and went wearily down the stairs to rejoin the living’ (112).



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As with ‘Seraphina’, Gerard is struck by the analogies with his own life, and cannot shake off a sequence of nightmares in which the doll child and an indistinguishable figure in flight whom he takes to be Alice merge into one. While he identifies with Julia, he is not ready to follow her example and ‘rejoin the living’, for ‘Without Alice . . . Staplefield was dead and gone’ (114). Alice and the past are inextricably intertwined; he cannot renounce either, and remains trapped in Frederick’s victim position. On his return to Australia Alice resumes contact to explain that during his London visit she was undergoing surgery, and that, if her medical diagnosis is correct, they will soon be able to meet in the flesh. In actual fact it will take another thirteen years for Gerard, finally, to encounter her, in circumstances which will turn him into the petrified image his mother presented at the start of his quest. Like Julia’s extraordinary reading matter in the British Museum, Viola Hatherley’s stories hold clairvoyant powers whose influence appears potent even a hundred years on; indeed, what little Gerard’s mother was prepared to tell him of her past is that ‘one [of Viola’s stories] came true’ (122). This is the 1925 typescript of ‘The Revenant’, which Gerard discovers in his mid-thirties, after his mother’s death, together with two photographs, a radiant picture of herself with baby Gerard, the other the picture of the mysterious, beautiful woman he had come across as a child, hidden in the top cupboard over her bed. Phyllis fell off her footstool when attempting to retrieve and destroy the folder. If this is ‘the story my mother had died trying to keep me from reading’ (129), it is also quite literally the story she almost died for as a result of reading. The story and the photographs of herself and her sister represent the equivalent of a trauma mark, always concealed yet forever present, even their hiding place an invocation of the past (the top cupboard of her original bedroom in Ferrier’s Close holds the secret to her story and that of ‘The Revenant’). ‘The Revenant’ takes up aspects of the earlier tales – the hypnotic and supernatural qualities of a painting, the revenge of the dead – and interweaves them with the story of sibling rivalry and family breakdown. The tale is set in an English country estate, Ashbourn House (another version of Staplefield or Ferrier’s Close), and recounts the fatal influence of Imogen de Vere’s tragic love story on the third generation, her orphaned granddaughters Cordelia and Beatrice, who live with their uncle and aunt. Imogen had a terrible punishment exacted on her by her brutal husband Ruthven for her adulterous relationship with the painter Henry St Clair. While her face was disfigured by the mysterious, debilitating illness that afflicted her after spending a fatal last night in her husband’s




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house, St Clair was ruined when Ruthven seized all his paintings, including the portrait of his wife. Rather than destroying the painter’s work, Ruthven (like Edmund in ‘Seraphina’) succumbs to its ghostly allure, and in order to pass on the curse makes the maintenance of the collection central to his bequest to the descendants of his wife. When Cordelia comes into her maturity, she is told the terms of the legacy, and promptly falls in love with the solicitor’s clerk, Harry Beauchamp, who visits to examine the collection. Harry is, however, more struck with St Clair’s pictures, in particular what he calls his ‘exorcisms’ (178), the sinister antithesis to Imogen’s portrait and his lyric landscape paintings. If Cordelia is drawn to Imogen’s picture as a source of inspiration and comfort, the focus of Harry’s increasingly unhealthy obsession is ‘The Drowned Man’, a series of interlocking panels which, opened up, reveal a drowned corpse’s face, ‘life-size, teeth bared, eyes wide open and staring’ (184), a face which changes age depending on the proximity or distance of the observer (another echo of ‘Seraphina’), an object of abjection. Harry comments that ‘it’s like being reminded of something, and not being able to remember what it reminds you of’ (196): a vision of death’s shadow presence in every living body. Exploring the room, Cordelia discovers a strange contraption somehow connected to Imogen’s fate since the green Pre-Raphaelite gown featured in St Clair’s portrait is folded up in the box which contains the apparatus. In the meantime Beatrice, who nurtures a long-standing resentment against Cordelia, takes up work in London. After much prompting Harry proposes to Cordelia, but she soon has cause for jealousy, and the story – the final sections of which Gerard recovers in Ferrier’s Close – ends with her bursting in on a sexual assignment between Harry and Beatrice in the attic studio which houses St Clair’s paintings. As Gerard learns from Abigail Hamish’s letter (the old lady who responds to his search for information on Phyllis Hatherley) and from his personal investigation of Ferrier’s Close, where he comes across letters and diary entries by Viola and Anne, the story of the real-life sisters Anne and Phyllis replicated central parts of ‘The Revenant’. Anne, in rereading their grandmother’s story, feels unnerved by the correspondences in the family constellation: ‘I’ve never thought of Filly and me as estranged, just not terribly close. But now I wonder. Just as it didn’t seem odd, before, that she and I haven’t talked about our parents for years, and now it does’ (307–8). As in Viola’s tale, the sisters are orphans, their parents (like Alice’s) having died in a car crash, and live with relatives, their grandmother and after her death their spiritualist aunt Iris. At the time of the crisis, 1949 (the date on the back of Anne’s picture), Phyllis



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studies typing and shorthand in London, while Anne is looking after the ailing Iris. In the process of having family paintings evaluated for a sale to boost their depleted finances, Anne becomes engaged to the agent’s representative, Hugh Montfort.35 Now that yet another jigsaw of the story has fallen into place, she feels under a strange compulsion to read everything that happens in the context of ‘The Revenant’. Her attraction to Hugh is as much over-determined by her conviction that the story is repeating itself as is her jealousy of her sister, who ‘behaved exactly like Beatrice’ (311) on being introduced to her fiancé; in her diary she even starts mixing up their names. Despite frantic vows – ‘I just mustn’t think about it any more. . . . I’ve locked the story in the study. I will never read it or think of it again. . . . I must not think about it any more . . . I will not read the story again’ (312–14) – she is compelled to return to it always. In her obsession with ‘The Revenant’ Anne mirrors Harry Beauchamp’s fixation with the ‘Drowned Man’, for which she now scours the house, ostensibly to ‘prove it doesn’t exist’ (312), more probably because she is certain it does. Ultimately ‘The Revenant’ comes true because of the way in which it is overread by Anne, who initially wonders whether ‘the story [is] making me see things that aren’t there’ (308); it comes true further because of the conjunction of Anne’s hysterical and Phyllis’s performative reading practices. For, having read Anne’s diary, Phyllis decides to act out ‘The Revenant’. When Anne discovers her in the attic room in bed with Hugh, ‘she threw back her head and looked straight at me’ (315) in a metadramatic gesture which provokes Anne to take the story to its extreme conclusion. Iris, who knows about Phyllis’s but not Anne’s treacherous actions, changes her will, disinheriting Phyllis and leaving everything to Anne. According to Miss Hamish Anne then mysteriously disappeared: Gerard is convinced that she became the victim of murder at the hand of his mother. The real story emerges from a sequence of terrifying Gothic encounters which Gerard must negotiate in Ferrier’s Close: messages from Iris’s Ouija board which incriminate Phyllis, the hallucination or apparition of a spectral figure while he lies asleep on the living-room couch, whisperings from the gallery of the library, a near-fatal entrapment in the cellar (where Gerard believes Anne was murdered after finding a missing section of ‘The Revenant’ with a handwritten message by her), all culminating in the apocalyptic confrontation with the past that his entire life has been straining towards. Having recognized the anagram in ‘A.V. Hamish’ and the fact that Abigail Victoria Hamish and Anne Victoria Hatherley share the same initials, Gerard mounts the stairs to the attic studio of the house he has set on fire in his desperate attempt to force open the cellar




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an indistinct figure shrouded in flowing white . . . glided to the door . . . I saw that she was tall and statuesque and veiled like a bride; a long white veil, floating above a great cascading cloud of chestnut hair that flowed on down over her shoulders exactly as it had in so many dreams of Alice. Her arms were entirely concealed by long white gloves, and her gown, too, was white, gathered high at the waist. . . . ‘My questing knight,’ she whispered. ‘Now you can claim your prize.’ . . . The veil floated free; the cloud of chestnut hair skipped from her shoulders and fell at her feet with a soft thud. Lamplight gleamed upon a bald, mummified head, skin stretched like crackling over the dome of the skull, with two black holes for nostrils and a single eye burning in a leprous mass of tissue, fixing me, half a life too late, with the enormity of my delusion as I saw that Alice Jessell and Anne Hatherley and Abigail Hamish were one and the same person . . . (366–7, 372) In a frenzied impulse towards punishing her sister and completing the cycle of repetition, Anne fell victim to her own murderous scheme. Having understood her grandmother’s references to Imogen de Vere’s mysterious illness, she knows that it originated from the strange apparatus Cordelia found in the studio because this apparatus, an early Roentgen machine, was in the possession of Viola’s scientificallyminded husband Alfred. It is with this fluoroscope that Anne plotted the ultimate revenge when she moved the machine into the top cupboard over Phyllis’s bed, connecting it to her bedside lamp: every time the lamp was switched on, the deadly rays would be directed towards Phyllis. While she was aware that the radiation would fall out on both sides of the partition, thus also endangering her in the adjoining bedroom, she did not realize that Phyllis’s bulb was blown. On the night of the betrayal Phyllis slept in the studio room, and Anne went to bed thinking she was ‘safe’ (371), not realizing that the machine was in fact switched on, thus inflicting on herself the horrific radiation burns meant for her sister. Terrified, Phyllis fled the scene, giving birth to a son, the first Gerard Hugh, who lived for only a few months: ‘My halfbrother, you could say, except that I had only been born because he had died’ (336). Hugh Montfort, Anne implies, suffered an ‘accident’ (371),



door. There, in the studio featured in the climax of ‘The Revenant’ and so critical also to his mother’s story, he comes face to face with a spectacular version of Miss Havisham, a ghastly parody of the Pre-Raphaelite maiden as a harbinger of death and decay:

having presumably been done away with in the cellar where she locked up Gerard, or pushed down the stairs as Harry is by Beatrice in ‘The Revenant’. Having imparted to Gerard his legacy of death and destruction, Anne, an Erinye of sisterhood, descends into the blazing library, while Gerard escapes out of the French windows of the burning house that once was the Staplefield of his imagination. That Miss Havisham/Miss Jessel/Alice in Wonderland exits through the library, there to be consumed by the flames which will also obliterate the literary legacy that has scripted into existence the family drama and trauma of which Gerard is the sole survivor, is a reminder of the primarily textual constructions to which his identity and affective universe have been subject. The instability of this textual inheritance is signalled by the prevailing mode of the uncanny, which shapes Gerard’s experience and Viola Hatherley’s stories alike: both are haunted by doubles (Alice and Seraphina, Gerard and Frederick, Cordelia/Anne and Beatrice/ Phyllis, Harry Beauchamp and Hugh Montfort, Harry Beauchamp and Alfred Hatherley), odd coincidences (clairvoyancy in ‘The Gift of Flight’, the sibling relationship in ‘The Revenant’ and the Hatherley family), and automata (the doll child, Miss Havisham). The conjunction of the ‘oddly familiar’ (246) and the strange (‘heimlich’ in its dual meaning of ‘homely’/familiar and ‘secret’ conjuring up the category of the ‘unheimlich’), which in his seminal article of 1919 Freud defined as constitutive of the uncanny,36 is the ghost that stalks Gerard from the outset, culminating in his ‘elusive sense of recognition’ (253) at Ferrier’s Close. ‘[T]here was something unheimlich about it’, Viola writes with reference to her literary clairvoyancy: ‘I felt that some sort of prognostic gift had been thrust upon me, and I didn’t like it’ (294–5). The recuperative potential of such a gift is explored in ‘The Pavilion’, whose protagonist finds the courage to disentangle herself from an uncongenial marriage by visualizing it within the Gothic framework of the vampire story. By contrast, Viola’s tale of family collapse, originating as it does from her profound disquiet about her husband’s preoccupation with his fluoroscope, her sense of having ‘married a stranger’ (294), have the effect of conjuring up what they seek to pacify: an extreme estrangement.

1.5 Conclusion This condition of estrangement which haunts the neo-Victorian novel offers an apt reflection on the instabilities of our contemporary relationship to the Victorian past, a past deceptively familiar to us through its




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literature, art, architecture, socio-cultural and political discourses, yet always ultimately intangible, and utterly remote from our experience. In exploring the uncanny aspects of fictional characters’ compulsion to return to their roots in their endeavour at self-definition, neo-Victorianism draws our attention to the conflicted nature of our engagement with our own literary and cultural histories, involving us in imaginary dialogues across the centuries. It is no coincidence that of the four texts discussed in this chapter, two are set in our time looking back, while the other two are looking forward from a nineteenth-century vantage point and, by having the protagonists address their heirs, also apostrophize the reader. In their focus on painful reminiscences as the foundation of contemporary identities, these novels move beyond the nostalgic excesses of popular neo-Victorianism’s investment in costume drama and bedroom plots to examine the role of cultural memory to our twenty-first-century sense of (literary) self. Memory, as Jacques Le Goff observed at the start of the postmodernist period, ‘is an essential element of . . . individual or collective identity, the feverish and anxious quest for which is today one of the fundamental activities of individuals and societies.’37 Significantly, it was the later nineteenth century which saw the beginnings of modern memory research (by Pierre Janet, William James, Freud, Henri Bergson) and investigations into cerebral, subconscious, and traumatic processes of recollection, which highlighted the catalytic impact these had on literature and art.38 By mapping the cultural memory traces which shape their protagonists’ lives and afford cathartic relief in traumatic crises, neo-Victorian novels like Misfortune relate contemporary-asnineteenth-century gender dysphoria not back to the later Victorian era of sexological enquiry,39 but to earlier traditions from classical to (early) modern literature, problematizing historical continuities. Traumatic experience, Cathy Caruth argues, is often related to a sense of belatedness that expresses itself through geographical and temporal distance: ‘since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time.’40 This other place and other time is pinpointed in all of the texts, from Misfortune’s Greek and Roman antiquity in Turkey to the origins of Grange House’s family drama in the Irish Famine. In The Thirteenth Tale Margaret comes to accept and is able to work through her anguish only by listening to Vida Winter recalling hers. The Ghost Writer propels the hero into a painful recognition of the past by effecting a complex synthesis between family quest story, Victorian literary pastiche, and Gothic trauma narrative.



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Why does the neo-Victorian novel so consistently retrace Freud’s dysfunctional family romance? That, as Setterfield puts it, ‘it is dysfunction that makes a story’41 is richly illustrated in Victorian fiction, which revolves around flawed, fractured, dissolving, newly emerging (usually no less dysphoric) families: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw. The key figure, who once brought the family into being, the mother, is identified by her absence, and is often replaced by a defective surrogate (Miss Havisham or, in her younger configuration, a madwoman or homicidal governess). Condemned to the shadows or an early grave in nineteenthcentury literature, the mother is, however, of crucial importance to the neo-Victorian genre, where she is frequently complemented by a sister figure: here, the mother (or mother-and-sister pair) is the mark of trauma, literarily represented as the Urtext which, if recovered and read correctly, is able to furnish a resolution to the protagonist’s predicament. The mother and the maternal home, acting as they do as sites of both alienation and ultimate reconciliation, constitute central metaphors of the legacy of Victorianism in neo-Victorian fiction. The Victorian family mansion fulfils this function also in the ‘new’ neo-forties genre represented by Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) and, most recently, Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009), texts (and homes) both haunted by spectral mothers (in Waters’s case by the narrator’s memory of his deceased mother, a former nursery-maid, and his desire to take control of the house in which she worked in a quasi-maternal capacity, destroying the rightful owners in order to repossess her). The ancestral home, in contemporary historical fiction, thus assumes the function of Woolf’s lighthouse. As Suzanne Nalbantian remarks, the lighthouse is ‘the visual focus which provokes the memory by way of conceptual association. For the artist, the lighthouse as an object and place incites the memory process.’42 What the lighthouse was to modernist fiction, the Victorian ancestral home, firmly possessed by the spirit of a matriarch and writer figure, is to the contemporary neo-Victorian imagination.




Race and Empire: Postcolonial Neo-Victorians

Hybridity is . . . the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority). . . . [T]he colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory . . . a negative transparency. If discriminatory effects enable the authorities to keep an eye on them, their proliferating difference evades that eye . . . Those discriminated against may be instantly recognized, but they also force a recognition of the immediacy and articulacy of authority – a disturbing effect that is familiar in the repeated hesitancy afflicting the colonialist discourse when it contemplates its discriminated subjects: the inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeakable rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the Hottentots. . . . [Hybridity] reveals the ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion[.] Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ (1985)1 Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. . . . [B]oth as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and 66



2

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Appeals to the past are among the commonest strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions – about influence, about blame and judgement, about present actualities and future priorities . . . Past and present inform each other, each implies the other and, in the . . . ideal sense intended by [T. S.] Eliot, each co-exists with the other. . . . [H]ow we formulate or represent the past shapes our understanding and views of the present. Edward W. Said, Culture & Imperialism (1993)3 In the previous chapter we focused on the complex structures of memory and mourning in the neo-Victorian family romance as metaphorically configured in the image of a haunted and haunting mansion. This chapter is again concerned with traumatic experiences, but here we examine the ‘house’, and heritage, of colonialism and the British Empire, and closely related to this, Victorian Orientalism and constructions of subalternity. As Edward Said pointed out in Culture & Imperialism, the Victorian novel had a central investment in sustaining the imperial project even as it marginalized the colonial worlds to which it dispatched its protagonists (St John Rivers in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jem and Mary in Gaskell’s Mary Barton), or from which they derived a sudden influx of wealth, resulting in a startling change of fortune (Jane via her uncle in Brontë’s novel; Pip via Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations). This peripheral representation of the Empire and its peoples, whose exploitation or subjection was yet so intricately connected with the fates of the hero/ine, became the site of contestation in one of the earliest neoVictorian novels, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which conferred subjectivity, speech and ‘a life’ on what Rhys called the ‘poor ghost’ of Brontë’ s Creole madwoman.4 What is surprising in light of the direction Rhys’s novel gave to the genre is that, apart from J.G. Farrell’s The Siege



cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1987)2

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of Krishnapur (1973), Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows (1976), and the emergence of the American neo-slave narrative5 (a genre inaugurated in 1966 by Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and epitomized in 1987 by Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize winning Beloved ),6 only the last fifteen years have begun to see a rise in postcolonial narrative approaches to the nineteenth century: Jane Rogers’s Promised Lands (1995), Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner (2002), Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003), Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (2005), Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2007), and Iliya Troyanov’s The Collector of Worlds (2008). The Orientalist pitfalls for neo-Victorianism of the less serious kind are explored humorously in Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire (2003), which mocks the fashionable taste for historical fiction set in exotic surroundings in the figure of the nineteenth-century hack novelist Stapleton, a male version of the bestselling writer Marie Corelli, who produces a ‘staple’ diet of potboilers about colourful foreign locations in their imagined past glory: Zoe. It’s a romance of old Byzantium . . . Jolly interesting – the subject, I mean, not the novel . . . Uggdryth . . . a romance of life among the Vikings. I meant to get them to invade Britain . . . Dun Eggs. Medieval China . . . Very pretty – willow trees and pug dogs and the girl threw herself into a brook. And before that . . . Abyssinia . . . A romance . . . [a]mong the early Christians . . . All out of books, you know . . . it was all out of three pages of Gibbon, and the rest . . . I made it all up . . . Invented. The whole caboodle, anthropophagy, sacred tigers, ritual dances with cowcumbers, all of it. Did very well, so my bookseller assures me. All out of my noodle.7 If, as Marie-Luise Kohlke reminds us, ‘the Victorian age that once imagined the Orient as seductive free zone of libidinous excess’ has now itself become orientalized as ‘Western culture’s mysterious, eroticised, and exotic Other’,8 postcolonial neo-Victorianism has to negotiate, and resist, a twofold drive for Orientalism in the popular imagination. This chapter examines a series of recent postcolonial encounters with the neo-Victorian across a range of geographical and temporal locations: 1838 India just prior to the first Opium War (1839–42) in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008); Jamaica and the immediate post-slavery period (1838–40) in Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008); 1860s Egypt in Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing (2009), and late-nineteenth to early twentieth-century juxtaposed with millennial Egypt in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (shortlisted



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for the Booker Prize in 1999). While Pullinger explores colonial paradigms through the lens of class, Ghosh, Fish, and Soueif scrutinize Victorian attitudes to race and empire through the shared themes of racial violence and slavery, sanctioned and maintained by the imperialist imperatives of Christian religion and the politics of colonial occupation and judicial oppression (the corruption of the courts is central to Sea of Poppies and Map of Love and features also in Strange Music). The voices of resistance are represented linguistically through hybrid and experimental languages, and generically through patterns of fusion and disruption: the epistolary, diary and first-person novel is broken up by omniscient narration (Strange Music, Map of Love, Mistress of Nothing); the Victorian Bildungsroman is complemented by Indian and Egyptian mythologies (Sea of Poppies, Map of Love, Mistress of Nothing); the realist narrative is injected with the uncanny and transformed into magic realism (Sea of Poppies, Isabel’s visit to the mosque in Map of Love, Elizabeth’s visions in Strange Music). These novels, we argue, illustrate postcolonial neo-Victorianism’s creative challenge to the critical theory concepts of hybridity and the silence of the subaltern. In her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1987) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak defined the subaltern as the indigenous rural subject silenced by both imperial and local discourses and structures of power, arguing that the female subaltern – epitomized by the Hindu widow’s self-immolation – ultimately always remains unrepresentable and ‘cannot be heard or read’.9 In focusing our attention on the voices of female West Indian slaves, indentured workers, and convicts, on the apotheosis as the founding mother of a new community of a rural widow snatched by her lower-caste lover from the funeral pyre, on the dialogues between Egyptian intellectuals and villagers, and on the linguistic versatility of servants, these novels contest the ideas both that the dispossessed are of necessity voiceless, and that silence, where it does exist, must invariably reflect disempowerment (Ghosh’s near-mute giant Kalua is a potent counter-example of the latter, as is Ada McGrath, the Scottish New-Zealand heroine in Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano). At the same time the extradiegetic and intradiegetic loci of representation are problematized: the authors creating these resistant voices as well as some of their protagonists (Fish’s Elizabeth Barrett; Soueif’s Anna, Layla, Amal, and Sharif; Pullinger’s Lucie Duff Gordon) occupy the position of Spivak’s intellectual, thus reflecting discursive dominance or, against the background of the Barrett family’s sugar plantation, and Anna’s and Lucie’s fellow-expatriates, the power of imperialism vis-à-vis the subaltern characters (Kaydia and Sheba in Strange Music, the fallaheen in The Map of Love).



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Homi Bhabha’s influential argument, in ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ (1985), that hybridity serves as a tool of colonial subjection – the hybrid, like miscegenation, providing the antithesis of racial and linguistic ‘purity’ – while at the same time containing within it an impulse towards subversion by opening up a space for resistance, is vividly illustrated in the interplay of languages in Sea of Poppies, the first volume of Ghosh’s projected Ibis Trilogy. The representatives of colonial power (such as the ship’s pilot James Doughty and the capitalist-imperialist wife ‘Beebee’ Burnham) share their hybrid speech with the ethnically indeterminate ‘subaltern’, the head lascar (hired sailor)10 and ex-pirate Serang Ali. Hybrid language, Ghosh notes in an interview, ‘came to reflect the realities of the lives of these characters. When a language spreads, it creates these contact languages, which are basically pidgin languages.’11 The majority of the Hindu, Urdu, and Bengali terms featured in the book, he points out, are listed in the OED: ‘they are English words’: a reminder of the multicultural and mutable nature of English, of the existence of not one but multiple ‘world Englishes’,12 as well as a game with the Indian reader who, like the author himself, may enjoy experimenting with ‘Hindi-English’.13 A detailed glossary, available in electronic format, plays on the multiplicity of etymologies, usages and meanings for every term: The Ibis Chrestomathy (fictively authored, ‘in the late 1880s’ – fifty years after the events of the novel – by the dispossessed Raja reincarnated as the Ibis community’s storyteller and historiographer, Neel Rattan Halder).14 Ghosh thus engages his readership in a complex reflection on the historical development of English in its interaction with other cultures and languages, illustrating the globalization of hybrid Englishes by posting his Chrestomathy on the internet. What originated as Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Hind, Laskari becomes, ‘in its English incarnation’, ‘a new coinage, with a new persona and a renewed destiny’;15 the language of Empire is subverted into the languages and cultures of its subjects. The multiplicity of variants in characters’ speech in Sea of Poppies replicates the multiple and unstable spellings of the terms which fertilized the English language in the nineteenth century.16 In contradistinction to the twenty-first-century assumption that ‘in this age of globalisation . . . English is becoming more and more expansive’, Ghosh draws attention to its potential impoverishment in comparison with past centuries: ‘in the 19th century, English was much wider, more accepting of other influences, especially Asian influences. Not just Hindustani but Chinese too. But what happened from the



2.1. Hybridity and resistance in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008)

20th century was that they started ridding English of Asian influences. English today is comparatively limited. – Which is why I feel that if . . . Asian writers . . . are going to write in this language at all, then we must reclaim for it what it historically had.’17 Indeed, as the nautical pilot Doughty impresses on the first mate of the Ibis, the American freedman Zachary Reid (who is mistaken for a white), ‘The zubben, dear boy, is the flash lingo of the East. It’s easy enough to jin if you put your head to it. Just a little peppering of niggertalk mixed with a few girleys. But mind your Ordoo and Hindee doesn’t sound too good; don’t want the world to think you’ve gone native. And don’t mince your words either. Mustn’t be taken for a chee-chee.’18 Mince his words Doughty does not when he is humiliated publicly, in Bengali, in front of his host, the Raja, by a dancer whose sexual services he once enjoyed and whose unflattering gossip he now overhears: ‘Hot cock and shittleteedee! . . . Damned badzat pootlies. You think I don’t samjo your bloody bucking? There’s not a word of your black babble I don’t understand. Call me a cunnylapper, would you? ‘D rather bang the bishop than charter your chute. Licking, did you say? Here’s my lattee to give you a licking . . . ’ (110). Doughty has to be dragged off and handed into the safe-keeping of the lascars, cutting a rather Quixotic figure of mortified disempowerment. Neither his hybridity nor his grasp of the language of the subaltern here benefits the colonial master. The dancer does not understand his words, and he is no longer capable of speaking in any other way: his ability for multilingualism and verbal pyrotechnics has atrophied in linguistic opacity. But then Doughty is, overall, a harmless character, endowed with, as Zachary reflects, a ‘kindly, even generous spirit’ (46), and much more interested in his creature comforts than the oppression of the local populations. Similarly, hybridity is turned into a comedy of miscomprehension in the case of ‘Beebee’, the wife of the imperialist Benjamin Burnham (a former slave trader who, after the abolition of slavery, deals in opium and deportees instead). Beebee’s exchange with the penniless Frenchborn orphan Paulette Lambert about an offer of marriage represents the near-collapse of colonial language. After her father’s death Paulette has found a home with the Burnhams, but, having fallen in love with Zachary, is alarmed by the existence of an undesired suitor, not least because the man in question, a reactionary judge, stretched her patience to its limits at the previous night’s dinner party: ‘Sentiments, my dear Puggly,’ [Mrs Burnham] said sternly, ‘are for dhobis and dhashies. We mems can’t let that kind of thing get in the



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way! No, dear, let me tell you – you’re lucky to have a judge in your sights and you mustn’t let your bunduk waver. This is about as fine a shikar as a girl in your situation could possibly hope for.’ . . . Suddenly, as her suspicions deepened [about Paulette’s evident distress at the idea of the match], the Beebee cut herself short and clamped her hands on her mouth. ‘Oh! dear, dear Puggly – tell me – you haven’t . . . ? you haven’t . . . No! Tell me it isn’t so!’ ‘What, Madame?’ said Paulette, in puzzlement. The Beebee’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘You haven’t compromised yourself, Puggly dear, have you? No. I will not credit it.’ ‘Compromise, Madame?’ Paulette proudly raised her chin and squared her shoulders. ‘In matters of the heart, Madame, I do not believe that half-measures and compromises are possible. Does not love demand that we give our all?’ ‘Puggly . . .!’ Mrs Burnham gasped, fanning herself with a pillow. ‘Oh my dear! Oh heavens! Tell me, dear Puggly: I must know the worst.’ She swallowed faintly and clutched her fluttering bosom: ‘ . . . is there? . . . no surely there isn’t! . . . no . . . Lud! . . .’ ‘Yes, Madame?’ said Paulette. ‘Puggly, tell me the truth, I conjure you: there isn’t a rootie in the choola, is there?’ . . . Paulette was a little surprised . . . but she was glad, too, to have the conversation turned in this new direction, since it presented a good opportunity for escape. Hugging her stomach, she made a moaning sound: ‘Madame, you are perfectly right: I am indeed a little foireuse today.’ ‘Oh dear, dear Puggly!’ The Beebee dabbed her streaming eyes and gave Paulette a pitying hug. ‘Of course you are furious! Those budzat sailors! With all their udlee-budlee, you’d think they’d leave the larkins alone! . . . ’ (252–4) Hopelessly at cross-purposes, neither grasps the other’s meaning. Another burlesque of miscommunication is played out through situational rather than linguistic malapropism in the figure of the mad ‘gomusta’ (Burnham’s accountant and general functionary) Baboo Nob Kissin. Nob believes that he is undergoing a process of reincarnation in which he is merging, in spirit and flesh, with the deceased Ma Taramony: the woman he worshipped, his deeply religious uncle’s wife who in widowhood became a renowned Vaishnavite saint and before her death promised she would return to him. His growing delusion about Zachary’s ‘real’ identity as Krishna in disguise considerably



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incommodes the object of his adoration. Zachary is mystified by Nob’s references to his whistle and potential amorous desires, disconcerted by his peculiar and persistent interest in him, and alarmed by queries about his colour (Nob later responds with jubilation to the discovery that Zachary is entered on the crew register as ‘black’). This flamboyant character’s spiritual and bodily hybridity expresses itself in a progressively subversive rejection of imperial codes of gender purity through the public cultivation of femininity (by wearing his long hair loose and dressing in Taramony’s clothes, imitating the swaying of her hips, he believes he is opening himself up to interpenetration by her spirit, thus commencing his, and her, re-embodiment). A naturally gentle man (though he devises the means of Neel’s downfall), he passes on to Paulette her father’s last words and her mother’s medallion and, irrespective of the threat to his own position, arranges her passage on the Ibis, where he is overcome by an irresistible ‘maternal’ urge to tend to the needs of the convicts, finally to defy the law and hegemonic structures altogether when he releases Neel and Ah Fatt into freedom. By liberating the outlaws, thus enabling Ah Fatt to wreak a murderous revenge on the first mate, Crowle, he becomes complicit with the insurrection which will change the ship’s destiny forever. In his religious and personal delusions Nob represents a comic version of anti-imperial resistance and insubordination and is therefore, as the narrator indicates early on, fated to find entry, albeit as a caricature, in the Hindu heroine Deetie’s ‘shrine’, her memorial record of the founding generation of the emerging multicultural community (123). Another member of this community, Paulette, while not immune from the occasional blunder – she intermingles her English with French expressions, to at times unwittingly humorous effect – is otherwise linguistically astute, polyvocal, and ‘international’ in Homi Bhabha’s sense. Bhabha argues that what he calls the ‘Third Space’ of enunciation, in which meaning is produced by the dynamic interaction of speech acts, linguistic performances, and cultural context, offers subversive opportunities for intercultural engagement: a willingness to descend into that alien territory . . . may . . . open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between . . . that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. . . . It is in this space that we will



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Paulette is a native speaker of French and Bengali, the latter of which she learnt from her adoptive mother and step-brother Jodu. Her bilingualism, as well as her preference for saris, veiling customs, and resistance to the raced and gendered status quo, enable her to accede to this ‘Third Space’ and pass as an Indian, facilitating her escape from the Burnhams and ensuring her undetected presence on the Ibis, in the very face of sexual and racial stereotyping by the Captain, Charles Chillingsworth, who previously dined in her company at the Burnhams’: ‘“This old crone here, for instance,” said the Captain, looking directly at Paulette’s hooded face. “A virgin-pullet if ever I saw one – often trod and never laid! What conceivable purpose is served by transporting her across the sea? . . . If you ask me, Doughty, it’d be a mercy to have her put down’ (332). Not even Zachary who, despite his tender feelings refused to countenance her plan of boarding the Ibis in the guise of a sailor, is able to recognize her and feels perplexed when the elderly widow, whose steps he wishes to steady, rudely pushes aside his helping hand. It is only when Paulette erroneously translates an English idiom into Bengali that Neel, the erstwhile Raja stripped of his title and possessions by a fraudulent trial instigated by Burnham and sentenced to deportation for a crime he did not commit, detects her hybrid identity, but on account of her low-caste Bengali assumes she is a prostitute who picked up her English from her clients (361–2). Hybridity thus operates as a complex and multifaceted metaphor of subversion: a means of resistance which, more often than not, is misapprehended by the colonized as much as by the colonizers. For all their initial misapprehension of each other, the ‘subaltern’ group and those who throw in their lot with them, such as Paulette, Zachary, and Nob, all share an important degree of multilingual and/or intercultural proficiency which remains inaccessible to the imperialists. While, with the exception of Doughty, none of the colonists understands, let alone speaks, Bengali, the disgraced Raja is in supreme command of the English language and British cultural heritage, and finds that he unsettles the English with his learning (Hume, Locke, Hobbes, and Chatterton are all equally unknown to the expatriates, who resent Neel for his apparent familiarity with what they take to be the colonial elite by whom they have been snubbed). At the culmination point of his humiliation, when after his trial he is strip-searched



find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this ‘Third Space’, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.19

and manhandled and the jailor refuses to respond to his English, Neel recognizes the subversive power of turning the master’s tools against the representatives of the British Empire: ‘he had nettled him, simply by virtue of addressing him in his own tongue – a thing that was evidently counted as an act of intolerable insolence in an Indian convict, a defilement of the language . . . [H]e still possessed the ability to affront a man whose authority over his person was absolute . . . [H]e decided . . . he would speak English whenever possible, everywhere possible, starting with this moment, here’ (266). As he comes to conceptualize English as a vehicle of resistance, Neel begins to recover childhood memories which refamiliarize him with his suppressed cultural heritage, the rural Bhojpuri, the language he had learned from his closest advisor, Parimal (the servant who after Neel’s imprisonment takes in his homeless wife and child), until he was prohibited its use by his father. Now he discovers the potent lyricism and mythological force of this ‘forbidden’ and ‘lowly’ language: ‘he recognized that the secret source of its nourishment was music . . . of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing and separation’ (367). This recuperation of cultural memory enables him not only to communicate with, and thus become accepted as part of, the migrants with whom he shares the ship’s ‘between-deck’ but from whom he is separated by his convict status and the walls of his cell; it also confers upon him the power of storyteller as he recounts the origins of the Ganga-Sagar Island they are in the process of passing, an ancient foundation myth20 which offers the diffuse group of ‘girmitiyas’ (indentured workers) a communal rite of passage as they leave familiar geographies and their old lives behind. At the time of his greatest material and physical dispossession, Neel’s hybrid cultural and linguistic heritage thus facilitates his reclamation of his ethnic roots and his entry into an indigenous community which respects him, for the first time, for his wisdom rather than his family lineage. Even Zachary, a monolingual speaker of English who experiences some difficulty in decoding Doughty’s and Serang Ali’s speech, draws on his sociolinguistic ‘talent for changing voices’ and registers for social appointments and in his business dealings (47): in this way the lightskinned son of a freed slave (whose name recalls Zachary Macaulay, the Scottish abolitionist) is able to pass as white, rising to the position of officer on a former slaver, and being issued with dinner invitations by the local and colonial elite. The Raja even speculates about Zachary’s high-born origins, while the first mate’s profound hostility is rooted



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in his resentment of what he perceives to be Zachary’s privileged class background. This miscomprehension is encouraged by Serang Ali who, having recognized Zachary’s transformative talent, enthusiastically adopts his cause and equips him with the paraphernalia of white European gentility (suits, shoes, a watch: the remains, as Zachary discovers, of a renegade white, a pirate). To Serang Ali and the other lascars, Zachary is ‘almost one of themselves’, and yet is ‘endowed with the power to undertake an impersonation that was unthinkable for any of them; it was as much for their own sakes as for his that they wanted to see him succeed’ (46–7). Serang Ali’s name for Zachary (‘Malum Zikri’, ‘one who remembers’, 238) indicates his wish for friendship and solidarity across racial boundaries. Like Magwitch on Pip, Zachary realizes that Serang Ali had ‘acquired a claim on him’ (21), which, like Dickens’s hero, he is determined to shake off. In contradistinction to Great Expectations, Zachary merely observes, but does not assist in, the escape of his Magwitch. Serang Ali’s ultimate fate remains uncertain at the close of the novel as he drifts off on one of the longboats in the company of Kalua, Jodu, Neel, and Ah Fatt. In Serang Ali and his lascars Ghosh depicts an ethnically diverse community which serves as a model for the intercultural kinship that begins to develop among the migrants: ‘they came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese. They came in groups of ten or fifteen, each with a leader who spoke on their behalf . . . To break up these groups was impossible’ (12–13). Ghosh intended the lascars to represent India and Asia’s ‘very deep and important contribution’ to the nautical industry of the time. The parallel he draws between the lascars and today’s diasporic IT workers,21 however, stands on shaky legs: Serang Ali’s nautical expertise derives not from the latest technology but, rather, from long-standing experience and age-old techniques. Thus Zachary finds that his use of a watch and a sextant would have moved the ship ‘hundreds of miles off course’, had Serang Ali not ‘been steering his own course all along, using a method of navigation that combined dead reckoning . . . with frequent readings of the stars’ (16). His recourse to astronomy, an ancient method of navigation, correlates with his herbalist knowledge, which protects Zachary from infection when the first Captain of the Ibis succumbs to disease. While certainly the target of discrimination, the lascars do not represent the ‘march of technological progress’ (this progress, Westernstyle, as the text reminds us, is aligned with slavery, the opium trade, and imperial oppression) so much as traditional knowledge, a communal



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spirit, and resistance. The driving force of the latter two is indicated in their collective bargaining skills: ‘they had to be taken together or not at all, and they had their own ideas of how much work they would do and how many men would share each job’ (13). Most importantly, Zachary discovers that Serang Ali was previously involved in piracy. An insurgent against established authority, he is united in common cause with the wrongfully convicted, deported for the crime of their miscegenation (the Chinese-Parsi Ah Fatt) or their learning and intelligence (Neel), and with the offenders against indigenous norms of caste and religion: Jodu, the transgressor against religious sexual codes (a Muslim, he is discovered during an assignment with Mania, a Hindu), and Kalua, the martyred caste outlaw who strikes back in self-defence, killing his tormentor, the sadistic ‘subedar’ (Indian army officer) Bhyro Singh, in a spectacular scene of insurrection in the face of abject violence. When Kalua is tied to the flogging stake, his arms prized apart as if in mimicry of the crucifixion (this is a ship under ‘Christian’ command, owned by the religious zealot Burnham, and Singh represents both native and imperial hegemonies), he is cast, and abused, as the representative of the subaltern group, the girmitiyas: ‘it was as if they were being primed, not merely to watch the flogging, but actually to share in the experience of pain . . . it was as if they were all, severally, being tied to the frame for the flogging’ (446). As Chillingsworth reminds his officers, the British Empire honours indigenous hierarchies of caste and religion because they uphold the imperial project: ‘There is an unspoken pact between the white man and the natives who sustain his power . . . that in matters of marriage and procreation, like must be with like . . . The day the natives lose faith in us, as the guarantors of the order of castes – that will be the day . . . that will doom our rule’ (442). Ironically, the colonists themselves embody the counter-principle of the caste system they profess to protect: Burnham and Crowle are self-made men who accomplished abroad what the British class system would not have permitted them to achieve at home. Alienated from themselves and their communities, and lacking the ‘multiplicity of selves’ (407) which distinguish the non-colonists, they seek relief in brute force, the religion of free trade (‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ’, 106), and hollow phrases which bestow a civilizing mission on imperialist greed. Burnham’s vindication of slavery as ‘the march of human freedom’ (73) and of the opium trade as ‘our God-given duty to confer these benefits upon others’ (106) pinpoints the ideological alliance of militarism, commerce, and religion in the service of empire; the opium factories in which Deeti’s husband



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and Ah Fatt’s father work in Ghazipur and Canton are ‘institutions steeped in Anglican piety’ (83). This alliance also shapes the politics of slavery, religious fanaticism and domestic patriarchal despotism in Strange Music and the British occupation of Egypt in The Map of Love. Thus it is not only Elizabeth’s slave-owning father, but even the freed slave Tippy who ‘sketched a pretty scene of how happily the Negroes lived when the sugar estates were in their prime’;22 and the Oriental Secretary Mr Boyle declares, in flat denial of the Egyptian independence movement, that ‘the country had never been run so efficiently and . . . the Egyptians had never been happier or more prosperous than under Lord Cromer’.23 ‘It is this pretense of virtue’, the Ibis’s captain warns Burnham, ‘that will never be forgiven by history’ (242). Burnham admits that the economic threat of Chinese trade restrictions is the underlying reason for the impending Opium War: ‘To put the matter simply: there is nothing they want from us . . . But we, on the other hand, can’t do without their tea and their silks. If not for opium, the drain of silver from Britain and her colonies would be too great to sustain . . . British rule in India could not be sustained without opium and that is all there is to it’ (103, 106).24 Without the enforced monocultural cultivation of poppy in India, which deprives entire villages of food crops (a danger that the paternalist landowner Sharif averts in The Map of Love by dissuading the fallaheen from moving ‘wholesale into cotton as Cromer would have them do’, 257), and without the enforced trading of opium in China, the British Empire would be imperilled. The novel’s title signals the hold poppy has taken on the Indian countryside: ‘lands that had once provided sustenance were now swamped by the rising tide of poppies’ (187). The ravages of the opium trade on individuals and communities are highlighted at the start of the text, when Deeti reflects on the back-breaking and unprofitable nature of poppy farming: what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But . . . the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign asámi contracts. . . . It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn’t accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the opium and would never let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to . . . just about enough to pay off your advance. (27)



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Deeti’s first husband, Hukam Singh, and the Chinese-born Ah Fatt are victims of addiction. Hukam works in an opium factory, many of whose workers are addicts like him. His wedding night is spent in opium-induced dreams, while, to ensure procreation, his drugged wife, an unwilling Draupadi,25 is raped by his younger brother in the presence of her in-laws, his mother and his uncle, Bhyro Singh. The horrendous consequences of opium on the body of the addict are depicted graphically in Ah Fatt’s withdrawal symptoms: when Neel first encounters his fellow-convict, he is skeletal, comatose, soiled with excrement, periodically jolted into motion by trembling fits. Neel’s nursing returns him to consciousness, yet their deep friendship is as nothing when Ah Fatt is offered opium in a sadistic game Crowle and Bhyro Singh play on the convicts to edge them into betraying each other; he does, instantly. The notion of any kind of moral responsibility for the personal and communal wreckage caused by the opium trade is coldly refuted by Burnham, the representative of the East India Company: ‘what would our ladies – why, our beloved Queen herself? – do without laudanum? Why, one might even say that it is opium that has made this age of progress and industry possible: without it, the streets of London would be thronged with coughing, sleepless, incontinent multitudes. And if we consider all this, is it not apposite to ask if the Manchu tyrant has any right to deprive his helpless subjects of the advantages of progress?’ (107). Progress and precision are the principles that drive the production process in the Ghazipur Opium Factory in which Deeti recovers her husband after his collapse. As Ghosh notes, the factory tour in chapter 5 was inspired by J.W.S. Macarthur’s Notes on an Opium Factory (1865),26 a text written by the superintendent of the Ghazipur factory in the style of a travelogue for British tourists. Here the imperial project joins hands with the Orientalist construction of the East. The devastation wreaked by opium is juxtaposed to the spiritual transformation the migrants undergo on board the Ibis: starting off as a disparate assemblage of homeless ‘coolies’, they quickly grow into a close-knit kinship group. This rebirth into a new communal identity is overseen by two mother figures: the vessel itself, literally and figuratively a womb (397) – ‘a great wooden mái-báp, an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come’ (328) – and Deeti, the founding mother of the new extended family emerging from it. Ghosh’s choice of a ship as the setting for his story was, he says, influenced by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851); further inspiration came from Melville’s story ‘Benito Cereno’ (1855) about a boat controlled by slaves, and The Encantadas (1854), a book of sketches



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about the Galapagos Islands, itself motivated by Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839).27 In its emblematic role as a ‘vehicle of transformation’ (388) the Ibis becomes an enchanted space, the realm of magic realism. The realism of the earlier depiction of the factory here makes way for a symbolic narrative. In realistic terms it would be difficult to imagine how the all-too close proximity of life in the cramped and airless quarters of the between-deck, minimally upgraded from its previous use as a slave container, or the even more confined space and non-existent amenities of the convict cell, could create ‘an atmosphere of urgent intimacy’ instead of prompting feelings of rampant claustrophobia (223). The focus on communal concord and fusion correlates with the features Said attributes to postcolonial ‘narratives of emancipation and enlightenment’: ‘integration not separation’.28 It is Paulette who first articulates the new quasi-familial bond: ‘From now on, and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings – jaházbhais and jaházbahens – to each other. There’ll be no differences between us’ (328). Like Neel earlier on, Deeti and the other migrants overcome the internalized caste system. Deeti, the quintessential subaltern sati of Spivak’s essay, the widow released into a second life when saved from her husband’s funeral pyre by the ox-cart driver Kalua, attains the status of female elder when she starts speaking up for the community. Thus when one of the girmitiyas dies, the protest she organizes forces the captain to concede limited funeral rites. Deeti is consulted about marriage and increasingly charged with arranging the affairs of the community: ‘it was as if she had been appointed the matron of the dabusa by common consent’ (395). Heeru’s wedding, which she oversees, further cements the communal bond. Tragically, the ‘sacramental circle of matrimony’ in which the migrants are joined together (429) is broken up by violence when Jodu is discovered with Mania and Deeti and Kalua are exposed by Bhyro Singh. The novel’s conclusion is open-ended, suggesting both the possibility of escape and uncertainty about the fate of the fugitives, while repeated references throughout to Deeti’s shrine and the long family line to come into being from her second marriage promise the survival and reunion of the characters. The final lines’ focus on Deeti’s piercing grey eyes return us to her opening vision of a tall-masted ship which launched her into her inner ‘voyage out’. The journey motif with its literal and metaphorical passage to a new self, a new life, a new society combines self-liberation with the threat of a new enslavement: the destination of the Ibis is Mauritius, a French-speaking British penal colony, where the indentured workers are awaited eagerly by sugar planters desperate to



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replace their slave labourers set free by the end of the ‘apprenticeship’ system in 1838. While the British slave trade had been abolished in 1807, the Ibis’s previous use as a slaver indicates how recently the trade had been operating illegally. Nor did the Emancipation Act of 1833 put a stop to slavery in British island colonies; as Christine Bolt observes, the introduction of the apprenticeship system effectively continued it: ‘vagrancy laws and legislation confin[ed] the freedmen to their former masters’ estates or to specific localities, . . . permitting severe corporal punishment, as well as fixing hours of work and allowances for food, clothing, medicine and lodgings. Although the experiment came to an end in 1838, . . . the efforts of the planter class to ease their labour problem through importing indentured labourers, mainly from India, were seen as tending to introduce a disguised form of slavery.’29 The vexed question at the end of Sea of Poppies is thus whether Zachary, the son of a freed slave, is leading Deeti’s community to a new form of bondage.

2.2. Voices across borders: Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008) Where Sea of Poppies ends, Strange Music begins: with the horrendous conditions in the transitional period just after the nominal abolition of the apprenticeship system on another island under British rule, Jamaica. ‘Slavery’s ended . . . All we free free’, a field labourer triumphs, only to be reminded by Sheba, one of the three first-person narrators: ‘Yu full-a-foolishness . . . Way we liv jus git worse’ (26). The contract imposed on them under the apprenticeship system keeps their wages to half the going rate,30 disabling them from putting money aside for buying freeholds and setting up elsewhere, while requiring them to work twice as much to make up for depleted numbers, with the fear that if the crop is not harvested in time, they will be paid nothing at all (29). Working conditions are dire and the wage-contract system is a farce; their rights are as non-existent as they were under slavery: the overseers are wielding whips, their shacks are set on fire, Sheba’s lover Isaac is beaten to death, Isaac’s mother Eleanor and Sheba are gang-raped by marauding militia men, and the master picks his mistresses from among the most vulnerable and voiceless: girls under ten and indentured child workers imported from Africa with scarce command of English. The final year of the apprenticeship system, 1838, and the immediate post-apprenticeship period see the persistence of sexual slavery, lynchings, and brutal reprisals against the background



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of the plantation owners’ dance of death in the face of financial ruin. The militia men’s assault takes place in August, a few weeks after the apprenticeship system was officially abolished on 31 July.31 The novel is set at Greenwood and Cinnamon Hill Estate, the Jamaican sugar plantation of the Barretts, and in Torquay. The field labourer Sheba’s voice (who recounts the events from April 1838 to May 1839) is complemented by that of Kaydia, a housemaid (whose thoughts revolve around Sam Barrett’s abuse of her under-age daughter Mary Ann and his death in February 1840).32 The third narrator is Elizabeth Barrett, recovering from debilitating illness in Torquay, who in letters and diary entries written between November 1838 and April 1840 struggles to face up to her family legacy of slavery and develops her vision as a politically engaged artist by starting to write a poem about a fugitive female slave. Drawing as it does on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s family circumstances, actual correspondence,33 diary entries,34 her father’s estate in Jamaica, and her brother Sam’s involvement in the management of quasi-slavery conditions, this novel, like The Mistress of Nothing, makes a contribution to the hybrid genre of neo-Victorian bio-fiction,35 while its imaginative re-vision of Barrett Browning’s ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ also engages with neo-Victorian adaptation in the style of Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London (1989) and Tess (1993), Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990), and A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005), which rewrite canonical Victorian texts (Jane Eyre, Jekyll and Hyde, Tess, The Turn of the Screw). The first-person narrator of ‘Runaway Slave’ sees her black lover savagely murdered, is raped by his killers, among whom is her master, and bears a child ‘far too white – too white for me’.36 After smothering the baby and burying it in dark soil she becomes ‘reconciled’ to what has now been returned to blackness.37 She escapes, but the slave-hunters catch up with her at Pilgrim’s Point, where she dies at the flogging-post. Fish’s three women’s voices intermingle in and through the ‘strange music’ of their echoes of Barrett Browning’s poem, written in 1846 during the Brownings’ honeymoon in Pisa.38 The poem was commissioned (probably by Maria Weston Chapman) for and first appeared in the abolitionist yearbook of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, The Liberty Bell, in 1848, and was revised several times until 1856 (this final version is reproduced in Fish’s book).39 The novel’s title is taken from Robert Browning’s first (1845) letter to Elizabeth Barrett, reprinted in extract as an epigraph to the ‘Prologue’. Browning refers to the ‘fresh strange music’ of her poetry;40 in the novel Elizabeth records in her diary: ‘If I can sweeten



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this strange music called life, add light to dismal, sombre, unharmonious tones, I shall be pleased yet’ (129). Apart from ‘Runaway Slave’ Fish notes two further central influences: ‘Strategy’ (1996) by the Chinese-Jamaican poet and Anglican priest Easton Lee, and Wide Sargasso Sea. Her novel thus performs a sophisticated process of imaginative reconceptualization, interpolating Victorian, neo-Victorian, and postcolonial sources. The dramatic monologue of ‘Runaway Slave’ is recreated in Sheba’s voice, while Kaydia’s experience reflects Lee’s ‘Strategy’ of resistance through mimicry: in the poem an older female slave advises a younger woman to pre-empt rape by anticipating the master’s desire (Kaydia’s intervention is an exact transposition of the old woman’s words), and to improve her condition with the production of mixed-race children: ‘When you get in a him bed / shut you eye tight, grit you teeth / . . . for all you want is a brown baby / that guarantee privilege’.41 A risky strategy: in Sea of Poppies Zachary’s mother is manumitted after giving birth to a light-skinned son, but in Valerie Martin’s Property (2003) Sarah remains a (sexual) slave; the master she loathes never tires of her, and she additionally becomes the target of her mistress’s cruelty. As Kaydia discovers in Strange Music, her mother Rebecca Laslie too chose this path: Kaydia is not her father’s daughter but the product of Rebecca’s liaison with her master, Elizabeth’s Uncle Samuel, and while Rebecca secured a small house and a (contested) legacy42 (and her lightskinned daughter found a position on his nephew’s estate rather than in the fields), she pays a heavy price in the loss of her family and the lack of closeness to her daughter. Kaydia herself does not reap any benefits from her seduction of Sam. Here Kaydia’s story also revisits Wide Sargasso Sea: like Antoinette she ‘looks to a white man for salvation’,43 realizing too late that her sacrifice was in vain. She cannot protect her daughter, Mary Ann, from Sam’s predatory desire, nor do her own sexual compliance and subsequent pregnancy result in a bequest like that of her mother’s. Sam Barrett, who as his uncle’s executor continues to withhold Rebecca’s legacy, is an unlikely candidate for offerings of any kind. Like Rhys’s heroine Mary Ann disintegrates under the impact of white masculinity. Wide Sargasso Sea also offers a context for Fish’s choice of multiple narrators: As with Wide Sargasso Sea, each voice in my novel arises in a setting where the question of whether anyone will listen is real and urgent . . . The juxtaposition of the three female voices . . . provides the basis for [a] speculative journey, one that shows how people might imaginatively understand and have solidarity with those they do not directly



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know. I have wanted to sustain a tension between the reality of each woman’s isolation and the possibility of their unrealized solidarity, between the immediate pressures on them and their longing for a different world. The book therefore expresses hope and a possibility of liberation and change.44 Kaydia and Sheba meet fleetingly, at market, when each is facing her greatest crisis: Kaydia is reeling from the discovery of her origins (as Samuel’s child and Sam’s cousin) and her violent break-up with her mother (which resulted in the latter suffering a miscarriage); Sheba has given birth to her rape-child and is in deep anguish. Their tragedy is that neither knows of the other’s condition, thus the rapport each feels and seeks is not realized. When Kaydia recognizes Sheba as one of the field slaves from Cinnamon Hill she has ‘an urge to reach out’ – ‘My feeling of wanting, to touch, to pull my hand from my chest is so strong’ – but she ‘cannot speak’ because, ‘[w]rapped in some terrible secret, [Sheba] does nothing but stare . . . All of what I am like dead blossoms wilts to nothing’ (164). Sheba, too, has the impulse to connect: ‘A woman stumbles against me. Curses. Me seen she face at Cinnamon Hill; eyes grief-filled. . . . In a violent rush of passing pickney she’s whisked from me sight . . . Inside me flare, too long imprisoned, storm-like, it a anger of anguish briefly uncovered, me must think of something to make she hear, make she see. . . . But already she’s lost in a flood of market sellers’ (188). The only lasting connection that is made in the novel is of the imagination: that of the poet’s. If Elizabeth’s picture, among a number of paintings Sam has brought back with him from his visit home, leaves only a passing impression on Kaydia (98–9), Elizabeth is first haunted and then progressively mesmerized by her visions of a black woman, a ghostly and silent visitor who comes to her in her opium dreams. In the course of her mental journey she moves beyond her narcissistic preoccupation with herself (her illness, the central theme of her letters) and her family’s affairs to visualize Leah (the obeah woman), Sheba (who in her imagination merges with another slave of her cousin Richard’s stories, Quasheba, called Venus in Sheba’s story, 36), and Kaydia’s daughter Mary Ann. Confined to her room, with letters and a view of Torquay harbour constituting the only link to the outside world, Elizabeth starts conceiving of herself as a ‘blind poet’, directing her energies inwardly (129).45 This focus on her inner life enables her to confront internal conflicts: emotionally chained to a despotic, larger-than-life father, who put her under house arrest for signing a petition against the apprenticeship system, she suffers from a profound depression born of her horror of the



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legacy of slavery: ‘How to escape a polluted family? . . . [A]ll those whom I most dearly love . . . are implicated in this crime, as well as myself. Our decadence makes me sick. . . . Why has it taken so long for this realization to form, and for me to confront the facts?’ (116). Her wounded, stricken body, her near-paralysis stand as the symbol of the guilt and shame attached to the family. And yet, as she is well aware, the material benefits of her heritage keep her in comfort and safeguard her independence (125).46 When the opportunity arises to make a small intervention, she promptly circumvents it: on his visit home, her brother Sam asks her advice about their uncle’s bequest to Rebecca Laslie, and Elizabeth hastily retreats into platitudes: ‘If I could assist him in some even small way, I would’ (113). A simple reference to her uncle’s original wish might sway him, but the thought that ‘rumours of impropriety between this servant and Uncle Samuel will spread like fire . . . if she does receive the legacy’ (113) keeps her conspicuously silent: the fate of the servant is as nothing when held against the standing of the family. Fish here creates a believably contradictory character who, for all her imaginative empathy with the protagonists of her inner vision, continues to collude with the system when her own life might be affected. Indeed, the historical Barrett Browning would propose that her marriage announcement carry a reference to ‘Wimpole Street & Jamaica . . . or & Cinnamon Hill, Jamaica’ and had to be pulled up by Robert Browning: ‘the name & “Wimpole St.” will do – Jamaica, – sounds in the wrong direction, does it not?’47 It is only in her dream world that Elizabeth is able to connect with the experiences of slaves and experiment with the assumption of a black subjectivity. A series of opium-induced visions shape her imaginative encounter with the ‘Other’, the woman in the mirror, guiding her towards the conception of her poem on the ‘Runaway Slave’. While some of her waking dreams furnish an image of her own future with Robert Browning, the vast majority are of a black woman. The first time she glimpses this ‘other’ woman it is her own reflection she sees; here already the leitmotif of her later poem (‘I am black’) comes to the fore: I am small and black . . . A thin partition divides us; why do I regard the woman who watches me with distaste? She has a searching quizzical look, slightly remote and mischievous; the features, wasted . . . The mouth is large, obstinate, projecting – she is full-lipped – and has dark eyes, deep and calm, and long thick ringlets, again, dark brown, almost black[.] (10)



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As Jane Markus has argued (from whose biography this passage is adapted),48 Barrett Browning believed she had inherited African blood from her grandfather Charles Moulton, and wrote to Robert Browning that she would have preferred to bring to their marriage ‘some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave’.49 Markus’s hypothesis of the Barretts’ mixed race has been discredited and Barrett Browning’s letter interpreted in light of her discomfort with her family’s slavery past,50 but in Fish’s novel Elizabeth’s ‘distaste’ is directed both at her incapacitating illness and her quasi-African looks; much later, as she is about to start working on her poem, she still wonders whether ‘black [can] represent beauty?’ (182). Not surprisingly, then, this experience of (self-)rejection is succeeded by a vision of Brontë’s Bertha Mason, with ‘wild matted hair’, setting fire to a ‘house of memories’ (12). This image recurs towards the end of the novel, when Elizabeth decides that the ‘[w]alls of silence’ erected around slavery ‘must be knocked down’ (118), and in her mind’s eye sees a woman (herself) with a young boy (her future son) symbolically destroying her family heritage by burning a tapestry replica of Hope End, the English family seat funded with the proceeds of slavery and lost to her father’s declining fortunes (173–4). Her inner vision thus progresses from literary cliché to the literature of abolitionism, from associating blackness with illness (her body’s condition) to identifying with the woman slave in a world of white male violence. As she contemplates writing about slavery, ‘to reach the oppressed through thought’, Elizabeth reflects on the boundaries of subjectivity and authorial ventriloquism: ‘Can we not imagine ourselves into another’s skin? Can we not dream ourselves into another world . . . ? Give breath and life to histories that otherwise might not live?’ (18). Haunted by the horrifying reminiscences of her white Jamaican cousin Richard Barrett of the terrible punishments meted out to fugitive slaves, she becomes preoccupied by the thought of a slave woman called Quasheba, tortured despite her advanced pregnancy (Richard was involved in hunting her down, and later is one of the men raping her near-namesake Sheba). The specifically sexual violence endured by female slaves conjures up the image of a young girl ‘suffering a general feeling of malaise, aches and pains and convulsive twitches of the muscles. Her skin is blotched red as if affected by measles.’ Wracked by ‘paroxysms . . . she enters a hell of writhing agitation, into which most would feel loath to look. Vainly does she struggle. She’s been buried for thousands of years in a coffin of the thickest wood, the conflicts and horrors and evil nightmares are over-powering’ (61). An allegory



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Mary Ann had monsters in the head. Some days she skin went hot and strange smells lived in she hair. . . . Hours later I’d find she – straw tangled into matted hair; dress skew-whiff; small body balled-up tight like she was cornered by life . . . Mary Ann grew lumps in she mouth, throat too . . . And she disappeared haunted me like all she other strange acts. Why she cowered, cat-like, from everyone . . . Wouldn’t shine Mister Sam’s boots, scrub or polish yacca floor in him blue bedchamber. Said she hated blue. . . . Blue dress from England Mister Sam give she. . . . Kicking, fighting, snarling, wildly matted mane muddled round she honey-brown neck, screaming like she felt tackle hell’s fire when Mister Sam forced she into that blue dress. He forced my daughter into its bodice, stiff-shouldered and hunched as a soldier she strutted across great-house hall. Then spewed everywhere. . . . That night she shredded that dress. (44–6) Mary Ann is the ultimate ‘subaltern’ of Spivak’s description. In contradistinction to the adult women, she cannot tell her story. Her speech is largely limited to sounds: crying, whining, shouting, screaming. Muted, traumatized, and maddened, she represents a young Bertha Mason who can articulate only her rage. When Kaydia returns from market without the candles she wanted, she ‘headbutts my neck, tin knuckles beat my grey skirt; fists hammer my chest’ (167). She is the quintessential victim, compelled to return to her abuser, again and again, instead of seeking shelter with her mother, who attempts to protect her by distracting Sam’s attention towards herself. But there is nowhere for Mary Ann to turn: Kaydia lives on the estate, and her father previously whipped her so brutally that she carries permanent scars on her face. For her there is no escape, however desperate, like Sheba’s infanticide and suicide, or Kaydia’s flight; she is trapped for good and has no mental conception of her condition. The young girl destroyed before her body has had time to grow into womanhood paves the way for Elizabeth’s vision of Sheba and her baby. She sees the familiar woman, but now she is nursing a mixedrace baby. It is only from the baby’s response that she realizes what is happening: ‘The baby’s face crumples up; its cry turns into a wail. Worst of all the little neck swells becoming scarred and red, the face blood-spattered . . . A Negro baby, here in my room? Surely it isn’t kin of mine’ (173). Ironically, the baby may well be kin, since her cousin Richard is one of Sheba’s rapists. Elizabeth’s disclaimer recaptures her



of slavery, this is also a concrete visualization of the young Mary Ann abused by Sam Barrett, as recorded by Kaydia:

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earlier anxiety about her racial heritage, and provides a link with her father’s imposition of a marriage embargo on his children.51 Edward Barrett’s unacknowledged concerns provide a context for Sheba’s infanticide: ‘If Papa fears dark offspring, would Quasheba not fear a white child? Would the reminder not be sickening to her also? The master’s look’ (185).52 The analogy between her father’s and Sheba’s rejection of the mixed-raced child places greater moral culpability on the former while generating understanding for the latter. That the raped woman can only loathe the material reminder of the violence she suffered is comprehensible; but ‘is Papa killing his grandchildren by preventing their births? Is this not some kind of murder?’ (184). As she considers the slave woman’s feelings, Elizabeth begins to ‘experience an intense bond similar to sisterhood – a unity with the runaway’s cause’ (183) – and starts to write. In Elizabeth’s project of empathetic remembering Fish extends Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory: the collective re-membering of communal trauma is complemented by an individual act of bearing witness to trauma shared imaginatively through identification: ‘How to not sympathize but empathize. Imagination is like the act of remembering, without memory being in the consciousness’ (183). Processes of imaginative remembering are crucial to the work of the writer, especially if she carries the burden of collective hereditary guilt. The central issues she wanted to address in her novel, Fish states, are ‘the need for atonement’ and the ‘relationship between the literary imagination and the social, political and ethical responsibility and obligation of the writer’. Elizabeth’s ‘trying to reach out’ to Kaydia and Sheba is ‘part of the process of her maturing as a writer’.53 In the act of imagining Quasheba’s experience, Elizabeth finds that her reflections merge with her protagonist’s dramatic monologue, creating a dialogue where before there was only an image in the mirror. This dialogue becomes a trialogue, as Fish, a British-Caribbean writer, imagines Elizabeth Barrett, slavery’s daughter, envision a slave woman’s life; and ultimately turns into a quatrologue by involving the contemporary reader in processes of identification: I am black, I am black! And yet God made me they say: but if He did so, smiling back He must have cast His work away under the feet of his white creatures, with a look of scorn, that the dusky features might be trodden again to clay.54 This is where spirit meets flesh. Imagine Quasheba, a wretched black soul on bended knee, a Christian, pleading for her right to live. Did her white masters whip



