Re-Reading the Age of Innovation: Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830-1950 [1 ed.] 1032043598, 9781032043593

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Re-Reading the Age of Innovation

The period of 1830–1950 was an age of unprecedented innovation. From new inventions and scientific discoveries to reconsiderations of religion, gender, and the human mind, the innovations of this era are recorded in a wide range of literary texts. Rather than separating these texts into Victorian or modernist camps, this collection argues for a new framework that reveals how the concept of innovation generated forms of literary newness that drew novelists, poets, and other creative figures working across this period into dialogic networks of experiment. The 14 chapters in this volume explore how inventions like the rotary print press or hot air balloon and emergent debates about science, trade, and colonialism evolved new forms and genres. Through their examinations of a wide range of texts and writers—from well-known novelists like Conrad, Dickens, Hardy, and Woolf to less canonical figures like Charlotte Mew, Elías Mar, and Walter Francis White—the chapters in this collection re-read these texts as part of an age of innovation characterized not by division and divide but by collaboration and community. Louise Kane is Assistant Professor of Global Modernisms at the University of Central Florida. She is a General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines series and Editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement.

Among the Victorians and Modernists Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered. Titles include: Illegitimate Freedom Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940 Gaurav Majumdar Byronism, Napoleonism and Nineteenth-Century Realism Heroes of Their Own Lives? Tristan Donal Burke Strange Gods Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel Timothy L. Carens Re-Reading the Age of Innovation Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830–1950 Edited by Louise Kane Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End Edited by Diana Maltz For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035

Re-Reading the Age of Innovation Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830–1950 Edited by Louise Kane

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Louise Kane; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Louise Kane to be identified as the author 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-04359-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-04362-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19162-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgmentsviii List of contributorsix Introduction

1

LOUISE KANE

PART I

Inventing and Innovating: Science, Technology, Formal Experiment21   1 The Sky as Heterotopia in Dickens, Gissing, and Woolf

23

CLAES E. LINDSKOG

  2 The Rise and Fall of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (1881–1930)

36

JAYME YAHR

  3 Balloonomania: Flying Machines, Periodicals, and the Trajectory of World Literature

48

LOUISE KANE

  4 A Metaphysical Theater: Abstract Painting, Color Music, and Futurist Experiments in Avant-garde Film

63

CHRISTOPHER TOWNSEND

PART II

Changing Landscapes: Empire, Trade, Ecology79   5 Histories Yet to Come: Adventure Fiction and the Ideologies of Free Trade KEITH CLAVIN

81

vi  Contents   6 Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire

97

CAMELIA RAGHINARU

  7 Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief in the Poetic Landscapes of Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot

111

ANNA BEDSOLE

PART III

Navigating Feeling: The Self, Empathy, Human Character125   8 F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore: The Aesthetics of Sympathy and Texts of Transition

127

KATHRYN LAING

  9 Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind in Walter Francis White’s The Fire in the Flint

141

MASAMI SUGIMORI

10 A Writerly Communion: Browning, Balzac, and Catholicism in Edith Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer” (1900)

158

NANCY VON ROSK

PART IV

Blurring Boundaries: Gender, Sexuality, Desire173 11 “Disposed to Daring Innovation”: New Modernism, New Woman Fiction, and New Motherhood

175

ELIZABETH PODNIEKS

12 “Sometimes I Pose, but Sometimes I Pose as Posing”: Stella Benson’s Early Fiction

190

NICOLA DARWOOD

13 Parsing Between-ness: Love, Looking Backward and Forward, in Charlotte Mew’s Short Fiction KRISTEN RENZI

203

Contents vii 14 The Spirit of Contemporary Life: Icelandic Queer Modernism

217

ÁSTA KRISTÍN BENEDIKTSDÓTTIR

Afterword233 REGENIA GAGNIER

Index237

Acknowledgments

Editing a book is never a simple task, and this volume has been no exception. However, the process was made far easier by several people, not least the brilliant contributors whose essays represent the result of painstaking drafts and revisions, countless research trips to archives and libraries, and, most importantly, a desire to “keep calm and carry on” even when events like the global pandemic posed unprecedented challenges. Special thanks go to Deborah Mutch and Dennis Denisoff for their continued encouragement and advice on honing the volume’s focal frame, along with Ruth Berry, Bryony Reece and Michelle Salyga at Routledge, and to Regenia Gagnier for her poignant Afterword. I would also like to express gratitude to the various librarians, archivists, and curators who have helped to make this volume a reality. My wonderful colleagues at UCF have provided invaluable support and advice, particularly FX Gleyzon, Anna Jones, Trey Philpotts, and Dawn Trouard. Finally, but certainly not lastly, thank you to those closest to me—Mum, Cory, Richard, and Alan Thorne—for your patience, understanding, and helpful suggestions as I worked on this book.

Contributors

Anna Bedsole pivoted to life in the corporate tech world after completing her dissertation on Gothic girlhood in Anglo-Irish novels and earning her PhD degree. The same skills acquired in the PhD journey, of complex problem solving and negotiating thorny gender dynamics, continue to serve her well, and she looks to continue to pursue her interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts as an independent scholar. Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir is Lecturer in Icelandic literature at the Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Iceland, and Co-Editor of the journal  Skírnir.  Her current research focuses on contemporary Icelandic literature and literary history, queer literature, and queer history. Keith Clavin received his PhD degree in Victorian Studies from Auburn University. His primary research examines the contact zones between Victorian literature and Latin American economies. He has written on the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and the visualization techniques of British economists. He maintains secondary interests in narrative theory and contemporary cinema and has published on these topics in Textual Practice and Oxford Literary Review. He is currently teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nicola Darwood is Senior Lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire. Her research interests include early twentieth-century women writers, specifically the work of Elizabeth Bowen and Stella Benson, children’s fiction, Anglo-Irish literature, and the Gothic. She has published work on Elizabeth Bowen, Stella Benson, and Nancy Spain (her monograph The Loss of Innocence: the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen was published in 2012) and is the Co-Editor (with Nick Turner) of “Have Women a Sense of Humour?”: Interwar Women’s Comic Fiction, Co-Editor (with W R Owens and Alexis Weedon) of Fiction and “The Woman Question” from 1850 to 1930, and Co-Editor (with Alexis Weedon) of Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations. She is a Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and Co-Editor of The Elizabeth Bowen Review.

x  Contributors Regenia Gagnier, FBA, FAE, FEA, FRSA, holds the Established Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Exeter, founding and co-editorship of the Global Circulation Project, and Senior Research Fellowship in Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. Her monographs include Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986), Subjectivities: A  History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832–1920 (1991), The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (2000), Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859–1920 (2010), and Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century (2018). She is on the Editorial Boards of 21 scholarly journals and has supervised to completion 81 doctorates at Stanford and Exeter. Louise Kane is Assistant Professor of Global Modernisms at the University of Central Florida. She has published widely in the field of modern periodicals and transnational avant-gardes and her critical edition of Wyndham Lewis’ America, I Presume is forthcoming with Oxford UP. She is also a General Editor of the forthcoming three-volume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines series. Kathryn Laing lectures in the Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Her research interests are principally in late nineteenth-century Irish women’s writing, modernism, and modernist women writers. She has published widely on Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, George Moore, Mabel Robinson, and Hannah Lynch. She is also the co-founder, with Sinéad Mooney, of the Irish Women’s Writing Network (1880–1920), https:// irishwomenswritingnetwork.com, and General Editor of two series: Key Irish Women Writers and Irish Women Writers: Texts and Contexts (Brighton: EER). Her most recent publications include Irish Women Writers at the Turn of the 20th Century: Alternative Histories, New Narratives, co-edited with Sinéad Mooney (EER, 2020) and published in association with the Irish Women’s Writing Network; Hannah Lynch (1859–1904): Irish Writer, Cosmopolitan, New Woman (Cork University Press, 2019), co-authored with Faith Binckes; and ‘“An Outpour of Ink”: From the “Young Rebecca” to “The Most Important Signature of These Years”: 1911–1920’ in Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s­1920s: the Modernist Period, eds. Faith Binckes and Carey Snyder (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Claes E. Lindskog is currently Senior Lecturer in English at Lund University in Sweden. His research focuses on the interrelations between spatiality, knowledge, and power and includes an article in Brontë Studies on the function of the sky in Jane Eyre.

Contributors xi Elizabeth Podnieks is Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her areas of research and teaching include modernism, motherhood studies, life writing, and popular/celebrity culture. Selected publications include the monograph Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin  (2000); the edition  Rough Draft:  The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929–1937  (2012); and the edited collections  Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures  (2010);  Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture (2012); and Pops in Pop Culture: Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the New Man  (2016). Articles and book chapters have appeared in  a/b: Auto/Biography Studies,  The Journal of Popular Culture,  The  Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and The Routledge Companion to Motherhood, among others. Her monograph Maternal Modernism: Narrating New Mothers is forthcoming. Camelia Raghinaru holds a PhD in English from the University of Florida, and she currently works as Professor of English at Concordia University, Irvine. Her research interests focus on utopian studies, modernism, Irish literature, and popular culture. Her articles on Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Bréton have been published in various academic journals, including Studies in the Novel, [sic], Forum, and edited collections (Great War Modernism and Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad). Currently, she is at work on a book project on the Gothic and the sublime. Kristen Renzi is Associate Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where she works in the areas of Victorian and transatlantic literature, the fin-de-siècle, feminist and queer theory, and gender studies. Her work has been published in Modernism/modernity, SubStance, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Studies and in several edited collections. Her monograph An Ethic of Innocence (SUNY Press, 2019) treats issues of gender, epistemology, and pragmatism within the literature and culture of emerging modernity. She is also a poet and author of the poetry collection The God Games and Other Voices (Main Street Rag Press, 2017). Masami Sugimori, Associate Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University, specializes in twentieth-century American and African American literature and culture. He is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the relationship among racial passing, modern America, and modernist literary discourse. Articles related to this project have appeared in Faulkner Journal and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

xii  Contributors Christopher Townsend is Professor of the History of Avant-garde Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was the recipient of an HD Fellowship in American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University, 2019–20, and is a senior research fellow of the Henry Moore Institute. He has published widely in the fields of film and media and is working on a book exploring the early twentieth-century film magazine Close Up. Nancy Von Rosk is Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York, and the editor of Looking Back at the Jazz Age: New Essays on the Literature and Legacy of an Iconic Decade (2016). Her publications on Edith Wharton and other late nineteenthand early twentieth-century American writers including Willa Cather, Anzia Yezierska, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman can be found in essay collections and the journals Studies in the Novel, Journal of the Short Story in English, Journal of Transnational American Studies and Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies. Jayme Yahr, PhD, is Associate Curator at the Crocker Art Museum. She is a specialist in American art, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Over the last decade, she has published numerous articles and book chapters on the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine and New York’s Gilder Circle, which included such artists as Louis Comfort Tiffany, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Cecilia Beaux. Additional areas of Yahr’s expertise include American works on paper, photography, and Native American art. Recent publications include “Disappearing Act: The Daniel J. Terra Collection of American Art (1971–2005),” Journal of the History of Collections (2018). Prior to joining the Crocker, Yahr designed and directed university-level Museum Studies programs in New Hampshire and Minnesota as an Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies.

Introduction Louise Kane

In September 1822, a reader of The Calcutta Journal sent a letter to its new editor, John Francis Sandys, reflecting on the changing world of then colonial India. “This is the age of innovation”, he marveled, “the age of research; and if the spirit of it continues, it cannot but be productive of a glorious and enlightened world” (“False Point of Honor” 331). The Industrial Revolution and the inventions it brought—from the sewing machine to the steam engine—had transformed the textile, manufacturing, and transportation industries, cemented capitalistic models of mass production and international trade, and contributed to a global sense of change met with a mixture of enthusiasm, as evidenced by the correspondent, and anxiety. Innovation during this period was not limited to technology and industry. The development of general anesthesia, largescale roll-out of the smallpox vaccine, and other scientific advancements like the discovery of electromagnetism and atomic theory represented tangible symbols of the ongoing “age of research”. Print objects like The Calcutta Journal played significant roles in fostering and documenting forms of newness that were ideological, too. The journal’s promotion of freedom of religion and critique of the dominance of the caste system and East India Trading Company embodied its imbrication within newly progressive thought networks spanning social, political, and international contexts. As the correspondent elaborated, “the art of printing, and the freedom of the press” meant that people were no longer bound “to one path, to one opinion alone” (“False Point of Honor” 331). This spirit of innovation was mirrored in literature and the arts. As one contemporaneous writer suggested, the early nineteenth century “may truly be called the age of literary experiment. .  .  . New books, new pamphlets, new journals, got up for the purpose of promulgating the news, entertaining the fancy, or reforming the mind and manners, crowd up our aching sight that we have hardly time to read” (“Literary” 2). Yet it is the period 100  years later with which literary innovation tends to be associated. One need not look far to find the familiar pronouncements which have seen literary modernism and the creative and economic networks that backdropped its emergence and success become DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-1

2  Louise Kane synonymous with literary newness. From Ezra Pound’s ubiquitous “make it new” slogan—or his lesser-known original, “Renovate, dod gast you, renovate!” (Ta Hio 12)—to Thomas Hardy’s contention that modern novelists had replaced “a beginning, middle, and end” with a structure resembling “a spasmodic inventory of items” (65), the works of early twentieth-century writers have long been equated with textual experimentation. That the world of writers like Pound was not so dissimilar from that inhabited by the correspondent to The Calcutta Journal remains relatively overlooked. Despite recent critical shifts toward more flexible definitions and geographic parameters of modernism and Victorianism, a generalized framing of these “isms” as two separate, back-to-back periods—the former representing ideas of vitality, newness, and innovation, the latter conservatism, tradition, and literary conventionality—persists. Literature is taught and studied according to this Victorian/modern dichotomy: university courses are often separated by period (the modernist novel, Victorian poetics); conferences and English departments bisect researchers and instructors into Victorian and modernist camps; and, while several interdisciplinary venues aim to work across period boundaries, many academic journals and publishing platforms retain some period specificity (The Journal of Victorian Studies, Modernism/modernity), if only as a means of providing scholars with the comfortable reassurance of collective identity. As such, the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers shared a fascination with innovation and with developing new literary strategies to record it require further exploration. Novelists like Dickens, for example, were natural innovators whose literary experiments were influenced by the technologies that changed their daily lives. Dickens’ strategy of “bringing together two strongly contrasted places . . . through the agency of an electronic message” (qtd in Forster 252) shows how he “connected the operation of the electric telegraph with the narrative method of his novels” (Sussman 78). While the New Modernist Studies has emphasized the link between technology and literary innovation, the intrigue that new inventions like the airplane presented to those writing in the 1910s and 1920s can be seen as part of a general interest in travel that, with the advent of the bicycle, motor car, and expansion of the railways, had captivated publics worldwide for several previous decades. Re-Reading the Age of Innovation: Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830–1950 proposes a new framework for the study and theorizing of literary texts and cultural products produced in and across these decades. Rather than viewing the novels, poetry, paintings, films, and other textual ephemera that appeared between 1830 and 1950 as belonging to separate Victorian or modernist periods, the 14 chapters in this collection re-read these texts as part of an age of innovation that not only defined the early twentieth century but also encompassed the

Introduction 3 nineteenth and even late eighteenth centuries. This age of innovation, the contributors argue, was characterized not by arbitrary temporal divisions but by dialogic connections between writers, artists, and literary movements possessing the same interest and investment in various forms of newness. The purpose of this volume is not to show how the Victorians were, in fact, innovative, or how modernists were not as modern as might be presumed but to propose the age of innovation as a fresh framework that sidesteps period-centered approaches to literature. This framework stresses the need to further examine questions relevant to the work of those who lived in the age of innovation. How did popular inventions alter the contours of literary narratives, or bring about new genres, such as abstract art and the short film? What was the impact of new attitudes toward religion and the human psyche upon writers and artists whose stories, paintings, and poems record the same deep-seated search for meaning? What changes in textual form and aesthetics were wrought by evolving debates about women’s and civil rights, colonialism, capitalistic models of global trade, and class structure? These are some of the questions the chapters examine, using a variety of approaches ranging from the comparative to the quantitative. Contributors explore a wide range of writers—from well-known novelists like Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf, to less canonical figures like Charlotte Mew and Stella Bowen— and genres, including the novel, poetry, literary periodicals and newspapers, the short story, and avant-garde film. The chapters reconsider the positive, productive possibilities that arise when we consider innovation as central to the shared themes, topics, and influences that united writers who have been jettisoned historically to opposing sides of the Victorian/modernist dichotomy. Of course, that is not to say that innovation is limited to this relatively brief 120-year period. Although the chapters cover texts produced between 1830 and 1950—from the French realist Honoré de Balzac’s short story “La Grande Bretèche” (1831) to the Icelandic novelist Elías Mar’s Man eg þig löngum (1949)—this temporal frame is cast as a rough net rather than fixed as a set of bookended parameters. The chapters are united in their contention that writerly dialogues and networks stretch backward and forward, existing before and after the dates that circumscribe this volume. Several chapters posit the late eighteenth century as the beginning of these dialogues, such as Claes E. Lindskog’s (Chapter 1), which traces acts of skygazing in the work of novelists like Woolf back to a pre-Victorian past when Romantic poets became fascinated by the sky’s sublime potential. Others look forward in their discussion of novel attitudes toward nationhood or sexuality as signifiers of imagined futures: Keith Clavin’s exploration of “Histories Yet to Come” (Chapter 5) and Nicola Darwood’s examination of Stella Benson’s “view of the future for women” (Chapter  12) evidence this approach.

4  Louise Kane The temporal frame of this volume is thus cast with a consciousness that no literary innovation can be entirely, completely new. Every text is, of course, a renovation of an existing idea or trope, but this volume argues that writers’ specific responses to the wider world of modernization of which they were a part speak to a distinct and unprecedented compulsion during this period to write this newness—to record it on the page. One might argue that this is simply the purpose of literary modernism—to reflect modernity, a reflection that inevitably required the development of new writerly techniques or narrative modes—but as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, this would involve too simplistic a definition of modernism. While it is technically possible to refer to the period of 1830–1950 as a period of long modernism, the contributions show how something different is happening here: an age of innovation that operates in defiance of, rather than deference to, such anachronistic labels as Victorian or modernist.

Problematic Approaches: Division, Difference, Dichotomy Certainly, literary and artistic figures working in the age of innovation did not see themselves as diametrically opposed or temporally disjunct to the degree posterity suggests. Of course, self-identified moderns such as Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence frequently asserted their aesthetic experiments as forms of literary newness that separated them from their Victorian predecessors, but this was often done in playful ways. Readers were, in part, invited to be in on the joke: innovation could not really be owned by a single generation but was instead subjective and permutating; an innovation in one age is a standard in the next, and the mundane predictability with which new became old rendered many immune to, or simply amused by, the familiar declarations of newness asserted by their (often younger) successors. As Mark Wollaeger has noted, “[m]ost artists who aspired to become modern identified the newness of their enterprise with a release from Victorianism as cultural propaganda” (128), their proclamations of separateness operating as a marketing strategy. Ezra Pound certainly knew how to preach innovation as a guarantor of literary originality. With his development of new literary movements and techniques (the “Imagistes”, the Vorticists, the ideogrammic method) and championing in 1913 of “our age, our generation”, one might be forgiven for assuming that Pound believed the age of innovation to be the sole possession and invention of the so-called “men of 1914”, that is “the men who [were in 1914] between their twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth years” (“Wyndham Lewis” 233). Yet we know this assumption does not bear out. In January  1914, Pound, his fellow Imagists F. S. Flint and Richard Aldington, and the French poet and London Rhymers’ Club member Victor Plarr made the two-hour drive from their city lodgings to the country house of the

Introduction 5 English writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in a motor car they rented from Harrods department store. The event would become known as the Peacock Dinner on account of the whole, roast peacock Pound insisted on serving Blunt’s guests.1 Yet the guestlist is more interesting than the eccentric culinary fare. At first glance, the party appears to be a strange mélange of old and new. Joining Pound and the younger generation of writers around the table were W. B. Yeats and his sometime patroness, Lady Gregory. Blunt was almost 50 years older than Pound and his fellow Imagist poets, Yeats was 20 years older. When gifted a marble box carved by the young French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska that contained poems by Flint, Aldington, and Plarr, Blunt described the poems as puzzling and Futuristlike in their language. Yet Pound’s account of the dinner, published later that month in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, emphasizes that it was very much a label-free affair. Blunt’s writing represented “the very height of the Victorian period”, Pound conceded, but the guests believed themselves to be “a committee of poets . . . representing no one clique or style but a genuine admiration for the power behind all expression, for the spirit behind the writing” (“Homage” 221). Their shared commitment to writerly innovation united those at the Peacock Dinner. Blunt was born in the early Victorian era and died in 1922, the oft-cited “annus mirabilis of modern anthropology” (North 6), but his work was energetically innovative in both content and style. His choice of a Lebanese proverb centered on rebirth and renovation—“Fear not. Often pearls are unstrung to be put in better order” (i)—as the epigraph for his travel writing volume The Future of Islam (1882) shows how Blunt certainly did not shy away from “making it new”. Nor did the other older guests. Yeats’ literary innovations, such as his reworking of the ballad form and experiments with automatic writing, are well-documented, as is Lady Gregory’s pioneering role in the Irish Literary Revival, a movement that epitomized the ideals of both renovation and innovation. Younger guests like Gaudier-Brzeska may have referred to themselves as “we, the moderns” (158), but this public self-identification took place just five months after they had dined happily with their forbears. This literary community is possible because, as Nicholas Daly has recognized, “authors debated the merits of their particular schools, but they did not see themselves as radically different in kind” (3). Although there are, of course, differences in style between a “Condition of England” novel and a Dadaist little magazine, the specter of literary periodization obscures how divergent formal or aesthetic techniques were employed by writers responding to the same fundamental concerns about society and their place within it. As Regenia Gagnier puts it in her Afterword, “everyone is modern and struggling with modern innovations in their own ways”. Scholarship has launched several challenges to period-focused critical frameworks and labeling systems. In 2008, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s now seminal PMLA article announced the rebranding of

6  Louise Kane Modernist Studies as the New Modernist Studies, a field whose “expansive tendency” urges re-reading texts with renewed cognizance of the porous, overlapping nature of boundaries relating to genre, discipline, geography, and period. As Mao and Walkowitz summarize, all period-centered areas of literary scholarship have broadened in scope, and this in what we might think of as temporal, spatial, and vertical directions. . . . As scholars demonstrate the fertility in questioning rigid temporal delimitations, periods seem inevitably to get bigger (one might think of the “long eighteenth century” or the “age of empire”). (737) This sense of periods getting “bigger” applies to the framework of this collection. Viewing the era of 1830–1950 as an age of its own involves doing some dismantling work that limits labels like “Victorian” and “modern”. Scholars have made repeated calls for revisionary approaches to these terms. Isobel Armstrong has proposed to “jettison the term [Victorian] altogether” on account of its misleading homogenization of the “diversity and complexity” (280) of nineteenth-century texts; Susan Stanford Friedman has urged that as “contradictory terms resisting consensual definition”, the nomenclatures “modern, modernism, and modernity” need to be deployed with discernment (“Definitional Excursions” 497). While contributors to this volume use terms like Victorian, modern, or modernist, they are employed as cautious (and sometimes contradictory) signposts of certain generic or stylistic traits, rather than as terms denoting rigid periodizations and ideals. Several studies have argued that similarities between Victorian and modern literatures render questions of periodization problematic. Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls have shown that modernism “habitually reworks and reinvents the legacy from which it recoils” (xvi); Rachel Teukolsky contends that Victorian writers pioneered the qualities of “formalism and abstraction” that “contributed to the emergence of modern Anglo-American aesthetics” (3). Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kristen Shepard-Barr’s recent volume Late Victorian into Modern (2016) attempted to eschew “traditional, compartmentalized models” (2) of literary categorization and focus instead on “crucial continuities across the period” (1). Anne Besnault-Levita and Anne-Florence GillardEstrada have explored how visual art, cinema, and literary texts exist “beyond the Victorian/modernist divide” (15). Yet these declarations of moving beyond or across a perceived set of period boundaries—of exploring “the in-between: the gradual changeover from one period to the next” (Marcus, Mendelssohn, and Shepherd-Barr 1)—often have the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the existence of the divide they call into question, or of reasserting periodization as a “critical issue” (BesnaultLevita and Gillard-Estrada 16).

Introduction 7

A New Framework: The Age of Innovation This volume aims to replace some of the thornier questions of periodization with a seemingly simple but potentially disruptive assumption: those writings in and across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were united in a unique, dialogic zeitgeist of literary experiment and textual innovation that unfolded and intensified as the twin harbingers of societal and intellectual change—technology and critical thinking—became irresistibly ubiquitous. Of course, the Anglo Saxons were innovative, the Romantics were ground-breaking, and Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe had written what are often considered the first novels in English well before this period. Yet, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represent an age of innovation in which writers, artists, and intellectuals, often equally as overwhelmed as they were enthused by the simultaneous and sustained bombardment of so many “news”, began to respond to these novelties—and their tacit equation with progress—in more cohesive and conscious ways. Technological advancements; scientific developments and inventions; changing attitudes toward religion, empire, and the place of the individual in an increasingly global society; nascent disciplines such as ecology and psychology; new ideas about sexuality, the role of women, gender, and the family; textual innovations and enhanced production processes: these are just some of the diverse and dizzying forms of innovation that influenced a wide variety of texts and genres between 1830 and 1950, and which the chapters in this collection explore in further detail. Recent scholarship has invested a new sense of the global into texts produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 Innovation is, of course, as “planetary” (Friedman, “World Modernisms” 500) as the forms of modernism with which it would later become aligned. In keeping with this global turn, the chapters explore the age of innovation as one which played out in—and through exchanges between—a vast array of countries and cultures; they touch upon genres such as the British novel, American magazine, French-language newspapers, and films and stories set in Italy, Africa, and Scandinavia. While the chapters discuss texts belonging to the Western literary tradition, this is not in any way to be perceived as a conscious omission, or as an assertion that the age of innovation was unique to continents such as North America and Europe. Diverse forms of literary innovation proliferated in the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) eras in Japan, for example, as new sub-genres such as the Japanese “I novel” (shishōsetsu) and detective novel (tantei shōsetsu, an East-West hybrid that combined Anglophone investigative tropes with a greater focus on probing psychological states) emerged. In China, the development of “mandarin ducks and butterflies” narratives and their replacement with New Culture Movement fiction exemplify how writers’ engagements with forms of newness were defined by continued processes of accretion, recycling,

8  Louise Kane and refinement. Although this volume is not able to offer exhaustive accounts of the age of innovation in all worldwide contexts, the essays contribute to this important task by taking into account nations such as Iceland, whose literary traditions and forms still remain as critical blindspots within the fields of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary studies. While this volume cannot hope to give complete coverage of the myriad ways BIPOC writers forged innovations in this period, many of the chapters emphasize inclusivity in their focus on authors and artists whose race, sexuality, nationality, or gender identification allow us to view them now as historically marginalized, such as the African American author Walter Francis White (Chapter  9), Charlotte Mew (Chapter 13), and Halldór Laxness (Chapter 14). Several probing studies have highlighted the broad theme of innovation as a framework for reevaluating literature. Alison Byerly’s Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (2013) shows how information networks, trains, and other technologies influenced “key narrative strategies” in nineteenth-century “realist fiction” (2), such as the Sherlock Holmes stories and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889). Alix Beeston’s In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (2018) asserts that “Surrealist photography” informs “the destabilizing operations of framing in the composite literary text” that is the modernist novel (51). Alex Goody’s Technology, Literature and Culture (2013) explores the influence of technological innovations upon literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, she argues, inventions like Nikola Tesla’s electricity supply system and Thomas Edison’s light bulb, Kinetoscope (an early form of motion picture camera), and improvements to Alexander Graham Bell and Antonio Meucci’s telephone “introduced a magical aspect into everyday lives” (Goody 8) that translated into literature, whereas the twentieth century brought “different engagements with the increasing proximity of the human and machine” (Goody 15). Deaglán ÓDonghaile posits that the “literature of terrorism” saw writers working between 1880 and 1950 employ with new vigor the themes of militancy and protest, drawing Victorian genres like the “penny dreadful” into unexpected contact with “the manifestos of modernism” (7). Kieran Dolin discusses the “tension between fidelity to tradition and . . . a radical attack” upon such fidelity that occurred as writers in the 1800s and early 1900s negotiated the new “emergence of law as the dominant discourse of value” (145). While these latter studies explore innovation in a wider time period, they focus on it within singular contexts: technology, terror, legal discourse. This volume extends these explorations of innovation by examining the link between the new—in both ideas and inventions—and literary newness across a variety of contexts and disciplines. The chapters, outlined in the following, are sectioned into four parts: the first focuses on inventions; the second on shifting landscapes resulting from evolving

Introduction 9 concepts of empire, belief, and selfhood; the third on human relations and philosophies of fellow feeling; and the fourth on radical deconstructions of gender and sexuality.

Chapter Summaries Part I: Inventing and Innovating: Science, Technology, Formal Experiment consists of four chapters that explore the impact of technological innovation on various genres, including the novel, periodicals, and film. In the first chapter, Claes E. Lindskog examines how the increased visibility of the sky in post-Industrial Revolution England, together with innovations in astronomy and air travel, informed an increase of skygazing scenes in the English novel. Comparing Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1840–1), George Gissing’s Thyrza (1887), and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs  Dalloway (1925), Lindskog argues that all three novelists present the sky as a form of Foucauldian heterotopia, an alternative space which offers characters conceptual escape from the stifling conditions of city life in London. Using an approach that combines traditional forms of close reading with linguistic concordance analysis and graphical visualization, Lindskog claims the increased prevalence of the word “sky” in these novels is a result of the renewed prominence it held in public consciousness. Certainly, inventions like the Hooker Telescope and commercial airplane helped to further an interest in space, the cosmos, and one’s place within it. Such inventions and celestial findings were met with fascination and awe by global audiences; the discovery in 1846 of Neptune was hailed “the most remarkable scientific discovery of the age” (“Le Verrier’s Planet” 154). While their depiction of scenes of skygazing shows how Dickens, Gissing, and Woolf were attuned to such discoveries, Lindskog also locates their interest in the sky in the older traditions of the Romantic poets, who privileged nature as a source of deep symbolic meaning and pioneered early forms of ecological discourse. While Lindskog’s chapter connects invention to innovation in the ­context of the novel, Chapter 2 explores the technological innovations that shaped periodical production in America’s Gilded Age. In this chapter, Jayme Yahr claims that specialist paper, halftone illustrations, and alternate use of rotary and flatbed presses to enable optimum printing of text and image forged the success of the popular, New York-based Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (1881–1930). The concepts of past and present, Victorian and modern prove somewhat redundant, Yahr notes, when applied to a periodical like the Century, as its ambitions to operate as a quality magazine bringing to readers the latest news in literature, politics, and current affairs meant that it was always innovating, continually making new. Periodicals are, after all, works that “signify space and time in ways meaningful to their readers at their perceived moments of reading” (Mussell 3; emphasis added). A  new moment of

10  Louise Kane reading and the issues meaningful within it could very quickly become old in the case of a monthly magazine like the Century. At times the Century’s newness meant, paradoxically, drawing on the past. As Yahr explains, Serres’ term “multitemporal object” is a more appropriate descriptor for the Century’s successful use of modern strategies. .  .  . The magazine employed familiarity mixed with technological innovation to produce texts and images that were at once accessible and familiar, such as the Civil War works and depictions of the frontier. For magazine editors like Richard Watson Gilder, who helmed the Century from 1881 to 1909, adoption and rejection of new print and production techniques were strategic; Yahr shows how the magazine’s commitment to technological advancements and new printing methods “positioned the Century’s readers as modern consumers even before the turn of the twentieth century”. Yet the magazine’s failure to commit to innovation in the fullest sense—it retained its small-c conservatism and failed to adapt to more advanced print technologies, such as photogravure—proved to be its downfall, Yahr contends. In Chapter 3, Louise Kane follows Yahr’s discussion of literary newness within periodical cultures and Lindskog’s focus on skygazing by examining how literary periodicals charted contemporary responses to a single innovation: the hot air balloon. Kane explains how revised understandings of space, distance, and time led to equally revised perspectives about how literature should function in a society that, thanks in part to such forms of new transport as the balloon, was becoming increasingly connected and global. Balloon narratives emphasized the balloon’s function as a transnational symbol and prompted new debates about nations’ evolving boundary lines. Kane connects these debates to then emergent nineteenth-century definitions of world literature pioneered by Goethe and reveals the fragile axes of thought upon which public opinion about innovation shifted. Mixed responses to the hot air balloon expose how “technology may be persistently present in literature . . . but what technology actually represented, enabled or undermined is not a constant for writers” (Goody 16). Fear of technological determinism and personal beliefs relating to liberty, foreign policy, trade, and imperialism influenced different reactions to the balloon as it became increasingly sophisticated in the 1800s and early 1900s. For cosmopolites like Goethe, the balloon represented a vehicle for overcoming national boundaries and for rethinking the polarizing geopolitics of colonial rule. Others viewed its potential for espionage as a dangerous threat to international goodwill, or, conversely, celebrated the balloon’s use as an instrument of warfare to fortify lines of separation between nation states.

Introduction 11 Chapter 4 sees Christopher Townsend examine avant-garde cinema as part of a long line of innovations spanning the disciplines of painting, music, and the physical sciences. Discussions of Futurism often center on the publication of Filippo Marinetti’s infamous “Futurist Manifesto” in the Bologna-based Gazzetta dell’Emilia in February 1909, but Townsend turns instead to Futurist filmmaking. Marinetti, the Ginanni-Corradini brothers, and Finnish Orphist artist Léopold Survage saw themselves as working within the same framework of experimentation established by earlier inventors, he argues. In early cinema, “lines between scientific research . . . and aesthetic practice were often blurred” (Skoller 547), and Townsend shows how the color music phenomenon developed by German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in the 1840s and the inventions it generated, such as the color organ, influenced the use of refracted light in early twentieth-century Futurist cinema and abstract art. The metaphysical and romantic philosophies of figures like Lessing and Nietzsche are also forms of innovative thought that set the intellectual and experimental staging for avant-garde filmmaking, Townsend contends. Like Yahr’s and Kane’s chapters, Townsend’s chapter explores the uncertainty that accompanied technological innovation; Marinetti’s rejection of the cinematograph on aesthetic grounds, for example, shows the processes of discernment and selectivity involved in developing and adapting older inventions. Part II: Changing Landscapes: Empire, Trade, Ecology probes literary experimentation brought about by innovation of thought—particularly in relation to debates about the economy, trade, and ecological concerns that changed concepts of selfhood and citizenship. In Chapter 5, Keith Clavin shows how “[a]dventure fiction, trade writing, and science played significant roles” in reflecting these debates and posed implications for imagined futures that were as terrifying as they were exhilarating. Analyzing H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1886–7), and H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon (1900–01), Clavin contends that these writers evolved adventure fiction from a genre evincing carefree explorations of masculine endeavors to one that served to relate rising anxieties about Britain’s colonial position and free trade policies. As Daly has noted, the adventure novel “articulated fantasies of spatiotemporal mobility” (82) for readers in its bridging of “the gap between the disjunct spaces of metropolis and colony” (27), but as readers came metaphorically closer to understanding life in the colonies, many began to question imperial rule and the dominion of Empire. In his assertion that “these texts also transmit the complex associations between adventure, literature, and imperial economic relations within othered locales”, Clavin explores how the figure of the trader unveils subversive representations of alterity that underpin surprisingly anticolonial, even postcolonial, aspects of adventure fiction. For Clavin, just as “a trader’s success depends upon an ability to comparatively ‘read’ cultures and, even more

12  Louise Kane so, on his proclivity to create narratives, invent myths, and recount legends”, so too does the genre of adventure fiction: its writers had to look both backward and forward to find new ways of re-reading colonial landscapes to publics who had begun to view jingoistic narratives as facile and outdated. Writers’ innovations with the adventure novel were thus central in prompting and recording new considerations of the problems, challenges, and moral objections relating to colonial rule. Certain historical changes, such as the conversion of New Zealand (1853), Canada (1867), and Australia (1901) to self-governing nations and cessation of the East India Company’s trading in 1874, furthered these considerations. In Chapter 6, Camelia Raghinaru shows how Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899–1900) responds to these considerations, with Jim’s attempts to understand his conflicted position in Patusan reflecting the growing sense of skepticism and suspicion that saw many people begin to see global capitalism as a model capable of destroying, rather than developing, international relations. Raghinaru echoes Clavin’s assertion that writers revised the functional purpose and generic conventions of the adventure novel in the late nineteenth century. She points to the limitations of existing genre fiction in representing complex shifts in public and private attitudes to the concept and workings of Empire and examines how Conrad innovates the romance genre while also retaining some of its conventions. Lord Jim is a novel “about romance reaching its utmost limit and impossibility, while self-conscious of its loss”. In Chapter  7, Anna Bedsole explores how T. S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy used a different genre—poetry—to record loss in spiritual contexts. While Clavin and Raghinaru explore how adventure fiction writers place the figure of the male trader in unfamiliar landscapes to voice doubts about empire and the colonial(ist) self, Bedsole argues that Eliot and Hardy place their (often male) speakers in alternate landscapes to foreground doubts and tensions that arose as Victorian determinism and religious faith came under perceived threat from technology and scientific discovery. Bedsole argues that Eliot’s and Hardy’s poetic representations of landscapes as alternately redemptive or spiritually barren can be read through the emergent discourse of environmental science. As Wendy Parkins and Peter Adkins have noted, the “formulation of the term ‘ecology’ occurred when the ecology of the British environment— the material and social relations between humans, other organisms, and the wider natural world—was being transformed by the impact of industrial capitalism and imperialism” (1). Rather than focusing on colonial landscapes, Hardy and Eliot focus on landscapes closer to home. The encroachment into green space as railways expanded, together with other inventions that had the power to transform the individual’s relationship to space and time—the establishment of the London Underground system in 1863, the Paris Metro in 1900, and the New York Subway in

Introduction 13 1904; the global shipping forecast (first broadcast in 1867); the motor car; the introduction of Daylight Savings Time (British Summer Time) in 1916; and the transmission of the first-ever radio weather bulletin in 1922—brought those living in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into an unprecedented awareness of—and contact with—the changing environment. Bedsole examines how the emergence in the late 1800s and early 1900s of a new type of “human [as opposed to plant-related] ecology” emphasizing “study of the geographic conditions of human culture” (Hayes 39) offers a lens through which to view Eliot’s and Hardy’s expressions of concerns about faith, human communication, and urban living in an age in which technological renewal seemed to be outpacing spiritual growth. In Part III: Navigating Feeling: the Self, Empathy, Human Character, contributors continue to explore the impact of new attitudes toward the self, fellow feeling, and religious belief upon modes of literary representation. The three essays in this part examine how these changing attitudes saw nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, from George Moore to Edith Wharton, engage in newly internalized, psychologically probing constructions of human character. With the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian theory, developments in psychology moved beyond Victorian notions of the healthy mind and drove the construction of the modernist self that Woolf would later pinpoint as having emerged by 1910 (the year “human character changed” (4)). The cogs that set these developments in motion, however, had been turning for several decades. Chapter 8, Kathryn Laing’s “F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore: the Aesthetics of Sympathy and Texts of Transition”, explores how the little-known fin-de-siècle writer F. Mabel Robinson possessed a “preoccupation” with human feeling that was in part the product of pre-Raphaelitism. Together with her sister (the novelist Mary Robinson), Vernon Lee, and George Moore, F. Mabel Robinson evolved an “alternative aesthetic of empathy”. Laing shows how “this aesthetic reached backward into older, pre-Raphaelite traditions, and forward into newly emergent ideas and conversations about aesthetics, naturalism, and wider European thought on the self and human relations, complicating attempts to view literary innovation through rupturing frameworks”. Laing argues that the precise ways the Robinsons, Lee, and Moore negotiated concepts of sympathy, empathy, and genres including French naturalism and social realism wrought a particular “hybridity” in their works and shows how this hybridity—in part the product of their kinder depictions of marginalized, denigrated members of society—presented implicit and innovative challenges to class structures. While Laing’s chapter connects sympathy to revised presentations of class, Chapter 9, by Masami Sugimori, explores how the African American novelist Walter Francis White used narrative empathy to call for racial equality and promote the aims of the incipient American Civil Rights

14  Louise Kane movement. Focusing on White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924), the chapter views White’s constructions of empathy as the product of his engagement with “multi-genre reading and writing” that encompassed earlier discourses of scientific determinism, European naturalism, abolitionist writing, and mid nineteenth-century novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Victorian novelists like George Eliot promoted “the extension of our sympathies” as a means of “extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot” (54), but recent scholarship has dismantled the idea that empathy studies resides “within the realm of Victorian studies” and shown instead how empathy “highlights alterity” (Sorum 9) as a universal theme. Sugimori’s chapter illustrates how White presents empathy as a similar form of edifying, unifying social bonding in an early twentieth-century Deep South setting: empathy has the potential to refine the sensibilities of readers who are “uninformed or neglectful of the South’s rampant racial violence”, mobilizing them to fight for the “collective cause”. Another innovation Sugimori identifies in White’s novel is the use of a “theatrical framework” to underscore the series of internalized thoughts Kenneth, the novel’s protagonist, experiences in the novel’s final, climactic scene. The chapter concludes by arguing that White evolves empathic discourse, giving it a “satirical overhaul as [he] complicates it to show the fragility (and superficiality) of improved race relations”. The mixed feelings of hope, doubt, and discomfort that accompanied the advent of more progressive values in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also inform Chapter 10, written by Nancy Von Rosk. Von Rosk’s examination of Catholicism’s role in Edith Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer” (1900) echoes Anna Bedsole’s discussion of Eliot’s and Hardy’s oscillations between expressions of religious doubt and faith. Arguing that Wharton’s story can be viewed as part of the New Woman movement, Von Rosk links the emergence of Wharton’s duchess’ feminism back to the poem that, she argues, influenced Wharton’s story: Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842). While Sugimori’s chapter shows how White uses French realism and anti-slavery discourse to reimagine the present, Von Rosk contends that Wharton also drew on earlier genres and texts, such as gothic fiction and Honoré de Balzac’s short story “La Grande Bretèche” (1831), to enact a radical conflation of religious fervor and illicit desire. Scholars like Maureen Moran have argued that Victorian writers often challenged ideas of Catholicism as bound up with repression or excessive piety and instead focused on its “association with the shocking, unorthodox, and countercultural” (3). With its combination of a familiar religious framework and allure of unspoken revolt, “transgressive Catholicism” provided a “safe environment” (Moran 106) for the consideration of alternative presentations of sexuality and gender roles. Von Rosk avers that Wharton adopts a gothic convention— the “alignment of transgressive sexuality with religious devotion”—to

Introduction 15 re-write Catholicism in this vein and contends that her paradoxical blurring of religiosity and sexual daring evinces a newness also reflected in her reworking of Browning and Balzac’s European settings—especially Italy. These were, after all, foreign spaces which “entertain[ed] simulating alternatives to the norms of home culture” (Moran 3). Part IV: Blurring Boundaries: Gender, Sexuality, Desire contains four chapters that examine transgressive presentations of the body in short stories and novels published between 1880 and 1950. The popularization of experimental psychology, sexology, and pornography saw bodies become increasingly public, rather than fiercely private, territories during this period, resulting in revised understandings of sexuality, desire, and gender roles. The worldwide rise of female suffrage movements and feminist magazines like The Freewoman (1911–2) and The Woman’s Protest (1912–3), together with the ways World War I “redefined” fundamental aspects of “pre-war masculine identity” (Meyer 148), enabled writers to discuss gender disparities with comparatively more freedom. In Chapter 11, Elizabeth Podnieks posits motherhood as a key theme that reflects these ideological revisions and stimulates several formal and textual innovations: “Ezra Pound’s 1928 urge to ‘make it new’ was already heralded in nineteenth-century New Woman texts where motherhood itself was becoming ‘new’ ”, she argues. Turning to The Daughters of Danaus (1894) by Scottish feminist writer Mona Caird and American novelist Dorothy Canfield’s The Home-Maker (1924), Podnieks shows how, despite being published 30 years apart, both Caird’s and Canfield’s texts contributed to this “making new” of motherhood. Rather than fulfilling traditional ideals of motherhood and living their lives within the private sphere of the home, the new women of their novels are global figures who operate “across national boundaries” and enter the public realms of trade and industry “on both sides of the Atlantic”. This brings a contrasting perspective to the simultaneous revisioning—illustrated in Chapters 5 and 6—of the role of the alpha-male trader during the same period. Podnieks locates the emergence of the New Woman in the late nineteenth century, but in Chapter  12, Nicola Darwood traces the genesis of radical ideas about female experience (and novelists’ attempts to pioneer new modes of representation to chart this experience) back to the mid 1800s. Her chapter demonstrates how the twentieth-century novelist Stella Benson reworks innovations seen in mid-to-late nineteenth-century fiction, such as authorially intrusive narrators, invocations of the supernatural, and character delineations influenced by controversial, experimental theories about the human mind. Benson’s idiosyncratic negotiations with old, new, and evolving literary conventions mirror the processes of ebb and flux—of rejection and acceptance, of clinging to pasts and looking to futures—that characterized responses to transitional ideologies and cultural change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Benson herself recognized, innovation did not necessitate a thorough rejection

16  Louise Kane of the old. “The word Progress instead of Change crowns novelty with a kind of halo and suggests that there is necessarily virtue in everything new”, she argued. “This is an easy thought, but not always a true one”. As such, “some new ideas . . . are bound to fail and some old ideas . . . ought to survive” (Benson 2). Darwood’s examination of the older ideas that survive in Benson’s forms of literary novelty is a reminder that the innovative quality of many writers’ and artists’ work was the process of “between-ness” they enacted as they recycled past forms while embracing new ideas. These recyclings could become forms of newness in their own right; they were renovations as much as innovations. Chapter  13, Kristen Renzi’s “Parsing Between-ness: Love, Looking Backward and Forward, in Charlotte Mew’s Short Fiction”, continues this examination of the politics of between-ness. Darwood contends that Benson drew on mid-Victorian forms of magical realism to create female characters who defy convention, and Renzi takes a similar standpoint in her assertion that Mew reconfigures earlier textual and narrative innovations—including a use of fairytales and forays into the supernatural within otherwise naturalistic settings—to fashion similarly revised constructions of female and male selfhood. Framed by feminist critical approaches, Renzi’s chapter shows how Mew’s reconfigurations of the short story genre, as seen in “The Smile” (1914), provided methods through which she could activate characters’ ideological entrances into, and enjoyment of, unconventional gender roles and lifestyles. In her careful reconstruction of Mew’s other(ed) worlds, Renzi echoes Von Rosk’s contention that writers like Wharton invoked alternative spaces (in their case, Italy) as a means of playing out equally alternative forms of sexual desire. As Judith Walkowitz has explained, transformative usages of space in nineteenthcentury fiction often coincide with nonconformist presentations of what were then seen as “dangerous sexualities” (6). Renzi explores how Mew draws on mid nineteenth-century writers’ use of such spaces, together with the fairytale, a genre which offers authors “the unique opportunity to speak [their] mind[s] without social condemnation” (Wagner 246), to conduct her own “alternative contextualization[s]” of love and desire. Writers’ equations of alternative spaces (strange poetic landscapes, unfamiliar metropoles or colonized countries, the sky as an escape from urban jungles) with unconventional ideologies or unorthodox political, social, or sexual activities are a textual innovation many chapters in this volume interrogate. Chapter  14 continues this interrogation by examining literary representations of sexual otherness in bohemian cityscapes such as Reykjavik, Berlin, and Taormina. In this final chapter, Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir argues that nineteenth-century debates about queerness and non-heteronormative desire influenced emergent discussions of such themes in the twentieth-century Icelandic novel. Taking Halldór Laxness’ The Great Weaver from Kashmir (1927) and Elías Mar’s Man eg þig löngum (1949) as its primary case studies, the chapter

Introduction 17 asserts that, while homosexuality can hardly be called new, its presence in these novels appeared as a form of newness because discussions of homosexual desire only began to reach Iceland in the 1920s. This resulted in a sort of delayed innovation as Icelandic writers began to explore a theme that had already received varied treatment by 1890s writers like Oscar Wilde, Robert Hichens, and, as the previous chapter examined, Charlotte Mew. The chapter relocates Pater’s “aesthetics of failure” within Elías’ writing: both Elías and Pater “explore in novel ways the manifold dimensions of not conforming, not succeeding, not doing, not being a ‘normal’ subject in a society that places ever more emphasis on normalization, be it late-Victorian England or mid twentieth-century Iceland”. Tracing nineteenth-century European LGBTQ texts’ influences on writers like Halldór remains complex, if not impossible, the chapter argues, because of the culture of “public silence” that saw homosexual discourse remain unacknowledged in Iceland. Halldór and Elías were unable to admit openly to reading writers like Pater and Wilde: theirs is thus a process of imitative innovation unspoken and hidden, unacknowledged but immediately visible when the narrative surface is scratched. The chapters in this volume expose the value of re-reading these narratives, together with the dialogic literary networks and connections that forged their backdrops but have often remained equally unacknowledged. They advocate sidestepping issues of periodization and focusing instead on innovation as a relative concept that applies as much to Dickens as it does to Woolf and that generated diverse, sometimes contradictory, forms of literary newness. While novelists, poets, and filmmakers differed in their attitudes to new technologies, ideologies, and philosophies, each chapter makes a case for the concept of innovation as one which ultimately unites, rather than polarizes, those who lived and wrote in an age of unprecedented change.

Notes 1 Lucy McDiarmid provides an in-depth discussion of the Peacock Dinner and how its sense of community trumped perceived “generational differences” (3). 2 The Victorian Studies for the Twenty-First Century (v21) Collective stresses the possibility of “reconceptualizing Victorian studies as a transnational field” (Lecourt n.p.). Anna Jones equates temporal with geographic deconstruction in her contention that understanding the “neo—” in neo-Victorian studies involves considering the “transnational” aspect of Victorian texts and its function in both “the global present and the longue durée” (1). See also Susan Stanford Friedman’s explanation of how “[c]omparatists such as Emily Apter, David Damrosch, Wai Chee Dimock, Eric Hayot, Djelal Kadir, Françoise Lionnet, Haun Saussy, and Shu-mei Shih (among many others) have dramatically changed the literary archives of comparative studies, influencing the global expansion of modernist studies” (Planetary Modernisms 6–7). Projects like Regenia Gagnier’s Global Circulation Project (http://literature-compass. com/global-circulation-project/) reemphasize the need to explore texts’ global mobility across temporal or geographic boundaries.

18  Louise Kane

Works Cited Benson, Stella. Worlds Within Worlds. Macmillan, 1928. Besnault-Levita, Anne, and Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada. “Introduction.” Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts, edited by Besnault-Levita and Gillard-Estrada, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1–18. Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen. The Future of Islam. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882. Byerly, Alison. Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism. U of Michigan P, 2013. Cianci, Giovanni, and Peter Nicholls. “Introduction.” Ruskin and Modernism, edited by Cianci and Nicholls. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp. xv–xvii. Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914. Cambridge UP, 2000. Dolin, Kieran. Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature. Cambridge UP, 1999. Eliot, George. “Art II—The Natural History of German Life.” Westminster Review, vol. LXVI, July 1856, pp. 51–79. “False Point of Honor.” The Calcutta Journal of Politics and General Literature, vol. 5, no. 230, Sept. 25 1822, p. 331. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens: Volume 3. Chapman & Hall, 1874. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/ Modernism.” Modernism/ Modernity, vol. 8, no. 3, 2001, pp. 493–513. ———. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. Columbia UP, 2015. ———. “World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Mark Wollaeger, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 499–528. Gaudier Brzeska, Henri. “Vortex.” Blast, vol. 1, 1914, pp. 155–58. Goody, Alex. Technology, Literature and Culture. Polity, 2011. Hardy, Florence Emily. The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928. Macmillan, 1930. Jones, Anna. “Transnational Neo-Victorian Studies: Notes on the Possibilities and Limitations of a Discipline.” Literature Compass, vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 1–18. Lecourt, Sebastien. “Victorian Studies and the Transnational Present.” v21 Collective. http://v21collective.org/sebastian-lecourt-victorian-studies-and-the-transna tional-present/. Accessed May 5, 2020. “Le Verrier’s Planet.” Sharpe’s London Magazine, vol. 3, no. 62, Dec. 31, 1846, pp. 154–56. “Literary.” The New England Galaxy and United States Literary Advertiser, vol. 9, no. 478, Dec. 8, 1826, p. 2. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz. “New Modernist Studies.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 3, 2008, pp. 737–38. Marcus, Laura, Michele Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr. “Introduction.” Late Victorian into Modern, edited by Mendelssohn Marcus and Shepherd-Barr. Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 1–15. McDiarmid, Lucy. Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal. Oxford UP, 2014.

Introduction 19 Meyer, Jessica. Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Moran, Maureen. Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature. Oxford UP, 2007. Mussell, James. Science, Time, and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press. Ashgate, 2007. North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. Cambridge UP, 2001. Ó  Donghaile, Deaglán. Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism. Edinburgh UP, 2011. Parkins, Wendy, and Peter Adkins. “Introduction: Victorian Ecology and the Anthropocene.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 26, 2018, pp. 1–15. Pound, Ezra. “Homage to Wilfrid Blunt.” Poetry, vol. 3, no. 6, 1914, p. 221. ———. Ta Hio: The Great Learning Newly Rendered into the American Language. U of Washington P, 1928. ———. “Wyndham Lewis.” Egoist, June 15, 1914, p. 234. Skoller, Jeffrey. “Experimentalism: Film and Video.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed., edited by Michael Kelly. Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 547–51. Sorum, Eve. Modernist Empathy: Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny. Cambridge UP, 2019. Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine. Greenwood, 2009. Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford UP, 2009. Wagner, Shandi Lynne. “Seeds of Subversion in Mary de Morgan’s ‘The Seeds of Love’.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, 2015, pp. 245–64. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. U of Chicago P, 1992. Wollaeger, Mark. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Princeton UP, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (The Hogarth Essays no. 1). Hogarth Press, 1924.

