Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations 2013036118, 9780415708302, 9781315886107

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Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture

Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations provides a comprehensive reflection of the processes of canonisation, (un)pleasurable consumption and the emerging predominance of topics and theoretical concerns in neo-Victorianism. The revisitations of the Victorian in contemporary culture document an unbroken fascination with the stories, histories, technologies and achievements, as well as the injustices and atrocities, of the nineteenth century. They also reveal that, in many ways, contemporary identities are constructed through a Victorian mirror image fabricated by the desires, imaginings and critical interests of the present. Providing analyses of current negotiations of nineteenth-century texts, discourses and traumas, this volume explores the contemporary commodification and nostalgic recreation of the past. It brings together critical perspectives of experts in the fields of Victorian literature and culture, contemporary literature, and neo-Victorianism, with contributions by leading scholars in the field including Rosario Arias, Cora Kaplan, Elizabeth Ho, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Sally Shuttleworth. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture interrogates current fashions in neo-Victorianism and their ideological leanings, the resurrection of cultural icons, and the reasons behind our relationship with and immersion in Victorian culture. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker is a lecturer in English literature and culture at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. She is assistant editor of Neo-Victorian Studies and has co-edited a special volume on Spectacles and Things. Susanne Gruss is a lecturer in English literature and culture at FAU ErlangenNürnberg, Germany. She specialises in contemporary English literature and culture as well as in early modern drama. She serves as assistant editor of Neo-Victorian Studies.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

1 Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our Feverish Contact’ Allan Conrad Christensen 2 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Jean Fernandez 3 Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry F. Elizabeth Gray 4 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era Lara Baker Whelan 5 Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road American Mobilities Susan L. Roberson 6 Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home Caroline Hellman 7 The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature Josephine Guy and Ian Small 8 Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction Novel Ethics Rachel Hollander

9 Science and Religion in NeoVictorian Novels Eye of the Ichthyosaur John Glendening 10 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture Edited by Katharina Boehm, Anna Farkas, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein 11 A Female Poetics of Empire From Eliot to Woolf Julia Kuehn 12 Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture Immersions and Revisitations Edited by Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture Immersions and Revisitations Edited by Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Neo-Victorian literature and culture : immersions and revisitations / edited by Nadine Boehm-Schnitker, Susanne Gruss.—First edition. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in nineteenth century literature ; 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—21st century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. English literature— 19th century—Influence. 4. Values in literature. 5. Culture in literature. 6. History in literature. 7. Literature and society—Great Britain. 8. Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837–1901. I. Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, 1975– editor of compilation. II. Gruss, Susanne, 1976– editor of compilation. PR481.N46 2014 820.9'0092—dc23 2013036118

ISBN13: 978-0-415-70830-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-1-315-88610-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Fashioning the Neo-Victorian—Neo-Victorian Fashions

vii

1

NADINE BOEHM-SCHNITKER AND SUSANNE GRUSS

Commodifying the Past: Canonisation, Consumption, Pleasure 1

Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal

21

MARIE-LUISE KOHLKE

2

Participatory Desires: On Metalepsis, Immersion and the Re-Plotting of the Victorian

38

ROSA KARL

3

Nostalgia and Material Culture: Present-ing the Past in Cranford

51

ANNE ENDERWITZ AND DORIS FELDMANN

Resurrecting Cultural Icons: Spectral Returns 4

‘Eminent Victorians’ and Neo-Victorian Fictional Biography

67

LENA STEVEKER

5

Bio-Fiction: Neo-Victorian Revisions of Evolution and Genetics ECKART VOIGTS

79

vi Contents 6

Neo-Victorian Gay Fictions: A Critique of Stereotyping and Self-Reflexivity

93

NADINE BOEHM-SCHNITKER

Traces, Traumas and Retrospective Anxieties 7

Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction

111

ROSARIO ARIAS

8

Spectres of the Past: Reading the Phantom of Family Trauma in Neo-Victorian Fiction

123

SUSANNE GRUSS

9

Narratives of Sexual Trauma in Contemporary Adaptations of The Woman in White

137

JESSICA COX

Refashioning (Neo-)Victorian Discourses 10 The Legacy of Medical Sensationalism in The Crimson Petal and the White and The Dress Lodger

153

CHRISTY RIEGER

11 The Neo-Victorian-at-Sea: Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian

165

ELIZABETH HO

12 From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond: Fearful Symmetries

179

SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

Coda: The Firm of Charles and Charles—Authorship, Science and Neo-Victorian Masculinities

193

CORA KAPLAN

Contributors Bibliography Index

205 209 227

Acknowledgements

In April 2010, the editors of this volume organised a conference on ‘Fashioning the Neo-Victorian: Iterations of the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Literature and Culture’ (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany). Most of the chapters in this book are much-extended versions of papers held at this conference, and we are thankful to our contributors for their cooperation and patience during the production process of this book. The other speakers at the conference deserve many thanks for making it such a stimulating and thought-provoking event: Dietmar Böhnke, Kim Brindle, Christine Ferguson, Ann Heilmann, Theresa Jamieson, Nadine Muller, Caterina Novák, Claire O’Callaghan, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Patricia Pulham and Anca-Raluca Radu. We are especially grateful to Anne Enderwitz as co-organiser of the conference, the speakers of our graduate forum and our student helpers, who provided us with organisational and technical support—and much-needed refreshments. The conference was generously funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Vinzl-Foundation and the Office for Gender and Diversity, and supported by Doris Feldmann and Rudolf Freiburg. We would like to extend our thanks to the three anonymous readers for Routledge, whose comments have helped us improve the consistency of this volume, and to Liz Levine, Nancy Chen and Joshua Wells at Routledge, who have patiently seen this book through the production process. Elizabeth Ho’s chapter ‘The Neo-Victorian-at-Sea: Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian’ is a revised version of a chapter from her monograph Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (Continuum 2012). It is reprinted here with kind permission of the publisher.

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Introduction Fashioning the Neo-Victorian— Neo-Victorian Fashions Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

‘Mr Hyde, Dorian Gray, Dracula . . . we are drowning in fiction!’ (Bourland 2010, 86), exclaims James Trelawney, the hero of Fabrice Bourland’s crime novel The Baker Street Phantom (2008), when his partner, Andrew Singleton, tries to explain that these beloved Victorian literary villains have made a ghostly re-entry into the 1930s and are now killing people in the streets of London. Unlike the bloodthirsty revenants of Bourland’s novel, which are eventually contained by his supernatural crime investigators, the infusion of contemporary literature with the Victorian past is no longer readily containable.1 The same is true for the material culture that surrounds us—as Cora Kaplan has aptly pointed out, ‘the fascination with things Victorian has been a British postwar vogue that shows no signs of exhaustion’ (2007, 2)—as well as for arts and aesthetics, which have widely appropriated the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that the Guildhall Gallery in London has recently covered in its exhibition Victoriana: The Art of Revival (2013).2 In 2000, John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff critically evaluated the position of the nineteenth century as the ‘historical “other”’ (xv) of contemporary culture and highlighted the fact that our historical difference from the Victorian Age not only allows us a more distanced evaluation of the Victorians, but that contemporary concerns, in their turn, influence the answers the past can yield in the fi rst place (xiv). More than ten years later, neo-Victorianism has become what we would like to call the ‘neo-Victorian project’, an ongoing cultural and academic venture to analyse the manifold overlaps and intersections, the continuities and the breaches between ‘us’ and ‘them’.3 As an increasingly common denominator for artefacts re-iterating Victorian culture, as well as an academic field exploring the historically specific uses the Victorian Age is put to, the neoVictorian project looks into the desires and contexts that tinge and shape the perspectives of our contemporary construction of memory; moreover, it explores the changing purposes with which we fashion the past—and with it, ourselves. The process of fashioning the neo-Victorian, that is, crucially entails a self-fashioning, which implies that the phenomenon of neo-Victorianism can be understood in the context of concerns regarding twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century identity politics. Neo-Victorian texts as

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Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

cultural doppelgängers of the Victorian Age both mimic and challenge the discourses of the nineteenth century. Even though postmodernity remains a helpful reference point for academia, writers and artists,4 neo-Victorianism has moved beyond postmodern concerns such as intertextuality, self-reflexivity or metafiction. Despite postmodernity’s ongoing relevance, neo-Victorianism calls for newly calibrated tools of analysis which enable us to approach it as a symptom of a contemporary literature and culture which more strongly integrates questions of ethics, reconsiders the author, allows the referent to become visible again behind the veil of material signifiers (Schabert 2006, 412–17), and plays at and with practices of immersion. With this volume, we suggest that, at a moment when the development of the field is still gathering momentum, 5 it is time to evaluate the methods and approaches that have already come to characterise the neo-Victorian project.

CANONISATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS In the academic field, one can hitherto diagnose a persistent dominance of the celebration of self-reflexivity or the knowledgeable revisitation of the Victorian in analyses of neo-Victorian returns. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, for instance, argue that the self-reflexivity of neo-Victorian literature and criticism and their relation to cultural memory allow for a working-through of past traumas (Kohlke 2008a, 7; Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, passim). Similarly, Kaplan emphasises the fact that neo-Victorian literature ‘includes the self-conscious rewriting of historical narratives to highlight the suppressed histories of gender and sexuality, race and empire, as well as challenges to the conventional understandings of the historical itself’ (2007, 3). And, in a comparable gesture of defi nition, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn understand neo-Victorianism as strongly emphasising the metafictional strategies and self-reflexivity of the discipline: ‘To be part of the neo-Victorianism we discuss in this book’, they point out, texts ‘must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery, and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (2010, 4). By evaluating the defi nitions hitherto gaining authority in the field, one can clearly discern a split between ‘strong’ and therefore more specific defi nitions which make self-reflexivity (or the ‘imaginative re-engagement with the period’, as Heilmann and Llewellyn put it, 6) a conditio sine qua non of the neo-Victorian reference to the nineteenth century, and ‘soft’ defi nitions which are more inclusive. Kohlke, for example, argues for ‘a suitably elastic and more rather than less responsive term to encompass the neo-Victorian’s ongoing shape-shifting’ (this volume, 27), thus suggesting a sufficiently flexible interpretation of the ‘neo-Victorian’ which can address the fact that the neo-Victorian project is still in the process of disciplinary differentiation and comprises a larger body of primary sources. The latter is

Introduction

3

particularly important in order not to exclude the neo-Victorian potential of media which prove immersive, affective or nostalgic in their engagement with the nineteenth century. We argue that cultural products appealing to the emotions, the senses, or a desire to re-inhabit the past should not be marginalised prematurely in the current process of canonisation as they may turn out to be indicators of the particular cultural and socio-historical reasons why the Victorian age continues to appeal to contemporary audiences. The same is true for neo-Victorian art, which tends to be diverse and has not yet been defi ned conclusively. As Sonia Solicari has highlighted, ‘[t]here is neither a handy manifesto nor a connected group of artists championing a particular aesthetic; rather Victoriana is the crossroads at which many different paths of inspiration coincide to produce works that speak about our negotiation of old and new, about who we are and where we come from’ (2013, 182)—a strict, prescriptive definition of neo-Victorianism would therefore possibly exclude texts from neo-Victorian scrutiny that are well worth analysing. In the face of a ‘sensory turn’ (Howes 2004, xii) in Victorian as well as in neo-Victorian studies (see Colella 2010; Arias in this volume), a more inclusive definition proves advantageous in order to delineate the burgeoning field of neo-Victorianism as descriptively as possible, and Kohlke’s programmatic opening chapter to this collection makes a strong point for such an approach. Within neo-Victorianism as an academic discipline, the plea for a clearcut defi nition of the field is symptomatic of practices of canonisation. In that context, the widely established critical emphasis on self-reflexivity provides a specific dividing line clearly differentiating the neo-Victorian from other historical fiction set in the nineteenth century, thus fulfilling an important function in the further institutionalisation of the neo-Victorian as an ‘-ism’. This attempt at defi ning the field succinctly may, as we have already pointed out, include some academic pitfalls, for example the narrowing down of the text base supporting the defi nition in the fi rst place. Thus, it implicitly reproduces the debate about high and low culture6 by installing the self-reflexive, critical quality of media as a criterion of value. This debate has recently gained momentum with the surprising success of mash-up novels like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), which, as the generic designation already betrays, combine (or ‘mash up’) longish quotations and the general plot of beloved classics with blood, gore and zombies (or other monsters).7 Literary critics have on the whole ignored the phenomenon or derided the texts as unoriginal (they do, after all, merely copy from classics),8 but, as Eckart Voigts reminds us, ‘profundity and depth of meaning is not what one seeks in this campy celebration of popular genres. One may remind the “purists”, however, that it is only the textual promiscuity of the undead zombies of Jane Austen’s creations and the performative urge of participatory culture that will generate new life from dead texts’ (2012, 51). Besides the question of exclusivity vs. inclusivity (of neo-Victorian literature and culture), this discussion entails

4

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

an epistemological conundrum in that it implicitly posits the contemporary subject as superior to the past, as it is allegedly able to address and even to redeem socio-cultural exclusions of the Victorian era (at least in an imaginary realm). This volume attempts to address such implied evaluations at a moment in the neo-Victorian project when processes of canonisation have not only begun to fossilise the body of works and media to be addressed under the heading of neo-Victorianism but also some critical approaches, theories and predominant concerns. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations advocates the application of the same self-reflexivity that critics have attested to the texts under scrutiny to the current academic processes of canonisation: In doing so, we can critique constructions of what is prototypically neo-Victorian, what is situated at its margins and what cannot wholly figure under this term. In this context, ‘fashioning’ the neo-Victorian—as the title of this introduction has it—has a double meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the shaping of the neo-Victorian, thus building on the broad range of work established so far; on the other, it also alludes to the fact that neo-Victorianism has already become something of a fashion both in academic institutions and on the market. We need to investigate the various literary, cultural and theoretical attempts at containing, defi ning and delimiting the neo-Victorian, and this volume aims to establish possible ways of understanding the cultural parallels between the Victorians and our contemporary age; at the same time, it wants to remain equally ‘sensitive to disjunction as to recurrence’ (Clayton 2003, 9).9

REVISITING THE VICTORIANS Neo-Victorianism is concerned with repetitions and reiterations of that which is considered Victorian, and many of the theoretical approaches to the field (trauma studies, haunting, spectrality and the trace or psychoanalytical notions of nostalgia) consequently contain a notion of return or revisitation. Repetitions, however, tend to ontologise that which they repeat and thus foreclose a clear perspective on that which has not yet been dealt with. In History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (2010), Kate Mitchell draws attention to a similarly calibrated historical return when she argues that ‘[t]hese fictions [ . . . ] explore both our continuity with, and our difference from, our Victorian forebears, and formulate our relationship to the period as a series of repetitions which produce both the shock of recognition and the fright of estrangement’ (177). She concludes by stating that the novels she deals with ‘return to Victorian vocabularies of history, memory and loss in order to recast historical inquiry as desire’ (182), and thus offers a very plausible reason for the allure of our contemporary return to the nineteenth century. We take this insight as one of our starting points: many of the contributions

Introduction

5

in this volume deal with forms of a desire for repetition (of generic forms, of figures of authority, of plots) which seem to be triggered by this dual relationship of continuity and difference (or revisitation) between ‘then’ and ‘now’. We suggest that neo-Victorian negotiations of historical difference are culturally operative in today’s self-fashionings and identity constructions as the Victorian age, due to its historical proximity and its medial, technological, political or cultural after-effects in the twenty-fi rst century, serves like no other era as an imaginary point of origin and provides a sense of permanence in a globalised society subject to changes of increasing pace, a point that is supported by Kate Flint when she notes that the period ‘is still contiguous [ . . . ] with the formation of our own world and in the development, which it witnessed, of a number of different modernities’ (2005, 231). The argument that the nineteenth century proves particularly suitable for the creation (or projection) of our own myths of origin is seminally highlighted by Kucich and Sadoff (2000). Focusing on academic points of departure, they conclude that [t]he period has been marked by major critical texts that claim to have found in the nineteenth century the origins of contemporary consumerism (Baudrillard), sexual science (Foucault), gay culture (Sedgwick et al.), and gender identity (Gilbert and Gubar, Showalter, Armstrong). [ . . . ] Rewritings of Victorian culture have flourished, we believe, because the postmodern fetishizes notions of cultural emergence, and because the nineteenth century provides multiple eligible sites for theorizing such emergence. (xiii–xiv, xv) Apart from this academic family resemblance, the neo-Victorian project arguably relies even more fundamentally on the nineteenth century to underscore contemporary identity politics. It remains to be shown in what ways the neo-Victorian project may play a part in corroborating defi nitions of Britishness after Empire, after Devolution, and in a post-9/11 society of control, in which national communities give way to global communities.10 Fully subscribing to the notion that the neo-Victorian is ‘more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth century’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 4), we propose that this ‘more’ does not only entail self-reflexivity, but also comprises immersive strategies. Due to the contiguous relationship between the Victorians and us, the neo-Victorian project lends itself particularly well to negotiate ‘who we are today’, and we contend that, consequently, neo-Victorianism should openly survey the manifold strategies catering to today’s identity politics. It would hence be defi ned by its particular way of revisiting the nineteenth-century past in order to (co-)articulate today’s concerns. This, in turn, is also reflected in the methodical and theoretical approaches of choice. Far from any anxiety of influence as devised by Harold Bloom, the Victorian is often appropriated to reveal a mirroring relationship between then

6

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

and now. Symptomatically, psychoanalytic theory looms large in neo-Victorian studies—our relationship to the nineteenth century is not just one of historical distance and fascination, it is also essentially psychological. Sadoff concurs with this evaluation when she explains: Psychoanalytic theory, itself linked to the historical emergence of trauma and theories of hysteria, among other conditions, may help us rethink the concepts of oddity, achronicity, and nostalgia with the tools of Freudian analysis: repetition compulsion, the return of the repressed, and the deferred action that precipitates mimetic or anti-mimetic splitting, and identification. Adding postcolonial notions to the mix leavens trauma theory into the cultural study of nation, narration, empire, and colonisation. (2010, 166) With this latter observation, she singles out another relevant ingredient of the neo-Victorian theoretical cocktail: postcolonialism (see Ho 2012). This approach not only addresses a specifically British historical trauma, it also provides further concepts of analysis such as stereotyping, mimicry or Orientalism.11 Besides, with the return of the repressed, Sadoff implicitly alludes to the historical situation of the neo-Victorian—the Victorian age, so forcefully rejected during high modernism, returns in the postmodern and post-postmodern age. Our retrospective view of the past is never a disinterested or ‘objective’ perspective, and despite our theoretically aware self-monitoring, we sometimes unwittingly retrace Victorian steps. Evolutionary theory might serve as an example for this: In his poem ‘Heredity’ (c. 1900), Thomas Hardy eerily concocts evolutionary theory and cultural memory. Like a parasite, Hardy’s ‘family face’ (1975, 434) outlives its hosts, fashioning them in its phenotypical mould without being affected in its turn. Today, the poem can be transferred to the context of memes, which, as cultural transmitters of ideas, elucidate the quasi-genetic replication of culture. Kaplan produces a similar argument when she uses Freud’s notion of the ‘“mnemic symbol”, a memorial or narrative that embodies and elicits a buried psychic conflict which cannot be resolved at present’ (2007, 7), again connecting memory work and psychoanalysis. The current craze for the cultural re-iteration of, say, the lives of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel as well as their insights into processes of evolution and heredity, bears witness to the continued relevance of this discourse.12 In neo-Victorianism, evolution, so groundbreakingly introduced during the Victorian age, can be understood as a powerful trope which serves to incorporate British society today into the ‘development thesis’, which gained discursive power to explain descent, family resemblance and the historicity of life. When it comes to its nineteenth-century legacy, contemporary Britain still grapples with its colonial past, lives in an environment shaped by Victorian (social) architecture and is far from free of Victorian value systems and gender hierarchies. At the same time, these legacies are often imaginatively

Introduction

7

dealt with in the very media invented or gaining dominance during the nineteenth century, such as the novel, photography or film. The process of adaptation—which combines biological and cultural developments in its very term—so central to neo-Victorian texts (and their reception), ties in with the connection between memory, evolution and psychology outlined above: Adaptation is a fundamental part of neo-Victorianism as a concept because all engagements with the Victorian in contemporary culture that fulfi l the metatextual and metacritical requirements [ . . . ] are necessarily adaptations or appropriations [ . . . ]. Adaptation is by its nature an evolving form, and one which we have inherited from the nineteenth century. (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 244) Drawing on evolutionary logic, Linda Hutcheon argues in A Theory of Adaptation (2006) that some ‘stories have great fitness through survival (persistence in a culture) or reproduction (numbers of adaptations)’ (32). She envisages adaptation as ‘repetition without replication, bringing together the comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty’ (173). These arguments illustrate the intricate web of interdependencies between ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘them’ and ‘us’. As a cultural practice, (neo-Victorian) adaptations fashion our cultural memory, create cultural value in confi rming the status of canonised works, document the ‘hereditary’ transmission of cultural content and our self-fashioning in the image of the past; last but not least, they provide versions of (marketable) authenticity for our consumption, which is often powered by desire, pleasure, and a nostalgic longing for an immersion into this past. As we have highlighted elsewhere, neo-Victorianism ‘provokes, appeals to and plays with contemporary desires, for example the desire on the part of readers/consumers to know and appropriate the past’ (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2011, 11). For this very reason, self-reflexivity should not be paramount in any defi nition of neo-Victorianism as it forestalls the analysis of immersive practices of reception and consumption, which may turn out to be equally defi ning features of the neo-Victorian project. A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) demonstrates the potential fallacies of such reiterations of the Victorian past when her twentieth-century scholars Roland and Maud, retracing their Victorian precursors’ steps, deem themselves completely independent from and uninfluenced by them. On their biographical treasure hunt, Roland suggests to Maud that they should free themselves for a while from their determination by the Victorians: ‘There’s a place on the map called the Boggle Hole. It’s a nice word—I wondered— perhaps we could take a day off from them, get out of their story, go and look at something for ourselves. There’s no Boggle Hole in Cropper or the Ash Letters—Just not to be caught up in anything?’ (Byatt 2009, 268). While considering themselves free from the Victorians’ plots, the two do exactly what Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte did a century previously,

8

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

which is revealed by a reprise of Roland’s utterance. Roland’s suggestion is answered by Randolph’s thoughts: ‘He remembered most, when it was over, when time had run out, a day they had spent in a place called Boggle Hole, where they had gone because they liked the word’ (286). In neo-Victorian studies, we sometimes equally retrace Victorian steps without realising it, and Victorian literary theory may serve as an example of such an unwitting replication. Tying in with Louisa Hadley’s emphasis on the special appeal of narrativity in neo-Victorianism (2010, 13), it is the theory of the novel, but also more general cultural debates of the nineteenth century that reverberate in neo-Victorianism. In the current process of neo-Victorian canonisation, the academic pre-occupation with distinctions between high and low culture does not only retrace one of the central debates of postmodernism, but can be seen to mirror the mid-Victorian debate on culture and civilisation as envisaged by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869). We would like to caution against the ideological charges such reiterations might entail. One of the achievements of postmodern criticism was to do away with these distinctions, and to enable a descriptive approach to all levels of literature. As Sally Shuttleworth observes in this volume, in ‘the looser arena of what is now most commonly termed neo-Victorian fiction, the presiding genius seems less George Eliot and more Wilkie Collins (with an added generous measure of sex)’ (182), thus revealing the historically specific appeal and re-invention of the sensational aspects of the Victorian on the one hand, but also the concomitant evaluations, on the other. From our point of view, the return of the sensation novel and the titillation of the senses that is so characteristic of it should not be lamented, but analysed—lest we reiterate the late Victorian dread of teleological decline and degeneration. We would like to complement the exclusionary logic that accompanies processes of canonisation and the demarcation lines of defi nitions in the sense of an either/or logic with one of both/and which emphasises the ‘interplay between immersion and self-reflexivity’ (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2011, 15) instead of opting for one or the other. The essays in Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, in their turn, shed light on the co-presence of these two tendencies and put well-established as well as innovative means of analysis to the test in order to further develop the neo-Victorian methodological tool kit.

CONTRIBUTIONS The four parts that make up this volume take up and complement the concerns that have dominated neo-Victorianism so far, while at the same time setting out to question them. Part I, ‘Commodifying the Past: Canonisation, Consumption, Pleasure’, sums up the canonisation of neo-Victorianism in recent years, and explores our ongoing fascination with and urge to revisit anything Victorian. The articles in this part make use of the concepts of

Introduction

9

immersion and nostalgia and reflect on the aspect of repetition entailed in these notions. They extend the critical approaches to the neo-Victorian delineated above by investigating the pleasurable and playful appeal of neo-Victorian products as well as the pitfalls of our contemporary negotiations of the Victorian past. Neo-Victorian texts (used in the broadest sense of the word), these articles argue, allow consumers to immerse themselves into a twenty-fi rst-century version of the period, based on a light-handed— and often nostalgic—recognition and disavowal of a fetishisation of the past. In her programmatic introductory article ‘Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal’, MarieLuise Kohlke opts for a broad defi nition of neo-Victorianism that mirrors the objectives of this introduction, draws attention to processes of canonisation in the field and points out that our (academic) engagement with the Victorian via the neo-Victorian is, at least at the moment, characterised by a tendency to ironically distance ourselves from the nineteenth century while, at the same time, emphasising its attractions. Using Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000) and Sarah Waters’s Victorian trio (Tipping the Velvet, 1998; Affi nity, 1999; and Fingersmith, 2002) as examples, Kohlke calls attention to the complicated (and sometimes problematic) processes of adaptation which distinguish neo-Victorian fiction from postmodern historiographic metafiction. Kohlke maintains that adaptation— and the obsessive repetition of adaptation that marks many neo-Victorian texts—can also be seen in the context of trauma writing (e.g. about the painful heritage of British colonialism), a topic that is picked up by several articles in this volume as a dominant concern of the neo-Victorian project. Kohlke’s article warns that neo-Victorianism has already started to develop a canon that seems to replicate conservative ideas of ‘highbrow’ vs. ‘lowbrow’ literature, and puts forth the need to re-evaluate our critical preconceptions about ‘critical mass’ or ‘critical value’, on the one hand, and the necessity to expand the neo-Victorian canon, on the other. Rosa Karl takes her cue from another aspect brought up by Kohlke: ‘Participatory Desires: On Metalepsis, Immersion and the Re-Plotting of the Victorians’ analyses affective ways of consumption, the ‘anxiety of affect’ that still characterises much literary criticism, and readerly immersion into the literary text—a decidedly pleasurable approach to the consumption of neoVictorian texts that is illustrated with a reading of Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001). Karl’s article strengthens the conviction within literary and cultural studies that emotional ways of cultural reception need to be further elaborated after a longstanding neglect in the context of (post-)structuralisms. Via her engagement with Fforde, she also points to an important precondition of our consumption of neo-Victorian texts: the Victorian (or the Victorian canon, to be precise) ‘is already a significant part of our personal narratives’ (48). The next contribution, by Anne Enderwitz and Doris Feldmann, extends Karl’s interest in the affective element into visual culture. Whereas Karl focuses on the presence of the Victorian in our (affective)

10

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

immersion into the neo-Victorian text, ‘Nostalgia and Material Culture: Present-ing the Past in Cranford’ highlights nostalgia as another approach the neo-Victorian project invites. Enderwitz and Feldmann use Cranford (BBC, 2007) to illustrate how far the nostalgic mode, ‘characterised by a longing for an irrecoverable past’ (51), is complemented and completed by a fascination with the material culture of the nineteenth century. They pinpoint the discomfort nostalgia (specifically in Fredric Jameson’s use of the term) seems to raise in neo-Victorian scholars. The authors agree with Karl that the affect involved in the neo-Victorian project should be understood as ‘an instigation for research’ (48), and suggest a re-orientation of the notion of nostalgia which takes psychoanalysis and material culture into account. With Cranford, they also demonstrate how neo-Victorianism revisits and refi nes Victorian concerns—the series, they point out, reinterprets ‘a text which itself performs a nostalgic longing for a pre-Victorian past as well as a fascination with objects of everyday life’ (51). The articles in Part II, ‘Resurrecting Cultural Icons: Spectral Returns’, pick up the idea of repetition and revisitation in differentiated discussions of the figure of the (Victorian) author: they focus on characters who brazenly defy Roland Barthes’s by now stereotypical postmodern axiom of the ‘death of the author’ and necessitate a renewed investigation of contemporary author functions in the context of what Kaplan has termed ‘biographilia’ (2007, 37–84). Implied in the figure of repetition, the return of the author— and of authority?—is symptomatic of our contemporary involvement with the past, as authority is, once again, conferred upon writers or scientists. Questioning the essentialisation of author figures as authoritative voices from the past as well as of past literary value is part and parcel of many contemporary re-engagements with the nineteenth century. The resurrection of iconic Victorians can also be understood as a logical consequence of the past’s commodification: as the recent centenaries and anniversaries prove (most notably Darwin’s bicentenary in 2009 or the Dickens year in 2012), cultural icons are a means to reduce complexity; they are easily recognisable as brands, they are marketable, and they are profitable for the tourist and the culture industry alike. In ‘“Eminent Victorians” and Neo-Victorian Fictional Biography’, Lena Steveker introduces Darwin as an ‘author-scientist’ (and neo-Victorian celebrity) and discusses fictions that make ‘eminent Victorian authors’ their (often contradictory) heroes. With her readings of Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009) and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008)—fictionalisations or ‘biofictions’ of Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens, respectively—Steveker makes clear that neo-Victorian fictional biographies not only (re)create their subjects’ lives in relation to a specific historical moment, but also highlight what remained marginalised in the nineteenth century. In The Quickening Maze, which is, in fact, a dual biofiction that juxtaposes the life of eminent Alfred Tennyson with that of his contemporary John Clare, Foulds refuses to create a coherent image of Tennyson as a ‘poetic genius’ and instead leaves his readers with

Introduction

11

an ‘“unofficial” Tennyson persona’ (73); Flanagan’s Dickens is equally ‘unofficial’ and points readers to the postcolonial legacy of Victorian culture. Both texts, Steveker maintains, attest to a contemporary fascination with the Victorian author, but refuse to deliver a valorising biographical account. Eckart Voigts’s analysis of two fictionalisations of Darwin’s and Mendel’s lives, John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy (2005) and Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf (1998), can be read in conjunction with Sally Shuttleworth’s depiction of Mendelian ‘genetics’ and Kaplan’s coda on Darwin later in this volume. In its combination of biological science and biography, ‘Bio-Fiction: Neo-Victorian Revisions of Evolution and Genetics’ illuminates the negotiation of discourses on evolution and eugenics within literature and highlights the blending of fact and fiction in biofiction. Voigts positions Darwin as a figure of nineteenth-century popular discourse, thus adding to Steveker’s depiction of a popular (and populist) Darwin in the twenty-fi rst century. He reads The Darwin Conspiracy as a bio-fiction with a postcolonial agenda—Darnton’s text locates the origin of Darwin’s Origin in the margins of the Empire—and analyses Mendel’s Dwarf as a delineation of intra-scientific critique. Picking up on the topic of immersion introduced by Karl, Voigts locates much of the appeal—and the responsibility—of the neo-Victorian project in the ‘performative hermeneutics’ of the neo-Victorian text, which produces a participatory culture of active prosumers rather than passive consumers. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker’s essay ‘Neo-Victorian Gay Fictions: A Critique of Stereotyping and SelfReflexivity’, fi nally, works as a node to Part III, which deals more directly with the potentially uncomfortable aspects of neo-Victorianism in its illustration of the intricate relationship between the (dis)pleasures of repetition and the functions of the author in neo-Victorian fictions. Focusing on Will Self’s Dorian (2002) and Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), BoehmSchnitker draws an analogy between Homi Bhabha’s (postcolonial) notion of stereotyping and the historical difference implicated in the neo-Victorian project in order to highlight neo-Victorianism’s importance for contemporary constructions of subjectivity and its possible blind spots. Stereotyping, Boehm-Schnitker contends, can allow us to shed light on our motivation to return to and repeat the Victorian past over and over again; it reveals a potentially narcissistic element in our looking for our Victorian mirror image—which, similar to Bhabha’s concept of postcolonial mimicry, only reflects us ‘almost, but not quite’. At the same time, she reads Self’s Oscar Wilde and Tóibín’s Henry James as reflections of late-nineteenth-century self-fashionings of (gay) authorship. Part III, ‘Traces, Traumas and Retrospective Anxieties’, also capitalises on the notion of iteration and revisitation which is so crucial to the neoVictorian project, and turns to the trace, trauma, spectrality and haunting as central theoretical concepts. What exactly is repeated in the neo-Victorian project, these chapters ask, why and how is this done, and what does this imply for our specific historical relation to the nineteenth century? The

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Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

articles comprised in this part unite questions of gender and trauma as subjects that have repeatedly been identified as key concerns of neo-Victorian fiction (see Kohlke 2008a; Kohlke and Gutleben 2010; or Kaplan 2007). Neo-Victorian texts, these contributions demonstrate, can offer powerful ways to work through (or at least problematise) traumatic traces of the past in British cultural memory; at the same time, the authors analyse the recent interest in trauma in neo-Victorian texts as a ‘fashion’ that becomes questionable and problematic when it is treated naively. Rosario Arias’s article ‘Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction’ evaluates theoretical approaches to the remains of the past. She shares Enderwitz and Feldmann’s interest in the presentness of the Victorian past (or, to put it differently, the potential of neo-Victorian products to ‘presentify’ the past13), and attempts a theoretical conceptualisation of the trace as part of a new framework to explore neo-Victorianism. Arias delineates the use and development of the notion of the trace in Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concepts of the phantom and the crypt, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and, fi nally, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical theories, and illustrates her fi ndings via brief readings of Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), Waters’s Affi nity (1999) and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). Like Enderwitz and Feldmann, Arias attests to the importance of being able to grasp the presence of the nineteenth in the twenty-fi rst century, and calls for further critical analysis of the ways we apprehend the past through our senses. With ‘Spectres of the Past: Reading the Phantom of Family Trauma in Neo-Victorian Fiction’, Susanne Gruss continues and elaborates on Arias’s depiction of Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytical concepts. The phantom and the crypt, Gruss contends, are suitable tools to scrutinise the notions of trauma and spectrality which have quite literally haunted neo-Victorian critical discourse in the last couple of years. In her readings of John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) and Asylum (2013) and Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), Gruss analyses the question of intergenerational (or phantomatic) haunting and family trauma and points to the ways in which these texts interlink traumatisation and (inter)textual haunting. At the same time, she maintains that these novels can be used to question our own stance on the neo-Victorian and the usefulness of trauma studies as an apt theoretical tool for neo-Victorian studies: whereas The Thirteenth Tale celebrates the potential of Victorian literature (and the immersion of readers into these texts) as recuperative and redemptive in Dana Shiller’s sense of the term (1997, 541), this is true for neither of Harwood’s novels—in The Asylum, the protagonist repeatedly characterises her uncle’s bookshop as stifl ing and dangerous and, more importantly, in The Ghost Writer, an obsession with the (literary) past becomes almost lethal. Jessica Cox broadens the view on trauma by focussing on ‘Narratives of Sexual Trauma in Contemporary Adaptations of The Woman in White’. Like Kohlke and Gruss, she stresses the dominance of trauma writing in neo-Victorianism, and points

Introduction

13

out the importance of the act of writing as a ‘writing through’ trauma in both Wilkie Collins’s works and rewritings of Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) (‘it is frequently through writing that characters resolve, or at least confront, past traumas’, 140). In David Pirie’s 1997 screen adaptation of the novel, James Wilson’s ‘sequel’ The Dark Clue (2001), and Linda Newbery’s young adult fiction Set in Stone (2006), the central (yet implicit) trauma of The Woman in White is made explicit in a narrative turn that reflects contemporary anxieties about sexual abuse and articulates parallels to the nineteenth-century past. At the same time, Cox illustrates the legacy of sensation plots in neo-Victorian fiction, a generic concern which is taken up by Christy Rieger in her article. ‘Refashioning (Neo-)Victorian Discourses’, the fi nal part of this volume, picks up several strands from preceding parts. The figure of the scientist—an author-figure in his own right, as chapters from Part II demonstrate—is shown to be implicated in allocating subject positions to individuals by declaring them healthy or ill, thus engaging in powerful processes of life writing. The articles in this part also pose ethical questions that complicate our relation to the Victorian past in the contemporary novel (a concern shared by the interest in trauma studies in Part III), and return to the question of the fashioning or creation of neo-Victorianism. In ‘The Legacy of Medical Sensationalism in The Crimson Petal and the White and The Dress Lodger’, Christy Rieger focuses on the increasing destabilisation of the scientist or doctor as a figure of authority. She analyses the construction of a voyeuristic scopic regime in the context of medical discourses, reading Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger (1998) and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) as sensation(al) narratives which implicate their readers in medicine as an ethically questionable practice as regards its display of the suffering body of patients. Rieger’s article also offers a counterpoint to the appeal of immersion: rather than actively immersing themselves into these texts, readers are entrapped by stories which force them to re-evaluate their own position as consumers of the neo-Victorian spectacle—the concept of ‘reader entrapment’ becomes, in Rieger’s analysis, an unwanted form of immersion. Elizabeth Ho discusses colonial discourses in ‘The Neo-Victorian-at-Sea: Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian’ and picks up the postcolonial strand introduced in the articles by Steveker and Boehm-Schnitker. In arguing for a (re)conceptualisation of the postcolonial neo-Victorian as a global phenomenon, Ho’s article complements Kohlke’s delineation of the neo-Victorian investments in the past in its stringent focus on the traumatic legacy of English imperialism in Kneale’s English Passengers (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008). Ho focuses on ‘trauma narratives indicative of postcolonial neo-Victorianism’ (171), in which the sea serves as a strongly politicised metaphor for the possibility of a deterritorialised Empire (and a deterritorialised neo-Victorianism) in a globalised world. Favouring routes over roots, the texts analysed by Ho throw the traces of travelling identities all the more into

14

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

relief—despite and, paradoxically, because of the fact that the sea yields the possibility of a more fluid mapping. With ‘From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond: Fearful Symmetries’, Sally Shuttleworth reconsiders both the emergence as well as the discursive strategies of the neo-Victorian phenomenon and the history of her own term ‘retro-Victorian’ (first coined in the early nineties) and its focus on Darwinism, science and moral conscience, and thus complements (and in part answers back to) Kohlke’s introductory article. With the decrease of the material presence of the nineteenth century (especially in architecture), Shuttleworth notices the emergence of a new form of engagement with the Victorian which she is reluctant to call neo-Victorian, even though it is likewise characterised by an engagement with the nineteenth century through cultural memory. Shuttleworth’s focus on haunting and the uncanny in Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009) recalls Arias’s and Gruss’s articles, while her discussion of Andrea Barrett’s ‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeks’ (in Ship Fever, 1996) returns to her own concern with science in ‘Natural History: The RetroVictorian Novel’ (1998). Science, Shuttleworth points out, ‘provides both an overarching theory of replication, and the cultural content of self-defining narratives of descent’ (184), and, once again, becomes a way to work through (intergenerational) trauma. Cora Kaplan provides a conclusion for this volume in reflecting on the craze for Charles Darwin as scientist-author elicited by the 2009 bicentenary and the ways in which both Darwin and Dickens have been cut down to size by recent cultural discourse; it is by way of their family lives that the twenty-fi rst century consumes Darwin and Dickens. With ‘Coda: The Firm of Charles and Charles—Authorship, Science and Neo-Victorian Masculinities’, she revisits her interest in ‘biographilia’, and points out that the private figures have come to dominate the neo-Victorian market (an insight that affi rms the basic assumptions of Steveker’s contribution). As regards neo-Victorian methodologies, Kaplan contends that ‘[p]sychoanalysis has provided one theoretical tool for analysing the neo-Victorian; more recently, evolution has provided another’ (194). In line with our reflections on processes of canonisation in the field, Kaplan closes the frame by cautioning against too ready an embrace of evolutionary conceptualisations of history in neo-Victorian studies. We should be wary, she argues, to naturalise today’s family resemblance to the Victorians by way of referring to a quasi-biological process: ‘historical change should not be seen as an organic process, even a mediated one, but as an active social, political and cultural force’ (194). Taken together, these essays allow for a critical reconsideration of neoVictorianism as an emerging academic field. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations wants to support crucial debates on the question of how the contemporary reference to the nineteenth-century past can be theorised, which topics are etched out as prevalent and which discursive negotiations characterise our culture today. Far from being

Introduction

15

merely our ‘historical other’, ‘“the Victorian” serves as a continuous reference point of twentieth-century discourse’ and twenty-fi rst-century concerns (Joyce 2007, 12). In Fabrice Bourland’s novel, which has haunted the beginning of this introduction, the revenants have taken on shapes that are characterised not only by the descriptions in the novels they have sprung from, but also by their popular depictions in film and other media: The features and general appearance of these beings in their extreme plasticity corresponded quite accurately to the image created by the collective imagination. [ . . . ] As for Count Dracula, dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt and flannel waistcoat, and a long black silk cape, Bela Lugosi’s cinematic interpretation, seen by the world the year before, had manifestly had time to make its indelible mark on the imagination of my contemporaries. (2010, 168–69) It is a keen eye for the way in which our ‘collective imagination’ keeps appropriating the Victorian age, and keeps turning it into a contemporary phenomenon (or phantom) that takes up our twenty-first-century convictions and concerns, which shapes the articles in this volume. NOTES 1. The fact that neo-Victorianism has already reached the English classroom attests to this statement—a 2010 York Notes Companion on contemporary literature includes a chapter on neo-Victorianism which discusses A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey and Sarah Waters (Tolan 2010). 2. See the exhibition website, which advertises the exhibition as follows: ‘From the macabre to the quaint, the sensational to the surreal, “Victoriana: The Art of Revival” is the fi rst ever exhibition in the UK to offer a major examination of Victorian revivalism in all its forms’ (http://www.cityoflondon.gov. uk/things-to-do/visiting-the-city/attractions-museums-and-galleries/guildhall-art-gallery-and-roman-amphitheatre/Pages/victoriana.aspx). 3. Novelist DJ Taylor’s derisive description of neo-Victorianism as an (already) overly institutionalised academic fashion attests to the growing popularity of both the term and the phenomenon. The concept of neo-Victorianism, Taylor puts forth, ‘is very gratifying, but simultaneously constraining, as it conveys the feeling of a once unsullied beach leading down to bright, pristine water, now stalked by well-meaning but officious lifeguards’ (Guardian). The term ‘neo-Victorian project’ was introduced by Marie-Luise Kohlke in the inaugural edition of Neo-Victorian Studies (2008, 5). 4. Christian Gutleben’s Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (2001), for example, is a founding critical text of the field which specifically explores nostalgia in relation to the neoVictorian. Today, it becomes increasingly clear that typically postmodernist approaches such as Fredric Jameson’s notion of the loss of a sense of historicity need to be newly adapted to the growing body of neo-Victorian texts. 5. An indication of this is the profound increase in the publication of academic studies on neo-Victorian literature such as Arias and Pulham’s Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave

16

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

Macmillan 2009), Hadley’s Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us, Heilmann and Llewellyn’s Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009, or Mitchell’s History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (all Palgrave Macmillan 2010), or the Rodopi series edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering, 2010; Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics, 2011; NeoVictorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, 2012; Neo-Victorian Cities: Re-Imagining Utopian and Dystopian Metropolises, forthcoming 2014). A debate interestingly wedged between the Victorian and today, spanning postmodernism as a counterpoint to modernism’s avant-garde, trying to ‘cross the border, close that gap’ (Fiedler 1987). See Marie-Luise Kohlke’s contribution in this volume and Imelda Whelehan, who argues that, even though adaptation is understood as foundational for the relation between the Victorian and the neo-Victorian, ‘few consider screen adaptations in equal terms, but rather as an illustration of a lesser achievement, or even as doing an active disservice to the book’ (2012, 273). As we are in favour of an, as yet, flexible definition of the neo-Victorian, we would also argue for the historical reference point of the long nineteenth century, which includes Jane Austen. See also the contribution by Rosa Karl in this volume. This is something that seems to be changing at the moment—see for example the article by Voigts quoted in this chapter and a recent special edition of the journal Adaptation on Adaptation, Transmedia Storytelling and Participatory Culture (vol. 6, no. 2, 2013), edited by Pascal Nicklas and Eckart Voigts. In this context, the creation of terminology is central: defi nitions always also constitute what they signify. Terminological varieties in the discussion of contemporary adaptations and appropriations of the nineteenth century include ‘neo-Victorian’ (Shiller 1997), ‘retro-Victorian’ (Shuttleworth 1998), ‘post-Victorian’ (Kucich and Sadoff 2000) and ‘Victoriana’ (Kaplan 2007). For an overview see Andrea Kirchknopf (2008) or Mark Llewellyn (2008). Recent publications (Arias and Pulham 2009, or Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010) demonstrate that the latter has been established as a widely accepted umbrella term which is, however, still under revision. Within a global context, a more descriptive term such as ‘Neo-Nineteenth Century’ might, for example, prove more useful. See also Helen Davies’s discussion of the debate of the term in Gender and Ventriloquism (2012, 1). For a fi rst evaluation of neo-Victorianism as a phenomenon of a postcolonial, globalised world see Elizabeth Ho’s Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (2012). See also Ho’s contribution in this volume. See, for example, Kohlke’s article ‘Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction’ (2008b) or Nadine Boehm-Schnitker’s chapter in this volume. Rainer Emig suggests the use of Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘mimicry’ as a tool of interpretation for adaptations in general—like Bhabha’s always incomplete and distorted imitation of the other, he argues, adaptation ‘always implies that which is adapted, and its critics as well as aficionados are confronted with the thereby constructed monumentality of an original and the cultural power it gains from this construction’ (2012, 20). See the contributions by Eckart Voigts, Sally Shuttleworth and Cora Kaplan in this volume.

Introduction

17

13. ‘Presentification’ is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s denominator for ‘techniques that produce the impression (or, rather, the illusion) that worlds of the past can become tangible again’ (2004, 94). Gumbrecht is part of a wider discussion on the ‘production of presence’, which entails questions such as how the term ‘presence’, which is already charged philosophically, might be rendered productive for literary studies. Gumbrecht, not without polemics, decries the ‘loss of the world’ brought about by hermeneutics, and argues for a return to a more ‘direct’ approach to the ‘things’ the humanities deal with (92).

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Commodifying the Past Canonisation, Consumption, Pleasure

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1

Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal Marie-Luise Kohlke

The decades surrounding the twenty-fi rst-century millennial turn have witnessed the equivalent of a cultural gold rush, with artists and academics mining the rich—and profitable—vein of neo-Victorian literature and wider neo-Victorian practice in such varied areas as the visual arts, adaptation, and the heritage industry. Not only do writers return over and over again to the nineteenth century in their fictions—among them prominent award winners such as Peter Ackroyd, A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey, and Sarah Waters—but critics and theorists seem to harbour a similar repetition compulsion. Between 2007 and 2013 alone, five major international conferences were dedicated exclusively to ‘neo-Victorianism’,1 while neoVictorian academic publications, university courses, Masters and PhD dissertations on the subject proliferate. I employ the term ‘neo-Victorian’ in the broadest possible sense here, as indicating cultural and critical practice that re-visions the nineteenth century and its latter-day aesthetic and ideological legacies in the light of historical hindsight and critique, but also fantasy—what we want to imagine the period to have been like for diverse reasons, including affi rmations of national identity, the struggle for symbolic restorative justice, and indulgence in escapist exoticism. Admittedly, this broad usage of ‘neo-Victorian’ to cover virtually all contemporary fiction prominently engaging with or set outright in the nineteenth century remains contentious, and I will return below to the question of the term’s strict or porous boundaries and the (in)appropriateness of different demarcations, as I explore specific claim-stakings in the neo-Victorian goldfields, as well as the sometimes uncertain metals discovered and promising veins not yet developed. In the process, this chapter will highlight some limitations to current critical approaches, bore through unquestioned assumptions we bring to the genre, and reflect on attendant risks of neo-Victorian canon formation, including the oversight of literary ‘buried treasures’.

THE TRAUMAS OF DEFINITION, DELIMITATION, AND IMITATION What makes historical fiction set in or obsessed with the nineteenth century ‘true’ neo-Victorian gold? How ‘neo’ must neo-Victorian literature be to

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count as such? Are there ontological levels of ‘neo-Victorianness’? Is a novel that imagines ‘new’ Victorian characters, lives, and plots more original— more ‘neo’—than one that borrows from actual historical precedents or literary pre-texts, that is, than those texts which ‘only’ rewrite rather than writing from scratch? If so, among the two novels commonly, although perhaps erroneously, 2 regarded as the founding exemplars of the neo-Victorian genre, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) would rank higher than Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Yet the latter text is taught as widely, possibly even more so, due to its intimate intertextual relation to Jane Eyre (1847), as if the canonicity of Brontë’s novel had rubbed off on its later ‘prequel’. And how should unconscious influence be measured? Fowles believed himself to have chosen Charles Smithson, his hero’s name, ‘quite freely’ only to realise some months after the novel’s dispatch to the printers ‘that Charles was the name of the principal male figure’ in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1824) (1994, xxix), a text which he had frequently reread and translated into English. Fowles also became increasingly convinced that de Duras’s titular outsider heroine ‘was very active in [his] unconscious’ while writing (xxix), implicitly providing the model for his own outcast Sarah Woodruff, illustrating that within the ‘multidimensional space’ of any text, as Roland Barthes famously remarked, ‘the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original’ (1977, 146–47). Yet arguably it is just that anteriority in the face of the rich profusion of the earlier period’s literary production which drives the neo-Victorian project. The sense of belatedness poses an opportunistic challenge, inviting a reflexive self-measuring against what went before via revisitation and manipulation of individual (and sometimes multiple) nineteenth-century precursor texts; the period’s prominent literary forms, such as the Bildungsroman, tripledecker novels, sensation fiction, or the dramatic monologue; and their attendant narrative conventions, including the omniscient narrator or multiple narrative perspectives, poetic justice, and closure. For contemporary writers jaded by poststructuralist moral relativities and multiplications of notions of historical ‘Truth’, Victorian literature seems to afford opportunities—now perceived as circumscribed or lost—for making vital emotional and ethical connections with readers, for relating to something solidly ‘real’ before its dissolution into intangibility behind impenetrable screens of representation and simulation. As Fredric Jameson noted, the postmodern subject ‘can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present; rather, as in Plato’s cave, it must trace our mental images of the past upon its confining walls’, while ‘history [ . . . ] itself remains forever out of reach’ (1991, 25), transformed ‘into so many pseudoevents’ (48). Often aligned with ironic distaste for/ distrust of/distancing from the ‘Victorian’, the ‘neo’ within ‘neo-Victorian’ is thus balanced by an emphasis on the perceived pleasures and attractions of the same;3 hence ‘Victorian’ should not be viewed as occupying a secondary or inferior position within the conjunction. Like the cyclically recurring

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vogue for material Victoriana in the way of antique furniture, jewellery and painting, the period’s literary aesthetic is re-fashioned/re-furbished into an object of desire and recuperation as much as contestation and subversion, as first remarked by Christian Gutleben in his ground-breaking Nostalgic Postmodernism (2001). Gutleben reads neo-Victorianism in terms of an inherently contradictory, backward-looking/longing engagement with nineteenth-century literary antecedents and techniques that precipitates rather than obstructs postmodern experimentation. On the one hand, he notes, the neo-Victorian novel ‘reverts to certain fictional codes of the past’ in a manner seemingly ‘alien to the postmodern spirit’; on the other, it ‘make[s] use of narrative fragmentation, textual heterogeneity and generic plurality’ aligned with a more deconstructive aesthetic, materialising ‘a new type of postmodernism’ (218–19), which privileges a ‘spirit [ . . . ] of assimilation and reconciliation’ as well as ‘sedition and agitation’ (220). Both these opposite tendencies are comprised within the hyphen linking ‘neo’ and ‘Victorian’, neither of which term assumes automatic priority, although the respective balance between the two will shift according to writers’ divergent emphases on one or the other. Matthew Kneale’s epic English Passengers (2000) affords an apt example of the genre’s typical mixing of old and new in its selection from the ragbag of the cultural imaginary. As much gripping copy of the Victorian adventure yarn as postmodern disquisition on ‘History’ as deliberate and/ or inadvertent fictionalised (mis)representation, the novel’s wide array of narrators from a cross-section of society—including Tasmanian aborigines, transported convicts, the Sincerity’s Manx smuggling crew, various settlers, administrators and the titular English passengers, representing the upper middle and professional classes via Reverend Geoff rey Wilson and Dr Thomas Potter—produces a dialogic cacophony of competing worldviews. Analogous to Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) with its diversity of registers spanning the circus folk on the margins of society, the working poor, the industrious middle classes, the nouveaux riche, and leisured gentlemen, Kneale’s tapestry of different perspectives and ideologies conveys the impression of an all-encompassing social reality of the period. Simultaneously, however, English Passengers’s presentation of this multi-vocality from limited fi rst-person points of view, without an interpreting omniscient narrator as in Dickens’s novel, unpicks the cohesive master-narrative of History-as-progress, implicitly endorsing the underdogs’ points of view of history-as-trauma and history-as-persecution by those more powerful. Akin to the pseudo-legalistic juxtaposition of multiple fi rst-person ‘testimonies’ in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), Kneale’s technique also facilitates the (self-)exposure of morally compromised villains (and, indeed, ‘heroes’). Most dramatically, this is accomplished through the egomaniacal Potter’s racist ravings on AngloSaxon supremacy and the legitimacy of the extermination of lower races in his notebooks, denounced by the Manx Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley as

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‘a packet of gibberish’ (Kneale 2001, 452)—a reading evidently advocating present-day egalitarian ethics and anti-racist sentiments. Just as importantly, Kneale’s neo-Victorian approach enables him to summarily dispense poetic justice to hypocrites and wrong-doers, indulging a resolutely anti-postmodern didactic agenda, which comes explicitly to the fore at the contrived ending of the novel that all too neatly ties up the main characters’ storylines. The punitive grand fi nale fi nds the deranged Wilson exiled as a castaway on the Isle of Wight where, like the last aboriginal survivors, he becomes a tourist attraction, while Potter, slain by the Manx mariners whose ship he pirated, ends up as a presumed aboriginal specimen on show in an exhibition dedicated to his life’s work—the very place he had reserved for the indigene skeletons he stole. In contrast, Kewley and his surviving crew evade punishment by the law, and the mixed-race Peevay’s violent vengeance on the white men is rewarded by his discovery and rise to leadership of a community of others like him. Grievous trauma, if not exactly undone, is certainly made good. Postmodernism’s essential ‘contigu[ity] with romantic sensibility’, in its retention of ‘the Enlightenment’s impulse towards individual and social liberation’ (Drolet 2004, 2)—in this case from imperialist injustice and oppression—is diff used into reader (and author) appeasement. What Kneale recuperates from the Victorian aesthetic are the pleasures of a renewed endorsement of narrative per se, a gratifying (if slightly skewed) ‘moral’ certainty, and a sense of closure and quasi providential justice—all of which the heterogeneity of English Passengers, with its disruptive patchwork of personal memoirs, journal entries, letters, testimonies to atrocity, confessions, ‘scientific’ notebooks, religious discourse, authoritarian penal reform theory and virulent social Darwinism, paradoxically mediates against. If the range and variety of Kneale’s possible intertexts complicates the discernment of relative influence and/or derivation (see his authorial ‘Epilogue’, 455–58), such criteria prove even more ambiguous in the case of multiple neo-Victorian works by one and the same author. Seemingly lacking nineteenth-century precursor texts, Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998), for instance, might be considered more neo-Victorian than her Affi nity (1999), which borrows from cultural histories of spiritualism and the lives of actual Victorian mediums, albeit in generalised or encrypted terms (Kontou 2009, 176–78). In turn, Affi nity would be more ‘neo’ than Waters’s Fingersmith (2002), because the latter models itself on readily recognisable Victorian intertexts, primarily Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Collins’s The Woman in White. Yet Waters’s fi rst novel likewise owes an intertextual debt, albeit not to a Victorian but a neo-Victorian text—namely Chris Hunt’s Street Lavender (1994) (Waters qtd. in Armitt 2007, 121). Again a graded classification system throws up more problems than it solves, with neo-Victorian adaptivity becoming in part self-referential. Or should this hierarchy of novelty be reversed, so that selfconscious appropriations of prior nineteenth-century sources/discourses

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become essential elements for works to qualify as neo-Victorian? Simon Joyce seems to propose as much when discussing these historical fictions as ‘works of rescription [ . . . ] offering a metacritical commentary on the possibilities and limits of the fictional form they are adapting for modern uses’ (2007, 147). The works of early theorists of neo-Victorianism, such as Dana Shiller’s ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’ (1997) and Daniel Bormann’s The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel (2002), have also explicitly linked neo-Victorian practice to postmodern recuperation/re-writing. Similarly, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn prefer to restrict the appellation ‘neo-Victorian’ to those works self-consciously staging ‘a series of metatextual and metahistorical conjunctions as they interact within the fields of exchange and adaptation between the Victorian and the contemporary’ (2010, 4). Yet, I would argue that such demarcation proves inadequate for conceptualising the full range and diversity of neo-Victorian writing. Not least, as Linda Hutcheon points out in A Theory of Adaptation (2006), rescription/revision is hardly postmodern (or ‘neo’) and may have little more critical legitimacy or usefulness than the concept of originality (3–4). Any ‘originality’ resides not in the uniqueness of the stories or prior stories’ retelling, but in the particular conjunction of the two and the pleasure derived ‘from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’ (4). This strikes me as rather an apt description of neo-Victorian literature also, which thrives in equal measure on the recycling of well-known tropes derived from nineteenth-century culture and on their disconcerting ‘(post)modern’ narrative (re)deployment. Hence such standard tropes as the fallen woman, the orphan, spiritualism, and the London slums are transformed, respectively, into agents of social and sexual liberation; advocates of self-chosen, non-patriarchal/non-heteronormative families; a form of capitalist entrepreneurialism and empowerment by the socially marginalised; and carnivalesque spaces of self-fashioning. Yet many general readers will likely register such metamorphoses unconsciously and instinctively rather than cognitively and intellectually. As Hutcheon stresses, ‘adaptation as adaptation is unavoidably a kind of intertextuality’, but only ‘if the receiver is acquainted with the adapted text’ (2006, 21), which can never be guaranteed.4 Nonetheless the unacquainted may take pleasure of a different sort from the adaptation: from a visceral immersion in the vividly re-imagined world, a renewed faith in the power of stories, their moral purpose and poetic justice—none of which require palimpsestic doublevision or prior knowledge. The success of neo-Victorian revisitations with variation, then, is not necessarily dependent on any clear-cut recognition of what exactly is being replicated or how it is being varied. It stems as readily from the manipulation of readers’ generalised, frequently stereotyped, and ritually comforting preconceptions of the ‘Victorian’ and the ‘Victorians’, what Jay Clayton calls the period’s ‘most quaint and clichéd features [ . . . ] revived

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ad nauseam’ (2003: 9), ‘a hodgepodge of trivia and clichés’ (14). These in turn often derive from popular ‘Dickensian’ fi lm and television adaptations rather than detailed knowledge of actual source texts and Victorian cultural discourses. 5 The issue of adaptivity is complicated further by the amalgamative tendency of ‘the adaptive chain’ of multiple subsequent adaptations, risking the eventual disappearance of the source text altogether (Kirchknopf 2008, 72), comparable to a game of Chinese Whispers. Remarking on the inclination of ‘adaptations [to] speak to themselves and one another rather than only to the precursor text’, Heilmann and Llewellyn pertinently inquire, ‘what are we adapting: the Victorians/Victorian text or the mediation they/it have already undergone in popular culture?’ (2010, 212). The correct answer may prove both and neither; that is, we may be adapting free-floating simulacra that have taken on virtual lives of their own, no longer reducible to particular source-texts or adaptation histories. This phantasmatic—or what Sally Shuttleworth terms ‘atmospheric’ (this volume, 182)—quality of neo-Victorian adaptation (of both texts and the nineteenth century more generally) disqualifies it from being elevated to the defi ning characteristic of neo-Victorianism. Furthermore, any such defi nition would render the neo-Victorian highly divisive as regards relative reader sophistication,6 creating a hierarchy unsustainable in view of the genre’s popular rather than elitist appeal. The ritualistic aspect of adaptation highlighted by Hutcheon might more profitably be linked to repetition compulsion and thence to trauma. I have argued elsewhere that trauma underlies much of the neo-Victorian project, the ethical impulse of which stems from the desire to render belated witness to or commemorate historical wrongs that—if at all— were recorded from highly biased points of view, usually those of history’s victors rather than victims (2008a, 7–11; Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, 1–35). This tendency is better understood in terms of the un-pleasures of repetition, confronting readers with painful and unsettling rather than nostalgically reassuring or celebratory versions of the past—hardly the ‘more congenial affair’ which Shuttleworth believes the Victorian to have become in light of an apparent diminishing preoccupation with ‘crises of conscience’ in recent neo-Victorian writing (this volume, 179, 182). Admittedly, the trauma angle does render British connotations of the term ‘neoVictorian’ problematic, since it resurrects the very spectres of imperialist exploitation and appropriation responsible for many of the wrongs being registered and worked through. This is especially the case when the term is applied to postcolonial and subaltern literatures, or historical fictions of other nations that never were or, by the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, were no longer British colonies. Yet even then, such terminological tensions catalyse rather than curtail crucial debates about cultural memory and forgetting, facilitating a self-conscious encounter with history rather than, as Shuttleworth suspects, ‘undermin[ing] our attempts to understand, historically’ (190).