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her lover to death? They dragged him . . . where? . . . She crawled to touch his blood’s mark in the dust . . . 55 How much grief, I ask, must her soul bear? ‘Mere grief’s too good for such as I,’ comes the woman slave’s reply, ‘so the white man brought the shame ere long to strangle the sob in my throat thereby. They would not leave me for my dull wet eyes! – it was too merciful – to let me weep pure tears, and die.’56 Cousin Richard said of Quasheba that she probably strangled her own child, and must be without her faculties. He defined her by what she was not. . . . [I]t stands to reason that this runaway slave was neither bad, nor mad57 – if I focus on what she was, then perhaps I can wear the cloak of change. (183–4) As a vehicle of political transformation Barrett Browning’s ballad,58 like authentic slave narratives by Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845) and Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1860), Francis Harper’s 1859 poem ‘The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio’, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), is addressed to a white readership in the North (Plymouth Rock, Massachussetts, was a symbol of liberty in abolitionist literature).59 The speaker’s appeal to the ‘pilgrim-souls’60 who came to America in quest of freedom casts slavery’s ‘white men’ and ‘hunter-sons’61 in a role equivalent to their ancestors’ religious persecutors, representing the abolitionist community and above all the slaves as the morally rightful heirs to the founding fathers. The poem resonates with the assertion of the speaker’s black identity and her representative status62 and culminates in a ‘declaration of sentiments’: ‘I am not mad, – I am black!’63 ‘Runaway Slave’ was published in the year of the first Seneca Falls convention, which inaugurated the American women’s rights movement (a movement which developed out of abolitionism, established in response to the dismissal of the American women delegates at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840).64 The feminist ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ was modelled on the American ‘Declaration of Independence’, which is conjured up in the poem’s reference to Washington, the first president of the independent nation. This inheritance of ‘Free America’ is wrongfully denied to the slave, whose association with the American eagle again emphasizes the legitimacy of her claim.65 The ‘unnatural’ act of infanticide reflects on the aberrance of a system which violates the very principle of its foundation. Slavery, the poem emphasizes, ‘artificially divides the world in two, severs the biological . . . bond between mother and child, and even splits the subject’.66 As Marjorie Stone’s comparison of the poem with other publications



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in the Liberty Bell indicates, Barrett Browning aligned herself with the radical politics of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society rather than with the more conservative racial and sexual politics of the New England and British anti-slavery societies, and further radicalized existing abolitionist topoi with her graphic depiction of infanticide and her protagonist’s call for a slave insurrection.67 Female slaves who killed children resulting from rape, Barbara Christian argues with reference to Morrison’s Beloved,68 ‘might be seen as striking out at the master/rapist and resisting the role of perpetuating the system of slavery through breeding’.69 This reflects Leah’s instructions, the obeah woman to whom the pregnant Sheba turns in her anguish: ‘[Buckra] Pickney isn’t made of bones, skin, flesh, blood. Kill it. KILL IT afore ninth day’ (191, emphasis in original; also 144–5). Barrett Browning’s protagonist appears to take a ‘mad’ pleasure in observing that emblem of the slave master, the male white child, struggle for his freedom, vainly; madness here is encoded as the madness of slavery, but also as the rage and counter-violence that slavery breeds in its victims (the poem was originally entitled ‘Mad and Black at Pilgrim’s Point’).70 By contrast, Sheba suffers a breakdown as a result of her desperately conflicting impulses. It is only after her attempt to save her child by passing it on to the departing Kaydia has failed that she is driven to carry out Leah’s orders. There is no symbolic threat of a slave insurrection as in Barrett Browning’s words (‘We are too heavy for our cross / And fall and crush you and your seed’),71 only desolation, as Sheba, distraught after burying her child, wades into the sea. Kaydia, who also carries a white man’s child within her, takes the opposite course of action. When she sees Mary Ann riding away with Charles, her former lover and Mary Ann’s father (the man who scarred her with his whip, while she sought to protect her), she runs away, not into death like Barrett Browning’s slave, but into freedom: ‘Can’t bear losing another pickney. Can’t take that risk. So I run away from Charles, from Mary Ann’ (205). In contradistinction to Sheba she does not turn towards but away from the sea: ‘Feeling warmth of smoothstoned coast road I branch off other way, swerve from Montego Bay. Run away. Coast road to Falmouth’s empty. Open. Rising. Rum flowed red. Screaming gone. Dead’ (205). Suicide (Sheba); escape (Kaydia); liberation (from her family inheritance, into politically motivated art: Elizabeth): Strange Music offers three alternatives to Barrett Browning’s dénouement. Ambiguous, even ominous as Kaydia’s final words are, the sunrise that accompanies her



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flight represents a new beginning: a life beyond our control. ‘Gone’: where Barrett Browning’s slave, as Sarah Brophy has argued, is frozen into a spectacle to be repossessed by the white male gaze,72 Kaydia removes herself from the narratorial and readerly vision and, like Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea, ‘walk[s] away without looking back.’73 Even Sheba’s drowning, prefaced as it is by the memory of Isaac’s embrace, carries a subdued note of celebration, reviving a memory of fulfilment at the moment of death: ‘warmth of you arm round me shoulder; lying, lip to lip; you body warmth, salt of you breath, and kissing you sleeping head’ (197). Unlike Barrett Browning’s slave, whose last thoughts are directed towards her abusers, Sheba turns her back on slavery and ‘returns home’ to her lover. These acts of self-affirmation reflect Fish’s intention ‘to present women who are seeking to discover ways to overcome or change their circumstances and sense of being trapped. I wanted to find a way to celebrate this, to write a song of liberation, as opposed to presenting characters as victims striving against all the odds.’74

2.3. Orientalism and transculturalism: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999) and Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing (2009) The structuring device of interlocking narratives of (personal/political) liberation set against the backdrop of colonial and cultural-imperialist rule is also a central feature of Soueif’s The Map of Love, which connects women’s voices from the past and the present through the imagination of a contemporary female writer figure, Amal al-Ghamrawi, who as a left-wing Egyptian intellectual writing in English acts as an avatar of Soueif. Here, the key metaphor is not of music (though music has a powerful effect on the affective life of the turn-of-the-century heroine)75 but of embroidery and weaving: the ‘subversive stitch’ (needlework, embroidery, quilting)76 is a recurrent symbol in women’s writing; notable postcolonial examples include Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1983) and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). In The Map of Love weaving, as a metaphor for the feminist project of revision, is closely related to the (proto)postcolonial espousal of hybridity, reflected in Amal’s (and other characters’) multilingualism, translationism,77 and interculturalism. With an estranged English husband and two adult sons in Britain, while she lives in Cairo, and as a literary translator, Amal straddles two cultures, and thus is the ‘true’ heir of the turn-of-the-century Lady Anna Winterbourne, her English great-aunt by Anna’s second marriage



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to the Egyptian nationalist Sharif al-Baroudi. ‘What difference do a hundred years – or a continent – make?’ (12), Amal asks when she first reads Anna’s diary: ‘the sense of Anna speaking to me – writing it down for me – is so powerful that I find myself speaking to her in my head. At night, in my dreams, I sit with her and we speak as friends and sisters’ (306). The novel is set largely in Egypt, in two time periods whose political events in the history of the country are placed in close comparison: the fin de siècle and first decade of the twentieth century (1896–1911: pace Nasser, in the novel’s first epigraph, ‘the most fertile [period] in Egypt’s history’, n.p.) and the years approaching the millennium (1997–98). The turn of centuries is here coded as a significant moment of cultural, political, and personal transformation. The newly widowed Lady Winterbourne arrives in Egypt in 1900, in the final year of Victoria’s reign and at the start of a new century, in search of a new life; her second marriage coincides with the resurgence of Egyptian nationalist politics and a revitalized mood for independence and democracy. Ninety years later Isabel Parkman sets out to Egypt to reconnect the two branches of the al-Baroudi/al-Ghamrawi line, against the background of domestic Egyptian, Middle Eastern, and wider international political conflict. Like Strange Music, this is a story of severed cross-cultural/racial family relations, recovered through personal documents, the imaginative work of the central narrator, and the echoes of the original love story in the relationship between Anna’s American-born great-granddaughter Isabel, a 35-year-old divorcee, and Sharif’s Palestinian-Egyptian great-nephew ‘Omar, Amal’s brother.78 An eminent conductor, Palestinian rights advocate and cultural critic as well as a man twenty years her senior, ‘Omar al-Ghamrawi is transparently modelled on Edward Said (whose Orientalism, and postcolonial theory more generally, provide an epistemological backdrop to the novel).79 When she consults him about her discovery of Egyptian papers among her dying mother Jasmine’s possessions, he suggests that she visit his sister Amal in Egypt. In the process of reading Anna’s diaries and translating her sister-in-law Layla’s notebooks, Amal moves from the position of biographer and researcher to that of a narrator engaged in weaving together a story from multiple strands. Thus chapter 13, which follows Anna’s and Layla’s accounts of their first encounter, presents us with an unmediated narrative not drawn from the diaries, in which Layla, working on embroidery, shows Anna the particular stitch she is using (149): an apt metaphor for the creative work of the writer (Amal, representing Soueif), who ‘stitches’ together epistolary narratives, first and third-person accounts, telephone



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conversations, factual historical documents, chapter epigraphs from a wide range of sources (Egyptian, Arabic, English literature throughout the ages, Victorian literature, world literatures, including quotations from political and social commentators who feature as characters), and a mythic/supernatural interlude. The embroidery metaphor is extended in the image of the tapestry: Jasmine’s trunk contains part of a larger wall-hanging, a triptych Anna mentions weaving in her diary as her ‘contribution to the Egyptian renaissance’ (403), with the three panels depicting the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, her brother and lover Osiris, and their child Horus (Soueif notes that the triptych also reflects the three religions, ancient, Christian, and Muslim, as well as the lovers-sister triad replicated in each time period).80 With its classical motif and inscription from the Qu’ran (‘It is He brings forth the living from the dead’, 491, 516), the triptych represents the continuity of the past in the present: a continuity reflected, romantically, in the two love stories, the children they produce (the second Sharif, child of Isabel and ‘Omar, is the greatgreat-grandson/great-nephew of Sharif al-Baroudi), and the incestuous undertones of Isabel and ‘Omar’s relationship (‘Omar discovers that Isabel’s mother was the woman with whom he once had a passionate love affair, and fears that he might be Isabel’s father). Political continuities are manifest in the turn-of-the-century and end-of-the-millennium nationalist struggles for internal democracy and independence from imperial control. Artistically, the principle of continuity is embedded in the composition of the text and its three principal narrators (Amal, Anna, Layla). If Anna’s tapestry stands for the writing process, it also emblemizes intercultural communication: when Layla and Anna exchange their first words in Sharif’s house, where Anna, in the guise of a young Englishman, is held captive by two young nationalists, the flow of their conversation – in French, their shared language – is compared to weaving (135). Weaving metaphors recur whenever Amal reflects on the narrative process (136, 255, 299). In the course of her fictional reconstruction of Anna’s experiences, Amal’s sense of reality becomes submerged by the intense inner life the story and its central characters assume in her imagination: Anna, she writes, ‘has become as real to me as Dorothea Brooke’ (26). Anna not only turns into a fictional character; she comes to represent the paradigmatic heroine of the Victorian realist novel. Why Dorothea? Like George Eliot’s protagonist in Middlemarch (1871–72), Anna is both an insider and an outsider to her society: Dorothea because of her deep yearning for a purposeful life dedicated to social reformism, of meaningful and



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profound thought transcribed into writing and transformative action; Anna because of her quest for new horizons, a life beyond the safe boundaries of upper-class English society, her openness to other cultures, her sensual delight and adventurous spirit. Dorothea’s intellectual and social reformist vision and Anna’s experiential, transcultural, and antiimperialist impulses are shared by Amal, who after the breakdown of her marriage has led the life of a recluse, confined to her Cairo flat, always waiting for a phone call or visit by one of her sons. To Amal her life in Britain, in ‘a house out of a Victorian novel’ (45), is just as lost and yet as palpably real as is Victorian fiction; as is her late-Victorian ancestor and heroine Anna. Imagining Anna, tracing her journey into a fulfilled cross-cultural marriage, writing about her family life enables her to work through her own failed marriage. In imagination her identity merges with Anna’s as she dreams of ‘lying in the courtyard of the old Baroudi house . . . with Nur [Anna’s and Sharif’s daughter] sitting by my head tugging at my necklace when I think to look in on my sleeping children. With Nur on my hip I go into the house and upstairs to the boys’ room in our house in England and there they lie’ (406). Her dream life also amalgamates the two romantic couples (she sees herself lying in Sharif’s arms, feeling relief at the knowledge that he is not her father [446]). Isabel, in her turn, begins to confuse reality and imagination when she refers to Sharif’s house as ‘The one in the story – I mean the one in the journals’ (203). If Anna appears a variant of the Victorian heroine in quest of her identity, a cross between Eliot’s mid-Victorian Dorothea and the intrepid and adventure-bound New Woman of the fin de siècle (a generation which brought forth many women travellers),81 then Sharif, as he is presented in Anna’s journals, represents the ‘dark, enigmatic hero of Romance’ (254–5): an Orientalist fantasy Soueif encourages and then deconstructs by turning Sharif into a complex political character.82 A passionate advocate of national liberty, he desires an intellectual equal for his wife; a Byronic hero in looks, he is a John Stuart Mill in thought and action. Like Mill, Sharif adds clauses to his marriage contract repudiating his rights over his wife: if Mill felt it his ‘duty to put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage . . . and a solemn promise never in any case under any circumstances to use [his powers]’,83 Sharif implements equal divorce rights and a pledge of monogamy. Anna and Sharif further reflect Mill and Harriet Taylor in combining a love match with a working partnership in which they support each other and co-author political writings. In the figure of Sharif Soueif exposes Western cultural and literary fantasies of the depraved Muslim despoiler of Western virgins, the ‘wicked Pasha



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who would lock you up in his harem and do terrible things to you’ (153), as explored in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings (such as Thomas Rowlandson’s The Pasha)84 and pornography (photography,85 and fiction such as The Lustful Turk, see our discussion in Chapter 3). Not only is Anna’s imagination free from such cultural stereotypes, she also, rather unconvincingly, feels no sense of apprehension when she is abducted. In the story of her first husband’s depression and guilt-stricken death following his involvement in Kitchener’s Sudan expedition of 1896–98, and by later making Anna a witness to the Denshawai/Dinshawi affair of 1906, Soueif illustrates that it is not the ‘Pasha’ but rather the Western imperialists who wreak barbarity on the innocent. In 1906, at a pigeon-shooting party, five British officers intruded into a village, angering the villagers by shooting at their birds; in the ensuing skirmish a gun went off, wounding five of the inhabitants, including a woman; the officers were threatened by the villagers, one of them died of sunstroke, and a local man who had tried to help was beaten to death by the soldiers arriving on the scene. In the subsequent show trial four men were sentenced to execution and eight condemned to be publicly flogged, while others were given harsh prison sentences. The savagery of the British response to a conflict that had been triggered by imperial officers in the first place caused widespread consternation in Britain, hastening the resignation of Lord Cromer.86 The poet and Egyptophile Wilfrid Blunt (featured briefly in the novel), who in 1882 had supported the uprising led by Urabi Pasha, organised a public campaign to end occupation.87 George Bernard Shaw made ‘The Denshawai Horror’ and his indictment of the British Empire central to his ‘Preface for Politicians’ (1907).88 The ground for this climate of fear and brutal reprisals was prepared by a fake letter purportedly originating from Egyptian nationalists but in reality concocted by the Oriental Secretary, Harry Boyd,89 with the collusion of Cromer, who sought to persuade the Foreign Office to authorize a greater use of force by producing ‘evidence’ of a planned nationalist uprising. The baroque excess of the letter’s mimicry of the ‘language of the East’ 90 acts as a further reflection of the Orientalist fantasies of the imperial rulers: the missile is awash with linguistic and stylistic absurdities.91 Published in 1965, Clara Boyle’s book, with its celebration of the ‘great pleasure’92 involved in the composition of a document instrumental in encouraging bloodshed and the colonial imposition of terror, illustrates the continuity of Western cultural imperialism in the modern period.93 It is with rising anger that Amal reflects on Boyle and his ‘wife’s confidence – not in some long-ago forgotten time, but in the Sixties, in the Sixties when I was alive – that he



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had put his finger on and had actually expressed “the workings of the oriental mind”94 – my mind’ (494, emphasis in original). The novel thus serves to educate Western readers to a recognition of the persistence of cultural prejudice, the fierceness of which, as Soueif describes in the opening essay of Mezzaterra (2004), makes ‘people with an Arab or a Muslim background living in the West . . . [do] daily double-takes when faced with their reflection in a Western mirror’.95 In sharp contrast to Boyle’s Orientalist fantasmagoria, Soueif has her contemporary characters discuss the etymology of Arabic words, drawing attention to the maternalist, quasi-feminist roots of political and religious terms. This, alongside Anna’s reflections on what ‘real’ harem life is like, provides a counter-narrative to the Orientalist construction of Arabic language, life, and culture. As Said famously argued, Orientalism, with its ‘ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and . . . “the Occident”’, produced the Orient ‘politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically’, to the extent that ‘no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism’.96 For all her lack of prejudice, this also applies to Anna in her initial stage as a British tourist and member of the expatriate community in Egypt. Though she feels alienated by the attitudes of Boyle and other functionaries and much more at ease with Egyptophiles like James Barrington, the third Secretary, and Mrs Butcher, a broad-minded vicar’s wife, her first letter home is, as Amal comments, ‘a little self-conscious, a little aware of the genre – Letters from Egypt, A Nile Voyage, More Letters from Egypt . . . Perhaps she was thinking of a future publication’ (58).97 Initially at least, Anna’s response to Egypt is filtered through the mirror of Western travelogues, letters, and memoirs. Like Lucie Duff Gordon she stays in Cairo’s Shepheard’s Hotel, invokes the Arabian Nights to describe her experiences (67, 134, 137), and in her cross-dressing escapades imitates not only the New Woman but also a Bedouin woman traveller described in Duff Gordon’s letters.98 Just as her interest in Egypt was first prompted by art – John Frederick Lewis’s paintings of Arabic domestic interiors – so the voices of her literary predecessors appear to her to possess a far greater degree of authenticity than those of the representatives of the Empire: ‘I cannot help feeling that the letters of Lady Duff Gordon give a truer glimpse into the Native mind than do all the speeches of the gentlemen of the Chancery’ (107).99 Literature, art, and writing are key to Anna’s experience and sense of identity: like Amal’s this is a story about a writer-in-the-making.



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When she is held captive, her immediate focus on noting her thoughts down greatly unnerves Sabir, the servant abducted with her (a version of Duff Gordon’s Omar). Even before her friendship with the al-Baroudis she begins to lay claim to a literary voice and vision of her own, sending a sketch and pencil drawing to her father-in-law, Sir Charles (an outspoken critic of empire), which satirize the British expatriates reclining in the shadow of the Great Pyramid and pronouncing on the Oriental mindset. Her awareness of the analogies in gendered, classed, and racial hegemonies and the way these shape social and intercultural interaction is indicated in her depiction of the scene. Only the English gentlemen are ‘lolling at their ease’ (97), at the centre of the tableau, supremely oblivious to any threat to their position. Nor do they take notice of the servants, Emily and Sabir. The latter is, however, fed bits of food by Barrington just as Toti the dog is by Boyle. (Barrington is a sympathetic character in the novel, the only Englishman in Egypt to remain in touch with Anna after her marriage and who supports Egyptian independence; his relationship with his manservant is, however, ambiguous and potentially exploitative in its sexual undertones.) In contrast to the men the lady, Mrs Butcher, appears painfully conscious of her constraints, ‘sitting very upright on a cushion in a neat dress of grey with navy trimming and a well-restrained bonnet’ (97). Emily, Anna’s English servant, who is in Egypt under duress, signals her discomfort as well as her subaltern status by sitting ‘in one corner looking away from the party’, while Anna, the observer, herself occupies ‘another with my sketching-pad poised on my knee’ (97). The life force in this tableau derives not from the frozen positions and postures assumed by the English characters, but from the Egyptians, placed a short distance away, who sit (or crouch or squat) quietly for some stretch of time, and you begin to imagine that nothing can move them from their seeming placidity – until suddenly there is a murmur and there are movements and men standing up and arms waving and raised voices and then it all subsides again into quiet, the peace and the restiveness alike being incomprehensible to me[.] (97) The ‘inscrutability’, pace Homi Bhabha,100 of the ‘natives’ calls for instant self-assertion on the part of the colonial masters; thus one of the Englishmen begins to ‘hol[d] forth on the subject of the “effendis” whom he . . . dislikes intensely for . . . their attempts to emulate us. He derides their golf collars and two-tone boots, their “undigested” championing of European ideas of liberty and democracy. He is suspicious of their French education’ (97). Intriguingly, while the Egyptians present are servants, their proximity



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and energy direct the imperial gaze to those ‘other’ Egyptians, the educated elite and indigenous ruling class, the intellectuals from which the nationalist movement draws its inspiration and its leaders. Here the adoption of ‘English’ values, above all the impetus for democracy and self-government, is disparaged as seditious and implicitly associated with the terror of the French Revolution. In contradistinction to the representatives of colonial power, Anna becomes more sensitized to the subject position of her own ‘subaltern’ and starts to reflect on Emily: ‘I wonder whether it is possible for a conquering nation to truly see into the character of the people whom he rules. How well, in fact . . . do I know Emily?’ (99). If in all the twenty years she has served as Anna’s maid Emily has always been ‘keeping her distance and pinching herself a little space’, would she ‘bloom and open into more vivid life’ in a cottage of her own and in possession of an independent income (99)? These thoughts are pursued further by Amal, who feels frustrated by Emily’s persistent silence and Anna’s failure to engage on any deeper level with her: ‘How old is she? What does she want for herself? . . . Can she yet do what Hester Stanhope’s maid did, who . . . caught the fancy of a passing sheikh but was denied permission to marry him?101 Would she do what Lucy [sic] Duff Gordon’s Sally did and melt into the back streets of Alexandria, pregnant with the child of her mistress’s favourite servant, Omar al-Halawani?’ (68). While the fallaheens’ voices resonate in the novel, Emily remains the silent Other, the subaltern whose voice and perspective are unrepresentable. When Anna informs her of her marriage and offers her a choice between continuing in her service, albeit in a very different context, and leaving her employment and returning to England, ‘she was cross with me . . . although she did not betray it except by a slight tightening of the lips’ (323), and opts for the latter. If Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s maid is given a voice and a life by Barrett Browning’s biographer Margaret Forster (in her 1990 novel Lady’s Maid), Soueif’s fictional lady’s maid is dispossessed even of a surname and fades into oblivion: an intriguing application of Spivak’s subaltern theory to the English maidservant. Emily’s fate of being erased from history was suffered in real life by Sally Naldrett, the English servant who accompanied the consumptive Duff Gordon to Egypt in 1862. Naldrett’s relationship with Omar Abu Halaweh, Duff Gordon’s dragoman, was discovered, dramatically, when on Christmas Eve 1864 she gave birth on a boat travelling up the Nile.102 Duff Gordon was outraged at what she perceived as an unpardonable betrayal; in 1855, Barrett Browning, in process of writing her epic of cross-class sisterhood, Aurora Leigh (1856), had responded



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similarly ‘shocked’ and ‘pained’ to the news of the (freshly married) Elizabeth Wilson’s imminent confinement.103 However progressive, in theory, their views were on class or race relations, Victorian female middle-class intellectuals and writers like Duff Gordon and Barrett Browning were incapable of moving beyond a near-feudal conception of ‘their’ servants.104 While she delivered the child and begrudgingly oversaw the couple’s marriage (Omar was already married, and Sally was left in no uncertainty about her status as an adulteress), Duff Gordon cast doubt on Omar’s paternity to justify her harsh treatment of Sally and leniency towards him.105 The disgraced maid and her infant were dispatched speedily, with instructions that Abdullah be handed over to Omar’s first wife, and Sally return to Britain. Duff Gordon’s biographer, however, surmises that Naldrett may have remained in Egypt.106 This is the scenario Pullinger explores in The Mistress of Nothing, which ends with Sally’s intercultural competence and bilingualism enabling her to secure an upwardly mobile position from maid to tourist advisor in an upmarket Cairo hotel. The difficulties she initially experiences in her struggle for survival illustrate the imperial control the British lady exerts over her servants, English and Egyptian, even beyond their employment: Sally is dismissed without a reference, and thus forced to accept poorly paid work in disrespectable establishments (she narrowly escapes a worse fate); Omar is forbidden to offer her a home with his family, even though his parents and first wife wish to do so;107 Sally’s appeals to Egyptian acquaintances are to no avail. Ironically, in her own microcosm Lucie thus reflects aspects of the despotic regime of the Pasha she so disparages.108 The novel examines the way in which rigid English class divisions become porous in the contact with another culture, but are then reinstated with a vengeance. As Lucie settles into her life in Egypt, acclimatizes to Egyptian culture and social intercourse, and begins to learn the language, she starts dispensing with English decorum, and encourages Sally to do likewise, discarding gloves, boots, stays, European dress and codes of behaviour. If Lucie dons the comfortable clothing usually worn by men, Sally, like Soueif’s Anna, revels in the anonymity and mobility Arabic women’s dress bestows on her; ironically it is Lucie who points out that ‘You never know when we might need you to be able to move freely through the city without being seen to be European . . . to pass as Egyptian’.109 The conditions of travel and their domestic circumstances erode social distances,110 establishing an intimacy that would be unthinkable in Britain. Substitutes for the family Lucie had to leave



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behind, Sally and Omar share her meals, and Lucie even gets into the habit of brushing Sally’s hair, playfully reversing the positions of mistress and maid. It is only in preparation for a reunion with her husband that her hybrid condition becomes a matter of concern to Lucie: ‘I’m neither English, nor Arabic; I’ve been a kind of creature in between. I look a kind of man/woman’ (115). When, while she is still reeling from the shock of desertion,111 Sally reveals an entirely unexpected, and fulfilled, life of her own, Lucie responds with extreme severity. Pullinger suggests that Lucie is primarily motivated by a sense of her own loss (3–4). As Catherine Wynne argues, however, Duff Gordon’s dismissal of the mixed-race child as ‘hideous’112 indicates her rejection of the hybrid family she had helped create: ‘The son of Sally and Omar exposed the limits of Gordon’s intercultural encounter. . . . [B]y disciplining Sally . . . Gordon was policing the boundaries of empire and gender and purging her Egyptian home of the more visceral dimensions of cultural interaction’.113 Ultimately, Pullinger’s Sally realizes that she has never been ‘fully human’ to Lucie, but only ever ‘part of the background, the scenery . . . a useful stage prop’ (3). Pullinger here charges her fictional character with the lack of imagination and sensitivity for which the historical Duff Gordon censored European travel writers, among others Harriet Martineau: ‘the people are not real people, only part of the scenery to her, as to most Europeans’.114 Here, too, then the English maid is placed in direct correlation to the ethnic, subaltern ‘Other’. The fictional Sally challenges this conceptualisation by repeatedly confronting Lucie; she never succeeds in effecting a single acknowledgement. In Soueif’s novel Anna displays a greater sense of awareness of and sympathy towards her maid’s constraints, but she, too, is indifferent to her inner life. This is intensified by Emily’s rejection of Egypt and silent, yet palpable, resistance to Anna’s explorations. Like Sally to Duff Gordon, Emily acts as a reminder of Anna’s transgressions against normative English feminine behaviour. Both women’s responses to Egypt are born from Orientalism; but where Emily’s mind is filled with fears of abduction and the white slave à la Ingres’ Odalisque à l’esclave (68), Anna’s vision is of the ‘luminous beauty’ (27) of the play of light and shadow in Lewis’s paintings. When she encounters these very vistas in the al-Baroudi house, she is instantly and permanently captivated. Her night-time glimpse of the harem interior, with its ‘high windows and recessed divans, rich hangings and a tiled floor leading with dainty steps to a shallow pool’ (108), is a reminder of Lewis’s The Reception (Figure 2.1).115 On awakening she is



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Figure 2.1 John Frederick Lewis, The Reception (1873), oil on panel © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / Paul Mellon Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library

presented with a near-replica of his Siesta (Figure 2.2):116 ‘I had slipped into one of those paintings . . . There above me was the intricate dark wooden latticework and beyond it a most benevolent, clear blue sky . . . [T]here, across the room, and on a divan similar to mine, a woman lay sleeping . . . Her skin was the colour of gently toasted chestnut, and she lay on cushions of deep emerald and blue, and the whole tableau was framed, yet again, by the lattice of a mashrabiya’ (134). Anna believes herself transported into both a Lewis painting and the Arabian Nights, and starts composing her own ‘Arabian’ tale about the ‘fair occupier of the opposite divan’; ‘it seemed so odd just to sit there – in one of my beloved paintings, as it were, or one of the Nights of Edward Lane. I took the same pleasure in my gentle jailer that I would have done from those’ (137).117 As the world of art and the imagination is ceding place to a new-found reality and she is invited into the al-Baroudi family, her long-standing sense of alienation, born from her unhappy marriage and the tragic death



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Figure 2.2 John Frederick Lewis, The Siesta (1876) © Tate, London 2009

of her husband, begins to lift. Now that she is becoming part of a new, very different community, the world of the Europeans takes on an outlandish, quasi-Oriental character. When on her trip to the Sinai, dressed and veiled as an Egyptian woman, she observes, undetected, a group of English acquaintances at the train station, they strike her as ‘exotic creatures, walking in a kind of magical space, oblivious to all around them’ (195). In her transformation from Oriental tourist to adoptive Egyptian she embraces harem life, whose reality she finds very dissimilar from the Western imagination. The al-Baroudi harem is an extended family with close female networks to other households: communities which encouraged and enhanced women’s interactions whereas traditional family structures in the West isolated them from each other.118 As Ruth Bernard Yeazell has pointed out, Western ‘collective fantasizing’ constructed a homogeneous image of ‘the harem’, drawn from ‘lore about the Grand Seraglio and atmospheric trappings freely borrowed from the Arabian Nights’. Distinctions only came to be noted when Western women travellers gained access to Eastern homes; yet ‘the very fact that [they] repeatedly recorded their disenchantment with actual harems, announcing over



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and over again how little the reality of Eastern domestic life met their expectations, testifies to the continuing power of the imaginary harems they had inherited’.119 Acutely aware as she is of the prejudices and fantasies she once in part shared in her fascination with the sensuality of Arabic domestic interiors, Anna discovers in herself ‘a strange unwillingness to provide a detailed picture of “life in the Harem”’ (354). Her endeavour to persuade her English friend Caroline to come for a visit proves unsuccessful. Instead Anna becomes a member of the Arabic New Woman movement, recording her friendship with feminist activists such as Zeinab Fawwaz (237)120 and Malak Hifni Nasif (355),121 with whom she plans to set up a women’s journal with French and Arabic editions: ‘the idea is to compare the conditions and the aspirations of different women in different societies – it is not to confine itself to the “Question of Women” but to enter into matters of more general concern and so demonstrate that women are ready to enter a wider arena’ (355). The first factual Egyptian women’s magazine, Al-Fatah (The Young Lady), had been founded a decade earlier, in 1892, and defined itself, pace Hind Nawfal, ‘as a scientific, historical, literary, humoristic magazine concerned with [the female] sex . . . It . . . will discuss . . . the condition of woman’.122 The turn of the century saw the emergence of a range of women’s magazines, some of which, like the journal in which Anna and Layla become involved, had a wider political agenda. These publications, Sonia Dabouss notes, ‘began to demonstrate a mounting awareness in print of Egyptian national identity and the need for improvements in women’s status’.123 The al-Baroudi women, along with their friends, also implement and contribute to a women’s lecture series in the newly established university co-founded by Sharif.124 Soueif recreates a vibrant atmosphere of social reformism, left-wing thought, and feminist debate which anticipates the radical and sexual politics of the 1960s, in which Amal and her circle of intellectuals and activists came to maturity. The text highlights that, crucially, the emerging Egyptian feminist movement of the early twentieth century had powerful allies in the nationalist leadership: thus the sheikh who conducts Anna’s and Sharif’s Egyptian wedding, Mohammed ‘Abdu, a historical figure, had advocated women’s rights in his newspaper (al-Waqa-ea al-Misriya, Egyptian Events) since the 1880s,125 and with his disciple, Qasim Amin, the author of The Liberation of Women (Tahrir al-mar’a, 1899) and The New Woman (al-Mar’a al-jadida, 1900),126 leads a discussion in the al-Baroudi house to which the women listen from the balcony (375). This scene offers an implicit comparison with the condition



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of women in Britain: there, too, women were listening intently from balconies (Parliament), but the men were significantly less amenable to consider their rights. In the process of enculturation Anna thus moves from the Orientalist observer, adventurer, and travel writer to the politically committed nationalist-feminist journalist. After Denshawai her writing becomes focused on the struggle for Egyptian self-government. The text explores the interconnection between nationalism and feminism as a catalyst of women’s entry into the public sphere: as the al-Baroudi and al-Ghamrawi households start hosting mixed-sex political events involving foreign visitors, traditional principles of segregation are being superseded by the politics of liberation. Anna becomes Sharif’s collaborator and English voice; by translating his French articles for the British periodical press she establishes a platform for the Egyptian independence movement in the heart of empire. Her aspiration to represent ‘an Egyptian who would address British public opinion in a way that it would understand . . . Someone who could use the right phrases, employ the apt image or quotation, strike the right note and so reach the hearts and minds of the British people’ (399) is thus realized, briefly, and brought to completion eight decades after Sharif’s assassination by their great-nephew ‘Omar and the influence his political writings exert on Western thought. The ending of the novel, with its uncertainty about ‘Omar’s own fate, brings the map of inter/transcultural personal and political relationships and the cycle of destinies full circle. Whether Sharif the baby from ‘Omar and his eponymous forefather, or Amal’s book manuscript from Anna’s story, the living have, as in Anna’s tapestry, been brought forth by, and will, it is suggested, continue the legacy of, the dead.

2.4. Conclusion The legacy from the nineteenth century that the postcolonial neoVictorian novel confers on the reader has poignant political resonances. A colonized country and people’s struggle for independence and social democracy, the recurrence of imperial paradigms in different guise in the twenty-first century, the rewriting of history from the erstwhile ‘subaltern’s’ point of view, the interplay of military, economic, religious, and cultural expressions of colonial rule, the diversity of (proto)postcolonial identities and subjectivities, giving rise to a hybridity of voices and strategies of resistance: however disparate the four novels discussed in this chapter, they share a central commitment to political revisionism. Each draws on the leitmotif of the journey to explore narratives of personal



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and collective development, in which voyages into selfhood are made possible by the close affective bonds and ‘maps of love’ created between and across different cultures. In this journey to self-determination and spiritual union with the cultural Other music plays a pivotal role: if opera, in The Map of Love, unleashes pent-up emotion, enabling a grieving process which ancient Arabic song is subsequently able to transmute into an awakening to a new life, the song of the people, in Sea of Poppies, generates a communal bond which transcends boundaries of caste, religion, race, and gender: the ‘strange music’ of voices thus fused together into poetry forges a connection not only between the characters, but also between the writer and the reader of postcolonial neo-Victorianism.



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Sex and Science: Bodily and Textual (Re)Inscriptions

[S]cientific representations of the feminine body are . . . a constitutive part of wider social discourses that are informed and shaped in their turn by economic, class, and racial ideologies. . . . [T]easing out some of these connections . . . suggest[s] how the fluid, symbolic reservoir of cultural associations focused on the feminine body operate[s] in scientific discourses to produce historically specific material effects. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, Body/Politics (1990)1 If the political re-visioning impulse of contemporary neo-Victorian fiction has a key theme aside from race and empire, it is the interrogation of gender and sexuality as constructed and regulated through the discourses of science. In this chapter we investigate the continuing appeal of that most ‘sensational’ aspect of the nineteenth century: its politics of the body and the way that body was mediated through the sexualized and scientific gaze. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth have drawn attention to the ways in which scientific approaches to the female body and female sexuality have always been closely bound up with the politics of class and race. The cultural, socio-political, and imperial implications of scientific constructions of the sexed, raced, and classed female body are pivotal concerns of feminist neo-Victorianism, which aims to interrogate the legacy of historically specific paradigms in contemporary society. As Jeannette King has pointed out, the return, in fiction, to Victorian women’s lives and conceptualizations of gender ‘provides an opportunity to challenge the answers which nineteenth-century society produced in response to 106



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the “Woman Question”’,2 enabling contemporary women writers to probe the continuity of sexual and social configurations in the present. Victorian sexuality and the way we re-imagine it, its contradictions, excesses, dissimilarities from or correspondences with our diversity of experience holds an irresistible appeal for the neo-Victorian imagination. The nature of our interest in the Victorian body arguably reveals less about the Victorians and more about our own preoccupations: MarieLuise Kohlke rightly notes that neo-Victorianism has ‘become the new Orientalism, a significant mode of imagining sexuality in our hedonistic, consumerist, sex-surfeited age.’3 In its least refined form the contemporary fascination with ‘sex and crinolines’ reflects, as Christian Gutleben has noted,4 a nostalgic fetishization of the taboo, the secret and forbidden in a world of sexual over-exposure, a disingenuous belief in the radical nature of a society no longer under the shadow of what Michel Foucault in 1976 conceptualized as the ‘repressive hypothesis’.5 As we discuss in Chapter 6 in relation to costume drama, dressing up a twenty-first-century body in Victorian attire not only bestows the illusion of capturing, if fleetingly, the physicality of the past, but also carries the promise of reviving the lost thrill of disrobing in the contemporary. The subsequent ‘uncovering’ of the Victorian body mimics the scandalous disclosures of Victorian society (lurid divorce cases, male brothels frequented by prominent public figures,6 organized female child abuse and under-age girl trafficking).7 This culture of scandal interconnects with the culture of exhibition: the Victorian preoccupation with the collection, display, and scopophilic objectification of ‘other’ bodies and races is reflected in today’s Big Brother culture of (sexual) exhibitionism. Readers of neoVictorian novels like Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) and viewers of the TV adaptations of Sarah Waters’s novels are encouraged to indulge in the fantasy of savouring what a Victorian prostitute ‘really was like’ or what ‘actually happened’ in lesbian encounters before the sexual liberation of the 1970s (on the contemporary TV screen lesbian sex is still coded as faux heterosexuality).8 A marketing tool which plays to the sexual immaturities of our age, the neo-Victorian body can, in more sophisticated textual constructions, serve to address contemporary identity politics by ‘mainstreaming’ gay coming-out-stories (as Waters’s novels do). It can also be used to scrutinize the instabilities of modern sexual categorizations rooted in Victorian sexological conceptualizations, such as transvestism and trans/intersexuality, then understood to be synonymous with homosexuality: an example here is Patricia Duncker’s novel James Miranda Barry (1999) about Britain’s first female doctor, who rose to pre-eminence in male disguise.9 Our academic



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interest in rediscovering our radical roots in Victorian cultural and socio-political discourse is undercut in plots which expose radicalism as a guise for sexual libertinism and gendered, classed, or raced exploitation: thus in Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998) the upper-class editorial board of the factual late-Victorian feminist journal Shafts is engaged in the lesbian abuse of working-class women, and in Belinda Starling’s Journal of Dora Damage (2006) female abolitionism and male anarchism are implicated in the pornographic objectification of women and black men. At its most complex, metafictional, and ironic, neo-Victorianism explores the inscription and textuality of the desire to repossess the Victorian by performing a slippage between the central character and the text, between a physical body and the textual corpus. In late-twentiethcentury fiction like Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) the instability of the heroine’s body stands in for the illusionary character of the neo-Victorian novel itself, the ‘Cockney Venus’ Fevvers’s publicity slogan ‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’10 providing a tongue-in-cheek comment on the ever-frustrated desire about authenticity that neo-Victorianism invokes. In post-millennial literature it is frequently the discovery of a corpse which performs this metaphoric exchange: Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (2007) draws on the criminal enquiry into a gay murder to enact a multiple process of Wildean recovery through pastiche and parody, while Kate Summerscale’s novelistic crime study, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), involves the modern reader in the investigation of mid-Victorian child murder in the middle-class family and through its play with the generic conventions of fiction, biography, reportage, and crime investigation pinpoints the instability of any attempt at arriving at ‘truth’ claims about the past. The metonymy of the female body acting as a ‘cover’ (covering) of the text and the gendered and raced subject’s effort to break free from physical and textual strangleholds is most strikingly accomplished in The Journal of Dora Damage, in which a female bookbinder starts by recycling female garments and accessories for the covers of ladies’ diaries, only to find herself indentured into the pornographic book trade. This is represented on the cover of the novel with the image of a female torso tied into a corset (Figure 3.1): the act of opening and reading the book is thus pictorially associated with the loosening of the laces and the stripping of a faceless woman’s body of her clothed ‘bindings’. That these ‘bindings’ might be of a sexual nature is implied with the allusive reference to ‘Damages Bindery’ providing ‘Bindings of any kind’ to satisfy specialized tastes. The chilling conclusion of the novel, which sees the heroine narrowly escape the fate of being made over into a book cover herself, constitutes an apt metaphor for the neo-Victorian project of textual (and sexual) re-embodiment. 10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn


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Figure 3.1 Paperback cover of Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing


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Our focus in this chapter is on three post-millennial novels by women which problematize nineteenth-century – and, by inference, contemporary – sexual, textual, and scientific inscriptions of the gendered, classed and raced body: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003), a version of the neo-slave narrative11 set in the Napoleonic period of the 1810s but extending to the years 1860 and 2002; Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006); and Starling’s Journal of Dora Damage. In our discussion of these texts we will be guided by feminist approaches to science, the body, pornography, and the gaze, in particular Emily Martin’s investigation of the objectifying gaze of nineteenthcentury science and its emphasis on observation, evaluation, and visualization,12 Londa Schiebinger’s exploration of the ways in which scientific racism and sexism combined in constructing the black female body,13 Susan Griffin’s examination of pornography’s ‘sacred images’,14 Laura Mulvey’s neo-Freudian concept of the scopophilic gaze,15 and Lisa Sigel’s interrogation of the mid-Victorian scientific turn towards pornography as a development coincidental with the professionalization of science and symptomatic of its imperial objectives.16 The word pornography first came into usage in English in the early Victorian period;17 by the 1860s, the time in which Harris’s and Starling’s novels are set, pornography had become the province of an elite male scientific culture.18 In our discussion of neo-Victorian feminist fiction’s reconceptualizations of nineteenth-century science, the body and pornography we draw not on the post-feminist notion of pornography as an ‘expression of erotic possibility within the realm of fantasy’,19 but on the radical feminist definition of thanatica (degradation and violence as the structuring principles of a drive towards death) as opposed to erotica (sexually explicit material which depicts the pleasure of the participants without acts of coercion or objectification),20 an approach embraced by the texts. Charlene Senn’s further differentiation between ‘Sexist and Dehumanizing’ (conventionally termed ‘soft’) pornography with ‘no explicitly violent content’ (but which ‘may imply acts of submission or violence by the positioning of the models . . . costuming . . . or by setting up the viewer as voyeur’)21 and its hardcore violent extension illustrates the three stages of Dora Damage’s ‘apprenticeship’ from erotica to ‘non-violent’ but degrading pornography (which, while leaving no traces on her body, starts to affect her mind) to, finally, the explicit threat of pornographic mutilation being enacted on her body and that of her daughter. That the dividing line between ‘hard’ and ostensibly



3.1 Scopophilia and paratextuality

‘soft’ forms of pornography is permeable is demonstrated by Hottentot Venus: here the dehumanizing gaze and its subsequent pictorial and sculptural representation are exposed as (scientific) rape. Harris’s title highlights the Foucauldian theme central to all three novels: the way in which individuals and their bodies are disciplined into discourses of power through ‘observation’, the term pointing to the controlling gaze of institutions and individuals equipped with institutional power, and how this power is reproduced in textual form.22 However, the use of the plural – The Observations – hints at the possibility of subverting the gaze and its textual inscriptions by altering the positions of observer and observed. This ambiguity is also reflected on the UK covers of Harris’s and Chase-Riboud’s novels. A self-conscious play with paratextuality, in Gérard Genette’s sense, is an important feature of these novels, and indeed, of most of the neo-Victorian fictions examined in this book; their cover images, titles, epigraphs frequently serve the purpose of a ‘threshold . . . a “vestibule” that offers [readers] the possibility of . . . stepping inside . . . a zone not only of transition but also of transaction’.23 The Observations (Figure 3.2) features a young woman in the process of opening a book while glancing sideways, as if to ensure that she will not be surprised in what appears to be a furtive act. As we cannot see her eyes, our attention is drawn to her hands: metonymically, the image directs us to the slippage between an individual and her social status, the protagonist’s hands and her economic position as a ‘hand’. Hands, literally and literarily, played a crucial part in the social and libidinal organization of Victorian life.24 The slim book in the woman’s hands adds to the synecdochic structure of the cover in that it embodies her mistress in the form of her notes and ‘observations’ on the domestic servant class. Reading (and misreading) is a central preoccupation in the novel, as is implied in Mrs Reid’s name: she likes to ‘read’ her maids’ minds, who, as the cover indicates, respond by reading her and her observations in turn. The loose papers visible at the back of the notebook contain the clue to what ‘really’ happened to the young woman’s predecessor, a maid who came to a tragic end on a railway line. The conjunction of title and cover thus draws our attention to the gaze and its relation to processes of reading and – via the loose sheets – writing, while at the same time destabilizing the position of the reader-as-observer, hinting at the subversive possibilities of returning the gaze. Similarly, the cover of Hottentot Venus (Figure 3.3) directs us to the subject of the novel – the objectifying gaze to which the ‘exotic’ (hinted at in the incoming sailing boat and the palm leaves) is subjected and with which racial hegemonies are established and maintained – by



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Figure 3.2 Hardback cover of Jane Harris’s The Observations (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.



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Figure 3.3 (Paperback) jacket cover of Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud (New York: Random House, 2003), used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.


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guiding our attention towards those engaged in this process of specular dehumanization: the diverse audiences that flocked to see the spectacle of the Khoisan or Khoekhoe/Khoikhoi (South African tribal) woman brought to London in 1810 and exhibited as ‘the Hottentot Venus’25 in British and Parisian freak shows until 1815. The visual emphasis on four spectators on the left-hand margin of Chase-Riboud’s cover enacts an intertextual reference to a contemporary French cartoon (Figure 3.4).26 It also implicates us, the reader, in this appropriatory gaze, hinting at our own complicity in processes of objectification and commodification. The object of this prurient voyeurism, Sara/Sarah/Sa(a)rtjie Bartmann/Baartman(n) herself,27 is depicted on the back cover of the novel, in an aquatint of 1811 which pictures heavy tribal paint like a facial mask (Figure 3.5). The image highlights the correlation between racial and sexual abuse. The paint/ mask upsets even as it claims to sustain the illusionary ‘authenticity’ of the tribal outfit, pinpointing the artificial and pornographic nature

Figure 3.4 ‘Les Curieux en extase ou les Cordons de souliers’, colour print showing Sarah Baartman ‘on show’. Original engraved by J. Hopner (1814?), reproduced by permission of Museum Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa (Museum Africa Accession No. MA1974–625)



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Figure 3.5 Frederick Christian Lewis, ‘Sartjee the Hottentot Venus, Exhibition at No 225, Piccadilly’ (1811) © The British Library Board (C.191.c16)


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of the act. It simultaneously draws attention and denies access to the face (in Chase-Riboud’s novel it is Sarah herself who insists on wearing a mask during her public performances, thus asserting a degree of agency). The mask protects the individual against the glare of the audience, while simultaneously turning her into a generic representation of African womanhood. The covering of the face with its attendant invitation to speculate about what might lie beneath acts as a metonymy for that other part of the Khoisan female physiognomy which attracted the obsessive-compulsive curiosity of European audiences, ethnographers and scientists (the elongated labia of the mythical ‘Hottentot apron’ or tablier represented figuratively by the apron covering the pudenda). Hottentot Venus makes for painful reading because the real-life Saartjie Baartman’s individuality and human dignity were violated in life and after her death in 1815. Her skeleton, body cast, preserved brain, and pickled genitals were displayed in the leading French scientist Georges Cuvier’s Muséum d’Histoire naturelle after being written up in his treatise on her autopsy.28 Baartman’s skeleton and body cast were later exhibited in the Musée de L’Homme in Paris until feminist protests in the 1970s led to their removal to a storeroom.29 Following lengthy negotiations between the South African and French governments, Baartman’s remains were returned to South Africa and buried on National Women’s Day in August 2002.30 If Baartman and her body were the object of voyeuristic and pornographic racial speculation for almost two centuries, The Observations provides a more comforting account of the empowering potential of the gaze when appropriated by the object of observation.

3.2 Subaltern subversions: Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006) In this novel narrated by the ‘Other’ of Victorian fiction,31 the prostitute, the fourteen-year-old Irish Bessy Buckley in flight from her pimp (her mother) takes employment in a rundown rural estate in the vicinity of Glasgow where, despite the bizarre treatment she encounters, she becomes attached to her mistress, the twenty-year-old Arabella Reid. As Bessy discovers when secretly reading her mistress’s notebook, Mrs Reid is engaged on writing a treatise on domestic servants in the style of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management,32 crossed with a scientific study of the particularities of the servant species: Had we an account of the nature, habits and training of the domestic class in my time and details of particular cases therein, no history



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could be more useful, but it strikes me that such matters are rarely heeded and that what knowledge we have remains within the realm of personal experience. It were to be wished that some good author would make his observations on the subject during his time so that the knowledge could be passed down . . . In the absence of such an author, I humbly offer the following theoretical discourse and case studies. Those servants I have lived to see myself I wish to remember and note down in these pages, both for my own use and for the elucidation of others. (72) Mrs Reid here follows the tenets of contemporary science which, as Martin points out, historically constructed vision – observation – as the primary means of attaining ‘objective’ knowledge: ‘The emphasis on observation, on mapping, diagramming and charting, . . . meant that the “ability to ‘visualize’ a culture or society almost bec[ame] synonymous for understanding it.”’ The ‘objectifying and limiting’ aspects of this scientific ‘visualism’ only came to be challenged in the later twentieth century.33 In the period in which Harris’s novel is set, observation was considered essential to the scientific project. Mrs Reid’s notes on the domestic servant appear inspired by Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), which also focused on a particular group of working-class subjects (impoverished streetsellers and dwellers) with the aim to establish hitherto unknown ‘facts obtained by positive observation and investigation’.34 Following Mayhew’s lead, Mrs Reid establishes the servant genus as a different ‘race’ (one that in Mayhew is explicitly associated with ‘Hottentots’), scientifically to be studied, measured, and categorized into separate sub-divisions through the tools of phrenology and ethnography.35 Seeking as she does to identify and classify scientifically the physical markers and character traits, and best training programme for the production, of the ‘ideal’, most consummately obedient and loyal servant, Mrs Reid embarks on idiosyncratic experiments which involve issuing arbitrary commands. She proceeds to study her maids’ physiognomies, takes cranial and body measurements (a feature common to nineteenthcentury scientific literature, and particularly prominent in criminal studies36 and dissection reports37), and in an employment centre even attempts to examine the stools of applicants. The methodologies and discourses of contemporary science, when purloined by the young wife of a lawyer and aspiring MP are, unsurprisingly, interpreted as a sign of madness. Her manuscript is consigned to the flames (where it is retrieved by Bessie, to be later misinterpreted as a male-authored satire by a publisher). Yet Mrs Reid’s experiments are no more eccentric than



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the haphazard treatment by means of which her husband and the family doctor seek to restore her to mental health: the latter obsessively examines her stool for external, physical markers of insanity, and writes her up as a case study to further his career. In contrast to the indifferent scientist, Mrs Reid is interested in her ‘subjects’ and vigorously pursues their education. Like the real-life Arthur Munby towards his secret maid-of-all-work lover and later wife, Hannah Cullwick,38 she commissions her maids to write down their observations of their daily life while herself keeping a diary of their habits,39 admires Bessy’s strong arms (58), and encourages her to dress up as a lady (59–60). Nor does her desire for social cross-dressing stop with her servants; Bessy is shown photographs of Mr Reid ‘in pirate togs with a cocked hat on his head and a sabre in his hand’, while Arabella herself poses both ‘as a dark-skinned princess of the Orient, draped in a robe with a sash at her waist and a pitcher balanced on her hip’ and as an ‘old-fashioned maid’ crouching at the feet of her master (242–3): Mrs Reid mimics Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography40 while also engaging in the roleplaying games Munby devised for Cullwick, modelling her alternately as slave and lady, Magdalene and young man.41 If for Munby, as Anne McClintock has noted, ‘the irresistible lure of working women was that in watching them he could voyeuristically enjoy the masculine traits he coveted, without endangering his own socially prescribed sense of maleness’,42 Mrs Reid, the middle-class lady without a purpose, uses her power over her maids to experiment with the subject positions of scientist, teacher, mother, and child. While ostensibly setting out to breed absolute submission, what she enjoys most is the subversion to which she herself aspires and which she ultimately attains only in madness. In the diaries she commissions a mere list of tasks fulfilled is not satisfactory; what she wants to see is a record of her maids’ feelings and reflections: an inscription of her own unacknowledged inner life displaced into that of her servants. By prompting her to articulate a (fabricated) version of self which anticipates her desires she encourages Bessy to become an observer herself, an upwardly mobile reader responsive to literary lessons of self-help (gleaned from the pages of Dickens’s Bleak House and Great Expectations), and a writer in her own right, with the effect of undermining the imperative of obedience she otherwise seeks to inculcate. This obedience led to the demise of Bessy’s predecessor, the Irish maid Nora. Bessy initially speculates that Nora was hit by a train because she was too literal-minded in following her mistress’s commands, but later discovers that Nora committed suicide after being dismissed by Mr Reid when she disclosed her pregnancy.



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The concept of observation and the scientific gaze is here appropriated by women across the class-divide: by the frustrated upper-middle-class wife in quest of a meaningful occupation (before her marriage Arabella aspired to a philanthropic teaching career) and by the domestic servant, otherwise the subject of scrutiny and investigation. While Bessy is much more sharply observant than anybody else in the book (she infers Nora’s pregnancy from passages in her diary) and succeeds in manipulating her employers’ gaze for her purposes, the middle-class wife is unable to gain any authority from her mimicry of scientific methodologies. Her escape from captivity ends with a violent attack on the vicar (the man who had raped and impregnated Nora), after which she is committed to a private psychiatric hospital, where she happily settles into recording the antics of fellow-patients. The maid, by contrast, comes into her own in the course of her studies of the master class. The book we read constitutes Bessy’s spirited analysis of gendered class relations in Victorian rural society, in the city, and in the madhouse, as well as an unsentimental account of child sexual abuse and prostitution. When her past threatens to catch up with her in the shape of her mother Bridget, intent on reclaiming her as her primary source of income, Arabella’s final bout of violence releases Bessy from maternal sexual exploitation while binding her all the closer into her own service (in the tussle between the two women, each of whom wants to retain control of Bessy, Bridget is pushed off the railway bridge under an oncoming train). Rather implausibly, Arabella’s madness has the effect of securing Bessy’s lasting devotion despite her being the cause of her mother’s gruesome death. Bessy blames herself for causing Arabella’s breakdown and precipitating the chain of events by staging ghostly visitations in order to punish her for her objectification of her. ‘I was no more than a “thing” to Arabella, a thing that might be experimented upon, toyed with and cast aside at a whim when it had outgrown its use’ (102), she rages after reading her case study of ‘Bessy (The Most Particular Case of a Low Prostitute)’, written after Arabella’s discovery of Bessy’s antecedents. However resourceful Bessy proves in manipulating her employers (Arabella’s nerves are shattered by her invention of Nora’s spectre, and after his wife’s breakdown James Reid becomes entirely dependent on her), her one attempt to break free from her internalized servitude is short-lived. While asserting her independence through physical work, she remains defined by and beholden to the master class’ gaze. Thus her book is addressed to unspecified ‘gentlemen’, the governors or medical directors of Arabella’s lunatic asylum, where Bessy has found employment as a kitchen maid and attendant. Positioned alongside



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the ‘gentlemen’ of the textual address, the reader by inference becomes associated with the madhouse keepers. As if to garner the approval of the ‘gentlemen’, Bessy announces her intention of taking up writing for good. Earlier in the story we are shown her expertise in capturing the imagination of different audiences: her mistress, for whose delectation she records the naïve thoughts of the dutiful maid; and male drawingroom society, whom she entertains with bawdy songs (one of her ballads is purloined and turned into a bestselling broadsheet by a neighbouring poet afflicted with writer’s block). The Observations suggest that, if only they are feisty enough, working-class women are able to appropriate the mistress’s tools; disentangle themselves from the master’s observation, however, they can not.