Part I

Inventing and Innovating Science, Technology, Formal Experiment

1 The Sky as Heterotopia in Dickens, Gissing, and Woolf Claes E. Lindskog

Introduction The difference between the earth and the sky is the central distinction in our physical environment. Despite being such an important component of the space in which we live, however, the sky is usually taken for granted and, as a consequence, ignored. As Virginia Woolf points out in her essay “On Being Ill” (1926), it often takes a period of illness to give us the leisure to discover what an “extraordinary spectacle” (321) we have right above our heads. Woolf treats her reader to a long description of the splendors of celestial mechanics, before remarking that “[o]ne should not let this gigantic cinema play perpetually to an empty house” (321).1 One effect of Woolf’s essay is to make the reader look up; it functions as a poster for that show in the sky. To paraphrase Joseph Conrad (7), the essay makes us see. This chapter uses the motif of skygazing to complicate our view of modernist fiction as a category distinct from and antagonistic to its immediate predecessors.2 Rather than being two mutually exclusive categories, each forming an organic whole, Victorian and modernist novels have many points in common. The perceived difference between the two may instead be seen as one of emphasis and of the degree to which they use these elements. For example, this chapter argues, Victorian and modernist novels use the motif of skygazing in very similar ways. The novels belong to a shared period of exponential scientific progress that drove the fields of cosmology and astrophysics from the mid 1800s through to the early 1900s. Their acts of skygazing can be seen against this context, also point to an influence from Romantic poetry. The continued presence of the same motif is an indication that, in the history of the novel as a representation of external reality, the difference between Victorian and modernist fiction is insignificant compared to the difference between the pre-Romantic and post-Romantic novel. It is my contention here that the sky is used in both the Victorian and modernist novel as a non-finite “heterotopia”, a term introduced by Foucault (24) to describe places in the real world that function as projections DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-3

24  Claes E. Lindskog of utopian desires and that may act as refuges or vents for needs that go unmet in everyday life, or as complements or correctives for the limitations of the hegemonic social structure. Spaces that can be used as heterotopias include mirrors and prisons, churches and theaters, novels, and, I suggest, the sky. To demonstrate the continuity between Victorian and modernist fiction in their use of the sky as heterotopia, I will briefly discuss the history of the visibility of the sky in the English novel in general. Then I will look at how this motif is used in three ostensibly very different novels: Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1840–41), Gissing’s Thyrza (1887), and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). These novels have been chosen as much for their similarities as for their differences: all three novels are set primarily in London and use the sky as a non-finite counter-space to the resolutely finite space of the metropolis, but they come from different periods and display very different attitudes toward life, from the anti-revolutionary and anti-Romantic fervor of Dickens to the grim realism of Gissing and the almost ecstatic lyricism of Woolf.3 However, despite the great transformations in human relations to the sky that took place between these novels, indicated by air pollution and airplanes, the sky retains its role as a heterotopia, carrying empty promises of liberation. The different novels may take different attitudes to these heterotopias, but the motif itself remains remarkably similar.

Making the Sky Visible The main spatial property of the sky is its lack of visual boundaries. While terrestrial, and especially urban, spaces may seem to be closed and finite—and thus comprehensible to human cognition—celestial spaces appear non-finite and intrinsically impossible to comprehend. The sky hence becomes a site of openness, freedom, and unknowability; it is not by accident that the sky has been given a significant place in many religions. At the same time, the sky as a space in its own right is rarely depicted in literature; usually the sky is reduced to its human uses and to a human scale; it becomes a discrete part of our finite human world. As Woolf comments, “[w]hat snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine, daub windows gold” (“On Being Ill” 321). This has generally been the role of the sky in literature: functioning as the background to human endeavors, often in the form of weather. Consequently, the sky as a spatial experience has largely been ignored in literary criticism.4 In order for the sky to function as a literary space, it needs to be discovered. Like all spatial experiences, the sky has its own history, dependent on the shifting social framework of our existence; we produce the sky as space through our “social practice” (12), in Henri Lefebvre’s terminology. The question here, then, is why literary texts produce the space of

The Sky as Heterotopia 25 the sky and what this spatial production tells us about the social conditions of the novel at different periods. Given that the need for heterotopias in Foucault’s theory is the result of social pressure, that need tends to be greatest where social pressure is greatest: in the city. Thus, non-finite heterotopias are often used as symbols of a transcendent promise that is otherwise lacking in the confined spaces of the metropolis. If spatial experiences have a history, a history that evolves alongside different ways of experiencing society, so do sensory experiences, as Fredric Jameson points out (229). The mind is notoriously selective in what it sees and ignores, and literature reflects the shifting patterns of what is deemed worthy or unworthy of notice. Exploring how the sky is represented in the novel at different times necessitates an understanding of the history of what Sara Danius calls “visibility” (11). The elements of a text world that are made visible within the text are influenced both by the social practices of the time and by the development of literary techniques. Danius concedes that earlier writers such as Jane Austen utilized visual descriptions of the world, but that these “tend to be brief and are easily absorbed by the narrative structure” (21). It was only with the first great works by Stendhal and Balzac around 1830, she argues, that novels began to include sensory descriptions that exceeded the needs of the narrative. Detailed descriptions of the experience of the sky as a space, rather than as a mere indicator of the weather, would certainly qualify as superfluous in most situations, and should hence be a good indicator of this general development. Based on Danius’s work and on the habitual distinction between a preoccupation with the objective, external world and a more subjective emphasis on the internal, one could then make two hypotheses. First, there should be a sharp increase in the number of references to the sky between English novels written in the first and the second half of the nineteenth century, by which point French realism had had time to make an impact on English fiction. Second, there should be a corresponding decrease after 1910, when narratives continued to turn the literary gaze increasingly inward. To test these hypotheses, I have developed a statistical survey of the mention of the word “sky” in 240 British works of fiction published from 1719 to 1929. This survey gives a rough measure of the “sky visibility index”—the “visibility” of the sky—in each text. The averages of the sky visibility indices for all the texts in each period are presented in Figure 1.1.5 For each of the 12 time periods, 20 novels were selected, based on the criteria of continued popularity, historical importance, inclusivity, and accessibility. Fiction with supernatural elements has been excluded, as well as works of science fiction, since these may be expected to show an almost inevitable relation to the sky. The referent of “sky” has not been taken into account nor the extent of the surrounding description of the sky, so the index should only be taken as a rough indication of how visible the sky is in each text.

26  Claes E. Lindskog

"Sky" per 100,000 words 30

25

20

15

10

5

0

Figure 1.1 The average of the sky visibility index over 20 novels from each period. The sky visibility index is here defined as the frequency of the word “sky”, as measured by the number of instances per 100,000 words.

Based on the data in Figure 1.1, both hypotheses can be refuted. As predicted, the sky is almost “invisible” during the eighteenth century, but it then increases its visibility dramatically at the beginning of the nineteenth century, long before 1840 when French realism began to emerge as a distinct literary movement. After a brief dip in the 1860s, the sky visibility index then increases at a fairly steady rate between 1870 and 1929. Of the 60 texts in the highest visibility quartile, only 16 were published before 1890, and seven of those were written by Hardy. Of the texts in the lowest quartile, with an index lower than 2.4, 38 were published before 1840 and only one, May Sinclair’s The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922), was published after 1880. At the same time, it is notable that many novels that have traditionally been periodized as modernist or at least proto-modernist, owing, among other characteristics, to their perceived inward, introspective narrative style, have unexpectedly high indices: all the included works by Aldington, Forster, Richardson, West, and Woolf and over 60% of the included works of Conrad and Lawrence occupy the highest quartile, with an index of 15.8 or more, peaking at 65.2 for Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), closely followed by Lawrence’s The Trespasser (1912, 62.3), and Woolf’s Orlando (1928, 52.3). This steady increase destabilizes the familiar periodization of texts into comfortable “Victorian” or “modernist” groupings. Instead

The Sky as Heterotopia 27 of a sudden shift as we turn from Victorian to modernist novels, we find a steady rise, and it is paradoxically the most internally focused, modernist texts that are most preoccupied with the external space of the sky. Skygazing is hence revealed as a long-standing textual trope that endures across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Dickens to Woolf, novelists writing in the 1830s and 1930s were united in their new turn to the skies. As Figure 1.1 shows, this turn begins to become particularly noticeable in 1820, 20 years prior to French realism’s emergence proper. Instead, there must be some other influence behind this increase in the visibility of the sky, an influence that appears to sustain in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. Again, the statistics suggest an answer: Romantic poetry. If we look at the five Romantic poets who may be deemed to have had the greatest influence on later English novelists, we find that they have very high sky visibility indices: the Lyrical Ballads 69.5; Wordsworth’s The Prelude 41.7; the collected poems of Coleridge 89.7; of Shelley 133.1; of Keats 34.3; and of Byron 20.9. A fine example of a Romantic skyscape can be found in Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo” (written 1818–19, sky visibility index 32.7), which describes the sky in architectural terms. Notwithstanding the finite nature of human architecture, the speaker introduces this set piece by proclaiming his love for places “where we taste/The pleasure of believing what we see/Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be” (Shelley ll. 15–17). The examples given of such spaces are the sea and the sky, two unbounded, non-finite, spaces framed only by the horizon, and hence representative of the immense possibilities of our imagination. Here, as in many other Romantic poems, the city’s opposite—nature—is figured as a heterotopia, with the sky available as a reminder of nature in the city and as a symbol of the transcendental possibilities of nature everywhere. I would tentatively suggest that the sky becomes more visible in British fiction largely as a result of a gradual incorporation into the novel of motifs and preoccupations associated with Romantic poetry, an incorporation that became more prevalent as contemporary scientific interest in exploring the sky and space reached something of a zenith.6 In particular, this Romantic motif is recycled in both late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction to create non-finite heterotopias as a foil to reality. If the novel as a genre developed as a response to the transition to a mainly urban economy in the eighteenth century, the development of the visibility of the sky is an indication that the Victorian and modernist novel are both responses to an increased sense of unease in the city, the same unease that can be found in the work of the Romantics. In the rest of this chapter, I shall compare three otherwise very different novels that all use the contrast between the finite city and the non-finite sky: Barnaby Rudge (13.5), Thyrza (19.4), and Mrs Dalloway (43.2).

28  Claes E. Lindskog

Dickens’s Romantic Skies In Dickens’s historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1840–1), set primarily during the Gordon riots of 1780, the contrast between finite and non-finite, closed and open spaces is an important structural element. The setting is spread over many different spaces, both public and private, most of which are threatened or contested, but at the heart of the action lies Newgate Prison, which like London itself is figured as an enclosed and finite space.7 Even more claustrophobic than the prison itself, however, is the situation of Barnaby’s mother, and Barnaby’s use of the sky as heterotopia should be seen as an attempt to liberate his mother and himself from their circumstances. Barnaby is often unable to distinguish between reality and symbol, prefiguring the narrators of Dickens’s last novels, who have a similar tendency. One evening, before joining the rioters, Barnaby stands looking at the sunset and says wistfully to his mother “[i]f we had, chinking in our pockets, but a few specks of that gold which is piled up yonder in the sky, we should be rich for life” (Dickens 361). He describes a real sky and the words could function as a mere metaphor for the way that sky looks, but Barnaby does not use them metaphorically; he really believes that there is gold in the sky. Nor does Barnaby’s mother challenge his confusion but instead extends the metaphor: “Do you not see . . . how red it is? Nothing bears so many stains of blood, as gold” (Dickens 361). There has been a shift in the color of the sky, from gold to red. Barnaby’s vision of gold in the sky becomes associated with murder and the burning city; the bloodred sky instead presents Romantic skygazing as suddenly associated with revolution and crime (Dickens 420). Dickens contrasts the sky as a symbol of the hope for social change with the image of the modern metropolis as a prison, of which Newgate is just a part. However, far from being on the side of the revolution, the novel seems to warn us against such Romantic illusions, describing these as both impractical and, ultimately, destructive. Dickens’s heterotopias need a firm grounding in reality if they are not to be dangerous. This contrasts with the more positive presentation of the sky in The Old Curiosity Shop, which bears a similarly high sky index of 14.1.

Gissing’s Taunting Skies If Dickens’s urban spaces seem claustrophobic and in need of heterotopias, then that applies even more strongly to those of George Gissing. As Jameson has argued, Gissing’s urban spaces represent a claustrophobic version of Dickens’s city, “reduced to the empty grid of calls by one character to another, visits to oppressive rooms and apartments, and intervals of random strolls through the poorer quarters” (190). The spatial units are as alienated as the individuals producing them, and the sky becomes a strictly regulated commodity in this claustrophobically restricted economy of space.

The Sky as Heterotopia 29 In Thyrza (1887), Gissing also likens working-class London to a prison: Lambeth Bridge appears like “the entrance to some fastness of ignoble misery” (Gissing, Thyrza 133), and the sky can only be contemplated from within the prison. This “sealing off of Lambeth” (Goode 103) is also repeated in other boroughs. In The Nether World (1889), a new housing development for the poor in Clerkenwell is described as “terrible barracks” with “[v]ast, sheer walls” and “[a]n inner courtyard . . . looking up to the sky as from a prison” (Gissing, The Nether World 274). In both novels, the word “nether” is used more to describe the city beneath the sky than a city beneath the world; toward the end of her travails, Thyrza muses that “[i]f the sky were always as to-day . . . she might find the life before her in truth as little of a burden as it seemed this morning. But the days would again be wrapped in nether fumes” (Gissing, Thyrza 511). As in Barnaby Rudge, the sky is inexorably separated from the mire of human life, but here access even to that most democratic of heterotopias remains strictly regulated; access to the sky is a matter of class. Consequently, when Thyrza’s sister Lydia dreams that “it were possible to quit the streets for but one day, and sit somewhere apart under the open sky”, she is immediately put in her place again by a narratorial comment: “It was not often that so fantastic a dream visited her” (Gissing, Thyrza 73). Not coincidentally, the novel begins in the Lake District, that region emblematic of Romanticism, where a middle-class character, Annabel, wonders whether the time she spends watching the clouds “was not in truth more gainful than that wherein she bent over her books” (Gissing, Thyrza 30). In a novel where spiritual improvement forms a significant secondary theme, such an observation is not unimportant; it is not leisure that Annabel benefits from, but the contemplation of the tranquility and expansiveness of nature, something that the Londoners are largely denied. The human need for non-finite spaces is most clearly expressed when Thyrza for the first time sees the sea, her mesmerization echoing the Romantic sublime moment: You and I cannot remember the moment when the sense of infinity first came upon us; we have thought so much since then, and have assimilated so much of others’ thoughts, that those first impressions are become as vague as the memory of our first love. But Thyrza would not forget this vision of the illimitable sea, live how long she might. She had scarcely heretofore been beyond the streets of Lambeth. At a burst her consciousness expanded in a way we cannot conceive. (Gissing, Thyrza 205) This passage only refers to the sea, but the sense of expansion and apparent promise of self-improvement carries over to the sky when this scene is referenced in two later passages. First Thyrza, back in Lambeth, sees a cloud and is reminded of her excursion to the sea: “Look at that

30  Claes E. Lindskog white billow of cloud on its fathomless ocean! Even now there were clouds like that high up over Eastbourne. One such had hung above her as she drove with Mrs. Ormonde up Beachy Head” (Gissing, Thyrza 256–57). Here it is the blue sky that is described as a “fathomless ocean”. Later in the same passage, “[s]ky and water met on that line of mystery” (Gissing, Thyrza 257) the horizon. The fact that the sky is always half-available might devalue it in the eyes of the beholder, but its association with the sea makes it visible again. Similarly, when Lydia sees the sea for the first time, she momentarily confuses the two: “everything ceased; there seemed to be nothing but blue sky before her. Ah, that was the sea, then” (Gissing, Thyrza 376). Thyrza, like “Julian and Maddalo”, thus associates the two non-finite spaces most readily accessible to us: the sky and the sea. The finite is constantly jostled against the non-finite, to the immense advantage of the latter. Like Foucault’s heterotopias, Gissing’s sky functions as a space of both illusion and compensation. But Gissing is no Romantic; the sky may retain its symbolic power, but it is largely denied to the denizens of the nether world and exists for them only as a hope or a taunt. In both Dickens and Gissing, the sky is unreachable, a symbol of impossible hope. In the early twentieth century, however, the skies became open to human invasion as never before. The technical innovations of the early twentieth century brought with them a profound re-examination of all spatial experiences; in the nineteenth century, industrialization may have obscured the skies, but in the twentieth century, they were invaded by airplanes and searchlights. As Stephen Kern argues in his magisterial work on time and space in modernity, “[m]odern technology also collapsed the vault of heaven. Never before the age of the wireless and airplane did the heavens seem to be so close or so accessible” (317). The aerial warfare of World War One inevitably invaded the novel: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918, 44.0), Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929, 18.5), and Woolf’s The Years (1937, 44.2) all include images of planes and zeppelins sullying the transcendental possibilities of the sky. Consequently, twentieth-century writers, like their nineteenthcentury counterparts, use the sky as heterotopia, but rather than being tauntingly inaccessible, the sky now tends to symbolize the impossibility of transcendence in a world where even the sky has been invaded by war and advertising.

Woolf’s Humanized Skies This new accessibility affects the sky also in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, in which an airplane scrawls an advertising message in the sky, thus ironically subverting the idea that messages in the sky necessarily have divine origins. As Laura Marcus comments, “[t]his is advertising as transcendence” (71–72). A  desire for transcendence has already spread through the crowd below, first latching on to a car with an unknown person on

The Sky as Heterotopia 31 board: “Mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 12). The power within the car may be human and transient, but it receives all the trappings of a god: “greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 14). Immediately afterward, the projection of this longing for transcendence is shifted to the airplane, “actually writing something! making letters in the sky”, first a C, an E, and an L, perhaps spelling out the word “celestial”, and then “K, and E, a Y perhaps?” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 17). The suggestion is that technological progress, allied with commercialism, pretends to be the key to all human problems. Commercialism and engineering are not just metonymies for human power but also for human preconceptions of usefulness. As previously mentioned, in the essay “On Being Ill”, written a little over a year after Mrs Dalloway, Woolf associates looking at the sky with being ill—a state that liberates the individual from the obligation to be useful. The wasteful celestial spectacle—and by extension the person who gets in other people’s way in order to look at it—“call for comment and indeed for censure. . .. Use should be made of it” (Woolf, On Being Ill 321). Skywriting for advertising purposes would seem to be one way of making the sky useful. Such blatant usurpation of traditional agents of transcendent messages for purely human advertising reasons may strike the reader as a distasteful portent of the ultimate dissolution of all values under industrial capitalism, but another spectator helps us read the scene differently. Septimus Smith—who is, significantly, ill—sees the letters, “languishing and melting in the sky”, not just as a transcendent message that he is as yet unable to read but also as a promise, “signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 19). While the other spectators see a commercial message addressed to every consumer and intended to be read, Septimus sees a distinctly un-commercial (“for nothing”) personal message that he will never be able to read, but whose message lies in the medium rather than in the code. Skygazing opens Septimus’s eyes to the beauty of the world as a whole. Following the apparent message in the sky, Septimus feels that “wherever he looked . . . beauty sprang instantly. . . . Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out .  .  . and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery . . . all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 59). Septimus’s experience of the world is reminiscent of the “philosophy” Woolf claims in “A Sketch of the Past” to have reached, “that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern . . . that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art”

32  Claes E. Lindskog (Woolf, A Sketch of the Past 72). Here all spaces are unified: the earth and the sky, the mind and the world.8 Rather than being the background for human endeavors, the sky forms an immense work of art—the empty cinema in “On Being Ill”—which we normally ignore, but to which Septimus, like Barnaby and Thyrza, becomes peculiarly attentive. Just as Septimus’s apparently useless skygazing is soon interrupted by his concerned wife, Clarissa was once interrupted by her admirer Peter Walsh with the possibly facetious question: “Star-gazing?” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 30). She was, in fact, not looking at the stars but involved in a moment of intimacy with Sally Seton, but Peter’s choice of accusation is still significant. His remark suggests that he regards both skygazing and homoerotic desire as being without practical use. Whatever Walsh’s reasons, Clarissa herself also implicitly makes the connection between her intimacy with Sally and the transcendental associations of skygazing, considering Sally’s kiss as “a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling” and Peter’s interruption as akin to “running one’s face against a granite wall in the darkness” (Woolf, Mrs  Dalloway 30). The nonfinite, transcendent sensation of Sally’s gift meets the finite, earthly wall of Peter’s socially acceptable courtship. The treasure Sally gives Clarissa is associated with the non-finite and with the apparent uselessness of skygazing; romanticism is hence contrasted with realism and the latter is found wanting, just because of its limited conception of use. Significantly, the same triad of immense value, social uselessness, and skygazing that is brought up in connection with Sally’s treasure re-occurs when Clarissa, during her party, hears that Septimus—a young man she did not know—has killed himself. She withdraws from her party, identifying strongly with Septimus, who, she feels, had “plunged holding his treasure” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 156). Reflecting on this and feeling supremely happy, Clarissa goes to the window, with the avowed intention to devote herself to more skygazing: “Many had time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky.  .  .. It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 157). Significantly, one of the guests at the party, old Mrs Hilbery, recognizes that the party is indeed a major artistic accomplishment: Did they know, she asked, that they were surrounded by an enchanted garden? Lights and trees and wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky. Just a few fairy lamps, Clarissa Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But she was a magician! (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 162) Clarissa’s party, which the disgraced teacher Miss Kilman considers to be frivolous and without practical use, thus turns out to be an integrative

The Sky as Heterotopia 33 experience similar to Septimus’s sky. As usual in the novel, the sky connects people, unlike the case in Dickens and Gissing where the sky offers only individual refuge. In Mrs Dalloway, then, the heterotopia of the sky functions as a reminder that the world is a whole and that enjoyment of life depends on a recognition of the beauty of one’s surroundings. As Woolf avers in “On Being Ill”, the “gigantic cinema” of the sky may hitherto have played “to an empty house” (321), but the auditorium appears empty because the audience has had an empty gaze, rather than a lack of opportunity.

Conclusion As this chapter has shown, the visibility of the sky and its use as heterotopia increased gradually during the nineteenth century, reaching something of an apex in modernist novels like Mrs Dalloway. This gradual rise indicates, first, that the modernist novel is not entirely separate from Victorian fiction but rather a development of it, at least in this aspect, and, second, that the visibility of the sky in fiction is a sign of an increased influence of Romantic motifs in what is otherwise realistic fiction. Both the Victorian and the modernist novels are patch-works of motifs, and the use of the sky as a heterotopia is one such motif shared by Victorian and modernist fiction. Comparing Mrs Dalloway to Barnaby Rudge and Thyrza demonstrates that all three novels present the sky as an “other” space of transcendent promise, useless to the vast majority of people but in which the people who are too good—or too different—to fit into their social context can take mental refuge. The narratorial attitudes to these heterotopias may differ—Dickens is antagonistic toward them and Gissing presents them as a cruel taunt, while to Woolf they are a central concern in the world—but the relation between the city and the sky remains the same in all three. Furthermore, by showing us the sky, these novels show us the world, and thereby the world becomes more visible in its own right: a gigantic cinema playing perpetually to an increasingly perceptive house. These novels make us see.

Notes 1 Woolf’s argument here temporarily runs parallel with Ruskin’s assertion in the first book of Modern Painters (1843) that “[i]t is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man . . . and it is just the part in which we least attend to her” (vol. 1 201). 2 Modernism is a much contested term, and here I use the term to refer to the fuzzy set of works that have popularly been called modernist, without taking a position as to whether that label is justified or not. 3 The first two novels may not be representative of their respective authors, but such considerations are outweighed by the clarity of their use of the sky, which parallels the treatment of the sky in more famous works where the sky is less prominent. 4 There are, however, a number of excellent studies of meteorological and astronomical perspectives in literature, which occasionally also evince an eye for the

34  Claes E. Lindskog

5

6

7

8

sky itself as a spatial experience. For a recent study of the weather in English literature, see Alexandra Harris, Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies (2015). For a thorough discussion of one particular aspect of the weather in London, see Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016). There is also a pamphlet on weather in Woolf: Paula Maggio, Reading the Skies in Virginia Woolf: Woolf on Weather in Her Essays, Diaries, and Three of Her Novels (2009). The astronomical perspectives in, primarily, Hardy and George Eliot, are discussed in Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (2014). Finally, two studies of astronomy in the works of Hardy and Woolf, respectively, should be mentioned: Pamela Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (2007); and Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (2003). The survey was conducted using the “Hyper-Concordance” prepared by Mitsu Matsuoka (at The Victorian Literary Studies Archive, http://victorian-studies. net/concordance/, in some cases augmented with e-texts from Project Gutenberg or other sources). This survey has also been used in Claes E. Lindskog, “The Spatial Experience of the Sky in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights” (2020). The assertions of Hulme and Eliot saw the construction of the now familiar critical paradigm in which Romanticism and Modernism were considered as diametrically at odds with one another. For Romantic influences on Virginia Woolf, see Ellen Tremper, “Who Lived at Alfoxton?”: Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism (1998) and Lorraine Sim, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (2010). For a Foucauldian reading of the spatiality of prisons in Dickens, see Jeremy Tambling, Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State (1995), 17–47. The city itself may, however, also be seen as non-finite in its overwhelming complexity, for which see Jameson 190 and Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (1998). For the idea of patterns in the world in Woolf, see Sim 163–73.

Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, edited by Allan H. Simmons, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 5–9. Danius, Sara. The Prose of the World: Flaubert and the Art of Making Things Visible. Coronet Books, 2006. Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge, edited by Clive Hurst, Oxford UP, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. Gissing, George. The Nether World, edited by Stephen Gill, Oxford UP, 1992. ———. Thyrza, edited by Pierre Coustillas, Victorian Secrets, 2013. Goode, John. George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction. Barnes and Noble, 1979. Gossin, Pamela. Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World. Ashgate, 2007. Harris, Alexandra. Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies. Thames and Hudson, 2015. Henchman, Anna. The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford UP, 2014. Henry, Holly. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy. Cambridge UP, 2003.

The Sky as Heterotopia 35 Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Methuen, 1981. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1800–1918. 2nd ed., Harvard UP, 2003. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith, Blackwell, 1991. Lindskog, Claes E. “The Spatial Experience of the Sky in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,” Brontë Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2020, pp. 63–70. Maggio, Paula. Reading the Skies in Virginia Woolf: Woolf on Weather in Her Essays, Diaries, and Three of Her Novels. Cecil Woolf, 2009. Marcus, Laura. Virginia Woolf. Northcote House, 1997. Matsuoka, Mitsu. “Hyper-Concordance.” The Victorian Literary Studies Archive. victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance/. Accessed May 4, 2018. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. John Wiley, 1885, 6 vols. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Julian and Maddalo.” The Major Works, edited by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 214–15. Sim, Lorraine. Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience. Ashgate, 2010. Tambling, Jeremy. Dickens, Violence and the Modern State. Macmillan, 1995. Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. U of Virginia P, 2016. Tremper, Ellen. Who Lived at Alfoxton? Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism. Associated UP, 1998. Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens. Palgrave, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. “A  Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: A  Collection of Autobiographical Writing, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed., Harcourt, 1985, pp. 61–159. ———. Mrs Dalloway, edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford UP, 2000. ———. “On Being Ill.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf: vol. 4 1925–1928, edited by Andrew McNeillie, Harcourt, 1994, pp. 317–29.

2 The Rise and Fall of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (1881–1930) Jayme Yahr

Introduction Between 1881 and 1930, the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine was a leader in the field of American periodicals with a circulation of over 250,000 at its height (Koenig 3). A  magazine created for upper- and middle-class consumption, the Century is what Michel Serres and Bruno Latour call a “multitemporal” (60) object; a singular object that borrows from the past while looking to the future, much like an accordion compressing and expanding, with each movement it “reveals a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats” (Serres and Latour 60). The paradox of typifying the recent past and the future is exemplified in the magazine’s highly praised Civil War series, published in the late 1880s, and its serialization of literary texts that America would embrace as indicative of modern life, including Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, and Mary Hallock Foote’s tales of the frontier West. Furthermore, this duality is evident in the artwork that enlivened its pages. In its heterogeneity and diverse contents, the Century asked readers to question, through literature, illustrations, reviews, and opinion columns, dominant ideals and cultural constructs while simultaneously calling for readers to embrace a modern approach to the reproduction of images and texts. This chapter argues that it was the Century’s embodiment of temporal duality—its looking to the past and the future—that not only brought the magazine its fame but also led to its downfall.

Century’s Beginnings To understand the magazine’s aims and readership, it is essential to begin at its inception in 1881. The Victorian period is typically associated with British literature published during the 64-year reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). Nineteenth-century America (or Victorian America) can be viewed in many ways as a counterpoint to Victorian Britain, even though it shares the same temporal descriptor. Instead of looking toward the DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-4

Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 37 expansion of borders and conquered colonies for confirmation of power and identity in an effort to emulate Britain’s imperialist agenda, America looked inward. After battling Britain in the American Revolution of the later 1700s, the young country was entrenched in Civil War from 1861 to 1865. The Union victory in 1865 and reunification of the country ushered in a period of national (identity) reconstruction. Labeled the “Gilded Age”, a title taken directly from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s parody The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, published in 1873, mid- to late-nineteenth-century America was marked as an age of energy, innovation, and enterprise, but could be seen, simultaneously, as “prudish” (Murfin and Ray 496) and “narrow-minded” (Schlereth xi). This duality of definition, denoting a time that was at once progressive and conventional, was exactly what the Century was tasked with representing in its pages when it began its run in 1881. It was not, however, a new periodical; rather, the Century Magazine, in general form, began under the name Scribner’s Monthly in 1870. Nineteenth-century American periodicals were in a constant state of title flux; name changes were common and the Century was no exception, with early versions of the magazine titled Old and New; Riverside Magazine for Young People; Putnam’s Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and National Interests; Hours at Home; and Scribner’s Monthly.1 Each consecutive change to a magazine’s title reveals what Serres and Latour describe as a “disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions dating from different periods” (45). Each issue of a magazine is not entirely new; instead, it is an object indebted to the past and reworked with contemporary changes. Editors felt especially obliged to keep up with these changes; a periodical was, after all, designed to be current and timely. This series of alterations renders any magazine “contemporary by assemblage” (Serres and Latour 45), reflecting what Ben Highmore terms “the past [that] doesn’t pass” (307). The duality of combining past and present, the familiar and the new, is exactly what Richard Watson Gilder brought to Scribner’s Monthly when he became an assistant editor under Josiah Holland, whose dedication to moralizing fiction and editorials fit his evangelical Christian beliefs, as well as America’s post-Civil War efforts at reconstructing family life within a radically altered infrastructure based upon the abstract concepts of freedom and nationality. As Holland’s health began to fail, Gilder assumed increasing editorial control and gradually began to alter the periodical’s once “lofty aspirations” (Szefel 24), increasing the publication of material related to art and artists by ten percent and slowly changing the tone of the periodical from moralizing to informational. In November 1881, Scribner’s Monthly changed its name to the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine and broke with its eponymous publisher Scribner and Sons. Yet, eager not to be seen as completely new,

38  Jayme Yahr or to lose readership and advertising revenue, the magazine published a piece in the “Topics of the Time” section of the first issue under its new publisher, The Century Company. This editorial described the change in name while asserting that the Century was beginning its new periodical career “from a high vantage-ground” (“Topics of the Time” 143). The note continued by establishing that the magazine “starts with virtually one-hundred and twenty-five thousand subscribers .  .  . SCRIBNER’S MONTHLY was the child of experiment; THE CENTURY is the offspring of experience” (“Topics of the Time” 143). Gilder also ensured that the magazine, in its transition from Scribner’s to the Century, enjoyed the benefit of an uninterrupted print run so as not to lose subscribers or force the magazine to start from scratch at a time when small magazines were frequently being subsumed by larger titles. He was also the “offspring of experience” as the Century’s note suggested. No longer bound to Scribner and Sons or Josiah Holland after his death in 1881, Gilder was able to implement a progressive editorial approach that led to the Century’s success in an era in which mass-market literary periodicals were still an emergent genre. The first issue of the Century included “A Diligence Journey in Mexico” by Mary Hallock Foote, “A Curious Experiment” by Mark Twain, “Tommaso Salvini” by Emma Lazarus, and “My Escape from Slavery” by Frederick Douglass. From the outset, Gilder and the magazine’s editorial staff created a table of contents that was designed to resonate with not only readers who sought conservative, didactic reading but also readers who wanted something beyond tales of religion and morality. The narratives of now-famous writers were interspersed with poetry and sections titled Topics of the Time, Literature, Communications, Home and Society, The World’s Work, and Bric-à-Brac. Each area of the magazine included etchings that provided visual stimulation among the dense pages of text. In its content and the material layout of this content, the Century was mixing popular and elite magazine forms into an assemblage of widely circulated “big” periodical and lesser-known “little” magazine; poetry and non-fiction; home and industry; literature and advertising; images and editorials; and topical pieces and debate columns. Although not the only magazine of the period to mix popular and elite forms, Gilder had salvaged the connections between writers, artists, and advertisers and assembled them into a new magazine with all of the familiarity of the past, a modern approach to a late-nineteenth-century periodical. In order for Gilder and the magazine’s staff to successfully produce a product of consistency, one that was a bridge between past and future, it was essential to establish the Century as a periodical that could be consumed, evaluated, and then discarded. James Mussell describes the magazine as “thus both a commodity in its own right as well as serving as a space for presentation of other, often mass-produced commodities” (15). The Century evinces this principle through the embrace of

Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 39 technology that allowed for an increase in detailed imagery and advertisements throughout the magazine. Just one year prior to the Century’s 1887 anniversary issue, a rotary press was adopted in lieu of the traditional flatbed press, which increased magazine output tenfold, as pages were printed from rolls of paper, rather than stacks, which more than doubled the rate at which copies of the magazine could be printed.2 Furthermore, the Century adopted the rotary table to increase the speed of the “gathering” process. In the magazine’s early years, gatherers would walk around a table literally piecing together one issue of the magazine at a time, collecting each page in the correct order until a full copy was created. The rotary table, alternatively, allowed for gatherers to sit in place while the table, holding stacks of printed pages, rotated around them. Rotary tables could service upwards of 16 gatherers, eliminating lag time. The technological advances adopted by the Century were largely enabled by Theodore De Vinne, whose De Vinne & Company printing firm had, since 1876, held responsibility for printing the Century (then Scribner’s Monthly). Drawing on his previous experience as the art director at St. Nicholas and Scribner’s Monthly, De Vinne ensured that the magazine ran illustrations on a flatbed press from 1886 until 1890 in order to control the quality of the prints. The slower print time of the flatbed press ensured opportunities to stop or alter a run of illustrations that were incorrect in format or lacked clear detail. In 1890, R. Hoe and Company, the same company that invented the lightning rotary press in 1847, built a rotary art press that enabled the magazine to print the first halftone illustrations from curved plates. Halftone illustrations were also cost saving for the Century, as they could be produced with just one color of ink and are composed of different sized dots and spacing, which tricks the eye into seeing smooth, but varied lines and shading. By 1890, the Century was operating fully on rotary and rotary art presses. De Vinne’s experiments with paper and ink combinations produced matchless presswork of both illustrations and text. Along with Gilder’s forthright promotion of America, De Vinne’s dominance in the technological field of printing presses gave the Century an appearance worthy of its editorial aspirations, was unmatched by rival magazines, and won admiration from master printers in Europe, some of whom sent representatives to study his methods. The Century employed newspaper tactics before its competitors by making images an essential part of its headliners each month. Such image-laden newspapers as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, later known as Frank Leslie’s Weekly, were buoyed by the Civil War, during which summaries of military developments and dozens of images were printed side by side. The adoption of newspaper-style structures by the Century comes as no surprise, as Gilder began his editorial career in New Jersey-based daily newspapers during the last months of the war.

40  Jayme Yahr

Past and Future The Century’s commitment to illustrators and refinement of the printing process was essential to the magazine’s early success, particularly when the “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” series was launched in the 160-page November 1884 issue. Consisting of 1,700 images, the series occupied nearly one-third of each issue between November of 1884 and November of 1887 and proved to be one of the Century’s most successful investments; monthly circulation during the series’ run rose from roughly 127,000 to 225,000, nearly doubling that of rival Harper’s Weekly (Fahs 314; Tooker 321; Gabler-Hover 241). The series was an example of non-fiction that connected past and future, allowing an author numerous pages to tell a complex story, time gathered together with multiple pleats. Part of the magazine’s new approach was to exploit the past to reconcile its conflicted readership. As part of this strategy, the Century commissioned first-hand accounts from those commanders and soldiers who fought in major battles of the Civil War and were still alive in the 1880s. From Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman to Joseph E. Johnston and James Longstreet, the series reinterpreted their war memories within the pages of a consumer object at the height of America’s industrial rise, 20 years post-Civil War. In its assemblage, the series was exactly what the American public needed as an entry point for personal reconciliation of emotion and experience related to the war and its aftermath. Janet Gabler-Hover has argued that the Century’s Civil War series “tapped into a great need in the still regionally divided country for a moral catharsis” and reopened the “still-raw wound of the North-South division” (241, 252) while also failing to address racism. Scholars have also noted that the motivation for the series, of reconciliation, was one-sided; the South was expected to atone for its racist sensibilities while the North relived its victory (GablerHover 242–43, 252). These interpretations coupled with the magazine’s shortcomings have subsequently branded the Century as elitist, biased, and prudish in the decades since its end; yet, the Century’s Civil War series’ embrace of text and images that recounted the recent past, in a forward-thinking, modern manner using recognizable tropes, signaled the magazine’s success in the late 1800s. To balance the Civil War series (the past) with images and texts that represented America’s future was Gilder’s primary task as the editor of the Century. In order for the magazine to be a viable and progressive consumer object, images of expansion and references to the successes that might be attainable in the future were essential components of each issue. This effort to look toward the future shows how the Century’s existence can be seen as part of a wider era of innovations that defies labels like Victorian or modern. These “futures” included commissioned texts and illustrations that described, examined, and fantasized the American

Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 41 West, a physical landscape that did not suffer the extensive damage of the South and the East during the Civil War. As art historian Eleanor Jones Harvey has argued with relation to the landscape and efforts at reconstruction, “the postwar landscape signaled a profound shift in the way land expressed American culture and its ideals”, as “home” had been irrevocably altered by the war (228). It is for this exact reason that Serres’ term “multitemporal object” is a more appropriate descriptor for the Century: its engagement with the newness of technology was a modernism in itself. The magazine employed familiarity mixed with innovation to produce texts and images that were at once accessible and familiar, such as the Civil War works and depictions of the frontier. Mary Hallock Foote and Henry Farny were two artists commissioned by the Century to create America’s future through images of the frontier. Foote, an Easterner by birth, who settled in the West in the 1870s, wrote novels serialized in the magazine, including The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of the Mining Camps, and produced all of her own artwork, providing readers with a first-hand account of frontier life. Like the frontier tales of Foote, the Century published Henry Farny’s illustrations of the West in conjunction with ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing’s series of articles titled “My Adventures in Zuñi”. The work Farny and Foote created for the Century was a successful reminder of the ways in which the West helped to shape the nation’s most popular periodicals in the latter nineteenth century and the manner in which the magazine promoted the frontier as the future of America within its pages, a counterpoint to the “past” of the Civil War series.

Innovations and Advancements The dedication of the magazine to technological advancements and the relatable tropes presented in text and image positioned the Century’s readers as modern consumers even before the turn of the twentieth century. However, the loss of Richard Watson Gilder, its long-serving editor, to semiretirement in 1905 and death in 1909, left the magazine without a clear editorial vision, as a string of six editors in quick succession found it difficult to embrace innovation. The Century, at times uncomfortably, jostled with finding the right balance between continued technological developments, changing socio-economic conditions, and consumer culture. Subsequently, the periodical became an off-kilter combination of past and present. Five brief case studies of the Century in the modern period, volumes 70, 72, 80, 92, and 99, spanning six issues of 1905, 1906, 1910, 1916, and 1919/1920, respectively, provide insight into the periodical’s attempts at finding its footing post-1905. The first five issues in volume 70 (1905) of the Century each have an opening page entirely composed of a color image, typically a pastoral scene or a composition that includes mothers and children. To keep

42  Jayme Yahr pace with competitors, the Century needed to adapt to new image processes. Robert Scholes has suggested that it is not just “verbal modernism” that can denote a magazine’s modern appeal; rather, visual art is also essential to understanding how magazines reached “wider audiences and thus [worked toward] gaining greater public acceptance” (135). The use of chromolithography to produce a color image was a radically new approach for the Century in 1905; color images were not found within the magazine during its height in the late 1800s. This form of image reproduction was not, however, used extensively throughout the Century’s pages. Instead, the images spaced throughout the pages of text were a combination of halftones, photogravure, and wood engravings, techniques that were widely used during the later nineteenth century. Although the number of halftones per issue increased in the modern period, the magazine had not fully transitioned to being modern in its technological approach to printing images, and therefore the attempt to place the Century squarely in the temporal box labeled Modern is problematic. The magazine’s jostling between past and present is, subsequently, evident in issue 6 (October) of volume 70, when the beginning and ending pages return to black-and-white imagery. Furthermore, volume 70 reflects a nineteenth-century layout, with little empty or white space, dense columns of text, and the retention of the original Century magazine section titled Topics of the Time. In addition to Topics of the Time, which would have been well known to the Century’s long-time subscribers, poetry remained prevalent. The magazine also continued to print both fiction and non-fiction, but the balance between the two categories had shifted greatly by 1905. The focus on fiction by American authors, an editorial policy that set the Century apart from its competitors in the 1880s, was largely, but not fully, discarded in the Modern period. For example, there was just one narrative serialized in the May through September issues of volume 70, American writer and Century editor L. Frank Tooker’s “Under Rocking Skies”. The remainder of articles and essays were devoted to narratives of industrial progress, foreign diplomacy, tales of exotic travels to such places as Victoria Falls, and Civil War recollections, which had already been extensively covered in the Civil War series some 20 years prior. Even with the introduction of new sections such as Open Letters and In Lighter Vein, which evidenced the magazine’s attempts to devote more space to the concerns and opinions of modern readers, there was a hesitancy to open the magazine to public discourse. Mark Morrisson has noted that many little American magazines such as the Little Review and even the anti-capitalist Masses made “efforts . . . to make their magazines lively public forums based on successful commercial models” (11). However, a large part of the Century’s struggle to embrace modernism was its uncertain approach to combining little magazine trends, such as providing an open forum for public discourse within “a consciously insulated readership” (Harris 9)

Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 43 with large magazine tactics, such as new image reproduction methods and low production costs. As Donal Harris suggests, many periodicals in the late nineteenth century were “prominent pioneers of a hybrid magazine genre” that combined content and visual style, yet “as the magazine market became more competitive [at the turn of the century .  .  .] the savviest publishers and editors sought to distinguish themselves not by content but by style” (6). The Century epitomizes this focus on style over content in order to compete with other big magazines, but its removal of long-standing sections titled Bric-à-Brac and Home and Society, as well as the magazine’s refusal to fully embrace twentieth-century fiction, proved to be unsettling for subscribers. The off-kilter, tentative combination of past and present extended into each subsequent volume of the Century. The use of chromolithography continued in volume 72 of the magazine (1906) yet was only used to create one image in the first, fourth, fifth, and sixth issues, and two images in the second and third issues, each highlighting a “cover story” or acting as a frontispiece. An increased reliance on halftones, with dozens per issue in this volume, saw the quality of the magazine’s illustrations begin to decline. Although largely unchanged in format from 1905, including dense pages of text in two standard columns, the first six issues of volume 72 reveal the magazine’s small efforts at adopting new, modernist styles over content in the form of experimentation with various typefaces for story titles and bylines. Five years later, in 1910, the Century remained largely the same in layout, content, and scope. The number of color images ranged between one and four in each of the six issues in volume 80. As a counterpoint, Cosmopolitan offered readers more than double the number of color images found in the Century, a testament to the importance of visual modernism and style over content, in positioning a widely circulated magazine for market success. Furthermore, the use of photogravure, halftone printing, and woodblock printing could be seen interspersed throughout pages of text. Non-fiction that recounted the pleasures of varying sports, such as golf and boating, likewise, could be read in nearly every issue of the volume, with Christian-themed essays on the Holy Land and the Bible interspersed throughout the periodical’s pages. The Century had, with its non-fiction content, taken a step back in time further than the 1880s, when editor Richard Watson Gilder altered the magazine’s moralizing tone and religious content. In a note to the readers of the Century in the October issue of volume 80 (1910), Robert Underwood Johnson, who by this point had been the new editor for just one year, made it clear in a letter from the editor that the Century was changing tack. Although the magazine aimed to “minister to their [the readers’] enjoyment”, it would return, the editorial stated, to “conserving a lot of old-fashioned virtues” (“The Century to its Readers” 955). The note to readers continues by addressing the magazine’s “progressive influence in art, in literature, and

44  Jayme Yahr in social and public affairs” but adopts a distinctly didactic tone when it entreats readers not to succumb to “bad, poor, and trashy newspapers and magazines”, but, instead, to nourish their families with the “substantial intellectual and moral food” that the Century supplies each month in its pages (“The Century to its Readers” 955). This was just one of many examples of what Arthur John has termed the “sudden shifts in content, format, and editorial direction” (71) that characterized the Century in the early twentieth century. The continued jostling between traditional and more progressive ideals is particularly evident in volume 92 (1916). The May through October issues exhibit a specific redirection of the Century’s editorial efforts and a deliberate disconnection with World War I, which America would enter less than a year later. The visible changes to the magazine were minimal between 1910 and 1916 but did include a reduction in color images and a greater focus on photogravure. Attempts to modernize the magazine from an editorial standpoint were specifically in written content. The moralizing and religion-themed essays were dropped from the Century by 1916, as were the Open Letters and Topics of the Time sections, attempts to keep pace with modern trends and appeal to a varied audience. Replacing these two sections was a new section titled Current Comment that combined contemporary topics of myriad types, including military- and politically-themed essays, with letters to the editor. Beyond these brief comment sections, the Century did not engage with current events in its articles, instead, the magazine revived the editorial policy of American topics by American writers first instituted decades prior by Gilder. As World War I intensified, the Century focused intently on American fiction and the American West, publishing “The Beekeeper’s Wife”, by Willa Cather, Helen Nicolay’s “The Opening West”, poems by Robert Frost, and serializing “The Leatherwood God”, by William Dean Howells. A renewed focus on America and fiction were small steps toward a modern future for the Century, yet the magazine remained firmly rooted in the past. Upon entering the 1920s with volume 99, the Century embarked on what would be its last decade in print. The post-World War I  tone of the magazine returned to exoticism with such non-fiction essays as “Havana” and “Adventures in Central Africa”. Alongside these stories of travel was a mixture of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The November  1919 through April  1920 issues also show a reduction in color images, with just two, each serving as a frontispiece. Halftone printing had fallen out of favor and was replaced by additional photogravure images, as well as a designated artwork section that reproduced works by a singular artist. For instance, the February 1920 issue showcased the paintings of American artist George Luks and the December 1919 issue included four autochromes, photographs created through single glass plates coated with dyed, microscopic potato starch grains. The inclusion

Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 45 of autochromes was the most modern of all the small changes evident in the Century between 1905 and 1920. Although the variations in printing techniques and editorial changes to section titles were attempts to modernize the magazine, they did not reflect the newest advances in technology, current events, or altered layout/design and did little to transform the Century from an innovative late-nineteenth-century magazine to a successful consumer good in the modern period.

Conclusions: Modern Failure The Century’s inability to align with what Heather Haveman has referred to as the “five axes” (10) upon which America’s modernization took place led to the periodical’s failure. These axes include the economic shift from farming to industrial production, the rise of the city, the change in social relationships resulting from the city and capitalist system, technological change, and cultural change based upon time. Each of the axes described by Haveman is the essential component of the Century’s rise in the late 1800s and its eventual fall in the modern era. The shift from country to city and the rise of the capitalist system were essential factors in the formation of a magazine-as-consumer object. By the second decade of the twentieth century, America’s move from farming to industry, countryside to city, was an issue of the past. New York City alone had grown from 76,000 in 1800 to 3,371,000 in 1900 and had reached 5,620,048 by 1920 (Scholes and Wulfman 28; U.S. Bureau of the Census). The rise of the city was palpable and carried with it the city’s trappings, including industrial and consumer-based competition. The technological advances that the Century embraced, such as the rotary printing presses and rotary table that allowed for efficiency without sacrificing detail, were a boon to the periodical’s production in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the cultural shifts surrounding American identity and reconciliation of past and future, as seen in the Civil War series and images of the frontier, were drivers in the magazine’s rise to dominance, especially in terms of circulation numbers. Yet, the characteristics of success that the Century subscribed to during the nineteenth century turned to characteristics of failure for the magazine in the early twentieth century, as evidenced by the continued use of chromolithography, halftone printing, and woodblock printing in 1905 and the slow change to reproducing a majority of images through photogravure by 1920. Instead of utilizing the newest technology for periodical printing, the Century held on to less innovative processes. In some ways, this could be seen as the familiar eschewal of mass culture and its associations with technology, commerciality, and large-scale publishing processes that many modernist magazines enacted in the early twentieth century.3 However, the widespread use of photogravure, a photo-mechanical process by which copper plates are etched to produce photo-like details was not

46  Jayme Yahr adopted by the Century as quickly as many of its competitors, including the Ladies’ Home Journal and McClure’s. Furthermore, improvements to the printing process continued, including the development of a linotype machine that allowed for line typesetting rather than setting letter by letter, technology that was quickly embraced by daily newspapers. As Haveman explains in relation to the fourth axis of modernization, technological change and economic change go hand in hand; they drive each other (11). The technological advancements that ushered in the modern period of American magazine publishing were also the driving forces in the reduction of cost for both producers and consumers. The Century, still bound to older technologies, and unable to quickly assume modernist trends, was not able to lower its 35-cent price to meet the 10-cent to 15-cent standard set by its magazine competitors or the 1-cent to 2-cent price of a newspaper. The magazine had ceased to be an amalgam of past and future; it was barely maintaining a presence within the market at a time when America was no longer looking for cultural reconciliation but was, instead, quickly separating the past from the present. When the magazine was sold to Forum in 1930, its monthly readership base was 20,000, less than 10% of its circulation during the Civil War series (John 271). Despite its incorporation of some modernist tropes, techniques, and tendencies, the inability of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine to transcend its status as a late-nineteenth-century print object and evolve fully into a modern consumer good led to its failure.

Notes 1 The complete run of Scribner’s Monthly, from November  1870 to October 1881, and a partial run of the Century, from November 1881 to October of 1899 have been digitized through the Making of America project, Cornell University Library, http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/s/scmo/index.html, which is now housed through the Hathi Trust Digital Library. An extensive collection of digitized Century volumes from 1881 through 1920 is available from https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006057380. 2 See Haveman for a more detailed account of the printing process. Haveman also notes that “In the first decade of the nineteenth century, three men had to work for one full day to print 4,000 sheets; 40 years later, three men working with steam-powered machines could produce 56,000 sheets every day—fourteen times as much” (58). 3 See, for example, the publishing model of John Middleton Murry’s Rhythm, which was produced in small batches with hand drawn illustrations. All advertisements—a “degradation of the artistic magazine” (Murry 36)—were excised from the magazine’s first issues.

Works Cited Churchill, Suzanne W., and Adam McKible. “Little Magazines and Modernism: An Introduction.” American Periodicals, vol. 15, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–5.

Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 47 Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861–1865. U of North Carolina P, 2003. Feldman, Jessica. Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge UP, 2002. Gabler-Hover, Janet. “The North-South Reconciliation Theme and the ‘Shadow of the Negro’ in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.” Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, UP of Virginia, 1995, pp. 239–56. Gilder, Richard Watson, and Helena de Kay Gilder. Gilder Family Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Harris, Donal. On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines. Columbia UP, 2016. Harvey, Eleanor Jones. The Civil War and American Art. Yale UP, 2012. Haveman, Heather A. Magazines and the Making of America. Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860. Princeton UP, 2015. Highmore, Ben, editor. The Design Culture Reader. Routledge, 2009. John, Arthur. The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner’s Monthly, and Century Magazine. U of Illinois P, 1981. Koenig, Michael. “De Vinne and the De Vinne Press.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 41, no. 1, 1971, pp. 1–24. Morrisson, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. The U of Wisconsin P, 2001. Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. Murry, John Middleton. “What We Have Tried to Do.” Rhythm, vol. 1, no. 3, 1911, p. 36. Mussell, James. Science, Time and Space in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press. Ashgate, 2007. Schlereth, Thomas J. Victorian America. Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876–1915. HarperPerennial, 1991. Scholes, Robert. “Modernist Art in a ‘Quality’ Magazine.” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 135–64. Scholes, Robert, and Clifford Wulfman. Modernism in the Magazines. An Introduction. Yale UP, 2010. Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus, U of Michigan P, 1995. Szefel, Lisa. The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. “The Century to its Readers.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, vol. 80, no. 6, 1910, p. 955. Tooker, L. Frank. Joys and Tribulations of an Editor. Century, 1924. “Topics of the Time: The Century Magazine.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, vol. 23, no. 1, 1881, p. 143. U.S. Bureau of the Census. Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1920. www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab15.txt. Accessed May 24, 2020.