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Indeed, too much political correctness and would-be historical exactitude may prove obstructive, because a single comprehensive term is arguably required to enable us to map and cross-reference the wealth of diverse historical fictions engaging with the nineteenth century in a holistic and not just piecemeal fashion. Accordingly, at this comparatively early stage in the critical project, I advocate employing ‘neo-Victorian’ (albeit provisionally) as a generic and integrative umbrella term to encompass virtually all historical fiction related to the nineteenth century, irrespective of authors’ or characters’ nationalities, the plots’ geographical settings, the language of composition or, indeed, the extent of narratives’ self-consciousness, postmodernism, adaptivity or otherwise. When Shuttleworth argues for a much more tightly circumscribed defi nition to preserve historical referentiality, she simultaneously acknowledges the genre’s mutability in response to our changing ‘needs and desires’ and ‘intellectual trajectories’, such as feminism or postcolonialism (this volume, 179). Yet just this protean aspect, I would argue, demands a suitably elastic and more rather than less responsive term to encompass the neo-Victorian’s ongoing shape-shifting. Arguably, it makes little sense to describe the American writer Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) as neo-Victorian, yet deny that appellation to her Orange Prize winning neo-slavery narrative Property (2003), simply because the fi rst novel is set in London and based on the obvious pre-text of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), whereas the second is not specifically adaptive, except in the wider sense that its narrator’s racist false consciousness writes against the grain of both nineteenth-century slave testimonies and their re-imagined postmodern counterparts, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Indeed, a case can readily be made for significant interconnections between Martin’s two novels, for instance as regards the author’s treatment of gender issues, including women’s physical abuse and sexual exploitation, and both texts’ gothic imagery of monstrosity, imprisonment and persecution, all motifs frequently encountered in other neo-Victorian literature. Whereas it is crucial to remain sensitive to possible differences in narrative technique and approach—let alone political agendas—between writers according to their own and their fictions’ national backgrounds and (self-)locations, identifying correspondences and convergences is just as important. Admittedly, nineteenth-century Britain was not nineteenth-century America, but then nineteenth-century England was not nineteenth-century Scotland, Wales or Ireland either, just as nineteenth-century New York differed greatly from the Confederate States or the Wild West. Delimiting neo-Victorian fiction along geographical or national lines also poses problems for the classification of novels that shift between different nations and parts of the world, such as Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) or Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens (2009). Both texts highlight the nineteenth century as the advent of modern-day globalisation, migration, and networks of cultural exchange, via increasingly interdependent economies and markets—literary,

28 Marie-Luise Kohlke mercantile, criminal—subverting the very possibility of categorical cut-offs for the neo-Victorian novel at arbitrary national borders which, even in imperial Britain’s case, were already permeable and often in flux. Nationality, however, should not be discounted altogether. One of the most promising veins of future criticism looks set to be the analysis of the comparative significance of historical fiction within different national literatures and cultural imaginaries according to what might be called ‘foundational trauma’. In the case of Germany, for example, the Holocaust will likely remain the historical node of greatest traumatic intensity through and against which the modern democratic state will define itself for the foreseeable future. Hence for all that Germany’s unification and initial formation as an imperial nation-state occurred in 1871, the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century will probably dominate German historical fiction, in terms of working through issues of national accountability and participating in narratives of collective identity. In contrast, in the case of the UK and its one-time territories the long-term impact of colonial violence and empire-building on modern state configurations, combined with still ongoing debates about national apologies and reparations to indigenous peoples, positions the nineteenth century as paramount within changing narratives of ethnically diverse nationhoods striving for inclusivity. Memories of Britain’s past imperial glory also contribute to the nation’s conviction of remaining an important world power/player even without the trappings of massive standing armies or industrial complexes. In the case of the US, the nineteenthcentury traumas of slavery and the Civil War serve as decisive points of origin of the nation’s modern self-definition (rightly or wrongly) as would-be world defender of freedom, human and civil rights, disseminating democracy and ‘justice’ across the globe. In addition, these narratives of identity readily accommodate the later traumas of World Wars I and II and 9/11, constructing America as valiantly battling against monstrous evil (albeit of absolutism/totalitarianism/terrorism rather than slavery) analogous to imperial Britain’s professed mission of spreading civilisation to benighted realms. Areas of underrepresented US neo-Victorian fiction, where further growth can be expected, include more novels addressing Native American history and the genocidal Indian wars of the late nineteenth century, as well as more novels like John Sayles’s A Moment in the Sun (2011) about nineteenth-century American imperialism abroad, for instance in Cuba and the Philippines—not least as the latter readily invites comparison with the resurgent neo-imperialism of many US foreign and economic policies today. No fiction’s origins, originality or specific adaptive practice, then, establishes a neo-Victorian novel’s ‘neo-ness’. Rather, that resides in the simultaneously predictable/innovative ways writers fi nd to reconfigure nineteenth-century spatial and temporal settings (from across the globe), the period’s discourses, ideologies, historical figures and/or particular cultural texts (British or otherwise), past and present anxieties and traumas, so as to surprise their audiences anew, while satisfying reader expectations

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primed and (pre-)programmed by different kinds of prior Victorian and neo-Victorian encounters.

THE SPECTRE OF THE HIGHBROW/LOWBROW DIVIDE Admittedly, such a catch-all, omnivorous approach to the ‘neo-Victorian’ may invite criticisms of slack, even sloppy defi nition, lacking in critical rigour and exactitude. Why not just describe such writings as ‘historical fictions that happen to be set in the nineteenth century’ as opposed to distinctly ‘neo-Victorian’? Yet the nineteenth century functions differently to other temporal locations in historical fiction due to its particular role as harbinger of capitalist (post)modernity and its continuing ‘living’ presence in the here and now; that is, unlike, say, ancient civilisations, the Victorian consists not so much of relics and ruins as of pervasive embodied/ incarnate material traces structuring today’s cultural institutions, political and socio-economic frameworks, and the landscapes, cityscapes and global spaces we inhabit—an integral part of the lived/living fabric of the present. Neo-Victorian literature may be better understood in terms of a liminal ‘zone’, a term advocated by Clayton as an exploratory tool for charting the nineteenth century’s afterlife as a ‘contingent field of relevance’ (2003, 38), intersecting but also discrepant with historical fiction as a whole. Yet whereas discrimination on the basis of geographical or national criteria seems counterproductive, discrimination on the basis of genre, subject matter, writing style, and/or target audience remains even more ambiguous. It is worth noting that many of the most critically discussed neo-Victorian novels, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), or all three of Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian trio, are romances, not just in the sense of quest narratives but also the less ‘respectable’ sense of love stories/romantic fiction. Yet I suspect few critics would want to extend the term ‘neo-Victorian’ to include all romance novels set in the nineteenth century à la Harlequin historical fiction and bodice rippers, although Cora Kaplan seems to consider this possibility when she describes ‘Victoriana’ as ‘a genre that has become so capacious and lucrative that it contains several mini-genres, including pastiche Victorian crime fiction and mass-market romance’ (2007, 88). Nonetheless, the general conviction remains that neoVictorianism is—if not exclusively, at least in part—a postmodern phenomenon, not only in its historiographic metafictional disturbance of the traditional history/fiction binary, but also in its deconstruction of metanarratives such as ‘Culture’, resulting in a breakdown of distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, erudite art and popular culture (a process arguably already set in motion by nineteenth-century subgenres such as gothic and sensation fiction). Why should romances by Fowles, Byatt, and Waters be admissible as neo-Victorian ‘literature’, whereas mass market historical fictions about the same period are dismissed a priori as not making the grade

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as ‘so-called paraliterature’ (Jameson 1991, 2) or pariah-literature? Such a move seems counterintuitive to the neo-Victorian’s implicit alignment, analogous to postcolonial literature, with what Herbert J. Gans calls ‘the argument for cultural democracy’ and ‘cultural pluralism’ (1999, xi), that is, with a dismantling of established aesthetic and discursive hierarchies. This raises the question whether some of our most acclaimed neo-Victorian classics are pure gold or more adulterated metal, lest we reinscribe the highbrow/lowbrow divide, inviting accusations of a resurgent elitism of taste. Whereas it seems perfectly sensible to study the influence of examples of nineteenth-century popular culture, such as the Victorian music hall, sensation fiction, penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers, or even pornography, on neo-Victorian literature, the latter’s interface with and possible debt to contemporary romantic fiction appears somehow unappealing as an avenue of critical exploration. Such disdain implicitly views neo-Victorian fiction as being aimed, fi rst and foremost, at sophisticated (that is, ‘high culture’) readers, as serving more serious functions than the ‘spurious gratification’ provided by ‘meretricious and escapist’ popular culture (Gans 1999, 41), and offering self-conscious acts of cultural memory and historical consciousness-raising rather than trivialised dumbed-down entertainment. Yet surely part of the reason for studying and theorising the genre resides exactly in its general rather than specialised popularity, its evident cross-over appeal and resulting prominence in the marketplace. It seems no coincidence that Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) should have been selected as one of the 25 books, of which 40,000 complimentary copies (per title) were given away on the inaugural World Book Night, UK, on 5th March 2011. Future research may prove that neo-Victorian writers, conscious of the demands of the market, not only model their fictions on successful nineteenth-century sources and genres, but also deliberately borrow from current popular forms of writing. Here is one ‘vein’ of neo-Victorian criticism, then, that invites further exploration: its partisan and exclusive selectiveness and potential complicity with a reinstatement of the literary vs. popular/mass market distinction.

CRITICAL MASS AND THE NEO-VICTORIAN CANON The teaching of and critical writing about particular novels fi rst create, then confi rm and eventually perpetuate these texts’ literary status and significance, impacting canon formation. Yet on what basis do we make our selections? Besides novels winning prominent literary prizes, attracting television and fi lm adaptations, and addressing our own critical/theoretical obsessions, the main selection criteria seems to be that of ‘critical mass’, which takes two main forms: 1) formal imitations of the Victorian voluminous three-decker novel or serial publication; or 2) the repeat offender syndrome. Following in the footsteps of Fowles’s 445-page neo-Victorian

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novel with its paratextual additions and authorial erudition, the epic length and weightiness, as well as plotted complexity and polyglossia, of novels like Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (1989, 1221 pp.), Byatt’s Possession (1990, 511 pp.) or Kneale’s English Passengers (2000, 480 pp.) assert themselves as substantial works that cannot not be taken seriously. On the other hand, the repeated revisitation of the nineteenth century by writers like Peter Ackroyd or Sarah Waters ‘proves’ the period’s continuing relevance to present-day concerns, as well as its persistent appeal and marketability in contemporary culture.7 Why keep writing about it, if it doesn’t matter? Why keep mining, if not for gold? Some novels, such as Waters’s Fingersmith (416 pp.), of course, evince critical mass on both counts. In part, the perception of cultural significance is engendered by the sheer density, reiteration and accumulation of neo-Victorian tropes, images, words and worlds produced. Yet several problems arise from privileging critical mass. Unless neo-Victorian novels are supported by serious publicity and attract initial acclaim, critical mass may result in serious oversights and unjustified exclusions from the emergent neo-Victorian canon. The ‘repeat offender syndrome’ in and of itself fails to ensure recognition, and one-off neo-Victorian wonders risk being relegated to oblivion, especially when authored by writers primarily associated with other genres. Let me cite two examples in point. In The Blood Doctor (2002) by Barbara Vine, a.k.a. the well-known crime writer Ruth Rendell, the protagonist’s investigations for a biography of his great-grandfather Henry Nanther, physician to Queen Victoria and the royal family, uncover evidence that his ancestor conducted sinister, quasigenetic research on his own family. The novel crucially engages in neoVictorian problematisations of the costs of progress and scientific advances both in the nineteenth century and our own time. My second example is Rose (1996) by the American writer Martin Cruz Smith, better known for his contemporary Soviet Union- and Russia-based political thrillers, especially Gorky Park (1981).8 Set in the harsh environs of a Lancashire mining community in the 1870s, Rose is a gripping tale of love, murder and ‘class-bending’ (as opposed to the gender-bending more often associated with neo-Victorian fiction). Charged with investigating the disappearance of an Anglican curate in Wigan, the mining engineer Jonathan Blair falls unsuitably in love with a (seemingly) working-class woman, a romance that ends evocatively similar to Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’ in Angels & Insects (1992), with the disillusioned lovers turning their backs on Western ‘civilisation’. Smith’s often bleak and claustrophobic world re-imagines Britain’s (now largely disappeared) industrial heritage, something that has not yet been done to any comparable extent to neo-Victorian revisitations of the (under)worlds of nineteenth-century spiritualism, prostitution, pornography, criminality, prisons and asylums.9 Cruz’s novel indicates another suggestive vein for neo-Victorian criticism to explore, if only to speculate why this industrial topos should remain so underrepresented.

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As well as prospecting for neo-Victorian ‘new gold’ or future canonical works, then, we should also be actively prospecting backwards to uncover traces of ‘old’ gold missed during earlier surveys, searching the archives to identify unjustly neglected writers and texts. The work of Maggie Power affords a useful case study in point. Three years before the appearance of the first novel in Waters’s neo-Victorian trio, Power had already completed her own, commencing with Goblin Fruit (1987), followed by Lily (1994) and Porphyria’s Lover (1995).10 Whereas Power’s initial period of neo-Victorian production preceded that of Waters (1998–2002), it coincided with one of the most prolific neo-Victorian periods for Ackroyd and Byatt. Hence the oversight of Power’s work cannot be attributed to a cultural environment unreceptive to this emergent genre. Whether overshadowed by more established writers or unlucky in terms of her publishers, their advertising and marketing efforts, none of Power’s novels has hitherto registered on the neo-Victorian critical ‘metal detector’. Yet Power’s lush and densely intertextual novels rival some of the best neo-Victorian fiction today. Like the ‘goblin fruit’ of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1859, publ. 1862), from which she drew her first title, Power’s novels are sensational, sensual, seductive, morbidly gothic and positively dripping with eroticism and decadence. Power may not mine the lesbian vein as Waters does, but she already employed the neo-Victorian mode to explore obsessive (albeit mainly heterosexual) relationships, female sexuality and erotic transgression, prostitution, spiritualism and spiritualist fraud, spectrality, madness and venereal disease. Power’s writing is curiously prophetic both of the major preoccupations of later bestselling neo-Victorian fiction and its power to discomfit, shock and, at times, push against the limits of good taste.11 In addition, her work is intricately adaptive, undertaking sophisticated intertextual recyclings of multiple cultural texts simultaneously. In the case of Goblin Fruit these include Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ (begun 1856, publ. 1904), the biographies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddall, a variety of PreRaphaelite paintings, fairy tales, Jane Eyre (1847) and John Keats’s ‘Lamia’ (1819). Yet for all that, Goblin Fruit is a surprisingly slim and imagistically condensed volume, which bears comparison with Wide Sargasso Sea, a text Power describes as ‘a sensuous prose poem’ (2008) and cites as inspiration for her later writing. Indeed at a mere 94 pages, Goblin Fruit is even shorter than Wide Sargasso Sea (156 pp.) and bears little resemblance to the deliberately weighty neo-Victorian tomes discussed earlier, raising the question whether Rhys’s novel would have garnered the same critical acclaim had it only been published in the last few decades.

OTHER UNCERTAIN METALS: THE SERIAL PHENOMENON Another problem with using critical mass to identify neo-Victorian ‘mother lodes’ is the ambiguous grey zone extending beyond romance novels into

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other subgenres of historical fiction, such as novels of empire, adventure/ military campaign fiction and crime writing. There are several profuse producers of novels with nineteenth-century settings, who are nonetheless not accorded generic importance in neo-Victorian criticism. What are we to make, for instance, of Caroline Harvey’s work? This includes Legacy of Love (1980 and 1983), a three generation saga of rebellious women, the fi rst of whom (barely) survives one of Britain’s nineteenth-century Afghanistan disasters, Leaves from the Valley (1980) about the Crimean War, City of Gems (1981) about Victorian Britain’s imperialist exploits in Burma, The Steps of the Sun (1999) about the second Boar War, and The Taverner’s Place (2000), a family saga spanning the period from the 1870s to WWII. All of these include romance plots but, like the earlier cited neoVictorian ‘classics’, can hardly be reduced to the same. Legacy of Love, for example, makes interesting reading in comparison to Philip Hensher’s critically acclaimed The Mulberry Empire, or The Two Virtuous Journeys of The Amir Dost Mohammed Khan (2002) which, as noted by Mariadele Boccardi, constructs clear parallels between onetime British and latter-day Soviet neo-imperialist exploits in Afghanistan (1979–89), as well as more recent NATO-led interventions in the country (2009, 134, 136–41). Yet unlike Hensher’s novel—which incidentally also incorporates a romance element—Harvey’s work appears to have attracted no critical interest whatever, despite the fact that the author herself is very well-known, although not under her pseudonym but rather her real name: Joanna Trollope. Trollope’s use of a pseudonym is puzzling, especially as most of her book covers seem to introduce the author as ‘Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey’. Accordingly, it cannot be intended to function along the lines of nineteenth-century, coyly gender-ambiguous pseudonyms assumed by the Brontës or George Eliot, although perhaps analogous in seeking to pre-empt gender-biased criticism against ‘women’s romance’, in Harvey/ Trollope’s case by keeping her ‘serious’ fiction with contemporary settings distinct from her somehow ‘lighter’ historical writing. Put differently, the author herself seems to convey uncertainty about the true metal of her neoVictorian fiction. As Sarah Waters suspects, the ‘poor and patchy critical attention’ afforded historical fiction for much of the twentieth century may relate to it being ‘a genre dominated by women’ (1996, 176). Although ‘women’s historical fiction often constitutes a radical re-writing of traditional, male-centred historical narrative’, ‘attempt[ing] to map out an alternative, female historical landscape, or to redefi ne the nature of historical agency itself’, Waters notes that it has been repeatedly ‘dismissed as romantic, escapist or historiographically naïve’ (176). Such prejudice, however unconscious, may yet continue to inform neo-Victorian criticism as regards non-canonical writers and writing perceived to occupy the borderline of the resurgent ‘high’ and ‘low’brow divide. Comparable examples of neo-Victorian ‘serial offenders’ that draw scant or limited critical attention can be found within crime fiction. Of these, novel

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series in non-comic mode, preferably by eminent historians, travel writers or broadcasters, appear to fare slightly better, attracting occasional critical mention, as in the case of Jenny White’s series featuring Kamil Pasha (2006–10) and Jason Godwin’s featuring the eunuch investigator Yashim (2006–11), both set in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, or Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde Murder Mystery series (2007–12). Much more prolific, however, is Emily Brightwell, a.k.a. Cheryl Arguile, with her Victorian Murder Mysteries series (1993–2013) headlining Mrs Jeffries, a police inspector’s housekeeper, and her crew of fellow servant-sleuths, as of 2013 standing at thirty-two volumes, while the Amelia Peabody series (1975–2010) by Elizabeth Peters (pseudonym for another American writer, Barbara Mertz) includes nineteen volumes so far. A bluestocking Egyptologist, the unorthodox and staunchly feminist Peabody marries the archaeologist Radcliffe Emerson at the end of the first volume and thereafter dominates their sleuthing relationship, which covers the period from 1884–1922 (with only the first eight volumes having strictly nineteenth-century settings). Although admittedly the single examples I have read from Brightwell’s and Peters’s series struck me as rather light/light-hearted, seeking to entertain rather than promote serious historical insight or revision, the novels do revisit nineteenth-century class and gender issues in ways that readily mesh with existing neo-Victorian criticism on these topics. More pertinently, the part-comic mode of Brightwell’s and Peters’s series cannot be regarded as a disqualification, because elsewhere it counts as a legitimate tool of deconstruction and/or parody as, for example, in Lynne Truss’s Tennyson’s Gift (1996). Indeed, a better analogy might be George MacDonald Fraser’s long-running Flashman Papers (1969–2005), which at the time of Fraser’s death amounted to eleven novels and a volume of three novellas. From the first instalment, Fraser’s paratextual editorial prefaces and notes, his explicit historical revisionism and comical debunking of the master-narrative of glorious empire, his protagonist’s hyper-sexuality and the ribald political incorrectness with which Fraser parodied Victorian ideologies and moral hypocrisy, all prefigured important later developments in neo-Victorian fiction. Yet even Fraser’s work has been largely excluded from the neo-Victorian canon.12 However, another issue deserves attention besides the ‘seriousness’ of the writing, namely the manner of production, for neo-Victorian series may be viewed as a counterpart to nineteenth-century serialisation. The prevalent playing to market interests, both creating and satisfying readers’ demands for further regular instalments of familiar characters’ adventures in ever new and different settings, seems a distinct imitation of nineteenthcentury literary practice. Hence, regardless of relative ‘literary’ merit, the production contexts of these novels may yet warrant the neo-Victorian appellation. A particularly illustrative example can be found in the work of the ultra-prolific Anne Perry, whose Victorian crime mysteries have repeatedly reached the New York Times bestseller list. Her Thomas Pitt (1979–2012) and William Monk series (1990–2013), featuring Victorian

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police inspectors and their love interests and later wives, already run to twenty-eight and nineteen volumes respectively.13 Yet most striking for the purpose of my argument is Perry’s series of Christmas Novellas. Consisting of twelve publications so far, again set in Victorian climes/chimes and often recycling characters from her other historical fiction, the series deliberately revivifies mid- to late Victorian publishing tradition, not least as regards the Christmas ghost story (although Perry tends to avoid supernatural elements). As summarised on the V&A’s website, from the 1840s onwards, publishers began producing ‘cheaper special Christmas reading material for the aspiring middle classes’, making Christmas ‘the peak season in the publishing calendar’ and simultaneously developing authors’ ‘acute sense of a new Christmas market’ (‘Victorian Christmas Reading’ n.d., n.p.). Thus Dickens regularly produced stories for special Christmas editions of Household Words and All the Year Round (most famously, in terms of its enduring popularity, A Christmas Carol [1843]), with other writers like Collins following suit. Whereas we tend to focus on neo-Victorian texts’ imitations and subversions of nineteenth-century literature’s formal elements, there are also evident ‘doubling’ aspects between Victorian and neo-Victorian fictions’ publication and advertising processes, as well as their intended markets and target audiences, which deserve much closer scrutiny. The fi nal test of individual works’ neo-Victorian quality and canonicity may prove their multi-directional and long-lasting appeal to numerous general and specialist readerships. From the influence of romantic fiction to the legacies of Victorian serialisation, through the renewed contestation of the highbrow/lowbrow divide and interrogations of canon formation, to the prospecting for and excavation of as yet undiscovered buried treasure, the neo-Victorian goldfields—and sometimes minefields—promise further productive explorations and speculations in years to come. NOTES 1. ‘Neo-Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation’ (2007, Exeter University, UK), ‘Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and Re-Writing the Past’ (2008, University of Wales, Lampeter, UK), ‘Fashioning the Neo-Victorian: Iterations of the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Literature Culture’ (2010, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany), ‘Neo-Victorian Networks: Epistemologies, Aesthetics and Ethics’ (2012, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), and ‘Neo-Victorian Cultures: The Victorians Today’ (2013, Liverpool John Moores University, UK). An earlier version of this chapter was presented as the opening keynote lecture at the ‘Fashioning the Neo-Victorian’ conference. 2. The neo-Victorian phenomenon could arguably be pushed back further in time, prior to the advent of postmodernism, via consideration of works by earlier writers, including Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) and Freshwater: A Comedy (perf. 1923, rev. 1935, publ. 1976), as well as novels by Catherine Carswell, John Galsworthy, Michael Sadleir, May Sinclair and Silvia Townsend.

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3. Daniel C. Bormann specifically comments on the reassuring Victorian sense of a more stable history—as both knowable and teleological—as one of the pleasures and consolations afforded by neo-Victorian fiction, balancing the latter’s epistemological challenges (2002, 70–72). 4. Any intertextual practice runs the risk of even ‘acquainted’ receivers missing more oblique or multi-layered allusions, particularly where several intertexts are being evoked and co-mingled. Similarly, Clayton comments on ‘the contradictory legacies cultural objects can bestow’, noting that ‘similar, even identical, phenomena can have hugely variable meanings for different people and at different times’ (2003, 24). 5. Students of my undergraduate ‘Neo-Victorian Fictions’ seminar at Swansea University, asked to complete a questionnaire as to what they associate with the term ‘Victorian’, almost invariably list ‘Dickens’ and ‘Queen Victoria’ among their answers. Yet follow-up questions rarely elicit more than a superficial acquaintance with either individual or their works/writings, although some students will refer to a biopic of Victoria or a fi lm adaptation of a Dickens novel they have seen. 6. Heilmann and Llewellyn contend that there are ‘two levels of reading’ in neo-Victorianism, producing fi rstly, two kinds of reading experiences based on ‘a distinct and differing knowledge of the act of appropriation’, and secondly, ‘divided readerships’ consisting of ‘the “ordinary” reader and the more “knowledgeable” critical reader’ (2010, 17–18). Yet even sophisticated readers display different levels of critical knowledge and awareness regarding different adapted texts and discourses, as well as at different times in their reading lives and/or careers as academic researchers. At best, I would argue, there exists a continuum of naïve/sophisticated reading, with ever shifting gradations of non-recognition and knowledge. 7. Besides his neo-Victorian inflected studies of Dickens, London and the Thames, Peter Ackroyd has written multiple neo-Victorian (or part neoVictorian) novels: The Great Fire of London (1982), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Chatterton (1987), English Music (1992), Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), The Plato Papers (1999), The Fall of Troy (2006) and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008). Although set in 1795, Ackroyd’s The Lambs of London (2004) could also be read as dealing with ‘the long nineteenth century’. Waters’s neo-Victorian ‘trio’ consists of Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affi nity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), whereas her most recent novel The Little Stranger (2009) evinces affi nities with the Victorian ghost story as well as displaying Poe-esque overtones. 8. Employing ‘neo-Victorian’ generically, as I have proposed doing, Rose is not a one-off for Smith, strictly speaking; his alternative history The Indians Won (1970) re-imagines a different outcome to the American Indian Wars and the establishment of an independent Indian nation in the midst of a necessarily quite different, modern US. 9. Although evocations of industry appear in other neo-Victorian novels, including Gustine’s work in the Sunderland potteries in Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger (1999), William Rackham’s soap manufactory in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), or Samuel Ransome’s tannery and his family’s cocoa and confectionary factory in York in Fiona Shaw’s The Sweetest Thing (2003), these industrial vignettes tend to be subordinated to other major themes in said novels. 10. Power’s fi rst novel was published under the name of Margaret Power. 11. A comparison of Power’s detailed description of a fallen woman’s use of contraception in Goblin Fruit (1987, 3), for instance, makes Michel Faber’s

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depiction of the same in The Crimson Petal and the White (2002, 6) read far less daring and original. 12. Significantly, none of the major cited monographs on neo-Victorianism by Gutleben, Bormann, Clayton, Joyce, Kaplan or Heilmann and Llewellyn reference Fraser. Neither do Kate Mitchell’s History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fictions: Victorian Afterimages (2010), Louisa Hadley’s NeoVictorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us (2010) or Elizabeth Ho’s Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (2012). 13. Anne Perry’s case complicates not just the highbrow/lowbrow divide, but also—quite literally—the fiction/history binary. For ‘Anne Perry’ is, in fact, another pseudonym, or rather the adopted identity of Juliet Marion Hulme who, in 1954, as a teenager in Christchurch, New Zealand, together with her friend Pauline Yvette Parker killed Parker’s mother in a frenzied attack, apparently in an attempt to prevent the girls’ imminent separation. The murder trial rapidly moved into Sarah Waters territory, with assertions of an ‘unhealthy relationship’ (‘Parker-Hulme Murder Case’ 1954, 1), involving avid journal scribblings and exaggerated literary ambitions. Although the defence’s plea of not guilty on the grounds of insanity was rejected by the jury, the defendants were spared the death penalty on account of their youth, and some five years later were freed and assumed new identities. The convoluted case reads like a Victorian sensation novel plot or melodramatic reallife crime transposed into the twentieth century, with a true metafictional postmodern ending: a teenage murderess changes identity and becomes a popular bestselling author of neo-Victorian murder mysteries.

2

Participatory Desires On Metalepsis, Immersion and the Re-Plotting of the Victorian Rosa Karl

LITERARY HERITAGE AND THE ANXIETY OF AFFECT This essay analyses a group of, at first glance, widely divergent phenomena which seem to pervade our interactions with whatever is perceived as central to our literary and, more generally, cultural heritage. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001), with its playfully enhanced prominence of the canonical, serves as primary example and starting point. Fforde’s literary detective novel may not appear to be a typical neo-Victorian text in the sense of ‘those works which are consciously set in the Victorian period [ . . . ] or which desire to re-write the historical narrative of that period’ (Llewellyn 2008, 165), but it offers itself as a rich metatext for the neo-Victorian, as the following analysis intends to show. The cultural practices that will be inquired into are, it should be stressed, not restricted to our engagement with the Victorian; potentially, they are factors in all reference to what has been called ‘heritage’ since the 1980s. A longish nineteenth century, however, seems to hold pride of place in the popular perception of British ‘literary heritage’—only excepting Shakespeare (whose myth is, in large parts, also an invention of that time).1 The somewhat awkward notion of a ‘longish nineteenth century’ as a main frame of reference for literary heritage is also due to perspective: From the viewpoint of contemporary popular perception the traditional distinction between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Romantic’ has blurred considerably. Austen, for example, is often perceived as part of the Victorian, 2 the Keats festival 2010 in London offered the opportunity to ‘meet the Victorians’, and the recent BBC series on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, styled in the vein of Byronism, was broadcast as Desperate Romantics (2009). The term ‘neoVictorian’, which has become the dominant designation for our manifold interactions with such heritage, can therefore sound misleadingly clear-cut, even while it is certainly less unwieldy than a more open ‘Retro-NineteenthCentury’ would be. What makes Jasper Fforde’s series, or in this case his fi rst Thursday Next adventure, a metatext for ‘contemporary re-imaginings of the nineteenth century’ (blurb Neo-Victorian Studies)?3 As the title, The Eyre Affair, signals, we are dealing with a text in which canonical literature, primarily but

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not exclusively Charlotte Brontë’s most popular novel, Jane Eyre (1847), plays a leading part. A recurring feature of Fforde’s novel, and one of its chief attractions, is what Margarete Rubik, in an essay entitled ‘Invasions into Literary Texts, Re-Plotting and Transfictional Migration in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair’ (2007), calls the ‘trespassing between fictional reality and canonical literature’ (172). Put more simply, this is the popular device of having a fictional ‘reader’ (usually from a world resembling that of the actual readers) enter a ‘book’ or ‘story’ in his or her fictional world and influence its course—that is, re-plot it. Despite our familiarity with this device, a certain uneasiness or anxiety appears to be attached to these crossings, as Rubik’s ‘trespassing’ and ‘invasion’ already suggest— especially when the disrupted text is canonically familiar and not as freshly invented as the fictional interloper. Some texts and contexts are, after all, protected and preserved by the National Trust and suchlike organisations. Our world may not feature the literary detective units and ‘jurisfiction’ departments of Fforde’s fictional universe (i.e., executive entities that punish tampering with the canonical); nevertheless, the re-visioning and rewriting of central historical and literary heirlooms, which is so characteristic of the neo-Victorian, seems to exist in a similarly anxiety-ridden condition. On the one hand the manipulation of enshrined heritage carries hints of ‘sacrilege’,4 resulting in a frisson which is certainly part of the neo-Victorian attraction, on the other the re-imaginings, while they can be liberating, are constantly at risk of succumbing to a diffuse but threatening ‘danger of nostalgia’, of becoming a ‘vapid period piece’ (Swift qtd. in Shuttleworth 1998, 262) which all too easily yields to ‘the almost sentimental appeal’ (259) of a not unproblematic past.5 Kaplan, in her introduction to Victoriana (2007), points out that there is a ‘high degree of affect involved in reading and writing about the Victorian past’ (5)—while this high degree of affect also seems to be bound up with a ‘cloying nostalgia’ to which Victoriana are found to be susceptible (6). The ‘intensity of emotion and authenticity of experience’, which not only Shuttleworth considers to be sought in turning to ‘the Victorian’ (1998, 260), seems to derive from our conflicted attitude towards its heirlooms as well as the thrill of trespassing on ‘hallowed ground’ and maybe claiming it for new inheritors; it is also haunted by the anxiety of ambiguous, possibly damnable and politically as well as critically incorrect affective entanglements. (Proper) neo-Victorian fiction, Heilmann and Llewellyn demand implicitly, is to be characterised by a ‘revitalized, even pyrotechnic response to the “tradition” still so much represented by the Victorians’ (2010, 4). The ‘complex web of interrelations and influences’ (4) that comes into play whenever this ‘tradition’ is appropriated seems to be not only highly charged but also somewhat treacherous, as it threatens to entrap those who approach it with a lack of self-conscious caution. The trespassings ‘between fictional reality and canonical literature’ (Rubik 2007, 172) as staged by Fforde’s text are disruptions which depend very much on such established tradition, while presenting their pyrotechnics as light-hearted play.

40 Rosa Karl AFFECTIVE IMMERSION Despite—or maybe because of—its decidedly irreverential appearance, the Hodder cover of The Eyre Affair manages to pointedly visualise the threat and thrill of an ‘inappropriate’ present trespassing on a well-known and well-loved, if also very much kitsched, nineteenth-century past: A garishly painted sports car (belonging to protagonist Thursday Next, the literary detective who is responsible for most of the book-hopping and consequent re-plotting in the novel) bursting through an idyllic landscape filled with (presumably dancing) daffodils, which is revealed to be ‘made of paper’ by the tears the violent invasion leaves—while it is at the same time depicted as a three-dimensional space which can be entered by the car. William Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (1807, the origin of the cover’s dancing daffodils on the lakeshore) plays a minor part in the novel, but may here function as a popular icon for nineteenth-century canonical literature in general. The scene we see is, of course, also one of the favourite spots for literary tourism in the UK. Many of us may have ‘been there’ (on the shores of Ullswater, in search of the expected ‘host of golden daffodils’, Wordsworth 1807, 149), with or without sports cars. The book jumping, the trespassing that takes place here, is not only an ideological problem (one of tampering with ‘heritage’, or even ‘historical truth’—or of not rewriting it sufficiently). It is, technically, also what narratologists would call a metalepsis, a movement from one narrative level to another and therefore a violation of ontological boundaries. Metalepsis is generally held to be ‘fundamentally disruptive’ to the fictional world and therefore to have a ‘destabilizing and disorienting effect on the reader’ (Malina qtd. in Rubik 2007, 173). This disorienting effect, or rather a certain uneasiness and anxiety, however, seem to be not as much experienced by general readers of The Eyre Affair as by professional academics writing about the phenomenon. Indeed, it could even be argued that what an amateur reader is witnessing is primarily a protagonist doing ‘for real’ exactly what readers tend to do unwittingly and habitually: they immerse themselves in a book. According to cognitive psychologists, even re-plotting is part and parcel of these aff ective pleasures of reading (Rubik 2007, 175).6 Imaginary interaction with fictional worlds and their characters, however, is generally regarded with some suspicion. Stigmatised as mere naïveté and ‘affective fallacy’, it has been placed under a strict taboo for professionals who, after all, were the ones to prescribe what ‘normal literary intuitions’ (175) are. As with all interactions with ‘heritage’, the contested authority to authenticate readings (of text, place, traces of the past, etc.) has been claimed and regulated predominately by academia.7 The critical history of Jane Eyre shows that the novel’s extraordinary power to draw the reader in has fascinated and unnerved its audiences since its publication. As George Henry Lewes remarks in an early review,

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the novel ‘fastens itself upon your attention, and will not leave you’ (Fraser’s Magazine, Dec. 1847, qtd. in Allott 1974, 691–92). This effect of being enchanted or even possessed is reported by a considerable number of readers. Many of the early reactions to Jane Eyre, however, compliment the text on this ability—even when they are somewhat afraid of being ‘led astray’ by the narrator.8 Virginia Woolf’s ambiguous admiration for Charlotte Brontë, whom she considers a ‘selfcentered and selfl imited’ writer (1916, 157), is exemplary for its modern anxiety and admiration of Jane Eyre’s Victorian affect: ‘As we open Jane Eyre once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall fi nd her world of imagination [ . . . ] antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date [ . . . ], a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious. So we open Jane Eyre; and in two pages every doubt is swept clean from our minds’ (156). Immediately Woolf fi nds herself sitting in Jane’s window seat by force of an ‘[exhilaration which] rushes [her] through the entire volume, without giving [her] time to think, without letting [her] lift [her] eyes from the page’ (156). The encounter leaves her ‘steeped through and through with [ . . . ] Charlotte Brontë’ (156), an affective convergence the modernist critic seems to be in need of exorcising in somewhat condescending tones in the remainder of her chapter, where she elaborates on the drawbacks of an author who puts all her ‘[tremendous force] into the assertion, “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”’ (157–60). Anxieties about an (over)identification with ‘the Victorian’ seem to lead beyond the question of ‘truth’ or authenticity into the realm of mental pathologies, where uncanny affects cloyingly seduce their unwary victim on the path towards vapidity. This would cast the (neo-)Victorian in the potential role of la belle dame sans merci: very fascinating company, but not necessarily healthy for the male powers of reason and critical detachment. Jane Eyre, that ‘most irresistible fi rst-person heroine in literature’ (Miller 2002, 12), may not have the beauty of Keats’s pernicious fairy, but she certainly has the power of storytelling. In their guardedness against relinquishing control these reservations seem to almost echo the Victorian discourse on the dangers of indulgent novel reading, where ‘over-identification with the characters about whom one was reading and a capacity to be emotionally, irrationally stirred [ . . . ] were the most frequently remarked characteristics of the woman reader’ (Flint 1996, 252). It is no coincidence that most warning examples given to amateur readers in danger of immersion—Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey, 1817), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and many others—are female. The prejudice against the naïvely participatory reader has a gendered tradition that, interestingly, has also coloured the attacks on ‘inappropriate’ and ‘embarrassing’ consumption of heritage from the 1980s onwards, whereas the abhorrence of touristic practices typically involves class- rather than gender-related stereotypes. The tourist, especially as a mass phenomenon, tends to be faulted as an unreflecting consumer of prefabricated

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pseudo-events, set off against the informed and knowing—implicitly upper class—traveller.9 As a result, the tourist experience is ridden by anxieties to be there for the wrong reasons, show embarrassing behaviour patterns and—especially in heritage tourism, which can itself be seen as an attempt to escape the masses10 —to fall into the trap of a ‘cosy, simplified view of the good old days’ (Ousby 1990, 7) which is also, one may add, perceived as politically suspect. The negative overtones of the participatory element inherent in our interactions with cultural heritage can arguably be seen as part of a struggle for control over legitimacy in the contested space of national and individual identity work. The traditional prescriptions of keeping a ‘healthy’ professional distance—with regard to literature a purely platonic love where there is no undue exchange between the ‘great work’ and the critical reader, with regard to history a similarly impossible ideal of the historian as neutrally transparent medium—have been severely challenged. They rest on an essentialist argument of ‘truth’ that is no longer tenable in an academic context where the constructivist position on history and culture as emergent and continually in process has been widely accepted (Bruner 1994, 407). While these developments considerably lessen the ‘scandal’ of the neo-Victorian as such, traditional anxieties still influence our ‘normal[ised] literary intuitions’ (Rubik 2007, 175) and lead to the use of an apologetic, or rather apotropaic, invocation of the ‘vapid period piece’ as distinctly other. More recently, the taboos regarding affective immersion have also lost their hold through widespread phenomena in the cultural practices of participatory fanculture and their analysis by cultural critics. The rewriting of beloved texts—or for that matter the writing of prequels, sequels and parallelquels as well as the re-enactment of their plots in live role games or the obsession with their minutiae, which is so characteristic of many online communities—has become a widespread and sometimes even profitable phenomenon. How fascinating it can be to huge numbers of readers to lovingly break the traditional taboos with regard to reverent icons of nineteenth-century literature is not only shown by the success of Fforde’s series, but also by the bestselling, if not exactly imaginative, monster mash-ups such as Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) or Sherri Browning Erwin’s Jane Slayre (2010). These adaptations rely on the marked incongruence of interspersing the classic’s original text (most of which they simply keep) with Buff ythe-Vampire-Slayer-style martial arts scenes, marketing their ‘classic regency romance’ as ‘now with ultraviolent zombie mayhem’ (flyleaf of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). The mash-up is presented as a collaboration between Jane Austen, ‘the author of [ . . . several] masterpieces of English literature’ and Seth Grahame-Smith, who ‘once took a class in English literature’ and ‘lives in Los Angeles’ (back cover). Literary heritage is spiced up with a few new ingredients—like the tried but enhanced formula of a favourite comfort food.

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CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE REVISION OF THE CANON Obsessing about details concerning so-called ‘high culture’ is indeed no longer the privilege of scholarly fractions, but has become, with a little help from the new information technologies and the Web 2.0, a widespread and enthusiastically pursued hobby.11 Interestingly, the means of crossing from one story level to another have undergone a development which seems to mirror this tendency: from unique, or at least rare, leather bound tomes, as in The Neverending Story (Michael Ende, 1979; adapted for film in 1984), to well-thumbed but mass-produced paperback editions as in the ITV miniseries Lost in Austen (2008). In the case of Fforde’s series the appearance of ‘well-thumbedness’ is apparently central enough to be delivered via a ‘used look’ by the publishing house, which prints ‘already frayed’ edges on the cover. The means of transport may still be a mass-produced commodity (the paperback), but it is transformed through personal usage—just as cultural texts are incorporated into personal narratives in fandom (Pearson 2007, 104). The peculiar weight given to matters literary and cultural in Thursday Next’s world appears to play with exactly those developments and anxieties and therefore offers an interesting comment on the politics of the neo-Victorian. In her world, ‘art’ and its fandom have replaced political views, and even more obviously religion, as the basis for contentions. Street fighting between surrealists and impressionists, for example, is a common nuisance in her community (Fforde 2001, 9)—a behaviour which, in its vehement (if, to us, laughable) demarcation strategies is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s assessment that ‘explicit aesthetic choices are in fact often constituted in opposition to the choices of the groups closest in social space, with whom the competition is most direct and most immediate’ (1984, 60). If we look at the fan cultures of, say, Jane Austen, such a vying for social (or is it authorial?) space becomes less ridiculously strange, and the confl icts of Thursday’s world become more familiar: ‘[A] customary method of establishing one’s credentials as a reader of Austen has been to regret that others simply will insist on liking her in inappropriate ways’ (Lynch 2000, 7).12 Neo-Victorian reading often works in strikingly similar terms—apt neo-Victorian readers can, for example, measure their reading success by the amount of intertexts or historical (mis)representations they are able to identify. The perceived manipulation of cultural capital establishes a state of belonging, a bonding between neo-Victorian text and competent reader. Fforde simply concentrates these attitudes and depicts a world in which cultural capital ranks so high that it attracts all kinds of criminal activity—despite being monitored by special police forces. When the ultimate villain, Acheron Hades, is enabled to enter texts via a ‘prose portal’ (and it is significant that he needs a technological device for the crossing because he is not propelled by ‘love of literature’, which would presumably prevent the worst effects of his meddling), the darkest fears about the consequences of losing control

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over the access to these cultural stakes seem to come true. He threatens to kill the protagonist of a Dickens novel in the original manuscript, which apparently would have the power to erase him from all existing copies and therefore destroy the book in its entirety. This kind of retroactive revisionist logic is not only at work in literature within the Nextian Universe, but also in its history, where it is more familiar from countless science fiction tales of time-travelling and the manipulation of timelines—or from neo-Victorian adaptations of Victorian classics, such as Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), who work with a comparative revisionist angle in their attempts to ‘re-right’ Great Expectations (1861) and Jane Eyre, respectively.13 In Next’s world, someone has already been messing with history. Many events which are at the backbone of British identity have not taken place or have had a rather different outcome: for example, England has been occupied by the Germans for some time after the ‘second war’ and has only been freed and rebuilt later by the all-pervading and rather suspect Goliath Corporation (who are, of course, very eager to exploit the ‘prose portal’ for their own economic advantage). Whether this historically less glorious situation is one of the reasons for the intensified recourse to cultural heritage—parallel to the Thatcher era’s—is not made explicit; Fforde’s series is, after all, set in a parallel eighties.14 When Hades gets hold of the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, he threatens to destroy one of the most popular texts of the nineteenth century simply by kidnapping its protagonist and pivotal fi rst-person narrator. When he abducts her in the scene of the night-time fi re, the remaining pages of all existing copies go blank and the literary detective offices are picketed by worried fans: ‘There were thousands of them, encircling the station behind crowd barriers, silently holding candles and clutching their copies of Jane Eyre’ (Fforde 2001, 298). Fforde’s heroine will not only restore Jane Eyre to her text—and in this way save the novel—but in the process she makes a few significant alterations to the plot herself. Her deliberate ‘fiction infractions’ (Fforde’s term, defi ned as ‘unauthorised change of a book’s narrative’, http://www.jasperfforde.com/madeup2.html) are a punishable offence in her universe and will result in a trial in volume two, but Next is eventually acquitted by the judges because public opinion is that she has actually improved the narrative. Her offence can be healed by public acclaim, because the text’s integrity appears to be constituted along the lines of modern concepts of authenticity as a ‘social process’ rather than a ‘known entity’, a ‘negotiable concept’ which is socially constructed and therefore open to change. The new heirloom is obviously ‘“attractively authentic” as opposed to merely “historically accurate”’ (Burnett 2001, 45, 40). Apparently, the act of interfering with literary heritage is not off-puttingly scandalous to Fforde’s readers. As with the historical divergences, the differences between our Jane Eyre and the original version in Fforde’s fiction are actually remedied by Thursday’s infraction. From ‘our’ perspective they bring Jane Eyre closer to our familiar version and therefore make it

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‘how it should be’—a strategy which also playfully suggests that a revision may have indeed taken place. Thursday gives an overview of the ‘changes’ she instigates and her motivations in an excerpt from her ‘private diary’: ‘I had disrupted Jane Eyre quite considerably; my cry of “Jane, Jane, Jane!” at her window had altered the book for good. It was against my training, against everything I had sworn to uphold. I didn’t see it as anything more than a simple act of contrition for what I felt was my responsibility over Rochester’s wounds and the burning of Thornfield’ (351). In doing so she not only provides a new ending to the fictional readers, The Eyre Affair also rewrites the ending of Jane Eyre as we know it. Without changing the course of events—or for that matter our own texts of Jane Eyre—it offers a far more acceptable chain of causality for all modern readers who are troubled by the necessity of burning down Thornfield, maiming Rochester and conveniently killing off Bertha, apparently to make the fulfilment of the marriage plot possible. In Fforde’s version, Bertha dies almost heroically (it is her attack on the villain which ultimately enables his demise); the fi re and all its consequences are attributed to Acheron Hades, ‘third-most evil man on the planet’ (342). The conventional ending becomes not what calls for these disasters but is a ‘compensation’ for them (after all, the likewise heroicised Rochester deserves a reward). Thursday’s intervention even gives a ‘natural’ explanation to the supernatural calling in Brontë’s novel—one could suspect that this supernatural element is ‘explained’ in the best tradition of the female Gothic. As a member of the fictional Brontë Federation puts it, the altered text is ‘pure Charlotte Brontë’ (345): the developments are thus legitimised via a claim of authenticity. The canonical work, in the full sense of the authoritative original manuscript—a revered and very powerful object (not only) in Thursday’s universe—may be substantially altered, but it is still ‘true’. This somewhat paradoxical turn of Fforde’s plot, again, mirrors a typical consequence of modern fan cultures, where the ubiquitous return of interest in the author and the status of his or her work (an entity which had been declared dead in the interest of readerly freedom and the processual text) is, fi rst and foremost, apt to make us realise the might of the reader. In this context, Deborah Kaplan argues that ‘Austenmania has prompted a renewed awareness of the power of audiences to determine the status and meaning of literary works, to construct, in this case, very different Austens’ (2005, 4–5)—or, for that matter, Brontës and Jane Eyres, as well as diverse neo-Victorian nineteenth centuries.

PARTICIPATORY READING In the logic of Fforde’s universe, this proximity between the new fictional version of Jane Eyre and our ‘pure Charlotte Brontë’ suggests that our worlds may be closer than we had assumed, the barriers more pliable than

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reason would allow. This is a suggestion also toyed with in the makeup of the printed text we can buy at the bookshop. It pretends to be supplied by ‘Goliath—For all you’ll ever needTM’ (logo on the flyleaf of Fforde 2001). In later editions, readers are even invited to join the heroine as a colleague at Jurisfiction: ‘Ever wanted to be in books?’ (Fforde 2003, 362). It is not only the texts within The Eyre Affair which appear to be changeable. Fforde jokingly takes the idea of participatory books a bit further. A typical aspect of convergence culture is ‘the flow of content across multiple media platforms and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’ (Jenkins 2006, 2–3). From early on the Thursday Next series has been accompanied by a website which plays off the different possibilities and idiosyncrasies of electronic and more traditional media against each other. Besides ‘Special Features’ pages for each book offering the familiar genres of the ‘making of’, ‘wordamentaries’, ‘deleted scenes’ and so forth, the homepage also features the possibility to upgrade your personal hardcopy of the books. As Fforde puts it, his ‘books are in a constant state of improvement’—if not quite as volatile as the texts within his fictional world—and need to be updated frequently (http://www.jasperfforde.com/upgrade/upgrade.html). As the ‘Bookman Old Style’ (or is it ‘Book Antiqua’?) font used on the website already indicates, the procedure of updating turns out to be surprisingly low-tech despite the familiar software speak. After all kinds of warnings and precautions familiar to any computer user (including the possibility of a ‘deep text crash [ . . . ] which will render your book unreadable and could wipe your entire library’) we are simply asked to ‘us[e] a fine black pen [and] make the following corrections’ (http://www.jasperfforde.com/upgrade/upgrade. html). Readers are invited to make (authorised and copyrighted) changes to the books in a procedure which also serves to highlight that the much celebrated interactivity of the new electronic media can seem restricted and palely scripted in comparison with ordinary bookish adventures when the ‘barrier between reality and make-believe’ is allowed to be a little ‘pliable’, as Thursday puts it when recounting her first journey into a book, interestingly ‘with the help of’ not a prose portal but ‘of a good storytelling voice’ (Fforde 2001, 63). As the discussion of Jane Eyre’s immersive power should have shown, this aspect is not exclusive to the science fiction logic of Fforde’s book worlds. The upcoming updates proposed by the website continue a provocative play of crossing and re-plotting: Romeo & Juliet V1.3 upgrade: The messenger makes it in time; successful elopement, Montagues and Capulets keep on senselessly killing one another. [ . . . ] Sense & Sensibility V1.6 upgrade: Mrs. Dashwood (nee Ferrers) crushed by wagon. John Dashwood agrees to let the girls stay at Norland Park. [ . . . ]

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Paradise Lost Book 1 V1.8 upgrade: God forgives Satan and agrees to coalition. (http://www.jasperfforde.com/upgrade/upgrade.html)

RE-PLOTTING THE VICTORIAN To what extent does this relate to the phenomena we have come to call neo-Victorian? I would like to argue that the desire for authenticity in the neo-Victorian is also a desire to claim a (hotly contested) legitimate share in the cultural capital, to re-plot and to participate in the Victorian. This desire is, just like our engagements with heritage in general, contradictory: Like the heritage site, the neo-Victorian, while being offered in a commodified form, ‘must be seen to deliver the opportunity for visitors [or, more broadly, consumers—or, increasingly, prosumers] to build, enhance or reorientate their own sense of identity’ (Burnett 2001, 41; my italics). I would further argue that this desire is, despite protestations to the contrary, always and invariably nostalgic. This is not a debunking of the phenomenon (running along parallel lines to the heritagebaiting discussed above). I am using the term ‘nostalgia’ here not in its predominantly derogatory sense, but rather neutrally, if that is possible. Seeing nostalgia invariably as an, at best, embarrassing disease—probably akin to the hysteria induced by an overexposure to sensational literature—is not helpful if we want to explain the attractions of the neo-Victorian or phenomena like re-plotting, immersion and participation. Just as researchers of tourism have come to question the negative image of the tourist we might have to reflect on our assumptions and anxieties about nostalgic desire instead of apologetically playing it off against a yearning for authenticity. If we defi ne nostalgia with the help of Susan Stewart’s On Longing (1984) as the desire or longing for something that lies in the past, is often considered as more authentic than the everyday present and is inaccessible (133–34); if we see authenticity as a social process rather than a fi xed entity, then the yearning for it can, of course, never be fully satisfied. The past remains as inaccessible as the fictional—except through the insatiable demands of nostalgia which continually aim to possess it. Nostalgia propels our identity work, which attempts to possess a revised version of history and/or literature via a narration that transforms it into personal experience. This is only possible through the construction of an ‘imagined past which is available for consumption’ (143), a ‘Victorian’ that is necessarily shaped by the diverse demands of the present. There is another aspect of Susan Stewart’s study which is both interesting and important in this context: She describes antiquarianism, an engagement with history that closely resembles some retro- or neo-Victorian activities in their devotion to the replication of Victorian discourse, tone and texture, as ‘a theory of

48 Rosa Karl history informed by an aesthetics of the souvenir’ (140). Souvenirs function as specimen and trophies (147), as something which, via a concomitant narration, serves as a personal ‘statement of membership, not [so much] in the event, but in the prestige generated by the event’ (137). The souvenir has the capacity to internalise something that is external. It allows us to participate personally in what is ontologically inaccessible. Although generally mass-produced, the souvenir becomes an almost intimate part of our own story, constructing our identity. Something similar seems to be in effect concerning the dog-eared, wellthumbed, explicitly battered paperbacks which in modern tales of fiction infractions serve as the magic portal to another world. We may personalise these magic mass-produced portals by inscribing them with our comments and installing our, as Fforde’s website puts it, ‘third party ancillaries such as bookmarks, pressed flowers, old bus tickets, etc.’ (http://www.jasperfforde.com/upgrade/upgrade.html). We also personalise them by realising the artefact through our imaginations—by being ‘steeped through and through’ with the narrative, as Woolf (1916, 156) put it. These realisations usually involve imaginary re-plottings and identifications. The fantasy that it is possible to actually inscribe yourself into your favourite narrative and become part of the story, altering its course, shaping it according to your needs, appears to be a favourite element of modern adaptations. It certainly bears some resemblance to the touristic practices of graffiti and the sampling of ‘original material’ in order to form a stronger link to and evidence of the participatory experience. In more than one sense these battered paperbacks can be seen as ‘object[s] arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia’ (Stewart 1984, 135). Maybe Fforde’s books arrive ‘pre-frayed’ in order not only to simulate an already personalised object and therefore dispel fears of impersonal, gain-oriented commodification—but also to signal something that is a necessary precondition for his series—as it is a sine qua non for all neo-Victorian texts. The Victorian which is imagined for our consumption is already a significant part of our personal narratives and has been circulating in our discourses for a considerable time, while it has been and is being remade (consciously or unconsciously) by every new implementation. Against this background the ‘high degree of affect involved’ (Kaplan 2007, 5) is less apt to be a warning than an instigation for research. NOTES 1. For details of the development of the Shakespeare Myth see e.g., Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (2002). 2. T here are numerous instances online where every thing ‘Austen’ is linked to the Victorian, or, as one website puts it, ‘there is a whole culture of fans of Jane Austen [ . . . ] and the overall Victorian era and lifestyle’ (http://ezinearticles.com/?Express-Your-Inner-Jane-Austen-With-aVictorian-Retro-Shower-Curtain&id=4637295). Typically, Austen’s novels are seen as ‘Victorian era romantic classics’ (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/

Participatory Desires

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

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entertainment/1041215/jane-austen-festival-starts-in-canberra), while the fans of Austen usually include Victorian literature among their interests and vice versa. The Jane Austen Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World (M. C. Sullivan 2007) is perceived to be ‘just full of Victorian information’ (http://myvictorianbooks.blogspot.com/2009/07/janeausten-handbook.html) by the author of myvictorianbooks.blogspot. That this somewhat sloppy attitude towards period designations is also seen as a problem to be tackled (and apologised for) by the more organised fancommunities is evident in The Republic of Pemberly’s attempt to put its members and visiting Janeites on the proper track while at the same time explaining their confusion (http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/japeriod. html). As this explanatory description of the journal Neo-Victorian Studies shows, there already appears to be a tendency to read the subject matter of the neoVictorian in the more open frame proposed above. Quasi-religious practices with regard to literary and historical heirlooms are suggested by phrases such as the ‘literary pilgrimage’ to author’s graves, the ‘veneration’ of their ‘relics’ (chief among them, of course, manuscripts, but also locks of hair, clothing, etc.). In Germany this phenomenon, originating in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, is explicitly (and derogatively) called Kunstreligion. For a short overview of literary tourism as pilgrimage see Watson 2006, 27–28. In ‘Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel’ (1998), Sally Shuttleworth discusses Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992) in the context of the appeal of the Darwinian scandal to a postmodern age in which such an immediate crisis of belief was no longer possible. For the recent spread of such ‘pleasures of immersion and interaction’ via computer games and the medial habits in connection with Web 2.0 see also Douglas, 2004. On the political aspects of this struggle with regard to heritage see D. Timothy’s essay collection The Political Nature of Cultural Heritage and Tourism (2007). Thackeray wishes he had not been sent Jane Eyre, because his fascination with it has lost him an entire day (see Lodge 2009, 4). Smith, Brontë’s publisher, is also, as he puts it, ‘taken captive’ by the text despite other engagements (see his recollections reprinted in Orel 1997, 90). A review in The Christian Remembrancer from January 1848 is convinced that ‘The authoress of Jane Eyre will have power in her generation, whether she choose to exercise it for good or evil’. As the text stands, the reviewer considers its influence somewhat unhealthy and ‘is rather sorry to have smiled’ at its religiously incorrect jokes (qtd. in Allott 1974, 89, 91). About the distinction tourists/traveller see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture (1993); about the problematics of this dichotomy and its demarcations see Chris Rojek and John Urry, eds., Touring Cultures: Transformation of Travel and Theory (1997), 1–5, and for a criticism and outline of the traditional, class-related othering see Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (1990), 6–7. For the Post-Fordist convergence of tourism and heritage activities seeking ‘exclusivity, differentiation [and] unique personal experience’ see Apostolakis 2003, 796. Many of the fan-based texts appear to take humorous revenge on traditional highbrow ridicule of their indulgent practices by including rather unflattering versions of academics and their conceits. See, for example, the spurious

50 Rosa Karl introduction to Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen (Arielle Eckstut and Dennis Ashton, 2001) by one Oxonian Dr Elfrida Drummond, specialist on ‘Austenian punctuation conventions’ (2). That such parody is neither Austenite- nor amateur-exclusive can be attested by Stevie Davies’s Four Dreamers and Emily (1996), a novel about a group of readers for whom ‘Emily Brontë’ is an integral part of their everyday existence. Davies’s ‘semicolon-men’ share Dr Drummond’s almost monomaniacal fascination with punctuation. 12. For an overview of these strategies see also Deirdre Shauna Lynch, ‘Cult of Jane Austen’ (2005); that this othering of ‘illicit love’ is not a new phenomenon or exclusive to amateur fan cultures can be exemplified by L. Trilling’s ‘Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen’ (in Beyond Culture, 1978) or D. W. Harding’s ‘Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Austen’ (1963). 13. The term ‘re-right’ with reference to the ideological stance of contemporary rewritings was coined by Chantal Zabus in her 2001 article ‘Subversive Scribes: Rewriting in the Twentieth Century’, where she argues that certain rewritings, in their attempt to lend a voice to the silenced figures of canonical texts, may be ‘read as a re-righting gesture’ (191). 14. For a critique of the Thatcherite heritage boom see Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (1987); Michael Hunter, ed., Preserving the Past: The Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain (1996); David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998) and Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (1985).