3.3 Race, science, and the gaze: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003) The inescapability of the objectifying gaze and its textual inscriptions is the focus of Hottentot Venus. This is not the first response in fiction to the case of Saartjie Baartman. Apart from the contemporaneous French Vaudeville one-acter La Vénus hottentote, ou haine aux Françaises (1814),43 traces of the cultural myth of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ can be found in Charlotte Brontë’s inarticulate and animalistic Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847), Thackeray’s ambivalent representation of Miss Swartz in Vanity Fair (1848),44 Baudelaire’s cycle of ‘Vénus Noire’ poems in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), Angela Carter’s repartee, ‘Black Venus’ (1985);45 and possibly in Olive Schreiner’s black girl Sartje in From Man to Man (1926).46 The rise of feminism and postcolonialism in the later twentieth century led to fuller explorations from a black female perspective: Grace Nichols’s Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984),47 Elizabeth Alexander’s ‘The Venus Hottentot’ (1990),48 Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus (1990),49 and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000). As Wicomb’s modern protagonist remarks – problematically, as the narrator clarifies through her omission of parts of the story – ‘One cannot write nowadays . . . without a little monograph on Baartman; it would be like excluding history itself.’50 Most recently, photographic portrayals, by Lyle Ashton Harris and Renée Valerie Cox (‘Venus Hottentot 2000, 1995’) and Ingrid Mwangi (‘Static Drift’, 2001),51 have been complemented by Zola Maseko’s documentary film (1999)52 and the publication of two biographies, which illustrate the mythologizing power of the subject even in a fact-finding project: Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully (2009), while problematizing the temptation to fictionalize Baartman, start their book with a list of ‘Dramatis Personae’,53 and Rachel Holmes



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(2007) dramatically merges the identity of Baartman’s early master with that of a later manager at a crucial moment in her story.54 Both biographies at times move in the direction of historical biofiction. Even the ‘real’ Baartman is largely a product of the imagination. Twentieth and twenty-first-century responses situate Baartman within a complex framework of racial, sexual, colonial, and scientific discourses. There are at least seven interrelated contexts within which the public and scientific display of Baartman needs to be placed: imperialism; ethnographic influences on cultural constructions of black women; scientific scopophilia and the pornographic gaze; racial categorizations; cultural practices of collection and exhibition; abolitionism; and the ethics underlying museum collections. In the first instance, Western imperialism’s territorial expansionism found its scientific counterpart in the invasion and appropriation of the racially ‘other’ body. Anne Fausto-Sterling asserts that the ‘colonial expansions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shaped European science; Cuvier’s dissection of Bartmann was a natural extension of that shaping.’ Cultural stereotypes of a ‘hidden Africa’ were mirrored in the fascination with discovering and laying bare the ‘hidden’ genitalia of the African woman. 55 Secondly, ethnographic and literary representations since the seventeenth century of Khoisan or Khoikhoi/Khoekhoe sexuality and the female body gave rise to the cultural climate that would later produce the spectacle of the ‘Hottentot Venus’; thus Susan Iwanisziw draws attention to dramatic representations influenced by Richard Ligon’s 1657 True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados.56 Thirdly, by the time Baartman arrived in London in 1810 bodily traits like a large rump in black female subjects had come to be pathologized as a physiological disorder (‘steatopygia’)57 which provided visual markers of racial qua sexual aberration: the buttocks and the purported hypertrophied labia of Khoikhoi women were taken as proof of the sexual atavism of the black races. The cultural fixation with buttocks acted as a displacement of the genitalia and also reflected anxieties about homosexuality,58 while the idea of a female genital appendage fed into contemporary fantasies about hermaphrodites and intensified fears about uncontrolled female clitoral sexuality.59 Anthropological and criminological studies by Buffon, Lombroso, Ferrero, De Blasio and Hildebrandt drew analogies between racial inferiority, sexual degeneracy, and social deviance by seeking traces of steatopygia or irregular genital development in the prostitute’s and female criminal’s,60 lesbian’s,61 or nymphomaniac’s body.62 This in turn encouraged the literary and artistic iconography of the prostitute as a ‘Hottentot’.63 The criminological interest in sexual pathology, combined



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1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same time . . . the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’; 4) as a category of ‘otherness,’ the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general ‘powerlessness’ . . .64 The extreme commodification of black women’s body parts illustrates this process of abjectification. As Holmes and Sadiah Qureshi note, ‘the breasts of Khoisan women made into souvenir pouches were kept as trophies by Europeans’,65 and ‘Khoikhoi women were treated as taxidermic material, their skins stripped and stuffed to preserve them as specimens of the anomalous’.66 The dismemberment of the African body was so profoundly ingrained as a valid ‘scientific’ undertaking in the Western psyche that even a committed anti-imperialist like Olive Schreiner, who passionately promoted the human rights of the black population in South Africa, was able to comment in a letter to a friend that she had had an inspiration for one of her novels while ‘writing an article on the Bushmen and giving a description of their skulls’.67 Imperial science constructed racial difference simultaneously in sexual and in animalistic terms. The fourth context for Baartman’s experience is the categorization of the African, specifically the Khoikhoi, as sub-human. Scientific studies drawing on ethnography had long been concerned with establishing the Khoi people as occupying the lowest rung of humanity with the San or ‘Bushman’,68 thus representing a link between human and primate. As Londa Schiebinger points out, the Linnaean concept of the Great Chain of Being was central to scientific theories of race in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: ‘This doctrine postulated that species were immutable entities arrayed along a fixed and vertical hierarchy stretching from God above down to the lowliest sentient being.’ European scientists, intent on finding evidence of this chain, embarked on comparative dissections of humans and animals and the study of skeletons: in their search for ‘transitional forms bridging the gap between animals and humans’ they ‘settled on the ape, and especially the orangutan . . . as the animal most resembling humankind’, while constructing Africans as the ‘lowest’ race of 10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn


with the imperial sexual gaze and the colonial politics of conquest, led to the conceptualization of the black female corpse as the epitome of abjection and pornographic or, in Hortense Spiller’s terms, ‘pornotropic’ obsession. Pornotropy, Spillers argues, is an essential aspect of slavery:

humans. Since women were ‘seen as sharing similar deficiencies when measured against a constant norm – the élite European man’, the black woman became the paradigm for everything that was ‘Other’.69 Fifthly, Baartman’s experience exemplifies the nineteenth-century ‘culture of display’ which witnessed the widespread collection and exhibition of exotic animals (as in London’s Liverpool Museum managed by William Bullock, who declined to exhibit Baartman but felt less compunction about displaying Laplanders a decade later).70 Baartman’s economic value, Qureshi emphasizes, lay in ‘her perceived uniqueness as a rare live specimen of the exotic.’71 Like the wild animal she was dressed up to resemble, she was subject to proddings and baitings by spectators.72 The exhibition of animals correlated with that of exotic peoples as emblems of imperial conquest and proved a particularly lucrative form of public amusement; the display of Baartman was followed between 1822 and 1853 by that of Esquimaux (as explored fictionally in Andrea Barrett’s Voyage of the Narwhal, 1998), Native Americans, San (‘Bushmen’), ‘Aztecs’, and Zulus.73 Their entertainment value was closely connected to the popularity of freak shows exhibiting human ‘curiosities’ such as dwarfs and living skeletons; human and animal exhibits often shared the same floor space.74 A sixth context is the political background of abolition. The sensation Baartman caused arguably cannot be attributed to her singularity status as a black subject: there was a sizeable black population in London at the time,75 and black performers enjoyed a considerable degree of visibility. Rather, Baartman prompted intense political interest because her arrival followed shortly after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, thus coinciding with abolitionist efforts to extend the law to achieve the emancipation of all existing slaves (a goal not realized until 1833).76 Contemporary political cartoons exploited the link between abolitionism, Whig politics, and the spectacle of the Hottentot Venus by depicting Lord Grenville (the leader of the ‘Broad Bottoms’) entering into a business arrangement with Baartman.77 A court case initiated in 1810 by the African Institution to release her from public viewings and repatriate her attracted enormous attention and was dismissed when Baartman bore witness to the consensual nature of her career as an entertainer78 and its financial rewards.79 Hendrik Cesars, who had been compromised as Baartman’s slave master, was replaced by Alexander William Dunlop; after Dunlop’s death in 1812 Baartman came under the control of a new manager/owner, Henry Taylor. Lastly, even though Baartman’s body has been laid to rest, Baartman’s case throws into relief the ethical dimensions of museum collections and the ways in which they ‘encode racialized ideologies by claiming 10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn


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to provide privileged and objective views into a people’s lifestyle’.80 The continuity of this racialized gaze rationalized with reference to scientific and educational endeavour was illustrated in a museum exhibit that toured the US, Australia, and Britain in 1992. The installation, entitled ‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit’, involved the display, inside a golden cage, of a couple purportedly originating from an obscure island represented by a map and faked Encyclopedia Britannica entry. The pair was shown carrying out traditional domestic tasks and declared willing to undertake other optional activities for a fee. As Qureshi records, ‘Many paid the requisite fee to view “primitive” genitalia or watch the ritual dance, some walking away when their expectations of “authenticity” were unfulfilled. Others . . . assumed positions of control and superiority, some even hurling abuse or sexually harassing the pair. Many participants, after realizing that the performance was not an “authentic” display, became angry and upset . . . castigat[ing] the exhibitors for their “immoral” deception of the public.’81 Given these multiple contexts, the case of Baartman has been read as a paradigmatic signifier of scientific and cultural pathologies of race, gender and sexuality: a ‘unifying symbol’ for the South African nation.82 Her experience, as Zoë Wicomb argues, ‘neatly exemplifies some of the central concerns of postmodern thought – the inscription of power in scopic relations, the construction of woman as racialized and sexualized other; the colonization and violation of the body; the role of scientific discourse in bolstering both the modernist and the colonial projects’.83 The danger of this approach, Quereshi affirms, is that Baartman’s ‘lack of agency, and politicization contribute to the risk of re-establishing her as a curiosity’.84 It is this agency and the individual behind the cultural icon that Chase-Riboud seeks to recover and, in Morrison’s terms, re-member, just as in her earlier historical novel, Sally Hemings (1979, followed by The President’s Daughter, 1994), she re-memorized the titular slave woman’s life-long relationship with Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, her owner, and the father of her slave children. In Hottentot Venus Sarah decides to leave her Khoekhoe community for servitude in white Cape Town after she has lost her entire immediate family, with both her parents and her husband and child having fallen victim to a series of white massacres. It is only by braving the hostile gaze of white society that she believes she can retain her immunity from that society’s irredeemable brutality. Chase-Riboud confers a level of choice where the factual Baartman most likely had none. An 1814 French newspaper interview claimed that Baartman was abducted on the eve of



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her wedding celebrations after her father and fiancé had been killed by marauding troops.85 Indentured life was rather more prosaic: Baartman was traded, separately from her family (she had six surviving siblings),86 from one employer to the next. While Chase-Riboud’s protagonist seeks out a white employer, the real Baartman was sold by the Dutch farmer Cornelius Muller to a Free Black, Pieter Cesars (Peter Caesar in the novel), who purchased her on behalf of his German employer, Jan Michiel Elzer; after his death she came into Pieter’s possession and subsequently worked for his brother Hendrik Cesars as a nursemaid and domestic servant.87 The complexities of black-to-black exploitation (the Cesars, descendants of slaves themselves, had slaves as well as servants)88 are polarized into white racism and male sexual abuse in the novel, where from her first encounter with a white employer Sarah is subjected to sexual harassment with the full collusion of white women: the mission nun tactfully leaves the room to allow Caesar to prod her bottom, expose himself and threaten her with his demand of sexual services. White female complicity continues in the Caesars’ home when her mistress, revolted by Sarah’s body glimpsed after a bath, reveals its particularities to her brother-in-law Hendrik, who rapes her within earshot of the family. Some years later Hendrik is persuaded by Dunlop, an explorer, naval surgeon, and adventurer, to embark on a joint money-making venture by taking Sarah to London (in real life, the debt-ridden and illiterate Cesars was pressured into a bogus contract by Dunlop, a staff surgeon at the Slave Lodge, who had probably seen one of the performances Cesars arranged for Baartman at the military hospital and come to conceive of her as the solution to his own pecuniary difficulties).89 Sarah consents to the scheme because she is in a relationship of sorts with Dunlop and believes his promises of marriage, and because she cannot see a possible future for herself in her country. As in The Observations Sarah’s internalized acquiescence with the master’s rule was initiated in childhood and early adolescence by the kind treatment of a slave master, thus forever merging the positions of master, friend, and father in the heroines’ mind: Mr Levy, to whom the thirteenyear-old Bessy was sold as a sexual slave by her mother, taught her to read and write, gave her a literary education, and encouraged her every whim, while the Reverend Freehouseland, the missionary who purchased Sarah from her aunt and named her, did not even expect sexual favours and instilled in her a deep conviction in the moral inviolability of contracts. Once entered into, an agreement, even only verbal, was to be considered binding in the eyes of God and by the laws of personal integrity: ‘All contracts were sacred . . . They represented one’s given



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word, which was the very essence of Englishness and English faith. The word of a gentleman. And the word of Christ. . . . A debt was to be honoured’ (19). This provides a psychological context for Sarah’s otherwise incomprehensible loyalty to Dunlop, a man who makes no effort to feign an attachment; it furnishes an explanation for her collusion with Dunlop and Caesar during the court case, while the written contract that is hastily drawn up may explain her acceptance of Taylor and even her self-destructive submission to the sadistic animal trainer Réaux, to whom Dunlop and Caesar sell her at the gambling table before Dunlop departs on the Beagle (an ironic reference to Darwin’s later voyage of discovery).90 By that stage Sarah is additionally bound to Dunlop in marriage.91 A woman’s position in marriage under English law is inferior even to that of the ex-slave. As her friend Alice declares, ‘He at least had to pay you as his servant, and as his slave you could claim your freedom on English soil. As his wife, you are nothing except his property’ (183). Chase-Riboud is here drawing on prominent late eighteenth and nineteenth-century feminist arguments for marital reform to end the legal quasi-slavery of wives. Sarah’s belief that every contract represents a moral pledge prevents her from absconding from Réaux, whose régime becomes intolerable when he subjects her to the ignominy of a cage on stage and to the violence of the scientific gaze. Chase-Riboud explores the way in which Sarah’s psychological allegiance to colonial authority, resulting at it does from childhood indoctrination, makes her resistant to the abolitionist cause, not least because the court case brought against her will constitutes yet another exhibition which pulls record crowds. For this reason she insists on being ‘a free woman! I am not a criminal. I am not a slave. I am not a prostitute or an immoral person’ (149–50).92 The abolitionist offer of protection appears to her as yet another attempt at appropriation (and, indeed, the African Institution was compromised by financial irregularities and other dubious practices).93 Consequently she charges the mixed-race abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, who in the novel instigates the hearing, with exploiting her for his own purposes: ‘You see me as yours, as much yours as Master Dunlop sees me as his. You see me as a means to your goal of revolution, and rebellion, against the English. You are so angry you don’t really see me at all – only as an object . . . I don’t trust you, white black man’ (134). Tragically, she fails to recognize their shared experience of racial oppression, and conceptualizes him through her internalized colonial gaze: ‘I willed myself not to understand. . . . I saw what whites saw, a crazy nigger in Englishman’s clothes . . . waiting to pounce upon them with his



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poisoned spear’ (137). Joint racial provenance offers no grounds for making common cause; rather, the friends on whose support she relies are from the world of freak shows, social rejects like herself, above all women: this is the community with which she shares her greatest sense of identity. It is women who teach her to read,94 whereas, ‘convinced . . . that books in general and the Bible in particular wouldn’t talk to black folks’ (19), she had previously resisted even the teachings of the Reverend Freehouseland. Now she takes note of her friend Caroline’s assertion that ‘A book gets you out of the prison of your mind. And to read is to write. And to write is to own yourself’ (163). But write – and right – herself is precisely what Sarah is unable to do once she is in the grasp of the scientists. The indignities she suffers as an exhibit in freak shows are insignificant when compared to the calculated brutality of the scopophilia to which she is subjected in Paris at the hands of the scientific elite. In its extreme form scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, as Laura Mulvey argues in her classical analysis of twentieth-century film, can ‘become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active, controlling sense, an objectified other.’95 Chase-Riboud’s Cuvier resembles nothing so much as a scientific Peeping Tom with more than a touch of Jack the Ripper. The threeday ordeal of posing in the nude to Cuvier and his colleagues,96 all of whom share his conviction of the inferiority and sub-humanity of the black race, is carefully prepared by Chase-Riboud’s account of Sarah’s first encounter with Cuvier at a high society event: ‘The unblinking gaze of the doctor was as cold as ice and inspected me as if I had just arrived in a crate. . . . It was the cold stare of a cobra, paralyzing with fear before striking. I felt my chest being squeezed tighter and tighter as if in a fatal embrace, one in which I recognized my own fate in helpless horror. Oh Lord, this man’s a murderer’ (222). This sets the scene for Cuvier’s scopic abuse of Sarah in the gardens of his Natural History Museum, followed by his attempted rape at another society event, and his subsequent dissection of her body. As Susan Griffin has argued, the stripping of a woman’s body, one of pornography’s ‘sacred images’, typically assumes the mythological dimension of the Arthurian quest for the holy grail.97 Cuvier takes this one step further by elevating his psychotic obsession with stripping Sarah’s body of its ‘apron’ into a sacred text of science. Chapter 18, which presents Sarah’s unwilling modelling as a scientific peep-show, is narrated by a by-stander discomfited by his recognition of her humanity, the sculptor Nicolas Tiedemann. (This character is



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modelled on the real-life Nicolas Huet, one of Cuvier’s in-house staff painters who produced a body profile of Baartman,98 and Frederick Tiedemann, an abolitionist scientist who through comparative brain dissection disproved the theory that blacks bore greater resemblance to primates than to whites, arguing that any differences of ‘character’ were the result of ‘slavery and inhuman treatment’.)99 In her Acknowledgements Chase-Riboud notes that she based the racial pronouncements in this chapter on verbatim quotations from Cuvier and other nineteenthcentury scientists, philosophers and politicians, including Jefferson, Lincoln, Hegel, Darwin, Galton, Voltaire, Huxley, and Broca (319). The pornographic impulse that underlies the scientific obsession with Baartman is reflected in Cuvier’s and de Blainville’s unsuccessful attempts to coax or coerce her into permitting an examination of her genitalia; as in the novel Baartman was offered money but categorically refused to expose herself.100 The real-life de Blainville’s gaze and exasperation with Baartman’s resistance are in the novel projected primarily on to Cuvier, whose introductory speech to the other scientists in Chapter 18 is indebted both to Cuvier’s dissection report of 1817 and to de Blainville’s 1816 report to the Société Philomatique.101 The dehumanizing, deeply misogynist gaze of male science is also apparent in Frédéric Cuvier (George Cuvier’s brother) and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s Natural History of Mammals, the first volume of which (1824) reproduces lithographs of Baartman’s nude body taken from the Jardin des Plantes etchings.102 That Baartman features as the only human exhibit in a book on mammals signals her classification as sub-human, while the nature of her representation (the shadowing in of the nipples with the effect of throwing them into greater relief) carries distinctly sexual undertones. Pornographic scopophilia, or what one might call ‘scopopornia’, is key to Chase-Riboud’s presentation of Cuvier’s report of his autopsy of Baartman.103 While in his ‘Extrait d’Observations’ (1817) Cuvier, like de Blainville, draws analogies with primates, he depicts Baartman in more feminine terms than his colleague, extolling the gracefulness of parts of her body, and commenting on her ease of dancing and singing ‘in the manner of her country’.104 This eroticization of an individual whose body he then proceeds to dissect manifestly turns the autopsy itself into the public performance of an erotic act undertaken on an exotic subject, the object of manifold fantasies. (Cuvier’s factual report did not so much focus on Baartman’s sexual as rather on her racial features; he also refuted some of the myths about the ‘Hottentot apron’ as a congenital and pleasurable phenomenon.)105 Chapter 21 of the novel interweaves



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There is nothing more famous in natural history than the Hottentot apron, and at the same time, there is nothing that has been the object of so much argument.106 . . . . . . The baron had arrived at last at the place in Africa he wanted to be, most wanted to possess. . . . I listened to him murmuring like the litany Liberty, equality, fraternity, the litany Prepuce, pubes, pudendum, lavishing the skill of a sculptor and the heart of a butcher to excise the mysterious apron he was now free to explore without my consent. Over my dead body. . . . . . . Gentlemen, I have the honor to present to the Academy the genital organs of this, my Venus Hottentot, prepared in a way that leaves no doubt about the nature of her apron . . .107 . . . So, I thought, the soul is not located in the sex, for I feel nothing now that it is gone, floating in a jar, labeled Hottentot Venus, that circulates amongst the savants. (279, 281, 282, 283) The fictive Cuvier’s textual address to the reader is disrupted by Sarah’s observations, which has the effect of positioning us not alongside but above Cuvier, exposing to close scrutiny not only the autopsied body but also and especially the scientist’s disturbed mind and sexual violence. (This is made particularly explicit in Cuvier’s feverish excitement reaching its climax when he excises Sarah’s genitalia.) The reader is guided not by Cuvier but by Sarah’s disembodied voice, which comments sardonically on the proceedings and vows to haunt the museum. And haunt she does: just as in life she had released Cuvier’s imprisoned birds, so now she brings about the grisly death of Réaux, wreaks vengeance on Caesar and Dunlop, sets fire to Cuvier’s museum, and ensures the extinction of his family before giving him the coup de grâce. Finally, Cuvier’s brain is dissected on the same table and displayed in the same museum; in terms of its proportion to body size it proves to be smaller than hers (309). Cuvier and the other scientists’ speculations about the propinquity of the Khoekhoe people to the orangutan are brought full circle forty-five years after her death, when she observes the encounter between the aged Tiedemann and Charles Darwin. The meeting of two generations of scientists signposts the continued legacy of scientific racism in the Victorian period. As Crais and Scully note, the ‘Hottentot Venus’s greatest notoriety came with the spectacular proliferation of scientific racism in the second half of the nineteenth century’, with Baartman typically



Cuvier’s report with the language of a circus performer crossed with that of a pornographer:

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being cited as evidence of racial hierarchies.108 The depiction of the Hottentot Venus as ‘grotesque’ also served to standardize as superior European categories of aesthetic beauty.109 Thus in The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin referred to steatopygia to illustrate the extreme divergence in aesthetic sensibilities between ‘black’ and ‘white’ races: what was venerated as a marker of beauty among the former was perceived as deformity and disability in the West.110 In the novel Darwin’s own simian physiognomy, exploited by Victorian caricaturists, hints at racism’s displacement of anxieties about the self onto the Other: while Cuvier in his factual dissection report affirmed that he ‘had never seen a human head more similar to those of monkeys’,111 Sarah’s ghost comments at catching sight of Darwin that ‘I had never seen a white man who so resembled an ape’ (292). If Hottentot Venus gives us Sarah’s voice, this is of necessity a voice disjointed, its fragmentation being represented by the chapters’ shifting perspectives and the multiple voices placed alongside or in alternation with hers: a device which pointedly draws attention to her constrained agency (‘Just because I consent to this life doesn’t mean I choose it’, she tells Wedderburn [124]). The fantasy ending in which she takes revenge on the men who exploited and degraded her proffers a carnivalesque element which seeks to explode the control exerted by the framing strategies so evocative of her textual and sexual confinement. The objectification to which the real-life Baartman was subjected and the role of science in essentializing and rationalizing racial oppression are inscribed into the epigraphs to each chapter, most of which are drawn from Cuvier’s scientific writings. The chapter epigraphs are themselves framed by the four parts of the novel (early life in South Africa; London; Paris; afterlife and burial in South Africa), which are headed by extracts from nineteenth-century European writers (Mary Shelley, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Alexander Pushkin). As Jane Austen puts it in a fictive letter inserted in chapter 12, ‘What had I really felt, . . . witnessing this cruel humiliation of one of my sex, but a secret . . . joy at my own safety and invulnerability . . . I could never be she’ (159).112 The pastiche of Austen is unconvincing, but the implied reference to Jane Eyre and Bertha’s function as Jane’s Other reinforces the message of the novel’s framing devices: that white Western literature had a major investment in the imperialist project113 which made the abuse of Saartjie Baartman possible and continues to bolster racial hegemonies today. The sexual and textual inscription of the female body through the discourses of science and the politics of the gaze operate differently in the two novels discussed so far. While in The Observations the disciplining



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gaze is subverted by the working-class heroine and re-directed towards her own (limited) empowerment, Hottentot Venus problematizes the potential for resistance and appropriation by the racial subject it serves to control and subjugate, particularly if the gaze is wielded by imperial male science with the pornographic purpose of objectifying, degrading, dehumanizing and figuratively as well as literally dismembering the black female body. Our final example, Starling’s Journal of Dora Damage, provides a synthesis of Harris’s and Chase-Riboud’s approaches by drawing on the plot of a Victorian female artisan’s struggle to break free from the pornographic book trade in which she becomes entangled.

3.4 Reclaiming the (textual) body: Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006) In Dora Damage, too, the male gaze is harnessed to racial and sexual violence and cloaked in the guise of science. As in Chase-Riboud, factual contexts provide a backdrop to the fictional events: Starling’s Afterword indicates that the upper-class gentlemen’s club which commissions book covers for obscene and sadistic materials and conceals its toxic fantasies (necrophilia, racist violence, rape, pedophilia, sexual mutilation, ritual murder) behind Rousseau’s (in itself fraudulent) concept of the noble savage,114 ‘Les Sauvages Nobles’, is based on the factual ‘Cannibal Club’, an offshoot of the Anthropological Society of London with close links to the Royal Geographic Society.115 Prominent members included Richard Burton (who organized the club),116 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Charles Duncan Cameron, General John Studholme Hodgson, Sir James Plaisted Wilde (Lord Penzance),117 Thomas Bendyshe and, as an associate, Frederick Hankey.118 Monckton Milnes’s extensive collection of pornography was heavily indebted to Hankey, pronounced ‘un fou, un monstre’119 by the Goncourt brothers and ‘a second de Sade without the intellect’120 by his friend Henry Spencer Ashbee, the editor of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877, published under the pseudonym ‘Pisanus Fraxi’) and likely author of My Secret Life (1888–94, published under the pseudonym ‘Walter’). Like Sir Jocelyn Knightley in Starling’s novel, Ashbee donated his collection to the British Library.121 Ashbee’s rebellious family is recreated in Dora and her entourage: one of Ashbee’s estranged daughters became a bookbinder, his son Charles an Arts and Crafts reformer and socialist, and his wife took up feminism after initiating their separation.122 As in Dora Damage, the Cannibals were involved not only in the consumption but also the production of pornography.123 In her study of the club Lisa Sigel draws



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attention to the conjunction of class privilege, Tory politics, imperialist science, and ethnographic pornography, which ‘distinguished men from women, white from black . . . [and] justified social and political distinctions between those who studied and those who were observed’. Sigel concludes that ‘As scholars, politicians, scientists, artists, and finally imperialists . . . [t]hey contributed to the ethos of British society that argued for immutable difference, and they used this ethos to create the hierarchies of empire. Their fascination with these distinctions helped construct sex and race as biological categories . . . [T]he pornographic investigation of sexuality did not preclude the scientific; instead, they complemented and intensified each other.’124 As Starling’s novel emphasizes, women, too, can be participants in the commodification of others: Dora’s landlady Mrs Eeles, a satiric version of ‘a Miss Havisham in black’,125 has a weakness for child necrophilia, and the Ladies’ Society for Fugitive Slaves (probably modelled on the Ladies’ London Emancipation Society, the first nationwide women’s anti-slavery society, established in 1863),126 which is presided over by the rebellious wife of Sir Jocelyn Knightley, Dora’s principal client, exploits its freed slaves by exhibiting them in the semi-nude for sensual delectation and in order for the ladies to indulge in rape fantasies during private gatherings.127 Dora herself becomes an unwilling accomplice of the club when, driven by economic necessity, she takes on her husband’s bookbinding business after he is incapacitated by rheumatism. Her initial commission is innocuous. But when he realizes that his bookbinder is a woman, Knightley, aware of the opportunity to stimulate the dulled imaginations of the club, begins to engage Dora in a complex game of voyeurism and exhibitionism. It is at this point that she is given her first commission for sexually explicit material. After months of designing covers for increasingly disturbing books Dora is caught in a police raid on Charles Diprose, Knightley’s agent’s business in Hollywell Street (the hub of the erotic book trade in Victorian England),128 and finds herself abducted and deposited at Knightley’s house in the middle of a dinner party of Noble Savages. Here she recognizes that her gaze, imagined and now manifested in the flesh, is part of the erotic thrill for the men: ‘They were all there – for I had read their diaries, their letters, their stories, and they knew it too, as they watched me watching them’ (240). Knightley introduces her to the group as his ‘magnum opus. What a woman we have made of you!’ (235). Held in the lascivious stare of the men, Dora grasps that, to them, her professional service has always been a sexual one, and feels disempowered by her own gaze: ‘It felt tremendously improper for me to witness this



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male occasion; it somehow felt more shameful than anything I had seen in any book . . . But I could not avert my gaze, and the men within, too, stared back out at me, laughing in a fraternal code that sneered at outsiders’ (239). Dora finds herself trapped in the scopophilic régime Mulvey has described as pertaining to mid-twentieth-century film: ‘The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure . . . In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed . . . Woman . . . holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire.’129 While Dora the spectator is looking ‘on’ and ‘in’, she can never be the subject of the active and possessive gaze, having always already been objectified and possessed in imagination by the men who are watching her. There is no possible interchange, only the subjugation of the one by the gaze of the others. Neither is Dora a free agent in respect of her employment: when she objects to certain commissions, Diprose informs her that she has ‘no choice over what you do and do not bind’ (220). This lack of choice is also reflected in Knightley’s idiosyncratic payment practices which resemble those of the capricious lover more than the employer: feasts and feminine fripperies, not money, initially at least, is what she receives in return for her labour. Knightley’s gifts – a parasol, a tortoiseshell comb, a fan, dresses for herself and her daughter Lucinda, dangerously highheeled boots she cannot wear – represent the body of the courtesan, and it is this metonymic body which she then proceeds to work into her book covers. Her function, she realizes, is to act as a living embodiment of the sexual fantasies she enfolds in fitting covers: ‘I was one step away from Mistress Venus with her birch rods’ (220). Like Sarah Baartman she is approximated to, and judged by others as, a prostitute: the visits she receives from a succession of men, both high and low-born (Knightley, Diprose, his printer Pizzy, a brutish man easily mistaken for a pimp), are misinterpreted by her neighbours and lead to her daughter being shunned. If in Hottentot Venus Sarah decides to make the best of a bad job, so too does Dora, directing her energies into the purification of insalubrious matter by transforming it into aesthetically pleasing art: ‘To justify my role as Mistress Bindress in the obscene underworld of the book trade, I had to convince myself I was fashioning . . . the pearl and the grit in the oyster; I was making something beautiful out of something ugly’ (163). It is with this feminine aesthetics of decorative art – an art rooted in women’s traditional needlework130 – that Dora originally set out on her apprenticeship as a bookbinder. Inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s habit of binding her brother’s poems in her old gowns (70),131 and in anticipation of the surrealist artist Mary Reynold’s imaginative use of domestic



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accessories in the 1920s to 1940s,132 Dora recycles the paraphernalia of the household goddess: her mother’s silk dress, cushions, ribbons, earrings. The text affords an ironic perspective on a Victorian woman artisan whose economic constraints effect an alignment of her work with a materially more comfortable middle-class aestheticism. Evocative of the Pre-Raphaelite art of the time,133 Dora’s book designs also carry resemblance to the patterns, textiles, and printing innovations of the Arts and Crafts movement. The crucial difference is that Dora is penniless and must make do with the materials she has on hand; that she does so successfully bears witness to her talent. Her failure to thrive as a housewife stands in marked contrast to the skill with which she masters the craft of bookbinding. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Dora’s expertise in feminizing this traditionally masculine trade prompts marital discord and the threat of union action for breach of the prohibition to employ women as binders. Dora is here cast as a representative of the increasing numbers of women entering the bookbinding industry in the mid-Victorian period and the concerns this raised among male trade union members. Indeed, local factions in the London Society of Bookbinders exerted considerable pressure on individual employers as late as 1874 (the year which saw the establishment of the national Society of Women Employed in Bookbinding) to dismiss women workers on the grounds of wage competition and cheap labour.134 Starling’s novel exposes the lack of union protection and absence of viable alternatives in Victorian women’s economic struggle for survival: as she is neither a widow nor a fallen woman but a working mother in search of a living wage and an occupation which will allow her to look after her epileptic daughter at home, no benevolent organization will consider her for support, and she is faced with the stark choice of ‘workhouse or whorehouse’ (45). This is what keeps Sarah Baartman chained to her ‘keepers’ (193). It is because of women’s vulnerable position on the job market and the sexualization of their work that Dora falls into the hands of the Noble Savages. Her imaginative adaptation of a version of écriture féminine, her very aptitude in ‘writing the body’ in creating book covers out of feminine accessories, inevitably attracts the attention of Knightley and is purloined for pornographic purposes: ‘Just as some colours flatter particular complexions, and some bonnet styles suit certain shapes of head’, she is told, ‘so too must you consider the colours and styles of your binding according to the nature of the book’ with the aim ‘to arouse and induce a . . . carnal, rather than cerebral, reaction. . . . [I]t is the responsibility of you, the binder, so to clothe texts for me, the bibliophile, in suitably pleasing habillé’ (113–14).



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Knightley’s own ‘habillé’, the multiple guises in which he chooses to present himself, is pointedly unstable. A three-way cross between ChaseRiboud’s Dunlop and Cuvier and the real-life Richard Burton (with whom he shares, among other things, his spear-wound),135 and with ironic undertones of Austen’s fatherly protector/lover, he is, at turns and simultaneously, an adventurer, scientist, ethnographer, imperialist, racist, wifeabuser, who nevertheless treats Dora as his intellectual equal and suffers bouts of kind-heartedness at the least expected moments. A pornographer with violent proclivities who prides himself on his ‘collection of clitorises pickled in glass jars, along with the renowned “Hottentot apron”’ (238), he steps in to save the life and bodily integrity of the woman who threatens to ruin him. His most prized possession is a manuscript Dora is instructed to bind in what she is told is ‘Imperial Leather’ (342) and later discovers to be human skin (the remains of a Hindu woman the ‘knightly’ imperialist rescued from the funereal pyre). And yet the same man proves a skilled and humane doctor who brings indispensable medical relief to Peter’s rheumatism and Lucinda’s epileptic fits. This does not stop him, however, from menacing Dora with subjecting Lucinda to a clitoridectomy. Meant to excise independent female sexuality, Victorian clitoridectomies were indeed rationalized with reference to epilepsy (as well as hysteria and ‘self-abuse’).136 Knightley’s linguistic versatility, ethnographic learning, medicinal knowledge, and sexual curiosity are evidently modelled on Burton (1821–90), who, if he did not sport a body tattoo in order to pass as a native, underwent a circumcision in preparation for his pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, during which he successfully impersonated a Muslim doctor and dervish. Burton’s position on slavery and imperialism was ambivalent: he employed slave traders during his travels, abhorred mixed-race unions, and was scornful of abolitionism, yet from the early 1860s until 1880 he repeatedly called on the British government to abolish the slave trade in the Red Sea and in Egypt and to abandon the West Africa settlements, referring to slavery as ‘a blasphemy against humanity’.137 His contempt for Catholicism and his lifelong religious disagreement with his wife Isobel, a devout Catholic intent on converting him, are displaced into the race question and Knightley’s rage at Sylvia’s abolitionist fervour. Burton’s interest in Eastern erotica and in cataloguing the sexual particularities of different nations, and more specifically his fascination with circumcision, castration, and mutilation are projected into Knightley’s pornographic tastes. Like Knightley, Burton published erotica, some of which were printed under pseudonyms and under the guise of a fictive publishing house. His unexpurgated



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translation of and scholarly annotations to the Arabian Nights secured him great acclaim. While his sense of exile (born to English parents, he was brought up in France) is recreated in Knightley, Burton’s paternity was never in question. As Starling’s and other recent novels intimate, Burton has joined the company of ‘eminent Victorians’ (the Brontës, Brownings, Dickens, Charles Dogdson, James, Tennyson, Wilde) reimagined in the genre of neo-Victorian ‘bio-fiction’.138 Two of Dora Damage’s central scenes are played out between Knightley, Dora, and Diprose in Knightley’s study, which bears some resemblance to Cuvier’s museum and laboratory in Hottentot Venus: bursting with stuffed exotic animals, rare anatomy books, ethnographic and travel equipment and books (with several volumes by Burton) and erotic world literature (Boccaccio’s Decameron), it boasts a tiger skin and an Anatomical Venus at opposite sides of the room, as if to indicate the correspondences between a wild animal tamed in death and the body of woman made safe by the scalpel. Anatomical Venuses were wax models of women’s bodies with detachable fronts from which the organs could be removed. Used for medical training purposes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, replicas of the male and female body addressed sanitary and psychological issues resulting from the handling of corpses, as well as the shortage of human bodies available.139 However, Anatomical Venuses differed from male anatomical models in their meticulous adornment (long hair, fingernails, painted lips, sometimes necklaces) and in their eroticized poses; they often reposed on silk cushions (Figure 3.6).140 The glass cases in which they are displayed today associate them with Sleeping Beauty, the dormant object of desire forever compliant with the male gaze. In order to gauge Dora’s response to the spectacle of sexualized science, Knightley positions himself alongside her ‘as if he wanted to see what I was seeing’ (102). What she sees is of course not what she gets: the ambiguous title of the opulently bound volume of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543, ‘On the fabric of the human body’), the first anatomy book based primarily on human dissection, which revolutionized medical science in the Renaissance, will figure prominently later on in the novel, when Dora discovers this to be the title of the mysterious book she was made to inscribe blindfolded: ‘De humani corporis fabrica’, made from human flesh. Here again, the gaze is instrumental in structuring the sexual power relations between the objects of medical, scientific, and pornographic discourses and the men producing and disseminating these discourses. Before informing Dora that she meets the requirements of the job, Knightley offers her an appraisal of herself which involves an analysis of her physiognomy and case notes of her parental



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Figure 3.6 Venus Anatomica, Felice Fontana Workshop, Florence, 1780s, painted wax figure © The Semmelweis Museum, Library and Archives of the History of Medicine, Budapest, Hungary

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medical history. At the end of her visit Dora is presented with the Noble Savages stamp with which she is instructed to mark the rear covers of the books she will bind;141 she herself is of course later to be branded similarly when her posterior is tattooed with the Noble Savages imprint in Diprose’s preparation for her murder and prospective reprocessing: ‘I, who was once a woman, was to become a book covering . . . Sartor Resartus. The binder re-bound’ (409).142 In contradistinction to Cuvier’s museum, which in Hottentot Venus is the site of Sarah’s most humiliating exhibition during her lifetime, race appears to feature only marginally in Knightley’s study: the ‘tribal spears, beaded headdresses, and shields’ (102) on display on the walls are hardly taken in by Dora. And yet they play a major part in the denouement of the novel, the second key scene in Knightley’s study, when Dora, with the help of her lover, the freed American slave Din, kills Diprose, in selfdefence, with a spear and an overdose of chloroform, the latter administered with the verbal assistance of Knightley. Race, and in particular sexual stereotypes of race, matter greatly to the Knightley household: visitors encounter the race question on the very doorstep in the form of a hatstand in the shape of a semi-nude African boy. In the course of her first meeting with her employer Dora learns of Knightley’s intense distaste for his wife’s abolitionist convictions; later, when he casts her out for giving birth to a dark-skinned baby, even Dora suspects Lady Knightley of having exploited Din before he joined her business. What only transpires at the end, in an intertextual echo of Kate Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby’ (1893),143 is that Knightley harbours a ‘dark’ secret hinted at already in his Noble Savages alias ‘Nocturnus’ (a pun on his name: Knightley/nightly): that of his own mixed-race origins. His father was a French diplomat at the Algerian court; in a period of chaos after political relations broke down his English mother was raped (a scenario reminiscent of The Lustful Turk, the – authentic – pornographic book Dora is instructed to bind).144 Knightley’s fixation with human skin and bodily inscriptions, as well as his simultaneous revulsion by and fascination with African sexuality reveal deep-seated psychological issues. This is indicated by the ever more repulsive racist materials Dora receives for binding, such as a book featuring the Hottentot Venus entitled Afric-Anus (in its evocation of Ashbee’s pseudonym, Pisanus, an intertextual pun on the puerile nature of pornographic designations); its sub-title invokes the malaise of white masculinity: A Scientific Foray into the Size of the Negro Rectum in Relation to the Penis; followed by an Essay on the Libidinosity of Women of Colour (213). Not only does Knightley own the human skin of a Hindu



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widow, he also fantasizes about ‘L[a] peau de ma femme’ (384),145 telling his wife during their happier days that he is so enamoured of her skin that ‘he wanted to bind a volume of the finest love poetry from [her] shoulders after [her] death, so he would never have to be parted from their smoothness’ (385). His obsession is indicative of his profound anxiety about his own skin and its racial classifications (subaltern like the Indian widow; or English, upper class, and of the master race like his wife?). This may account for the startling contradictions in his life, of on the one hand ‘build[ing] [his] very career on the subjugation of [his] own race’ (435), and on the other inscribing his secret self on his body. The body tattoo he had inflicted on himself in order to be taken for an indigenous African during a dangerous expedition and his desire to have his complete works bound ‘with the skin from [his] torso, with the scar left by the spear resplendent across the back panel, and the tattoo round [his] navel on the front’ (147) constitute racial markers which he displays in spectacular fashion while concealing their hidden meanings. Ultimately he is able to uncover himself only to Dora, and disappears into the heart of his darkness, Africa, after leaving his estate to his mixed-raced son. The afterlife of the characters offers a personal-cum-political solution to the sexual colonization of women. By starting to give bookbinding lessons for women and founding a female bookbinding union (428)146 Dora helps to establish a viable career pathway that will enable women to move beyond the bleak choice of whorehouse, workhouse, madhouse. Starling’s dénouement is significantly dissimilar to the move of Sarah Waters’s Maud Lilly into rather than out of the sex trade. In Fingersmith (2003)147 Maud has internalized her pornographic training by her uncle (another version of Henry Spencer Ashbee) to the point of no return and concludes her narrative existence by writing lesbian pornography for the male heterosexual market. In contrast, Starling provides a programmatically feminist outlook for her protagonist. This also applies to personal relationships, where two counter-families – a non-sexual marriage between gay friends for the purposes of companionship and mutual protection and a female community of two women and their children – set new agendas for lifestyles more commonly found in the early twenty-first century than in 1902, the year Lucinda’s Epilogue ends. The text outlines the possibility of but ultimately rejects a romantic ending for Dora and Din, who part in order to achieve their separate political missions: while the Victorian period witnessed mixed-race marriages,148 this is not an option for Starling’s couple. Dora’s feminist aspirations prove more successful: with the publication



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of her journal she accomplishes what in The Observations Bessy plans to undertake at the end of her journey, and what Sarah Baartman realizes through her voiceover: to reclaim the female body for women’s writing, and thus to overwrite and invalidate the male gaze and its objectifying and dehumanizing discourses. Like a Victorian Hélène Cixous149 Dora calls on women to write themselves into existence: ‘I wanted to hand [notebooks] out on New Cut and Lambeth Walk, throw them from Waterloo Bridge to the mud-larks, walk up the street and give them to Mrs Eeles, Nora Negley . . . Write them, I would scream at them. What are we to write, their faces would ask . . . Your dreams, I would cry. Your thoughts. Your fantasies. Yours, and yours alone. In your own voice. Not constructed for you by Mr Eeles . . . or Mr Negley, dead or alive. Author your own body. Walk your own text’ (392).

3.5 Conclusion The three novels examined in this chapter problematize the multiple ways in which sexual, social, and racial hegemonies were created and maintained by the scopophilic, disciplining, mutilating régime of science, exploring the possibility of resistance and the potential of a femaleauthored reinscription and resurrection of the female body. As the case of Baartman illustrates, this was more difficult to achieve in real life than in fiction. Chase-Riboud’s and Starling’s novels provide chilling reminders of the factual sexual violence inflicted on the bodies of women in the name of science. In her Afterword Starling notes that Hankey ‘owned several volumes of pornography bound in human skin. Richard Burton promised him that he would bring back a piece of human skin from his trip to Dahomey in 1863 (stripped from “une négresse vivante” so that it would retain its luster)’ (446–7).150 The sadistic tastes of Cannibal Club members are also expressed in a commonplace book entry by Monckton Milnes dated 1860 and partly quoted in Dora Damage (447): ‘There is no accounting for tastes . . . Hankey would like to have a Bible bound with bits of skin stripped off live from the cunts of a hundred little girls and yet he could not be persuaded to try the sensation of f-ing a Muscovy Duck while its head was cut off . . . Hankey’s line of cruel enjoyment and his strong sense of the wickedness of killing animals for food. His extreme desire to see a girl hanged and have the skin of her backside tanned to bind his “Justine” with.’151 Such fantasies may well have been restricted to the disturbed minds of individuals, but as Sigel points out, the pornographic impulse embedded in the ethnographic studies and the erotic reading and writing habits of the Cannibal Club arose from within



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the same scientific and social contexts from which the new disciplines of anthropology, sexology, natural history and psychology developed: ‘Just as the empire reached its apex and the human sciences gained legitimacy at the beginning of the 1880s, the Cannibal Club apparently disbanded. The emergent disciplines overtook the club’s ways of thinking about sexuality and further legitimized them.’152 Starling’s and Chase-Riboud’s novels raise disconcerting questions about the conceptual paradigms of contemporary science. The fantasy of partaking in scientifically legitimated necrophiliac pleasures was recently brought to the global public by Gunther von Hagens’s sensational ‘Körperwelten’ (‘Body Worlds: An Anatomical Opus’, 1997–2009) exhibition, which by 2002 had attracted over eight million visitors worldwide,153 and in which corpses donated to medical science were presented, flayed like medieval torture victims, in provocative poses (one of the exhibits in the 2002 London exhibition, for example, was shown playing at chess, a metaphor for the game of life and death in which von Hagens aims to engage his audience). Visitors to this combination of a Victorian freak and a contemporary peep show crossed with the genres of slasher and snuff movie were welcomed by the Gothic fantasy of a pair of ghost riders in the tradition of Gottfried August Bürger’s 1773 poem ‘Lenore’ (‘The dead ride fast’).154 Edgar Allan Poe’s similarly titled poem of 1845 about a beautiful woman claimed by death155 further illustrates what has evidently become ‘the most poetical topic in the world’:156 the corpse as an erotic spectacle and mass market commodity.157 The erotics of the corpse, as Elisabeth Bronfen has demonstrated,158 serves to reaffirm rather than dissolve tropes of gender. Von Hagens’s representation of the paradigmatic male and female body is, predictably, stereotypical and fetishistic: warrior masculinity (an erect, muscular body in active fencing position)159 meets sexually provocative femininity, inviting the scopophilic gaze even in death (a female corpse reclining sideways, with one arm coquettishly held against the back of the head).160 The erotic positioning of von Hagens’s female cadaver bears striking resemblance to the iconography of the Anatomical Venus. These prototypes carry powerful echoes of male Western science across the centuries. The most revealing exhibit was the one in which the 2002 show culminated: ‘the bisected cadaver of an eight-months pregnant woman with her womb opened to reveal the foetus’. As the Guardian reported, ‘Von Hagens always arranges the exhibition this way: it starts relatively mutedly with preserved body parts and ends with the emotional climacteric’ of what von Hagens calls his ‘edutainment’.161



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If, following Andreas Vesalius’s lead, male scientists like von Hagens believe that ‘the violation of the body [is] the revelation of its truth’,162 it is surely no accident that much of contemporary women’s writing is so intent on interrogating the ways in which the sexual body of woman has been inscribed and objectified in cultural and textual history. Women’s historical and neo-Victorian fiction draws attention to and thus challenges us to confront the continuing legacy in our own time of the sexual violation of the human and especially the female body cloaked in the guise of science and education. In exploring the resistance of their fictional protagonists to actual abuses in the past, neo-Victorian fiction by women seeks to overwrite the pornographic ‘edutainment’ of our contemporary present.



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Spectrality and S(p)ecularity: Some Reflections in the Glass

A scopic culture developed from the possibilities of just three vitreous elements combined and recombined, the glass panel, the mirror, and the lens. These had been available for centuries but they now took different forms . . . In the nineteenth century glass became a third or middle term: it interposed an almost invisible layer of matter between the seer and the seen – the sheen of a window, the silver glaze of the mirror, the convexity or concavity of the lens . . . To look through glass in the mid-nineteenth century was most likely to look through and by means of the breath of an unknown artisan. The congealed residues of somebody else’s breath remained in the window, decanter, and wineglass, traces of the workman’s body in the common bottle, annealed in the substance he worked. Held up to the light a piece of common nineteenth-century window glass will display small blemishes, blisters, almost invisible striae, spectral undulations that are the mark of bodily labour and a brief expectation of life. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds (2008)1 One of the surprising things about glass, to northerners, must have been its resemblance to ice, and its difference from ice. Glass is made from sand, heated and melted: ice is a form of water, which shifts from solid to liquid with the seasons. The fairy stories which I now see provided much of my secret imagery as a 143



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In previous chapters we have examined the influence of material, mnemonic and literary inheritances, and scientific investigation in relation to Victorian discourses of race and sexuality. Alongside science, religion is at the heart of the Victorian period’s self-conceptualization. In this chapter, therefore, we take the simultaneously technological and scientific configuration of glass and specularity as a motif through which to interrogate notions of belief, faith, and religious understanding in neo-Victorian explorations of the nineteenth century’s doubts about philosophical and transcendental interpretation and identity. We are tracing the nature of glass and the mirror, pinpointed so accurately by Byatt as at the roots of the northern European fairytale, as metaphorical representations of the spectral and the s(p)ecular in our reinterpretation of the Victorians’ use of such tropes. Isobel Armstrong’s recent book Victorian Glassworlds (2008) is a reflection on the cultural possibilities of reading the Victorians’ fascination, even obsession, with glass as part of a wider metaphorical and metaphysical investigation of transparency as a political, social, and philosophical ideal. Armstrong’s evocation of the nineteenth century’s optical refraction through the idea of the ‘Victorian glassworld’ poses important questions about the nature of Victorian vision in multiple senses. The ‘middle term’ of Armstrong’s discussion, the intermediary state of the window, mirror, or lens, is, we would suggest, adaptable to the ways in which neo-Victorian literature sets up a mirror-like or reflective stance between our own period and that of the nineteenth century. The ‘invisible layer of matter between the seer and the seen’ could usefully be viewed as the textual layering of the contemporary novel and its Victorian narrative, the text becoming almost a glass permitting a double-viewed reflection. This double view and the visual sense of ‘looking backwards’ to the Victorians through contemporary lenses has been evoked though not explored in detail in recent critical works such as Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007) and Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007).3 But while such analyses have remarked on the disconnected continuities and fragmentations of those reflections using a range of literary and cultural moments from recent years, very little has been written on the ways in which neo-Victorian spectrality can be seen as a reflection of our inability to recapture the Victorians, and the impossibility of see(k)ing the ‘truth’ of the period through either fiction or fact, a point made by



child are northern tales about ice, glass, mirrors. It is surprising how often they go together. A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories (2000)2

Gary Day in reviewing both Joyce and Kaplan’s works in relation to religion in particular.4 Texts themselves become shadows, spectres and written ghosts that never quite materialize into substantive presences but instead remain simulations of the ‘real’. Much of the impossibility of providing the ‘proof’ for an ‘authentic’ experience of Victorianism comes down to a sense of the antithetical nature of our religious or spiritual relationship with the Victorians. Patricia Duncker has recently spoken of the neo-Victorian novel’s reticence in engaging with the multiple crises of religious faith undergone in the nineteenth century.5 Yet we would argue that both the failure to voice these crises and the dangers of overlooking them when they do occur in contemporary texts is to miss the ‘small blemishes’ in the glass that Armstrong writes about in a powerful discussion of the human presence of glass. Armstrong comments on this investment in the human nature of glass not only in terms of its manufacture at a general level but also through the way in which glass and its divinity, its magic, captured the ‘ghostly’ or spectral presence of its creator’s breath. Although Armstrong does not bring out the parallel explicitly, there is a sense in which her description is related to the question of Victorian spiritualism and the desire to see the mist of the mirror both as human and spirit-like, divine and earthly. The mystical, even magical nature of the glass object is always a deception, just as the mirror is never a true reflection of reality. The textuality and materiality of the window, mirror, or lens is thus a filter through which imagination and difference might meet, as closely as possible, the true or authentic. In this respect, it is worth considering how the visuality of the spectral and textual is posited in contemporary fiction that has to deal with the different nature of Victorian experience and its inconsistencies with contemporary negotiations of the past. One way to address this is through the return to the Victorians’ fascination with the possibilities of the spirit world and mediumship. Again, we think Armstrong’s Victorian narrative is a useful lens here, particularly when she configures the nature of the duality of glass; as she writes, ‘Glass is an antithetical material. It holds contrary states within itself as barrier and medium. The riddles it proposes arise from the logic of its material and sensuous nature.’6 Such ‘riddles’, one might argue, are the core tensions of Victorian belief, drawn into the division between the stained-glass window providing a pathway to God on the one hand and the scientist’s microscope exploring the evidence for human origins on the other; it was just such a dialectic as this which was exploited in the nineteenth century by writers and scientists alike.



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This visuality is spectral and specular in the sense that it haunts by its very presence in and dislocation from the real. Although the mirror or glass sets up the difference between states (reality, mirage) and the spiritualism of the Victorians provides a similar binary (living, dead), these are nevertheless permeable barriers. ‘Transparency’, Armstrong comments, ‘encourages a simple dualism, or, what is the opposite form of the same thing, the collapse of seer and seen into one another.’7 Armstrong’s suggestion here of the inherent ontological and epistemological tensions of glass bears relation to Julian Wolfreys’s Derrida-influenced comments on the nature of spectrality itself. Wolfreys writes: ‘[t]he identification of spectrality appears in a gap between the limits of two ontological categories . . . by emerging between, and yet not as part of, two negations: neither, nor. A third term, the spectral, speaks of the limits of determination, while arriving beyond the terminal both in and of identification in either case (alive/dead)’.8 Spectrality and glass, clarity and opacity, visibility and obscurity – all these terms are connected within the thread of the ‘(alive/dead)’ parentheses of Wolfreys’s statement and within those ‘blemishes’ of Armstrong’s Victorian glassworlds. The danger of espousing a (neo-)Victorian liberal humanism here is evident, but on the other hand it appears in the following reading of neo-Victorian texts that it is precisely these elements, fragments, spectres and dislocated visions of potential faith beyond the ‘real world’ that are at stake. Wolfreys’s text demonstrates in a different and yet similar vein the haunting presence of the Victorian spectre at a textual level, ranging from Charles Dickens through to Virginia Woolf. As Wolfreys states in the series of questions at the beginning of his book, ‘What does it mean to speak of spectrality and of textual haunting? What does it mean to address the text as haunted? How do the ideas of haunting and spectrality change our understanding of particular texts and the notion of the text in general?’9 We would add: what does it mean to write about Victorian spiritualism and/or faith in a neo-Victorian (con)text? What is it we want to see and in what do we desire to (dis)believe? This is part of a wider reflection on the ideas of spectrality, specularity, ghosts, the dead and the living. The historical pull of the past, the configuration of the present through the timeworn lens and the melancholic nostalgia which is always a foreboding of our own mortality are each (dis)embodied in our awareness of a sensory reality that is fragile, transient and yet endures beyond ourselves. One might think here of Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian ‘philosophy of the real as absent, non-existent’10 and the impact this has on our re-reading and re-visioning of the past through fiction, itself in some ways a non-real construct. The past is forever a reflection that our



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individual human future is not limitless, and in that sense ensures that our return to history and our belief in something beyond the here and now are indivisibly linked within the imagination. For the Victorians, such earthly limitations were accepted and acceptable while the persistence of the soul in an immortal condition held sway; after the religious crises of the mid-nineteenth century, such certainties were replaced or perhaps shadowed by faith in a spiritual world of ghosts, séances and a different plane of existence. As Ronald Pearsall puts it, ‘Spiritualism and the resurgence of the occult found fertile soil in Victorian England [because it] . . . provided a respectable fulfilment of this desire.’11 More recently, and in specific relation to the contexts and continuities between late-Victorian and neo-Victorian understandings of the séance, Tatiana Kontou has asked: to what extent do these author-mediums ventriloquize the dead? If the dead speak through the medium, then surely we can argue that the medium also speaks through them? How do we distinguish between these new and old voices? How are we to interpret this spectral dialogue between two worlds? What is added and what is taken away? What is lost forever in transmission?12 This chapter addresses such questions not, as in Kontou’s work, through a specifically gendered reading of the nature of the Victorian or neoVictorian séance, but rather by an interpretation which privileges the use of a specific metaphorical objectification – that of glass. The multiplicity of the glass figure, as outlined by Armstrong, permits a refracted and reflective negotiation of issues of belief and faith to be provided, not through the figure of the ghost or the performativity of the séance, but instead via the divergent nature of those ‘glassworlds’ for different (re)interepretations in and of the period. In recent neo-Victorian fiction the figure of the Victorian ghost, or the sense of the ghostliness of the Victorian past, has increasingly come to the fore. As a motif, the idea of the nineteenth-century spectre serves as a useful corollary to the contemporary author’s awareness of the ‘haunting’ presence of the Victorian period even into the twenty-first century. However, while critical work has explored this haunting and ghosting in terms of the refracted moment of historical fiction more generally, we want to assert the more connective threads surrounding shadows and ghosts of the Victorian period in the present as a re-articulation of the Victorians’ own fascination with séances, spectres, and other spookish things.13 While other chapters in this




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book touch on the nature of ghostly inheritances and mourning (Chapter 1) and magic and trickery (Chapter 5), rather than providing an interpretation of the neo-Victorian spirit (in simultaneously ghostly, temperamental, and psychical senses) through contemporary novels’ reworking of Victorian motifs, this chapter instead seeks to facilitate a reflection on our sense of belatedness and the need to write out or exorcize our Victorian spirits in the contemporary sphere. Our argument is that, even as we are obsessed by knowing, summoning up, and possessing/being possessed by the Victorians, we are enacting a specifically nineteenth-century preoccupation with the spectral, s(p)ecular, and reflective possibilities of the historical mirror, whether intact or, like the Lady of Shalott’s, ‘crack’d’. While neo-Victorian novels may frequently debunk the Victorian belief in spirits and séances, their own narratives speak to the notions of spiritualism, mediumship, and the desire for a version of the Victorian afterlife; in this sense, the chapter also probes the issue of secularity then and now, and the problem of how contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century can believably address the Victorian crisis of faith in the light of our own post-Christian contexts. ‘To speak of the spectral, the ghostly, of haunting in general’, Wolfreys notes, ‘is to come face to face with that which plays on the very question of interpretation and identification, which appears, as it were, at the very limit to which interpretation can go.’14 In this context it is useful to think about how many neo-Victorian novels rely upon this sense of ‘interpretation and identification’. Much neo-Victorianism winks knowingly at the reader who can recognize the allusion to other texts, and plays on the margins with a self-reflective and metafictional stance. Details such as the meta-authentic nature of the introductions and footnotes provided by fictional editors, which we discussed in the Introduction, signal that just as the spectre is summoned through the text’s mimicry, so too is the suspicion of the investigation involved in the reading of the narrative; in Chapter 1 we discuss such themes in relation to mourning but here we want to deal with them in terms of encoding. In her discussion and interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s work, Jodey Castricano uses the term ‘cryptomimesis’. Castricano defines this as the process within texts which ‘draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual works.’15 It is our contention in this chapter that much of the spectral nature of the play between ghostliness and writing in the novels we are discussing comes from this cryptomimetic method; that it constitutes a form of ghostwriting at multiple levels,



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often connected with a quasi-religious rather than encrypted sense of ‘revelation and concealment’. Sarah Waters’s novel Affinity (1999) provides a brief way into this theme. Set in and around Millbank prison in London in the 1870s it involves a dual narrative divided between the diary entries of two female protagonists. The novel is discussed in some detail in the next chapter, and so here we want only to draw attention to Waters’s scopic metaphor at two important moments. The first occurs when Margaret Prior has just taken up her duties as a lady visitor at Millbank, and involves one of the female wardens telling her about the therapeutic nature of observing the prisoners. Margaret writes in her diary that ‘[s]he said she had never had a visitor yet that didn’t like to stand at that window and watch the women walk. It was as curative, she thought, as gazing at fish in a tank. After that, I moved from the glass.’16 What is important at this moment is that we are watching Margaret through her own narrative as she is repulsed by the idea of watching and being watched. The move away from the glass cannot be enacted against the reader’s observation of Margaret and, in the act of recording it in her diary, Margaret draws attention to her inability really to understand the nature of scopic power. This is fundamental to our perception of the nature of the trick that Waters plays on her readers later in the text, for the clue, the cryptomimetic line, is there for us to follow from the earliest point of the narrative. What we are faced with, however, is a desire to believe, to place our faith in the act of storytelling itself and our unbounded trust in the spectral narrator of the text. While observation and looking is the key to Affinity, we don’t really ‘see’ what is presented to us because we displace our belief onto another part of the narrative. Indeed, in terms of spectrality we are blind to the Marxist implications of the term. For what we see(k) in this version of neo-Victorian fiction is satisfaction for our interest in the Victorians and their hidden sexuality. We ignore the original ‘spectres of Marx’ declared in The Communist Manifesto (‘A spectre is haunting Europe’)17 when we fail to realize that the servant in the household carries the key to the narrative. This exploitation of our cultural weak spots (suggestively inherited from the Victorians, like so much else) serves to play in a sophisticated way with the spectral presences we will permit ourselves to see and those we will not. We are prepared, potentially, to suspend our disbelief and believe that Selina Dawes is able to contact the spirit world and transplant herself to Margaret’s bedroom rather than acknowledge the presence of the servant woman Ruth Vigers. In the scene where Margaret realizes that the locket she places on the




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dressing-table mirror every night has gone, we want to share her belief in the spectral otherness of the misted mirror: ‘It [the water] was not quite chill, but it had misted the looking-glass; and as I wiped that I looked, for I always looked, for my locket. – My locket was gone! and I cannot say where’ (90). The desire to place faith in what that ‘misted . . . looking-glass’ might represent places both Margaret and the reader at a disadvantage. It serves to deflect our attention away from the figure in the background, the ‘presence’ inside the mirror and behind Margaret as she looks into the glass. The lack of clarity in Margaret’s gaze into the mirror reveals our own selectiveness when examining what lies in that ‘rearview mirror’ in cultural and social terms too. Following on from this opening discussion of the semiotics of glass and ghosting, this chapter will turn our gaze to some reflections on the neo-Victorian spectral text as exemplified by Charles Palliser’s The Unburied (1999) and Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows (2002); A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009); Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008); and John Harwood’s novel The Séance (2008).

4.1 ‘[L]ights and shadows moving on the inside of the windows’: Charles Palliser’s The Unburied (1999) and Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows (2002)18 At both the margins and the core of Waters’s novel is the figure of Margaret’s father, the professional historian George Prior. Invoked as muse to his daughter’s journal (‘I wish that Pa was with me now’),19 Prior also features – as the surname indicates – as a haunting presence in the narrative at key moments, and may even be the character whose breath she also desires to have clouded that mirror (she is dreaming of him just before this moment). The second novel we want to look at also features professional historians, not in the sphere of the prison but in the equally cloistered and entrapping narrative of ghosts, faith, and spectrality in the cathedral close. Charles Palliser’s historical quasi-crime novel20 The Unburied is, like the ‘so-called restoration work’ (19) being undertaken on the cathedral building at its heart, a text which attempts to reconstruct the possibilities of Victorian narrative technique through an able pastiche of the late-Victorian and Edwardian ghost story. The novel is centred round the Cambridge scholar Dr Courtine’s Christmas visit to Thurchester to stay with an old friend from whom he has been estranged for two decades. The purpose of Courtine’s visit is to trace a manuscript in Thurchester’s cathedral archives, the existence of which is doubted by many of his fellow scholars. His burning desire to unearth



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the document is driven not so much by scholarly passion as primarily by personal rivalry with another academic – a rivalry which reflects on the murderous consequences in a story from the town’s history during the English Revolution. Academics, college politics, the world of the cloister, political history, superstition and folklore, facts and authentication of the evidence: all these elements are blurred in Palliser’s narrative, which is haunted by the ghost stories of M.R. James and the unreliable narrative strategies of Henry James in The Turn of the Screw (1898). The narratives of both Jameses are of course ‘spectral texts’ in their own right: each looks back to an earlier period and dislocates a sense of textual time and historicity from the present moment of the act of story-telling. In the case of Henry James this is via reminiscence; in the work of M.R. James it is to be found in the fact that his Edwardian stories are themselves under the spell of the Victorians, returning as they do to a late-Victorian past. But they are also concerned with questions of belief, faith, and a focus on the simultaneous desire to know and not know the nature of a spectral ‘truth’. Like many neo-Victorian novels, Palliser’s text provides a metafictional commentary on the nature of historical fiction writing and the reasons behind our readerly (and writerly) desires to invoke the spectral text. As the Dean of Thurchester’s wife, Mrs Locard, asks Courtine: ‘Don’t you think that we read our own desires into the figures from the past about whom we reflect because, as erring mortals, we cannot be dispassionate?’ (135). ‘Passion’ in the sense of intellectual craving, physical desire, and Christian theology is a loaded term in this text, which contains many disquisitions on the nature of faith and religious belief. Earlier in the novel, Courtine engages in a debate with his former friend Austin about precisely such matters. Austin, once a ‘Tractarian of a very dandyish kind’ (36), is placed into contrast with Courtine and his ‘conviction that religion was a conspiracy of the powerful against the rest’ (36). What most dispirits Courtine is Austin’s articulation of religion as the placing of unconditional faith in the ‘truth’ of narratives, the near-sanctification of story and interpretation. As Austin declares, ‘without faith, all you have is superstition. Fear of the dark, of ghosts, of the realm of death which continues to frighten us, whatever we believe. We need stories to stop us being frightened. You’ve created your comforting myths and fictions from history . . . You are creating your own stories to console you’ (37). While Courtine admits that he respects the morality of Christianity, it is historical truth, the verifiable fact and documentary evidence that holds a higher power over his view of the world. In many ways what the text explores is Courtine’s inability and even reluctance to look more




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What I’m talking about is faith, belief, acceptance of the absolute reality of salvation and damnation. You – and others of our generation – lost your faith because you decided that science can explain everything. I believed that myself for a while but I came to understand that reason and faith are not in conflict. They are different orders of reality. Although I understand that now, when I was younger I shared your error. I know now that because there is darkness, there is light. That because there is death, there is life. Because there is evil, there is goodness. Because there is damnation, there is redemption. (37) The restoration metaphor is at work here but in a religious sense, and through the dialectic of the mirror or shadow. The view of the contraries that prove the existence of the othered and yet corollary counter state demonstrates that sense of faith in a balanced, ordered, rational and structured universe. One can believe, this argument contends, even if one cannot know; one might think of Armstrong here and the description of the ‘antithetical material’ nature of glass in the period, holding two contrary states in a unified object. Austin’s thinking is glass-like in this respect, and posits a kind of spectral logic that Courtine finds uncomfortable. The tension here between rationality and faith continues throughout Palliser’s novel and extends more broadly into the neo-Victorian genre as a whole. The popularity of, and fear located within, ghost stories, as the Victorians and Edwardians well knew, work in the spaces of this dialectic: the rational will to understand and debunk the inexplicable stands in a fraught relation with the instinctual desire to believe in something beyond that which can be explained by human consciousness, logic or science. This unease is of course something which is also reflected in our own contemporary relationship to the spiritual and the secular, and it raises the important question of how we address those issues of faith and belief that so fundamentally informed the Victorian approach to the world. One of the most significant moments of Palliser’s novel in relation to this point occurs when the narrator undergoes a momentary vision which throws into question his dogmatic non-belief in the world of the spirit. Dreamlike but also nightmarish, Courtine’s vision



closely into the glass and imagine something beyond the temporal; it is a narrative as much concerned with secularity as with specularity. Austin, on the other hand, all too willingly promotes confidence in the act of faith:


When I glanced up at the organ-loft I suddenly became aware of where I was and had no idea how much time had passed or how I had got to where I found myself. Over the edge of the rail was a pale spot in the darkness and as I watched, it resolved itself into a face which seemed to be gazing straight at me. A cold, white, empty face with eyes that were two pieces of glass – empty and yet they seemed to peer into me. They looked through my soul – or rather my lack of a soul for they found or created an answering emptiness within me. It was the face of a creature not of our world. How long we stared at each other – or rather I stared at him for I cannot be sure that he was looking at me – I have no means of knowing. The face disappeared and I seemed to awake with a shudder and in a cold sweat, and it was at that moment that I reconstructed the sequence of events. I had an idea about who it was that I had seen, but I could not accept it. Everything I knew and believed would be thrown into confusion . . . I had seen William Burgoyne. I was sure of it. In that case, the world was not as I had imagined it. The dead could walk again, for a man who had died two hundred years ago had appeared before me. That meant that all that I believed – all the decent, rational, progressive ideas by which I lived – were childish games that could only be played in the daylight. (151–2, 153) The protagonist’s desire to question, the scholarly pursuit of truth, and yet the anxiety about the nature of material reality have always been representative of the mid-Victorian angst of the characters presented in the narrative. As Catherine Belsey comments, using Freud’s theories of the uncanny and supernatural, such ‘supernatural events . . . are not in themselves uncanny: magic, apparitions, spectres and secret powers do not disturb us when they appear in fairy tales . . . But their occurrence in what seems like realism, when the Gothic invades the mimetic, produces a degree of unease.’21 The unease is shared here by both character and reader at the same level as such supernatural interventions ‘work’ in the ghost stories of M.R. James, Sheridan LeFanu, Conan Doyle and numerous other Victorian writers of suspense. By interposing the spectral into the secular imagination of Courtine at this moment in the novel, Palliser reconfigures the doubt of the Victorians into not so much a questioning of the one true church



is itself centred around the idea of observation and the specularity of glass:

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as into a challenge to rationalism and secularity itself as modes of existence. For if seeing is believing, then the hallucinatory status or otherwise of Courtine’s vision changes the status of the narrative perspective on the tale. However, there is the possibility in this passage that Palliser’s trickery is to dupe the unsuspecting reader at this point into questioning the narrator’s reliability, perhaps even his sanity. For him to visualize such a thing as a ghost from several centuries before is in many ways a clichéd element of the narrative. The conviction of being unable to determine what is seen but to then leap to the most (ir)rational conclusion is symptomatic of the claustrophobic tales of M.R. James, with his scholars driven to distraction by their inability to read logically the evidence before them. What we would like to suggest, however, is that this moment of vision is ambiguous and plays with the identity of the author as much as the narrator or a character within the text in a kind of imitation of John Fowles’s self-portrayal in sections of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). In an interview with Susana Onega published in 1993 after the appearance of his epic neo-Victorian novel of inheritance and intricate patterning, The Quincunx (1989), Palliser commented that ‘although [Fowles’s novel] is a very clever, witty book, . . . there is too much of Fowles coming and explaining and there are times when you really want him to leave the reader alone with the characters’.22 Despite this criticism of Fowles’s interventionist technique, Palliser’s The Unburied’s knowingness, such as when one character says to another that ‘we don’t exist in and for ourselves but only in as much as we are re-created in the imagination of another person’ (62), indicates a certain playfulness about the idea of this spectral presence in Courtine’s dreamlike vision; these characters, for all their doubt, perceive the nature of an omniscient intelligence. The spectre is the figure of the neo-Victorian novelist, acting as the medium conjuring forth the spirits of undead literature through pastiche, and also spectrally haunting those characters; the author is not entirely dead, but he is a representative of the living dead (in multiple senses) within the text itself. In Palliser’s complex and yet disarmingly simple interpretation of the problems of realist fiction itself, the tensions of the (neo-)Victorian novelist as observer, creator and narrator of characters become conflated into a sense of the overarching divine consciousness of faith. No clarification is provided for the reader, and part of the reason may be found in another statement by Palliser, in the same interview, that fiction is ‘not expository, it’s actually experiential. You are not told things. You are actually made to feel them.’23 This ‘experiential’ moment in the reading of the neo-Victorian text is evidently present in Courtine’s description



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of the ‘creature’ he ‘sees’. His agitation is reflected back to the reader but is also conjured up through that reader’s awareness of a large range of previous ghost stories. It thus becomes not only a reflection but also a positive refraction through the lens, as contemporary readers speculate on the contemporary writer’s attempt to capture the spectrality of the Victorian ghost tale. In the absence of the Victorians’ omniscient God – who was of course replaced in many ways by the omniscient narrator of classic high realism – we might have instead the spectral presence of the neo-Victorian writer, ghosting an identity in both present and past. There is also a continual play being enacted and multiplied here in the idea of the spectral and reflection as imagination and thought as well as image and presence. Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows, another story about the idea of church restoration and returning to the past at communal and individual levels, provides a useful example in a scene where two characters argue over the ‘reality’ of the past even down to its very fabric. Having discovered a coffin while undertaking excavation and modernization work in a remote English village, the church minister Banks declares: ‘I want you to experience the active presence of the past, to know this object [a brass coffin-plate] as it really is, charged with the energies of other lives.’24 There is an inevitable irony here – made clear very soon after as we read ‘when you disturb the dead, you disturb the living too’ (60) – in the idea that a coffin-plate creates a connection with the living. Yet Poster’s character is correct to see the coffin-plate and its inscription as a textual haunting and a moment of spectrality which can act as a pertinent and physical memento mori. For, like the mirror, it serves as a reflection on our own mortality. But perhaps more dangerously such reflections also give a sense of comfort which is the equivalent of story: as Banks says, ‘Like any community – like any individual for that matter – this village constructs and reconstructs its history partly on the basis of interpretations which are, strictly speaking, erroneous. Fictions, if you like, but fictions to which we must nevertheless give some form of assent’ (63). The (un)conscious desire to believe in the pattern is itself a form of faith, requiring as it does a belief in something which creates order, lineage, inheritance, structure for a purpose. That both these statements come from the novel’s central religious character is an important reminder of the significance of the interpretative aspect of society such figures provided for the Victorians, and also underlines one of the ways in which we perhaps find it harder to access that aspect of their culture in neo-Victorian fiction. It is noticeable, however, that the parallel is between misinterpretation of history and history being like ‘fiction’ because it underlines the similarity of the discourses. Religion too, after




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all, works at the level of parable, and is also dependent for interpretation upon our ‘assent’ via faith. Both Palliser’s and Poster’s novels are concerned with the different senses of restoration. In Palliser’s novel it is the restoration of a sense of the contemporary: Courtine’s obsession with the manuscript evidence of the past is an attempt to appease the accuracy of the historical record and yet also to ensure his own reputation. For Poster’s characters, especially the narrator Stannard (the architect overseeing the restoration work to the village church), it is the failure to recognize the difference between narrative and reality, history and present, which determines the action. But it is a storytelling based on choice and freedom which has irrevocable consequences. As Stannard comes to conclude, everything is based on: ‘Stories . . . all stories; and if I ask myself why that story rather than another, I find I have no ready answer’ (276).