3 Balloonomania: Flying Machines, Periodicals, and the Trajectory of World Literature Louise Kane Introduction In her discussion of Mrs  Dalloway, Gillian Beer notes that the airplane held the potential to alter narratives of nationhood and empire which were already under intense scrutiny as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. “England’s is, so writers over the centuries have assured us, an island story. What happened to that story with the coming of the aeroplane?” Beer asks (265). This chapter expands upon this question by asking how the hot air balloon functioned as an innovation that brought about earlier rewritings of this “island story”. I argue that the trajectories of the hot air balloon and the concept of world literature are concurrent; as the potential of the hot air balloon to connect travelers with different countries and cultures became increasingly apparent in the early to mid nineteenth century, so too did the desire to explore the cultures and, in some cases, literature s to read literatures of previously overlooked territories and nations. Scholarly explorations of flying machines such as the balloon in literature have remained stubbornly grounded to the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period now synonymous with literary modernism. The airplane with its “famous skywriting scene” as viewed by the transfixed pedestrians on Pall Mall in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway has been seen to represent “a commentary on consumerism and a model of collaborative, modernist reading” (Young 99). Flying machines in the work of science-fiction writers like H.G. Wells have been seen to embody “the Machine Age” with its “modernist underpinnings” (Telotte 3). The New Modernist Studies offers valuable frameworks for reading the intersections of technology and literature that took place in the early 1900s, but what is often lost amid these frameworks is how literary responses to innovations in aviation were not the sole preserve of selfdefined “moderns” like Woolf. Instead, they reflect a “science consciousness” (Telotte 3) and fascination for aeronautics and flying machines that can be traced back to earlier centuries. Claes E. Lindskog (Chapter  1) has shown how Dickens, Gissing, and Woolf were united in their shared interest in skygazing, an interest that grew with the advent of the airplane. DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-5

Balloonomania 49 His assertion that their presentations of the sky derive from Romantic traditions evidences how, long before Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith craned their necks toward the enigmatic “Kreemo” sky-writing, others had already begun to theorize the possibilities of the sky as a bridge between destinations and space for the external projection of internalized thoughts. In their status as timely objects, magazines, newspapers, and scientific periodicals provide records of the growing public consciousness of aeronautics and flying machines across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Periodicals’ focus on the “news” (read: newness, innovation) was in-built, after all. They tend to record the sudden vogue for all things hot air balloon related in two key ways: first, in the form of nonfiction pieces such as scientific papers and articles which were printed (and reprinted) in a range of periodicals that encompassed a variety of genres, including scientific journals, newspapers, and popular magazines. Second, in the form of short stories, serialized novels, poems, and travel writing in magazines that tended to be more strictly “literary” in nature. These (mostly fictional) pieces referred with increased frequency to the hot air balloon, often using it in innovative ways; perhaps as an object of homage in a poem, or, in the case of travel writing and adventure fiction, as a central plot device. While literary representations of hot air balloons abound in fiction that was not serialized in periodicals—such as Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), one of the few novels he published which was not serialized, or the powerful image in Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) of the small balloon taking off from Paris’ Gare du Nord Station during the Siege of Paris—examining balloon narratives that were published or serialized in periodicals highlights the ways in which the balloon came to stand as a sort of mythical icon for a new sense of transnationalism that emerged in the late eighteenth century and occurred concomitantly with (and in direct relation to) increasingly globalized forms of trade and human interaction. Between the early 1800s and 1900s, writers continued to draw upon the balloon in new and sometimes surprising ways; it was a symbol of narrative innovation in terms of its addition of spectacle and intrigue to plotlines, but also a symbol of the ongoing shift from isolationist, imperial worldviews toward nascent ideals of (neo)liberal globalism.

The Balloon: A Transnational Invention The balloon had captured public imagination since the late 1700s when inventors and amateur aeronauts engaged in a “balloon race” in their attempts to conduct the first manned hot air balloon flight. In August 1783, Jacques Charles demonstrated to entranced Parisians the first hydrogen-powered unmanned balloon, followed a month later by the Montgolfier brothers who launched the first passenger-carrying model

50  Louise Kane (albeit these passengers were a sheep, a rooster, and a duck) in front of a 130,000-strong crowd including Louis XVI and Marie Antionette. On 21 November of the same year, the brothers launched the first untethered, manned flight, which was swiftly followed by Charles’ launch of his own manned balloon from Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries on 1 December. As the English novelist Horace Walpole marveled, the turn of the century saw “balloonomania” (556) gain pace: “balloons occupy senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody” (449). Even at this embryonic point in its history, the transnational potential of the balloon was evident. In science journals, the first balloonists described their inventions as the pinnacle of “modern science and skill”, innovations that could facilitate “the exploration of inaccessible tracts of the globe” (Bacon 522). The crowds who witnessed early balloon launches embodied a literal transnationalism in their composition; many of the 400,000 spectators who witnessed Charles’s second launch, for example, were not from Paris but from countries all over the globe. Benjamin Franklin, who was at the time serving as the American ambassador to France, was one of these spectators. Journeying to another country to launch a balloon was common: the Italian Count Francesco Zambeccari chose North London as the site from which to launch his small hydrogen balloon in November 1783, and the first manned balloon flight in America set off from a small Philadelphia prison yard piloted not by an American, but by the French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard, an event which was watched by then President George Washington. Its potential to transport riders from one nation to another was a quality of the balloon that transfixed inventors and amateur balloonists more than any other. In 1832, Dr. Thomas Forster’s Annals of Some Remarkable Aerial and Alpine Voyages related the balloon’s ability to traverse national boundaries. The balloon, Forster described excitedly, was a mode of transport in which one could ascend among “the gay French” and descend among “the romantic people of Swizzerland [sic] and the Savoy, with their varied and peculiar costumes and new language” (87–88). Forster marveled at how the balloon allowed him to transcend “that vast barrier of Swiss and Savoyard Alps which divide Italy from France” (87). Peter Kalliney has noted how the balloon’s ability to move above and between national boundaries rendered it an emblem of the generalized “aesthetics of motion” that saw early-twentieth-century writers engage in increased representations of “travel and translation” (3) and brought about “the global dimensions of literature” (5). The balloon became a metaphor for modernists’ embrace of unpredictable forms of wandering and flânerie, for travel that privileged the journey over the destination: “the genuine traveler is blown about the world as an untethered balloon, with little sense of direction and no will to resist the forces of nature that cause the movement” (Kalliney 1). Yet the notion of the balloon as representative of new forms of transnationalism cannot necessarily be periodized.

Balloonomania 51 As early as the late 1700s, commentators remarked on the balloon as a metaphorical symbol of global exchange: the first accounts referred to the balloon as an “aerostatic globe” in its own right (“De Paris” 418), an aerial world that functioned as a microcosm of the many nations it traversed. The Pennsylvania-born balloonist John Wise’s “Announcement”, published in his local newspaper, the Lancaster Intelligencer, in 1843, demonstrates the way in which contemporary commentators highlighted the balloon’s transnational potential to entranced, if incredulous, readers. After outlining the basic science involved in navigating long distances with a balloon—his “long experience in aeronautics” had “convinced” him that “a regular current of air is blowing at all times from east to west”—Wise proceeded to his announcement: “It is my intention to take a trip across the Atlantic ocean with a balloon in the summer of 1844” (2). For Wise, traveling within countries by balloon was no longer enough: the aim of the balloonist was to go beyond national boundaries. While his decision to address his letter “to all publishers of newspapers on the globe” may seem presumptuous, it demonstrates that balloonists like Wise understood the global appeal of their balloon experiments. Newspaper coverage of balloons was frequently international in its outlook, with editors from periodicals based all over the world scrambling to secure stories about balloon launches in Europe and across the wider Continent. In London, the Westminster Magazine dedicated four of its thirty “Occurrences in the Year 1783” to balloon-related developments (“Occurrences” 715–16). The Gazette de France reported each new balloon launch to readers with an almost breathless enthusiasm; the Montgolfier launch of 21 November  1783 was described as “une expérience nouvelle  & trèsbrillante” (“De Paris” 418). In India, the Calcutta Review reported in 1786 on a series of late-night balloon “exhibitions” (Seton-Karr 100). Wise’s article may have first appeared in a regional Philadelphia-based newspaper (the Lancaster Intelligencer), but it was soon reprinted in Harper’s Magazine, one of the popular monthly New York magazines that was “sometimes identified as ‘quality’, ‘slick’, or ‘sophisticated’ ” (Hammill and Leick 176). It was also reprinted in specialist magazines like the Army and Navy Chronicle, other regionals such as the Baltimore-based Weekly Register, and the Edinburgh-based Hogg’s Instructor which playfully outlined Wise’s announcement and his attempt to lobby Congress for funding as “madness”, one of many “extravagant projects” in aeronautics that had “dazzled and bewildered the minds of men” (“Aeronautics” 165). Wise’s plan to cross the Atlantic did not materialize (he was, unsurprisingly, unable to secure insurance) but his determination to use the balloon to travel out of America and the international excitement, consternation, and admiration this provoked illuminate how balloons contributed to revised perspectives on space and time. With each new advancement—from Henri Giffard’s invention of the steam engine-powered, steerable balloon (known as the dirigible or

52  Louise Kane airship) in 1852 to the launch of the first weather balloon in 1896—the balloon gained an ever-increasing presence in periodicals. In 1871, the American periodical Scribner’s Monthly published “Something About Balloons”, a nonfiction account of the history of ballooning written by amateur balloonist J. R. Thompson. In his discussion of Félix Nadar’s Le Géant (The Giant) balloon, which was launched in October 1863 and at 200 feet in height was the tallest balloon ever built, Thompson conflates documentary and literary language as he describes the balloon’s passage over “the vine-clad hills of France”, “manufacturing towns of Belgium, with their many sprinkled lights flashing like another starry firmament beneath them” (389–90), the “shining network” of Holland’s canals, and “German châteaux, with the glint of sunrise on their fantastic gables” (390). Again, the focus is on the balloon as global transport, but Thompson also describes its evolution into a tool for warfare, a means of viewing other territories in more clandestine ways. The American Civil War, he explained, saw “the employment of balloons . . . to give intelligence of the movements and probable strength of the enemy” (390). The world’s first air force was, after all, the French Aerostatic Corps, which had been established during the Revolutionary Wars with the sole purpose of conducting reconnaissance missions by balloon. By the post-Industrial Revolution era, early Victorians had grown accustomed to seeing new inventions, but the balloon’s status as a potential weapon or tool of colonial oppression meant it was an invention that troubled many contemporary commentators. While Dr. Forster marveled at the balloon’s capacity to aid foreign exploration, he could not help but ponder how the balloon might evolve once inventors learned how to make it steerable, which, of course, they did, 20 years after he wrote the following in 1832: If God had permitted us to move in these machines in the air, in any direction we pleased, the science would have been the means of overthrowing all the social and civil relations of man; and indeed the powers of the steam vessel would have been nothing compared to those of the hot air balloon, in enabling oppressive hostility to annoy weak and defenceless states, and to establish a means of piracy and warfare greatly exceeding any belligerent engine hitherto known. (xiv) Here, Forster’s language—“the annoy weak and defenceless states”— is a reminder of the ongoing debates about international relations and colonial practices that formed the ideological backdrop to the balloon’s emergence. Balloons were not only a means of going beyond national or regional boundary lines but a way of shoring up these boundaries in the event of perceived threats. Together with airships and the zeppelin (a rigid walled version of the airship invented in 1900), from the

Balloonomania 53 mid-1800s, balloons had begun to play significant roles in various battles and wars. During the Siege of Paris (1870–1), they were used to remove Parisians from the Prussian-captured city. The balloon thus became a contradictory symbol of international worldviews and national pride: its dual role as an innovation that could defy national boundaries while also protecting or overstepping them bears obvious links to the colonial practices and international trade models that secured the position of certain countries within an economic hierarchy, and which were becoming increasingly contentious topics in mid-Victorian society.

Scale, Trade, World Literature In the early to mid nineteenth century, when balloons were becoming an ever more frequent sight not only in the air but in terms of their reportage in magazines and newspapers, debates about international relations, colonialism, the slave trade, and world politics gained increasing prevalence. Economic historians concur that “the nineteenth century is generally viewed as the first age of globalization”, the inevitable result of an ongoing “transformation of the global economy” that had, since the sixteenth century, seen improved shipping and trade routes, the development of new economic agreements between continents and countries, and, from the early 1800s, the expansion of free trade policies which removed restrictions on international imports and exports (De Zwart and Van Zanden 10). Globalization brought with it a new sense of scale, one which wrought a shift in public consciousness from the domestic to the international. The role of travel in producing this consciousness is well documented but perhaps best summarized by one anonymous Victorian commentator who, in 1838, pointed out that “facility in traveling” was “every day removing some barrier to improvement” and providing “frequent intercourse with the rest of mankind” (“Results of Travelling” 232). While the balloon was one of many methods of transport that evolved in the nineteenth century (the most notable, of course, being the steam locomotive), its contribution to this “international intercourse” was apparent from its inception. As the Scientific American reported in 1845, the balloon, many believed, demonstrated the potential for international travel afforded by “traveling rapidly and safely through the air” at “a velocity of 100 miles per hour” (“Traveling Balloon” 1). The world’s first powered airplane flight would not occur until December 1903 when Orville and Richard Wright flew their “Wright Flyer” for 123 feet. It is easy to forget that, before this, opportunities to see other countries and territories, let alone one’s own, were limited, if not impossi­ ble, for the average person. Of course, boat travel—whether it was on an ocean liner, cruise ship, or cargo steamer—offered passengers vistas of far-off land. Journeys by rail provided occasional panoramas, but the balloon and airplane gave unprecedented opportunities not only to see other

54  Louise Kane countries but also to see the world from a bird’s-eye view. Inventions like the balloon—coupled with the ongoing plethora of developments in astronomy and physics that brought news of new planets and passing comets to a fascinated public—prompted revised understandings of the world in terms of scale and distance which, in turn, further contributed to the sense of being a global, as well as a national, citizen. We can link this new sense of global scale, and one’s place within it, to the emergence of world literature. David Damrosch has noted that the advent of world literature as a concept is bound closely to “questions of scale” (2). These questions incorporate many different contexts when we consider them in relation to the hot air balloon: for the balloonist like Forster, scale might have meant the sense of altered perspective experienced by a viewer who, on a clear day, could find themself looking down at Europe’s boundary lines from several hundred feet above. Certainly, the sense of taking off in one part of Europe and landing in another had the effect of making previously vast swathes of land seem somehow smaller and more connected to one another. The balloon’s place in the emergence of a newly “scaled” literature, one which was skewed increasingly toward representations of countries and cultures that were not Anglocentric, has remained relatively overlooked, however. To find evidence of its significance, we can turn to the earliest theorist of world literature, Goethe, who provided the first usage of the term “world literature” when in 1827 he wrote to his friend Johann Eckermann that “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (Eckermann and Soret 351). For Goethe, the hot air balloon was a deep source of intrigue. In December 1783, he had discussed the excitement of the balloon launches that had taken place in Paris in previous months and expressed his hope that Germany would continue “to master the art of Montgolfier” (quoted in Ley 81). Perhaps in jest, Goethe even aimed to develop his own balloon, vowing to “progress slowly” and, in a reference to the Montgolfier brothers’ original experiments with paper balloons, “to be the first to chase an enormous paper ball into the air” (quoted in Ley 81). More significantly, the balloon was also a metaphor for the types of international exchange that could bring about weitlitteratur. As Katharina Mommsen has argued, Goethe had first admired the mythical magic carpet for its “symbolic function”, describing it as an “artful vehicle” that allowed riders “to change where you are, to rise into the air and descend at a better place” (205). However, Goethe soon turned to the hot air balloon as a mode of transport whose symbolic function could translate into reality; its riders found themselves, he pointed out, literally “floating between two worlds” (Mommsen 204). As one of the earliest poems about the balloon, Richard Harris Barham’s “The Monstre Balloon” (published in the January 1837 number of the English literary

Balloonomania 55 magazine Bentley’s Miscellany) jokes, the balloon could leave “Vauxhall on Monday at noon” and return “With news from Aleppo or Scanderoon” (17). Franz Strich’s Goethe and World Literature (1949) highlights the extent to which Goethe’s model of weltliteratur was influenced by an emergent awareness of globalization. For Goethe, it was the “ever-quickening speed of intercourse” brought about partly by enhanced global trade that resulted in the advent of “this kind of world literature” (quoted in Strich 351). Goethe viewed literature as operating as its own microcosmic trade system of “intellectual barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples, a literary market to which the nations bring their intellectual treasures for exchange” (quoted in Strich 5). The role of global economics continues to dominate scholarly discussions of “the foreign trade of literatures” (Wellek 283), with scholars debating whether world literature represents a system of transnational exchange and “cosmopolitanism” (Kalliney 59) or an inherently unfair system inflected by the same bonds of economic competition and inequality that define international trade relations between dominant and peripheral countries, forcing “writers on the periphery” to “assimilate the values of a literary center” (Casanova 178). Reading several balloon-related pieces published in the mid-1800s to early 1900s exposes how these balloon narratives were so often influenced by new ideas about where humans stood in relation to one another in an age in which national boundaries had begun to collapse and open out. As Goethe would write in 1830, “the only way towards a general world literature” was “for all nations to learn their relationships each to the other” (quoted in Strich 351). Balloon narratives, both fictional and nonfictional, show their speakers and characters trying to get to grips with these relationships. Jules Verne’s “Science for Families. A Voyage in a Balloon” exemplifies how the balloon was a vehicle that allowed for narratives that frequently moved between countries on the Continent. Originally published in the French literary magazine Musée des Familles  (Family Museum) in August  1851, the story was later re-issued as A Drama in the Air (1852) and was Verne’s second publication, the first having appeared in the same magazine the previous month. The narrator, a French balloonist, describes his ascent at a Frankfurt hot air balloon festival in a balloon he has spent the past few months constructing. Verne’s decision to place a French balloonist in Germany reflects the frequently transnational aspect of balloon launches: like many French balloonists, Verne’s narrator has become accustomed to traveling out of France to showcase his invention to foreign crowds. He details how the launch has brought “so many people to Frankfort [sic]” (Verne 3). Ballooning is described as an activity in a constant state of development, a series of “fine experiments” which have brought “the grave Germans” (Verne 3) into contact with French aeronauts. The speaker’s claim that all of his German “traveling

56  Louise Kane companions” failed to appear because “their courage had failed them at undertaking one of those excursions which, thanks to the improvement in aeronautics are free from all danger”, smacks of the dry-witted nationalistic pride that many French writers attached to their country’s balloon advancements (Verne 4). Yet, ultimately, the story shows people across the Continent uniting to support the balloonist: after the launch fails to go to plan, it is a Dutch peasant who rescues the narrator, who awakes dazed, but safe, in the peasant’s cottage “fifteen leagues from Amsterdam, on the shores of the Zuyder-Zee” (Verne 20). Will May has noted that literary critics have used the Romantic poets’ “visionary optimism” about the balloon “as a metaphor for an uneven poetic endeavor or artistic hubris” (11). It is possible to update this metaphor: if the balloon had begun as an uncertain innovation tentatively making its way into new territory, by the late 1800s, it had evolved into an established spectacle that frequently brought countries and cultures into contact. While early examples like Verne’s “Science for Families” show writers engaging in tentative discussions of transnational cooperation, as the balloon became an increasingly prevalent sight in the nineteenth-century skies, the links between the global exchanges afforded by the balloon and the literary possibilities these exchanges facilitated became increasingly explicit. The balloon became a metaphor for the increased assuredness with which writers working in or across the midto-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to discuss foreign affairs not with the naïveté of curious travelers, but with the nuanced understanding of seasoned cosmopolites. The dawn of cosmopolitanism is typically aligned with the emergence of literary modernism, but balloon narratives show how writers like Verne were cosmopolitan several decades before. As one writer described in a piece of travel writing for Longman’s Magazine in 1884, “Until I tried a balloon I had no idea what travelling was” (Haweis 183). The same article references writers, philosophers, and scientists from several different countries, from “the great Lavoisier” (Haweis 185) to Goethe himself. Tellingly, the writer quotes Goethe’s “What is man, Oh Lord, that thou art mindful of him” to express the altered sense of scale he experiences upon looking down from a balloon over London and registering “the minute creeping things called men” that crawl “like black specks” beneath him (Haweis 191). By April 1922, the balloon’s synonymity with internationalism was complete. The Dada magazine Le Coeur à barbe: journal transparent (The Bearded Heart: a transparent journal) featured an illustration of a hot air balloon on its front cover, along with images of a camel in a desert, a large steamer ship, a flash camera, and an advertising kiosk, to signify the transnational, modern ethos of the Dada movement and its proponents, including the magazine’s editor Tristan Tzara and contributors Erik Satie, Philippe Soupault, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. The balloon also served as an enduring icon of innovation

Balloonomania 57 for the surrealist movement; in 1952, Gil Joseph Wolfman’s short film L’Anticoncept was shown at Paris’ Avant-Garde 52 cinema club, where it was projected onto a white weather balloon instead of a screen.

Cosmopolitan or Colonialist? It is important to note, however, that, like the views the balloon offered its passengers, the cosmopolitanism it inspired was not as far-reaching as might be assumed. Instead, it was limited, skewed by the narrowness of its vantage point. The balloon saw writers engage in discussions of foreign spaces, and these discussions reached interested multitudes through periodicals, but much was absent from them. First, the balloon could not traverse the world, so the cultures and countries it could “cover” were necessarily limited. Second, writers of balloon narratives, or indeed sometimes the balloonists themselves, had little interest in exploring non-Western countries. Shu-Mei Shih has argued that [t]he application of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ is by definition asymmetrical, depending on the position of the subjects in question. When applied to Third World intellectuals, ‘cosmopolitanism’ implies that these individuals have an expansive knowledge constituted primarily by their understanding of the world (read: the West), but when applied to metropolitan Western intellectuals there is a conspicuous absence of the demand to know the non-West. This ‘asymmetrical cosmopolitanism’ is another manifestation of the Western-dominated worldview. (64–65) Other scholars have echoed Shih’s viewpoint, noting that in the mid-tolate nineteenth century, “cosmopolitan sentiment—the sense of connection to, and sympathy for, peoples living in distant lands—flourished in tandem with imperial arrogance and patriotic fervor, each of these affective states feeding off and renegotiating geopolitics” (Çelīkkol 270). This is true of the cosmopolitanism of the balloon narrative. The “Balloon Travels” series issued by the American author, publisher, and editor Samuel Goodrich in his Robert Merry’s Museum magazine exemplifies the contradictory ways in which writers used the balloon to frame imaginary navigations of foreign territories that were intended to appear as instructive and eye-opening but were inevitably steeped in the diction of colonialism, rather than cosmopolitanism. Goodrich edited the Boston-based Robert Merry’s Museum, an illustrated monthly children’s magazine, from its establishment in 1841 until 1867 when Louisa May Alcott took over. In his role as editor, Goodrich adopted the persona of “Robert Merry”, who served as the narrator of many of the magazine’s stories.

58  Louise Kane The “Balloon Travels” short stories appeared on a bi-annual basis from January 1851 until 1854. The balloon was adopted in a “make believe” aspect, with the imagined crowd of children to whom Merry spoke invited to join him in its basket in order to undertake “an excellent opportunity . . . for studying geography” (“Balloon Travels” 1851 108). The children discuss the possibility of visiting Mount Etna or Paris, before settling on discovering Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. In the January 1852 installment, the imagined action takes place in the Isle of Wight, Wales, and Liverpool “which has so much commerce with our country” (“Balloon Travels” 1852 99). In 1854, the children “visit” the Ionian Islands and hear the story of the Trojan War. Merry used the stories as an opportunity to teach early forms of world literature. From Greek epics (“Homer’s two great poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey”) (“Balloon Travels” 1854 48) to Welsh poetry (“the verses about Llewellin and his dog”) (“Balloon Travels” 1852 99), the Balloon Travels series offered discussions of various global texts. Goethe may have argued that “the only way towards a general world literature” was “for all nations to learn their relationships each to the other” (quoted in Strich 351), but the “Balloon Travels” series shows how even at an early point, constructions of world literature were exclusionary and prejudiced. We can apply Casanova’s assertion that there is a “hierarchical structure of world literature” (42) here. Greece and the British Isles are deemed to possess literature that should be taught to Merry’s juvenile audience, but literatures from non-European countries are not referenced once in the series. A single reference to Asia appears in relation to Greece, when the narrator makes a passing comment about “the country to the east of it, called Asia Minor” (“Balloon Travels” 1854 48). While the English Channel Islands of “Alderney, Guernsey, Jersey, and Sark” (“Balloon Travels” 1852 99) all make an appearance, the continents of Africa, South America, and Australia and their indigenous literatures are absent from the children’s stories. By the early 1900s, this attitude had not changed. John Bacon’s “To Explore Arabia by Balloon”, published in The Nineteenth Century and After, a popular British literary magazine that encouraged intellectual debate about current affairs, shows how while Bacon intended to use the balloon to explore other continents, the language through which he described an imagined Arabia reflects the prevalence of unabashed colonial attitudes. Arabia was a part of the “wondrous East” that “has remained untraversed by civilized man”, one of the “inaccessible tracts of the globe” that apparently posed a threat to landing balloonists on account of the “native fanaticism” of its non-Christian inhabitants (Bacon 251). In their frequent reference to acts of exploration as a means of “civilizing” apparently unchartered territories, many balloon narratives anticipated, or echoed, the languages of invasion and ownership that permeated the adventure novel (see Chapter 5, Keith Clavin’s “Histories Yet to Come: Adventure Fiction and the Ideologies of Free Trade”, for more on this). An

Balloonomania 59 example of this framing of the balloon through neocolonial language can be seen in the British Britannia and Eve magazine’s publication in 1936 of an article on “The Romance of the Ballooning” that explained how balloonists, upon landing, had to endure the threat of hostile foreign “villagers, armed with scythes and pitchforks” (Tangye 13). This was, in reality, something of a myth; although in 1783 Jacques Charles’ unmanned hydrogen balloon had been destroyed by startled peasants when it landed in a field in Gonesse, incidents such as this were rare and often recounted in heroic tones to enhance the nationalistic aspect of balloon narratives. That Tangye’s “Romance of Ballooning” was placed adjacent to another article on “Outposts of Empire” and a melodramatic short story titled “East Wind in Morocco”, which exhibited a stereotyped, misguided presentation of the country and its people, shows how even in the 1930s, the balloon still appeared as part of narratives that expressed jingoistic ideals at the expense of nuanced anthropological exploration.

Conclusions By the turn of the century, balloons had evolved in several ways. While early 1830s accounts of balloons reflect a sense of confusion about the balloon’s capabilities—one writer joked about a “popular rumour” that “the moon had been colonized” by a group of unfortunate “aerial voyagers” whose “balloon from earth” had been pulled into “lunar gravitation” (T. C. M. 312)—by the late 1800s and early 1900s, the balloon had emerged as a vehicle to be admired by, or ridden in, by sophisticated types whose understanding of the globe was sufficiently more advanced than it had been in the early 1800s. As noted earlier, in 1871, the FrancoPrussian War’s Siege of Paris had seen the balloon further evolve from novelty to vital lifeline. The Balloon Post—a two-page journal containing news and important events which was, naturally, distributed by balloon—was even established to keep captured Parisians in contact with “the most distant countries” (De Fonvielle 244). In 1874, the Japanese daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported enthusiastically on new “nighttime training courses” offered to acquaint interested parties with the “new sport” (“New Sports” 4) of hot air ballooning. By the 1890s, in America, balloons were regarded not only as intriguing spectacles but also as scientific instruments of progress offering valuable “meteorological observations” about changing “dewpoint” and the “distribution of cloud masses” (Hazen 289). In England, The Idler reported on the new vogue for long-distance balloon racing, the “airline from France to Russia” (Wellman 106) having been established by 1901. In 1886, the founding of the International Committee for Scientific Aeronautics, followed by the Permanent International Aeronautical Committee in 1900, had cemented the status of the hot air balloon, and its inventors, as symbols of a newly globalized world.

60  Louise Kane Yet the advancements that saw the balloon traverse increasingly vast distances were not matched by the ideologies that informed ideas about where humankind stood in relation to global society. While advancements in trade, travel, and tourism undoubtedly wrought revised attitudes toward international relations and prompted profound considerations of the place of the individual in a world society, discussions of the balloon also show how, for the most part, people were not yet ready to view themselves as global citizens, or at least not in any decolonial sense. Forster expressed fears that the balloon could be used to attain dominion over “defenceless states” and to expedite “warfare” (xiv), and as innovations continued to abound as the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth century, the popularization of zeppelins and advent of World War I saw balloons become increasingly weaponized as symbols of national power, perhaps even more fervently as a response to widespread anxieties prompted by growing calls for the dismantlement, or at least questioning, of colonial power and isolationist foreign policies. The balloon stimulated debate and discussion about foreign territories. Narratives depicting its launch and landing in different countries served to remind readers of the seemingly decreased distance between one geographical space and another. Like the steam train and passenger ship and early forms of the motor car, the balloon was a technology for bridging cultural divides that were not only literal but also metaphorical, hence Goethe’s turning to it as a symbol of cross-cultural exchange. Yet the extent to which balloon narratives produced these exchanges remains limited. It is certainly possible to link the emergence of, and increased interest in, world literature as both concept and category to the early 1830s when Goethe proclaimed weltliteratur’s potential while simultaneously lauding the balloon as a means of early transnationalism, but few writers consciously linked the balloon to the promotion of foreign literature. Those that did—such as Merry’s “Balloon Travels” series— often only used the balloon to circumscribe those literatures and cultures which were already known; more mysterious, lesser-studied continents and their literatures remained unexplored. Balloonomania, then, may have had the potential to foster forms of world literature, but its impact upon the “island story” (Beer 265) of Great Britain and other powers, such as the USA and France, was limited by declining, yet still present, colonial values. The balloon often served to uphold a sense of nationalism which prevented truly cosmopolitan engagements from taking place around it, as evidenced in its use as an instrument of warfare and espionage. The balloon also served, nonetheless, as a means of making people look inward as well as upward: just as those gazing at the airplane in Mrs Dalloway saw what they wanted to in its trailing letters, the balloon became a world of its own, its fabric globe functioning as a space onto which viewers across the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries projected their fears, hopes,

Balloonomania 61 and imagined futures as they grappled to understand a changing sense of selfhood that, owing to the unassailable pace of innovations in religion, science, and technology, was in a constant, continued state of uncertain navigation, much like the balloon itself.

Works Cited “Aeronautics.” Hogg’s Instructor, series 2, vol. 6, 1851, pp. 163–66. Bacon, John. “To Explore Arabia by Balloon.” The Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review, vol. 56, no. 330, Aug. 1904, pp. 251–61. “Balloon Travels Around the World.” Robert Merry’s Museum, July  1, 1851, pp. 108–11. “Balloon Travels Around the World.” Robert Merry’s Museum, Jan. 1, 1852, pp. 98–99. “Balloon Travels Around the World.” Robert Merry’s Museum, Feb. 1, 1854, pp. 46–49. Barham, Richard Harris. “The Monstre Ballon.” Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 1, Jan. 1837, pp. 17–19. Beer, Gillian. “The Island and the Aeroplane: the Case of Virginia Woolf.” Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, Routledge, 1990, pp. 265–90. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Harvard UP, 2004. Çelīkkol, Ayşe. “Form and Global Consciousness in the Victorian Period.” Literature Compass, vol. 10, no. 3, 2013, pp. 269–76. Damrosch, David. Introduction. World Literature in Theory, edited by Damrosch, John Wiley & Sons, 2014, pp. 1–11. De Fonvielle, William. Adventures in the Air: Being Memorable Experiences of Great Aeronauts. Translated by John S. Keltie. Edward Stanford, 1877. “De Paris.” Gazette de France, No. 94, Nov. 25, 1783, p. 418. De Zwart, Pim, and Jan Luiten Van Zanden. The Origins of Globalization: World Trade in the Making of the Global Economy, 1500–1800. Cambridge UP, 2018. Eckermann, Johann Peter, and Frédéric Jacob Soret. Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret: Volume I. Translated by John Oxenford, Smith, Elder & Co., 1851. Forster, Thomas. Annals of Some Remarkable Aerial and Alpine Voyages. Keating and Brown, 1832. Hammill, Faye, and Karen Leick. “Modernism and the Quality Magazines: Vanity Fair, American Mercury, New Yorker, Esquire.” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 177–96. Haweis, H. R. “In a Balloon.” Longman’s Magazine, vol. 5, no. 26, Dec. 1884, pp. 182–92. Hazen. H. A. “Four Balloon Voyages.” American Meteorological Journal. A Monthly Review of Meteorology and Allied Branches of Study, vol. 18, Nov. 1891, p. 289. Kalliney, Peter. Modernism in a Global Context. Bloomsbury, 2015. Ley, Willy. “For Your Information: Dragons and Hot Air Balloons.” Galaxy Magazine, vol. 20, no. 2, Dec. 1961, pp. 79–89.

62  Louise Kane May, Will. “Dickinson, Plath, and the Ballooning Tradition of American Poetry.” Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture, edited by Tara Stubbs and Doug Haynes, Routledge, 2017, pp. 9–32. Mommsen, Katharina. Goethe and the Poets of Arabia. Translated by Michael M. Metzger, Camden House, 2014. “New Sports.” The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 1874, p. 4. “Occurrences in the year 1883.” The Westminster Magazine, Dec. 1783, pp. 715–16. “Results of Travelling.” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, no. 341, Aug. 11, 1838, p. 232. Seton-Karr, W. S. Selections from Calcutta Gazettes of the Years 1784, 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, Showing the Political and Social Condition of the English in India Eighty Years Ago. Military Orphan Press, 1864. Shih, Shu-Mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. U of California P, 2001. Strich, Fritz. Goethe and World Literature. Translated by C. A. M. Sym, Routledge, 1949. Tangye, Nigel. “The Romance of Ballooning.” Britannia and Eve, vol. 13, no. 3, Sept. 1936, pp. 12–13, 96, 98. T. C. M. “Glimpses of Other Worlds.” The Metropolitan Magazine, vol. 13, no. 51, July 1835, pp. 308–17. Telotte, John. Animating the Science Fiction Imagination. Oxford UP, 2018. Thompson, J. R. “Something About Balloons.” Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 1, no. 4, Feb. 1871, pp. 385–90. “Traveling Balloon.” The Scientific American, vol. 1, no. 4, Sept. 18, 1845, p. 1. Verne, Jules. “A Drama in the Air.” The Works of Jules Verne, edited by Charles F. Horne, F. Tyler Daniels, 1911, pp. 3–20. Walpole, Horace. The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, edited by W. S. Lewis, Oxford UP, 1961. Wellek, René. Concepts of Criticism. Yale UP, 1963. Wellman, Walter. “Long-Distance Balloon Racing.” The Idler; an Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Sept. 1901, pp. 98–114. Wise, John. “Announcement.” Lancaster Intelligencer, 4 July 1843, p. 2. Young, John. “Woolf’s Mrs  Dalloway.” The Explicator, vol. 58, 2000, pp. 99–101.

4 A Metaphysical Theater: Abstract Painting, Color Music, and Futurist Experiments in Avant-garde Film Christopher Townsend Introduction Even as early avant-garde film directors looked to a future of utopian possibility and technological innovation, they looked back to the era these possibilities and innovations supposedly wished away and to older mediums such as painting. The new medium of film offered a framework through which the culture’s existing, dominant material practices—­ painting, writing, and performance—might be re-imagined beyond existing levels of experiment, hence Modernist Studies’ evaluation of the “cinematicity” of, inter alia, Virginia Woolf and Picasso. Yet, in its early exploration of film’s capacities, the avant-garde’s project was not to make movies as they might be understood within the structuring technologies, institutions, discourses, and practices of the nascent film industry but within the context of earlier utopian conceptions of subjective experience that emerged in formal experimentations and technical innovations from the mid-nineteenth century. These experiments and inventions often drew upon the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the idea of transference between (or commonality within) media central to wider notions of melomania and synesthesia. In their recourse to earlier traditions to ground their experiments with film, artists often imitated their peers working in other disciplines. Innovation for early avant-garde painters was something enacted through a conscious connection to—rather than rupture from—earlier scientific theorists and experimenters. Kandinsky regularly referred to Goethe’s writings, citing the Theory of Colors and the Conversations, among other works (Vergo 45). Orphist painters such as Frank Kupka and Sonia and Robert Delaunay relied heavily upon the color theories of the industrial chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul and continued a tradition of reference to scientific theory established by Impressionism. Non-representational painting critiqued bourgeois realism, but it rested conceptually upon the twin poles of romantic thought and scientific investigation that defined the Victorian era. Early-twentieth-century avant-garde writers and artists theorized and developed film in the same vein; they rejected realist DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-6

64  Christopher Townsend theater and photography but drew upon earlier experiments in painting and music to forge alternative forms of cinema. Indeed, cinema itself was already “painterly”: the technology that enabled advances in the camera may have been constantly evolving, but the camera embodied the theory of single-point perspective that had dominated painting since the European early modern era. In scrutinizing theorizations of cinema and filmmaking practice within the European avant-garde in the first decades of the twentieth century, I develop two arguments: first, that its imagination of film’s possibilities are best considered within the histories of painting and musical performance, rather than of commercial cinema, and second, that the intellectual roots of this theorization are grounded in philosophical and esthetic challenges to dominant models of rationality and organization that emerged in the nineteenth century. The avant-garde’s early conception and practice of film consciously extended experiments in painting and theater, undertaken since the mid-nineteenth century, while breaching the epistemic, ontological, and discursive conventions that structured film during its evolution. Only one of these conventions—temporal sequence—survives in early avant-garde theory and practice. Time, through the internal rhythm of mobilized abstract forms, is rendered malleable and separated from its role of systematizing the movement of concrete subjects in pictorial space. Instead, sequence is co-opted to produce repetition and displacement and extend the aspirations of abstract painting in creating sublimatory, subjective affect. The space and time of the picture plane in abstract film is fundamentally that of the painted canvas, rather than that of cinema. Its temporality, expressed as rhythm, is produced by the relation of abstract forms to each other within the work, not in the relation of concrete forms to an autonomous observer. The evidence for this challenges the long-established and widely accepted argument of Tom Gunning that modernist cinema shares with early industrial film production a commitment to a “cinema of attraction” by attending to observed phenomena and rendering them spectacularly affective (63). According to Gunning, avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s—notably Eisenstein and Léger—reprised both the exhibition of reality for its own sake and the exhibitionism, the acknowledgment of its being mediated, that characterized “primitive” cinema in film’s first decade. Gunning did not discuss any films made, or conceived, within the avant-garde before the early 1920s, and neglected the abstract films made in the 1920s by Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, and Viking Eggeling. Gunning undertook a very limited analysis of modernist writing on film and assumed improbable conceptual unities: for example, between Marinetti’s thought in 1913 and that of Léger in the early 1920s. A closer reading of early modernist texts about film, attending to writers fully imbricated within the European avant-garde—Ricciotto Canudo within Orphism, and in Futurism, the Ginnani-Corradini brothers, along with

A Metaphysical Theater 65 Marinetti and those painters who contribute to manifestos concerning both painting and film, notably Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrà—reveals certain unities: however, these are often antithetical to those posited by Gunning. Thought in these circles was conditioned by variations of romantic and idealist thought, notably that of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gotthold Lessing, and Henri Bergson. These intellectual models were widely used within the avant-garde to unsettle the positivist program that underpinned European modernity. Such dissidence included challenges to “the unities of time and place” (Carrà 156); to perspective as merely an instrumental system of description, such as that used in an “engineer’s design” (Balla et al. 106), and the refusal to consider “man as the center of universal life” (Boccioni et al. 65). Film derived from the Enlightenment’s privileging of the external perception and organization of material forms through perspective and the systematizing of time and space: it was “afflicted with objectivity” (Macrae 137). Even as it helped precipitate changes in experiencing and understanding time and space that were contingent upon industrialadministrative modernity, film endorsed a model of time and space that modernist modes of thought came to reject. Even those modernists most eager to endorse technology displayed a considerable skepticism toward the epistemic conventions governing film. Where those conventions were deployed in older media such as realist literature or painting, they had been widely challenged within nineteenth-century culture, for example in Symbolism, before they were assailed by later modernist practices. Gunning’s argument for the convergence of avant-garde and early commercial practices relies upon the wishful assumption that having disposed of the conventions of object-focused realism, temporal and spatial coherence, and subjective autonomy in older media, the avant-garde would happily redeploy them simply because they presented themselves within a new format. Modernist artists did not reject film: indeed, the avant-garde would be the site for the first theorization of that medium’s possibilities as an art form, rather than entertaining novelty. However, for that to happen, film had to be separated from conventions of realism, continuity, and autonomy that were antithetical to existing, nineteenth-century traditions of romantic and idealist thought. Such separation demanded a reduction of film to an eidos of temporality rather than materialist objectivity.

Futurist Innovations Given their enthusiasm for modernity’s technological revolution, it is not surprising that the Futurists undertook much of the early theorization of film and filmmaking. When Marinetti announced Futurism’s foundation “on the complete renewal of human sensibility induced by great scientific discoveries” he included “the cinematograph” in a long

66  Christopher Townsend list of innovations that had affected the human psyche (“Destruction of Syntax” 143). However, that capacity to record the world, whether on film or through the gramophone, had descended already into mundanity: “Having become commonplace, such possibilities fail to arouse the curiosity of superficial minds” (143). The challenge for Futurism was to recognize modernity’s modifications of human sensibility and to reflect these modifications. While Futurist poetry and painting succeeded in this regard, its use of film was a failure. If Futurist poetics, in its elimination of synthesizing terms within analogies, anticipates cinematic montage by a decade, we should also agree with Wanda Strauven that the movement largely fails to similarly exploit cinema as a weapon of speed and dehumanization to be deployed against passéism (Strauven 203). A very different practice, however, preceded Marinetti’s theorization. In Ravenna, Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni-Corradini had by 1911 made four short abstract films: Accordo di colore, Studio di effetti tra quattro colore, Canto di Primavera, and Les Fleurs (Color Harmony, Study of Effects Between Three Colors, Spring Canto, and The Flowers). In a 1965 interview, Arnaldo described how the pair worked directly by painting on untreated filmstrip, rather than with stop-motion animation.1 Since 1907 I had been thinking about the possibility of creating moving pictures. But in 1908/1909 there was no camera for taking timelapse photography, frame by frame. So I  decided to paint directly onto blank film stock—celluloid without silver nitrate. The optical firm Magini sent me the stock from outside town. (Verdone and Berghaus 402) The Ginanni-Corradinis belonged to circles frequented by Futurists such as Oscar Mara and Diego Valeri. Their project was inextricably associated with music, and these experiments were preceded by others that sought different means of creating a synthetic, dynamic relation between color and sound within space. By 1910, the brothers had installed projectors in an orchestra pit to create a play of colored lights during performances, built a “chromatic piano”, and theorized a concept of “colored music” (musica cromatica) (B. Ginanni-Corradini 156–182). Subsequently, there were plans to accompany with film music by the Futurist composer Ballila Pratella, and by 1912, the two were fully integrated into Futurism, under the pseudonyms Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra. In 1916, Ginna and Corra collaborated with another member of the Florentine literary vanguard, Emilio Settimelli, to produce Vita Futurista. Before the censor went to work, the film consisted of a sequence of 12 scenes “quite different in format and content” (Verdone and Berghaus 410). None of those scenes, however, presented “reality”: they were theatrical performances—for example, Balla’s contrived “Futurist stroll” or the provocation of an Englishman eating breakfast on the Piazzale

A Metaphysical Theater 67 Michelangelo—that were often anticipated by, or actually reconstructed from, earlier Futurist serate. As Verdone and Berghaus comment, Vita futurista was an extremely heterogeneous product and combined elements of painting, sculpture, theater, music, and poetry. As such, it was an expression of the plurisensibilità futurista (Futurist Multisensibility), of which the Manifesto of Futurist Cinema had spoken. Its visual nature links it to other important developments in avant-garde painting: the play of colors in Impressionism, the interpenetration of forms and lines in Cubism, the distortions of Expressionism, the abstractionism of Kandinsky. (415) In the July–August  1914 edition of Les Soirées de Paris, the expatriate Russian artist Léopold Survage proposed a wholly abstract film: Le Rhythme coloré (Colored Rhythm). The sketches show that Survage planned a work in which brightly colored abstract forms, on a black background, were transformed over time. Survage was working within the framework of Orphism, but he had previously been part of the “Golden Fleece” circle of symbolists in Russia and, in Paris, was perhaps influenced by the writing of Louis Favre on music and color. The “Golden Fleece” group included the writer Andrei Bely, whose ideas on musical structure as a universal artistic form are claimed to have influenced the composer Alexander Scriabin’s color-music project Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1909–10), a work scored for orchestra with projections of colored light. Survage’s project is thus part of a wider discourse around color music and the creation of sublimatory and transformative environments. He conceived his project in the terms of an explicitly musical rhetoric, realized it as painting, but wanted it to be film. The temporal and spatial properties of film would have made uniquely possible the synthesis of music’s temporality with the imaginary, formal rhythms of abstract painting.

Color Music and Abstract Art Survage was not alone in this desire: for more than a decade, composers had been searching for visual equivalents to abstract sounds and artists trying to endow abstract signs with the temporality inherent to musical composition. The impetus derived from Wagner’s concept of “absolute music”, profoundly affected by his reading of Ludwig Feuerbach. The interest in spiritual experience that characterizes many of modernism’s synthesizing projects suggests some investment in Feuerbach’s notion that the spiritual is only the outward projection of an interior human nature. Canudo’s concept of music as a synthesizing, and spiritually transformative art—which would inform his theorization of film—had its roots in

68  Christopher Townsend the French reception of Wagner, filtered through the Symbolist poet and critic, Paul Adam. Many abstract painters attempted to replicate musical elements such as rhythm and translate formal musical structures such as fugue and canon. Temporality was crucial to the achieving of visual effects that mirrored musical progression; furthermore, since in fugue and canon signs are inverted, their visual equivalents were necessarily abstract. Kandinsky ultimately formalized this relation in Punkt und Linie zu Fläche: Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente (Point and Line to Surface: A Contribution to the Analysis of the Elements of Painting 1926). James Leggio argues that this volume, which the painter began writing in 1914, represented the extension and modulation of ideas first formed earlier in the decade (102). Given the exchanges between Orphism and the “Blue Rider” group, there can be no doubt that Survage would have known of Kandinsky’s ideas. Both men were, in any case, drawing some of their inspiration from the same fount. Kandinsky’s ideas were shaped by correspondence and meetings with the “mystically inclined second-generation Russian Symbolists, notably Blok, Bely, and Ivanov” of the “Golden Fleece” group (Sheppard 153). Like the Ginnani-Corradini’s “play of colors” in Vita futurista, Survage’s project belonged to a tradition of innovative ideas about colormusic and the creation of sublimatory spatial environments that can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In 1850, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had distilled a century of speculative experiment in the arts and theorization in science into his work on color perception. The rationalization of this discourse, as seen in his essay “On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music” (1863), seemingly precipitated a new investment in synesthetic color-music technologies, starting with Alexander Wallace Rimington’s “Clavier à lumières” (Color Organ) demonstrated in 1895. Rimington equated the light spectrum with the musical octave but assigned all 12 notes within it an equal value. A  keyboard activated a series of contact switches that split an electrically produced white light into different colors at diatonic intervals in the spectrum, with the wavelength of each color close to that of a specific note. By 1912, Rimington’s organ was capable of artificially creating higher and lower registers through the use of separate keyboards to produce paler and deeper tones, though each color’s wavelength necessarily remained the same, unlike that of higher and lower octaves. The color music phenomenon inevitably impacted the development of abstract art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Czech painter Frantisek Kupka’s “Piano/Keyboard Lake” (1909) offers one of the earliest artistic renderings of color music in its merging of the vivid colors of a busy canal scene with piano keys, each of which corresponds to a different tone from the painting’s rich palette. The British

A Metaphysical Theater 69 artist Duncan Grant’s “Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound” (1914) offered a similar interpretation of color music in its form as a canvas scroll on which were collaged blocks of six rectangles in various colors. The experimental, multisensory possibilities of color music held an inevitable draw for filmmakers as well as painters. It is significant that Grant would later describe his “scroll” as a piece intended to operate almost as an early version of Edison’s Kinetoscope: the “scroll” was to be moved horizontally past an illuminated, rectangular viewing window, with a mechanical drive, to the accompaniment of music from gramophone records. Synchromism, which emerged among expatriate American painters who exhibited widely between 1912 and 1914, emerged as more artists turned inventors in their quest to create color organs, as evidenced in Nicolas Schöffer’s “Musikop” of 1912 and the American pianist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt’s color organ “Sarabet” (1916–19). The “Synchromist” painter Morgan Russell sketched a projector for colored light, the “Kinetic Light Machine”, extending the principles of the group’s painting to three-dimensional environments and introducing temporal transitions between colors. To further contextualize these seemingly eccentric devices and inventors, we might note that in 1920, the Ukrainian artist Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné designed the “Optofonium”, continuing the sound-painting synthesis. Baranoff-Rossiné had been a member of Orphist circles in Paris before 1914, experimenting with kinetic sculptures—one of which he entitled Symphony Number 1 (1913). By the early 1920s, he was a tutor in the VKhUTEMAS workshops—one of the crucibles of materialist, rational Soviet modernism. A crucial element of all these machines was the equivalence of abstractcolored forms to musical forms, with a variable tempo as one of its characteristics. Film was one way to achieve this, but it was by no means unique: the color organ was one method, the use of scores for projection from sophisticated lighting rigs another. What all three media achieved was the transformation of a static, plastic abstract art into light and motion and potentially the displacement of forms from two-dimensional planes into three-dimensional environments. Bruno Ginnani-Corradini recorded that his experiments with abstract film involved the creation of a three-dimensional space, painted entirely in white, and foresaw a future where the spectator would be incorporated in this environment as surface: “the well-dressed spectator will go to the theater of color dressed in white” (68). As Marinetti’s “The Variety Theater” (1913) attests, the synthesis of different media within the variety theater, or music-hall, fascinated the Futurists. Music halls, or vaudeville theaters, were one of the principal environments in which early film was exhibited, on mixed bills. It was accommodated there as a visual novelty, much as magic-lantern and slide shows had been in the mid-Victorian era. Marinetti wrote “The Variety

70  Christopher Townsend Theater” during the progressive transition from this mode of exhibition to dedicated cinemas. Film brought the Futurist fascination for speed and motion to the theater, Marinetti contended, enriching it “with an incalculable number of visions and spectacles that couldn’t otherwise be performed (battles, riots, horse races, automobile and airplane meets, travels, transatlantic steamers, the recesses of the city, of the countryside, of the oceans and the skies)” (“The Variety Theater” 159).

Rejecting Invention: Futurism and the Cinematograph However, while the Futurists were intrigued by color music and synesthesia, their relationship with film was not straightforward. The French critic Roger Allard wrote in 1911 that Futurist painters must have “a cinematograph in their bellies” and a year later—in no less a forum than The Blue Rider—would define the movement as “cinematism” (134). In a belated attack, perhaps not unrelated to the publication of “The Futurist Cinema”, Apollinaire would add that the Futurists were “cinématolâtres” (758). That Allard could make such a critique of cinema in the same volume as Kandinsky published his synesthetic play Der Gelbe Klang (The Yellow Noise), which depended upon theatrical lighting, suggests that the avant-garde drew subtle and important distinctions between the cinematograph, as a medium deriving from and promulgating photographic realism, and what it was attempting in various media with the projection and movement of color. A close reading of the early Futurist manifestos reveals the extent to which Futurists, especially Boccioni and Severini, were actually opposed to any direct association between dynamism and the cinematic. While pursuing dynamism, the Futurist painters’ manifesto explicitly rejected its cinematic reproduction: “The gesture that we want to reproduce will no longer be a moment in the universal dynamism which has been stopped, but the dynamic sensation itself” (Boccioni et al 64; emphasis added). This comparison between a concept of continuous flow that is at one with subjective experience and a derogated mechanism that separates flow into static fragments in order to represent it carries strong echoes of Bergson’s ideas in Creative Evolution (1907). Bergson comments on Muybridge’s chrono-photography as the serial freezing of the instant and privileges against it a notion of continual change of form: “in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only an instant view of transition” (319). Both Orphism and Futurism were indebted to Bergson’s ideas as conceptual bases for their world view; their conceptions of “simultaneité” and “simultaneità” shared aspects of his ideas of individual, malleable, and internalized time—and thus his critique of cinema as universal systematization, and fixing, of subjective experience.

A Metaphysical Theater 71 As early as the first collective manifesto, Futurism rejected the filmic principle of freezing a moment of time in space and recreating movement through the sequential presentation of a series of such moments. To this, we should add, in the same text, a dismissal of the photographic dependence on, and confirmation of, subjective materiality: “Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies . . . ?” (Boccioni et al. 65). By 1913, in distancing itself from the chrono-photography of the Bragaglia brothers, Futurism would also abjure lens-based practices: “We have always rejected with disgust and contempt even the most distant relationship with photography because it is outside the boundaries of art” (Boccioni et  al. 64). As Andrew Uroskie observes, chrono-photography and cinematography both separated the fluid, continuous motion of the world into discrete segments which film then reconstituted into the illusion of motion through a “physiological trick” (150–151). At the heart of Futurism’s rebuttal of Apollinaire’s accusation of cinephilia, and central to their refutation of the principles of coherent and conterminous time and space and the materiality of objects, was the movement’s investment in Bergsonian ideas and their Kantian roots. Bergson’s critique of the cinematic could only be countered by proposing a kind of film “sufficiently ‘abstract’ to be seen to renounce its claims to photographic indexicality” (152). Such filmmaking, as practiced and theorized by the Ginanni-Corradini brothers, not only eschewed indexicality: it had the added advantage of rejecting temporal–spatial unity, perspectival ontologies of space, and theatrical narrative modes.