3

Nostalgia and Material Culture Present-ing the Past in Cranford Anne Enderwitz and Doris Feldmann

NOSTALGIA AND NEO-VICTORIANISM In 2007 the five-part television miniseries Cranford was advertised as ‘the biggest period drama yet’ (Fox 2007). When first broadcast in the Sunday evening classic fiction slot on BBC One in November and December 2007, it had nearly eight million viewers every week, and it has won many awards.1 Cranford’s impressive cast boasts some of Britain’s top film and stage talents, including stars who have appeared regularly in costume dramas. The producer, the director and the script writer have an impressive period drama pedigree as well.2 The series may be seen within the larger context of recent nineteenth-century adaptations and revisitations in fi lm and literature and as participating in the contemporary cultural imaginary called neo-Victorianism, with its creative (re)constructions of ‘the’ Victorian past from the point of view of and for the present. As a cultural product catering to a mass audience, Cranford certainly partakes in fashioning ‘the rich afterlife of Victorianism’ (Johnston and Waters 2008, 8) and is part of ‘the neo-Victorian’s contribution to cultural memory work’ (Kohlke 2008a, 9). 3 This article highlights two key aspects of Cranford which seem to be relevant to the current cultural engagement with Victorianism in general and the ‘obsession with things Victorian’ (Kaplan 2007, 2) in particular. First, Cranford represents the past in a nostalgic mode; in a mode of memory which is enacted only in the light of an absence and thus characterised by a longing for an irrecoverable past.4 Second, Cranford testifies to the current fascination with Victorian styles and fashions, with Victorian material culture, i.e., with Victoriana in its earliest defi nition (Kaplan 2007, 1). The television series is a particularly interesting object of study in this context because it constitutes a reinterpretation of a text which itself performs a nostalgic longing for a pre-Victorian past as well as a fascination with objects of everyday life. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–53) presents nostalgia for an immediate past, but prevents unrestricted immersion into such an idealised perspective through its complex narrative structure, which distances the reader from the nostalgia presented on the diegetic level. The miniseries, in its turn, offers a narrative condensation of different texts by Gaskell and

52 Anne Enderwitz and Doris Feldmann generates myths of the Victorian past distanced from the everyday lives of today’s viewers. However, it also provides subtle strategies for reflecting on nostalgic forms of consumption and can therefore serve as an example of the multifaceted relationship between the neo-Victorian and nostalgia. Neo-Victorian scholars have frequently argued against conflating neoVictorianism with nostalgia. It is true that neo-Victorianism can imply a variety of different standpoints towards the past, but the unease which nostalgia evokes also stems from the fact that it is often associated with depoliticisation and sentimentalism (Kohlke 2008a, 9). As a result, nostalgia’s significance as a cultural and psychological force is only gradually achieving fuller recognition in critical discourses on neo-Victorianism. Although Fredric Jameson’s one-sided analysis of nostalgia as a disease of the postmodern age, as ‘an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions’ (1991, 286) which goes hand in hand with the loss of a sense of history has been rightly criticised (Shuttleworth 1998, 266), 5 nostalgia retains a negative connotation in the neo-Victorian context. Critics often appear concerned with fi nding ‘more than nostalgia’ (Kaplan 2007, 3) in neo-Victorian works, or with differentiating, on the one hand, between a positively connoted critical self-reflexivity or parodic subversion, and, on the other, naïve nostalgic longing (see Gutleben 2001, e.g., 10, 45, 218, or, in a similar gesture, Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 4, 228). Such attempts at differentiating works that constitute the neo-Victorian canon are, however, complemented by an exploration of the critical potential of nostalgia itself. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001)—published in the same year as Gutleben’s Nostalgic Postmodernism—Svetlana Boym reads nostalgia as ‘a symptom of our age, a historical emotion’, which is crucial for ‘the relationship [ . . . ] between personal and collective memory’ (xvi). Drawing on this insight, Kate Mitchell argues that nostalgic engagements with the past ‘invoke affect as a means toward historical recollection’, which ‘does not preclude sustained, critical engagement with the past’ (2010, 5). We would like to approach nostalgia in this latter sense as an affective mode of memory which constitutes a cultural force in its own right. How exactly does nostalgia work, what is its relation to material culture and to what extent does it account for a pleasurable viewing experience? For the purpose of our argument we approach nostalgia as a dialectic interplay of remembering and forgetting as well as an enabling and pleasurable cultural habit (Dames 2001, 4–6), which seeks to transform past events into manageable and coherent narratives (7). This is not to deny that forgetting is problematic in an ethical perspective.6 As a key factor in historically specific constructions of the past, however, the interplay between remembering and forgetting is crucial for understanding the relation between past and present. Nicholas Dames explains why nostalgic remembering implies forgetting by juxtaposing nostalgia with ‘pure memory’: nostalgia ‘consists of the stories about one’s past that explain and consolidate memory rather than dispersing it into a series of vivid, relinquished moments, and it can

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only survive by eradicating the “pure memory”, that enormous field of vanished detail, that threatens it’ (4). Focal points of nostalgic remembering are objects enacting the condensation of the past into a visible or ‘portable’ form (13). The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ desire to know and ‘own’ the Victorian past is often associated with today’s consumerist lifestyle (Kaplan 2007, 1–2)—another symptom of postmodern culture. It is important to keep in mind, though, that Gaskell’s Cranford already has a long history of appropriation in different forms and media7 and that the marketing of Cranford for Christmas via nostalgic images of rural life, which are mediated through a set of visual stereotypes, is not a new phenomenon.8 The original Victorian text itself, which first appeared in Charles Dickens’s journal Household Words (1850-59), can be seen as a commodity text, a term associated with periodical publication and a highly competitive (weekly periodical) market (Miller 1995, 8). This essay approaches the BBC Cranford as a complex, multi-layered product of popular culture, which offers a variety of different perspectives. It is idealising and sentimental but also self-reflexive and mildly satirical. Framed with a romance plot, it makes use of traditional heritage and costume drama conventions while also gesturing toward a social realism which focuses on the details of a relatively humble domestic interior as well as on class issues, poverty and industrialisation.9 The surplus of signification, which results from its multiplot structure, ensures its appeal to different kinds of viewers. The miniseries is in fact an amalgam of three completely separate narratives: Cranford, Mr Harrison’s Confessions (1851) and My Lady Ludlow (1858/59) (see Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 227). In order to establish more conventional patriarchal structures and to introduce a romance plot with a wedding, the adaptors introduced the more active and desirable male characters of Gaskell’s Mr Harrison’s Confessions. The integration of Gaskell’s My Lady Ludlow, a novella set in the eighteenth century, gives the viewers access to both the (outmoded) lifestyles of the privileged classes and to the problems of the working classes and the poor.10 But the pleasure the series affords also derives directly from the nostalgic mode in Gaskell’s Cranford and its partly ironic fascination with a pre-Victorian ‘thing culture’, a term which refers to the possibility of a metonymic reading of objects in realist Victorian fiction as commodities and as things (Freedgood 2006, 4–5).11 In this sense Gaskell’s text can be seen to foster a nostalgic preoccupation with everyday material culture—a perspective which may be paradigmatic for other neo-Victorian cultural products, many of which are part of popular culture and offer a pleasurable reading or viewing experience.12

MEDIATING THE PAST Like other adaptations of Victorian texts, the BBC Cranford is very much part of its own historical moment and indebted to contemporary popular

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culture (Louttit 2009, 44). The animated and playful opening credit sequence of the television series, which sets the tone for a pleasurably nostalgic event, was designed by Rosemary ‘Posy’ Simmonds, one of Britain’s leading comic strip cartoonists, and is reminiscent of her graphic novels.13 Simmonds’s latest graphic novel, Tamara Drewe (2007), which was inspired by Thomas Hardy and recently made into a movie (dir. Stephen Frears 2010), is similar to Cranford in offering a light, entertaining satire on the charms and follies of middle-class people in a rural village. The playfulness of Cranford’s title sequence points to the light-hearted character of its nostalgic stance. Written in incident-led episodes focusing on the everyday domestic dramas of a closely-knit local community, Cranford also resembles a modern-day soap opera. Yet whereas Coronation Street begins with evocative shots of an almost empty cityscape (Louttit 2009, 39), the opening pictures of Cranford show a secluded country town. In Cranford, the scenery is not introduced via sweeping establishing shots zoomed in (like Coronation Street) or zoomed out (like EastEnders). Instead, the opening sequence offers a painted middle ground contained and controlled by a frame. Thus it draws attention to the primacy of mediation. What is true for other neo-Victorian adaptations is true for Cranford as well: contemporary media culture represents the past at the level of cultural style, implying that ‘the’ Victorian past is always already mediatised and tends to be presented now by way of our own images of the period (Jameson 1991, 25).14 As viewers of Cranford, we are in the ‘presence’ of a virtual space in which Victorianism is refashioned and brought forth through modern technologies, which mediate the past in a nostalgic and aestheticised manner. With the use of simple animations within a two-dimensional panorama and a title set in cursive handwriting, Cranford gestures towards older cultural practices, performing a pseudohistoricisation.15 The ‘presence effects’ produced in this way are already permeated with absence and may be instrumental in reawakening a desire for the presence of the past (Gumbrecht 2004, xv, 106). The painted tableaux vivants of the opening credits also point to the heritage film tradition, which tends to celebrate the past by offering nostalgic images of a pre-industrial, ethnically homogenous England as well as class-bound visions of a small knowable local community. Although Cranford is characterised by some of the typical features of the heritage film16 — like a conventional filmic style (i.e., unobtrusive continuity editing) and a ‘surface’ or ‘illusionary’ realism with close attention to pseudo-historical settings—it exemplifies a slight variation within the tradition. Instead of offering commanding views of ‘English’ rural landscapes and awe-inspiring manor houses and instead of celebrating the elegant lifestyle of the privileged classes, the Cranford part of the story—the part of the series which this article focuses on—portrays everyday life in a small Cheshire market town in the early 1840s on the brink of massive social changes. In Gaskell’s Cranford, one of the more unconventional sources of the adaptation, smalltown life is dominated by single unmarried older women, who are ‘fossils’

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from the point of view of ‘progress’. In her presentation of the dilemma of the ‘redundant’ Victorian spinster (McDowell Cook 1999), Gaskell does not simply idealise her characters in terms of a proto-feminist utopia. Unlike Heidi Thomas, the author of the screenplay, she also stresses the unattractive traits of Cranford: the snobbery and ignorance of the Cranford ladies, the dull and stifl ing nature of village life, the overwhelming sense of loss as well as the constant confrontation with death.17 Within a culture which emphasises progress, the underlying concern with loss can be seen as a necessary reaction. According to Buchli, ‘nostalgia was a key element in the creation of foundational myths of industrialized nations’ (2002, 8). This may be one of the links between Victorian modernity and twentieth-/ twenty-fi rst-centuries’ late modernism. The anachronistic lifestyle of the generation of women depicted in Cranford, which is presented in a partly comic, partly heroic way,18 is itself a ‘nostalgic’ sign of a pre-Victorian past, which is rendered irrecoverable by rapid change. Additionally, in selecting and integrating practices from the past which constitute this lifestyle, nostalgia makes an ‘identifiable generation of what would otherwise remain a featureless demographic cohort’ (Davis 1979, 111). It can therefore be seen to distil the symbolic ‘stuff ’ from which a people’s sense of history is made and to generate notions of specific historical periods and distinct generations. In focusing on a group of middle-aged and elderly women, the BBC Cranford not only caters to an audience which is typical for costume dramas and which forms a growing market (Byrne 2009/10, 46),19 it also appeals to and helps foster the identity of a gendered age group within a society structured by differences such as gender and age. 20

NOSTALGIA: PRESENT-ING ABSENCE The charm of Cranford’s ‘Cranfordism’ as evoked by Gaskell consists of ‘domestic pleasures and simple pastimes’ (Cass 1999, 418) as much as the ‘loveable eccentricity’ (417) of its characters. The same holds true for the television series. The characters’ eccentricity is evidenced by Mrs Forrester’s flannel waistcoat for a cow as much as by Miss Matty’s and Miss Deborah’s economy of candles. Material things and the care which Cranford’s ladies bestow on them play a crucial role in demonstrating how much of their life is concerned with managing (potential) losses. ‘Cranfordism’ corresponds to a conservatism which is truly bent on conservation and for which change spells not simply transformation but threatens the loss of an entire way of life. Already in Gaskell’s text, material things are turned into signs of a culture threatened by change. Handcrafted items made from scrap remnants, such as the old notes which Miss Matty turns into paper candle lighters, contrast with mass-produced commodities and fi nd a parallel in the structure of the text itself, which is compiled from loosely connected old stories (Schaffer 2005, 222–27). The BBC miniseries draws on the nostalgic value

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of obsolete objects such as the lace or the flannel waistcoat to mark the advent of ‘a new set of highly visible, economic and social configurations’ which ‘will obliterate the quaint traces of provincial life, turning Cranford’s hairless cows, queasy cats, and passé fashions into nostalgic emblems of an irrecoverable past’ (Cass 1999, 419). The simple things of everyday life depicted in the series are signs of an old-fashioned culture which the viewers are invited to identify with. The object of nostalgia in Cranford is, ironically, a way of life which has already become antiquated at the historical moment portrayed by the television series. Miss Pole foretells the end heralded by the coming of the railway: ‘By 1845 we shall be utterly undone!’ (ep. 2, 44:21). Cranford articulates nostalgia and draws attention to the workings of nostalgia through a discourse of modernity and tradition which pervades the story but also through objects which—just like souvenirs—embody the transition from ‘event’ to ‘memory and desire’ (Stewart 1984, 135). ‘Telling objects’ (Bal 1994)21 provide a material anchor point for nostalgic narratives and serve as traces of the lived experience that nostalgia longs for and ‘remembers’ (Stewart 1984, 135). Early instances of such objects are Mrs Forrester’s old lace collar, which belonged to her mother-in-law, and her husband’s boot, which ‘fought at Waterloo’ (ep. 1, 46:44). Whereas these relics from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have a comic function, other personal souvenirs ensure the emotional depth of the series. Peter’s letters and the portrait of Miss Matty’s former suitor stand for personal experiences of mutual regard and love. They show that the inhabitants of Cranford treasure the past with an affect of sentimental longing. Such an apparently ‘private’ nostalgia (Davis 1979, 52) clings to material objects as focal points of desire. They offer access to a mode of memory which has already condensed the past into micro-narratives enabled by eradicating ‘that enormous field of vanished detail’ (Dames 2001, 4) that constituted the experience of the ‘original’ event. In contrast to a modernist consciousness à la Proust, which is flooded with memories, the stories occasioned by material objects in Cranford are the result of selective processes of nostalgic remembering (4). The rhetoric of change employed by Miss Deborah and also by Captain Brown masks the fact that modernity has already arrived in Cranford. 22 Cranford participates in an economy based on commerce and capital. Modern ideas and visitors from the wide world have entered the town and play a part in changing its social setting as well as its rigid conventions. The pre-industrial golden age of English heritage fi lms itself is exposed as a fiction when Cranford’s women, who tend to crave the ‘latest’ fashion in clothes, imagine themselves as a community which has not yet been touched and defi led by modernity. It is typical of the ambivalence of nostalgia in the context of consumer culture that in the realm of fashion a cutting-edge modernity (the latest fashion) appears highly desirable. By depicting the ideological struggle that surrounds historical change and by drawing attention to the signs of ‘progress’, the television series is able to

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highlight various forms and functions of nostalgia. It exhibits, for instance, the curious character of nostalgia as a condition of the present which hankers after a past ‘which has never existed except as narrative’ and which is ‘as any narrative [ . . . ] always ideological’ (Stewart 1984, 23). In this sense, the nostalgic reconstruction of the past represents the appropriation of a historical alterity for the sake of the present or even of the future. Besides exhibiting the workings of nostalgia as a narrative mode, Cranford tells its own nostalgic narrative of a past which successfully synthesises tradition and progress and embodies the best of two worlds: the values of a romanticised community life before industrialisation join up with social reform, modern medical techniques and the pleasures of shopping. The content of nostalgia which the series evokes is then not a traditional rural lifestyle destroyed by modernity but rather their imagined encounter as a success story: a moment in history in which fundamental changes are integrated into community life rather than destroying it. Cranford exhibits the fantasy of a community which stands fast against the social ills of nineteenth-century capitalism—alienation and commodification—while highlighting the seemingly innocent pleasures of consumer culture. The risks of capitalism (symbolised by the bankruptcy of Miss Matty’s bank) are attenuated by the profound social ties in the village. What holds true for neo-Victorian novels may also serve as an inspiration for understanding the nostalgia of Cranford: ‘We look back nostalgically not to an age of safe belief, for that holds few attractions for us now, but rather to a point of crisis’ (Shuttleworth 1998, 260). In Cranford, however, the object of nostalgia is a crisis that is being held at bay. Although it portrays a way of life threatened by change, the solidarity of the Cranford community helps to navigate the dangerous waters of life in a modern, capitalist society. Even though Cranford uses nostalgia self-consciously, the idealising perspective of nostalgia is not suspended. After all, ‘there is money to be made from nostalgia’ (Davis 1979, 126) and the series’ success is certainly linked to its nostalgic quality (126). In our view, Cranford’s popularity derives not least from the way in which the series exploits material objects. They are instrumental in constituting the temporal perspective which is decisive for nostalgia. The focus on objects of a temps jadis creates the impression of times long gone. What would traditionally be associated with the ‘reality effect’ of realism can also be associated with nostalgia’s attachment to detail and its resulting ‘presence effect’. It is important to note that this effect is simultaneously subverted by the idealisation of a nostalgic narrative. With the exception of the railway, which eats into the landscape, no object appears out of place in its surroundings or without meaning and purpose. Even the most profane things are treated as objects of value. That everyday objects and the practices that surround them are endowed with surplus meaning is shown in the scene where Miss Matty, who puts newspapers on her precious carpet to protect it from the sun, begins to chase sunbeams with Mary (ep. 2, 12:04–12:34). The way in

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which this childlike pursuit is fi lmed conveys a sense of playful harmony, of organic unity between material objects and their (female) users. They are treasured and used with disciplined economy: not a single drop of eau de cologne is to be wasted and the carpet’s colours must be protected from the sun at all costs.

MATERIAL CULTURE: IDENTITY, COMMODITY AND NOSTALGIA Cranford shares its interest in the re-presentation of material culture with recent developments in Victorian studies, the so-called material turn, 23 and with the mass marketing of and the popular craze for (neo-)Victorian fashions and lifestyles. The series provides graphic images of the power of things from everyday life to negotiate meaning and to signify value, to shape beliefs about the identities of individuals and groups. Fashion represents an obvious collective obsession, which is crucial to the identity of Cranford’s women. The ‘elegant household economy’ which the female residents practise because they are pressed by economic constraints encourages attention to small things, to details, the meaning of which is enlarged and deferred to non-economic levels. Miss Deborah and Miss Matty’s careful economy of candles may serve as an example. The scene in which the female residents of Cranford pool their candles to enable the new doctor to perform an urgent operation is characterised by careful composition and a painterly use of lighting (Louttit 2009, 42–43). 24 With these means, the gift is presented as a heroic sacrifice. The irony of the scene has been carefully prepared by the earlier sparing use of candles. The tension between economising and generosity constitutes the eccentric character of Cranford’s women as well as their sense of identity as Cranford women. To the doctor’s assertion that such readiness to help others is unheard of in London, Miss Deborah replies: ‘You’re not in London, Dr Harrison. You’re in Cranford now’ (ep. 1, 25:46). The exchange of gifts or presents is supposed to mark the spontaneous solidarity and the profundity of the ties between the female inhabitants of Cranford, romanticising Cranford in the nostalgic sense of a small female community as opposed to a modern, urban society. Nonetheless, the relation of the female characters to items of domestic material culture is frequently tactical. There are strategic parallels between gift exchange and the spirit of sociability on the one hand and the more calculating spirit that fi res the circulation of commodities on the other. 25 The gift of candles, for example, serves the new doctor’s integration into the community. The ‘tactical manipulation of small opportunities and fragments’ can be seen as the cultural practice of everyday life, as ‘a “way of operating” characteristic of the unempowered—“an art of the weak”—within a larger, more powerful economy’ (Miller 1995, 99). The series’ almost reverential attention to the tiny details of everyday material culture thus implicitly testifies to the

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limited power of the women of Cranford. The organisation of household spaces is embedded within the larger forces of commodification. The objects and lifestyles presented in Cranford address a commodity culture which was becoming a dominant force in the nineteenth century and which constructs consumer desire as female desire. Some of the commodities, the oranges, for example, are quite literally consumed by the main female characters and the question of how to consume them is presented in detail. The scene in which Miss Matty, Miss Deborah and Mary Smith retire to their separate rooms in order to eat oranges symbolises the impact of a rapidly growing consumerism on the status of women. As ‘consuming angels’ (Loeb 1994) they become ambivalent subjects who act out the contradictions inherent in the discourses that constitute (female) consumerism: on the one hand women are defi ned by restraint and self-control, on the other hand their appetites and desires are directly addressed and aroused by consumer goods. The result is an etiquette or a ‘respectability’ which cultivates secrecy and (self-)deceit. 26 In narrating the history of commodity culture from a nostalgic point of view, Cranford articulates the fantasy of a time when commodities could still be conceived as ‘things’ and were closely intertwined with the noncommercial. The fusion of commodity culture and nostalgic objects such as relics, memorabilia and keepsakes is possible because the economic discourses and practices in the Cranford story are embodied by idiosyncratic and eccentric female characters. Apart from Miss Deborah, who is associated with a pre-Victorian culture and who dies in the second episode of the series, they represent the more modern aspects of Victorian subjects in a society of consumption and spectacle. In buying or admiring fashionable clothes they exemplify one of the basic modern consumer practices: shopping. Miss Matty in particular resembles the conventional, ignorant, childish and feminised consumer who can be found in many modernist accounts of mass culture (Rappaport 2008, 291). Her responses to materiality, to money and the market are impulsive and emotional rather than rational. When she has to give up the ‘fiction of gentility’ and become a sales woman, commodity culture quite literally enters the home, conventionally considered ‘a haven from exchange, the one realm not defi ned by the cash-nexus’ (Miller 1995, 91): with the help of her female friends Miss Matty sets up a teashop in her front parlour. In giving part of her inventory away for free (she makes children a present of sweets) and in warning her clients against the health risks of green tea, she becomes the nostalgic embodiment of a benevolent, old-fashioned kind of business culture. On the other hand, her ‘eccentric’ behaviour can also be interpreted as a successful marketing strategy. In fact, as Miss Matty is in need of making a living rather than wanting to make a profit, her business seems quite removed from the logic of capitalist accumulation. At the same time, the commodities she sells, sugar and tea, were pervasive everyday expressions of imperialism in Victorian Britain.27

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Cranford thus enacts fantasies about the development of female consumer desires, of middle-class female tastes and pleasures, which are based on imperial extension but embedded in a local context of community life. In other words: a global market becomes a prerequisite for celebrating a local female community—a construction which is characterised by nostalgic attitudes towards materiality. Although the series alludes to the empire, it stands firmly in the Orientalist tradition by using the empire merely as the backdrop to English life. As in many Victorian novels, the ‘Orient’ is no more than the source of luxurious goods as well as the place people run off to and return from unexpectedly. Here the constitutive power of forgetting in the constitution of a pleasurably nostalgic narrative becomes manifest.28

MATERIAL CULTURE AND DESIRE Why are we so fascinated with Victorian material culture—a culture which exists through the in(ter)vention of media and narrative and which is placed beyond the horizon of present lived experience? First, an accumulative representation of the past through its scraps, as it were, may be attractive to those contemporary literary and cultural critics who have been taught to distrust grand narratives (Pykett 2003, 4). Second, this form of re-presentation can be seen as an expression of the desire to ‘rescue’ the past, whose materiality escapes us, in the present through (images of) objects which serve as traces of lived experience (Stewart 1984, 135). This ‘resurrection’ of the past may be abstracted and mediated, but the processes of mediation are not simply experienced as a loss, but also as a surplus of signification, as a triumph of the cultural sign over the limits of the natural (133–34). The immersion in the experience of what has been called ‘the presentification of past worlds’ (Gumbrecht 2004, 94) is, however, accompanied by distancing effects. Cranford portrays a spatial technique which exhibits the ambivalent processes of present-ing and distancing. In contrast to Gaskell’s Cranford, the television series includes not only scenes of shopping but also of window shopping. The Cranford ladies, for instance, admire or rather consume a set of Valentine’s cards carefully arranged behind the plate-glass of a shop window with their reverential gazes (ep. 3, 27:50–28:10). 29 The modern flat display window30 was and still is associated with the ‘pleasures of consuming spectacles’, with a world of show which confers upon the object an ‘aura of shining inaccessibility’ (Miller 1995, 2, 4)31 similar to the movement of distancing and desiring which nostalgia performs on a temporal level. ‘Such a world, newly mediated by glass, was one of the projects of Victorian modernism. [ . . . ] In the nineteenth century glass became a third middle term: it interposed an almost invisible layer of matter between the seer and the seen’ (Armstrong 2008, 3). The aesthetic development relating to the ‘exhibition value’ of goods ‘is most commonly associated with the emergence of new visual technologies, photography and

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film most particularly’ (Miller 1995, 6). Objects behind glass shown in a heritage fi lm resist our desire to possess them both in a temporal and in a spatial sense. This inaccessibility renders them all the more valuable. 32 Like the display window, the medium fi lm appeals to the visual sense but, even more than the display window, fi lmic mediation implies a virtualisation which achieves not only re-presentation of the object but also highlights its absence. In the process of mediating Victorian material culture, Cranford can thus be seen to double inaccessibility and desire. The paradoxical structure of present-ing absence continues to fuel nostalgia, a condition which can be called ‘the desire for desire’ (Stewart 1984, 23). This dynamic may well be part of the fascination of the neo-Victorian.

NOTES 1. Awards: best actress—Eileen Atkins; best sound fiction/entertainment; best production design (BAFTA TV Awards); outstanding supporting actress— Eileen Atkins; outstanding hairstyling for a miniseries or a movie (Emmy Awards); best actress in a miniseries or a motion picture made for television—Judi Dench; best miniseries (Satellite Award); television drama programme (Television and Radio Industries Club Awards); best actor—Philip Glenister; best actress—Eileen Atkins; best drama series; writer’s award— Heidi Thomas (Broadcasting Press Guild Awards). For further information see ‘Awards for Cranford’ (2007) on the IMDb website. 2. Judi Dench appeared in A Room with a View (1985), Pride and Prejudice (2005) and as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown (1997); Imelda Staunton appeared in Sense and Sensibility (1995), David Copperfi eld (1999) and also in the adaptation of Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novel Fingersmith (2005). Simon Curtis, the director of Cranford, was, for instance, the producer of David Copperfi eld (1999), Sue Birtwistle was the producer of Pride and Prejudice (1995), Emma (1996) and Wives and Daughters (1999). Susie Conklin is known for her work as script editor for Middlemarch (1994), Pride and Prejudice (1995), Emma (1996) and Wives and Daughters (1999). 3. In her introduction to the inaugural issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, Kohlke demonstrates convincingly that the term neo-Victorian is still in the making. She suggests that the neo-Victorian is set to being theorised as ‘a much more multi-layered and longer-term process than a quasi-in-vitro postmodern “invention” of the latter half of the twentieth century’ (2008a, 5). 4. Historically, the term nostalgia was coined by Johannes Hofer (1669–1752) as a name for a malady: the homesickness of people abroad. According to Hofer, the term is ‘Greek in origin and indeed composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nostos, return to the native land; the other, Algos, signifies suffering or grief; [ . . . ] the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land’ (qtd. in Jackson 1986, 373). Whereas in earlier times the concept relied on spatial distance, nostalgia today denotes a longing for a lost time and hence implies temporal distance. 5. According to Shuttleworth, ‘Jameson’s lament for the eclipse of historicity could itself be seen as an exercise in nostalgia’ (1998, 255). 6. Nostalgic forms of remembering pose a variety of ethical problems. For instance, nostalgia can entail an appropriation of historical alterity, e.g., in order to bolster one’s cultural capital by showcasing the past as individualised

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

‘property’. Our critical approach, however, includes an awareness for historical difference so that such appropriations can be analysed and criticised as part of the processes of neo-Victorian memory cultures. For the various material manifestations and forms of adaptation (magazine instalments, books, school books, plays and fi lms), see Recchio (2009, passim). For the popularity of Hugh Thomson’s illustrated edition of 1891, see Recchio (2009, 96 et seq.; 113). BBC One transmitted a two-part Christmas special called Return to Cranford in 2009. For further information see ‘Cranford’ on the BBC website. Since the BBC miniseries North and South (2004), a clear trend towards grittier and ‘dirtier’ costume dramas displaying social realism has evolved, for instance in productions like the BBC miniseries Bleak House (2005) or Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005). The realist style in Cranford is, however, less elaborate than in these productions. For a critical examination of the screenplay’s juxtaposition of social realism and farcical comedy, see White (2008, 155). Pittock complains about the strained connections between the three different story lines and about the ‘distortions’ of Gaskell’s Cranford, which make the BBC adaptation ‘trite and sentimental’ for him (2008, 7). For Bowen, the integration of two other stories by Gaskell makes the television drama ‘a good deal beefier and more far-paced’ without destroying the subtlety of tone and the reflexive irony of the Cranford story (2007, 17). One does not have to agree with Freedgood’s idea of thing culture as ‘a culture that may have preceded commodity culture’ (2006, 142), but the way she discloses the multiple ‘histories’ of fictional objects beyond and including a history of commodification may prove valuable in the context of neoVictorian studies. See also the contribution by Rosa Karl in this volume, which takes into account both nostalgic modes of reading and the pleasure of immersion in participatory reading. For information on Simmonds, see Jules Smith, ‘Posy Simmonds’ (2009). Jameson’s observation that we ‘seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history’ is true for Cranford (1991, 25), but we do not quite share his pejorative assessment of such representations. Certainly, we do not actually see ‘the’ Victorian past: we are confronted with a present in pseudo-historical costume. As one viewer remarks: ‘Judy [sic] Dench is excellent as Miss Matty but close-ups revealed plucked eyebrows’ (quoted from the Knutsford Group by Elisabeth Williams in Pittock 2008, 8). This is underlined by the rhythm of the title music and by the slowness of the camera movement. For a detailed analysis see Higson 2003, 37–42. The narrator in Gaskell’s Cranford story behaves like an (amateur) ethnologist or anthropologist who is ‘going native’ and whose aim is a ‘thick description’ of an ‘alien’ English culture (Knezevic 1998, 408). For a discussion of the differences of tone in Gaskell’s Cranford (humorous but respectful) and Thomas’s screenplay (more farcical) see White 2008, 154–57. Byrne also points out that the adaptation undermines images of virile men by presenting sick or mutilated male characters (2009/2010, 51). It is important to note, however, that Thomas’s screenplay privileges male knowledge and action, whereas male characters are absent, undermined or killed in Gaskell’s text (White 2008, 156).

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20. The television series remains largely silent about another category of difference, namely ethnicity. At the same time it depicts a process of levelling social differences. 21. ‘Cultural objects must signify through common codes, conventions of meaning-making that both producer and reader understand’ (Bal 1994, 98). 22. Captain Brown’s remark links the coming of the railway explicitly to modernity: ‘the pace of life will quicken; we will join the modern age’ (ep. 2, 44:57–45:00). 23. The explosion of interest in Victorian material culture is discussed by Lyn Pykett, ‘The Material Turn in Victorian Studies’ (2003). 24. The women are contained in a single fi lmic frame. The low-key lighting, the half-lit faces and costumes and the symmetrical composition—along with the solemn title music—lend the scene a reverential aura. 25. For a critique of the simplified binary opposition between gift and commodity see Appadurai (1986, 11–12). 26. Miss Deborah, for whom the word ‘sucking’ and the sucking of oranges is unacceptable, represents an older type of (female) consumer who tends to suppress (‘female’) desires. 27. These commonplace commodities taught Britons ‘to be at home or comfortable with their empire’ (Rappaport 2008, 289). 28. Recchio also remarks on the forgetting of aspects attached to empire in Cranford (2009, 242). 29. This viewing arrangement also interpellates the spectator on an extradiegetic level as a (visual) consumer of material objects. 30. This is a good example for the fictionalising character of attempts to render the past present—they were only invented around 1840 and could only be found in big cities at the time (Miller 1995, 1). 31. On a more general level, the power of the commodity can be related to its status as a fetish object which obscures the use-value of objects and conjures up the magical properties of things (Pykett 2003, 4—on Marx and Benjamin). 32. For Simmel’s defi nition of ‘valuable objects’ see Appadurai 1986, 3.

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Resurrecting Cultural Icons Spectral Returns

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4

‘Eminent Victorians’ and Neo-Victorian Fictional Biography Lena Steveker

(NEO-)VICTORIAN LIVES In his manifesto Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (2008), Philip Davis admits to having a ‘Victorian bump, a place in the mind that makes the experience of Victorian literature always matter’ (7). Although Davis calls himself a ‘neo-Victorian’ (2), he contends that his Victorian bump is not connected to ‘those explicitly neo-Victorian novels self-consciously based on Victorian characters such as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), or Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992)’ (147). But as these novels and many more British verbal and visual texts of the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries are determined by a persistent enthusiasm for revisiting and re-imagining the Victorian age, I would argue that contemporary British literature and popular culture do have their own Victorian bump, a place in the cultural imaginary that makes the experience of what is believed to be Victorian always matter. The Victorian age, which has by now been ascribed a central position within British cultural memory, has come to haunt the present, signifying in pop-cultural practices such as steampunk, in British fiction and in numerous TV adaptations both of Victorian classics and of neoVictorian bestsellers.1 One part of contemporary culture’s fascination with the Victorian age seems to be especially reserved for individuals of the nineteenth century as, for example, indicated by the project Darwin200 with its many celebrations of the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 2009, 2 prominent among them the exhibition ‘Darwin—Big Idea—Big Exhibition’, hosted by the Natural History Museum in London from November 2008 to April 2009. This exhibition was indeed as much concerned with Darwin the man as it was with his scientific theory of evolution, as it not only used posters dominated by the iconic representation of the scientist as a bearded old man, but also displayed numerous Darwin memorabilia such as hairs from his beard, samples of his handwriting and a reconstruction of his study.3 Jon Amiel’s 2009 film Creation, which offers a fictionalised account of Darwin’s life in the 1850s, relies on a similar strategy of representation, because it focuses on portraying the scientist as an individual

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struggling not with his research, but with the crisis it caused in his private life. The fascination with a famous Victorian displayed by both the Darwin exhibition and Creation also seems to be the driving force behind the largescale project Dickens2012, meant to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birthday in 2012.4 The strong contemporary interest in Victorian individuals can be linked to the impact which the genre of biography has made on the book market in the last two decades. As Cora Kaplan observes in her study Victoriana (2007), biography had become ‘the genre of choice for the common reader’ (37) by the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries. By the mid-noughties, literary biography had also made its comeback within theoretically informed literary studies where it had long been met with condescension and contempt. As it was seen as uncritically upholding the patriarchal tenets of a liberal-humanist ideology that privileged the white, European, masculine, heterosexual subject, literary biography was more often than not dismissed as unworthy of critical attention (40–43). However, whereas Victorian scholar Erin O’Connor was still forced to lament, in 2002, that ‘there is no real, shared sense [in the humanities] that biographical information might be essential to any responsible critical framework’ (384), Cora Kaplan states, a mere five years later, that ‘[l]iterary biography and theoretically framed critical studies are not now seen as inevitably at odds. These days, more often than not they are read as complimentary antagonistic approaches’ (2007, 43). If asked to pin down this development more precisely, I would argue that the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare biography Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) left no doubt that the time in which theoretically informed literary studies and life-writing were per se mutually exclusive was over once and for all. Greenblatt’s account of an early modern life marked a watershed in biography’s return to critical favour. However, the Victorian age is of more central significance to the genre’s current success with readers, writers and scholars. When Kaplan calls biography ‘the hot genre of trade publishing and literary studies alike’ (2007, 38), her statement is strikingly similar to that of an unnamed critic who, writing for the Edinburgh Review, claims that biography ‘is at this moment the most popular form of literature’ (‘The Literature and Language of the Age’, 329). But whereas Kaplan comments upon ‘[b]iography’s triumphal moment in the twenty-first century’ (2007, 37; my italics), the other critic’s review was published in 1889. Thus, it dates back to a period which has justly been described as an ‘Age of Biography’ (Atkinson 2010, 14) because of both the large number of biographies that appeared during Queen Victoria’s reign and the publication of the Dictionary of National Biography (starting in 1885).5 This reference work found its successor in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) which, by making it onto The Times’s list of the 100 best books of the noughties (‘The 100 Best Books of the Decade’), also implies that

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life-writing experiences a second heyday. The reawakened success of the genre of biography suggests a link between the 1990s/2000s and the Victorian age, as does the large number of Victorian individuals whose lives have been (re)written since the 1990s. Among them are, for example, the Brontë sisters, Robert Browning, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Christina Rossetti, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and, of course, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens.6 The popularity of nineteenth-century men and women has also spilled over into contemporary fictional biography as indicated by novels such as Emma Tennant’s Felony (2002), David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004), Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George (2005), Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009).7 (Re)Telling the lives of Victorian individuals, texts such as these revisit the Victorian age through both genre and characters. With its strong focus on Victorian biographies, contemporary life-writing—in all its fictional and non-fictional forms—turns towards an epoch that has often been presented, both in its own time and today, as an age of confident humanism and individual self-respect. In 1879, for example, literary critic Robert Goodbrand claimed that the late Victorian age was characterised by a ‘passionate interest in the individual’ that enabled people to ‘look at their fellow-men with an interest that terminates simply in himself’ (20). A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) draws a similar picture of that epoch when one of its twentieth-century protagonists comments as follows on the fictitious Victorian poets Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash: ‘They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures’ (2009, 254). Complementing such concern, Victorian scholar O’Connor sees the late nineteenth century as a period marked by curiosity in other people’s selves, a curiosity that finds expression in biography (2002, 385–86). Each of these different perspectives evokes the image of the Victorian age as a period of ontological certainties predating the postmodern splintering of the subject. Keeping this picture in mind, one might assume that twenty-first-century writers and readers privilege biographical accounts of the representatives of an era that promises release from today’s ever-increasing unease with the fragmented identities and inescapable textualities of the postmodern. Having said that, I hasten to add that life-writing in the early noughties has by no means returned to former humanist truths, whose ideological tenets came under critical scrutiny in the 1970s and 1980s. As the fictional elements, chronological disruptions and metabiographical reflections in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990) show, literary biography has come to acknowledge postmodern theoretical insights into the biographer’s influence, the discursivity of subjectivity and the constructedness of life-writing.8 Contemporary fictional biography is often even more progressive in that it has already left behind the postmodern experiments which marked literary

70 Lena Steveker and fictional life-writing at the end of the twentieth century. Whereas biographic metafictions such as Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1985), Barry Unsworth’s Losing Nelson (1999) or A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (2000) do not tell life stories, but radically problematise the epistemological, ontological and methodological processes on which biographical accounts are based,9 neo-Victorian fictional biography makes use of the conventions of neo-realism. Thus, it acknowledges the unattainability of the past subject whilst claiming that life and identity—both in the nineteenth century and, by implication, today—are indeed meaningful. Barnes’s Arthur and George, for instance, tells the largely linear and overall coherent (fictional) story of how Arthur Conan Doyle’s life became intertwined with that of George Edalji, solicitor and victim of the Victorian legal system. However, the text subtly questions the reliability of the (fictional) biographical facts it presents by sometimes adding information that cannot be harmonised with what has been told before. Readers constantly have to readjust their interpretative framework without knowing which piece of information is ‘correct’. Unacknowledged by characters and narrator, the contradictions that emerge from this strategy are left unresolved.10 Like Barnes’s Arthur and George, the two neo-Victorian fictional biographies which I will discuss in the remainder of this essay are neo-realist texts that create contradictory accounts of the ‘eminent Victorians’ whose lives they retrace.11 Fictionalising parts of the lives of Charles Dickens and Alfred Tennyson, respectively, Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009) share the interest in famous Victorian individuals that has determined neo-Victorian life-writing in the last years, but they refrain from the nostalgic hero-worship that characterises, for example, Ackroyd’s Dickens (Kaplan 2007, 50–62). Instead of celebrating Dickens and Tennyson as heroic men of letters and ‘great’ authors, Foulds’s and Flanagan’s novels focus on moments of crisis in these men’s lives. In doing so, they present their readers with ‘alternative’ biographical stories of two men, each of whom has entered British cultural memory as one of the most successful authors of his age. To put it differently, it is with the help of their alternative bio-sketches that these novels undermine the humanist notion of the ‘Great White Man’ as whom the writers they portray have come to be remembered.

EMINENT VICTORIANS I: TENNYSON DEPRESSED Foulds’s The Quickening Maze focuses on a period of Tennyson’s life some six or seven years after his friend Arthur Henry Hallam’s death and shortly before his own breakthrough as a poet. Covering a period of roughly one and a half years,12 the novel tells the story of Tennyson renting a house in Epping Forrest in Essex where he becomes neighbour and friend to one Dr Matthew Allen among whose patients at the High Beach Private Asylum is

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the poet John Clare.13 The novel offers different images of Tennyson. The fi rst is created by Dr Allen’s seventeen-year-old daughter Hannah, who is determined to be impressed by Tennyson even before she meets him. Imagining him to be an ‘extraordinary’ man living a ‘remarkable life’ (Foulds 2009, 12, 95), Hannah is besotted with this ‘tall, handsome, strong, dark’ poet (128) soon after she has made his acquaintance. She is clearly convinced of his poetic genius as her thoughts about a couple of notes she takes to be a new poem reveal: ‘His handwriting. The charged page vibrated in her sight. A poem lived on it. If she could [ . . . ] read those fresh words, [ . . . ] they would sing in her mind’ (96). Ironically, the reader cannot be sure whether the lines Hannah sees are indeed part of a poem or whether she knows any of Tennyson’s poetry at all, because The Quickening Maze differs from other literary biographies, which are often reliant on an author’s creative output as a means of structuring her/his life, in that it contains only one longer excerpt from his poems, which the poet recites to himself. In fact, it is through sentences such as those quoted above that the reader soon suspects Hannah’s view of Tennyson to be nothing but an overly flattering projection. Blinded by adolescent infatuation, she mistakes the messy slovenliness of his house with its ‘piles of books, and papers, the rumpled sofa and littered desk, the short-stemmed pipes that roosted on nests of ash’ for a sign of ‘gracious, intellectual disorder’ (96) and his brooding, reticent behaviour which borders on rudeness for a poet’s habitual ‘profound, productive quiet’ (206). It is only after Hannah realises that she will not make him fall in love with her (163) that her opinion of Tennyson undergoes a complete change; she begins to see him as a man who not only neglects his personal hygiene (193) but is also ‘dull, unresponsive, dumb as a beast’ (193). Although this image of Tennyson can no more be taken at face value than Hannah’s preceding positive impression of him, it gains more authority because it is similar to that constructed by the poet himself. His self-image, conveyed to the reader by the means of internal focalisation (like Hannah’s changing opinions of him), is that of a severely depressed and deeply insecure man suffering from writer’s block in the years following Arthur Hallam’s death. He feels ‘grief, coarse and brackish and tiring. [ . . . ] Arthur Hallam, his friend, was dead and had taken out of the world with him energy, air, life. [ . . . ] He was dumb and alone. He lacked the energy even to read other people’s words or get up from his chair. He stared at the fi re. He was alone’ (217–18). To make matters worse, Tennyson lets Hannah’s father convince him to invest his money into machine-carved oak furniture, a scheme that fails and leaves him bankrupt. Due to his fi nancial ruin, Tennyson is even more fi rmly in the grip of depression when he makes his last appearance in the novel: ‘[H]e took with him a wallet that contained half-fi nished things only and had new ones about Arthur in his throat, but none of that made a difference. [ . . . ] No, he returned with nothing. He’d tried the world, tried enterprise, and now was bankrupt [ . . . ]. It was a humiliation. He remained the same stale person’ (250–51).

72 Lena Steveker Readers who are familiar with Tennyson’s life will notice that the novel conflates different periods and events that took place between Hallam’s death in 1833 and Tennyson’s bankruptcy in 1843.14 While critics and biographers agree that his friend’s death did indeed leave the poet devastated, it also triggered ‘a burst of imaginative energy’ and ‘the years from 1833 to 1840 [were] fecund’, as Christopher Ricks puts it in his Tennyson biography (1989, 110, 161). Only later, during the years 1840 to 1845, did he ‘los[e] his creative impulse’ (163), regardless of the publication of Poems in 1842, which ‘established Tennyson as the foremost poet of his generation’ (163). Set roughly between late 1840 and early 1842, The Quickening Maze presents Hallam’s death as the primary reason for the depression Tennyson suffered from—which Ricks and other biographers prefer to call ‘melancholia’—although he seems to have had overcome his grief by then (Ricks 1989, 161–71; Tennyson 1969, 165). However, more important than this liberal handling of the temporal framework of Tennyson’s life15 are the poet’s contradictory portraits which the novel creates with the help of multiple internal focalisation. The fi rst is the favourable picture constructed by Hannah, which is eventually replaced by the self-image of a deeply depressed and apparently failing poet. Hannah’s original impression of Tennyson turns out to be nothing more than the cliché of a poetic genius, functioning as a foil for any similarly clichéd expectations the reader might have on encountering the name ‘Tennyson’ for the fi rst time in the text (Foulds 2009, 13). In spite of more balanced biographical stories—told, for instance, by Christopher Ricks and Robert Bernard Martin—that take into account his repeatedly precarious state of mental health (e.g., Ricks 1989, 151–71; Martin 1980, 250–88), the dominant public image of Tennyson is indeed that of Victoria’s fervently admired Poet Laureate who ‘remains one of the most popular poets in the English language’ and who ‘possessed the strongest poetic power’, as announced in Wikipedia, which is easily the source that most people are likely to consult fi rst. Foulds’s novel beckons towards this image in that it acknowledges the fame and popularity that Tennyson was to experience later in his life by mentioning it as if in passing, as a mere by-product of his mourning for Hallam: Tennyson sat by his fi re sinking into the grief that will make him famous. When the grief was total and full of questions, full of words, was a world itself, when he had written it [ . . . ], then Tennyson will be laureate, will be one of the great men of the age, known and praised throughout the Empire. [ . . . ] But at the present, it was simply grief. (Foulds 2009, 216–17; my italics) The covert heterodiegetic narrator points towards Tennyson’s later impact on English poetry one more time when he claims that this man ‘was the equal of any English poet’ (250), but the predominant portrait the novel conjures up is that of a deeply depressed man on the brink of failure.

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Juxtaposing different images of the poet, The Quickening Maze not only exposes the perception of Tennyson as a poetic genius as an over-simplified cultural cliché, but also tells an alternative biographical story which offers its readers an ‘unofficial’ Tennyson persona, as it were, presented from the inside of his (fictionalised) thoughts and feelings.

EMINENT VICTORIANS II: DICKENS REPRESSED Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting is also based on the strategy of creating contrasting images of an ‘eminent Victorian’ writer. The text tells interconnected stories about four different people: Sir John Franklin and his wife Lady Jane Franklin, a Tasmanian Aboriginal girl called Mathinna and, arguably most prominent of all, Charles Dickens.16 Similar to The Quickening Maze, Flanagan’s novel acknowledges the author whose life-story it tells as one of the most popular writers of the Victorian Age, describing him as, for example, ‘the great Dickens’ (2008, 39), ‘the great author’ (204) and ‘the most famous writer in all of England’ (209). In contrast to The Quickening Maze, these eulogies do not refer to a future point in time— Flanagan’s Dickens has already reached great popularity—but they, too, are inserted as if in passing into a text whose main focus is on a period of severe personal crisis in the author’s life between the years 1851 and 1857. Dickens is repeatedly presented as a man grown old before his time (21, 77) who takes increasing doses of laudanum in order to cope with a life he experiences as empty and shallow (91). Despite his literary success, he ‘felt something too close to failure stalking him like a shadow [ . . . ]. [ . . . ] A taint was upon Dickens. [ . . . ] No matter [ . . . ] what compliment, congratulation, ovation or award was granted him, all [ . . . ] air stank and all life was fading. [ . . . O]n the inside he felt as still as a seized cog. Nothing moved’ (32, 72, 73). Even more explicitly than The Quickening Maze, Flanagan’s text presents two completely different images of the author whose life it retraces. On the one hand, Dickens is portrayed as ‘the very bard of family’ (32) who celebrates Victorian middle-class domesticity in his novels and, on the other hand, he is described as the head of a dysfunctional family (95), an increasingly unsympathetic husband who visits prostitutes and habitually hurts his wife’s feelings (33–35, 157–60). What is more, he is shown as being torn into two, divided into an external Dickens—the successful author—and an internal Dickens who is full of self-doubts and despair. Unlike Foulds’s Tennyson, Flanagan’s Dickens is sure of his literary ‘[t]alent’ and his ‘genius’ (93), but he, too, experiences an existential crisis of identity, feeling his external self excavating his internal one: ‘He had been drawing on something within to keep writing his books [ . . . ] and it was some reserve he no longer had. His soul was corroding. Certain blows rained down on him, all the more incomprehensible and unsayable because of his external success. [ . . . ] He feared his work was

74 Lena Steveker eating up his soul’ (92–93). The reason the novel gives for this division is that Dickens feels torn between reason and desire. As ‘his whole life was an object in control of one’s passion’ (30), he struggles with the effort to ‘discipline his undisciplined heart’ (241). Grounding its biographical sketch in this dichotomy of mind and emotion, Wanting contrasts an external, ‘official’ Dickens persona—the famous author who is guided by reason— with that of an internal, ‘unofficial’ Dickens—the man who suffers from his longing for passion. In short, Flanagan’s novel acknowledges the culturally dominant image of Dickens as the most successful Victorian novelist, but it challenges this portrait as a one-dimensional construct which fails to take into account Dickens as a private person. Attempting to provide the character of Dickens with an ‘internal’ dimension, the novel describes him as a severely repressed man who can only admit love and sexual desire whilst acting on stage. During a joint theatre performance with the actress Ellen Ternan, Dickens makes a quasi-epiphanic experience when he suddenly has ‘a terrifying feeling, something at once outside of himself that had now entered him, a thing both wicked and exhilarating. [ . . . ] He was smelling her [Ellen], hot, musty, moist. [ . . . ] And at that moment, Dickens knew he loved her [ . . . ] and he realised he could no longer deny wanting’ (240–41). Here, Dickens fi nally reconciles his internal and his external selves, and thus overcomes his repression. However, this moment of unity is short-lived. Forced to live his relationship with Ellen in secret, hidden away from Victorian society, Dickens comes to suffer from psychotic anxiety to an extent that ‘the things he desired would become ever more chimerical, [ . . . ] movement and love would frighten him more and more, until he could not sit on a train without trembling’ (241). Offering this (fictionalised) psychological portrait, Wanting undermines the popular perception of Dickens as the most eminent of all Victorian novelists. However, in doing so the novel merely substitutes one clichéd image for another, for Flanagan’s Dickens represents the stereotypical sexually repressed Victorian prude living in an age of stifling morality, hypocritical sexuality and crippling emotional inhibition. In short, Wanting privileges the cliché of the repressed Victorian individual, which critics such as Michel Foucault and Steven Marcus have long exposed as a modern invention,17 but which, as the novel shows, still lives on in the cultural imaginary. In a similarly stereotypical, but ideologically much more troubling way, Flanagan’s novel links its discussion of Victorian emotional and sexual repression to the binary difference between ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’ underlying nineteenth-century colonial discourse. In Wanting, Dickens claims that ‘[t]he distance between savagery and civilisation [ . . . ] is the extent we advance from desire to reason’ (2008, 30). Indeed, he repeatedly condemns desire as ‘the mark of a savage’ (241) whilst ascribing reason and control of one’s passions to English ‘civilisation’ (e.g., 30, 31, 42–43, 46–47). This presentation of Dickens’s racist tendencies is historically correct; Dickens did indeed write a racist diatribe aimed at defending

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John Franklin’s arctic expedition against the accusation of cannibalism (Slater 2009, 381–82), and the dichotomy of reason/‘civilisation’ versus passion/‘savagery’ was of course part of Victorian imperial discourse. But even if Dickens, the ‘most famous Englishman of the age’ (Flanagan 2008, 162), can no longer repress his own desire the moment he falls in love with Ellen, the novel fails to sufficiently deconstruct the racist cliché voiced by Flanagan’s protagonist. This becomes most obvious in the fictional portrait of the girl Mathinna. At fi rst glance, her story represents the sufferings to which the British colonisers subjected the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, thus marking Wanting as a postcolonial neo-Victorian text that apparently challenges the marginalisation of the Other of Victorian imperialist ideology. Taking a closer look, however, it turns out that Flanagan’s novel reenacts precisely the discourses of British colonialism it seems to criticise. A dance scene in which Mathinna breaks free from the bonds of Victorian ‘civilisation’ that her English foster parents have forced upon her is of particular significance in this context. What starts out as a quadrille changes into something else as the girl begins to follow her own dancing rhythm: ‘Her cheeks were fi red, her body liberated, her mind had never felt so free [ . . . ] as with two deft movements she kicked off her shoes and became a kangaroo absolutely still, except for its head, click-clicking around, then a stamp, two leaps, and she was flying. [ . . . ] Mathinna felt as if she only had this one moment [ . . . ] to explain who she was’ (Flanagan 2009, 150–51; my italics). Describing Mathinna as fi nding freedom and her ‘true’ identity during a powerfully emotional dance in which she imitates an animal, this passage clearly presents the Aboriginal girl as the exotic Other of colonial discourse, thus uncritically perpetuating the racist ideology of Victorian imperialism. If, as Julie Sanders argues, ‘the Victorian era proves [ . . . ] ripe for appropriation because it throws into sharp relief many of the concerns of the postmodern era’, among them ‘the postcolonial legacies of the empire’ (qtd. in Heilman and Llewellyn 2010, 24), Flanagan’s neoVictorian novel Wanting indicates that colonialism is a still ongoing project haunting contemporary culture.

THE RETURN OF THE VICTORIAN AUTHOR With their portraits of the repressed Dickens and the depressed Tennyson, respectively, Wanting and The Quickening Maze offer alternative biographical sketches that serve both to undermine and to complement clichéd perceptions of two of the most successful nineteenth-century writers. In this, both novels resemble other neo-Victorian biographical fictions such as Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (1988), Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) and Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004). Similar to Arnold’s portrait of Charles Dickens as a deeply egocentric man, Carey’s depiction of Dickens’s alter ego Tobias Oates as a flawed, weak egomaniac and Tóibín’s

76 Lena Steveker account of Henry James’s public and personal humiliations, Flanagan’s and Foulds’s texts refuse to portray their literary protagonists as the ‘great’ Victorian authors who have been inscribed into British cultural memory. Instead, each author becomes not only a fictional character, but one with little if any control over his own life. ‘Greatness’ and ‘genius’ are exposed as exterior ascriptions serving as blankets to cover up the emptiness of the (fictionalised) individual’s life and his disorientation in society. However, the novels’ engagement with Victorian individuals serves more complex means than a mere debunking of their towering biographees. On the one hand, the very move of writing the lives of well-known Victorians expresses and satisfies today’s desire for ‘a humanism that gives priority to individual lives’ which, according to Kaplan, is one of the reasons why contemporary life-writing is obsessed with revisiting the Victorian age (2007, 37).18 On the other hand, the individuals portrayed in Foulds’s and Flanagan’s neoVictorian fictional biographies are characterised by self-doubts, depression and despair. Their self-deprecating isolation questions the image of the Victorian age as a period of confident humanism and individual self-respect. At fi rst glance, Foulds’s and Flanagan’s strategy of representation might be reminiscent of postmodern novels such as Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984): By contrasting several different images of the author Flaubert, Barnes’s novel not only points towards the instability of individual identity, but also negates the very possibility of creating a coherent account of somebody’s life. However, Foulds’s and Flanagan’s neo-Victorian fictional biographies categorically differ from Barnes’s postmodern biographic metafiction. Wanting and The Quickening Maze are in fact part of the anti-theoretical backlash that has been discernible in British literature over the last years. The two novels not only express a neo-realist confidence that it is possible to tell somebody’s life after all, however patchy the account may be. Juxtaposing different images of Dickens and Tennyson, they are furthermore engaged in resurrecting the idea of the author, more precisely the Victorian author, which is, according to Kaplan, one of the characteristic traits of neo-Victorian biographical writing: The healthy demand for Victorian literary biography and biofiction suggests either that the death of the author, the disappearance and dispossession of what Barthes called ‘his civil status, his biographical person’ has been greatly exaggerated, or, conversely, that the threat has breathed new life into the idea of the author. [ . . . ] Barthes himself concedes that ‘perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction’. (2007, 70–71) With their biographical accounts of Tennyson and Dickens, Foulds’s The Quickening Maze and Flanagan’s Wanting make two Victorian authors return as neo-Victorian fictional characters, thus exemplifying the desire of repetition which, as Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss argue in the introduction to this volume, is symptomatic of the neo-Victorian

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project. However, this is a return with a difference. Whereas both novels’ authorial characters seem to ‘satisf[y] both the epistemological terms of [the author’s] banishment and the psychological demand for his return’ (Kaplan 2007, 71), the paratext of Wanting implies that Flanagan follows a much more liberal-humanist approach in resurrecting the author. In the ‘Author’s Note’, he advises the reader: ‘This novel is not a history, nor should it be read as one. [ . . . ] The stories of Mathinna and Dickens [ . . . ] suggested to me a meditation on desire—the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs. That, and not history, is the true subject of Wanting’ (2008, 255–56; my italics). These few lines, which might certainly cause astonishment among literary critics whose theoretical training has taught them not to succumb to the intentional fallacy, are the most revealing sentences in the whole book when it comes to discussing the return of the author in neo-Victorian literature. In them, the writer Flanagan stylises himself as presiding over his own text and its semantic potential. Telling the reader how to read his book, he fashions himself as a figure of privileged textual authority. Therefore, it is in the novel’s ‘Author’s Note’ rather than in its protagonist that the figure of the Victorian author returns, positioning himself as the supreme ruler of what he has written. Literary critics such as Cora Kaplan might claim that ‘the humanist subject cannot come back unaltered from the moment of theory’ (2007, 71), but authors such as Richard Flanagan stubbornly insist they can.

NOTES 1. For examples of neo-Victorian literary texts, fi lms and TV series see Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 292–94. 2. According to the website of the National History Museum London, Darwin200 ‘was a national programme of events that celebrated Charles Darwin during 2009, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his famous book, On the Origin of Species [sic]’ (Natural History Museum, ‘Darwin200’). 3. The exhibition website does not exist anymore, but the online article ‘Darwin exhibition opens with hair and other treasures’ gives an impression of the emphasis the exhibition put on Darwin the individual (Natural History Museum 2008). 4. According to the project website, ‘in 2012, to celebrate 200 years since [Dickens’s] birth, organisations worldwide [ . . . ] plann[ed] festivals, exhibitions and much more in honour of the most internationally acclaimed British novelist’ (Dickens 2012). For a discussion of the cultural uses Dickens and Darwin are put to in neo-Victorian practices see Cora Kaplan’s coda to this volume. 5. See also Woolf’s ‘The Art of Biography’, where she argues that ‘[o]nly in the nineteenth century was biography fully grown and hugely prolific’ (1942, 187). For an analysis of the many kinds of Victorian biography see Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered (2010). 6. See, for example, Victoria Glendinning’s Anthony Trollope (1992), Jenny Uglow’s Elizabeth Gaskell (1993), Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (1994), Jan Marsh’s Christina Rossetti: A Literary Life (1994), Janet Browne’s two-volume

78

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Charles Darwin (1995, 2002), Stanley Weintraub’s Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert (1997), Kathryn Hughes’s George Eliot: The Last Victorian (1999), Christopher Hibbert’s Queen Victoria: A Personal History (2000), Sarah Wood’s Robert Browning: A Literary Life (2001), Peter L. Shillingsburg’s William Makepeace Thackeray: A Literary Life (2001), Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), Andrew Lycett’s Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (2007) and Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens: A Life Defi ned by Writing (2009). Such accounts of ‘eminent Victorians’—both fictional and non-fictional— are counterbalanced, at least slightly, by what Juliette Atkinson calls the current ‘appetite for biographies of “obscure” men and women’ (2010, 2), that is, Victorians outside the limelight of literary canonisation and cultural memory. Atkinson mentions, for example, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Ellen Ternan, The Invisible Woman (1990), Simon Garfield’s accounts of ‘ordinary’ Victorians, Our Hidden Lives (2004), and Angus Hawkins’s The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby (2 vols., 2007–2008) (2–3). For a more detailed analysis of Ackroyd’s Dickens see Kaplan 2007, 50–62. For critical readings of these biographic metafictions see Mariadele Boccardi, ‘Biography: The Postmodern Last Frontier: Banville, Barnes, Byatt, and Unsworth’ (2001); Ansgar Nünning, ‘“How do we seize the past?” Julian Barnes’ fi ktionale Metabiographie Flaubert’s Parrot als Paradigma historiographischer und biographischer Metafi ktion’ (1998); Ansgar Nünning, ‘Fictional Metabiographies and Metaautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Metagenres’ (2005); and Lena Steveker, Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Knitting the Net of Culture (2009), 18–39. Nünning 2007, 220–29 offers a more detailed analysis of the novel’s strategy of (mis)information. Due to a number of flashbacks, the plot-lines of Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) are in fact less linear than those of Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009), but both novels are indebted to neo-realist narrative conventions. No exact dates are given in the novel, but its different sections cover seven consecutive seasons. Due to this character constellation, Tennyson is by no means the only protagonist of the novel. One can easily read the text as a fictional biography of either John Clare or Matthew Allen, but as Tennyson is the most ‘eminent’ Victorian of the three main characters and as most of Clare’s writing is seen as that of a Romantic rather than a Victorian poet, I will focus on Tennyson in my subsequent analysis. See Christopher Ricks’s Tennyson biography (1989, 103–70). In the acknowledgements that conclude his novel, Foulds states that he took ‘several liberties, compressing events that occurred over several years into the space of several seasons’ (2009, n.p.). As these people’s life-stories are subtly interwoven, Wanting in fact comprises more than just one fictional biography, which is another parallel to Foulds’s novel. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I (1990); Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (1977). This desire can also be seen as underlying O’Connor’s argument in favour of literary biography’s critical value when she claims that ‘biography offers us a chance to renew our commitment to the humanism that ostensibly defines the humanities’ (2002, 385).

5

Bio-Fiction Neo-Victorian Revisions of Evolution and Genetics Eckart Voigts

INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM, SCIENCE AND BIOGRAPHY The bio-fiction of my title invites a twofold reference. I take the abbreviation ‘bio’ to refer both to biographies and biological science. My chapter looks at the way in which neo-Victorian bio-fiction reviews Victorian science and scientists. By considering Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf (1998) and John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy (2005), this article discusses a bio-fictional version of what has come to be known as the Great Evolutionary Synthesis (Darwinian evolution and Mendel’s ‘genetics’1). Mawer’s novel makes the link between these two most famous of nineteenth-century scientists explicit: ‘Darwin needed Mendel. O yes indeed Darwin needed Mendel’ (1998, 228). So far, however, this need has not been reflected in neo-Victorian contexts, in which only Darwin has loomed large. 2 His work and biography are predominantly discussed in the (Victorian) context of the basic conflict between science and religion or biocratic materialism and vitalist hermeneutics. 3 In the popular imagination, the neo-Victorian trend of the last decades has a clear focus elsewhere. As the Victorian era was perceived as by and large ‘feminocentric’,4 there is a noticeable re-reading of Victorian gender politics (in the novels of Sarah Waters, A. S. Byatt, John Fowles, Michèle Roberts, Emma Tennant and many others; in films such as The Piano, 1993 or The Governess, 1998); there is the postcolonial revisionism of Jean Rhys, Peter Carey or, more recently, in Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006); there is the penchant for Victorian crime (From Hell, 1991–98, fi lm 2001; Sherlock Holmes, 2009), for Victorian royalty (Mrs Brown, 1997; The Young Victoria, 2009) and other ‘eminent’, often literary, Victorian biographies (Wilde, 1997; the novels by Peter Ackroyd, Colm Tóibín, David Lodge). From the foundational texts, such as, for instance, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), onwards Darwinian neo-Victorianism has frequently amalgamated debates about gender, postcolonialism, crime or biography with its central concern: Victorian and neo-Victorian science. A plethora of classic neo-Victorian texts that are inspired by Darwinism (and frequently involve Darwin as a character or as quotable text) include A. N. Wilson’s Who Was Oswald Fish? (1981),

80 Eckart Voigts Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), A. S. Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’ (Angels & Insects, 1994) and Jenny Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle (1994). The focus on Darwin as the key representative of Victorian science is clearly evident in the context of academic ‘science and literature’ approaches by, among others, Sally Shuttleworth, 5 Hilary Schor,6 Judith Roof,7 Jay Clayton and George Levine.8 As Gillian Beer, George Levine, Janet Browne and others have made abundantly clear in discussions of the ‘literariness’ of Darwin, he utilised the literary technique of entwining meticulously detailed storylines that he was familiar with from his readings of George Eliot and other novelists (Browne 2003b, 55, 70). Darwin quickly became a scientific sensation. The pivotal scientific media event was the historic dispute with Bishop Wilberforce at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford in June, 1860 in which Wilberforce asked: ‘Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?’ and T. H. Huxley retorted to the jibe of simian ancestry that he would rather have an ape in his ancestry than ‘one who employs’ his great means and influence ‘for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion’ (qtd. in Browne 2003b, 122).9 Huxley’s polarising response, along with other performances that included setting pigeons free during an evening lecture at the Royal Institution, London in February, 1860 (105), turned Darwin’s learned treatise into one of the most important books in the history of human thought. Popular notions of Darwin were, of course, forged by ubiquitous caricatures in Punch, the Illustrated Times and elsewhere which—particularly after the Descent of Man (1871) and often based on Huxley’s developmental diagram of 1863—cast him as a composite hairy ape creature or worm and highlighted Darwin’s signature beard and eyebrows. Browne notes that these ‘powerful visual statements [ . . . ] were not just a transparent medium of illustration, but an actual shaper of contemporary thought’ (2003b, 381).10 The current interest in Darwin—with Richard Dawkins as ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ replacing T. H. Huxley as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’—must be contextualised within the continuing history of fierce disputes over mutually exclusive ideologies. As Virginia Richter (2014) points out, three central contemporary anxieties are frequently pinned on Darwin: the non-benign character of nature, the human-animal contiguity and the a-teleological character of natural selection. Contemporary traumas (nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’, Tennyson, In Memoriam; humans are essentially apes; evolution unfolds in an amoral, haphazard and coincidental fashion) are frequently identified as originating with Darwin and this causes the desire for repetition and compulsory revisitation. This, then, is the fi rst answer to the key question formulated by Georges Letissier of ‘how the return to Darwin’s writings and, more widely, to Darwin’s scientific and cultural contexts, relays present occupations amongst contemporary readers’ (2010, 73). The neo-Victorian fascination is with Victorian science as a persisting performance of the polarities of character and Weltanschauung—and Darwin is the icon of Victorian science.