4.2 ‘When Alice stepped through liquid glass’: A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009)25 In Palliser’s The Unburied a child plays a key role in uncovering the core of the mystery, and in Poster’s novel the privileging of one story and perspective over the others is the key decision for the narrator and, by implication, reader. Children and the idea of children’s stories have become more prominent in recent neo-Victorian fiction,26 and it is to a novel concerned with both children and the telling of their stories that we now turn. Byatt’s The Children’s Book covers the period from the mid-1890s to the First World War, and thus engages with both the neo-Victorian and the neo-Edwardian. Following the lives of a series of children and their parents, the text opens up a reading of the intellectual interactions, cultural exploration and experimentation, and perioddividing attitudes of the late-Victorian and Edwardian ages through the slippages, exchanges and enclosures of the individual families whose relationships are described. As a novel which consciously blurs fact and fiction, real figures and imagined identities, events which are verifiable and those that are dreamed, The Children’s Book regularly reminds readers of its own artificiality, indeed artifice, alongside the more collective memory of an historical time period obsessed with its own presentism, historical parentage, and future. As readers would expect from Byatt, the text is full of playful games about its own ontological identity as a fiction, the nature of narrative coincidence and convenience, and the knowingness of the narrative voice. Byatt seems to lead us towards an understanding of relationships around the domestic, the heart of



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course of many a Victorian realist novel, a domestic fractured, however, by the period’s sense of decadence and regression. It is a novel which focuses with often pin-point accuracy on the late-Victorian period as an age when the intelligentsia, and the progenitors of new social movements and discourses, were constituting themselves in the positions of adult and child, and occupied both sides of the Alice in Wonderland looking-glass. In The Children’s Book the crisis is one of time: the narrative feels nostalgic for its own moment, it moves forward and backwards continually not in terms of structure but in the slippages between understandings of the world around the characters, seeking reflections and patterns wherever they may be found. The return to childishness and childhood by both adults and adolescents alike is not sustainable in this period caught between the two ‘grown up’ ages of the Victorian and the First World War. It is the child-like unawareness of things outside of desire and attraction and thought and body which leaves this society unprepared for the realities and consequences of the magnitude of the horrors of war and also the twentieth century more generally. As Byatt has one of her characters comment early in the narrative when he sees the museum vault, its ‘funereal chamber’, filled with moulded effigies, they are like ‘prisoners in the Underworld’ (6). The fact that this comment, made by one of the children of the novel, coincides with the building works of the South Kensington Museum (subsequently renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum)27 is important. While Byatt’s novel is concerned with childhood and story, adulthood and reality, it wraps these themes within a kind of display case of the museum, creating a tale about the creation of aesthetic artefacts and their exposition. Indeed, the construction of museums, the display of objects and the development of a collective and individual sense of identity through them is key to the text, and the metaphor and materiality of glass play a significant role, reflected as it is in its own beginnings and origins in the South Kensington Museum and its incorporation of the world’s fair in Paris in 1900, and also in the fact that one of the central characters is in charge of the museum, another a fairytale writer, a third a potter. That the potter’s eventual apprentice, Philip Warren, is discovered like a lost orphan ‘squatting beside one of a series of imposing glass cases’ (3) in the museum at the novel’s start reflects on how the narrative privileges a sense of the glass-like as special, magical, fairytale-esque, and yet on the other hand ensures that it acts as a point of distancing between characters, as a division of fiction and reality, and as a substance through which we receive the narrative within the text.




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The building of the South Kensington Museum is a potent metaphor for the construction of stories and their accessibility to readers, revealing the creation of a space which exhibits artefacts that can tell something about the past while simultaneously being removed from the specifics of their original location, thus reflecting on the relation between contemporary writers and the historical narratives they create. What is significant here is how Byatt uses the theories of display and the exhibit in her novel. As Judith Roof notes in a comparative essay on Victorian museum practices of display and contemporary computer software packages: [i]n many exhibits, the presence of glass, used as a basic protective element . . . rarefies, amplifies, and arrests these artifacts in time. Victorian museum display separated artifacts twice: once from their context and once from the consumer, producing in the museum or exhibit a contiguous or metonymic relation between the display and the artifacts, among artifacts, and between artifact and viewer . . . [G]lass itself . . . became an element that both invited and restricted the viewer.28 Roof’s comments remind us of the associated dependency of objects on texts for meaning and accessibility when dislocated from their foundational context. In her ‘Acknowledgements’ to The Children’s Book, Byatt makes a related point about such objects and their presentation behind the glass when she writes of her own experience in researching the novel and handling items similar to those a character in the fiction creates: ‘A pot in the hands is quite different from a pot behind glass’ (616). It is this sense of the exhibition and the display which allows access to and yet distances from what is invoked when Byatt textually explores the Grande Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. The text serves to heighten the reader’s awareness of the fragility of the glassworks and other creative works Byatt imagines within it. Writing of the Paris exhibition she has her characters think of the ‘palace of mirrors’ and the ‘glass-roofed Grand Palais’ as carrying ‘the idiosyncratic metaphysical charm of all meticulous human reconstructions of reality’ (245). This is one of the ways in which she structures her narrative: those moments in the text where historical events are presented in brief, as outside of or incidental to the world of the characters are like the explanatory notes in the museum display case. Within the context of historical fiction writing, and specifically the neo-Victorian, Byatt might be seen to provide a comment about the relationship between



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such fictions and the nature of museum displays. As Charles Saumarez Smith notes in relation to contemporary museology, ‘[o]ne of the most insistent problems that museums face’ is ‘the idea that artefacts can be, and should be, divorced from their original context of ownership and use, and redisplayed in a different context of meaning, which is regarded as having a superior authority.’29 For the neo-Victorian novelist this is a problem of representation: how does the neo-Victorian novel work for the contemporary readership and provide a sense of historical period without divorcing either from a notion of ‘context’? Such historical notations as Byatt provides keep us updated with the accuracies and actualities of events but are presented to us through the lens of hindsight, with a regular sense that the characters themselves (and those living through the period in reality) are unaware of what these things mean. In a book so replete with those who write narratives, adapt them, reinvent them, and read them, it is noticeable how few of the characters can actually interpret the symbolism around them. For example, the children’s writer in the novel, Olive Wellwood, we learn, keeps her children’s narratives (which are both stories to be published for unknown children and adults, and also stories composed specifically for her children) in a ‘glass-faced cabinet’ (80), drawing a parallel to the glass-case nature of the museum pieces; indeed, in an important moment of the text which, for her children, breaks the spell of the magic stories she creates, she is even photographed for a magazine article alongside the bookcase. The disruptive presence of the modernity and reality brought by the photograph means that the books and the children within them come to stand as signifiers of the museum exhibit, their childhoods locked into time through the relation of photography to the public exhibition space (301–2). Yet Olive seems oblivious to the glasslike fragility of her relationships with the children in her home. In discussing the nature of her children’s writing with Prosper Cain, ‘Special Keeper of Precious Metals’ at the museum (3), Olive even tells him that stories are like mirrors: ‘You know, Major, a story, especially a mystery story, is all topsy-turvy. It works backwards, like tunnels of mirrors. The end is the cause of the beginning, so to speak’ (152). But the comment is most unrevealing in the sense that later in the narrative it is Olive’s failure to perceive the consequences of her actions in relation to the one story that destroys one of the children. In itself this serves as a comment on the nature of Byatt’s narrative, which carries part of its meaning in the fact that we foresee, and thus read ‘backwards’ the looming nature of 1914 and other aspects of the characters’ future in a way that they themselves cannot. But the narrator




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also suggests that for the characters it is the double look in the glass of time, a look that moves in both directions, which provides the momentum behind the action: ‘Backwards and forwards, both. The Edwardians knew they came after something . . . They looked back. They stared and glared backwards, in an intense, sometimes powerful nostalgia for an imagined Golden Age’ (391). The mirror or glass metaphor continues and provides a sense of metaphoric continuity throughout the text: one of the ‘lost’ children of the narrative finds her real father, the fairytale puppet-master, in the Spiegelgarten (‘a garden of mirrors’ [362]), and later, within the horrors of the war trenches, another, Julian Cain, will gain the material for his book of poems, Roll Call and Other Poems, with his lyric ‘The Woods’ beginning with the line ‘When Alice stepped through liquid glass’ (594). It is reflected even in the false world of ‘Trench Names’, in which Byatt’s character makes reference to the ‘English men’ who ‘[i]mposed a ghostly English map on French’ by naming the trenches after London streets, the titles of novels, or the characters from them: So here run Piccadilly, Regent Street Oxford Street, Bond Street, Tothill Fields, Tower Bridge And Kentish places, Dover, Tunbridge Wells Entering wider hauntings, resonant, The Boggart Hole, Bleak House, Deep Down and Gloom. Remembering boyhood, soldier poets recall The desperate deeds of Lost Boys, Peter Pan, Hook Copse, and Wendy Cottage, Horrors lurk In Jekyll Copse and Hyde Copse. Nonsense smiles As shells and flares disorder tidy lines. (595) The ‘wider hauntings’ of those ‘Nonsense smiles’ here provide the indictment of a mirrored landscape without substance; a fakery or trickery of false consolation provided by familiarity, especially in relation to literary mimicry. Given these comments on the construction of glass chimaeras of reality, it is little surprise that a character like Tom, the central child of the novel and the most significant child in Olive Wellwood’s stories, thinks himself into a mirror-world of the (un)real: ‘He had sensed that the Garden of England was a garden through a looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused to return. He didn’t want to be a grown-up’ (364). Later, Byatt’s narrative voice notes that the entire period’s distinctive characteristic is to be found in its ‘backwards stare [with its] intense interest in, and nostalgia for, childhood’ (394). Piecing together the symbolism of the novel’s



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An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of the person now absent . . . 30 Byatt has described Eliot’s description as ‘one of the most striking mirror-images in literature’.31 For Byatt, the nature of the glass within her novel (especially when expanded to include the fragile symbolic of the art works and collectibles frequently reflected upon throughout the text) is like Eliot’s ‘pier-glass, or extensive surface of polished steel’, which is itself not dissimilar to the cryptomimetic methodology we discussed earlier. It is the patternings which give the ‘scratches’ of the text meaning and substance, even as they demonstrate the ‘illusion’ behind this idea. We must decode the narrative in a way that the characters never can, for we are presented as somehow superior readers because we have the advantage of historicist hindsight. However, in the implicit allusion to Eliot Byatt also seems to speculate on the nature of the pattern-forming we desire as readers. Further, it is her grounding of such arrangements as part of the ‘metaphysical charm of all meticulous human reconstructions of reality’ (245) which provides the contexts for faith and belief within the novel. But there is a trickery involved here too. Like the glaze of Benedict Fludd the potter’s creations, glass and the ornate reflectivity of the mirrored aesthetic world Byatt describes in this period serve to provide the illusion of spectatorship and involvement at one and the same time. In its textuality the novel is like the pot to which Byatt refers in her ‘Acknowledgements’: we handle this narrative, we engage with it, experience it, but only from the perspective of the museum display case. There would be a difficulty in stepping into the ‘liquid glass’ of the text



use of glass encourages the reader to recognize it as a reworking of the ‘pier-glass’ idea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72):

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precisely because its artifice and its expression and acceptance of the idea of illusion constantly return back to us an image which questions what we want the novel to do. Unlike Byatt’s more prominent engagement with the neo-Victorian in Possession there is no attempt to bring readers into a ‘romance’ plot or to provide a satisfactory resolution. The suggestion here might be that the historical timeframe (1895–1919) is itself a preventative of such an approach: how can the reader suspend a disbelief in the constant and repeated knowledge within the text that the war is coming, and that this is not about the survival of the Victorian but the end of the Victorian. That comment about the Edwardians who ‘knew they came after something’ recognizes the chronological inability to do more than represent, in a poorer form, the images of the past. This is not about mourning so much as despair concerning the absence of an ability to reflect anything other than the spectral back to oneself. This is why Byatt’s use of nostalgia as a means of commenting on this period through the figure of the child and children is more problematic than it at first appears. Nostalgia for the past of childhood, as Byatt suggests, is partly a desire for pattern and substance. The novel charts how much the divide between childhood and adulthood resides in expectations: adults and children know that the evolution of childhood is to grow up, but once that maturing has taken place there is no map to follow. The period’s regression is located firmly by Byatt in the drive to write children’s literature in England, to turn adult writers into the children they once were, so that reference is made to Kenneth Graeme’s ‘baby talk’ (395) to his wife (he was forty, she ‘a girlish thirty-seven year old’) and even Baden-Powell, who, aged 47, proposed to a girl of 18, and ‘was fascinated by Peter Pan which he saw twice’ (395). The sinister edge to Byatt’s comments here on the men who seek to capture children in order to redeem something about their own childhoods depends on the balance of information: Graeme’s ‘grown-up job’ was in the Bank of England, while the army’s Baden-Powell ‘would travel many miles, and cross frontiers’ to be able to watch an execution (395). In contrast, Byatt writes that ‘[i]n Germany, there were theories of children and childhood’ (395). That Byatt selects two nations which less than a decade later would be destroying their barely adult armies in the First World War is more than a signal to the reader able to look backwards of what lies ahead. This is about Byatt constructing a glass which looks ‘[b]ackwards and forwards, both’ but which also reveals the contradictory nature of these portraits of individuals, genres and nations. It is a demonstration of the illusion behind Eliot’s ‘concentric arrangement . . . light falling with an exclusive optical selection’, and behind our attempt to place such



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patternings on to the past for the sake of narrative form and the comfort of story. In her focus on the museum as a place of secular worship, Byatt also raises a question about what we want to see in that display case world: exploring the museum space at the start of the novel, the children ‘crept down the uneven stone steps, holding a thin iron rail. At the foot of the staircase they found themselves cut off by a metal grille, beyond which stretched a long corridor, now vaguely visible as though there was a light source at the other end. The passage was roofed with Gothic vaulting, like a church crypt, but finished in white glaze industrial bricks’ (6). The conjunction of Gothic and industrial, the secular temple and yet the vaguely epiphanic ‘light source at the other end’, furnishes Byatt’s text with that ambiguous sense of unbelief and faith located in ideas of progress, modernity, and the backwards-forwards looking moment. It also provides a conjecture which, along with that sense of knowing one comes after something, seems to haunt part of our negotiation of the Victorian past. In telling us a children’s story – or rather a series of children’s stories – about a period unsure of its own identity except in relation to its post-Victorian status, Byatt might be seen to turn the spotlight on her contemporary reader, who stands peering at the display case glass that has itself become a mirror.

4.3 ‘A pure-Victorian half-made window’: Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008)32 While Byatt’s book engages with the turn-of-the-century nostalgia for the childhood sense of comfort no longer accessible in adulthood, Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter relocates this theme within a dual-time narrative of the mid-1990s and 1870s. The story revolves around Fran Morrison in the contemporary period, the daughter of the title’s glass painter, who returns from her global musical career when her father is taken into hospital. Edward Morrison is the proprietor of the Minster Glass stained-glass window shop tucked away in the London district of Westminster, close to the cathedral and several other religious locations. The company, which has been ‘in business since 1865’ (31), was established and developed ‘at a time when coloured glass was all the rage again’ (35). The influence of Pugin, the Gothic revival, Victorian medievalism, William Morris and, in particular, John Ruskin’s views on Gothic as an authentic religious or spiritual style33 are brought out in the novel alongside a more dominating sense of the connections between the glass-making and stained-glass production processes and the study of the angels which appear in such glasses.




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For in the novel the angel is a form of ghost or spectre made of glass. The angelology theme is explored via quotations from, among others, Edward Burne-Jones, William Blake, Emily Brontë, Thomas Carlyle, Coventry Patmore (the somewhat inevitable ‘angel of the house’),34 and in particular Cardinal John Henry Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865). What connects these different strands is the dualistic nature of belief and faith within the narrative, and the fabric of such spirituality as located in the image of the angel in the stained glass. During her investigations around the shop and the flat above it, in which she has not lived for several years, Fran begins to reconstruct her relationship with her absent father principally through attempting to piece together the project he was working on when he fell ill. In contradistinction to the narratives we discussed in Chapter 1, it is the patrilinear heritage which provides the focus here. Fran imagines her father ‘writing a history’ of the company (33) and pictures him ‘too meticulous . . . sitting up in his attic alone for hour upon hour, like Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch’ (35). Invoking Eliot’s failed scholar at this early stage suggests the ways in which Fran’s relationship with Edward is problematized at this point: she is dismissive of the life devoted to the craft of glass, as if it is somehow less substantial than her own career in music, not recognizing that both are about patterns, breath, and the displacement of human contact. However, what Fran comes to discover is that rather than the sterility of Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies, the history of Minister Glass her father was reconstructing is far more precise and manageable, focussing as it does on the restoration of one specific window’s original construction. The window in question is in St Martin’s Church, Westminster, where the ‘stone over the porch proclaimed its foundation in 1851’ (31). 1851 was of course the year of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, perhaps the ultimate representation of the secular glass temple of the Victorian period, a building full of commodities and things. But it was also a high point for the stained-glass revival in the nineteenth century with twenty-five glass company exhibitioners at the event.35 As Fran discovers during the course of the narrative, ‘Minster Glass had been responsible for [the St Martin’s window] creation back in Victorian times’ (10), and Hore taps into the idea of the revival of stained glass in the nineteenth century and the restoration of those Victorian productions in the contemporary period as the central trope of the story. Glass, the novel appears to suggest, is at its most resilient precisely because most fragile, is most angelic and heavenly when most earthly and human.



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While Fran begins to reconstruct the narrative of the stained glass made by her family’s company in 1870, she also pieces together aspects of her own history. Using journals, business papers, and other materials she finds both in the Minster Glass archive and through the help of the local vicar, Reverend Jeremy Quentin, who had commissioned her father to undertake the research, Fran traces the story of a love affair between Laura, the daughter of a previous vicar in the parish, Reverend Brownlow, and the designer of the original window, Philip Russell. By the end of the book, Fran has reached a conclusion familiar to readers of Possession, in which she is the link between different generations of the story and family history: ‘Laura, married to Philip, was my great-great-great-grandmother. Her son Samuel, born in 1882, had married Reuben Ashe’s grand-daughter, so Reuben was my ancestor, too’ (435). While the ending’s sense of tying up the loose ends of the dual-time narrative might seem to echo Byatt’s novel (and, indeed, Reuben Ashe, the founder of the company, might be a conscious echo of Byatt’s Randolph Henry Ash), what the novel achieves in relation to the motifs of stained glass and angels is worth further comment here because it reaches far beyond what might otherwise be considered a conventional neo-Victorian romance plot. The Victorian writer Laura Brownlow’s faith in the idea of the aesthetic, in particular the artist Philip Russell’s ability to bring the figure of her dead sister to life through stained glass in the Victorian narrative, and Fran Morrison’s own belief in the power of research and evidence are united in a sense of the force of John of Damascus’s words (cited as the epigraph to chapter 4 in the novel) that angels are ‘intelligent reflections of light, that original light which has no beginning’ (37). There is a potential play here in that the individual vertical divisions of stained-glass windows are known as ‘lights’,36 but what is more relevant is the sense of light as revelatory in spiritual terms. As the novel continues, it becomes clear that the chapter epigraphs are little homilies or themes for the chapters themselves. Like the biblical texts which provide Jeremy Quentin with the inspiration for his sermons (and indeed so served Laura’s father a century before), the novel presents us with a secularized conjunction of Victorian faith and contemporary spiritual desire. Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, the prayer of a dying man and the responses of both an angel and a devil to his soul’s prayer, thus functions as both the representation of a Victorian text caught up in the devotional power of the idea of angels that runs parallel to that provided in the form of stained glass, and as an illustration of the secularization of that religious vision in our own period. The church choir at




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St Martin’s, which Fran joins, is preparing a performance of Newman’s poem as adapted by Elgar for his oratorio of the same name in 1900. Fran’s participation in the rehearsals and performance thus becomes a means by which she can be a voice to her now silent but dying father’s soul in his hospital bed, just as she will complete his research into the stained glass. The return to Minister Glass marks a kind of return of Fran’s own soul or faith in the idea of human relationships, at least. The vicar wants to use a recent charitable bequest to the church to restore the window; as he puts it, ‘Stained glass is important. The windows are such an aid to worship, I find. In medieval times, coloured glass was said to inspire visions of ecstasy’ (48). It is the aid to her own understanding of her current predicament which Fran finds in both the church windows and the research into their history. At first, Fran has difficulty picking up the research of her father because it remains unclear what the 1870s stained glass did represent; however, it is not long before she does confirm that the ‘broken window was definitely an angel. At last I had found a thread leading into the past. A thread which, if I pulled, might begin to unravel a story’ (70). But what Fran uncovers in her research, beside her family’s narrative and her familial connection to the window itself, is a Victorian story about religious conflict concerning the representation of faith. The previous incumbent at St Martin’s, Laura’s father and one of the Reverend Quentin’s long dead predecessors as well as the man who commissioned the original window in memory of Laura’s dead sister, had been the victim of abuse and persecution by members of his congregation because of the high church implications of the stained-glass window. In this way, Hore’s text provides a subtle comment on the reductive nature of our readings of the Victorians’ confidence in and consensus about faith and belief, and the use of the Newman poem also alludes to this idea, evoking as it does the period of division in both religion and religious representation. As Jeremy the vicar comments, ‘I like to think of angels as a symbol of everything that is beyond our ordinary perception and understanding of the world; part of the universal song of praise that surrounds us always’ (284). This might sound like the kind of ‘metaphysical charm’ treated with some irony in Byatt’s novel,37 but in Hore’s there is a sense in which the stained-glass window simultaneously remains imbued with the faith of the past and functions as a non-religious record of the contemporary’s relationship to the historical. Although the novel does not theorize or conceptualize the nature of that encounter, there remains a connectiveness between the periods which provide the book’s structure, and a demonstration that while the purposes of such



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buildings as churches and such religious art as stained glass might change, this does not in itself eradicate the meaning or experience of those locations and objects in the present. To a degree, Hore’s is a Ruskinian view of the relationship between memory and architecture or the fabric of buildings such as stained-glass windows. Writing in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Ruskin states that Memory may truly said to be the Sixth Lamp of Architecture; for it is in becoming memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view, built in a more stable manner, and partly as their decorations are consequently animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning.38 In this sense, Hore’s text provides a contrary reading to Byatt’s The Children’s Book with its display case culture and the simultaneously distancing and enhancing nature of the object, the fabric of the past as connected to its aesthetic remains. Hore’s novel, conversely, suggests that the distanced object, when restored, as in the case of the stainedglass window of St Martin’s, increases in meaning and clarity, indeed it becomes the ‘decoration’ which is imbued with ‘metaphorical or historical meaning’; the restoration also negates part of the problem associated with the dislocation of the historical object from its context as outlined in the comment from Charles Saumarez Smith. Leaving the historical record in situ is seen in Hore’s novel to enhance its context and extend it without disrupting its signification for either period. The mystery and story Fran Morrison traces, indeed, provide added context to the original window and do not sacrifice this to the contemporary fabric which constitutes its reconstructed form. The ‘lights’ of the window therefore do serve multiple functions, representing the point at which the visions of past, present, and future might meet.

4.4 ‘[T]here may be some truth in those tales’: John Harwood’s The Séance (2008)39 The connectiveness between past and present and the idea of the spectral as a virtual embodiment of that coexistence between living and dead is fundamental to the way in which we look through that distorting glass back to the Victorians. Indeed, what we might be seeking in the spectral summoning up of the Victorian narrative in contemporary fiction is precisely such distortion, both of our own period and that




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of the nineteenth century. Two recent novels by the novelist John Harwood underline the tensions we are trying to articulate concerning the relationship between the spectral, the scriptural (in both religious and authorial senses), and the spiritual. The Ghost Writer (2004), which we discussed in Chapter 1, and The Séance (2008) are both texts that explore the ways in which individuals seek to make a connection with the past through narrative, and how the desire to acknowledge and even embrace the sense of being haunted is frequently re-enacted at a textual level. They are also novels about faith at different levels. The Ghost Writer’s Gerard Freeman discovers a manuscript, ‘a thick bundle of pages with typewriting on them, tied together with rusty black ribbon’ in his mother’s room. Gerard notes that ‘[a]s I drew out the bundle, a photograph slid into my lap.’40 This photograph proves just as important as the manuscript because of the way it stimulates Gerard’s interest in his maternal history. As such, it represents the visual and textual as spectral combination that releases an uncanny sense of the real captured in the imagined. Gerard’s narrative voice comments that ‘the woman in the photograph was calm and beautiful and alive, more alive than anyone I had ever seen in a picture’ (5), and we are reminded of the Victorian attraction to photography as a means of containing and not just representing an aspect of the spirit. Such echoes of the nineteenth century in a text partly set in contemporary Australia and London and partly figured through 1890s literature, are layered at a textual as well as visual level. The novel plays with the invocation of symbolic acts of naming. Like the reader, Gerard, himself a bookish child, is haunted by the presence of earlier textual women, Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Henry James’s Miss Jessel, conjured up in the name of Gerard’s pen friend, Alice Jessell. Blurring in the imagination both his real friend and the fictional character, Gerard presents us with a mirror to our own annotative awareness of the past signalled in such acts of homage. Alice will later write to Gerard that she does not ‘want to be fixed by a picture’ (25), so that the surrogacies of the imagination have to stand in for reality. Gerard’s account of his delvings into his family history, the releasing death of his mother, and his burgeoning relationship with Alice through letters, whose textuality will prove fundamental to the unlocking of the inherited mystery in a cryptomimetic manner, are interleaved with a series of Vernon Lee-esque short stories written by his great-grandmother which conjure up late-Victorian Gothic. What transpires is the realization when Gerard comes to London and finds the Hatherley house that the tales are not fictions but histories in the sense that they provide him



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with the investigative and interpretative clues. The narrative reveals that it is not the supernatural but the scientific, not the past or its literature but the more modern technology of the early-twentieth century, that are at the root of the Hatherley family story. As such, Harwood’s text enacts a kind of double cross on the reader: see(k)ing the dread pleasures of the pastiche Victorian ghost story, we are instead confronted with a spectral fabrication, a slippage between the narrative desires in which we place so much faith and suspended disbelief and the more terrifying technological realities of the modern world. It is gamma rays rather than the Gothic which does for the characters in this novel, just as it is the guns in French trenches that shatter the glass gardens in Byatt’s The Children’s Book. In this sense one might draw a comparison between what the neoVictorian novelist seeks to do in narrative returns back to the fractured faith of the Victorians and the work of the critic George Levine. Levine, at the outset of his 2006 book Darwin Loves You, which is about Darwin and contemporary society, states that ‘Evolution by natural selection seems to have removed both meaning and consolation from the world; those who discovered it and who now argue for it often engage in a kind of triumphal rationalism that treads all affective and extramaterial explanation underfoot. It is one thing to believe that science can explain the movement of the stars or even the composition of matter; it is quite another to believe that science can explain human nature itself, and all the disorderly intricacies of human life.’41 Levine’s statements on the issue of re-enchantment in particular highlight a potential connection with the need publicly to rethink the Victorians’ own relationship to religion and science, faith and doubt. The neo-Victorian novel itself often runs the danger of debunking faith without the kind of subtleties and nuances of thought and rationality that are frequently emblematic of the nineteenth century’s own debates on these matters. Harwood’s text and the narrator’s concluding realization of the magnitude of his self-deception might thus reflect something about our own delusions in the faith we place in the neo-Victorian text and in many respects its too-comforting treatment of the spectral. Like the Victorian fraudster mediums pulling out all the stops in the hoax séance, we are complicit in the fakery of the text and its summoning of the haunted and haunting past. Harwood’s second novel, The Séance, is more firmly set in the Victorian period but this still allows for a set of spectral and textual tricks to take place in his revisioning of the trope of the haunted mansion. Divided between four first-person accounts of different stages in the mystery surrounding Wraxford Hall and its history of alchemical,




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necromancing and mesmerist inhabitants, Harwood’s text is at its most knowing when it plays with our rationalized response to the Victorians’ obsession with spiritualism and the afterlife. Thus the central female figure and first/last narrator, Constance Langton, writes of her atheist father’s disapproval of the tenets of spiritualism: ‘I had already begun to suspect that Papa did not believe in God . . . [when] I discovered that the book he had been writing for so long was called Rational Foundations of Morality’ (12). Mr Langton’s book is designed to demonstrate that one should behave morally irrespective of the existence of God or an afterlife, something Constance thinks is common sense. It is also something that we are encouraged to endorse in the sense that the narrative positions us to hold on to our own rationalist, post-modern and postChristian perspectives on such matters. Yet Langton’s rationalist ethics is undermined very early on with his decision to leave his wife and daughter. At this point, the text almost suggests that cool rationalism is what destabilizes human interaction, rather than the less harmful faith in spirits and the beyond. As with The Ghost Writer, reading plays a key function in the narrative not only as we bring together the diverse range of stories but also in the earliest descriptions of Constance’s life. She views her childhood world as a ‘kind of limbo state in which I was free to read whatever I wished, and walk wherever I wanted, whilst at the same time feeling that nobody would care if I vanished from the face of the earth’ (12). Constance thus presents herself very much as a spectre, and later in the novel reading and mesmerism almost go together in the metatextual comment that ‘[i]n the deepest state of trance . . . a subject could be instructed to see scenes and persons who were not actually present’ (71). It is hard not to read this as a statement about narrative and the textual nature of the spectral along the lines of some of the earlier material we have discussed. Mesmerism is closely aligned to the idea of reading in this text, with Magnus Wraxford, the key spiritualist of the novel, described by his future wife Eleanor Unwin as having ‘a slightly Mephistophelean air, and dark eyes of remarkable luminosity. Though George had said he was handsome, the sheer force of his presence took me by surprise. The saying that eyes are the windows of the soul flitted across my mind as I extended my hand, but I had the discomfiting sensation, as our fingers touched, that my own soul had become momentarily transparent to his gaze’ (109). Reflection and observation are central once more, but within this broad conceptualization of the power of the séance is, as in The Ghost Writer, an emphasis on science and trickery. While necromancy, mesmerism, the ‘morbid fear of death’ and ‘the alchemists’ quest for the



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elixir of life’ (58) are presented as themes throughout the novel, they are always delivered in a tone of knowing scepticism. As readers we are regularly encouraged to invoke both scepticism and faith in Constance’s narrative and those she assembles from other characters such as the respectable village solicitor John Montague. Early in the text Constance confesses to us that she has faked spiritual trances. One of the reasons for her father’s departure is the obsessive nature of his wife’s hankering for communication from their dead child, Constance’s sister. After Langton’s desertion, Constance pretends to enter a trance in order to reassure her mother of her dead sister’s happiness in the world beyond. But the performance proves too strongly convincing for Mrs Langton and she commits suicide to rejoin her child in paradise, leaving a note beside her ‘empty bottle of laudanum . . . which read, “Forgive me – I could not wait”’ (31). Harwood’s ironic comment on the desire to place faith in the easily ventriloquized and faux-authentic contact between the living and the dead is also a reflection upon our own readerly yearning for the Victorian novel itself. Just as Harwood speaks through Constance and the other narrative voices, so his characters in turn imitate their parts from older Victorian narratives. Harwood even begins his novel with a paratextual nod towards the fakery via an epigraph from Revelations of a Spirit Medium (1891), a real text from the period, which explains how to ‘manifest a spirit’ using silk in ‘a darkened room’ (n.p.).42 There is thus a kind of suggestiveness about the functions of the spectral in these texts and Harwood’s awareness of the late-Victorian questioning of spiritualism, the truths it might reveal, and also the investigations into the faked performance of such séances via bodies such as the Society for Psychical Research. Is Harwood asking us to place our faith in his novel’s ability to mimic, medium-like, the period in which it is set? Or is he instead asking us to think about why we continue to wish these spirits to be summoned before us? Writing on Byatt’s paired neo-Victorian novellas published as Angels & Insects (1992), Hilary Schor comments that ‘Byatt, like any brave New Historicist, is trying to talk with the dead.’43 In contrast we argue that the works explored in this chapter use ghosts and the spectral to talk with the living. Metafictional texts, by their very nature, are more about the moment of their writing than the setting of that writing, and metahistorical novels, the genre into which the most interesting and stimulating neo-Victorian fiction falls, are as much concerned with the historical moment that is now than they are with the nineteenth century. By casting the fiction and the fakery of the séance, of the ghost and of the




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spectral itself back to us as contemporary readers, Harwood and others are multi-layering the notion of textual haunting, and possibly even challenging our ‘faith’ in the postmodern text and its own séance-like trickeries. Towards the end of Harwood’s novel our attention is turned to Whitby and the discovery of the truth of the mystery. As the site of Dracula’s landing, Whitby is of course an ideal location. The town where the classic representative of the undead and vampiric arrives in England is suitably ironic as the home of the woman everyone believes to be either dead or a murderess in Harwood’s text. But this knowingness – our knowledge when reading this neo-Victorian fiction of the appropriateness of this location’s literary significance for a late-Victorian reader eight years after the latest narrative within this novel is set – is part of the spectral show. For what it hints towards is that imperceptible but ever present spirit behind the best of the neo-Victorian genre of our desire to be tricked, of wanting to suspend disbelief and placing faith in the narrative dexterity that is only ever a patterning of concentric circles on the glass. While Wolfreys’s views on the spectral may be correct for a reading of the Victorians and Castricano’s ‘cryptomimetic’ theory is evidently supported by these texts, neither truly accommodates the sense of s(p)ecular faith we place into the novels themselves, and our presence at the table rapping as both spirit and believer.

4.5 Conclusion Just as neo-Victorian writers are eager to explore (and one might even say exploit) the popular perception of the late-nineteenth century as the age of the séance, of spiritualists and mediums, and of arcane returns to mysteries of religious practice and faith in the possibility of immortality, so too they must indicate scepticism and knowingness towards any such ideas. The repeated invocation of Victorian spiritualism, mesmerism, and mediumship in these texts is striking even when the conclusion emphasizes that the spirit realm is a false consolation for a period grappling with disparate theories of the world embodied in religion and science. Novels such as those by Byatt and Hore, which do not conjure up spiritualism and the figure of the medium, still are pervaded by an abiding sense of the complicated desire to communicate with the dead as part of our collective yearning to know something, to have a sense of revelation, of what lies beyond our own existence. Configured through the image of the display case or the stained-glass window, these novels also address the question of our engagement



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with the past and the contrary dialectic between periods and differing notions of faith. For the Victorians it was the possibility of an afterlife which sustained a form of belief that moved from religious orthodoxy and the church to spiritualism and the séance. For us the communion with the dead takes place via the neo-Victorian novel, and what we seek is less the confirmation of a world beyond the visible reality of daily life and more the comfort of narrative solace, textual salvation, and redemptive writing. The metafictional possibilities for writers to provide a subtle commentary on their own practice in summoning the Victorians in contemporary fiction are clear. What becomes less distinct in that misted-over glass is whether these anxious alliances with a Victorian tradition of the unexplained, the ghostly, and the secular fascination with the spirit world are consciously attempting to underline the spectral and, in essence, ‘faked’ nature of the neo-Victorian text. Do these novels coax us with their hoaxes, just as the Selina Dawes of the 1870s to 1910s duped a susceptible public eager for ghosts? Or do they constitute a comment on the need to believe, to look back and to be reassured that the past lives on, continually keeping those Victorian shadows part of our present? Ultimately, these texts all present us with an uneasy sense of the Victorians looking forward to us just as much as we look back towards to them, and indicate, however fleetingly, the potential substantiveness of those spectres in the glass. The awkward fear of religiosity or faith, the exploration of true existential crises is not necessarily at the root of the presence of (or possibility of) the phantasmagoric in the contemporary text. Instead, writers are demonstrating an increasing sensitivity to the idea that their publications are the equivalent now of the séances and communications with the dead then. Through pastiche and re-visioning, through the mesmeric nature of re-reading, the ghost writers of the present are playing an ambiguous game with a contemporary readership hungry for the summoned spirit of a Victorian fiction they believe in. And yet, as a character in Harwood’s second novel puts it, ‘Truly it is said, that he who attends a séance in the medium’s house is asking to be deceived’ (237). It is the nature of our desire for a readerly and visual deception that provides the focus of our discussion in Chapter 5.




Doing It with Mirrors, or Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic

Metafiction . . . self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (1984)1 When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality. . . . Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared . . . this is how simulation appears . . . a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal . . . We require a visible past, a visible continuum, visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulacrum (1984)2 [C]onjurors’ writings . . . should be seen as . . . essentially ‘performative’: as emulating and extending the stage act; as consisting of a sequence of gestures designed to misdirect the reader’s attention, to say one thing while doing another; and as repeatedly performing that quintessential conjuror’s routine of appearing to explain the trick while actually doing no such thing. Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts (2007)3 The previous chapter explored the theme of spectrality and haunting as metaphor for the influence the Victorian continues to hold over the contemporary imagination and the ways in which neo-Victorian texts 174



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encourage us to reflect on this influence. The focus of this chapter is again on the genre’s metafictionality, but here we examine the relationship between neo-Victorian author and reader as one that resembles that between conjuror and spectator. Neo-Victorian texts, we argue, self-consciously mimic the strategies of Victorian stage magic in order to entangle us in a performance of illusionism. Metafictional neoVictorianism is fuelled and sustained by textual illusion: the fabrication of a ‘plausible’ version of the Victorian past and a ‘credible’ representation of the places, characters, and experiences depicted in the text. As a sub-genre of postmodernist fiction neo-Victorianism, when at its most sophisticated, is self-referential, engaging the reader in a game about its historical veracity and (inter)textuality, and inviting reflections on its metafictional playfulness. If metafiction, as Patricia Waugh notes, calls attention to its counterfeit status, then neo-Victorian or, in Linda Hutcheon’s terms, historiographic metafiction4 stages its artefactual condition in order to challenge our desire for ‘reality’ and ‘truth’, dramatizing the essential constructedness of history and historiography. The position of the neo-Victorian author, and film maker, can then be compared to that of a conjuror: like the audience of a stage magician we know from the start that it’s all an act, but judge the quality of the performance by its ability to deceive and mystify us. A conjuror, as the master of Victorian stage illusion, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, famously noted, is ‘an actor playing the part of a magician’.5 Actor, conjuror, and neo-Victorian author/director all strive for a compelling performance with the power to dazzle and captivate. Just as nineteenth-century magicians’ invocation of spiritualist manifestations relied on the use of magic lanterns or angled mirrors projecting on to the stage the reflections of hidden actors operating behind screens or below stairs,6 so contemporary neo-Victorianism too plays with mirrors to lure us into suspending disbelief. In his cultural history of magic, Performing Dark Arts, Michael Mangan draws analogies between the stage acts and ‘performative writing’ of conjurors and the strategies of postmodernist fiction and film.7 Misdirection – the opening ploy of every trick, which consists in showing while hiding (obscuring how the illusion works by distracting the audience’s attention with the stage set or lengthy scientific or philosophical elucidations) – is as central to the art of the neo-Victorian writer and film director as to that of the conjuror. The stratagem of misdirection and the mise-en-scène of an illusion can be related to Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernist concept of simulation and hyperreality. Baudrillard uses the example of the theme park – Disneyland; a more specifically neo-Victorian paradigm would be



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Dickens World, as discussed in our concluding chapter – to argue that in its very inauthenticity the simulacrum, once it has assumed reality function in our imagination, serves to mask the more general inauthenticity (hyperreality) of the world in which we live: ‘Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland’.8 This process of raising the doubly artifical to the status of ‘reality’ in order to hide the hyperreality (artefactuality) of the original Baudrillard calls a ‘simulation of the third order’.9 Neo-Victorian fiction and film adapts Baudrillard by engaging us in a game of hide and seek, in which the deceptions in which the characters ensnare each other conceal even as they reveal the textual and visual deceits practised on reader and spectator, creating third-order simulations which aim to trick and then spectacularly undeceive us in our desire to capture the ‘reality’ of the Victorian worlds created. In this chapter, therefore, we draw on Mangan’s thoughts on the ‘performative writing’ of illusionists and Baudrillard’s concept of ‘simulation and simulacra’ to examine how a number of contemporary novels and films mimic Victorian conjuring techniques in order to interrogate our fantasies as well as our blind-spots. Among the texts to be discussed here are Sarah Waters’s intellectually most complex novel, Affinity (1999), whose invitation to identify with the first-person narrator leads us into overlooking the class-related clues to the story’s mystery; Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006), in which Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum and hyperreality are associated with Victorian thought experiments and the conjectures of quantum physics; and Steven Millhauser’s emblematic exploration of the conjuror’s (writer’s) craft in his story ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990). We begin and end with two metadramatic films of 2006 about Victorian stage magic: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (adapted from Millhauser’s story), which represent the neo-Victorian conjuring trick as a play in three acts: misdirection (the pledge of authenticity made towards the audience), the magic turn (the surprise, such as the disappearance of an object or a person), and the ‘prestige’:10 in stage magic the illusion itself, in neo-Victorianism the revelation of the trick. This dramatic structure is sometimes encoded paratextually on the book cover or in the title sequence. Thus the paperback cover (Figure 5.1) of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), a novel discussed in Chapter 1, presents us with a frontal view of two girls shown from the waist downwards in identical outfits (white dresses, black shoes), their only difference appearing to be in the positioning of the hands. This, then, is to be a story of two girls, two sisters, possibly twins; or is it?



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Figure 5.1 Paperback cover of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion, 2006), reproduced by permission of the Orion Publishing Group


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The pledge tendered by the image is destabilized by the titular reference to a crucial agent: the thirteenth tale. Thirteen, as readers know, is the number of oddness as of magic (reminding us of the uninvited guest in the fairytale who exacts revenge). The impression of a mystery to be unravelled is further heightened by the reviewer’s blurb underneath the title. As we discover early on (chapter 3) the thirteenth tale is conspicuous by its absence. The enigmatic relationship between the girls and the (uncertain, missing) story is key to the ‘twists and turns’, the story inside the covers. The ‘prestige’ to be revealed to us at the end of the text is encrypted on the spine and the back cover’s display of a single girl, in white with black shoes, standing alone, depicted from the knees downwards (Figure 5. 2). Initially this might be taken to be one of the girls figured on the front. It is only after reading the novel that we realize that the front and back covers perform a similar misdirection as the text does by exhibiting while disguising the third sister: a sleight of hand hinted at in her hidden hands. Similarly, Nolan’s title sequence draws attention to the three magic acts through headings (‘The Pledge’, ‘The Turn’, ‘The Prestige’) illustrated with a revolving board showing in alternation an empty cage and a cage with a bird, while two different birds are flying off the screen dropping feathers. The bird in (and out of) the cage image is an important clue for understanding the magic tricks of the protagonists as well as a metaphor for their plight: ‘Who cares for the man in the box?’, one of them will exclaim at the culmination point of the film.11

5.1 ‘Are you watching closely?’: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006)12 Adapted from Christopher Priest’s 1995 eponymous novel, The Prestige provides a striking, even chilling, metaphor for the imaginative and performative acts of contemporary neo-Victorianism. Text and film revolve around the embittered professional and personal rivalry between, and mutual destruction of, two Victorian magicians, Robert (in the novel Rupert) Angier (played by Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). Their names are emblematic of their profession, Angier’s evoking the world of dreams (‘anges’) conjured up by the magician, while ‘Borden’ hints at the crossing of ‘borders’, the boundary work involved in performing illusions. One of the underlying causes of their antagonism is their profoundly different approach, reflecting competing camps in Victorian magic: the ‘skilled artists’ who excelled at sleight of hand (but risked being dismissed as mere ‘jugglers’) as opposed to what Robert-Houdin called ‘the “false bottom” school of conjuring’, who



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Figure 5.2 Paperback back cover of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion, 2006), reproduced by permission of the Orion Publishing Group


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primarily relied on machinery.13 In Priest’s novel Borden belittles Angier for his ‘fundamentally flawed and limited understanding of magical technique’: he fails to grasp that ‘[t]he wonder of magic lies not in the technical secret, but in the skill with which it is performed.’14 While Angier’s pièce de resistance is indeed entirely a question of technology, ironically Borden’s leading act is itself contingent on circumstances other than mere skill. In the film the enmity between the two characters originates from a tragic accident when Borden, by tying the wrong kind of knot, caused the death by drowning in a water-filled cabinet of Angier’s assistant and wife. Angier later attempts to sabotage Borden’s performances and imitates his most celebrated act, ‘The Transported Man’, which consists of the magician entering a cabinet at one end of the stage while instantly re-emerging from another at the opposite end, catching the ball he had started to bounce across the stage. With the help of the ingenious Eastern-European scientist Nikola Tesla (a reallife inventor, here played by David Bowie)15 Angier acquires a quasiFrankensteinian electrical apparatus which enables him to outperform Borden. His star act is called ‘In a Flash’ and involves his disappearance in the midst of electric explosions, only to make a spectacular reappearance seconds later among the audience on one of the balconies. One day, however, his performance goes wrong when he drops through a stage trap door into a tank filled with water and drowns. Borden, who made his way backstage and into the basement in order to discover the secret of Angier’s trick, arrives to see his rival trapped in the tank. Found at the scene and convicted of having plotted Angier’s murder by having contrived to move the tank underneath the trap door, Borden is sentenced to death. There is of course more than one trick and turn to the story of the two magicians, and one of these is to present the audience with parts of the explanation of Angier’s secret at the very beginning. The film starts with Harry Cutter, Angier’s designer of illusions (played by Michael Caine), describing the three constitutive parts of every magic trick to a young girl (whom we later identify as Borden’s daughter): [The anonymous voiceover (indicated in italics) addresses the spectator while Cutter performs a magic dis/reappearance trick with a budgie to a girl; in the background Angier is shown staging ‘In a Flash’] Are you watching closely? – [Cutter’s voiceover.] Every magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called the pledge. It’s where the magician shows you something ordinary, a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. [Cutter produces a cage with a bird in it; Angier’s assistant



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asks for volunteers from the audience, who – with Borden in disguise among them – proceed to examine Angier’s magical apparatus.] He shows you this object, perhaps he asks you to inspect it, to see that it is indeed real, normal. But of course it probably isn’t. [While the volunteers return to their seats, Borden moves backstage.] The second act is called the turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. [Cutter makes the budgie and cage disappear while, apparently hit by electrical currents, Angier vanishes from the stage.] Now you are looking for the secret but you won’t find it because you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. [Borden arrives in the basement, moves past a blind man sitting in front of a water tank, and witnesses Angier dropping into the tank.] But you wouldn’t clap yet. [The girl grows confused, while the audience in the background is becoming restless as there is no sign of Angier.] Because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. [Cutter presents the missing bird to the girl, who starts clapping.] That’s why every magic trick has a third act: the hardest part, the part we call the prestige. [A bewildered and horrified Borden watches Angier struggle for life.] (00:42–03:12)16 ‘Are you watching closely?’ Repeated twice more, this question evidently issues a challenge. From the outset we are invited to reflect on our perception of events while enjoying the Freudian game of fort/da.17 In his ‘Special Features’ Nolan refers to the affinities between magician and film director,18 stressing that he wants viewers to pick up on the metafilmic dimension: The Prestige is ‘very much about film-making . . . It’s also intended to suggest . . . how the film itself is spooling its narrative out to the audience. We want people really to be aware of the effect the film is having on them as it’s unfolding before their eyes’ (0:17–0:42). This can be applied to the neo-Victorian fiction author.19 A novel like Affinity, as we shall see, shows us all the props and still succeeds in making us overlook the crucial details: the Millbank Prison, spiritualist and lesbian coming-out plots serve to obscure the meticulously choreographed deceptions carried out right in front of our eyes. If we were not taken in by the decoy story, we would pick up all the clues, as we do on second reading. Similarly, The Prestige plays with our blindness in the face of the insights we are given early on about how Borden and Angier’s tricks might work. Cutter insists that Borden’s act must rely on a double, but Angier’s persistent disbelief clouds our judgement; and while a child is instantly and painfully aware of the cruelty that lies beneath the bird




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dis/reappearance trick (the bird on display is crushed by the collapsing cage; the ‘recovery’ produces a second bird that had been hidden in the folds of the cloth), we remain impervious to its allegorical nature as an indication of Angier’s later stunt. Another important early clue is the revelation of the secret of a prominent magician, Chung Ling Soo (a historical figure), who relies on a permanent deception (of physical frailty) which, in order to sustain his act (of conjuring up a weighty glass bowl from his robe), must be maintained in his private life too; and yet we do not make any inferences about Borden’s changeable behaviour which so troubles his wife. A further context to the two magicians and their rivalry, as well as to the game with ‘original’ and ‘copy’, is Chung Ling Soo’s imposture of another Chinese magician, Ching Ling Foo, whose stunts he appropriated, just as Angier does Borden’s.20 Like The Prestige, some neo-Victorian fictions explicitly articulate a ‘pledge’ as the opening gambit of the trick. Thus Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) begins with an Editor’s Preface authored by a Cambridge professor, who assures the reader that s/he has undertaken his/her scholarly utmost to research the historical facts of the story we are about to read: ‘Many of the presented facts – names, places, events . . . that I have been able to check are verifiable; others appear dubious at best or have been deliberately falsified, distorted, or simply invented. Real people move briefly in and out of the narrative, others remain unidentified – or unidentifiable – or are perhaps pseudonymous.’21 The reference to the fabricated aspects of the story lends a degree of authenticity to the remainder. This is a familiar trope of Victorian adventure fiction, much of which begins with an ‘editor’ verifying parts of the story. In Rider Haggard’s She (1887), for example, the editor offers his uncertainty about the possible veracity of the narrator, the Cambridge mathematician Robert Horace Holly’s account, as evidence of his own credibility: ‘Of the history itself the reader must judge. . . . Personally I have made up my mind to refrain from comments. . . . To me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face. Its explanation I must leave to others.’22 The strategy of revealing while concealing the clues is brought to perfection in The Prestige. The very first camera shot offers an oblique illustration of Angier’s trick; but it is only at the end that we can make sense of what was disclosed to us at the beginning. The film opens on a vista of black top hats scattered on the ground in an outside space (Tesla’s laboratory grounds, we learn later). If we take the hat as a metonymy for the magician, this would hint at the magic trick being premised on the multiplicity, or at least duality, of magicians involved



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in any one performance (a duality recreated not only in the doubling of characters23 but also in the joint screenplay composition of the film director brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan,24 and further reflected in the close proximity of the release dates of The Prestige and Burger’s ‘sibling’ film about nineteenth-century magic).25 In the closing scenes of The Prestige we discover that Borden’s ‘Transported Man’ relied on twin brotherhood. There are two Bordens, and not even the women in their lives knew about their double identity (indeed, in Priest’s novel, their sense of self/selves is fundamentally linked to their unity, ‘Alfred’ being the composite name for the twins ‘Al’bert and ‘Fred’erick; when one of them dies, the other admits to ‘no longer know[ing] myself’).26 One of the brothers is hanged for murder, the other survives to kill Angier, whose own double had revealed himself to the Borden awaiting execution. Angier, too, has always had a dual identity: ‘The Great Danton’ in public life, he is Lord Colderdale in his private capacity. The secret of his survival resides in his apparatus, which is not, as his Victorian (and contemporary) audience might suspect, a tele-transportation device but a duplication machine. Just like the top hats we see yet whose meaning we do not take in at the beginning, Angier has been creating a copy of himself every time he performed his trick. The copy would continue the act by staging a glamorous return, while the original would fall through the trap door into the water tank and drown. When Angier set Borden up for his ‘murder’, he did not allow for Borden’s own duality. After Borden’s execution his brother exacts revenge by shooting Angier and setting fire to his theatre. In his dying moments Angier reveals his secret: [Angier] It took courage to climb into that machine every night not knowing if I’d be the man in the box or in the prestige. Do you want to see what it cost me? You didn’t see where you are, did you – look . . . [directing his eyes at a long row of water tanks, now all enveloped by flames.] [Borden] I don’t care. You went half-way round the world, you spent a fortune. You did terrible things, really terrible things, Robert, and all for nothing, nothing. [Angier, talking haltingly, in pain.] You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth. The world is miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, if you could make them wonder, then you got to see something very special. You really don’t know. It was . . . It was the look on their faces. [Falls back, dying.]




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[Cutter, performing his trick to Borden’s daughter.] Every magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called the pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary. The second act is called the turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it into something extraordinary. But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. [The surviving Borden enters to catch the ball his daughter is bouncing and take her home. – Flashback to earlier scene: after Angier’s death Borden is shown walking along the burning glass tanks.] Now you’re looking for the secret. [Flashback to opening shot of the film: vista of the top hats.] But you won’t find it because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled. (1:56:17–1:59:50) We want to be fooled because the ‘truth’ may be more than we have bargained for. In the concluding shot the camera moves over a multitude of glass cabinets before zooming in on one, which contains the – or rather a – dead body of Angier. The one transparent glass case stands for all the others, all holding the human remains of Angier’s performances. Every performance produced another replica that had to be disposed of. Each tank is a coffin, the basement of Angier’s theatre a graveyard of suicides. The original Robert Angier died at the rehearsal of his new act prior to its first public performance. The first glass cabinet houses the ‘original’, all others the copies. The glass case with the copy inside is an apt metaphor for film, for it too deals in ‘dead’ images. It is also a metaphor for neo-Victorian fiction and film, which play with our desire to rediscover and possess the ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ by offering us a hall of mirrors full of copy. As in Baudrillard’s third-order simulation, the copy becomes the real thing: in Angier’s performance as much as in neo-Victorianism.

5.2 The conjuror in the closet: Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) In Affinity it is the performance not of magic but of spiritualism in which the third-order simulation is embedded and through which it is deconstructed. Spiritualism and stage magic are of course closely aligned; they perform the same tricks in different environments: the private home for spiritualist sittings, the public domain of a theatre for displays of magic. Priest’s Rupert Angier initiates his magician’s career as a spiritualist preying on the vulnerability of the newly bereaved; in ‘Eisenheim



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the Illusionist’ and Burger’s adaptation the hero’s stage invocation of spectral apparitions blurs the boundaries between the performance of magic and the spiritualist séance. It was precisely because they knew all the tricks that masters of magic like Harry Houdini, unlike his filmic counterpart in Gillian Armstrong’s Death Defying Acts (2007), were able to debunk spiritualists as charlatans and failed magicians.27 In Waters a character’s reference to spiritualists as ‘a lot of clever conjurors’28 is confirmed early on by the spiritualist medium herself, when she explains one of her illusions to the woman already well on her way to becoming ensnared by her sleight of hand: after conjuring up the word ‘Truth’ on the flesh of her arm, she illustrates how she achieved the effect by marking out the letters with a knitting needle and then sprinkling salt on the wound, thus making the letters stand out in crimson (168). The ‘truth’ of the spiritualist performance is, indeed, fakery. Spiritualism in Affinity acts as a simulation which operates a treble deception: on the characters tricked by the lesbian couple, by masking, and thereby enabling, homosexual acts; on the protagonist, by furnishing her with an exonerating language for the exploration of her transgressive desires, and, through the concept of spiritual-qua-erotic ‘affinity’, securing her complicity in the prison escape plot; and on the contemporary reader, who will see through the spiritualist masquerade and yet is likely to be seduced into suspending disbelief in the desire for a happy supernatural ending to the lesbian love story. In her hide-and-seek game with the visible lesbian ‘spirit’ and the crucially ‘invisible’ part of her identity Waters draws on and extends Terry Castle’s concept of ‘the apparitional lesbian’ by adding class as a further determinant. Castle examines the way in which the figure of the woman-loving woman has haunted Western literature and film, arguing that the female ghost – so full of allure in her elusiveness and always denied at the point of materialisation – has served as a metaphor for the spectre of female same-sex desire. This ‘recognition through negation’, Castle concludes, has ‘functioned as the necessary psychological and rhetorical means for objectifying – and ultimately embracing – that which otherwise could not be acknowledged’.29 Affinity plays with the reader’s recognition of the conflation between spiritualism and lesbianism, illustrating the ease with which the former can be deployed as a screen for the latter by giving us some insight into what happens during the medium’s private séances with nervously depressed young women, who as a result of her special ‘treatment’ recover from their hysteria and develop a new spiritual, speak sensual, awareness, but who, unsurprisingly, cannot be produced at court as witnesses for the defence. And




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yet we fail to see the one truly ‘apparitional’ lesbian of the story who stage-manages all the events. If The Prestige hints at the necrophilic undercurrents in our imaginary revisitations of the Victorian, Affinity tenders a less sinister image of the neo-Victorian textual and sexual body. It tells the story of the Victorian hysteric-as-repressed-lesbian, Margaret Prior, through journal entries which map her growing obsession with the spiritualist Selina Dawes, incarcerated in Millbank Penitentiary for having caused her benefactress Mrs Brink’s death after assaulting a teenage girl during a private séance. Selina’s diary extracts, set two years earlier, are offered as a complementary account contextualizing her prison sentence and, as the novel progresses, increasingly serve as a counter-narrative to Margaret’s version and vision. Here, too, the text is framed by a corpse: the ‘still & straight’ (4), lifeless body of Mrs Brink, who suffered a heart attack as a result of the shock of disillusionment, anticipates Margaret’s projected suicide at the close of the novel. The corpse is emblematic not, as in The Prestige, of the neo-Victorian venture of resurrecting the past, but of the destruction wreaked by illicit desire on the Victorian spinster. The spectacular petrification of defrauded desire at the moment of enlightenment has its counterpoint in the consummation of desire, behind the scenes, by the trickster couple Selina and her maid Ruth. As in stage magic, which Affinity mimics in its enactment of pledge/misdirection, turn/disappearance, and prestige/shock revelation, the iconographic display of and fetishistic gaze directed at Selina’s body (its calculated impassivity acting as an invitation for the inscription of erotic fantasies)30 serves to distract the reader’s attention and provides a screen for the shadow game operated by Ruth. The instability of the figure of the ‘magician’ constitutes a conjuring trick in itself, for the ostensible mistress of illusions, the spiritualist, turns out to be the assistant merely: not the strategist who pulls the strings but, rather, as the line from Selina’s diary which concludes the novel indicates, one of her puppets: ‘“Remember,” Ruth is saying, “whose girl you are”’ (352). The ‘real’ conjuror, Ruth, comes doubly disguised, as Selina’s male spirit guide and cross-class ‘master’, Peter Quick (anachronistically purloined from Henry James’s Peter Quint, whose unruly temperament Quick anticipates),31 and as the lowly servant Vigers employed by Margaret’s mother; the tweeny not afraid of ghosts because she impersonates them. In Selina’s opening journal entry Quick is shown to be the central agent of the plot: it is he who frightened and then manhandled the hysterical Madeleine Silvester; his ‘white legs’ (and gender), exposed by his ‘open gown’ (2), that caused Mrs Brink’s



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collapse; and his desires and deeds which led to Selina’s conviction. As in the introductory pledge of a magic trick, the text offers us all the clues to the mystery, but it is only with hindsight that we recognize and understand them: when Quick leaves the scene, Ruth enters it; her intimidating attention to Mrs Brink (‘holding tight’ to her ‘hand . . . saying she would not let it go’ during the doctor’s examination) ensures her silence: ‘Mrs Brink looked then as if she longed to speak but could not’ (3). The love affair between Ruth and Selina is hinted at between the lines of Ruth’s refusal to ‘lock up my own mistress, who has done nothing’ (1). Later it is Margaret’s lawyer brother Stephen who muses about the ‘beau in muslin’ for whose sake Dawes must have gone to prison, while Vigers, the very lover in question, is offering biscuits to the guests (101). This scene is emblematic, for Ruth’s (the conjuror’s) silent presence is key to the ‘disappearance trick’ which follows the textual ‘pledge’ (Selina’s first diary entry, which exhibits the prime movers while obscuring the precise nature of their interaction). In her quest for Selina’s story Margaret repeatedly comes across representations of Peter Quick, and records the sense of odd familiarity she experiences when looking at the dark eyes and muscular arm of this supposed spirit reproduced on paper or in sculptural form, but never once does she (neither do we) recognize her own maid who daily helps her in and out of clothing, prepares her baths, and otherwise uses her free access to her mistress’s room to drive the trickster plot forward. Because the first-person perspective encourages our identification with the central character, we are seduced into sharing Margaret’s misperception of events, even though the textual insertions of Selina’s journal narrative allow us privileged insight into Ruth’s and Quick’s interconnecting manipulations. Ruth’s sudden appearance in her bedroom when Selina first takes up residence in Mrs Brink’s house is associated with the spectral identity she will soon co-opt for her spirit persona: ‘she had come quietly . . . like a real lady’s maid, like a ghost’ (119). Expected to be ‘omniscient, ubiquitous and invisible’, Victorian house servants were, as Tatiana Kontou points out, indeed constructed as a species of ghosts.32 In Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) the servants entertain themselves dancing, with ‘the noiselessness of ghosts’, in the sitting-room while their masters are dining below.33 The slippage between servant and spectre is also explored in the Victorian ghost story; thus when Henry James’s governess-narrator in The Turn of the Screw senses that there was ‘something undefinably astir in the house’34 in the early hours of the morning, she refers to both the living, and the undead, servants at Bly.