Film Theory: Ricciotto Canudo, Lessing, and Nietzsche When Canudo published “The Birth of a Sixth Art” in October 1911, it was not his first address to the question of film’s status as an art form. Three years before he had written “The Triumph of the Cinematograph” for a Florentine journal: an essay that could hardly have escaped the attention of the Ginanni-Corradini brothers. Canudo was a central figure in the Parisian avant-garde, an intimate member of Apollinaire’s circle. While Canudo saw film as arbitrating between the rhythms of space (the plastic arts) and the rhythms of time (music and poetry), this “superb conciliation” should not be thought of as the experiential unity of time and space that so troubled the Futurist painters (“The Birth of the Sixth Art” 59). Rather, Canudo was concerned with Lessing’s distinction between poetry as a temporal art and painting as a spatial one and with finding a means by which the two might be synthesized (Lessing 25–129). By 1911, several publications reflected Canudo’s preoccupation with temporal and spatial division and reconciliation. The most notable was The Book of Man’s Evolution, where he predicted that there would be a synthesis of all the arts and philosophy in a “Metaphysical Theater” (Livre d’evolution 325). Canudo now forecast that the cinematograph

72  Christopher Townsend would not only synthesize the separate terms of temporality and spatiality into which Lessing divided fine art but—through a reversion to collective experience—create a new theater that unified its disparate genres. For Canudo, this most modern invention pointed back to the archaic and classical worlds, invoking both Dionysiac experience and Apollonian “representation”, and it is notable that where Lessing initially conflated painting and sculpture in order, ultimately, to privilege the latter, Canudo separated them (Lessing 29). Indeed, we might see “a Painting and a Sculpture developing in Time, in the manner of Music and Poetry” as reflecting the temporality implicit in Cubist painting’s “movement” around its subjects within the picture plane and anticipating Futurism’s similar moves in sculpture (Canudo, “The Birth” 59). Two things are clear from Canudo’s 1911 essay: first that the cinematograph was still a medium in which artistic capacity was wholly latent and second that his conception of film fitted it into a broader art of the public spectacle, in which individual subjectivity was suborned to the collective. Film was “not yet an art, because it lacks the freedom of choice peculiar to plastic interpretation, conditioned as it is to being the copy of a subject, the condition that prevents photography from becoming an art” (61). So, as for the Futurists, one of the apparently eidetic parameters of film, its lens-refracted chemical-mechanical registration of the object in space, precluded it from becoming art, since it denied the possibility of agency. Canudo reflected on the way in which a photographic attention to detail informed contemporary, realist theater: concluding with an observation that the cinema was similarly concerned only with the external appearances of everyday life. He contrasted this with developments in modernist painting that sought to move beyond appearances: “But the cinematograph never fails to exalt the principle of representing life in all its totality and its exterior “Truth”. . . . It is the triumph of this artistic eye that Cézanne called, with a holy contempt: the photographic eye” (“The Birth” 175).2 Canudo’s ideas about cinema were also informed by Neitzsche’s thoughts. He was concerned with the division of the theater into genres of the comedic and the tragic: in Nietzsche’s influential, if problematic, account of Attic tragedy as the high point of Greek theater, the two “drives” that were presented side-by-side in that mode were “the Apolline art of the image-maker or sculptor and the imageless art of music, which is that of Dionysus” (Nietzsche 14). Canudo’s “new theater” was formulated in terms of public participation in what he variously terms “the Festival” (Fête) and “Pantomime”. He thus used the common modernist strategy, profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, of connecting the absolutely new to the archaic, in order to elide the Christian moral tradition and nineteenth-century bourgeois rationalism. One model for this union seems to have been the open-air performances that Canudo witnessed in the wellpreserved Roman amphitheater at Orange during the summer of 1911

A Metaphysical Theater 73 (“Réflexions sur Orange” 1127–31). He wrote that “there is a movement towards a theater of new, profoundly modern Poets; the rebirth of Tragedy is heralded in numerous confused open-air spectacles representing disordered, incoherent but intensely willed effort” (“The Birth” 60). It is within this context, and with a practice that, if it is cinematographic, is far from “photographic”, that Canudo saw the emergence of cinema. Canudo provided a commentary that absolutely distinguished the utopian possibility of cinema from both the contemporary “cinema of attraction” and cinema’s emerging narrative forms. The great fables of the past are retold, mimed by ad hoc actors chosen from the most important stars. What is shown above all is the appearance rather than the essence of contemporary life, from sardine fishing in the Mediterranean to the marvel of flying steel and the indomitable human courage of the car races at Dieppe or the aviation week at Reims. (“The Birth” 62)3 He critiqued here both the spectacle of modernity and the miming of the theatrical canon and contrasted them with contemporary experiments, noting that Gabriel d’Annunzio “has dreamed of a great Italian heroic pantomime for the cinematograph” (“The Birth” 62). For Canudo, the modernity of the cinematograph and its potential to challenge the conventions of the realist drama were linked to the classical Greek tradition. The articulating figure here is that of the comic—understood primarily in terms that seem to derive from Bergson’s 1900 essays on laughter, yet anticipating how critics in the French avant-garde after World War One would appraise Chaplin. For Canudo, the contemporary bourgeois theater—including its “photographic” realism—was an impoverished degeneration of the classical model. Early-twentieth-century conceptions of the social role of the Greek theater, often inaccurate, and derived largely from Nietzsche, were crucial to Canudo’s imagination of film’s possibilities as an art form. The “speed” [rapidité] of the cinematograph was vital in connecting any new theater with its classical antecedents. And for speed we should not read temporality: what interested Canudo was cinema’s capacity to move quickly between the twin poles of the Attic drama, the tragic and the comic, and thus unite them to create “the first new theater” (“The Birth” 64; emphasis added). That theater, however, was not the cinema as it existed in 1911, nor one that showed films of spectacles to audiences; rather, it was one that was, in itself, spectacular, and in which the audience was itself a participant—just as, within Nietzsche’s understanding of the Dionysiac, “man” was no longer spectator or artist but through collective engagement became “a work of art” (18). Nietzsche introduced to nineteenth-century modernity the imagined social projects of the classical and pre-classical theater as means of resolving the tension between the individual and

74  Christopher Townsend collective will that, starting from Hegel (359–60), was understood as an intractable dichotomy within liberal democracy. Canudo’s invocation of a new theater of sublimation and participation to create intersubjective harmony was not unique within the Parisian avant-garde of 1911. Henri-Martin Barzun’s theatrical project La Terrestre Tragédie, which combined choric chanting of poetry with changing projections of colored light, sought similar effects. Canudo wrote: The cinematograph as it is today will evoke for the historians of the future the image of the first extremely rudimentary wooden theaters, the ‘primitive tragedies’, where goats had their throats slashed and the primitive ‘goat song’ was danced, before the apotheosis of stone in which Lycurgus consecrated the Dionysian theater, and also before the birth of Aeschylus. (“The Birth” 65) In other words, if the contemporary cinema was the “primitive” drama, then its mature form was the equivalent of the Attic. Nietzsche’s invocation of the Dionysiac as an ecstatic, sublimatory experience in which individual identity was annihilated was crucial to Canudo here. “Now, hearing this gospel of universal harmony, each person feels himself to be not simply united, reconciled or merged with his neighbour, but quite literally one with him” (Nietzsche 18).

Conclusions The avant-garde wanted to make films rejecting the photographic truth of appearances on which the medium was predicated, along with the unity of time and space that it assumed. Early experiments with film largely eschewed the objectivity of lens-based cinematography—whether in the works of the Ginanni-Corradini brothers or Survage’s Colored Rhythm. This was not simply a matter of expediency or expense: Marinetti and the Ginanni-Corradinis had substantial personal fortunes, so the considerable costs involved in buying or renting equipment were unlikely to have acted as a deterrent. Indeed, one might say that these artists were less concerned with “cinema” than with the creation of kinetic, abstract environments that were associated with musical experiment—for example in Kandinsky’s influential color plays, but also in projects such as the Cubo-Futurist opera Pobeda nad solntsem (The Victory over the Sun) (1913) where the painter Mikhail Matyushin applied his theories of color to architectural space, using one of the most sophisticated lighting rigs in a western theater. These projects are variously conceived of as sublimatory (Ginanni-Corradini, Survage, and Barzun) or participatory (Canudo). The proposed and actual modes of exhibition were such that they were, unlike cinema

A Metaphysical Theater 75 in either its “attraction” or its narrative modes, not really modes of “exhibition” at all. These projects were theorized and achieved through projection, but film was far from essential. For the Ginnani-Corradini’s, hand-painted film realized temporal changes between complex, colored abstract forms, as could a carefully placed lighting rig for Kandinsky or Matyushin, or a color organ or similar device. In the limited examples where conventional cinematography was deployed, the output was radically theatrical in both content and context: indeed, from the evidence of Vita Futurista, it was hyperbolically performative without adhering to the melodramatic narrative forms that, in the later 1910s, began to dominate commercial cinema. What is clear from this activity is that the theory and practice of film within the early modernist avant-garde have little relationship to the cinema of attraction as a paradigm. Gunning’s model for the exploration of space and presentation of phenomena is wholly apposite to the prenarrative, pre-cinematic forms of exhibition for film as popular entertainment. However, to apply it to the output and ideas of avant-garde artists is to overlook their fundamentally different and well-defined conceptions of time and space, and indeed of reality, compared to those epistemic foundations on which film rests. When it came to the technological possibilities for film, the avantgarde’s embrace of nineteenth-century concepts and inventions like color music and the color organ shows how it looked backward in order to find ways of developing the medium. At a moment of gestation more than nascence, the avant-garde’s understanding and tentative exploration of the possibilities of film challenged the structural conventions of the medium. These challenges were less a matter of naivete concerning film’s technical possibilities on the part of artists and theorists within the avantgarde, and more a matter of trying to fit film to a fundamentally different conceptual matrix—one largely determined the metaphysical and romantic philosophy of figures like Lessing, Nietzsche, and Bergson, rather than empiricism or pragmatism. As the avant-garde’s complicated relationship with the cinematograph recalls, this was above all a challenge posed to photographic conceptions of objective reality and to the assumed unity of time and space. In other words, the avant-garde’s filmic project was to undermine the epistemic bases of naturalism upon which film was later seen to depend. Even as film moved beyond abstraction, in the 1920s, with the evolution of montage and the use of temporal alienation in surrealism, the avant-garde continued to find ways to subvert the spectacle of reality.

Notes 1 These films were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Milan in 1944. 2 This is from a section of the essay omitted in the English translation.

76  Christopher Townsend 3 The ‘races’ [courses du circuit de Dieppe] to which Canudo refers were the French Grands Prix held at Dieppe in 1907–08, rather than the horse races regularly staged there. There were no car races at Dieppe between 1909 and 1912. The ‘Grand Semaine d’aviation de la Champagne’ was staged at Reims in 1909 and 1910 but not again until 1913. Canudo’s references to these spectacles of modernity, neither especially current by autumn 1911, suggest that he had been working on the essay for some time. By contrast, his references to theatrical developments are to open-air performances that he had only recently seen and reported on.

Works Cited Allard, Roger. Revue indépendante, no. 3, Aug. 1911, p. 134. Apollinaire, Guillaume. “La Vie anecdotique: La Science futuriste.” Mercure de France, vol. 117, 1916, p. 758. Balla, Giacomo, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini. “The Exhibitors to the Public” (1912). Translated by Lawrence Rainey. Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, Yale UP, 2009, pp. 105–9. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell, London, 1911. Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini. “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (1910). Translated by Lawrence Rainey. Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, Yale UP, 2009, pp. 64–67. Canudo, Ricciotto. Livre de l’évolution. L’homme. Psychologie musicale des civilisations. Sansot, 1908. ———. “Réflexions sur Orange et la tragedie.” La Renaissance contemporaine, Sept. 18–24, 1911, pp. 1127–31. ———. “The Birth of a Sixth Art” (1911). French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology. Volume I, 1907–1929, edited by Richard Abel, Princeton UP, 1993, pp. 58–66. Carrà, Carlo. “The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells” (1913). Translated by Lawrence Rainey. Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, Yale UP, 2009, pp. 155–59. Ginanni-Corradini, Bruno. “Abstract Cinema—Chromatic Music 1912.” Translated by Umberto Appolonio. Futurist Manifestos, edited by Umberto Appolonio, Thames & Hudson, 1974, pp. 66–70. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avantgarde.” Wide Angle, vol. 8, no. 3–4, 1986, pp. 63–70. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford UP, 1977. Leggio, James. “Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and the Music of the Spheres.” Music and Modern Art, edited by James Leggio, Routledge, 2002. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry” (1766) Translated by W. A. Steel. Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, edited by J. M. Bernstein, Cambridge UP, 2003. Lista, Giovanni. Le Cinéma futuriste. Paris: Éditions Paris Expérimental, 2008.

A Metaphysical Theater 77 Macrae, David. “Painterly Concepts and Filmic Objects: The Interaction of Expression and Reproduction in Early Avant-Garde Film.” European AvantGarde: New Perspectives. Avant-Garde Critical Studies, 15, edited by Dietrich Scheunemann, Rodopi, 2000, pp. 137–54. Marinetti, F. T. “Destruction of Syntax—Wireless Imagination-Words in Freedom.” Translated by Lawrence Rainey. Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, Yale UP, 2009, pp. 143–52. ———. “The Variety Theater.” Translated by Lawrence Rainey. Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, Yale UP, 2009, pp. 159–65. Menke, Richard. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900. Cambridge UP, 2019. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Roland Speirs, Cambridge UP, 1999. Sheppard, Richard. Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism. Northwestern UP, 2000, pp. 145–70. Strauven, Wanda. “Futurist Poetics and the Cinematic Imagination: Marinetti’s Cinema without Films.” Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Avantgarde Critical Studies, vol. 24, edited by Günter Berghaus, Editions Rodopi, 2009, pp. 201–28. Uroskie, Andrew V. “Chronophotography and Cinematography to Photodynamism and Chromatic Music: Bergson’s Critique of Photography and the Birth of the Futurist Motion Picture, 1910–1912.” Futurismo: Impact and Legacy, edited by Giuseppe Gazzola, Forum Italicum Publishing, 2011, pp. 150–51. Verdone, Mario and Berghaus, Günter. “Vita futurista and Early Futurist Cinema.” International Futurism in Arts and Literature, edited by Günter Berghaus, De Gruyter, 2000, pp. 398–421. Vergo, Peter. “Music and Abstract Painting: Kandinsky, Goethe and Schoenberg.” Towards a New Art: Essays on the Background to Abstract Art, 1910–1920, edited by Michael Compton, Tate Gallery, 1980, pp. 41–63.

Part II

Changing Landscapes Empire, Trade, Ecology

5 Histories Yet to Come: Adventure Fiction and the Ideologies of Free Trade Keith Clavin

Introduction This chapter describes how new debates about free trade policy during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods manifested in similar literary correlates, most notably through adventure fiction. Representations of traders and colonial business endeavors served as ideological mediators between the conceptions of an earlier unified Victorian economy and an impending modern one shaped by diverse, competing agendas. The writing of H. Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells offers dramatizations of the theoretical difficulties of conceptualizing the British empire while the appropriate position of its trading policy underwent a revaluation as one era gave way to the next. Taken together, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1886), and Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1900– 01) serve as a set of case studies depicting the esthetic tension found in the adventure genre wherein a desire for established boundaries meets practical resistance in the form of paradoxical economic circumstances between trading partners. This enigma also finds striking comparison in much contemporaneous nonfiction economic writing, especially treatises assessing the validity or limitations of free trade. I will explain the economic stakes of the free trade debates in order to contextualize certain qualities of the adventure narrative as part of a larger discursive network grappling with new shifts in perspective about the seeming stability of nineteenth-century constructions of empire and their more ambiguous, twentieth-century counterparts. Economic tensions within the empire (and it is important to emphasize that these tensions are between the metropolitan and colonial settlers) came to define the debate surrounding efficacious foreign trade policy. The “Imperial system”, as it was sometimes referred to, contributed to the concept of “Greater Britain”: a nationalistic understanding of the set of relations that would help to restrict what had come to be known as “cosmopolitan competition” (Cunningham 158). This concern over the limits of competition is the dearer stake within the trade debate, and what makes it such a lightning rod for policy quarrels as well as a discourse DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-8

82  Keith Clavin that builds upon an anxiety about the future. Should Great Britain continue down a path of cosmopolitan progress that leads to a theoretical break with traditional national identity? Or should she revert to a more insular position? An Empire that protects its own products could potentially strengthen the bonds between geographically distant colonies but strain international relations. The uncertainty surrounding the long-term effects of free trade in the 1880s and 90s exposes a number of political and economic angsts. Whereas free trade principles carried the day for an extensive amount of time, a new dedication to imperialist operations required a revaluation of policy and perspective. The figure of the trader emerges as a functional meeting point for interactions between earlier and later notions of economic balance, especially as it pertains to the British Empire. As key participants within the imperial project, traders serve as embodiments of contact zones between metropolitan and colonized subjects. They must navigate between and across geographic and metaphoric boundaries, oftentimes encountering unfamiliar languages and social values, which force them to make sense of a place’s traditions through observation and interpretation. The result is a collection of literary figures that prove to be highly sensitive to cultural and textual cues. The trader also represents an intermediary figure, what might be termed an economic avant-garde, whose travels literalize the metaphoric cultural changes taking place as Victorian sureties gradually become modern anxieties. I  will explain how a trader’s success depends upon an ability to comparatively “read” cultures and, even more so, on his proclivity to create narratives, invent myths, and recount legends. Ultimately, the trader proves as much adventure writer as actual adventurer. The novels, which can be broadly classified as works contributing to the adventure genre of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, negotiate a similar ideological arena related to questions of economic loyalty and the right to profit. I use the label “adventure” as a shorthand descriptor for “lost world”, imperial, and seafaring fiction, intended primarily for boys, which appeared in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. Literary critics have long described the narrative formula of these stories as one of “explore, conquer, and rule” (Green 3), but recent scholarship has begun to read them as artifacts of more nuanced cultural moments that drew influence from different established genres and conventions. In his study of animals and empirical bodies, John Miller describes a process of “national destiny and character formation”, which happens at the meeting place between two strong ideological impulses: otherness and order and reveals a deep anxiety about the future of Britain and who (or “what”) will populate it, as well as a concern for its national “personality” (23). The field of utopian studies has also made significant contributions to criticism regarding adventure fiction. Specifically, Philip Steer has studied utopian novels as a genre whose “terrain is economics” and “the global

Histories Yet to Come 83 reach of British imperialism” (50). My argument situates the adventure novel as an exercise in imagining possible futures as well, though not exactly utopian, and as one with special importance given the liminal positions of both traders and the historical era in which these texts were produced.1 More noteworthy may be the point that these texts also transmit the complex associations between adventure, literature, and imperial economic relations within othered locales. For John Rieder, adventure fiction, with its “colonial-imperial” aspect and links to other genres such as lost-race fiction, utopian writing, and travel writing, in turn “affected the shape of emergent science fiction” (35). Adventure fiction is itself a meeting point between genres—or, to use Rieder’s phrasing, an “intersection of imaginary voyages, tales of adventure and colonial discourses” (35)—and exemplifies the hybrid character of the challenges facing British subjectivity’s grasp of imperial trade relations. These adventure narratives demonstrate new anxieties emerging from previously comfortable sureties about imperial relations and trade policies. What emerges from the web of connections are paradoxical desires for a flexible, global orientation of capital in order to promote economic progress and a singular, monolithic ruling body that will command a larger collection of imperial trading partners. Adventure fiction, trade writing, and science played significant roles in the construction of an understandable, if flawed, model for envisioning a future Britain. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay addresses a similar contradiction in the competing cultural demands found in science fiction’s relation with empire. Science fiction provided a necessary outlet and helped to conceptualize the transformations of “historical nations into hegemons” (231) and had to find representational patterns to simultaneously celebrate a technological future and maintain a hesitancy about the change in national identity. Adventure and trade writing both inherently engage an ideological disparity between two notions of the future: one defined by romantic understandings of an orderly past and the other by intense, spontaneous transformation. The selected texts spotlight the complex associations of an important, innovative age of imperial trading and science in conjunction with the progression of an important, innovative literary age in British fiction that evolved as the latter nineteenth century becomes the early twentieth century. Although often arranged as a strict binary comprised of Victorian versus more modern tendencies, the adventure stories discussed here allow a look at how cultural and literary spaces bleed into each other with greater frequency and magnitude in the 1800s and early 1900s. Like the trader, the free trade debates themselves and their literary correlates provide a concentrated study of how this absorption of traditional mores into new revisions remains somewhat immune from acts of easy periodization. The use of narrative frames and unusual chronologies prompts a series of questions regarding literary objectivity and realism. A number of canonical novels of this go-between era, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula

84  Keith Clavin and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, foreground the writing process through framed narratives that present textual verification as the key not only to understanding the past but also for inspiring a tension about the narrative’s future in the reader’s imagination. A re-appropriation of the narrative frame from the Gothic tradition helped to impart a metafictional aspect to models of realism that simultaneously maintained “found” documents while injecting a self-awareness of literature’s constructed-ness through that very tactic. An analysis of these adventure stories illustrates the significant growth of the frame technique from the earlier, single frame of King Solomon’s Mines to the more convoluted She and, finally, to the sundry collection of generative frames of First Men. Haggard’s traders practice the reading and interpreting of antiquated dialects and textual relics in order to establish a sense of temporal orderliness (albeit one that grows more precarious in She), but the protagonists of First Men actively partake in imposing structure through the act of writing. Wells wants to employ several separate narrative paradigms, from a variety of rhetorical angles. Like a type of literary cubism, he recognizes multiplicity as an unavoidable feature of piecing together a story in the new century. First Men even contains a chapter called “Points of View”, a title that captures the self-awareness of the novel’s groping for perspectival understanding. This innovative commitment to narrative experimentation—and specifically a hesitation to embrace complete narrative congruence—in imperial adventure settings also exists in Joseph Conrad’s novels, especially, Victory (multiple narrators, 1915), The Secret Sharer (mirrored plotlines, 1909), and Heart of Darkness (storyteller-within-the-story technique, 1900).2 By a similar theoretical turn, the pamphlets, treatises, and ideological paper wars regarding trade policies display the imaginative dexterity to envision, describe, and analyze the potential effects of disparate strategies among economic rivals across the globe. In what would become a foundational text for the movement, Thomas Briggs’s The Peacemaker: Free Trade, Free Labour, Free Thought explains that “intercolonial Free Trade is the only intercolonial bond of peace and amity, and that universal Free Trade is the only pioneer to universal peace” (95).3 The free trade movement, for all of its political motivations, promoted itself (and still does) as a system of international order founded upon an economic code of conduct. Free traders seized the rhetoric of peace and coupled it with a growing sense of cosmopolitanism in order to forward a dedication to the ideal of a unified global community. This goal coincided with a broad English sentiment of peace until the 1870s, when the end of that decade witnessed a major challenge to free trade doctrine in the form of the “fair trade” movement. Despite free trade’s long ideological reign, fair trade groups experienced an uptick in enthusiasm and credibility through a protectionist critique of free trade. A substantial portion of their rhetoric focused upon

Histories Yet to Come 85 the need for a new, more unified system of “British” trading policy that would join the growing number of colonial theaters. Even some former proponents of free trade, like William Cunningham, came to regard fair trade as a necessary transition for the changing structure of the British political economy. In short, fair traders promoted tariffs and taxation that would permit colonial goods an advantage in the metropolitan marketplace, which, according to their reasoning, was being restricted by unnecessary competition with foreign nations. In contrast, free traders disagreed with the tariffs but, more importantly, viewed their stance as bigger than mere economic policy. It was the enactment of an unavoidable, natural process. Regardless of civilization’s best efforts, “the system of international commerce flows on . . . in spite of the puny barriers by which the folly of man tries to check and impede its course” (Farrer 187).4 Free traders seized upon the rhetoric of natural balance and peace, while the fair traders presented themselves as necessary interventionists in a changing, complex world. When read in conjunction, adventure fiction and economic trade writing enter into dialogue with each other and it is possible to begin unpacking some of the many complex associations between literary and colonial exchanges. Adventure writers like Haggard and Wells produced narratives about faraway lands for mass consumption, but trade writers were also generating narratives apropos the colonial project for popular audiences. In essence, the colonial business venture gets written into adventure. On the macroeconomic level, these two genres of writing form the complementary components that drove revisions of received economic customs.

Adventure Fiction and Nostalgia At the outset of King Solomon’s Mines, the narrator, Allan Quatermain, identifies himself as a “trader”, who has been “hunting, fighting, or mining” since his days in the “old Colony” (Haggard, Mines 9). Despite introducing himself as a hearty, diligent man born of a hard-knock childhood, he quickly expands the description to include traits such as his distaste for “violence” and timidity (Haggard, Mines 9). Two aspects of his initial self-portrait are significant. The first is his explicit connection to the trading industry. Allan states he is 55 years old, which would mean his career as a trader has spanned from roughly the mid 1840s until the mid 1880s. The second is his fondness for self-reflection and a faith in considerations of the past to impart understanding about the present. His memories of adventure serve as an experiential bank account from which to draw knowledge and expertise as well as the basis for the novel to come. Throughout his journey, Quatermain must navigate between English and African customs, which are clearly presented through temporal markers. For example, when Foulata, the beautiful native girl, is to be seized by Twala, the impostor ruler, his diction, like that of the rest of

86  Keith Clavin the native population, recalls bygone English. Twala, who Ignosi will supplant, commands his guards to seize Quatermain and his men and, in anger, bellows, “How canst thou prevent it? Who art thou that thou standest between me and my will? Withdraw I  say” (Haggard, Mines 115). The English spoken by the native Africans, who abide by a much stricter monarchy, carries the mark of a romanticized, early modern syntax, which fulfills a double-sided desire for Haggard. On the one hand, it places the Africans into an antiquated, easily translatable linguistic system. On the other hand, that system reinforces the inherent connections within the novel’s temporal logic between earlier epochs and control, specifically a stable past that implies a simpler, finished era that accepts the consideration of a single ideology as sufficient. Quatermain is fully aware of the semiotics of his interactions and manipulates perceptions by (trade)marking his words with appropriate and telling time-based features. The premise of an archaic English language spoken among African tribes makes little sense on a practical level but ideologically permits Haggard to employ a simple, time-based binary as cognitive scaffolding for what is, in actuality, a complex, confused modern situation. Ironically, Quatermain mimics the Africans by adopting their (English-derived) but outdated discourse. During a hoax wherein he claims to employ “magic” by blacking out the sun he proclaims, “Ye have asked for a sign; it is given to ye” (Haggard, Mines 116). The scene is an obvious plagiarism of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as Haggard’s Quatermain claims a solar eclipse as proof of his sorcery. But beyond the linguistic and intertextual quirks, these lines of dialogue demonstrate the trader’s self-conscious role of interpreter. The trade situation at the end of the century required a similar effort from British citizens to find a structure for the contentious, convoluted relations of imperial trade policy. Over the course of these decades, consumer choice became highly political and convoluted. What came to be known as “imperial federation” argued for the “preferential treatment for colonial food products imported into Britain” (Robert F. Haggard 12). The goal was to enhance commercial ties between Britain and her colonies in such a way as to protect the colonial posts from competing with entire countries, such as Germany, especially after the publication of Ernest E. Williams’s Made in Germany in 1896, which quickly became a touchstone for fears about foreign trading supremacy. During the 1880s, fair traders had begun to gain political momentum thanks to a number of significant events that built upon the economic troubles of the little understood “Long Depression” (Cain and Hopkins 209–10). The Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 provided an explicit, governmental statement about the topic. The law required goods to present a reliable “trade mark” and “trade descriptions” to acknowledge “the place or country in which they were manufactured” (The Merchandise Marks Act 1887). It also warned against any “trade description in the English language which

Histories Yet to Come 87 could, in any way, be taken to convey the idea that the goods to which it is applied are of British make” (The Merchandise Marks Act 1887). Throughout the novel, characters interpret and revise their own understandings of the troubled relationships between an aristocratic social heritage (“the past”) and the forward-looking, capitalist perspective of empire. Financial profiteers like traders, miners, and metropolitan investors form the frontline of imperial interactions, and their method, laced with philosophical paradox, culminates in a body of writing that rhetorically struggles with the maintenance of a dated value system bending under the weight of its own expansion. The result is a new understanding of adventure fiction that serves as a type of historiography about the future of England’s economic policy. The obsolete linguistic modeling works with the archaic governmental model built upon aristocracy and birth to signal that these characters embody an ancient, if not completely erased, perspective of the world and that readers (and the traders in the novel) should be alert to their tendencies. Likewise, the traders position themselves within a long tradition of trading as regards encounters with other nations and colonies. As Sir Henry points out to Quatermain, “Ashtoreth of the Hebrews was the Astarte of the Phoenicians, who were the great traders of Solomon’s time” (Haggard, Mines 161). Descriptions like this push the rhetoric almost into a type of mysticism. The men “who managed the mines” predate modern culture and are part of an institution with its own unique set of conventions and ethics. Quatermain subscribes to this model of the trader’s ethos when he tells Umbopa that he will assist with the revolution against the imposturous cruel ruler, despite the fact that he does “not like revolutions” and is “a man of peace” (Haggard, Mines 98). The staid attitude toward revolution is not difficult to rationalize within a Victorian frame. However, it is not left at that. He will always “stick to” his friends but goes on to remind us: “I am a trader, and have to make my living, so I will accept your offer about those diamonds in case we should ever be in a position to avail ourselves of it” (Haggard, Mines 98–99). Gain is never far from the trader’s rationale, and it is not uncouth for Quatermain to consider profit. His remarks capture the conflation of a set of earlier, romanticized values regarding sheer gain with a modern explicitness of intention. He worries about associations with “revolutions” under any circumstances, a position that echoes the conservatism tied to peerages and a devotion to received authority. However, he is not averse to looking forward to potential opportunities that can be exploited for profit, without hesitation for etiquette’s sake. This paradox follows both free traders and fair traders. The free trader fetishizes a future tranquility attained through global commercial bonds, while the fair trader hopes to re-solidify a national identity with expansions of tariffs and revised policies, but both are beholden to the transitionary phase of empire and identity at the turn of the century.

88  Keith Clavin In an argument about the function of literary representations of the spider in adventure fiction, Claire Charlotte McKechnie interprets the spider as a figure of “unstable metaphorical meanings” with the ability to play upon fears of the “transgression of boundaries” (507) between established imperial binaries. Part of the spider’s cultural significance derives from its ability to move fluidly between standard contact zones. The trader possesses a more literal capability to cross locales within the empire, which often reflect disparate understandings of Britain’s allegorical future. He becomes a guide for those who must traverse temporal planes, namely, non-traders and readers. Within the narrative, he mediates between the English travelers and the native population through an expertise in geographic knowledge, and for the reader, this negotiation is represented through language. The depiction of an extinct syntax creates the space for Haggard to instigate a set of associations regarding English history as a settled matter that can be read as an attempt to turn back the clock toward an uncomplicated resolution of imperial trade relations that had evolved into an unwieldy muddle of competing interests and uncertain alliances. The language boundaries in King Solomon’s Mines reduce that muddle to a straightforward, reassuring fantasy of definite cultural categories and recognizable narrative order.

Writing as Innovation Whereas King Solomon’s Mines looks to the past to find one stable narrative that will permit access to a current interpretation, Haggard’s ensuing novel, She, demonstrates a push and pull of political ideologies through linguistic representations that expend more energy on the written word than the spoken. She can be read as an example of an innovative shift in narrative form at the turn of the century that employs framed narratives and explicit considerations of “writing” as a model for negotiating the confrontation with modern technologies, new social relations, and, most significantly for my purposes, the paradoxes of imperialism. H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon is a notable extension of the emphasis upon textual verification and trade that Haggard begins with She. When placed into conversation with each other, She and First Men can be realized as representative of a distinct esthetic nexus formed among framed narratives, adventure fiction, and imperial trading. King Solomon’s Mines requires belief in a singularity of perspective that can guide characters through diverse situations. She, in a proto-form, and First Men, in a more sophisticated style, acknowledge the variance of narrative purpose through a dedication to intertextual and metafictional apparatuses. In She (like King Solomon’s Mine), Haggard vacillates between nostalgic admiration for the regality of official historical memory, often grounded in a feudal economy, and fear about confronting an imperial future on its own, purely capitalistic terms. However,

Histories Yet to Come 89 the representational medium is different. She displays the fraught status of the past within a changing historical phase and exhibits that inherent apprehension through a narrative fixation on textual materials. The subtitle of She: A History of Adventure, throws the strange paradox of venturing into the past in order to produce a current, relevant chronicle into sharp contrast. Haggard expends a great deal of authorial energy on establishing definite traditions from which to justify the novel’s plot, nearly all of which depend upon the establishment of certain texts’ legitimacy. The novel’s “Introduction” details how the following narrative was mailed to him in “MS” form by L. Horace Holly so that it may be published. A postscript to the letter declares that he will seek “the sherd, the scarab, and the parchments” at a later date (Haggard, She 14–15). The writer of this introductory material signs it “THE EDITOR” at the conclusion and is explicit in the claim that he is merely an editor and not an author. The editor grapples with what to make of the enclosed manuscript and tries to place it within several genres. Pondering the question of whether it is a “gigantic allegory” or a philosophical treatise on the dangers of “immortality”, he ultimately decides that it is nonfiction because it bears “the stamp of truth upon its face” (Haggard, She 14). From this elaborate textual beginning, She grows more unusual in its use of paper trails as proof for its own self-conscious validity as well as a gauge of credulity for the characters’ trust during their travels. The emphasis upon textual verification continues as the narrative proper must justify its origins with a series of documents in conjunction with constant references to past aristocratic heritage. Upon his ward’s 25th birthday, Holly accesses a letter and accompanying documents (a collection of scrolls) from a safe-deposit box in a London bank. Along with the unsigned letter from the ward’s father, Holly describes, in minute detail, the “potsherd” inside, which is covered in ancient Greek writing. Haggard presents readers with a facsimile of the Greek before transcribing it into cursive characters “for general convenience in reading” (Haggard, She 38). He also provides an English translation, then discovers a second imprint in Latin. Again, he presents the “original” text followed by a cursive transcription. This is followed by an Old English version, then an Elizabethan one dated 1564, and then a mideighteenth-century account, which he is able to date, after doing some literary detective work involving a 1740 edition of Hamlet. Over the course of 10 pages, Holly presents eight separate “translations” from the sherd (Haggard, She 45). It seems the case that Holly, as an editor of these documents (and Haggard as an author), makes is one of accumulative substantiation. The longer the tradition, the more convergence across temporal epochs, then the greater the persuasive powers of those textual artifacts become. The circumlocution of standard plot, especially for an “adventure”, permits Haggard to make a case for Western civilization’s past via language, and

90  Keith Clavin to justify this treasure hunt as a tradition with explicit, almost Biblical, links to English forerunners. The verifying link of this long tradition is written language, which has permitted it to be carried forward and fulfilled. Like the trademark law, linguistic signs carry symbolic value for national identity along with data that reinforces a historical tradition. This move is in direct opposition to Ayesha’s own civilization about which we are told, “As to origin, they had none, at least, so far as she was aware” (Haggard, She 86). According to Holly, if a tradition is oral, it is nearly non-existent, and only the strength of paper can verify a culture’s history. The preoccupation with a textual record reveals the aspiration to employ the past as a mediator for interpreting extant circumstances and making decisions for those circumstances. Similarly, at the opening of The First Men in the Moon, readers are greeted with a series of writerly situations wherein Wells frames the narrative through an explicitly forward-looking, commercial context. Unlike Haggard’s narrator, who finds manuscripts and letters, Wells’s Mr Bedford, the narrator, sits down to record his “amazing adventures” (Wells 5) from a location in southern Italy and opens with a reflection upon the beginning of the adventure, which was instigated during an earlier writing retreat to Lympne in Kent. Bedford had retired to the countryside with the aim of composing a successful drama, having recently become “an ugly cropper” after a series of failed “speculations” (Wells 5).5 He hoped to build a new affluence as a playwright and believed his understanding of business exchanges would help his efforts. As he concludes, “Nowadays even about business transactions there is a strong spice of adventure” (Wells 5). The links between writing, investment, and “projects of colonisation” (Wells 122) only grow more intense as the narrative progresses. The final chapters consist of telegraphic transmissions from Cavor, who was been stranded on the moon, but most intriguing are Bedford’s remarks about his plans to publish a “scientific report” in a “larger volume” as a complement to this “popular first transcript” and introductory “abstract” (Wells 165). The novel becomes an exercise in translation wherein Cavor’s transmissions employ modern technological beliefs in radio waves, but also display “the trope of damaged communication” (Worth 81). This ambiguity permits Bedford the “license to edit and shape the transmissions” (Worth 79) as he sees fit. Claims to truth are certainly not new literary ground in 1901; however, the more conspicuous aspect of these examples is how the various performances of authorship work together. The labyrinthine textual connections that include abstracts, reports, alien ethnographies, and newspaper articles acknowledge that details and information have been left out of any single version and, therefore, must be offered as part of a larger complement of writing (the novel itself) that permits the narrative proper to claim validity.

Histories Yet to Come 91

Science Writing and Empire Wells makes specific and explicit links between not only science, in some general sense, but also scientific writing and imperial pursuits. While the scientist in First Men, Cavor, seems to be good-hearted and hopeful for peace with the Selenites, Wells places him in a passive subjective position in respect to the aggressive and enterprising businessman, Bedford, who comes to control their adventure to the moon, thanks to an obsession for coordinating a colonial mining system between the Earth and the moon. Cavor not only craves communion with “professional scientific men” but also permits Bedford to seize upon a fantasy regarding the seizure of gold across the solar system (which he likens to Spain’s terrestrial attempts) that inspires him to coin the phrase “planetary rights of pre-emption” (Wells 30). After months of learning scientific procedure, the basics of engineering, how to sketch drafts, and much practical planning, Bedford concludes, “this is Imperial!” (Wells 30). Despite being so distracted with locating “patents and concessions in the craters of the moon” that they nearly become stranded there permanently, Bedford predicts that “things look bright for my Company” (Wells 90, 87). The conceptualization of the stewardship of the moon is made through a hope for binding business contracts, like patents and the official declaration of a right to seize a planet’s resources. Bedford’s entrepreneurial spirit, for all its perceived independence, turns to the production of formal documentation in order to justify its power as well as equal the established strength of Cavor’s scientific discourse. Through these two characters, Wells brings the ideologies of capitalist expansion and scientific progress into immediate contact and, through that closeness, demonstrates how they work hand in glove for the empire’s ends. One initial reading might be that enterprise for profit taints good, scientific men like Cavor, but the novel also reminds us that each project is motivated by an obsession with prospects for the future. The shared desire for imminent possibilities creates a dangerous mix of narrow selfinterestedness and an unquestioned acquiescence to the authority of textual materials. Cavor’s “eighteen long descriptions of lunar affairs” (Wells 164) place him, in spite of his sincere hopes of peaceful community, into a confrontation with the ironic similarities between imperial treatises and scientific writing. The assortment of observational descriptions about Selenite culture supplies a sensation of cognitive control over the moon’s historical past, which not only brings the intense otherness of the Selenites into a collection of interpretable documents but also objectifies their existence into an easily consumed (and potentially conscripted) station. Embedded within these critiques of science, economics, and empire is an implicit recognition of the slipperiness of formal documentation and

92  Keith Clavin even writing itself. The metafictional premises that structure these two novels illustrate a dedication to documents as records of the past but also bespeak a tenuous forward-looking appeal. A competition between the traditional ideas of assurance found through the tracking of history and new attempts at the fragmentation of conventional narratives converges. This phenomenon is similar to the textual situation of free trade writing. Within those debates, England was deciding on a policy that would shape its future engagement with the world, but the decision was dependent upon how the nation viewed itself and its historical traditions. What is the appropriate model to follow? She and First Men both address this topic toward the ends of their novels. Holly explains to Ayesha why a ruler who dominates her subjects with fear is not a strong leader. Again, we explained that it was the character of monarchs that had changed, and that the one under whom we lived was venerated and beloved by all right-thinking people in her vast realms. Also, we told her that real power in our country rested in the hands of the people, and that we were in fact ruled by the votes of the lower and least educated classes of the community. “Ah,” she said, “a democracy—then surely there is a tyrant, for I have long since seen that democracies, having no clear will of their own, in the end set up a tyrant, and worship him”. “Yes,” I said, “we have our tyrants”. (Haggard, She 225) Despite Holly’s palpable admiration of Victoria, it is that very admiration that creates an uneasiness of philosophy. Free trade would push political economy further into the realm of a “democracy” (which is implied to be a vulnerable, if not wholly dangerous, system), yet holly is also critical of the true empress, Ayesha, as an unchallenged authority. Each queen represents a different approach to trade and government. Victoria manages a progressive capitalism through free trade while Ayesha exercises unlimited control through regulations that aim for an empire of unmistakable unity. Holly’s is a choice between two possible futures based upon readings of prior governments. In First Men, after a chapter titled “The Natural History of the Selenites”, Cavor’s lunar messages tell of a very similar conversation with the Grand Lunar of the Selenites. In an attempt to explain the governance of a world that “cannot even unite to overcome the beasts that prey upon his kind” but “dares to invade another planet”, Cavor must confess that they have “no Grand Earthly” (Wells 196–97) to rule them and that the belief in a totalizing autocrat had been shunned on Earth. Rather, he explains, “all rule” (197; emphasis in original). Cavor is left, in what comes across as a difficult case to make, to justify the existence of “many different forms of government” and the “inconvenience of diverse tongues” (Wells 199),

Histories Yet to Come 93 which are accepted as beneficial on Earth. The Grand Lunar is “greatly impressed” by the “folly of men in clinging” (Wells 1999) to such a project. As with Holly, Cavor walks a line between a practical acceptance of democratic rule and a tentative desire to regain some type of homogenous belief in a definitive ruler who could finally make the inhabitants of the Earth “united in one brotherhood” (Wells 198). Free trade ideology essentially promised the reconciliation of this dilemma—a joining of disparities through a single cause: mutual gain. The two exchanges with absolute rulers also illustrate the challenge of merging two conceptions of time. While a true monarchy is an anachronism by the turn of the century, Cavor nevertheless imagines “what order will some day be” (Wells 198; emphasis added) once humans can join their civilizations. Holly and Cavor’s troubles coincide with the temporal dilemma that British citizens confronted in free trade debates. Within the midst of an explicit move into the contingencies of an expanding imperial future, a memory of the past intervenes to structure a cyclical frame. Imperial trading, while promoting expansion, progress, and future-oriented goals, asks subjects to imagine the capitalist network as the reclamation of bygone, Victorian understandings of history and government. This paradox is enhanced through First Men’s formal structure. The multiple frames and various reports merge into the actual narrative. Bedford presumes Cavor is dead, but this cannot be verified. Moreover, the Selenites continue to live and operate on the moon under an unspoken assumption that they have been waiting for the day they will encounter the inhabitants of Earth. Stephen D. Arata presents the “narrative of reverse colonization” (623) as the fundamental anxiety in Dracula, and Wells also implies this potential in First Men while accentuating that potential more explicitly in several earlier works including The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898). The novel becomes a type of anti-narrative, with neither literal conclusion nor narrative closure. The frame and the plot within the frame structure merge and readers are left with a sense of displacement between two formerly segregated conceptions of narrative (and ideological) time. Like the borders between nations become trade allies, prior boundaries dissolve and the supplemental structuring mechanism becomes the substantive figure. In a similar, if more muted fashion, the characters in She enact a textual uncertainty that parallels free trade and fair trade ideologies as well. In response, they turn to written texts and bygone customs in order to (mis)read the lost, time-out-of-joint worlds around them. The process is part of a larger cultural impulse to make sense of the complex economics of empire, but it is fraught with potential misunderstanding. Like the map in King Solomon’s Mines, She uses the textual value of the sherd to assert “the power of the past to remain true in the present for both the character and the reader” (Bushell 623), which endorses a knowledge system founded upon a particular history and its continued application

94  Keith Clavin moving into the next century. As Holly notes to himself, I was “a rational man, not unacquainted with the leading scientific facts of our history, and hitherto an absolute and utter disbeliever in all the hocus-pocus that . . . goes by the name of the supernatural” (Haggard, She 146). His reaction to “hocus-pocus” illustrates a common trouble in these stories wherein reading the narrative’s signs contradicts with the subject’s orthodoxly British thinking, although he does ultimately believe in Ayesha’s powers by the novel’s end. Despite attempts at scientific rationalization and historical verification, the supernatural proves valid. The point exposes a contradiction in Haggard’s narrative logic. Notwithstanding the many textual gestures toward a literal timeline, Holly must accept the wonders of an ancient (unwritten) history as transcendent of those linguistic boundaries. The desire for a stabilizing past not only symbolizes the impulse for control within the shifting dynamics of international relations but also reveals the difficulties of building a conception of the future through interpretations of earlier epochs. Our conceptions of the past are as fluid and changing as the next anthropological discovery or trading expedition. Chronicling the past is as much of a challenge as envisioning the future, and Holly’s failure reminds us of the trouble that omniscience and realism present to literature at a century’s end.

Conclusion To claim Haggard as an avant-garde writer would be a difficult claim to support. His personal politics and literary appropriations were solidly conservative. But, in some ways, this fact makes his contrast with Wells more telling. Despite a personal conviction to English historical supremacy and overt attempts to discredit or drown a genuine othered voice, the esthetic unconscious of She betrays the unavoidability of breaks in singularity within trading and literary cultures. As Randall Stevenson puts it, fictional innovation “rarely abandons the story altogether, or smashes up the clock entirely” (87) but does often rearrange narrative events to disrupt a standard chronology. Under these terms, Haggard’s She can be situated in dialogue with the more sophisticated linear disruptions of writers like Wells and Conrad. Haggard positions his traders as a culturally advanced group that must journey into jungles wherein populations less technically advanced and dependent on magic and superstition remain. But Wells’s characters confront the raw potential of technological supremacy, one which pushes them into a clash with a world (and time) yet to come. Haggard and his traders attempt to understand their present circumstances through a return to known, established conventions of interpretation, but Wells indulges in the flexibility and inherently de-centered structure found in the production of written language, which permits many possible rewrites of any given narrative. This distinction between Haggard and

Histories Yet to Come 95 Wells is located at the intersection of empire and technology, which helps to explain an essential transition between the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury uses of narrative for conceptualizing imperial trade relations. First Men foregrounds writing as a transitional tool that helps the involved parties to organize their understanding about the yet unconquered colony. While Bedford does not begin as a trader in as formal a sense as Quatermain, he quickly seizes upon the potential for mining the ubiquitous gold of the moon and a desire to imitate earlier colonial projects that established mining and trade operations. King Solomon’s Mines resolves uncertainty in a manner that allows Haggard to impart an artificial certitude onto the colonial surroundings, but She and First Men exploit the inherent doubts of speculation as a tool to obligate readers to stumble through the processes of writerly invention, along with the protagonists and authors themselves. These latter novels draw attention to the always already present aspects of intertextuality and metafiction, features which had appeared throughout the free trade debates and would soon pose a central challenge for modernist literary purposes. Although we refer to them as “Lost World” narratives, “Lost Time” may be a better label. In adventure fiction, the rhetorical functions of trade parallel those found within disputes involving British free- and fair-trade disagreements as well as an anxiety about the potential social attributes of future colonies. Literal and figurative incarnations of trading relationships display the ideological ambiguity inherent to a changing cultural phase. Haggard and Wells take mirrored approaches to unraveling the knots of the imperial system. Haggard employs an interpretive model that privileges bygone customs in order to establish a sense of singular stability during a period of colonial uncertainty. Wells, on the other hand, envisions economies that extend the bounds of known technology. Taken together, both methods dramatize cultural debates regarding trade and the associative textual stakes of the British Empire as one historical era closed, and another began.

Notes 1 See Wegner 59–61 for a thorough discussion of utopian writing and its construction of British conceptualizations regarding the interaction between present and possible future national identities. 2 In a literal illustration of the close ties between these writers, Conrad dedicates his 1907 The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale “to H.G. Wells.” Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau also employs the framed narrative and found documents techniques. 3 The third edition of this text was retitled Poverty, Taxation, and the Remedy: Free Land, Free Trade, Free Men, in 1890. 4 The first edition was published in 1881. 5 The editorial endnotes define “ugly cropper” as a term for someone fallen on “sudden misfortune” (Wells 5).

96  Keith Clavin

Works Cited Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1990, pp. 621–45. Briggs, Thomas. The Peacemaker: Free Trade, Free Labour, Free Thought. E. W. Allen, 1877. Bushell, Sally. “Mapping Victorian Adventure Fiction: Silences, Doublings, and the Ur-Map in Treasure Island and King Solomon's Mines.” Victorian Studies, vol. 57, no. 4, 2015, pp. 611–37. Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914. Longman Publishing, 1993. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. “Science Fiction and Empire.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2003, pp. 231–45. Cunningham, William. The Rise and Decline of the Free Trade Movement. Cambridge UP, 1904. Farrer, Thomas Henry. Free Trade vs. Fair Trade. 4th ed. The Free Trade Union, 1904. Green, Martin Burgess. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. Marboro Books, 1979. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. Edited by Dennis Butts, Oxford UP, 2008. ———. She: A History of Adventure. Edited by Daniel Karlin, Oxford UP, 2008. Haggard, Robert F. The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1870–1900. Greenwood Press, 2001. McKechnie, Claire Charlotte. “Spiders, Horror, and Animal Others in Late Victorian Empire Fiction.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 17, no. 4, 2012, pp. 505–16. Miller, John. Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction. Anthem, 2012. Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2008. Steer, Phillip. “National Pasts and Imperial Futures: Temporality, Economics, and Empire in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Julius Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 (1889).” Utopian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49–72. Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. U of Kentucky P, 1992. The Merchandise Marks Act 1887: With Special Reference to the Importation Sections. 50 & 51 Vict., c. 28. Wegner, Phillip E. Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity. U of California P, 2002. Wells, H. G. The First Men in the Moon. Edited by Steve McLean, Penguin Classics, 2005. Worth, Aaron. “Imperial Transmissions: H. G. Wells, 1897–1901.” Victorian Studies, vol. 53, no. 1, 2010, pp. 65–89.

6 Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire Camelia Raghinaru

Introduction In A Singular Modernity, Frederic Jameson argues that modernism originates in a distaste of the conventional and the outmoded rather than an exploration of the undiscovered (35–36). As in the Hegelian Aufhebung, content subsists in a work as that which is canceled, modified, inverted, or negated, in order for us to feel the force in the present of what was once called innovation. Modernism is a negative process, a fuite en avant, like Walter Benjamin’s angel blown backward by the storm wind of history, or capitalism. In reaction to Victorianism’s positive categories of progress and strict codes of social order and morality, modernism is defined by negative categories such as disorientation, disintegration of the familiar, fragmentation, annihilation, dislocation, and alienation. The radical transformation of the world itself spreads through the end of the nineteenth century, in utopian and prophetic impulses. This is why the older ideologies of the modern have been misleading in their insistence on the inward turn of the modern or its subjectivization of reality. In fact, modernist evocations of subjectivity can be read as longings for depersonalization or any form of existence outside the self in a world radically transformed. The call to subjectivity is rather a call to change, to transfiguration. Modernist subjectivity encrypts the allegory of the transformation of the world through revolution. This momentum is to be completed by a utopian and revolutionary transmutation of the world. The revolutionary change stirs in the present impulses that demand new kinds of human beings to populate a world undergoing metamorphosis, in view of the fact that all great philosophies of modernism project methods of radical depersonalization. The taboo on reified forms of subjectivity becomes suspect due to the content of universality they carry in the weight of outworn emotions and passions. In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson affirms that Conrad’s modernism in Lord Jim is announced by his ability to capture the increased fragmentation of the rationalized world and of the colonized psyche. He views modernism as a late stage in the bourgeois cultural DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-9

98  Camelia Raghinaru revolution, in which the “inhabitants of older social formations are culturally and psychologically retrained for life in the market system” (225). The fragmented economy of capitalism opens the discussion into the new system in which the hired object of labor is no longer the pseudofeudal/romantic hero of the ruling class but the specialized, routinized, systematized Weberian proletariat laborer who undergirds the weight of the metropolis. Lord Jim’s modernity is not as simple as a chronological break with Victorianism, but rather a new shift in sensibility that gained momentum across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jim finds himself at the point of collision between contradictory and divergent internal and external realities that the new modern self seeks to encompass. This is a new world of innovation; one of rapid technologization, urbanization, and secularization, from which certainty and confidence in progress have been removed. As a subject interpellated by both emerging post-imperial conditions and the former pull of his Romantic/imperial self, a self determined by duty, Jim undergoes a process of disintegration, fragmentation, and alienation which fascinates him as much as a leap into the abyss, but which he tries to resist in the name of duty. The crux of his inner struggle is always between preserving his former condition of order as a dutiful, honorable, white English subject and the counter impulse to leap into the abyss of depersonalization and give in to a type of utopian impulse that would bring about both a new type of subjectivity and a new world to inhabit. As such, Jim’s narrative is one of perpetual replication of crisis. As Stephen Ross asserts, what distinguishes Lord Jim from other Conradian narratives (such as The Nigger of “Narcissus”) is the refusal of the former to accept the “nostalgic affirmation of the ‘posthumous creation’ of an authentic community” (66). Instead, Lord Jim “concludes with a radical uncertainty about any such possibility” and rather affirms the “radical uncertainty and contingency” (Ross 66) of Jim’s world. Jim’s focus on a code, particularly the code of duty, is, according to Ross, Conrad’s way of dealing with the perplexing transition from the old ideology of values to “the emergent system of global capitalism [which] appropriates older ideologemes and social organization, retaining and exploiting the ‘value-aura’ emanated by their formal persistence even as it replaces their content with its own worldview” (67). Lord Jim holds in balance the tension between a renewed quest for objective knowledge as the best means of confronting colonial uncertainty and a lack of faith in the values of an Empire built on rationalism and science.