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In this essay, the important neo-Victorian subgenre of scientific biofiction, that is, fictionalisations of biological science and scientific biographies, will be used to link popular nineteenth-century notions of Charles Darwin and the unlikely posthumous success story of Mendelian genetics to contemporary concerns. It is another instance of what I have called the ‘performative hermeneutics’ of neo-Victorianism (2009, 108–25). I like this descriptor because it highlights the fact that neo-Victorian fiction actualises the Victorian past, turning it into a presence rather than just reading or re-reading it. In their introduction to this volume, the editors invoke Gumbrecht’s ‘desire for presence’ (17 n. 13), and Enderwitz and Feldmann also discuss his conceptualisation of ‘presence effects’ (54). As I argue elsewhere (Voigts 2013), the term particularly applies to what the popular, participatory culture of ‘prosumers’ is doing with its mash-ups and irreverent re-readings of the nineteenth century at a cultural moment in which genre thresholds have become low. Surely, neo-Victorian texts are more than merely ‘historical fiction’, as Heilmann and Llewellyn (2010, 6) correctly emphasise, and they are also more than ‘contemporary history in fancy dress’—Eric Hobsbawm’s quip quoted by Heilmann and Llewellyn (27). What emerges is a blurry, fuzzy text, composed of both pastness and presentness—and in the case of Victorian bio-fiction also composed of fact and fiction. This epistemological conundrum—how to tell the past from the present and the fact from the fiction—has haunted criticism of neoVictorian bio-fiction. Neither in neo-Victorian fiction nor in neo-Victorian biography will we fi nd a ‘real’ Darwin: theoretically any division between fact and fiction is untenable. In a collection of essays on documentaries, Eric Heyne very convincingly argues that the distinction between fact and fiction is dependent on individual reading processes. He points out that the distinction is not based on a range of fi rmly set boundaries, each upheld by a particular reader, but rather a more fluid and ad hoc ‘boundary,’ one that varies by reader, by text, and even by changed circumstances (with the same reader and text). That is, I believe we treat texts as fiction or nonfiction based on a complex web of factors, any of which can change over time, even relatively short stretches of time when our functional relationship to a text has changed. (2008, 121) One might read a fictional biography for the facts and a factual biography for the fiction. It is critical consensus that any biography is the construct of an author, whether fictional or factual: the sources are unreliable, memory is fallible. Ina Schabert concludes that ‘the reality of past lives cannot be known’ (1982, 7) and Richard Holmes argues, ‘[t]he biographer has always had to construct or orchestrate a factual pattern out of materials that already have a fictional or reinvented element’ (1995, 17). We also

82 Eckart Voigts have to observe with Martin Middeke, however, that bio-fictions ‘do not deny the respective historical foil on which they are written—indeed how could they without missing their point?’ (1999, 4). So the historical foil becomes an added value, something, in fact, to play with. To the extent that they are metabiographical fiction, these novels also reflect on what they are doing, pinning the traumas of evolutionary theory and bioethics on Darwin. In terms of the fuzzy mix of pastness and presentness in neo-Victorian bio-fiction we can conclude that these texts are full of both Victorian and contemporary science, but with a critical ‘science studies’ attitude. Significantly, when Andrew Brown (1999) introduced the term ‘Darwin wars’ he appropriated the name of a Victorian scientist for marketing a book on a feud with only tenuous links to Darwin, between contemporary evolutionists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Darwin is the most prominent of numerous scientists and explorers in neo-Victorian texts, both fiction and non-fiction. Often, he is heroically placed among (or ahead of) Einstein and others in the glorification of scientific achievement. In the fi rst episode of the TV documentary miniseries Evolution (PBS, 2003), Daniel Dennett programmatically reiterates his statement from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea in 1995: ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law’ (1995, 21). Most neo-Victorian views of Darwin exhibit an ardent preoccupation not as much with his science as ‘with the cultural features that create a scientist’ (Browne 2010, 372). Frequently, his personality is brought to the fore and he is seen, variously, as Victorian sage, icon of secularism or, as in Creation (2009), loving father.11 In public discourse, as Sally Shuttleworth has pointed out since 1998, Darwin is either a hero or at least benign and unassuming or both. In the biographies of Janet Browne and others, we are faced with a likeable personality, who, ‘underneath the mild exterior [ . . . ], teemed with ideas—daring and unusual proposals that he hesitated to put before the world’ (Browne 2003b, 6). Readers of Darwin such as Browne, Gillian Beer and George Levine have tried to salvage Darwin from the vices of Darwinist nihilism or brutalism. The famous phrases that close the Origin of Species (1859) are a key passage for this Darwin revisionism as they signal both Darwin’s awareness of their re-defi nition of the world as the result of war and coincidence and his attempt to use literary devices to re-enchant a world devoid of God and telos: Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling

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on according to the fi xed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (1996, 490) ‘Beauty’ and ‘wonder’ serve to save Darwin from the destructive legacy of a worldview dominated by ‘war’, ‘famine’ and ‘death’. To some extent, Darwin’s public profi le indicates the persistence of C. P. Snow’s dichotomy of the Two Cultures, in spite of attempts to use passages like this to erase this divide. Levine argues that Darwin’s ‘way of seeing also opens possibilities for fresh and creative thinking, infuses the world with value, implies the ethical significance of natural phenomena, and leaves the world fundamentally enchanted’ (2006, 40). Whereas the tendency to whitewash and purify a younger, more affective Darwin has culminated in the Darwin bicentenary celebrations in 2009,12 there is a reverse tendency to hold the man who compared his wife to a dog (9) morally culpable for masculinist domineering in science, for rampant laissez-faire capitalism, or for Social Darwinism.13 Thus, for Browne, his biology ‘mirrored the British way of life in all its competitive, entrepreneurial, factory spirit’ (2003b, 54); for Desmond and Moore he ‘had a mechanism that was compatible with the competitive, free-trading ideals of the ultraWhigs’ (1991, 267). Most of the Darwin bio-fictions, however, put his achievement into perspective and raise moral doubts: Darwin occasionally emerges as the fi rst social Darwinist, as the man who monopolises knowledge supplied by Covington, Wallace and others or who unscrupulously destroys the faith of his religious contemporaries (Covington, Captain FitzRoy). Numerous ghosts haunt Darwin’s biography—his handicapped daughter Annie, the long fermentation of his theory, his mysterious disease, and so on. Just as in many of the neo-Victorian bio-fictions, my key question is: Who gave Darwin his ideas and how did mid-Victorian media help him shape these ideas. I would like to narrow down the focus on the origins of the Origins.14

JOHN DARNTON, THE DARWIN CONSPIRACY (2005) Whereas one might infer that Darwin also sought to provide access to the origins of life—his major work is, after all, called On the Origin of Species—he does not at all address questions of origin.15 Janet Browne suggests that ‘his story was not about the start of life but about the processes that governed organisms during their life spans’ (2003b, 61). Darwin relies on a particular brand of empiricism that renders the presumably meaningful present-day appearance of nature meaningful only in the sense that it is the result of a contingent, coincidental process without external will and telos. Whatever is was not made by a mythical, transcendental entity (‘God’) but must be explained in terms of evolutionary function.16 Nature must be

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made available by scientific mediation. John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy speculates on the sources for Darwin’s rejection of God and telos. Most of the Darwin bio-fictions have one element in common: Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution is unwittingly sparked off by the work or ideas of staunch creationists—variously Captain FitzRoy, Syms Covington, Robert McCormick, Richard Matthews or John Gould. Darnton’s biofiction narrates the origin of the Origin via the myth-ridden narrative of the three captives on the Beagle from Tierra del Fuego.17 Captain FitzRoy had collected three indigenous Fuegians of the Yamana tribe—two males called Jemmy Button and York Minster and a young female called Fuegia Basket—on a journey three years earlier and exhibited them as curiosities. Almost a laboratory-style anthropological experiment, they were to be returned to their native communities by the Beagle, accompanied by the missionary Richard Matthews. As Browne notes, this project was inspired by Captain FitzRoy’s missionary zeal, but hardly an unusual transcultural captivity (2003a, 235). As is well known, the 1833 experiment failed. Having left Matthews and the Anglicised Fuegians with the ‘natives’ for a couple of weeks, FitzRoy and Darwin returned to fi nd a disillusioned Matthews desperate to return to the safety of the ship after having been raided and pestered by the ‘natives’. Browne also notes a couple of ‘English-style evenings’, ‘singing songs around the campfi re’ (251)—and these evenings provide the location for interesting speculative passages in The Darwin Conspiracy. The novel is in many ways a derivative adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s Possession to Darwin bio-fiction. As shown above, Darnton is part of a veritable deluge of Darwin-related narratives. In narratives focused on the journey of the Beagle, such as Peter Nichols’s non-fictional Evolution’s Captain (2003) and Harry Thompson’s fictional This Thing of Darkness (2005), Darwin is frequently juxtaposed with FitzRoy, his creationist captain. Mr Darwin’s Shooter by Roger McDonald (1999) focuses on Simon ‘Syms’ Covington, Darwin’s servant who helped shooting, collecting and labelling specimens. In Nicholas Drayson’s Confessing a Murder (2002) the narrator provides Darwin with the idea of his ‘Theory’ and also with the necessity to publish it before Alfred Wallace does. Almost all of these performances of Darwin and Darwinism use Victorian science for contemporary concerns.18 Darnton’s plot casts Darwin as a Social Darwinist and the moral victim of his own future theory. The ‘original’ naturalist on the Beagle was the surgeon Robert McCormick who served for a year until he left the ship in Brazil, while Darwin, listed as a ‘supernumary’ and gentleman companion to Captain FitzRoy, took over. In Darnton’s crime narrative, Darwin fails to help his rival on the Beagle, McCormick, who is cliff hanging on the edge of a volcano. ‘So that’s how it is, eh, Mr Darwin? Survival of the fittest!’ (2005, 264–65)—and McCormick lets go, or his hand slips, it says in Darwin’s ‘manuscript’. Or maybe Darwin let go—the reader is invited to speculate, whereas the non-fictional McCormick lived on until 1890. Darnton tells this

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story via forgotten manuscripts written by Darwin’s obscure daughter Elizabeth and discovered by an American graduate student and his beautiful love interest, who turns out to have hereditary links to Darwin. As in so many neo-Victorian novels the Victorian age is the locus of conflict, passion and drama—turning science into a ‘scientific’ romance. Possession’s Roland and Maud become Hugh Kellem and Elizabeth ‘Beth’ Dulcimer when it eventually turns out that Beth is in fact distantly related to Darwin via Darwin’s daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth is the historical gap in which Darnton fills his fictional speculation. The function of this otherwise trite present-day subplot, complete with eager young academics turned manuscript fetishists who liaise romantically, is of course to infuse the text with a metabiographical and a meta-Victorian dimension. Hugh and Beth are biographers who illustrate the lures and dilemmas of writing lives. Interestingly, the origin of the Origin is located in the fictional chief of the Fuegian tribe, transmitted to Darwin via the Beagle surgeon McCormick under the influence of a mind-expanding inhalation of indigenous drugs—clearly a piece of postcolonial wishful thinking. Using Darwin’s nickname on the Beagle, Philos, an apocryphal—and fictional—letter by Matthews has the chief Okanicutt expound the nucleus of transmutation. Faced with the Bible’s original sin, the chief argues: ‘Why choose an explanation that you cannot see when there is one that you can see?’ (292). Visibility and accessibility are the advantages science has over myth. ‘We do not believe the world was created in six days. That is a short time to do so much work. We believe that the world came into being a very long time ago’ (292). Here, Okanicutt replaces Charles Lyell. When Philos, the preDarwinian Darwin, invokes God and asks about the origins of the world, Okanicutt’s pantheist reply refers to the ‘endless forms’ to which Darwin ascribed grandeur: ‘It happened, that is all that matters. Very long ago. So long it is impossible to imagine. Over time many things can happen. Seas happened. Mountains happened. Islands happened. Even this horrible place, which we call the end of the earth, happened. Over time many grains of sand make a beach’ (292). Chief Okanicutt’s narrative, the narrative of evolutionary development as a series of contingent events that ‘just happen’ over the long ‘geologic’ time that Charles Lyell introduced, turns out to be much more rational and scientific than the monotheist essentialisms and a prioris of the Empire ‘Brits’ could ever be.19 When Darwin has to all appearances sunk into a drug-induced sleep, Okanicutt even becomes the source for the idea of natural selection, naming it Temaukl, the Fuegians’ word for supreme being, which makes ‘being’ supreme: ‘Have you not heard,’ said the chief, ‘that the sea-turtle lays its eggs upon the shore? And when the eggs hatch, hundreds of baby turtles run for the water. Many are killed by the birds. Only the strongest make it to safety. They are the ones who will carry on and make more turtles. That is Temaukl.’ (294)

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The two fictional researchers are correct in doubting that anyone will believe the theory of evolution came from a Fuegian shaman via an obscure Scotsman to Alfred Wallace who forced Darwin to publish what he had withheld because of a guilt complex resulting from his failure to help McCormick in distress (300). Clearly Darnton’s fl imsy conspiracy tale was provoked by the lure of ennobling and ‘re-naturalising’ The Origin of Species by putting its key idea into the mouth of a Fuegian chief. Darwin the male scientist is an almost murderer and highly suspect, and this dislocation of Darwinism turns it into a benign, environmentally friendly, natural and naturally rational law rather than the theory to accompany ideologies of Western capitalism. The passage introduces a piece of wishful fictional thinking: In the competition for superior knowledge between the imperial centre and marginalised colonised subject, the tables are turned. It is the Fuegian Chief, representing an indigenous people, who shocks Victorian monotheism out if its complacency—rather than a wealthy, inexplicably boring and nit-picking, dead, white and English patriarchal scientist. Darnton’s novel makes quite clear that—very much in opposition to Darwin’s Origin of Species—the quest for origins is at the core of many Darwinian bio-narratives. 20

SIMON MAWER, MENDEL’S DWARF (1998) Simon Mawer’s erudite and stereoscopic view on the vagaries of scientific discovery introduces a contemporary geneticist and his hyperrational and hypercynical fi rst-person narration. In typical neo-Victorian fashion, the level of contemporary inquiry is written into the text. Mawer’s novel has a metabiographically investigative biographer who is superior to the clichéd couple in Darnton, but in similar ways artificially linked to the Victorian past. Dr Benedict Lambert, who introduces himself in Mendelian terms as phenotypically abnormal, is a geneticist, a ‘dwarf’ and also distantly related to the great Victorian scientist: the novel is metabiographical in the sense that the narrator, the achondroplastic (i.e., short) geneticist Lambert, is the biographer of his great-great-great-uncle Gregor Mendel. Lambert is an investigative scientist and a passive object at the same time, a fascinating scientific narrator and a monstrosity straight out of a Victorian freak show— his grandfather actually ran a show of ‘anatomical curiosities’ at Pimlico (Mawer 1998, 57)—and seen exactly like this by contemporary media. The Sun, The Daily Mail and a BBC producer who wants to do a ‘personal interest’ documentary (245) are cast as contemporary descendants of the Victorian freak show, responding to Lambert’s paper in Nature on his own genetic set-up with headlines such as ‘Dwarf Biologist Discovers Himself’ or ‘Little Guy, Big Discovery’ (242–43). His photograph on the inside page of The Sun (‘Brave Benedict’ opposite ‘Pouting, Protuberant Pamela’, 243) seems to bring (arcane, male) science to the level of sensationalist (populist,

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female) exploitation. Thus, Lambert mixes scientific exceptionalism (from genius scientist to mad scientist) with physical abnormality. He embodies the chance variability of nature and exists as a challenge to the human desire to engineer, structure and narrativise a telos into nature according to crude notions of normalcy. He represents a challenge and antithesis to the modern regime of ‘normalism’ (Link 2004, 35–36), that is, the primacy of the data-driven criterion of statistical occurrences. The novel makes this clear on its very fi rst page, which casts the audience of Lambert’s lecture under the dehumanising scrutiny of footnote-ridden scientific language as an example of ‘normal’ variation according to Mendelian laws—a ‘normal’ phenotypical variation that excludes Lambert himself: There before the good doctor [ . . . ] are all the phenotypes one could wish to see: male and female, ectomorphic and endomorphic, dolichocephalic and brachycephalic, Nordic, Mediterranean, Slav, Mongoloid (three), Negroid (one). There are chins cleft1 and normal, hair curly2 and straight, eyes blue3 and brown and green, skins white, brown, yellow, and black,4 crania bald5 and hirsute. (1) Lambert eventually identifies the single-letter error in the transcription of the human genome and raises questions about the commercial exploitation of genetic engineering as a present-day eugenics. While exploring the roots of genetic engineering in late Victorian eugenics, Lambert sets nineteenth-century attitudes towards science off from the present-day intellectual poverty of capitalism: ‘At least the old eugenics was governed by some kind of theory, however dreadful it may have been. The new eugenics, our eugenics, is governed only by the laws of the marketplace. [ . . . ] Are we really such intellectual dwarfs [ . . . ] as to imagine that the laws of supply and demand can be elevated to the level of a philosophy?’ (273). The biographer is metabiographically aware and knows that the conventional over-sexualisation in recent neo-Victorian narratives raises expectations: ‘What did he [Mendel] do for sex, I wonder? Was he a hand-reared man? Did he lust after choirboys, or after respectable widows?’ (72). Lambert swiftly introduces Frau Rotwang, muses on the curious resonance of her name with suppressed emotionalism (73) and takes the liberties of fictional biography with her; from one sentence in Hugo Iltis’s biography of Mendel, he constructs a continuing infatuation: ‘Niessl, indeed, used to speak of a certain Frau Rotwang whom Mendel called upon frequently in the early years’ (73). Both the Mendel clichés and the metascientific attitude are introduced early in the novel by Lambert’s biology teacher and his attitude to Lambert’s classmates, the contemporary non-fictional neo-Darwinians Steve Jones and Richard Dawkins: Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk. [ . . . ] The monastery was miles away from anywhere. No one knew about him and his work,

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Eckart Voigts and he knew nothing about what was going on in the scientific world of his time, but despite all these disadvantages he started the whole science of genetics. There’s a lesson for you. You don’t need expensive laboratories and all that equipment. You just need determination and concentration. Stop talking, Dawkins. You never stop talking, boy, and you never have anything worth saying. (18)

This is irony at the expense of the teacher (who does not realise the genius of future scientific celebrities), or of Dawkins (who is unfavourably compared to the Victorian scientist Mendel), or of both. The novel is full of ironic parallelisms, from the very fact that Mendel experimented with garden pea ‘dwarfs’. Both scientists deliver lectures, both win (in Mendel’s case limited) scientific recognition but lose feminine affection. It is significant that the narrator is a scientist and his narrative is littered with footnotes and diagrams: This criticism of science and scientific language comes from within, not from the humanities. The gender structure is clear: on both temporal levels, science and scientists are male and women are assigned the role of incomprehending onlookers (Frau Rotwang) or even laboratory rats. Lambert’s love interest is interestingly called Jean Piercey; she is tall, has an extra-marital affair with the scientist-dwarf, becomes pregnant, has an abortion, returns to her infertile husband, wants a child, and asks, perversely, Lambert to be the sperm donor; Lambert agrees to the secret plot in exchange for anal (i.e., infertile) penetration, she becomes pregnant again, is unsure whether Lambert has in fact got rid of the dwarf gene, gives birth to a ‘normal’ child, falls into a post-natal coma, and loses her child when her husband, who learns from Lambert that he, the dwarf, fathered Jean’s child, kills Lambert’s son. In terms of his science, Mendel emerges as a humane but unwitting precursor of eugenics, with a highly critical attitude of the blunders of genetic science permeating the entire book. It is full of cheating scientists, Darwin and Mendel among them (226). At the same time the novel supports the idea of bio-determinism and is in awe of the achievements, strains and costs of doing science: Mawer even has a list of scientists killed and forced into exile. Mendel is favourably compared with August Weismann from Freiburg who bred five generations of mice, nine hundred mice, and chopped their tails off to disprove the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which the narrator calls ‘quintessentially Teutonic [ . . . ], going one further than God’ (230). Towards the end of the novel, Mawer supplies a fierce criticism of a racist bio-science, or, in the words of Jürgen Link, the rigid social construction of what is socially ‘average’ and therefore acceptable (2004, 35). This ‘protonormalism’ (38) obviously constructs ‘abnormal’ minorities as deviant or deficient, for instance in studies that seek to prove inherited intelligence and then apply fi ndings to ethnic groups. The reader is offered three quotations and he is to decide if the author is geneticist Karl Pearson,

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the 1913 US Public Health Service official Henry Goddard or Adolf Hitler. They all very much promote eugenic anti-Semitism. This is bad, prejudiced science and the narrator comments: ‘Genes code for protein. They don’t do anything else, and there simply isn’t any protein with a domain marked intelligence’ (Mawer 1998, 234).

CONCLUSION In summary, one may state: The pull towards Darwin (and, to an immensely lesser extent, to Mendel) is clearly fed by present concerns and is far less nostalgic than other branches of neo-Victoriansim. Darwin is narrativised and ‘presentified’ as an icon of Victorian science, and biographers, screenwriters and novelists alike ask the question: What does Victorian science tell us about the unresolved debates in contemporary evolutionary and biological theory? The challenges of a ‘biocentric’ worldview dominated by evolution and suggesting a world without a special place for humanity, without God or telos, without meaning or Sinnstiftung, continue to provoke responses from contemporary writers. The ‘biocratic’ paradigm, that is, the claim that biologists and neurologists have been able to scientifically explain human nature and thus put an end to other forms of meaning-making (myth, religion, politics, art, literature), is an implied challenge to the idea that meaning is generated from constructions of past events (i.e., Darwin’s very endeavour). To the extent that bio-science is set up as an ahistorical telos, Darwin bio-fiction is useful in reminding us of the historicity and metaphoricity of a science itself entangled in constructed meanings and frequently in all-too-human pettiness. The metabiographical impulse thus persists in recent fictional biographies of Victorian science. In Darnton’s novel the impulse is, above all, a postcolonial critique, in Mawer’s text the trajectory is metascientific. Mawer juxtaposes ‘good’ science with bad pseudo-science and commercialised science. Both Darwin and Mendel are unlikely geniuses, and both are connected with the generation of the ‘pseudo-scientific’ horrors of the twentieth century, social Darwinism and eugenics—with an attempt of postcolonial polishing on Darnton’s side. The Darwin Conspiracy is one of several Darwin bio-fictions (particularly prior to the Darwin year and beyond the popularising, anti-creationist need to enhance Darwin’s public profile) that revise Shuttleworth’s idea of Darwin as hero (1998, 260), veering towards a critical view of Darwin as representative of the colonising and masculinist scientific attitude of high Victorianism. The obscure Mendel of posthumous fame, however, fares considerably better, precisely because of his marginalisation: in Mendel’s Dwarf, he never comes to embody institutionalised science and its subsequent eugenicist follies and vices. For all their various limitations, both fictional biographies are useful in that their narratives deliberately blur the fuzzy divisions between biographical fact and biographical fiction. They often resort to

90 Eckart Voigts paratexts to gesture towards a disentanglement and signposting, but ultimately the line between fact and fiction is determined by the reader and the relative intensity and function of the individual reading process. In fictionalising biography, the present inserts itself into the past, transposing its own ‘ontological doubt’ (Shuttleworth 1998, 260) on Victorian science. NOTES 1. Mendel did not know about genetics but found the mechanism of carrying inheritable traits a plausible and mathematically sound way to account for variation. 2. Byatt has noted the ‘obsessive recurrence’ to Darwin (1995, 443) and Gutleben his ‘strong presence’ in neo-Victorianism (2001, 207). As PietrzakFranger, Schaff and Voigts (2014) show, the Darwin industry has anything but abated, but peaked in 2009. In the monographs by Hadley (2010), Mitchell (2010) and Heilmann and Llewellyn (2010), Mendel is (predictably) missing. Interestingly, however, Darwin also receives merely passing mention, for instance in the context of a ‘deeply dehumanizing, misogynist view of male science’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 128). Heilmann (2014) focuses more closely on Darwin as a Victorian scientific explorer. Cora Kaplan’s coda to this volume shares Heilmann’s emphasis on Darwin as representative of male Victorian science, and Sally Shuttleworth discusses Andrea Barrett’s short story ‘The Behaviour of the Hawkweeds’ (in Ship Fever 1996), one of the few fictionalisations of Mendel. 3. E.g. Dawkins (1986), Dennett (1991), Amigoni and Wallace (1996), Kitcher (2007), Dupré (2003), Hodge and Radick (2003) and Ruse (2006). Influential biographies include Browne (1995, 2003) and Desmond and Moore (1991). Ruth Padel provided a tribute biography in verse (Darwin: A Life in Poems, 2009). 4. This is Harsh’s term for a narrative that ‘puts women in central or decisive roles [ . . . ] and defi nes the world [ . . . ] in terms of female experience’ (1994, 18). 5. See Shuttleworth 1998, 260–61. Levine (1988), Glendening (2007) and Dawson (2007) discuss the impact of Darwin on Victorian fiction and culture. On Swift and Byatt, see also Bormann (2002) and Pesso-Miquel (2010). Letissier (2010) also discusses Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000) and Sebastian Faulks’s Human Traces (2006). Rostek discusses Darwinian themes in Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping (2004) (2011, 204). 6. Schor describes the retro-Victorian novel as a neo-realist (rather than postmodern) confl ict between the rivalling concepts of Darwinism and divine grace (2000, 247). 7. Judith Roof sees the Darwinian theories as attempts to panoptically control ungovernable, wild nature. In this sense, Darwinism may even serve as a precursor of ‘de-authorised’ net and web metaphors prevalent in contemporary cybernetics (2000, esp. 115–16). 8. See Schor 2000, 247. 9. In a different article, it would be worthwhile to compare T. H. Huxley’s scientific performances of Darwin as anti-Christian figurehead or Asa Gray’s activities in the USA to contemporary Darwin campaigning. 10. The essay will also pass over the amalgamation of popular print culture, portrait photography and evolutionary ideas in numerous photographs of the

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11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

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celebrity Darwin that were disseminated as cartes de visite (Browne 2003b, 273), over the impact of translations of Darwin, or over the key influence of popular fi lms on the ‘image’ of Darwin. The 2009 movie Creation (2009, dir. Jon Amiel) is discussed by Cora Kaplan in this volume. Other visualisations of Darwin include the seven-part BBC serial The Voyage of Charles Darwin (1978). For a current overview of Darwin as a scientific persona see Pietrzak-Franger and Voigts (2014). See the radical claims of Barzun (2008 [1941]) or Weikart (2004), whose books exemplify the tenuous link of Darwin to Hitler as a creationist strategy of undermining Darwin’s public profi le. Invoking Donna Haraway, Clayton points out that neo-Darwinism creates its own sense of time—he terms it ‘genome time’—about (1) fi rst and last things, (2) storing the past and blueprinting the future, and (3) linguistic metaphors (2003, 168). I will focus on the obsession with origins and perpetuity. Creationists seek for origins and provide an explanatory narrative for past events that cannot be easily observed in the present day. The fi rst book of the Torah/Bible is, after all, called Genesis (from Gk.JQHVL9, ‘creation, beginning, origin’) and supplies a myth of origin. This is why literal adherence to this myth is called ‘Creationism’. Darwin pits the function of fi nches’ beaks against the meaning of scripture and provides narratives that render the beaks meaningful because they make the present beaks speak about past changes and developments. As Clayton notes, one of the stories that hardly any Darwin bio-fiction passes over is the Three Fuegians-narrative (2003, 170). It can be found in Janet Browne’s biography as well as in Nichols’s Evolution’s Captain, McDonald’s Mr Darwin’s Shooter and Thompson’s This Thing of Darkness. Often these texts imply a gendered discussion of male Victorian science and the male Victorian scientists, as in Heilmann and Llewellyn (2010, 106–42), who address three key texts: Barbara Chase-Ribourd’s Hottentot Venus (2003), which dramatises an encounter between Darwin and the eponymous post-mortem subject of early nineteenth-century racial and sexual speculation in order to draw attention to the continuity of scientific racism; Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009), which discusses the female naturalist and her struggle to be taken seriously by male scientific circles; and Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), which retraces a Darwinesque scenario, offering an alternative vision of the Darwinian naturalist equipped with a feminine sensibility: a quality conducive to an empathetic response to the ethnic and sexual Other, which also allows for a female contribution to the naturalist project. Levine makes chance and contingent plotting in character-oriented narratives key elements in the Darwinian influence on nineteenth-century novelists (1988, 19)—Darnton’s clumsily constructed romance violates these norms of ‘Darwinian’ narratives. A very different and much more plausible story about the role of visual culture in the origins of the Origin has been told by Julia Voss and Jonathan Smith. Both highlight that transmutation and natural selection came to Darwin primarily after he had returned from his voyage via the rather more commonplace Victorian media of lithography and taxidermy. Voss (2007, 50–64) argues that the image factory of taxidermist and illustrator John Gould provided Darwin with a key to his collection of specimens, and she also berates Darwin for failing to have mentioned Gould, who was the most distinguished illustrator in Britain at the time. She also makes a plausible

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Eckart Voigts case for the pivotal role that mid-Victorian media such as lithographs and taxidermy played in shaping evolutionary thought. In spite of the well-known fact that Darwin himself was not a good illustrator, Smith argues that ‘Darwin could not help but be visually alert, for he lived in a century and a culture that were relentlessly, explosively visual’ (2006, 30).

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Neo-Victorian Gay Fictions A Critique of Stereotyping and Self-Reflexivity Nadine Boehm-Schnitker

INTRODUCTION The neo-Victorian project by now comprises a body of approaches —already in the process of canonisation—which help to defi ne the re-entry of the past into the contemporary cultural scene.1 Apart from a focus on self-reflexivity, the recovery of lost or suppressed voices or the notions of haunting and spectrality have gained high currency in the academic discourse on neo-Victorianism to explore the return of things Victorian in the present. 2 As Marie-Luise Kohlke highlights, neo-Victorian revisitations of the nineteenth century ‘can be read as indicative of personal and cultural trauma: in Freudian terms, as the compulsion to repeat the past that has not, as yet, been adequately processed and integrated into consciousness’ (Kohlke 2008a, 9).3 Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham equally situate neoVictorian revisitations of the past in a psychoanalytical framework when they maintain that the nostalgic return to the Victorian ‘maternal’ body implied by neo-Victorian fiction underlines a simultaneous longing and anxiety that manifests itself in a series of recognizable features which Freud describes as uncanny. Freud’s list of psychological triggers for uncanny sensations include the double; repetition; the animation of the seemingly dead, or, conversely, the deathlike nature of the seemingly animate; ghosts or spirits; and the familiar made strange. (2009, xv) The widely accepted plausibility of psychoanalytical approaches in the field is in itself indicative of the fact that the Victorian age is considered crucial regarding contemporary subjectivities; revisitations of the nineteenth century are thought to have a bearing on the twenty-fi rst-century psyche. I would like to draw on the ambiguity of desire and anxiety in neo-Victorian references to the past indicated in the quotations above and introduce a different kind of repetition compulsion that might reveal a problematic aspect of the neo-Victorian retake on the past, one that questions the ethically or politically motivated recovery of ‘lost voices’ by foregrounding the

94 Nadine Boehm-Schnitker sometimes playful,4 sometimes painful vacillation between disavowal and recognition in the context of constructions of western subjectivities and their implications in power hierarchies. In my analyses of gay fictions, both the novels themselves, Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002) and Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), and the dynamics of consumption of neo-Victoriana will come into view in order to shed light on processes of fashioning the neo-Victorian today. In very different ways, both novels repeat texts by canonical Victorian authors and thus perform a ‘doubling’ with a difference. The doppelgänger as a personification of the mirror-relationship between the two time levels negotiated in neo-Victorianism makes it obvious that the ‘return to the Victorian’ is not necessarily a one-way affair, but much rather a reciprocal one, which is reflected in the academic use of tropes of spectrality and haunting, or the notion of the past as a revenant, which turns our revisitations into responses to the Victorian. 5 The neo-Victorian is in many respects understood as an uncanny doubling, a double of the Victorian text which mimics ‘its language, style, and plot’ and repeats its ‘tropes, characters and historical events’ as well as its genres, thus sometimes defamiliarising ‘our preconceptions of Victorian society’ (Arias and Pulham 2010, xv). At the same time, the Victorian age is invested with the potential to function as our mirror image, due to its relative historical proximity and several points of recognition (Gilmour 1993, 245). The reason why the contemporary return to the Victorian age may have an uncanny quality, I argue, is because by looking into the historical mirror cabinet, we almost see ourselves, but not quite (Bhabha 2004, 122). Identity is somewhat dislocated as we look at ourselves in terms of a second-order observation, that is, we watch ourselves watching ourselves. Our postmodernist retrospective is often highly self-reflexive, it is true, but also possibly narcissistic in its emphasis on the self as well as the visual and specular imagery pertaining to self-reflexivity. Homi Bhabha’s notion of stereotyping provides a fitting concept for processes of identity constructions in the reception of neo-Victorian texts or other artefacts. With Bhabha, it becomes possible not only to question whether neo-Victorian cultural products are predominantly immersive or self-reflexive and thus to ascertain their political drift, but also to shed light on their function for subject formations and the degree to which they cater to the contemporary vogue of identity politics. Bhabha understands colonial discourse as an ‘apparatus [of power] that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences. Its predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for a “subject peoples” through the production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form of pleasure/unpleasure is incited’ (1997, 295), a function in which stereotyping plays a major role. Transferring this postcolonial set-up to the historical ‘us’ and ‘them’ within neo-Victorianism, a similar relationship accounts for our understanding of the nineteenth century. In analogy to orientialist constructions of Western

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subjectivities as superior to the racial other, neo-Victorianism may fall into the trap of constructing a position of historical superiority from which the previously repressed can finally be represented, the silenced spoken and wrongs set right. There seems to be a tendency in the neo-Victorian project to take such a revelatory stance,6 if only for the sake of the more sensational and thus marketable appeal of products. Bhabha argues that ‘the relations of knowledge and power within [such an] apparatus are always a strategic response to an urgent need at a given historical moment’, the need ‘to contest singularities of difference and to articulate modes of differentiation’ (297). Similarly, the neo-Victorian project negotiates contemporary desires and proves conductive in defi ning contemporary British identities by way of an intracultural historical difference not only after Empire, but also after devolution and more far-reaching processes of globalisation. It is hence hardly surprising that the boundaries of ‘the’ neo-Victorian are still widely contested, not only as to its temporal scope, but also to its geographical extension: does ‘the Victorian’ refer to the history of Great Britain, the UK, Europe, Britain’s former colonies or to an even broader geographical scale? What kinds of identities can the look into the Victorian mirror corroborate?7 Bhabha’s postcolonial approach helps to address this question as it comprises psychoanalytical concepts such as the Freudian fetish or the Lacanian mirror stage in order to reveal the extent to which stereotyping is ingrained in processes of identification and identity construction; hence, the practice of stereotyping turns out to be more revealing as regards its subject rather than its object, which, in its turn, is applicable to the historical relationship between the nineteenth and the twenty-fi rst centuries.8 The stereotype, understood as a ‘disavowal of difference’ (298), operates as a strategy to fi x and dominate the other in order to stabilise one’s own identity. In the context of neo-Victorian studies, processes of stereotyping can be functionalised to keep cognitive dissonances at bay by reiterating received notions of the nineteenth century, thus consolidating ‘the myth of historical origination’ (297). Fetishism, Bhabha maintains, partakes of an interplay between metaphor and metonymy, it is ‘always a “play” [ . . . ] between the archaic affi rmation of wholeness/similarity [ . . . ] and the anxiety associated with lack and difference’ (298). It is playfulness that connects the oscillation between recognition and disavowal to a pleasurable process that might help explain our fascination with the Victorian as opposed to other periods in vogue in historical fiction. Furthermore, Bhabha’s focus on the construction of an ‘original presence’ strikes a chord in the neo-Victorian project. The contemporary need to construct a historical origin in the nineteenth century9 is thwarted by the fact that the nineteenth century does not necessarily offer the sameness desired, and reflects a distorted image instead. This is why stereotyping requires repetition: ‘The process by which the metaphoric “masking” is inscribed on a lack which must then be concealed gives the stereotype both its fixity and its phantasmatic quality—the same old stories [ . . . ] must be told (compulsively) again

96 Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and afresh, and are differently gratifying and terrifying each time’ (Bhabha 1997, 300). The repetition compulsion implied in the stereotyping process can, I suggest, account for the great market power of neo-Victorian products, which frequently present the same old, that is canonical, stories again and afresh.10 As the Victorian age provides us with stories of origin—of our gender identity, (media) technology, sociocultural and economic structures or value systems—it is to some degree like looking into a mirror with the hope of seeing the favoured ego-ideal reflected. Such an interplay between repetition and difference also bears similarities to theorisations of gender identity, which is relevant in the context of gay fictions: Judith Butler’s notion of performativity conceives of sex as a cultural construct that gains material effects through the repetition of acts citing a social script of gender roles and their concomitant matrices of desire (1990, 33; 1993, 2). These performances are understood as iterations of an ‘original’ which is, however, only hypostasised by these repetitions. These reiterations of gender thus have something in common with (neo-Victorian) reiterations of history, and investigated together, they should yield some information on neo-Victorian constructions of subjectivity as well as of the past. In reading Self’s and Tóibín’s texts, my aim is thus not only to provide an analysis of neo-Victorian gay fictions, which, in their turn, rely on narcissistic mirrorings, but also, on the level of cultural processes of production and consumption, to explain our fascination with the neo-Victorian in the context of contemporary desires and subject formations; these aspects should have a bearing on how we deal with neo-Victorian canon formation11 and with possible reiterations of Victorian ideologies.

AESTHETICISED ABUSE: OSCAR WILDE’S VIRAL LEGACY IN DORIAN: AN IMITATION Peter Widdowson contends that Dorian should be understood as a revision of Oscar Wilde’s text, with revision denoting ‘novels which “write back to”—indeed, “rewrite”—canonic texts from the past, and hence call to account formative narratives that have arguably been central to the construction of “our” consciousness’ (2006, 491). Positing that The Picture of Dorian Gray helped shape ‘our’ consciousness, Widdowson implies that contemporary efforts at rewriting include a search for that which is mirrored back at us, affi rming ‘our’ identity. From this point of view, rewritings imply a hermeneutic setup in which today’s historical distance from the nineteenth century enables us to understand both ‘us’ and ‘them’. In the light of stereotyping, such processes of understanding must be acknowledged as libidinally charged: ‘we’ desire to see ourselves mirrored in the Victorian but reject that which questions ‘us’. Revisionary novels, Widdowson goes on to argue, are a subcategory of historiographic metafiction and have a ‘clear cultural political thrust’ (505). Even though they establish

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a ‘new, autonomous work’ (503), they keep the pretext in view (502) and keep up a continuous dialogue with it ‘to speak the unspeakable of the pretext, hinting at its silences’ (504). It is ‘its’ silences, not ‘ours’ throughout the text—Widdowson thus hints at the revelatory gesture of revisions. However, only when revisions, in their turn, reflect on what they make the Victorian say, can they actually provide reliable insights into our particular relationship to the past. I agree insofar with Widdowson that Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) does indeed shimmer through the fabric of Will Self’s novel, which replays the fi n de siècle story in the fi n de millénium, spanning the time from Lady Diana’s marriage in the early Thatcher years up to her death and Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. Self’s medially updated version of The Picture of Dorian Gray lives up to an aestheticism that does away with the binary surface/depth by creating a rhizome of text. Moving from ‘Recordings’ via ‘Transmission’ to ‘Network’, he interweaves the different strands of the novel. Dorian: An Imitation speaks the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ with an unfl inching verbosity, which is signposted from the very beginning of the novel. Interestingly, the explicitness about sexual practices is, quite in contrast to Wilde’s opening in Basil’s studio, set in a domestic scene: Once you were inside the Chelsea home of Henry and Victoria Wotton it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night-time. Not only was there this crucial ambiguity, but the seasons and even the years became indeterminate. Was it this century or that one? Was she wearing this skirt or that suit? Did he take that drug or this drink? Was his preference for that cunt or this arsehole? (3) It is Henry and Victoria’s home in which neo-Victorian time levels tend to blur and binary oppositions resolve into indifference, including sexual preferences. Dorian articulates what Wilde’s novel could only hint at, and does so with a visual quality of description that makes the text verge on a ‘graphic’ novel, whose pictures are evoked by a highly sensual language. The following passage describes a scene of violent gay sex, in which Dorian remains unharmed in more senses than one: he considers himself (in Henry’s words) ‘fucking immortal’ (93) because Baz’s video installation Cathode Narcissus contracts AIDS in his stead. In the club ‘Mineshaft’, Dorian is attacked by a ‘leather queen’, but can successfully defend himself: Dorian smashed the man’s head against the floor with his hand, again and again, until there was a pink mist of blood in the air. In Dorian’s fevered head the blood beads doubled up, tripping over one another until this cardiac timpani reached a crescendo. His whole consciousness of the world swelled and whooshed and wobbled and dilated as amyl nitrate swirled in a vast anticyclone over the face of the earth. (96)

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Maliciously playing at the aestheticist predilection for the art of music, the narrator synchronises the rhythmic ‘crescendo’ of the attack with both an excess of violence and Dorian’s orgasm. One might therefore argue that Dorian, quite in line with the notion that neo-Victorianism articulates suppressed Victorian discourses, renders explicit atrocities which readers of Wilde’s negative Bildungsroman could only guess at. What becomes clear after the epilogue of the novel, however, is that this passage was, in fact, written by Henry Wotton, who penned the novel the reader has so far ascribed to a heterodiegetic narrative instance. Structurally, Dorian adds its equivalent to Wilde’s aestheticist preface in the epilogue to the end of the novel. The epilogue sets in with Dorian holding the manuscript, thus aligning the protagonist with the real reader. All the very explicit crimes, sexual escapades and the murderous sex, we come to understand, have not actually happened. Dorian is simply a gay man, still very beautiful and young at thirty-five, who has established his own design imperium on the basis of his Oxford education, and whose best friends Henry and Baz have died of AIDS. The passage quoted above is introduced by Henry during a conversation with Baz: ‘I bet I could write your dialogue so that it had greater authenticity than when you actually spoke it in Manhattan. [ . . . ] You tell it how it was, Baz—I’ll listen to how it should’ve been’ (92). That the following dialogues are not ‘real’ dialogues is typographically indicated by introducing them with dashes instead of inverted commas (Hayes 2007, 156). ‘Real’ situations and Henry’s imagined/written versions intersect again and again and blur the difference between diegetic fact and intradiegetic fiction in this novel in the novel. It is very much in line, albeit exclusively on different ontological levels within fiction, with Wilde’s poetology, which renders fiction more ‘authentic’ than reality, and has life imitate art and not vice versa (Wilde 2007, 337). Tongue in cheek, the novel plays at debates of late Victorian literary criticism when it pits faithful representation against Henry’s gothic version of events. The imitation turns to parody when Dorian, of all literary characters, complains that Henry has taken ‘colossal liberties with the truth!’, even more so when Victoria didactically replies: ‘But it’s a novel, Dorian. Besides, Henry also took the trouble to formally distinguish those scenes where he was present from those where he couldn’t possibly have known exactly what happened’ (259). Consequently, the epilogue’s dialogues are indicated by dashes, as Henry is already dead at that point. As the epilogue proceeds, Henry’s voice returns from the dead, overwriting once more the clear distinction between his AIDS-infected morbid fantasy-novel and the ‘real’. This coincides with the digitalisation of Baz’s video installation: ‘“Cathode Narcissus Belongs to Us All”, the slogan on the homepage proclaimed; “Download Some Perfection Today”. [ . . . ] During the first few months of 1997, the cathode Narcissi spread throughout the virtual metabolism of the culture, like a digital virus’ (270–271). Intended as a statement for gay liberation, Dorian admits that it is ‘a tad . . . uncanny’

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that now, at thirty-six, he still looks as young as his 1981 self (271). This is when Henry’s voice uncannily returns from the dead and accuses Dorian of having lived ‘under an assumed identity’ (271); thus, the logic of scenes which Henry can actually represent as a first-hand observer is stretched even further. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost’ (271), Dorian’s friend Angela remarks fittingly as Self plays at the jargon used to describe instances of the past haunting the present. In this supposedly liberated time in which gay identities can be represented positively, Dorian falls prey to paranoia which is so closely connected to ‘homosexual panic’ (Sedgwick 2002, 159). The events that follow paradoxically re-affirm Dorian’s cruelty and sexual escapades, further blurring the lines between fact and fiction. After a bout of blackmail threatening to publish the video tape showing his body suffering from AIDS, Dorian is killed shortly after the death of Lady Di—the novel thus simultaneously kills off two iconic figures of the gay community.12 Self’s hypotext remains visible in its poetology, its characters, its style and the general plot line, and Dorian updates many of its motifs. When Wilde’s protagonist ponders his ancestry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, he wonders: ‘Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?’ (2007, 112). This ‘germ’ is easily translated into the HI-virus, which becomes an allegory of cultural decline and infectious transmission in Dorian, with transmission echoing not only the passing on of the virus but also the intertextual references or infections between text and hypotext as well as the monitors transmitting Dorian’s image in Baz’s Cathode Narcissus. The aspect of narcissism, in the novel’s mode of the ‘queer Gothic’ (Smith 2009, 178), toys with the motif of the uncanny doppelgänger, which also comprises the idea of homosexuality, because Narcissus falls in love with his mirror image, with sameness, with the same sex. On the level of cultural processes of consumption, narcissism of course also mirrors the desire to see the same time and again, to consume reproductions of the past which only mildly alter stereotypes. Self’s ‘imitation’ of Wilde’s novel simultaneously caters to and subverts such desires. His version of Sibyl Vane is a black youth called Herman, a boy who infects—according to Henry’s narrative—the whole group with AIDS when Lady Di marries Charles in 1981. This marriage is depicted as a public display sanctioning heteronormativity which, however, is equally enmeshed in death as Diana’s shortened nickname implies. Herman’s blackness, in its turn, introduces racial power hierarchies, black British identities and racial discrimination into a hypotext mainly characterised by class differences rather than by race and ethnicity. In Wilde’s text, Philip Herbert, a man whose last name partly echoes Herman’s, is described as one of Dorian’s ancestors. The contemplation of his portrait triggers reflections on the ‘germ’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘Here was Philip Herbert, described by Francis Osborne, on his Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elisabeth and King James, as one who was “caressed by the Court for his handsome face, which kept him not

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long company”’ (112). The germ of this aristocratic lineage not only alludes to Dorian’s sexual preferences—Herbert was a favourite of James I—but also fatefully foreshadows Dorian’s demise by a ‘loss of face’. The same afflictions haunt the present in Dorian; the imitation of Wilde’s text in the context of the 1980s shows a decade of morbid decay in analogue media, digitally remastered in the 1990s. Dorian thus only partially lives up to the categories established by Widdowson, and the question remains which suppressed voice of the past is to be excavated. It is clearly not a gay liberation, fi nally speaking the ‘love that dare not speak its name’. The text is far too implicated in reflections on mediality and cultural critique for that. Victorian ‘germs’ recast as virality in a postmodern age, for example, evoke Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and its concomitant implosion of difference, which also accounts for the confusion of ontological levels in the novel: ‘Total metonymy, then—viral by defi nition (or lack of defi nition)’ (Baudrillard 1993, 7). The neo-Victorian Dorian in Henry’s fantasy lives virality, a virality that evolves side by side with mediality from analogue to digital, and thus plays on simulation theory avant la lettre already inculcated in fin-de-siècle aestheticism. After all, it is not far from Wilde’s dictum that ‘Life imitates Art’ (2007, 337) to Baudrillard’s notion that the copy precedes the original, ‘the map [ . . . ] precedes the territory’ (2006, 1). By narrativising the analogy between Wilde’s literary theory and Baudrillard’s media critique, Self establishes a close connection between the respective fins de siècles, the 1890s and 1990s, which, via the leitmotif of the viral, can be envisioned as a process of replication. His adaptation thus hinges on infection, so that cultural evolution as illustrated by Linda Hutcheon, who appropriates Richard Dawkins’s idea of memes (2006, 32), is no longer a positive development on the basis of ‘cultural selection’ (177), but down to the blind will of viral reproduction and dispersal. It is probably quite fitting for a fin-de-millénium cultural theory to conceive of culture as an illness, and the ‘anxiety of influence’ as a viral colonisation of the body. The parallelism of biological discourses of infection and notions of cultural influence characterises Self’s take on processes of adaptation and defi nes neo-Victorianism as a viral replication of the nineteenth century, ‘propagated through mere contiguity’ in the ‘order [ . . . ] of metastasis’ (Baudrillard 1993, 7). For mere historical closeness, the nineteenth century proves particularly infectious. Self’s subtitle ‘an Imitation’ characterises the novel as a retake of Wilde’s text. It repeats the hypotext’s gay identities and renders them explicit, it updates the arts from portraiture to video installation to digital representation and recasts aestheticism as simulation. This repetition with a difference illustrates the ethical implication of the ontological inversion that aestheticism initiated and that simulation replays in a different order of representation: the novel thus questions an age in which ethical obligation is erased by a suspension of the real just as moral realism was superseded by aestheticism, and in which the viral fundamentally constitutes contemporary

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subjectivities. Infection through contiguous replays is made to resemble fin-de-siècle decadence. Will Self offers us a mirror cabinet of historically calibrated takes on gay identities, which illustrates how we are always already enmeshed in power hierarchies. Thus, the text obliterates a vantage point for self-reflexivity. What remains at the end of the novel is business, business as usual, because Dorian’s design imperium is built to last (2002, 266–7). In the contemporary cultural market, business as usual might result in endless imitations—a cultural dystopia which cautions against too swift attempts at canon formation and academia’s propensity to establish patterns by looking for the same recurring again and again. Dorian is hence less a critical engagement with the nineteenth century than a cultural critique of contemporary markets. Instead of mirroring a picture we have—more or less—expected, that is, Dorian holds up a glass in which we see the emptiness of a stance of epistemological superiority and thus thwarts attempts at stereotyping. By rendering epistemologically superior reading positions insecure, Dorian shifts the focus from the Victorian object to the contemporary subject, which is why it proves an interesting instance of neo-Victorian literature even though it is not set in the Victorian period.

HAUNTING AUTHOR FUNCTIONS: TRANSATLANTIC HOMOSEXUAL PANIC IN COLM TÓIBÍN’S THE MASTER Whereas Self’s imitation turns to parody, Colm Tóibín’s The Master revisits the past through a literary pastiche. The novel about Henry James’s ‘middle years’ is a novel about a blind spot, that of Henry James’s sexuality and sexual orientation. The narrated time sets in a decade after the criminalisation of homosexuality with the Labouchère Amendment (1885) and ranges from January 1895 to the close of 1899. Even though Tóibín forbade any comparisons of the two author figures James and Tóibín (Kaplan 2007, 69), and even though a blunt attempt at psychoanalysing The Master or reading it as a roman à clef would undoubtedly fail to account for the complexity and the aesthetic beauty of the novel, Tóibín’s literary engagement with James’s life in the closet and with his authorship can nevertheless be counted as a paradigmatic case of histories repeating in different discursive realms, one defi ned by late Victorian mores and criminalisation, one situated in the heyday of the Celtic Tiger and post-decriminalisation. Eibhear Walshe concurs that ‘James’s life provides Tóibín with the metaphor for his own imaginative sense of the post-gay moment, this repressed life as an image for his own “unease and melancholy”’ (2006, 134). James’s texts as well as the biographies of the James family inform Tóibín’s novel at every turn: ‘I wish to acknowledge that I have peppered the text with phrases and sentences from the writings of Henry James and his family’, Tóibín states in the novel’s ‘Acknowledgements’. Tóibín speaks to the dead (Greenblatt 1988, 1) and makes them speak to a contemporary

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audience; in clearly ‘mimicking language, style, and plot’ of James’s texts (Arias and Pulham 2009, xv), he succeeds in a neo-Victorian double articulation of sexuality, subjectivity and aesthetics in different cultural settings. Tóibín not only weaves primary sources into his novel—The Master draws to a great extent on The Ambassadors (1903), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1888; Savu 2009, 188) and ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898) among many others—but also on texts of criticism, specifically on Eve Sedgwick’s queer reading of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (Savu 2009, 180). In The Master, the character Henry James sums up the content of the story when asked by Edmund Gosse what he is planning to write: ‘I have in mind a man who all his life believes that something dreadful will happen to him [ . . . ]. He tells a woman of this unknown catastrophe and she becomes his greatest friend, but what he does not see is that his failure to believe in her, his own coldness, is the catastrophe, it has come already, it has lived within him all along’ (Tóibín 2004, 355). In her reading of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, Sedgwick analyses the ‘dreadful’ thing that the protagonist John Marcher fears as the secret of homosexuality in a time when the fi ne line dividing social bonds to maintain patriarchal social structures from the socially ostracised homosexual relations between men was severely guarded: ‘Because the paths of male entitlement, especially in the nineteenth century, required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state of what I am calling male homosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement’ (2002, 159). What follows from this condition is ‘a sometimes agonized sexual anesthesia that was damaging to both its male subjects and its female nonobjects’ (161; my italics). By the same token, it engenders a specific kind of aesthetics that, as ‘the possibility of an embodied malehomosexual thematics has [ . . . ] a liminal presence’, is one of absence, ‘specifically of the absence of speech’ (164). Sedgwick highlights the trope of preterition as the defi ning stylistic device; both ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ and The Master are characterised by a negotiation of that which can be said in the open and that which must remain in the closet. The shared aesthetics is one dependent on repressed desires that need to be spoken about but can never be expressed, hence ‘sexual anesthesia’ engenders a stylistically beautiful, but emotionally ‘empty’ aesthetics. The female characters in both texts are much more ‘in the know’ than their male counterparts; nevertheless, they have to suffer the male characters’ emotional sterility necessary to ensure the validity of heteronormativity. Comparable to the character May Bartram, who fails to establish a love relationship with Marcher in James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, James’s cousin Minnie Temple, his sister Alice and his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson die without having been loved or even emotionally supported by him in The Master. About Constance, he realises after her suicide: ‘He had his reasons for choosing to remain alone; his imagination, however, had stretched merely as far as his fears and not

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beyond. He had exerted control; what he had done made him shudder. Had he gone to Venice that winter, he knew, she would not have killed herself’ (Tóibín 2004, 255–56). In The Master, James’s sexual repression is turned into a source of creativity, albeit a creativity with clearly described boundaries. Aesthetic discourse serves as a code to articulate gay identities, a strategy employed frequently in Irish writing before 1993. As Eibhear Walshe elucidates, the aesthetic was the sole acceptable discourse within which the homoerotic could be approached, or so it seemed. In contrast, since 1993, a number of Irish writers have made their own sexual identity implicit in their public personas and in their own creative writings. Before decriminalisation, Irish lesbian and gay writing was, in the words of Gerry Smyth, part of a borderland, an in-between space within Irish writing, liminal in cultural and political life and language. (2008, 138) The Master proves a transitional text, negotiating the pre-1993 suppression at a time when homosexuality can be addressed openly. Consequently, the novel provides a hopeful outlook. Whereas ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ is not concluded by ‘gay self-knowledge but the heterosexual, self-ignorant acting out of just this fantasy’ (Sedgwick 2002, 172), Tóibín ends his novel with a family ideal that is based on newly constructed rules of living together (2004, 357) and thus foreshadows a different discursive situation for gay identities, which Tóibín’s James encapsulates in ‘the moral’ he envisages for another story he intends to write: ‘The moral is [ . . . ] that life is a mystery and that only sentences are beautiful, and that we must be ready for change’ (355). James’s life up to that point has been one of suppressed desire, of life sublimated into art. Minnie Temple’s death in 1870 haunts James and he tries to ‘lay the ghost by wrapping it [ . . . ] in the beauty and dignity of art’ (qtd. in Savu 2009, 193), which only succeeds for the price of repression and by becoming somewhat fictional and ghostlike himself: ‘He lived, at times, he felt, as if his life belonged to someone else, a story that had not yet been written, a character who had not been fully been imagined’ (118). The necessity for repression is even more clearly illustrated by the relationship between Henry and Constance, specifically by the scene when Henry goes to Venice after her suicide, is haunted by her ‘absolute presence’ (269), by ‘a phantom he dreamed about’ (257); he finally decides to drown her clothes at ‘the place at the lagoon’ where ‘there is nothing’ (267): ‘Some of the dresses had floated to the surface again like black balloons, evidence of the strange sea burial they had just enacted’ (270). It takes several attempts to keep the clothes under water, and thus to repress the memories connected to them as strictly as possible, because they would bring a knowledge to the surface that would imply Henry’s recognising himself as homosexual. James is not only haunted by the ghosts of women he failed to love and support

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but he himself can be seen as a kind of spectral presence, whose body only ‘materialises’ in one intimate scene with Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘They lay side by side without speaking. Henry could feel the bone of his pelvis hitting against Holmes. [ . . . ] He could hear his own breathing and sense his own heart beating as he closed his eyes and turned his back on Holmes. [ . . . ] He wondered if he would ever again be so intensely alive’ (98). Apart from that moment, James’s body is fittingly described as the ‘Vanishing Homosexual’ haunting the neo-Victorian text (Walshe 2006). The Master is very much concerned with the channelling of desires and the production of art, with art as a negotiation of the sayable and the unsayable. The love ‘that dare not speak its name’ remains unuttered in Tóibín’s bio-fiction but comes into view with the Wilde trials (2004, 73). Regarding the cultural interpretation of the trials in Ireland, Walshe underscores that they can be understood ‘as yet another bitter episode in the colonial struggle against British imperialist law’ (2006, 125); he delineates the history of gay liberation in Ireland and shows that, even in the 1980s, Irishness and homosexuality were more or less seen as mutually exclusive until, at least legally, homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993 (127). In The Master, Irishness, imperialism and the question of compulsive heterosexuality closely intersect from very early on. In the chapter entitled ‘February 1895’, Henry starts to feel uneasy in London society after the failure of his play Guy Domville the previous month and gladly accepts invitations to Ireland by Lord Houghton, ‘who depended on imported guests’, thus turning Henry himself into a transAtlantic colonial good (23), as well as by Lord Wolseley, ‘who had become Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s forces in Ireland’ and had not ‘seen his play’ (22). Before these personages are mentioned, Henry ponders how he moves ‘carefully and easily among the powerful’ (21), a crucial difference to his sister Alice, who ‘had been the most anti-imperialist of the family; she had even loved Parnell and longed for Home Rule for Ireland’ (22). Henry’s enmeshment into powerful circles makes him rather blind for Alice’s situation and her suffering (152); he even burns the letters she wrote to Constance in which she tried to openly lament her situation (262). Henry’s failure to ‘see’ the predicaments of women as well as his blindness to his own innermost feelings gesture towards a condition he shares with the governess in Henry James’s story ‘The Turn of the Screw’: He wanted her to have no skills at reflection or self-examination, he wanted the reader to know her by what she noticed, and what sights, indeed, she used her narrative to gloss over. Thus the reader would see the world through her eyes, but somehow see her too, despite her efforts at self-concealment and self-suppression, in ways she could not see herself. (148) This duplicates the situation of the reader of The Master, who is enabled to glimpse the depths that become visible whenever the narrative voice

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loses control and grants access to a psychological depth that slips through James’s ‘social mask’ (106). This narrative structure sutures the reader to some degree into the text, allowing a vacillation between identification and second-order observation.13 Tóibín’s retrospective of James’s biography is suspended in a web of intertextual references. On a literary level, these references draw on a wide range of fictional and historical texts of the nineteenth up to the twenty-fi rst century. Drawing again on Butler’s notion of performativity, this is a literarily mediated way of quoting norms of gay identities. By reiterating nineteenth-century narratives of closeting, The Master draws attention to non-viable subject positions and offers a very complex version of the ‘self-conscious rewriting of historical narratives to highlight the suppressed histories of gender and sexuality’ that is arguably so characteristic of neo-Victorianism (Kaplan 2007, 3). On a cultural level, such a web of references negotiates gendered subjectivities in the context of a postcolonial and post-gay moment, catering to ‘the post-lapsarian mood of the noughts’ (67). The novel looks back to a time when homosexuality was criminalised from the point of view of post-decriminalisation, to a time when British legal structures vitally formed Irish gendered subjectivities from the point of view of a post-devolutionary situation. It is hence an intracultural, historical other that is reiterated in The Master, which is ‘almost but not quite’ the same. It is repeated at a time when Ireland is situated in a much more European and, by extension, global context that necessitates a re-evaluation of Irish identity because Ireland, in its own right, verges on an endemic capitalist form of imperialism that, to a great extent, flourishes through American investments—less a literary than an economic transatlantic relationship. Henry James as an American-born author with Irish ancestry, who lived in Great Britain for a large part of his life and acquired British citizenship one year before his death, provides an apt mirror image. His biography is ‘rooted’ in Irishness but dislocated from it early on in his life; at the same time, it has enough gaps to allow for the recognition of the fact that the mirror image is evasive. Tóibín’s Jamesian hauntings provide ample aesthetic enjoyment and deal with the anaesthesia of repressed sexuality and its relationship to literary production in different discursive contexts. It is precisely the level of aesthetics that makes us ‘hear’ that which used to be foreclosed in the nineteenth century and makes us respond without constructing a reading position of scopic superiority.

CONCLUSION The two novels under consideration address problematic aspects of the dialectics between stereotyping and self-reflexivity. Whereas Dorian questions scopic superiority by playing an ironic postmodernist game with

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different ontological levels through a novel in the novel, and by fi nally dissolving them through the motif of viral contagion, The Master attempts to evade scopic superiority in our contemporary stance to the past by foregrounding aesthetics as a field of negotiation or translation between the late Victorian and the neo-Victorian. Both novels play at the blind spot in self-reflexivity—‘our’ own position or point of view—and thus lay bare exactly that position that is occluded in processes of stereotyping. Drawing on the paradigmatic fi n-de-siècle novel on narcissism, the doppelgänger and gay identities, Will Self stages a repetition of a canonical text with a difference. Dorian, however, does not exhaust itself by telling the same stories again and afresh, but cunningly criticises a way of consuming the nineteenth century which expects nothing but a repetition affi rmative of the status quo. The novel thwarts a superior reading position by seeming to perform an ‘Imitation’, but eventually subverts it by revealing that it is not the alleged nineteenth-century silences which are under scrutiny but our own stances towards the past. The Master mirrors the nineteenth century by writing pastiche on the one hand, and on the other, by enacting a doppelgänger relationship between two authors, calibrated by different historical and socio-cultural contexts. Paradoxically, by repeating and stylistically imitating Jamesian aesthetics, Tóibín is able to critique gender performativity then and now. Whereas Tóibín indeed writes back to the nineteenth century, Self talks back to contemporary shortfalls of cultural consumption. I would like to give my readings another turn of the screw by bringing pleasure into focus as well. If, in Hartmut Böhme’s words, the contemporary cultural imaginary is to a large degree defi ned by self-reflexivity (2006, 482), then, in the neo-Victorian scopic regime, self-reflexivity has come full circle: we look into the nineteenth-century mirror to see ourselves, we know that we look and why and reflect on it, but, to make looking pleasurable, we disavow being conscious of the very process. Neo-Victorian looking (or reading and watching, for that matter) takes a middle stance between (nostalgic/fetishistic) immersion in the past and critical self-reflexivity, a process that can be termed ‘cultural fetishism’. According to Böhme, cultural fetishism is ‘the current form of the medial exteriorisation of anthropological potentials’ (479, my translation). We look into the Victorian mirror in order to construct a contemporary identity, thereby vacillating between pleasurably disavowing our awareness of the scopic regime to immerse ourselves into our supposed origins and suspending this disavowal to reflect on the processes of meaning and identity construction. The self-reflexive uncovering of various implications into the politics of remembering—for example taking into account imperialist complicities or exclusions of specific sexualities—together with the pleasurable disavowal of these insights account, I think, for the ongoing fascination with the neo-Victorian.

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NOTES 1. See also the introduction and the contribution by Marie-Luise Kohlke in this volume. 2. See Arias and Pulham 2009, Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, the introduction and the contributions by Rosario Arias, Susanne Gruss and Jessica Cox in this volume. 3. Kohlke further elaborates on the complex issues of neo-Victorian representations and their ethical pitfalls in her joint introduction (with Christian Gutleben) to Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma (2010, particularly 14–20). 4. Many neo-Victorian critics have emphasised the retrieval of lost voices or the recovery of the repressed as one of the central aims of the neoVictorian project, such as Kohlke in her already quoted introduction to the inaugural edition of Neo-Victorian Studies (2008, 9) or Cora Kaplan (2007, 3), which can be understood as an empowering gesture, positing the contemporary scholar as the liberated subject, fi nally able to express that which could not previously be articulated. Even if this is done with an ethical impulse, it remains problematic that, in the process of speaking for the other, the other is appropriated and potentially objectifi ed. Dana Shiller expresses this idea in similar, albeit more tentative terms when she claims that neo-Victorian fi ction attempts to ‘evoke’ the past’s ‘spirit’ (1997, 547). 5. In a similar vein, Helen Davies conceives of neo-Victorian fiction as ‘“talking back” to the Victorians’ (2012, 3). 6. Whereas A.S. Byatt’s Possession ironises this tendency by cleverly undermining the supposedly superior and theoretically informed position of the twentieth-century scholars on the trail of nineteenth-century poets (see the introduction to this volume), John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy, which mimics Possession’s structure, provides a good example of a revelatory stance in neo-Victorian fiction (see Eckart Voigt’s analysis of the novel in this volume). 7. Questions like these may help to explore whether the conspicuous concentration on the novel genre in neo-Victorian studies indicates a reiteration of the form’s affi liations with social strata defi ned by race, class and gender. Also see Kohlke’s contribution in this volume. 8. In a negative sense, Kate Flint warns against ‘period fetishism’ (2005, 230), but there are also more positive takes on this concept as in the contribution by Anne Enderwitz and Doris Feldmann in this volume. 9. See Kucich and Sadoff (2000, xiv) and the introduction (this volume, 5). 10. See also Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 10. 11. See Kohlke’s contribution in this volume. 12. Another dead character, Ginger, James Vane’s postmodern equivalent, kills Dorian in a public toilet (Self 2002, 278), a dismal ending which is certainly not without some tongue-in-cheek allusion to George Michael’s ‘gay escapades’ in similar locations. 13. The notion of ‘suture’ is derived from (psychoanalytical) fi lm theory, but can be transferred to a literary context and narratives in general. Suture ‘stitch[es] the spectator into the filmic text’ and, in addition, draws attention to the stitching together of scenes that are separated by cuts which are rendered invisible. This results in the illusion of a continuous diegetic world on the one hand, but also highlights the fact that viewers are thus stitched into the film or made to identify with the world that is depicted (Hayward 1996, 371–79).