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That ghosts might take the earthly shape of maids is insinuated in Selina’s warning words to Margaret: ‘They [spirits] . . . see everything. Even the pages of your secret book’ (111). The birth of Peter Quick, the removal of the medium’s cabinet to the alcove that has a door in it (thus enabling Ruth’s entries and exits), the establishment of séances with Mrs Brink’s friends, the introduction of private sessions with pretty women Peter fancies – none of these ideas originate from but are ‘visited’ on Selina. Ruth’s increasing mastery of Selina, as recorded in her diary, is accompanied by Quick’s sado-masochistic interventions. The rope that cuts into Selina’s flesh during sittings, the collar that marks him out as her owner, the mantra of obedience he impresses on her (‘your prayer must always be May I be used . . . my medium must do as she is bid’ [261]): all reverse social hierarchies of class as much as they transgress gender codes. Ruth’s management of Mrs Brink and implicitly threatening behaviour when Selina is installed in the house (all previous mediums, Ruth tells Selina, turned out to be ‘crooks’ and had to be dismissed; Ruth’s warning is not missed by Selina [155]) suggest that Ruth master-minded past encounters with mediums for her own libidinal purposes, and that Selina’s satisfactory performance may be judged in terms of her compliance with Ruth’s desires. In contradistinction to Margaret, the reader is thus able to gain insider knowledge of Ruth’s control of Selina, and yet is no closer than Margaret to making a connection between Ruth/Peter Quick and Vigers, the servant Margaret can so frequently ‘hear . . . stir[ing] above’ her at night (116). It is only after the final magic turn, Selina’s disappearance from Millbank (an escape brought about not with the help of spirit hands but with the connivance of a friendly warden duped with messages from the beyond), and with the emergence of the ‘magician’ figure into full view, that the reader is at last able to ‘see’ and identify Ruth as Vigers, Margaret’s maid, currently on her way to Italy with Selina in order to start a new life with Margaret’s name and inheritance: ‘Now . . . I began to glimpse the whole, thick, monstrous shape of it’ (337). The crucial insight here is Margaret’s, and our own, class blindness: ‘What was she, to me? I could not even recall the details of her face, her look, her manners. I could not say, cannot say now, what shade her hair is, what colour her eye, how her lip curves’ (340). The ‘monstrous’ consequences of acquiescing with the idea that those deemed socially ‘inferior’ are irrelevant and therefore rightly remain invisible to us strike home with a vengeance. At the start of her diary Margaret had set out to write history from a new



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angle, a perspective programmatically different from the one her historian father would have taken: ‘no, of course he would not start the story there, with a lady and her servant, and petticoats and loose hair’ (7).35 By not ‘bother[ing] with the detail of the skirts’ (8), her father – the male historian and story-teller – would have missed out on a vital insight into the personally intimidating and disciplining nature of the penitentiary’s architecture. Margaret gains her first view of Millbank when, on entering the prison grounds, she bends down to disentangle her gown from jutting stones: ‘it is in lifting my eyes from my sweeping hem that I first see the pentagons of Millbank – and the nearness of them, and the suddenness of that gaze, makes them seem terrible. I look at them, and feel my heart beat hard, and I am afraid’ (8). This experience predisposes her to empathize with the inmates and their predicament rather than to assume the position of ‘upright’ superiority expected and advised by Mr Shillitoe and Miss Ridley. However, as she realizes at the end of her journey, this womancentred and supposedly bottom-up perspective still excluded the key agent, the servant, thus causing her own demise. Ironically, while from her first visit to Millbank Margaret is aware of and sensitive to the panoptical gaze – a gaze which she realizes is also, increasingly, turned on her, both at home and in the prison36 – she never considers the potential dangers of the maid’s gaze. Despite a childhood incident, when a servant responded to her stare with a painful pinch (340), and in the face of the Millbank prisoners’ intent observation of her and warnings about their cunning manoeuvres,37 it is only after her maid has made away with her lover, her money, and her identity that she comes to recognize the controlling, blinding power of the subaltern’s gaze: ‘Every time I stood in Selina’s cell, feeling my flesh yearn towards hers, there might as well have been Vigers at the gate, looking on, stealing Selina’s gaze from me to her’ (341–2). In a variation of the triangular love plot of James’s The Bostonians (1886)38 Waters adds a twist on the gendered class dynamics of the contest: as in James a ‘masculine’ intruder intervenes in the ‘romantic friendship’39 between a repressed lesbian middle-class hysteric and her feminine-spiritualist object of desire; the difference is that Waters’s triumphant lover is a lesbian servant. The all-embracing illusion to which Margaret has fallen victim has the effect of turning not only her life, but even her death into a simulacrum. Thus her farewell letter to her one-time lover and sister-in-law Helen, posted with the thought of her imminent, scandalous, life in Italy with Selina, now assumes the appearance of a suicide note: ‘I wish you will only regret my going from you, not cry out against the




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manner of it. I wish you will remember me with kindness, not with pain. Your pain will not help me, where I am going. But your kindness will help my mother, and my brother, as it helped them once before [when she attempted suicide]. . . . I cannot live, and not be at her side!’ (316). Just as the ‘interrogation posed by simulation’, in Baudrillard’s terms, precipates ‘the knowledge that truth, reference, objective cause have ceased to exist’,40 so Margaret’s comprehension of the momentous imposture enacted on her retrospectively dispossesses all of her thoughts and actions, her sense of identity, her prospective suicide even, of authenticity and ‘truth’.

5.3 Simulation and consciousness: Mind travel in Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006) The instability and insubstantiality of all truth claims in the face of the omnipresence of the simulacrum is explicitly grounded in Baudrillardian philosophy in The End of Mr Y. Epigraphed by a quotation from Simulacra and Simulation, the text prefaces itself as ‘a gigantic simulacrum . . . that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference’.41 This is implied by the self-referential title adopted from the (fictive) fin-de-siècle novel about a self-reflective alternative world which by the nature of the simulation it projects induces the ‘real-life’ death of author and reader alike. The ‘end’ of ‘Mr Y’ is a mind game with proliferating significations: at its most concrete level, that of the fiction within the fiction, it is about the ‘end’ (death) of the character Mr Y, the protagonist of Thomas E. Lumas’s novel, and about the nature of his ‘end’; for the heroine of Thomas’s novel (note the authorial names game) it is also about the demise of the author, Lumas, and all of his readers, and thus paradoxically about the cultural ‘undeath’ of this particular author, who continues to attract attention precisely because of the mythology of a deadly curse; on a further level it is about putting an end to Mr Y: the book, the person, and the questions both raise about consciousness and ‘reality’. In Affinity Margaret’s self-deception and dream of happiness with Selina are of Baudrillard’s first order of simulation: simulation ‘founded on . . . imitation and counterfeit’ with the aim of instituting a utopian order, in which ‘a radically different universe takes form’: a ‘romantic dream’ that ‘stands opposed to the continent of the real’,42 the ‘real’ here denoting normative, heterosexist society. By contrast, in The End of Mr Y the protagonist’s self-image and perception of the world are already consciously invested in third-order simulation, where, as



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Baudrillard argues, the ‘models no longer constitute . . . the imaginary in relation to the real, they are themselves an anticipation of the real, and thus leave no room for any sort of fictional anticipation – they are immanent, and thus leave no room for any kind of imaginary transcendence.’43 This transcendence is unattainable in a simulation which always feeds and returns on itself: the dream world of the personal and collective unconscious to which the characters accede in both Lumas’s and Thomas’s novels. Thomas’s twenty-first-century anti-heroine Ariel Manto, her nominal identity already a construct (her first name a maternal fantasy of apocalypse derived from Plath’s poetry, her surname a self-reinvention), withdraws to the life of the mind and poststructuralist theory in her endeavour to find relief from a difficult childhood that has left her permanently alienated from her body (which she continues to selfharm with abusive sexual encounters): ‘Real life is physical. Give me books instead: give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book; I’d give anything for that’ (134). Fascinated by thought experiments which establish a conceptual bridge between poststructuralist theory and quantum physics, she starts out on a doctorate under the supervision of Saul Burlem after hearing his lecture on the Victorian writer Lumas. Mysteriously Burlem, who is planning to write a biography of Lumas, disappears shortly after Ariel takes up her studies. On her way back from the university, closed after the partial collapse of the science building, she stops by an antiquarian bookshop, in which she stumbles across The End of Mr Y: the novel of which there exists only one known copy in a German bank vault. Her feverish purchase and consumption of the book is matched by its contents. It relates the story of the late-Victorian ‘Mr Y’ who, baffled by a fairground illusion (the materialization of ghostly apparitions on stage), seeks out the conjuror in order to gain insight into how the trick works and, after being given a magic potion enabling him to mind-travel into people’s consciousness, becomes obsessed with the ‘Troposphere’ (adapted from ‘tropos’, character, and ‘atmosphere’ [68–9]): so much so that he sacrifices everything for it, his marriage, profession, material existence, ultimately even his life. As Ariel discovers when she travels to the Troposphere herself, this alternative universe has a quality so irresistible and addictive that it proves indeed life-threatening. The fictional Lumas is adapted from the Victorian writer Edwin A. Abbott (1838–1926), whose mathematical novel Flatland (1884), an early science-fiction text much-admired by Ariel, experiments with




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the impact of one and two-dimensional worlds on the development of consciousness, personal identity, and social interaction. The protagonist of the two-dimensional Flatland travels to the one-dimensional Lineland and the three-dimensional Spaceland and imagines what life might be like in no-dimensional Pointland; when on his return to Flatland he attempts to alert his compatriots to three-dimensional thought he is imprisoned for sedition.44 Lumas also carries echoes of the Victorian mathematician, physicist, and poet James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79), briefly mentioned in the novel (96), whose ‘Lines written under the conviction that it is not wise to read Mathematics after one’s fire is out’ (1853), ‘A Poem in Dynamics’ (1854), and ‘Recollections of Dreamland’ (1856) explore the existence of parallel worlds: the mathematical school of ‘Learned fools’ drilled into ‘formal rules’ (‘Lines’) is juxtaposed to the world of dreams, into whose ‘boundless space’ the speaker travels and whose fourth dimension, Time freed from linear progression, enables him to ‘link the past and present into one continuous life’ (‘Dreamland’). ‘A Poem in Dynamics’ parodically brings these worlds together through an ‘infinitesimal link’ and an ‘Equation of Continuity’; a similar equation and diagram feature in The End of Mr Y (266).45 The most important model for Lumas is Samuel Butler (1835–1902), whose satirical utopia Erewhon (1872) and philosophical reflections in his Note-Books on the nature of reality and consciousness are repeatedly discussed in the novel. Like Butler, Lumas had a stormy relationship with Darwin over their divergent approaches to evolution. The key role Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia is accorded in Butler’s study on Evolution, Old and New (1879)46 is satirized in the novel through Burlem’s choice of a hiding place for the most dangerous page of The End of Mr Y (the page containing the recipe for the tincture which enables entry to the Troposphere). Lumas’s claim that the world only exists in and through thought is drawn from Butler’s Note-Books, as quoted (in adaptation of Hamlet) in the epigraph to Part One: ‘Not only is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all, except in so far as thinking has made it so’ (1).47 Butler’s concept of ‘unconscious memory’ (memory inherited phylogenetically in the course of the evolution of a species), his ascription of life and sentience to ‘every atom in the universe’,48 in particular his reflections on the way in which evolution might affect machines in generating consciousness and what impact this might have on human–machine relations are of direct relevance to the novel. Ariel recognizes the analogies with Butler’s thought and is further entranced by Lumas’s novel because its preface formulates ideas which anticipate twentieth-century poststructuralist theory – Derridaean



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THE DISCOURSE WHICH FOLLOWS may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerized by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed. Those readers should not abandon their scepticism, for it is their will to seek to peer behind the Conjuror’s curtain, as it is the will of man to ask those peculiar whats, and wheres and hows of life. Of life, as of dreams. Of image, as of word. As thought, as of speech. When one looks at the illusions of the world, one sees only the world. For where does illusion end? Indeed, what is there in life that is not a conjuring trick? . . . As Robert-Houdin has built automata with which to produce his illusions, I shall here propose to create an automaton of mind, through which one may see illusions and realities beyond; from which one, if he knows how, may spring into the automata of all minds and their electricity . . . (29–30, emphasis in original) In this novel too parallels are drawn between the illusions produced by a magic trick and the poststructuralist concept of the simulacrum. Both are associated with the world of dreams and the unconscious, in which we appear to accede to insights which our ‘waking’ mind strives to analyse and organize logocentrically, through language. In an echo of Derrida’s ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’49 there is nothing beyond the symbolic. All the world’s an illusion of enunciation. However, just like a conjuror plays with the audience, so the author backtracks repeatedly, most prominently at the end of the preface, when his disclaimer – ‘it is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered’ (31) – hints at the opposite, intimating the truthfulness of the fiction, the ‘reality’ behind the illusion. Similarly, the preface proposes both that there is an external creator – the ‘conjuror’ who invented the mind-reading machine – and that the world is entirely of our own making, a reflection solely of our unconscious, of dreams, memories and fantasies: ‘Perhaps I mislead the reader by talking of the Conjuror. Let the creator become curator! And we creatures who live on in the dreams of a world made of our own thought . . . where the fibres of being are conjured from memories no more real or unreal than the dream in which we may observe them’ (30). Here the stage magician summoning up an illusion, who represents the idea of a transcendent force, is conjured away.



différance and polysemy, the Lacanian imaginary and symbolic, Baudrillard and simulation:

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The creator become curator is a reference to William Paley’s early nineteenth-century metaphor of the ‘watchmaker’, which sustained the Enlightenment idea of the universe as a ‘divinely inspired machine’ operating on the cause and effect principles of Newtonian physics.50 The concept of an ‘artificer’51 or ‘Great Architect’52 came under heavy attack from evolutionists, Darwin as well as Butler, the latter of whom devoted an entire chapter of his book on Evolution, Old and New to disproving Paley in order to affirm the teleology of all organic matter as the foremost principle of evolution. While countenancing the idea of a design to the world, Butler drew on Buffon and Erasmus Darwin to argue that ‘the design which has designed organisms, has resided within, and been embodied in, the organisms themselves’: the world was the work not of a deity but of organic life itself.53 Lumas’s preface thus engages the reader in a Victorian philosophical-theological-scientific debate about the provenance of the ‘design’, the human mind, and its essence, consciousness. The question of the design/er is later applied to the Troposphere which, Ariel is told, is a human creation (223). In Lumas’s preface there is, and yet is not, a designer; the world is free to develop within the constraints of its construction, the origins of which are unknowable. The paradox posited in the conjunction of an external (conjuring/transcendent) and an exclusively internal (dreaming/imagining) consciousness, of maker, machine, and mind, of illusion and ‘reality’ remains unresolved. The preface concludes by reiterating, in aporistic terms, the supremacy of the dream world: ‘beyond this is not truth but what we have made truth; yet this is a truth we cannot see’ (30). Ultimately it is only through ‘the logos of metaphora’ that we can ‘find the protasis of the past, that glorious illusion which we call memory’ (30): our sense of a past, so essential for our self-consciousness, is founded on images drawn from our imagination. Lumas’s conceptualization of the world as illusion and our entrapment within our mental universe are illustrated in two of his short stories whose meaning Ariel ponders before she discovers The End of Mr Y. In ‘The Daguerrotype’ an exact replica of the protagonist’s house mysteriously materializes in close proximity to his home, its only difference being its absolute inaccessibility. An old man explains that the house might constitute a three-dimensional copy made in a four-dimensional world; just as it is impossible to ‘enter’ a two-dimensional daguerreotype of a three-dimensional ‘original’, so the equivalent might be true in this case. When the protagonist goes to see the old man, what he finds is his three-dimensional card-board copy. In the light of Lumas’s preface the implication is that if the old man is the counterpart to the conjuror,



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the protagonist’s (and by inference the reader’s) world constitutes a mere simulacrum; a simulacrum, however, within which individual consciousness has developed. That this consciousness is forever trapped within its confines is suggested by a second story, ‘The Blue Room’, in which two philosophers seek to leave the titular room, but all exit routes invariably return them to their point of departure. Their philosophy is powerless to offer a resolution to the experiential and psychological muddle: the phenomenologist argues that ‘as there are no such things as ghosts, they have nothing to fear’, while the existentialist concludes that ‘he has never seen a ghost, and therefore . . . they don’t exist’ (16–17). The Freudian concept of the uncanny54 might offer an explanation for ‘The Blue Room’ as a metaphor for the unconscious processes of the mind. Coming as it does at the start of the text and thus as a prologue to Lumas’s novel, the story also furnishes an explicatory model for Mr Y’s Troposphere which, as Ariel discovers, is ‘made by thinking’ (265), representing both individual and collective thought and memories, and which can thus be conceptualized, as Lumas’s preface already indicates, ‘as a text . . . a world of metaphor’ (267). One of the reasons for Ariel’s fascination with The End of Mr Y is its engagement with the very ideas with which she approaches literary texts and life. The psychoanalytic, linguistic, and poststructuralist theories the novel illustrates in its representation of the unconscious and the world of dreams are complemented by the concepts of quantum physics when Ariel begins to discuss alternative models of the universe with the evolutionary biologist Heather and the theologian Adam. In contradistinction to the deterministic model of Newtonian physics (whose defunctness is signalled by the collapse of the Newton Building), quantum physics, as Ariel explains, offers a wealth of probabilities. Subatomic particles are thought to deviate from binary norms (‘here/there’, ‘day/night’) by being everywhere at once, violating linear Newtonian principles of cause and effect (past, present, future). Two different interpretations within quantum physics assign these particles a fixed place either through the presence of an observer or across a multiverse: ‘while the Copenhagen interpretation suggests that all probabilities collapse into one definite reality on observation, the many-worlds interpretation suggests that all the possibilities exist at once, but that each one has its own universe to go with it’ (158). The reader’s implicit presence offers an illustration of the Copenhagen model when applied to the fictional universe(s) of the novel (our gaze fixates Ariel as being in one place at a time: either the Troposphere or the ‘real’ world), while the concept of multiple worlds is exemplified




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by Ariel’s journeys to the Troposphere: not only does she – and some of the people she meets there – exist in two places at once (mentally in the Troposphere, physically in the ‘real’ world), but she is also able to travel across multiple minds and memories as well as through time. Her use of the tropospheric ‘underground’ system of time travel, by means of which she is able to return to an earlier moment in ‘real’ time, thus revoking an action she would have committed shortly afterwards, by selecting the train most representative of that moment’s emotion, generates two different versions of her ‘real-life’ experience. Her intervention, at the end of the novel, in two historical events creates a diversity of new worlds when, through mind control, she stops the turn-of-the-century American amateur scientist Abbie Lathrop (based on a real-life figure)55 from breeding the first generation of laboratory mice and persuades Lumas to burn the manuscript of his novel, thus ending the ‘curse’ of Mr Y. If Lumas’s preface to his novel sets up a self-contradictory pledge which metafictionally recreates the ‘both/and’ alternatives of quantum physics’ multiple worlds, then the Troposphere functions as the text’s central conjuring trick. It too has inexhaustible possibilities: believed to be the site of the personal and the collective unconscious, of individual dreams and cultural myths, reflecting Classical mythology, literature, Hollywood film, virtual reality and second life games, the ‘Tropo’sphere is the world of illimitable tropes (98). To every traveller the Troposphere, or MindSpace, looks different. When Ariel first encounters the Project Starlight men, who are intent on killing everybody who knows the secret, and tries to block their approach, they cannot see the obstacles she places in their way. Only the quasi-supernatural characters (the KIDS, Apollo Smintheus, and Adam, who died while travelling in her mind) share Ariel’s mental vision. In the course of her trips she comes to recognize the metaphorical nature of the Troposphere: its derelict urban landscape, seen always at night at whatever time in the day she visits, reflects her punitive sense of self. But the Troposphere also taps into cultural fantasies and myths: the Project Starlight gangsters seem to have sprung straight from Hollywood action movies, while their uncanny child guides, the KIDS, are demonic versions of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum; Ariel’s postmodern deity, the decidedly camp Apollo Smintheus, god of mice, derives from Greek mythology and Homer’s Iliad.56 While the gangsters exert considerable influence over the ‘real’ world and indeed caused the flight of Ariel’s supervisor, the mouse god and the dead/ly children have the appearance of purely imaginary characters: of simulacra. In adaptation of Baudrillard’s point



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about Disneyland serving to conceal the hyperreality of the world which created it, the Troposphere has the effect of both hiding and intimating the artefactual nature of Ariel’s ‘reality’. As a metaphor for the unconscious it enhances the extra-tropospheric world’s appearance of authenticity: everything is possible in the Troposphere, and nobody can get really harmed (a bomb has no effect on the KIDS), but in the ‘real’ world Adam is beaten up, Ariel is sexually abused, and Burlem has to run for his life. Yet the idea that Adam’s and Ariel’s death in the ‘real’ world is complemented by eternal life in the Troposphere casts the nature of this ‘reality’ in doubt. Indeed, repeated references, throughout the novel, to the counterfeit appearance of the ‘real’ world hint at its condition as a simulacrum. Early into the story, on her way to university, Ariel muses that ‘The whole place has the kind of stillness you’d expect just before the world ended’ (83), noting that ‘The sky is . . . a hyperreal blue’ (121); later she reflects that ‘For the second time this week, I feel as though I’m living in a black-and-white photocopy’ (289). As Ariel’s visits increase, the Troposphere begins to assume a greater appearance of reality (clouds start to appear on the night sky, she feels raindrops and sees trees and a garden), whereas the ostensibly ‘real’ world turns more artificial. This is particularly notable after Ariel has tracked down Burslem, who is in hiding with Lura, the German physicist who owned the only extant copy of Lumas’s book before it found its way to Ariel. As she is approaching insight into the hyperreality of the ‘real’ world, Ariel becomes aware of the rain ‘pounding’ down ‘like an industrial machine’ (385), the sky being ‘drum-metal grey’ (385) and then ‘as blue and sharp as a reflection in metal . . . it’s more like something from a book than from real life’ (386). In fact, not only are neither of her worlds ‘real’, the question arises whether Ariel is actually (still) alive. When she expresses her fear that the Starlight men might kill her, ‘Apollo Smintheus looks away from me for a second, as if he’s wondering whether or not to tell me something’ (224). Later he impresses on her that ‘Nothing leaves the Troposphere’ (267), and that ‘Being in the Troposphere . . . [means] [i]f you’re here, you’re already dead’ (334), urging her to ‘give this some more thought’ (338). Are we to conclude that to enter the Troposphere means to die, or conversely, that it is only the dead who have access to it; that it is a kind of repository for the spirit when the body has ceased to exist (this appears to be the case with the KIDS and later Adam)? Or perhaps Ariel died at the start of the novel, in the collapsing campus building; indeed the event that immediately follows, her discovery




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of the bookshop and Lumas’s novel, has the hyperreal quality of the Troposphere. Perhaps the ultimate illusion operated by the novel, one that is implied but left for the reader to explore further (Apollo Smintheus’s instruction to ‘give this some more thought’ is addressed to us as much as to Ariel), is that Ariel or any of the characters ever was alive to begin with. If, as Apollo Smintheus reminds her, ‘The thought is all thought. – The mind is all mind’ (265), the Troposphere and also the extra-tropospheric world, everything that forms part of Ariel’s experience, might be read as an elaborate simulation: one that, as in Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999),57 is generated electronically by a computer programme. Early on in the novel, Ariel, Heather and Adam consider to what extent machines might develop consciousness. This was an idea explored by Lumas’s real-life model, Samuel Butler, in his 1863 riposte to Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), ‘Darwin Among the Machines’, in which he argued that machine evolution would eventually supersede human evolution: ‘we are ourselves creating our own successors . . . we are daily giving [machines] greater power and supplying . . . that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race’, concluding that ‘In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race’.58 This piece was later adapted for Erewhon,59 which posits the machine as having gained ascendancy over humanity: ‘Man’s very soul is due to the machines; it is a machinemade thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him.’60 Ariel comments that ‘there’s no reason machines . . . can’t become conscious as long as they inherit this consciousness from us’, wondering whether ‘we can merge with machines and become cyborgs, and eventually the machine part of us might become conscious’ (336). In her adaptation of Butler’s ideas to twenty-first-century human-machine interaction, Thomas draws on Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991), which claims a ‘mythic’ temporality for millennial modernity: ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs. . . . The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality’; ‘the boundary between science fiction and social reality’, Haraway affirms, ‘is an optical illusion.’61 This optical illusion is taken to its stark conclusion in Thomas’s novel when Lura speculates about the possibility of conducting a thought experiment through a computer simulation: ‘Imagine a computer, with a vast hard drive memory. There’s a programme running on the computer – maybe a little like a game, with



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characters and locations. . . . Say they’re part of a simulation game . . . a little town for them to live in, and then the software generates effects like rain and droughts and wars? . . . What do you know about artificial intelligence?’ ‘I know that Samuel Butler was concerned that machines could become conscious as easily as humans did’, I say. ‘That machine consciousness is as inevitable as human consciousness. . . . He argued that consciousness is just another part of evolution. It’s a random mutation that could happen to anything. . . .’ . . . ‘Imagine that some mutation happens in our computer simulation. The little characters become conscious. Now. What would their thoughts be made of?’ . . . I imagine what it would be like to be one of these digital, binary characters. How many dimensions would you be aware of? How would you interact with other characters? I think about what this world is made of – basically zeroes and ones – and then I realise that in this little world everything would be zeroes and ones. . . . I’m already beginning to feel sick. (390–1) Ariel’s considerable discomfort signals her dawning recognition of what might be her ‘true’ condition. In order to enter the Troposphere, she had to traverse a tunnel, as described by Lumas’s hero, but in addition to the flickering images of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Roman and Arabic numerals and letters – the realm of language, the symbolic, thought – Ariel saw binary code, zeroes and ones (177–8). When Ariel confronts her about the possibility that they are ‘living in a computer simulation’, Lura prevaricates – ‘The computer is a metaphor’ (392) – but suggests that Ariel’s ability to influence thoughts on her mind-reading ventures might indicate her capacity to think in machine rather than simply in software code (395): which is the reason for her double mission, on behalf of Lura and Apollo Smintheus, to modify the past by making Lumas and Lathrop change their minds. However chilling Thomas’s magic ‘turn’ may be with the reader’s gradual realization of the nature of the simulation on display, the sentimental dénouement comes as a distinct anti-climax. The conclusion to the conjuror’s tripartite act presents us not with the ‘prestige’, the revelation of the trick, but with a cliché: after fulfilling their passion for each other, Ariel and Adam, the new-born Adam and Eve, move beyond the edge of consciousness into an Edenic garden possessed of a tree. In her Acknowledgements Thomas admits to the difficulties posed by this ending, intended to show that ‘Ariel and Adam never escape




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language and metaphor: they don’t find anything absolute at the edge of consciousness, just religious imagery’ (n.p.). In the Baudrillardian reading the novel invites, the ‘simulacrum of divinity’ represented by iconic representations such as the Garden of Eden (and perhaps also Apollo Smintheus, a parodic version of the divine) might then serve the purpose of ‘effacing God’ by bringing home to us the ‘truth . . . that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum’; for ‘if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith . . . [t]hen the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum’ – indeed, this point (and quotation) is impressed on the reader on the opening page, in the first epigraph.62 The question remains whether a cliché can pull off the trick, especially since the idea of a transcendent power strangely resistant to the computer simulation – the very opposite of Baudrillard’s simulacrum – has already been urged on us via the immunity churches and cathedrals enjoy from the Project Starlight men. In its resurrection of religious stereotype (the letter Y might be considered an iconic representation of the crucifix, and the Troposphere the soul’s limbo) Thomas’s novel comes dangerously close to the naïve and anti-intellectual writing of Salley Vickers’s Mr Golightly’s Holiday (2005). A Baudrillardian or postmodern ending this is not. It might be possible to read the ‘Epilogue’ as performing a metafictional return to the beginning, in that Ariel realizes her wish to become ‘part of a book . . . an intertextual being, a book-cyborg . . . a bibliorg’ (134), by entering yet another novel by Lumas: The Apple in the Garden, mentioned in the opening chapter (9, 17). The tree also reflects on her previous ruminations as to whether being equipped with the ability to write machine code might mean ‘that if I think a tree, I can make a tree?’ (395). Conversely, the disintegration of her previously highly sophisticated mental life to a state of prehistoric innocence may indicate that her ‘repair’ to the system – the destruction of Lumas’s book, which perhaps generated the birth of consciousness in the simulation – has implemented a regressive process of unknowing. But this unknowingness sits oddly with the heroine’s heretofore so self-reflective voice. If anything, the unsatisfactory ending to The End of Mr Y demonstrates the impasse neo-Victorianism faces when it seeks to marry conventional expressions of Victorian (religious) belief with postmodern metanarrativity. Religion is the one important feature of Victorianism that neo-Victorian authors, when they approach it at all (see Chapter 4), attempt to ventriloquize at their peril.



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Where does this leave the neo-Victorian reader? We enter the minds of the twenty-first-century characters as they enter those of Victorian figures. In the end all turns out to have been a mind game. There is nothing outside the text; there is nothing ‘real’ about the Victorians outside our imaginary constructions of them. Just as Burlem’s view of the Troposphere resembles a picture postcard of Victorian London immersed in fog (382), whereas on her trip to the nineteenth century Ariel’s vision of a Dickensian fog is blurred at the edges because she never actually read Dickens and her unconscious, reliant on second-hand information in constructing the image, invokes the reflection of a reflection (441), so every neo-Victorian text is inevitably trapped in a metaphorical Troposphere of its own in which it can recreate, like the shadow art of the Lady of Shalott or the glassworks discussed in the previous chapter, nothing but the reflection of its own imagination.

5.4 Death, resurrection, and cinematography in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (2006) and Steven Millhauser’s ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990) It is this simulacrum of a reflection, the invocation of a quasi-spectral image of the real, which sustains the conjuring trick in The Illusionist. In his ‘Special Features: Commentary’ on the film Neil Burger noted that to him Chief Inspector Uhl’s point that ‘Perhaps there’s truth in this illusion’ represents the ‘key line’ of the film: ‘You have to embrace illusion to get to the truth’.63 Just as neo-Victorian writers research the period in order to fabricate fiction from ‘factual’ contexts, so in order to create convincing stage illusions the film crew was advised by three magicians (David Blaine, James Freedman, and Ricky Jay, the latter of whom plays an old-fashioned magician in The Prestige).64 The effects created were, as far as possible, authentic, and the actors playing the young (Aaron Johnson) and adult (Edward Norton) Eisenheim were asked to perform ‘real’ conjuring tricks (‘Special Features’, 7:01–7:10, 16:54–17:07). If The End of Mr Y plays on the illusion of life, Burger and his metafilmic hero Eisenheim stage an elaborate game with the illusion of death. The ease with which death can be simulated and turned into a spectacle is demonstrated to the audience (both intra and extradiegetic) early on in Eisenheim’s performance of a mirror trick (21:30–25:32). That what we are going to see and how we are going to interpret it to a crucial extent relies on our perceptiveness in relation to our position vis-à-vis the magician (film director) is intimated in the mise-en-scène, which involves a large mirror being moved into place on the stage.




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While Eisenheim is only visible partially from the back, the audience is reflected frontally in the moving mirror: the scene to be set in motion will revolve around the spectators (ourselves) as much as around Eisenheim and what he does on stage. His instruction to his volunteer – ‘Gaze directly into my eyes. Look nowhere else’ (23:20–23:25) – issues an invitation to the viewer to become as hypnotized and absorbed by the deception as she does. In the act that ensues a member of the audience is given a hooded red robe (a variation on the black-hooded harbinger of death), positioned in front of a mirror, and told to wave to the image; the hooded reflection first complies, but soon develops a life of its own when it is joined by a second phantom, which proceeds to stab the first. As the ‘reflection’ lies prostrated on the mirrored floor, a ghostly ectoplasm (a feat adapted from David Brewster’s early-nineteenth-century ‘Dr Pepper’s Ghost’)65 rises from the figure and hovers over the mirror until it is dematerialized by the conjuror.66 This episode constitutes a direct parallel to The Prestige’s opening gambit; we are shown the trick before we can understand its full significance. The sequence begins as a recognition scene: in his involuntary volunteer, the Crown Prince’s fiancée, Eisenheim identifies Sophie Duchess von Teschen. As adolescents Eisenheim, a carpenter’s son, and Sophie, an aristocrat’s daughter, were deeply in love, but were forced apart by her parents. An apprentice magician, Eisenheim then failed in his magic endeavour to make them disappear together; now, after years of training, the outcome is to be dramatically different. This is implied in a double entendre when, after the performance, Eisenheim responds to the Crown Prince’s dismissal of magic with the remark that ‘Perhaps I’ll make you disappear’ (27:33–27:36). The message is directed at Sophie who now, at last, recognizes him; it is also directed at us, issuing a cryptic hint at Eisenheim’s emerging plans. With its female volunteer Eisenheim’s act presents a version of the ‘Death and the Maiden’ trope, which appeared on film for the first time in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, the period in which The Illusionist is set. Georges Méliès’s Escamotage d’une Dame chez Robert-Houdin / The Vanishing Lady at the Robert-Houdin Theatre (1896) shows the recording of a performance in which a woman seated on a chair is covered with a cloth; when the cloth is lifted she is no longer there; when it is lifted a second time, the spectator is confronted by a skeleton.67 Méliès trained as a magician before turning to film as a new, and superior, vehicle for the production of illusions.68 Burger’s film about a conjuror’s mirror game with disappearance and reappearance, death and resurrection thus constitutes a self-referential engagement



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with the birth of film as the medium which ‘killed’ and ‘resurrected’ stage illusionism, in altered form, in the late-Victorian era. In his ‘Commentary’ Burger notes that he took pains to use the ‘old visual vocabulary’ and ‘autochrome’ quality of silent film, and refers to his work as comparable to that of a ‘magician setting up a misdirection’ (9:34–9:35, 42:31, 48:18–48:19). The misdirection enacted by The Illusionist is twofold. In the case of the phantom death it consists in giving us a first taste of the grand illusion Eisenheim will operate on Inspector Uhl (and us) when the same woman, Sophie (Jessica Biel), who in the initial performance of the act was selected to play the part of volunteer by her then-lover, Crown Prince Leopold, will later be set up to be ‘killed’ by Leopold and ‘resurrected’ as a spectral avenger by Eisenheim. The misdirection here involves presenting us with an allegory of what is to follow, but of course we cannot identify it as such at this early stage. The second misdirection concerns the flashback technique with which the story is narrated. The film begins with Uhl’s (Paul Giamatti’s) arrest of Eisenheim on stage as he is in the process of materializing an apparition to the extreme excitement of the audience. Uhl then reports back to the Crown Prince (played by Rufus Sewell), who expresses irritation about Uhl’s failure to ‘put an end to it’ (5:37); Uhl assures him that there are only a ‘very few’ ‘loose ends of the case’ (5:13, 5:09–5:10). The Crown Prince’s exasperation with Eisenheim, agent provocateur in his personal capacity as in his challenge to rationalism, prompts Uhl’s recapitulation of the conjuror’s life and career. From this point the film follows a chronological sequence of events, and only at the end returns to flashback in its final illumination, Uhl’s realization that it was all a trick and speculation about how it was done. The device of re-narration by somebody other than the central protagonist casts the veracity of the account in doubt: Uhl cannot know the details of Eisenheim’s early life, even less the particulars of his adolescent romance with Sophie. Since everything, including the resolution, is presented through Uhl’s eyes, it must ultimately, as Burger affirms in his ‘Commentary’, remain ‘all conjecture’ (1:38:16–1:38:18): ‘what he chooses to believe, what the audience chooses to believe . . . may-be it’s true, may-be it isn’t’ (1:29:18–1:39:25). That appearances are deceptive is brought home to us in the latter part of the film, when the plot returns to the two opening scenes, Uhl’s arrest of Eisenheim and his subsequent meeting with Leopold, which now assume a significantly different outlook (representing the ‘magic turn’ of the film). Not only did Uhl fail to make an arrest because Eisenheim concluded his final performance with his own spectacular




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dematerialization on stage at the very moment of capture, but Uhl’s subsequent arrival at the hunting lodge is motivated by sentiments rather dissimilar from those of a subordinate acknowledging defeat: he comes to charge the Crown Prince with the murder of the Duchess. When Leopold realizes that he is about to be seized by emissaries of his father, Emperor Franz Josef I, whom he was plotting to overthrow, he shoots himself. It is only after his death that Uhl discovers that he was, after all, innocent, having been framed by Eisenheim for a simulated murder which served to provide an escape route for the lovers. Since Sophie had been entrusted with the Crown Prince’s treason plan and their engagement was a prerequisite for securing the support of the Hungarian part of the Empire, he would never have consented to her departure, least of all in the company of his declared rival, Eisenheim, who had publicly taunted him as a usurper during a private performance, when Leopold was powerless to lift his sword (dubbed ‘Excalibur’ by the magician), the emblem of his legitimacy as a ruler, until enabled to do so by Eisenheim. Here, then, is the third misdirection, followed by the ‘prestige’, the illuminating disclosure of what ‘really’ (might have) happened: like Uhl and Eisenheim’s theatre audience, who inferred the identity of Sophie’s murderer from her phantom appearances on stage, we were fooled into believing that she was killed by the ruthless Crown Prince, rumoured to have disposed of a previous lover in just such a manner. Uhl reconstructs what he believes to have been the sequence of events: Sophie deliberately sought out Leopold in his hunting lodge to provoke his anger, using an inattentive moment to drug him in order to make his subsequent pursuit of her to the stables appear to have taken place in a drunken rage without endangering her, rode off in an apparent swoon, and deposited herself in a river shortly before Eisenheim and his recovery party ‘found’ her chilled (‘dead’) and ‘wounded’ body. The doctor who showed Uhl the corpse but interfered with its examination is a fellow professional (the clue for the film spectator is that he is played by the same actor who initiated the young Eisenheim into his conjuring career). The gem stone supposedly retrieved from Sophie’s clothes which Uhl, together with another stone discovered in the stable of the lodge, identified as missing jewels from Leopold’s sword are from the very weapon which Eisenheim had previously handled while performing the ‘Excalibur’ trick. Now Uhl recalls a conversation at the train station that he overheard between Eisenheim and the man who later impersonated the ‘doctor’: ‘When it’s done, you will travel ahead with her, and I will follow’ (49:41–49:46, 1:37:35–1:37:39). Eisenheim’s



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necromantic performances after Sophie’s death, Uhl realizes, served the single purpose of establishing the credibility of his apparitions as ‘real’ entities with superior insight over life and death, thus preparing the way for his invocation of the Duchess. His public séances indeed secured Eisenheim enormous popularity among ordinary people: when arrested during a particularly electrifying spectral show, it was only his appearance on the balcony of the police station and his disclaimer of magic (‘everything you’ve seen . . . is an illusion, it’s a trick – it’s not real’) which dispersed the crowd otherwise ready to storm the building (1:13:30–1:13:38). Inevitably this repudiation acted as a reinforcement of Eisenheim’s spiritualist powers. Only after the description of the ‘Orange Tree’ mystery (a trick that always baffled him) is passed on to him by a street boy and his pocket is picked by a man resembling Eisenheim, whom he sees departing with Sophie’s locket dangling from his hand, does Uhl gain insight into the conjuror’s final and most superlative act: that Sophie is alive and Eisenheim has found a way to ensure their permanent union through their joint disappearance. Just as at the outset Eisenheim had furnished Uhl, the amateur magician, with the explanation for a minor trick when he was asked for the mystery of the ‘Orange Tree’ (19:13–21:02), so now he leaves him with the ‘Orange Tree’ in order to protect, in the act of revealing to him, his grandest illusion. The film concludes, as it began, with an image of butterflies: the iconic representation not only of Eisenheim’s relationship with Sophie (whose wooden butterfly-motif locket in knowing hands transforms into a heart-shaped pendant) but also of the ‘Orange Tree’, which stands for Eisenheim’s death and resurrection stunt. The ‘Orange Tree’ is composed of two acts: a member of the audience is asked for a handkerchief, which is placed for safe-keeping in a box (while secretly being purloined); seeds planted in a bucket filled with soil grow into a tree bearing real fruit, which is distributed to the audience; one of the remaining oranges opens to reveal mechanical butterflies carrying the handkerchief towards the audience (13:20–16:15).69 Just as the tree serves to hide the handkerchief’s disappearance by focusing the audience’s attention elsewhere, while the butterflies dramatize the return, and thus the prior loss, of the object, so Eisenheim’s necromancy was a means of distracting Uhl’s and Leopold’s energies away from pursuing too closely the mystery of Sophie’s death, thereby enabling her safe passage to a secret destination. The subsequent invocation of her ‘spirit’ was calculated both to bolster the illusion of her death and to intensify speculation about the identity of her ‘murderer’, taking advantage of the




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Crown Prince’s increasing unpopularity to inculpate him. Leopold, who from the start is determined to uncover the secrets of Eisenheim’s illusions (‘How does he do it?’ [5:18–5:19]), becomes their foremost victim. His death constitutes the end of a tyrant, but it also spells the defeat of rationality; the Crown Prince was the only character never to be taken in by Eisenheim’s feats. The overthrow of this representative of empire hints at the impending collapse of the established order in the new century. It is no accident that it is the son of a carpenter and that of a butcher (Uhl, 34:50–34:59) who, conjointly, bring about the fall of the heir to the throne. In The Prestige, too, the working-class magician (Borden) ultimately prevails over his titled and wealthy rival. In both films class issues are implicitly aligned with race: the Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo is an important role model for Borden, while Eisenheim comes to his maturity in East Asia and later employs Chinese assistants when he embarks on his most baffling performances. In their exploration of the collision, at the close of the nineteenth century, of spirituality and rationality, art and science, illusion and reality, The Prestige and The Illusionist thus co-opt metaphors of class and race in order to establish conjuring as a category of cultural, social, and political crisis. That illusionism is a portent of change heralding the approach of a new world order is made explicit in the opening sentence of Millhauser’s story, from which Burger adapted his film: ‘In the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long dissolution, the art of magic flourished as never before. . . . Among the remarkable conjurors of that time, none achieved the heights of illusion attained by Eisenheim, whose enigmatic final performance was viewed by some as a triumph of the magician’s art, by others as a fateful sign’ (215). Here there is no love plot, and the factual Crown Prince, Rudolf, is mentioned only in passing, with reference to Eisenheim’s first spectral apparition, Greta, rumoured to be both the ghost of Rudolf’s mistress Mary Vetsera (who found a violent death with her lover at his hunting lodge in Mayerling), and that of his mother Elizabeth (230).70 Millhauser’s text is not about professional-as-sexual rivalry, much less about the quasi-Shakespearean faking of a death to bring about a lovers’ reunion, but exclusively about the art of illusionism, the construction of a ‘metafictional sublime’.71 Burger’s film, reflecting as it does on its own status as an artefact, echoes the original text’s self-referential quest, which probes the writer’s craft in creating and sustaining feats of the imagination. The story concludes Millhauser’s collection of uncanny and metafictional tales



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The Barnum Museum, named after Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–91), the nineteenth-century American showman, circus owner, collector and exhibitor of curiosa, freaks, and automata: a version of the Victorian conjuror.72 The text consistently calls itself into question, drawing attention to the constructedness and illusory quality of all narrative by adopting the discourse of hear-say and highlighting the variety of possible readings.73 Just like Eisenheim’s performance itself, accounts of it are invariably unstable; concurrence of opinion relates only to the perceived mastery of his act and its emblematic nature: ‘All agreed that it was a sign of the times’ (237). Even his fellow magicians are unnerved by Eisenheim’s move beyond the limits of comprehension and imitation. The sentiments of Uhl, chief of police, sum up the feeling of unrest prompted in the profession: certain distinctions must be strictly maintained. Art and life constituted one such distinction; illusion and reality, another. Eisenheim deliberately crossed boundaries and therefore disturbed the essence of things. In effect, Herr Uhl was accusing Eisenheim of shaking the foundations of the universe, of undermining reality, and in consequence of doing something far worse: subverting the Empire. For where would the Empire be, once the idea of boundaries became blurred and uncertain? (235) Eisenheim’s greatest challenge is precisely that by unsettling reality he undermines the spectators’ belief in their own existence.74 As if to reinstate the disrupted boundaries, the narrative voice (which Burger adapted for Uhl) strains to provide explanations for Eisenheim’s tricks, always to find its rationalism confounded by the conjuror’s unfathomable artistry. The development of his craftsmanship is orchestrated in the text by three central acts, which represent the three different stages of his magic career: from apprenticeship (pledge), through mastery (turn), to climactic dissolution (the prestige). The first of these ‘acts’ recounts Eisenheim’s initation into the dark arts through a foundation myth: the boy was set on his course by an accidental encounter with a travelling magician found sitting under a tree, who performed a series of tricks, which he then crowned with his own disappearance, and that of the tree. This offers an ironic reflection on the biographical conjuring tricks of factual magicians: in his memoirs Robert-Houdin, for example, invented the figure of Torrini, an older Italian magician who saved the young man’s life and adopted him as his surrogate son, thus launching him on his stellar career.75 Méliès is said




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to have been inspired at the age of ten to take up magic after attending a performance by Robert-Houdin;76 and Harry Houdini named himself after his spiritual father, Robert-Houdin, whom in his later writings, in an embittered Oedipal contest, he sought to expose as a charlatan.77 While many of Eisenheim’s stage illusions are indebted to Robert-Houdin, he is also modelled on Houdini, whose ethnic (Jewish-Hungarian) background he reflects; Burger’s Eisenheim additionally draws on the Houdini family mythology, in particular the legend of his father’s duel with and triumph over a prince.78 At a second stage, after Eisenheim’s genius has been established with the account of numerous dazzling feats, his position as the unrivalled master of magic is confirmed in the monumental clash with other magicians. (Professional competition was indeed a regular occurrence among illusionists, and Houdini in particular made a career of inviting challenges, on one occasion summoning the suffragettes to a duel for the best performance of escapology.)79 Rivalry, the leitmotif of The Prestige, is here a defining phase in the magician’s evolution. If the ‘first act’ in Eisenheim’s self-constitution consisted in being given professional birth by a father figure, this second act is about the defeat of the father, again mirroring the self-representations of historical magicians. Provoked by the presumption of a rival, Bendetti, Eisenheim appears to sabotage his performance through mental suggestion; Bendetti mysteriously disappears in the middle of an act after entering a trick cabinet. The arrival of a new, and more powerful, rival, Ernst Passauer, is greeted with heightened excitement, and mounting audiences watch with bated breath the war of the titans, conducted through competitive performances scheduled for complementary sets of weekdays. When Passauer begins to emerge as the superior talent, Eisenheim stages his victory by concluding Passauer’s final performance with the disappearance of his props, followed by the spectacular unveiling of the conjuror, who turns out to be none other than Eisenheim himself: ‘The audience, understanding at last, rose to its feet and cheered the great master of illusion, who himself had been his own greatest rival and had at the end unmasked himself. In his box, Herr Uhl rose to his feet and joined in the applause. He had enjoyed the performance immensely’ (225). This virtuoso triumph of self-referentiality coincides with the close of the century, ringing in the death throes of the Habsburg Empire. The final act reveals not only the conjuror’s performance, but his very person as an illusion. After retiring from the stage for the whole of 1900, during which he studies photography and cinematography, Eisenheim returns to launch a new career at the intersection between stage magic



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and spiritualist séance. His decision to distance himself from traditional, nineteenth-century magic is indicated by the paucity of his equipment: a single chair, a small, glass-topped table, which disposes of the trick compartments of the conventional magician’s apparatus. The childhood and adolescent state of his spectres, materialized possibly with a hidden projector (as is demonstrated to Uhl in The Illusionist in a scene in which Burger himself makes a spectral appearance),80 is indicative of the infancy of the cinematographic art Eisenheim has embraced. The enthusiastic, even hysterical following enjoyed by his apparitions Greta and Frankel (a parodic adaptation of Hänsel and Gretel lost in the dark woods) and Rosa and Elin epitomizes the affective appeal of the new technology’s power to spirit up of forms and project them on to the audience, ‘Greta’ anticipating the later emotive response to Garbo in the 1920s and 30s. Eisenheim’s identity here becomes blurred as he moves from the performative acts of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century magicians, Robert-Houdin and Houdini, to those of modernist revolutionaries like the Soviet film director Eisenstein, whose name his invokes (Eisenstein was born at the cusp of two centuries, the turning point in Eisenheim’s career, into a Russian-German Jewish family).81 Eisenheim’s final performance, which stages the disappearance through dematerialization of the magician himself, symbolizes the way in which stage magic was being superseded by film,82 as exemplified by erstwhile magicians like Méliès, who retired from conjuring to take up the new art form. At the same time this final illusion returns us to the beginning, the old magician who spirited himself away after performing his tricks and initiating the new generation into the craft. As in the case of the original foundation story a new mythology is inaugurated, and Eisenheim’s audience is left wondering whether Uhl (like the tree in the initiation act, or the orange tree in the handkerchief trick) ‘was himself an illusion, a carefully staged part of the final performance’, a variation on the second act’s rival magician (237); indeed Uhl’s name echoes J.B. Priestley’s uncanny Goole in An Inspector Calls (1945). The arguments that arise over ‘whether it was all done with lenses or mirrors’ or, conversely, with recourse to supernatural powers (237) proffers an ironic metaphor for the magic feats of neo-Victorianism.

5.5 Conclusion The creation of a compelling impression of ‘reality’ and the subsequent deconstruction of this impression as an illusion are the central axes around which all of the texts and films discussed in this chapter revolve,




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and which are key to the strategies of metafictional and metafilmic neo-Victorianism: historiographic metanarratives that aim to engage us in a game with their artefactuality. If, as the film theorist Richard Allen argues, the sophisticated film spectator ‘actively participates in the experience of illusion that the cinema affords’,83 then the appeal of metatextual neo-Victorianism lies precisely in its challenge to reader and audience to derive pleasure from its pyrotechnic performance while simultaneously remaining attentive to and, able to savour, the complex operations of its deceptions. ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, The Illusionist and Affinity summon spiritualism as a metaphor for the neo-Victorian project of ‘spiriting up’ the Victorian, drawing attention to its strategies of dissimulation and manipulation which capitalize on the desire for the uncanny in order to conceal the human agencies at work behind the scenes. The extent to which we overlook or develop an awareness of these agencies is dependent on the degree of our compliance with or resistance to the textual or filmic play with point of view. The Prestige and The End of Mr Y issue an invitation to reflect on their constructedness by invoking our knowledge of and interest in Victorian science and poststructuralist theory and yet succeed in deceiving us, just as Victorian conjurors did their audience in the very act of displaying all the props. In its compositional structure – an opening offering misleading clues, followed by a surprise/turn in the narrative, which culminates in a climactic revelation – metanarrative neo-Victorianism employs the same performative techniques as Victorian stage magic. In allowing us insight into how the illusion is produced, if only we ‘watch closely’ enough, neo-Victorianism departs from stage magic, challenging us from the outset to embrace a double vision which satisfies our desire for what Baudrillard calls ‘a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin’84 even as it is engaged in deconstructing it.



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The Way We Adapt Now: or, the Neo-Victorian Theme Park

The Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything – and in just about every possible direction; the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs, dances, and tableaux vivants were constantly being adapted from one medium to another and then back again. We postmoderns have clearly inherited this same habit, but we have even more new materials at our disposal – not only film, television, radio, and the various electronic media, of course, but also theme parks, historical enactments, and virtual reality experiments. The result? Adaptation has run amok. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (2006)1 For a combination of reasons, variously suggested to be insecurity about the present, the undermining of national identity as a consequence of the European Union, economic decline, the craze for devolution, the British seem to be taken up with their own past. Television’s fascination for costume drama at the close of the 1980s intensified during the 1990s. With tourism such an expanding industry we seem in danger of turning the country into a vast theme park. Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio (2001)2 As we have seen throughout this book, the roots of our neo-Victorian approaches to the past often lie with the Victorians themselves. Adaptation of textual materials into a range of other cultural formats 211



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is no exception: the previous chapter’s discussion of the (intertextual, metafictional) trickery of the neo-Victorian magician examined the nature of the trick narrative as an historically adaptive site. Linda Hutcheon’s comments on an age of adaptation running ‘amok’ and the reference to the UK as a ‘vast theme park’ are a telling testimony to the ways in which postmodernity has generated a range of returns back to the past, specifically to focusing on the Victorians’ own instincts to explore and adapt the past and the present into a different sense of the future. Simultaneously an act of homage and an act of appropriation, the adaptation straddles the concepts of originality and origins, the new and the inherited. Perhaps most interestingly of all, in an age of adaptation what comes into play is not only the dialogue between new text and old but also the intertexts and interplays between different adaptations in their own right. We have reached a point, for example, where a new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility or Great Expectations is as much about the dialogue between this and earlier adaptations as it is about the relationship between the adaptation and Jane Austen’s3 or Charles Dickens’s novels; the same applies to that range of BBC and ITV serials from the late 1960s and 1970s as they are now positioned in dialogue with their 1990s and 2000s successors. Andrew Davies, the most significant adaptor of nineteenth-century literature from the 1990s to the present comments on his awareness of previous adaptations: ‘I make myself watch the old adaptations, so at least if I plagiarize them I’m doing it consciously.’4 This internalization of the nature of adaptation, whereby adaptations speak to themselves and one another rather than only to the precursor text, has led to a paradigmatic shift in the nature of adaptation itself. What, now, does it mean to adapt the Victorians? And what are we adapting: the Victorians/Victorian text or the mediation they/it have already undergone in popular culture? Does each adaptation move us further away from the Victorians, just as chronology creates a greater number of years between us and them, or does this very fact represent a new challenge to adaptors in terms of how they deal with the issue of authenticity itself? We are aware of the contexts of what Kamilla Elliott terms the ‘novel/film debate’ and recognize that the nature of adaptation and the adaptive act must be registered on their own terms. As Elliot points out, she found it impossible to write the book she planned on Victorian fiction and film adaptation because it was ‘stymied by problems, paradoxes, and polarizations in novel and film studies more generally.’5 Recognizing the difficulty of appropriating certain terminologies across different media, we are also not arguing here for what Eckhart Voigts-Virchow names ‘the (untenable) primacy of literature’.6 However, in a culture so obsessed 10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn


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with adapting the Victorians, and particularly with the re-adaptation of the classic realist novel, interaction between the ‘novel’ and the ‘film’ must be foregrounded within such debates because of what Elliott calls the ‘perplexing paradox’7 that divides the literary from the filmed, and the way in which the two are read both in criticism and culture. This chapter explores a number of adaptive sites and their relationship with the Victorian in contemporary culture. It begins with a discussion of the nature of recent adaptations and appropriations of Victoriana as synonymous Dickensiana via TV and the Dickens World theme park. We briefly place this discussion into the context of a twentieth-century critique of emergent neo-Victorianism, Brian Moore’s The Great Victorian Collection (1975), highlighting the fears of fabrication that existed over thirty years ago about how the Victorians might fit into a world increasingly obsessed with the heritage industry and the functional reality of the space of the museum, and how in some respects Moore’s nightmare vision reflects aspects of the millennial presence of ‘Victoriana’ within the culture at large. In the following section, ‘Lark Rise to Cranford and back again’, we explore the generic intertextual relationships between adaptations and the moving dynamics between original text, TV, film, radio or theatre appropriation, touching on issues related to ‘nostalgia TV’ on the one hand, and theatrical misappropriation or musical adaptation on the other. Finally, we take the recent work of the adaptor Andrew Davies as a case study in the internalization of the adaptive process across both Victorian and neo-Victorian textual engagements. At the root of our interest throughout this chapter is the nature of ‘theme-park Victoriana’, which John Gardiner defines as the ‘view of history in museums, visitor attractions and shops that foregrounds the interactive and the commercial, favours sensory input and atmosphere above the dryly factual, and elevates private and local experience beyond the traditional narratives of national history.’8 What we are inquiring into here through theories related to heritage, museums, and adaptation is the expression of similarity and difference in dealing with the nineteenth-century experience, not only in these designated sites of heritalogical interaction but also in the dominant modes of TV costume drama and docu-drama.

6.1 Victoriana World: TV, theme parks, and the object of authenticity If Gardiner is correct in this estimation of the revealing nature of the late-twentieth-century fascination with the branding of ‘heritage’, then the recent furore over the opening of what we might term ‘The 10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn


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Great Victorian Theme Park’, Dickens World, speaks cultural volumes. As Colin Sorensen noted in 1989, ‘historic theme parks and heritage centres probably tell us as much about ourselves as about the past – indeed probably far more.’9 It is a long-standing trope that Dickens equates to the Victorian and that much of the mainstream public perception of the nineteenth century is, in fact, rooted in a Dickensian sense of the period; as Gardiner himself puts it, ‘Charles Dickens is the Victorian era . . . “Dickensian” often illuminates “Victorian” rather than vice- versa’.10 The fact that this relationship has become key to the configuration of the Victorian in the contemporary imagination has provided the owners of Dickens World with a unique selling point: for if what most of us imagine as the authentic representation of the Victorians is derived from our knowledge of the Dickensian adaptation on our TV and film screens, then Dickens World becomes a magnified and multiplied imitation of an imitation. It allows us to enter a world where the fictional characters of Oliver Twist or Hard Times come alive and also come to embody the supposed fictional-yet-historical individuals they represent. The fact that Dickens’s texts are themselves often based on parody, grotesque exaggeration, and the caricature does not deny, indeed rather enhances, their claim to authenticity. Dickens himself, as Juliet John has noted, was a (self-conscious) generator of aspects of the heritage industry; as John states, ‘[t]he image of the uncommercial Dickens is testimony to an ongoing modern need to sublimate money matters in the cultural sphere; it is also testimony to the extent to which Dickens commodified himself for money as well as for the masses.’11 Dickens, then, was hardly averse to the idea of theme-park merchandizing and the culture of the commodity, or the commoditization of culture. Quite what Dickens would have made of the possibilities of the ‘Great Expectations Boat Ride’, ‘The Haunted House of 1859’ or the 4D cinema housed in ‘Peggoty’s Boathouse’ must remain open to speculation, but the way in which the Dickens World experience – complete with the opportunity ‘to come face to face with some of Dicken’s [sic] literary characters in their magnificent rendition of a Victorian town courtyard’12 – attempts to blur and combine the nature of fiction and fact, literature and reality, and the ease with which individual characters come back to life, belie the fact that of course they never lived in the first place. Instead, what the theme park delivers to the public is a representation of a representation. That this fiction claims an element of authenticity at the same time as it seeks to exploit the benefits of modern technology makes it paradigmatic of a shift in our conscious understanding of the difference between the Victorian and the contemporaneous. One can, for



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example, go to destination 2 on the Dickens World map and discover how ‘The Victorian School Room meets the 21st Century’ as desks and chalkboard make way for plasma screens and the world of Hard Times becomes a state-of-the-art conference venue. The multi-purpose nature of the venue is itself a point to consider, particularly in relation to the more recent marketing of the Dickens World experience for wedding receptions, birthday parties, its now regular comedy club evenings and ‘60s and 70s Dance’ nights.13 We begin to wonder whether it is the accessibility, affordability and availability of the venue which attracts customers to these events rather than the ‘Dickensian’ location. The mind boggles at the Dickensian possibilities of having Miss Havisham attend one’s wedding reception, for example. But it is not only in the realm of the theme park that we see such engagements taking place between the technological advances of the contemporary sphere and the Victorian imaginary. Andrew Davies’s recent BBC adaptation of Bleak House (2007) was structurally designed to mimic the nature of the more authentic (to the Victorians) serial format; TV audiences were thus asked to buy into the idea that the instalment plan of sequential episodes was somehow able to bring them closer to the reading habits of the original publication. A similar trend might be discerned in Simon Callow’s series of Dickens readings, The Mystery of Charles Dickens (BBC4, 2005), itself a follow-up to his performance in The Importance of Being Oscar (1998), a monologue about Oscar Wilde. What both these issues seem to mark out is a desire within the contemporary fascination with the Victorian to return to a more ‘authentic’ experience of the Victorian text. For an academic correlative to this we might cite David Barndollar and Susan Schorn’s ‘Revisiting the Serial Format of Dickens’s Novels; or, Little Dorrit Goes a Long Way’, where they discuss projects to read Dickens in monthly instalments at the University of Texas between 1996–1999, and ‘Dickens by Pixels’, where A Tale of Two Cities was provided online in weekly numbers to mimic the ‘authentic’ mode of dissemination.14 All these instances, in their attempts to return to a somehow more ‘real’ sense of the cultures in which Victorian textual processes worked, might be placed into a useful contrast with the director Sergei Eisenstein’s declaration back in 1944 that filmic style itself began with the Victorian novel.15 As Robert Giddings and Keith Selby note, adaptations from the Victorian have been part of the nature of British broadcasting since its inception: ‘[f ]rom the very earliest days, long before the emergence of anything resembling the classic serial, the BBC had experimented with narrative prose fiction as the raw material




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for broadcasting.’16 They go on to list the frequency with which Dickens was broadcast on radio, including the staple A Christmas Carol in December 1925, 1928, 1929, 1933, 1934 and 1935, referring also to the serialization of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers in 1938; in the same year an extract from The Pickwick Papers appeared on TV.17 With more than 75 years of adaptation history behind every contemporary production of a Victorian classic for TV (and just as much for film), an often uneasy balance must be struck between the medium and the adapted text. The importance of Dickens, as Giddings and Selby highlight, lies in his multiple roles as a national and potently universal signifier to a range of audiences: Charles Dickens, original stalwart of the tradition – who provided much lively raw material from the earliest days of broadcasting – after a brief eclipse, seems to be in for something of a revival at a period of immense technical and economic media advancement. His genial face on our banknotes – an image combining the collective potency of creative genius, popular culture, national memory, commerce and the state – would provide the Barthians hours of useful contemplation.18 The serialization of Oliver Twist (BBC 2007) perhaps marks the best illustration of the ways in which we seek even now to relate the nineteenth-century popular text to our contemporary attraction to the narrative techniques of the soap opera; EastEnders meets Oliver! in a culturally hybrid mode that appears to do little to enhance the reputation of either. In other words, there is a kind of reciprocity and hospitality at work in the way in which we attempt to return the millennial media back to the print cultures of the mid-Victorian period on the one hand, while we need also to recognize how the roots of modern movie technique, adaptation, and fears over authenticity and originality can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In his recent book Original Copy, for example, Robert McFarlane explores the nineteenth century’s uneasy relationship with ideas of originality that inevitably, though not always explicitly, comments on the nature of the authenticity of creation. As McFarlane notes, ‘from the late 1850s onwards, unoriginality – understood as the inventive reuse of the words of others – came increasingly to be discerned as an authentic form of creativity.’19 The nature of the aesthetic as reproduction, the copy and the inauthenticity inherent within its status as an artwork20 is thus a preoccupation inherited from the Victorians themselves. By its



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nature, this is a debate tied up with issues connected to realism, and coincides with new developments in fields such as photography.21 That this discussion locates itself in a position between the text and the image is no accident, and the fact that we remain concerned with the relationship between the visual – here the televisual and filmic – and the literary texts on which the moving pictures are based illustrates yet again one of the many contemporary postmodernist engagements that have their roots in the nineteenth century. The adaptation often seeks to project back to the viewers, as we shall see in the following section, a version of reality that aims to provide an authentic representation of what they imagine to be the Victorian landscape in a way not dissimilar to Scarlett Thomas’s novel The End of Mr Y, discussed in the last chapter. The adaptation becomes something that we can relate to at a fundamental level and recognize as comforting, familiar, and homelike in the sense of nostalgic. Dickens World might be seen as the perfect fusion within popular culture of the landscapes of literary text, reality, and visual representation. It does for the Victorians what Disneyland does for cartoon characters: it brings them to life in all their fabricated, artificial, and inauthentic glory. Of course, Dickens World’s depiction of the Victorian cityscape as derived from Dickens’s novels in fact clouds over the issue of how even in the nineteenth century itself there was a sense in which Dickensian narratives very rapidly became representative of an alternative version of Victorian reality. This is something which has started to be satirized by neo-Victorian fiction writers. It is evident in Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (2007), a neo-Victorian thriller which in its prose style mimics Wilde’s verbal wit and which features both Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle as the potential suspects in a murder plot following the former’s grisly discovery of the body of Billy Wood, one of his protégés, in an uninhabited house which serves Wilde and companions as a meeting place. What proves interesting here is the way in which Brandreth has his character, Oscar Wilde, ever the arch-social critic and representative of the decadent end of the Victorian period, comment on the contemporary (both now and 1890s) cult of Dickens, the social commentator representative of the culture of the early to mid-Victorian age. In the excerpt below the first-person narrator, Robert Sherard, persuades Wilde to inform Billy’s mother, a resident of Broadstairs, in person of her son’s tragic death: ‘He spoke often of his mother. He loved her dearly. He told me that his mother did not understand him, but that she understood herself well




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enough to know she did not understand him. He was a clever boy. And kind. . . . He had no education to speak of – he could barely read – but when I read Shakespeare to him, he would memorize the words almost at once and then declaim them with an instinctive authority, intelligence and feeling that were remarkable . . . Billy Wood had the makings of what they call “a star”. He was luminous. He shone. He would have gone far, Robert. . . . I was proud to be nurturing his natural talent. His loss to me is grievous. His loss to his mother will be terrible.’ ‘What sort of woman is she?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’ ‘I have dark forebodings about her, Robert,’ Oscar replied, blowing his nose and mopping his mouth with his handkerchief. He shifted in his seat. ‘I am not optimistic. You must remember, she lives in Broadstairs.’ ‘What does that mean?’ I asked, sensing that Oscar’s mood was moving rapidly from the elegiac to the playful. Oscar shook his head, muttering with a sigh, ‘Broadstairs . . . ah me!’ ‘What is wrong with Broadstairs?’ I ventured. ‘Is it not one of Queen Victoria’s favourite watering holes?’ ‘Her Majesty is not the problem, Robert. It is Dickens who is the difficulty.’ ‘Dickens?’ ‘Dickens! Yes, Robert, Charles Dickens, the late, lamented. Broadstairs was his favourite holiday retreat. It was Dickens who put Broadstairs on the map. He wrote David Copperfield there – in a cliff-top villa that, naturally, now glorifies in the name of Bleak House. If you are so inclined, you may visit it. There is a twopenny tour. And if you take it, when you reach the room that used to be the great man’s study you will learn of the legend that says, “Leave a note for Mr Dickens in the top drawer of his writing desk and he will come in the night to read it . . .” Oh, yes, in Broadstairs the spirit of Dickens is everywhere – he is everywhere. You cannot escape him, try as you might, because, by way of unconscious tribute to their most celebrated visitor, the good people of Broadstairs have each and every one transmogrified themselves into characters from their hero’s oeuvre. The stationmaster looks like Micawber, the town crier is Mr Bumble, the benevolent landlady at the Saracen’s Head takes her cue from Mrs Fezziwig . . .’ ‘You exaggerate, Oscar.’ I laughed. ‘Would that I did,’ he sighed. . . . To my astonishment, when we alighted from the train, it seemed that Oscar was right. It must, of course, merely have been the power



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of his suggestion, but, as we walked the short distance down the hill from the railway station towards the centre of the town, every passerby appeared to be a caricature of humanity, decked out in elaborate period costume, playing a role in a vast Dickensian pageant. We passed an obsequious muffin-man who touched his cap to us (‘Uriah Heep,’ murmured Oscar); a fair-haired, shoeless, ragged boy to whom Oscar tossed a halfpenny (‘Oliver Twist?’ I asked); a beaming, bonhomous, bespectacled gentleman who raised his hat to us unbidden with a ‘Capital morning, is it not?’ (‘Mr Pickwick!’ we whispered merrily, together and at once); and several more.22 In Brandreth’s novel the fictive Wilde’s distaste for Broadstairs initially appears to originate from upper-class snobbery (including the reference to Shakespeare as indicative of a ‘higher’ cultural sphere than the populist Dickens), until the parodic display of the town’s Dickensian characters23 merges the satirical with the metafictional. Just as the central characters in the novel – Wilde, Doyle, Sherard (Wilde’s first biographer) – are tongue-in-cheek representations of real-life personalities, so some of the setting is based on actual localities. Broadstairs, a town in Kent, is home to the Dickens House Museum; the Dickens World theme park is also located in Kent. Our attention is thus drawn to the factual, contemporary, here-and-now context of the Dickensian and by its nature (neo-)Victorian heritage industry; this inevitably affects our reading experience. Because it is of our own time, the simulacrum – the Dickens theme park – for a moment lends a heightened degree of reality to the invention in the book, by implication conferring greater authenticity on the Wilde and Sherard characters too, who appear to have much so more substance than the Dickensian caricatures they encounter on the street. The French critical theorist Jean Baudrillard calls this an experience of the ‘hyperreal’:24 the simulacrum ceases to constitute a mere representation, an image of the real; to us it becomes real, for however fleeting a moment (see our discussion of Baudrillard’s theory in Chapter 5). If we apply Baudrillard’s concept to neo-Victorian fiction, we find that here the third-order simulation works both to conceal and to reveal the text as an artefact. In the case of Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders, irrespective of how much we know about the real-life Oscar Wilde or the real-life Robert Sherard who narrates the story, we will approach the book as an invention; a pastiche in the form of a thriller. The more familiar we are with Wilde’s work, the more entertaining we are likely to find the pastiche; but no reader will be tempted to read the text as a representation of historically accurate events. The device of the Dickens theme park




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has the dual effect of bringing the characters closer to us, making them more real, and at the same time highlighting the constructedness of the text: what the Dickensian figures are in the context of a theme park, the Wilde and Sherard personalities are within the parameters of Brandreth’s fictional imagination. In neo-Victorian fiction the thirdorder simulation that is effectuated by the artificial revealing the artefactual nature of the text thus serves to undermine our desire to consume these novels as naïve readers, challenging us to probe them for their multi-layered reinventions of the Victorian in order to throw into relief the constructions of the contemporary. In Dickens World the opposite principle is at work: the hyperreal world begins to assert a claim to be a visualization of the real. What Dickens World, and to an extent Brandreth’s game with the idea of 1890s Broadstairs acting as a prototype theme park for the present day’s Dickens World, reveals is something that has increasingly come to figure in museological studies; that is the critical and academic theory behind the nature of museums and heritage centres. Interestingly, Brandreth’s text plays with the key concept, as Susan Pearce puts it, that ‘museums have . . . become contested territories, where we play out the representation of cultural variation, and the ways in which we perceive ourselves.’25 Within this concept, however, there are a series of potential misattributions between ideas of the real and the imaginary, the original and the copy, and in this instance the Victorian and the neo-Victorian. Much of this debate was pre-empted in the mid-1970s by Brian Moore in his novel The Great Victorian Collection. Moore’s text has relevance and pertinence here as his pre-heritagization critique of the culture that continually seeks a return to the authentic object of history (and which blurs ideas of academic and popular enactments of historical empathy) acts as a warning about the ideas and attitudes we are in danger of upholding at this millennial moment.