Nostalgia, Community, Skepticism Lord Jim deals with the nostalgia for a primitive, mythic community. Jim is part of a maritime community that functions as an imperial corporation that idealizes itself as an organic, harmonious whole. The disintegration

Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire 99 of this ideal is obvious not only in Jim’s tragic fate but also in the pains Marlow takes to convince himself of the centrality of a shared identity despite being plagued by doubt and uncertainty. The imagined community rests on the narrative Marlow creates around Jim to try to salvage his own faith in heroism and fidelity, in “us”. Solidarity, honor, and sacrifice are exactly the values Jim betrays, thus challenging the assumption that a white English gentleman is unconditionally faithful to the community to which he pledges loyalty. The ethical code of romantic chivalry meets its dissolution in the isolation, alienation, and guilt further perpetuated by the nostalgia for a primitive original truth. Both Jim and Marlow deal with their doubts by claiming British superiority, even as that fiction is challenged and delegitimized in Jim: It is the phenomenology of English imperialism in its corporate representatives that justifies the claim to superiority. [Marlow’s] need to believe in Jim—or to construct a Jim he can believe in—is far more important than what Jim actually is: clearly not someone whom one can leave in charge on any deck nor someone who, good and stupid, possesses ‘the instinct to courage’ undisturbed by either intelligence or nerves. (Rau 61) Just as pride in the maritime community is forged in adventure and travel writing, so the fiction of its superiority must be preserved by the fabrication of a collective identity of heroic and uncompromised “us”. There is a degree of nostalgia in the return to a primitive society, the leap into the forgotten, but not a leap to something that was, but rather to a potential never fulfilled—a utopian view projected in the past that would be fulfilled. Conrad’s Lord Jim is based on the supposition of nostalgia for a missed opportunity, as Jim exclaims when he realizes the chance at heroism he missed had he stayed on the Patna. The rest of the novel is a downward and backward movement of sorts, as Jim seeks to reclaim the lost moment, repeatedly and futilely. Jim’s catastrophe is to be a hero displaced from his heroic tale by the forces of uncertainty and nihilism that impede the hero’s reinstatement. As Jackson puts it, “Lord Jim, then, stages an altogether conventional story in relation to a series of different kinds of readers and thereby reveals the resistances to the revelation of the desire of the subject of the spiral-return plot form” (95). In Conrad’s novel, the most chivalric pose of the hero is also the most naïve and easily knocked down by the ensuing chain of events. But, Jackson argues, this is also Conrad’s way to stage the Romantic past in relation to the present, as a traumatic compulsion to repeat the past in order to restore an earlier state of things, but that ends in a kind of tragic suicide. Thus, anxiety both drives Jim’s journey onward and ends it in death as the only cure to his existential disease.

100  Camelia Raghinaru Critics have noted the influence of “muscular Christianity” (Dryden 25) in the formation of the ideal nineteenth-century subject, whose robust masculinity and commitment to imperial values enforces the rigidity of the ethical codes to which Jim is compelled to adhere. On the other hand, the text opposes resistance to this idea of radical correction of fallen humanity by insisting that all is illusion and there are no absolute values deriving from an objective source. Thus, there is a theological site of revolutionary approach to the idea of progress and perfectibility that harkens back to the Romantic myth of the original unity between man/ nature, male/female, man/god, and the disunity after the sin of knowledge and the fall. In this sense, Conrad’s novel is tinged not only with a nostalgia for Romanticism but also with the sense that there is no return to the Edenic unity, no way to correct the fall, and that redemption is not about bringing the past back but instead about inhabiting the site of trauma and suffering. For Conrad, there is no fantasy of paradisiacal redemption but only of secular and profane intervention. Tony Jackson discusses the temptation of some realist writers to a kind of “ameliorative return” (69). However, “a generic shift in realism occurs with the discovery that the necessary amelioration is not only untrue to the real human situation but is in fact naively sentimental” (69) and a romantic fantasy. Conrad questions the singularity of the self-defined, self-fulfilled subject and reveals the subject as an empty structure. The subject is a narrative structure, made of words, and its only authentic narrative is that of the loss of ontologic certainty. Lord Jim is an attempt to stave off the dire consequences of this realization by having recourse to community as the only means to preserve singularity through struggle, tension, and in relation to the Other. Conrad’s modern subject is defined through an endless dialectic with the community—the plural forms of human life. It also presents nation as the closest form of community but subverts it as a corrupt form of community in its obsession with power, injustice, violence, control, and manipulation. Kieran Dolin makes the same point when he notes that Marlow’s loss of faith is related to his repatriation, it is something that “occurs at home” (165). He is the one who “experiences the undermining of values that accompanies the espousal of cultural relativism.  .  .  . Home, however, becomes the locus of disenchantment for Marlow” (Dolin 165). The news of Jim’s end creates a lack of faith in imperialism for Marlow, despite his empty imperialist slogans, and leads to his nihilistic views in the end chapters. As Dolin continues to argue, by giving voice to Jewel’s fears and undermining the narrative authority through his own outrage at the fact that neither Jim, nor anyone else is “good enough” for the outside world, Marlow creates a sense of “cosmic anomie” that transforms the empire from a “citadel of law” (Dolin 166) to a place of vast wilderness. Though not a pessimist, Conrad’s emphasis on the role of the community in shaping the individual, or rather the way community fails, makes him a

Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire 101 skeptic in regard to nationhood and progress. As Petra Rau also concludes, “much of the quandary in Marlow’s response to Jim lies in his reluctance to concede the obsolescence or at least the deficiency of national character as a legitimizing fiction for Empire” (20). What complicates matters for Marlow is his conflicting approach to community as an ambiguous “us”, where Jim is and is not quite “one of us”, essentially reducing this illusive community to “so much empty rhetoric” (Rau 20). As Rau elaborates, Collective and socially constructed identity are very important in Lord Jim as hallmarks of the British Empire and its institutions, notably the Merchant Navy in which Jim serves and which is implicated in the trade that makes Empire such a lucrative venture. . . . What is at stake . . . in Jim’s public trial for dereliction of duty is not just an individual’s failure but the reputation of a corporate institution that supports the legitimacy of Empire through the superior values and skills of white men. (20) The innovation of Conrad’s approach rests in the clash between the hero’s code of Romantic loyalty to the values of his community and the changing nature of this community, to the point that fidelity itself becomes a liability. Fidelity is undermined as an impossible value at the end of the novel when Jim betrays his promise to Jewel to never leave Patusan, hinting at the fact that law and order is bound to fail when confronted with the chaos of darkness. As Dolin explains, “[u]nderlying the novel’s exposure of the limits of legal rationalism and of the horrors of normative chaos, then, is a recognition of the desire for a world of justice and the need to choose actively to build it” (168). Conrad’s works register the disenchantment of subjects of Empire who have a conflicted relationship with imperial exploitation. His works employ “tropes to challenge the conventions of the imperial romance, thereby interrogating the idea of Eurocentrism which these literary conventions served to promote for the reader back home” (Panagopoulos 56). Much has been said about Jim’s romantic guilt regarding his failure of duty, but one thing that stands out is the fact that his schizophrenic relationship with duty in the context of colonial exploitation gestures to a turning point in what Panagopoulos terms the “psychology of the colonist” (55) that is akin to a moment of suspension of colonial law that produces a space of exception in the logic of exploitation, thus opening the void of postcolonial utopianism.

The Question of Empire Cohen argues that the imperial romance collapses in on itself when confronted with the reality of imperial traffic. The character’s circulation from place to place is characterized by deferral, delays, shifts, gaps, and ambiguities in Jim’s narrative because “the viable places Jim seeks are

102  Camelia Raghinaru ultimately, and repeatedly, denied, as they are conquered by the traffic of the community of the sea, carrying with them the history of his failure” (Cohen 392). This results in a schizophrenic perception of the self—first viewed from the center of the metropolis by Jim and Marlow before and right after the Patna disaster, and then viewed from the periphery of Patusan, where the connection to the center is lost and revealed as a merely imaginary network, from the perspective of the metropolis. In fact, the mobility away from the center is really a displacement, an exile that severs Jim from his network of “one of us” to which he maintains allegiance until the very last, but to which he ceases to belong in a way that suggests the bonds of Empire to the colonies are less solid than he imagined. As Marlow himself describes it, “[f]or a moment I had a view of the world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive” (Conrad 228). The wrenching question at the heart of the novel stems from Jim’s guilt, and perhaps implicitly that of Conrad’s readers, of imagining a path of emancipation from, and against, Empire. It is also symptomatic of the retrospective glance that we might be tempted to read too much into Jim’s (and Conrad’s) post-imperial emancipation, given the ambiguities posed by Marlow’s narrative of “one of us” versus “one of them”, and whether the implication of this opposition is criticism, rather than support, of the superiority of the British Empire over its colonial subjects. It is true that, on the one hand, the narrative is anxious to confirm the superiority of Jim over his non-white counterparts in terms of heroism, moral consciousness, and refinement of self-awareness and self-reflection. This becomes clear when Conrad compares Dain Waris to Jim: That brave and intelligent youth (‘who knew how to fight in the manner of white men’) wished to settle the business off-hand, but his people were too much for him. He had not Jim’s racial prestige and the reputation of invincible, supernatural power. He was not the visible, tangible incarnation of unfailing truth and of unfailing victory. Beloved, trusted, and admired as he was, he was still one of them, while Jim was one of us. Moreover, the white man, a tower of strength in himself, was invulnerable, while Dain Waris could be killed. (Conrad 263) As Panagopoulos notes, “there is an implicit racial hierarchy operating in the text to privilege whites over Orientals” (61), the purpose of which is to associate racial hybridity with crime and immorality (both Cornelius and Brown are such hybrids) and to conflate “social class with race so that a hierarchical model emerges with the English gentleman at the top and all the other races and classes at some remove below” (62). Based on his perceived social and racial purity, Jim’s gentility comes into question when he discharges himself dishonorably of his duties on the Patna in

Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire 103 the midst of its crisis, placing his own personal interest and safety above those of the ship’s passengers. On the other hand, however, if the codes are switched, Jim’s leap could be read as something other than an unfortunate desertion of duty more proper for a “native” than for an Englishman. One argument in favor of an alternative reading is the fact that the Malays are presented as more dutiful than their European masters and continue steering throughout the emergency, not because [they] are innately more courageous and self-disciplined, but because the narrative needs to establish a cultural contrast between the two groups for dramatic as well as ideological purposes. (Panagopoulos 63) Thus, they are stuck in a narrative of exclusionary Orientalism where the dividing line between Eurocentrism and its opposite is one’s ability to think in terms of individualism, rather than “an uncomplicated communal ethos that serves to negatively define and sustain the Modernist angst of the European on board” (Panagopoulos 64). Thus, Jim’s jump frames him as a critical, skeptical, rational decisionmaker who instinctively reacts against the abjection of undifferentiation in the midst of an emergency. In the moment of decision, he creates a new moment of exception, in which the law is suspended and a new type of consciousness emerges—the modern subject wracked with guilt equally at staying or jumping, caught in the aporia of the dysfunctional law of Empire, in which the white man’s honor will indict him whether he stays and acts like a passive, dehumanized native (as the Malays are portrayed) or jumps to the peril of his honor. Marlow is caught in the same aporia of doubt as Jim when confronted with a “sovereign . . . fixed standard of conduct”: I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible—for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death—the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct. It is the hardest thing to stumble against; it is the thing that breeds yelling panics and good little quiet villainies; it’s the true shadow of calamity. (Conrad 37) Jim’s leap from the ship in the moment of danger, rather than indicting him as a failed British seaman, underscores his interiority and inner complexity as an imperial subject who, in trying to act the part and separate himself from the native, exercises his individual autonomy and suspends his white self in a move that turns upon itself, marking the moment of decision as a crisis point.

104  Camelia Raghinaru Jim’s dilemma, which involves a type of nihilism and abjection of his Romantic self, comes to symbolize a crisis in subjectivity. Jim is a colonial administrator with a barely realized intuition about the fragility and instability of colonial law, emerging as a political and moral consciousness at a time when “the British empire slowly became a victim of its own spatial success as much as its military and political failures” (Cohen 377). Emerging out of this sentiment are the “difficulties immanent in imperialism’s articulation of the global” (Cohen 378), which are also staged in the moral dilemma of Lord Jim. Jim finds himself at the intersection of colonial traffic and networks of power—“[T]he surplus geographical value . . . of labor on the sea is the traffic that it produces and perpetuates” and the “territorialization and reterritorialization of space” (Cohen 386), which has more to do with the mapping and remapping of new territory across vast oceans. It rather has to do with a “traumatic and tortured version of . . . the compression of time and space” (Cohen 388), which brings the world collapsing on top of Jim and furthers the theme of exile of the marginalized post-imperial British administrator, who reiterates the leap from darkness into deeper darkness into a repetition of his earlier movement. Exile becomes the natural condition of the colonizer who is constantly relocated beyond the boundaries of Empire, even as he continues to reassert colonial boundaries to the new geographical location he inhabits, thus perpetuating his failure. For instance, Jim’s move to Patusan is akin to “[going] out and [shutting] the door behind him”, and, as Marlow points out, shutting it behind him “with a vengeance” (Conrad 168). In “[hurling] defiance at the universe” (Conrad 171), Jim inhabits a new universe where failure and success become unrecognizably blurred: He had to give in to my arguments, because all his conquests, the trust, the fame, the friendships, the love—all these things that made him master had made him a captive too. He looked with an owner’s eye at the peace of the evening, at the river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of the forests, at the life of the old mankind, at the secrets of the land, at the pride of his own heart; but it was they that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath. (Conrad 180) That Jim is as much a master as he is a slave speaks to the double-binding conditions of imperialism. His leap from the Patna is mirrored in his leap on Patusan: “This is where I leaped over on my third day in Patusan. . . . Good leap, eh?” (Conrad 182). This daring leap makes him addicted to danger, as Jewel soon realized, when “she saw in him only a predestined victim of dangers which she understood better than himself” (Conrad 225). The present danger is linked to the past valuation of cowardice, because “[n]obody, nobody is good enough” (Conrad 232).

Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire 105 Ultimately, Jim’s running away from Empire leads him to a forgotten place on earth: It was a strange and melancholy illusion, evolved half-consciously like all our illusions, which I suspect only to be visions of remote unattainable truth, seen dimly. This was, indeed, one of the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth; I had looked under its obscure surface; and I felt that when to-morrow I had left it for ever, it would slip out of existence, to live only in my memory till I passed myself into oblivion. (Conrad 235) The novel’s response to questions of colonialism and the self manifests in Conrad’s innovations of form and narrative style. Many years before the emergence of high modernism, external, “objective” events are marginalized in the narrative, in order to make room for introspection, a criticism of Empire and racial relations, the formation of modern subjectivity, and the failure of representation. The ending is ambiguous, and the narrative is not shaped by a reliable, obtrusive, omniscient narrator. The demise of Jim as a unified subject anticipates the dictates of modernist fiction in its concern with fragmentation, uncertainty, ambiguity, and the interruption of expected continuities. The novel reflects new anxieties about the colonial self that, as the previous chapter by Keith Clavin shows, began to emerge long before the turn of the century, its narrative both revealing and obscuring the failure to represent the problem in Jim’s guilt: exactly what it is that makes it impossible for him to exist—both in the Empire and outside of it. In Minima Moralia, Adorno identified the “cult of the new, and thus the idea of modernity as a rebellion against the fact that there is no longer anything new” (235). In the spirit of Benjamin, the whole of the modern becomes “the first consciousness of the decay of experience” (Adorno 235). The novel is about romance reaching its utmost limit and impossibility, while self-conscious of its loss. Specifically, Jim’s romance ends with a recognition of the impossibility of attaining the ideal self posited by the genre. Jim’s final gesture, his willing surrender to death at the hand of Doramin, is both a radical romantic gesture and a nihilist one: Stein’s words, ‘Romantic!—Romantic!’ seem to ring over those distances that will never give him up now to a world indifferent to his failings and his virtues, and to that ardent and clinging affection that refuses him the dole of tears in the bewilderment of a great grief and eternal separation. (Conrad 287) The failure of Jim’s redemption and reintegration into the structures of the Empire, as “one of us”, is also Marlow’s failure, whose investment in Jim’s rehabilitation indicates that for him too, what is at stake, is the preservation

106  Camelia Raghinaru of the integrity of the imperial metanarrative of law, order, duty and honor— and the ability to represent and rationalize it in narrative form.

Narrative and the Modern Subject The one thing that staves off nihilism in the narrative is the belief in a type of interiority that allows for the former imperialist or colonist to morph into a modern subject. As Tracy Seeley notes, “[i]dealization and gnostic recognition together make a coherent self possible, protected from nihilism and the extinction of self-identity. . . . Jim’s ego-ideal may thus protect him from despair; but for Conrad, that ideal must be countered by admitting its illusory nature” (498–99). Jameson notes the nihilism embedded in the figure of Gentleman Brown and his “passion for nothingness” (255). Jameson also describes a “void at the heart of events and acts in this work” that appears “hollow and empty” (257), which connects Conrad’s text to a type of Sartrean existentialism and Nietzschean nihilism. This new representation of an experience that “interrogate[s] the objective conditions of possibility of [representation]” (Jameson 260) is connected to the idea that vastness of space is inversely proportional to the expansion of time and reflective also of the multifaceted impact of texts like Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889). In Lord Jim, time itself becomes empty, a “fundamental revelation of the nothingness of existence” (Jameson 261). Jameson points out that the leap from Patna makes the rest of Jim’s quest a repetition of the initial trauma, which drives the novel to focus on the individual act (rather than a meditation on history, as in Nostromo). The utopian potential of the novel resides precisely in its nihilistic component. Jim’s leap from the Patna, the crux of the novel, is pointedly “the interrogation of a hole in time. . . . There is no present tense in the act, we are forever always before and after it, in past and future tenses” (Jameson 264). It is an investigation of an individual existential act of such a nature as to end in a philosophical paradox. The anarchic element that threatens the fragile order reconstituted by Jim on Patusan is, of course, Gentleman Brown, preceded and foreshadowed as if by an early apostle of evil by the wretched Cornelius. Brown comes as a chaotic, catastrophic force that imposes a new order on Jim, subverting traditional paternalistic rule whereby the law of the father dominates Jim’s expectations of duty and self-imposed code of conduct. The way for Brown is prepared by the foreshadowing of catastrophe in Marlow’s pessimistic discourse: “[a]nd yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion?” (Conrad 154). As a “latter-day buccaneer”, Brown finally strikes terror: “[t]wo hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you” (Conrad 256, 271). Brown, as a malevolent force of disorder, emerges naturally from the adventure narrative as Jim’s dark double. In

Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire 107 the repetitive logic of the narrative, Brown also emerges as a test for Jim’s newfound security and confidence. Having failed a series of previous tests that challenged him to take control of his fate, Jim is now confronted with the ultimate surprise: the antinomianism of the law of Empire. Brown is evil because he has chosen to defy his “fathers” (nation, law, state, self) and symbolizes, therefore, the absolute force of freedom, the prohibited new—a private entrepreneur who represents his interests alone, and who constitutes a law unto himself. As Jim’s double, he poses the question of ultimate freedom: that of rejecting the paternalistic function in order to emerge as a new universality with a potential for becoming that which is not defined by the master narratives of family, tradition, state, Empire, or market—that rejects transcendent law, in other words. Brown’s role as the serpent in the Garden of Eden functions as an apocalyptic trope in the narrative: “. . . and Brown, as though he had been really great, had a satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims” (Conrad 281). There was in him an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude toward his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. (Conrad 269) To Jim’s narrative of order, duty, and courage, Brown opposes the destabilizing narrative of recklessness, vengefulness, fierce disdain, and fiendish maliciousness. To Brown’s insidious scheming, Jim opposes a spirit of fair play, in good keeping with his jovial British male identity. Cornelius assures Brown that Jim “will come straight here to talk to you. He is just like a fool . . . . He is not afraid—not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone” (Conrad 275). The two white men are poised against each other like archetypes of Good and Evil: Their antagonist must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. . . . [He] cursed in his heart the other’s youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. . . . He had all the advantages on his side—possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. (Conrad 277) Nonetheless, Brown seems to have the aid and conspiracy of the dark powers and fortuitous coincidence in the person of Cornelius, who intervenes fatefully with information about the hidden way out.

108  Camelia Raghinaru As Ross notes, Brown challenges the safety of the fantasy of security that Jim has reconstituted for himself as a reminder of the home he left behind: Gentleman Brown’s arrival in Patusan shatters this assumption, however, revealing that Jim has neither repressed nor circumvented the paternal function, but temporarily deflected it, setting it up in effigy (i.e., Tuan Jim) while he pursues gratification by actualizing his fantasy constructions. Brown’s challenge to the integrity of the order that Jim has constructed out of the raw materials of his imaginary forces Jim to confront the fact that he has been able to gratify his desire only by subjecting competing desires to strict limitations, accumulating the excess in the reservoir of his authority, the persona of Tuan Jim. (91) Tuan Jim does not challenge the law of Empire, and does not even refashion it critically. Critics have pointed out that Jim’s redemption in Patusan is a more successful version of the colonizer than before, where he can finally prove himself white and British. Tom Henthorne shows that, as a model colonist, Jim tasks himself with “civilizing” Patusan into a profitable colony, safe for the goods and lives of the Empire and where his supposed “racial prestige” (210) becomes a sublimation of the fetishes of courage and honor that he brings with him from his old world. His new security is political, military, and economic, and is dependent on his ability to master the indigenous populations with the resolve and condescension inherent in the narrative of the so-called good colonist. These traits—racial prestige and a concern for the welfare of his people—are the very things Brown’s speculative “satanic” intelligence uses to attack Jim. Not only Jim’s dark double but also the dark double of imperial paternalism, Brown confronts Jim with his previous failure in reverse. In order to protect both Dain Waris and Doramin’s people and also his imperial interests, Jim has to play a double game of fidelity to opposing parties, where he has political (duty to the mission of the Empire) and personal (loyalty to the Bugis and his love for Jewel) investments. In a traumatic repetitive move, he sacrifices the latter to the former, in a final gesture of submission to the Victorian fantasy of white duty and courage, predictably “gratifying his desire by uniting with it in the ultimate actualization of fantasy: “ ‘Very well,’ said Jim, lifting his head suddenly after a long silence. ‘You shall have a clear road or else a clear fight’ ” (Conrad 283). Jim’s compromise is reached unilaterally. Not even Tamb’ Itam, his faithful servant, can comprehend his master’s decision. However, he follows Jim with a fidelity and a belief in his lord so strong that even amazement is subdued to a sort of saddened acceptance of a mysterious failure. He

Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire 109 has eyes only for one figure, and through all the mazes of bewilderment he preserves an air of guardianship, of obedience, of care. (Conrad 284) Jim’s resolve to devote his prowess to the good of his adoptive community flounders, even as he engages in self-justification: [B]ut I spoke to you, O Doramin, before all the others, and alone; for you know my heart as well as I know yours and its greatest desire. And you know well also that I have no thought but for the people’s good. (Conrad 284) This pledge to the Bugis does not stop him from rationalizing his competing allegiance to his past, which haunts him in the person of Brown, Empire’s waste: He was ready to answer with his life for any harm that should come to them if the white men with beards were allowed to retire. They were evil-doers, but their destiny had been evil too. Had he ever advised them ill? Had his words ever brought suffering to the people? he asked. He believed that it would be best to let these whites and their followers go with their lives. It would be a small gift. (Conrad 286) Jim “does not pass through the fantasy, but identifies with it” (Ross 93). Delicately poised for a moment on the transcendental instance of decision, he reenters the continuum of history by extending the rule of imperial law on Patusan. The violence of state law has superseded the justice of the individual decision, and this brings to fulfillment Doramin’s prediction about “good” colonialism’s conflict of interest in governing a colony for the benefit of the Empire.

Conclusion J. Hillis Miller notes that Jim’s condition is that of “a man who has lost faith, conviction, his customary material surroundings” (28), and this uncertain position is reflected in the structure of the novel. The novel has no center, and in its impossibility of telling the story, it mirrors the gradual nineteenth-century movement away from narratives stabilized by the presence of an omniscient narrator with a reliable point of view. Conrad does not employ a reliable narrator for long. The novel’s omniscient narrator gives us direct access to the hero’s mind early in the story, but the bulk of the novel is made of interpretations of Jim through the lens of Marlow and his listeners, as well as other minor characters, and Jim, who attempts to interpret his own experience. As Miller notes, “The novel is

110  Camelia Raghinaru a complex design of interrelated minds, no one of which can be taken as a secure point of reference from which the others may be judged” (31). Thus, even structurally and stylistically, the novel self-consciously distances itself from omniscience and objectivity, and from any “structuring principle which will allow the reader to find out its secret, explicate it once and for all, untie all its knots and straighten all its threads” (Miller 25).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 2006. Burke, Edmund. “Mr. Burke’s Speech on American Taxation.” The Hibernian Magazine, Or, Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge, Mar. 1775, pp. 145–63. Cohen, Scott A. “ ‘Get Out!’: Empire Migration and Human Traffic in Lord Jim.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 36, no. 3, 2003, pp. 374–97. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim (1900). Oxford UP, 2008. Dolin, Kieran. Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature. Cambridge UP, 1999. Dryden, Linda. Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance. Macmillan, 2000. Henthorne, Tom. “An End to Imperialism: Lord Jim and the Postcolonial Conrad.” Conradiana, vol. 32, no. 2, 2000, pp. 203–27. Krishnan, Sanjay. “Seeing the Animal: Colonial Space and Movement in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.” NOVEL: A  Forum on Fiction, vol. 37, no. 3, 2004, pp. 326–51. Jackson, Tony. The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce. U of Michigan P, 1994. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Cornell UP, 1981. Miller, J. Hillis. “Lord Jim: Repetition as Subversion of Organic Form.” Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Harvard UP, 1982. Panagopoulos, Nic. “Orientalism in Lord Jim: The East under Western Eyes.” Conradiana, vol. 45, no. 1, 2013, pp. 55–82. Rau, Petra. English Modernism. National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950. Ashgate, 2009. Ross, Stephen. Conrad and Empire. U of Missouri P, 2004. Seeley, Tracy. “Conrad’s Modernist Romance: Lord Jim.” ELH, vol. 59, no. 2, 1992, pp. 495–511.

7 Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief in the Poetic Landscapes of Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot Anna Bedsole

Introduction Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot: at first glance, the two poets share a name, a profession, and little else. Dan Jacobson notes, “[i]t is hard to think of two other major twentieth-century English poets . . . whose lives, interests, views of the world, and poetic output appear to be so unlike one another’s” (40). Eliot and Hardy were contemporary poets from 1909, when Eliot began publishing his first poems, to 1928, when Hardy died. Eliot’s body of work, especially The Waste Land, has long been synonymous with literary modernism, his highly referential and ambiguous poetics canonically representative of the innovative aesthetics and preoccupations with modernity that epitomize modernist poetry. Hardy, meanwhile, has frequently been considered almost a leftover from the previous generation, with his insistence on traditional form and rhyme, seen in such famous examples as “The Convergence of the Twain” (1914), leading several critics to discuss Hardy’s poetry as if split into two parts: the Victorian and the Modern.1 While their poetic aesthetics are very different, the two poets share a concern with the possibility of meaning—especially religious or metaphysical meaning—in the world, and for both poets, the landscape of their poetry reflects these concerns. Francesco Marroni argues “[in ruralism] Hardy seemed to discover a gratifying link between the individual and the community” (146), and Eliot would later find a similar consolation in the English countryside. In this chapter, I examine how Hardy and Eliot’s views of uncertainty, doubt, and faith are reflected in their poetic landscapes. My argument draws on Carol Christ’s Victorian and Modern Poetics (1984) in its assertion that the shared concerns of Hardy and Eliot unite not only two poets but two seemingly different poetic styles, into a dialogue that renders obsolete (and somewhat irrelevant) the usual questions of periodization that accompany readings of such canonical figures. For Christ, “their sense of the dangers of Romantic inwardness, of arbitrary and personal meanings, of alienation from tradition, motivates each DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-10

112  Anna Bedsole of them to evolve strategies which establish a poetry of mental action in an objective context” (11–12). Christ points out that not only do the moderns share the same basic concerns as the Victorians, they arrive at a comparable solution: “In ways similar to those of Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle, or Tennyson, Yeats, Pound, and Eliot each desires a unified culture in which art, politics, and religion symbolically articulate a common system of belief” (148–49). The two poets certainly have very different aesthetics and poetic philosophies, and I will not attempt to dispute that, nor argue that Hardy was a direct influence on Eliot. Eliot and Hardy share similar concerns, however, with a lack of religious and intellectual certainty, a felt absence of or distance from God, and a sense of alienation from and disgust with contemporary society. As Jeffrey Meyers argues, “[t]hough Hardy’s work clashed with Eliot’s classicism, religious beliefs and theory of impersonality in poetry, Eliot was actually very like him both in his character and (despite his theory) in his intense expression of emotion” (10). While the poets’ shared concerns about the position of the individual in an era in which societal and religious certainties were eroding are well known, the specific ways in which they turned to nature as a means of addressing these concerns remain less discussed. This chapter argues that we might read Eliot and Hardy as poets whose depictions of landscape reflect contemporary shifts which, as the nineteenth century drew to a close and the twentieth century began, saw ecology begin to emerge as a new scientific branch of study.

Ecology and the Search for Meaning It is important that by the time Hardy was writing his earliest poems, scientists were beginning to refer to ecology—originally viewed as a subbranch of botany—as a field of study in its own right. After the first recorded usage of “oecology” in 1875, early journal articles described it as “the exploration of the endless varied phenomena of animal and plant life as they manifest themselves under natural conditions” (BurdonSanderson 613). By the time Eliot began writing, ecology had evolved in tandem with sociology sufficiently enough to allow scientists and cultural commentators to begin describing a new form of “[h]uman  ecology, a study of the geographic conditions of human culture” (Hayes 39). One concern that Eliot and Hardy share is a search for meaning in a barren world, a world in which the animal and plant life surrounding them is conveyed through images of decay and infecundity that represent the more troubling questions about human culture that ecology had started to examine. The sterility and infertility of Eliot’s The Waste Land are well documented.2 In “The Burial of the Dead”, for instance, a prophetic voice paints a picture of a dry, dead world: “What are the roots that clutch,

Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief 113 what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?” (Eliot 19–20). The image is one of desolation and desperation; roots “clutch”, holding tightly to whatever life they can find in this desolate place reduced to “stony rubbish”. In addition, the sun “beats”, burning the land and everything in it with a harsh, inescapable heat. This contrasts with Hardy’s depiction of the winter landscape in “Neutral Tones” (1898): “the sun was white, as though chidden of God,/And a few leaves lay on the starving sod; /— They had fallen from an ash, and were grey” (2–4). Hardy’s landscape, if not dead, is dying—the soil is “starving”. Eliot’s landscape, on the other hand, is stony and dry; it is already long-dead. While the desolation of Hardy’s landscape owes something to its wintry setting, Eliot’s initial “Burial of the Dead” landscape knows no seasons—it has been dead or dying for a long time now, trapped in a barren Purgatory. Also note the difference in the suns: both are ominous and contribute to the melancholy sense of the two poems but in different ways. Eliot’s sun is harsh and unrelenting—it kills through its nearness and heat. Hardy’s sun, however, is pale in the winter sky. It lacks heat, power, and warmth—everything that gives life. In addition, both times Hardy refers to the sun he uses religious diction, describing it as “chidden of God” and “God-curst” (2, 15). Hardy blames a capacious divine power for robbing the star of its light and heat. The implication is that if the sun is cursed, then the earth it shines on is also cursed and will remain in an eternal winter. The vegetation, and lack thereof, is also significant in the openings of the two poems. The only sign of plant life in Hardy’s poems is the leaves, which “had fallen from an ash, and were grey” (4). Hardy connotes death through the leaves in three ways; the leaves are fallen, which is already a sign of autumnal death. In addition, the leaves are gray; they are not even the bright dying leaves of autumn that make pools of gold and scarlet on the ground. Like the sun, they have been drained of all color and therefore of life. To cement the sense of death in the poem, the leaves come from the ash tree, whose name alone provides interesting alternate connotations. Ashes are gray and often cold, with similar characteristics to the colorless winter day which the poem depicts. Ash also recalls a phrase from “The Burial of the Dead” in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: “we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” (Book). While the prayer looks to a coming resurrection for the dead, Hardy’s poem offers no such promises. The dead ash leaves suggest the finality of physical and spiritual death, not hope for new life. Of course, “The Burial of the Dead”, the first section of The Waste Land, takes its title from this same Anglican text, and grapples with spiritual and physical death; the speaker promises, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (30). The line, with its suggestion of the dissolution of physical bodies, echoes the bleak reality of the dissolution of love in Hardy’s “Neutral Tones”. The last stanza bemoans

114  Anna Bedsole how “love deceives”, and the poem, addressing the ex-lover, ends with the images of “Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,/And a pond edged with greyish leaves” (13, 15–16). The desolate scene offers little hope that the couple’s love will be resurrected. Central to Eliot’s and Hardy’s engagements with landscape is the use of the speaker as a bridge between society and the environment. In an era in which the place of the individual in society came under increasing scrutiny, the language of ecology—particularly in relation to the changing of the seasons—offered ways of mediating the tensions between humans and the physical worlds they inhabit. Harsh winter landscapes had already emerged in the mid-Victorian era as the scene of choice for painters like Turner, whose Snowstorm (1842) embodied a new tendency that, Ruskin argued in Modern Painters (1843–60), saw artists treat their landscape almost as “a subject of science” to be conveyed through an increasingly “faithful representation” (vol. 3 248) of light, mist, and rain. Along with “Neutral Tones”, Hardy’s bleak winter landscape also appears in “The Darkling Thrush” (1900) and “In Tenebris” (1901). In the opening lines of “Thrush”, the speaker stands outside at twilight, “when frost was spectre-grey” (2). Again, Hardy connotes winter and death through sensory words and suggestive diction. “Frost” immediately suggests cold, while the use of “spectre” to describe the gray frost evokes the idea of ghosts and, therefore, death. Not only is it winter, but it is also the “dregs” of winter; winter is already a season where everything fruitful has been consumed, so to be left with the dregs of winter is to be left with the very worst of an already barren season. In addition, the speaker stands in “the weakening eye of day” (4), which suggests the literal coming darkness of night and a sense of inner blindness. As DeSales Harrison explicates, “The final awareness in ‘Darkling Thrush’ is an unawareness, the knowledge of limit rather than a sharing of knowledge. In this inheres disconsolateness; for all the speaker’s attention to natural phenomena, he remains reluctant to read nature as a book of wisdom” (405). His reluctance to “read” (Hargrove 11) nature differs from Eliot, who repeatedly uses natural elements, including landscapes, as symbols of spiritual reality. Eliot’s landscape and vegetation are equally, though differently, bleak. If anything grows in Eliot’s landscape, it is clutching roots and branches. Moreover, “the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/And the dry stone no sound of water” (23–24). Thus, in addition to the violent heat of the sun, there is no water to sustain life. The only relief is in the shadow of a red rock. Eliot’s landscape is not the pale wintry landscape of Hardy, but the static deadness of a chronically barren land. Gordon observes “the two symbols of the city and the desert dominate the poem as they dissolve in and out of one another. They represent the inner landscape of the soul: a sordid, chaotic, barren hell” (61). In “What the Thunder Said”, Eliot depicts the desert in even more disturbing terms:

Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief 115 “Who are those hooded hordes swarming?/Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth/Ringed by the flat horizon only” (366–70). In Eliot’s vision, the desert is infinite, prey to the ominous, plague-like “hooded hordes”, and the very earth, broken and barren, has become a stumbling block. The landscapes of both poets are important, as Hardy’s bleak winter wasteland anticipates Eliot’s red desert. In “The Darkling Thrush”, Francesco Marroni suggests that “the desolation of the scene subsumes the spiritual wasteland of the dying century: Hardy conveys the sensation that he is living in a time devoid of meaning, marked by the end of culture” (145). This loss of culture and meaning is reflected in the “chaos, terror, and emptiness” (Hargrove 14) of Eliot’s desert, where there is nothing to sustain intellectual, spiritual, or cultural life. In a similar fashion to Hardy’s poems, winter also assumes an important role in The Waste Land: to demonstrate the agony of death in life. The poem opens with the transition from winter to spring, inflected by a yearning for the pain-numbing effect of winter: “winter kept us warm, covering/Earth in forgetful snow” (5–6). The trouble with Eliot’s Waste Land civilization is that it prefers the unfeeling death of winter to the painful life of spring; his characters are consumed by the pursuit of a soul-deadening comfort. Eliot’s London is set in the numbness of winter: “Unreal city,/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/I had not thought death had undone so many” (60–63). The people in Eliot’s winter urban setting are worse than dead; they are forever caught in Purgatory. Eliot’s wintry London also signifies the impossibility of human intimacy and meaningful connection. Nancy Hargrove asserts that “the dirty fog is symbolic of the drabness and dreariness of the life of a city worker, the anonymity and solitude of his existence, and the numbing spiritual miasma which deadens his soul with apathy” (66). The scene ends with the speaker attempting to establish connection with an acquaintance, desperately seeking “one I knew” and “crying out his name” (69). This lack of connection is also present earlier in the Hyacinth Girl interlude. Eliot gives us the lovely picture— all the more heartbreaking for its loveliness—of the couple coming back “late, from the Hyacinth garden,/Your arms full, and your hair wet” (37–38), yet the speaker is unable to respond to or embrace love: I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed’ und leer das Meer. (38–42) The line break between “not” and “speak” visually enacts the silence that paralyzes the speaker. The speaker is also caught in the same purgatorial

116  Anna Bedsole state as the crowd on London Bridge; like the sea from the Tristan und Isolde quotation that ends the stanza, relationships are desolate and barren. One of the most graphic examples of this sense of emotional deadness and isolation is seen in “The Fire Sermon”, in the scene between the typist and clerk. The purpose of the relationship is sex, devoid not only of love or emotion but even of passion. The typist is “bored and tired”, and accepts the clerk’s advances even though they are “undesired” (236, 238). The clerk’s lust is so great that “his vanity requires no response,/ And makes a welcome of indifference” (241–42). What Hargrove calls the “sterility of love and sex” (73) points to the unbridgeable isolation in even seemingly intimate acts.

Communication, Culture, and Landscape We see this same impossibility of communication, especially between romantic couples, in Hardy as well, particularly in the winter setting of “Neutral Tones”. In the midst of this barren landscape, the speaker of the poem makes a point to emphasize that his lover’s smile is “the deadest thing/Alive enough to have strength to die” (9–10). Worse than the natural death all around him is the death of communication and love between the couple. The speaker in the poem relates the barrenness of the relationship in the second stanza: “Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove/Over tedious riddles of years ago;/And some words played between us to and fro/On which lost the more by our love” (5–8). The beloved’s eyes “rove”, which indicates disinterest, and the complications of their relationship are “tedious riddles”. Furthermore, nothing is accomplished by their attempts to communicate, as the words only “play” between them. This stanza could easily describe Eliot’s middle-class couple in “A Game of Chess:” “Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak./What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?/I never know what you are thinking. Think” (111–14). The woman’s frantic, un-hearing words “rove” through the infinite gap in her marriage, searching for an answer from her lover. The lover’s reply is a “tedious riddle”: “I think we are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones” (115–16). Couples in the poems of both poets share a tragic inability to connect on any meaningful level or to sustain such a connection. P. E. Mitchell notes that Hardy’s poems often concern “lovers whose love is thwarted in one way or another” and present marriage as unsatisfying, sterile, and stultifying (78, 91). In Eliot’s The Waste Land, Cyrena N. Pondrom argues, “The failure of union is most prominently figured . . . by the breakdown of a wide variety of human relationships, and the breakdown of love”  and cites the Hyacinth Girl episode and the first conversation in “A Game of Chess” as examples of unrealized or broken romantic relationships (427). The sense of alienation extends to society, and both poets associate the breakdown of culture with the urban landscape. Again, the framework of

Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief 117 contemporary ecological discourse offers a means of reading this breakdown. As ecology evolved from a discipline occupied with the study of natural surroundings to “[h]uman ecology” (Hayes 39) that focused not only on rural landscapes but also on the  ecology  of the city, the issue of human relations in urban settings inevitably began to dominate this form of ecology. In an era of unprecedented urban growth which saw cities like London, driven by innovations like the expansion of the London Underground and the development of affordable council housing estates for urban workers, undergo rapid changes, the more rural parts of their landscapes forever altered by these new symbols of urbanity, it is unsurprising that social scientists began to consider the impact of this on human communication. The paradox of living more closely together but remaining isolated is one noted by the earliest scholars of ecology. As one 1926 study explains, “[h]uman ecology, as sociologists conceive it, seeks to emphasize not so much geography as space. In society we not only live together, but at the same time we live apart” (Park 2). The Waste Land’s urban scenes reflect this communication breakdown. “The Fire Sermon” opens with a scene of wintry urban abandonment, and the language of its desolation is at first beautiful: “The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf/Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind/Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed” (173– 75). However, Eliot then details the former (summer) state of the river: “The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,/Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/Or other testimony of summer nights” (177–79). As Hargrove explains, the silk handkerchiefs and cardboard boxes signify contraceptives, and therefore “[the] summer Thames thus symbolizes the general corruption of contemporary civilization” (73). The winter urban setting soon descends into scenes of darkness and death: “A rat crept softly through the vegetation/Dragging its slimy belly on the bank/. . . On a winter evening round behind the gashouse” (187–88, 190). Even the humans have become less than human: “At the violet hour, when the eyes and back/Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits/Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (214–16). In Eliot’s nightmare world, people are stripped of their humanity and reduced to machines, alienated from each other and themselves. This denouncement of “the human engine” indicates long-term anxieties about technological progress and its costs, which were put on devastating display in World War I. In addition, the city, which should be a center of cultural and spiritual guidance for a nation, reduces the individual to anonymity and precludes meaningful community. Hardy shared this sense of alienation from society. In “In Tenebris”, the speaker bemoans how his contemporaries cannot share his sense of impending doom: “Breezily go they, breezily come; their dust smokes around their career,/Till I think I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here” (7–8). Like Eliot’s speaker in The Waste Land, Hardy’s

118  Anna Bedsole speaker feels he is out of sync with the culture that surrounds him. He sees something terribly wrong with the world, but everyone else is blind to the tragedy. The speaker claims, “The blot seems straightway in me alone; one better he were not here” (4). The problem with his society, the speaker argues, is that it indulges in an unrealistic optimism. It is not that the speaker is necessarily averse to hope but insists it is necessary to face facts; he “holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst” (14). Hardy arrived at the conclusion of inherent uncertainty before his writerly counterparts such as Arnold, Mills, Ruskin, and Huxley, who still sought a satisfying and impenetrable intellectual system of thought.

Uncertainty and Belief While the age of Enlightenment placed great faith in the power of the intellect, the imagination, and the progress of science, Hardy’s poetry rejects this search for certainty in recognition of the uncertainty inherent in epistemology, an uncertainty that came to define the so-called crisis of faith and widespread development of skepticism that both reflected and contributed to the various innovations in science, technology, and philosophy that knitted together late Victorians and early moderns into a shared sense of disbelief and religious doubt. Studies like Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) asserted positivist philosophies which, coupled with the rise of interpretivism and continental philosophers like Freud, Nietzsche, and Bergson, only served to amplify this sense of uncertainty. The landscapes of both poets represent their similar search for meaning in a world devoid of surety. Harriet Davidson attests, “desire is caused by the lack of absolutes in human life . . . and causes change in its restless search for something to relieve this lack” (126). Both Hardy and Eliot are driven to find meaning in a world without certainty. Their mutual recognition of this uncertainty marks their shared investiture in it as something to be explored—rather than denied—as part of a new approach to coping with a changing society that, as we have seen, was not the property of the moderns but had developed over a longer period of time. Unlike the secular Victorians such as Arnold and Mills, who proposed to replace religion with art and literature, Hardy and Eliot emphasize the dissolution of culture.3 Eliot concluded early on that no system of belief can be conclusively proven; any system of belief must be held on “nothing but faith” (Beasley 45). Hardy also arrived at the conclusion that certainty is impossible, albeit much earlier than most of his contemporaries; as Timothy Hands suggests, “Hardy experienced no certainty at all” (211). While early attempts to tackle this problem aimed at finding solutions to this doubt, whether religious or scientific, Hardy saw no solution to

Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief 119 doubt. The speaker of “In Tenebris” states that “death will not appal/ One who, past doubtings all,/Waits in unhope” (22–24). As Hands explains, “Where there were no limits to Hardy’s possible beliefs, there were equally no limits to his doubts. Although there were few things he could not believe, there were likewise few things that he could” (211). Hardy’s views were not fixed; Pauline Fletcher recognizes that as a young man, his pessimism and “ancient, pre-Christian belief in Fate or Chance” (229) were influenced by Schopenhauer’s fatalism, but Donald Davie suggests that he ultimately adopted a more positive “scientific humanism” (10). The poets’ shared recognition of uncertainty contributed to Hardy’s deep gloom and sent Eliot on the pilgrimage that ultimately culminated in Four Quartets. It is notable that both Eliot and Hardy found a degree of refuge from their uncertainty and isolation of the city in the English countryside. For example, Marroni suggests, “[Hardy’s] terrified aloofness from the urban crowds implied a nostalgic look at rural England that, in his poetry, meant much more than a mental place to find solace and tranquility” (146). Eliot would later find a similar consolation in the countryside, as displayed in poems such as “Little Gidding”. The poetic landscapes of both poets are firmly rooted in England. Pauline Fletcher describes how Hardy, in poems such as “The Homecoming”, and along with other poets like Emily Brontë and Charles Algernon Swinburne, “exhibits a perverse love for the most barren and bleak landscapes, landscapes that in their rugged harshness may be called ‘sublime’ . . . the picturesque . . . has given way to a sense of place that is very English, and firmly rooted in personal experience” (146). Importantly, Hardy’s English countryside is not a pastoral paradise. In “The Oxen” (1915), Hardy gloomily recalls his childhood faith with sharp nostalgia. The title of the poem refers to the superstition that on Christmas Eve, barnyard animals such as cows and sheep would kneel in recognition of the birth of Christ. On the one hand, the poem associates Christian belief with safety and comfort, as he remembers sitting “by the embers in hearthside ease” on Christmas Eve and picturing the oxen kneeling in a “strawy pen” (4, 6). In addition, the children and family sit “in a flock” (3), a Biblical allusion to Jesus’ many references to his followers as sheep and himself as the shepherd. While this sheeplike trust gave the speaker comfort and security, the use of “flock” to describe himself and his fellow believers could also indicate what the speaker now indicts as a lack of individual critical thought and discernment. The speaker admits that it did not “occur to one of us there/To doubt they were kneeling then” and rather wistfully acknowledges “So fair a fancy few would weave/In these years!” (7–10). This admission reveals how the speaker views religious faith as incompatible with the intellectual mind; it is not just the speaker who has lost faith but also the majority of

120  Anna Bedsole thinking society as well. It is significant that in this poem, rural life is inextricably associated with religious faith. For Hardy, the familiar Wessex landscape provokes both longing for faith and religious doubt, as in “The Darkling Thrush”, where the bleak winter landscape embodies doubt and unbelief, and yet a part of that landscape, the thrush, prompts the longing for belief and hope. The landscape unearths Hardy’s memories of a secure faith earlier in life, while the harshness of nature speaks to the discoveries of such scientists as Darwin and Huxley, and the resulting absence of God. Rural landscapes, then, offer ways for Hardy to mediate religious uncertainty and to find some sense of belief, even if it is only fleeting. Landscapes also offer the same redemptive quality for Eliot: they may be reflections of uncertainty, but they allow for ruminations on the process, and eventual re-instigation, of belief. While Hardy’s landscapes draw concretely from the Wessex landscape, Eliot’s landscapes are largely imaginary. Lyndall Gordon suggests that in The Waste Land Eliot “creates a unique ‘phantasmal’ world of lust, cowardice, boredom, and malice on which he gazes in fascinated horror” (106). While they may not literally correspond to specific landscapes in the way Hardy’s settings do, landscape is still essential to Eliot’s poetic articulation of belief. The same landscapes—dirty urban streets, rocky deserts, riverbanks, gardens— recur throughout the body of Eliot’s work, from the anesthetized streets of “Prufrock” to the garden of “Little Gidding”. Hargrove insists that the balance shifts, however; she argues that “Baudelaire’s teeming and decadent metropolitan settings appear often in Eliot’s early poetry, while Tennyson’s English countryside dominates the middle and later works” (12). This shift is especially apparent in “Little Gidding”. The title of the poem, which refers to the site of a seventeenth-century Anglican community, serves as a framing device that establishes the poem as quintessentially English. The poem begins in “midwinter spring . . ./When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire/The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches” (1 l.4, 1 ll.4–5). As the speaker goes on to describe a journey to this place which he imbues with enlightenment, he asserts: There are other places Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws, Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city— But this is the nearest, in place and time, Now and in England. (1 ll.35–39) The speaker mentions England twice more in the poem, stating “Here, the intersection of the timeless moment/Is England and nowhere”, and that “History is now and England” (1 ll.53–54, 5 l.24). Though the speaker recognizes the sacredness of other places and does not confine

Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief 121 spiritual life to one place, his own spiritual life is grounded in a place (and indeed religion) distinctly English.

Conclusions: Loss and Renewal While both poets share to some extent the belief that poetry provides the spiritual guidance and refreshment that society has lost, one of the key differences between Hardy and Eliot is where they place the blame for this loss. Hardy’s speakers tend to have a kind of persecution complex, a sense that other people or even a malignant divine force is poised against humanity. Zietlow points out, “The speakers of Hap, A Sign-Seeker, and The Impercipient [sic] are all self-centered, a condition that is emphasized by the frequency of first-person pronouns, and they all feel a sense of persecution” (15). Both poets were concerned with the worry that belief may not triumph over spiritual deadness. In Hardy’s “Impercipient”, Zietlow notes, “the longing . . . for belief goes unfulfilled, and he laments that he must endure not only his failure to accept orthodoxy, but the accusation of wilful agnosticism. These poems dramatize the anguish resulting from the recognition of God’s absence in the world” (8). While Hardy focuses the blame on external factors, Eliot turns his accusation inward. Gordon relates, “For Eliot, there was no sudden blinding certainty, but a long period of doubt. . . . For thirteen years he was one of the ‘straw men’ poised to act but lacking, he felt, the stamina” (87). He too felt the absence of God but blamed this absence on his own failings. Hardy’s poetics enact an accusation against an unfeeling, uncaring divinity. He has a sense of something promised, perhaps even joy experienced for a short while, and then lost. He blames this disappointment on “purblind Doomsters [who] had as readily strown/Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain” (13–14). In Hardy’s poetic landscape, he (and the rest of humanity) are helpless in the face of a rigid predestination. This Immanent Will is not necessarily God, however; as Osborne notes, “[Hardy’s] poems repeatedly attempt to de-anthropomorphize and de-Christianize God” (466). It is difficult to know Hardy’s theology, as Hardy avoided “any kind of categorization” in his beliefs (Hands 210). What is clear, however, is that “at the ideological level, Hardy . . . kept faith with his lack of faith” (Osborne 462). However, he retains a nostalgia for belief and indeed is influenced by his childhood in the church. Of his poetry, Hands observes, “An overall impression is given of a regret, sometimes sentimental, sometimes wistful, for a religious belief which he found constantly considerable, yet personally elusive because intellectually unacceptable” (215). His response to the absence of God was to look to the goodness and morality of humans in order to substantiate any kind of hope for the future of mankind. Eliot is different in that he sees society as having rejected God and chosen its own destruction.

122  Anna Bedsole While landscapes and the natural world prompt Hardy’s speakers to voice intensely personal declarations of misery with which Hardy himself sympathized, self-exposure was the furthest thing from Eliot’s goals for his poetry. Yet Eliot claimed that poetry remained, in some ways, a personal confession, and Davidson points out “[the] infusion of intense yet impersonal feeling . . . gives the poem its special quality. . . . The intensity of feeling creates its own reality at the same time that it seems to mirror a known world” (103). The reason for this might be that Eliot turned his most critical eye on himself. While Hardy blamed others, society, and God, Eliot saw himself as participating in the worst of society. He believed that the worst of his society was also true of himself, that they were “duped into believing that no alternatives exist to determinism” (Timmerman 17). His poetry does not spare society, but he does not accuse it from a place of personal injustice. As Gordon further explains, “Eliot was haunted by the model lives of the chosen, Dante and Augustine, against whom he matched the prosaic, sordid, and promising facts of his own existence” (87). This spiritual longing and self-condemnation can be seen in “The Death of Saint Narcissus” (1915), in which Saint Narcissus “deliberately cuts himself off from his own kind, but to his dismay sees no divine light, but only his flaws” (Gordon 91). Like Hardy, Eliot found a way to live with the absence of certainty. Gordon says that for Eliot, “doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief” (115). Indeed, The Waste Land offers no answers. Timmerman eloquently articulates this: “In a sense, Eliot’s whole poem is a question mark. That question, in all of its fundamental simplicity, is whether we see anything beyond our immediate perception” (20). For Hardy, the answer is a wistful but definite “No”. Eliot, on the other hand, expresses the cautious hope for renewal. His repetition of “Shantih” at the end of The Waste Land is neither a plea for old certitudes nor a sign of impending Hardy-esque doom. It is a type of benediction that leaves us not with exuberant hope, but with an earthy, weary hope, reminiscent of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”. In Four Quartets, especially “Little Gidding”, we see the evolving struggle in The Waste Land developing into a system of belief. While this system is less certain and more open than that of both religious and secular Victorians, ultimately it is Eliot—not Hardy—who is the inheritor of the quintessential Victorian, Tennyson. Tennyson’s lines from the “Prologue” act as fitting commentary on “Little Gidding”: We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see; And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. (21–24) We cannot imagine Hardy ever accepting this view, or even the secular Matthew Arnold’s resolution in “Dover Beach” to “be true/to one

Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief 123 another” (29–30) as a defense against the chaotic forces of nature and war. Donald Davie labels Hardy a “scientific humanist who pins his faith . . . on ‘loving-kindness operating through scientific knowledge,’ ” and argues that because of this scientific humanist stance “the ideas of Thomas Hardy . . . are far more forces to be reckoned with than the ideas of T. S. Eliot” (7, 5). Whether we agree with this conclusion or not, it is clear that Hardy anticipates the agnosticism and scientific faith of the later twentieth century much more than Eliot, who in the face of cultural chaos ultimately chose a more traditional philosophical and religious solution.