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Traces, Traumas and Retrospective Anxieties

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7

Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction Rosario Arias

This essay deals with the presence of the Victorian past in contemporary culture and considers the theoretical notion of the trace as a viable theoretical framework to analyse the presentness of the Victorians in recent fiction.1 My aim is to explore the ways in which the inscription of the Victorian past in the twentieth- and twenty-fi rst centuries can be examined in relation to this variously defi ned notion. I will address the different critical perspectives on the concept of the trace, from Jacques Derrida’s inception in the late 1960s and his later development in the figure of the spectre (in close connection with the work of the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok), to the hermeneutic approach of the phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical theories on the trace. I will discuss the concept of the trace as developed by Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative (1984–88) and Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), where he explains its pivotal role in memory and history to arrest loss and forgetting. Furthermore, I will draw on the increasing critical interest in the trace, cultural phenomenology and the apprehension of the senses in Victorian culture and how this intersects with the ways in which the Victorians are today made present and visible through vestiges, fragments and ruins, on the one hand, and through the representation of sensory perception in neo-Victorian novels, on the other. The hybrid nature of the trace, which partakes of both absence and presence, past and present, facilitates the blurring of temporal and spatial boundaries between the Victorian and the contemporary age. Lastly, I will argue that this emphasis on presence and preservation is in keeping with challenges to postmodernism, which should not be taken as a backlash but as a way of moving on with a difference. If critics such as Marie-Luise Kohlke call for ‘a self-reflective, self-interrogative approach to the neo-Victorian enterprise [ . . . ] as one of the most urgent challenges within Neo-Victorian Studies in the near future’ (2008a, 13), the trace proves to be an apt critical tool to consider contemporary interventions into the Victorian age from a theoretical point of view. The spectral trope has already proved to be extremely fruitful for neoVictorianism; the ‘trace’, however, has as yet been only mentioned in passing. Since the ‘uncanny 1990s’ there has been an upsurge of interest in

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considering the pervasiveness of the Victorian past through the trope of haunting and spectrality. The two main trends are constituted by Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic work on the phantom and the crypt (see Arias and Pulham 2009, xi–xxvi). In Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction, Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham concluded their joint introduction by underlining the inherent potentiality within the liminal existence of the ghost, seen as a metaphor of the doubling aspect of our relationship with the Victorians (2009, xxv). The figure of the ghost is characterised by the blurring of boundaries and by the indeterminacy of a spectral occurrence that disjoints temporal linearity. Drawing on my previous work on haunting and spectrality, I take one step further in this essay and focus on the concept of the trace, both similar and dissimilar from the spectre. Arguably, the trace offers a sense of direct connection to the referent and engages with a more material relationship with the past. Interestingly, in the exordium to Specters of Marx (1994), Derrida compares the ghost, the spectral moment, with a ‘living-on [ . . . ] namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity’ (xx). This reference to the trace is deprived of the negativity imbued in the original ‘trace’ mentioned and expounded in Writing and Difference (1967) and Of Grammatology (1967/1974), at the beginning of his career, in which the emphasis is on the trace understood as the absence of presence. In fact, in the last interview before his death, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview (2007), Derrida expands on the new meanings of the trace and explicitly equates the trace with the spectre, thus bringing to the fore ‘the suppression of indeterminate negativity or abstract negativity’ (Duff y 2007, 1). In Derrida’s words, ‘[a]ll the concepts that have helped me in my work, and notably that of the trace or of the spectral, were related to this ‘surviving’ as a structural and rigorously originary dimension’ (2007, 26). In turn, and from a point of view based on Freudian psychoanalysis, Abraham and Torok deal with traces of past wounds in their explanation of the processes of memory. Freud as well as Abraham and Torok favour the archaeological metaphor to refer to ‘the act of remembering as the uncovering of a secret’ (King 2000, 15), a secret that is unspeakable and lodged in the crypt, a psychic place. The memory traces are ‘the vestiges of perception’ (Abraham and Torok 1994, 91), of the unconscious, the symptoms on the surface/shell of the eruption of the repressed, that secret that is unspeakable—the transgenerational phantom. The trace is defi ned as being double, as it partakes of the shell and the kernel:2 ‘memory traces could have the same mediating mission as representations, affects, and fantasies. Memory traces are to be distinguished from the latter only by their orientation: their mission is centripetal while the others’ is centrifugal’ (92). As Mark Dawson states in his study of the trace in Abraham, ‘the memorial

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of the trace is a monument which “lives on”, which “does not cease being active” and is an “indissoluble unit”’ (2009, 75). Abraham’s conception of the trace-as-memorial focuses on ‘a register of presence’ (75).3 In line with Abraham’s work on the trace in the processes of memory, Paul Ricoeur defines the trace as a pivotal concept in memory and history. In what I have developed so far one question emerges: must the trace be connected with death and loss? ‘Must every trace be thought of as remains, residue, leftover?’ (Greisch 2004, 89). I would like to contend that we can provide another view on the trace, already delineated by Derrida, Abraham and Torok, and fully developed by Ricoeur—the trace in relation to life (presentness, presence, preservation), and not to death (absence and loss). Paul Ricoeur advances much of his theory of the trace in Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (1985) where he sets himself to examine the symbolic representation of the trace as ‘the icon of the immemorial [our ancestors], along with that of our successors, the icon of hope’ (1988, 116). Ricoeur notes the different conceptualisations of the term when he distinguishes three types of trace: the ‘mnesic trace’ (the cerebral cortical) in the brain or cortex, the ‘mnemonic trace’ (psychical trace) in the unconscious, and the ‘written trace’ (crucial in the historiographic process) (qtd. in Greisch 2004, 83). The past leaves a trace: Through generalization, the vestige becomes a mark. At the same time, the origin of a trace is extended from a human being or an animal to anything whatever. On the one hand, the idea of being past has disappeared. All that remains is the remark that the trace is ‘left behind’. Here is the heart of the paradox. On the one hand, the trace is visible here and now, as a vestige, a mark. On the other hand, there is a trace (or track) because ‘earlier’ a human being or an animal passed this way. Something did something. (Ricoeur 1988, 119) This excerpt best summarises my main concerns in this essay, as contemporary interventions into the Victorian backtrack the passage of traces:4 ‘“Passage” is a better way of speaking about the dynamics of a trace, while “mark” is a better way of indicating its static aspect’ (120). Therefore, the passage, the tracing of the Victorian traces, results in a persistent yet continuous movement between the present and the Victorian past. Seen in this light, the retrieval of Victorian traces, the passage, is, then, alike to the notion of revisitation which presides over the chapters in this volume. Revisitation, as the editors of the volume state in their joint introduction, emphasises continuity with a difference: ‘a desire for repetition [ . . . ] which seem[s] to be triggered by this dual relationship of continuity and difference (or revisitation) between “then” and “now”’ (this volume, 5). In contemporary revisitations of the Victorian past by John Harwood, Sarah Waters, Belinda Starling or A. S. Byatt, postmodern historicity (as defi ned by Fredric Jameson) is replaced with ‘a sense of a referent’, as Dana

114 Rosario Arias Shiller understands it (1997, 541). In this sense, the neo-Victorian novel has evolved in a way that seems to stand in opposition to the definition of postmodern fiction as provided by Linda Hutcheon in the 1980s, which ‘stresses [ . . . ] the tensions that exist, on the one hand, between the pastness (and absence) of the past and the presentness (and presence) of the present, and on the other, between the actual events of the past and the historian’s act of processing them into facts’ (1989, 73). In fact, following Shiller’s pioneering discussion of neo-Victorianism, there has been subsequent critical interest in analysing tools to challenge death and arrest loss in neo-Victorian novels. In what follows, I will develop how the Victorian past is made present and visible in recent fiction as the materialisations of Victorian ghostly apparitions. Along similar lines, recent Victorianists have directed their attention to the relevance of the trace, as well as to the representation of bodily experience, of ‘being affected’ by the bodily senses, in Victorian culture. Virginia Zimmerman’s Excavating Victorians (2008) examines Victorian narratives and stories of fragments, ruins and fossils as a literature of excavation, and underlines how ‘excavation became a powerful epistemological trope for the Victorians’ (8). She draws heavily on Ricoeur’s concept of the trace and maintains that Ricoeur’s trace signals preservation (9). In other words, the doubled nature of the trace (similar to that of the photograph, as I will argue later) dissolves time and space—in travelling across time, it also exists in our present. Ultimately, Zimmerman treats her literary texts as ‘text-objects’ (23), as traces of the Victorian past that need to be excavated by the critic/observer/archaeologist. Neo-Victorian fiction, in its turn, offers ample space to bridge the gap between the (Victorian) past and the present through the trope of excavation and fossil creatures. One such example is Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), a neo-Victorian novel which shows three relevant instances of vestiges and traces of the personal and historical past, thus suggesting geological/archaeological activity: the Victorian Matthew Pearce’s encounter with the ichthyosaur at Lyme Regis, which reinforces his loss of faith; the image of the clock that Bill Unwin, the contemporary narrator, inherits as a wedding gift; and Matthew Pearce’s journals which textualise the past through the written word. The fi rst trace of the past, as shown in the Victorian strand of the novel, is, therefore, the fossil remains of the ichthyosaur. According to A. S. Byatt, ‘the Victorian hero’s encounter with a fossilized creature, representing deep time’ is a ‘regular topos, almost a cliché’ (2000, 72) in contemporary novels, which often also resort to the Victorian figure of Mary Anning, and this is also true for Ever After: [Matthew Pearce] saw an ichthyosaur. [ . . . ] Quite probably, he had seen one before. If he had been to London, which he probably had, he would have seen in the British Museum the famous ichthyosaur, thirty feet long, discovered (fi rst of its kind to be so unearthed) by Mary

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Anning of Lyme Regis—beside which awesome exhibit this half-buried specimen, perhaps some fi fteen feet, was a mere baby. (1992, 100) A. S. Byatt (2000, 72) and Christian Gutleben (2009/10, 139) track down the hero’s experience with one fossil (an ichthyosaur or a trilobite, respectively) to Henry Knight’s face-to-face encounter with the trilobite in Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). In contemporary fiction the literary ancestor of Matthew Pearce’s ichthyosaur is Charles Smithson’s fascination with fossil hunting in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). More recently, Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2010), an example of ‘biofiction’ in Cora Kaplan’s term (2007, 65), has featured the trope of the fossil in the literary depiction of the figure of Mary Anning, whose passion for fossil-hunting is equally shared by Elizabeth Philpot in the novel, thus forging links between two women in a domain dominated by men. If this vestigial presence of the past, the ichthyosaur, triggers Matthew’s fi nal rejection of his religious faith, a relic from the past, the family clock, made in 1845 by Matthew’s own father and given to Matthew and his bride as a wedding present, helps provide ‘a sense of historical lineage’ (Shuttleworth 1998, 261), and, I would add, a sense of family lineage, because Unwin also inherits the family clock. Therefore, ‘[b]y investing [Unwin’s] life with a sense of historically grounded continuity, engrafting his own onto that of his ancestor, he seeks to avoid the emptiness of his own values and experience’ (261). The clock, a material trace of the familial past, represents the passing of time, the transience of life, but at the same time it is an object that has been passed on from one generation to the next in the Unwin family. As Ricoeur affirms, ‘[t]he creative power of repetition is contained entirely in this power of opening up the past again to the future’ (2006, 380). Consequently, this material trace serves the purposes of standing against transience and death, symbolised in ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’, ‘the paradoxical, ambiguous inscription on the family clock’ (Malcolm 2003, 156). In a similar fashion, Louisa Hadley refers to Matthew’s journals as past remains which permit ‘the historical specificity of the past and its connection to the present. [ . . . T]he past is returned to its specific historical context while also allowed to have an afterlife in the present’ (2010, 134). Hadley’s reference to the journals as remains that belong to the past but simultaneously have ‘an afterlife in the present’ inevitably takes us back to the dual nature of the trace in that it partakes of both absence and presence—it connects past, present and future. All in all, however pessimistic and death-driven Ever After might seem, Swift’s novel also allows for the incorporation of the potent image of the vestigial object, and the survival of the past through significant traces: ‘The object from the past that exists in the present and implies the future is the key to the effort to control time: the object might be a trace and thus embodies the passage of time yet it itself exists across time and paradoxically becomes a vehicle for asserting a coeval view of time’ (Zimmerman 2008, 14).

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As I have already pointed out, Dana Shiller seems to agree to the actual living of the (Victorian) past in the present, a past that cannot be extinguished because, as Shiller suggests, ‘[t]hings do survive, words foremost among them, and these moments from the past give us sustenance and remind us that we are not alone’ (1997, 557). She also acknowledges the fact that through its visible marks, ‘it is possible to recapture that past in ways that evoke its spirit and do honor to the dead and silenced’ (546). In a similar fashion, Ricoeur maintains that the reworking of the traces to represent the past has to be achieved ‘out of a sense of debt to the dead: without them, we would be creatures cast adrift from a sense of continuity—we owe our being as cultured humanity to those who have gone before’ (Simms 2003, 95). This entails Ricoeur’s other two defi nitions of the trace: the psychical and the cortical trace, which are intrinsically linked to forgetting and oblivion. The cortical trace, as the documentary (written) trace, is ‘external’ in that it is placed in the organisation of the brain, whereas the psychical trace is internal: ‘it consists in the passive persistence of fi rst impressions: an event has struck us, touched us, affected us, and the affective mark remains in our mind’ (2006, 427). Here, the traces are not entirely past as they continue to have an effect on us; therefore, it could be argued that the trace, in its tangibility, is linked with our being affected in a bodily sense. In fact, phenomenology is concerned with perception through the senses: ‘as we get on with our life we do not notice the role of the senses in organising experience and “constituting” the physical world; it is precisely their business to make their role invisible to us. Hence to rediscover and articulate it, we have somehow to get a detached, “sideways”, look at ordinary experience, and this is what [ . . . ] modern art and phenomenological philosophy make possible’ (Baldwin 2004, 11). In what follows I would like to turn to the phenomenological apperception of the Victorian world through the senses and the (psychical) trace that this apperception leaves in us as embodied subjects. Victorianists seem to concede increasing importance to the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, and the applicability of his theories to material conceptualisations of Victorian subjectivity. William A. Cohen’s Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (2009) suggests that Victorian writers and critics anticipated later findings about embodiment by twentieth-century phenomenologists. He argues that his book coincides with ‘a burgeoning critical interest in the meaning of sensory experience’ (23). In this line, other critical works worth citing here are Steven Connor’s Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds (2008) and Chris Otter’s The Victorian Eye (2008), to name but a few. This growing concern with sensory experience in critical studies on the Victorian age parallels the expansion of neo-Victorianism in the last ten years, in which sensory perception plays a fundamental role. In combining Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutic approach and the cultural phenomenology supported by David Trotter, Steven Connor and William Cohen, I will discuss

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the relevance of sensory experience in some contemporary re-imaginings of the Victorian past. In so doing, I will follow Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisation of the senses according to which ‘[the senses] organise experience in such a way that it presents to us a world of things arrayed before us in a three-dimensional objective space within which we are located as just another object’ (Baldwin 2004, 11). Even though vision ranks highest in the hierarchy of senses (Cohen 2009, 17), I would like to begin with the sense of touch, because neo-Victorian fiction has particularly emphasised the closeness of human bodies in their plots. Seeing and touching, and being touched and seen, constitute a reciprocal activity which forms the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s theories about the ways in which subjects perceive other subjects and establish a corporeal relation between one’s body and the body of others as objects placed in the world: ‘My hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens fi nally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part’ (qtd. in Cohen 2009, 18). This view of the body as being constitutive of the self, as against Cartesian rationalism, has gained predominance in Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novels. Nan and Kitty, in Tipping the Velvet (1998), Selina and Vigers, on the one hand, and Selina and Margaret, on the other, in Affi nity (1999), and Sue Trinder and Maud Lilly in Fingersmith (2002), engage in a series of bodily interactions which, according to cultural phenomenology, ‘bring the surface and the interior into proximate relation’ (Cohen 2009, 35). These interactions signify connection and closeness between the bodies involved, but they also facilitate the tangibility of the nineteenth-century body for the contemporary audience. Maud Lilly, for example, is treated like a book and is consequently not meant to be touched, as Mr Lilly does not allow anyone to touch his books: ‘“My happiness is nothing to him,” she said. “Only his books! He has made me like a book. I am not meant to be taken, and touched, and liked. I am meant to keep here, in a dim light, for ever!”’ (2002, 124; my italics). She is not regarded as a perceiving subject, deprived as she is of human tenderness and care, and, consequently, she is not allowed the experience of being touched, because this would mean a closeness with the outside world Mr Lilly does not permit (Sue Trinder later sets things right in Maud’s bodily perceptions). In Affi nity Margaret visits the store-room where the prisoners’ belongings are kept and opens Selina’s box to fi nd her clothes and her hair, bound tight and plaited into one thick rope, and fastened, where it had been cut from her, with coarse prison twine. I put my fi ngers to it. It felt heavy, and dry—as snakes are, I believe, for all their glossiness, said to feel dry to the touch. [ . . . ] I remembered studying Selina’s picture, and seeing the fancy twists and coils of her hair then. It had made her vivid to me; it had made her real. (1999, 239)

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In the quoted passage, Margaret touches Selina’s hair and this helps her establish a closeness by means of the sensory experience; at the same time, the hair, as remnant of a recent past, triggers Margaret’s visual perception and representation of Selina in that room. In other words, although Selina is physically absent, by means of the tangible reality of the hair she is made present before Margaret’s (and the reader’s) eyes. In overlapping touching and seeing, this passage reverses the ‘haptic visuality’ in which vision is endowed with ‘the tactile qualities of proximity and direct contact’ (Cohen 2009, 17). Questions of in/visibility were of particular concern to the Victorians, as they struggled to make visible what was usually invisible to the eye, and critics have examined perception and technologies of the eye as part of the nineteenth-century process of modernisation. One fitting example is Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999), which analyses ‘how ideas about perception and attention were transformed in the late nineteenth century alongside the emergence of new technological forms of spectacle, display, projection, attraction, and recording’ (2). Chris Otter, in turn, problematises two visual concepts (panopticism and the fl âneur) in relation to ocular perception and power.5 These critical studies underline the predominance of the eye in Victorian culture. In extension, I would stress the figure of the spectre, and the doubled nature of photography as having to do with ocular experience, the power of the eye and questions of in/visibility. Both the spectre and photography stage a paradoxical relationship with the past because both invoke presence and absence, life and death, present and past. The defi ning features of the spectre and photography mobilise the notion of the trace, because they are vestiges of the past and disrupt temporal linearity in collapsing past and present.6 Interestingly, Kate Mitchell engages with the relevance of photography in neo-Victorian fiction, not as problematic representation of the past, but as a memento (a trace) of the dead, part of ‘memory discourse, invoking its vocabulary of presence and restoration [ . . . ]. Photography becomes a vehicle for exploring the attempt to restore the past via word and image’ (2008, 85). Neo-Victorian novels such as Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights (2004) and Susan Barrett’s Fixing Shadows (2005) are two cases in point in which photography mediates between the Victorian past and the contemporary age. Gas, light and glass were of considerable importance for the process of modernisation in the Victorian period. Lynda Nead affi rms that ‘[g]as and glass also created the visual conditions for new forms of modern urban leisure’ (2000, 9). Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 undertakes a thorough study of the scopic culture in the combined form of ‘the glass panel, the mirror, and the lens’ (2008, 3). It is particularly telling that Armstrong discusses man-made glass culture as ‘residues’ and ‘traces’ of ‘somebody else’s breath’: ‘To look through glass in the mid-nineteenth century was most likely to look through and

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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’ (4; my italics). Armstrong’s comments on the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Exhibition stress the intrinsic quality of nineteenth-century glass culture and the position that the glass building occupied as a ‘free-standing volume of space, making the spectator aware of transparency above, behind, and below, phenomenologically both in transparency and of it, is the sensation that comes across from descriptions’ (151). Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) offers a description of the Billington & Joy emporium that produces a strikingly similar effect to the sense of transparency and that of disruption of time/space boundaries to be found and felt in the Crystal Palace. The narrative voice stresses the presence of glass to attract the attention of potential customers, and likens this to modernity: William Rackham’s view of the enormous glass-fronted Billington & Joy emporium [ . . . ] is panoramic. Dozens of display windows [ . . . ] proclaim the store’s grand scale and modernity [ . . . ] The whole effect, indeed, is so suggestive of the great Crystal Palace Exhibition on which the store is modelled, that some visitors, in their awe, are reluctant to buy anything, lest they mar the display. (49–50) However fascinating this description of (neo-)Victorian scopic culture may be, it is, undoubtedly, the sense of smell that controls Faber’s novel: on the one hand, the male protagonist William Rackham’s Perfumery Industry and its toiletries dominate the novel, and on the other, the stench of the London underworld (as well as that of bodily fluids), choking and suffocating at times. David Trotter argues that smell ranks lowest, as compared to other senses like sight and hearing, and further contends that ‘it is the lack of an appropriate semantic field which renders the mere allusion to a bad smell in narrative so profoundly unsettling’ (2005, 39). Faber’s novel offers a number of scenes in which good and bad smells are to be sensed not only by the characters of the novel, but also, phantasmatically, by the contemporary reader, thus inviting us to revisit the Victorian world of odours. This phenomenological activity recalls what Janice Carlisle posits in Common Scents: ‘Victorians might have found occasions for sensory response in the olfactory images of the novels that they read and, therefore, a form of sensory training’ (2004, 7). To the contemporary reader, being part of a culture which favours odourlessness, a novel packed with so many references to stench, smells and odours of all kinds might be disturbing. However, I would like to argue that smell takes us back to the Victorian period in an extremely self-conscious way, and invites us to dissolve past and present, the Victorians and the de-sensitised contemporary age by means of our response to odours and smells as traces of the Victorians. One scene in

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the novel actually invites the reader to indulge in the smell of lavender and to attune with Sugar’s physical experience in observing Rackham’s lavender fields. On her second visit, the smell of lavender is mixed with that of burning wood, which exudes an intoxicating odour: ‘[A]s the fumes of lavender grow more powerful, there grows in Sugar a fear that she might be overcome [ . . . ]. Is it better to breathe deeply, getting as much fresh air as possible along with the fumes, or is it better to hold one’s breath? She tries both, and decides to breathe as normally as she can manage. [ . . . ] But she was too giddy, even then, with anticipation’ (Faber 2002, 492). Sugar eventually faints, ‘her tongue feels swollen with lavender’ (493), and as Silvana Colella puts it, ‘[t]he evanescent, invisible nature of odours signals a reality which is both densely historical and disconcertingly spectral’ (2009, 104). Presence and absence, present and past, are combined in the nature of the smell, which evokes an embodied reality, urging the reader to materialise those smells in her or his turn. The crude material of the Victorian world in this novel is staged in many scenes: for example, Mrs Fox, Henry Rackham’s platonic love and long-standing spiritual companion, is ill with consumption and while she is rambling about the real existence of heaven, ‘as real and tangible as the streets of London, full of vigorous endeavour and the spark of life’, Henry is taken aback by the physical reality of her body, apprehended by the senses: ‘He blinks, his breath taken by the reality and tangibility of her, the sharply familiar shape of her face and the look on it’ (Faber 2002, 467). This overview of how the Victorians continue to have an effect and to affect us has delved into the ways in which the trace is linked with our being affected in a bodily sense. Ultimately, it should not be forgotten that this characteristic of producing effects is related to the trace’s passing or passage. In this sense, Ricoeur’s trace owes much to Emmanuel Levinas who states that the presence of the trace is that of passage: it ‘is the very passing toward a past more remote than any past and any future which still are set in my time—the past of the Other’ (1986, 358, my italics). Structured as passage, Levinas calls attention to the contradictory nature of the trace, then, joining absence and presence, a kind of ‘Presence-of-Absencein-Passage’ (Casey 1988, 253), where ‘being is not utterly extinguished or forgotten . . . it is itself powerfully present in la passé, whether the passage occurs in the expression of a face or in the style of one’s writing’ (252). Ethical issues are brought to the fore as trauma studies have utilised Levinas in the encounter with the other. If Kohlke argues that neo-Victorian theory shows ‘a curious reluctance to engage head-on in cross-cultural comparisons [ . . . ] in order to get fully to grips with exactly how cultural memory of the nineteenth century is mediated and shaped by a genre that is hardly exclusively “British” in any self-contained sense’ (2009/10, 255), the trace of the other, following Levinas, lends itself to ethical and political issues that cannot be overlooked in new approaches to neo-Victorian studies. Ricoeur’s passage of traces, that produces effects, and Levinas’s

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trace as mark of the other, as appearance of the absent other, offer useful points of entry into the memorialisation of the Victorians. To the question some critics pose, ‘[h]ow does the ethical relation appear in an absence, the absence of the past?’ (Eaglestone 2004, 284), the reply should be reversed as the absent other of the past actually appears in the face-to-face encounter: ‘What a particular trace signifies is not central: that it signifies and what this implies is’ (285). The appearance of the absent other signifies because it constitutes us as survivors, ‘because the dead other continues to constitute me as its survivor, it serves as a source of meaning from beyond the grave’ (Davis 2007, 117). The trace of the Victorian other constitutes us as their survivors. In the ethical encounter with the absent Victorian dead, we become their survivors and they provide meaning to contemporary culture. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben in their joint introduction to Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma liken Levinas’s ethics of alterity to ‘[the capacity] neo-Victorian rewritings of nineteenth-century traumas acquire [ . . . ] “to speak-for-the-other”’ (2010, 20). Levinas underlines that an ethical relationship is precisely one entailing our responsivity to the other, which neo-Victorianism articulates: ‘[t]he epiphany of the absolutely other is a face in which the other calls to me and signifies an order to me by its nudity, its denuding. Its presence is a summation to respond’ (Levinas 1986, 353). In speaking for the other, we take an active role in memorialising the dead, and become their inheritors, giving meaning to their traces in contemporary culture. To conclude I would like to draw some connections between the trace and the challenges posed to postmodernism in contemporary culture. This should not be taken as part of the backlash against postmodernism, but as a moving-on with modification, which acknowledges the relevant work produced under the postmodernist aegis. Alexia Bowler and Jessica Cox have recently discussed the cultural significance of the notion of ‘adaptation’ for our sustained fascination with the nineteenth century, and have acknowledged ‘the active theorising and engagement with the process [of adaptation], its usefulness as a means of interrogating and critiquing our own society and of facilitating a new understanding of our relationship with and perception of a cultural past in such close proximity with our own’ (2009/10, 2). Arguably ‘on the verge of epistemological transition’ (3), as the world seems to be placed, postmodernism has already begun to show debilitating signs. In his 2009 essay, Michael Martin forcefully argues that the dominance of critical approaches, loosely included under the umbrella term ‘postmodernism’, is already losing strength: ‘Postmodernism has run out of fresh ideas. [ . . . ] Its downfall has already begun. But I do not dare prophesy what will arise in its place. Even though I will not be unhappy to see it go, I anticipate the arrival of its successor with trepidation. [ . . . S]omething will take its place. Of this we can be certain’ (89). With less animosity against postmodernism, Colin Davis similarly perceives that ‘something culturally significant is occurring’ (2007, 155), ‘the need to believe that something of us and of what we love

122 Rosario Arias will survive’ (159). Contemporary theorists seem to be drawn to the question of presence and ‘presentification’ as defined by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004, 94). He is, in turn, influenced by a number of philosophers such as Martin Seel, who proposes to reflect on the concept of ‘appearance’ (qtd. in Gumbrecht 2004, 63): ‘an aesthetics of appearance tries to bring back to our consciousness and to our bodies the thingness of the world’ because ‘appearance [is associated] with presence’ (Gumbrecht 2004, 63). Undoubtedly, the orientation towards survival and presence (rather than death and loss) seems to prevail in the work carried out by neo-Victorian critics such as Shiller and Mitchell. In this respect, we need to look for productive theoretical and critical tools to discuss the pervasive presence of the Victorian past, and how this is kept and preserved (albeit in a modified sense) in contemporary culture. One such critical tool is the notion of the trace: Derrida’s trace and spectre, Abraham’s memory trace, Ricoeur’s examination of the trace, and Levinas’s ethical approach to the face of the other are already manifestations and symptoms (traces?) of a past that is not effaced altogether, that continues to have meaning, and continues to affect us in the present through the apprehension of the bodily senses. NOTES 1. The research carried out for this paper has been fi nanced by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación: FFI2009–09242. 2. According to Abraham and Torok, the crypt is the location where the dead loved ones are buried deep inside one’s unconscious as the result of a failed process of mourning. They also tried to point out the relevance of the shell and the kernel as ‘a theory of readability’ (Rand 1994, 16) because they believed that, despite difficulties, there was always the possibility of uncovering significations in patients. 3. For a thorough examination of the phantom and the crypt as tools to approach trauma and spectrality, consult Susanne Gruss’s chapter in this volume. 4. This is, in fact, analogous to Ricoeur’s process of historical memory, ‘the past passage of living beings’ (1988, 120). 5. A thorough study of these two visual concepts has to be left out of this essay, mainly concerned with traces and vestiges of the Victorian past. 6. See also Arias 2009a.

8

Spectres of the Past Reading the Phantom of Family Trauma in Neo-Victorian Fiction Susanne Gruss The past is in the present in the form of a haunting. (Freccero 2007, 94) [T]o tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns, although never as a presence or to the present. Ghosts return via narratives, and come back, again and again, across centuries, every time a tale is unfolded. (Wolfreys 2002, 3)

TRAUMA AND/AS HAUNTING Both trauma studies and the concepts of spectrality and haunting have established themselves as important paradigms of neo-Victorianism.1 Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham suggest that neo-Victorian literature can be read as uncanny, as a ‘“double” of the Victorian text’ which ‘functions as a form of revenant, a ghostly visitor from the past that infiltrates our present’ (2009, xv). With the gothic novel as a genre that seems to ‘infect’ the majority of neo-Victorian texts, the strong focus on ghosts and haunting is not only part of the texts themselves, Victorian intertexts also haunt neo-Victorianism in general. While trauma theory as an academic discipline developed mainly in the 1980s and 90s in response to thinking about war traumas (most importantly the Holocaust and the Vietnam War) and sexual abuse, it is rooted in the late nineteenth century: Roger Luckhurst highlights ‘the drift of trauma from the physical to the mental realm that would start taking place in the late nineteenth century’ (2008, 2–3) and, in a similar fashion, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben describe the nineteenth century as ‘[t]o some extent the cradle [ . . . ] of contemporary trauma studies and notions of subjectivity’ (2010, 2). And even though Freud’s most elaborated treatments of trauma developed after World War I (esp. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, transl. 1922 and Moses and Monotheism, 1937, transl. 1939), his thinking on the topic originates in his work on hysteria (with Josef Breuer) in the 1890s.2 In Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (2009), Jill L. Matus points out that the term ‘trauma’ emerges in the late nineteenth century—the OED credits

124 Susanne Gruss William James with using the term ‘psychic traumata’ to exemplify psychic injuries (10). Matus illustrates Freud’s early work on traumatic neuroses, but also focuses on Victorian wars and railway disasters as a source of trauma. With reference to publications such as Edwin Morris’s A Practical Treatise on Shock (1867), she notes that even though there are considerable differences between contemporary understandings of trauma and Victorian thinking, the Victorian term of ‘shock’ provides ‘a significant “prehistory” of current conceptions of trauma and evidence of the role of literature in the cultural formation of trauma’ (182). If it is true that, as Cora Kaplan argues, the Victorian is ‘at once ghostly and tangible, an origin and an anachronism’ (2007, 5) in neo-Victorian products, then the combination of haunting and trauma should prove a fruitful approach for further analysis. In this essay, I argue that the fascination of much recent neo-Victorian fiction with the figure of the writer—and the preceding section of this volume attests to the unbroken appeal of the Victorian author—can be linked to aspects of trauma studies, especially the notion of intergenerational haunting and the concept of the phantom as developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. In strengthening questions raised in Rosario Arias’s contribution, I will demonstrate that the phantom can be established as a central paradigm of criticism that serves the analysis of fiction as well as the analysis of the relationship between (neo-Victorian) literature and (contemporary) readers. In John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004), the young protagonist is lured into a deadly trap via the Victorian ghost stories written by his great-grandmother, and in Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), a young biographer sets out to uncover the secrets of elusive author Vida Winter and has to face her own family trauma in the process.3 In both novels, the Victorian past invades these narrators’ twentieth-century present through the biography and narratives of authors who come to haunt and influence their lives. In both novels, reading and interpreting the texts and life stories of these authors’ past becomes the narrators’ own quest for identity: In The Thirteenth Tale, Margaret Lea not only uncovers the trauma at the heart of Vida Winter’s constant reinventions of herself, she also learns how to come to terms with the loss of her Siamese twin; Gerard, the narrator and protagonist of The Ghost Writer, has to delve deep into his mother’s history in order to uncover the literary legacy of his great-grandmother Viola Hatherley and the traumatic sibling rivalry between his mother and her sister Anne, which has, unbeknown to him, haunted his life for decades. Harwood revisits several of these topics in his latest offering The Asylum (2013), a novel in which family rivalries, false identities, traumatic haunting and ‘persecution visited on following generations’ (Kohlke 2013, 208) are once again central. Replete as they are with the tradition of the gothic, the sensation novel and the Victorian ghost story (most notably Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, 18984), The Ghost Writer, The Asylum and The Thirteenth Tale may serve as exemplary texts that force their narrators to literally dig up

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their families’ traumas and therefore demonstrate how neo-Victorianism deals with trauma in the form of the phantom.

THE PHANTOM AND INTERGENERATIONAL HAUNTING As I have already pointed out, the relationship between haunting and trauma seems to be fruitful for the interpretation of neo-Victoriana. Even though Nicolas Abraham wrote and published ‘Notes on the Phantom’ in 1975, Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994)5 and the subsequent reception of his concept of hauntology in works such as Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997), Julian Wolfrey’s Victorian Hauntings (2002) or Nicholas Royle’s seminal The Uncanny (2003) quite literally overshadowed Abraham’s phantom and the elaboration of this concept in essays written in collaboration with his colleague Maria Torok.6 It is only in recent years, and most notably in critical work on gothic and/or neo-Victorian literature that Abraham and Torok are being rediscovered—their concepts of the phantom, the crypt, and intergenerational haunting lend themselves easily to critical re-investigations of Victorian Gothic such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw or Daphne du Maurier’s neo-Gothic Rebecca (1938).7 At the same time, these concepts also allow for a productive analysis of the persistence of the ghost in neoVictorian fiction. As Kate Mitchell has convincingly shown, the figure of the ghost is central in neo-Victorian fiction because it can serve ‘as a metaphor for both the persistence of the past and our relationship to it today’ (2010, 180), and especially for our continuous need to ‘conjure up’ (180) the historical, cultural or literary ghosts of the nineteenth-century past. The phantom is a ‘gap’ in the unconscious of a subject which derives from the secret of a parent or parent figure that is not, in contrast to the Freudian concept of melancholia as unsuccessful mourning, related to a traumatic experience of the subject him- or herself: ‘What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. [ . . . ] In all respects and by all accounts, the patient appears possessed not by his own unconscious but by someone else’s’ (Abraham 1987, 289). The secret is passed on to the child unconsciously and distorts the life of the ‘phantom carrier’ ‘with alternative and lateral meanings’—he or she is ‘[h]aunted by traces of unspoken past events and dramas’ (Berthin 2010, 5). Intimately linked to the notion of intergenerational trauma, the phantom is the repressed trauma of the parent generation that comes to haunt their children, and can therefore be read alongside the work of trauma theorists such as Marianne Hirsch.8 In trauma studies, concepts closely resembling the phantom are nothing new: Hirsch has coined the term ‘postmemory’ as a denominator for the relationship of the second generation (esp. children of Holocaust survivors) to the traumatic experiences of their parent generation and the ways in which these experiences can be transmitted.9 Laurie Vickroy delineates the transference of traumatic responses from survivors of

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trauma onto their children, listing symptoms such as ‘depression, mistrust, and emotional constriction’, and points out that ‘children inherit patterns of traumatic response’ (2002, 19). For Abraham and Torok, the phantom is complemented by the intrapsychic crypt or tomb; as a result of a radical denial of loss, ‘[t]he words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed—everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject’ (1994, 130). This tomb or crypt, the result of a secret that cannot be disclosed, continues its subversive action. The phantom is thus a personification of the parent generation’s traumatic silence that haunts a younger generation who becomes ‘the mere vessel for narratives and dramas outside of their control and their time frame’ (Berthin 2010, 18). At the same time, the phantom (or, for the sake of this chapter, the ghost or spectre) demands to be heard—it ‘underlines a concealed secret which has not come to light as yet, but still has to be acknowledged’ (Arias 2009a, 135). I have used the terms ‘phantom’, ‘crypt’ and ‘trauma’ as quasi-synonymous so far, and indeed the phantom and the crypt are tantalisingly similar to the concept of traumatisation. Defi nitions of trauma usually resemble Ann Whitehead’s: In Trauma Fiction (2004), she describes trauma as ‘an event or experience which overwhelms the individual and resists language or representation’ (3); Cathy Caruth uses language closely resembling that of spectral haunting when she links being traumatised to being ‘possessed by an image or event’ (1995, 5); and Luckhurst connects the critical notion that trauma defies narrative to a haunting—traumatic memory, he argues, ‘persists in a half-life, rather like a ghost, a haunting presence of another time in our time’ (2008, 81).10 With reference to Abraham and Torok’s work, Nicholas Rand maintains that ‘[t]he bulk of The Shell and the Kernel deals primarily and most explicitly with how best to understand the devastations of trauma and other enemies of life’ (1994, 16), and Esther Rashkin notes that the symptoms of phantomatic haunting occur ‘when a shameful and therefore unspeakable experience must be barred from consciousness or “kept secret”’ (1988, 37). It is precisely the aspect of unspeakability that links the phantom to many definitions of trauma. In contrast to Derridean deconstruction or Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, in whose works the endless chain of signifiers ensures that meaning must always remain precarious and potentially unreadable (and therefore also unspeakable), the secret as stated by Abraham and Torok can be decoded after a traumatic collapse of meaning.11 The discovery of family secrets and the subsequent (re)integration of the gothic hero/ine into the frameworks of society that is so characteristic of (neo-)Victorian Gothic is therefore a strategy of emplotment that mirrors the psychoanalytic process of uncovering the phantom, in which the analyst has to unfold the tragedy/secret of, paradoxically and untypically for the psychoanalytic process, someone other than the patient (Rashkin 1988, 41).

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‘JUST REMEMBER: I TRIED TO KEEP YOU SAFE’: FAMILY SECRETS AND/AS HAUNTING In Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (2002), Annette Kuhn explores the need to hide things from those closest and concedes that ‘[t]he past is like the scene of a crime: if the deed itself is irrecoverable, its traces may still remain. From these traces, markers that point towards a past presence, to something that has happened in this place, a (re)construction, if not a simulacrum, of the event can be pieced together’ (4). As in their (Victorian) Gothic pretexts, in The Ghost Writer, The Asylum and The Thirteenth Tale the family secrets that are hidden from (and by) the narrator figures are scenes of trauma. Gerard’s mother Phyllis (in The Ghost Writer) has lost the child she has conceived from her lover Hugh Montfort, her sister Anne’s fiancé; after her escape from England to Australia (to get away from her sister’s revengeful spite), she has hidden her (and therefore his) origins from her son by making up a rural English fantasy home, Stapleton, based on one of her grandmother’s stories. Even though Phyllis stresses that she ‘tried to keep [him] safe’ (Harwood 2005, 68), the phantom created by her secret past makes Gerard susceptible to the insinuations of his ever elusive lover Alice Jessell (who is, as the reader finds out in the fi nale of the novel, his mad and disfigured aunt Anne); it enforces his burgeoning belief that his mother is a murderer, and eventually threatens to destroy his identity and life. In Ferrier’s Close, his mother’s home—a full-blown gothic mansion—where Anne tries to drive Gerard mad, he is not only increasingly afraid of having lost his mind. In the course of his research, he also fi nds ‘proof’ of his own death in a death register (333) before he grasps the truth of his mother’s secret: ‘Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant, deceased in the borough of Westminster. My half-brother, you could say, except that I had only been born because he had died. [ . . . ] I was his ghost; or he was mine, I couldn’t quite decide’ (336). ‘The phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other’ (Abraham 1987, 291)—and this is quite literally true for The Ghost Writer, in which the phantom attests to the death of Phyllis’s fi rst child. Gerard’s increasingly weak grasp of reality is weakened even further by the instability of language: ‘Filly killed us all, one by one. Hugh too. Filly killed Hugh too, Gerard, you just don’t know it yet. Or had it said “you too”?’ (331), he hears a ghost in Ferrier’s Close whisper. Gerard’s inability to see through the machinations of Alice/Anne is, in part, due to the fact that his mother’s secret must not be detected, that is, that his phantom resists discovery. Colin Davis describes the phantom as a ‘liar’ whose ‘effects are designed to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure its secret remains shrouded in mystery’ (2005, 374), and Gerard is therefore easily convinced that his mother is a murderer before he has to admit to himself that she did, in fact, keep her former life secret in order to keep her son safe (and, quite possibly, sane).

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In its obsession with the fragility of identity and the constructedness of memory, The Asylum is a worthy follow-up to The Ghost Writer. At the onset of the novel, protagonist and narrator Georgina Ferrars finds herself in a private asylum, Tregannon House, where she has apparently admitted herself under the assumed name Lucy Ashton (an alias derived from Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, 1819), even though she has no memories of the act. As the story unfolds, Georgina is increasingly forced to admit that her memories of the recent past are slippery—and she cannot recall the last six weeks. This amnesia, allegedly brought on by a violent seizure, is explicitly linked to trauma and repression by the sinister doctor Straker, who tells her that seizures can occur ‘after a particularly terrifying experience [ . . . ]—the mind protecting itself, like a scab growing over a wound before the wound itself has healed’ (2013, 39). While Georgina’s loss of memory is in fact the calculated result of Straker’s experimentation with an early form of electroconvulsive shock treatment rather than of traumatic repression, Georgina does harbour the phantom of a family trauma: her mother is not really her biological mother. Georgina is the illegitimate daughter of her mother’s cousin Rosina, a well-hidden secret that has for years tried to push its way into Georgina’s conscious mind in the form of an imaginary childhood friend called Rosina (‘the name simply floated into my head one day, and I liked the music of it’, 20), an imaginary sister Georgina visualises in her own mirror image when she is in ‘a strange, half-mesmerised state’ (20), with a voice that ‘seemed to come from outside’ (21). Georgina has thus quite literally incorporated the trauma of her own illegitimate birth, and phantomatic haunting and the questioning of identity are reinforced when another double, Lucia Ardent, turns up on her doorstep. Lucia seems to be uncannily familiar to Georgina, and the physical likeness of the two women heightens a nauseous feeling of loss of identity—Georgina is ‘seized by a dizzying sense of unreality’ (151) when the two women swap identities as an experiment proposed by Lucia, who is eventually revealed as the protagonist’s half-sister, the product of an affair Rosina’s sister Clarissa had with Felix Mordant before he met and got engaged to Rosina.12 Identity is therefore precarious, and Georgina can only reconstruct her past and her own memories through her journal—‘[w]hat defi nes us’, Kohlke notes with reference to The Asylum, ‘may be what we forget or imagine as much as what we accurately recall of the past—and ourselves’ (2013, 209). The amnesia brought on by Straker’s experiments cannot be reversed, and even though she has unravelled the origin of her phantomatic twin sister, the story of Georgina’s past must remain a (fictional) construction she can never ascertain because she is no longer able to remember it. In The Thirteenth Tale, Vida Winter is the phantom or ghost of her own story—she is the ‘girl in the mist’ (Setterfield 2007, 169 et passim), Shadow, the ‘ghost child. No mother. No name. The child whose very existence was secret’ (361), the Angelfield twins’ secret half-sister, who comes to haunt

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life at Angelfield. Unknown to Margaret and the reader, this ghost child also haunts the text and gradually takes over the narrative. Early in their relationship, Margaret notes that Winter is ‘the disappearing point at the heart of the narrative. She spoke of they; more recently she had spoken of we; the absence that perplexed me was I. What could it be that had caused her to distance herself from her story in this way?’ (110). While Heilmann and Llewellyn argue that Winter’s distancing (or dissociating) herself from her tale marks her narrative as trauma writing (2010, 49), the fi rst person pronoun increasingly creeps into the narrative (or begins to haunt it) as the girl in the mist takes action. This ghost haunting the narrative is also, however, used by Winter to deflect her biographer’s interest from her traumatic experience, the fi re at Angelfield in the course of which she attempts to kill Adeline, the ‘hostile and aggressive’ (Setterfield 2007, 167) twin in order to save ‘passive, docile’ Emmeline (377) whom she has loved ever since her arrival at the house and whose illegitimate son Aurelius she has saved from Adeline’s jealous fits. Whether Shadow accidentally burns Emmeline or whether she is so traumatised by the loss of her twin that she is beyond help is left open; when Shadow tries to talk to the saved twin, ‘this person, this someone, this one or the other, this might or might not be, this darling, this monster, this I don’t know who she is—does not reply’ (378). Winter’s hand bears the mark of the fire—the library’s doorknob has transformed her palm ‘into an entirely unrecognizable landscape, like a scene left permanently altered by the passage of a flow of lava’ (52)—and the now famous author tries to bury the incident by inventing ever new life stories for journalists who come to interview her. Her trauma is transmitted to Margaret and reinforces the narrator’s own ghost, that of her dead Siamese twin, who haunts her throughout the narrative. Similar to Georgina in The Asylum, Margaret’s phantom is her mirror image, her ‘dark’ double or doppelgänger (just as Vida Winter or ‘Shadow’ is the doppelgänger of the twins), the result of her mother’s repressed grief for Margaret’s Siamese twin who died when the girls were separated. This phantom starts to haunt her when she is a child and is reinforced by her traumatised and silenced mother’s inability to leave her own grief behind. Like Winter, Margaret is marked by the loss which is the origin of her trauma, ‘[p]ale silver-pink, a nacreous translucence. The line that divides’ (356)—the scar left behind from the operation which separated the twins and killed her sister; for both women, trauma bears corporeal traces.13 Once she fi nds her birth certificate and with it confi rmation that something is wrong, her phantom sister becomes a semi-conscious part of Margaret’s existence that she consistently mourns and cannot leave behind—in contrast to the phantoms that haunt Gerard and Vida Winter, and comparable to Georgina, Margaret’s lost twin might therefore be seen as a result of Freudian melancholia: once she has learned how to mourn her by the end of the novel, she is able to let her go. The haunting almost-reunions with her sister in window panes and mirrors (e.g., 56) also personify Margaret’s

130 Susanne Gruss death drive, and it is only through her witnessing Vida Winter’s recovery through narration that Margaret can finally come to terms with her own traumatic past.

‘ONE CAME TRUE’:14 TRAUMATISED NARRATORS AND (INTER)TEXTUAL HAUNTINGS Especially The Ghost Writer and The Thirteenth Tale are characterised by the immense impact of (Victorian) literature and authors on the (contemporary) narrators’ lives and tales, which works as an intertextual haunting in both novels. In both texts, the libraries become topographies of family secrets:15 In The Ghost Writer, it is in the library at Ferrier’s Close that Gerard finally discovers the clue that helps him to understand his aunt’s lethal plans when he studies a book about the fluoroscope (a primitive X-ray machine) and eventually grasps that, imitating the fate of Imogen de Vere, one of the heroines of her grandmother’s tales, Anne had originally planned to kill his mother with X-rays when her plan backfired, leaving her permanently disfigured and sending her pregnant sister Phyllis on a frantic escape to Australia. In The Thirteenth Tale, the library is one of the first hiding places of the ghost child (Setterfield 2007, 104), and it is also in her library that the interviews with Vida Winter take place. Not surprisingly, maybe, it is also in these libraries that both fires originate; these fires destroy the (literary) past in order to grant the protagonists a future—at least at first sight. Contrary to The Ayslum, in which Georgina’s amnesia prevents a reclamation of traumatic memory via narration, both novels explore the possibility of writing about trauma. In The Thirteenth Tale, it is at first impossible to write Winter’s biography because the writer, as I have already indicated, continuously reinvents and fictionalises herself, and thus creates her own biofiction. When Margaret does hear the full story, she finally decides not to publish her biography. Both texts—Margaret’s biography and the narrative it is based on—are written by traumatised authors. Ghost child Vida Winter is traumatised by the fire and the death of one twin, her constant fictionalising of her own identity not simply an attempt to perpetuate the glamorously enigmatic reputation of her persona as best-selling author, but also the result of an actual inability to ‘tell the truth’; in this context, the burning of the library becomes a signifier of repression rather than liberation. Margaret is traumatised by the death of her Siamese twin. ‘Story-telling, listening (bearing witness), and writing are acts of catharsis which redeem the past and [ . . . ] bring about a profound transformation of the protagonists’ lives’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 37)—as Heilmann and Llewellyn note, when Margaret has resolved the mystery and uncovered Vida Winter’s identity as not that of Adeline March, but of Shadow, her new vision of the ghost child, a ghost who ‘haunts softly’, a ‘little ghost [who] was at home in this house. At home in this family’ (Setterfield 2007, 351), is indeed recuperative. Once her identity has been unveiled, Winter is able to

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voice her traumatic secret. Margaret’s act of witnessing enables her to face her own trauma, the ghost of her Siamese twin, and makes her the keeper of not only Winter’s secret, but also of Emmeline’s son, her friend Aurelius Love. While Margaret is finally able to face the loss of her twin, she can also reunite Aurelius with his half-sister and decides not to publish the biography she has written in order to protect the living. This fictional development goes hand in hand with trauma theory. Critics such as E. Ann Kaplan value ‘telling stories about trauma’, as the act of narration ‘may partly achieve a certain “working through” for the victim’ (2005, 37);16 from a narratological perspective, Mieke Bal points out the importance of bearing witness to (re)integrate traumatising events (1999, x), an argument that is reiterated by Susan J. Brison, who stresses the need to translate traumatic memory into narrative memory: ‘Trauma undoes the self by breaking the ongoing narrative, severing the connections among remembered past, lived present, and anticipated future. In telling a first-person trauma narrative to a suitable listener, the survivor is, at the same time and once again, a second person, dependent on the listener in order to return to personhood’ (1999, 41). Whereas storytelling thus becomes quite literally life-saving in The Thirteenth Tale, the conclusion of The Ghost Writer is somewhat bleaker. Similar to Setterfield’s novel, in which Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw recur repeatedly and are also appropriated in the plot, The Ghost Writer is saturated with Victorian literature and art.17 With the pastiche Victorian ghost stories written by Viola Hatherley, Harwood creates an intricate web of intratextual connections in which literature seems to parallel and influence (Gerard’s) life. All four stories, ‘Seraphina’, ‘The Gift of Flight’, ‘The Pavilion’ and, most importantly, ‘The Revenant’ (the story that ‘comes true’) depict protagonists who are morbidly—and eventually fatally—infatuated with (fictitious) lovers (or works of art in general). All stories eerily foresee the fate Anne (as ‘Alice Jessell’) has envisioned for Gerard, whom she intends to drive mad and kill, and although he does see the parallels, he cannot break away from his mysterious lover Alice. ‘Seraphina’ focuses on the suicidal obsession of the protagonist with a painting and the supposedly ‘ideal’ ghostly woman who seems to inhabit it. In ‘The Gift of Flight’, young poet Frederick Liddell re-enacts E. T. A. Hoff mann’s ‘The Sandman’ (1817) when he attempts to resurrect his dead lover in the form of a puppet. Julia Lockhart, his current lover, eventually recognises his obsession, destroys the aggressive puppet, and decides—in contrast to Gerard—to opt for a life that is not haunted by the phantoms of the past. In ‘The Pavilion’, a nightmarish dream results in the protagonist’s revelation that she must not marry her fiancé, vampiric aristocrat Denton Margrave, but lead a self-determined life as a writer. ‘The Revenant’, fi nally, is the story of obsession which has destroyed the life of Gerard’s mother Phyllis and, consequently, his own, when her sister Anne becomes increasingly possessed with this tale of transgenerational curses and sibling rivalry that seems to prefigure what is currently happening to her and her

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sister. In a letter, Viola Hatherley notes that the correspondences between her story and her granddaughters’ situation, who live with her after the premature death of their parents, is ‘[s]heer coincidence of course [ . . . ] but there was something unheimlich about it. I felt that some sort of prognostic gift had been thrust upon me, and I didn’t like it’ (294–95). Viola’s stories not only serve as a script Anne tries to re-enact in order to exact vengeance on her nephew, they are also uncannily acute warnings the young man fails to pay heed to. Viola as an author figure therefore cannot unfold literature’s potential to heal. Alice Jessell/Anne Hatherley becomes another author figure who tries to orchestrate her own bio-fiction in completing the re-enactment of her grandmother’s tale by having the ‘curse’ destroy the third generation, her sister’s son. The novel insinuates that, like Vida Winter, Anne is not only scarred on the outside (and like Winter, she has brought her injuries onto herself), she might also be truly traumatised by having witnessed her sister having sex with her fiancé and thus affirming Anne’s paranoia that her life is a mere repetition of ‘The Revenant’ (or is this just another illusion she has built up?). Anne manipulates Gerard into bearing witness to a narrative which is not meant to heal, but to counterbalance her own hurt by meting out ‘justice’ in destroying Gerard’s life (and with it, her sister’s legacy). Even though Gerard survives the fi re, his life has been ‘stolen’, as he himself repeatedly states. Here, the fi re in the library functions as a metaphor of (positive) repression as it eventually destroys the revenant Anne and might fi nally allow Gerard to fully repress his mother’s traumatic phantom. However, in contrast to Margaret Lea, whose confrontation with her own phantom and newfound position as the keeper of Winter’s secrets enables her to leave the past behind, Gerard has to concede that his lifelong passion for Alice Jessell and Victorian literature has hindered him to live. As Anne, this novel’s scary combination of femme fatale, ghost and madwoman à la Bertha Mason reminds him, he ‘chose to be [her] eyes and ears, [her] puppet’ (370) instead of living his life.

‘THE DEAD GO UNDERGROUND’:18 NEOVICTORIAN WRITERS AND READERS It is through this combined focus on authorship and author figures, phantomatic haunting and trauma that The Ghost Writer and The Thirteenth Tale add a new layer to the neo-Victorian obsession with the return of the author. The fictional authors—Viola Hatherley, her grand-daughter Anne and, to a certain extent, Vida Winter—are ghostly revenants that haunt the lives of both intra- and extratextual readers. At the same time, both novels might also be read as allegorising the impact of neo-Victorian literature on the contemporary market: like neo-Victorian literature in general, these texts are haunted by the nineteenth-century past; their protagonists’

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immersion into Victorian texts and (auto)biography is never an innocent pleasure, as it reveals hidden traumas that always also implicate the readers. Heilmann and Llewellyn note that 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. (2010, 169) Both texts work because readers of neo-Victorian literature want to be fooled by the narrative (a strategy that also works remarkably well in Sarah Waters’s Affi nity, 1999). Both The Thirteenth Tale and The Ghost Writer ultimately prompt their readers to reread them in order to search for clues of the ‘ghost child’, for hints about Alice’s malicious identity and Gerard’s increasing suspicions, and The Asylum calls for similar reading strategies. Rereading The Thirteenth Tale might attest to Dana Shiller’s notion of the ‘redemptive past’ in the neo-Victorian novel: Even though Shadow’s tale (and it is the tale of the ‘girl in the mist’ that unfolds in a second reading of the novel) might not necessarily ‘manage to preserve and celebrate the Victorian past’ (Shiller 1997, 541), the novel eventually celebrates the recuperative potential of literature and storytelling in general. However, it is not necessarily Victorian literature that develops this healing quality; as I have already pointed out, the fi re in Angelfield library serves as a metaphor of Winter’s traumatic repression, and although she duplicates parts of the library in her obsessive collection of Victorian texts in her own library later in the novel, it is through her own, twentieth-century texts and her stories that both she and Margaret can fi nally heal. This positive aspect of healing is something that cannot be realised in The Ghost Writer; although Viola’s ghost stories and the complex intertextual framework evoked by them have the potential to save her great-grandson, Gerard’s phantomatic haunting with his mother’s secret and his obsession for Alice Jessell, herself a complex mix of Victorian signifiers such as the Pre-Raphaelite woman, the Lady of Shalott, Charles Dickens’s Lady Havisham or the aggressive vampire woman, prevents him from making constructive use of the stories. Even though The Asylum does not engage with this discussion directly, the antiquarian bookshop of Georgina’s great-uncle serves a similar function in demonstrating how literature from the past can haunt the present—and not necessarily in a good way. ‘I never imagined that books could be so oppressive’, Georgina complains, noting that her uncle’s volumes ‘poison the air with mould and damp’ (2013, 139). The contact with or immersion into the (literary) past is therefore potentially unpleasurable in these texts—and the same is true for neo-Victorian texts. Carla Freccero points

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out that ‘haunting, ghostly apparition, reminds us that the past and the present are neither discrete nor sequential. The borderline between then and now wavers, wobbles, and does not hold still’ (2007, 196). In these texts, as ‘revenants’ of the nineteenth-century past, not only does the borderline between past and present, real and fictitious wobble—the haunting presence of trauma narrative also forces the readers to re-evaluate their own stance on the Victorian and the neo-Victorian. Literature’s potential to be naively ‘recuperative’, that is, literature’s capacity to revisit the historical traumas that might still linger on in the twenty-fi rst century and to somehow ‘make things right’ again, are seriously questioned in Harwood’s texts, in which literature does decidedly not have the recuperative power that can redeem past mistakes. In The Asylum, books are described as mildewed debris of the past, and Georgina’s own life story cannot be salvaged from the unconscious of the heroine. Looking at the (literary) past from a contemporary angle, an obsession with the Victorian might, as The Ghost Writer shows, even prove lethal if it serves to deflect readerly interest from the present. Paradoxically, thus, some neo-Victorian texts might be read as cautionary tales against the pleasurable immersion into the nineteenth century. At the same time, the texts I have analysed complicate the use of trauma as a trope in neo-Victorian literature. Rather than uncritically assuming the universal potential of literature to ‘heal’ the wounds of the past, these novels point to a prevalence of traumatic memory that cannot (and should not) be overwritten by (at best) pseudo-consoling neo-narratives. The tropes of haunting, ghosts and trauma, which have so strongly permeated neo-Victorian writing and theorising thus far, might therefore also have reached a point of saturation. NOTES 1. For publications that attest to this development, see two recent collections of essays: Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds.), Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (2009), and Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (eds.), Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering (2010). See also Kohlke’s introduction to the inaugural issue of Neo-Victorian Studies (2008), in which she suggests trauma as one of the central interpretive paradigms of neo-Victorian literature (7–9), and the contributions by Rosario Arias and Jessica Cox in this volume. 2. For a detailed discussion of the development of Freud’s thinking on trauma see E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture (2005), esp. chapter 1, ‘“Why Trauma Now”: Freud and Trauma Studies’ (24–41). Kaplan traces Freud’s thinking from his collaboration with Josef Breuer (Studies in Hysteria, 1895), in which the authors propose that ‘the symptoms of hysteria are the result of trauma’ (26), to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism. 3. It is relatively easy to categorise The Ghost Writer as ‘neo-Victorian’ because the novel’s twentieth-century narrative is interspersed with the fi n de sièclestories written by Gerard’s great-grandmother Viola Hatherley, which influence the lives of Viola’s granddaughters and her great-grandson. It is slightly harder to secure the temporal setting of The Thirteenth Tale, as there are no

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

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references to historical events, but the pervasive influence of Victorian texts certainly also makes Setterfield’s novel neo-Victorian (see also Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 252 n. 20). Henry James himself is one of the central characters of neo-Victorian biofiction (see Kaplan’s chapter on ‘Biographilia’ in Victoriana 2007, 37–84 and Boehm-Schnitker’s contribution in this volume), and The Turn of the Screw is arguably the intertext for neo-Victorian re-inventions of the Victorian ghost story. See Ann Heilmann’s article ‘The Haunting of Henry James’ (2010), in which she reads contemporary revisitations of James’s tale as ‘a marker of how much we remain fascinated by the issues James explored’ (128). Although Derrida wrote the foreword to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word and was thus intimately familiar with their concepts, he ignored their fi ndings in his own work on spectral haunting. Royle points out that, ‘[g]iven the amount of attention he gives to their work in other writings, Derrida’s apparent silence on Abraham and Torok in Specters of Marx, and in particular his silence about Abraham’s so-called theory of the phantom, [ . . . ] seems rather remarkable’ (2003, 280). For extensions of the concept of the phantom and the notion of the crypt, see esp. ‘Story of Fear: The Symptoms of Phobia—the Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom?’ (Torok 1975), ‘The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act Preceded by The Intermission of “Truth”’ (Abraham 1975), both in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (1994), and The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (1976, English ed. 1986). To date, Roger Luckhurst is the only critic who works with texts that are not (neo-)Victorian (‘“Impossible Mourning” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Michèle Roberts’s Daughters of the House’, 1996). In Arias and Pulham’s collection, several essays employ the concept of the phantom. For readings of gothic literature, see Allan Lloyd Smith, ‘The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca: The Uncanny Reencountered Through Abraham and Torok’s ‘Cryptonymy”’ (1992); Boyd Petersen, ‘Double or Phantom? Transgenerational Haunting in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (2005); and Christine Berthin, Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (2010). Esther Rashkin’s Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (1992) also includes a good introduction to the works of Abraham and Torok. For a link to trauma studies, see Laurie Vickroy’s Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (2002), in which she briefly delineates the transference of traumatic responses from survivors of trauma onto their children. For Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’, which describes the relationship of the second generation to the traumatic experiences of the parent generation, see, for example, ‘Moving Beyond: The Generation of Postmemory’ (2008). See, for example, Marianne Hirsch, ‘Moving Beyond: The Generation of Postmemory’ (2008). Caruth, whose Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996) are seminal texts in the field, goes on to argue that ‘thus the traumatic symptom cannot be interpreted, simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the lending of unconscious meaning to a reality it wishes to ignore, nor as the repression of what once was wished’ (1995, 5). Note that Caruth has also been criticised for her conception of trauma, especially for her almost exclusive focus on dissociation and the complete collapse of meaning and understanding. See Kaplan’s Trauma Culture (2005, 34–36) for a brief delineation of this discussion. Colin Davis argues that the secret/crypt ‘can and should be put into words so that the phantom and its noxious effects on the living can be exorcized’ (2005, 378).

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12. The traumatic secret at the heart of The Asylum obviously also closely mirrors Harwood’s scenario in The Ghost Writer, turning this novel into a revenant of the earlier text. 13. Heilmann and Llewellyn point out that these marks of trauma also connect the two women (2010, 48). 14. Harwood 2005, 129. 15. Heilmann and Llewellyn argue that the library ‘safeguards familial records, while connecting personal history with the collective history of ideas and the literature of past ages’ (2010, 36). 16. This argument was introduced by Holocaust critics such as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub—see, for example, Dori Laub’s ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’ (1992). A similar argument can be found in Kalí Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996), which focuses on literature by trauma survivors; Tal argues that ‘[s]uch writing [literature of trauma] serves both as validation and cathartic vehicle for the traumatized author’ (21). 17. Note that Whitehead points to intertextuality as a typical trait of trauma fiction: ‘Intertextuality can suggest the surfacing to consciousness of forgotten or repressed memories’ (2004, 85). See Heilmann and Llewellyn for a detailed exploration of the intertextual framework of The Ghost Writer, especially the use of James’s ghost stories and novellas as inspiration for Viola’s tales (2010, 254 n. 32). 18. Setterfield 2007, 280.