6.2

‘Memory fatigue’: The great (neo-)Victorian collection26

The Great Victorian Collection is the magical realist tale of Anthony Maloney, an assistant professor of history at Canada’s McGill University. It begins with his arrival in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California on his way to a conference at Berkeley. After checking into the Sea Winds Motel, dining at a non-descript restaurant recommended by the motel owner, and then retiring for the evening, Maloney has an ‘extraordinary’ dream, which involves him having lunch in a pub called The Cheshire Cheese,



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There was only one other customer who did not seem North American. He was a tall man who wore dark, old-fashioned clothing. I didn’t see his face, but when he rose and left the room I felt compelled to get up and follow him . . . [I] went outside, and found myself in an ill-lit alleyway behind the pub. The man in dark clothes stood, waiting, with his back to me. I knew then that he had been sent to guide me. The man walked up the alleyway and, pointing to an oak door at the end of it, beckoned me to go ahead of him. I went to the door and pushed it open, believing it would give onto the street. Instead, I found myself in the darkened bedroom of the Sea Winds Motel, the same room in which I had gone to sleep. The bed was empty and the bedclothes were disarranged. I went to the window, raised the blind, and looked out at a pale pink sunrise. Below me was the motel parking lot, large as a city block. But now the lot resembled a crowded open-air market, a maze of narrow lanes lined with stalls, some permanently roofed, some draped in green tarpaulin awnings. I unfastened the catch of the window, opened it, climbed out on the sill, and eased myself on to a wooden outdoor staircase, which led down to the lot some twenty feet below. I began to walk along what seemed to be the central aisle of the market, an aisle dominated by a glittering crystal fountain, its columns of polished glass soaring to the height of a telegraph pole. Laid out on the stalls and in partially enclosed exhibits resembling furniture showrooms was the most astonishing collection of Victorian artefacts, objets d’art, furniture, household appliances, paintings, jewelry, scientific instruments, toys, tapestries, sculpture, handicrafts, woolen and linen samples, industrial machinery, ceramics, silverware, books, furs, men’s and women’s clothing, musical instruments, a huge telescope mounted on a pedestal, a railway locomotive, marine equipment, small arms, looms, bric-a-brac, and curiosa. As I moved on, staring about me, I became aware that the stalls were unattended and that my guide had not followed me into this place. I knew then that all of this had, somehow, been given into my charge. And, as soon as I knew it, I woke up. (9–10) There are clear links here again to the conjunction of the real and hyperreal as discussed in relation to The End of Mr Y in the previous chapter.



‘just off Fleet Street’,27 and finding himself somewhat disgruntled to be surrounded by other tourists. The dream continues:

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But Maloney’s dream is framed within a set of quite distinct desires not to be a heritage tourist, that is, to be authentically placed within the (Victorian) England of the dream. This stimulates his desire to follow the other, the visionary male figure representative of that authentic experience precisely because he is so conspicuously non-tourist. No explanation of this figure is ever given in the text; he might be inferred to be Maloney’s father and simultaneously a representative of a more universal (and authentic) Victorian forefather. When Maloney awakes, rather than discovering that it was all a dream, he looks out of the window to find that everything is ‘exactly’ as in the dream (11) and that he is now, he feels, the guardian-curator of the memorabilia that have materialized in the car park, the baton of museum ownership presumably having been passed to him from the mysterious man who led him there. What follows is the story of how Maloney and also the community into which he has imagined the greatest collection of Victoriana in the world are swamped by TV news crews, journalists from across the US and Canada, corporations and venture capitalists who want to develop a theme park around the collection, and academic experts brought in by different sides to authenticate or disprove the Victorian status of these objects and adjudicate on whether Maloney’s dream-narrative explanation can be believed. Alongside this story is a parallel tale of Maloney’s gradual disintegration into insomniac madness as he endeavours to dream-weave new fantasies which might allow him to escape from the constraints of the Victoriana he has brought into existence. The story, then, is a kind of parable about the potential dangers of over-interpreting the possibilities of the historical imaginary to create an empathetic communication between periods. While Maloney originally thinks the collection will make his fortune, in both financial and intellectual terms, he soon realizes it is his downfall precisely because it ties him to objects rather than individuals, to things rather than people, and to the past rather than the present. Possessing the past through the appropriation of possessions is not the same as recapturing the authenticities of the historical experience, and Maloney’s physical and mental decay during the text might be seen as a deliberate re-focusing by Moore of the term nostalgia to encompass the debilitating disease it represented in Renaissance and seventeenth-century thought.28 The fact that in the three decades since the publication of Moore’s fiction the neo-Victorian has come to have a growing share in our contemporary cultural and aesthetic marketplace and memory, not to mention notions of ‘national heritage’, suggests that the Victorians have almost been (c)locked into a kind of thirty year plus cycle of influence, that



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they have become institutionalized markers of the (re)passing of time and fashion for the last century. Maloney’s ‘strange journey’ has been characterized as Moore’s ‘exploration of hyperreality’29 and the cultural contexts of the book seem to bear this out. As has been noted elsewhere, Moore’s novel appeared contemporaneously to works by both Umberto Eco and Baudrillard30 on the nature of reality and authenticity specifically in relation to the theme park experiences offered by Disneyland in the United States. Moore’s book is undoubtedly concerned partly with the nature of such matters with deliberate reference to the case of America. His status as an Irish-born adopted Canadian citizen living in the United States inevitably raises questions related to national identity and the (in)authenticities within the perceptions of knowing what being an American (or any other kind of national) might mean. If we view Maloney’s narrative as a hyperreality, then the implication is that an aspect of reality itself must be embedded (and hidden or closed off) within the fantasy of the story. Perhaps in this instance that reality is the fact that the world which Maloney inhabits before the appearance of the collection is dominated by the Victorian and Victoriana. Although the novel is set in Carmel, California, Maloney is there on a journey that takes him away from his home in Canada, a country that was both part of the Victorian Empire and remains a part of the British Commonwealth. Maloney’s home city of Montreal became the largest metropolitan centre in British North America in 1860 and the financial and cultural capital of Canada;31 in his turn, Maloney has invested his intellect and his academic capital in the history of the Empire and its commodities. Coming from this cultural perspective, an historian like Maloney would evidently be aware of his move from a nation with a Victorian past (Canada) into a country with a very public rejection of its (pre-Victorian) colonial ties with Great Britain (America). This rejection itself in many ways necessitated the creation of a potential vacuum of heritage and collective memory. Moore’s novel critiques the notion of an authentic materialism related to the Victorians themselves; it challenges the replication of a nationality within a theme park setting and, more importantly, it throws into relief the inauthentic nature of any endeavour to possess the past. This inauthenticity is not only grounded in the desire to fabricate and replicate Victorian objects but also in the attempt to place oneself into a Victorian imaginary. In this respect, Moore’s novel reflects on a cultural and curatorial anxiety concerning the relationship between truth and authenticity, memory and ethics within the context of the museum or exhibition. Maloney’s museology enacts a blurring of the important




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legal, ethical and historical distinctions encountered within the modern museum around the issues of ownership and conservation,32 which themselves impact on the nature of collective cultural memory and capital.33 The suicide of Maloney at the end of the novel defeats the notion of preservation and conservation at a more literal level. What Maloney’s death means is the removal of the collector from his symbolic relationship to the collection, just as the Victorians are themselves, as Maloney acknowledges, always beyond physical possibility in the collection in the car park. The conclusion Asa Briggs makes about the Victorians’ obsession with material objects has relevance for this discussion. In the final chapter of Victorian Things, entitled ‘New Things – and Old’ Briggs concludes: ‘The history behind all this [the book] is relevant to the present as well as interesting in itself. There are always surprises, but as the wisest interpreters of things . . . have never hesitated to say, would you know the new you must search the old . . . To forget the past would be to ignore the future.’34 Placing this into the context of Moore’s novel, one could argue that The Great Victorian Collection presents both a reflection on the fascination with Victoriana around and up to the moment of its writing in 1975 and a kind of dystopic vision of a future governed by a commercialized (a)historicism where individuals in the present are trapped within a stifling conceptualization of the past, a world, in other words, in which innovation and originality become alienated in favour of fakes that can never be originals and yet are also not strictly speaking fakes, and where the imagination is trapped in reliving and rematerializing the same dream or ‘false’ cultural memory. Thus Moore’s novel becomes applicable to our reading of the presence of the Victorian in the present: the collective sense in which we are all seeking to respond to something that is both then and now. As Cora Kaplan points out, as a ‘meditation on the modern obsession with things Victorian, The Great Victorian Collection explores the late twentieth-century desire to know and to “own” the Victorian past through its remains: the physical and written forms that are its material history.’35 But this is exactly the level at which the text seeks to interrogate the very notion of the possibility of an authentic neo-Victorianism beyond the level of the fetishized object or the fantasized subject. Thus, while Kaplan goes on to suggest that the novel is ‘a surrealist exposure of the grotesque and even dangerous side of the historical imagination’,36 it might instead be argued that it is the failure of the imagination to be historical or historicized that lies at the core of the problem. Maloney’s imagination is caught within the impossibilities of maintaining the functions and contexts of the real, lived present in conjunction with a fetishistic focus on the material



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objects of a Victorian subjectivity. The Great Victorian Collection seems almost to play with our interpretation of the title’s second word: how ‘great’, the text appears to ask, is this Victorian collection given the trauma undergone by its creator/curator? Or is the greatness of the collection an emphaticness surrounding its overwhelming power and authority? Does Maloney become created by rather than the creator of the collection? In that sense, does he become the prototype (post/neo-)Victorian, literally succumbing as a subject to the awe of Victorian things? Moore’s novel is at one level a surrealist fantasy. Interestingly, however, what it predicts about the kind of Disneyfication of the historical, specifically the commoditization of the Victorian in the contemporary cultural and popular marketplace, is pretty close to the mark. What is at stake here is the issue of (in)authenticity in relation to the objects and productions of the Victorian. Yet this authenticity cannot help but be questioned when it comes under the mantra ‘more materialist than thou’ and is driven by a desire to out-commoditize the Victorians, the great inventors of ‘things’ themselves and the people who did most to move forward into modernity while simultaneously dwelling on an ‘antiquarian introspection’.37 Moore’s presentation of a deontological position, in which his central protagonist is divided between his intuitionist desires and a decisionist impulse in relation to the aesthetic pleasure to be found in the objects in his care, and in particular their potential for an ethical hedonism in which the consummation of his desire would rule paramount, is correlative to our continued fascination with what the Victorians did and how we can know, even feel, as they did. Making their objects the fetishized commodities of a postmodern culture which thrives on the inauthentic, we are caught between the desire itself and the impossibility of its fulfilment. Difference prevails because this is one aspect of the historical process that, no matter how powerful or feasible the materialization, is always beyond the historical imaginary. Indeed, as David Lowenthal highlights, while ‘[e]very relic . . . exists simultaneously in the past and in the present . . . [t]o be conscious that things are anachronistic entails historical insight.’38 It is the inability fully to formulate this sense of the anachronistic that destroys Maloney’s sanity as he searches in vain for the possibility of a real memory within the fabric of his authentic collection of Victorian relics. One of the more intriguing features of our enduring enthusiasm for the Victorian, however, particularly as we have turned the millennium and are thus past the centenary of the death of Victoria herself, is its presence in an age characterized by Andreas Huyssen as one suffering from ‘memory fatigue’.39 Perhaps our very instability and insecurity




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relating to the recent memories of the twentieth century, from the Second World War through to a post-9/11 landscape as outlined in Huyssen’s book, lies beneath our reassuringly nostalgic attraction to the nineteenth century and the materialist potency of Victorian things. What the Victorians and their objects represent is solidity and fixity at a time at which we attempt to transport those objects into the future. The Great Victorian Collection, though, is a theme park which fails to live up to our preconceived and partial cultural memory because it makes concrete and material those things which can only ever exist as knowable entities in the abstract and illusory; like relics, such things only mean ‘what history and memory convey’.40 Reality TV shows such as Channel 4’s The 1900 House (1999), The Edwardian Country House (2002), or more recently BBC 2’s Victorian Farm (2009) play explicitly on this sense of the tangibility of past things, if not the possibility to recapture for a sustainable period those past times, but so do costume dramas and classic adaptations. It is to these genres we now wish to turn to explore how they too are part of that conflation of present and past in narrative history. They also, in the specific instances we explore here, bring out various complexities in terms of the relationship between the Victorian precursor text’s specificity and its contemporary representation on screen.

6.3 From Lark Rise to Cranford and back again As Jacques Le Goff argues, ‘The distinction between past and present is an essential component of the concept of time.’41 But how is this ‘distinction’ to be visualized when it is part of an adaptive discourse that not only seeks to negotiate the relationship between past and present, but the multiple versions of the past available to be adapted? While Dickens represents the pinnacle of the classic literary serial, the BBC, ITV and the film companies have sought to branch out from these texts into the works of other Victorian authors. Within a cultural marketplace and recent entertainment history saturated in adaptations of nineteenth-century literature, it is little wonder that there is an increasing sense of inwardness, even incestuousness, within the sphere of TV adaptation. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that the dialogue between adaptations was starting to become obvious in the schedule overcrowding at specific times of the year (Advent could easily be rechristened ‘The Adaptation Season’), the most noticeable and recent instance of this trend out of Dickens is to be found in BBC One’s adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (2007) and Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (2008–9). The former returned for a



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two-part ‘Christmas’ special in December 2009, and both Gaskell and Thompson adaptations were mercilessly parodied over the same festive season by Victoria Wood in her spoof ‘Lark Pies to Cranchesterford’.42 Cranford, first shown in five episodes in November and December 2007, is based on three of Elizabeth Gaskell’s stories published between 1851 and 1858: the sketches or vignettes of Cranford, the novella ‘My Lady Ludlow’ and the short story ‘Mr Harrison’s Confessions.’ Although related texts, each is very different from the others, a fact displaced in the homogenization of the narratives in the BBC version, and particularly unnuanced in the 2009 Christmas special with its sentimentality and romanticized resolution.43 Ironically, ‘My Lady Ludlow’ itself embodies an historical novel partly set during the French Revolution which raises significant epistemological questions about the knowability and narratability of history, and the nature of social progress; none of this was reflected in the adaptation of these texts, and such questions were displaced on to the vague rumblings about the coming of the railway instead. Lark Rise to Candleford, televized in ten parts between January and March 2008, and recommissioned for a second and third series which ran in 2009 and 2010, takes its inspiration from Flora Thompson’s 1939–43 novel trilogy about late-nineteenth-century provincial life.44 The close sequence in broadcasting dates, the mirror effect produced by the titles (Candleford echoing Cranford), the overlap in the cast of actors, and the affinity of themes (star-crossed or timid lovers, petty jealousies, tensions between the different social strata, the clash between tradition and innovation) created metafilmic intertextualities which cast Candleford as the sequel to Cranford. The title sequence in each case moved from fields and a nature setting to a Victorian village. The love-stricken but self-sacrificing Jessie Brown in Cranford, played by Julia Sawalha, was recast as the feisty, if love-crossed postmistress Dorcas Lane in Candleford; both women refuse the men they desire for the sake of their fathers and never cease to regret it. Claudia Blakley’s Martha, Miss Matty’s loyal maid-servant and later landlady in Cranford, returned to us in the role of the socially responsible Emma Timmins with upwardly mobile ambitions for her eldest daughter, the post-office assistant Laura. The personal tragedies in the life of kind-hearted and easily contented Miss Matty ( Judi Dench) were comically transmogrified into the melodramatic vicissitudes and antics of the penniless, fun and beer-loving Caroline Arless played by Dawn French. In the later episodes Dawn French’s character was taken under the wings of and kept on the straight and narrow by her friend Emma, and the conjunction of these two women may have prompted viewers to associate the




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pair with Dawn French’s Geraldine Grainger and Emma Chambers’s Alice Horton (Chambers bears a physical resemblance to Blakley) in the popular BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley (1997–2007). The Vicar too likes to indulge (albeit in food rather than drink) and shows a propensity for attracting embarrassing situations. Just as the bank crash in Cranford, in which Miss Matty loses her money, offered the BBC a prime opportunity to remind audiences of its twenty-first-century equivalent in Northern Rock mismanagement and governmental irresolution, so Dawn French’s appearance in Candleford brought the neo-Victorian back in the fold of the contemporary. These intertelevisual elements made both Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford into different kinds of adaptation precisely because they sought to play on the notion of comfortable, familiar Sunday night entertainment, rather than on any sense of the social problems that the novelists themselves were trying to explore. That the technique worked is evidenced by Cranford’s Christmas special for 2009, a decision no doubt made partly in the light of regular viewing figures for the 2007/08 series in the region of 8 million; Lark Rise had a regular audience figure of around 6.7 million.45 The comforting nostalgia associated with the regular classic serial is located both in its simultaneous otherness from the contemporary and the reassuring stability of its portrayal of a collective, community-based past. Linda Hutcheon has identified one of the pleasures of adaptation as the recognition of repetition; Hutcheon writes that ‘[p]art of this pleasure . . . comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change.’46 Adopting Michael Alexander’s term, Hutcheon argues that these texts become ‘inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts.’47 While this may be true at one level, we might also want to question to what degree this is a conscious part of their dissemination to the wider audience. As we argued in the introductory chapter of this book, there are often two kinds of readership for neo-Victorian fiction: readers who know relatively little of the Victorian texts/authors being played with, and another type of reader who is aware of the ‘original’ text (often an academic) and who can therefore engage on a more sophisticated level with the nature of the pleasures within adaptation itself, namely the necessary knowledge of what is being adapted. The same distinction may need to be made at the level of the TV, film, radio or theatre adaptation too. There is also an additional factor to take into account when dealing with Hutcheon’s comments on ‘repetition’, and that is the way in



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which the BBC adaptations of Gaskell and Thompson played on the idea to the possible detriment of both works. Specifically, the decision to mirror the casting of Cranford in Lark Rise to Candleford has the potential to undermine the very real cultural differences between the two works as adapted, and in the case of Cranford in particular reinforces the collapse of sophisticated narrative interpretation at the heart of Gaskell’s texts. Indeed, following the first broadcast so swiftly with the second almost allowed for a seamless segueing between them. Just as Dickens has for so long been equated with the Victorian, so the BBC made Cranford and Lark Rise blur into the same block of narrative nineteenth century in a quasi-amalgamated adaptation, thus reducing the importance of both novels as separate, distinct, and chronologically diverse representations of the Victorian period. In circumscribing the boundaries between the texts, the BBC might be seen to have bought into the idea that all adaptations of the nineteenth century are really aspects of the same cultural, hegemonic and homogeneous themes; that timing itself did not and does not matter within the adaptive sphere. A similar point could be made about the relocation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, in some respects a prototype of the lateVictorian ghost story, into a post-Great War setting in the December 2009 BBC adaptation by Sandy Welch: such dislocation of the temporal specifics of James’s narrative (a story set in the mid-Victorian period related in the 1890s) performs a double distancing from the historical specifics of the narrative as an act, and inevitably loses the imprecision concerning the central protagonist’s reliability at the same time. If Giddings and Selby are correct in their statement that ‘classic serials may also be seen as examples of broadcasting ritual, which involves an examination of the genre as a means by which a culture speaks to itself, and incorporates an evaluation of shared beliefs and values as transmitted by the form’,48 then this blurring of distinction illustrates the ahistoric specificity of contemporary portrayals of the Victorian, and the past more generally. Although, to use Robert Hewison’s phrase, we might be witnessing ‘Britain in a Climate of Decline’49 precisely because it is heritage that dominates contemporary culture, the historical generalism displayed in relation to the past now so ever present on TV schedules, film listings, and even Past Times catalogues cannot help but make one wonder what ‘heritage’ means in these contexts. For surely to know, understand, and even to be obsessed with a shared past relies on enough sense of historical knowledge to recognize conceptualizations of difference between now and then, and also between the various forms of ‘then’ on offer.




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There is also the danger of seeking to underline the contemporary relevance of the storyline. In the BBC’s 2001 adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), the tale of an unscrupulous financier and a damning indictment of the laissez faire economic liberalism of the nineteenth century, the parallels with City of London ‘fat-cats’ and in particular the figure of Robert Maxwell became part of a caricature process. As James Thompson notes, ‘David Suchet’s Melmotte amounted at times to an impersonation of Maxwell. Assertion of continuity, or parallels, between then and now were noticeably . . . overt.’50 Indeed, when Suchet acted in the BBC drama Maxwell (2007) it could have been billed as a sequel to the Trollope adaptation: a true-life neoTrollopean tale in a neo-Victorian society. While such comparisons make the adapted texts’ relevancy to the contemporary world more directly visible, they also run the risk of hijacking the original texts in the cause of contemporaneousness.51 In the case of Cranford the collapse of Miss Matty’s bank and the loss of her savings rightly drew parallels with the fall of Northern Rock, and served to indicate the ways in which our current banking system remains largely Victorian in its foundations. With Flora Thompson’s narrative, however, the repeated focus on the importance of the Post Office as the core of the community, right down to tediously mundane 60 minute episodes on the loss of a parcel of fancy bows from Paris, stretched the contemporary parallels to breaking point. The adaptation also reinforced the idea of Lark Rise to Candleford itself as a group of largely humorous tales of village life. In effect, this was the BBC doing an H.E. Bates on Thompson’s text and trying to emulate ITV’s success with The Darling Buds of May (1991–93).52 Thompson’s trilogy, on the other hand, represents a far more realistic and in some senses harsher version of the bucolic ideal that now finds its place on our Sunday night schedules. Even in 1944, when Hugh Massingham wrote his introductory preface to the collection of Thompson’s three texts, it was recognized that in order to get the full import of the narrative(s) you had to read beneath the surface: after summarizing the three significant social, economic, and cultural shifts illustrated across Thompson’s novels from pre-industrial rural life through to the mass modernity and increased suburban interconnectedness of Lark Rise and Candleford, Massingham wrote, ‘It is clear, then, that Flora Thompson’s simple-seeming chronicles of life in hamlet, village, and market town are, when regarded as an index to social change, of great complexity and heavy with revolutionary meaning. But this you do not notice until you look below the surface.’53 It is questionable whether the portrayal in the three series of the Lark Rise trilogy really allows viewers (as readers) to ‘look below the



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surface’. The plots of later episodes were overladen with incidents of trifling importance that captured each serial vignette as an image of a relatively unchanging balance of communities. The episodes served as weekend entertainments, but did not constitute a neo-Victorian engagement as such with the nature of how to tell the Victorian story now by doing justice to both the text adapted and the field of contemporary adaptation. The mid to late 1990s have been characterized as a period in which there was a ‘Renaissance of the Classic Serial’,54 and the development towards the end of that decade and around the millennium of the ‘docusoap’ confirms the sustainability of this ‘distinct genre’.55 While Sarah Cardwell has highlighted the way in which there is often a limited, canonical range of texts entering the adaptation process (‘Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and so on – [who] tend also to dominate the academic construction and study of English literature’),56 our concerns here relate to how canonical difference and cultural difference are subsumed into a homogenized sense of the past, and more importantly the past as a mirror to ourselves. Frederic Jameson’s prediction in 1991 that we were witnessing the death of the ‘nostalgia film’57 seems somewhat out of tune with contemporary culture. Although Jameson’s theories on postmodernism have been key to that term’s development, as Cardwell notes there is a definite comparison to be made between nostalgia and the classic adaptation: ‘[n]ostalgia is considered a postmodern phenomenon; so is television.’58 Indeed, Cardwell goes on to argue that ‘[c]lassic-novel adaptations could therefore be regarded as the epitome of our postmodern quest for the past; . . . they, like our quest, are characterised by a prevailing nostalgic mood.’59 But what nature does this ‘postmodern quest’ have? What is its intention? To judge by recent adaptations it is stability, normativity, and universalism, aims that seem at odds with postmodernity’s faith in fragmentation, flexible notions of subjectivity, and fluidity in identity and sexuality. As Cardwell reveals, this ‘postmodern quest’ is derived from ‘a singularly “un-postmodern” desire for historicism – a determination to understand the present as it relates to the past’.60 What many recent adaptations appear to present us with is the past as now. Ronald Thomas’s comment on what drives our appetite for forms of neo-Victorian adaptation is a telling statement on the difference between the representation, our interpretation, and our contemporary preoccupations: Our desire for a show – or, to be precise, for the moving-picture version of a Victorian novel – does not manifest our desire for Victorian




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culture or even for Victorian character so much as it does a desire for historical dissimulation. Liberating us from the repressive hypothesis of the Victorian subject, this desire manifests modernity’s attempt to participate in a performance in which the demarcations of difference between them and us may effectively be dissolved.61 Thomas articulates his faith in the fact that the visual medium is itself connected to nostalgia when he states that ‘[w]hat we sometimes fail to remember is that the cinema itself is a nineteenth-century invention . . . Through the magic of this reel-to-reel device, we make our own ceremonial return to Victorian culture each time we enter a movie theatre and the house lights go dim, regardless of what title is listed on the marquee.’62 But the idea is more complicated than this, for surely the nature of that ‘ceremonial return to Victorian culture’ must partly be coloured by the nature of the Victorian representation on the screen itself. The ‘appropriateness’ or otherwise of an adaptation – stage, screen, or TV – inevitably raises questions about the reasoning behind it. Is it seeking to provide a new angle on the nineteenth century, or to make a fast buck? This is, of course, not only a UK-based phenomenon, nor does it apply only to television or film. In the US the Victorians have frequently re-appeared on Broadway stages over the last decade, even, and perhaps most surprisingly, in the form of two plays based on the life of John Ruskin.63 To take a UK example, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of The Woman in White (2004) may well prove an entertaining version of Wilkie Collins’s original 1860 novel, but the sensation it provides within a theatrical/musical context will be very different to the original ‘sensational’ nature of its publication. Whether a comparison can be made between the sinister portrayal of Count Fosco in Collins’s text and his all-singing, all-dancing, Michelin-man representation in the song ‘You Can Get Away With Anything’ (‘Put on a good show!/ Always Count Fosco he puts on a good show!’), or between Collins’s narrative and the musical Laura Fairlie’s ‘If Only I Could Dream This World Away’ is another matter. The following lines from Fosco’s lyric might even provide an apt summary of the commercially-driven aspects of neo-Victorianism in popular culture: I live to push the boundaries, to break the rules, in short One must be something of a bounder if one intends to play this game There’s only one thing that one has to have



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Lloyd Webber can of course play on the disclaimer beneath the musical’s title that this is ‘Freely adapted from the classic novel by Wilkie Collins’, and there is no reason why he, the lyricist, the director Trevor Nunn, and even Lloyd Webber’s brother Julian (for whom Lloyd Webber wrote The Woman in White Suite for cello and violin, 2005) should not seek to benefit by providing the kind of adaptations for which there is an evident marketplace. Yet it does seem revealing that while Lloyd Webber’s Victorian forebears, Gilbert and Sullivan, were writing operettas that provided astute social commentary and political portraits of the nation’s leaders (think of the Gladstone-esque performance in Iolanthe, 1882), the contemporary alternative in the musicals is a rather low-brow and ‘free’ imitation of ‘classic novels’. Robert Stam has theorized aspects of this desire for ‘faithfulness’ to the original text and argues that such criticisms are misplaced: ‘When we say an adaptation has been “unfaithful” to the original, the very violence of the term gives expression to the intense disappointment we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what we see as the fundamental narrative, thematic, and aesthetic features of its literary source.’65 Stam continues that fidelity as an ideal is both impossible and undesirable, partly because the move to a different medium cannot hope to sustain or replicate our sense of the textual reality of the original. While we have sympathy for Stam’s critique, there does remain nevertheless the uneasy sense that this provides a potential blank slate for the developments of adaptations that bear little but the name of the original, which is then used for trading and commercial rather than aesthetic and innovative reasons. If adaptations do not add something to the portrayal of the original narrative but instead detract from it, what is their role in the cultural sphere? The dance production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray raises a similar question. Choreographed by Matthew Bourne, Dorian Gray premiered in August 2008 at the Edinburgh International Festival before embarking on a UK-wide tour to rave reviews and numerous award nominations. Speaking to a journalist in an interview about the adaptation, Bourne comments that [t]here is quite a lot of Wilde in it . . . the story of this beautiful young man getting corrupted inside has been pushing me into deeper, darker areas. But I wanted to make the story more contemporary,



one has to have no shame Yes I can get away with everything because I have no shame.64

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The decision on when to set the production ties in with a clear sense of the retro culture of the late 1990s and the millennium. This is a period in which restoring Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s houses back to their ‘original’ state coincided with a semi-anachronistic retrospective approach to 1960s and 1970s fashion, music and culture in general. It also reflects an anxiety about the possibilities of being ‘authentic’ (or rather of being judged inauthentic) to a particular period. When Bourne’s collaborator, in the same interview, comments on the need to ‘get it right’ in ‘details of style’, he is referring not to the dangers inherent in a retro setting (is everything a period piece of the correct period) but to the fact that ‘Everyone in the audience knows as much about the present as we do. They all go shopping.’67 As a combination of the commercial and the cultural, the statement ‘They all go shopping’ serves to encapsulate one of the dangers of the free market in adaptations as much as in stocks and shares. This commodification is heightened through the portrayal of Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray himself in the dance: since they are no longer cast as painter and artistic model, the performance also removes the portrait as a metaphorical device in favour of Dorian’s beauty being ‘immortalised through an ad campaign’: ‘So Basil . . . is going to be an iconic photographer, someone like Annie Leibovitz, and Dorian is going to become the face of a new perfume, like in a Calvin Klein ad.’68 In one sense, the photograph and the stylish modernity of the adaptation serve as contemporary signifiers of the kinds of positioning suggested in Wilde’s novella, yet in another they present the odd prospect of the public marketing of what in Wilde’s text is a deliberately private, hidden, and ambivalent dialogue between self and ego, reality and fantasy/nightmare. Will Self, in his novel Dorian (2002), engages in a similar higher technological game by using a media installation and drugs where the dance uses photography and fashion. Both adaptations, however, inevitably return us in some ways towards the meanings in which Wilde himself was simultaneously trying to be and not be of his cultural moment. For that, at least, they deserve some credit. Their engagement with the retrospective nature of adaptation, however, raises questions about how texts become not only adapted but translated into different cultural



so . . . had a lot of discussions about period. At first we were thinking of the 1960s, but that’s a period we love and keep going back to. I wanted to push us outside our comfort zone. So we’re setting it in the present – which is quite scary for us.66

moments. Where the Victorians drew on myth and the mediaeval for their interpretation of contemporary social and cultural concerns, we instead return to them as figures of equal distance and seemingly transferable frames of reference. The difference, however, is in the term ‘revival’. Victorian revivalism delivered a sense of purpose beyond the adaptive in the fact that the revival of an earlier period – such as the mediaeval – served not so much as a visual or fashion statement, but rather reflected a political position, invoking an ideological inheritance at the same time. The fact that this ideology was idealist in nature does not diminish the fact that the past to the Victorians themselves was partly didactic and functional: William Morris’s emphasis on the beauty of craftsmanship, for example, was as much driven by socialist principle as public taste. Peter Bowker’s serial comedy-drama Desperate Romantics (BBC2, 2009) recognized the radical political and cultural roots of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s origins while at the same time supplying plenty of sex and drugs. As the title screens to each episode declared: ‘The “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” were inspired by the real world about them, yet took imaginative licence in their art. This story, based on their lives and loves, follows in that inventive spirit.’ Disowning a sense of authenticity or factuality, the series gave itself the freedom to reinvent the Brotherhood’s narrative firmly within a post-millennial sensibility pre-occupied with sex. What contemporary adaptations of the Victorian text do in the case of Dorian Gray and others, however, is utilize the precursor text as a means to reflect the ideology of the present as divorced from the past. The difference between retro and revival, between translation and adaptation, is drawn along these lines. The 2009 film version of Dorian Gray (of which we can catch a showing at Dickens World’s cinema), directed by Oliver Parker, who previously directed Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1999) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), thus enhances and makes more prominent the unspoken elements of Wilde’s text, particularly in relation to the potential violence of Dorian’s character. But it is largely impossible for the text to be filmed in a way that makes it reflect Wilde’s manifesto in his ‘Preface’ concerning the Victorian fear of realism being the rage of a Caliban seeing himself in the glass. Such a specifically 1890s mantra cannot really survive the extension of the film’s time frame to the 1920s to encompass the First World War and a suffragette who tries to redeem Dorian’s soul. To carry the Caliban glass motif through would mean recognizing the threat that such an adaptation has to pose to the contemporary audience in relation to their own lifestyles, to blur their public and private faces through the mirror of the text. Parker is unable




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to do this not only because an adaptation invariably changes its precursor but also for the simple reason that the adaptation has been made in a period in which no such distinction is acknowledged. If there were a Dorian today, then his canvas carcass would probably occupy the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and be entered for the Turner Prize. Ultimately, what each of the examples given briefly here illustrates, from the adaptation of Gaskell and Thompson’s novels through to Lloyd Webber’s take on Wilkie Collins and Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray, is the way in which the Victorian has become fair game for an ahistoric sense of the adaptive. Blurring the distinctions not only between then and now but also between adaptations of very different texts, the BBC’s recent work on Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford raises fundamental questions about neo-Victorianism on the screen. Collapsing difference into similarity might be an easy way to make the audience feel comfortable and provides a sense of reassurance that the adaptation itself is part of a nostalgic return to an older-style, traditional Victorian sense of ‘home’, but in reality it does justice to neither the original text(s) nor the modern viewer. Adaptation is a complex business with varying demands and a mixture of successes and failures that would have been recognized by many a Victorian writer. In the following section, we look at the example of the single most influential adaptor of the Victorian and neoVictorian texts, both highs and lows, in this period: Andrew Davies.

6.4 ‘I’m not sure how much of a Dickensian I am really’: The adaptive affinities of Andrew Davies69 In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1987 novella Cuts the juxtaposition between the high-impact media corporation Eldorado Television and the shabby Victorian university that stands alongside it is sharply drawn. But perhaps more dramatic than the division between academic, high cultural, and populist accessibility figured in the physical appearance of these two institutions representing the solidity of the nineteenth century versus the glacial sheen of the contemporary is the discussion that takes place concerning the costume drama Gladstone, Man of Empire. These production debates come to a crisis when one of the actors, Sir Luke, declares after having read the script, ‘I simply find it hard to believe that Mr Gladstone ever appeared in the nude before Queen Victoria at Windsor . . . And even more unlikely that he did so while playing the ukulele.’ As the executive Jocelyn Pride points out to him, however, ‘[T]his is a drama-doc . . . It’s fictionalised verity. You take real people and events but you’re not slavishly bound to actual



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facts.’70 Adaptation of history, the media moguls suggest, is fair game in the interests of audience attraction, and ‘fictionalised verity’ serves as the modus operandi of the adaptor’s work. Although this book is concerned with the period 1999–2009, Bradbury’s 1980s satire of Thatcherite adaptation, with its play around the idea that the period itself is an intentional appropriation of those ‘Victorian values’ so esteemed by the Iron Lady, and David Lodge’s contemporaneous companion piece Nice Work (1988) illuminate the contexts of contemporary adaptation of the Victorians around the millennium. As already indicated above in the discussion of The Way We Live Now, turning to the Victorians as representatives of something stable, secure, and comparable to us moved into a new context around the year 2000; indeed, it is possible to mark part of this turn in one key figure: Andrew Davies. If the BBC costume drama represents a safe bet in terms of generic cultures of consumption, then the name of Andrew Davies is a guarantor for the viewing public of the ‘authentic’ adaptation. Davies has built a reputation for the reinvigoration of the classic serial format over recent years and through ‘his distinctive “televisual” aesthetic’.71 His identity as an adaptor of nineteenth-century, particularly Victorian contexts has made him a cultural authority on the Victorian and neo-Victorian literary spheres. Through a Davies adaptation not only do Victorian texts come to life on the screen, but also the contemporary filmic techniques seek to mimic the Victorian format of the serialized novel. Davies’s two most recent experiments with this format – Bleak House and Little Dorrit – usefully offer themselves up for comparison given the quite significant disparity in their reception by the viewing public. Davies’s attempt to emulate the serialization format was perceived both by the public and within the costume drama industry as one of the unique selling points of his adaptation of Bleak House. Gripped by the attempt to invert the contemporary familiarity with the soap opera format and its reputation for dealing with cutting-edge social issues into a Dickensian retrospective, audiences applauded the regularity of the serial’s instalments and BBC executives rejoiced in the hook this provided into their weeknight viewing figures. Moving the traditional location of the costume drama from 9pm on a Sunday evening slot into the weeknights and ensuring that the Victorian soap opera followed the BBC’s flagship production in this format (EastEnders) guaranteed that parallels between Victorian and contemporary realism would be drawn; one of the directors of the Bleak House adaptation, Justin Chadwick, came from experience on EastEnders.




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However, while the award-winning Bleak House served as a pinnacle of Davies’s reputation for the delivery of condensed, accessible, and yet textually authenticated adaptations, the sequel serial, his adaptation of Little Dorrit (2008) failed to make the same conceptual and entertainment connection with the public, although it has won more recent critical acclaim.72 By the end of its weeknight run it was attracting audience figures of only around 2.5 million, which is dwarfed by comparison with the regular 8 million viewers for Cranford, and even the 6 million who tuned in repeatedly to Bleak House in its weeknight slot (up to 9 million viewers per week including the weekend omnibus slot). More viewers watched Little Dorrit on the weekend omnibus edition,73 but the figures were still not as high as might have been anticipated for a serial of this kind, made by the BBC and with the Davies brand attached. In January 2009 the BBC announced that it would concentrate less on classic adaptations of the nineteenth century over the coming years, and instead refocus its dramatic output towards more contemporary films and serials about twentieth-century history (such as the recent Diary of Anne Frank, 2009) and literature post 1901 (see The 39 Steps, also 2009).74 This is possibly part of the BBC’s growing awareness of its own parodic position in relation to classic adaptations: one of the biggest radio hits over recent years has been Radio 4’s Bleak Expectations (two series have been broadcast, 2007 and 2008, both written by Mark Evans), a serial which has mercilessly and very entertainingly pastiched the Dickensian framework of the Victorian narrative through the use of Dickens’s plots and also absurdly significant names such as the villain ‘Mr Gently Benevolent’ or the arch-foes of the hero being the entire family known as ‘Hardthrasher’, the first member of whom is encountered as the Headmaster of the school ‘St Bastard’s’. The series also cleverly juxtaposed itself as narrated text rather than televisual performance. The drama of the programme is driven by the account of the life’s writing through the retrospective position of Sir Philip, formerly ‘Pip Bin’. Through radio, therefore, there is an invocation of the textual process of writerly creation, the Dickensian public readings and the performativity of the original text, all of which cannot be accommodated within the television adaptation in the same way; Davies has himself talked about the difficulty of representing the figure of the author in visual adaptations.75 The popularity of the radio series Bleak Expectations is no doubt partly drawn from its tonguein-cheek approach to adaptation, partly its absurdist plot stands, and also, perhaps most importantly, its satirical approach, which undercuts and derides any audience desire to take it seriously. As a reflection of the BBC’s attitude towards the classic serial it serves as a useful reminder



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that one must always be alert to the dangers of over-serious readings of adaptations themselves, an issue which perhaps came to light in the Little Dorrit adaptation. Assessing audiences and their responsive tastes is notoriously difficult, given that television viewing is subject to a range of external forces and pressures outside of the media executive and adaptor’s control. Yet the distinct difference between the reception of Bleak House and Little Dorrit inevitably raises questions about the possibility that either the latter adaptation did not provide what audiences sought or that the original text of Dickens’s novel was not able to make the transfer into a Davies adaptation. Boyd Tonkin, writing in The Independent, balanced out the positive and negative sides of the debate but also revealed an important sense of absence in the adaptation itself: Mr Dickens has returned to the screen, courtesy once more of Mr Andrew Davies. That tireless workhorse of classic adaptation has now pulled Little Dorrit into the public square. As splendid a show as ever we saw, some cry: Victorian London as squalidly gorgeous as ever; a capital troupe of our finest thespians striking poses, making faces and contorting voices to a standard that leaves the world in awe; every creaking gate and dripping chamber stylishly distressed to within an inch of its grimy Gothic life. Stuff and nonsense, snorts the rival camp. This heritage drama plumbs unprecedented depths. One thick slice of histrionic ham drops on another, wedged between turgid doorstops of unfathomable plot. Costumed camp addles the senses of its twee antiquarian followers. This reactionary rabble would nominate the cast and crew of Emmerdale for Baftas if only they snuck in some crinolines, bustles and the odd steam-engine. For an author so frequently dramatised, Charles Dickens has almost become invisible. Everyone appears to know what they think about the novels, the adapters and the actors.76 The contradictions and tensions here are typical of the response generated by Davies’s work on Little Dorrit, but less so in relation to Bleak House. What is being underlined is the familiarity of things as part of the comfort of the adaptation – the scenery of London is ‘as squalidly gorgeous as ever’ as an ostensibly positive sign, yet the ‘depths’ of the ‘unfathomable plot’ appear to get in the way of the visual pleasures to be found in such squalor. We want it to look terrible in a sublime way, but we also want it simple, intelligible, uncomplicated, and also unmediated




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by the familiar knowledge of the space it inhabits. It is interesting that ‘heritage drama’ is here deemed negative rather than part of a cultural positive. The fact that ‘Mr Dickens’ and ‘Mr Andrew Davies’ are portrayed as a related double act of Victorian advertising is also important, because Tonkin and others who criticized the adaptation never really pin down whether the faultlines are divided between these two figures: is Little Dorrit hard to adapt (Dickens’s problem) or did the adaptor not have his magic touch this time (a problem for Davies and the BBC)? Part of the problem does appear to be located in the artifice of the production. The actors and their script are identified as a block between audience and ‘authenticity’ partly because they appear to be hamming it up and partly because they are a ‘reactionary rabble’: they are too familiar to serve the purpose required of contemporary adaptation, and one suspects the fear is that their invoked presence of other televisual experiences is part of the filter that does not allow for the adjustment to the specifics of the adaptation in hand. There is also, of course, the issue of knowing and not knowing Dickens, here invoked by Tonkin as an ‘invisible’ presence in the adaptation. In this context it is worth exploring the issue of how TV adaptation of Victorian texts demonstrates the dual function of providing a contemporary re-interpretation in line with Karen Chase’s suggestion in the epigraph to this book’s Introduction that each age has to reinvent Middlemarch, and yet also needing to remain ‘authentic’ to the Urtext. Chase’s collection contains an essay by Jakob Lothe which explores just such an issue. In ‘Narrative Vision in Middlemarch: The Novel Compared with the BBC Television Adaptation’,77 Lothe specifically discusses how Eliot’s third-person narrative vision is represented on film, in this case the 1994 BBC adaptation, and ‘the different problems and possibilities as far as the transformation from verbal prose to film is concerned.’78 What Lothe suggests is that ‘watching an adaptation, we see what is presented on the screen rather than what the literary narrator makes us visualize as we read’.79 In this sense, the visual adaptations explored in this section could be connected with the filmic ‘magic’ discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to the films The Prestige (2006) and The Illusionist (2006). What the film about nineteenth-century magic requires of us is a kind of disbelief or an ability to see but not read (as in understand) the images presented to us until the director has created the desired impact of understanding. Similarly, the adaptation of a novel from the Victorian period has to make us believe as much in the mode of the narrative and its storytelling practice as the events contained within it. Lothe seems somewhat cautious about exploring the issue of different media



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in these terms, and one can see why. The danger, which he pre-empts, is that such a comparison might be perceived as ‘critically dubious’80 precisely because it blurs the requirements of very different forms of textual engagement. Yet Lothe’s reading along this route proposes a very interesting take on the relationship between the precursor text and the adaptation which has particular relevance to other neo-Victorian adaptations. Lothe comments that it is natural to link the implied author to director Page’s imprint on the film: the combined result of his choices, priorities, and decisions during the process of filmmaking. Yet since this particular film is an adaptation, Eliot is an ‘implied coauthor’, that is, an implied author whose story, ideas, and value system Page both represents and interprets.81 Combining the figures of director and author in this way, Lothe extrapolates a relationship based in the idea of collaborative auteurship which locates itself in the directorial figure rather than the author of the adaptation. Revealingly, the director is positioned as the figure of authority in this relationship, and Andrew Davies is only mentioned in an endnote reference to Lothe’s essay, and yet the 1994 version of Middlemarch really served as the starting point of Davies’s reputation for the great Victorian adaptation; the perhaps now better known Pride and Prejudice came in 1995. In April 2007 it was announced that a new film version of Middlemarch to be directed by Sam Mendes was in production, and that Andrew Davies was providing the script for this new adaptation.82 As an indicator of the truth of Chase’s comments about each generation reinventing Eliot’s text this could hardly be surpassed, implying as it does that Davies’s Middlemarch of 1994 and his Middlemarch of 2010 would and will be able to encapsulate a different approach because of the 16 year interval between them; in an interview, Davies comments that the shelf-life of an adaptation is ‘about ten years’ and that he ‘might come back in twenty years . . . and have another go’.83 The fact that this reinforces the kind of internalization of adaptation mentioned above in relation to the BBC and ITV recasting of the classics on a twenty year cycle offers us an additional argument in favour of the incestuous reading of costume drama adaptations of the Victorian classics. In this respect, it also draws a distinction between the academic climate of the moment and the ongoing significance of reclaiming and recovering ‘lost’ works of Victorian literature, and instead recalibrates attention towards a continually replenished




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and recast (both as in redesigned and as in being equipped with new star actors of the present in the roles), singularly homogenized narrative of the ‘Victorian’ on screen. Adaptations are intimately connected with ideas of the canonical, both drawing on and supporting canonical positionings of individual writers. But as we can see, they are also in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century continually engaged in processes of self-canonical recognition. Where in the past different Dickens or Eliot novels might be identified as holding specific positions within the cultural awareness based on the number and quality of different TV or film adaptations of their work and an internal canon might have existed between a 1970s BBC version and a 1990s version of the same text, now we are entering a period where there is the possibility of a Davies canon in which different adaptations of the same text battle for the supremacy of cultural recognition. But if Davies has earned his reputation through the adaptation of Victorian texts, it is also important to recognize the influence he has held over the adaptation of the neo-Victorian. Davies’s work on the adaptations of two of Sarah Waters’s turn-of-the-millennium novels (Tipping the Velvet, 1998, and Affinity, 1999) has ensured that, for critics at least but also one suspects for the larger audience, Waters’s work has somehow become ‘classicized’ through the process, right down to the Hitchcockesque cameos. Just as we noted above that the seamless transition for the audience between Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford led to the conflation of the two different periods of each group of texts into a single narrative viewpoint of ‘the Victorian’, so Davies’s adaptations of Waters’s neo-Victorian novels might be read as a bridgeless segueing between the Victorian text and the neo-Victorian revision of that text. Importantly, such compounding of adaptive sites also acts as a potential indicator of the ways in which Davies’s and Waters’s works are in dialogue with each other rather than the Victorian period or a precursor text. If we follow Lothe’s line that George Eliot and her director Anthony Page are in some respects ‘co-authors’ of the 1994 Middlemarch, then this also becomes true of Davies’s and Waters’s work. Potentially, this makes the adaptations far more concerned with the contemporary (the double influence of the now in the collaboration, for example, rather than the collective influence of then and now) than it does with the refraction of the nineteenth century through the lens of the contemporary camera. Waters’s novels are themselves engaged in that prismadic relationship with the earlier narratives on which she draws from the Victorian period. This might suggest that there is a collectivization of the experience of reading the Victorians being brought



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to a wider audience while also sustaining a commitment to new drama and contemporary authorship. However, the fact that Davies’s adaptation of Tipping the Velvet (BBC 2002) will be remembered as much for the golden phallus/dildo as anything about the narrative of women’s rights presented in the novel is surely problematic. This problem is made more apparent in Davies’s recent adaptation of Waters’s second novel Affinity (ITV 2008). In an ironic inversion of Davies’s other work, where the sexual undertones of Victorian texts have to be brought into a contemporary/late-twentieth-century context through more tactile relationships between characters, a different discourse register and even the visual addition of a wet shirt, in the case of Affinity Davies’s adaptation heteronormativizes Waters’s text through the additional character of Margaret Prior’s fiancé. Theophilus’s attempted rape of Margaret is a pivotal scene in her demonstration of sexual (rather than emotional or displaced psychological) affection towards Selina Dawes. The adaptation suggests that there must be a reason why Margaret is awakening to a lesbian consciousness during the course of the film, and that reason has to be grounded in a trauma-based revulsion from men. Compared to the narrative of Tipping the Velvet (both book and adaptation) this is a reduction of the possibilities for a positive construction of same-sex desire. While Davies maintains some flashback reminiscence scenes that allow us to conjecture things about Margaret’s prior relationship with Helen, there is nevertheless the implied context of the ultimate denial of penetrative intercourse with her fiancé to explain her feelings for Dawes moving from affection to post-traumatic sexual longing. This is not to attempt to mark out a gender-specific point about the relationship between adaptor and writer, or to argue for the need for male adaptors to keep clear of women writers’ work. It does, however, raise an important issue about the marketing and marketability of the contemporary Victorian adaptation. What role(s) does it serve within the larger context of Victorian costume drama? What is more fundamental – the relationship to the present, or the capturing (even mimicking) of the Victorian past? There is also, in this specific case of Davies’s adaptation of Affinity, an important point to consider concerning the thematic connections between Affinity and Little Dorrit. It is possible that Waters’s rendering of the possibilities of ‘deviant’ sexuality within the setting of a prison owes not a little to the conjunction of the central image and one of the sub-plots of Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit, namely the Marshalsea prison and the relationship between Miss Wade and Tattycoram. There is thus again the potential




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for a slippage between adaptive sites, given that ITV’s broadcast of Affinity at the end of December 2008 coincided relatively smoothly with the final episode of Little Dorrit (it followed two weeks later). This suggestive sequential arrangement promotes the idea that, just as contemporary concerns can be blurred with the Victorian text to be exploited and explored, so too links can be made across the serializations derived from texts in both periods. The thematic connections between the Victorian ‘original’ and the neo-Victorian reinterpretation function once more as a telling reflection on the palimpsestuous nature of adaptation identified by Linda Hutcheon.

6.5 Conclusion Adaptation is a fundamental part of neo-Victorianism as a concept because all engagements with the Victorian in contemporary culture that fulfil the metatextual and metacritical requirements we set out in this book’s introduction are necessarily adaptations or appropriations – be it of plots, characters, or intellectual concerns and cultural preoccupations. Adaptation is by its nature an evolving form, and one which we have inherited from the nineteenth century. As David Lowenthal states of the Victorians, ‘[n]o people since the Renaissance combined such confidence in their own powers with so much antiquarian introspection’,84 while Elizabeth E. Guffey comments on how contemporary retro culture, although different from the Victorians’ sense of the retrospective, nevertheless invokes aspects of ‘Victorian revivalism’.85 Looking forward, perhaps our own contemporary confidence in our technological, materialistic and financial supremacy is at the root of our return back to the Victorians. However, recent decades have, it seems, moved us into a period where the innovative and dramatic nature of the classic serial has shifted on to a contradictorily safer, yet risqué, portrayal of the Victorians on the large and small screen, on radio and even in the musical. The fact that this is coupled with a return to the theme-park-cum-freak-show mentality of Dickens World, so clearly identified as a possibility by Brian Moore in his 1975 novel, and accompanied by a material notion of nostalgia as things, possessions and objects either from the past or fabricated to imitate items from the past, might possibly give us cause for concern. In part, these anxieties should be at the aesthetic level: what does it say for our culture that we have to centre the importance of an adaptation on the contemporary issues that we feel should set the viewers’ agenda? How do we deal with the idea of difference and ensure that we do not collapse the Victorian



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into ‘the past’ as a whole and thus undermine the very historical distance which gives meaning to our re-interpretations and adaptive modes? These concerns must be raised at a wider cultural and social level: what does the way we adapt now indicate about postmodernism and neo-Victorianism as one of its prominent aspects? What does the backward turn mean for our contemporary culture? And does all of this signal that, unlike the Victorians, we are not able to look backward and think forward at the same time? This book began with reference to work published in the New Scientist magazine at the start of 2009 suggesting that the Victorians’ sense of social cohesion, moral purpose, and ontological reasoning were all connected to ‘Victorianism’ in literature and culture. What connects us now is the ‘neo-Victorian’: a self-conscious reflection on the possibilities, negativities, revisionary capacity, and belatedness that underline our relationship to that period. Modernity and postmodernity are brought together within and because of a series of historical conflicts, differences, unities and collective cultural experiences. As we write this, adaptations of the Victorian legacy into a neo-Victorian present are going on all around us. In the bicentennial year of the birth of Darwin, Tennyson, and Gladstone, and the sesquicentennial year of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, it is inevitable that our thoughts return to the nineteenth century; the 2012 Olympic year will also mark the celebrations of Dickens’s bicentenary and it will be interesting and informative to see how the Cultural Olympiad will negotiate a sense of forward-looking Britain in a global context while necessarily paying homage to the dominant figure of Victorianism writ large. Yet while there is nothing inevitable about our continued engagement with the intellectual challenge the nineteenth-century figures represent, there is an undeniable need to pay heed to the fact that what defines neoVictorianism resides in the acknowledgement that we must recognize the Victorian past in order to engage with the contemporary present.




Introduction: Neo-Victorianism and Post-Authenticity 1 Ian Sample, ‘Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say psychologists’, The Guardian, 14 January 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism. See also John Sutherland, ‘Believing in 19th century novels’, The Guardian, 14 January 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/14/literatureevolutionary-advantage-university-missouri (both sources accessed 3 October 2009): ‘An article in the New Scientist argues that Victorian delusion gave Britain an evolutionary advantage. The authors have done a multi-factor analysis on characters from classic Victorian fiction such as Dorothea Brooke, Heathcliff and Dorian Gray and uncover the kinds of interlocking ideological beliefs that create cohesion, collective effort, and self-denial for the greater good. We read Victorian fiction and are condescending about the death of Nell – “one would need a heart of stone, etc.” – the “happy ever after endings”, and promote Flashman, not Tom Brown, as our heroic figure. We are proudly unVictorian: disabused, but diffident.’ 2 Karen Chase, ‘Introduction’ to Karen Chase (ed.), Middlemarch in the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 3. 3 Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 November 1919, repr. in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 213. 4 Henry James, Preface to Vol. 7 of the New York edition of The Tragic Muse (1908), http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/text07.htm (accessed 29 September 2009). 5 Zadie Smith, ‘The book of revelations’, The Guardian, 24 May 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/24/classics.zadiesmith (accessed 3 October 2009). Smith here refers to James’s complaint that Middlemarch was written with ‘too much refinement and too little breadth’, see Henry James, ‘Middlemarch’ (1873), repr. in section entitled ‘Novels by Eliot, Hardy and Flaubert’ in Stephen Regan (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: Routledge, Open University, 2001), p. 81. 6 James, ‘Middlemarch’, p. 85. 7 Smith, ‘The book of revelations’. 8 Hugh Kingsmill, ‘1932 and the Victorians’, English Review, 9 (1932), p. 684, quoted in Stefan Collini, ‘“The Great Age”: The Idealizing of Victorian Culture’, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 211. See also Robert MacFarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2007), p. 15. 9 Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (New York: OUP, 1973) posits that poetic creativity is driven by an anxiety about the poet’s relationship to precursor poets, and that one way of overcoming such anxiety and asserting individuality is actively to misread or revision the work of earlier figures. 246



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10 Notwithstanding modernist antipathy to the Victorians and Virginia Woolf’s pinpointing of 1910 as the turning point from old to new world aestheticism, twentieth-century criticism traced the beginnings of modernism back to the Victorians: Malcolm Bradbury and James MacFarlane’s modernism covers the period 1890–1930, and Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou’s (eds) Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998) reproduces texts from the mid-nineteenth century. See Bradbury and McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’, in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 19–55. 11 Smith, ‘The book of revelations’. 12 See, for example, F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948) and Raymond Williams’s Reading and Criticism (London: Miller, 1950) and Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958). 13 See Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), specifically chapters 1 and 2. 14 Cora Kaplan, ‘Perspective: Fingersmith’s Coda: Feminism and Victorian Studies’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13:1 (2008), p. 53. 15 For the different terminologies see Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel’, in Elinor S. Shaffer (ed.), The Third Culture: Literature and Science (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 253–68; Mariaconcetta Costantini, ‘“FauxVictorian Melodrama” in the New Millennium: The Case of Sarah Waters’, Critical Survey, 18:1 (2006), pp. 17–39; Andrea Kirchknopf, ‘(Re)Workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology, Contexts’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (2008), pp. 53–80, http//www.neovictorianstudies.com 16 Neo-Victorian Studies: see www.neovictorianstudies.com 17 Penny Gay, Judith Johnston and Catherine Waters (eds), Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), pp. 10–11. 18 See Robin Gilmour, ‘Using the Victorians: the Victorian Age in Contemporary Fiction’, in Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (eds), Rereading Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 190. Gilmour cites the standard historical novel (‘modern perspective and . . . modern idiom’); ‘pastiche and parody’; ideological ‘inversion’; ‘subversion of Victorian fictional norms’; ‘reworking or completing of a classic’ and the ‘research novel’. As the present study shows, such modes have continued since the start of the millennium and Gilmour’s essay and have been enhanced and modified as neo-Victorianism has developed conceptually and theoretically. 19 Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 66. 20 [Miriam Elizabeth Burstein], ‘The Little Professor: Things Victorian and Academic’, ‘Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels’, 15 March 2006, http:// littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2006/03/rules_for_writi.html (accessed 12 August 2008). 21 Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism, p. 7. 22 Nora Hague’s Letters from an Age of Reason (London: Simon and Schuster, 2001) may serve as an entertaining case in point. Hague’s heroine discovers orgasm by reading a sexually-explicit discussion of Henry Maudsley’s (an apt



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23

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27 28 29 30

Notes reflection of the libidinal qualities of reading the novel seeks to produce); later she launches into her first heterosexual relationship, with a fugitive American slave, with remarkable equanimity. But pleasure is not the only sensation with which to assuage modern readers’ desire for the Victorian experience: the heroine is subsequently confined to a lunatic asylum by her parents, who are outraged about her cross-race relationship and can only deem her mad; she consequently suffers nightly sexual assault at the hands of the attendants. Fortunately a rescue party is organized by her feminist, socialist, and other politically progressive friends, and the lovers are reunited. While Hague researched some aspects of the period (but fails to create believable characters), Faye L. Boothe’s Cover the Mirrors (London: Pan, 2007) has no such pretensions: it is, blandly, a bodice ripper about sex, with spiritualism thrown in on the margins to tick a second box. While the modernists themselves and even more immediately after the Victorians authors like Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells can be seen to use literature as a comment on, engagement with, or subversion of their Victorian precursors, we are taking the more recognizable version of the neo-Victorian to start from the mid-1960s onwards for the purposes of this book. For a useful summary of the ‘Age of Austerity’ as the period in which the neoVictorian developed see Sarah Gamble, ‘“You cannot impersonate what you are”: Questions of Authenticity in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 20:1–2 (2009), pp. 126–40, specifically pp. 126–9. See Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, ‘Choosing one’s heritage’, in For what tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), pp. 1–19. For a recent discussion of these ideas within Derrida’s theories see Rosalyn Diprose, ‘Derrida and the Extraordinary Responsibility of Inheriting the Future-to-Come’, Social Semiotics, 16:3 (2006), pp. 435–47. One might take the perpetually reinvented version of the BBC costume drama as a signifier of the endurance of the Victorian – and the longer nineteenth century – within the adaptive sphere, particularly the way in which a postmillennial return to the scenes of earlier Dickens and Austen adaptations has sought to refashion the genre for a new generation. For a discussion of these themes see Chapter 6. The debate between reading this period as nineteenth century rather than Victorian has recently been summarized in Martin Hewitt, ‘Why the Notion of Victorian Britain Does Make Sense’, Victorian Studies, 48:3 (2006), pp. 395–438. Hewitt’s article is a response to various other scholars who have raised questions about the ‘Victorian’ issue. For the purposes of this book and indeed for our classification of the genre as a whole, ‘neo-Victorian’ works far better (if only in terms of catchiness) than ‘neo-nineteenth century’, although there is necessarily some slippage between the two periods in recent fiction. Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2007).