Notes 1 See Harrison 403–404, Beasley 79. 2 See, for example, Stead 94. 3 See Matthew Arnold’s introduction to The English Poets: “most of what passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry” (xviii).

Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, edited by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, Broadview Press, 1999, pp. 722–23. ———. “Introduction.” The English Poets, edited by Thomas Humphry Ward, Macmillan and Company, 1885. Beasley, Rebecca. Theorists of Modern Poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Routledge, 2007. Burdon-Sanderson, John. “On the Origin of Biology and Its Relation to Other Branches of Natural Science.” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 1707 (1893): 613–17. Christ, Carol. Victorian and Modern Poetics. Chicago UP, 1984. Davidson, Harriet. “Improper Desire: Reading The Waste Land.” The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, edited by A. David Moody, Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 121–31. Davie, Donald. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. Oxford UP, 1972. Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.” Collected Poems 1909–1962, Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1963, pp. 200–9. ———. The Waste Land. Collected Poems 1909–1962, Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1963, pp. 51–82. Fletcher, Pauline. Gardens and Grim Ravines: The Language of Landscape in Victorian Poetry. Princeton UP, 1983. Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. Oxford UP, 1977. Hands, Timothy. “One Church, Several Faiths, No Lord: Thomas Hardy, Art, and Belief.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Rosemarie Morgan, Ashgate, 2010, pp. 199–216 Hardy, Thomas. “Hap.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert O’Clair, vol. 1, 3rd ed., W. W. Norton and Company, 2003, p. 44. ———. “In Tenebris,” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert O’Clair, vol. 1, 3rd ed., W.W. Norton and Company, 2003, pp. 45–46.

124  Anna Bedsole ———. “Neutral Tones.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, vol. 1, 3rd. ed., edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert O’Clair, W.W. Norton and Company, 2003, p. 44. ———. “The Darkling Thrush.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, vol. 1, 3rd ed., edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert O’Clair, W. W. Norton and Company, 2003, p. 48. ———. “The Oxen.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, vol. 1, 3rd ed., edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert O’Clair, W.W. Norton and Company, 2003, p. 58. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot. U of Mississippi P, 1978. Harrison, DeSales. “Reading Absences in Hardy’s Lyrics: Representation and Recognition.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Rosemarie Morgan, Ashgate, 2010, pp. 403–23. Hayes, E. C. “Sociology and Psychology; Sociology and Geography.” American Journal of Sociology vol. 14 (1908), pp. 371–407. Jacobson, Dan. “T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Quality of Time.” PN Review, vol. 17, no. 2, 1990, pp. 39–44. Marroni, Francesco. “Poet, Poetry, Poem.” Thomas Hardy in Context, edited by Phillip Mallett, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 143–52. Meyers, Jeffrey. “T.S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy.” Notes on Contemporary Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, 2012, pp. 8–10. Mitchell, P. E. “Passion and Companionship in Hardy’s Poetry.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 27, no. 1, 1989, pp. 77–93. Osborne, John. “Larkin’s Hardy.” Thomas Hardy in Context, edited by Phillip Mallett, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 459–71. Park, Robert E. “The Concept of Position in Society.” Papers and Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, Dec. 29–31, 1925, Vol. XX: The City. American Sociological Society, 1926, pp. 1–14. Pondrom, Cyrena N. “T.S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 12, no. 3, 2005, pp. 425–41. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters, 1885, 6 vols. Shaw, Marion. “Hardy and Tennyson: Poets of Memory, Loss, and Desire.” Thomas Hardy Journal, vol. 27, Autumn 2012, pp. 10–26. Stead, C. K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. Rutgers UP, 1986. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “In Memoriam A.H.H.” The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, edited by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, Broadview Press, 1999, pp. 204–53. The Book of Common Prayer. The Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, 2014. Timmerman, John. “The Aristotelian Mr. Eliot: Structure and Strategy in The Waste Land.” The Yeats Eliot Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 2007, pp. 11–23. Zietlow, Paul. Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy. Harvard UP, 1974.

Part III

Navigating Feeling The Self, Empathy, Human Character

8 F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore: The Aesthetics of Sympathy and Texts of Transition Kathryn Laing Introduction In “Personal Reminiscences of Walter Pater”, poet William Sharp muses on the flourishing salon culture of the period, in particular, “the delightfully promiscuous gatherings, where all amalgamated so well .  .  . due in great part to the brilliant young-scholar-poet, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson (Madame Darmesteter), and to her sister, the well-known novelist, Miss Mabel Robinson” (Sharp 187). His effusive endorsement of the Robinson sisters and their “delightfully promiscuous” London literary salon provides an ideal paradigm of the aesthetics of fin-de-siècle London. At once “a meeting-place for poets, novelists, dramatists, writers of all kinds, painters, sculptors, musicians, and all manner of folk, pilgrims from or to the only veritable Bohemia” (Sharp 187), their salon facilitated networking between an array of different artists, writers, and publishers. It was here that literary greats, those who already had established reputations, such as Henry James, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, rubbed shoulders with younger and less established writers and artists who needed to establish connections and to begin “making it new”. George Moore and Vernon Lee featured among this younger set whose innovative esthetic projects intersected in distinctive ways with those of the Robinson sisters. While Sharp’s identification of Mary Robinson’s brilliance has been recognized in recent fin-de-siècle criticism, her younger sister Mabel is no longer a well-known novelist. A recovery of this forgotten figure, her oeuvre, and a preoccupation with “human feeling” and the “ethical responsibilities of aesthetics” that she shared with her sister and Vernon Lee offers a unique perspective on how the Robinsons and Lee pioneered an alternative esthetic of empathy in the late nineteenth century. This esthetic reached backward into older, pre-Raphaelite traditions, and forward into newly emergent ideas and conversations about aesthetics, naturalism, and wider European thought on the self and human relations, complicating attempts to view literary innovation through rupturing frameworks. The circle of writers to which the Robinson sisters belonged DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-12

128  Kathryn Laing were at once fascinated by the new but ambivalent about jettisoning the old, “including both mid-Victorian moral culture and novelistic traditions” (Larson 3). Ambivalence was a defining feature of fin-de-siècle engagements with the concept of sympathy, the closely related but still emergent understanding of empathy, and more broadly, “fellow-feeling” (Hammond and Kim 3). Within literary contexts, critics have suggested that the shift between the terms “sympathy” (invoking pity) and “empathy” (invoking feeling with) denotes a shift from realism to modernism, while others have suggested that the terms are less easily defined in the nineteenth century (Greiner 158). Recent scholarship asserts that “literary modernism’s engagement with the problem of other minds and empathy is a continuation of an earlier, nineteenth-century tradition that has long been recognized in literary studies” (Hammond 20), and new approaches to affect have formed the focus of a proliferating field of scholarship in the disciplines of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and literature. This chapter argues that Mabel Robinson’s preoccupation with sympathy and aesthetic function draws further attention to the innovative negotiation of these terms among her circle. Vernon Lee’s position as Burdett outlines it, is indicative: For the avant-garde of the 1880s and 90s neither Dickensian sentiment nor Eliotean sympathy seemed to have worked. Realist fictions and narrative paintings either could not evoke the right kind of feeling, or else such feeling could not and did not translate into social reform. But by the end of the century, the choices seemed little better. Endorsing a hedonistic, self-pleasuring individualism or else a creed of self-denying altruism was equally repugnant to Lee. (5) Situated in dialogue with selected writings by Vernon Lee and George Moore specifically, Mabel Robinson’s work exposes further the hybrid and transitional nature of these fin-de-siècle texts. Therefore, it is essential to explore Mabel Robinson’s life and work in the context of the brilliant London coterie over which she and her sister presided. Lee and Moore benefitted from the Robinsons’ salon networks, just as they were influenced by the sisters’ esthetic practice. This was not a tight-knit inner circle, however. Mabel Robinson felt marginalized by the intense relationship between Lee and her sister, and Moore and Lee despised each other.1 But Mabel was arguably a lynchpin between these triangular friendships and the filter for theories about sympathy and the possibility of ethical aesthetics. Emily Harrington has anatomized Mary Robinson’s “lasting influence on Vernon Lee’s investment in both theories of sympathy and practice of aesthetic philanthropy” (76). Together, during the early 1880s, they considered how art could

F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore 129 promote sympathetic understanding in the reader, envisioning “aesthetic experience as responsive or interactive rather than solitary or solipsistic” (Harrington 68). Mabel Robinson also figures in this discourse. Teasing out features of this triangular relationship will lay the groundwork for a discussion of Mabel Robinson’s literary friendship with Moore and the ways in which it contributed to transformations in Moore’s aesthetics, particularly as Moore’s engagement with French naturalism during this period was tempered by multiple new interests and influences, resulting in a “deployment of naturalism for new ends” (Joyce 800). Dialogue or conversation, central to successful coterie culture, also became a trope around which debate about an ethical aesthetics was structured between the Robinson sisters and Lee, and between Mabel Robinson and Moore. I examine Mabel Robinson’s treatment of ideas of sympathy, arguably empathy (before the term had been adopted and developed by Vernon Lee) through dialogue in her fiction and between her own fiction and non-fiction, that of Lee and, more fully, Moore.2 Robinson’s Mr Butler’s Ward (1885) can be read in dialogue with Lee’s Miss Brown (1884) and ideas set out in “A  Dialogue on Novels” (1885). Her novels Disenchantment: an Every-Day Story (1886) and The Plan of Campaign (1888) form part of a conversation about the limits of naturalism traceable through Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1885), Confessions of a Young Man (1888), and Esther Waters (1894). These texts function as “a public dialogue among friends on issues that divided as well as united them” (Brake 41).3

The Robinson Salon and F. Mabel Robinson From 1877 until 1888, “[t]he Robinsons were ‘at home’ on Tuesday and Friday afternoons, providing an ‘almost an open house for the painters and writers of the pre-Raphaelite movement’” (Vadillo 67). Members of this intellectual and esthetic mélange, other than those listed earlier, included Oscar Wilde, Edmund Gosse, Arthur Symons, and the publishers Kegan Paul and T. Fisher Unwin. Ana Pajaro Vadillo and Laurel Brake give the fullest accounts of those who attended the salon, establishing its close affiliations with the pre-Raphaelite esthetic, the power of its connections, and Mary Robinson’s position within those networks.4 Mabel Robinson (1858–1954) is a much more shadowy figure, her considerable oeuvre as an art critic, social commentator, translator, and novelist consigned to or lost in the archives. She abandoned her art studies at the Slade Art School to become a writer, publishing several novels during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1898, she was appointed secretary to Bedford College, University of London, a higher education college for women founded in 1849. After moving to Paris where Mary had settled following her marriage to James Darmesteter and, after his death, to Émile Duclaux, traces of Mabel’s literary activities after the 1890s become scarcer. But in fin-de-siècle London, she was involved in women’s suffrage and women workers’ rights,

130  Kathryn Laing philanthropic enterprises, and Irish politics, in addition to co-hosting a salon where the doctrine of art for art’s sake was both embraced and questioned.5 She contributed to a range of periodicals including the Athenaeum, The Academy, and the Fortnightly Review on various subjects including working conditions for women, a topic she also covered for Oscar Wilde’s Woman’s World. Her numerous essays on the art world appeared in The Magazine of Art and Art Journal and deliberations on fiction in the girls’ magazine Atalanta. She also published six works of fiction and the Irish History for English Readers under the pseudonym, William Stephenson Gregg. The Robinson sisters’ concern with an ethical aesthetics may well have been born out of their philanthropic leanings. As Diana Maltz has outlined, “female aesthetes writing as social workers and reformers composing innovative prose” (205) were not uncommon during this period, and she includes Mary and Mabel Robinson among these. Mary Robinson’s engagement in specifically woman-centered social reform further promoted her esthetic networks. She had worked with Clara Pater in the 1870s on the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women at a time when Clara’s brother, Walter, was a fellow at Oxford. The association continued when the Paters moved to London, settling close to the Robinsons (Brake 43). Vernon Lee formed part of this Robinson/Pater circle in both Oxford and then London during the early 1880s. The question of sympathy for the suffering of the less fortunate partially informed the narrative of Lee’s first novel Miss  Brown, published in 1884, and several essays published during the same period. In her fictionalized portraits of the Robinson sisters as Mary and Margery Leigh, Lee demonstrates that Mabel was part of the conversation. The portraits also offer insight into the sisters’ preoccupations that impacted their own esthetic practice and formed part of a conversation with Lee too. In Miss  Brown, the Leigh sisters are described as existing “on the borderland—Mary Leigh being a sort of amateur painter with strong literary proclivities” (Lee, Miss  Brown 28). While Mary is a “demi, semi aesthete”, Marjorie is described as a “somewhat pigheaded and conceited young philanthropist” who has a “blind impulse to harass an aesthete” and is “only interested in school boards and depauperisation and (it must be admitted), a mild amount of flirtation with young men of scientific and humanitarian tendencies” (Lee, Miss Brown 31, 137, 38, 31). The philanthropically minded Leighs are involved in educating impoverished women at “Marjorie’s college” and have a profound influence on Anne Brown’s education, which has hitherto been shaped by the decadent aesthetics of her guardian, Walter Hamlin, who declares that “Everything is legitimate for the sake of aesthetic effect” (Lee, Miss  Brown 34, 94). Anne’s support for Hamlin’s short-lived embrace of a realist esthetic as a poet, her attempts to awaken him to the squalid conditions of his tenants, and her own desire to “break with the school of aesthetic

F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore 131 indifference”, and embrace the “Freedom to sympathise and to aspire”, articulate broader esthetic debates of the period (Lee, Miss Brown 225, 52). Through Anne’s various awakenings, Lee critiques estheticism, questions the efficacy of “missionary aestheticism”, and even tests out the limited possibilities of naturalism in her quest to articulate a necessary new understanding of the “moral function of the novel” (Towheed 222), without repeating the moralizing tendencies of Victorian realism. Mabel Robinson’s first novel, Mr Butler’s Ward, was published a year after Lee’s controversial Miss Brown. It reads in many ways as a direct riposte to the earlier publication and as an engagement with the tensions Lee outlines between ethics, aesthetics, and what might constitute (to borrow Virginia Woolf’s phrase), the “proper stuff of fiction” (Woolf 161). The parallels between the two novels are numerous—a Pygmalioninspired plotline, representations of esthetic London society, and naturalistic depictions of deprivations caused by neglectful landlords. This was politicized further in Robinson’s novel as the early and final sections are set among the impoverishment and suffering of mid-century Ireland. Unlike the bucolic Italian setting in which aesthete Walter Hamlin meets the strikingly beautiful servant Anne Brown, Deirdre Dineen’s situation is more desperate. Daughter of a bailiff in Ireland, murdered for his evictions of starving tenants, she is sent to a French convent before becoming the ward and governess for the children of an absentee landlord, Mr Butler. The esthete and popular artist Arthur Bellingham falls in love with the innocent Deirdre and persuades her to become his muse, model, and wife. Like Anne’s growing awareness in Miss Brown of the esthetic, psychological, and moral distance between herself and her guardian, Deirdre comes to recognize a “fundamental want of sympathy between herself and her husband” (Mabel Robinson, Mr Butler’s Ward 123). Failed human relations—that is the failure of the artist to treat his model as anything other than object—and failed esthetic achievement are connected in both novels. Hamlin is “indifferent to the hidden reality of this girl” and finds “that you are far more difficult to draw than I expected” when Anne first models for him (Lee, Miss Brown 64, 63). Likewise, in Robinson’s version, the failure of sympathetic connection between husband and wife is registered as an artistic failure: “Bellingham had absolutely no knowledge of his wife’s nature. He set to work too quickly, and found the material was unyielding to his touch” (Mabel Robinson, Mr Butler’s Ward 313). While these novels end in and to some extent embody an esthetic impasse, both writers continued to articulate new possibilities for the art of fiction. Lee continued this conversation from a different angle in her essays published during the same period, in particular, “A  Dialogue on Novels” (1885). In this essay, Dorothy Orme, a participant in a conversation about the nature of fiction and the moral function of the novel, seems yet another composite Mary and Mabel Robinson figure: “painter, sculptor,

132  Kathryn Laing philanthropist and mystic” (Lee, “A Dialogue on Novels” 382). Dorothy, in conversation with Lee’s avatar, Baldwin, Mrs Blake, an eminent English novelist, and Andre Marcel, a French novelist, debate from different standpoints “what the novel should aim at” (Lee, “A  Dialogue on Novels” 381). French naturalism is defended, opinions about English realism and its limitations voiced, and ideas about the “substitution of psychological sympathetic interest” in fiction are circulated (Lee, “A Dialogue on Novels” 382). Baldwin argues “that although the novel, for instance, is not as artistically capable as painting, or sculpture, or music it is practically more important and more noble” (Lee, “A Dialogue on Novels” 388). The significance of the novel and the novelist is to do with feeling and, by implication, the sympathetic imagination, he continues, and thus the position of the novelist is a powerful one: “the modern human being has been largely fashioned, in all his more delicate peculiarities, by those who have written about him; and most of all, therefore, by the novelist” (Lee, “A Dialogue on Novels” 390). Mabel Robinson touches on this ethical function of the novel and novelist in a later essay aimed at the young aspiring novelists and readers of Atalanta. In “The Novel with a Purpose”, Robinson outlines in more simplified terms aspects of the debate between Lee’s Baldwin and his walking companions. Asserting that the novel with a purpose is ultimately a false form of art, she claims, nonetheless, that there is a close and necessary connection between morality and fiction: Artists attempt to paint life and human nature, and maintain that fiction must be true to these, or it becomes a falsehood; and it is often said by them that art is un-moral: neither moral nor immoral, but that, like dressmaking, its connection with right and wrong is obscure. An indecent dress is immoral, and one which is badly made is contemptible. This is true also of books: but I myself hold that the connection of the novel with morality is closer, and am convinced that the tendency of the novel with a purpose is as false as its art, for the novel is not merely an amusement, it is an interpreter, and every novel-writer who respects her art, her public, and herself, selects stories and characters and situations which are new as well as true, or which are made novel through being regarded from a new standpoint. (Mabel Robinson, “The Novel with a Purpose” 779–80) Robinson’s distinction between art and style is somewhat blurred here, but her assertion of difference between moral purpose—the novel as a form of propaganda or as mere entertainment—and ethical responsibility is not: “Novelists have an ethical as well as an artistic responsibility, for a widely read novel is, to some extent, a power for good or evil” (“The Novel with a Purpose” 781).

F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore 133 The power of the novel, she goes on to argue, rests in its capacity to create a sympathetic space in which other lives can be glimpsed: Here is the real moral power and mission of the novelist: she is the interpreter of life, the historian of manners, and the medium through which we learn something of those sorts and conditions of men from whom we are separated by class, race, character, and sex. It is true we can see only through the glass and dimly, but the novel may give the outline which we must all fill in for ourselves. Life, reflection, experience, and our own heart confirms or obliterates the impression, and its value depends on truth more than on any other quality, indeed so soon as the novelist departs from fidelity to life, her usefulness is gone. (Mabel Robinson, “The Novel with a Purpose” 782) Touching on the vexed question of other lives and how “truth” and “fidelity to life” in art might be achieved, Robinson anticipates Virginia Woolf’s more famous and developed mapping of esthetic transitions at the turn of the century: “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide” (Woolf 160). Traces of these transitions and indications of new directions are already embedded in a debate between Mabel Robinson and George Moore, both exercised by these questions, illustrating continuity and connection rather than simple rupture between tradition and necessary reinventions.

F. Mabel Robinson, George Moore, and Naturalism6 While conversations over ethics and aesthetics between the Robinson sisters and Vernon Lee can be traced through their publications and correspondence, Mabel Robinson was engaged in a similar dialogue with George Moore. Moore was introduced to the Robinson salon in 1877, at the height of its embrace of fin-de-siècle estheticism, and was quick to integrate himself into its literary and publishing networks. Mary Robinson records the quirkiness of his first appearance there—“Il avait l’air d’un peintre avec sa barbe, sa ‘lavalliere’, sa jaquette de velours noir”, but in the same memoir, she acknowledges that she and Mabel made an equally strange impression, dressed in the aesthetic attire of flowing white muslin gowns and resembling the “statues de la façade de Chartres” (116). Their friendship was lifelong, although the relationship with Mabel was a more fractious one, perhaps due to his close involvement in her budding literary career. A letter Moore wrote to Mary Robinson in 1919 illustrates not only its depth but also its tensions: “It was a pleasure to get your letter for you and Mabel are so closely woven into my life that I doubt if a week ever passes without my thinking of you. Mabel is

134  Kathryn Laing inexplicable. . .. You are mysterious but not inexplicable” (Unpublished letter, George Moore to Mary Robinson 121ff). Not only esthetic connections but also differences were certainly an aspect of the earlier relationship between Mabel Robinson and George Moore, differences that proved to be creative for both writers. Moore, fully fledged and self-proclaimed disciple of Emile Zola before shifting allegiances in the 1880s, admired Mabel Robinson’s first novels and vocalized any reservations in literary reviews and letters to her. Having published his controversial naturalist novel, The Mummer’s Wife (1885) with Vizetelly (Zola’s English publisher) and been appointed a literary adviser for the publishing house, Moore was eager to recruit Robinson into his naturalist school. Facilitating the publication of her first novel, Mr Butler’s Ward, in the newly established line of one-volume novels in the same year A Mummer’s Wife was published, Moore’s letters to Robinson reveal his relish in the role of literary mentor and advisor.7 There are close connections, noted by reviewers, between Mabel Robinson’s Disenchantment and Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife, published a year before, in their attention to the alcoholism and disintegration of central characters. Robinson was less convinced about being labeled a naturalist however, admitting to Moore that she “had never read a naturalistic novel” (Mabel Robinson to George Moore, qtd. in Frazier 499, note 24). It is more likely that Robinson’s training came not through reading but through her encounters with the realities of poverty. In Lee’s Miss  Brown, for instance, Anne learns about the squalid living conditions of the inhabitants of a nearby “foul little fen village”, “cynically huddled together in cabins no better than sties” (160). In addition, Robinson’s engagement with Land League issues in Ireland and her resulting tour of Ireland, witnessing desperate conditions there, informed the opening passages of Mr  Butler’s Ward and her later Irish-set fiction.8 Her reluctant affiliation with naturalism was also due to her reservations about the naturalist methods embraced by Moore at this juncture, reservations she made most explicit in a later novel, The Plan of Campaign, whose detached, observer novelist is clearly modeled on him. Robert Gough is described as a “fair faultlessly got up young man with a cold blank face, quietly observant eyes and the air of a person who is present at a spectacle” (Mabel Robinson, The Plan of Campaign 10). That she was taking aim at Moore’s esthetic practice is made evident in her reiteration of Gough’s cold detachment and tendency to see things around him only as material for his fiction: “When, late in the afternoon, Gough returned to Miss Considine’s he found himself in a domestic interior of the utmost value to him as a novelist” (The Plan of Campaign 216). Robinson’s sharp depiction of Gough’s lack of sympathetic engagement and thus, it is implied, flawed esthetic treatment of his fictional subjects belongs to that conversation begun in 1885 over affinities with the naturalist school, issues of style, and the aesthetics of sympathy. Robinson not

F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore 135 only critiqued Moore’s detached observer esthetic practiced in his naturalist fiction in her Plan of Campaign, but she also voiced reservations about his enthusiastic embrace of Paterian aesthetics—the target of Lee’s Miss Brown too. Moore gives a glimpse of their ongoing conversation and of their divergences in Avowals: “Mabel, on whose judgment I reposed much trust, distressed me with remarks regarding what she termed Pater’s mannerisms, saying they were too marked for a great work of art, and you’re putting it forward as one of the greatest ever written” (Avowals 183). Robinson’s critique of Pater’s mannerisms may well have been imparted to Moore in conversation. However, she had also observed in a short commentary published in 1890 that “leading writers of our time are disposed to certain affectations and graces”, and argued that “human feeling” is “forever interesting”, while “Style is to a very great extent a thing of fashion” (Mabel Robinson, “Truthfulness to the Self” 326). This was possibly a direct retort to Moore’s Confessions published in 1888 which voiced unstinting praise for Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, described as “the first in English prose I had come across that procured for me any genuine pleasure in the language itself” (Moore, Confessions 239). In contrast to his enthusiasm for Pater in Confessions, Moore had expressed ambivalence about Robinson’s 1886 novel Disenchantment, critiquing its loose plot structure but also acknowledging the power of its sympathetic portraiture of the alcoholic and despairing Philip Preston: “[b]ut the figure of the Irish politician I accept without reserve. It seems to me grand and mighty in its sorrowfulness” (Moore, Confessions 234). In this novel, Robinson’s focus is not only on the disintegrating body but also on pity, or more appropriately here, sympathy and the nature of sympathy itself. Augusta, Philip Preston’s wife both pities and abhors her husband for his failings. Delia, her friend and erstwhile rival for Philip’s affections, urges something more than pity in response to Augusta’s agonized cry: “Oh, it’s a horror!” to which Delia responds: “Feel what he feels! Know what he knows! Carry that knowledge alone! Go about your work! Do as he has done. Fight as he is fighting” (Mabel Robinson, Disenchantment 396–97). Robinson’s emphasis on the necessity of feeling not just pity but an embodied sympathy with, or empathy, is staged through dramatic and impassioned conversation between the two women. Such a narrative practice suggests again intersections between Robinson’s fiction and Lee’s Miss Brown, a novel “urging that sympathy is crucial because it is integral to what a human being is—it is a vital response of the body to the life infused in the body of another” (Martin 38). Moore’s indebtedness, I  argue, to Robinson’s experimental “ethical aesthetics” in this novel and others that she, with her sister, and Lee had tried to formulate, as well as to her criticisms, is evident in the transitional nature of his fiction of the 1890s. For some of his short stories written during the 1890s already suggest an inward turn, an attempt at registering sympathy, that is the possibility, or impossibility, of inhabiting

136  Kathryn Laing the suffering of another through narrative (Frazier 204). Esther Waters (1894) is “traditionally considered to be one of the rare examples of English naturalism” (Baguley 119). It also offers another example of Moore’s shifting esthetic allegiances during this period and a further illustration of the imbrications of old and new. Esther Waters simultaneously throws off the shackles of morality-bound realism by giving a redemptive and so controversial account of an unmarried mother (it was among several of Moore’s works that faced censorship) and gestures beyond the conventions of its naturalist ethos. Although Moore’s study of the English servant Esther Waters is partially guided by the credos of French naturalism, detached scientific study of character shaped by attention to heredity and environment, for example, it also explores the possibilities of Esther’s overcoming these strictures and achieving some kind of autonomy and agency. This autonomy is realized in part through a shift in Moore’s technique, “allowing Esther to create herself” and he does this by choosing “conversation rather than dissection” (Saudo-Welby 223–24). As SaudoWelby goes on to argue, “it is the dramatizing of Esther’s life in dialogues that succeeds in substituting sympathy and compassion for the distant amusement engendered in his readers by Flaubert” (224).

Conclusions I wish to conclude then with a consideration of this substitution of sympathy and compassion in the contexts of the debates with Mabel Robinson over sympathy and style, aesthetics, and ethics already outlined. This is particularly relevant to an understanding of the narrative shifts in Moore’s writing, in which the detached observer occupies the same space as an emergent new kind of writer whose quest is to create a narrative that inhabits Esther’s experiences. His methods for achieving these aims are articulated most succinctly in a declaration of admiration for the Dutch landscape painter Ruysdael: “because I desire above all things to tell the story of life in grave simple phrases, so grave and simple that the method, the execution, would disappear, and the reader, with bating breath, would remain a prey to an absorbing emotion” (Moore, “The Louvre Revisited—II” 700–1).9 This aspiration to create a narrative effect where only feeling is visible and stylistic effect is minimized also chimes with Robinson’s critical assertions voiced in her 1890s essay: “What you say is of more importance than the grace with which you say it . . . It is better to hunt the right word half a morning than to rest satisfied with a word à plié-près” (Mabel Robinson, “Truthfulness to the Self” 326). The allusion to the Flaubertian “le mot juste” is accompanied, however, in Robinson’s writing with the sense that language itself is limited. “Poor words!” says Delia in conversation with Augusta as they sketch in Disenchantment, “they’re like women—undervalued; and yet they make quite as much difference to our

F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore 137 happiness as deeds”. . . . “But sympathy! Oh, well, that shows itself by instinct; words make no difference one way or the other” (Mabel Robinson, Disenchantment 79–80).10 Robinson’s pronouncements are again blurred and undeveloped. This brief exchange hints, however, at the idea that the evocation of feeling, and therefore sympathy between characters and between the narrative and the reader must overcome the limitations of language and, by extension, existing esthetic practices. There is a striking parallel with Robinson’s text in Moore’s moving portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship in Esther Waters. United in their precarious conditions, the pregnant Esther abandoned by the father of her child and her browbeaten mother pregnant yet again, Moore offers a glimpse of the profound sympathetic connection between the two women in his description of their walks through London: “And in those walks very little was said. The two walked in silence, slipping now and then into occasional speech, and here and there a casual allusion or a broken sentence would indicate what was passing in their minds” (Moore, Esther Waters 104). The “absorbing emotion” Moore aimed for, engaging the reader’s sympathy, even empathy, in his portrayal of the plight of mother and daughter and the bond between them, is achieved through broken conversation between the two women and narrative silences. Trying to explain her position to her mother, Esther is silenced into understanding: “I was telling you, mother____” “But I don’t want no telling that my Esther ain’t a bad girl.” Mrs Sanders sat nodding her head, a sweet uncritical mother; and Esther understood how unselfishly her mother loved her, and how simply she thought she might help her in her trouble. Neither spoke, and Esther continued dressing. (Moore, Esther Waters 103) This experiment in constrained and restrained narrative, with empathic connections between mother and daughter and characters and readers happening between the lines, gains further resonance in the unfolding scenes that follow. Here Moore’s detailed and naturalistic attention to the process of Esther’s lonely confinement in a hospital for unmarried mothers is shot through with pathos when, at the end of it all, Esther discovers her mother has died in childbirth. But the narrative of Esther’s stranded condition, economically, socially, and emotionally, is not simply the result of Moore “taking observations” or urging the need for social reform through the presentation of unmarried motherhood. It is instead a condition the reader is forced to inhabit through the understated portrait of the mother–daughter relationship prior to this chapter and through its loss. Moore achieves here the narrative effect of something “grand and mighty in its sorrowfulness” that he admired in Robinson’s earlier fiction.

138  Kathryn Laing As Meghan Hammond has observed, realism, naturalism, and modernism can all be classed as literature of fellow feeling, “that is, as literatures deeply concerned with overcoming the conceptual problem of other minds and establishing points of connections between separate subjective entities” (Empathy 177). Ways in which connections can be established are threads that can be traced through the literary conversations between Mabel Robinson’s forgotten publications and Lee’s writing of the 1880s, and between Robinson and Moore up to the mid-1890s. Mabel Robinson’s insistence that “human feeling is forever interesting” shaped her own ambivalences not only toward inherited narrative traditions, the “novel with a purpose”, but toward some of the esthetic affiliations of her own circle. Recovering her shared quest for an alternative kind of ethical aesthetics alongside her sister and Vernon Lee, and the ways in which this informed the textual conversations between herself and George Moore, offers a new understanding of the hybridity of these particular fin-de-siècle texts.

Notes 1 The salon members often featured in each other’s fiction. Mary and Mabel appeared as the Leigh sisters in Miss  Brown, Moore caricatures Lee in his portrait of Cecilia Cullen in A Drama in Muslin where Alice, who she loves, is arguably partially modeled on Mabel Robinson. Moore makes a thinly disguised appearance in Robinson’s The Plan of Campaign. 2 Empathy “was a means of restoring a modern, scientifically validated moral role for art which had nothing to do with Victorian puritanism” (Burdett 3). 3 Brake argues that Lee’s Miss Brown, Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Miss Bretherton, and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean can be read in this way. See Brake 41. 4 See also on London literary networks and network theory, Ní Bheachaín and Mitchell (77–94). 5 F. Mabel Robinson is listed as a committee member of “The Women’s Trade Union League”, Hearth and Home (4 August, 1898), and is also included among a striking list of signatories including Olive Schreiner, Emily Crawford, M. Blind, Jex-Blake appended to the publication of “Women’s Suffrage. A Reply”, Fortnightly Review (1889). 6 This section of the chapter draws on my argument about the Moore/Robinson relationship in “George Moore and F. Mabel Robinson: Paris and the Woman Artist” (Laing 133–52). 7 This correspondence is held in the National Library, Ireland. See also Frazier, George Moore 499. 8 Robinson toured Ireland with her friend Charlotte McCarthy and father, the writer, journalist, and Irish MP, Justin McCarthy. For further discussion of Robinson’s biography, her interest in Irish politics and involvement with Ladies’ Land League, see Binckes and Laing, 2019. 9 According to Adrian Frazier, Moore offers in this article the most accurate description of “the stylistic virtues of Esther Waters” (209). 10 Mary Robinson, although working in a different medium and writing about poverty, shows a similar suspicion of language. “Robinson disavows the power of the figure of the poet, claiming that words are ‘weak as water’, in order to bring the polarities of poetry and poverty closer together” (Harrington 85).

F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore 139

Works Cited Binckes, Faith, and Kathryn Laing. Hannah Lynch 1859–1904: Irish Writer, Cosmopolitan, New Woman. Cork UP, 2019. Brake, Laurel. “Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle.” Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, edited by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 40–57. Burdett, Carolyn. “ ‘The Subjective Inside Us Can Turn into the Objective Outside’: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics.” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 12, 2011, pp. 1–31. Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. U of Virginia P, 2003. Frazier, Adrian. George Moore 1852–1933. Yale UP, 2000. Greiner, Rae. Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Hammond, Meghan Marie. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Hammond, Meghan Marie, and Sue J. Kim, editors. Rethinking Empathy through Literature. Routledge, 2014. Harrington, Emily. “The Strain of Sympathy: A. Mary F. Robinson, ‘The New Arcadia’ and Vernon Lee.” Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. 61, no. 1, 2006, pp. 66–98. Joyce, Simon. “Impressionism, Naturalism, Symbolism: Trajectories of AngloIrish Fiction at the Fin de Siècle.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 21, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 787–803. Laing, Kathryn. “George Moore and F. Mabel Robinson: Paris and the Woman Artist.” George Moore’s Paris and His French Ongoing Connections, edited by Michel Brunet, Fabienne Gaspari, and Mary Pierse, Peter Lang, 2015, pp. 133–52. Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget). “A Dialogue on Novels.” The Contemporary Review 48, Sept. 1885, pp. 378–401. ———. Miss Brown. William Blackwood & Sons, 1884. Maltz, Diana. “Wilde’s The Woman’s World and the Culture of Aesthetic Philanthropy.” Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, edited by Joseph Bristow, U of Toronto P, 2003, pp. 85–211. Martin, Kirsty. Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence. Oxford UP, 2013. Moore, George. Avowals. Boni and Liveright, 1919. ———. Esther Waters (1894). J. M. Dent & Sons, 1936. ———. “The Louvre Revisited—II.” Speaker, vol. 3, no. 76, 13 June  1891, pp. 700–1. ———. Unpublished Letters: George Moore to Mary Robinson, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds Anglaises 121ff. Ní Bheachaín, Caoilfhionn, and Angus Mitchell. “Alice Stopford Green and Vernon Lee: Salon Culture and Intellectual Exchange.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 25, no. 1, 2020, pp. 77–94. Robinson, F. Mabel. Disenchantment (1886). J.B. Lippincott, 1890. ———. Mr Butler’s Ward. Vizetelly & Co., 1885. ———. The Novel with a Purpose.” Atalanta, vol. 71, Aug. 1893, pp. 779–82. ———. The Plan of Campaign: A Story of the Fortune of War. Vizetelly & Co., 1888.

140  Kathryn Laing ———. “Truthfulness to the Self.” The Art of Authorship: Literary Reminiscences, Methods of Work, and Advice to Young Beginners, edited by George Bainton, D. Appleton and Company, 1890, pp. 326–28. Saudo-Welby, Natalie. “ ‘The Soul with the False Bottom’ and ‘The Deceitful Character’: Analysing the Servant in the Goncourts’ Germinie Lacerteux and George Moore’s Esther Waters.” George Moore Across Borders, edited by Christine Huguet and Fabienne Dabrigeon-Garcier, Rodopi, 2013, pp. 209–26. Sharp, William. “Personal Reminiscences of Walter Pater.” Papers Critical and Reminiscent by William Sharp, selected and arranged by Mrs William Sharp, Heinemann, 1912, pp. 187–228. Towheed, Shafquat. “Determining ‘Fluctuating Opinions’: Vernon Lee, Popular Fiction, and Theories of Reading.” Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. 60, no. 2, 2005, pp. 199–236. Vadillo, Ana Parejo. “Aestheticism ‘At Home’ in London: A. Mary F. Robinson and the Aesthetic Sect.” London Eyes: Reflections of London in Text and Images, edited by Stephen Barber and Gail Cunningham, Berghahn, 2007, pp. 59–78. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4 1925– 1928, edited by Andrew McNeillie, The Hogarth Press, 1984, pp. 157–65.

9 Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind in Walter Francis White’s The Fire in the Flint Masami Sugimori Introduction In 1922, upon H. L. Mencken’s proposition, Walter Francis White decided to write his first novel The Fire in the Flint (1924) to rectify T. S. Stribling’s uninformed portrayal of educated blacks in Birthright (1921). At the time of writing the novel, White was serving as the assistant to James Weldon Johnson, the executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). White recalls in his autobiography that both Mencken and Johnson thought White—a lightskinned, blue-eyed, blond-haired African American—would be able to utilize “the variety of experiences which my appearance made possible by permitting me to talk with white people as a white man and with my own people as a Negro [which] gave me a unique vantage point” (A Man Called White 65). Curiously, however, the book turned out a bluntly partisan novel featuring a “dark brown”-skinned (Fire 13) protagonist Kenneth B. Harper and demonized, or sympathetic but gravely flawed, white characters. Indeed, The Fire in the Flint translates White’s “variety of experiences” into a deeply divided world, particularly since most of those experiences came from the lynching investigations he conducted. As the novel begins, Kenneth opens a doctor’s office, having just returned to his hometown Central City in southern Georgia. He received medical education in the North, followed by military service in the French theater of World War I. Unlike his younger siblings Bob and Mamie, whose daily encounter with racist incidents has made them worried, repulsed, and, for rebellious Bob, confrontational, Kenneth follows the accommodationist teaching of his late father (“stay away from them [whites] and let them alone as much as possible”) and Booker T. Washington’s emphasis on economic success and respectability (17–18). However, through directly witnessing social, legal, and economic injustices to—and sexual exploitation of—blacks, Kenneth realizes that those dicta avail little and that what few sympathetic whites in the upper class of Central City are all powerless amid the town’s racist majority and its collective socio-economic influence. Upon DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-13

142  Masami Sugimori his girlfriend Jane Phillips’s encouragement, Kenneth begins to take leadership in advocating for the Black masses and cofounds “The National Negro Farmers’ Co-operative and Protective League” (NNFCPL), a Black sharecroppers’ union, against the Ku Klux Klan’s warnings (173– 75). Racial tension mounts and eventually catches the Harper family in a violent series of events, with white youth’s gang-rape of Mamie and the death of Bob, who kills two of her assailants and eventually himself and whose body gets desecrated by a lynching mob. Later, KKK members lynch Kenneth under a false accusation. The novel ends with the text of an Associated Press dispatch, which attributes the event to Kenneth’s “attempted criminal assault on a white woman” (300). Once published, as Kenneth Robert Janken summarizes in his biography of White, the novel received polarized reviews. These reviews ranged from admiration for its powerful exposé of Southern racism to condemnation of its alleged untruthfulness (Janken, White 108–12). At the same time, even favorable reviews could not help but note the work’s technical flaws. For instance, W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson both commented on “White’s lack of subtlety in character development, an opinion seconded by friendly white writers”, and Joel Spingarn assessed that the story ended up a “melodrama” because of one-dimensional characters (Janken, White 110). White himself later wrote that the “modest bestseller” status the novel enjoyed was “far beyond its literary merits” (A Man Called White 68), attributing the good sales to its “melodramatic” sensation and contrasting it with his more artistically refined but commercially unsuccessful second novel, Flight, published two years later (80). Twenty-first-century scholars also share such critique of The Fire in the Flint’s artistic shortcomings. Cheryl A. Wall, for example, suggests the difficulty of balancing the truthfulness of contents and effectiveness as a work of fiction, as “the commitment to a single verifiable truth both inspires and cripples their [White’s and Jessie Fauset’s] fiction” (82). In particular, though he successfully “drew the vivid details of the plot from his investigative reporting” of many lynching cases as well as the violent oppression of unionized Black farmers in Arkansas, “White is on shakier ground when he invents details for the novel” (91). Andrew B. Leiter cautions against dismissing The Fire in the Flint for its “literary ‘flaw’ that has hampered its appreciation over the years” (69). For him, however, the novel’s redeeming value presents itself “[w]hen read and accepted as propaganda”, where it successfully provides “the most exhaustive pointby-point rebuttal of [Thomas] Dixon’s fiction [The Clansman]” (69). Accordingly, as regards the novel’s technical artistry, Leiter virtually concurs with the past commentators. Due to its conspicuous melodrama and propaganda, the apparent lack of subtlety in its plot and character construction, and White’s own reservations about its “literary merits”, The Fire in the Flint’s nuanced technicality has not received any critical attention. I argue, however, that

Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind 143 informed by his own extensive reading, White strategically incorporates a variety of literary traditions ranging far beyond melodrama or propaganda. The novel’s pointed exploration of Black lives and race relations in the South derives not only from its visceral materials but also from its innovative presentation of those materials through integration of various sociological, scientific, and literary approaches to the study and representation of human relations. These include Victorian emotionality, regionalist and protest realism, naturalistic determinism, and modernist emphasis on inner, psychological realities. In particular, White coordinates modernist narrative strategies, such as stream of consciousness, with Victorian modes of affective discourse in order to navigate the novel’s propagandistic and melodramatic dimensions in ways that develop the audience’s knowledge of and empathy for Black people’s suffering. White borrows from nineteenth-century abolitionist literature’s activation of Victorian sentiment and promotion of white readers’ vicarious experience of Black slaves’ pain, but he further enhances the process by adopting modernist narration and challenging readers to see racial issues from blacks’ perspective.

Multi-Genre Reading and Writing White began reading literature in his childhood. As his religious father prohibited him from “any novel less than twenty-five years old”, by his early teens he read “Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and some of the Harvard Classics” (A Man Called White 18). Though this early experience did not include modern literature, his New York City life as an NAACP officer, starting when he was in his mid-20s, introduced him to contemporary literary and art scenes. White later recalled that the parties James Weldon Johnson and his wife Grace had at their apartment, which led to the development of the New Negro Renaissance, also helped him to expand his network: Heywood Broun, Claude McKay, Fania Marinoff, and Carl Van Vcchten . . . Langston Hughes, Eva and Newman Levy, Ruth Hale, Countee Cullen, Carl and Irita Van Doren, Marie Doro, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, George Gershwin, Mary Ellis, Willa Cather, Blanche and Alfred Knopf, Walter Wanger, Joan Bennett, and many others who then enjoyed fame or were destined to achieve distinction in the arts, letters, or human relations were among those I was privileged to know. (43) As this long list of fellow partygoers shows, with “[t]he color line . . . never drawn at Jim’s” (43), White’s new friends included many practitioners of contemporary literature and art from a variety of backgrounds.

144  Masami Sugimori With some of them, Sinclair Lewis in particular, White developed close professional relationships involving the exchange of feedback on each other’s works. Indeed, The Fire in the Flint demonstrates White’s familiarity with past and present literary traditions through a description of Kenneth’s reading experience and preferences (44–46). He refers to Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant to whom he refers as “French realists” (46), enjoys “romances” by Zane Grey, Jack London, and Joseph Conrad, and discusses how the “adventurous and rococo romances” of Grey and London are separate from the sublime-oriented romance of Conrad in which nature’s “relentless power and savagery” evoke “love” and “fear” at the same time (46). White also points to some defining characteristics of literary naturalism, such as pessimistic determinism based on instinct and environment, as Kenneth has reservations about “Theodore Dreiser’s gloominess and sex-obsession” as well as “his pessimism or what seemed to him a dolorous outlook on life” (45). Though White does not specifically use the term “modernism”, his familiarity with the stylistic experimentation of early-twentieth-century novels manifests in Kenneth’s mixed response to D. H. Lawrence’s and Knut Hamsun’s works. It at once frustrates and impresses Kenneth how their “[m]ystical, turgid, tortuous phrases, and meaning not always clear” help represent “the bends and backwaters and perplexing twistings of the stream of life”. For Kenneth, the “lack of plot” serves to reflect the complexity and disorderliness of human existence: “life itself is never a smoothly turned and finished work of art, its causes and effects, its tears and joys, its loves and hates neatly dovetailing one into another as writers of fiction would have it” (45). White’s understanding of these literary movements informs The Fire in the Flint. Though the French realism of Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant differs immensely from the protest realism that underlies the propagandistic aspect of White’s description of Southern racial issues,1 both branches share an intended effect on the reader, namely, learning about an unfamiliar world and realizing the inadequacy and limitation of one’s accustomed horizon. While reading French realism makes Kenneth feel that “[t]he very dissimilarities of environment and circumstance between his own acquaintances and the characters in the novels he read, seemed to emphasize the narrowness of his own life in the South” (46), White intends the realistic dimension of The Fire in the Flint to shock white readers in a similar fashion. He writes in an October 17, 1923, letter to Mencken: Colored people know everything in my book—they live and suffer the same things every day of their lives. It is not the colored reader at whom I am shooting but the white man and woman . . . who has never suspected there are men like Kenneth Harper, who believes that every lynching is for rape, who believes the ex-confederates are

Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind 145 right when they use every means, fair or foul, “to keep the nigger in his place”. (qtd. in Cooney 232)2 Shadi Neimneh notes that the novel’s depiction of “interracial violence” bears a “naturalistic dimension” that gives its readers a sense of environmental determinism: “We as readers also come to realize that this violence is determined and caused by environmental factors beyond the characters’ control” (173). This is evident when Mamie’s concern about men’s “unwelcome attentions” (30) is compared to the unpredictable but inevitable destruction by a natural disaster: “She, like Bob, felt always as though they were living on top of a volcano—and never knew when it might erupt” (31). Throughout the story, White shows the Black characters’ helplessness under the town’s white-supremacist regime in deterministic images such as “a tiny boat . . . on a limitless sea, with neither compass nor chart nor sun nor moon to guide him” (72), “a chip of wood floating on the surface of a choppy sea” (73), “the cards all stacked against me!” (119), and “the very fates themselves . . . in league against Kenneth” (260).3 The Fire in the Flint’s stylistically traditional references shaped its critical reception as a novel that was disconnected from modernist esthetics. James Weldon Johnson’s 1924 letter to Anne Spencer shows, for example, that he considered it to be “cast . . . in the old mold”, to be set apart from the emerging African American literary avant-garde (qtd. in Nowlin 514). Yet traditional literary frameworks actually inform many of the novel’s modernist aspects, such as the forms of interior monologue and free indirect narration that White uses to explore characters’ subjective, ongoing mental processes.4 In Chapter  1, for example, the pessimistic determinism of naturalism underlies Kenneth’s emotionally charged recollection of World War I: That had been some exciting ride across. And then the Meuse, the Argonne, then Metz. God, but that was a terrible nightmare! Right back of the lines had he been assigned. Men with arms and legs shot off. Some torn to pieces by shrapnel. Some burned horribly by mustard gas. The worst night had been when the Germans made that sudden attack at the Meuse. For five days they had been fighting and working. That night he had almost broken down. How he had cursed war! And those who made war. And the civilization that permitted war—even made it necessary. Never again for him! (19) Here, free indirect narration, signaled by flashbacks and colloquial ejaculations in third person, conveys Kenneth’s stream of consciousness, and his fragmented mind, once “almost broken down”, corresponds with the physically fragmented bodies witnessed in the battlefield. His

146  Masami Sugimori disillusioned, vehement condemnation in the final sentences indicates not only his helplessness to the power that “made war”, “permitted war”, and thus consumed human lives but also the failure of “the civilization” and its teleological promise.

Kenneth’s “Victorian” Turn: Empathy, Emotionality, and Abolitionist Discourse White’s own early reading experience features some major Victorian writers such as Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, but Kenneth’s list includes none of them. One may find the omission to be natural, considering the novel’s early characterization of Kenneth as a typical modern man skeptical of Victorian values—a World War I veteran with a traumatic battlefield experience (19), cynicism toward religion (72), and “philosophic” pessimism about historical progress and reluctance at social commitment (46–47). However, given the Harpers’ family values and middle-class respectability, indicated by the fact that they constitute “a happy and reasonably prosperous, intelligent family group—one that can be duplicated many, many times in the South” (31), it would have been unsurprising if Kenneth had found the premises, if not necessarily the storylines or characters, of Victorian literature highly relatable. To depict Kenneth’s growth into a race activist, White draws upon earlier literary experiments with the concept of empathy, using it as a conceptual framework to present the human behaviors and activities of his characters while also employing the empathic mode of persuasion seen in nineteenth-century abolitionist writings. In her “Concluding Remarks” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe attributes “Christian”, “humane”, “kind, compassionate and estimable people’s” surprising support of the Fugitive Slave Act (621) to their ignorance of slavery and determines to show them its lived, and thus emotionally charged, reality: “These men and Christians cannot know what slavery is; if they did, such a question could never be open for discussion. And from this arose a desire to exhibit it in a living dramatic reality” (622). In the previously quoted 1923 letter to Mencken and early in his novel, respectively, White echoes Stowe by characterizing both his white readership and Kenneth as uninformed or neglectful of the South’s rampant racial violence and the invalidity of its self-justification. White alludes to this parallel while presenting Kenneth’s changed attitudes in terms of his newfound ability to know, feel, and act, thus encouraging his own readers to follow the same process. When Kenneth gets motivated to work for the collective cause, White portrays the transformation in terms associated with Victorian emotionality. As the project of founding a Black cooperative society progresses, Kenneth took on an eagerness which was at marked variance with his former manner. His eyes shone with the desire to make their plan

Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind 147 a success. Of a tender and sympathetic nature, almost with the gentleness of a woman, he realized now that the burdens of his race had lain heavy upon him. He had suffered in their suffering, had felt almost as though he had been the victim when he read or heard of a lynching, had chafed under the bonds which bound the hands and feet and heart and soul of his people. (148–49) The preposition “Of” that opens the third sentence suggests that Kenneth’s “tender and sympathetic nature, almost with the gentleness of a woman”, is his inherent quality, not a newly acquired one—and, accordingly, that the motivation to serve the Black community has helped the character recover his wholeness from the former, deeply fragmented modern self.5 Indeed, whereas his earlier recollection of the war features the dismemberment of nameless bodies in the language of fragmentation (19), his later revisit to the battlefield memory foregrounds two specifically racialized beings bonded into therapeutic coexistence: “He remembered the night he had seen a wounded Black soldier and a wounded white Southern one, drink from the same canteen” (226). It also turns out that under Kenneth’s religious skepticism lies “some sort of a God”, though long unrecognized due to his “immers[ion] . . . in his beloved profession” (168) and compromised through “adapt[ation] to conditions” of Central City (169). Once reawakened, this moral principle, as “a deep religious or, better, an ethical sense”, opens his eyes to “the far greater problems of those so closely bound to him by race” (169). White’s novelistic design around Kenneth’s transformation also accounts for the seemingly inconsistent characterization of his girlfriend Jane Phillips, who stands in the crossroads of two of the most frequently mentioned artistic flaws of The Fire in the Flint: the unconvincingness of its romantic subplot and character development. The chapter on Kenneth and Jane’s reunion, where “love almost at first sight” (81) takes place, ends with exaggerated stereotypes of Victorian femininity, such as irrationality and submissiveness: “she longed for him to argue with her, override her objections [to having a romantic relationship], convince her against her will” (84). Then, five chapters later, she returns as a modern New Woman, who not only claims her voice (“Wait a minute until I’ve had my say”; “I’m not through yet!”) to challenge Kenneth to confront “the race problem” (138–39) but also leads their problem-solving effort with her “theory”- and “facts”-based approach (141). The rest of the novel, however, presents her according to traditional gender expectations and only shows her in various supporting roles for Kenneth. In these seemingly random transitions, one can find a similar pattern to Kenneth’s case, in that renewed appreciation of Victorian values of empathy enables Jane to serve her people better. Indeed, when she mentions her change, Jane identifies the specific aspects of emotionality—namely,

148  Masami Sugimori “whining and cringing”—that she has overcome: “Be proud of your race and quit whining and cringing! . . . There, I’ve wanted to get that out of my system for a long time—ever since we talked together last Christmas. Now it’s out and I’m through!” (139). Accordingly, to facilitate the promotion of the NNFCPL, Jane makes a highly calculated choice and execution of elements of Victorian femininity. Not only does she let Kenneth introduce the project as his own creation, to address effectively the “folks . . . in the South—[who] think all that women can do is cook and keep house and bear children” (166), but she also plays the supporting role of “loyal ally” defined explicitly in terms of middle-class womanhood: “While Kenneth talked to the men, Jane circulated among the women, who were subtly flattered that one so daintily clad and well educated should spend so much of her time and energy talking to lowly ones like themselves” (196–97). In his characterization of Kenneth, White deploys a mode of discourse based on empathy through imaginative identification, referring to the tradition of antebellum anti-slavery literature. In contrast with his former suspicion of Northern Black newspapers’ coverage of lynching (26), Kenneth’s reactivated tenderness enables him to feel for the victims “when he read or heard” about them and experience their “suffering” vicariously (149). This process models itself on slave narratives, as well as abolitionist novels. For example, in tandem with her dismay at Northern whites’ lack of sympathy for fugitive slaves, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin emphasizes both the importance and the difficulty of reaching beyond the discursive medium through imaginative reading. Chapter 9, titled “In Which It Appears That a Senator Is But a Man”, features Ohio Senator John Bird who, despite his “particularly humane and accessible nature” (144), has just voted for the Fugitive Slave Law, because his idea of a fugitive slave is limited to “the letters that spell the word,—or at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture” (155). Unlike his wife, whose “many gentle and womanly offices” (147) immediately condemn the law outright, it takes “[t]he magic of the real presence of distress” (156), cast by a direct encounter with a fugitive mother Eliza Harris and her 4-year-old son Harry, for the Senator to make a morally, if not legally, right decision for the oppressed. Indeed, multiple contemporary reviews compared The Fire in the Flint to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For most of them, similarity lay in the books’ social impact—as, for instance, “a trail blazer, an epoch marker of sociologic interest” for Charles S. Johnson in the Opportunity (345). But Edward E. Waldron’s survey of British reviews that made the same comparison—Leeds Mercury, British Weekly, and Calcutta Guardian—indicates that for them, the novels’ common attributes also included emotional appeal and informative power (69–70). Significantly, Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not limit the effect of this “magic” to characters in the story but extends it to real-life readers. In the same paragraph that depicts Senator Bird’s conversion, Stowe’s narrator

Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind 149 directly addresses the novel’s readers, even Southern ones, expressing her confidence that they would respond exactly as Senator Bird just did: “And you need not exult over him, good brother of the Southern States; for we have some inklings that many of you, under similar circumstances, would not do much better” (156).6 White adopts a similar strategy, evoking a parallel between Kenneth and the reader of The Fire in the Flint through the shared act of “read[ing] or hear[ing] of a lynching” (149) and, accordingly, encouraging the latter’s own transformation. Referring to Charles Dickens’s novels, Sally Ledger points to nineteenth-century melodrama’s potential to achieve “a realism of affect” (12), which promotes social action through portrayal of deprived people’s emotional hardships. Both The Fire in the Flint and Uncle Tom’s Cabin activate this process to encourage the reader’s real-life action for racial justice, exemplified within the story by Kenneth’s and Senator Bird’s simultaneous knowing of and feeling for lynching victims and fugitive slaves, respectively. As for white audiences within the story, however, White is much more cautious than Stowe. While visiting Atlanta, for instance, Kenneth talks to three prominent white men—Dr. Scott, John Anthony, and David Gordon—who approximate the novel’s target audience in their liberal, reasonable, and sympathetic mind, on the one hand, and their reluctance to support a radical change, on the other. During the interview, when Dr. Scott recommends a “sweet-tempered and patient” approach, Kenneth responds by enumerating racial injustices and challenging him to imagine how he would feel if they befell him: Suppose you saw your women made the breeding-ground of every white man who desires them, saw your men lynched and burned at the stake, saw your race robbed and cheated, lied to and lied about, despised, persecuted, oppressed—how would you feel, Dr. Scott, if somebody came to you and said: ‘Be patient’? (255) The chapter ends with a positive response from John Anthony (“It’s about time we woke up” [259]); however, White provides no follow-up on these Atlantans, and the final mention comes from Kenneth’s recapitulation of the interview on his way back to Central City, characterizing them as “[b]roadminded but afraid to speak out” (263).