9

Narratives of Sexual Trauma in Contemporary Adaptations of The Woman in White Jessica Cox

1

‘I HAVE BEEN CRUELLY USED AND CRUELLY WRONGED’

Wilkie Collins’s 1860 sensation novel, The Woman in White, opens with an image of a woman traumatised. Anne Catherick, the woman in white of the title and the illegitimate daughter of a gentleman and a servant woman, has escaped from a lunatic asylum where she has been imprisoned by Sir Percival Glyde in an attempt to prevent her revealing the secret of his own illegitimacy. Glyde subsequently marries Anne’s half-sister, Laura Fairlie, and, in an effort to secure his wife’s inheritance and with the help of the villainous Count Fosco, he switches her identity with that of Anne Catherick. When Anne dies (of natural causes), she is buried under the name of Laura Fairlie, while Laura is imprisoned in an asylum under the name of Anne Catherick. The novel thus focuses persistently on women traumatised by their encounters with a repressive patriarchal system which enables, with relative ease, the systematic abuse of the Victorian woman. 2 In recent years, The Woman in White has become an important source text for neo-Victorian authors, screenwriters and stage producers. The reasons behind the proliferation of adaptations of Collins’s most famous novel are various: the continuing popularity of gothic and sensation fiction suggests one possible explanation,3 while some of the dominant themes of Collins’s novel—the search for identity and the challenge to established gender roles, as well as the effects of traumatic experience on an individual—continue to appeal to modern audiences. The Woman in White is one of a number of Victorian novels repeatedly subject to literary and filmic adaptation. Other works popular with neo-Victorian novelists and screenwriters include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860), and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898).4 Significantly, all these novels contain images of traumatised women: Collins’s Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie, Brontë’s Bertha Mason, Dickens’s Miss Havisham and James’s unnamed governess, suggesting that contemporary writers are, at least in part, concerned with exploring trauma through a return to the past. It seems apt that Collins’s woman in white, whose ghostly appearance in the middle of a moonlit road in the dead of night enthralled Walter

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Hartright and a generation of Victorian readers, should continue to haunt the literary imagination, providing the starting point for a neo-Victorian return to a past which remains a spectral presence. 5 In contemporary adaptations and reworkings of Collins’s novel, trauma retains a central role. However, a number of literary and fi lmic texts which draw explicitly on the novel introduce elements of sexual trauma, which are significantly absent not only from Collins’s original sensation novel, but from Victorian literature more generally. Amongst these recent reworkings are James Wilson’s The Dark Clue (2001), written as a sequel to The Woman in White, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002), Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006) and Linda Newbery’s Set in Stone (2006), all of which revisit aspects of the Laura Fairlie-Anne Catherick plot from Collins’s novel, as well as the 1997 television adaptation of The Woman in White, directed by Tim Fywell and written by David Pirie, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 musical adaptation.6 This essay explores some of the intersections between Victorian and neo-Victorian narratives in terms of representations of sexual trauma, examining the engagement with and motivation behind the theme of sexual trauma which features in these contemporary adaptations of The Woman in White. I consider the extent to which these narratives seek to highlight sexual abuse, which remained largely veiled in Victorian literature and culture, and the apparent ongoing problems of articulation inherent in contemporary portrayals of sexual abuse and trauma. In addition, I examine briefly the ambivalent nature of these adaptations in terms of their depictions of sexual trauma, which can be read as both indicative of a desire to uncover past injustices (the concealment of sexual abuse in Victorian culture) and as representative of a prevailing cultural fascination with sexual trauma.

TRAUMA NARRATIVES AND THE NEO-VICTORIAN PROJECT Trauma is a prevalent feature in contemporary literature—from post-colonial writing, to trauma memoirs, to historical fiction. This reflects a broader trend within modern culture in which trauma narratives—personal, political, national and international—are a persistent presence in newspapers, magazines, soap operas and the cinema. This pervasive interest in trauma is also evident in the neo-Victorian project—the plethora of neo-Victorian novels and films of recent years as well as the wealth of criticism engaged with these works—which repeatedly emphasise historical traumas. Laurie Vickroy suggests one possible reason behind the historical author’s interest in trauma: ‘Testifying to the past has been an urgent task for many fiction writers as they attempt to preserve personal and collective memories from assimilation, repression, or misrepresentation’ (2002, 1). Marie-Luise Kohlke identifies trauma as one of the key features of neo-Victorianism when she proposes that trauma functions as a central motif in neo-Victorian

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fiction: ‘[T]he [Victorian] period is configured as a temporal convergence of multiple historical traumas [ . . . ]. These include both the pervasive traumas of social ills, such as disease, crime, and sexual exploitation, and the more spectacular traumas of violent civil unrest, international confl icts, and trade wars that punctuated the nineteenth century’ (2008a, 7). These traumas, Kohlke suggests, have clear parallels with contemporary culture, hence providing another possible reason for the persistent presence of trauma narratives in neo-Victorian texts and the apparent desire to rewrite Victorian ‘trauma’ narratives such as The Woman in White.7 The adaptations of The Woman in White with which I am concerned focus not on trauma in its broader historical sense—in relation to empire, trade wars, and conflicts, or ‘social ills’—but, like the original novel, on individual, personal narratives of trauma, and (in a departure from Collins’s narrative) specifically sexual trauma (sexual abuse, incest, rape). However, while these works are concerned with individuals’ personal experiences of trauma, together they suggest an overarching concern with the prevalence and representation—or rather, the lack of representation—of sexual abuse in Victorian literature and culture. To this end, they can be seen as an attempt to offer a ‘corrective’ to the Victorian past, to acknowledge the widespread existence of traumas which were all too frequently concealed from public view. As Vickroy observes, ‘[w]ider cultural traumas are contained in the psychological and physical experiences of a few characters’ (2002, xv); ‘representative characters’ can ‘exemplify social conflicts and wounds’ and ‘the individual body becomes a historical marker to unspeakable experience but also a marker for potential change if healed’ (xiii). Further, the neo-Victorian trauma narrative, in uncovering the repressed traumas of the past, has the potential to ‘critique culturally dominant views of identity and marginality and resist suppression of traumatic events’ (xiv). In this respect, there is a clear parallel between neo-Victorian fictions (literary and screen) and one of the central aims of Victorian studies: to identify those discourses which remain hidden within Victorian literature and culture, and to challenge those narratives and views which assist in this process of concealment. In the introduction to their recent edited collection on neo-Victorianism and trauma, Kohlke and Christian Gutleben note that neo-Victorian narratives of personal trauma ‘resonate uncannily with contemporary concerns, as evident in today’s keen interest in—and ready market for—confessional literature of abject pain and suffering, for instance on the themes of child and sexual abuse’ (2010, 3). This suggests another, less palatable, reason for the prevalence of narratives of sexual trauma in neo-Victorian fiction and film: whereas such narratives may serve to highlight past wrongs, they might also be read as both opportunistic and voyeuristic, indicative of a contemporary fascination with personal narratives of trauma—evident in literature, fi lm, television, and the media. As Irene Gammel notes, by the late twentieth century, public testimonies of sexual abuse were commonplace:

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‘In popular media, personal accounts of sexual trauma have become a stock topic for news shows, television talk shows, self-help books, magazines and personal memoirs’ (1999, 63). This trend continues today, on the one hand representing the victims’ desire to bear witness, but on the other speaking to an uncomfortable fascination with narratives of sexual trauma on the part of the reader/viewer—a paradox reflected in neo-Victorian narratives of abuse which arguably seek both to redress past wrongs and capitalise on the contemporary popular—voyeuristic—interest in trauma narratives. The persistent concern with individual experiences of sexual trauma in contemporary re-imaginings of The Woman in White suggests a broader concern with the Victorian experience of such traumas, and the need to return to the past in order to uncover and ultimately heal those wounds, to address and redress the fact that ‘much of traumatic history, particularly that which affects the socially marginal, has remained repressed, unwritten’ (Vickroy 2002, 167). Louisa Hadley notes that neo-Victorian novels often ‘incorporate narrative descriptions of private acts and desires that would have been elided in Victorian fictional accounts’ (2010, 157), including sexual abuses. Paradoxically, however, the return to the sexual traumas of the past suggests a displacement: the traumas of the present are obscured, veiled even as they are reimagined within a historical setting. The repeated engagement with the theme of sexual trauma in reworkings of Collins’s sensation novel raises further significant questions: about contemporary narratives’ deviation from the original text, and more broadly about the manner in which neo-Victorian texts seek to revise both the Victorian sensation novel and the Victorian past. These narratives offer a commentary on contemporary concerns and anxieties, as well as indicating possible parallels between Victorian and contemporary literature and culture in terms of the problems of representation inherent in narratives of sexual trauma from both the past and present. Narratives of trauma suggest the potential cathartic effects of writing trauma, and point to a possible reason for the prevalence of trauma narratives in the neo-Victorian project: the traumas of the past—so often ignored at the time—must be written in order for us to come to terms with our collective history; we must write the traumas of the past in order to confront and ultimately deal with them.8 Such narratives, then, can be read as examples of what Helen Davies terms ‘talking back’: ‘a palpable desire to respond to the Victorians in some way, to answer back to the society and culture of this era’ (2012, 1).9 The act of writing functions as a central motif in neo-Victorian trauma fiction: it is frequently through writing that characters resolve, or at least confront, past traumas. This is evident in a number of adaptations of The Woman in White. In both Wilson’s The Dark Clue and Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, the protagonists are engaged in biographical projects, and through the act of researching and writing about others’ traumatic experiences, confront their own repressed past and emotions, while in Set in Stone and Fywell’s film adaptation, diaries, letters and the act of narration play pivotal roles in the unfolding of the story.10 Discussing Setterfield’s novel in

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relation to Dori Laub’s work on trauma, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn note the importance of narrating the past as a means of dealing with the past: ‘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”’ (qtd. in Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 54).

WILKIE COLLINS AND VICTORIAN REPRESENTATIONS OF SEXUAL TRAUMA Sexual trauma does not form part of Collins’s original narrative, though the narrative references illicit sexual relations (Philip Fairlie’s affair with Anne Catherick’s mother, resulting in the birth of an illegitimate daughter), and includes a portrayal of an abusive marriage (between Laura Fairlie and Sir Percival Glyde). Although Glyde represents the figure of the abusive husband who wields total control over his legally disempowered wife, the narrative strongly implies that this abuse does not take a sexual form. His assertion that his wife is ‘not in the least likely’ to bear children (Collins 2003, 326), in light of the infrequent use and unreliability of contraceptive methods at this time, suggests that the marriage is a celibate one. Hence while the narrative is concerned with the offenses committed by the figure of the abusive husband against his wife, sexual abuses—which, like the excessive control Glyde wields over Laura, were effectively condoned by the Victorian legal system—are notably absent from the text, hinting at their unspeakable nature within a Victorian context. In a later novel, Man and Wife (1870), Collins does offer a representation of the sexually abused woman through his portrayal of the character of Hester Dethridge, a mute, who suffers various abuses at the hands of her husband, culminating, the narrative implies, in rape. However, hardly surprisingly in a mainstream Victorian novel, the nature of the abuse is obscured, and it is left to the reader to interpret the true meaning of her confession. In the narrative about her married life she writes: ‘No mortal eyes but mine will ever see these lines. Still, there are things a woman can’t write of even to herself. I shall only say this. I suffered the last and worst of many indignities at my husband’s hands’ (599, my italics). In order, no doubt, to avoid outraging Victorian sensibilities, Collins’s text only hints at what has occurred; thus the narrative masks the rape of Hester by her husband, just as nineteenth-century law masked the abuse of women behind the veil of the sanctity and respectability of marriage. Lisa Surridge reads Hester’s self-imposed muteness, following the murder of her husband, as representative of ‘the unspeakable in the novel’ (1996, 105), and suggests that ‘Hester’s silence seems to represent society’s inability to listen rather than her literal inability to speak’ (106), indicating Victorian society’s tendency to ignore the (sexual) abuse of women for propriety’s sake. It is further significant that what is ‘unspeakable in the novel’, is, as Hester’s

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confession suggests, also unwriteable: Hester cannot bear to commit the details of her husband’s abuses against her body to paper, even when there is no one to ‘bear witness’ to her narrative. Unlike later protagonists in the neo-Victorian novel, she is unable to work through her traumatic experiences, to fi nd catharsis through writing. Her failure to adequately deal with the trauma she has experienced ultimately results in an extreme reaction against the patriarchal system which she views as responsible for the abuse she has suffered when she murders her husband and later attacks the novel’s villain, Geoff rey Delamayn, who subsequently dies. Though Collins cannot fully articulate the sexual trauma endured by Hester, the effects of her inability to process her past are clearly apparent in his narrative: unable to ‘bear witness’ to her own traumatic experience, she enacts a violent revenge on those she perceives as responsible for the systematic abuse of the Victorian wife. While her acts of violence in themselves may represent a form of catharsis, a step towards healing the wounds infl icted by the past, they ultimately infl ict further damage on the abused woman: Hester is rendered mute following her attack on her fi rst husband, while the consequence of her attack on Geoff rey is her lifetime imprisonment in an asylum. While sexual abuse is rendered an ‘unspeakable’ act in Man and Wife, Collins nevertheless succeeds in highlighting the existence of such crimes in Victorian Britain. Furthermore, the narrative is significant in terms of its portrayal of the long-term results of traumatic experience. This represents a significant development from his earlier novel, in which these lasting effects are underplayed. Although The Woman in White opens with an image of the traumatised woman, and subsequently details the traumatic events endured by Laura Fairlie, including the loss of her identity and her false imprisonment in a lunatic asylum, it concludes with no visible effects of the past apparent in any of the three central characters (Laura, Marian and Walter), although the past remains something which must be forgotten, suppressed, silenced. Laura Fairlie does not narrate her own story of traumatic suffering; indeed, she rarely speaks in the novel. When, at the conclusion of the narrative, she threatens to refer to the past, she is silenced by Marian: ‘My darling Walter,’ [Laura] said, ‘must we really account for our boldness in coming here? I am afraid, love, I can only explain it by breaking through our rule, and referring to the past.’ ‘There is not the least necessity for doing anything of the kind,’ said Marian. ‘We can be just as explicit, and much more interesting, by referring to the future.’ (626) The end of the novel, then, looks to the future, rather than the past: the past is to be forgotten, laid to rest; it cannot be seen to exert an influence on the present. Contemporary trauma narratives, in contrast to this, suggest the impossibility of forgetting: the past will influence the present and the future will rear its head through bad dreams, flashbacks, and other manifestations.

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Indeed, Vickroy defines trauma as ‘a response to events so overwhelmingly intense that they impair normal emotional or cognitive responses and bring lasting psychological disruption’ (2002, ix). Whereas Anne Catherick undoubtedly suffers ‘lasting psychological disruption’ as a consequence of her treatment at the hands of her mother, Glyde and Fosco, the image of Laura at the end of the novel as contented wife and mother would appear to call into question the extent to which she endures a significant degree of trauma. In The Woman in White, the central characters are able to move beyond their traumatic ordeals, and eventually to experience a ‘new sense of freedom from the long oppression of the past’ (Collins 2003, 620). In contradistinction to this, there are some indications in the novel that the events of the past have had a significant effect: the refusal to talk of the past on the part of Walter, Marian and Laura implies that traumatic events have been deliberately suppressed as a means of coping with them. Furthermore, whereas Laura is forbidden to speak of the past, others speak of it through the construction of the narrative of The Woman in White, which is collated by Walter Hartright after the events in the novel have taken place, a process which might be viewed as a cathartic working through of past traumas. However, the exclusion of Laura Fairlie from this process—the character at the centre of the novel’s traumatic events—undermines its effectiveness as a means of processing the consequences of these traumas: not only is she forbidden from speaking of the past, she is further silenced through the presentation of a narrative consisting of multiple accounts with the notable exception of her own. The image of the happy wife at the conclusion of the novel suggests that either she has suffered no lasting effects from her experiences, or that she has repressed events to such an extent that there is no outward sign of them. Either way, there is no evidence that she has undergone a process of healing, which the neo-Victorian trauma narrative implies is so important. Collins’s refusal to explicitly acknowledge the long-term effects of traumatic experience in The Woman in White, his representation of sexual abuse in Man and Wife as something unspeakable/unwriteable, and the broader concealment of sexual abuse within Victorian culture points to one possible reason for the inclusion of narratives of sexual trauma in later adaptations of Collins’s work: an attempt to redress a historical injustice, and to highlight the extent to which Victorian literature and culture sought to conceal the abuses that took place. The refusal to look to the past, to consider its influence, to work through its traumas, marks a point of distinction with the neo-Victorian project, which is frequently concerned with revisiting, acknowledging and working through the traumas of the past.

REIMAGINING TRAUMA IN ADAPTATIONS OF THE WOMAN IN WHITE Whereas allusions to sexual trauma are notable by their absence in The Woman in White,11 such abuses play a central role in recent adaptations of

144 Jessica Cox Collins’s novel: in Fywell’s 1997 screen adaptation of the novel, the ‘secret’ which Glyde attempts to protect is his sexual abuse of the young Anne Catherick, rather than his illegitimacy; in Wilson’s The Dark Clue, Walter’s desire for Marian (evident in the original narrative) culminates in rape; in The Thirteenth Tale, there is a strong suggestion that the three sisters (the twins Adeline and Emmeline and the third sister, whose identity is unknown but who is given the name ‘Shadow’) are the product of incest (the twins) and rape (‘Shadow’); whereas in Newbery’s Set in Stone, the apparently respectable Ernest Farrow is discovered to have repeatedly abused his daughter Juliana, who subsequently bears a child by him. However, although reworkings of The Woman in White include an insistent focus on sexual trauma, paradoxically, these acts are frequently obscured from the reader/viewer: scenes of explicit sexual violence and abuse are omitted or veiled. Whereas rape and sexual abuse are almost entirely absent from the Victorian novel, neo-Victorian fiction and film frequently references such abuses in no uncertain terms, yet it often does not fully represent these traumas. These narratives seek to make visible that which the Victorian novel obscures: the sexual abuse of women in Victorian culture (linked to the notions of repressive patriarchy with which The Woman in White, and Collins’s other fiction, is so overtly concerned). Paradoxically, however—like Victorian fiction—they struggle to fully articulate the instances of sexual abuse which are so central to the characters’ lives, and which have such profound effects. The opening scene of Fywell’s 1997 screen adaptation hints at the trauma which lies at the centre of the secrets revealed. In a deviation from Collins’s novel, and one which places Marian, rather than Walter, centre stage, it is Marian’s narration that opens the fi lm, with the words ‘[t]he bad dreams always come back again’ hinting at the traumatic nature of the character’s experiences (Fywell 1997, 00:03:02). The fi lm includes several significant departures from the original narrative: gothic elements are privileged;12 the three sisters all share the same father; and sexual trauma forms a key part of the story (supporting Rachel Malik’s assertion that the fi lm ‘reworks key sensation tropes in the light of current defi nitions and anxieties’ [2006, 189]). This theme is introduced initially by one of the servants in Sir Percival Glyde’s pay, who accuses Walter of sexual harassment, asserting that ‘he tried to make me undress’ (Fywell 1997, 00:32:33). The notion of false accusations of sexual harassment as a source of power is further suggested by Marian forcing the doctor to give her information about the imprisonment of Anne Catherick by threatening to accuse him of improper behaviour. On the one hand, this speaks to a modern concern regarding the problematic nature of accusations of rape and sexual abuse, but it also serves to highlight the powerless position of the Victorian woman, whose body often represented her only limited source of power. The problematic nature of such power is suggested by the inclusion of two characters who suffer rape and sexual abuse at the hands of Glyde—Laura Fairlie, who, unlike her original, is subject to sexual as well as other forms of abuse by

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her husband, and Anne Catherick, abused by Glyde as a young child. Laura tells Marian: ‘I do not want children—not the way he touches me when he . . . ’. The significant gap here is suggestive of the problems of articulation relating to narratives of (sexual) trauma, though she continues, ‘I never knew men could enjoy the act, even in hatred’ (00:41:50), making clear the nature of her husband’s abuse. Similar problems of articulation pervade Anne Catherick’s story. The doctor responsible for her treatment informs Marian that ‘[w]hen she was twelve, she came to see me because she was morally degraded’ (01:31:23), and later revelations confi rm that this ‘moral degradation’ was the consequence of the sexual abuse she suffered—emphasising Victorian attitudes towards victims of sexual abuse, who were generally perceived as ‘fallen’ regardless of the circumstances which led to the abuse. Like other victims of sexual attacks, Anne has problems articulating her traumatic experience: she records it in a diary paper, but then buries it in her father’s grave—hinting at the unspeakable nature of her experience, and suggesting significant parallels with the character of Hester in Man and Wife, whose inability to articulate her experience of sexual trauma is, as we have seen, symbolised by her refusal to speak at all, by her self-imposed muteness. In Fywell’s adaptation, the literal burying of the narrative of sexual abuse has obvious symbolic connotations: unable to confront the implications of her experience, Anne ‘buries’ the memory of it. The potential healing process offered by articulating her experience through writing is disrupted by her subsequent burial of the narrative, which suggests an element of regression in terms of dealing with sexual trauma: details are recalled only to be repressed again. Exhuming the grave some years later in an attempt to discover a missing will, Walter and Marian discover her confession, written when she was twelve years old: ‘My own secret is I have one who comes to my bed at night as a husband’ (01:40:43). The words anticipate those used to describe the abuse of Juliana in Newbery’s Set in Stone (‘her father had been regularly coming to her bedroom during the night. He had—in short, he had used her as a substitute wife’, 2006, 252), whereas the burial of the diary paper in the grave of the father emphasises the expectation that the father should/will protect the vulnerable daughter—an expectation which is entirely undermined in both texts. Problems of articulation in relation to sexual trauma are also evident in Wilson’s The Dark Clue. Towards the end of the novel, the character of Walter, who has been engaged to write a biography of the painter J. M. W. Turner, supposedly driven to madness by his attempts to unravel the details of his subject’s life,13 rapes Marian. The incident is recorded by Marian herself in her diary, but although the events immediately before the rape are detailed in a manner too explicit for the Victorian reader, the rape itself is obscured by a significant gap in her narration of events. At the point at which the rape takes place, Marian’s diary contains her reflections on the event rather than a description of what actually occurs:

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Jessica Cox [W]as not this the hellish parody of something that—despite myself—I had thought of? Had I not sometimes dreamed about it, even; and for a moment after I’d woken fancied I felt him beside me? [ . . . ] [M]ixed with the horror and the pain—I cannot deny it—there was a throb of pleasure too. A mockery—an inversion, like a Black Mass—of the joy I had imagined. So it was not enough that Walter should betray me, his wife, his children, himself. I must betray them all, too. (Wilson 2001, 367)

Hadley, commenting on the elision of the rape from Marian’s narrative, offers the following explanation: ‘Given that the account is taken from Marian’s diary, it is perhaps not surprising that she chooses to omit the terrifying moment and instead ponder Walter’s mental state as he committed the act’ (2010, 47). However, this explanation overlooks both the significance of this omission in terms of trauma narratives (the repression of traumatic events) and the importance of what replaces her description of the rape: an acknowledgement of her own desire for Walter and positioning of herself as perpetrator (betrayer) as well as victim in this scenario. On a simplistic level, Wilson’s inclusion of Walter’s rape of Marian, and particularly her admission that she experiences ‘a throb of pleasure’ during the act appears problematic, raising questions about issues of consent which are common in contemporary discourses on rape. However, in terms of the narrative’s portrayal of trauma, Marian’s admission links her to images of trauma victims in contemporary culture, where feelings of guilt and responsibility are acknowledged as common amongst victims of sexual abuse. Wilson’s re-imagining of Collins’s ‘hero’, Walter Hartright, as a rapist is also potentially problematic in terms of the liberties contemporary writers take with Victorian narratives (see Heilmann and Llewellyn xx). Whereas Collins’s narrative may contain ambiguous references to sexuality and sexual abuse (Anne Catherick’s plea to Walter Hartright, for example: ‘if you will only promise not to interfere with me’ [22]), Wilson presents a far more explicit narrative, reinventing Hartright in line with contemporary attitudes towards sexual abuse. Just as Marian perceives herself as both victim and betrayer, Walter is presented as victim as well as criminal. Nevertheless, the manner in which not only the narrative as a whole, but Marian specifically seeks to absolve him of responsibility for the attack (‘what he had done to me was an act of despair’, 378) makes for uncomfortable reading. Whereas both Marian and Walter are forced to deal with the personal traumas that result from the latter’s investigations into Turner’s own ‘dark’ life, the narrative, like Collins’s original novel, concludes with the suggestion that trauma will be repressed rather than confronted. Marian records in her diary the agreement she makes with Walter regarding what has passed between them: ‘You may talk to me of what happened between us if you will, but neither you nor I will ever mention it to Laura or to any other living soul, and it will never happen again’ (386). The postscript to the narrative refers to ‘the invisible threads that run between us [Marian

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and Walter]’ (389), indicating that the traumas of the past are not as easy to suppress as Collins’s novel appears to suggest, and yet, the problems of articulation and the desire to suppress the past which are evident in the neo-Victorian novel links it to its Victorian predecessors. In Set in Stone, problems of articulation around the issue of sexual abuse persist. Juliana Farrow, the victim of the abuse, like Collins’s Laura Fairlie, is effectively silenced in the narrative. As in Collins’s novel, Newbery’s work presents multiple narrative voices, but Juliana’s is not one of them. The story of her abuse at the hands of her father and the birth of the child fathered by her father is not only related by other characters, but comes to them indirectly as well. Samuel Godwin, based on Collins’s Walter Hartright, hears of Ernest Farrow’s abuse of his daughter through his predecessor, Gideon Waring, in whom Juliana has confided. The novel’s other central narrator, Charlotte Agnew, based partially on Anne Catherick, becomes aware of the abuse through a conversation with her predecessor, Eliza Dearly, who has learnt of it from the suicide note of Juliana’s mother, whom Juliana had also told. When Samuel confronts Mr Farrow about the accusations, he is effectively unable to speak of the act itself, which instead is initially conveyed through significant gaps in his speech: ‘You have—I—I know!’ (Newbery 2006, 276). Realising that his ‘inarticulacy seemed to give [Mr Farrow] relief’ (276), Samuel finally manages to convey his meaning: ‘Juliana has been most foully abused, and by yourself—’ (277). Even here, however, the nature of the abuse is veiled, obscured. It is, as Samuel notes, ‘something so repellent that I cannot bring myself to give it words’ (277). The gaps in place of an explicit articulation of the act itself recall both Fywell’s adaptation and Wilson’s novel, and indeed such instances are a distinctive feature of trauma narratives.14 In all these works, then, significant narrative gaps stand in place of scenes of sexual trauma, raising important questions about neo-Victorian articulations of trauma.15 While Newbery’s narrative, like Fywell’s and Wilson’s works, struggles to fully articulate the scenes of sexual trauma which drive it, it is, nevertheless, concerned with the long-term effects of traumatic experience. The setting for the main action of the narrative shifts from the 1850s of Collins’s original novel to the fi nal years of Queen Victoria’s reign, with the fi rst chapter dated June 1898. However, the central narrative is framed by a prologue and an epilogue, both dated 1920. This neo-Victorian novel, then, speaks of its belatedness not only through its own date of publication, but also through its emphasis on the time that has passed for the characters of the novel, for whom the Victorian Age is constructed as a distant memory. Through this narrative framing, the portrayal of the sexual abuses hidden behind a facade of Victorian respectability is doubly contained: relegated to a past that is distant for both reader and narrators. In its conclusion, Newbery’s novel shifts the focus to the aftermath of the war, and presents an image of the traumatised soldier, allowing for a shift in emphasis, a displacement even, in terms of the narrative’s portrayal of trauma. The image

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that closes the novel is not of the traumatised victim of sexual abuse, but the shell-shocked soldier traumatised by war, though it is significant that the victim of shell-shock is also the product of an incestuous and sexually abusive relationship: the son of Juliana and her father. The inclusion of sexual trauma in these narratives reflects contemporary concerns and anxieties, but the replication of Victorian narrative conventions enables both displacement and closure. As in the typical Victorian novel, the perpetrators of wrongdoing—with the significant exception of Wilson’s Walter in The Dark Clue—are suitably punished: Juliana’s father in Set in Stone is drowned, while in Fywell’s version, as in Collins’s original narrative, Glyde dies in a fi re. In both these later texts, however, the heroine is responsible for the villain’s death: in Fywell’s adaptation, Marian acts the role of avenging angel, deliberately locking Glyde in the burning building, effectively killing the figure of the rapist in an act of vigilante justice, while in Set in Stone, Charlotte refuses to allow Mr Farrow, who has jumped into the lake in an effort to save his daughters, into the boat and he subsequently drowns. Both characters seek to absolve themselves of full responsibility for the abusers’ deaths: Marian’s act of revenge is undermined by her realisation that there is no other way out, implying that his death was not premeditated, whereas Charlotte tells Samuel, ‘I did not mean to kill him, it was not my intention’ (Newbery 2006, 290). Though Fywell and Newbery ensure that justice is done— that the good survive and the wicked are punished—it cannot, it seems, come at the expense of undermining the characters’ ‘goodness’. Further, this return to a typical Victorian ‘ending’ counteracts the suggestion that trauma narratives rarely reach the neat, conclusive ending that the Victorian novel suggests. There are striking similarities between contemporary adaptations of The Woman in White in terms of their insistent focus on trauma as part of their reworking of Collins’s novel. Like the original narrative, and the sensation genre more broadly, all of these texts are concerned with family secrets and hidden identities, but they also represent (even as they obscure) what remains largely hidden in the Victorian novel—incest, sexual abuse, suicide—and portray the lasting effects of these traumatic legacies. In mimicking the structure of The Woman in White, with its multiple narrators and emphasis on storytelling as ‘truth’, these narratives articulate a desire to reveal the ‘truth’ about the Victorian family, and the possible abuses concealed therein. Marian’s fi nal words in Fywell’s version suggest that the sisters’ traumatic experiences have lasting effects, in contrast to Collins’s narrative: ‘I have one waking prayer—let it be over’ (Fywell 1997, 01:51:14), implying that the effects of sexual trauma continue to permeate the lives of the survivors and those close to them. The words, accompanied by an image of Marian embracing a little girl who we assume is the daughter of Walter and Laura, also highlight the continuities between the Victorian period and our own time, in which the threat of sexual violence

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remains prevalent. Marian’s declaration—‘I can never forget the cruel cycle that began so long ago’ (1:50:56)—further emphasises the parallels. The introduction of narratives of sexual trauma into these various adaptations of Collins’s novel reflects a central concern of western society today, but simultaneously suggests significant parallels with Victorian literature and culture: problems of articulation persist in these contemporary narratives of sexual trauma, and indeed the displacement of these narratives into a Victorian setting provides further evidence of this. However, these works also contribute to the plethora of narratives of sexual trauma which permeate contemporary culture. Neo-Victorian narratives of sexual trauma thus occupy something of a paradoxical position. The ambivalence of such narratives is emphasised by the paradoxical purposes they serve—performing an important and significant act of historical revisitation, emphasising the extent to which the sexual abuse of women was rendered invisible in nineteenth-century culture, while simultaneously reflecting the contemporary desire for salacious details of what goes on behind closed doors. Whereas this desire may often be constructed as a necessary cathartic process through which crimes and criminals are brought to light (see Salah, 2010, 32) and the extent of such abuses revealed, the element of voyeurism evident in such narratives nevertheless reflects a disturbing trend in contemporary culture in terms of its insistent return, in fiction, fi lm, and the media, to personalised narratives of sexual trauma. This ambivalence invites a comparison with the Victorian sensation novel which both highlights social injustices (particularly in terms of the position of women) and concerns itself with crime and family secrets in order to entertain and titillate the reader. The dual purpose of neo-Victorian narratives of personal trauma echoes the sensation genre in the manner in which it embarks on a process of bearing witness and attempts to engage the modern reader with details of sexual scandal. Nevertheless, in resisting fully articulating the sexual abuses which occur, these neo-Victorian narratives at once continue the process of obscuring such abuses so evident in Victorian literature and culture, while refusing to fully participate in the culture of salacious and unnecessary detail which permeates other narratives of our times. NOTES 1. Collins 2003, 28. The words are spoken by Anne Catherick, during her initial encounter with Walter Hartright. 2. For a broader exploration of representations of trauma in Victorian fiction, see Jill Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). 3. See Christy Rieger’s essay in this volume for a further discussion of neoVictorianism and its engagement with Victorian sensation narratives. 4. Brontë’s novel is revisited in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001) and Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006) as well as numerous fi lm adaptations. Great Expectations is the key

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

Jessica Cox source text for Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004), and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2007) and also the subject of multiple screen adaptations. James’s novella is the inspiration for Joyce Carol Oates’s short story ‘The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly’ (in her collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, 1994), Alejandro Amenábar's fi lm The Others (2001), and A. N. Wilson’s novella A Jealous Ghost (2005). As Susanne Gruss contends in her essay in this volume, trauma and spectrality ‘haunt’ neo-Victorian critical discourses (this volume, 123). This essay focuses on Wilson’s The Dark Clue, Newbery’s Set in Stone, and Fywell’s screen adaptation. See Susanne Gruss’s essay for an analysis of Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (this volume, 123–136). For a discussion of Lloyd Webber’s musical, see Christiana Salah’s article, ‘“This picture always haunted me”: Dramatic Adaptations of The Woman in White’ (2010). The centrality of trauma in the neo-Victorian project is also suggested by the recent collection of essays, edited by Christian Gutleben and Marie-Luise Kohlke, Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma (2010). Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn discuss trauma in the neo-Victorian novel in their recent work, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century (2010); see particularly Chapter 1, “Memory, Mourning, Misfortune: Ancestral Houses and (Literary) Inheritances” (33–65). In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), Dominick LaCapra hints at the necessity behind writing history’s traumas: ‘There are reasons for the vision of history [ . . . ] as traumatic, especially as a symptomatic response to a felt implication in excess and disorientation which may have to be undergone or even acted out if one is to have an experiential or empathetic basis for working it through’ (2001, xi). The notion of writing trauma as a means of catharsis can also be linked to psychoanalytic notions of catharsis, first developed by Josef Breuer in relation to the case of Anna O. in the late nineteenth century, and more broadly to the process of psychoanalysis itself, which is partially concerned with the uncovering and processing of repressed (often traumatic) memories (see Freud and Breuer 1895; for a more recent study on the role of trauma within psychoanalysis, see Ulman and Brothers, 1993). See Rosario Arias (this volume, 119; 121). In this respect, the latter two adaptations echo Collins’s original novel, which takes the form of a series of different narratives. The implication that Collins should address this issue in his novel is obviously problematic. However, the representation of the abuse of women under a patriarchal system is central to the novel, hence the suggestion that the absence of any reference to sexual abuse is in itself significant. See Lisa Hopkins, Screening the Gothic (2005). Significantly the label of madness as a convenient excuse for sexual transgression echoes Victorian medical discourses on women and sexuality. As Heilmann and Llewellyn note of Adeline’s inability to articulate her grief at the loss of her sister in The Thirteenth Tale (‘There was a fi re. [ . . . ] I lost everything. [ . . . ] Oh, Emmeline!’, Setterfield 2007, 52), ‘Miss Winter’s fractured speech reflects the impact of traumatic memory’ (2010, 49). Here we fi nd a direct parallel with one of the few Victorian novels to hint at the possibility of sexual abuse: in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), the reader does not bear witness to Alec’s rape/seduction of Tess.

Refashioning (Neo-) Victorian Discourses

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10 The Legacy of Medical Sensationalism in The Crimson Petal and the White and The Dress Lodger Christy Rieger

INTRODUCTION A current textbook on medical ethics features the case study of a clip posted on You Tube in 2008, which received almost a million and a half views. Videotaped by a nurse, the clip shows a group of Philippine health care providers joking and cheering as they remove a body spray canister from the rectum of a young male patient. The doctor removes the bottle’s cap and sprays the contents toward the crowd of nurses and doctors viewing the procedure, who laugh and joke. The textbook authors note that the incident is an ‘egregious’ breach of ‘the duty of confidentiality’ (Paola, Walker and Nixon 2010, 149). Superfluous personnel invaded the patient’s privacy, the merrymaking affronted his dignity, and the posting of the video without the patient’s permission violated his right of informed consent (149). At least two doctors and a nurse received three month suspensions for their actions. I note the recent appearance of this incident in a medical textbook because it mobilises images and anxieties typical of what I term ‘medical sensationalism’: scandal, illicit sexuality, the abject body, and medical misconduct. Above all, perpetrators of what is now known as the Black Suede scandal (so named after the body spray) use a recent form of mass publication to turn an invasive procedure into a source of public entertainment. Because the suffering body as spectacle already pervades medical reality shows and dramas on television, the clips’ viewers likely saw it as less disturbing than one might suppose. Joseph Turow notes that since 2005, forensic detective programmes and medical reality series ‘[show] off the human body and its cavities with zeal’ (2010, 348). Neo-Victorian discourse negotiates these topics for latter-day readers in a transhistorical register. Specifically, neo-Victorian fi ction interrogates issues of patient privacy and autonomy manifest in cases like the Black Suede scandal and prominent in anxiety over the unregulated dissemination of medical fi les, which has only worsened with the increasing digitalisation and centralisation of patient records in developed countries. Mark Llewellyn attributes much of the popularity of neo-Victorian fi ction to how the Victorians ‘offer the potential space for working through

154 Christy Rieger ideas and concerns that still dominate social discourses’ (2008, 175). Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger (2000) and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) do so as they draw attention to the Victorian fascination with what Robert Louis Stevenson termed the ‘strange case’. This outlier medical condition elicits what Stevenson’s Dr Lanyon sadly calls his ‘disgustful curiosity’ (2005, 45). Like Stevenson’s strange case, Holman and Faber’s novels situate the abnormal body within storylines rife with spectacle, criminal activity, concealed identities, and dramatic revelations. While their cast of characters includes vulnerable patients and the doctors who seek to manage them, readers are encouraged to identify with the strong-willed and multifaceted prostitute figures, Gustine in The Dress Lodger and Sugar in Faber’s novel, which helps to explain why critics such as Marie-Luise Kohlke have focused on Victorian sexuality in the novels. As I aim to show, however, both authors are as interested in the sick or diseased body as the erotic body. They seek to make twenty-fi rst-century readers recognise their complicity with both a sensation-seeking public and a medical field that exploits the suffering body of its patients.

RESISTING THE MASCULINE REGIME It is true that the novels do often conflate the allure of the sexual body with the fascination elicited by the medical anomaly. For instance, the fiancée of surgeon Henry Chiver in The Dress Lodger denounces him for exposing the naked corpse of a female victim of cholera to the curious gaze of his young medical students. She feels their sexual excitement redirected from that body to her own figure as soon as she enters the room. Years earlier, the doctor had accepted the corpse of a beautiful prostitute from the notorious murderer William Burke. She was, remembers Henry, ‘so fresh he had to have her’ (Holman 2000, 183). He then struggles with his own sexual desires preparing to dissect the woman’s body, perfectly preserved in whisky. Moreover, The Dress Lodger centres on his quest to study an infant born with his heart on the outside of his chest. This is the child of Gustine, the girl prostitute who excites him sexually. Kohlke asserts that Chiver’s obsession with the child’s abnormality and ‘the reader’s desired mastery over the Victorians’ secret lives, vices, and perversities’ are cases in which ‘sexual appetite is sublimated into empirical investigation and intellectual knowledge’ (2008b, 54). For Kohlke, readers of both works revel in what she terms ‘sexsation’ (52), which functions much like the Orient did for the Victorians, as a realm of libidinal fantasy. I am not seeking to minimise the sexual titillation of these works. Rather, defi ning the pursuit of medical knowledge as sublimation may prematurely shut down conversation about how these texts imagine illness as a site of voyeurism and spectacle in timely ways for contemporary readers.

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As a case in point, when Dr Curlew subjects Faber’s Agnes, an upper class wife, mother, and hysteric to humiliating pelvic exams, he assumes a detached professional manner as he explains that ‘I’m afraid all is not as it should be’ (169). Her womb has moved higher, a physical defect that corresponds with her increasingly aberrant mental state (169–70). Instead of the diagnosis improving Agnes’s condition, however, her shame over this sexual violation pushes her further into disassociation from her body and immersion in an elaborate dream world. In recurring fantasies, she boards a train to what she envisions as the Covent of Health, a sanctuary presided over by kindly nuns. Because the doctor seems asexual in this scene, his invasive practices do not call attention to sexual sublimation, but rather the conflict between a modern medical perspective, in which the body must be touched for diagnosis, and a cult of feminine sexual purity, in which a woman’s psychic wholeness depends on bodily self-possession. In other words, Faber mines this scene not for prurience but rather for the irony and pathos of competing discourses that collide on the body of a child-like woman and make her sick. All in all, both novels celebrate a post-Foucauldian space of feminine privacy. This site thwarts the control of obtuse males—husbands, lovers, and doctors working in league with one another—that preserve their power through control of the ill. It is by now a familiar gesture for critics to claim that they or the novels they read complicate or otherwise ‘get beyond’ Foucault. Anna Maria Jones describes this critical turn as a desire to move beyond a master narrative of surveillance and control in order to rediscover ‘the exhilaration of messiness [ . . . ] and more or less explicitly, the promise of a return of liberal agency’ (2007, 3). Readers witness this eventual liberation from seemingly ubiquitous power structures frequently in both novels. They see, for instance, Gustine’s baby boy die in her arms before Dr Chiver legally possesses the boy in order to revive his career through observation of the infant’s exposed heart. In a more pointed echo of Foucault, an ancient grotesque woman known as The Eye earns her keep by spying on Gustine in the evening so that the young prostitute does not pawn her expensive dress. ‘How Happy Jeremy Bentham would be’, the narrator exclaims, ‘to discover a living, breathing Panopticon moving through Sunderland’s East End [ . . . ], its formidable sight turned upon a single prisoner only—that pretty girl laced inside her bright blue dress’ (Holman 2000, 10). After Gustine’s infant dies, however, the Eye realises that she too loved the girl’s child, and in her grief willingly gives up her post. Holman thus situates the recovery of agency within a Victorian sentimental discourse. Whether peering from a central tower or trailing the object of surveillance, the narrative suggests, a guard is only human, and thus vulnerable to pity for the sufferer. Holman prefaces part II of the novel with a quote from William Harvey’s The Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordi 1628): ‘the heart is the beginning of life [ . . . ]. [I]t is the household divinity’ (147). Situated on the page beneath a staring human eyeball, the

156 Christy Rieger epigraph plays on the dual meaning of heart as vital muscular organ and as seat of human affection. The narrative thus moves the reader from the fi rst defi nition of ‘heart’ as ‘object of medical inquiry’—its value for the medical eyes of Drs Chiver and Clanny—to its meaning of ‘domestic care and affection’—its fi nal significance for Gustine, her baby and the Eye (‘Heart’). Holman implies that we need only look to the Victorians themselves for resolution to a critical impasse. In The Crimson Petal and the White, female characters likewise escape masculine control, either through the inaccuracy of Victorian medicine or, more frequently, the efforts of strong women sympathetic to their plight. In the fi rst scenario, social reformer Emmeline Fox breaks away from her physician father’s regime of convalescence when she naturally recovers from an illness that he misdiagnosed as a fatal case of consumption. In the second, the prostitute Sugar ‘liberates’ William’s wife and daughter from his household. Sugar helps Agnes take fl ight before her doctor and husband can commit her to an asylum. At the close of the novel, Sugar subverts the power of Dr Curlew and William Rackham by escaping with William’s daughter into an unknown future.1 Because these women, like Holman’s Eye and Gustine, are not the biological mothers of their charges and remain unmarried, though, they do not submit to restrictive ideas of motherhood and domesticity. Faber thus engineers emancipation for his heroines through celebrating the maternal heart as household divinity while severing it from the domestic sphere and blood relations altogether.

MEDICAL READERS AND SENSATIONAL TEXTS Beyond this rewriting of feminine agency, both novelists suggest that the driving impulse behind a sensationalist reading—the desire to witness something out of the ordinary, even shocking—not only informs the curiosity of twenty-fi rst-century readers eager to observe end-state cholera or the diary of a Victorian hysteric, but resides within the clinical gaze itself. In one notable instance, Faber’s industrial tycoon Rackham contemplates his mistress Sugar’s naked flesh, marked by symmetrical swirling patterns, in bed. They look, the narrator describes, ‘as if scored on her skin by a painstaking aesthete or an African savage [ . . . ]. To William, the patterns are beguiling, a fitting mark of her animal nature’ (Faber 2002, 173). Then the commentary disrupts Rackham’s lustful appreciation through reframing the prostitute’s body in medical language. The novel’s Dr Curlew, it notes, would identify this as an ‘unusually generalised psoriasis’ that ‘crosses the diagnostic line into a rarer and more spectacular condition called ichthyosis’ (173). Transferring interpretive control from lover to doctor foreshadows how Dr Curlew becomes the site of male authority—what little is left of it—by the close of the sprawling tale: he convinces William to commit his wife, and the physician exposes Sugar’s pregnancy after he examines

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her injured leg, which terminates her job as governess to William’s daughter. More significantly, the adjective ‘spectacular’ situates the logic of sensationalism within medical discourse. That is, the more anomalous the visible sign, the more it asserts its special status as spectacle, as spectacular. This differs from Foucault’s dispassionate clinical gaze in Birth of the Clinic (1973) that treats ‘abnormality as a form of regularity’ because variations cancel each other out when integrated into an overall ‘domain of [diagnostic] probability’ (102). These neo-Victorian novels show doctors as beguiled by the unusual as the common spectator: both are drawn to the body that lifts one out of routine familiarity, challenges interpretive powers and makes for a good story. In this sense, they resemble spectators attending the grotesque performances of The Crimson Petal; William Rackham and his friends pay to see the Great Flatelli, a flatulence performer, and in another scene are entertained by Pedal Pagnani, described as ‘The Only Violinist in the World Without Arms’ (347). As is the case in contemporary medical reality shows, neo-Victorian medical sensationalism blurs the line between medical instruction and vulgar curiosity. The allure of the singular medical case excites Holman’s Dr Chiver in particular, who works in a field in the midst of rapid transformation. He is an anatomist who acquires medical knowledge via dissection of dead bodies and direct observation of live ones rather than through textbook knowledge and lectures, the educational mainstay of the previous generation of medical students epitomised by his uncle, the physician Dr Clanny. Set in 1831 in Sunderland, a city in northeast England quarantined by the cholera epidemic, The Dress Lodger depicts doctors, patients and corpses during a crucial decade in the history of medicine. Meegan Kennedy, for instance, shows how the theory and ideology of medicine changed significantly in this period, owing to a backlash against ‘heroic’ medicine, with its fixation on blood-letting and amputation (2010, 10). Doctors in the eighteenth century focused on the body as a ‘curious sight’ (34) as anatomists, physicians and surgeons exhibited anomalous cases to a large crowd of professional witnesses. This discourse evident in medical writing and demonstrations ‘highlights a rhetoric of extremity, asserting the rarity, value, secrecy, difficulty or oddity of the phenomenon under study’ (35). Passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832, which gave doctors greater access to unclaimed bodies, spurred a nineteenth-century ideal of hands-on diagnosis and dissection, which demanded a close, dispassionate, even mechanical form of observation. Holman draws on both models of knowledge in her portrayal of Dr Chiver. We witness the dead body as curious sight for vulgar spectators in numerous scenes, such as when uncouth medical students gaze at the bodies of dead young women and the townspeople view the dissection of Chiver’s fiancée. Yet Holman carefully echoes the language of the New Science as well. Chiver demonstrates the modern method when he lectures to his medical students while dissecting Fos, a victim of cholera: ‘“and the pulmonary artery here”, he continues mechanically, “speeds blood to the lungs, where it undergoes a chemical

158 Christy Rieger process that changes it from a dark to a florid color”’ (Holman 2000, 154). Although this detached perspective characterises the methodology of the New Science, Holman does not ultimately privilege one perspective over the other. The novel makes no ethical distinction between a body exhibited in a large lecture hall as curious sight versus a study in a new disease dissected in a small lab for anatomy students, nor any between a corpse procured through body-snatching or provided by the British government. Chiver himself admits that both scenarios result in doctors working on ‘the bodies of the poor [ . . . ] so that we may learn from them how to save the rich’ (21). We see a similar blurring of authoritative medical discourse and a penchant for the exciting when Henry lifts up the garment clothing Gustine’s baby and sees its pulsing heart covered by a thin layer of skin. He looks ‘wildly about the room for someone, anyone, who might appreciate the marvel within his lap’ (131). He has read of medical abnormalities such as children born with four legs or a boy born with a twin growing from its chest, but, he notes, they ‘happen to other people, in places far away’ (131). As is the case with Sugar’s psoriasis, the infant’s ectopia cordis introduces the exotic into the midst of familiar Victorian narratives, stories of the prostitute’s body as object of desire for bourgeois men or the squalid infant’s body as object of pity and outrage for the social reformer. Beyond defamiliarising well-known images, the scene demonstrates that Gustine’s baby cannot properly be a marvel unless someone else, presumably with at least rudimentary medical knowledge, shares the doctor’s appreciation of the child’s unique anatomy. Chiver acts like a detective figure in sensationalist fiction who wants to reveal the extraordinary fi nd he has made in an unlikely domestic setting. In fact, Gustine has hidden her infant from the doctor as she tries to ascertain whether he is the right man to entrust with her child’s future. Whereas a woman’s power in Victorian sensation fiction might reside in her secret identity as bigamist or murderer, this episode locates the girl’s power in her ability to withhold her baby’s body from the eager gaze of the medical establishment. I titled this essay the ‘legacy’ of medical sensationalism in order to underscore how these two novels dramatise tendencies present in Victorian culture: the decentralisation of medical authority and indecent display of abject bodies. Specifically, Edward Berdoe claimed in The Universal Review that, by the late 1880’s, the notion of The Lancet as a staid professional journal written by doctors for doctors has been utterly transformed. He asserts that most people know its readers do not work in the field of medicine. Readers may purchase the periodical at any railway station at which Punch is sold, and scores of readers use it to grace their drawing room table. Its readers seemingly peruse it for respectable self-education, he asserts, but really seek the thrills associated with sensationalist literature. The proprietors of the journal, he concludes, minister to ‘depraved tastes’ and for the simple reason that ‘in this commercial age—it pays!’ (1888, 246). He sees its publication of the most ‘minute and disgusting details’ as diff using medical

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authority in troubling ways, giving it to young people and women, populations that would typically have the least power in relation to the authority of doctors. Andrea Kirchknopf describes the neo-Victorian investment in ideological readings of the Victorians as ‘a drive to unearth—or invent— material not part of the official historiography of the nineteenth century and utilize this to reinterpret the Victorians’ (2008, 58). She here captures how these writings re-imagine this strand in nineteenth-century culture: they pick up and foreground a concern about the misappropriation of the ailing body that exists but is much less visible than the figure of the fallen woman in Victorian discourse. Of course, the contemporary Western world does not wrestle with the issue of prostitution or the threat of infectious diseases to the same extent as the Victorians. We do fi nd violations of medical privacy deeply troubling, however.

DISEASE, DISPLAY, AND ETHICS As a means of exploring these issues, The Dress Lodger and The Crimson Petal and the White depict interpretive control of the sick and diseased as circulating amongst social groups in unexpected ways. Holman’s novel, in particular, does not so much locate power in the gaze of the wise physician as in the person or group that stages the diseased body. Doctors Chiver and Clanny learn this the hard way when subject to the jeers of an angry Sunderland mob at the opening performance of the play titled Cholera Morbus: or Love and Fright. Even though a letter-writer to the Times has denounced the bad taste of making the plague a source of ‘merriment and ridicule’ (Holman 2000, 101), the working class relishes the opportunity to denounce the medical establishment for stealing the corpses of their diseased relatives and enforcing repressive quarantines. The play’s actors describe the cholera as the disease that will ‘Starve the Poor, Ruin the Tradesman, Fright the Rich, and Turn Men Blue’ (106). In the midst of this carnivalesque uprising, however, working-class war hero Jack Crawford falls with convulsions in the pit. The medical men then take him to their nearby dissecting theatre to treat the dying man, despite his strenuous objections and the suspicions of his friend that the physicians only want to carve him up. Even Henry ‘can see how to a simple man like Robert, the suspicious man, this auditorium must appear a house of horrors. Is he more frightened of floating fetuses in specimen jars arranged neatly on bookcases, Henry wonders, or of the human skeletons, dark brown and oily-looking, suspended by delicate cords of silk?’ (116). Medical progress resides in its ability to see, know, and display, and at this point in the novel, the authority of the medical man triumphs because he exhibits the body. When Dr Chiver must dissect Audrey’s corpse in the fi nal scene, their collective narrative voice asserts: ‘We’ve all turned out for the show’ (186). The narrator then speaks directly to twenty-fi rst-century readers, claiming

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that ‘[t]his is the story of those whose peace was sacrificed so that your tonsils might be disposed of and your septums no longer deviated. This is the story of those who serve’ (256). Holman’s purpose here reflects that of other neo-Victorian works that give a voice to the silenced and marginalised in Victorian culture. Those who serve thus become the Others to upper-class Victorians and we who read their stories almost two hundred years later, the unappreciative benefactors of their sacrifice. Beyond critiquing a complacent attitude of medical and technological superiority, the fears of Victorian patients seem especially relevant in our own era. X-rays and medical records float about in cyberspace, our medical records might be inappropriately leaked to the press if there’s enough interest, and in an extreme scenario, one’s operation could end up on You Tube. Kohlke notes that Chiver’s theft of bodies resonates with current concerns such as the illicit and/or stolen organs trade (2008b, 58), and one can extend on this observation by noting how the Internet enables unauthorised appropriation of virtual in addition to physical bodies. At the same time as Holman’s novel rewrites narratives of medical heroism to include those who serve, its narrator seems particularly committed to identifying a model of storytelling that creates an ethically informed relation between readers and the Victorian dead. It disingenuously asks: ‘When the body of a story is stretched out before us, we who are new to the telling of the tales sometimes don’t know where to make the first cut. Which is the best way to enter? Shall we plunge deep into the heart of the matter or begin systematically with the extremities?’ (28). We are then informed that the author made the wrong initial cut, and must go back in time to when Henry and Gustine fi rst met. To do so, readers must join the narrator in turning our attention from the dissecting platform to a back corner table and treat it as a séance table. In challenging its audience—‘Are you prepared to begin again with the story our table has to tell?’ (28)—this persona privileges an open, patient, receptive orientation toward the Victorians rather than one that appropriates their suffering to satisfy curiosity or provide entertainment. Of course, taking a seat at the séance table means making the Victorians completely bodiless.2 This is all well and good, but the paradox remains that the novel does offer up what Berdoe would call the ‘most minute and disgusting details’ of the abnormal or diseased body for our diversion, as evident in its portrayal of the ‘cold blue state’ of cholera that includes as much stomach-turning detail as any case study in the Lancet (114–15). In effect, these works create a fractured subject position for readers—we apprehend the ailing body as spectacle yet feel there is something wrong in doing so. The story entraps us. Critics have applied the concept of ‘reader entrapment’ most fruitfully to eighteenth-century satire, particularly the works of Jonathan Swift. Just as a police or a sting operation sets up the unwitting criminal for prosecution, this technique puts readers into an initially exciting yet ultimately uncomfortable position. Carl Kropf explains that

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entrapment occurs when an author seems to force his [or her] reader into choosing among unacceptable readings, forces him into an unacceptable role, arouses expectations he does not fulfi ll, or otherwise causes the reader significant discomfort. [ . . . ] Entrapment beguiles the reader into consenting to a proposition or assuming a role that has painful consequences in light of more mature reflection or later developments in the text. (1992, xiv) Providing a specific reading in this audience-oriented criticism, Louise Barnett shows how readers recognise and interrogate their position as voyeurs spying on women in several Swift poems. The reader entrapment in neo-Victorian texts, however, differs from that of most eighteenth-century satire in a crucial manner. The implied reader of a Swift poem is that of a historical contemporary spying on the body of Celia or a beautiful young nymph. In contrast, neo-Victorian narrators highlight the chronological gulf between twenty-fi rst-century readers and Victorian abject bodies. In doing so, they immerse readers in voyeuristic narratives at the same time as they make us reflect on our own urge to see suffering as spectacle. As another instance of reader entrapment, Holman counters a questionable objectification of the sick through excavating the subjectivity of her dying characters. Readers are privy to the thoughts, memories, sense impressions, and emotions of Jack Crawford, the fossy-jawed matchstick painter, and the old woman known only as the Eye. We learn that her devotion to surveillance is much more than a means of supporting herself in the present. When very young, she failed to perform her job duty one day of keeping watch on a line lowered into a coal-mining shaft, and thirty miners perished. When she recalls this moment while dying, she is no longer a mere metonym for an abstract scopic regime, but rather an old woman who has been traumatised by the oppressive role of paid voyeur. Holman thus sets readers up for a Foucauldian reading of the Eye as powerful, then encourages them to realise the inadequacy of that paradigm when embodied in a woman marginalised by her gender, destitution, old age, and physical disability. Faber also interrogates how readers appropriate the suffering body, but with greater focus on frustrating readers cast in the position of amateur medical sleuths. This is especially evident in the sad tale of William Rackham’s wife Agnes. She fi rst appears as a typical Victorian child woman, trapped in a life of meaningless leisure in which she exercises her stifled creativity and agency through reading mystical works of spirituality or modifying her gowns for the Season on the sewing machine in her sickroom. When Dr Curlew subjects her to one of his humiliating routine pelvic exams, she is clearly depicted as a Victorian hysteric subject to oppressive medical control. Sugar reinforces this perspective when she writes ‘Tyranny!’ and ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong!’ in the margins of a medical tract that attributes feminine invalidism to intellectual pursuits (Faber 2002, 171). The storyteller then posits the neo-Victorian reader as an amateur psychologist, or,

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perhaps, academically trained Victorianist who draws on prior knowledge of the era to explain what is really wrong with Agnes. In one early scene, a thin shaft of sunlight illuminates her diary lying open in her sickroom, and the narrator emphasises that ‘you’, the reader, ‘squint to read’ (203) her tiny handwriting. ‘Really must get out more’ (203), the entry reads, which reinforces a feminist reading of Agnes’s plight. The author complicates this diagnosis, however, through revealing a secret to readers, that she has a brain tumour behind her left eye. ‘No one will ever find it’ in her lifetime, he confides; ‘Roentgen photography is twenty years in the future’ (219). We seem to have solved the mystery here, especially when William notices that Agnes’s pupils change before one of her fainting fits and asks Dr Curlew if they signify a bodily cause for her illness, a theory that the physician dismisses. Near the close of the book, however, we learn that Agnes’s neglected daughter Sophie experiences troubling visions. At this point, we have three theories for Agnes’s madness: a sociological reading, the brain tumour, and inherited mental illness. Faber ultimately denies readers the satisfaction of a clear diagnosis: one or all of these explanations might account for her bizarre behaviour. One might argue that this uncertainty is, in fact, a form of medical realism: doctors themselves often work with competing and equally plausible explanations for syndromes, particularly in the case of mental illness. In any case, the reader remains suspended between rational yet ultimately unsatisfying explanations. As if in response to the inadequacy of these diagnoses, Faber shifts attention from a diagnostic to a therapeutic frame of reference. Agnes yearns for a place of privacy and rest in which nuns minister to her bodily and spiritual wellbeing. In terms of her fi nal fate, readers do not know really what happens to her after Sugar helps her board the train. Refusing to conclude her story may be the only way that Faber can imagine granting this unstable, deeply unhappy woman some measure of freedom and privacy. 3 Roland Barthes claims that ‘the “private” life is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, not an object’ (1981, 15). This unease about being an object also informs the episode with Sugar’s abhorrence of being photographed as a prostitute: being ‘chemically fi xed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can be never clothed again’, she asserts (Faber 2002, 37–38).4 Holman’s Gustine likewise refuses to allow a young writer, a self-styled ‘Student of Life’ (Holman 2000, 90), to capture her visual and verbal image for his forthcoming work on prostitution. By rejecting fi xed representation in this way, both heroines resist being reduced to a type, to an essential and sensational image of the ‘the prostitute’. In her treatment of neo-Victorian representations of the syphilitic patient, Monika PietrzakFranger shows how Angela Carter similarly veils the ailing bodies of her subjects in “Black Venus” and foregoes capturing them in a simple static image shaped by dominant discourses of the syphilitic woman. Rather, Pietrzak-Franger argues, Carter ‘draw[s] attention to their multiplicity,

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the complexity of individual existence living in the shadow of such culturally sanctioned accounts’ (2011, 38). Holman and Faber seek to create ‘zones of space and time’ for their fallen women that shield them from this shadow and open a space for their own self-creation. All in all, Holman and Faber dismantle a narrative of medical progress in order to promote an ethics based on healing, privacy and comfort. At the close of The Dress Lodger, Gustine mothers a frightened child, in addition to embarking on a career as a nurse in which she will ease the pains of the sick and dying. Dr Clanny has approvingly noted that she has a natural gift for healing. For Faber, whether little Sophie exhibits signs of incipient madness or not, we know that Sugar will protect and care for her: the prostitute’s fi nal words in the novel promise the child the warmest, driest, and most comfortable bed imaginable. This guarantee counters the painful role that the childhood bed plays for both females: Sugar’s mother made her submit to her fi rst customer there and Sophie repeatedly wet her bed, presumably to secure the attention of her neglectful parents. In effect, Sugar will transform the bed from a site of childhood trauma to one of rest and safety.

CONCLUSION Although they oppose medical authority, display, and objectification to patient autonomy and healing, these neo-Victorian writings do not necessarily vilify the entire Victorian medical establishment. Dr Clanny’s faith in Gustine as healer makes her respectable and successful career as a nurse possible. Nonetheless, they consistently indict the misuse of medical authority when it violates patient confidentiality and autonomy in ways that are quite consistent with recent textbooks for medical students. Twenty-fi rst-century readers may have put the Victorian loss of bodily self-possession behind them in the forms of body snatching, imprisonment of the mentally ill and deadly contagious diseases. All the same, neo-Victorian medical sensationalism indicates that some anxiety about the power of the medical field to diagnose, display, and manage sick bodies remains with us. Because they show the complicity of readers in these scenarios, the novels also make their contemporary readers think about the voyeuristic impulses underlying our own critical paradigms. Like the medical sleuth, we have the impulse to see, to know, to ‘get at the heart of the matter’ as we bring knowledge of Victorian hysteria or Foucauldian theory to bear on The Dress Lodger or The Crimson Petal and the White. Of course, the issue of voyeurism itself is not specific to Neo-Victorian works. Nonetheless, the ways in which medical sensation novels make readers interrogate both their own voyeuristic tendencies and sense of scientific superiority in relation to the Victorians appears to be a crucial ongoing concern of the neo-Victorian project.

164 Christy Rieger NOTES 1. Focusing on the fate of the Dickensian child in Faber’s novel, Elizabeth Rees elaborates on this point and notes that Sugar saves Sophie from ‘the selfinterested patriarchal nature of the Victorian family, and perhaps even from a fate like that of Agnes’s’ (2012, 123). 2. See the volume of essays edited by Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (2009) for work on the images of ghosts and haunting in neo-Victorian fiction. 3. Interestingly, Faber himself earned money by being, in his words, ‘a guinea pig for medical research’. He eventually became a nurse, which he ‘credits with contributing to a better understanding of humans and their nature’ (Richards 2002, n.p.). 4. See Voigts-Virchow (2009) for an extensive discussion of photography in Crimson Petal and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith.