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31 Christine L. Krueger (ed.), Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2002). 32 Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007). 33 This is particularly noticeable in a frequent return to the work of John Fowles even in recent criticism: see, for example, Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Goodbye to All That’ in Gay, Johnston and Waters, Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns, pp. 205–14, Lisa Fletcher’s two Fowles chapters in Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 195–236, and Peter Preston, ‘Victorianism in Recent Victorian Fiction’, in Marija Knezevic and Aleksandra NikcevicBatricevic (eds), History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 91–109. A notably more diverse and multi-genre approach is taken in Rebecca Munford and Paul Young’s double special issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory on the theme of Neo-Victorianism, 20:1–2 (2009). 34 David Andress, ‘Truth, Ethics and Imagination: Thoughts of the Purpose of History’, in John Arnold, Kate Davies and Simon Ditchfield (eds), History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture (Shaftesbury, Dorset: Donhead, 1998), p. 240. 35 Kenneth Womack, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 6, p. 8. 36 Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London: Profile Books, 2002), p. 147. 37 Jonathan Clark, Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 3. 38 Peter Widdowson, ‘“Writing back”: contemporary re-visionary fiction’, Textual Practice, 20:3 (2006), p. 492. 39 Michel Faber, The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006), p. xii. Further references appear in the text. It might of course be possible that the reader too is fictional here. 40 For further attention to this topic see also the discussion of The Thirteenth Tale in Chapter 1. 41 Mandler, History and National Life, p. 23. 42 Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997), pp. 30–1. 43 Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), p. 3. Further references appear in the text. 44 Susan Barrett, Fixing Shadows (London: Review, 2005), p. 372. 45 David Lodge, Nice Work (1988; London: Penguin, 1989), p. 83. 46 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 128. 47 Ibid, p. 19. 48 Kaplan, Victoriana, p. 106. 49 A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 11. 50 See Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism. 51 James’s text actually reads: ‘“Remember, if you please,” said my friend, looking at me over his spectacles, “that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected to bear Victorian fruit. Further, remember that an immense quantity of clever and thoughtful Rubbish is now being written about the Victorian



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53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

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Notes age.”’ M.R. James, ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’, Collected Ghost Stories (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), p. 281. The statement is usually translated as ‘beneath the signs there lay something of a quite different kind’: see Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin, D.J. Enright (London: Random House, 1993), p. 273. D.J. Taylor, Kept: A Victorian Mystery (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), p. 41. Kaplan, Victoriana, p. 40. Jonathan Dee, ‘The Reanimators: On the Art of Literary Graverobbing’, Harper’s Magazine, (June 1999), pp. 76–84. James Harold, ‘Flexing the Imagination’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61:3 (Summer 2003), p. 247. Ibid, p. 248. Opening sentence of Lytton Strachey’s Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918; London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), p. vii. Harold, ‘Flexing the Imagination’, p. 250. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 126. James Wilson, The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 472. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 133. Ibid, p. 145. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 8. Ibid, pp. 27–32. Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, p. 124. Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night (London: John Murray, 2006), p. 3. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 129. Kaplan, Victoriana, p. 5. See, for example, Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, ‘Introduction’ to Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds), Haunting and Spectrality in NeoVictorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–16. Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Heinemann, 2005), p. 222. Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (London: John Murray, 2007), p. 219. Both McEwan’s and Jones’s novels were discussed by John Sutherland in his keynote address at the ‘Neo-Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation’ conference at the University of Exeter in September 2007; parts of this Introduction were, however, already written for delivery at the conference. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 1998), p. 302.

1 Memory, Mourning, Misfortune 1 Steven Rose, The Making of Memory (London: Bantam Press, 1992), pp. 33–4. 2 Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), p. 14. Kaplan quotes from Freud’s ‘First Lecture’, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1909/1910), vol. 11 of The Standard Edition of the Complete



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Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 16. Freud defines Nachträglichkeit as a belated response to an earlier incident whose traumatic import is only realized after the event. See Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895/1950), vol. 1 of The Standard Edition (1966), pp. 352–6; discussed by Elisabeth Bronfen in The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998), pp. 255–6. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communcation’, Studies on Hysteria, trans. and ed. James and Alix Strachey, assisted by Angela Richards, vol. 3 of The Pelican Freud Library (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 53–69. First German edition 1895, first English edition 1955; later extended in Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, pp. 9–55. See Toni Morrison’s Beloved (London: Picador, 1987): ‘If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world’ (p. 36). As Caroline Rody notes, rememory ‘postulates the interconnectedness of minds, past and present’, thus ‘realizing the “collective memory”’; ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, “Rememory” and “A Clamor for a Kiss”’, American Literary History, 7:1 (Spring 1995), p. 101. Sarah Blake, Grange House (New York: Picador, 2000), pp. 204–5. Further references appear in the text. Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion, 2006), p. 240. Further references appear in the text. Wesley Stace, Misfortune (2005; London: Vintage, 2006), p. 357. Further references appear in the text. Dolores dies at the cusp of the new century, in 1800, aged five (p. 25); Rose is born in 1820 (p. 522). Byron’s relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh reputedly culminated in the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth Medora, in 1814. A.S. Byatt, Possession (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), p. 82. In the novel Maud Bailey, the feminist scholar specializing in the Victorian woman poet Christabel La Motte, discovers the hiding place of Christabel’s love letters to the married fellow poet Randolph Ash when recalling one of her poems about her dolls. In Ovid’s story the nymph Salmacis watches the beautiful youth Hermaphroditus take a sea bath and, overcome by irresistible desire, forces herself on him; in the struggle ‘the two bodies / Melted into a single body / Seamless as the water’; ‘Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’, in Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 228. See Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), pp. 216–8. For ‘The Female Rambling Sailor’ see also http://folkstream.com/102.html (accessed 10 November 2008). For real-life eighteenth to early-twentieth-century women who impersonated men see Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989), and Jo Stanley (ed.), Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages (London: Pandora, 1995).



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13 Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, p. 69, p. 150, p. 152. 14 For Love Hall Tryst’s Songs of Misfortune, produced after the publication of the novel, and an interview with the author see http://www.puremusic. com/60lovehall.html (accessed 18 November 2008). 15 Emily Jeremiah, ‘The “I” inside “her”: Queer Narration in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace’s Misfortune’, Women, 18:2 (2007), p. 140. 16 Colin Greenland, ‘Skirting the Issues’ [review], The Guardian, 28 May 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/may/28/featuresreviews.guardianreview16 (accessed 7 September 2009). 17 The quotation is taken from Blake’s Grange House, p. 356. 18 The text is set in 1896–97, thus contemporaneous with the publication of Studies on Hysteria (1895). 19 The title quotation is taken from Thirteenth Tale, p. 7. 20 We are told that the fire at Angelfield, and thus the subject-constitution of Vida Winter, happened sixty years ago, and that she was sixteen at the time. The reference to the first use of a bicycle (p. 73) during Charlie’s and Isabelle’s childhood would date this time back to the 1890s (when bicycles came into vogue), which would point to the first two decades of the new century as the period during which the Angelfield twins grow up. However, there are no references to the First World War or other historical events. As Setterfield indicates in an interview, the decision to blur historical chronologies was intended: ‘I was certain . . . that it should inhabit an imaginary space poised between the real and the fictional. I wanted to give it a very deliberately “bookish” tone, and to place it at one remove . . . from the reality of contemporary, everyday life.’ ‘Quality Paperback Book Club: Interview with “13th Tale” author’ (accessed 20 November 2008), http://thebookblogger.com/ qpb/2007/03/interview_with_13th_tale_autho.html. In the novel Margaret complains of losing her ‘anchor in time’ (p. 239), which turns Miss Winter’s Yorkshire home into a version of the enchanted space of Satis House, a place where Margaret ‘never looked at the clock’ (p. 284). 21 ‘Interview with “13th Tale” author’. 22 As trauma experts argue, memories of extreme experiences become ‘dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control’, creating, in Cathy Caruth’s words, a ‘double wound’ when fully remembered; ‘fragments of these unintegrated experiences may later manifest recollections or behavioural reenactments’. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Tauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), p. 3; Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), p. 160. 23 Betwixt and Between echoes Albert Camus’s 1937 collection of essays L’envers et l’endroit; Hauntings is the title of Vernon Lee’s Gothic short stories of 1890; Martin Donisthorpe Armstrong is the author of the short story collection The Puppet Show (1922), which includes metafictional tales on ‘The Author and the Critics: A Study in Symbolism’ and ‘Biography: A Study in Circumstantial Evidence’, and in ‘The Uncomfortable Experience of Mr. Perkins and Mr. Johnson’ engages with the Doppelgänger motif, identity and the uncanny. Miss Winter’s titles are also adapted from popular music (Jay Bennett’s Twice is Forever) and film (Jez Butterworth’s 2001 The Birthday Girl). As if to visualize



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the metafictional game about reading and writing, Miss Winter’s book titles are displayed on the hardback cover of Setterfield’s novel; see http://www. amazon.co.uk/Thirteenth-Tale-Diane-Setterfield/dp/0752875736. This is already signalled in Miss Winter’s extensive and costly range of Jane Eyre editions: ‘the collection of a fanatic’ (p. 240). Her retreat is set in Yorkshire moorland. In Angelfield, Hester notices the novel lying around the house and returns it to the library, only to come across it again in another location. Jane is reconfigured in Hester (the ‘plain’ governess who falls in love with her employer, Dr Maudsley, leaves to maintain her independence, and is later reunited with him after his wife’s death) and in ‘Shadow’ (the motherless child and poor cousin); Bertha stands model for Angeline; baby Aurelius, the lost ‘heir’ (Eyre), is wrapped into a page from Jane Eyre. The vagaries of literary criticism are mocked when Margaret struggles, and fails, to decipher a symbolic meaning from the page which would shed light on Aurelius’s origins; later she discovers that it was a random page salvaged by Shadow during Adeline’s indendiary in the library. When she first visits the ruin of Angelfield, Margaret is immediately struck by its ‘asymmetrical construction’: ‘The house sat at an awkward angle. Arriving from the drive, you came upon a corner, and it was not at all clear which side of the house was the front.’ (pp. 128–9) At the close of the novel, all the angles are evened out when the new building erected on the site is made to ‘face straight towards you’ (p. 401). The real-life Henry Maudsley (1835–1918) was not an advocate of girls’ education, arguing in ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’ (1874) for a sex-specific training geared to women’s biological function as wives and mothers and warning against subjecting girls to a ‘masculine’ programme of intellectual study on the grounds of its permanently damaging repercussions on their physical and mental constitution. While the factual Maudsley invested his efforts in attempting to prevent women from attaining the professional training that would enable them to compete with male physicians like himself, Setterfield’s doctor figure proves willing to learn from and collaborate with Hester and is later shown to have embarked on a lifelong professional partnership with her. For Maudsley’s article and repartees by women doctors see Katharina Rowold (ed.), Gender & Science: Late Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Female Mind and Body (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996). Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 57. For trauma analyses in neo-Victorian literature see Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (eds), Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 832. The web metaphor of Eliot’s novel is here applied to the intricate network not of a wider community but a family: ‘Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole’ (Thirteenth Tale, p. 59). Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 109. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 838.



Notes 253

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31 The quotation is taken from John Harwood, The Ghost Writer (2004; London: Vintage, 2005), p. 294. Further references appear in the text. 32 The Turn of the Screw is central to the construction of Alice ‘Jessell’ in Harwood’s novel. Three of James’s other ghost stories/novellas serve Viola Hatherley as inspiration and are mentioned in one of the letters Gerard finds: ‘The Way It Came’ (1896) provides parallels with ‘The Revenant’ in the way in which imaginary anxieties become real through obsessive brooding; ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) with its Spencer Byron who returns to his family home after a long absence, there to be confronted by the ghost of his alter ego and to wake up in the lap of his friend Alice Staverton, has resonances with Gerard’s experience and might even prompt a reading of the ending which would presume Gerard’s death; in ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895) the common cause the apparition of a dead lover makes with the protagonist’s worst enemy has analogies with Alice’s exposure as Anne Hatherley. ‘The Pavilion’, whose decadent writer Denton Margrave is cast in the role of vampire, draws on the motif of the draining of lovers’ energies and vitality in James’s The Sacred Fount (1901), a novel Viola Hatherley debunks as ‘Marie Corelli in fancy dress’ (Ghost Writer, p. 292). 33 Setterfield, Thirteenth Tale, p. 27. 34 The Yellow Book ran from 1894–97, ceasing publication the year before Harwood’s Chameleon, which, as Gerard discovers in the British Library, ran only for that particular year (p. 74), thus resembling The Savoy‘s publication history (1896). The contributors to the issues he examines include avantgarde poets, (anti)decadent writers, and illustrators of the fin de siècle. 35 Whether the echo of the titular protagonist of George Moore’s 1921 novella ‘Hugh Monfert’ (In Single Strictness) is intended is unclear. Moore’s Hugh Monfert also finds himself trapped in a triangular relationship with a sibling pair, but in this case the dilemma he faces is his homosexual desire for the brother. 36 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in Victor Sage (ed.), The Gothick Novel: A Selection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), pp. 76–8. 37 Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), p. 98. First published in Italian in 1977. 38 Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 2. 39 See Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 40 Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Trauma and Experience’, in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, p. 8. 41 ‘Interview with “13th Tale’ author’. 42 Nalbantian, Memory in Literature, p. 81.

2 Race and Empire 1

Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ (1981), in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 34–5 (emphases in original).



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7 8

9 10

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1987), in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 82–3. Edward W. Said, Culture & Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp. 1–2. Rhys in a 1969 interview, quoted in Elizabeth R. Baer, ‘The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway’, in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (eds), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover: UP of New England, 1983), p. 132. The genre is defined by Ashraf H.A. Rushdy as ‘contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative’, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: OUP, 1999), p. 3. For female neo-slave narratives see Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2007), pp. 55–103. Philip Hensher, The Mulberry Empire (London: Flamingo, 2003), pp. 152–3. Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza (eds), Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 68. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, p. 194. In Ghosh’s The Ibis Chrestomanthy ‘lascar’ is defined by its indeterminacy and hydridity. See http://www.ibistrilogy.com/content/pdf/the_ibis_chrestomathy.pdf, p. 18 (accessed 14 January 2009). Jabberwock [Jai Arjun Singh], ‘Opium, giant whales and khidmatgars: a conversation with Amitav Ghosh’, 19 June 2008, http://www.ultrabrown. com/posts/opium-giant-whales-and-khidmatgars-a-conversation-withamitav-ghosh (accessed 14 January 2009). See Ravinder Gargesh, ‘South Asian Englishes’, in Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson (eds), The Handbook of World Englishes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 90–116. Ghosh in Jabberwock, ‘Opium’. Ghosh, Ibis Chrestomathy, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. Ghosh in Jabberwock, ‘Opium’ (emphasis in original). Ibid. Amitav Gosh, Sea of Poppies (London: John Murray, 2008), p. 45. Further references appear in the text. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Difference’ (1988), in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies Reader, p. 209 (emphasis in original). J.P. Mittal, History of Ancient India: A New Version (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2006), p. 173. Ghosh in Jabberwock, ‘Opium’. Laura Fish, Strange Music: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 111. Further references appear in the text. Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (1999; London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 96. Further references appear in the text.



Notes 255

Notes

24 For the historical context see Frederik Wakeman, ‘The Canton Trade and the Opium War’, in John K. Fairbank (ed.), Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part I, vol. 10 of The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), pp. 173–4; and Jean Chesneaux, Marianne Bastid, and Marie-Claire Bergère, China from the Opium Wars to the 1911 Revolution, trans. Anne Destenay (New York: Pantheon, 1976). 25 A heroic figure in The Mahabharata who marries five brothers; see John Dowson, A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography, History, and Literature (London: Trübner, 1879), pp. 94–7. 26 Ghosh in Jabberwock, ‘Opium’. 27 Ibid. 28 Said, Culture & Imperialism, p. xxx. 29 Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 79. 30 The Barrett’s Jamaican plantation labourers at Cinnamon Hill were paid ‘two bits or sixpence’, as compared with the more usual ‘four bits or a shilling’, but faced with labour unrest and the Baptist and Presbyterian ministers’ support for fairer wages, Sam Barrett conceded the point. See Jeannette Marks, The Family of the Barrett: A Colonial Romance (1938; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), p. 463, p. 466. 31 Ibid., p. 642. 32 The real-life Sam(uel Moulton) Barrett caused some concern for the Presbyterian minister, Hope Masterton Waddell, about his wage policy at Cinnamon Hill. Waddell was also asked by a black member of his church to intervene in Sam’s seduction of his daughter Mary Ann, who had been given a necklace and earrings; he advised the father to shame the master by publicly crushing the trinkets. Mary Ann’s age and the nature of their relationship are uncertain. Sam resented Waddell’s interference and in 1838 upheld his uncle Samuel Barrett Moulton Barrett’s earlier exclusion of the minister from Cinnamon Hill, but agreed to a reconciliation in 1840, and after contracting yellow fever asked to be given the last sacrament. Ibid., pp. 456–7, pp. 480–93; R.A. Barrett, The Barretts of Jamaica: The Family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Society: Wedgestone Press, 2000), p. 95; Julia Markus, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 94. 33 Some of Barrett Browning’s real-life correspondence is presented in the novel not in epistolary form but, with slight alterations, as Elizabeth’s thoughts, such as the passage on the Emancipation Bill and its consequences for Jamaican planter society on p. 23; see her letter to Mrs Martin, 27 May 1833, quoted in Barrett, The Barretts of Jamaica, p. 89. In our subsequent discussion ‘Elizabeth’ refers to Fish’s character and ‘Barrett Browning’ to the writer. 34 In her Acknowledgements Fish includes Philip Kelly and Ronald Hudson (eds), Diary of EBB: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1831–1832 (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1969) among her inspirations for Barrett Browning’s writing style. 35 Laura Fish, ‘Strange Music: Engaging Imaginatively with the Family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from a Creole and Black Woman’s Perspective’,



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40

41

42

43 44 45

46

47

48 49 50 51 52

Victorian Poetry, 44:4 (Winter 2006), p. 507. The novel closely follows the biographical sources indicated in the Acknowledgements. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (1856 version), repr. in Fish, Strange Music, Stanza XVI, p. 210. Ibid., Stanza XXVI, p. 212. Markus, Dared and Done, p. 92. Marjorie Stone, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians: “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and Abolitionist Discourse in the Liberty Bell’, in Alison Chapman (ed.), Victorian Women Poets (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer/The English Association, 2003), p. 34, p. 39. Friday, 10 January 1845, in Daniel Karlin (ed.), Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: The Courtship Correspondence 1845–1846. A Selection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 1. Easton Lee, ‘Strategy’, From Behind the Counter: Poems from a rural Jamaican experience (1996; Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998), pp. 130–1, Stanza 3, lines 10–11, 14–15. Samuel Barrett Moulton Barrett bequeathed his servant Rebecca Laslie £100, but tied the legacy to a clause which made the payment subject to the executors’ (his brother Edward and nephew Sam’s) arbitrary decision (‘such Legacy shall only be payable in case my Executors shall consider her conduct and attention during my illness shall have merited such a Mark of my approval’); see Marks, Family of the Barrett, pp. 460–1, and Barrett, The Barretts of Jamaica, p. 97. Fish, ‘Engaging Imaginatively’, p. 509. Ibid., pp. 509–10. Elizabeth’s comment in the novel, ‘I live as a blind poet, only inwardly’, is adapted from a letter to Browning of March 1845: ‘I have lived only inwardly, – or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still . . . I am, in a manner, as a blind poet’, in Karlin, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, p. 34. Elizabeth Barrett inherited £8000 from her Jamaican Uncle Samuel and her grandmother Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett; Markus, Dared and Done, pp. 93–4. Ibid., p. 112. Similarly, Barrett Browning was to extol the cross-class friendship between mistress and maid in Aurora Leigh, attacking the exploitation of working-class women by upper-class ladies, and yet treat her own servant Elizabeth Wilson shabbily, denying her a wage rise after ten years of service – one is reminded of Sam’s underpayment of the Jamaican ‘apprentices’ – and forcing her to choose between her children and her continued employment with the Brownings. See Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1988), pp. 272–3, pp. 315–16. Markus, Dared and Done, p. 107. Ibid., pp. 106–7. Joseph Phelan, ‘Ethnology and Biography: The Case of the Brownings’, Biography, 26:2 (Spring 2003), pp. 261–82. Markus suggests that Edward Barrett feared that the Barrett blood was racially tainted (Dared and Done, pp. 105–6). ‘The master’s look’: Barrett Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanza XX, p. 211.



Notes 257

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53 Fish, ‘Engaging Imaginatively’, p. 515. 54 Barrett Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanza IV, p. 207. 55 ‘They dragged him – where I crawled to touch / His blood’s mark in the dust’, ibid., Stanza XII, p. 209. 56 Ibid., Stanza XIV, p. 209. The first line of the stanza (‘Grief seemed too good for such as I’) is here rendered in its original 1846/8 version (Stanza XV), ‘Mere grief’s too good for such as I’; see The Victorian Age, ed. Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson, vol. E of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 1088. 57 An echo of the first line of Stanza XXXI, p. 213. 58 Barrett Browning referred to her poem as a ‘rather long ballad’; quoted in Ann Parry, ‘Sexual Exploitation and Freedom: Religion, Race, and Gender in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”’, Studies in Browning and his Circle, 16 (1988), p. 120. 59 Stone, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians’, p. 54. 60 Barrett-Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanza I, p. 206. 61 Ibid., Stanzas XXIX, XXXIV, XXXV, pp. 213–14. 62 ‘[M]y black face, my black hand’, ‘I am black, I am black’, ‘we who are dark, we are dark’, ‘We were black, we were black’, ‘My face is black’; ibid., Stanzas III, IV, VI, VIII, XIII, XV, XVI, XXVIII, XXXI, pp. 206–10, p. 213. 63 Ibid., Stanza XXXI, p. 213. 64 Dale Spender, ‘Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’, Women of Ideas & What Men Have Done to Them (1982; London: Pandora, 1990), pp. 273–9. For a fictional treatment of the political links between abolitionism and North American feminism see Marge Piercy’s Sex Wars: A Novel (2005). 65 Barrett Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanzas XXIX and XXXI, p. 213; Stone, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians’, p. 52. 66 Susan Brown, ‘“Black and White Slaves”: Discourses of Race and Victorian Feminism’, in Timothy P. Foley, Lionel Pilkington, Sean Ryder, and Elizabeth Tilley (eds), Gender and Colonialism (Galway: Galway UP, 1995), p. 129. 67 Stone, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians’, pp. 46–53. 68 For a comparison with Beloved see Marjorie Stone, ‘Between Ethics and Anguish: Feminist Ethics, Feminist Aesthetics, and Representations of Infanticide in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and Beloved’, in Dorota Glowacka and Stephen Boos (eds), Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 131–58; Elizabeth H. Battles, ‘Slavery through the Eyes of a Mother: The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’, Studies in Browning and his Circle, 19 (1991), pp. 93–100; and Tricia Lootens, ‘Publishing and Reading “Our EBB”: Editorial Pedagogy, Contemporary Culture, and “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”’, Victorian Poetry, 44:4 (Winter 2006), pp. 499–500. As Barbara Christian notes, there is, however, a fundamental difference between the female slave who kills her master’s child, the product of rape, and Sethe, who kills the child she had with a slave lover; see her ‘Beloved, She’s Ours’, Narrative, 5:1 (1997), p. 42. 69 Ibid., pp. 41–2. 70 Markus, Dared and Done, p. 92. 71 Barrett Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanza XXXIV, p. 214. See also the graphic description of the child’s earlier struggle for life, Stanzas XVII and XX, pp. 210–1. In the original 1846/8 version ‘his master’s right’ is rendered



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73 74 75

76 77

78

79

80

81 82 83 84

85

86

‘the master-right’ (Stanza XVIII), highlighting the child’s embodiment of the system of slavery (see Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn., vol. E, p. 1088). Sarah Brophy, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and the Politics of Interpretation’, Victorian Poetry, 36:3 (1998), pp. 278–80. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 133. Fish, ‘Engaging Imaginatively’, p. 517. It is in Rome, in the opera, that Anna is first able to grieve for her husband, and that she has her first, unknown, encounter with Layla and Sharif. On her later trip to the Sinai, she is equally moved by a singer performing in the desert. Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984). As Waïl S. Hassan points out in ‘Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, the novel ‘enacts a poetics of translation on several levels – plot, theme, language, and discourse’, PMLA, 121:3 (2006), p. 757. For a discussion of the novel’s hybridity see Amin Malak, ‘Arab Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif’, Alif, 20 (2000), pp. 140–83. The spelling of ‘Omar is rendered as in Soueif’s novel. Kate Pullinger uses a different spelling for her similarly named character in The Mistress of Nothing. Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin, 2003). For the central role of Said’s arguments to Soueif’s novel see Mariadele Boccardi, The Contemporary British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 107–8. For the novel’s engagement with postcolonial theory see Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘Fictionalising Postcolonial Theory: The Creative Native Informant?’, Critical Survey, 16:2 (2004), p. 43. Ahdaf Soueif, ‘Talking about The Map of Love’, interview with Paula Burnett, EnterText, 1:3 (2001), p. 98, p. 101, http://arts.brunel.ac.uk/gate/entertext/ issue_3.htm. For the mythical context see Tara D. McDonald, ‘Resurrecting Iris in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, in Metka Zupancˇicˇ (ed.), Hermes and Aphrodite Encounters (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2004), pp. 163–70. Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird, Menie Muriel Dowie, Amelia Edwards, Mary Kingsley among others. Soueif, ‘Talking about The Map of Love’, p. 102. Quoted in Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (1928; London: Virago, 1988), p. 67. After 1812; see the paintings reproduced and discussed in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000). See the early-twentieth-century French postcards of the Algerian harem (woman) analysed in Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (1986; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). John Marlowe, Anglo-Egyptian Relations 1800–1956, 2nd edn. (London: Frank Cass and Co, 1965), p. 179; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the



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89

90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101

102 103 104

Notes Liberal Age 1798–1939 (1962; London: OUP, 1967), p. 201; Peter Mansfield, The British in Egypt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 172; M.W. Daly, Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2 of The Cambridge History of Egypt (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 243; Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: OUP, 2004), p. 346. Owen, Lord Cromer, p. 228. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface for Politicians’, John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara: also How He Lied to her Husband (London: Archibald Constable & Co, 1907), p. lvi. For the factual letter quoted and discussed in Soueif’s novel (pp. 415–19, 493–4) see Clara Boyle, Boyle of Cairo (Kendal: Titus Wilson and Son, 1965), pp. 62–4. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., pp. 62–3; Map of Love, pp. 417–19. Boyle, Boyle of Cairo, p. 63. Indeed, while Daly’s 1998 Modern Egypt underplays the British reprisals as ‘unarguably . . . inept’ (p. 243), and Owen’s 2004 biography seeks to exonerate Cromer from responsibility (pp. 336–7), John Marlowe’s Cromer in Egypt (London: Elek Books, 1970) not only boasts two photographs of the Denshawai floggings and executions, but makes the extraordinary claim that Egyptian protest was caused by the British public response to the event: ‘Left to themselves, it would probably not have occurred to the nationalist leaders to make very much of an issue about the hanging and flogging of a few peasants’ (p. 266). Boyle, Boyle of Cairo, p. 62. Soueif, Preface to Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 4. Said, Orientalism, pp. 2–3. See Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt (1865; London: Virago, 1983) and Last Letters from Egypt (London: n.p., 1875); Charles and Susan M. Bowles’s A Nile Voyage of Recovery (London: n.p., 1897). See Letters from Egypt, p. 18, p. 288; for the cross-dresser see p. 96. Passages from Anna’s diary are placed in italics in the novel; this and subsequent emphases are in the original. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, p. 35, see the opening epigraph to this chapter. Lady Stanhope’s maid Hester Williams was denied permission to marry her lover, Hanah Massad, ‘a great favourite with his mistress’, who was promptly dismissed from her service; Joan Haslip, Lady Hester Stanhope: A Biography (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1934), p. 224. Duff Gordon’s maid received various offers of marriage; see Letters from Egypt, 20 January 1864, p. 108. Katherine Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (London: Tauris, 2007), p. 292. Quoted in Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 302. Duff Gordon countenanced (sexual) slavery and child marriage in her Egyptian friends and herself had two slaves; when one of these, the Sudanese girl Zeyneb, started questioning Duff Gordon’s authority, she was hastily passed on to another family (Letters from Egypt, 9 April and 1 December



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114

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118 119 120

1863, pp. 51–2, pp. 82–3). For Victorian travellers’ acquiescence with MiddleEastern slavery see Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 146–8. Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon, pp. 293–4. Ibid., pp. 293–6, p. 308. The prohibition enables Pullinger to circumvent the problem of how Sally would respond to a polygamous marriage. Seclusion in the home would also have disabled her from working; her idea that she might contribute to the family economy is at odds with contemporary reality. Duff Gordon recorded in a letter of 12 May 1863 that Mabrouka, Omar’s first wife, had only once set foot outside the door of her marital home (Letters from Egypt, p. 60). We refer to the fictional character as Lucie. Duff Gordon cites many instances of forced labour, dispossession, gratuitous imprisonment, and brutal reprisals against the local population. Her letters were intercepted, and she herself was threatened by an emissary of the Pasha (Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon, p. 345); in the novel an attempt is made to bribe Omar into killing her. Kate Pullinger, The Mistress of Nothing (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009), p. 57. Further references appear in the text. Writing to her husband on 3 January 1864 Duff Gordon records sharing a cabin with Sally and Omar, who slept at their feet; Letters from Egypt, p. 90. Instead of spending the winter months with her, Alexander Duff Gordon departed on a hunting expedition with his daughter after the briefest of visits; Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon, pp. 288–90. Quoted in ibid., p. 294. Catherine Wynne, ‘Navigating the Mezzaterra: Home, Harem and the Hybrid Family in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, Critical Survey, 18:2 (2006), p. 60. Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 20 January 1864, p. 108; see also 7 February, pp. 111–12. The reference is to Martineau’s Eastern Life, Present and Past (London: Edward Moxon, 1848). For a colour reproduction see http://www.orientalist-art.org.uk/lewis39.html For a colour reproduction see http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ ViewWork?workid=8680 Anna’s reference is to Edward William Lane’s 1850 translation of The Thousand and One Nights. Compare with Duff Gordon: ‘it’s the reverse of all one’s former life when one sat in England and read of the East. “Und nun sitz ich mitten drein” [and now I’m right in there] in the real, true Arabian Nights, and don’t know whether “I be as I suppose I be” or not’, Letters from Egypt, 10 December 1862, p. 34 (emphasis in original). Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (London: Leicester UP, 1996), pp. 127–8. Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, pp. 1–2. Fawwaz established her feminist reputation with her manifesto article ‘Fair and Equal Treatment’ (1891) and a biographical dictionary of notable women, Scattered Pearls in the Generations of Secluded Women (1894).



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Notes She contributed to Hind Nawfal’s women’s magazine Al-Fatah. Sonia Dabbous, ‘“Till I Become a Minister”: Women’s Rights and Women’s Journalism in pre-1952 Egypt’, in Naomi Sakr (ed.), Women and Media in the Middle East: Power Through Self-Expression (London: I.B. Taurus, 2004), p. 41; ‘Fair and Equal Treatment’ is translated in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (eds), Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago, 1990), pp. 221–6. Writing under the pseudonym Bahithat Al-Badiya, Malak Hifni Nasif collected her articles and political speeches in her book Al-Nisa’iyat (‘Feminist Texts’). She used the Nationalist Congress in Heliopolis in 1911 to proclaim the feminists’ demands. Margot Badran, ‘Egyptian Feminism in a Nationalist Century’, Mujeres Mediterránneas – Femmes Mediterranées – Mediteranean Women – Dones Mediterrànies, http://www. mediterraneas.org/article.php3?id_article=178 (accessed 2 January 2009). Dabbous, ‘Till I Become a Minister’, p. 41; Hind Nawfal, ‘The Dawn of the Arabic Women’s Press’ (1892), in Badran and Cooke, Opening the Gates, (pp. 217–19), p. 218. Dabbous, ‘Till I Become a Minister’, pp. 41–2. Inaugurated in 1909, the real-life lecture series at the Egyptian University included Malak Hifni Nasif among the speakers. See Badran, ‘Egyptian Feminism in a Nationalist Century’. Dabbous, ‘Till I Become a Minister’, p. 41. Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (1992; Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000). Amin advocated women’s education and an end to seclusion as a precondition for national progress. His condemnation of the ignorant, hyper-sensual wife only concerned with pleasure and material goods, and strategic references to women’s maternal role as educators of men and marital function as companions and co-equals drew on arguments similar to those co-opted by Mary Wollstonecraft and the Victorian women’s movement.

3 Sex and Science 1

2 3

4 5

Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Introduction’ to Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 3. Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 6. Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza (eds), Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 67. Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 173. Michel Foucault, ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 49.



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9

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

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For the Cleveland Street Scandal see Donald Thomas, The Victorian Underworld (London: John Murray, 1998), p. 102. W.T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6, 7, 8, 10 July 1885. Andrew Davies’s 2002 BBC version of Tipping the Velvet lends enormous prominence to Waters’s quirky dildo while neglecting her book’s central symbol, the oyster; in his 2008 ITV adaptation of Affinity Margaret Prior is implausibly equipped with a fiancé (see our discussion in Chapter 6). Barry has been the subject of a number of biographies, most recently Rachel Holmes’s Scanty Particulars: The Mysterious, Astonishing and Remarkable Life of Victorian Surgeon James Barry (London: Penguin, 2002). Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Vintage, 1984), p. 7. Engaging with aspects of both genres, Hottentot Venus explodes the categories of the neo-slave narrative and the neo-Victorian novel. For details of the former see Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), and Judith Misrahi-Barak (ed.), Revisiting Slave Narratives: Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves (Université Montpellier III: Coll. ‘Les Carnets du Cerpac’ no. 2, 2005). Emily Martin, ‘Science and Women’s Bodies: Forms of Anthropological Knowledge’, in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth, Body/Politics, pp. 69–82. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science (London: Pandora, 1993), pp. 143–83. Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence (1981; London: Women’s Press, 1988), pp. 8–81. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14–26. Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002), p. 162. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first English usage of the term to 1842 (OED online). Sigel, Governing Pleasures, pp. 50–80. Jane M. Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 179; also Judith Butler, ‘The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess’, Differences, 2:2 (Summer 1990), pp. 105–25, and Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 205–9. Rosemary Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge 1992), p. 113; also Sarah Gamble (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 297. Charlene Y. Senn, ‘The Research on Women and Pornography: The Many Faces of Harm’, in Diana E.H. Russell (ed.), Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography (Buckingham: Open UP, 1993), pp. 181–2. Michel Foucault, ‘The Means of Correct Training’ and ‘Complete and Austere Institutions’, Discipline and Punish, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 188–224. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), p. 2. Barry Reay devotes a chapter of his book on Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby (the cross-class relationship parodied in The Observations’ dyad of



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26

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28

29 30 31

32

33 34

35 36

37

Notes mistress and maid) on the semiotics of hands: ‘Dorothy’s Hands: Feminizing Men’, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), pp. 125–42. The term ‘Hottentot’ originates from the Dutch word for stutterer and referred to the click sounds of Khoi speech, a complex language Dutch settlers found it difficult to master. See Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman: Born 1789 – Buried 2002 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 10, and ‘The Heroine’s Note’ in Barbara Chase-Riboud, Hottentot Venus (2003; New York: Anchor, 2004), n.p. Further references to the novel appear in the text. The cartoon associates the British obsession with Baartman not only with sexual prurience but also with cannibalism: while the Scottish soldier on the right attempts to peep under Saartjie’s apron, blissfully unaware of the vulnerability to imminent attack of his own buttocks, the female spectator bends down to get a better view not of Baartman’s but of the other Scotsman’s privates, who himself can conceive of Baartman only as consumable victuals. Critical accounts render her names differently. For details see Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009), p. 9, p. 107. To distinguish between the factual personality and the fictional subject we will use the surname, sometimes in conjunction with Saartjie, to refer to the real-life woman, and Sarah (sometimes with the surname) when discussing Chase-Riboud’s protagonist. M. G[eorges] Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations Faites sur le Cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de VÉNUS HOTTENTOTE’, Mémoires du Muséum d’Histoire naturelle (Paris: A. Berlin, 1817), pp. 259–74. Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”’, British Journal for the History of Science, xliii (2004), p. 246. Holmes, Saartje Baartman, pp. 169–83. ‘A Conversation with Jane Harris’, included in the US Penguin’s ‘Book Clubs/Reading Clubs’ review: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/ us/observations.html (accessed 2 September 2009). The first edition of this enormously popular manual was published in 1859–61; the novel is set in the early 1860s: Jane Harris, The Observations (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 112. Further references to the novel appear in the text. Martin, ‘Science and Women’s Bodies’, p. 69. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1: The London Street-Folk (1851; London: Frank Cass & Co, 1967), p. iii. Thanks are due to Allison Neal for drawing our attention to the parallels with Mayhew. Mayhew, London Labour, pp. 1–2. See Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, The Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, trans. and introduced by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson (Durham: Duke UP, 2004; published originally as La donna delinquente in 1893 and first published in English in 1895), Part III: ‘Pathological Anatomy and Anthropometry of Criminal Woman and the Prostitute’, pp. 105–56. See W.H. Flower’s ‘Account of the Dissection of a Bushwoman’, Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, 1 (1867), pp. 189–208.



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38 Hannah Cullwick (1833–1909), char-woman, cook, housemaid, and housekeeper, and Arthur J. Munby (1828–1910), barrister, diarist, minor poet, amateur photographer and ‘collector’ of working-class women, entertained a relationship from 1854 until Cullwick’s death in 1909. Prompted by Munby, Cullwick started to keep a diary recording her working days. Munby also encouraged Cullwick to read eighteenth-century classics like Clarissa and to learn French. See Liz Stanley, Introduction to Liz Stanley (ed.), The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant (London: Virago, 1984), pp. 1–34. For the social, sexual, and racial (master/slave) contexts see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995); Reay, Watching Hannah; and Diane Atkinson, Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick (New York: Macmillan, 2003). 39 In his diary Munby recorded his encounters and conversations with as well as observations of working women; see Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby 1828–1910 (London: John Murray, 1972). 40 Cameron’s (1815–79) late-Victorian photography revolutionized the art; see Julian Cox and Colin Ford, with contributions by Joanne Lukitsh and Philippa Wright, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (London: Thames & Hudson in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum and The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, 2003). 41 See Munby’s various photographs of Cullwick, in McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 135–6. 42 Ibid., p. 103. 43 Théaulon, Dartois and Brasier, The Hottentot Venus, or The Hatred of Frenchwomen, trans. and repr. in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), pp. 127–64. In the play a young Frenchwoman passes herself off as the Hottentot Venus in order to attract the attention of her cousin, who is determined only to marry an exotic foreigner. 44 As Deborah A. Thomas argues in ‘Miss Swartz and the Hottentot Venus Revisited’, Thackeray Newsletter, 36 (1992), pp. 1–5, the illustration entitled ‘Miss Swartz rehearsing for the Drawing Room’ in chapter 21 of Vanity Fair, in which one of her hands demonstratively points to her large rump emphasized by the bustle of her dress, can be read as a reference to Baartman. 45 Carter’s short story problematizes Baudelaire’s ‘Black Venus’ cycle in which his Creole lover Jeanne Duval is associated with the Hottentot Venus; see Jill Matus, ‘Blonde, Black and Hottentot Venus: Context and Critique in Angela Carter’s “Black Venus”’, in Alison Easton (ed.), Angela Carter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 161–72. 46 Sartje is adopted by the New Woman protagonist Rebekah and integrated into her family of four white boys when the mixed-raced child is rejected by her biological parents, Rebekah’s husband and their black servant. 47 See ‘Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman’s head while having a full bubble bath’, in which the female speaker puns on the term ‘steatopygous’ and expresses the desire to ‘place [her] foot / on the head of anthropology’, in Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (London: Virago, 1984), p. 15.



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48 Elizabeth Alexander’s ‘The Venus Hottentot’ also invokes Sylvia Plath in its celebration of the rage of the abused woman, who fantasizes about rising from the operating table: ‘I’d spirit / his knives and cut out his black heart, / seal it with science fluid inside / a bell jar’ for display in a museum; The Venus Hottentot (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990), pp. 6–7. 49 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (1990; New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997). Parks emphasizes Venus’s self-destructive desires: her love affair with the ‘Baron Docteur’, a version of Cuvier (originally played by a black actor) and her self-commodification have provoked controversy; see Jean Young, ‘The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, African American Review, 31:4 (Winter 1997), pp. 699–708. Parks engages metadramatically with the contemporary textual construction of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and her erotic appeal by incorporating Théaulon, Dartois and Brasier’s Vaudeville play within the plot when one of the characters impersonates Venus in order to recapture the waning affections of her fiancé. The threat of a German doctor in possession of a female ‘Hottentot’ corpse who will beat him to the publication of the first ever dissection report persuades the Baron Docteur to hand Venus over to assassins. The objectification and murder of an early-nineteenth-century black woman is here implicitly associated with the cultural, scientific, and racial politics that would lead to the Holocaust of the 1940s. Part of the play is set in Tübingen, a historic university town in Southern Germany, the alma mater of the Romantic poets Hölderlin and Mörike, the philosophers Schelling and Hegel, and the scientists Kepler and Alzheimer. Parks evidently wants her audience to remember that academic institutions carry their own legacy of racism. 50 Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story (2000; New York: Feminist Press, 2001), p. 1. The all-to-easy equation of Baartman with black South Africa is problematized when David’s search for his Griqua (Khoi) roots uncovers his likely descendancy from Cuvier, while the black female comrade in the liberation movement whom he helps to victimize is associated with Baartman and Krotoa, a Khoisan woman employed by Jan Van Riebeck (the seventeenthcentury governor of the Cape), whose interracial marriage to the Danish surgeon Pieter van Meerhoff was the first of its kind. The narrator’s refusal to include David’s ‘stories’ of Baartman and Krotoa is a political response to the claim to ‘speak for’ the two women. The novel has a dual time-line, the 1880s to 1920s and the early 1990s. See Dorothy Driver’s Afterword (pp. 215–54), and Kai Easton, ‘Travelling through History, “New” South African Icons: The Narratives of Saartjie Baartman and Krotoä-Eva in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story’, Kunapipi, 24:1–2 (2002), pp. 237–50. 51 Maria Cristina Nisco, ‘Dark Histories, Bright Revisions: Writing the Black Female Body’, Nebula, 3:1 (April 2006), pp. 67–70. For other creative instances of ‘re-membrance’ see Anca Vlasopolos, ‘Venus live! Sarah Bartmann, the Hottentot Venus, re-membered’, Mosaic, 33:4 (2000), pp. 128–43. 52 Zola Maseko, The Life and Times of Sara Baartman: ‘The Hottentot Venus’ (Icarus Films, 1999), see http://icarusfilms.com/new99/hottento.html.



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53 Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. xiii–xiv. The book provides fascinating new insights, such as dating Baartman’s birth back to 1777, as opposed to 1789, and gives fuller details of her employment history in Cape Town and her private circumstances; quantities of missing (or incomplete) references, however, lend it a semi-fictionalized appearance. 54 Holmes (Saartjie Baartman, p. 118) asserts (without providing a source) that after Dunlop’s death Hendrik Cesars reconstituted himself as Henry Taylor. The complexities of the relationship between the three creators of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ are quasi-sentimentalized with the (unreferenced) speculation that Dunlop left his belongings to Baartman and Cesars (p. 115). 55 Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of “Hottentot” Women in Europe, 1815–1817’, in Londa Schiebinger (ed.), Feminism & the Body (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 204, pp. 221–2. 56 Susan B. Iwanisziw, ‘The Shameful Allure of Sycorax and Wowski: Dramatic Precursors of Sartje, the Hottentot Venus’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, 16:2 (2001), p. 3. 57 As Yvette Abrahams points out, ‘steatopygia’ has yet to be defined; see ‘Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Early-NineteenthCentury Britain’, in Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri, with the assistance of Beth McAuley (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998), pp. 221–2. 58 Fausto-Sterling, ‘Gender, Race, and Nation’, p. 216. 59 These anxieties continue in the twenty-first century with the rise of labiaplasties: the cosmetic alteration or excision of the labia majora or minora when considered to be ‘too over-developed’ to suit a female body beautiful whose primary function is the accessibility of the vagina (The Perfect Vagina, dir. Heather Leach, Channel 4, 17 August 2008). See also the Manhattan Center for Vaginal Surgery’s representations of ‘defective’ and ‘corrected’, aesthetically and functionally ‘enhanced’ and ‘rejuvenated’ vulvas, http://www.centerforvaginalsurgery.com/nyclabiaplasty/labiaplastypictures.htm; for feminist counteractivities see New View Campaign, http://newviewcampaign.org/default.asp (both sources accessed 23 September 2009). 60 Lombroso and Ferrero, in Criminal Woman, The Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, constructed the female criminal – as also the female genius (p. 84) – through bodily (particularly facial and genital) anomalies (p. 49, p. 54, pp. 136–8, pp. 141–2), deploying photography as scientific proof of their claims, and pronouncing female criminals and prostitutes alongside lesbians, ‘savages’, primates, and children as atavistic. Ultimately, even the ‘normal’ woman had a ‘natural’ disposition towards deviance. See David G. Horn, ‘This Norm Which Is not One: Reading the Female Body in Lombroso’s Anthropology’, in Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (eds), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), pp. 109–27. 61 For the conceptual link, in the scientific imagination, between genital ‘abnormalities’, race, and sexual deviance see Jennifer Terry, ‘Anxious Slippages between “Us” and “Them”: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies’, in Terry and Urla, Deviant Bodies, pp. 139–48.



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62 Some physicians believed that a disposition towards nymphomania could be detected from the (négroid) ‘animal organization’ of the body such as ‘small eyes, large, broad nose and chin, thick lips, and the disproportionate size of the posterior position of her head’; see John Tompkins Walton, ‘Case of Nymphomania Successfully Treated’, American Journal of Medical Science, 33:1 (1857), p. 47, quoted in Carol Groneman, ‘Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality’, in Terry and Urla, Deviant Bodies, p. 220. 63 In ‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality’, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) Sander Gilman draws attention to Edouard Manet’s representation of Emile Zola’s prostitute Nana in L’Assommoir (1877), which prompted his 1877 painting Nana and in its turn, together with his earlier Olympia (1863), inspired Zola’s depiction of Nana in his eponymous novel of 1880 (pp. 104–7); also discussed in Gilman’s Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989), pp. 287–307. See Abele De Blasio’s illustration ‘Steatopygia in an Italian prostitute’ (1905) reproduced in Gilman’s books (p. 100; p. 303). 64 Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, 17:2 (Summer 1987), p. 67. 65 Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, p. 15. 66 Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 247. 67 To Mrs Francis Smith, Cape Town, Sunday Night, Oct. [1909]), in S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner (ed.), The Letters of Olive Schreiner 1876–1920 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), p. 290. 68 In his autopsy report Cuvier referred to Baartman as ‘notre Boschismanne’ (‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 264, p. 270, p. 271), a racial categorization challenged by Johannes Müller in ‘Ueber die äusseren Geschlechtstheile der Buschmänninen’, Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und Wissenschaftliche Medicin (1834), p. 324. 69 Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, p. 145, p. 148. For scientific constructions of the Great Chain of Being in relation to Baartman see also Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (1985; London: Penguin, 1987). 70 See Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1978), pp. 273–5. 71 Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 235. 72 See a contemporary account in Altick, Shows of London (p. 269): ‘He found her surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her, another walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; and one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, “nattral.”’ This scene is reproduced in Chase-Riboud (p. 106). 73 Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 238. For the exhibition of Zulus, which prompted Dickens to write his essay on ‘The Noble Savage’ (Household Words, 1853), see also Bernth Lindfors, ‘The Hottentot Venus and other African attractions in nineteenth-century England’, Australasian Drama Studies, 1 (1983), pp. 90–5. 74 Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 237. Caroline Camancini, the ‘thirty-inch fairy’, one of Sarah’s best friends in Chase-Riboud, is based on



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79 80 81 82 83

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86

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the real-life Miss Crackham, the ‘Sicilian Fairy’ (Qureshi, ibid., pp. 236–7; see also Altick, Shows of London, pp. 253–87). As Abrahams points out, ‘white freaks were always exhibited as oddities, whose value lay in the way they were distinguished from the rest of their species. Black people, on the other hand, were exhibited as typical of their race’ (‘Images of Sara Bartman’, p. 225). Crais and Scully cite a figure of 5–10,000 (Sara Baartman, p. 67). Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 241; see also our discussion of the 1833 act and its aftermath in Chapter 2. Charles Williams, ‘Prospects of Prosperity’ (1810), repr. in Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, (unnumbered) plate 9. Baartman’s act consisted in playing the guitar, singing and dancing, thus blending the freak show with aspects of her earlier career in Cape Town, where she had been an evening entertainer. Holmes argues that the ‘key to her popularity was not in the scale of her physical endowments . . . but in her music, in the way she moved and in her skills as an entertainer’ (Saartjie Baartman, pp. 34–5, 69–70). See ibid., pp. 76–109, for details of the court case. Some of the depositions and speeches are reproduced in Chase-Riboud, chapter 11. Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 247. Ibid., p. 248. Easton, ‘Travelling through History’, pp. 244–5; Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, p. 171, p. 177, p. 187; Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 149–69. Zoë Wicomb, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 93. Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 251. ‘Paris: La Venus Hottentote’, Affiches, annonces et avis divers ou Journal Général de France, 18 September 1814, p. 15, quoted in Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, pp. 18–19. The factual Baartman had a lover in Cape Town, whom she lost under less dramatic circumstances: while in the service of Cesars, she lived with Hendrik van Jong, a Dutch army drummer working for a British battalion, and had a child with him. The child died and the relationship dissolved after Hendrik’s battalion was posted elsewhere. This was Baartman’s second of three children, all of whom died (Crais and Sully, Sara Baartman, pp. 46–7). She referred to her four sisters and two brothers in the court case. One of her brothers rebelled against Cornelius Muller; Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, p. 25, p. 100. Ibid., pp. 21–40. Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, p. 25. A degree of racial ambiguity is retained in the novel when Hendrik Caesar boasts of his Hottentot ancestry, which his brother hotly denies. Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 54–6. The historical Dunlop died in 1812. In 1814 Baartman was taken to Paris by Taylor, who increased the length of her daily performances from six to ten hours, and appears to have sold her to a handler of animals, S. Réaux, who increased Baartman’s shifts to twelve hours, followed by additional private performances (Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, pp. 127–31). Crais and Scully



Notes 269

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92

93

94 95 96

97 98

99

100 101

Notes draw attention to a French emigrant with the same surname (Jean Reaux), who acted as a ballet master in Cape Town’s African Theatre in 1805–11, speculating whether this might have been the same man as, or a relative of, Baartman’s later master (pp. 51–3, p. 127). There is no factual record of Baartman ever having married; see Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 108–9. They speculate, however, about a fourth child conceived in England, possibly by Dunlop. The historical Baartman did not appear in court but was interviewed separately by Zachary Macaulay (who features in the novel) and four other men; Robert Wedderburn did not contribute to the case (Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, pp. 101–2). Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 86–9. Abolitionist leaders like Macaulay had business interests in the Sierra Leone Company and upheld the apprenticeship system, thus perpetuating slavery. The real-life Baartman remained illiterate (Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, p. 13). Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 17. Réaux arranged for Baartman to model for Georges and Frédérik Cuvier, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Henri de Blainville and other scientists in the Jardin des Plantes for three days in February 1815. Distressed at being expected to undress, she resisted all attempts to make her discard the handkerchief with which she covered what the scientists most desired to behold. In his dissection report Cuvier was later to represent her forcible exposure as a pleasure entertained cottequishly: ‘she had the complaisance to undress and to allow herself to be painted in the nude’; ‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 264 (trans. Heilmann). Griffin, Pornography and Silence, p. 29. See Holmes, Saartjie Bartman, p. 137; for his portrait of Baartman see p. 145. In Chase-Riboud Nicolas Tiedemann admits to having temporarily purloined Sarah’s skull; Baartman’s skull did indeed disappear for some months in 1827 (see Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 245). Frederick Tiedemann, ‘On the Brain of a Negro, compared with that of the European and the Orang-Outang’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, cxxvi (1836), p. 519, p. 521, pp. 525–6. Henri de Blainville, ‘Sur une femme de la race hottentote’, Bulletin du Société Philomatique de Paris (1816), p. 189. De Blainville, ‘Sur une femme de la race hottentote’, pp. 184–90; Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations’, pp. 259–74; Chase-Riboud, Hottentot Venus, pp. 233–6. Chase-Riboud closely follows parts of de Blainville’s report, which first engages with Baartman’s personal history and then relates the specificities of her body to that of the orangutan. The report’s second part reveals de Blainville’s pornographic obsession and his growing irritation with Baartman’s refusal to allow him to ‘cartograph’ her body at closer range: ‘As for the organs of generation, although he feels that it would have been important to observe them with care, M. de Blainville was unable to do so sufficiently; here is what he saw’ (p. 187); ‘In the ordinary position . . . no trace of any pedicle formed by the big labia could be seen . . . but in certain positions . . . one saw hanging between the thighs a fleshly appendage of at least a thumb in length, which M. de Blainville supposes with sufficient probability to have been the nymphae; but he can’t assure us of



270

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103

104 105

this’ (p. 187; compare with Chase-Riboud, p. 235); ‘Her buttocks are really enormous . . . When touching them, it is easily determined that the greatest part of their mass is cellufat; they tremble and quiver when this woman is walking, and when she sits down, they flatten themselves and strongly project themselves backwards’ (p. 187; see Chase-Riboud, p. 235); ‘The person who exhibited her . . . reports that Saarah has a strongly pronounced venereal appetite and that, one day, she threw herself forcefully on a man she desired; but M. de Blainville is somewhat skeptical about this anecdote. . . . Saarah seems good, gentle and timid, very easy to guide when you please her, sullen and stubborn in the opposite case. She appeared to have a sense of modesty, or at least to feel very uncomfortable with exposing herself in the nude . . . For this reason it was impossible to persuade her to let [her organs of generation] be examined in any sufficient detail. M. de Blainville says he has observed in her little steadiness of purpose; one may think she is quiet, powerfully occupied by something, and suddenly a desire will spring up in her which she will immediately seek to satisfy. Without being a choleric, she easily takes to opposing people; thus, she had conceived for M. de Blainville a kind of hatred, probably because he approached her, tormenting her further by taking details of her appearance; to the point where, however much she liked money, she refused what he offered her with the aim of rendering her more docile’ (p. 189; trans. Heilmann). Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Frédéric Georges Cuvier, Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères, avec des figures originales coloriées, dessinées d’après des animaux vivants; publié sous l’autorité de l’Administration du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris 1824–47), vol. 1, facing p. 1 (frontal portrait by Léon de Wally, 1815, entitled ‘Femme de Race Boschismann’, repr. in Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, plate 14) and p. 3 (side portrait by Nicolas Huet, 1815, see Holmes, p. 145). In Chase-Riboud Georges Cuvier is credited for authoring the book, adding another layer to his exploitation of Baartman. Baartman died in late December 1815, officially of smallpox, most probably from the combined effects of overwork, influenza and bronchitis, possibly pneumonia, and alcohol abuse. Holmes (Saartjie Baartman, pp. 152–8) suggests that Réaux, who had been approached by Cuvier about the sale of her body in the event of her death, hastened her demise by encouraging her drinking habit. Cuvier was granted a special licence to seize and dissect her body (ibid., p. 155). His report was later reproduced, in abbreviated version, under the title ‘Femme de Race Boschismanne’, in his brother’s Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères (pp. 1–7) to provide a commentary to the lithographs. Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 263 (trans. Heilmann). In 1834 the German scientist Johannes Müller still maintained that elongated labia were part of the natural anatomy of Khoikhoi women and that length depended on age; see ‘Ueber die äusseren Geschlechtstheile der Buschmänninen’, pp. 320–21, pp. 339–40, pp. 343–44. Cuvier had contested the trope of racial-qua-anatomical difference by emphasizing that the ‘Hottentot apron’ had been artificially produced by genital manipulation, and that the practice was authorized by the Pope after Catholic missionaries found that prohibition interfered with conversion efforts (‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 267). He also challenged the idea that



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108 109 110 111 112

113 114

115 116 117

118

119 120 121

Notes indigenous women might have found any enjoyment in the practice: Baartman was ‘unlikely to have taken pleasure in procuring for herself an ornament of which she was ashamed and which she took such care to hide’ (p. 268, trans. Heilmann). See also Richard Burton’s brief account of West African customs and his ‘Notes on the Dahoman’, Selected Papers on Anthropology, Travel and Exploration (London: A.M. Philpot, 1924), pp. 122–3. Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 259. Ibid., p. 266; ‘my Venus Hottentot’ is ‘this woman’ in the original, echoing Cuvier’s repeated reference to ‘notre Boschismanne’; there is no direct address to his fellow scientists. Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, p. 145. Nicholas Hudson, ‘The “Hottentot Venus,” Sexuality, and the Changing Aesthetics of Race, 1650–1850’, Mosaic, 41:1 (2008), p. 34. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871; London: Penguin, 2004), Part III, ch. 19, pp. 645–6. Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 271, trans. Fausto-Sterling, ‘Gender, Race, and Nation’, p. 224. Austen was in London during Baartman’s time and visited the exhibits in Bullock’s Liverpool Museum, wondering whether she herself might not be a suitable specimen to be placed on display there. See David Nokes, Jane Austen: Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), pp. 374–5, p. 410. Baartman performed in Bath in 1811 (Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, p. 105). However, there is no indication that Austen saw, or commented on, her exhibition in either location. See Edward Said, ‘Consolidated Vision’, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp. 73–229. The concept of the ‘noble savage’ often served to justify colonial exploitation. For Rousseau’s misappropriation of his contemporary Peter Kolb’s much more benevolent depiction of the African population of Cape Hope see Andreas Mielke, ‘Contextualising the “Hottentot Venus”’, Acta Germanica, 25 (1997), pp. 154, 156–7. Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 50. Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), p. 195. These are the names cited in Belinda Starling’s Afterword to The Journal of Dora Damage (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 446. Further references appear in the text. Further members were Edward Vaux Bellamy, Sir Edward Brabooke, Charles Bradlaugh, Frederick Popham Pike, William Simpson Potter, George Powell, Henry Ricketts, Simeon Solomon, George Augustus Sala, and E. Villine. Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 51, p. 53, p. 57, p. 58; Frank McLynn, Burton: Snow upon the Desert (London: John Murray, 1990), p. 240. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraires (Monaco: Imprimerie Nationale, 1956), vol. 5, 7 April 1862, p. 89. Quoted in Ian Gibson, The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 32. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1964; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 37.



272

122 Agnes Lavy was the bookbinder, and Elisabeth Lavy, according to a family memoir, became an ‘ardent suffragette’; see Gibson, The Erotomaniac, p. 132, p. 134. 123 See Gibson, The Erotomaniac, p. 59, p. 65, p. 66; James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth 1851–1885 (London: Constable, 1951), pp. 157–60. 124 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, pp. 79–80. 125 Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘De Corporis et Libri Fabrica: Review of Belinda Starling, The Journal of Dora Damage’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn 2008), p. 197; http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/. 126 For the Ladies’ London Emancipation Society see Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 180–1. Prominent members also involved in the women’s rights movement included Frances Power Cobbe, Harriet Martineau, and Harriet Taylor. 127 For the ‘prurient gaze’ of English abolitionists see Colette Colligan, ‘Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery and England’s Obscene Print Culture’, in Lisa Z. Sigel (ed.), International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography 1800–2000 (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005), pp. 67–73. 128 W[illiam] Roberts, Book-Hunter in London: Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting (London: Elliot Stock, 1895), p. 228; Gibson, The Erotomaniac, p. xi. 129 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 19. 130 For subversive uses of female needlework see Roszika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984); for examples of embroidered book covers see p. 73 and Plates 44 and 96. 131 Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth purportedly covered books in this way; see Maggs Bros Ltd, Bookbinding in the British Isles: Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Maggs Bros, 1996), p. 132. According to Charles Southey’s Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey (1850, quoted from Nixon), Robert Southey’s daughters (Sara Coleridge, Dora Wordsworth and Edith May Southey) bound ‘from 1200 to 1400 volumes’ in cotton garments; for an example from Southey’s ‘Cottonian Library’ see Howard M. Nixon, Five Centuries of English Bookbinding (London: Scolar Press, 1978), p. 194. For further examples (including a volume bound by ‘Mrs Wordsworth’) see the British Library ‘Database of Bookbindings’ (accessed 26 October 2008), http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings/Results.aspx?Search Type=AlphabeticSearch&ListType=CoverMaterial&Value=117. We are grateful to Dennis Low, Crystal Lake, and other NASSR scholars for guiding us towards these sources. 132 Mary Reynold’s (1890–1977) inventive bindings included a split kid glove for Paul Éluard and Man Ray’s Les Mains libres (1937), a thermometer for Raymond Queneau’s Un Rude hiver (1939), typewriter paper for Jean Cocteau’s La Machine à écrire (1941), a corset stay for Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmâle (1945), and a pottery cup handle in the shape of a serpent for Queneau’s Saint Glinglin (1948). See Hugh Edwards (comp.), ‘Books Bound by Mary Reynolds’, Surrealism & its Affinities: The Mary Reynolds Collection



Notes 273

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136

137 138

139 140

141

142

Notes (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1973), pp. 82–103. For images see Susan Glover Godlewski, ‘Book Bindings by Mary Reynolds: A Selection’, Chicago Institute of Art, http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/bindings/index.php and her ‘Warm Ashes: The Life and Career of Mary Reynolds’, Mary Reynolds and the Spirit of Surrealism, Museum Studies, 22:2 (1996), pp. 102–29, available online from the Chicago Institute of Art, http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/ essays/godlewski4.php (both sources accessed 16 October 2008). Kohlke, ‘De Corporis et Libri Fabrica’, p. 196. Ellic Howe and John Child, The Society of London Bookbinders 1780–1951 (London: Sylvan Press, 1952), pp. 208–10, p. 219. While camped on the Red Sea in 1855, Burton’s trek was attacked by Somali warriors and a spear pierced his cheek; he retained a visible scar; Brodie, The Devil Drives, p. 123, p. 126. Starling cites Brodie in her Afterword (p. 448 n. 1) and evidently drew on Brodie in her depiction of Knightley. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 75–8. Isaac Baker Brown, expelled from the Obstetrical Society in 1867, mutilated girls from age ten to married women seeking relief from the newly implemented divorce act in the period 1859–1866; the novel is set in the years 1859–60. Brodie, The Devil Drives, p. 286. For further details on the information in this paragraph see pp. 88–91, pp. 194–95, pp. 208–9, p. 296. For a conceptualization of neo-Victorian bio-fiction see Cora Kaplan, Victoriana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), pp. 37–84. Further fictional recreations of Burton are presented in Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire (2003) in the adventurer Alexander Burnes, and in Iliya Troyanov’s The Collector of Worlds, trans. William Hobson (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). Troyanov explores the dichotomy between the ‘real’ man (curious, intrepid, genial, but always of a kindness unparalleled by others) and his mask of the cynic capable of violence and murder, as mediated by the voices and perspectives of his Indian and Arabic-African servants: ‘I didn’t think he was a terrible man: it was the man he pretended to be that terrified me’ (p. 384). This echoes Brodie’s assessment that Burton’s ‘inhumanity was more pretended than real’ (The Devil Drives, p. 244). Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 32. For a discussion of Anatomical Venuses see Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 44–7; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), pp. 128–9; Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, femininity and the aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992), pp. 100–1; Warner, Phantasmagoria, pp. 31–6. From the mid-nineteenth century bookbinders started imprinting their acronyms on their designs; Ruari McLean, Victorian Publishers’ Book-Bindings in Cloth and Leather (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1974), pp. 13–14. However, as a female bookbinder, and a woman working for the sex trade, Dora cannot leave her mark but instead becomes a ‘marked’ woman. Starling here engages with Thomas Carlyle’s satirical book about the symbolic nature of clothes, Sartor Resartus, first published in Fraser’s Magazine (1833–34).



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143 In Chopin’s story a young Louisiana mother, an orphan of uncertain provenance, is abandoned by her husband after giving birth to a darkskinned child. After her suicide he discovers that his mother was of mixed race; the child reflects his own heritage. See ‘The Father of Désirée’s Baby’ (Désirée’s Baby’), in Kate Chopin: The Awakening and Other Stories, ed. Pamela Knights (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 193–8. 144 See Marcus, The Other Victorians, pp. 197–216. 145 Starling’s grammatical error (‘le peau’) may derive from her use of Brodie, in whose biography the Goncourt brothers’ journal entry recording Hankey’s desire for a young girl’s hide is rendered incorrectly (The Devil Drives, p. 196). 146 The real-life founder, in 1874, of the Society (not, as in Starling, Union) of Women Employed in Bookbinding was Mrs Paterson; Peter Gordon and David Doughan, Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations, 1825–1960 (London: Woburn Press, 2001), p. 185. 147 In Waters’s Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2003), too, books and bindings are associated with the female body and human hides (p. 209). Maud comments on her entrapment (and Sue’s), saying that ‘the habits and the fabrics that bind me will, soon, bind her. Bind her, like morocco or like calf. . . . I have grown used to thinking of myself as a sort of book’ (pp. 250–1). Unlike Knightley, however, Mr Lilly has no personal sexual interest in the business, which he pursues with clinical precision and detachment. 148 See Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (ed.), Black Victorians: Black Victoriana (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003), in particular Figures 8, 17, 29. 149 See Hélène Cixous’s manifesto for écriture feminine, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), pp. 245–64, especially p. 246. 150 Starling references this quotation to Brodie’s The Devil Drives, but this particular version derives from Pope-Hennessy’s Flight of Youth, p. 119. The Goncourt brothers (Journal, vol. 5, pp. 92–3) record in their diary for 7 April 1862 that Hankey was hoping to receive the tanned skin from the thighs of two women or, preferably, the skin of a young girl stripped from the living body: ‘la peau sur une jeune fille vivante . . . mon ami [Burton] . . . m’a promis de me prendre une peau, comme ça, pendant la vie’. 151 Houghton Commonplace Books, Trinity College, Cambridge, quoted in Gibson, The Erotomaniac, p. 31. 152 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 80. 153 Stuart Jeffries, ‘The Naked and the Dead’, Guardian online, 19 March 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/mar/19/arts.highereducation (accessed 13 August 2008). 154 In Bürger’s poem the titular heroine bemoans the failure of her fiancé to return from the battlefield; her death wish recalls Wilhelm, whose spectre arrives on a ghostly horse to reclaim her. The poem ends with the couple galloping away, illustrating the line repeated five times that ‘Die Toten reiten schnell’ (‘The dead ride fast’). See ‘Lenore’, Gedichte von Gottfried August Bürger (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 188[?]), pp. 35–42. In von Hagens’s rider exhibit two flayed corpses sit astride a ghostly horse which is rearing upwards towards



Notes 275

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158 159 160 161

162

Notes the spectator; see ‘Selected exhibits from Body Worlds, the anatomical exhibition of real human bodies’, exhibit 1, Guardian online, http://www. guardian.co.uk/gall/0,,669680,00.html (accessed 13 August 2008). ‘Lenore’ (1831), Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 611–12. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, ibid., p. 557. The official Body Worlds website – http://www.koerperwelten.com/en.html – is a model of consumer commodification: a ‘Prelude’ on ‘The Human Saga’ (a celebration of the exhibition’s decade-long success) leads to details of forthcoming ‘Exhibitions’, followed by a page on ‘Body Donation’ with a contact address for (von Hagens’s) Institute for Plastination housed at the International Body Donor Office, where the interested public may donate their bodies for future exhibitions. Three further pages offer information on the plastination process, the inventor (with a hagiographic account of von Hagens’s ‘life for science’ and political sacrifices for the principle of free speech) and his institute. The final pages take us to the ‘Store’, where we can buy Body Worlds mousepads and keyrings, and a ‘Media’ section with press reports returns the reader thematically to the first page. See Over Her Dead Body. ‘Selected exhibits from Body Worlds’, exhibit 7, Guardian online, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,,669680,00.html (accessed 13 August 2008). Ibid., exhibit 8, http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,,669680,00.html (accessed 13 August 2008). Jeffries, ‘The Naked and the Dead’. The idea has a long tradition: as Warner (Phantasmagoria, p. 36) notes, wax models of the human body, entering the fairground in the late eighteenth century, ‘made knowledge itself a form of entertainment’. Quoted in Iain Bamforth’s Introduction to The Body in the Library: A Literary Anthology of Modern Medicine (London, Verso: 2003), p. ix.