“Theatrical” Climax The final chapters of The Fire in the Flint revolve around the expansion of the NNFCPL, the mounting and eventually actualized danger to the Harper family, and a new plotline concerning the Ewing family. Roy Ewing, the owner of a general merchandise store, represents not only Central City’s white upper class—as the president of the local Chamber of

150  Masami Sugimori Commerce—but also its hypocritical respectability and unwillingness to grapple with the town’s race problem. On the same night that the Central City Klan meets and discusses what it calls the “vile plot” of NNFCPL (205), the Ewings call and ask Kenneth to treat their nineteen-year-old daughter Mary in critical condition from “severe internal hæmorrhages” (214). The surgery is successful. Mamie’s rape and Bob’s lynching occur while Kenneth is away visiting Atlanta, and devastated Kenneth back in town gets another call from Mrs  Ewing, as Mary suffers from a grave setback. Though angry at the white race that “murdered my brother, my sister’s body, my mother’s mind, and my very soul!” (279), Kenneth overcomes his violent desire to let Mary die and take revenge on the whole white race. After another successful operation, Mrs  Ewing reveals that her husband left for Atlanta the day before in an attempt to see Kenneth (because of the increasing danger to him) and the Georgia Governor there. “[C]linging to his arm” as Kenneth leaves, she pleads for his utmost caution (296). Both Kenneth’s visit during Roy’s absence and Mrs  Ewing’s action at the doorway turn out fatal, as 15 Klan members, vigilant for Kenneth’s move on the white woman, attack him outside and, despite his “[m]adly, desperately, gloriously” carried fight (297), lynch him to death. White puts this plotline in a specific genre framework, as the narrator introduces it as a “drama that threatened to translate itself into tragedy” (207). Accordingly, theatrical diction abounds, with Mary’s bedroom called “the place” of a “scene” (207–8), those present there “the actors” (208), and Roy Ewing’s concerned look a “by-play” to Mrs Ewing’s despaired sobs (211). The narrator does not explain this sudden announcement of a literary genre, but the way White presents the plot sequence indicates several reasons. First, it counterpoints the scene with the self-important theatricality of the KKK meeting taking place on the same night. Second, the dramatic framework implies that the characters act according to a script instead of their own free will, thus foregrounding how naturalistic determinism underlies the events. Indeed, the narrator repeatedly attributes the characters’ actions to factors beyond their control, such as Roy’s “inherent, acquired, environmental prejudice” which at first makes him reluctant to seek Kenneth’s help (212) and the coincidental turn of events that leads to Kenneth’s doomed return from Atlanta to Central City and, eventually, to the Ewing house: “All these things [e.g., the failure of Jane’s warning telegram to reach Kenneth] had so happened as though the very fates themselves were in league against Kenneth” (260). Third, White’s introduction of theatrical genre signals the increased significance of audience. Kenneth’s imaginary comparison of himself to an “actor”, with the Ewings as his audience, during his second treatment of Mary (292) sheds light also on the implied theater-within-theater back in the first one. Here, Kenneth performs an emergency operation in front of the audience of whites who, while wishing for its success, are also skeptical due more to their failure to see the same humanity in the Black doctor than

Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind 151 to any question of his expertise. In this setting, too, White embeds his ongoing strategy of evoking the audience’s emotional connection and develops an actor–audience cooperation as the operation progresses. Roy learns to trust Kenneth, obeying the doctor’s request for him to wait in the hall and, more importantly, seeing Kenneth beyond the dictate of the hierarchical racial system: “The colour and race of the surgeon had been almost forgotten in the strange circumstances” (217). White Dr. Bennett, who once called Kenneth a “damned nigger telling me I don’t know medicine!” (62) when the Black doctor proved his diagnosis of a Black woman wrong, also becomes a supportive audience-on-stage who offers both technical and moral support by administering an anesthetic (214), lightening “[a] burden . . . from Kenneth’s shoulders” by means of “encouragingly”-made gestures (216) and, after the successful performance, congratulating Kenneth with “admiration in [his] voice” (217). White also captures the interracial actor-audience collaboration on the level of shared inner experience, through a sentence that registers the subjective perception of the ongoing flow of time: “Ten—fifteen—twenty— thirty—forty—fifty minutes crept by on lagging feet—to the two doctors and the nurse each minute seemed an hour” (215). Such condensed application of the major motifs and narrative modes developed in the novel suggests the possibility of yet another reason for White’s adoption of the theatrical framework. That is, to isolate a space where the novel’s audience can see how race relations would play out, with all parameters laid out and all actions, both external and internal, visible.7 Indeed, when the story revisits the Ewing house after Mamie’s rape and Bob’s lynching, White arranges this second act to revolve around a similar set of actions seen in the first. The results differ radically, however, which significantly qualifies the forms of change that the first act pictured optimistically, namely, those forms based on the goodwill and support of moderate white members of the South. For example, Roy and Dr. Bennett, two major members of the theater-in-theater audience who rectified their racist attitudes through witnessing Kenneth’s strong performance, abandon their roles this time. Both of them have left the house— Roy for Atlanta, and Dr. Bennett presumably for home after violating Kenneth’s “express orders” and allowing Mrs Ewing to give Mary solid food, thus worsening her condition (288). In his extreme anger at the racial violence to his family, Kenneth’s reaction to this new state of the audience also departs from the interracial cordiality and understanding that characterized the first act. He interprets Roy’s absence (incorrectly) as the sign of the same “cowardly”-ness that characterizes the white mob (280) and Mrs Ewing’s disregard for his professional advice as deriving from racially biased assumptions about one’s trustworthiness: “He knew that Dr. Bennett’s word counted more than his.  .  .  . Dr. Bennett knew medicine no later than that of the early eighties. But Dr. Bennett was a white man—he a Negro!” (288).

152  Masami Sugimori In tandem with thus exacerbated race relations, White substantially twists the course of the reused actions, motifs, and presentations so as to foreground the naiveté of the initial picture. As Kenneth has no motivation or even intention to succeed in the second operation, “the scene in which he’d play the leading rôle” (289–90) concerns not his medical performance but an imagined scenario where he lets Mary die and blames the Ewings for not following his instruction: “Lord, but he’d be magnificent! Booth and Tree and Barrymore and all the rest of the actors they called great, rolled into one, couldn’t equal his scorn [for the Ewings], his raising and lowering of voice, his tremendous climax!” (291). Fitting to its status as “an awful dream”, this part of the narration progresses in free indirect style or interior monologue, often fragmented or fluid: “Why does the air seem so heavy? Can’t keep eyes open. Feel like bathing in chloroform” (293). Such modernist presentation of epistemological crisis reveals Kenneth’s inner turmoil, caused by his excruciating experience as a Southern Black, to the novel’s real-life audience, and challenges it to answer the same question that Kenneth asked earlier: “how would you feel, . . . if somebody came to you and said: ‘Be patient’?” (255). In contrast, this forceful invitation to empathize does not reach the white theater-in-theater audience, as Mrs  Ewing cannot imagine the Black doctor’s feelings. Indeed, the second act’s neutralization of interracial goodwill also affects the epistemological dimension: The minutes sped by. Half past twelve! One o’clock! Half past one! Mrs. Ewing sat anxiously by the bed, not daring to speak. She had misinterpreted Kenneth’s smile. It had frightened her a little. It’s because he’d been through so much today, she thought. I’ll turn down the light so it won’t be too great a glare. She did. It never occurred to her that Kenneth’s smile could mean anything other than that he was gaining ground in his fight for her little girl’s life. Outside, the fifteen [mobsters] waited. . . . Minutes, hours passed. It grew cold. The strain was getting irksome. They watched the room where shone only a faint light now. They pictured what was going on in that room. (291–92) The passing of time, which in the first act provided the subject of Kenneth and Dr. Bennett’s shared inner experience (215), here serves as a lead-in to the in-story audience’s sinister, and eventually fatal, “misinterpret[ation]” of the Black doctor’s action. As Mrs Ewing fails to see a seething anger at whites under Kenneth’s smile, she lowers the light to facilitate his operation. In the next paragraph, again led off by a real-time report of temporal flow, another audience, comprising of white mobsters, in turn misinterprets the reduced light, thus “picture[ing]” the scene self-righteously to justify their violent agenda.

Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind 153 It is here that the Victorian empathy inherent to the novel’s address to the audience undergoes a satirical overhaul as White complicates it to show the fragility (and superficiality) of improved race relations. Indeed, the second act applies the word “vicarious” in terms not of feeling for the afflicted but of Kenneth’s vengeful consideration of helpless Mary as the candidate for “vicarious sacrifice” (289) and “vicarious victim for those [whites] who had struck him mortal blows without cause” (291). Immediately after the successful second operation, White’s narrator explains how, just as happened to Roy in the first act (217), the extreme circumstance enables Mrs Ewing to overcome racial hierarchy. He even furthers this development by evoking a protective mother–“child” relationship for her and Kenneth: “She explained [the danger to Kenneth] patiently as though talking to a child. Neither of them realized the unusualness of their situation. Both had forgotten race lines, time, circumstances, and everything else in the tenseness of the moment” (294). This “moment” of genuine interracial bond, however, ends even before the conversation does, as Mrs Ewing’s language betrays her deep-rooted prejudice which lets racial slur come out before she checks it: ‘Roy heard them talking about you and cursin’ you out about some kind of a society you’ve been formin’ among the nig—the coloured people. He told’em they oughter let coloured men like you alone ’cause you were a credit to the community. The nex’ mornin’ he foun’ a warnin’ on the front po’ch from the Kluxers, sayin’ he’d better stop defendin’ niggers or somethin’d happ’n to him!’ (294–95) In the final sentence of the passage, White introduces italicized letters to signal Mrs Ewing’s agitation which also weakens her discursive self-control. Here, she speaks with a thicker Southern accent and this time says the whole N-word in relaying the KKK’s blackmail. While somewhat tempering her usage of the epithet with incomplete utterance and (possibly) direct quoting, White still suggests that Southern racism is apparent even in the spiritually sublime moment of an exceptionally kind-hearted mother.

Conclusion The Fire in the Flint mobilizes old and new literary genres and movements innovatively to increase the effectiveness of its anti-lynching message and call for social, political, and economic fairness. White incorporates the discursive modes and literary tropes of regionalism, protest realism, and deterministic naturalism into his use of narrative techniques associated with modernist literature. White’s deployment of key Victorian parameters, which inform this process, further enhances the novel’s modernist innovations. With a white audience in mind—especially those

154  Masami Sugimori unfamiliar with racial violence and Black lives in the South—White aims for the direct portrayal of blacks’ experience, both internal and external, through the modernist device of stream of consciousness. In an effort to develop the audience’s knowledge and empathy further, White models such immediacy on nineteenth-century abolitionist literature’s emotional appeal to the readers’ Victorian sentiments. With such a strategic coordination of old and new literary styles, The Fire in the Flint may even claim a unique position in modern African American literature. Indeed, early-twentieth-century African American works with high-modernist technicality tend to posit the modern as opposed to the Victorian.8 James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), for instance, revolves around the unreliable first-person narrator’s turning “all the little tragedies of my life” into “a practical joke on society” through telling a story of his racial passing (5). This premise effectively compromises the poignancy of what the narrator claims to be “a tragedy, a real tragedy!” of running into his white father at a Paris opera house, who abandoned and now fails to recognize him (71). Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), likewise, puts the modern in the way of traditional Victorian values. Here, third-person limited narration conveys an African American housewife’s ongoing mental conflict, showing how her domestic “safety, security” gradually implodes as her un-“safe” old friend, who embodies fluid identity, consumerism, and individualism, comes into her life (47). In 1922, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which White lobbied as an NAACP officer, passed the House of Representatives but eventually failed due to a filibuster in the Senate. White did not see in his lifetime the passing of a federal anti-lynching law, which did not take place until 2018, but his continued effort to visualize to the world the reality of brutal racial violence in the South culminated in the 1929 publication of Rope and Faggot: A  Biography of Judge Lynch. Looking back on the campaign two decades later, White expresses some satisfaction— though somewhat restrained, considering the uncertainty of legislative prospects—in the fact that more informed Americans expressed their condemnation of lynching (A Man Called White 42–43) and more educational institutions stepped up to teach the history and state of this crime (98). White feels particularly pleased to find that the “Rope and Faggot Line” became “a new synonym for Mason and Dixon’s line” (98), and thus the geopolitical boundary now became a moral line across which all Americans must reach out. Written and published between the Dyer Bill and Rope and Faggot, White’s first novel The Fire in the Flint does not specify the North’s response to the dispatch on Kenneth’s lynching nor the result of Roy Ewing’s effort to talk to the Georgia Governor, in the ending. White’s arrangement of the second “theater” scene leaves little to no room for any optimistic interpretation,9 but his choice to leave it open may indicate his earnest hope that the future would defy all the odds.

Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind 155

Notes 1 Janken points to the novel’s regionalist realism as well, finding a “local color” element in the construction of Central City. He calls the fictional town “a composite picture of small-town southwest Georgia” and also conjectures that the author got inspiration from W. E. B. Du Bois’s observation of Albany, Georgia, in The Souls of Black Folk (“Civil Rights” 822). 2 As for White’s sense of potential Black audience of The Fire in the Flint, Charles Scruggs infers that he “knew but would not admit that the Black audience he had promised to white publishers was a myth” (“All Dressed Up” 557). Indeed, as Scruggs documents, his mobilization of NAACP branches to sell the book to blacks did not work, which motivated White to cultivate, through his columns in the Pittsburg Courier, a wide range of interests in his Black readership (557–58). 3 For Russ Castronovo, in the violently racist, culturally impoverished Central City, Kenneth’s esthetic interest and literary reading, which serve his escapism from the harsh environment, themselves become a liability to Black masculinity and activism: “In a world where Black masculinity is under attack, beauty is hardly the weapon of choice, for it represents a debilitating detour from hands-on politics” (1455). 4 David Lodge considers interior monologue and free indirect style the two main subcategories of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Though free indirect style itself dates back at least to Jane Austen, Lodge finds in it the modernist attention to one’s ongoing mental process, as the method combines the inner working of “a character’s mind” with third-person “authorial participation” (43). 5 On the socio-historical level, this recovered wholeness corresponds with Kenneth’s self-identification with the lived collective experience of Black people. Karsten H. Piep finds in Kenneth’s activist rhetoric “a historical-materialist point of view” predicated upon “not abstract notions of liberty and freedom, but the shared experience of physical suffering [which] compels blacks to unite and to embrace strategies of communal action” (273). 6 Such a call for the reader’s simultaneous knowing and empathizing also characterizes the rhetorical strategy of slave narratives. Harriet Jacobs, for example, challenges her white readership not to judge slave women for failing the “principles of morality” (85) but to know that the very system of slavery makes observance impossible: “O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another” (86). Likewise, William Wells Brown emphasizes the impossibility for the white reader to know and feel the slaves’ pain enough: “Reader, did ever a fair sister of thine go down to the grave prematurely, if so, perchance, thou hast drank deeply from the cup of sorrow? But how infinitely better is it for a sister to “go into the silent land” with her honor untarnished, but with bright hopes, than for her to be sold to sensual slave-holders” (56). 7 This interpretation coheres with White’s technical design for The Fire in the Flint expressed in his April 14, 1925, letter to Edgar H. Webster: “I tried, with the same scientific objectivity of the chemist in the laboratory, to place Kenneth Harper with certain ideas and ideals in the midst of a definite environment and then to present as fairly as I could his reactions to the environment and the environment’s reaction towards him, letting the story work itself out along those lines” (qtd. in Suggs 172–73). Also, as Charles Scruggs points out, this statement reflects Mencken’s earlier comment on George Bernard Shaw’s naturalistic plays (Sage in Harlem 151), which further indicates the likelihood that White intended the novel’s theatrically configured final scenes to function as his experimental “laboratory”.

156  Masami Sugimori 8 From both big data and small data analyses of late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century literature, Melba Cuddy-Keane finds that “the radical break theory of modernism” (28), which assumes distinct binary differences between Victorianism and modernism, does not fully represent the actual corpus of literary discourses. She proposes “the palimpsestic model of history” (28) instead, whose flexibility allows for “numerous patterns—oppositions between and within generational eras, but synchronies and continuities as well” (35). Applied locally to a specific sample, this model also helps to capture the literary composition of works like The Fire in the Flint, in which the Victorian and the modern operate in a variety of relationships—including opposition, transformation, coexistence, coordination, and reciprocation—and on a variety of levels such as narration, characterization, and in-text reference. 9 Most likely, White himself did not have any optimism about the possibility of gubernatorial intervention in the imminent racial violence, given the Georgia Governor at the time of the story’s ending. In his autobiography, White mentions the controversial 1913 murder trial and conviction of Leo Frank, a Jewish Northerner. White calls Frank “one more racial victim of Southern political ambition,” noting how the case helped Hugh M. Dorsey, the prosecutor, to run successfully for governor of Georgia three years later (A Man Called White 26). The trial proceeded in a mob-filled courtroom and, though Frank’s death sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment, abduction and lynching soon followed.

Works Cited Brown, William Wells. “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown.” Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. 1853. Edited by Robert S. Levine, 2nd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 49–80. Castronovo, Russ. “Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis.” PMLA, vol. 121, no. 5, 2006, pp. 1443–59. Cooney, Charles F. “Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance.” Journal of Negro History, vol. 57, no. 3, 1972, pp. 231–40. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Crossing the Victorian/Modernist Divide: From Multiple Histories to Flexible Futures.” Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts, edited by Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada and Anne Besnault-Levita, Routledge, 2018, pp. 21–39. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Edited by Lydia Maria Child, published for the author, 1861. Janken, Kenneth Robert. “Civil Rights and Socializing in the Harlem Renaissance: Walter White and the Fictionalization of the ‘New Negro’ in Georgia.” Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 4, 1996, pp. 817–34. ———. White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP. New Press, 2003. Johnson, Charles S. “Review of The Fire in the Flint, by Walter Francis White.” Opportunity, vol. 2, no. 23, Nov. 1924, pp. 344–45. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. Edited by Jacqueline Goldsby, W. W. Norton, 2015. Larsen, Nella. Passing. 1929. Edited by Carla Kaplan, W. W. Norton, 2007. Ledger, Sally. “ ‘Don’t Be So Melodramatic!’ Dickens and the Affective Mode.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 4, 2007, pp. 1–14.

Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind 157 Leiter, Andrew B. In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances. Louisiana State UP, 2010. Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. Penguin, 1992. Neimneh, Shadi. “Thematics of Interracial Violence in Selected Harlem Renaissance Novels.” Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 50, no. 2, 2014, pp. 152–81. Nowlin, Michael. “Race Literature, Modernism, and Normal Literature: James Weldon Johnson’s Groundwork for an African American Literary Renaissance, 1912–20.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 20, no. 3, 2013, pp. 503–18. Piep, Karsten H. Embattled Home Fronts: Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I. Rodopi, 2009. Scruggs, Charles. “ ‘All Dressed Up But No Place to Go’: The Black Writer and His Audience During the Harlem Renaissance.” American Literature, vol. 48, no. 4, 1977, pp. 543–63. ———. The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s. Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. 1852. Penguin, 1981. Suggs, Jon-Christian. Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life. U of Michigan P, 2000. Waldron, Edward E. Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance. Kennikat Press, 1978. Wall, Cheryl A. “ ‘To Tell the Truth about Us’: The Fictions and Non-Fictions of Jessie Fauset and Walter White.” The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by George Hutchinson, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 82–95. White, Walter Francis. A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White. 1948. U of Georgia P, 1995. ———. The Fire in the Flint. 1924. U of Georgia P, 1996.

10 A Writerly Communion: Browning, Balzac, and Catholicism in Edith Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer” (1900) Nancy Von Rosk Introduction In her biography of Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee observes that Wharton’s Italian stories show her “fascination with the dark, violent side of Italian drama and color” (107). She includes among these stories, “The Duchess at Prayer”, an early and under-examined story, published in 1900 and inspired by both Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842) and Honoré de Balzac’s “Le Grande Bretêche” (1831).1 Like Browning’s poem and Balzac’s tale, Wharton’s gothic story of an oppressive marriage and sinister murder is revealed through a male character. Wharton’s story, however, also interrogates and fills in the gaps of these nineteenth-century male texts, drawing on the innovations of her predecessors to frame her own equally novel presentations of female characters living unorthodox lives in foreign settings. Using gothic conventions, in particular Catholic elements, Wharton creates a more feminist work where the Duchess is no longer hidden behind a curtain nor behind the duke’s flamboyant language, and unlike Balzac’s “lonely and silent” (Orlando 51) Josephine de Merret, Wharton’s Duchess ultimately finds a more powerful means of expression.2 Moreover, Wharton’s story dramatizes the alliance between her faith and her feminism as the nineteenth century moves into the twentieth. Catholicism, vilified throughout much of the nineteenth century in Anglo-American culture, becomes not only less troubling but also a kind of spiritual refuge as older traditions give way to modernity. When Browning published “My Last Duchess” in 1842, England had been convulsed by the Oxford movement as clergy turned to Catholic ritual to reinvigorate the Anglican churches. Many saw the movement as “Papal aggression”, and when leader John Henry Newman “converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845 . . . the movement came to an end”, leaving those who had “suspected Newman of smuggling the pope’s legions within the walls of Anglicanism” feeling “vindicated” (Schlossberg). Distrust of Catholics in English society remained throughout much of the nineteenth century, but by the time Wharton published “The Duchess at Prayer” in 1900, the crisis DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-14

A writerly communion 159 of the Oxford Movement was past and attitudes toward Catholicism were shifting from fear and anxiety to desire and longing. Indeed, Catholicism held an enormous sway over the cultural imagination on both sides of the Atlantic as the nineteenth century became the t­wentieth century; Catholic art and rituals became intertwined with fin-de-siècle aestheticism and what Jackson Lears describes as the “impulse of antimodernism” (xv). Lears points out that within an “atmosphere of upper-class anxiety”, there were “longings for a regeneration at once physical, moral and spiritual” (xii). We see this longing in Wharton as well as in many other early-twentiethcentury intellectuals and writers such as T. S. Eliot, Henry Adams, and Willa Cather who were also drawn to what Carol Singley has termed Catholicism’s “history, mysteries, and stability” (36). Indeed, Catholicism and its aesthetic splendor—its art, ritual, and sublime cathedrals—seemed to speak to Wharton’s deepest longings. As Singley observes, “like art, the church offered spiritual reassurance, a sense of being grounded in history and an opportunity to transcend the mundane”, and in her later years, Wharton would be “deeply involved with the Catholic church” (185, 186). While Singley speculates that it may have been Wharton’s divorce that prevented her conversion, it is clear that Catholicism always held an allure for her, and that allure grew stronger over the years. Although “The Duchess at Prayer” was written well before Wharton was a participant in Catholic life, the story nevertheless highlights the importance Catholicism had for Wharton’s imagination even in her earlier years. Especially telling is how Wharton uses the trope of Catholicism in an innovative way, for it is aligned with patriarchal rule and brutal power as well as feminist resistance and rebellion, suggesting then not only a persistent tension in Wharton’s life and work but also a convergence of the Victorian and the modern.

Italy and Robert Browning’s Duchess In his preface to The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne considers the challenges facing an American writer: No author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight as is happily the case with my dear native land. (854) In his notebook, he also reveals an attraction to the Catholic art and ritual he found in Europe: “Oh, that we had cathedrals in America”, he declares, “were it only for the sensuous luxury” (Lears 186). Wharton would share

160  Nancy Von Rosk Hawthorne’s fascination for both Catholic ritual and Europe’s seemingly darker and stormier past, but Wharton’s relationship with the Old World would be a more intimate one; for her, Europe would always be a home as well as a source of inspiration. Wharton spent most of her childhood in Europe. Her family’s return to New York when she was 10 was, as Lee puts it, “a life-changing trauma” (16). In her autobiography, Wharton writes: “It was indeed an unsavory experience, and the shameless squalor of the purlieus of the New York docks . . . dismayed my childish eyes stored with the glories of Rome and the architectural majesty of Paris” (A Backward Glance 44). She found refuge in her father’s library because “[w]hat could New York offer to a child whose eyes had been filled with shapes of immortal beauty and immemorial significance?” (A Backward Glance 54). Indeed, Wharton would repeatedly turn to Europe and European writers for inspiration, and though she would eventually make her home in France, it was Italy that first propelled her writing and captured her imagination. Between 1885 and 1905, she “immersed herself in Italian history, art, architecture and literature” (Lee 90). These were the years she produced Italian Backgrounds, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, her first novel set in Italy, The Valley of Decision, as well as many poems and stories with Italian themes. After her Italian travels in 1895, she wrote to a friend, “The older I grow the more I feel that I would rather live in Italy than anywhere . . . it breaks my heart every time I have to leave it” (Lee 88). Robert Browning would probably have shared Wharton’s sentiments, for he too had fallen under the spell of Italy—perhaps as no other Victorian writer had—deeply immersing himself in Italian history and culture. After Browning made his first trip to Italy in 1838, he returned with his wife Elizabeth, settling in Florence, where their only child was born and they lived happily for 15  years. While Browning returned to England after Elizabeth’s death in 1861, he traveled to Italy several times and eventually died in Venice at his son’s home in 1889. As it would be for Wharton, Italy, for Browning, was a home as well as a source of inspiration. Indeed, in addition to “My Last Duchess”, so much of Browning’s work is set in Italy and inspired by Italian history. Poems such as “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “Andrea Del Sarto”, and Wharton’s favorite, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” are all inspired by Italian historical figures, and his masterpiece, The Ring and The Book, is based on a true Italian crime from the seventeenth century. One could argue that Wharton’s ambitions between 1885 and 1905 were similar to Browning’s in that she too had a desire to bring Italy’s history alive in her writing.

Browning and Wharton: New Experiments With their unreliable speakers and often jarring language, Browning’s dramatic monologues stand apart from much of the flowery, formulaic

A writerly communion 161 Victorian poetry of his day. Like the modernists of the early twentieth century, Browning was innovating and “making it new”. As Matthew Bolton has pointed out, Browning’s work was seen by the English reading public as “baffling and obscure” (60). In “My Last Duchess”, for example, the “reader must work to complete the poem’s meaning”, since there is a “tremendous gap in the duke’s story” (60). “The melding of challenging forms with disturbing themes”, Bolton notes, “helps explain why Browning was so unappealing to his contemporaries for so many decades” (61). The transition from Victorian to modernist poetics was not unidirectional, but conflicting and contradictory, characterized by “preservation” and “continuity”, as well as “rupture” and “destruction” (Feldman 435). This is especially evident in the way Eliot both emulates and transforms Browning by “turning the dramatic monologue inward” (Bolton 66). As Bolton explains, “Eliot takes Browning’s essentially dramatic, spoken form and sinks it into the depths of the psyche, where conscious reflection, selfconscious reflex and subconscious impulse mingle” (66). Wharton too was indebted to her writerly predecessors, but unlike Eliot, she readily acknowledges that debt. She describes Browning as “the great awakener of my childhood”, (Fedorko 25) and her story’s plot and its characters—a cold jealous duke who murders his wife after he has her immortalized in a specially commissioned piece of artwork—all pay tribute to Browning’s poem. Another telling point is that Wharton specifically names her duke “Ercole”. Though she places her story in Vicenza rather than Ferrara—the subtitle and setting of Browning’s poem—the Ercoles were in reality the dukes of Ferrara, and as Louis Friedlander has convincingly argued, the life story of Alfonso, heir and son of Ercole II, bears the “closest possible resemblances” to Browning’s speaker (Friedlander 667). While Wharton’s story is inspired by Browning’s poem, she also inflects her work with a more modern and feminist sensibility. Although Browning’s evil duke incriminates himself, the duchess in his poem is silent, a shadowy, undeveloped character. Wharton further develops Browning’s feminist themes by shifting the focus to the duchess, a vibrant woman who refuses to submit to patriarchal law. As Wharton’s narrator in “The Duchess at Prayer” struggles to understand the sculpture’s expression—“But the face. What does it mean?” (154)—we cannot help but recall the response of Browning’s duke to his listener’s implied surprise and confusion: “but to myself they turned/ And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst/How such a glance came there” (10–12). Like Browning’s duchess who had “a heart . . . too soon made glad” (22), Wharton’s duchess “was always laughing” and “was all for music, playacting and young company” (“Duchess” 155). While there are similarities between poem and story, there are also significant differences. Wharton’s story focuses on the events that take place before the Duchess’s death. She also exaggerates the opposition between the duke and duchess so that the tension in Browning’s poem is heightened

162  Nancy Von Rosk dramatically. Unlike Browning’s loquacious and gracious duke, Wharton’s Ercole is “a silent man, stepping quietly with his eyes down as though he’d just come from confession” (“Duchess” 155). And while Browning only hints at the duchess’s independent streak, Wharton’s duchess takes charge and puts her desires first. In the duke’s absence, for example, she goes to great lengths to create her own personal pleasure garden, spending extravagantly on trifles and then denying the chaplain money for books. Moreover, she mocks the priest’s appeal as she “breaks out at him with a laugh”, and he is left “turning red at the affront” (Wharton, “Duchess” 156). While Browning highlights the duchess’s innocence, Wharton chooses instead to highlight her defiance. Browning’s duchess then is more like a Victorian angel in the house; she delights in pleasing others, uplifting all those around her. Significantly, she does not mean to defy male authority. She is merely too kind. Wharton’s duchess is no angel. Writing during the fin-de-siècle wave of feminism, Wharton creates a duchess who is bold and extravagant, her behavior driven by her own self-interest. Both story and poem also differ in how they treat the Duchess’s death and the subject of art. Browning leaves the circumstances ambiguous with the line, “I gave commands” (45). In Wharton’s story, however, the reader actually witnesses the murder of the Duchess when the duke drinks to the “very long life” of his wife’s lover, Ascanio, and the Duchess, after drinking to Ascanio’s “happy death” (“Duchess” 162), dies, having been poisoned by her husband. Significantly, the artwork that will immortalize her is not hidden behind a curtain with its viewing controlled by the duke. The statue is placed in the chapel, and after the Duchess has died, the servant’s grandmother hears moaning coming from it. Moreover, as Kathy Fedorko notes, the sculpture’s facial expression “changes after the Duchess’s death to reflect the agony she experienced during her last hours alive” (my emphasis) (26). This “reflects the intense anxiety the story expresses about the power of male gynophobia to transmogrify spontaneous life into static art” (Fedorko 28). This gothic touch, however, could also express the limitations of male power if the Duchess’s spirit returns from beyond the grave to change the artwork the duke originally commissioned. While the painting of Browning’s Duchess remains “static” behind the duke’s curtain, the sculpture of Wharton’s Duchess reveals a new emphasis on ambiguity and uncertainty that undercuts the duke’s power. As if to further detract from his power, the duke too is now an art object. In Browning’s poem, we have the Duchess painted by Fra Pandolf, and in Wharton’s story, we have “Duke Ercole II painted by the Genoese priest” (“Duchess” 153). Furthermore, instead of looking as if he were alive, the Duke’s face is described as: “sallow as a wax effigy, high-nosed and cautious-lidded as though modeled by priestly hands; the lips weak and vain. . . . One of the Duke’s hands . . . turned the pages of a folio propped on a skull” (“Duchess” 153). The painting of the duke signifies

A writerly communion 163 death while a kind of life force emanates from the painting of the Duchess; as the narrator describes the face in this painting, he notices the “flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow” (“Duchess” 153). While Browning’s listener only contemplates the life-like quality of the painting of the Duchess, finally, the narrator in Wharton’s story must move away from the vibrant painting and confront the unspeakable terror in the sculpture. When he approaches the statue, the horror is all the more shocking as he is expecting to see yet another beautiful image. As the narrator explains, the Duchess’s attitude was one of transport, as though heavenly airs fluttered her laces. . . . I saw how admirably the sculptor had caught the pose of her head, the tender slope of her shoulder, then I crossed over and looked into her face—it was a frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt, and agony so possessed a human countenance. (“Duchess” 154) “Hate, revolt and agony” are the very things Browning’s Duchess could never express. Significantly, in Wharton’s story, it is a servant who has control over who will view the statue. We learn that while the Duke had forbidden anyone to step into the chapel after his death, the servants nevertheless go in with the new heir and witness the statue’s supernaturallychanged expression. Also, when the narrator asks if the crypt, which houses the remains of the Duchess’s unfortunate lover, was ever opened, the servant responds, “Heaven forbid sir! Was it not the Duchess’s express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?” (“Duchess” 164). Ultimately, it is the Duchess’s words that are honored while the duke’s orders are ignored; in Wharton’s feminist revision, the duke is silenced and there is no longer any ambiguity surrounding the Duchess’s horrifying fate. There is, however, uncertainty regarding the duke’s power over his art collection. As Browning’s Victorian angel becomes a horror “of hate, revolt and agony”, returning from the grave and defying the power of her husband, Wharton draws upon the defiance alluded to (but not fully developed) by Browning and conflates it with the more feminist undertones of the “New Woman”.

Religion, Sexuality, and Balzac’s “Le Grand Bretèche” In addition to demonstrating Browning’s influence, Wharton’s story was also inspired by Honoré de Balzac’s 1831 short story “Le Grand Bretèche”, a tale of a house with a horrendous secret: a house where a woman’s lover is buried and where religious devotion is a façade for transgressive sexual behavior. Wharton felt “La Grand Bretèche” was “the most perfectly composed of all short stories” (Wharton, The Writing of Fiction 67), and she acknowledged that Balzac’s “construction of

164  Nancy Von Rosk witnesses” (Lee 627) was a model for Ethan Frome. Balzac’s narrative method, “whereby a past event is framed by a present one” (Fedorko 53), was a technique Wharton used in much of her earlier work as well, particularly in her gothic tales. As Eve Sedgewick has observed: Of all the Gothic conventions . . . the difficulty the story has in getting itself told is of the most obvious structural significance. A fully legible manuscript or an uninterrupted narrative is rare; rarer still is the novel whose story is comprised by a single narrator, without the extensive irruption into the middle of the book of a new history with a new historian. (13–14) “The Duchess at Prayer” is certainly a tale that has “difficulty” in “getting itself told”. Wharton’s gentleman narrator hears the story from an old servant who in turn has heard it from his grandmother, who heard some of the tale from yet another servant. With his “senile shuffle”, the old servant also undermines his reliability with such commentary as “It’s not for an unlettered man to say” (Wharton, “Duchess” 155). Although the old man claims he knows the story from “[o]ne that saw it by God” (Wharton, “Duchess” 154), we do learn as the tale unfolds, that there is much his grandmother did not see for herself. This structure resembles Balzac’s “La Grand Bretèche” in which a series of witnesses informing the narrator, Monsieur Bianchot, create a labyrinth in which getting to the story—or at least to someone who actually witnessed the events of the story—takes quite some time. Just like Wharton’s narrator, Bianchot is an outsider and he hears the story of Josephine de Merret from others: the notary, Monsieur Regnault, whose information is described as gossip, the hostess of the inn, Madam Lepas, and finally, Rosalie, Josephine’s servant who was an eye witness to the actual events, but whose account is described as confused. Even as Bianchot questions his sources, he himself seems unreliable, a man who prefers his own fantasies to actualities, for he “wove delightful romances” when gazing at the house, and later at the inn, “lost himself in a romance a la Radcliffe” (Balzac 9). Wharton’s use of Catholicism in “The Duchess at Prayer” also recalls “La Grand Bretèche” as both stories intertwine Catholicism and illicit love. Balzac, for example, highlights that in the midst of her affair, Josephine de Merret “never appeared purer or more saintly”, and she holds closely a cross which is a token from her lover, a dark Spaniard who is known for his religious devotion: “He read his breviary like a priest” (Balzac 15, 11), and he also posits himself within yards of Madame de Merret’s chapel. Wharton’s story sets up a similar dynamic as the Duchess meets her lover in the crypt of the house chapel. She insists that she not be disturbed while she is at prayer, and as her love affair intensifies, so it seems does her religious devotion. Such a situation creates much irony, for

A writerly communion 165 her behavior is admired. The old servant, for example, comments that her “fervent devotion” was a “matter of edification to all the household and should have been peculiarly pleasing to the chaplain” (“Duchess” 157). In addition to heightening irony, this alignment of transgressive sexuality with religious devotion is a well-established gothic convention. Catholicism plays an “active role in most gothic novels”, and in the very first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), “a Catholic chapel provides one of the key sites of the action” (Haggerty 63). It is in Otranto’s chapel where Matilda meets the young peasant Theodore, and it is also in the chapel where she is murdered by her father. When Wharton not only situates her illicit affair within the confines of a chapel but also has Ascanio buried alive in its crypt, she turns to a familiar convention that depicted Catholicism as the site where patriarchal law is simultaneously upheld and broken. Wharton’s praying marble figure sealing the lover’s doom in the chapel crypt combines sexuality, violence, and religion in one unforgettable image. Moreover, her description of the sculpture itself alludes to both sexual and spiritual ecstasy. As Emily Orlando points out, there is a double meaning in “the Duchess’s attitude of transport”, and the “reference to the Duchess’s ‘love locks escaping from her coif’—the skullcap worn by nuns beneath a veil—suggests a repressed sexuality yearning for liberation from the conventions of a devout life” (47). Indeed, Wharton’s Catholic imagery dramatically heightens her feminist vision as well as the gothic themes and atmosphere of Balzac’s original story.

Balzac, Wharton, and the Catholic Uncanny Wharton’s bringing together of religion and sexuality and her story’s anti-Catholicism are not only important components of gothic literature, they are also integral to Anglo-American attitudes that flourished during much of the nineteenth century. As Haggerty and other scholars have observed, the gothic emerged prior to the Victorian period and its origins are inextricably intertwined with the growing urgency of anti-Catholicism in English culture. When the Catholic Relief Act passed by the Parliament in 1778 removed some restrictions of the purchase and inheritance of land by Catholics, many viewed it as “a threat to English independence” (Haggerty 65). Lord George Gordon would soon after lead thousands of protesters in No Popery Riots. Patrick O’Malley argues that gothic novelist Ann Radcliff—writing after this rioting—would not just reflect an “upsurge of anti-Catholic sentiment”, but that her “literary anti-Catholicism helped to create a useful language for anti-Catholic sentiment throughout the nineteenth century” (17). By the time that Matthew Lewis’s gothic novel, The Monk, was published in 1796, the perception of Catholicism as dangerous, corrupt, and foreign was so established that, as Haggerty puts it, “the very identity of catholicity is almost immediately positioned as a type

166  Nancy Von Rosk of polymorphous perversity masquerading as sexual innocence” (39). Susan Griffin describes Catholicism’s role in Victorian popular culture as “uncanny” as Protestant England, in a sense, becomes haunted by its Catholic past (7). Indeed, as O’Malley remarks, “With its systems of saints, rituals and seemingly supernatural sacramental theology, Roman Catholicism appeared to many English critics to be an eruption of the medieval into the present, an anachronism . . . dangerous to liberty and prosperity in contemporary England” (20). Fears would reach their peak in the mid-nineteenth century when many Anglican clergies, most notably the Oxford Tractarians, urged a return to Catholic rituals, and in 1850, the Roman Catholic Church was reestablished in England for the first time since the Reformation. Rome’s establishing of 13 sees and the archdiocese of Westminster was partly to better serve the Catholic Irish who were streaming into England after the famine. To many English, however, who were still reeling from the conversion to Catholicism of the renowned theologian, John Henry Newman, this action seemed like “Papal aggression” intent on the “reconquest of England” (Wohl n. p.) Though not an Anglo-American tale, Balzac’s story relies on gothic conventions and anti-Catholicism. Balzac’s narrator tells us, for example, that he is left with a feeling of “religious dread, not unlike the deep emotion which comes upon us when we go into a dark church at night and discern a feeble light under a lofty vault—a dim figure glides across—the sweep of . . . a priest’s cassock is audible and we shiver” (Balzac 12). In Wharton’s story, this anti-Catholicism is more pronounced and developed. Her chaplain is an especially despicable figure whose movements are described as “scuttling” and “skulking” (“Duchess” 158, 163). We are told that in the painted rooms of Vincenza, the “priests came and went softly as cats prowling for birds” (“Duchess” 155). Indeed, the very opening lines of “Duchess” heighten how Wharton’s tale relies on the anti-Catholic motifs so prominent in Victorian culture: “Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of the old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional?” (“Duchess” 153) her narrator asks. Wharton’s use of the confessional here would have resonated powerfully for her readers since “it was the confessional and the sexual license that was imagined to take place within its confines that seized the anti-Catholic imagination throughout the nineteenth century” (O’Malley 74). Many popular novels of the period featured sensational stories of confessors violating their female penitents’ innocence through rape or seduction. Later in the century, novels as well as political cartoons would “demonstrate a more subtle suspicion: the fear that the confessional gives another man access to the married woman, the inner self who should be known only by the husband to whom it belongs” (Griffin 167). Griffin also notes that “nineteenth-century fiction consistently imagines Catholicism’s troubling presence in America and Britain as a family story” where

A writerly communion 167 what was most threatening was the “entry of the foreign subject into the home” (10). Wharton’s comparison of her Italian house to the face of a priest in a confessional is telling indeed then, for she is not dramatizing the power a priest might have to enter and disturb domestic space, but rather she is suggesting that the priest and this domestic space are one and the same. The chaplain is not interested in usurping power from the duke nor in seducing the Duchess; the chaplain aligns himself with the duke; he spies on the Duchess and informs the duke of her infidelities. While reflecting the popular cultural notion that “Romanism is a system of espionage, of intimacy violated by spies” (Griffin 150), Wharton highlights that these Catholic spies are not a threat to patriarchal law and order, but rather are explicitly aligned with that order. Rather than engaging in a power struggle, the husband and the priest work together in Wharton’s story to dramatize the extent of patriarchal culture’s repressive hold on women. With Catholicism as the antagonist, Wharton’s tale takes its place in a well-established gothic tradition. Moreover, Wharton continually defines the Duchess and her lover by showing how much they rebel against Catholic rule. When the Duchess first arrives at the villa, for example, the changes she makes suggest a kind of pagan opposition to her husband’s religious striving. She designs the gardens so that there would be “water-jets that drenched you unexpectedly” and “wild men that jumped at you out of thickets” (Wharton, “Duchess” 155). She also brings “mountebanks and fortune tellers” and “travelling doctors and astrologers” (Wharton, “Duchess” 155) to the villa. Though she affects religious devotion, she really has little respect for the church, going to such lengths as playing pranks on the chaplain by disguising herself as a nun. Even in her death, the Duchess rebels, “all night twisting herself like a heretic at the stake and her teeth being locked, our Lord’s body could not be passed through them” (Wharton, “Duchess” 162). The Duchess’s lover, the Cavaliere Ascanio, meanwhile, is an enemy of the church who “set fighting above praying”, and “some say he tried to carry off a nun from the convent of Santa Croce” (Wharton, “Duchess” 155). He joins the Duchess in her pranks and “paragoned her in his song to all the pagan goddesses of antiquity”. (Wharton, “Duchess” 156). The couple’s joyful camaraderie starkly opposes the duke’s regimented power structure where a man rules and a woman must obey. Rather than the angelic and victimized Duchess imagined by Browning, Wharton’s Duchess works with her male lover to defy oppressive power structures. Indeed, her rebellion is not just directed at her husband but at ecclesiastical authority itself. While Wharton’s story shows the continuing power of anti-Catholic motifs, it also attests to the instability of these conventions as well, reinforcing that by 1900, the fears that were heightened mid-century by the Oxford Tractarian movement were no longer so immediate. By the century’s end, Catholicism was still seen as a part of a more primitive

168  Nancy Von Rosk past, but rather than one that threatened modernity was imagined as the very thing that might rescue and inspire modern society. As Lears notes, “toward the end of the nineteenth century, cultural commentators increasingly stressed the salutary effects of art and ritual on ‘the instinct of worship,’ and their examples were invariably Catholic” (194). “Biographies of medieval saints and translations of their writings proliferated as never before”, Lears writes, and “on both sides of the Atlantic, a diffuse but pervasive sentiment spread: a sense that nineteenth-century science had not explained the universe, a quickening hope that mystery was alive in the world” (143, 142). This surge of interest in Catholic art and ritual coincides with Wharton’s travels in Italy and her writing of “The Duchess at Prayer”. Wharton herself could be described as a weary modern who would turn, in her final decades, to the rituals and traditions of Catholicism for solace and meaning. Although raised in the Episcopal tradition, Wharton “was drawn to Catholicism’s history, mysticism and stability” (Singley 36), her involvement with the Catholic Church deepening in her final years. As Singley notes, Wharton read The Lives of the Saints, the history of the Church, and developed close relations with Catholic clergy. Indeed, Singley argues that for Wharton, Catholicism also offered surprising new ways of considering female identity at the turn of the century: Whereas both Protestant and Catholic reinforced the social inferiority of women, Catholicism alone taught women’s spiritual and moral superiority through its veneration of the virgin. Wharton had been actively engaged in recuperating the feminine principle in much of her work, exploring matriarchies, Greek goddesses and primordial maternal forces. (Singley 37) Singley sees Wharton’s turn toward Catholicism also as a return to her earlier religious interests (65). In her autobiography, Wharton relishes, for example, the wonders of living in Catholic Rome as a child: “I remember . . . heavy coaches of Cardinals flashing in scarlet and gold through the twilight of narrow streets; the flowery bombardment of the Carnival procession watched with shrieks of infant ecstasy” (Wharton, A Backward Glance 29). And yet later on she remembers she had developed a darker, austere religious outlook reminiscent of Calvinism: “I had worked out of my inner mind a rigid rule of absolute unmitigated truth telling the least imperceptible deviation from which would inevitably be punished by the dark power I knew as God” (Lee 37). This tension—a delight in the aesthetic richness of religion and a sense of its darker patriarchal power—remains a tension in Wharton’s life and work so “no matter how strong Catholicism’s appeal”, Wharton also “remained skeptical of Catholicism” (Singley 190). Wharton’s abiding attraction to Catholicism

A writerly communion 169 and her ultimate turn to the Church of Rome is “an uneasy alliance between mutually exclusive spiritual and feminist longings” (Singley 37). These tensions are evident certainly in “The Duchess at Prayer”. The Duchess—as much as she rebels against Catholicism—also embodies Catholicism. The Catholic Other, as it were, erupts as an uncanny presence in Wharton’s text. The Duchess and her lover are saints as well as sinners, and the language describing them slips into the diction of religious devotion that is suffused with Catholic imagery. The Duchess’s hair, for example, is compared to priestly garb as it “glittered of itself like the threads in an Easter chasuble” (Wharton, “Duchess” 156). When the Duchess is covered with jewels, she shines like “Our Lady of Loreto”. (“Duchess” 162). Interestingly, the Duchess herself becomes a kind of sacrificial Christ-like figure. Not only is she poisoned at a gruesome sort of “last supper”, her bedstead is also strangely described in religious terms as it “lifted its baldachin, a yellow Christ agonized between the curtains” (“Duchess” 153). The Duchess’s lover meanwhile, the rebellious heretic who would rather fight than pray, is compared to a Catholic martyr. He is “as beautiful as a Saint Sebastian” and “every soul about the place welcomed the sight of him”. The couple seems sanctified by Wharton’s language as “the two matched each other like the candlesticks on an altar” (“Duchess” 156).

Conclusions We see in “Duchess” the aesthetic beauty and sensuality of Catholicism, as well as its ruthless unfettered patriarchal power. Although Wharton relies on gothic conventions and establishes Catholicism as the villain, the varied meanings Catholicism holds in her work are more complicated and unstable. Indeed, Wharton’s work reminds us not only of the shifting attitudes toward Catholicism as the nineteenth century drew to a close, but the tensions and contradictions at the heart of her own life and work. Throughout her life, Catholicism always held a special appeal, yet despite her growing interest in the Roman Church and attendance at Mass in her final years, she could never convert because, according to her friend Gaillard Lapsley, she was “too much an ‘intellectual rationalist’ to accept its transrational doctrines” (Lewis 511). Singley emphasizes this as well when she writes that Wharton, “[l]ike many Victorians, wrestled with spiritual meaning in the context of scientific rationalism” (38). As Singley elaborates: She embraced science and technology, but she never believed that science held all the answers to human mysteries. Unlike many Victorians she foresaw neither smooth progress nor apocalyptic reform. Instead she persisted in raising difficult moral and spiritual questions in an upper-class society that considered such inquires a breach of

170  Nancy Von Rosk good taste and she sought to affirm individual moral responsibility amid widespread complacency. (140) Singley’s observations highlight how Wharton’s spiritual dilemma leaves her somehow in between the Victorian and the modern, struggling to reconcile the demands of the spirit with the demands of the intellect. Wharton’s spiritual and intellectual quandary brings to mind that other weary modern, T.S. Eliot, who, in 1927, converted to Anglicanism and would identify himself as an Anglo-Catholic. Like Wharton, Eliot found comfort in Catholic ritual and was “indifferent to twentieth-century social schemes in which the individual was of small worth” (Gordon 90). As Lyndall Gordon asserts, he “discarded popular ideologies of social change—extreme politics and liberal optimism—as solutions to cultural despair and offered as an alternative the idea of a community knit together by religious discipline” (89). For Eliot, modern life worked against individual freedom. He once wrote: “It is not that the world of separate individuals of the liberal democrat is undesirable, it is simply that this world does not exist” (397). Eliot saw instead “the masses with their illusion of freedom manipulated by a society organized for profit”, and so he looked to the Anglican Church with its community and tradition as a “corrective to the faddist modern mind” (Gordon 88, 89). Eliot, like Wharton, was intent on bringing together the seemingly opposing realms of spirituality and modernity; he was resolved to “search for faith even while accepting the knowledge which erodes it, resigning himself to the insoluble contradictions in his own psyche” (Lears 312). Wharton undoubtedly committed to this search even while she seemed to know she would not find the answers for which she longed. In one of the late entries of her commonplace book, she wrote: “I  don’t believe in God, but I do believe in his saints. What then?” (Lewis 509). Wharton’s “what then?” here hangs in a kind of void, for her question is one that seems to have no answer, highlighting her lonely position, as well as her willingness to stand alone and apart, to forge her own way. As well as informing her relationship with religion, tensions and contradictions also inform Wharton’s relationship with her literary predecessors. Just as her Duchess embodied Catholicism while also rejecting it, shining like “our Lady of Loreto”, while being “paragoned . . . to all the goddesses of pagan antiquity”, Wharton would both employ and reject aspects of Browning and Balzac’s works, revering as well as revising them, and illuminating for us the tensions of her own cultural moment as those “insoluble contradictions” remain.