11 The Neo-Victorian-at-Sea Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian Elizabeth Ho

Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of The Narwhal (1998)—set primarily in nineteenth-century Philadelphia and an unspecified icy North—implicitly stages a neo-Victorian dilemma. Consumed by the search for the missing explorer, Sir John Franklin, and marooned in the Frozen Sea, the battered crew of the Narwhal do not discover ‘even the smallest scrap of new coastline’ and are scooped by Elisha Kane’s surprise rescue and triumphant return to Philadelphia (92). Increasingly disillusioned, the suspicious men ‘experience the search for Franklin’s remains as just [ . . . ] distraction’ from expedition commander Zeke Voorhees’s voracious quest for fame (98). Anchored to an increasingly ghostly British presence, the sailors are ‘distracted’ from national agendas such as Zeke’s ambition to lead the US in the ‘allied sciences’ (Driver 2001, 3) of geography, surveying and navigation that make up imperial knowledge. At the same time, other histories such as the Irish Famine, which sparked a different kind of sea voyage, have been forgotten while in the Arctic, ‘where no one might ever have seen them, three young Englishmen had each been given a careful and singular grave’ (90). Tied to the search for coastline and the boundaries of an open polar sea, the expedition’s mission—neo-Victorianism’s mission—becomes increasingly unclear: ‘Commander Voorhees made it sound as if we were going to rescue survivors’, one character complains, ‘yet it seems we’re only going after corpses’ (50). As if to answer this call for ‘survivors’ rather than ‘corpses’, there has been a sea change in post-millennial fiction’s treatment of ‘the Victorian’. Barrett’s image of the ship trapped in ice, I argue, reflects the current ‘frozen’ state of the archive neo-Victorian studies likes to claim as its own: can neo-Victorian studies and production put Britain (and Franklin) to rest and embrace some new paradigm that will not just revisit the imperial games of the past? Recently, a concentration of neo-Victorian novels has formed based around and structured by the sea voyage rather than the more ‘settled’ locales of conventional neo-Victorian texts like Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and Jack Maggs (1997), or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). I am going to call this sub-genre the ‘neo-Victorianat-sea’. Texts such as Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Harry

166 Elizabeth Ho Thompson’s To The Edge of the World (2006), Andrea Barrett’s short stories from Ship Fever (1996) and Servants of the Map (2003) and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) are concerned with journeys rather than the founding acts of settler colonialism themselves: a privileging, echoing James Clifford, of routes over roots (1997, 4). Previously tied to the nation-state and processes of decolonisation around the former British Empire, I claim that the further neo-Victorianism moves from Britain, the more capable it becomes in addressing new sites of production. The neo-Victorian-at-sea extends this argument by establishing the ocean, rather than Britain, as the liquid site of empire reframing British imperialism as a ‘vast and evolving political space’ (Klein 2002, 2). The neo-Victorian-at-sea serves as a reminder that the British empire was above all an ‘empire of the seas’ (2), forcing us to rethink the usual structures of centre and periphery that mark most postcolonial fiction. In this essay, I read the neo-Victorian-at-sea as an attempt to move beyond conventional neo-Victorianism’s bounded territorial spaces and status as national literatures and argue instead for a global memory of ‘the Victorian’ that is attuned to the conditions and experience of transnationality. This new direction for neo-Victorian fiction responds to the tensions between empire and Empire, or, a staging of the efficacy of postcolonial theory to address the realities of globalisation.

THEORISING THE NEO-VICTORIAN-AT-SEA At fi rst glance, the turn to the sea (and I include its setting of the sea, ships and ports) and its dramatis personae (pirates, sailors, human cargo) seems, perhaps, over-determined for neo-Victorian fiction. For a postcolonial project invested in forms of cultural memory, the sea, according to Derek Walcott, is ‘history’. The sea functions as the ‘grey vault’ (2007, 137): at once watery archive, graveyard, and theatre of memory that tosses up detritus as the monuments and submerged histories of colonial atrocities. In keeping with postcolonial imperatives, the neo-Victorian-at-sea can make that ‘grey vault’ available for recall and restitution in the present. Like the many critics engaged in historicizing the sea and revising its status as mere metaphor, empty, timeless and thus ahistorical, the neo-Victorian-at-sea associates itself with other ventures that regard the sea as a new paradigm capable of ‘accommodating various revisionary accounts [ . . . ] of the modern historical experience of transnational contact zones’ (Klein 2002, 2).1 Rehistoricisations of the sea, including the neo-Victorian-at-sea, owe a debt to Paul Gilroy’s reclamation of the Black Atlantic and slavery’s disruption to the narratives and conventional periodicisations of modernity. In Gilroy’s analysis, the ‘contact zone’ of the Atlantic meant that the intellectual and cultural traditions reified as discrete or authentic are, in fact, transcultural, polyphonic and hybrid. Gilroy highlights ships as the avatar of modernity, in particular, as ‘a living, micro-culture, micro-political system in motion’

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(1993, 7); a repository of the economics and half-remembered experiences of the slave-trade; a space for the orchestration of temporal and even geographical resistances; and a powerful chronotope and counter-culture to Western orthodoxies and constructions of modernity. Whereas Gilroy’s canvas of the Black Atlantic has been revised and expanded to include other African experiences and to be more translocal and transnational in scope, his ideas still underpin interventions in the standard stories of globalisation as modernity, available and accessible to all. Despite The Black Atlantic’s impact on literary and cultural studies and the prominence of the sea in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a foundational text of postcolonial neo-Victorian fiction, neo-Victorianism approaches the sea in the millennium with a surprising sense of belatedness. Constrained by the self-imposed parameters of the Victorian, neo-Victorian studies and fiction embraces Foucault’s hugely influential re-readings of sexuality in the nineteenth century and yet is sometimes reluctant or feels unable to turn to Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. Novels set in pre-abolition nineteenth century and prior to the reign of Queen Victoria—Caryl Phillip’s Cambridge (1992) or Andrea Levy’s A Long Song (2010)—do not often fall under neo-Victorianism’s scrutiny, thus the incorporation of slavery appears uneven. The slave narrative’s specificities as a form also act as significant deterrent to neo-Victorianism’s usual colonising tendencies, thus the ‘neo-slave narrative’ exists as its own separate subgenre. 2 Hemmed in by chronology, neo-Victorianism fi nds it too late to celebrate or critique the spectacle of Britain’s naval might and tragedies in the early nineteenth century, thus excluding the sea novels of Patrick O’Brian (the most wellknown of the Aubrey/Maturin series being the 1990 novel, Master and Commander) or Julian Stockwin’s Kydd series (2001–present). The turn to the sea, however, can rejuvenate the field’s archive and generic capabilities as the Victorian can now also be read as maritime empire and a memory of empire that is also shared between Britain, Africa, Asia and the Americas. What enables the neo-Victorian-at-sea, I believe, are current geopolitical imperatives that refocus our attention from the Atlantic to the South and other China Seas and the Indian Ocean. This shift offers vastly different stories, epistemologies, patterns of migration and trade as ‘old diasporas’ interact with ‘modern empires’ touched by the Victorian but not necessarily of the Victorian (Hofmeyr 2010, 722). In response to this new global vision, a key feature of the neo-Victorian-at-sea has obviously become the ship, derived from another Foucauldian concept, the ship as heterotopia. In his unfi nished essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Foucault traces the links between the nineteenth-century ‘great obsession’ with the accretions of time and history to our designation as an ‘epoch of space’ (1967, 22). Drawing on the language of displacement, Foucault writes, ‘we are at a moment [ . . . ] when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein’ (22). To explain the contradictory ways in which we are newly

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emplaced, Foucault appeals to the concept of heterotopias. Governed by certain principles, Foucault deems sacred and profane spaces as varied as cemeteries, the Oriental garden and motel rooms as examples of heterotopia. A history of such ‘counter-sites’ that are ‘without geographical markers’ (25) and a study of their contradictory and disruptive uses would allow for the identification of ‘heterotopic sites’ (26) where otherness is constructed and can thrive. Most attractive to the neo-Victorian-at-sea is Foucault’s fi nal assertion that ‘the ship is the heterotopia par excellence’ (27). Ending on a note of imaginative escapism, he elaborates, ‘in civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates’ (27). Building on the ship as the ‘great instrument of economic development’ (27), the argument that Foucault did not want to explore, Cesare Casarino argues that the concentrated return to sea narratives in the late-nineteenth century was a method of registering, via an existing representational form, a ‘world system that was increasingly arduous to visualize, the more multiple, interconnected and global it became’ (10). As the political economy of the late-nineteenth century transitioned from mercantile to industrial capitalism, literary production turned towards the familiar sea narrative in order to ‘get across the radically new’ (6). The neo-Victorian-at-sea arguably reflects a similar crisis: the return to the sea narrative responds to a need to make sense of global consumption, trade and labour, and the mass movement of people via a previous moment of globalisation made possible by imperialism. By focusing on the sea, the novels that I will be examining in this essay resist the urge in much neo-Victorian fiction to return to the prominence of the nation-state and posit instead an unbounded globality that might unravel neo-Victorian studies by expanding it to its limits.

FROM ‘BLACK LINE’ TO ‘BLACK WATER’: ENGLISH PASSENGERS AND SEA OF POPPIES In what follows, I offer a reading of two novels, Kneale’s English Passengers and Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies: both novels invite us to disassociate ‘the Victorian’ with its landed qualities and transform it instead into a memory of the voyage, a series of encounters with other cultures and peoples without the tyranny of origin. Written in 2000, English Passengers offers other ‘island stories’ to complicate the British colonisation of Australia by dramatising the extinction of full-blooded aboriginals in Tasmania. Led by the rebellious Mother, the remaining aborigines are forced to relocate their dwindling numbers to Flinders Island in the mid-nineteenth century. Mother’s half-white son, Peevay, a product of her rape by a white convict, narrates these sections of the novel. As Peevay slowly learns English, his hybridity becomes a powerful weapon against colonial oppression as he organises ‘PEEVAY’S MOB’ (433) by educating his compatriots about

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‘writing and LAWS, white men’s tricks and BIBLE CHEATING and more’ (434). Against this land-based politics of memory, English Passengers also focuses on the ill-fated voyage of the smuggling ship, Sincerity, and its crew from the Isle of Man, a semi-colonised space in the history and geography of the British Isles. The Sincerity carries a mutinous group of over-zealous English explorers determined to discover the Garden of Eden in Tasmania. Told as a series of missives, journals, letters and other documents of a ‘travelling culture’ (Clifford 1997, 17), English Passengers can be regarded as an example of what Paul Carter has called ‘spatial history’ that is ‘neither static nor mindlessly mobile, [ . . . ] where traveling is a process of continually beginning, continually ending, where discovery and settlement belong to the same exploratory process’ (1987, xxiv). However, unlike Carter’s celebration of the dialectic of land and sea, English Passengers seems unable to commit to the shift in representational strategies offered by the neo-Victorian-at-sea. I read the interweaving of the Sincerity’s voyage with the portrayal of aboriginal dispossession as an expression of anxiety and suspicion over what can be lost by the turn to the sea; as the Sincerity is shipwrecked off the coast of England, we are offered only a momentary glimpse of a community beyond a hegemonic landed understanding of the Victorian. English Passengers presents the ship as an alternative archive and poses the question: what would ‘the Victorian’ look like told from the position of the voyage? Neo-Victorianism relies on an archive constituted of texts and artefacts: novels and films from Byatt’s Possession (1990) onwards have fetishised the archive and thus, a certain neo-Victorian thingy-ness lends a particular thickness or grants authenticity to the reconstruction while also correcting what currently counts as the historical record. The ship in the neo-Victorian-at-sea offers an opposing archival act to conventional neoVictorian texts; it is quite happy to jettison the same texts and things—the signifiers of Englishness and Victorianness—that might interfere with its own, often illegal, trading agendas. Captain Quillian Illian Kewley and his Manx crew, for example, scoff at the ‘shame of passengers’ but ‘worse, Englishmen all of them’ (79) and extend their scorn to the loading of the English expedition’s stores of the ‘best potted ham, hermetically sealed salmon, hotch-potch from Aberdeen, and whole cases of sherry, whiskey and champagne [ . . . ], folding tables and chairs, table linen, crockery and some finest Sheffield silver cutlery’ (43) into the Sincerity’s hold. While the English passengers—the Reverend Wilson; surgeon and racialist Dr Potter, based on Dr Robert Knox; and the young botanist, Timothy Renshaw— struggle to maintain their various English practices aboard ship, they are also overwhelmed by the ‘sea technicalities’ of sailing life (108). Removed from the regularities of English life, the ship becomes a ‘field of battle’ between those on deck and those who should remain below (109), between languages, and between nations. Englishmen and Manxmen compete over space and morality: Wilson’s construction of a ‘sea lectern’ and a ‘sea pulpit’ out of champagne and cutlery boxes for his sermons on deck, for example,

170 Elizabeth Ho directly contradicts Captain Kewley’s command that ‘this is a ship, not a preaching house’ (114). Only the appearance of a pirate or customs ship on the horizon and an ensuing cannon fight restores Kewley’s authority and prevents Wilson from delivering his sermon on ‘the sea! The sea! That great wilderness’ (120). The ‘sea technicalities’ seem to be, at the onset of the novel, a distinct cure or alternative to the English passengers’ religious zeal and theories of racialism. One of the greatest strengths of the ship is its ability to undo Englishness—a vehicle that breaks it down and disinters it from its landed qualities. The Sincerity and its Manx crew deliberately undermine Englishness and, by extension, the landed nature of the neo-Victorian project. Under Captain Kewley’s command and careful scrutiny, the crew has secretly stocked a separate cargo of contraband goods. Kewley’s design of the Sincerity mocks the sincerity of neo-Victorian reconstruction itself. Loose blocks behind ‘the two busts, of Albert and Victoria’ which, significantly, ‘seemed somehow a touch less anchored’, trigger the ‘hinged trap door’ to the secret hold (35). Kewley continues: From the dining-cabin floor down, the Sincerity was two entire vessels, one inside the other. The inner hull was those timbers I’d bought from the boat that was being broken up, and though I’d had it thinned out a little, still it didn’t sound hollow if you gave it a thump. It even looked weathered and damp, just like it should. As for the gap between these two hulls, this was no more than eighteen inches—more and the hold would have looked too curious—but eighteen inches right round the body of a ship holds a mighty store of bales of tobacco and flasks of brandy. (35) The Sincerity functions differently than neo-Victorianism’s oft-criticised theme-park immersion in the nineteenth century. Dismissing the goal of some neo-Victorian texts to recreate or adapt the nineteenth century, the Sincerity is neither ‘some piece of cheap faked-up carpentry’ nor does it ‘sound hollow’ or inauthentic. The Sincerity jettisons a postcolonial neoVictorianism too as we are asked not to focus on the recovered ‘inner hull’ or hidden ship but the ‘eighteen inches’ of space between the two ships nestled one inside another. The Sincerity’s energy is entirely devoted to the ‘dark’ space that girds the ship. As the avatar of the neo-Victorian-atsea, the Sincerity’s eighteen-inch gap describes an intimate illegitimacy or, again, the space between empires. Structured as it is by the concept of the ‘contact zone’, the neo-Victorianat-sea explores the loss of traditional dialects and native languages through education and participation in an empire of English. These novels stress the polylinguistic aspects of travel and how they relate to the questions of recovering—and recovering from—the atrocities of colonialism. Multilingualism, as Tina Steiner has argued, becomes a way of introducing conflict

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and a littoral system of power and coercion subsumed under the smooth multicultural canvas of a ‘trading lingua franca’ or by the perceived ‘peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade’ (2008, 49). English Passengers, for example, dramatises the extermination of aboriginal dialects but also the extinction of other ways of being British. Kneale reveals in the appendix to the novel that the Manx dialect ‘gradually declined during the nineteenth century and the last native Manx speaker died in the 1970s’ (459). Manx was a language made up of Irish and Scottish Gaelic peppered with the words and phrases that register the Manx obsessions: ‘the sea, herring and superstition’ (459). English Passengers reflects the variety lost under the violence of colonialism—indigenous Tasmanian culture and life certainly—but also how the effort to bring an anarchic language under control is brought about by eliminating competing forms of the vernacular in favour of an authoritative but still undetermined standard English. The ‘British’ centre is consolidated by the governing of any forms of what Evelyn Chi’en has called ‘weird’ (2004, 4) or ‘broken’ (64) English that could offer a counter-discourse and the seed of Otherness within the supposedly ‘United’ Kingdom. Once the novel reaches land, so to speak, and drops anchor in Tasmania, it asks us to question the ethics of such a watery world-view. We are forced to reconsider the transnational and liberatory potentials of the ship against the violent extermination of Tasmanian aborigines. Whereas the routes and rhythm of ships’ travel dominate the structure of the novel, the narrative on land presents us with trauma narratives indicative of postcolonial neo-Victorianism: the novel includes a description of the Black Line, a British-sanctioned raid of the island by settlers, ex-convicts and soldiers to round up aborigines for deportation ostensibly for their own protection. Told from the point of view of several British characters—a farmer and George Alder, the Governor of Van Dieman’s Land—the Black Line creates a powerful narrative disruption from the Sincerity’s liquidity. As accusations of ‘deliberate murder’ are launched against Alder (Kneale 2001, 150), we come to realise the tensions between the two narrative threads, one aqueous, one territorial: While I had been arguing with the fellow we must have ridden over a ridge, as now a fi ne view stretched out ahead. It was an exhilarating spot, with gulls hanging high in the wind and the crash of waves all around. To the left lay the sea, to the right also, with the thick line of men glinting and stamping away in each direction, as far as the shores. In front of us lay a wide expanse of open grassland, rolling gently down to the water, and looking a little like some wild part of the Devonshire coast. We had reached the very end of the peninsula, and our great march. (150–51) Here, the reader is faced with two scenarios: despite being surrounded by the sea, the vista is monopolised by the ‘great march’ of whiteness and

172 Elizabeth Ho violence that transforms the Tasmanian environment into a semblance of ‘the Devonshire coast’. In the end, the Black Line forestalls any celebratory notion of diaspora that the Sincerity may represent—looking across the ‘fi ne view’ of the Tasmanian landscape, Governor Alder muses that the ‘most noticeable thing about the scene [ . . . ] was that it was wholly and utterly empty of aborigines’ (151). English Passengers loosely fictionalises the experiences of indigenous historical personages: Peevay’s Mother, for example, is based on aboriginal resistance fighter Walyer, ‘who fought the whites and was greatly feared by them’ (455). The desecration of Mother’s corpse is also based on the events surrounding the death of ‘Truganini’, mythologised by colonial authorities and historians as ‘the last of the Tasmanians’ (qtd. in Barlow 1998, 58) and enshrined as a powerful and poignant symbol of authenticity and extinction. Like Walyer, Truganini is an iconic figure who literally embodies the political narratives of indigeneity, nation and feminism (Perera 1996, 396). At the same time, her remains establish ‘evidence’ of a fictive authenticity that mobilises historical and legal challenges to Native Title and other land claims. In the novel, the ever-rebellious Mother, who is renamed ‘Mary’ by her English captors, dies at the moment her photograph is about to be taken, deliberately toppling the record-making device as she crashes to the ground. Her attempts to evade the gaze of scientific imperialism only serves to spur Dr Potter to body-theft because the ‘aborigines of the colony being so greatly reduced, their bones are known to attract the interest of museums and scientific institutions within Europe’ (Kneale 2001, 339). As ‘Mother Mary’, her remains become relics offering conduits to imperial rather than religious power; looting such relics imbues Potter with the worldly, material power to claim the legitimacy of his version of ‘the Victorian’. Without her and the truth-value of the photographic record, the territorial version of ‘the Victorian’ can only be Potter’s, that is, ‘wholly and utterly empty of aborigines’ (151). Thus, the voyage of the Sincerity—the neo-Victorianat-sea—sits uneasily beside the potent land-based politics of memory that Mary’s/Truganini’s remains represent. Ambivalence towards the neo-Victorian-at-sea’s project can be seen in the complicated plot surrounding Mary’s remains and the fate of the Sincerity and her Manx crew. Some summary here is necessary to illustrate the novel’s uneasiness with its global implications. Happily abandoning their English passengers on their disastrous mission to search for the Garden of Eden and having fi nally found a buyer for their contraband, the crew of the Sincerity eagerly prepare for their return to the Isle of Man. As they are about to set sail however, Captain Kewley spots the bedraggled group of English explorers on the shore and, overcome by morality, brings them aboard ship. With their number depleted by a vengeful, murdering Peevay, who has fi nally had his ‘killing war against num, thirty summers late’ (394), the English passengers and Potter’s contraband of aboriginal specimens are reunited with the Sincerity. Driven mad by religious zeal and

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by Peevay’s systematic hunting of his men, Reverend Wilson breaks free of his prison in the hold to smash and reveal evidence of ‘Potter’s evil’ (396), his papers, aboriginal artefacts and specimens, including Mary’s remains, gathered on the expedition. Having snuck aboard ship, Peevay manages to steal his mother’s bones in the melee and bring them ashore for burial, thus re-interring ‘the Victorian’ and its capability for telling a Tasmanian story. When the passengers discover that the Sincerity is, essentially, a smuggling ship, the English decide to mutiny, imprison Captain Kewley and the crew, and sail, almost single-handedly, back to England. In sight of England, the ship becomes wedged between two massive rocks and sinks after months of neglect in a severe storm. During the escape, Dr Potter is murdered and his body entombed within the shipwreck. Exiled from the Isle of Man by his criminal record, Kewley travels to London and stumbles across the book launch and exhibit for The Destiny of Nations, Potter’s racist diatribe, paid for by his supporters who have also excavated the wreck of the Sincerity for Potter’s scientific artefacts. In the glass case, under the heading ‘Unknown male presumed Tasmanian aborigine Possible victim of human sacrifice’ (454), Kewley identifies the skeleton of Potter from the fatal blow to his skull and his beard, a ‘fi ne shade of red’ (454). As the novel cannot entertain the possibility of aboriginal survivors in Tasmania, it takes its revenge on Potter’s corpse. In an online interview with Boldtype, Kneale has expressed his interest in capturing the ‘craziness of the Victorian British mind’ and the ‘dangerously misguided notions of the nineteenth century’ in English Passengers (Boldtype 2000). Peevay’s burial of Mother and Potter’s future as an exhibit of the ‘barbarism’ of the ‘Black Type’ he so abhorred offer a fitting anti-colonial ending to Kneale’s anti-colonial novel (Kneale 2001, 406). The novel’s events culminate in the recovery of and the recovery from the imperial past and appear to fulfil the expectations of postcolonial neo-Victorian narratives. However, this does not account for the sinking of the Sincerity. Caught between rocks off the shore of England, the eighteen-inch gap of the ship, Kewley makes sure to mention, is crushed along with the neo-Victorian-at-sea’s potential. Poised between neo-Victorianism and the neo-Victorian-at-sea, or stuck between two rocks and a hard place, the novel remains uncertain about the vagueness of heterotopic space and the real geography of imperial power represented by Tasmania and poor Kewley’s fi nal journey to London via the regulatory controls of public transportation. In contrast to English Passengers, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, with its focus on the Indian ocean, is nothing but celebratory in its use of the voyage to achieve its recovery work, specifically, revising Gilroy’s argument in The Black Atlantic for the Indian diaspora. Surprisingly, India has not been a robust producer of neo-Victorian narratives, overshadowed, it seems, by 1947 rather than 1857.3 But, the neo-Victorian-at-sea allows for this redress: Sea of Poppies, the fi rst part of a trilogy, dramatises the export of Indian, and to a lesser extent, Chinese labour around the British

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empire, reframed by Ghosh as ‘Greater India’. Using opium as a vector, Ghosh restores to centrality the figure of the ‘coolie’ and thus a history of slavery to the Victorian, problematically imagined as over before neoVictorianism begins its memory-work. The novel traces the journey of the Ibis, its crew of ‘Chinese and East Africans, Arabs, and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese’ that had ‘nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean’ and its cargo of indentured workers (2008, 13). Written in 2008, the novel fi nds for a diasporic, transnational present a version of the Victorian past accountable to international contracted labour originating in India, China, and Africa, and migration to destinations beyond the ‘properly’ colonial spaces prized by neo-Victorian studies. Sea of Poppies features an interwoven array of cultures and composite identities sponsored by the routes and spaces between empires. Unlike English Passengers, however, once the Ibis is boarded, Sea of Poppies never lands. Emphasising the enclosed spaces of the ship, Ghosh weaves together the lives and fortunes of various characters to make up the diasporic and theoretical tapestry of the novel. The novel introduces characters like Deeti, an Indian woman, rescued from suttee, who escapes her life and her caste with her lover to join the Ibis for a new life ‘where the holy Ganga disappeared into the Kala-Pani, “the Black Water”’ (3); Neel Rattan Halder, a Bengali aristocrat and landowner who is tricked into forgery and bankrupted by the unscrupulous Benjamin Burnham, owner of the Ibis and opium trader; transported as a convict, Neel shares his cell with Ah Fatt, a Parsi-Chinese labourer and former opium addict; and Paulette, orphaned by the death of her French botanist father, who stows away disguised as a coolie rather than marry the buffoonish Mr Kendalbushe. Together, their stories on the Ibis recover the history of the indentureship of over two million coolies who defied the traditional Hindu ban against leaving the sacred waters of the Ganges in order to labour on plantations in the Mauritius, British Guyana and beyond. The Ibis’s de facto leader, second mate Zachary Reid or ‘Malum Zikri’ (15), forms the link between decks. Throughout the novel, he conceals his racial identity as the ‘son of a Maryland freedwoman’ (10) in order to pass as white. Zachary’s ‘metif’ (464) identity and the Ibis’s own refurbishment into ‘a hold that was designed to carry slaves [but] will serve just as well to carry coolies and convicts’ underscores the links between the slave trade of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the plurality of Indian labour and migration (74). In Zachary, Ghosh confronts négritude with ‘coolitude’, Khal Torabully’s influential reclamation of the pejorative term ‘coolie’, to symbolise instead ‘the possibility of a composite identity to ease the pain and enrich culturally the lands in which he/she settled’ (Carter and Torabully 2002, 144). Using the dominance of the Ibis as heterotopia, Ghosh highlights ‘coolitude’s’ function as a memorial strategy, addressing the coolie’s need to restore to memory the ‘cultural implications of the Voyage’ (141) which were not, as the Ibis’s travellers realise, ‘experienced in full consciousness’ at the time of its undertaking (342).

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The novel infuses ‘the Victorian’ with what Torabully calls a ‘marine essence’ (158) and reconstitutes the ship as a means to enable the ‘metaphorical construction of a new identity’ (158). Sea of Poppies champions the sea voyage because the majority of the neo-Victorian-at-sea’s memory-work occurs during passage. Thus, Ghosh describes the interactions between the Anglo-Chinese criminal, Ah Fatt, and the Indian convict, Neel, as the most intimate of friendships that can only develop in the darkest of shared cells. With a sparse English being the only mode of communication between the unlikely pair, Ghosh claims that ‘the genius of Ah Fatt’s descriptions lay in their elisions, so that to listen to him was a venture of collaboration, in which the things that were spoken of came gradually to be transformed into artifacts of a shared imagining’ (345). Through such moments of ‘collaboration’, Neel begins to register cosmopolitan values, ‘that Canton was to his own city as Calcutta was to the villages around it’ (345). The pidgin language of the sea, accompanied by silences, provides a ‘shared imagining’ whereby the ship, rather than the place of arrival, becomes the initial space and experience of multiculturalism outside of India. Sea of Poppies revisits neo-Victorianism as elision rather than postmodern rupture or break so that the ship and duration rather than the destination and origin are privileged. Thus the reader comes to realise with Deeti that the Ibis was ‘the Mother-Father of her new family, a great wooden mái-báp, an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come’ (328). Both Kneale and Ghosh are interested in recapturing and partly reconstructing a panoply of Englishes. Sometimes reverent and sometimes mocking, Sea of Poppies delivers a world without English enriched only by locality and dialects. The Ibis represents the multitudinous linguistic attempts at transgression, constructions of new subjectivities and the breaking with origin: not one India, not one Africa, not one China, not one Britain. To elaborate on language’s ability to achieve liberatory ends, Ghosh appends to the American edition of Sea of Poppies the text of ‘The Ibis Chrestomathy’, begun by Neel, which rivals the chronotope of the ship in the representation of linguistic and intellectual transnationalism. Neel’s Chrestomathy functions ‘not so much a key to language as an astrological chart, crafted by a man who was obsessed with the destiny of words’ (473). Checked against the ‘complete and authoritative lexicon of the English language’—the Oxford English Dictionary—the Chrestomathy exists as a genealogy and an almanac of how ‘Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Hind., Laskari or anything else’ words become naturalised (474), thus disappearing, into official English. Neel’s life work mirrors the journey of the ‘many migrants who have sailed from eastern waters towards the chilly shores of the English language’ (473). Carried on by Neel’s descendants, ‘wordy-wallahs’ drafted to continue his legacy (474), the Chrestomathy offers a recovery of a history of the English language as a ‘sea-language’ (483), richly rooted in nautical terms and carrying with it a submerged history of colonialism and migration. The Chrestomathy also provides a recovery from the past

176 Elizabeth Ho as ‘so long as the knowledge of his words was kept alive within the family, it would tie them to their past and thus to each other’ (474). Like the ship, language becomes another contact zone that resists the monolingualism of nation and empire. In addition to the linguistic attack on English, the novel challenges conventional narratives of migrations from East to West, as Inderpal Grewal has noted, by preferring journeys from the East to the East (2008, 183). Telling the story of his childhood, Ah Fatt describes being inspired by the ‘famous and beloved title, Journey to the West’, a gift from his Parsi tutor in China. Ah Fatt’s dream of wanting to ‘go West’—to ‘Mr Moddie’s very own homeland—Hindusthan, or Jambudyipa as it was called in the old books’ (Ghosh 2008, 387)—dismays his father who thinks it is the ‘real West’ (387–388) that should drive his son’s desire to travel. Ah Fatt’s journey, like that of the Ibis and many of her passengers, disrupts the dyad of West and non-West and argues for continuities between communities that share histories of anti-colonial struggle and trade. Such vignettes have led critics like Grewal, among others, to critique Ghosh for romanticising, especially precolonial, ‘narratives of cosmopolitan tolerance and peaceful coexistence engendered by trade’ (2008, 180). Some of Ghosh’s fiction exhibits an uncomfortable tendency to forget that profound intolerance and difference existed prior to nation and colonialism’s redrawing of national and diasporic lines. However, Ghosh’s foray into neo-Victorianism in Sea of Poppies can counter such criticisms: if the Victorian recalls primarily a memory of empire, as I have argued, then any depiction of trade, migration, mobility and even language itself, must be saturated by colonial power relations. Certainly, the cosmopolitan vision of the novel does not extend to Zachary, for example, who remains blind to the similarities between his own heritage of slavery and the future of his human cargo in the hold.

OFF THE MAP: EMPIRE OR EMPIRE? The recurrent theme of cartographic failure in the neo-Victorian-at-sea suggests a sustained concern with the direction of neo-Victorianism and its reach. Almost all of the novels I have mentioned and discussed so far contain, as part of their introductory materials, maps of their journeys. As a privileged system of postcolonial texts, maps are intimately linked to imperial expansion, epistemology and legitimacy. Graham Huggan, among others, has argued for the necessity of ‘decolonizing the map’ (1987, 147) to resist hegemonic, Western constructions. It is imperative, according to Huggan, for postcolonial texts to ‘reconceptualize the map itself as the expression of a shifting ground between alternative metaphors rather than as the approximate representation of a literal “truth”’ (153). Yet, the neoVictorian-at-sea rejects this conventional postcolonial argument of deconstructing the map or, what Catherine Nash calls ‘map breaking’ (1994,

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245), and insists instead on the absolute failure to map at all. In English Passengers, the crew of the Sincerity rely on outdated charts, one which marks the Cape Colony ‘as Dutch, which took us back to Napoleon himself’ (107), and, after an almost blind sailing to the antipodes, decide to set their course according to ‘a little sketch map drawn by some doctor friend of Potter’s’ (272). Barrett’s Voyage of the Narwhal offers an even more striking example of cartographic failure: unable to imagine a conventional voyage or narrative, the ship is stalled in ice for much of the novel. Locked and frozen, the crew is unable to navigate and eventually has to abandon the Narwhal to conclude the journey on foot across the ice. Even Sea of Poppies ends in mutiny with characters jumping ship, stranding the Ibis with a partial crew and much calamity. Neo-Victorianism offers a corrective to the political blindness to the will of empire in the present which tends to refute postcolonial scholarship and the project of decolonisation, both of which have done so much to recover local histories under empire. The concentration of neo-Victorianism in the post-millennium emphasises the continued relevance of postcolonial theory at a particular moment when empire is evoked again as a way of making sense of globalisation and to mediate the dominant fantasy that our geopolitical situation has been a single-super power world. It strikes me that the return to ‘the Victorian’ shares with postcolonial studies an interest in maintaining the centrality of empire and its mechanisms not only in the defi nition and establishment of the postcolony, but also in the salutary and forgetful discourses surrounding globalisation, what Loomba et al. call the ‘eclipse’ of postcolonial theory (2005, 8). The neo-Victorian-at-sea’s depiction of cartographic failure is deliberately at odds with its insistence on the map itself and this indicates, I believe, an uncertainty towards what kind of empire is being articulated in these novels. Which is also to ask, what kind of neo-imperialism is going on in the present? Do we experience imperialism in the present as more territorially bounded, akin to the ‘old imperialism’ offered by conventional neo-Victorian texts that takes place through the acquisition and control of sovereign nations—as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan underscore? If we choose the sea, do we eschew the prominence and enhancement of state power in favour of Hardt and Negri’s concept of a decentred, globalised, deterritorialised Empire? Or, perhaps, some combination of both? This debate is where I think the neo-Victorian-at-sea leads us. NOTES 1. See also Christopher L. Connery’s ‘The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary’ (1996), or Heather Blum’s The View from the Masthead (2008). 2. See Ashraf H. A. Rushdy’s Neo-Slave Narratives (1999). 3. For British-Indian neo-Victorian examples of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, see Marie-Luise Kohlke (2010). I have found neo-Victorian texts in general

178 Elizabeth Ho originating from India rare, exceptions being the Bollywood extravaganzas, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001) and Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005), both anti-imperial narratives set in the nineteenth century, the latter depicting the events leading up to the 1857 Sepoy mutiny.

12 From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond Fearful Symmetries Sally Shuttleworth

There are many Victorian eras. As a child in the early 1960s, my own introduction to things Victorian was through the dark, brooding serials screened for children at Sunday teatimes. Dickens recounts in ‘Nurse’s Stories’ (The Uncommercial Traveller, 1860–69) how the fears engendered by his nurse’s tales still live within him in adulthood. Dickens’s own narratives, as recreated for television in these classic serials, defi ned in turn the nightmares of a new generation, from Miss Havisham in flames at the window, to the menacing horror of the grotesque Quilp. Memories of the Shivering Sands, in an adaptation of Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), still flood through me if I step on moist sand. This was a Victorian era delivered in grainy black and white, and defi ned by darkness, repression and violence, without any leavening of humour. For the current generation, the nineteenth century is an altogether looser, and more congenial affair, a label liberally applied (with little concern for the niceties of dates) to any production in ‘costume’, from Jane Austen on, and perhaps best defi ned by the sprightly, sexually explicit television adaptations of Andrew Davies. Other, more interesting, recreations of the Victorian world emerge in the current steampunk movement. Rooted in the aesthetics of Victorian technology, the exuberant physicality of its creations contrast sharply with postmodernist electronic minimalism. The movement celebrates a return to craftsmanship, in a playful reworking of William Morris. Looking back to the world of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, steampunk gleefully embraces its own nostalgia in what Brian Catling has termed ‘a calibration of longing’ (Catling 2009). The Victorian age is an ever fertile terrain which we draw upon to feed our own needs and desires, the shapes we produce shifting with the social and political landscapes of the decades, and (our political masters will be pleased to hear), with the intellectual trajectories of Victorian scholarship. Whilst feminist scholarship in the seventies and eighties gave rise to a rash of novels reinserting the female voice into history or the silent spaces of classic novels, more recent scholarship on race and imperialism, or sexuality, has had an equally strong impact on subsequent forms of the historical novel. The term ‘retro-Victorian’ in my title refers back to an earlier essay, ‘Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel’, fi rst written and delivered

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as a conference paper in 1993, although the conference volume itself was not published until 1998. These five years saw a significant shift in the British political landscape: whilst 1998 takes us to the euphoria of the early Blair years, 1993 was just after Thatcher’s gloomy reign (1979–90), when the UK was still under Conservative rule, with John Major at the helm. Victorianism in these years had a very particular charge, as pinpointed in Alasdair Gray’s wonderful satirical novel, Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer (1992). Gray creates his own ‘blurb for a high-class hardback’: ‘Since 1979 the British government has worked to restore Britain to its Victorian state, so Alasdair Gray has at last shrugged off his postmodernist label and written an up-to-date nineteenth-century novel’. Layer upon layer of irony surrounds this creation of an ‘up-to-date’ nineteenth-century novel; its impetus, as the facetious blurb notes, is the Thatcher government. Famous for her declaration that ‘there is no such thing as society’, Thatcher led a government which championed rampant individualism and the free market economy, and attempted to dismantle the welfare state, all the while calling on the electorate to embrace a return to Victorian values. Samuel Smiles was once again elevated to hero status, with Self-Help (1859) republished (in an abridged version) by Penguin as a business management classic, with a foreword by that arch-conservative minister, and architect of ‘Thatcherism’, Sir Keith Joseph. For a nineteenth-century scholar it was a disturbing time, with massive cuts to university budgets and social welfare programmes, all under the banner of a new Victorianism. At the same time, the early 1990s saw a flood of novels either set within, or focused upon, the Victorian period. ‘Natural History’ set out to analyse that phenomenon, focusing specifically on a particular subset which explored the impact of Darwinian theory (drawing on A. S. Byatt’s ‘Angels and Insects’ and Graham Swift’s Ever After, both 1992). Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) had argued that our postmodern age exhibited an historical deafness, which was manifest in a ‘well-nigh libidinal historicism’ (Jameson 1991, 18) whose symptoms were the flattening out of history into image, and ‘an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions’ (286). It is a damning cultural judgement. In suggesting the term ‘retro-Victorian’ fiction, I wished to lift the genre out of Jameson’s category of pastiche, and into a more knowing, self-conscious and ironic form—style not for its own sake, but to interrogate the relations of past and present. Although the two texts adopted very different narrative frames (immersion and mimesis in the Byatt, and Victorian/contemporary juxtaposition in the Swift), both focused on the overthrow of natural theology and arguments for Design, with the development of the new biology. Both texts are undoubtedly exercises in nostalgia, but a nostalgia, I argued, not for the comfortable world of religious faith, but rather the intensity of experience, the sense of personal authenticity gained, at a point of crisis.

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In an age allegedly without grand narratives, such dramas of conscience carry an intense appeal. To set against the rampant individualism and bastardised form of social Darwinism of early 1990s politics, we were given a version of the Victorian age that focused on moral conscience (although of a highly personalised, introverted form, distinct from a more generalised social conscience). In one of the early progenitors of the retro-Victorian novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), John Fowles had also invoked the explanatory framework of Darwinism, linking his own postmodern freedom as author to the overthrow of the Victorian gods. As an author he notes (with an explicit nod to Robbe-Grillet and Barthes), he is a god ‘but in the new theological image’, and his ability to disrupt readers’ sense of reality is a challenge to ‘your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those capitalized ghosts in the night that are rattling their chains behind this book’ (Fowles 1969, 85–7). Fowles playfully attacks Victorian shibboleths, and in particular any sense of linear history and progression, but the text is nonetheless trapped itself within the assumptions of its own era. The author/narrator writes of Darwin with the arrogance of hindsight: ‘Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself’ (47). The vision of Darwinian theory Fowles presents is of permanent flux, and ‘something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man: its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviourism, that is philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane’ (105–6). Fowles reads the 1960s sense of relativism, and the lack of an overarching moral and epistemological framework back into the Victorian period, constructing a Darwinism for the age of B. F. Skinner and R. D. Laing. Darwinian theory, now properly understood, takes on a thoroughly iconoclastic force, undermining not only religious frames of reference, but those central tenets of high Victorian culture: morality and duty. The attractions of Darwinian theory for the postmodern author are legion. The figure of Darwin himself offers a potent self-image for the ambitious writer, aiming to name and shape the world anew. Both the postmodern novelist and Victorian sage (in current reconstructions of ‘Darwin’) are involved in exploring and disrupting myths of origin, seeking through language to refashion our world and cultural constructions of history and selfhood. Darwin becomes in himself a form of origin, a figure who recast the foundations of modern knowledge, from the temporal framework of existence, to an understanding of what it is to be human. Whilst distrusting of grand narratives and certainties, the postmodern author yet puts faith in the power of the creative mind to overturn fi xities. Darwin is at one and the same time a figure of Victorian authority, and an analogue of the postmodern writer. In the Victorian-focused novels that have followed on from Fowles in the 1960s, and Byatt and Swift in the early 1990s, Darwinian

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theory, as Kaplan has also noted, has remained a powerful component, whether in explicit reworkings of Victorian cultures of natural history and voyages of discovery (Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers, 2000 or Roger McDonald’s Mr Darwin’s Shooter, 1998) or more diff use engagements with the tenets of evolution. There appears an unstated acknowledgement that any attempt to rethink and recast our own historical origins in the Victorian period must take account, at some level, of the great reshaper. The recent extraordinary fanfare, both within the media and the academy, around the Darwin centenary in 2009, neatly encompassing both man (200 years since birth) and work (150 years since the publication of the Origin), confi rmed his centrality within contemporary culture. Such treatments were rarely questioning, or playful, but operated more as a solemn installation of Darwin within the pantheon, becoming, in Fowles’s term, a god, but in a ‘new theological image’ (86).1 Our postmodern age looks back to Victorian times, both as an age of outmoded certainties, and also as the origins of a secular, scientific culture. Since the early 1990s there has been an intensification of Victorian-focused novels, with distinct thematic sub-genres developing, such as low-life and underworld, lesbian sexuality or psychiatry. 2 Whilst the ‘retro-Victorian’ novels of the early 1990s seemed to take their cue from George Eliot, employing a self-conscious interrogation of our relations to a Victorian past in order to fi nd a greater sense of fi xity, depth or moral purpose in an increasingly rootless modern age, the fiction of the Blair years and the economic bubble of that era was generally less angst-ridden. 3 In the looser arena of what is now most commonly termed neo-Victorian fiction, the presiding genius seems less George Eliot and more Wilkie Collins (with an added generous measure of sex). Plots and preoccupations focus more on the slippery nature of identity than crises of conscience, and Victorian England sometimes becomes an atmospheric spatial category, rather than a temporal period which predates and defi nes our own. The turn of the millennium had huge symbolic significance for the ways in which we construct our narratives of cultural identity, as the Victorian era became overnight a period seemingly distanced by two centuries; more substantively, it also signalled a major weakening in the ties of cultural memory. With the death in 2009 of Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier of the First World War, there was much media focus on the loss of a living link to this momentous, but distant past.4 The demise of the last Victorian is now imminent (as I write, there are three people in the UK, all women, still surviving who were born in the Victorian age).5 From that point, direct transmission of oral memory will cease, and our access to the Victorian age will be mediated, whether through familial transmission of memories, or archival databases such as the National Sound Archive at the British Library.6 Whilst the sense of atmospheric immediacy evoked through films or television might, paradoxically, increase, our sense of direct historical lineage will decline. At the time that Fowles was writing in

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the 1960s, there remained, even in the midst of the great post-war reconstruction boom, a strong sense of the Victorian period dominating the material, tangible aspects of daily life. Victorian terrace housing framed the landscapes of our cities, with outside privies, and coal fi res still the norm. The massive blackened buildings of Victorian factories still supported mass employment in heavy industry, whilst education was shaped by the spatial configuration of Victorian schools. Such material continuity easily bred a sense of imaginative closeness with the Victorian period. Whilst Victorian architecture still shapes our cities, albeit to a lesser degree, the almost universal shift to indoor bathrooms, central heating, telephones and all the paraphernalia of the digital age lessens the sense of domestic continuity. In the domain of work, Victorian warehouses and factories are more likely to support luxury dwellings than heavy industry. The diminution of physical links has bred, in its turn, a celebratory nostalgia for an imagined world, seen most strongly in the steampunk movement, with all its lovingly-created impossible machines, whilst the neo-Victorian novel focuses, to a surprising degree, as Hilary Schor and many of the contributors to this volume have pointed out, on the relationship between the material and immaterial world, as manifest in our preoccupation with Victorian ghosts, mediums and spiritualism.

CULTURAL MEMORY I: ‘THE BEHAVIOR OF THE HAWKWEEDS’ A new form of engagement with the Victorian era is now emerging in contemporary fiction, one that does not attempt to recreate a Victorian novel for the twenty-fi rst century, but rather focuses on the ways in which we engage with the Victorian period through cultural memory. I will look at two very different examples, ‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’ in Andrea Barrett’s collection Ship Fever (1996), and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009). Barrett’s stunning collection offers a series of meditations on science, both historical and contemporary. The title story is set, without framing narratives or postmodern artifice, at the period of the Irish famine, focusing on the struggles of a doctor in Quebec as wave upon wave of disease-ridden emigrants arrive on Canada’s shores (the parallels with current problems of forced migration are unstated, but omnipresent). ‘The English Pupil’, by contrast, is a wonderful vignette of Linnaeus at the end of his life. A man who had sought to name the whole natural world is now the victim of a stroke, unable to recall even his daughter’s face and name. There is extraordinary poignancy in this contrast between the taxonomic and imperial vision, and the faltering man, trapped in a mind which still has vivid flashes of memory, but cannot focus on the present. Our reading of the story is of course framed by our own knowledge that Linnaean taxonomy has long survived the man, and his names, categories and hierarchies live on in common culture.

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‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’ focuses centrally on memory and inheritance, in all their interrelated forms. Set entirely in contemporary America, it yet reaches back to the figure of Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk whose work, ignored at the time, became the foundation stone for theories of genetic inheritance. At one level the story traces a tale of direct cultural transmission: ‘Even now this seems impossible: how could I have known someone of an age to have known Mendel?’ (Barrett 1996, 20). The story is narrated by a woman whose grandfather had, as a child, worked with Mendel in his monastery garden. History is replicated in the next generation as the narrator in her own childhood had, in turn, helped her émigré grandfather in the nursery where he worked. In complex intertwining strands, the science of genetic inheritance, with its sexual underpinnings, is woven into a tale which encompasses Mendel’s thwarted research, and the frustrations of a modern marriage. The title is wonderfully allusive, with that second defi nite article, and its archaic ring, capturing the language of nineteenth-century botanical research, whilst also suggesting a modern familial, or marital drama, featuring the Hawkweeds. The botanical referent is to Mendel’s work; not to his research on peas, which led to his framing of the laws of inheritance, but rather to his fruitless subsequent research on hawkweeds, recommended by the scientist Nägeli. Principles of sexual reproduction lay at the heart of his failure: hawkweeds, which reproduce asexually by parthenogenesis, failed to conform to the patterns of inheritance established by his experiments on the sexually reproducing peas. The wayward behaviour of the hawkweed is mirrored in the narrator’s marriage, which, after successful reproduction, has transmuted into an asexual form. In the modern tale, Mendel’s research becomes a form of cultural and sexual capital as the narrator, a woman, who like Mendel is set outside the scientific establishment, tries to increase her allure to her geneticist partner by dramatising her links to Mendel. When the tales of oral memory, crafted to suggest an intimate relation to the origins of his discipline, fail to work, she offers papers, tangible evidence of an historical lineage which clinches the deal. Her value, she realises, lies in ‘the way I was linked so closely to other times and places’ (24). In this story about the power of stories, and the ways in which we draw on the past to construct our sense of identity, science provides both an overarching theory of replication, and the cultural content of self-defi ning narratives of descent. As wife and mother, the narrator sits in her husband’s genetics lecture for thirty years, listening to him appropriate and reproduce her Mendelian tale: ‘The one I told him, in which Mendel is led astray by a condescending fellow scientist and the behavior of the hawkweeds. The one in which science is not just unappreciated, but bent by loneliness and longing’ (13). Success in breeding has not blunted the loneliness and longing which suff uses the narrator’s own interpretation of Mendel’s life. Her relations with her husband are based on a form of withholding, of a second tale which for her gives meaning to the

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fi rst, in which the Mendelian story is repeated and transmuted in the next generation, fashioning her life. She is, she declares, a woman who knows ‘a pistil from a stamen’ (17). Just as her grandfather had helped Mendel in the sexual reproduction of plants, so she as a child worked with Tati in his nursery. The sexual propagation of plants becomes tragically confused, however, with generational, sexual, racial and political confl ict when her grandfather, a Czech, believes he sees his boss, a German, molesting her. In the ensuing struggle the German slips and dies, and her grandfather is accused of murder. With extraordinary concision, Mendelian genetics, and the tale of his rivalry with Nägeli, are reworked through subsequent generations in dramas of ethnic hatred and sexual trauma. The narrator measures her life through Mendel, seeing herself in relation to pairs of men: ‘Mendel and Nägeli, Mendel and Tati; Tati and Leiniger, Tati and me’ (27). The unspoken coupling here is that of her childhood self and the German boss Leiniger, whose lust in old age leads to his death. Her hidden story, with its traumatic reinterpretation of Mendelian inheritance, only emerges into partial light with her own re-entry into sexual vitality. Stimulated by the presence of young German researcher Sebastian, she seizes control of her tale of Mendel from her astonished husband, who had come to regard it as his own. Shaping and controlling of history become once more part of the dynamics of sexual exchange, although this time unsuccessfully. The German’s rejection reprises the assault by Leiniger, whilst the Third Reich’s preoccupation with purity of race and breeding are retrospectively layered over Mendel’s gentle experiments with peas. Sebastian’s study of Rassenkreise, or race circles, and the eruption of the German word into the narrative, parallel the narrator’s own recourse to her grandfather’s insult, ‘Prase’, and the hidden history it represents. Whilst Sebastian becomes a famous scientist, her husband, Robert, by contrast, loses direction as genetics moves on from Mendel, and he is left stranded with his stories, which students no longer wish to hear, a form of Ancient Mariner of science. ‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’ is not a neo-Victorian story; it eschews the over-used structure of paralleled nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives to reflect more broadly on the workings of memory and inheritance. Mendel’s laws of inheritance work at a physical level—Robert’s genetic mutation (he had six fi ngers) is passed not to his daughter, but his granddaughter. Structures of replication work, however, more pervasively at cultural, social and personal levels, raising questions about the relationship between scientific law and individual will. The issues in play are those addressed by Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), or Jude the Obscure (1895)—how far are Tess and Jude determined by their ancestry, or their own interpretation and internalisation of the workings of heredity? At heart the questions are those highlighted by the great nineteenth-century founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim, in his study of suicide (1897): how can an act, whose essence appears to be its voluntariness, yet be statistically

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predictable? Barrett’s story shows the power of oral and familial transmission of memories, and their translation into culturally defi ning narratives. It also traces the ways in which the individual makes sense of his or her life by creating and imposing patterns and symmetries, defi ning selfhood through a replication of the past. Barrett’s narrative is consistently subtle, and understated; as the story unfolds, the fruitless work of a nineteenthcentury monk on the reproduction of hawkweeds illuminates the cultural, intellectual, and sexual frustrations of a woman at the end of the twentieth century. ‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’ reaches back through memory to the nineteenth century, exploring in the process how the dry scientific principles of sexual reproduction are re-enacted in the ways in which we engage with the scientific stories of our past.

CULTURAL MEMORY II: HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry is a twenty-fi rst-century tale suff used with Victorian tropes and concerns. The long fi ngers of the Victorian age reach out from their graves. Spatially and thematically, the novel is dominated by Highgate Cemetery where, it is noted, Karl Marx and George Eliot are the star attractions. As in Possession (1990), perspective is supplied by a young academic, who in this case is writing a thesis on the cemetery. He imagines the cemetery ‘as a prism through which he could view Victorian society at its most sensationally, splendidly, irrationally excessive; in their conflation of hygienic reform and status-conscious innovation, the Victorians had created Highgate Cemetery as a theatre of mourning, a stage set of eternal repose’ (Niffenegger 2009, 52). In its conjunction of psychoanalytic and materialist interpretive tools, the reading is persuasive, but Robert himself loses faith in his own theory; as individual biographies ‘seduce’ him, he becomes ‘sidetracked by anecdote’: ‘He began to take the cemetery personally and lost all perspective’ (52). The dilemma of the researcher, seduced by the particularity of materials so that controlling theoretical narratives cease to hold, is also that of the individual writ large. Like ‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’, Her Fearful Symmetry addresses how we retell and negotiate our relations to the past, both immediate and historical. Controlling distance, in this case, is wonderfully disrupted by unruly Victorian narratives, entering into and taking possession of both characters and literary structure, so that the Victorians’ preoccupation with life after death starts to appear rational and understated, compared with the excesses of the contemporary plot. As a reworking of the Victorian ghost story, the novel is concerned with afterlife in all its multifarious meanings. The opening of the novel, with its teasing chapter title ‘The End’, is deeply, and horribly, matter of fact: ‘Elspeth died while Robert was standing in front of a vending machine watching tea shoot into a small plastic

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cup’ (3). There is no grand Victorian death scene; this contemporary version of death is unspeakably banal, as if life itself is indeed nothing more than a stuttering flow into an ugly plastic container, which then abruptly ceases. Without shift of tone, we move from Elspeth’s final thoughts, to the gurgle of death, to her disembodied spirit looking down on her material self, before she becomes ‘scattered nothingness’ (4). The trope of final, out of body experience is becoming so naturalised in contemporary culture, it scarcely disrupts the flat realism of the scene. Robert, in his response, a young man curled around the body of a middle-aged woman, mirrors and indeed exceeds some of the most melodramatic excesses of gothic fiction, but the narrative is deliberately stripped of the language and sentiments of the gothic. When Elspeth and Robert discussed what she could leave him after death, he suggested reincarnation or that Victorian favourite, a lock of hair; Elspeth countered with a twenty-fi rst-century equivalent, cloning, or the gift of her twin nieces. The fearful symmetry of the title captures the relations between past and present, this life and after life, and also the questions of individuation and identity which arise when you live with a mirror image of yourself. Like Barrett’s Mendelian tale, Niffenegger’s story is concerned with replication: Elspeth and her identical twin, Edie, have themselves been replicated (without, it seems, any obvious intrusion of male genetic material), in their more youthful versions, Julia and Valentina. The Victorian novel was of course obsessed with twinning and doubling, and how it could operate across class or generation. In Bleak House (1853), Lady Dedlock is replicated in her maid, Hortense, but also in her daughter Esther, whilst The Woman in White (1860) offers the classic doubling of Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick, across the class divide. Francis Galton, in his ‘The History of Twins’ (1875), took the preoccupation into a new scientific dimension, laying down the foundations for subsequent psychological and sociological studies of the relative effects of nature and nurture. Perhaps most germane to Niffenegger’s work is Hardy’s disturbing last novel, The Well-Beloved (1897), with its replication of woman, and male sexual desire, across the generations, as the protagonist falls in love serially with a woman, her daughter, and granddaughter. When Robert fi rst sees the twins, ‘[h]e was enchanted. They were like an early Elspeth, a previous version that had been withheld from him until now. They’re so young. And so strange. My God, they look like they are about twelve’ (98). The perception of their youth does not prevent him from lusting after them; the twins are, in a different form, the child woman so desired by the Victorians. In this novel, disturbance is partially smoothed away by making Robert’s initial relationship with an older woman, so it becomes less troubling in repetition than in The Well-Beloved. As Freud noted in ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), doubling and haunting are intimately related. Robert, as a true aspiring Victorian, wishes that Elspeth would haunt him, but ‘she was not haunting him, except in memory, where she dwindled and blazed at all the wrong moments’ (54). Niffenegger plays on

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the relationship between psychological and literal interpretations of haunting; the uncontrolled flares of memory become literalised when the twins discover that Elspeth is haunting their flat. There is no sense, however, of the uncanny, or the supernatural. Freud observes that the uncanny in magical practices, or the minds of neurotics, occurs when there is ‘the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality’ (Freud 1985, 367). Niffenegger erases these distinctions between the psychical and material world: Elspeth is a down-to-earth ghost, treated as an entirely natural phenomenon by the twins and Robert. In a playful note to the neo-Victorian reconstructive industry, she has to learn how to be a ghost: she wishes she had read more Le Fanu for tips on haunting (Niffenegger 2009, 134), and mixes up reading of Middlemarch and Emma with Turn of the Screw and bits of M. R. James and Poe to learn about ghosts (275). She follows the usual patterns of signalling a ghostly presence, such as slightly rearranging furniture and significant objects, before she realises that she can write in dust, pondering as she does so that ‘household dust was largely comprised of shed human skin cells. So perhaps I’m writing with bits of my former body’ (215). New meaning is given to the liturgical phrase, ‘from dust to dust’, and to central feminist tenets: she is not writing on but in the body. Like the ghostly Elspeth, Robert and the twins also turn to Victorian literature and culture in order to navigate their way through the cultural, social and psychological spaces of contemporary life. Julia and Valentina read the Lonely Planet guide, and Dickens (70), to prepare for their trip to London, whilst Robert, consumed with interest in Victorian thanatology and burial practices, is erotically fascinated by the story of Lizzie Siddall. We are told twice that he has little interest in the novels of Mrs Henry Wood (160, 261), presumably because the resurrection of the dead wife in East Lynne is a sham (she never died in the first place). Arriving in London, the twins’ responses are framed by Alice in Wonderland (82) and Dickens (in the person of their lawyer, 91). The most Dickensian figure in the tale, however, is set outside a Victorian frame. Martin, setter of crossword puzzles and translator of ancient texts, is introduced in startling terms as he steps out of the shower: ‘[H]e was bright red, as though a superhuman housewife had parboiled him to extract impurities’ (18). The conceit is pure Dickens, but the character, with his obsessive compulsive disorder is not allowed to languish as a Dickensian ‘grotesque’ but becomes the sympathetic pivot of the novel, counterpointing the main tale. With his obsessions organised around the controlling idea of symmetry (19), and his piles of boxes which contain, he informs Julia, ‘emotion. In the form of objects’ (131), he forms a condensed, internalised version of the death rituals and grandiose tombs of the Victorian cemetery. Symmetry becomes a form of control, a way of imposing meaning in the face of death and loss, but it also, as the twins know to their cost, acts as a form of imprisonment. In a novel preoccupied with resurrection, it is Martin who, in conquering his fears and all those repressed emotions embodied in his boxes, experiences a true rebirth.

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As victim of a ‘superhuman housewife’, Martin inhabits the inherent ambiguities identified by Freud in ideas of the homely or ‘heimlich’, suggesting at once an intimate home tended by a ‘careful housewife’ (Freud 1985, 343), but also a terrain of hidden secrets. Such ambivalence gives rise to Freud’s notion of the ‘unheimlich’, or uncanny, and the psychological disturbance created by doubling and repetition. The double itself, he observes, originally conceived (in the figure of the soul), as ‘an assurance of immortality’, becomes in reverse ‘the uncanny harbinger of death’ (357). Her Fearful Symmetry gives literal form to this insight. The twins, in their mirrored state, are both blessed and cursed by symmetry. Niffenegger is fascinated by this replication of selfhood, and the comforts, and traumas, it delivers, particularly at the point of movement into adult sexuality. With the added dimension of sexual rivalry with her alternate mirror image, the ghost of her mother/aunt, Valentina is doubly imprisoned. Her planned escape, through death and revivification, is deeply overdetermined, picking up on Victorian stratagems, associated with the cemetery, to prevent being buried alive (a fate Freud describes as ‘the most uncanny thing of all’, 366), and Victorian fictional texts, both Collins’s Woman in White (which Valentina reads as she hatches her plot (Niffenegger 2009, 275), and Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) with its ghastly transfusion scene. Niffenegger creates a determinedly matter of fact recounting of both planned death, and subsequent revivification. Despite all the gothic elements, including grave robbing, the dominant tone is not that of horror and the macabre, but realism, which verges on the comic. The revived corpse of Valentina—inhabited by Elspeth’s ghost—immediately wishes for sex, although ‘her breath smelled wrong, like spoiled food, like the hedgehog he’d found dead in the heating system at the cemetery’s office’ (353). Whilst Freud attributes the experience of the uncanny to the desire to return to the mother’s body (Freud 1985, 368), the plot is here reversed, with the mother inhabiting the child’s body. Valentina had clearly not understood the import of The Woman in White, focusing no doubt on the question of doubling, rather than the stealing of identity in death. Niffenegger has rewritten ‘Sleeping Beauty’ so that the wicked stepmother steals the prince. The disturbing quality of Her Fearful Symmetry lies less in the gothic trappings of the plot, than in the ‘monstrous selfishness’ (Niffenegger 2009, 339) of the characters involved, particularly that of Elspeth, now revealed as the twins’ mother, who has been prepared to trick, manipulate, and indeed kill her own daughter in order to regain her own life and lover. We learn early on that the family mausoleum has ‘a bas-relief of a pelican feeding her young with her own blood, a symbol of the Resurrection’ (11). The plot offers a grotesque reversal of this motif, where instead of giving her own blood to feed her child, the mother feeds upon the corpse of her own daughter to recreate herself in a youthful bodily form. Christian theology and the Victorian preoccupation with the possibilities of life after death are reinterpreted through the ruthless individualism of our age, and its cult of youth. The myth of the pelican is supplanted by a Darwinian vision of

190 Sally Shuttleworth a mother eating her young, and the survival of the fittest—Elspeth, in her rejuvenated form, gives birth to another child. This is a parable for the Botox age, when Victorian preoccupations with life after death have been replaced by the development of the science of ‘human enhancement’.7 In his poem ‘Heredity’ (c. 1900), Hardy contemplates the ‘family face’ which, in place of any theological alternative, offers a form of evolutionary immortality: ‘Flesh perishes, I live on’ (1975, 434). It is an ominous, disturbing poem, which construes genealogical replication and the triumph over oblivion it confers as a form of personal threat, consuming and overriding individuality. Writing a hundred years later, Barrett and Niffenegger also address the theme of replication and afterlife. Both are resolutely secular texts: Niffenegger’s title silently invokes the ‘immortal hand or eye’ of Blake’s poem, ‘The Tyger’ (1794), but the Almighty has no place in this work, except as a begetter of Victorian thanatological rituals. Both works are concerned with biological, cultural and historical replication, and the dramas of symmetry. ‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’ is a carefully crafted piece in which the genetic laws of inheritance operate as both theme and organising principle, enfolding within itself a study of cultural memory and repetition, and the negotiation of personal identity through narrative. Her Fearful Symmetry is more anarchic and messy, with its Victorian strands refusing to be constrained. Genetic replication here operates both within and across generations, both affi rming and threatening individual identity. The tale of the twins is set in counterpoint to that of Martin, with his rituals of symmetry, as he battles to control the repressed emotions symbolised by his boxes. In both cases we are in the territory of Freud’s uncanny, where the double, or familiar, returns again in threatening form. The text as a whole is placed within the nineteenth-century frame defi ned by Highgate Cemetery, with the protagonists consuming and re-enacting, in a different key, the plots, rituals, and obsessions of the Victorian age. History, in this case, returns as farce, or more accurately, the comically macabre. Neither work attempts any form of historical ventriloquism, or reconstruction of the Victorian novel. If there is pastiche, in Jameson’s terms, it is knowing and playful. With hindsight, Jameson’s analysis in 1991 of the ‘libidinal historicism’ which accompanied an increasing ‘historical deafness’ was extraordinarily prescient (18, xi). The advent of the World Wide Web has only increased ahistorical modes of thought; we are bombarded by texts and images which arrive shorn of historical lineage, without order or causality. At the same time, the number of neo-Victorian novels has grown exponentially. The label, of course, covers a very wide spectrum of work, but with much of this material there remains the danger that in creating an atmospheric, re-imagined Victorian age, they actively undermine our attempts to understand, historically, the culture of the nineteenth century, and its relations to our own. I depart here from Kohlke’s suggestion that the label neo-Victorian be applied to all works ‘prominently engaging with or set outright in the nineteenth century’ including works that are ‘escapist

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exoticism’ (this volume, 21). To defi ne the category so broadly is to lose that quality of self-conscious questioning of our relations to the Victorian era which helped generate the sense that a new category of fiction had arrived, one quite distinct from earlier forms of the historical novel. Once fiction loses that sense of questioning, and awareness of its own placement in time, then the ‘Victorian’ in fiction can become little more than outward trappings, which help to accentuate, in Jameson’s terms, our ‘historical deafness’. Neither of the texts I have examined in this essay fit easily into the category of neo-Victorian, however broadly defi ned, but offer instead new ways of engaging with our Victorian heritage without resorting to ventriloquism. ‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’ and Her Fearful Symmetry do not attempt to replicate Victorian forms. They have, instead, taken replication as their central theme and organising framework, pursuing its implications through biological, cultural, social and textual forms. In their very different ways, they explore how the legacies of the nineteenth century enter into the dramas of identity in the postmodern age.