4 Spectrality and S(p)ecularity 1 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds (Oxford: OUP), pp. 3–5. 2 A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 151. 3 See our discussion of both these critics’ texts in the Introduction, pp. 9–10. 4 See Gary Day, ‘The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror and Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism (review)’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13: 2 (Autumn 2008), especially p. 311 where Day comments: ‘But the absence of religion from both books suggests that we do not always use history to express our current anxieties.’ 5 ‘Imagining the Real: Close Encounters Between Fiction and History’, keynote lecture delivered at the ‘Adapting the Nineteenth Century’ conference, University of Wales, Lampeter, 22 August 2008. This chapter was already in draft before Duncker’s paper, but we are grateful to her for the conversation we had about the possibilities of a ‘neo-Tractarian’ text, and for her confirmation concerning the perhaps troubling absence of religious crises in neo-Victorianism arising in part from our post-Christian framework. 6 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, p. 11.



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7 Ibid. 8 Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. x. 9 Ibid, p. ix. 10 Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 5. 11 Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers: The Victorians and the Occult (1972; Stroud: Sutton, 2004), p. 57. 12 Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2. 13 A notable recent exception to this critical lack is Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds), Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 14 Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, pp. x–xi. 15 Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001), p. 6. 16 Sarah Waters, Affinity (1999; London: Virago, 2000), p. 17. Further references appear in the text. 17 Opening sentence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (1888), introduction and notes by Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 219. 18 Charles Palliser, The Unburied (London: Phoenix, 1999), pp. 104–5. Further references appear in the text. 19 Waters, Affinity, p. 7. 20 For a discussion of the detective elements of Palliser’s story see Catherine Mari, ‘Desperately Looking for the Truth: The Traps and Trappings of Crime Fiction in Charles Palliser’s The Unburied’, in François Gallix and Vanessa Guignery (eds.), Crime Fictions: Subverted Codes and New Structures (Paris: Paris-Sorbonne UP, 2004), pp. 89–97. 21 Belsey, Culture and the Real, p. 9. 22 Susana Onega, ‘An Obsessive Writer’s Formula: Subtly Vivid, Enigmatically Engaging, Disturbingly Funny and Cruel. An Interview with Charles Palliser’, Atlantis, XV:1–2 (May–November 1993), p. 281. 23 Ibid, p. 282. 24 Jem Poster, Courting Shadows (London: Sceptre, 2002), p. 58. Further references appear in the text. 25 A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009), p. 594. Further references appear in the text. 26 See, for example, James Wilson’s Consolation: A Novel of Mystery (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), which, like Byatt’s novel, is set during the period of the children’s literature boom during the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods; another recent text, Charles Elton’s Mr Toppit (London: Viking, 2009), while not strictly neo-Victorian, exploits the idea of the Victorian / Edwardian children’s writer and children’s fiction. 27 For a history of the development of the museum and its building see John Physick, The Victoria and Albert Museum: The History of its Building (Oxford: Phaidon / Christie’s, 1982). The museum was renamed in 1899. 28 Judith Roof, ‘Display Cases’, in John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (eds), Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 104.



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29 Charles Saumarez Smith, ‘Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings’, in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), p. 9. 30 George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 264. 31 Byatt, On Histories and Stories, p. 162. 32 Rachel Hore, The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008; London: Pocket Books, 2009), p. 228. Further references appear in the text. 33 See Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853), in Dinah Birch (ed.), John Ruskin: Selected Writings (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2004), pp. 32–63. 34 Patmore’s poem ‘The Angel of the House’ was originally published in 1854 and then in expanded form in 1862. The term has been widely adopted to refer to the wifely and motherly ideal represented by a Victorian woman devoted to her children and submissive to her husband. 35 For a discussion of stained glass and the manufacture of glass for the construction of the Great Exhibition site, see Nance Fyson, Decorative Glass of the 19th and early 20th Centuries: A Sourcebook (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles Books, 1996), especially pp. 19–89. For details of the number of stained glass exhibitioners see Robert Ellis, Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue (London: Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, 1851), especially ‘Class 24: Glass’, vol. 2, pp. 697–709. 36 See http://www.norfolkstainedglass.co.uk/Glossary/glossary.shtm (accessed 10 September 2009). 37 Byatt, The Children’s Book, p. 245, see our previous discussion. 38 Ruskin, ‘The Lamp of Memory’ (1849), in Birch, John Ruskin, p. 18. 39 John Harwood, The Séance (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 57. Further references appear in the text. 40 John Harwood, The Ghost Writer (2004; London: Vintage, 2005), p. 4. Further references appear in the text. 41 George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), p. 1. 42 Elijah Farrington and Charles F. Pidgeon, Revelations of a Spirit Medium, or, Spiritualistic mysteries exposed: a detailed explanation of the methods used by fraudulent mediums, by A. Medium (St Paul, MN: Farrington & Co, 1891). 43 Hilary M. Schor, ‘Sorting, Morphing, and Mourning: A.S. Byatt Ghostwrites Victorian Fiction’, in Kucich and Sadoff, Victorian Afterlife, p. 247.

5 Doing It with Mirrors 1 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 2. 2 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (1984; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 6–7, p. 10. 3 Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), p. 114. We are grateful to Tamsin Kilner O’Byrne for drawing our attention to this book. 4 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic metafiction: “the pastime of past time”’, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988; London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 105–23. 5 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic (1878), quoted in Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 99.



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6 For the first use of magic lanterns to create spectral effects see Etienne Gaspard Robertson’s late-eighteenth-century ‘Fantasmagorie’, discussed in Mangan, ibid., pp. 123–5, and Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria (Oxford: OUP, 2006), pp. 147–50. 7 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. xix, pp. xvi–xxii. 8 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 12. 9 Ibid., emphasis in original. 10 The earliest use of ‘prestige’ meaning ‘deceits, impostures, delusions, cousening tricks’ dates back to 1656; from 1832 the term could refer to ‘Machines by which phantasmagoria and oracular prestiges were played off,’ OED 2009 online. In his novel The Prestige (1995; London: Orion, 2004) Christopher Priest draws on it as a symbol of ‘prestidigitation’ or sleight of hand: ‘Chris Priest interviewed by Don Iffergrin’ (October 2006), http://myweb.tiscali. co.uk/christopherpriest/pres_qa.htm (accessed 25 March 2008). 11 The Prestige, dir. Christopher Nolan, screenplay by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan (Warner Bros Pictures and Touchstone Pictures, 2006), 1:52:54–1:52:56. Further references appear in the text. 12 The title quotation is taken from The Prestige, 0:54–0:56. 13 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, pp. 104–5. This differentiation is contradictory, given that Robert-Houdin prided himself both on his art of prestidigitation and his mechanical inventions. 14 Priest, The Prestige, p. 64. 15 Tesla was an eccentric scientist and inventor among whose discoveries is the principle of alternating current. See ‘Chris Priest interviewed by Don Iffergrin’. As Nolan states in his ‘Special Features: Director’s Notebook’ (The Prestige), 1:50–2:13: ‘There is an interesting relationship in the film between the scientists of the day who were essentially the new magicians . . . and the way in which magicians . . . co-opted the imagery of science . . . to sell old tricks in a new way.’ 16 For Priest’s (considerably less dramatic) description of the three stages of the magician’s performance see The Prestige, p. 64; for the pledge, which he calls ‘the Pact of Acquiescent Sorcery’, see pp. 32–4. 17 As Mangan notes, the disappearance and reappearance of objects so central to conjuring tricks bears resemblance to Freud’s ‘fort’/‘da’ paradigm as discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; see Performing Dark Arts, pp. 145–6. 18 ‘The film-maker almost more so than the novelist has a very close relationship with the magician in terms of the way in which we are using the release of information, what we tell the audience when, the point of view we are drawing them into . . . we use those techniques to fool them’ (‘Special Features: Metaphors of Deception’, 14:03–14:22). 19 ‘A good illusion works very much like a novel . . . I was trying to think . . . if there was a story that could be told . . . so that the various secrets . . . are unravelled in the way that a magician unravels the secrets of a trick.’ (Priest, ‘Special Features: Metaphors of Deception’, 12:13–12:36). With its Gothic overkill and Frankensteinian ending Priest’s novel is, however, less effective, and metatextual, than Nolan’s film. 20 Priest features the ‘original’, the Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo (The Prestige, p. 36); Burger’s choice of the ‘copy’ (the Chinese-American Chung Ling Soo) for his adaptation is a further intertextual joke on the doubling of



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25

26 27

28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35

Notes the magician figure. See Frank Cullen, with Florence Hackman and Donald McNeilly, Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 223–5. Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night (London: John Murray, 2006), p. 1. H. Rider Haggard, She (1887; Oxford: OUP, 1991), p. 5. Kim Newman, ‘The Grand Illusion’, Sight and Sound, 16:12 (2006), p. 16, p. 19. For the brothers’ collaborative approach see Dan Shewman’s interview, ‘Nothing Up Their Sleeves: Christopher and Jonathan Nolan on the Art of Magic, Murder and The Prestige’, Creative Screenwriting, 13:5 (2006), pp. 60–5. The Illusionist was premiered on 27 April 2006 (Newport Beach International Festival), The Prestige on 17 October 2006 (Rome Film Festival and Hollywood); see the Internet Movie Database information available at http:// www.imdb.com/title/tt0443543/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/ (both accessed 25 March 2008). Priest, The Prestige, p. 116, p. 204. Houdini toured Europe and America with the aim to expose spiritualists, publishing A Magician Among the Spirits (New York: Harper) in 1924. See Kenneth Silverman, ‘A Magician Among the Spirits’, Chapters 11–16, Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 247–384. Sarah Waters, Affinity (1999; London: Virago, 2000), p. 98. Further references appear in the text. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), p. 60. Margaret’s first glance at Selina, through the ‘eye’ of the prison cell’s door, invokes the artefactual nature of the object of desire: ‘I was sure that I had seen her likeness, in a saint or an angel in a painting of Crivelli’s’ (p. 27). See, for example, Carlo Crivelli’s ‘Annunciation with St Emidius’ (1486), National Gallery, London, http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/crivelli/ annunciation.jpg.html (accessed 29 December 2009). Waters’s reference to Crivelli is, of course, ironic, given that the trance-like state in which Selina presents herself, clutching a violet in a shaft of sunlight, serves the purpose of seducing Margaret and initiating her into her new life as a ‘believer’, thus making her an agent of Selina’s liberation. For Waters’s intertextual engagement with The Turn of the Screw (1898) see Ann Heilmann, ‘The Haunting of Henry James: Jealous Ghosts, Affinities, and The Others’, in Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds), Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 121–5. Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 190–1. Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta. 1876; London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 226. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), in The Turn of the Screw: Henry James, ed. Peter J. Beidler (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), p. 65. For a brief discussion see M.L. Kohlke, ‘Into History through the Back Door: The “Past Historic” in Nights at the Circus and Affinity’, Hystorical Fictions: Metahistory, Metafiction, ed. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, special issue of Women, 15:2 (2004), p. 157.



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36 ‘I knew . . . that, careful as I have been – still and secret and silent as I have been, in my high room – she [mother] had been watching me, as Miss Ridley watches [in Millbank Prison], and Miss Haxby.’ (p. 223) For a discussion of the novel’s panopticism see Mark Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!”: Sarah Waters’ Affinity’, Journal of Gender Studies, 13:3 (2004), pp. 204–10; Lucie Armitt and Sarah Gamble, ‘The haunted geometries of Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Textual Practice, 20:1 (2006), pp. 142–9; and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2007), pp. 48–53. 37 They have been known to blind matrons by sticking knitting needles through the eye-hole (p. 23). 38 In The Bostonians the Southern lawyer Basil Ransome succeeds in persuading the spiritualist Verena Tarrant to abandon the feminist hysteric Olive Chancellor, who is desperately in love with her, for (an inequitable) marriage; Verena is as much under Basil’s spell and command as Selina is under Ruth’s. 39 For the concept of ‘romantic friendship’ acting as a cover for female same-sex relationships see Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (London: William Morrow, 1981). 40 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 3. 41 Ibid., pp. 5–6. Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr Y (2006; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), n.p. Further references appear in the text. 42 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 122. 43 Ibid. 44 Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland (1884; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 45 James Clerk Maxwell, ‘Recollections of Dreamland’ (June 1856, under ‘Occasional Poems’), ‘Lines written under the conviction that it is not wise to read Mathematics after one’s fire is out’ (10 November 1853, under ‘Serio-Comic Verse’), ‘A Poem in Dynamics’ (19 February 1854, ‘Serio-Comic Verse’), in Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, with a Selection from his Correspondence, and Occasional Writings, and A Sketch of his Contributions to Science (London: Macmillan and Co, 1882), pp. 599–601, pp. 622–8. 46 Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old and New; Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as Compared with that of Charles Darwin (London: A.C. Fifield, [1879]). 47 Samuel Butler, ‘Nothing Good or Ill, etc.’, in Further Extracts from the NoteBooks of Samuel Butler, ed. A.T. Bartholomew (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), p. 31. See Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2: ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ 48 Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory, with an introduction by Professor Hartog (London: Jonathan Cape, 1880), p. 176. 49 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), p. 158. 50 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 91. 51 William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), quoted in Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 91. 52 Butler, Evolution, p. 26.



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53 Ibid., p. 31. For a refutation of Paley see pp. 24–33. 54 One of the examples Freud discusses in his 1919 essay on ‘The Uncanny’, in Victor Sage (ed.), The Gothick Novel: A Selection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), is an involuntary, recurrent return to a place from which one seeks to escape, pp. 83–4. 55 See ‘The Mouse Genome’, Nature, 420:510, 5 December 2002, http://www. nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6915/full/420510a.html, and The Abbie Lathrop Collection at the John Staats Library, Jackson Laboratory Cancer Centre, http://library.jax.org/archives/personal_papers/lathrop.html (both sources accessed 28 December 2008). 56 Book I (paragraph 5) of Homer’s The Iliad, trans. Samuel Butler (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1942) contains an appeal to ‘King Apollo . . . of Sminthe’ (p. 8). 57 The Matrix, dir. and written by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski (Groucho II Film Partnership, 1999). In the film’s dystopian universe Butler’s idea of machine dominance has been realized; humans are bred to power the machines and are kept in perpetual bondage through computer simulation. The name of Thomas’s author, Thomas E. Lumas, has some resonances with that of the film’s hero, Thomas A. Anderson, whom Ariel replicates in her ‘redeemer‘ function; Ariel’s mentor figure, Apollo Smintheus, is suggestive of Morpheus; the Starlight men resemble the agents, and Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra plays a role also in The Matrix. 58 Cellarius [Samuel Butler], ‘Darwin Among the Machines’, The Press, 13 June 1863, repr. in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon’, ed. Henry Festing Jones (London: A.C. Fifield, 1919), p. 44. 59 In the Preface to Erewhon: Over the Range (1872; London: Jonathan Cape, 1908) Butler refers to ‘The Mechanical Creation’, a revised version of the piece published in the Reasoner, 1 July 1865, which he adapted for the ‘Book of the Machines’ chapters (23 and 24) of Erewhon. 60 Butler, Erewhon, p. 247. 61 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), p. 150, p. 149. 62 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 5–6. See our introductory paragraph on the novel. 63 The Illusionist, dir. and written by Neil Burger (Momentum Pictures, 2006), 1:31:32–1:31:49. Further references appear in the text. 64 Newman, ‘Grand Illusion’, p. 19. For the involvement of real-life magicians in The Illusionist see ‘Special Features’, 0:31–1:01, 8:37–8:39, 19:17–20:40. 65 The scientist David Brewster explained in lectures published in 1832 how hovering spectral forms (‘Dr Pepper’s Ghost’) could be produced with angling sheets of glass placed both below and above stage; see Warner, Phantasmagoria, pp. 152–3, and Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 125. In The End of Mr Y (p. 45) Lumas’s protagonist refers to Dr Pepper’s Ghost as one of the ways in which the fairground doctor produces his illusions, but like Eisenheim’s professional colleagues he remains mystified as to how he creates his special effects. See also ‘Special Features’, The Illusionist, 1:05:03–1:05:26.



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66 For the equivalent description in Millhauser’s ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ see The Barnum Museum (1990: London: Phoenix, 1998), pp. 219–20. (Further references appear in the text.) Here there is only one phantom, which stabs itself. 67 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, pp. 116–17. For stills see http://dvdtoile.com/ Film.php?id=12290 (accessed 30 December 2009). 68 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 126. 69 See also Millhauser, ‘Eisenheim’, p. 218. For a description of Robert-Houdin’s ‘Marvellous Orange Tree’ see Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 104. 70 The precise nature of the death of Crown Prince Rudolf and his young lover, Mary Vetsera, at Mayerling in January 1889 remains unresolved. See Brigitte Hamann, Rudolf: Kronprinz und Rebell (Wien, Amalthea Verlag, 1984), pp. 437–95. Elizabeth (‘Sissi’) was assassinated in 1898. 71 Mary Kinzie, ‘Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser’, Salmagundi, 92 (1991), p. 115. 72 Charles Gregory, entry on Phineas Taylor Barnum in Justin Wistle (ed.), Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture 1800–1914: A Biographical Dictionary (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 29–31. 73 ‘The story goes’, ‘One version of the story’, ‘Some said . . . others said . . . Arguments arose’ (p. 216, p. 217, p. 237) are some of the many examples throughout the text. 74 Pedro Ponce, ‘“a game we no longer understood”: Theatrical Audiences in the Fiction of Steven Millhauser’, Review of Contemporary Film, 26:1 (2006), p. 100, p. 101. 75 Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Mémoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author and Conjuror, Written by Himself, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (1859; London: T. Werner Laurie, 1942), pp. 49–65. For Torrini’s non-existence see Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, pp. 113–4, and Silverman, Houdini, p. 271. 76 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 117. 77 Ibid., p. 145. 78 Silverman, Houdini, p. 3; for the story of the duel see Ruth Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (London: Mandarin, 1995), p. 8. 79 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, pp. 154–7. 80 See Burger’s ‘Commentary’, 1:08:23–1:08:38. 81 Ronald Bergan, Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1999), pp. 19–22. 82 See Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, chapter 7, especially pp. 116–8, p. 138. 83 Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), p. 3. 84 See Baudrillard’s opening quotation to this chapter, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 10.

6 The Way We Adapt Now 1 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. xi. 2 Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 124.



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3 Andrew Davies’s 2008 BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility started with a striking echo of Ang Lee’s and Emma Thompson’s 1995 version: as if to pay homage to the previous adaptors Davies too furnished Austen’s third, in the original text rather bland and underdeveloped, sister with tomboyish independence and a spirit of adventure which mark her out as a ‘girl of the future’; a portent of the late-Victorian New Girl and even perhaps a comic avatar, in Regency costume, of the contemporary viewer. For Austen adaptations more generally see Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (eds), Jane Austen in Hollywood, 2nd edn. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald (eds), Jane Austen on Screen (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); Linda V. Troost, ‘The nineteenth-century novel on film: Jane Austen’, in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 75–89; and Claire Harman, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009), especially the chapter ‘Jane AustenTM’, pp. 243–81. 4 Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, ‘A practical understanding of literature on screen: two conversations with Andrew Davies’ in Cartmell and Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, p. 239. See also Davies’s specific comment that after watching the 1982 TV version of Bleak House’s death of Jo (the crossing sweeper) ‘I felt I had to rip it off; or to put it more respectably, offer a kind of homage to the earlier adaptation’ (p. 239). 5 See Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), p. 1. 6 Ekchart Voigts-Virchow, ‘Heritage and literature on screen: Heimat and heritage’, in Cartmell and Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, p. 123. 7 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 1. 8 John Gardiner, ‘Theme-park Victoriana’, in Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorians since 1901: Histories, representations and revisions (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004), p. 167. 9 Colin Sorensen, ‘Theme Parks and Time Machines’, in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), p. 66. 10 John Gardiner, The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), p. 161. 11 Juliet John, ‘Dickens and the Heritage Industry; or, Culture and the Commodity’, in Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (eds), Conflict and Difference in NineteenthCentury Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 157–70. 12 Taken from Dickens World homepage: http://www.dickensworld.co.uk/ (accessed 20 October 2008). 13 See http://www.dickensworld.co.uk/events.php (accessed 13 September 2009). 14 See David Barndollar and Susan Schorn’s ‘Revisiting the Serial Format of Dickens’s Novels; or, Little Dorrit Goes a Long Way’, in Christine L. Krueger (ed.), Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2002), pp. 157–70. 15 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism (New York: OUP, 1992), pp. 395–402. 16 Giddings and Selby, The Classic Serial, p. 9.



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17 Ibid., p. 9 and p. 13; see also pp. 12–13 for details of the regularity with which nineteenth-century novels were adapted for radio and TV. 18 Ibid., pp. 188–9. 19 Robert MacFarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in NineteenthCentury Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2007), p. 8. 20 For a detailed discussion of this aesthetic concept see Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 211–44. 21 See Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999). 22 Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and The Candlelight Murders (London: John Murray, 2007), pp. 71–4. 23 The characters are taken from The Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1838; Oliver, Mr Bumble), ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1843; Mrs Fezziwig), and David Copperfield (1850; Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber). 24 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (1984; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 1–3, pp. 12–14. 25 Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Museums and the Appropriation of Culture (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 1. 26 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), p. 3 27 Brian Moore, The Great Victorian Collection (1975; London: Paladin, 1988), p. 9. Further references appear in the text. 28 See David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), pp. 10–13. 29 Seamus Deane, ‘The Real Thing: Brian Moore in Disneyland’, Irish University Review, 18:1 (1988), p. 74. 30 See ibid., p. 74; see also Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), p. 2. 31 United Nations Association in Canada, ‘UNA Canada presents a Sense of Belonging’, http://www.unac.org/sb/en/hostcommunities/montreal.aspn (accessed 3 October 2009). 32 See Gary Edson (ed.), Museum Ethics (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 36–89. 33 See Norman Palmer, ‘Museums and Cultural Property’, in Vergo, The New Museology, pp. 172–204. 34 Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (1988; Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2003), p. 377. 35 Kaplan, Victoriana, p. 1. 36 Ibid. 37 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, p. 96. 38 Ibid., p. 241. 39 Huyssen, Present Pasts, p. 3. 40 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, p. 249. 41 Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), p. 1. First published in Italian in 1977. 42 Part of Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas, BBC 1, 24 December 2009. 43 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Cranford Chronicles (London: Vintage, 2007). 44 Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy (London: Penguin, 2008), composed of Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), Candleford Green



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56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

Notes (1943). The trilogy was later dramatized by Keith Dewhurst, Lark Rise to Candleford (London: Hutchinson, 1980). For Cranford viewing figures see http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/ stories/2008/03_march/31/cranford.shtml (accessed 20 September 2008); Lark Rise viewing details can be found via a BBC Press Release in January 2008: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/01_january/25/ lark.shtml (accessed 20 September 2008). Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 4. Ibid., p. 6. Giddings and Selby, The Classic Serial, p. ix. See Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987). James Thompson, ‘The BBC and the Victorians’, in Taylor and Wolff, The Victorians since 1901, p. 163. Chris Loutitt has recently written of the need to see such adaptations ‘in the context of the period’s [the mid-2000s] political and ideological mood’, arguing that the BBC adaptations of Cranford and Bleak House are ‘clearly cultural products of the Blairite era’: see ‘Cranford, Popular Culture and the Politics of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television’, Adaptation, 2:1 (2009), pp. 35, 36. The bucolic adaptation of the adventures of Ma and Pop Larkin in ITV’s serialization of Bates’s novels and stories has long served as a classic model of the family-focused classic adaptation. H.J. Massingham, ‘Introduction’ to Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, pp. 9–10. See Giddings and Selby, The Classic Serial, pp. 80–103. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation revisited: Television and the classic novel (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002), p. 1. See also Cardwell’s essay ‘Literature on the small screen: television adaptations’, in Cartmell and Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, pp. 181–95. Cardwell, Adaptation revisited, p. 2. See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), especially chapter 9. Cardwell, Adaptation revisited, p. 185. Ibid, p. 186. Ibid., p. 209. Ronald R. Thomas, ‘Specters of the Novel: Dracula and the Cinematic Afterlife of the Victorian Novel’, in John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (eds), Victorian Afterlife: Postnodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 307. Ibid., p. 292. See Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, ‘Victorians on Broadway at the Present Time’, in Krueger, Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, pp. 79–94; and Weltman’s ‘Victorians on the Contemporary Stage’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13:2 (2008), pp. 303–9. For Weltman’s interpretation of The King and I in relation to its original sources see ‘The King and Who? Dance, Difference, and Identity in The King and I and Anna Leonowens’, in Birch and Llewellyn, Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 171–85. For recent plays in the UK see Warwick sociologist Steven Fuller’s Lincoln and Darwin – Live for One Night Only! (2008) and Three Women after the Soul of William James



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73

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75 76

77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

(2009; the three women are Harriet Martineau, Darwin’s French translator Clemence Royer, and Helena Blavatsky), http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/swfuller/ entry/new_play_three/ (accessed on 3 October 2009). Libretto, The Woman in White (London: Really Useful Group, 2003), p. 39. Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 3. See also Stam’s essay ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000), pp. 54–76. Judith Mackrell, ‘Because Wilde’s worth it: Dorian Gray re-imagined as a gay aftershave model for our times?’, The Guardian, 12 June 2008, http://www. guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/jun/12/dance.culture (accessed 3 October 2009). Ibid. Ibid. Cartmell and Whelehan, ‘A practical understanding of literature on screen’, p. 240. Malcolm Bradbury, Cuts (1987; London: Arena, 1988), pp. 16–17. Cartmell and Whelehan, ‘A practical understanding of literature on screen’, p. 239. In September 2009 Davies’s adaptation received seven Emmys: Andrew Clark, ‘BBC drama Little Dorrit takes seven Emmy awards’, The Guardian, 21 September 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2009/sep/21/ emmy-awards-little-dorrit-30-rock-mad-men (accessed 3 October 2009). See Alaistair Jamieson, ‘BBC Costume Drama Little Dorrit sees audiences slide only halfway through its run’, Daily Telegraph, 23 November 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/3507849/ BBC-costume-drama-Little-Dorrit-sees-audience-slide-only-halfwaythrough-its-run.html (accessed 3 October 2009). For details see Leigh Holmwood, ‘Bonnets and bodices lose attraction for BBC’, The Guardian, 10 January 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/2009/jan/10/television-bbc-drama (accessed 3 October 2009). See Cartmell and Whelehan, ‘A practical understanding of literature on screen’, pp. 241–2. Boyd Tonkin, ‘Why BBC costume drama needs to go beyond bodices’, The Independent, 7 November 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/tv/features/why-bbc-costume-drama-needs-to-go-beyondbodices-997577.html (accessed 3 October 2009). Jakob Loethe, ‘Narrative Vision in Middlemarch: The Novel Compared with the BBC Television Adaptation’, in Karen Chase (ed.), Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 178. Ibid. Ibid, p. 179. Ibid., pp. 180–1. Ibid., pp. 182–3. ‘Mendes to direct Middlemarch film’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6577101.stm (accessed 20 April 2007). Cartmell and Whelehan, ‘A practical understanding of literature on screen’, p. 242. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, p. 96. Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 8.



Notes 287

Historical texts revisited in neo-Victorianism Abbie Lathrop Collection. John Staats Library, Jackson Laboratory Cancer Centre, http://library.jax.org/archives/personal_papers/lathrop.html (accessed 28 December 2008). Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland (1884). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Amin, Qasim. The Liberation of Women and The New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism (1899 and 1900). Trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson. 1992; Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, or, The Thousand and One Nights. Trans. E[dward] W[illiam] Lane. 4 vols. London: John Murray, 1850. Armstrong, Martin Donisthorpe. The Puppet Show. Berkshire: The Golden Cockerell Press, 1922. Ashbee, Henry Spencer [‘Pisanus Fraxi’] (ed.). Index Librorum Prohibitorum: Being notes bio-, biblio-, iconographical and critical, on curious and uncommon books. London: privately printed, 1877. Austen, Jane. Emma (1816). Harlow: Pearson Education, 1999. Baudelaire, Charles. Les fleurs du mal (1857). Paris: Seuil, 1993. Blainville, Henri de. ‘Sur une femme de la race hottentote’. Bulletin du Société Philomatique de Paris (1816), pp. 183–90. Bowles, Charles and Susan M. Bowles. A Nile Voyage of Recovery. London, Tokyo: n.p., 1897. Brontë, Ann. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847). Ed. Richard J. Dunn. New York: Norton, 2001. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights (1847). Ed Linda H. Peterson. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (1846/8 version). In Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson (eds), The Victorian Age. Vol. E of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2006, pp. 1085–92. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (1856 version). In Laura Fish, Strange Music. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008, pp. 206–14. Bürger, Gottfried August. ‘Lenore’. Gedichte von Gottfried August Bürger. Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 188[?]), pp. 35–42. Burton, Richard. ‘Notes on the Dahoman’. Selected Papers on Anthropology, Travel and Exploration. London: A.M. Philpot, 1924. [Butler, Samuel] Cellarius. ‘Darwin Among the Machines’. The Press, 13 June 1863. Repr. in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon’, ed. Henry Festing Jones. London: A.C. Fifield, 1919, pp. 42–7. Butler, Samuel. Erewhon: Over the Range (1872). London: Jonathan Cape, 1908. Butler, Samuel. Evolution, Old and New; Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as Compared with that of Charles Darwin. London: A.C. Fifiled [1879]. 288



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310

Note: illustrations are referenced in bold. Abbott, Edwin A. 191–2 Flatland 191–2 abolitionism 82–91, 108, 123, 136, 138 abuse child 107 sexual 38–9, 125, 191 see also incest; rape academia 10, 17–18, 107–8, 150–2, 182, 191, 228 accuracy in historical detail 21 literary 35 adaptation 8, 9, 10, 16–18, 22, 31, 211–43 of the classics 226, 234–6 musical 166, 232 theory of 8, 22–3, 32, 211 TV 8, 27, 31–2, 212, 221–37 aesthetics 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 27, 130, 161, 216, 222 feminine 132 afterlife cultural 2–3 literary 2 alchemy 169 Alexander, Elizabeth ‘The Venus Hottentot’ 120 Alexander, Michael 228 allusion 28 Amenábar, Alejandro The Others 65 America 45 American Anti-Slavery Society 90 Amin, Qasim The Liberation of Women 103 The New Woman 103 anamnesis 34 anarchism 108 Anatomical Venus 136, 137, 141

anatomy 37 ancestral heritage 28 see also domestic space – ancestral home Andress, David 10 angelology 163–7 Anglicanism 78, 126 Anthropological Society of London 131 anthropology 121 see also ethnography anti-imperialism 122 appropriation 4, 9–10, 17, 19, 26–7, 29, 31, 114 Arabian Nights 96, 101, 102 Armstrong, Gillian Death Defying Acts 185 Armstrong, Isobel 30, 143–5, 152 Victorian Glassworlds 30, 143 army imperial 95 Arnold, Matthew 27 ‘Dover Beach’ 25, 27 Arts and Craft Movement 131, 134 Ashbee, Henry Spencer (aka ‘Pisanus Fraxi’ and ‘Walter’) 131, 138, 139 astronomy 76 Atwood, Margaret Alias Grace 91 Austen, Jane 40, 130, 135, 212 Pride and Prejudice 1, 2, 241 Australia 55–6, 59 authenticity 1, 15, 19, 22, 30, 96, 108, 114, 145, 175, 190, 235 bodily 50, 108, 114 meta- 148 post- 1, 23–4, 182 and theme parks 214–16 authorship 34, 45, 47–8

311



Index

Index

autobiography 40 fictional 34, 40 see also genre automata 63, 207 Baartman, Saartje 20, 29, 110, 114, 120–31, 132, 134 Baden-Powell, Robert 162 ballads 39 Barndollar, David 215 Barnes, Julian Arthur & George 68 Barnham, Phineas Taylor 206 Barrett, Andrea The Voyage of the Narwhal 68, 123 Barrett family 69 and slave ownership 81–91 Barrett, Richard 86 Barrett, Samuel 82–4 Barrett, Susan Fixing Shadows 15–16 Bates, H. E. 230 Baudelaire, Charles Les Fleurs du Mal 120 Baudrillard, Jean 31, 174–7, 183–4, 189, 190, 192, 199, 210 hyperreality 31, 174, 175, 196–8, 219 third order simulation 31, 176, 184, 192–3, 220 belatedness 3, 14, 28, 34, 148 Belsey, Catherine 3, 153 Bendyshe, Thomas 131 Bernard Yeazell, Ruth 102 Bergson, Henri 64 Bhabha, Homi 29, 66, 70, 73–4, 97 Bildungsroman 25 biofiction 82, 121 biography 20, 21–3, 36, 47–8, 92, 108 biology 37, 41 Blaine, David 201 Blake, Sarah Grange House 28, 35, 36, 41–7, 48, 51, 53, 64 Blake, William 164 Blakley, Claudia 227 Bloom, Harold 3 anxiety of influence 3

Blunt, Wilfred 95 body, the female 29, 106–42 politics of 29 maternal 42 subjected to scientific discussion 106–42 Bolt, Christine 81 bookbinding 108, 131–40 Booker Prize see Man Booker Prize Booth, Wayne C. 22 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society 82, 90 Bourne, Matthew 233–4 Dorian Gray 233–4, 236 Bowie, David 180 Bowker, Peter Desperate Romantics 235 Boyd, Harry 95 Boyle, Clara 95 Bradbury, Malcolm Cuts 236–7 Brandreth, Gyles Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders 108, 217–19 Breuer, Josef 34 Brewster, David 202 Briggs, Asa 224 British Museum 58, 59 Broadway 232 Bronfen, Elisabeth 141 Brontë, Anne The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 42 Brontë, Charlotte 12, 136 Jane Eyre 2, 9, 34, 41, 42, 49, 53, 55, 65, 67, 82, 86, 120, 130 Villette 12–13, 55 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights 34, 41–2, 49, 65 Brophy, Sarah 91 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 19, 20, 29, 82–91, 98 Aurora Leigh 98–9 ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ 82–9 Browning, Robert 82, 85 Bürger, Gottfried August ‘Lenore’ 141



312

Burger, Neil The Illusionist (film) 31, 176, 201–9, 240 Burne-Jones, Edward 164 Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth (aka ‘The Little Professor’) 6–7, 11, 14 Burton, Richard 131 Butler, Samuel 192–3 ‘Darwin Among the Machines’ 198 Erewhon 192, 198 Evolution, Old and New 192, 193 Note-Books 192 Byatt, A. S. 8, 22–3, 143–4 Angels & Insects 171 The Children’s Book 30, 156–63, 166–7, 169 Possession 8, 18, 22–3, 35, 38, 162, 165 Byron, George 37, 94 Caine, Michael 180 Callow, Simon The Importance of Being Oscar 215 The Mystery of Charles Dickens 215 Cambridge 23, 182 Cameron, Charles Duncan 131 Cameron, Margaret 118 Campion, Jane The Piano 9, 69 Canada 220–2 Cannibal Club 131, 140 canonical literature 4, 22, 25 neo-Victorian 9–10 capitalism 77, 220–9, 244 Cardwell, Sarah 231 Carlyle, Thomas 164 Carroll, Lewis 136 Alice in Wonderland 56, 58, 63, 168 Carter, Angela ‘Black Venus’ 120 Nights at the Circus 108 Castle, Terry 185 Castricano, Jodey 148, 172 Cesars, Hendrik 123 Cesars, Peter 125 Chambers, Emma 228 Chapman, Maria Weston 82 characterization 7, 20

Chase, Karen 1–2, 240 Chase-Riboud, Barbara Hottentot Venus 29, 110, 111, 113, 116, 120–31, 135, 136, 138 The President’s Daughter 124 Sally Hemings 124 Chatterton, Thomas 74 childhood 54, 125, 156–63 parental relationship 34, 155–63 trauma 34 children 84 children’s literature 161–3 China 66, 68, 78, 206 Chopin, Kate ‘Desiree’s Baby’ 138 Christian, Barbara 90 Christianity 77, 151, 169–70 Cixous, Hélène 140 Clark, Jonathan 11 class 106, 188 and caste 77 system 77–8 working 45, 98, 116–20, 131, 188 see also servants clitoridectomy 135 collection intuitionist and decisionist positions 225 politics of 107, 121, 157, 220–8 see also exhibition culture Collins, Wilkie The Woman in White 21–2, 42, 49, 52, 65 colonialism 8 see also postcolonialism Conan Doyle, Arthur 153 Conrad, Joseph 130 consciousness 192, 194 see also mind contemporary fiction 27 Corelli, Marie 68 costume 39, 99 costume drama 27, 64, 107, 211, 226–36 Cox, Michael The Meaning of Night: A Confession 23, 182 see also authenticity, post-



Index 313

Index

Cox, Renée Valerie 120 Crais, Clifton 120, 129–30 Cranford (BBC TV) 32, 236–7, 238, 242 criminology 121 Cromer, Lord 95 cross-dressing 39, 118 cryptomimesis 148–50, 161, 168, 172 Cullwick, Hannah 118 cultural imagination 20 culture high vs. low debate 23, 31–2 Cuvier, Frédéric and Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire Natural History of Mammals 128 Cuvier, Georges 116, 121–31, 136, 138 Dabouss, Sonia 103 Darwin, Charles 128, 129, 245 On the Origin of Species 198 Voyage of the Beagle 80 Darwin, Erasmus Zoonomia 192 daughter 41–7 Davies, Andrew 31, 212, 213, 236–44 and Charles Dickens 32 and Sarah Waters 31–2, 242–4 Bleak House (BBC) 32, 215, 237, 239 Little Dorrit (BBC) 32, 237, 238, 239, 243–4 Middlemarch 240 Day, Gary 145 death 62 ‘Declaration of Independence’ 89, 124 ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ 89 Dee, Jonathan 20 democracy 92, 98 Dench, Judi 227 Denshawai/Dinshawi Affair 95 Derrida, Jacques 8, 146, 148, 192, 193 despotism 99 detective fiction 16–17, 18, 108

Dickens, Charles 25–7, 136, 146, 212, 238–9 adaptations of 212, 215–16 Bleak House 19, 118 Great Expectations 25, 26–7, 33, 34, 35, 41, 43, 50, 55, 62, 63, 65, 67, 76, 118 see also Jones, Lloyd Mister Pip Hard Times 215 A Tale of Two Cities 215 Dickens World 31, 176, 213–14, 244 ‘Dickensian’ 7, 37, 201, 213 Disneyfication 32 Disneyland 175–6, 223 divorce 107 domestic space 28, 35, 52, 65, 117–20, 156–63 ancestral homes 19, 28, 35–65, 67 country house 59 Eastern 101–3 feminization 35 libraries within 36, 48, 51, 63 and servants 116–20 doubles 63, 176, 178, 181, 183–4 Douglas, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas 89 Drewe, Robert The Savage Crows 68 Duff Gordon, Lucie 69, 96, 98 Du Maurier, Daphne Rebecca 49 Duncker, Patricia 145 James Miranda Barry 107–8 Dunlop, Alexander William 123, 125 East India Company 79 EastEnders 216, 237 Eco, Umberto 223 ecriture feminine 134 editor as literary technique 23 education 118 edutainment 141–2 Egypt 28, 68, 91–104 Eisenstein, Sergei 215 Elgar, Edward 166



314

Eliot, George 2, 3, 12, 16, 130, 242 Middlemarch 1–2, 3, 16, 54, 55, 93–4, 161, 240, 242 Eliot, T. S. 67 Elliott, Kamilla 212 novel/film debate 212–13 Elzer, Jan Michiel 125 Emancipation Act 81 empathy 189 historical 88, 220 Empire 29, 66–105, 205–6, 222–5 England 56, 59 epistemology 4, 92 erotica 110 essentialism 130 ethics and collection/exhibition 123–4 and historical fiction 3, 4, 10, 13, 19, 20, 87–9 ethnography 116, 117, 121, 122, 207 Eugenides, Jeffrey Middlesex 41 Evans, Mark Bleak Expectations (radio) 238 Evans, Richard 13–14 evidence 19 see also detective fiction; research evolution 192 exhibition culture 107, 116, 121, 123, 157–9, 161–2, 172–3, 206, 225 exoticism 128 Faber, Michel 11, 13, 14, 17, 23 The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories 12, 14 The Crimson Petal and the White 11–12, 13, 14, 17, 23, 107 fabrication 19, 31, 34 fairy story 143–4 faith 30 see also religion family relations 41–63, 65 Farrell, J. G. The Siege of Krishnapur 68 fatherhood 43 Fausto-Sterling, Anne 121 femininity 73 feminism 28, 104, 119–20, 126

Fielding, Henry 39 film 4, 5, 6, 9, 31, 188–210 First World War 159–61, 229, 235 Fish, Laura Strange Music 29, 68–9, 78, 81–91, 92 Flaubert, Gustave 130 Forster, Margaret Lady’s Maid 98 Foucault, Michel 107, 111 Fowles, John 8 The French Lieutenant’s Woman 8, 154 freak shows 114, 123, 127, 129, 206 Freedman, James 201 French, Dawn 227–8 Freud, Sigmund 34, 43, 63, 64, 65, 181 fort/da game 181 Galton, Francis 128 garden 51, 52 Gardiner, John 213 Garrison, William Lloyd 90 Gaskell, Elizabeth 227, 236 Mary Barton 67 Gay, Penny 5 gaze, the imperial 98, 121–2 politics of 29, 111–12 and reading 111–12, 131, 149-50, 189 scientific 118–20, 121–2, 127 white male 89–91, 121–2, 131–40 gender 8, 38–41, 66, 106–42 dysphoria 64 gender-bending 39 Genette, Gérard 111 genre autobiography 28, 34 diaries and journals 28, 34, 36, 45, 69 dramatic monologue 83 letters 69, 92–3 patchwork texts 28 romance 162 science fiction 191 travel writing 100, 103–4



Index 315

Index

Ghosh, Amitav Ibis Chrestomathy 70 Ibis Trilogy 70 Sea of Poppies 28, 68–9, 70–81, 78, 83, 105 ghosts 84 see also spectrality ghost story 55 Giamatti, Paul 203 Giddings, Robert 211–12, 215, 229 Gilbert and Sullivan Iolanthe 233 Gilmour, Robin 5 Gladstone, W. E. 236 glass, use of as metaphor 4, 30, 143–73 as mirror 37, 56, 143–73 stained glass 163–7 global literature 25, 93 global politics 29 Goncourt brothers 48 Gothic literature 34, 42, 49, 61 Graeme, Kenneth 162 Grand Exposition Universelle 158 Great Exhibition 164 Great Famine (Ireland) 42, 45, 64 Grenville, Kate The Secret River 68 Grenville, Lord 123 Griffin, Susan 110, 127 Gutleben, Christian 6, 7, 18, 55 Hagens, Gunther von 141–2 Haggard, Henry Rider She 182 Hankey, Frederick 131 Hapsburg Empire 206, 208 Haraway, Donna ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ 198 Harding, John Wesley (aka Wesley Stace) 39 Hardy, Thomas The Hand of Ethelberta 187 Tess of the d’Urbervilles 82 harem 94–5, 101–3 Harold, James 20–1 Harper, Francis ‘The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio’ 89

Harris, Jane The Observations 29, 110, 111, 112, 116–20, 125, 130–1, 140 Harris, Lyle Ashton 120 Harwood, John The Ghost Writer 28, 35, 55–63, 65, 168 The Séance 30, 167–72 haunting see also spectrality Hegel, G. W. F. 128 Hensher, Philip The Mulberry Empire 68 heritage culture 8, 28, 213–18, 229, 234, 240 heritage industry 31–2, 213–18, 229–30, 234 heritage tourism 222 hermaphroditism 39, 41, 121 heterosexuality 39, 107 Hewison, Robert 229 historical fiction as a genre 4, 6, 15, 23–4, 155 as romance 68 and women writers 9 historians 10–11, 150–5 historical figures uses of within neoVictorianism 19–20 historiography 11, 30, 66, 70, 150–5 history and imagination 10–11 Victorian 8 Hobbes, Thomas 74 Hobsbawm, Eric 27 Hodgson, John Studholme 131 Holmes, Rachel 120–1, 122 homosexuality 39, 121, 139–40, 185 Hore, Rachel The Glass-Painter’s Daughter 30, 163–7 Houdini, Harry 185, 207, 208 Huet, Nicolas 128 humanism 146 Hume, David 74 Hutcheon, Linda 32, 211, 228, 244 Huxley, Thomas Henry 128 Huyssen, Andreas 225 ‘memory fatigue’ 225–8



316

hybridity bodily 73 cultural and adaptive 216 gendered 39 linguistic 35, 69 see also language and postcolonialism 66–105 and resistance 70–81 spiritual 73 hysteria 33–4, 38–9, 135, 185–6, 208 identity black female 84–86, 121–3 black male 108 community 79 female 29 ideology 77–8 illegitimacy 45 illusion magical 202 optical 38, 198 textual 19, 202 see also magic Illusionist, The (film) see Burger, Neil imagination 64, 84, 93, 100 imperialism 29, 67, 110, 121 see also empire; slavery incest 37, 41, 43, 49–50, 51 indebtedness 25 independence 92 India 28, 66, 68, 78 industrialization 27 inheritance 28, 34, 35, 38, 53, 188 familial 34–65 paternal 53 interculturalism 76, 91 internationalism 25 intersexuality 38 intertextuality 17–18, 38 Ireland 45 Islam 93 Iwanisziw, Susan 121 Jacobs, Harriet Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 89 Jacobus, Mary 106 Jamaica 68, 81–91

James, Henry 2, 9, 20, 55 ‘The Aspern Papers’ 20 The Bostonians 189 The Turn of the Screw 34, 42, 55, 57, 63, 65, 82, 151, 168, 186 TV adaptation 229 What Masie Knew 44 James, M(ontague) R(hodes) 18, 151 James, William 64 Jameson, Frederic 231 nostalgia film 231 Janet, Pierre 64 Jay, Ricky 201 Jefferson, Thomas 124, 128 John, Juliet 214 Johnson, Aaron 201 Johnston, Judith 5 Jones, Lloyd 24 Mister Pip 24–7, 68 Joyce, Simon 9, 144 Kaplan, Cora 4–5, 9, 18, 20, 24, 33–4, 144–5, 224 Keller, Evelyn Fox 106 Khoisan (also Knoekhoe/ Khoikhoi) 114, 116, 121, 122, 124 King, Jeanette 9, 106–7 Kingsmill, Hugh 2–3 Kitchener, Lord 95 Kneale, Matthew English Passengers 68 Kohlke, Marie-Luise 68, 107 Kontou, Tatiana 9, 147, 187 Krueger, Christine 9 Lacan, Jacques 192–3 Language 28, 70, 95, 195 Arabic 70 Bengali 70 bilinguism 74 Chinese 70 English 74–5 etymology 96 experimental 69 Hindu 70 Laskari 70 malapropism 72 miscommunication 72 monolinguism 75



Index 317

Index

Language – continued multilinguism 71, 91 pidgin 70 polyvocalism 73 Urdu 70 Lark Rise to Candleford (TV) 32, 226–7, 242 Laub, Dori 54 laudanum 79 Law, the 24, 71, 73, 126 Leavis, F. R. 3 Lee, Easton 83 Lee, Vernon 168 LeFanu, Sheridan 153 legacy financial 60 Le Goff, Jacques 64, 226–7 lesbianism 107, 121, 181, 185–6, 189 Levine, George 169 Lewis, Frederick Christian ‘Sartjee the Hottentot Venus’ 115 Lewis, John Frederick 96, 100 The Reception 100, 101 The Siesta 102 The Liberty Bell 82 Ligon, Richard True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados 121 Lincoln, Abraham 128 Locke, John 74 Lodge, David Nice Work 16, 237 London 57, 59, 61, 79, 130, 168 London Society of Bookbinders 134 Lothe, Jacob 240 Lowenthal, David 225 The Lustful Turk 95, 138 Macarthur, J. W. S. Notes on an Opium Factory 79 madness 46, 51, 67, 87, 117, 119–20 magic 30–1, 174–210, 211 as metafictional 174–6 and film-making 181 ‘In a Flash’ trick 180 ‘mirror trick’ 201–2 misdirection 175, 176, 179, 186 trick 31 Victorian 178, 180

magic realism 80, 220 Man Booker Prize 24, 68 Mangan, Michael 174, 175, 176 Mandler, Peter 10–11, 13 marginalization 17 market literary and cultural 27, 31, 213 mainstream 31, 213 Markus, Jane 86 marriage 39, 80, 94, 99, 101–2, 118, 125, 126 Martin, Emily 110 Martin, Valerie Mary Reilly 82 Property 83 Martineau, Harriet 100 Marxism 149 Maseko, Zola 120 Massingham, Hugh 230 Mason, Daniel The Piano Tuner 68 master/slave relationship 76–81, 90, 97 matrilineal heritage 28, 41–7, 168 Maudsley, Henry 52 Maxwell, James Clerk 192 Mayhew, Henry London Labour and the London Poor 117 McClintock, Anne 118 McEwan, Ian 24–7 On Chesil Beach 24, 25 Saturday 25, 26–7 McFarlane, Robert 216 medicine 52, 59 medievalism 30, 163–7, 235 Melville, Herman ‘Benito Cereno’ 79 The Encantadas 79 Moby Dick 79 Mendes, Sam 241 memory 28, 33–63, 67, 167 cultural 8, 28, 75 familial 28, 33–63 fatigue 225 traumatic 49, 56 mesmerism 170



318

metafiction 4, 6, 17–18 definition of 31 see also magic metahistory 4, 6, 28 metanarrative 28 metaphor embroidery 93–4, 132 metaphysical 31 Michelet, Jules 13 Mill, John Stuart 94, 245 Millhauser, Steven ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ 31, 176, 184, 201–09 Milnes, Richard Monckton 131, 140 mind games 190 travel 190–201 misogynism 128 modernism 3 modernity 3, 159 Moore, Brian The Great Victorian Collection 32, 213, 220–26, 244 Morris, William 163, 235 Morrison, Toni 88, 124 Beloved 68, 90 ‘re-membering’ 88, 124 Motherhood 41–7, 55 biological 46, 55, 61 spectral 65 Mother–daughter relationship 41–7 Moulton, Charles 86 mourning 28, 33–65, 67, 148 Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management 116 Multilinguism see language Mulvey, Laura 110, 127 Munby, Arthur 118 murder 62, 108, 183, 203 child 108 Musée de L’Homme 116 museology 159, 220, 222 Muséum d’Histoire 116 mutilation genital 110 Mwangi, Ingrid 120

myth Classical 38, 196 Egyptian 93 family 37 foundational 75 origin 174 power of 75 Nalbantian, Suzanne 65 Naldrett, Sally 98 narrative linearity 51 style 28 narrative voice 14–15, 39–40, 187 narrator 15, 38, 40, 92 first-person 40, 69 gendered 38, 83–4 multiple 83 third-person 40, 92–3 unreliable 24 nationalism 92, 103, 104 natural History Museum 127 necromancy 170 necrophilia 132 neo-Edwardianism 156 neo-slave narrative 68 Neo-Victorian Studies 5 neo-Victorianism definition of 5–6, 8–10, 23–4, 244–5 and faux-Victorian 5 and historical fiction 6 and ‘Little Professor’s Rules’ 6–7 and post-Victorian 5, 6, 25 and retro-Victorian 5 neuroscience and memory 33, 35 and reading 1–2 New Historicism 171 New Scientist 1 Newman, John Henry 164 The Dream of Gerontius 165–7 Newtonian physics 193, 195 New Woman 40, 96 Arabic 95–103 Nichols, Grace Fat Black Woman’s Poems 120 Nolan, Christopher The Prestige (film) 31, 176, 178–84, 186, 201, 206, 240



Index 319

Index

Nolan, Jonathan 183 Northern Rock 230 Norton, Edward 201 nostalgia 18, 26, 32, 34, 55, 56, 64, 107, 157, 162, 228, 236 and fetishization 107 Nunn, Trevor 32 nymphomania 121 Oliver Twist (TV adaptation) 216 Onega, Susana 154 opium 68, 76 First Opium War 68, 78 optical illusion 198 orientalism 68, 79, 91–104, 107 Victorian 28, 67, 91–104 orphans 60 Ovid Metamorphoses 37, 38, 40 painting 59–60, 61, 95 Paley, William 194 Palliser, Charles The Quincunx 35, 154 The Unburied 30, 150–6 panopticism 189 paratextuality 110–16 parenthood adoptive 43 biological 43 Park, Susan-Lori Venus 120 parody 108 past 3 function of 3 pastiche 22–3, 64, 108, 150, 173 Patmore, Coventry 164 Pearce, Susan 220 Pearsall, Ronald 147 performativity 50 periodization 8–9 philanthropy 119 photography 15, 95, 118, 159, 168, 217, 234 phrenology 117 physiognomy 117, 130, 136 piracy 77 plagiarism 22 Plath, Sylvia 191

Poe, Edgar Allan ‘Lenore’ 141 poetry 22–3, 38, 82–91 political correctness 6 politics 3, 5, 6 popular culture 39 pornography 29, 32, 95, 108, 121 book trade in 108, 131–40 ethnographic 132 postcolonial 24, 26, 66–105 theory 29, 66–105 Poster, Jem Courting Shadows 30, 150–8 postmodernism 11, 18, 27, 64, 175, 200, 211, 217 poststructuralism 191, 193 pregnancy 46, 83, 118 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 50, 57, 134, 235 Prestige, The (film) see Nolan, Christopher Priest, Christopher The Prestige (novel) 31, 178, 182 Priestly, J. B. An Inspector Calls 209 prostitution 74, 107, 116, 119, 121 Proust, Marcel 18 Pugin, Augustus 163 psychic investigation 168–70 psychoanalysis 28, 195 psychology 40, 46 evolutionary 1 Pullinger, Kate The Mistress of Nothing 29, 68, 82, 91, 99–104 Pushkin, Alexander 130 quantum physics 176, 191, 193–4 queer 39 Qureshi 122, 124 race 29, 66–105 racism 125 scientific 129–30 rape 52–3, 79, 83, 86, 87–8, 90, 110–11, 131 scientific 111, 129



320

readers 2, 4, 11–14, 17–18, 23, 57–8, 88, 105, 114, 173, 176 academic and non-academic 17–18, 228 as observers 111–12, 155 reading 4, 12–14, 57–8, 59, 111–12, 125, 170, 176, 178 real vs. fictional debate 20–2 realism 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 34, 155, 157, 217 reality 58, 146, 194–6 virtual 196, 211 reform social 93–4 religion 30, 72–3, 77, 145–73, 194 and fanaticism 78 repetition historical 43 research 16, 92, 165 responsibility marital 47 moral 47, 79 restoration as metaphor for neoVictorianism 152 Revelations of a Spirit Medium 171 ‘re-vision’ 91–104, 106, 173 rewriting 28, 82 Reynolds, Mary 133 Rhys, Jean 8 Wide Sargasso Sea 8, 67, 82, 83, 91 Richardson, Samuel 40 Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugène 175, 207 romance 55, 162 family 50 Roof, Judith 158 Rose, Steven 33, 35 Rousseau, 131 Rowlandson, Thomas The Pasha 95 Royal Geographic Society 131 Ruskin, John 163, 166–7, 232 Said, Edward 29, 80 Culture & Imperialism 67 Orientalism 92, 96 Sample, Ian 1, 2 Sanders, Julie 16, 17, 21, 22, 24 Saumarez Smith, Charles 159, 167

Savoy Magazine 57 Sawalha, Julia 227 scepticism 30 Schiebinger, Londa 110, 122 Schor, Hilary 171 Schorn, Susan 215 Schreiner, Olive 122 From Man to Man 120 The Story of an African Farm 34 science 29, 30, 62, 106–42, 170 methodologies 119 see also gaze, scientific scientist/s 30 scopic culture 143–5 scopophilia 29, 107, 110–16, 127 scopopornia 128 Scott, Walter 13 Scully, Pamela 120, 129–30 séance 30, 147, 204 Second World War 226 secularism 30, 151–5 Selby, Keith 211–12, 215, 229 Self, Will Dorian 234 self-help 118 Senn, Charlene 110 sensation fiction 18–19, 54 servants 46, 75, 98–9, 116–20, 188 relationship with mistress 117–20, 188 Setterfield, Diane 65 The Thirteenth Tale 28, 35, 36, 47–55, 56, 64, 176, 177, 178 Sewell, Rufus 203 sex 8, 29, 106–42 and exploitation 119 sexology 64, 121, 141 sexuality 24, 40 and libertinism 108 and repression 23 Shafts 108 Shakespeare, William 219 Hamlet 192 Shaw, George Bernard ‘The Denshawai Horror’ 95 ‘Preface for Politicians’ 95 Shelley, Mary 130 Frankenstein 34 Shuttleworth, Sally 106



Index 321

Index

sibling relationships 43, 48–50, 51, 63 and rivalry 35, 59 Sigel, Lisa 110, 131–2, 140 sisterhood 52, 60, 178 slavery 29, 69, 77, 80–1, 122, 123 apprenticeship system 81 sexual 81–91, 122 Smith, Zadie 2, 3, 4 Society for Psychical Research 171 Soo, Chung Ling 182, 206 Sorensen, Colin 214 Soueif, Ahdaf The Map of Love 28–9, 68–9, 78, 91–105 Mezzaterra 96 South Africa 111, 116, 122, 130 South Kensington Museum (Victoria and Albert Museum) 157 spectrality 24, 25, 30, 55–63, 143–73 specularity 30 speech see voice Spiller, Hortense 122 and pornotropic 122 spiritualism 9, 30, 60, 156–72, 181, 184, 185–6, 204 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 29, 66–7, 69, 80, 86–7, 98 Stace, Wesley Misfortune 28, 35, 37–41, 48, 51, 57, 64 Stam, Robert 233 Starling, Belinda The Journal of Dora Damage 29, 108, 109, 110, 131–40 stereotype 95 steatopygia 121 Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy 40 Stevenson, Robert Louis Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 49, 82 Stone, Marjorie 89–90 Stoker, Bram Dracula 1, 34, 172 storytelling 27, 36–7, 43, 44, 48, 58–60, 149, 188 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin 89

Strachey, Lytton 21 subaltern/ity 28, 29, 66, 67–105, 139, 189 see also voice subjectivity 29, 224–5 Summerscale, Kate The Suspicions of Mr Whicher 108 supernatural 59 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 131 tattoos 135 Taylor, D. J. 16 Kept: A Victorian Mystery 16–19, 22, 23, 40 Taylor, Harriet 94 Taylor, Henry 123 taxidermy 122 technology 76, 208, 211, 214–15 television 211 see also adaptation Tennant, Emma Tess 82 Two Women of London 82 Tennyson, Alfred 42, 136 Tesla, Nikola 180 Thackeray, William Makepeace 18 Vanity Fair 40, 120 thanatica 110 Thatcher, Margaret 5, 237 The 1900 House (TV series) 226 The Edwardian Country House (TV series) 226 theatre 31 theme park culture 213–18 Thierry, Jacques-Nicolas-Augustin 13 Thomas, Ronald 231–2 Thomas, Scarlett The End of Mr Y 31, 176, 190–201, 210, 221 Thompson, Flora 226, 227, 236 Thompson, James 230 Tiedemann, Frederick 128, 129 time travel 195 Tonkin, Boyd 239 Toryism 132 Tractarianism 151 transculturalism 91–104 transgression 188 sexual 39, 107



322

translation 91 transvestism 39, 107 trauma 28, 36–65, 67, 86–8 domestic and familial 29, 36–65 historical 29, 87 theories of 28 and witnessing 37, 47–55, 63, 64, 87, 88 Tremain, Rose The Colour 68 trickery 170–1 see also magic Trollope, Anthony 216, 230, 237 Troyanov, Illiya The Collector of Worlds 68 Turner, J. W. M. 21–2 Turkey 64 twins 48, 176–8 Uncanny, the 42, 55, 63, 194 utopianism 190 ventriloquism 22–3, 86, 147, 200 Vickers, Salley Mr Golightly’s Holiday 200 Victoria, Queen 8, 79 Victorian defining the 3–4, 21 novel 2, 4, 12, 17, 27, 93–4, 155, 171 readers 1, 2, 12 sexuality 107 stereotypical 6–8, 47 values 5, 40 Victorian Farm (TV series) 226 Victorian fiction 1–3 as precursor text 16–17, 35, 155 Victorian Studies 32 Victoriana 17, 32, 33, 213, 222–8 violence 51, 77, 131 see also rape voice 70, 104 literary 97 of the subaltern 29, 97–9, 104 Voigts-Virchow, Eckhart 212–13 Voltaire 128 voyeurism 114, 116

Walker, Alice The Color Purple 91 Walker, Margaret Jubilee 68 Wallace, Diana 9 Walpole, Horace The Castle of Otranto 49 Waters, Catherine 5 Waters, Sarah 8, 19, 31, 176 adaptations of novels for TV 31–2, 107, 242–4 Affinity 19, 31, 149–50, 173, 176, 181, 184–90, 190, 210, 242, 243 Fingersmith 4, 139, 242 The Little Stranger 65 Tipping the Velvet 108, 242, 243 Waugh, Patricia 31, 174 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 233 The Woman in White 32, 232–3 Webber, Julian Lloyd 233 Wicomb, Zoe 124 David’s Story 120 widowhood 72, 80 Widowson, Peter 11 Wilde, James Plaisted 131 Wilde, Oscar 19, 136, 217–19, 233–5 Williams, Raymond 3 Wilson, A. N. A Jealous Ghost 82 Wilson, James 22 The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense 21–2 Wolfreys, Julian 146–8, 172 Womack, Kenneth 10 women’s rights 101–4, 106–7 women’s writing 9, 29, 36–7, 41–8, 57–9, 65, 91, 119–20 Wood, Victoria 227 Woolf, Virginia 2, 16, 146 Orlando 40 To the Lighthouse 16 Wordsworth, Dorothy 132 writing, acts of 36, 41, 44, 49, 56–7, 59, 65, 91, 119, 125–7 Wynne, Catherine 100 Yellow Book 57

Wachowski, Andy and Larry The Matrix 198

Žižek, Slavoj 146



Index 323

Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009

Excavating Victorians (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

The Villainous Victorians

Excavating Victorians

The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians

The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians

Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce

Energy In The 21st Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Warfare in the Eighteenth Century

Europe in the Sixteenth Century

Energy In The 21st Century

Poland in the Twentieth Century

Europe in the Sixteenth Century

Warfare in the Seventeenth Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Poland in the 20th Century

Imperialism in the Twentieth Century

EPR in the 21st Century

Physics in the nineteenth century

Hope in the 21st Century

Energy In The 21st Century

Energy in the 21st Century

Citizenship in the 21st Century

Energy in the 21st century

England in the Fifteenth Century

Greece in the Twentieth Century

Islam in the 21st Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009

Excavating Victorians (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

The Villainous Victorians

Excavating Victorians

The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians

The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians

Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce

Energy In The 21st Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Warfare in the Eighteenth Century

Europe in the Sixteenth Century

Energy In The 21st Century

Poland in the Twentieth Century

Europe in the Sixteenth Century

Warfare in the Seventeenth Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Poland in the 20th Century

Imperialism in the Twentieth Century

EPR in the 21st Century

Physics in the nineteenth century

Hope in the 21st Century

Energy In The 21st Century

Energy in the 21st Century

Citizenship in the 21st Century

Energy in the 21st century

England in the Fifteenth Century

Greece in the Twentieth Century

Islam in the 21st Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

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