NOTES 1. Fowles’s formulation was applied to the avant-garde modern novelist. In current debates around evolutionary theory, the most vocal supporter of atheism, Richard Dawkins, is frequently accused of creating a new religion out of the tenets of evolutionary theory. 2. Examples of these categories include: low life: Charles Palliser, The Quincunx (1989), Sheri Holman, The Dress Lodger (1999); sexuality: Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet (1998); psychiatry: Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (1997), Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces (2005), Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze (2009). For a discussion of Holman’s The Dress Lodger, see Christy Rieger’s contribution in this volume, and also Lena Steveker’s analysis of Foulds’s The Quickening Maze. 3. For a discussion of the various categorisations of postmodern Victorian fiction see Kirchknopf 2008, 59–66, and Bormann 2002, 55–62. Excellent discussions of the field are to be found in Kucich and Sadoff (2000); Kaplan (2007); Hargreaves (2008); Gutleben (2001); Clayton (2003); and Arias and Pulham (2009). 4. Harry Patch (17 June 1898–25 July 2009) inspired a song by Radiohead, ‘Harry Patch (In Memory Of)’, which was recorded shortly before his death, and premiered on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme the day before his funeral. Patch was a veteran of Passchendaele, and his recorded interviews in the last years of his life, talking about the senselessness of war, were very widely reported. 5. ‘List of British Supercentenarians’. Wikipedia. The list appears to be updated daily. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_supercentenarians, accessed 22 June 2013.’ 6. The UK was slightly slower off the mark with reference to oral history than the US, but thanks in large part to the labours of Professor Paul Thompson, the Oral History Society and Journal were founded in 1971. Professor Thompson was also behind the invaluable development of ‘National Life Stories’ at the British Library Sound Archive (www.bl.uk/nls).

192 Sally Shuttleworth 7. See, for example, Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom, eds., Human Enhancement (Oxford: OUP, 2009), which looks at the ethical issues raised by the development of drugs and technologies which could prolong and utterly transform what we currently understand as ‘natural’ human life.

Coda The Firm of Charles and Charles— Authorship, Science and Neo-Victorian Masculinities Cora Kaplan On my way to my London hairdresser’s once every month or so, I pass by the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street—one of several addresses associated with him that have become mini museums and popular tourist attractions. A few years ago, with some time on my hands, I thought to pay it a visit, only to discover a coy little notice posted on the door—‘House closed: Mr Dickens is being refurbished’. Turning the corner I saw that 12 Rogers Street, a building that had been in the process of being ‘refurbished’ for some months, had a new name: ‘Charles Darwin House’. On a whim I went in and spoke to the receptionist, who explained that Charles Darwin House contained the offices of the Biochemical Society, the British Ecological Society and the Society for Experimental Biology, and that, yes, she said, slightly embarrassed, they had existed under another name— something with green in the title, but had taken advantage of Darwin’s annus mirabilis to rebrand. On I went, to Waitrose Supermarket at the Brunswick Centre nearby, where I purchased, among other things, some Natural Selection California Crimson Raisins, whose blurb on the back of the packet is titled ‘The Story’, and reads as follows: In 1859 Charles Darwin was the fi rst to recognise the benefits of evolution in nature—naturally occurring developments in animals and plants that offer a subtle advantage over their counterparts. Based in Shrewsbury, the birthplace of Darwin, Evolution Foods have searched the planet to bring you Natural Selection, a range of old favourites all offering unique character that we think you’ll fi nd highly appealing. I would love to meet and congratulate the copywriter of this delightful item. The way the local (Shrewsbury) and the global (searching the planet) are brought together with celebrity (Darwin’s birthplace) is particularly fi ne, but the transformation of ‘natural selection’ (itself Darwin’s more diplomatic rendering of the crueller processes of evolution) into an ‘appealing’ choice of something at once old, new and unique is a stroke of genius. I like to think that he or she is a successful English Literature graduate of one of Britain’s distinguished universities.

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The refurbishment and marketing—local and global—both of Mr Dickens and Mr Darwin as part of the heritage industry is not, of course, a new phenomenon. In the anticipation of the respective anniversaries of their birth, and in the aftermath of these celebrations, both figures have been regularly brushed up and resold as quintessentially historical, absolutely modern and, of course, as Dickens famously said of himself, ‘inimitable’. The contiguity of their birth dates—2012 and 2009—has made them into complementary figures, paired avatars of literature and science. Only rarely do we imagine them as jostling for fame, although in 2000 Darwin did replace Dickens on the £10 banknote. Curiously the act of celebration, meant to make them larger in the popular imagination, also has the effect of cutting them down to size. I am in possession of a Darwin doll, bought at the Wellcome Institute, and I see that a ‘Little Thinker’ Dickens doll is one of several of the novelist available on the web. Darwin’s ideas may have been, as we are often told, ‘dangerous’, but the man himself, it now appears, was cuddly. George Levine’s Darwin Loves You (2006) defends the scientist against his detractors, and Jon Amiel’s 2009 fi lm Creation shows Darwin in a family setting, fighting and failing to save his much loved daughter Annie from the death that awaits her, remembering her as he agonises over the writing of The Origin of the Species. Dolls from Dickens’s works, also for sale, are, interestingly, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, evoking family, sentiment and Christmas rather than the author himself who brutally ejected his blameless wife from his home and refused her access to their children. Many of the contributions to this volume highlight a key aspect of neoVictorianism, its nostalgia for the past, sometimes diagnosed as a ‘desire for repetition’, psychoanalytically indicative of an unresolved relationship to trauma. The past as lost pleasure and buried violence are both seen as in play in neo-Victorian returns. Psychoanalysis has provided one theoretical tool for analysing the neo-Victorian; more recently, evolution has provided another. Yet suggestive as it is to think of the evolution of representations of the Victorian over time in Darwinian terms one should perhaps caution against pushing that appealing analogy too far, remembering that historical change should not be seen as an organic process, even a mediated one, but as an active social, political and cultural force. A case in point is the transformation of Dickens across the millennial decades into both an undisputed ‘national treasure’ and ‘our contemporary’, and, as contributors to this volume have noted, the less predictable recasting of Darwin as a great literary stylist, as much ‘writer’ as scientist, a rebranding that at once elevates his individual contribution to knowledge and culture and softens the hard edge of its content. One of the developments that sets the stage for this reinvention is that imaginative writing, in its widest definition, especially that from past centuries, has acquired a new ethical as well as aesthetic gloss. This too might be seen as a neo-Victorian return, a twenty-first-century version of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘The Hero as a Man of Letters’ in Heroes and Hero

Coda 195 Worship (1841). Carlyle’s depictions of his literary ‘heroes’—the idiosyncratic Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns—have something to say to the present impulse to ennoble writing and authors. Like him we prefer our cultural idols to be figures from the past rather than the bedevilled present. Carlyle’s sour view of his own age resonates all too well with today’s dystopian structures of feeling—postcolonial melancholia in Paul Gilroy’s evocative locution (2005). Yet this downbeat social imaginary, even at its bleakest, still harbours for many a secular humanist a yearning for something (and/or someone) to admire. This longing, which exists in radical and conservative forms, finds a common composite object of veneration in enduring writing and an idea of authorship, which does not exclude our ‘great’ women writers, but has a very particular gendered investment in male authorship. Today, one might argue, in the wake of the feminist revolution, but also as a symptom of its backlash, we are more comfortable if, like Carlyle, we imagine our male authors to be flawed personalities, but redeemed—for their readers and in their public legacies—through the ethical and aesthetic value, and distinctive pleasures that their writing confers. This is not a neat moralising trade-off but one that thrives on its apparent contradictions. The longstanding and not-sosecret libidinal appeal of ‘wild’ masculinity sits alongside its critique and its potential transformation into the ideal of domestic man, of companionate faithful men and fathers. The current elevation of imaginative writing with authorship as its necessary corollary creates a category of masculine subjectivity constructed from and resolving—if only temporarily—the paradox of modern masculinity. The turn to imaginative writing as a society’s most searching discourse in periods when public culture and ethics seem at an all-time low or politics disappoints is not a new response. But the transformation of scientist into ‘writer’ and ‘novelist’ into social scientist in the last three decades, so that each can represent a figure in which the scientific and creative imagination are successfully joined and merged is an interesting if not entirely new development. When, for example, I began my teaching career at Sussex University in the late 1960s, Dickens was not a particularly favoured author in the nineteenth-century curriculum, much less, as the Dickens Project would have it, the first ‘modern’ novelist. In those relatively left-wing days he was seen as one among many nineteenth-century reformist writers—his radicalism compromised by his association with conservative Carlyle. Nor had Darwin, in this period, been appropriated as an ‘author’ for literary study—he was notably absent from the most innovative interdisciplinary course in the Sussex curriculum, ‘The Modern European Mind’, which, in the late sixties, highlighted Marx, Freud and Nietzsche; even now, some forty years on, MEM, still going strong, does not include Darwin. Darwin’s cultural and scientific legacy in this period was more often the target of criticism from the left of the humanities and the sciences. He was certainly not seen as the ethical, empathetic and culturally benevolent figure that ‘literary Darwin’, as Steven Shapin calls him (2010, passim), has become.

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Times do change. Pioneering monographs by Gillian Beer (Darwin’s Plots, 1983/2000) and George Levine (Darwin and the Novelists, 1988) successfully promoted Darwin as the author of the most compelling of nineteenth-century narratives as well as the key to our understanding of mid- and late-Victorian fiction. As a result of the initiative of cross-disciplinary scholars the discourses of science and literature in the Victorian period are now viewed as deeply intertwined, their narratives and figures of speech—metaphorically and metonymically—informing and structuring each other. English studies has widened its defi nitions of the literary to include scientific narrative and argument, and historians of science, if not science tout court, have acknowledged the usefulness of literary analysis in thinking about the ways in which scientific paradigms are built, revised and dismantled. The period before the professionalisation of science, when gentlemen of independent means like Darwin could indulge their interests, is, for cultural analysts, a kind of golden age for this rapprochement—and neo-Victorian writers from John Fowles through A. S. Byatt have found it a particularly rich resource. Yet historians of science are not necessarily persuaded by Darwin’s emergence as author, or the general hype surrounding the double anniversary of his birth and his most influential text. Steven Shapin, in a polemical essay in the London Review of Books, ‘The Darwin Show’ (2010), attempts to discover what the extravagant claims—that Darwin had ‘made the modern world’—and the extended celebrations of 2009 were all about. Shapin looks at the ways in which 2009 foregrounded modern ‘Darwinianism’ but paid scant attention to the historical Darwin, and when it did, did so with rather suspect motives. He reminds us that ‘[t]he very idea of paying homage to the great scientists of the past is problematic. Scientists are not widely supposed either to be heroes or to have heroes’. ‘Modern sensibilities insist’, Shapin says, ‘on scientists’ moral equivalence to anyone else, and notions of an impersonal Scientific Method, which have gained official dominance over older ideas of scientific genius, make the personalities of scientists irrelevant in principle’. Science, he argues, advances through paradigms, not persons. His analysis offers a clue to why Darwin needs to become an ‘author’ above all for literary studies to embrace and anoint him. ‘Homage to the scientist and to the artist sits astride one of our great cultural faultlines’, says Shapin. ‘What is owed to reality, and what to the creative work—even the imaginative, literary and political work—of those who are said to lift the veil of reality’s structural and dynamic secrets?’ The run up to Darwin’s year—his birth and the 150th anniversary of Origins—and its aftermath has certainly worried that line. George Levine has devoted two recent books to giving Darwin and Darwinism an affective and ethical makeover as a cultural hero of today’s sensibilities. In Darwin Loves You (2006) he argues that Darwin ‘has survived not only as the icon of a revolutionary shift in the way we think about origins and humanity but as an unpleasant idea [ . . . ,] the most striking

Coda 197 embodiment of that scientific rationalism that, in Max Weber’s terminology, “disenchanted” the modern world’ (1). Against this view, shared by many of Darwin’s own contemporaries, and promoted by twentieth-century popular scientists such as Stephen Pinker, Levine says that for him, personally, Darwin provides a ‘kind of secular epiphany’ (272) and argues more broadly for Darwin as a ‘usable model’ of ‘nontheistic enchantment’ or ‘secular re-enchantment’ (273). Conceding that Darwin shared ‘some of the fundamental Victorian biases and assumptions, of his class, of his gender, of his race’ and that these may even be ‘constitutive’ elements of his theory (272), Levine nevertheless suggests that Darwin’s ‘feeling for the organism, a remarkable capacity to think himself into the creatures whose history he was trying to understand’ coupled with his passion for his subject and his ‘enchanted vision of a mindless and chance-driven world’, a vision that induced in him feelings of ‘awe and wonder’ leads away from hierarchy and division (272–73). Instead it inaugurates a vision of ‘kinship’ in ‘diversity’ and a world full of affect that does not compromise scientific clarity in which the ‘sublime of the ordinary’ could be recognised and a sense of life’s mystery—and possibility—retained (272–73). Levine’s book is scholarly, thoughtful and compelling, whether one buys its argument or resists it.1 However, it is just its poetic excess, like Shapin’s countervailing polemic, that indicates how much is at stake in these opposed versions of the legacy of the man and his work. In Darwin Loves You, Levine refers to the ‘enchanted’ nature of his prose. In a slimmer, slighter follow-up, Darwin The Writer (2011), he explores that prose and its constitutive importance to the ideas it conveyed. Darwin the Writer celebrates Darwin’s ‘remarkable imagination’ and the ‘quiet power’ of his writing and attempts to persuade us that what his work means ‘inheres as much in the nuances of feeling, the affi rmation of an engaged self, and the texture of his arguments’ (211) as in his ideas. Those ideas themselves along with his assessment of the writing is reworked by Levine into a sort of secular theology, an affective, aestheticised ethics to restore hope and an element of optimism in a peculiarly dark, unhopeful present. Levine prefaces this volume with the story of two encounters with members of the American public which moved him in part to write the book—one with a female fundamentalist at one of his academic lectures who tells him he is damned for even believing in evolution, another with an ‘ignorant’ barista in a Bleeker Street coffee shop who was convinced that Darwin said we were descended from monkeys (x, xii). These stories—whose significance might be open to interpretations other than those the author provided—are an odd way of rationalising Levine’s own wish that Darwin’s life and work be recognised as model through which to re-enchant a fallen world. They tell us more perhaps about the political pessimism of the critic, and the historical moment that has generated, among certain cultural commentators at least, such a strong desire for a cultural icon, than about Darwin’s own personal, scientific, literary or ethical legacy.

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Dickens’s Birthday Party year promised a celebration along the same order as Darwin’s 2009. At the very least it has intensified the ways in which Dickens’s celebrity status as the great Victorian writer has skewed the critical treatment of his work and his life, and the relentless imbrication of the two. Of course the rise and rise of his critical and popular fortunes in the last three decades or so—with new editions of his correspondence and journalism—has greatly enhanced our understanding of his work. Michael Slater’s recent, long awaited biography (2009) highlighted the relationship of Dickens’s fiction to his voluminous writing in other genres—to privilege the work as Dickens asked us to in his will. Yet his everywhereness on stage and screens large and small, and his gold standard currency in the academy, has had another less salutary effect—a resistance to criticising him at all, either as social and political man or writer. Biographers should like their subjects and they mostly do, and critics too must have some sympathy— perhaps in the old fashioned eighteenth-century usage—with their texts and topics. But there is an important difference between sympathetic analysis which is productive and creative and a kind of identification—professional in this case as well as or as much as psychological—with one’s subject. Twenty-fi rst-century biographies hold back from defending Dickens’s treatment of his wife Catherine, or indeed his children, detailed at length in Robert Gottlieb’s Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (2012). Slater without moralising too much in retro-Victorian fashion takes a nicely judged, we might say ‘ethical’ distance from Dickens’s behaviour to Catherine throughout, whereas Claire Tomalin’s shorter, more popular Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) is more openly critical. However the question of Dickens’s relationship to Nelly Ternan remains more contentious and disturbing—at least among biographers. Tomalin’s brilliant The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1991) not only claims that they were lovers, but gives qualified support to the evidence that they had a child that died, and even suggests that we do not dismiss evidence that Dickens may have died in Nelly’s house rather than at Gad’s Hill. In response—to debunk this and other claims in Tomalin’s work—Michael Slater has written The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (2012), tracing the story of Dickens and Nelly as it erupts over time—from Dickens’s own day to ours. A common reader today, laying aside his treatment of Catherine and of his children, might see the Dickens/Nelly story as humanising the great man. But Slater, wrongly I think, concludes that the story still has interest for the media because ‘one of the main things Dickens still represents in our culture is the idea of blissful, quintessentially English, domesticity’ (2012, 191). To support this he cites Kathryn Hughes in a 1984 BBC programme, Dickens’s Secret Lover, as saying if the liaison were proved to be sexual, its effect on ‘the public mind’ would be ‘like fi nding Father Christmas had been to a brothel’ (191). Less than credible in 1984, this ill-expressed view, which implicitly equates a mistress to a prostitute, seems even more absurd today, not only misogynist but both ignorant of

Coda 199 and condescending towards the mores of a popular audience. The projection onto the sensibilities of the supposed public of a queasiness that seems rather to inhere in the critics, seems to me symptomatic of the way in which Dickens scholars themselves wish to preserve Dickens’s image, an example of the sort of fetishising of the past through its evocation that this volume’s editors warn against in their introduction. Into even the most subtle readings of Dickens—take, for example, Contemporary Dickens (2009), an excellent collection of essays edited by Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David—one sometimes feels there has crept a kind of self-censoring piety, in which Dickens can never be seen to fail or be wrong or even to come in on a level field with other writers but must always get better and better, more and more prescient the more we look at him. The editors of Contemporary Dickens have two aims which they believe makes their book different from other collections: ‘it seeks to disclose the nineteenth-century origins of many of those issues that currently absorb us: not only was Dickens fully contemporary with his age [ . . . ] but he is also our contemporary’, ‘a great Victorian’ and ‘a great precursor of modernity’ (2009, 2). ‘The second primary contribution of this volume lies in its illuminating the particular importance of Dickens, particularly late Dickens—as a novelist, reformer, activist, ethicist, psychologist, anthropologist, and biographical subject—in the critical reassessments being undertaken across the disciplines’ (3). This is the moment where the Dickens project, with a small p, crosses the Darwin project I have been discussing. Just as Shapin points out that Darwin illegitimately comes to stand in for and give a figurative nobility to the whole movement of natural science towards and away from his theory of evolution—and to become par excellence the ‘good’ man as author and authority—so late Dickens comes to be a polymath as well as an object of study: a biographical subject, a political figure, but also a progenitor of the human sciences. If his life was not specially ethical, in his work he is an ‘ethicist’. There is a kind of ‘airlessness’ in a criticism framed by these excessive claims and the way in which the social history of the period becomes a device through which Dickens’s claims to greatness in his time and through his legacy can be foregrounded. And this perspective leads to strange manoeuvres when it comes to those moments where Dickens’s expressed political views do not seem to meet the requirements of twentyfi rst-century political consensus. A good example of this is the vexed question about Dickens’s initial response in his correspondence to the atrocities committed in the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857—the massacre of women and children at Cawnpore; in his letter to A. Burdett Coutts, he notes that if he were commander in Chief in India he would do his utmost ‘to exterminate the Race upon whom the late cruelties rested [ . . . ] to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth’ (Tomalin 2011, 321–22). Critics and biographers point out that Dickens’s later comments and the range of writing on India in Household Words (1850–1859) are more measured and complex, and that, at the revelation of British retaliations, he draws back

200 Cora Kaplan from this initial response. Michael Slater, interestingly, reads Dickens’s violent response to Cawnpore, expressed in two key letters to women friends, as deeply enmeshed in the confl icting feelings he was having at a time when he was disentangling himself in a cold-blooded manner from his marriage, targeting his wife Catherine as a bad mother as well as a temperamentally unsuited consort, a moment of anxious protectiveness for the reputation of his mistress Nelly Ternan (2009, 441). This is not an unreasonable way of understanding Dickens’s more general state of mind at this time, but it is unclear where it takes us. Does it, as Slater seems to imply, mitigate Dickens’s initial response to Cawnpore, or could the violence of Dickens’s response to the attack on women and children elsewhere, if moved along this line of psychological reasoning, be as easily brought home to himself? It is interesting that Slater does not consider this possibility. I want now to return to Darwin—especially to literary Darwin as the complementary other to Dickens the ‘great author’. If Dickens can take over the role of anthropologist and ethicist, then Darwin, through the same logic, can become a kind of novelist manqué. Levine’s depiction of the key character of his writing—its ‘nuances of feeling’, its expression of the ‘engaged self’, its very ‘texture’ suggests as much while stopping short of such a claim. Gillian Beer in the introduction to the third edition of Darwin’s Plots (2000) insists that she is not making this claim, but rather suggesting ‘that how Darwin said things was a crucial part of his struggle to think things, not a layer that can be skimmed off without loss’ (xxv). Darwin’s Plots can be credited with helping to open one of the most productive areas of interdisciplinary study—in which, as Beer says, we explore how ‘narrative and argument share methods’ and enquire ‘what differences can be maintained between narrative and argument’ (xxv). This last enquiry seems productive, as long as we do not, too quickly, collapse the two. Darwin, Beer writes, is getting younger every year. ‘He is no longer the authoritative old man with a beard substituting for God’ (xvii)—and that is certainly true of his depiction in Jon Amiel’s film Creation (2009); where he is young, beardless, and, when not angsting about publication, or grieving, a sexy ‘modern’ dad, involved with his children, in love with his wife. Instead we have, on the one hand ‘the young man eager for knowledge and adventure’ and on the other, an adult man who suffers from a range of maladies, a man whose ongoing ethical crisis about his ideas and their ramifications makes him ill. But this modest caring man, as he is now usually portrayed, does have a potential Achilles heel, which critics and historians have found in his view of non-white races, perhaps especially his shocked and aversive response to the Fuegians that he encountered during the voyage of the Beagle. He experienced, as he wrote in a letter to his sister Caroline in 1833, ‘disgust at the very sound of the voices of these miserable savages’ (1985, 304). Beer mounts a blistering defence of Darwin’s racial attitudes and their legacy against arguments which see Darwin as providing ‘a grounding vocabulary for colonialism’ (2000, xxi; 1998). Darwin’s

Coda 201 leading biographers, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, have written a whole book—Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins (2009)—which takes what is undisputed, Darwin’s deep aversion to slavery, and the anti-slavery networks in which his extended family were steeped—the brotherhood of all races as Desmond and Moore put it (passim)—as the ground from which the whole theory of the origin sprang. This, for Shapin, is a move too far: ‘It is an explosive claim. It makes the general theory of evolution an outgrowth not just of a special theory of human evolution but of moral sensibilities and a political agenda. It leaves in tatters a notion of a protected apolitical and amoral domain inhabited by Darwin’s science’ (2010). Is it right? Shapin asks fi rst, and second, ‘why the answer should matter so much?’ Shapin does not think it is right for a number of reasons, but most of all because a) there is little support that Darwin thought common descent was a decisive abolitionist tactic or b) that the institution of slavery depended on a belief that the human races had diff erent ancestries. Shapin highlights the censoring effects of heroicisation: that we must endow the man who made the modern world with conventional virtues. He believes that this leaves us with a paradox, because that man ‘was conventional in his fibre; the man whose works were used to justify ruthless competition was retiring, reticent and generous; one of history’s greatest books was written by someone who insisted that his own mental abilities were only middling’. As an historian of science, Shapin is concerned with the way in which Darwin has become a site for a modern debate about God in which he stands in for atheism rather than the agnosticism that he held on to—he was, after all, buried with full Christian rituals. I, on the other hand, am more perturbed by the family romance that has taken over some presentations of Darwin. In his book Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter and Human Evolution (2001), Randal Keynes, one of the Darwin family’s collateral descendants, explores the impact of the death of his beloved daughter Annie on Darwin and, peripherally, on the Origin as well as on other later writings. It is a fascinating, measured book of social as well as family history that investigates the spectrum of Christian beliefs in the period and the reaction of others of Darwin’s friends to their children’s death, as well as exploring the possible medical causes of Annie’s death. It is, of course, centred on the family but its claims for the relationship of Darwin’s mourning and loss to his work is modest, and interesting. Jon Amiel’s Creation, on the other hand, has a rather different slant. Annie is clearly the cleverest of the children and the closest to Darwin, so of course the one who must die; the film oscillates between scenes in which she is alive and in which she is dead and speaking to or with Darwin, and it is Annie who is seen to come to terms with the cruelty of Darwin’s theory—in one chilling scene where the children are watching a fox kill a rabbit, she explains to her siblings that the rabbit must die so the fox cubs are fed. All the ‘stories’ that Darwin tells his children are rendered as familial—the

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indigenous children who are taken off the island and educated and paraded in England, but who strip off and run back to their Fuegan parents as soon as they are brought back to the island, are not instances of savage atavism and reversion so much as the triumph of family feeling. Annie’s favourite story is the sentimental death of an orang-utan in the zoo, a creature who knows when the game is up and comforts her distraught keeper, and thus stands in for Annie’s death. The debate about the Origin and its religious foes is reduced to the ongoing standoff between Darwin and Emma, his religious—but not fundamentalist—much loved wife. Psychological interpretation is vulgarised and sentimental in the film. Darwin’s writer’s block is only removed when he can properly grieve for his daughter and put her ghost to rest. Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Huxley, his friends who come down to the country house to urge him to publish, are a kind of jokey couple—one tall, one dwarfed. A bare minimum of scenes shows Darwin doing anything remotely scientific, but we do see him, finally, writing. Family romance is a fantasy, Freud tells us, in which we imagine that we are not the children of our real, ordinary, everyday, flawed parents, but are in fact the offspring of parents of much higher social standing, parents who are in every way a superior breed. The sentimentalisation of Darwin’s ‘family life’ and the crudely instrumental use of their personal tragedy in Amiel’s fi lm is an aspect of that fantasy; manipulated by the fi lm we, the viewers, are made to believe that here was a kind of transcendental tragedy and grief—more noble than our own. The Darwinian family romance of today displaces onto Darwin a kind of sentimentalised desire for a forefather who is better than those we have—a modest ethical man in a world who, through modern interpretation, might rescue an age without ethics or modesty. Making Darwin pre-eminently an ‘author’, ‘a husband’, ‘a father’, and taking him out of the capitalist rat race in which science and academia—each with its own aggrandising forms of celebrity—are now so fully implicated, feeds that fantasy. In this coda I am clearly using the widest, most embracing defi nition of what constitutes the neo-Victorian. I believe that the fictions that have been the focus of so much of this new and fascinating field need to be read in relation to a much wider range of discourses and debates about the significance and legacy of Victorian culture as they shift and bend in the high winds of the uncertain present. How we regard past ‘genius’—who we construct as heroes and why, what stature and what agency we give to literature (and criticism) past and present—these are questions we need, as good academics and ordinary citizens of the world, to keep asking of ourselves and our work and our objects of study. It is an often told story, but an ironic one in relation to the reincarnation of Darwin that I have been describing, that towards the end of his life he ceased to be able to read poetry or appreciate music. Shakespeare was anathema—his aesthetic sensibilities had withered but he retained his lifelong pleasure in novels, which Emma read to him. He thought fiction ‘works of the imagination [ . . . ] not

Coda 203 of a very high order’ but he enjoyed them, and blessed ‘all novelists’ for the ‘wonderful relief and pleasure’ they brought to him (Beer 2000, 254). He hated unhappy endings. Darwin’s pleasure in novels as well as his typically Victorian view of their modest merits, even though no longer ours, might serve as a gentle counterweight to the present claims for the form and for authorship in the academy, in part an effect of our professional investment in both. The neo-Victorian plays with the elision of narrative fiction and ‘real’ life, but does not necessarily give it the wished for ethical status that I have been describing in this chapter. I think we need to think again about making narrative or the novel and especially their only too human authors, our moral and political guide. NOTES 1. For a related but differently framed and inflected study of Darwin, Freud and the meaning of death see the brilliant Darwin’s Worms (1999) by psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips. Phillips’s emphasis is on the way both Darwin and Freud help us to understand loss and death as an integral part of life.

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Contributors

Rosario Arias is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Malaga (Spain). She is the author of a book on psychoanalytic perspectives on the mother-daughter relationship and has co-edited (with Patricia Pulham) Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave 2009). Her volume Science, Spiritualism and Technology, a facsimile edition of spiritualist texts, which belongs to the collection Spiritualism, 1840–1930 (Routledge), with Patricia Pulham, Christine Ferguson and Tatiana Kontou, is due out this year. Her main areas of research are neo-Victorian fiction, haunting and spectrality, and revisions of the past. Her next project is a monograph on neo-Victorianism and the senses from the perspective of phenomenology. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker is a lecturer in English literature and culture at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). She has published on a variety of subjects, among them the role of religious and ethical discourses in contemporary literature and popular fi lm as in her monograph Sakrales Sehen (transcript 2009). Her current work deals with neo-Victorian and Victorian Studies. She is assistant editor of Neo-Victorian Studies and has co-edited a special volume on Spectacles and Things (2011, with Susanne Gruss). In her recent book project she explores the cultural history of perception in nineteenth-century texts as well as the re-evaluation of aesthetics in terms of aisthesis within cultural studies. Jessica Cox is a lecturer in English at Brunel University, London (UK). Her research interests include neo-Victorianism, sensation fiction, and adaptation. She is the author of a number of articles on Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the Brontës, and adaptation, editor of New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Rodopi 2012), and co-editor of a special edition of Neo-Victorian Studies (Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and Rewriting the Past 2009/10) and Women and Belief 1852–1928 (Routledge’s History of Feminism series 2012). She is currently working on a book on neo-sensation fiction.

206 Contributors Anne Enderwitz studied English and Philosophy in Berlin and Edinburgh. She was a Marie Curie Fellow at UCL, a lecturer at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies, FU Berlin (Germany). She is currently a lecturer at the Peter Szondi-Institute for Comparative Literature at the FU Berlin. Her thesis is on modernism and melancholia. Her current research interests are modernist literature (especially Conrad and Ford) and culture, early modern drama and economics, subjectivity, language and affect as well as the production of knowledge. Doris Feldmann holds the chair in English literature and culture at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). Her research and teaching areas cover English literature and culture from the Renaissance to the present with special emphasis on the complex relations between literature and other discourses (economic, philosophical, political, etc.) and media (digital media, film). She has written monographs entitled Gattungsprobleme des ‘domestic drama’ (1983) and Politik und Fiktion (1995), translated Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1992, 1996) and Gayatri C. Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2014) and co-edited Anglistik im Internet (1997), Theorising Cultural Difference and Transdifference (2006) and Viktorianismus (2013). Susanne Gruss is a lecturer in English literature and culture at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). She specialises in contemporary English literature and culture as well as in early modern drama. She has published a monograph on twentieth-century feminist writing (The Pleasure of the Feminist Text: Reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter, Rodopi 2009), and written articles on neo-Victorianism, gender, fi lm adaptation, questions of canonisation, and the Gothic. Her research interests include gender studies, fi lm and media studies, neo-Victorianism, and, more recently, the intersections of legal discourses, drama and genre on the early modern stage. She serves as assistant editor of Neo-Victorian Studies and has recently co-edited (with Nadine Boehm-Schnitker) a special issue of the journal on visual and material culture. Elizabeth Ho is Associate Professor of English at Lingnan University (Hong Kong) where she teaches a variety of classes in global literatures in English. She has published articles on neo-Victorian fiction and graphic novels in journals such as Antipodes, Cultural Critique, and College Literature and is the co-editor (with Louisa Hadley) of Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher’s Afterlife in Contemporary Culture (2010). She is the author of a monograph on global neo-Victorianism, Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (Continuum 2012) and serves as consultant editor of Neo-Victorian Studies.

Contributors

207

Cora Kaplan is Professor Emerita of English at Southampton University. She is currently an Honorary Professor in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London and a Senior Research Fellow in English at King’s College, University of London (UK). Her most recent book is Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh UP and Columbia UP 2007) and she is a General Editor, with Jennie Batchelor, of the ten volume History of British Women’s Writing (Routledge 2010). Rosa Karl is currently researching her second book project, which is concerned with the role of canonical nineteenth-century literature for contemporary heritage practices and fandom. A specialist on British Romanticism, she is the author of a monograph on Percy B. Shelley’s poetics (Paradoxe Paradiesschöpfung: Untersuchung zu einer Ethik und Rhetorik des Un-Vernünftigen in den Texten Percy Bysshe Shelleys 2011) and of several articles on Romanticism, cultural memory and literary tourism. Rosa Karl graduated from Bamberg University and holds a PhD from LMU Munich (Germany). She is currently teaching at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and LMU Munich. Marie-Luise Kohlke lectures in English literature at Swansea University (UK) with main research interests in neo-Victorianism, trauma narrative, gender and sexuality. She is the General and Founding Editor of the peer-reviewed e-journal Neo-Victorian Studies (http://neovictorianstudies.com) and co-editor (with Christian Gutleben) of Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, including Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering (2010), NeoVictorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics (2011), and Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the ReImagined Nineteenth Century (2012), with Neo-Victorian Cities: ReImagining Utopian and Dystopian Metropolises forthcoming in 2014. Christy Rieger is an associate professor of English at Mercyhurst University in Pennsylvania (US). She teaches courses in Victorian literature, gender studies, and composition. She has published essays on issues of spectatorship, interpretation and reading in the works of Ruskin, Tennyson, and D. G. Rossetti. Her current project investigates the relation between sensationalism and medical drugs in Victorian culture. Sally Shuttleworth is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (UK). Her research has been largely in the field of Victorian Studies, with a particular emphasis on the interrelations between literature and science. Her books include George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (1984), Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996),

208

Contributors

and The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840–1900 (2010). Lena Steveker teaches British Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University in Saarbrücken (Germany). Her main research interests are contemporary British literature and popular culture as well as early modern English drama. She has published several articles on cultural memory, trauma, ethics and identity in British literature. Her fi rst monograph, Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt came out with Palgrave in 2009. She is co-editor of the essay collections Heroism in the Harry Potter Series (Ashgate 2011) and Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change (forthcoming with AMS Press). She is currently writing a monograph on theatre and news culture in early modern England. Eckart Voigts is Professor of English Literature at TU Braunschweig (Germany). He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books and articles, predominantly on drama, adaptation, media and heritage culture, and neo-Victorianism, such as Introduction to Media Studies (Klett 2004), Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions since the Mid-1990s (Narr 2005), Adaptations—Performing Across Media and Genres (WVT 2009) and Refl ecting on Darwin (Ashgate, forthcoming in 2014).

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Index

A

B

Abraham, Nicolas, 12, 111–113, 122–127 Ackroyd, Peter, 21, 31, 32, 69–70, 79 adaptations: concept of, 7–9, 121; contemporary adaptations, 16n9, 137–138, 148; screen adaptations, 13, 16n6, 144; terminology for, 16n9; trauma in, 137–140, 143–149 ‘affective immersion’, 40–42, 47 Affi nity, 9, 12, 24, 117, 133 Albert, Prince, 69 Alias Grace, 165 Alice in Wonderland, 188 All the Year Round, 35 Allen, Matthew, 70–71 Ambassadors, The, 102 Amiel, Jon, 67, 194, 200–202 Anatomy Act, 157 Angels & Insects, 31, 80, 180 Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter and Human Evolution, 201 Anning, Mary, 114–115 Arguile, Cheryl, 34 Arias, Rosario, 12, 93, 111–112, 123–124, 205 Armstrong, Isobel, 116, 118–119 Arnold, Gaynor, 75 Arnold, Matthew, 8 Art of Fiction, The, 102 Arthur and George, 69, 70 Ash, Randolph Henry, 7, 69 Asylum, The, 12, 124, 127–130, 133–134 Atwood, Margaret, 165 Austen, Jane, 3, 41, 42, 43, 179 Author, Author, 69

Baker Street Phantom, The, 1 Bal, Mieke, 131 Barnes, Julian, 69, 70, 76 Barnett, Louise, 161 Barrett, Andrea, 14, 165, 166, 177, 183–187, 190 Barrett, Susan, 118 Barthes, Roland, 10, 22, 76, 162, 181 Basket, Fuegia, 84 Baudrillard, Jean, 5, 100 Beagle, 84, 85 Beer, Gillian, 80, 82, 196, 200, 203 ‘Behavior of the Hawkweeds, The’, 183–186, 190–191 Beloved, 27 Berdoe, Edward, 158, 160 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 123 Bhabha, Homi, 11, 94–95 bio-fiction: evolution and, 79–90; fictional biography, 67–78; genetics and, 79–81, 86–90; lithography and, 91n20; neoVictorianism and, 79–83; postcolonialism and, 79–89; revisions and, 79–92 Biographer’s Tale, The, 70 biography: fictional biography, 67–78; life-writing, 68–70, 76; neo-Victorianism and, 79–83; science and, 79–83 Birth of the Clinic, 157 Black Atlantic, The, 166–167, 173–174 Black Suede scandal, 153–154. See also medical sensationalism Blair, Tony, 97, 180, 182 Blake, William, 190 Bleak House, 187 Blood Doctor, The, 31

228

Index

Bloom, Harold, 5 Boccardi, Mariadele, 33 Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, 1, 11, 13, 76, 93, 205 Böhme, Hartmut, 106 Boldtype, 173 Bormann, Daniel, 25 Bourland, Fabrice, 1, 15 Bowler, Alexia, 121 Boym, Svetlana, 52 Brandreth, Gyles, 34 Bride of Lammermoor, The, 128 Brightwell, Emily, 34 Brison, Susan J., 131 Brontë, Charlotte, 22, 33, 39, 41, 45, 69, 137 Brontë, Emily, 33, 69 Brown, Andrew, 82 Browne, Janet, 80, 82, 83, 84 Browning, Robert, 69 Burns, Robert, 195 Butler, Judith, 96 Button, Jemmy, 84 Byatt, A. S., 7, 21, 29–32, 67–70, 79–84, 113–115, 169, 180–181, 196

C Cambridge, 167 canonisation: of neo-Victorian literature, 2–9, 30–35, 38–40, 43–45; processes of, 3–9, 14, 93–96 Carey, Peter, 21, 44, 75, 79, 165 Carlyle, Thomas, 194–195 Caruth, Cathy, 126 Casarino, Cesare, 168 Cathode Narcissus, 97, 98, 99 Catling, Brian, 179 Charles Darwin House, 193 Charles Dickens: A Life, 198 Charles Dickens Museum, 193 Chevalier, Tracy, 115 Chi’en, Evelyn, 171 Cholera Morbus: or Love and Fright, 159 Christian theology, 189, 201 Christmas Carol, A, 35 City of Gems, 33 Clare, John, 10, 71 Clayton, Jay, 25, 29, 80 Clifford, James, 166 Cohen, William A., 116 Collins, Wilkie, 8, 13, 23–24, 35, 137–148, 179, 182, 189 colonialism, 9, 75, 166, 170–171, 175, 200

Confessing a Murder, 84 Connor, Steven, 116 contemporary adaptations, 16n9, 137– 138, 148. See also adaptations Contemporary Dickens, 199 contemporary fiction: postmodernism in, 121–122; presentification and, 122; sexual trauma in, 137–150; traces of past in, 111–122 ‘contemporary re-imaginings’, 38, 117, 140, 143–149 Coronation Street, 54 Coutts, A. Burdett, 199 Covington, Syms, 84 Cox, Jessica, 12, 121, 137, 205 Cranford, 10, 51–63 Crary, Jonathan, 118 Creation, 67–68, 82, 194, 200–201 Crimson Petal and the White, The, 12, 13, 119, 153–164 critical mass, 9, 30–33 crypt, notion of, 112, 122n2, 125– 126, 135n5, 135n11 cultural capital, 43–45, 47, 61n6 cultural fetishism, 106 cultural memory: debates about, 7, 26; in neo-Victorian fiction, 2, 4–7, 12–14, 26, 30, 51, 67–70, 76, 120, 166; in retro-Victorian fiction, 182–190 Culture and Anarchy, 8

D Daily Mail, The, 86 Dames, Nicholas, 52 Dark Clue, The, 13, 138, 140, 144– 146, 148 Darnton, John, 11, 79, 83–86, 89 Darwin, Charles, 6, 10–11, 14, 67–69, 80–86, 89, 180–182, 193–203 Darwin and the Novelists, 196 Darwin Conspiracy, The, 11, 79, 83–86, 89 Darwin Loves You, 194, 196–197 Darwin the Writer, 197 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 82 Darwin’s Plots, 196, 200 Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, 201 David, Deirdre, 199 Davies, Andrew, 179 Davies, Helen, 140 Davis, Colin, 121, 127

Index Davis, Philip, 67 Dawkins, Richard, 80, 82, 87–88, 100 Dawson, Mark, 112 De Duras, Claire, 22 death, impact of, 188, 200–202 Dennett, Daniel, 82 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 111, 112, 122, 125 Descent of Man, 80 desire: material culture and, 60–61; participatory desires, 38–47 Desmond, Adrian, 83, 201 Dickens, 69, 70 Dickens, Charles, 10–11, 14, 23–24, 35, 44, 53, 69–77, 133, 137, 179, 188, 193–195, 198–200 Dickens 2012, 67–68 Dickens’s Secret Lover, 198 Dictionary of National Biography, 68 ‘diseased body’, 154, 159–163. See also medical discourses Diski, Jenny, 80 doppelgängers, 2, 94, 99, 106, 129 Dorian: An Imitation, 11, 94–101, 105–106 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 69, 70 Drayson, Nicholas, 84 Dress Lodger, The, 13, 153–164 Du Maurier, Daphne, 125 Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, 116 Durkheim, Emile, 185

E EastEnders, 54 Edinburgh Review, 68 Einstein, Albert, 82 Eliot, George, 8, 33, 69, 80, 182, 186, 189 Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses, 116 ‘eminent Victorians’, 67–78, 78n7 Emma, 188 Ende, Michael, 43 Enderwitz, Anne, 9, 51, 206 English Passengers, 9, 13, 23–24, 31, 165, 168–173, 177, 182 Erwin, Sherri Browning, 42 eugenics, 87–89 Ever After, 12, 67, 80, 114, 115, 180 Evolution, 82 evolution: bio-fiction and, 79–90; neoVictorianism and, 6; revisions of, 79; taxidermy and, 91n20 evolutionary theory, 6, 82–84, 89, 191n1

229

Evolution’s Captain, 84 Excavating Victorians, 114 Eyre Affair, The, 9, 38–46

F Faber, Michel, 12, 13, 119, 154–156, 161–163 ‘family face’, 190 family history, 201–202 family romance, 201–202 family secrets, 127–130, 148–149 Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, 127 family trauma, 123–136 Feldmann, Doris, 9, 51, 206 Felony, 69 Fforde, Jasper, 9, 38–48 fictional biography, 67–78. See also bio-fiction fi n-de-siècle novel, 100–101, 106 Fingersmith, 9, 24, 30, 31, 117, 138 FitzRoy, Captain, 84 Fixing Shadows, 118 Flanagan, Richard, 10–11, 69–70, 73–77 Flashman Papers, 34 Flaubert, Gustave, 41, 76 Flaubert’s Parrot, 70, 76 Flint, Kate, 5 Foucault, Michel, 5, 74, 155–157, 167–168 Foulds, Adam, 10, 69–73, 76 Fowles, John, 22, 29–30, 67, 79, 115, 181–183, 196 Frankenstein, 125 Fraser, George MacDonald, 34 Freccero, Carla, 133 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The, 22, 29, 67, 79, 115, 181 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 93, 112, 123–124, 187–190, 195, 202–203 From Hell, 79 Future of Nostalgia, The, 52 Fywell, Tim, 138, 140, 144–145, 147–148

G Galton, Francis, 187 Gammel, Irene, 139 Gans, Herbert J., 30 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 51–56, 60, 69 gay fiction: analyses of, 94–100; gay liberation and, 98–100, 104; gender identity in, 96, 101–106; homosexual panic, 101–106;

230 Index self-reflexivity in, 93–106; stereotyping critique of, 93–106 gender identity, 96, 101–106 genetics, 79–81, 86–90 Ghosh, Amitav, 13, 27, 166, 168, 173–176 Ghost Writer, The, 12, 124, 127–128, 130–134 Ghostly Matters, 125 Gillooly, Eileen, 199 Gilroy, Paul, 166–167, 173–174, 195 Girl in a Blue Dress, 75 globalisation: global consumption, 168; global memory, 165–166; realities of, 166–167; sea narratives and, 165–168, 172, 177 Goblin Fruit, 32 Goblin Market, 32 Godwin, Jason, 34 ‘gold’ literature, 21–35. See also neoVictorian literature Goodbrand, Robert, 69 Gordon, Avery F., 125 Gorky Park, 31 Gosse, Edmund, 102 Gottlieb, Robert, 198 Gould, John, 84 Gould, Stephen Jay, 82 Governess, The, 79 Grahame-Smith, Seth, 3, 42 Gray, Alasdair, 180 Great Charles Dickens Scandal, The, 198 Great Evolutionary Synthesis, 79 Great Expectations, 44, 137 Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, 198 Greenblatt, Stephen, 68 Gruss, Susanne, 1, 12, 14, 76, 123, 206 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 122 Gutleben, Christian, 2, 23, 52, 115, 121, 123, 139 Guy Domville, 104

H Hadley, Louisa, 8, 140, 146 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 70–72 Hard Times, 23 Hardy, Thomas, 6, 54, 69, 115, 185, 190 Harvey, Caroline, 33 Harvey, William, 155 Harwood, John, 12, 113, 124, 127, 134

haunting: in contemporary culture, 75, 99; family secrets and, 127–130; in neo-Victorian texts, 104– 105; phantom and, 125–126; spectrality and, 93–94, 112, 123–125; trauma and, 123–125, 130–134 Haunting and Spectrality in NeoVictorian Fiction, 112 Heilmann, Ann, 2, 25–26, 39, 141 Hensher, Philip, 33 Her Fearful Symmetry, 14, 183, 186–191 ‘Heredity’, 6, 190 Heroes and Hero Worship, 194–195 Heyne, Eric, 81 high culture, 3, 8, 30, 43 highbrow literature, 9, 29–30, 35, 37n13 Hirsch, Marianne, 125 History and Cultural Memory in NeoVictorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages, 4 Ho, Elizabeth, 13, 165, 206 Holman, Sheri, 13, 154, 156–163 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 104 Holmes, Richard, 81 Holocaust, 123, 125 homosexual panic, 101–106 homosexuality, 99–106 Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 202 Household Words, 35, 53, 199 Huggan, Graham, 176 Hughes, Kathryn, 198 Hunt, Chris, 24 Hutcheon, Linda, 7, 25–26, 100, 114 Huxley, Thomas, 80, 202

I ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, 40 Illustrated Times, 80 immersion, affective, 40–42, 47 imperialism, 165–168, 172–173, 176–177 In Memoriam, 80 intertextuality, 22–25, 32, 36n4, 105, 130–133, 136n17 Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, 198

J Jack Maggs, 44, 75, 165 James, Alice, 102, 104 James, Henry, 11, 76, 101–106, 124–125, 137

Index James, M. R., 188 James, William, 124 Jameson, Fredric, 10, 22, 52, 113, 180, 190–191 Jane Eyre, 22, 32, 39, 40–41, 44–46, 131 Jane Slayre, 42 Johnson, Samuel, 195 Jones, Anna Maria, 155 Jones, Gail, 118 Jones, Lloyd, 79 Jones, Steve, 87 Joseph, Sir Keith, 180 Joyce, Simon, 15, 25 Jude the Obscure, 185

K Kaplan, Cora, 1, 14, 29, 68, 77, 115, 124, 193, 207 Kaplan, Deborah, 45 Kaplan, E. Ann, 131 Karl, Rosa, 9, 38, 207 Keats, John, 32, 41 Kennedy, Meegan, 157 Keynes, Randal, 201 Kirchknopf, Andrea, 159 Kneale, Matthew, 9, 13, 23–24, 31, 165, 168, 171–177, 182 Kohlke, Marie-Luise, 2, 9, 21, 93, 111, 120–123, 138–139, 154, 160, 190, 207 Kropf, Carl, 160 Kucich, John, 1, 5 Kuhn, Annette, 127 Kydd, 167

L Labouchère Amendment, 101 Laing, R. D., 181 LaMotte, Christabel, 7, 69 Lancet, The, 158, 160 Last Dickens, The, 27 Laub, Dori, 141 Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, 112 Leaves from the Valley, 33 Legacy of Love, 33 Letissier, Georges, 80 Levinas, Emmanuel, 12, 111, 120, 121, 122 Levine, George, 80, 82–83, 194, 196–197, 200 Levy, Andrea, 167 life-writing, 68–70, 76. See also biography

231

Lifted Veil, The, 189 Lily, 32 Linnaeus, Carl, 183 literary heirlooms, 39, 44, 49n4 literary heritage, 38–44 Llewellyn, Mark, 2, 25–26, 39, 141, 153 Lodge, David, 69, 79 London Review of Books, 196 Long Song, A, 167 Losing Nelson, 70 loss, impact of, 188, 200–202 Lost in Austen, 43 ‘lost voices’, 93–94, 107n4 low culture, 3, 8 lowbrow literature, 9, 29–30, 35, 37n13 Luckhurst, Roger, 123, 126 Lugosi, Bella, 15 Lyell, Charles, 85

M Madame Bovary, 41 Major, John, 180 male homosexual panic, 101–106 Malik, Rachel, 144 Man and Wife, 141–143, 145 ‘map breaking’, 176–177. See also sea narratives Marcus, Steven, 74 Martin, Michael, 121 Martin, Valerie, 27 Marx, Karl, 186, 195 Mary Reilly, 27 masculine subjectivity, 154–156, 193–195 Master, The, 11, 75, 94, 101–106 Master and Commander, 167 material culture, 51–63 Matthews, Richard, 84 Matus, Jill L., 123–124 Mawer, Simon, 11, 79, 86–89 McCormick, Robert, 84, 85 McDonald, Roger, 84, 182 medical authority, 158–159, 163 medical discourses, 153–155, 157–159, 162 medical sensationalism: Black Suede scandal, 153–154; in Crimson Petal and the White, 153–164; ‘diseased body’ and, 154, 159–163; in Dress Lodger, 153–164; ethics and, 159–163; legacy of, 153, 158–159; reader entrapment of, 160–161

232 Index Memory, History, Forgetting, 111 Mendel, Gregor, 6, 11, 86–89, 184–185 Mendel’s Dwarf, 11, 79, 86–89 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 116, 117 Mertz, Barbara, 34 metalepsis, 38, 40 Middeke, Martin, 82 Middlemarch, 188 Mister Pip, 79 Mitchell, Kate, 4, 52, 118, 122, 125 modernism, 6, 55, 60 modernity, 55–57, 119, 166–167, 199 Moment in the Sun, 28 Monkey’s Uncle, 80 Moonstone, The, 179 Moore, James, 83, 201 Morris, Edwin, 124 Morris, William, 179 Morrison, Toni, 27 Moses and Monotheism, 123 Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, The, 155 Mr Darwin’s Shooter, 84, 182 Mr Harrison’s Confessions, 53 Mrs Brown, 79 Mulberry Empire, or The Two Virtuous Journeys of The Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, 33 My Lady Ludlow, 53

N Nash, Catherine, 176 Nature, 86 Nead, Lynda, 118 neo-Victorian: ‘eminent Victorians’, 67–78, 78n7; family history and, 201–202; fashioning, 1–17; nostalgia and, 51–53, 194; postcolonialism and, 6, 13–14, 27–30, 75, 79–89, 166–167, 170–173, 176–177; social history and, 199–202 neo-Victorian fiction: cultural memory in, 2, 4–7, 12–14, 26, 30, 51, 67–70, 76, 120, 166; family trauma in, 123–136; fictional biographies, 67–78; gay fiction, 93–107; globalisation and, 165– 168, 172, 177; retro-Victorian fiction and, 179–192; sea narratives, 165–178; spectres of past in, 123–136; theorising, 166– 168; trauma in, 123–141, 150n7

neo-Victorian literature: canonisation of, 2–9, 30–35, 38–40, 43–45, 93–96; critical mass and, 30–33; description of, 24–25; ‘gold’ literature, 21–35; highbrow literature, 9, 29–30, 35, 37n13; impact of, 132–134; lowbrow literature, 9, 29–30, 35, 37n13; revisitation of, 2–15, 22–26, 31, 51, 93–94, 113–114; self-refl exivity of, 2–4; subgenres of, 29–35, 81, 167; trauma in, 123–136, 138–141, 150n7; understanding, 21–30 neo-Victorian lives, 67–70 neo-Victorian masculinities, 154–156, 193–195 Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma, 121 neo-Victorianism: bio-fi ction and, 79–83; characteristics of, 26, 105, 138–139; concept of, 4–15, 15n3, 16n10, 176–177, 194; contemporary fiction and, 111–122; defi nition of, 3–9; evolution and, 6; expansion of, 114–116; fashioning of, 13; mediating past and, 53–55; nostalgia and, 51–53, 194; performative hermeneutics of, 81; as phenomenon, 1–3, 13–15, 15n3, 16n10, 29, 32–35, 35n2, 40–42; postcolonialism and, 6, 13–14, 27–30, 75, 79–89; postmodernism and, 25–30; science and, 79–83; self-refl exivity and, 93–101; trauma writing and, 12–13, 123–125, 138–141, 150n8; understanding, 1–15 Neverending Story, The, 43 New York Times, 34 Newbery, Linda, 13, 138, 144–145, 147–148 Newton, Isaac, 82 Nichols, Peter, 84 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 195 Niffenegger, Audrey, 14, 183, 186–190 Northanger Abbey, 41 nostalgia: explanation of, 51–52, 61n4; future and, 55–57; material culture and, 51–63; mediating past and, 53–55; neoVictorianism and, 51–53, 194;

Index

233

O’Brian, Patrick, 167 O’Connor, Erin, 68, 69 Of Grammatology, 112 Oliver Twist, 24 On Longing, 47 On the Origin of Species, 82–83, 86, 182, 194, 196, 201–202 Oscar and Lucinda, 165 Otter, Chris, 116, 118 Ourika, 22 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 68 Oxford English Dictionary, 175

6, 13–14, 27–30, 75, 79–89; sea narratives and, 166–167, 170–173, 176–177 postmodernism: in contemporary fiction, 121–122; debates about, 8, 16n6; neo-Victorianism and, 25–30; ‘new type’ of, 23–24; nostalgia and, 52–53; postmodern historicity, 113–114 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 180 Power, Margaret, 32 Practical Treatise on Shock, A, 124 presentification, 12, 17n13, 60, 122 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 3, 42 psychical trace, 112–113, 116 Pulham, Patricia, 93, 112, 123 Punch, 80, 158

P

Q

Pair of Blue Eyes, A, 115 Palliser, Charles, 31 Paradise Lost, 47 participatory culture, 3–4, 11, 81 participatory desires, 38–47 participatory reading, 45–48 Patch, Harry, 182 Pearl, Matthew, 27 Perry, Anne, 34–35 Peters, Elizabeth, 34 phantom: concept of, 112–113, 123–125, 135n6; of family trauma, 123–132; haunting and, 125–126 Phillip, Caryl, 167 Piano, The, 79 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 96–97, 99 Pietrzak-Franger, Monika, 162 Pinker, Stephen, 197 Pirie, David, 13, 138 Plato, 22 Poe, Edgar Allan, 188 Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Offi cer, 180 Porphyria’s Lover, 32 Portrait of a Lady, The, 102 Possession, 7, 29, 31, 67, 69, 84–85, 169, 186 postcolonialism: bio-fiction and, 79–89; neo-Victorianism and,

Quickening Maze, The, 10, 69–76 Quincunx, The, 31

postmodernism and, 52–53; ‘present-ing absence’ and, 55–57, 61 Nostalgic Postmodernism, 23, 52

O

R Rand, Nicholas, 126 Rashkin, Esther, 126 reader entrapment, 160–161. See also sensationalism Rebecca, 125 re-imaginings, 38, 117, 140, 143–149 Remarkable Creatures, 115 Rendell, Ruth, 31 retro-Victorian fiction: cultural memory in, 182–190; neo-Victorian fiction and, 179–192; symmetry in, 186–191 revisionism, 34, 43–45, 79–83 Rhys, Jean, 22, 32, 44, 79, 167 Richter, Virginia, 80 Ricks, Christopher, 72 Ricoeur, Paul, 12, 111, 113–116, 120, 122 Rieger, Christy, 13, 153, 207 Roberts, Michèle, 79 romance novels, 29–33 romance plot, 53, 85, 201–202 Romeo and Juliet, 46 Roof, Judith, 80 Rose, 31 Rossetti, Christina, 32, 69 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 32 Royle, Nicholas, 125 Rubik, Margarete, 39

234

Index

S Sadoff, Dianne F., 1, 5, 6 Sanders, Julie, 75 Sayles, John, 28 Schabert, Ina, 81 Schor, Hilary, 80, 183 Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel, 25 Scott, Sir Walter, 128 sea narratives: globalisation and, 165– 168, 172, 177; imperialism and, 165–168, 172–173, 176–177; ‘map breaking’ and, 176–177; postcolonialism and, 166–167, 170–173, 176–177 Sea of Poppies, 13, 27, 166, 168, 173–177 secularism, 82, 182, 190, 195–197 Sedgwick, Eve, 5, 102, 103 Seel, Martin, 122 Self, Will, 11, 94, 96–100, 106 Self-Help, 180 self-reflexivity: critique of, 93–94, 101; in gay fiction, 93–106; of neo-Victorian literature, 2–4; stereotyping and, 93–101; view of, 94, 105–106 sensationalism: in Crimson Petal and the White, 153–164; in Dress Lodger, 153–164; ethics and, 159–163; legacy of, 153, 158–159; reader entrapment of, 160–161 Sense and Sensibility, 46 Servants of the Map, 166 Set in Stone, 13, 138, 140, 144–145, 147–148 Setterfield, Diane, 12, 124, 129, 138, 140 sexual trauma: in adaptations, 143–149; in contemporary fiction, 137–150; elements of, 138; scenes of, 138, 147; theme of, 138–143 Shakespeare, William, 38, 68, 202 Shapin, Steven, 195–197, 199, 201 Shell and the Kernel, The, 126 Shelley, Mary, 125 Sherlock Holmes, 79 Shiller, Dana, 12, 25, 113–114, 116, 122 Ship Fever, 14, 166, 183 Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction, 123 Shuttleworth, Sally, 8, 11, 14, 26, 80, 82, 179, 207–208 Siddall, Elizabeth, 32, 188

Simmonds, Rosemary ‘Posy,’ 54 Sixty Lights, 118 Skinner, B. F., 181 Slater, Michael, 75, 198, 200 Smiles, Samuel, 180 Smith, Martin Cruz, 31 Snow, C. P., 83 social history, 199–202 social realism, 23, 53, 62n9 social reform, 57, 156, 158 Solicari, Sonia, 3 Specters of Marx, 112, 125 spectrality, 11–12, 93–94, 112, 123 Starling, Belinda, 113 Steiner, Tina, 170 Steps of the Sun, The, 33 stereotyping: critique of, 93–96; in gay fiction, 93–106; process of, 105–106; self-reflexivity and, 93–101 Steveker, Lena, 10, 67, 208 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 27, 154 Stewart, Susan, 47 Stockwin, Julian, 167 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The, 27 Street Lavender, 24 Sun, The, 86 Sunless Sea, A, 34 Surridge, Lisa, 141 Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, 118 Swift, Graham, 12, 67, 80, 114–115, 180–181 Swift, Jonathan, 160, 161

T Tamara Drewe, 54 Taverner’s Place, The, 33 Temple, Minnie, 102, 103 Tennant, Emma, 69, 79 Tennyson, Alfred, 10–11, 70–76, 80 Tennyson’s Gift, 34 Ternan, Ellen (Nelly), 74–75, 198, 200 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 185 Thackeray, William, 69 Thatcher, Margaret, 44, 97, 180 Theory of Adaptation, 7, 25 Thirteenth Tale, The, 12, 124, 127–133, 138, 140, 144 This Thing of Darkness, 84 Thomas, Heidi, 55 Thompson, Harry, 84, 165–166 Time and Narrative, 111, 113

Index Times, 68, 159 Tipping the Velvet, 9, 24, 117 To the Edge of the World, 166 Tóibín, Colm, 11, 75, 79, 94, 96, 101–106 Torok, Maria, 12, 111–113, 124–126 trace, notion of, 111–122 trace, psychical, 112–113, 116 trauma: in adaptations, 143–149; in contemporary fiction, 137–150; family trauma, 123–136; haunting and, 123–125, 130–134; intertextual hauntings, 130–133; in neo-Victorian fiction, 123–141, 150n7; in neoVictorian literature, 123–136, 138–141, 150n7; re-imagining, 143–149; representations of, 141–143; sexual trauma, 137– 150; writing, 12–13, 123–125, 138–141, 150n8 Trauma Fiction, 126 Trollope, Joanna, 33, 69 Trotter, David, 116, 119 Truss, Lynne, 34 Turn of the Screw, The, 102, 104, 124–125, 131, 137, 188 Turow, Joseph, 153 ‘Tyger, The’, 190

U Uncanny, The, 125, 187 Uncommercial Traveller, The, 179 Universal Review, The, 158 Unsworth, Barry, 70

V Verne, Jules, 179 Vickroy, Laurie, 125, 138–140, 143 Victoria, Queen, 26, 31, 68, 69, 147, 167 Victorian: ‘eminent Victorians,’ 67, 70–78, 78n7; global consumption of, 168; global memory of, 165–166; literary heritage of, 38–44; neo-Victorian lives, 67–70; re-plotting, 38–42, 46–48. See also neo-Victorian Victorian Eye, The, 116 Victorian Glassworlds, 116, 118 Victorian Hauntings, 125 Victorian lives, 67–70. See also neoVictorian

235

Victorian past: in contemporary fiction, 111–122; family trauma and, 123–136; spectres of, 123–136. See also nostalgia Victoriana, 1, 39, 51, 68 Vietnam War, 123 Vine, Barbara, 31 viral contagion, 96, 100–106 Voigts, Eckart, 3, 11, 79, 208 Voyage of the Narwhal, The, 165, 177

W Walcott, Derek, 166 Wallace, Alfred, 84, 86 Walshe, Eibhear, 101, 103, 104 Wanting, 69–70, 73–77 Waters, Sarah, 9, 12, 21, 24, 29–33, 79, 113, 117, 133, 138 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 138 Weber, Max, 197 Wells, H. G., 179 Weltanschauung, 80 White, Jenny, 34 Whitehead, Ann, 126 Who Was Oswald Fish?, 79 Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, 67 Widdowson, Peter, 96–97 Wide Sargasso Sea, 22, 32, 44, 167 Wilberforce, Bishop, 80 Wilde, Oscar, 11, 34, 96–100 Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, 68 Wilson, A. N., 79 Wilson, James, 13, 138, 140, 144–147 Wolfrey, Julian, 125 Woman in White, The, 12–13, 23–24, 137–150, 187, 189 Woolf, Virginia, 41, 48 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 102 Wordsworth, William, 40 World War I, 123, 182 Wotton, Henry, 98 Writing and Difference, 112

Y Young Victoria, The, 79

Z Zimmerman, Virginia, 114