Notes 1 “The Duchess at Prayer” was first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1900, and later included in the short story collection Crucial Instances (1901).

A writerly communion 171 2 Emily Orlando has also noted the links to Balzac and Browning; however, she sees Wharton’s duchess as having less agency and asserts that “Wharton’s revision distinguishes her from the twentieth-century women writers Gilbert and Gubar see envisioning the possibilities of female empowerment” (51).

Works Cited Balzac, Honoré de. “La Grand Bretèche.” Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell, Ebooks@Adelaide, 2007, pp. 1–19. Bolton, Matthew. “T.S. Eliot and Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologues.” Context, Reception, Comparison, Critical Lens: Critical Insights. T. S. Eliot, edited by John Paul Riquelme, Salem Press, 2009, pp. 55–73. Browning, Robert. “My Last Duchess.” Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, 7th ed., W.W. Norton, 2001, pp. 2028–29. Christ, Carol. Victorian and Modern Poetics, U of Chicago P, 1994. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. Faber and Faber, 1999. Fedorko, Kathy. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. U of Alabama P, 1995. Feldman, Jessica. “Modernism’s Victorian Bric-a-Brac.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 8, no. 3, 2001, pp. 453–470. Friedlander, Louis. “My Last Duchess.” Studies in Philology, vol. 33, no. 4, 1936, pp. 656–84. Gordon, Lyndall. “Conversion.” Modern Critical Views: T. S. Eliot, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp. 77–94. Griffith, Susan. Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2004. Haggerty, George. Queer Gothic. U of Illinois P, 2006. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Preface to The Marble Faun.” Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels. Literary Classics of the United States, 1983, pp. 853–56. Lears, Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture: 1880–1920. U of Chicago P, 1983. Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. Vintage Books, 2007. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. Harper and Row, 1975. Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context. Oxford UP, 1987. O’Malley, Patrick R. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge UP, 2006. Orlando, Emily. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts. U of Alabama P, 2007. Schlossberg, Herbert. “The Tractarian Movement.” www.victorianweb.org/religion/herb7.html. Accessed May 8, 2020. Sedgewick, Eve. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. Methuen, 1986. Singley, Carol. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge UP, 1998. Wharton. Edith. A Backward Glance. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. ———. “The Duchess at Prayer.” Scribner’s Magazine, Aug. 1900, pp. 151–64. ———. The Writing of Fiction. Simon and Schuster, 1997. Wohl, Anthony S. “The Re-establishment of the Catholic Hierarchy in England, 1850.” www.victorianweb.org/religion/Hierarchy_Reestablished.html. Accessed May 8, 2020.

Part IV

Blurring Boundaries Gender, Sexuality, Desire

11 “Disposed to Daring Innovation”: New Modernism, New Woman Fiction, and New Motherhood Elizabeth Podnieks Introduction She was called ‘Novissima’: the New Woman, the Odd Woman, the Wild Woman, and the Superfluous Woman in English novels and periodicals of the 1880s and 1890s. A tremendous amount of polemic was wielded against her for choosing not to pursue the conventional bourgeois woman’s career of marriage and motherhood. Indeed, for her transgressions against the sex, gender, and class distinctions of Victorian England, she was accused of instigating the second fall of man. (Ardis 1)

So Ann Ardis opens her influential study on the New Woman. Relatedly, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver explain that “the sanctification of motherhood gained its full ideological force in the nineteenth century and the successful or failed performance of maternity became the ubiquitous subject of social debate and textual representation”. And yet, “maternity is one of the least studied aspects” of the period (1). New Woman writers, grappling with convention, present protagonists like the career-driven, single, or unhappily married mother. Taking my cue from scholars like Ardis and others who profess that New Woman stories are central, not marginal as traditionally held, to the genesis of modernist prose, I argue that Ezra Pound’s 1928 urge to “make it new” was already heralded in nineteenth-century New Woman texts where motherhood itself was becoming “new”.1 I elucidate these claims through two novels: The Daughters of Danaus (1894) by Scottish writer Mona Caird and The Home-Maker (1924) by American Dorothy Canfield, focusing on the exilic mother who flees the institution of patriarchal motherhood. In so doing, my study theorizes maternity as a newly vital thematic concern that brought texts from the fin de siècle and early to mid-twentieth century into dialogue with one another. New Woman fiction emerged during the fin de siècle, an epoch signaled by the “collision between the old and the new” when “British

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-16

176  Elizabeth Podnieks cultural politics were caught between two ages, the Victorian and the Modern” (Ledger and Luckhurst xiii). The end of the nineteenth century was “fraught with anxiety and with an exhilarating sense of possibility”, manifested by “a constellation of new formations” like new woman, new realism, new journalism, and new human sciences (Ledger and Luckhurst xiii). The New Woman is particularly useful in linking Victorian and modernist fictions given that “The ‘newness’ of the New Woman marked her as an unmistakably ‘modern’ figure, a figure committed to change and to the values of a projected future” (Ledger, New 5). In positioning New Woman fiction as constitutive of modernism, I draw on the work of Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, which traces how the field of modernism itself is undergoing innovation in the present day. Their collection Bad Modernisms showcases and interrogates new modernist studies which arose in the late 1990s, driven by two mandates: “one that reconsiders the definitions, locations, and producers of ‘modernism’ and another that applies new approaches and methodologies to ‘modernist’ works” (1). Particularly salient here is Mao and Walkowitz’s expanded periodization, making it feasible for me to consider New Woman fiction as modernist: the first generation of New Woman writers began producing major works in the 1880s, on the cusp of what is traditionally regarded as modernism’s historical timeline.2 Additionally, Anglo-American literary modernism has been codified as a series of movements predicated on a rupture with the immediate past and involving aesthetic experimentations that sought new ways to represent subjectivity and time. New modernism challenges assumptions that experimental products by the likes of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound singlehandedly defined the period (Mao and Walkowitz 1), making way for New Woman texts which are, in the vein of Victorian realism, typically not aesthetically experimental. New Woman stories are more innovative in content than in form. Angela Ingram insists that texts may be excluded from revisions of literary history because prevailing “hierarchies of genre” (5) value formal experimentation over content that was subversive or shocking. Celeste M. Schenck suggests that poets like Anna Wickham and Charlotte Mew were neglected because of their traditional meter: “conventional form, although alive and well in genteel Georgian verse, was the bête noire of the Modernist movement in poetry” (229). Schenck aims to “roughen up the history of literary Modernism” by positing that if the radical poetics of Modernism often masks a deeply conservative politics, might it also possibly be true that the seemingly genteel, conservative poetics of women poets whose obscurity even feminists have overlooked might pitch a more radical politics than we had considered possible? (230–31)

“Disposed to Daring Innovation” 177 Many conventional New Woman fictions pitch the politics of unorthodox motherhood. This is the case with Hadria Fullerton and Evangeline (Eva) Knapp, protagonists in The Daughters of Danaus and The HomeMaker, respectively: Hadria adopts an illegitimate orphan and privileges her over her biological sons; and both characters seek self-fulfillment not through their children but from professional outlets (the former as a musician, the latter as a sales manager in a department store).

Maternal Spheres To appreciate how the New Woman emerged into and out of text, I offer a brief overview of the prevailing Victorian ideologies shaping womanhood and motherhood.3 The mid-nineteenth century was preoccupied with the Woman Question relating to women’s legal rights, status, and selfhoods within the private sphere of the home, and their roles in the wider public sphere of work, their communities, and even nations. At issue was the degree to which women adhered to notions of “womanliness”, where success was the fulfillment of what Lyn Pykett calls the “proper feminine”, situating the ideal woman within the bourgeois, middle-class domicile. Here, she was valued for tending to the hearth, and for reproducing (and being morally responsible for the purity of) not only her own children but also those of the nation (Improper 12). As the “angel in the house”, she is asexual, passionless, self-sacrificing, and dependent. Her “improper” antithesis, a failure of the “feminine”, is demonic, animalistic, sexually voracious, self-assertive, and independent (Improper 16). With women thus polarized, men secured their place within the competitive, economic, public domain of “industry, commerce and politics” (Improper 12). Pykett qualifies these divisions as consistently contested “in a variety of discursive contexts” (Improper 13). Such contestations are played out within the discursive context of New Woman texts, reflecting the overlapping of older and evolving debates about gender. I want to adapt Pykett’s terms to show that dichotomous femininities inform conceptions of “proper” and “improper” maternities. My discussion builds upon the theoretical underpinnings of the institution of white patriarchal motherhood, as outlined by Deirdre H. McMahon. Drawing on the work of Adrienne Rich, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Sara Ruddick, McMahon summarizes that motherhood not only is a manifestation of biology but also operates as an institution that “serves inherently political functions” on three levels: the historical valuing of women for their reproductive capacities; the participation of women’s reproductive labors in the ongoing “maintenance of social institutions” such as “class hierarchies, normative gender roles, the concentration of wealth through inheritance, and nationalism itself” (192–93); and the institution of motherhood taking precedence over women’s actual experiences of parturition and relationships with their children. Citing legal theorist

178  Elizabeth Podnieks Martha Fineman’s statement that motherhood is colonized by “the core concepts of patriarchal ideology” (193), McMahon expounds that for the Victorians, mothers became “conduits of material and cultural reproduction” so that the “idealization of maternity is invested in the reproduction of ideology rather than children—safeguarding norms and ideas, including the boundaries of identity” (194). The maternal paragon was also disputed. Analyzing medical and advice literature, for instance, uncovers topics like infanticide, insanity, and the sexualized maternal body, leading Rosenman and Klaver to conclude that images of the demonic and aberrant mother created “fraught sites of instability” generating “both anxieties and discursive possibility” (8–9). The “reorientation” of Victorian studies in the last few decades has dislodged “maternity from its imbrication in conventional formulations of domestic femininity” (Rosenman and Klaver 11), necessitating the reconceptualizing of motherhood as well; their collection Other Mothers advocates “defamiliarizing maternity” (19) by promoting a dialogue about its numerous possibilities. This defamiliarizing informed the agendas of New Woman writers. While some authors continued to champion the “good” mother—from the perspective of social-purity feminism, for example—many wrestled with the resisting or rejecting of it, contending with charges of “bad” mothering and “unwomanly” behavior, precisely the accusations leveled against protagonists Hadria and Eva. The maternal ideal of the fin de siècle persisted into the modernist period. However, Bonnie Kime Scott highlights a myriad of modernist texts proffering “[r]adical critiques of the patriarchal family”, centered in part “on maternal relationships, and alternate familial forms” (14). I want to approach these critiques through the concept of exile which, as seen earlier, Schenck applies to experimental “content” excluded from the canon of experimentation. Exile itself is one of modernism’s central tenets, crystallized by Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus who declares “I will not serve” as he flees his Irish homeland at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (268). Susan Stanford Friedman observes that “The founding gesture of American Modernism seems to have been expatriatism”, which enabled the mind and spirit to be free “From convention, from the pressure to conform, to do the respectable, the proper, the expected” (88, 94). Shari Benstock perceives that for women like HD, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes, “the flight to freedom often meant a flight from the implicit expectation of marriage and motherhood” (28). These freedoms afforded women the opportunity to experience and write about disparate maternal desires and identities, from specifically matrifocal perspectives, that is, from the position not of the daughter (or less typically the son) but of the mother herself. Analyzing The Daughters of Danaus and The Home-Maker, I demonstrate some of the ways that New Women protagonists like Hadria and Eva fled conventional expectations of mothering, and articulated their matrifocal refusals to serve the institution of patriarchal motherhood.

“Disposed to Daring Innovation” 179

The New Woman: Names and Narratives In Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894), 21-year-old Hadria is living in northern Scotland with her siblings and parents in a district where “society smiled upon conformity”, but she is a non-conforming New Woman (5). Her “originality” worries her mother, and her views are “shocking” (5, 89). She is mocked by “a callow youth” at a dinner party, who found a fertile subject for his wit, in the follies and excesses of what he called the ‘new womanhood.’ It was so delightful, he said, to come to the country, where women were still charming in the good old way. He knew that this new womanhood business was only a phase, but “he could not stand it when [women] went out of their sphere, and put themselves forward and tried to be emancipated and all that sort of nonsense” (112). This “callow youth” echoed tenets of the day. In August  1893, the British feminist periodical The Woman’s Herald published “The Social Standing of the New Woman”, where readers learn that “woman suddenly appears on the scene of man’s activities, as a sort of new creation, and demands a share in the struggles, the responsibilities and the honours of the world, in which, until now, she has been a cipher” (Tusan 169). The following year, the phrase went mainstream in a disagreement between Irish feminist author Sarah Grand and English anti-feminist author Ouida that was played out in the pages of the American magazine the North American Review. In March 1894, Grand calls on the “new woman” to develop intellectual and spiritual powers for the purposes of saving men, who in their moral failings have become effeminate (30). In the May issue, Ouida charges that Grand’s New Woman is “a menace to humankind” due to “her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-weening estimate of her own value and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous” (39). Responding to images such as these, popular British newspapers and magazines like The Pall Mall Gazette and Punch registered society’s anxieties about the Woman Question, unleashing captions and cartoons deriding the New Woman as “improperly” feminine—just as the “callow youth” (Caird, Daughters 112) denigrated Hadria. The New Woman’s presence in such diverse publications marks the transatlantic nature of her currency. Emerging in Britain, she concurrently shaped American culture, evidenced in the interplay of characteristics between the Scottish Hadria and the New Yorker Eva. Martha H. Patterson finds that “from the New Woman’s inception, American magazines borrowed New Woman iconography mostly from European, especially British, sources, and charted the status of the New Woman around the world” (5). Patterson’s account of the American iteration conflates attributes across national boundaries: she is a “suffragist, prohibitionist, clubwoman, college girl, American girl, socialist, capitalist, anarchist,

180  Elizabeth Podnieks pickpocket, bicyclist, barren spinster, mannish woman, outdoor girl, birth-control advocate, modern girl, eugenicist, flapper, blues woman, lesbian, and vamp” who connotes “a distinctly modern ideal of selfrefashioning” (1–2). Asking “Did the New Woman really exist?” Talia Schaffer confirms that “clerks, typists, teachers, college students, journalists, or perhaps even shopgirls” sought “greater autonomy in everything from etiquette to employment” (39). These qualities were adopted “by young middle-class women and modified into claims for personal liberty and equality” (Heilmann 5), reflective of legal, educational, economic, and social advancements on both sides of the Atlantic, like The Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882); establishment of Cambridge University colleges Girton (1869) and Newnhan (1871); suffrage campaigns (1860s on); and birth control pamphlets (late nineteenth century). The New Woman was regarded “as either a cause or a symptom of cultural disintegration and social decline, or as the cure for current social ills” (Pykett, Engendering 17–18). Despite its singularity, then, the New Woman was an unstable category, although there was consensus that she was “dangerous, a threat to the status quo” (Ledger, New 11). A dominant anti-feminist discourse strove to demean and diffuse her gendered anarchy, one that the New Woman countered through a “reverse” discourse by which she “began to speak on her own behalf” (Ledger, New 10). Thematic clusters of New Woman fiction inscribe these reversals. Ardis enumerates stories that reject the endorsement of and narrative culmination in marriage; resist the binary of “pure” (60–61) and “fallen” (138) woman; explore erotic desire over romantic love and female-centered friendships over female-male couplings; and recognize women’s professional aspirations. These discourses co-exist, however, with what Ardis calls a trope of “disempowerment” (96) or “boomerang” (146) plotting in which the New Woman’s political, social, and artistic activisms and ambitions are abandoned or failed, and the protagonist is punished for her daring by being called back to home and husband; condemned to a lonely existence as a seemingly superfluous spinster; or killed off.

Novel Motherhood: “Opposing the World” The Daughters of Danaus operates within these dichotomous discourses. Of being a wife, Hadria insists, “I would rather beg in the streets, than submit to the indignity of such a life!” (22). Despite her friend Valeria Du Prel’s cautioning, she holds to her conviction because, “I still believe in revolt” (22). Hadria’s “revolt” aligns her with the New Woman described by Elaine Showalter: “an anarchic figure who threatened to turn the world upside down”, characterized in “the vocabulary of insurrection and apocalypse” (38, 39). Hadria’s certitude that marriage would entail “the loss of freedom, the right to oneself” (40) is pitted against the dominant attitudes of her community, articulated by Henriette Temperley in

“Disposed to Daring Innovation” 181 a lecture on “the sphere of woman in society”, by which she urges “any really nice woman” to refrain from “moving a little finger to attain, or to help others to attain, the smallest fraction more of freedom” for women (37). Pressured by familial expectations, Hadria weds Henriette’s brother, Hubert Temperley, but only after he promises never to impede her independence. However, she soon learns that he tricked her and she experiences the union as imprisonment, firing her “with a more angry spirit of rebellion” (52). Dominant and reverse discourses apply to motherhood as well. Grant Allen and Caird herself, two of the most popular authors of the fin de siècle, provide the context for Hadria’s maternal conflict. In his 1889 manifesto for motherhood, “Plain Words on the Woman Question”, Allen charges that a woman “ought to be ashamed to say she has no desire to become a wife and mother” and that “We will not aid or abet women as a sex in rebelling against maternity” (214, 220). In her 1892 polemic “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’ ” Caird refutes that a woman is “naturally” fit or destined for motherhood, pointing to her “thousand emotional and intellectual attributes that are wholly superfluous to her merely maternal activities” (818). She protests that “Women have been forced, partly by their physical constitution, but more by the tyranny of society, to expend their whole energies in maternal cares”, which has led to “a thousand evils” (Caird, “Defence” 819), such as dangers to women’s health, potential harm to unwanted children, and depriving women of other kinds of occupations which they may prefer or for which they may be more qualified. Caird proposes that the quarrels related to maternity are those “between decaying institutions and the stirrings of a new social faith” (“Defence” 828), implicating the tensions and negotiations between the old and new of the Victorian and modernist periods. Hadria’s unhappiness in marriage is exacerbated by motherhood. She reflects that “Throughout history [. . .] children had been the unfailing means of bringing women into line with tradition”: children “had been able to force the most rebellious to their knees;” and “[a]n appeal to the maternal instinct had quenched the hardiest spirit of revolt” (Caird, Daughters 57). What Showalter calls the “the vocabulary of insurrection and apocalypse” (39) is intended to be negated here, but because Hadria is a New Woman she is not brought “into line with tradition”. She cares for her boys but does not love them unconditionally: “They represent to me the insult of society—my own private and particular insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood. It is through them that I am to be subdued and humbled” (58). To Henriette, who is appalled by her attitude, Hadria unleashes the full force of her reverse discourse of “improper” maternity. She denies “that motherhood has duties except when it is absolutely free” and critiques its institutional restrictions: “no woman has yet been in a position to know what it is per se, strange as it may appear. No woman has yet experienced it apart from the enormous

182  Elizabeth Podnieks pressure of law and opinion that has, always, formed part of its inevitable conditions” (103). Her verdict is that “Motherhood, as our wisdom has appointed it, among civilized people, represents a prostitution of the reproductive powers” (104). At the same time, learning that the town’s unmarried schoolmarm committed suicide in shame after giving birth, Hadria adopts the illegitimate Martha, setting her up with a caregiver in a nearby cottage. Hadria battles patriarchal motherhood, for in “defending this child” she is “opposing the world and the system of things that I hate—”, and she hopes to teach Martha “to strike a blow at the system which sent her mother to a dishonoured grave” (57, 58). This anarchic gesture results in Hadria’s “more personal interest in her charge. She had taken it under care of her own choice”, and therefore she “felt the relationship to be a true one” (73). Unlike her sons, Martha symbolizes for Hadria a woman’s reproductive autonomy. In the spirit of Rosenman and Klaver, Hadria is an “other mother” who “defamiliarizes” a biological destiny. Hadria additionally contravenes convention by leaving her husband and sons to exile herself, with Martha and the caregiver, to Paris to realize her dreams of becoming a composer. Before her marriage, her friend Professor Fortescue had urged, “I hope that you will find time to develop your musical gift. . . . Don’t be persuaded to do fancy embroidery” (33). The “persuasion” likely came from her mother, who “opposed her daughter’s endeavours” because “[i]t was not good for a girl to be selfishly pre-occupied” (33). Nevertheless, once married, she continued to hone her talents in line with her New Woman and modern sensibilities: she was “disposed to daring innovation. Her bizarre compositions shocked [Hubert]” (51). En route to France and to the School of Music there, she senses, after seven “long” years of marriage, the “joy of freedom and its intoxication”; this freedom “was the first condition of a life that was worth living” (91). In Paris, she thrives under the tutelage of Monsieur Jouffroy, but his warning that he had seen the “brilliant careers” of too many women ruined by the “fatal instinct” (97) for maternity prove prescient. Having been dispatched to bring Hadria home, Henriette triggers Hadria’s “stormy inner debate” (107) as to her responsibilities toward not only her abandoned husband and sons but also to her mother, who is dying of despair over Hadria’s actions. Bedridden, Mrs Fullerton is the embodiment of a life predicated on patriarchy. Hadria decries “the sadness of her mother’s life, the long stagnation, the slow decay of disused faculties” and “hungry claims of a nature unfulfilled”, whereas Mrs Fullerton is proud that “I  have always done my duty, —I have sacrificed myself for the children” (110) and now expects Hadria to sacrifice herself in turn. The generational divisions between them are called to mind when Hadria’s friend Valeria cautions Hadria to “avoid the tragedy that threatens all spirits who are pointing toward the new order, while the old is still working out its unexhausted impetus” (34). Mrs Fullerton is

“Disposed to Daring Innovation” 183 a bitter ambassador for the Victorian order who stifles her daughter’s vanguard mobility. Hadria’s reluctant return to Scotland is thus a flight to domestic entrapment once more. She mourns the loss of her profession and becomes suicidal when Martha’s father surfaces and takes Martha away, but she determines to use her experiences to advance an agenda of opposition. Henriette had earlier claimed that “it is not possible for any woman to resist the laws and beliefs of Society” and that Hadria “can’t escape from the conditions of her epoch” (41). Hadria is a “boomerang” figure in a disempowering plot, but in her preference for non-biological maternity, she resists “Society”. If she does not quite escape, she sets out a blueprint for others, informing her sister that “The hope of the future lies in the rising generation. You can’t alter those who have matured in the old ideas. It is for us to warn” and that “The one thing I won’t do, is to be virtuously resigned. And I won’t ‘make the best of it’ ” (143). Hadria has come home, but she has not given in.

Modern Shifts: “The Healthy Balance of Their Nature” The Daughters of Danaus both complies with and defies the “conditions of [Hadria’s] epoch”. As such, it illustrates New Woman fiction that was in part made possible by—just as it influenced—a shift from British classic realism to Victorian “new” realism (alongside French naturalism). At stake in the formation of this fiction were contemporary debates about representation, which came to a head with the censoring of George Moore’s novel A Modern Lover by Mudie’s circulating library in London in 1884. Moore’s subsequent advocacy for a “realer” realism that is not tempered by platitudinous morality and that gives its readers a more direct and genuine account of all human nature and experience, including sexuality, helped to inaugurate the “new” realism of the period (Ardis 31–32). This movement was inspired by the French naturalism of the 1860s, whereby authors applied the objective standards of science to the observations of character to discern truths about human personality and behavior. Despite its intentions, though, naturalism failed—like classic realism—to dismantle notions of idealized womanhood (Ardis 36–37). Contrasting both realism and naturalism, the New Woman’s “new” realism sought to render female “desires that have never been realized before” and imagine “worlds quite different from the bourgeois patriarchy” (Ardis 3), as witnessed by Hadria’s reluctance to marry, efforts to become a composer, and repudiation of prescribed motherhood. The New Woman continued to stir debate in the twentieth century, being profiled in novels by writers like Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and Rebecca West. These “self-consciously modern novelists” tackled the central themes of “late-Victorian dissolution”—including “modern marriage, free love, the artistic aspirations of women, female eroticism”

184  Elizabeth Podnieks (Pykett, Engendering 15)—already taken up by New Woman writers like Caird. The New Woman heroine in both fin-de-siècle and modernist texts reflects “a modernist discourse of rupture”, a “disruptive” breaking “with the past, with convention, and even with nature” (Pykett, Engendering 57). For Ledger, the reclamation by feminist revisionists of New Woman authors as “proto-modernists” casts light on a genre too long neglected, “a victim of its awkward positioning between the literary grand narratives of Victorian realism and high modernism” (New 181). Through this revision, fin-de-siècle New Woman writers have “acquired a certain cachet as the literary ‘mothers’ of female modernists” (New 180–81) such as Mary Butts, Jean Rhys, and Woolf. Woolf herself avers that “we think back through our mothers if we are women” (83). Relatedly, Jane Eldridge Miller’s arguments about the Edwardian novel invoke—and can be applied to—New Woman fiction, as in the fact that “Edwardian novelists created modern heroines who refused to accept marriage and motherhood as their only destiny”, but who remained inundated by rhetoric promoting domesticity (4). As a result, Edwardian women lived “a double life, one that was alternatively (or even simultaneously) Victorian and modern, repressive and liberating, traditional and radically new” (195). This description also applies to the New Woman, manifested not only in the work of Caird but also that of Canfield. Eva, the protagonist of The Home-Maker, is the wife of Lester and the mother of three young children in a New York suburb. Being around 40 years old in the 1920s, she is effectively a transatlantic contemporary of Hadria. While there is a 30-year gap between Caird’s and Canfield’s novels, their overlap can be further theorized through E. Ann Kaplan’s study of “ ‘Master’ mother discourses” (19) in North American film and literature. Mother discourses reiterated traditional biases relegating the mother to the home for the survival of the species, recapitulating women to a destiny predicated on biology. Consequently, in the early- and mid-twentieth century, “the nuclear family remained intact and the mother was still central, though defensively so” (18). Like Caird’s, Canfield’s narrative is evidence of Ledger’s as well as Rosenman and Klaver’s ideas, illustrating how dominant and reverse discourses operate to create “fraught sites of instability” for the traditional family. Stylistically, The Home-Maker is a conventional novel falling within the period of high-modernist experimentation; it represents innovation of content as it stakes a claim for extracting motherhood from patriarchy. The Home-Maker’s “instability” is illuminated by Eva’s paradoxically “good” and “bad” mothering. She is a womanly woman who greets her husband and children at the door “fresh in a well-ironed, clean, gingham house-dress” (27) and who is a devoted and supremely capable parent: “Nobody could take care of you like Mother when there was something the matter with you” (39). She laments, however, that “children didn’t realize the sacrifices you made for them” (43), echoing Hadria’s cry,

“Disposed to Daring Innovation” 185 “Did no other woman realize the insult of it all?” (Caird, Daughters 51). Eva’s submersion of self to the drudgery of housework and the exhaustion of childcare leaves her physically and emotionally distressed, and she becomes a demonic mother taking out her frustrations on her children. She feels “resentment” toward Stephen, looks “sharply” at Helen, and is a hostile force at the dining table: “Her presence was still heavy in the room as though she sat there, brooding over them” (12, 41, 36). Eva’s confinement to the private sphere takes its toll: she has “an hysteric breakdown” (36) and, like Hadria, grows suicidal. Eva may here be the manifestation of Hadria’s longing for a “sister-soul [. . .] who shared her rage and her detestations” (Caird, Daughters 51). For Eva, “These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and the speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity” (48). Like Hadria, Eva delivers the reverse discourse of her own dominant one as she exposes the myths of motherhood. Eva resists the ideologies of successful femininity but simultaneously reveals their stranglehold. She is convinced that she was “fit for something better than scrubbing floors all her life” (50). However, “She wanted to be a good Christian woman. She wanted to do her duty”, praying, “O God, help me to be a good mother!” (50). Eva’s husband acknowledges her maternal ambivalence: “Lester never doubted that his wife loved her children with all the passion of her fiery heart, but there were times when it occurred to him that she did not like them very well” (71). He blames their predicament on himself for not making more money, and when he is fired from his job at Willing’s Emporium he too wishes to end his life. A botched suicide attempt leaves him paralyzed in a wheelchair, and Eva is forced into the public sphere to earn an income in his place. Hired to work in the Emporium’s Cloak-and-Suits department, Eva becomes a New Woman, just as Lester becomes a New Man as he delightedly assumes full-time care of the children (albeit with some assistance from the women’s Guild).4 Eva and Lester prove Pykett’s qualification that, notwithstanding Victorian gendered divisions, women and men crossed over and into both the private and public spheres to varying degrees (Improper 13). In the workforce, Eva takes on the masculine characteristics of the New Woman. She is un-femininely “tall”, she eats her breakfast downtown “in a cafeteria like a traveling-man”, and she moves with “athletic certainty” (124, 152, 159). She is made the protégé of enlightened husband-and-wife partners Jerome and Nell, whose desire to build “a modern organization” is paralleled in Eva’s modernized life (259). Not only does Eva excel at her tasks, earning a promotion to manager, but she also becomes a more liberated and thus more successful mother. Just as Hadria reveled in the “joy of freedom and its intoxication” (Caird, Daughters 91) as she embarked on a music career, so Lester wonders,

186  Elizabeth Podnieks “[w]as this Eva the same as the old one? This Eva who came in every evening tired, physically tired as he had never seen her, but appeased, satisfied, fulfilled, having poured out in work she loved the furious splendor of her vigor” (221). Understanding that Eva is not suited to be a fulltime, stay-at-home parent, the whole family is happier by “the change in Mother which they all noticed (227). Eva puts proof to Caird’s argument in “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women’ ” (and illustrated through the creative yearnings of Hadria) that, when women have been forced by “the tyranny of society, to expend their whole energies in maternal cares”, “it has destroyed the healthy balance of their nature” (Caird, “Defence” 819). As Caird concludes, and as Eva testifies, “It may seem paradoxical, but is none the less true, that we shall never have really good mothers until women cease to make their motherhood the central idea of their existence” (“Defence” 819). Having gained freedom from maternity, Eva is terrified that she will be exiled back to it if Lester should recover from his injury: “She did not want her husband to get well. She did not want to go home and live with her children” (287). The Willing business embraces modernity, but Eva’s community clings to old-fashioned spheres of separation: “If Lester got well, of course he could not stay at home and keep house and take care of the children [. . .] no able-bodied man ever did that. What would people say? It was out of the question” (287). Lester loves his new role at home, but his thinking he could remain there as a healthy man “was heresy”; he “heard the threatening snarl of that unsuspected, unquestioned Tradition, amazed that any one dared so much as to conceive of an attack on it” (313). Unlike Hubert who noted of his marriage, “I could not endure that there should be any disturbance—any eccentricity—in our life” (Caird, Daughters 41), Lester takes drastic steps to preserve the eccentricity of his so-called heretical situation. When he regains his ability to walk, he keeps the truth from Eva, choosing to feign paralysis as the only way they can both fulfill their parental objectives. At the same time, although Eva’s empowered future has been determined by her husband rather than her own free will, Lester’s decision signals that gender categories are shifting as men embrace and prioritize fatherhood.

Conclusions: Bad Mothers of Modernism Hadria and Eva are New Woman mothers whose newness spans the Victorian and modernist eras. While the traditional romance plot culminates in marriage, these protagonists appear in novels that introduce—and undermine—marriage at the beginning. Their stories unfold within the separate spheres of gender where they are delimited by motherhood and, in such a condition, are immersed in a death-in-life existence. To save themselves and to achieve independence, they seek release: Hadria expatriates to France, and Eva escapes to Willing’s Emporium. In exiling themselves

“Disposed to Daring Innovation” 187 from their children, in craving intellectual and creative stimulation, and in seeking alternate or “aberrant” maternal arrangements, the protago­ nists are versions of the New Woman who is “dangerous, a threat to the status quo” (Ledger, New 11), and a “distinctly modern ideal of selfrefashioning” (Patterson 2). The protagonists must battle Caird’s “decaying institutions” (“Defence” 828). They have limited successes: Hadria begrudgingly returns home, and Eva remains a career woman only at the cost of her husband fraudulently confining himself to a wheelchair. Concurrently, Hadria and Eva critique Caird’s “tyranny of society”. Showalter attributes the fin-de-siècle “breaking down” of “all the laws that governed sexual identity and behavior” (3) in part to transatlantic New Women. In reaction to the many disruptive women contemplating maternity outside of marriage or not even having children, public and political discourses emphasized the centrality of the nuclear family to ensure the perpetuation of rigid gendered spheres and continuation of a strong (read: white) nation. For Showalter, as we have heard, the New Woman was “an anarchic figure who threatened to turn the world upside down” (38), as constructed through a “vocabulary of insurrection and apocalypse” (39). Hadria and Eva are, ultimately, mothers who mount this insurrection. They do not necessarily repudiate maternity, but they revolt against imperatives that make it a requirement of womanhood. Through their mutual insurrections against patriarchal motherhood, and in their vanguard promotions of a “new social faith” in the autonomy of mothers, they share a commitment to renewing and transforming motherhood at the nexus of the old and the new.

Notes 1 For the dating of Pound’s “make it new” slogan, see North 162–64. 2 See, for instance, Heilmann 4; Ledger, New 2; Patterson 1–2. 3 These apply to the most pervasive New Woman icon, who is typically white, middle- and upper- class, and Anglo-American. That said, scholars like Patterson (2) and Heilmann and Beetham (1) have uncovered that the New Woman could be a racialized, hybrid, working-class, cross-cultural, and even international phenomenon. 4 Gender anxieties and rebellions apply equally to men, but are beyond the scope of this chapter.

Works Cited Allen, Grant. “Plain Words on the Woman Question.” A New Woman Reader, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson. Broadview Press, 2001, pp. 210–25. Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. Rutgers UP, 1990. Benstock, Shari. “Expatriate Modernism: Writing on the Cultural Rim.” Women’s Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. The U of North Carolina P, 1989, pp. 19–40.

188  Elizabeth Podnieks Caird, Mona. “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women’.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review (May 1892), pp. 811–29. ———. The Daughters of Danaus. Middletown: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014. Canfield, Dorothy. The Home-Maker. Academy Chicago Publishers, 1996. Egerton, George. “A Keynote to Keynotes.” Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography, edited by John Gawsworth, Ernest Benn, 1932, pp. 57–60. Fineman, Martha A. “Images of Mothers in Poverty Discourse.” Mothers in Law: Feminist Theory and the Regulation of Motherhood, edited by Martha Albertson Fineman and Isabel Karpin. Columbia UP, 1995, pp. 205–32. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Exile in the American Grain: H.D.’s Diaspora.” Women’s Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. The U of North Carolina P, 1989, pp. 87–112. Grand, Sarah. “The New Aspect of the Woman Question.” The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894–1930, edited by Martha H. Patterson. Rutgers UP, 2008, pp. 29–34. Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism. Palgrave, 2000. Heilmann, Ann, and Margaret Beetham. “Introduction.” New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930, edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham, Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–14. Ingram, Angela. “Introduction: On the Contrary, Outside of It.” Women’s Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. The U of North Carolina P, 1989, pp. 1–15. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin, 1992. Kaplan, Ann E. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. Routledge, 1992. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin De Siècle. Manchester UP, 1997. Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst. “The New Woman.” The Fin De Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880–1900, edited by Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst. Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 75–76. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New.” Bad Modernisms, edited by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Duke UP, 2006, pp. 1–17. McMahon, Deirdre H. “ ‘My Own Dear Sons’: Discursive Maternity and Proper British Bodies in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver. Ohio State UP, 2008, pp. 181–201. Miller, Jane Eldridge. Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel. The U of Chicago P, 1997. North, Michael. Novelty: A History of the New. University of Chicago Press, 2013. Ouida. “The New Woman.” The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894–1930, edited by Martha H. Patterson. Rutgers UP, 2008, pp. 33–42. Patterson, Martha H. “Introduction.” The American New Woman Revisited: A  Reader, 1894–1930, edited by Martha H. Patterson. Rutgers UP, 2008, pp. 225–50. Pykett, Lyn. Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century. Edward Arnold, 1995.

“Disposed to Daring Innovation” 189 ———. The ‘Improper Feminine’: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992. Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, and Claudia C. Klaver. “Introduction.” Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver, Ohio State UP, 2008, pp. 1–22. Schaffer, Talia. “ ‘Nothing but Foolscap and Ink’: Inventing the New Woman.” The New Woman in Fiction and Fact, edited by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 39–52. Schenck, Celeste M. “Exiled be Genre: Modernism, Canonicity, and the Politics of Exclusion.” Women’s Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. The U of North Carolina P, 1989, pp. 225–50. Scott, Bonnie Kime. “Introduction.” The Gender of Modernism: A  Critical Anthology, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott. Indiana UP, 1990, pp. 1–18. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Penguin, 1990. Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth. “Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics during the Fin-de- Siècle.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 1998, pp. 169–82. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Harper Collins, 1977.

12 “Sometimes I Pose, but Sometimes I Pose as Posing”: Stella Benson’s Early Fiction Nicola Darwood

Introduction Stella Benson’s Preface to her first novel, I Pose (1915)—“[s]ometimes I pose, but sometimes I pose as posing” (i)—indicates, perhaps, that the reader should not take everything in this novel at face value, that they should look beneath any suggestion of reality. This is a warning that should be also considered when also reading her second and third novels, This is the End (1917) and Living Alone (1919). All three can be read as experimental texts, ones that utilize elements of realist fiction, fin de siècle proto-feminism, and responses to impending modernity. As Richard Allen and Dennis Walder note, however, there is no one “hard and fast definition of the realist novel” (192); Allen and Walder chart a pathway through the realist literature of the nineteenth century, from the portrayal “in extensive detail [of] what the author knew at first hand of the conditions of Manchester working-class people” in Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), to R. L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) which “brought readers to the edges of their seats with excitement as the adventure unfolded . . . but [with] an undercurrent of realism in the description of people and places” (192–93). André Brink suggests that due to “the turmoil of uncertainty” that became increasingly prominent as the nineteenth century progressed, society’s “self-confident faith in reason and reason’s access to the real” and “faith in representation” began to waver, as “mankind started dreaming in a different key” (1). This chapter argues that Benson’s novels offer an alternative, although arguably utopian, view of the future for women that reflects this dreaming in a different key. Benson proposes a world of equality where women can, without hindrance or social castigation, live independent lives and, if they so desire, seek their “soul’s remotest/And stillest place” (I Pose xi). Yet in creating this alternative future Benson draws frequently on the narratives of a Victorian past, often utilizing the realist traditions she claimed to reject, and negotiating, often evolving in her own way, other tendencies seen in nineteenth-century fiction, such as a turn to elements of the supernatural through use of alternative, DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-17

Stella Benson’s Early Fiction 191 sometimes magical, spaces, and a consideration of themes including the role of women in society in narrative form and changing perceptions of the self as psychology gained greater traction in the late 1800s. The three novels have similar motifs, but the journey that women have to make in order to gain some sense of freedom is consistent across all three texts. I Pose follows the story of a gardener and a suffragette (both unnamed) as they travel across the ocean, “exploring the adoption of new poses in a world where the old stereotypes no longer work” (Trodd 73). While actively promoting the right of women to vote, the suffragette is also aware of the limitations of her gender in early-twentieth-century society. Debra Rae Cohen argues that Benson’s two subsequent novels (This is the End and Living Alone) utilize “a complex interplay of realism and fantasy” in order to discuss the “conflicting ideologies on the home front” (Remapping the Home Front 48–49). In a novel that discusses issues such as the savagery of war and female independence, This is the End opens with a startling statement, one which could be seen as nihilistic: “[t]his is the end, for the moment, of all my thinking, this is my unfinal conclusion” (This is the End 1). Benson develops her discussion of a woman’s desire to be allowed to live independently during a time of war, the narrator telling the story of Jay Martin who has escaped the restrictions of her so-called family. Living Alone is the most optimistic novel of the three, and deals, in part, with situations faced by many during World War I; however, Benson claims in the foreword, “[t]his is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people” (Living Alone v).

Reading, Writing, Showing Off Benson writes at length in her diaries about books she has read; her diaries indicate that she was a voracious reader, often reading a book a day. It is evident that she was keen to read contemporary, experimental poets and authors such as Thomas Sturge Moore, Dorothy Richardson— despite Benson’s dislike of Pointed Roofs, a novel which deals with “feminine sacrifice” according to May Sinclair (qtd in Johnson 113)—and Ford Maddox Ford (reading The Good Soldier on January 3, 1918). She also attended exhibitions by avant-garde painters such as one organized by Spencer Gore in March 1916, although she was not complimentary about his art. Commenting on the exhibition and making it clear that she did not approve of Futurist art either, Benson writes that she had “no sympathy for Impressionist Art if it doesn’t produce on me a recognisable impression”, continuing “I do not like to have to retire backwards into the street to try and find out what certain splodges are,  & even then never know. After all an Impressionist is not a futurist, he should convey something” (Diary 4.3.1916). While Benson may have sought out modernist fiction, some critics believe that her writing should not be

192  Nicola Darwood considered in the same light. In an essay in which her own disapproval of modernist writers is evident, Hyde asks “[w]hy is the genius of Stella Benson not better appreciated among her contemporaries?” She continues: “[b]reaking their necks, themselves, to achieve new tricks and gadgets, they looked about for Stella Benson’s trick or gadget, and could not find it”. Hyde concludes that Stella’s books are in a world of their own. She is neither recognised ‘highbrow’ nor would the ‘lowbrow’ understand her. But . . . she had an insight into the fatal flaw of twentieth century construction—its dehumanising character—and she knew exactly how to reveal it. (qtd in Lloyd) Benson’s innovations, then, do not fit standard molds of modernist experimentalism. Anthea Trodd argues that Benson’s fiction falls outside the “canonical Modernism” of Richardson, Mansfield, and Woolf (71). She states that Benson’s treatment of the great contemporary public experiences as they impinged on the individual was one attempt to bridge the gap between the documentarist novelist who discussed urgent topical subjects with traditional fictional methods, and the modernists who experimented with new forms of representation of private experience and consciousness. (74) Other critics have stressed the similarity between Benson and nineteenth-century writers. Cohen states that Benson’s “idiosyncratic fauxnaif style led puzzled reviewers to compare her work to Kipling’s fairy tales” (Remapping the Home Front 49). Benson’s diaries indicate that she admired Kipling (another writer whose innovations defy categorization), recording, for example, that she has been re-reading both Dickens and Kipling (cited in Baldwin Davis 3). Benson’s early fiction highlights her experimental style. Her choice of number and length of chapters of I Pose—the first chapter runs to over 300 pages, while the second (and last) chapter, whose concluding lines read “Yes. I pose of course. But the question is—how deep may a pose extend?” (I Pose 313) occupies a mere nine pages—suggests an authorial manipulation of the reader, altering the pace of the novel, and producing a coda to the main text. At the end of the first chapter, a reader might suppose that the suffragette and the gardener are to marry, but the ending of the novel also signifies the ending of the suffragette’s life and the gardener’s decision to cease posing. It is the narrator, though, who has the last word, having spoken the first words, and so the reader, faced with the fluidity of identity and of reality which arose during World War I, is left to wonder who is really posing: the author, the narrator, or the reader?

Stella Benson’s Early Fiction 193 The title of the novel—I Pose—the preface, and the concluding lines suggest an element of performativity, of identity which is not fixed. The centrality of the self to Benson’s fiction suggests a focus on what George Johnson has since termed “dynamic psychology”, a new field of psychology developed by the nineteenth-century thinkers Frederic Myers and William James, which considered the nature of selfhood. Johnson argues that a number of writers “rapidly absorbed but also interrogated these new constructions of selfhood and generated eclectic, multi-layered approaches to characterisation” (1). Although Benson is not discussed in Johnson’s text, it can be argued that her approach to the idea of the self can be read in terms of nineteenth-century literature which engages with dynamic psychology, that is texts which “attend to unconscious and subliminal motivation [. . . within] a construct of realism” (4). The gardener of I Pose is not the only Benson character, however, who deliberately chooses which pose, or identity, to adopt on any given day; this is also a trait of both Jay and Anonyma Gustus (This is the End). Jay poses as a bus conductor in order to earn sufficient money to live (although she works very hard to be a good bus conductor), whereas Anonyma’s posing is borne out of vanity, and perhaps out of a need to protect herself against the vicissitudes of the uncertainties inherent during the war. She poses as a creature of simplicity but, as the narrator divulges, “[s]he had simplified her life and her looks” and then continues “[n]ow to be simple is all very well, but turn it into an active verb and you spoil the whole idea. To simplify seems forced, and I think Mrs Gustus struck harder on the note of simplification than that of simplicity” (Benson This is the End 7–8). The opening poem of Living Alone, “The Dweller Alone”, expands upon notions of identity and the divided self. In the fifth, and final, stanza the speaker alludes to the division between the corporeal and the soul, or perhaps Freudian concepts of id and the ego that gained increasing prominence toward the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, stating “I will divorce my Self” and continuing: I am free of indecision Of blood, and weariness, and of all things cruel. I have sold my Self for silence, for the jewel Of silence, and the shadow of a vision. (xii) In an article published in 1933, Benson writes that I Pose, “was written in order to show off; it was an exercise in deliberate self-revelation, as I  imagine all books by authors in their early twenties are” (“About my books” 39). Benson’s “deliberate self-revelation” can be construed as self-conscious experimentation; its narrative structure and content can be considered an excellent foundation stone for her later fiction. In addition to the length of the chapters, authorial manipulation can be

194  Nicola Darwood seen in Benson’s use of her narrators who can be read as major characters in these three novels.1 There are numerous occasions of narratorial direct address in the novels, for example, in I Pose, the narrator often poses questions which she then answers: “Whose idea was it to make money round? I sometimes feel certain I could control it better if it were square” (8). The narrator of Living Alone also occupies a central position in the novel; it is the narrator in this instance who places the text in its (fictional) geographical location: “I don’t suppose for a moment that you know Mitten Island: it is a difficult place to get to; you have to change buses seven times going from Kensington, and then you have to cross the river by means of a ferry” (21). This narratorial address, however, is an innovation honed by earlier novelists; the use of an intrusive narrator is one that can be found in nineteenth-century fiction, for example in George Eliot’s Silas Marner, indicating a thread that can be seen to join the different narrative strategies of writers across the two centuries. While Benson’s choice of narrators is interesting, one of the more striking devices she employs is the use of poetry not just to mark the beginning and end of her early novels, but also as punctuation marks throughout This is the End. This mixing of poetry and prose is reminiscent of the multi-genre format of popular nineteenth-century literary magazines, such as The Century Magazine (discussed by Jayme Yahr in Chapter 2). Benson’s poems act as anaphoric references, interacting with her prose content to provide a poetic overview of either the book, or the following chapter, or serving to both introduce new ideas and reinforce emotions expressed in the novel. The opening poem of I Pose, for example, highlights the loss that many will experience during the war: “[I]t’s such a little thing to die/. . . We do not care—my Friend and I,/. . . we have no eyes/For Heaven . . . or Hell . . . or dreams like these” (ii). There are seven major poems in This is the End (with some snippets of poetry throughout the novel) each one marking the end of a chapter and, with one exception, introducing ideas which will be explored in the succeeding chapter. Placed just before the second chapter, an unnamed poem indicates the psychological strength that Jay derives from a secret daydream at a time when “[m]y yesterday has gone, and left me tired”, where the speaker can hide her “heart away before to-morrow kills it” (39). Benson believed, intriguingly, that she was a better prose writer than poet; in a letter to Naomi Mitchison (sent sometime in 1929) Benson says, “I cannot repeat too often—I am absolutely not a poet at all—not even poetic .  .  . This isn’t humility. I  think I  am rather a good writer apart from poetry” (qtd in Mitchison 134). While Benson may not have had a great deal of faith in her poetic abilities, Mitchison reports that at a talk she gave at Oxford in which she quoted from one of Benson’s poems, a young poet “was fearfully interested in yours especially ‘Every Tree . . .’. He is a man called Auden, aged twenty two and with any luck the real thing” (136).

Stella Benson’s Early Fiction 195

Explorations of the Female Self A second poem in I Pose, which also verges on the nihilistic and which, to a certain extent, relates once more to the loss of certainty experienced in World War I, is placed between the first and second chapters of this novel. This poem again suggests death, in this instance the death which follows the suffragette’s decision that she cannot bear to lose her identity in marriage:

Tomorrow it shall be my goal To throw myself away from me, To lose the outline of my soul Against the greyness of the sea. (303)

Actively involved with the suffrage movement following the death of Emily Davison at the Epsom Derby, Benson worked in the office of the United Suffragists and for the Women Writers Suffrage League. As Sandra Kemp et  al. note, the suffrage movement was a “major polemical focus” of fiction following the foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903, a focus which meant that novels moved away from the traditional marriage plot with its associated “guarantee of formal closure” and instead had “not only a new subject-matter, but a new shape” (xiv), a new shape that can be seen in Benson’s own narrative structures. Benson is not the first to question a woman’s role in society; such debates took place in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with George Eliot or George Egerton, for example, explicitly writing about the inequalities inherent in society. In her depiction of the suffragette’s struggles, Benson again continues to explore issues brought to the larger attention of the public by Victorian writers, especially in the novels of fin de siècle writers. Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers locate a certain independence of form as the possession of modernist women writers who lived as they wrote, lived what they wrote, wrote what they lived. If the conventions of syntax or narrative technique must be abandoned, so too must the conventions of morality, behaviour and expectation. The modernist woman is not unconventional; she is anti-conventional, wishing her creative energy to take every form of expression available to her. (10–11) Benson’s unconventional writing style, however, derives in part from her use of the realistic, matter-of-fact tone through which nineteenth-century novelists introduced characters by describing their key traits and characteristics. This is particularly evident in the narrator’s first mention of Jay, the protagonist of This is the End: “I want to introduce you to Jay”, a

196  Nicola Darwood “bus-conductor and an idealist. She is not the heroine, but the most constantly apparent woman in this book. I cannot introduce you to a heroine because I have never met one” (2). One of the problems of periodizing women writers by labels such as “Victorian” or “modern” is that it has the effect of stereotyping their formal experiments or engagements with different forms of culture. Celeste Schenk notes that women writers have always been “subjected to competing stereotypes”, being seen as either “beneath” the complex poetic cultures of modernist experiment— “too mired in nature to master the codes or poetic form”—or being seen “upholders” of forms of Victorian culture so often seen as “rigid, conservative, form-bound, repressive of spontaneity and experimentation” (228). In reality, Benson’s formal experiments moved far beyond these polarized extremes. Her own personal background reflected her movement between conventionality and more unorthodox ways of living. Born in 1892 into a wealthy family, Benson had left home at the age of 21 to live in Kensington, seeking to make her own way in life. Phyllis Bottome provides a rationale for Benson’s move away from the family home believing that “the mere fact of her being ‘born’ and possessing distinguished relatives2 handicapped her natural gifts . . . so she stripped herself to the bone, to face the world, unprivileged” (2).3 Benson appears to have been determined to be anticonventional, eschewing both a comfortable existence in her family home and, initially, ideas of marriage. Benson later moved to the impoverished area of Hoxton in London, the area which appears in a number of her novels as Brown Borough, and began to work for the Charity Organisation Society, seeing at first hand the dehumanizing nature of poverty highlighted particularly in A. S. Jasper’s account of his childhood. Benson’s growing disillusionment with her ability to effect significant change in Hoxton is apparent in an article that she wrote in 1919 about her experiences during the war: The march of civilisation is not a particularly well-organized procession: sometimes it almost seems as if the stragglers outnumber those who keep in step. . . . In the van of the march the music brays confidently, wearying the ears of heaven with its brazen boastings of progress. .  .  . Perhaps Heaven only hears the boasting, perhaps Heaven has washed its hands of us, perhaps after all we are but dirt and deserve nothing better. (“Little Back Room” qtd in Bedell 3) Even in her discussions of the London poor, however, Benson writes against the accepted view that charitable organizations are there to assist the poor. The narrator of Living Alone highlights the opposing position, that some charities hinder and interfere in the lives of others: “[t]he more committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand”

Stella Benson’s Early Fiction 197 continuing that “[w]hen your daily round becomes nothing more than a daily round of committees you might as well be dead” (5). On the front page of her diary for 1918, Benson transcribed a poem which she finished writing on June 14, 1918, called “Detachment”. Living Alone starts with this poem, now renamed “The Dweller Alone” (which is the title of the last chapter of the novel). In addition to its themes of identity and the divided self, the poem further explores the horrors of war and the desire of the speaker to find a place of silence, away from the pain of living through that time. The speaker cries out:

I will make my dwelling Far from my Self. Not through those hind’ring tears Will I see men’s tears shed. Not with these ears Will I hear news that tortures in the telling. I will go seeking for my soul’s remotest And stillest place. (xi)

Arguably it is that “stillest place” that Benson was searching for her in her early twenties, a search that manifested itself in her anti-conventional life during that period and which probably provided her with both the creative environment within which she felt able to write, and also much of the material that can be found in her early novels. It is interesting to note, for example, that in these three novels Benson departs from the conventional marriage plot of earlier, populist fiction and adopts fin de siècle fiction’s tendency, particularly New Women fiction, to discard this trope. Describing “the transition from the modernism of content to the modernism of form”, Jane Miller notes that writers in the early twentieth century were: eager to discard what [H G] Wells termed ‘the sawdust doll’—the conventional heroine who, although presented in a variety of guises, basically served as an embodiment of British society’s stereotypes of femininity, and tended to be insipid and unrealistic—and tended to write about modern women realistically, with psychological complexity and sexual frankness. (3–4) In Living Alone, Sarah Brown, while not, perhaps, exhibiting “sexual frankness”, appears to neither expect love or marriage, nor does she completely regret its lack.4 Bedell suggests that “Sarah accepts herself as she is. She does not judge herself by others’ standards . . . She is what she is” (57). It is, perhaps, this acceptance of what she is that makes Sarah a truly feminist character—she has an ability to proceed through life without being concerned about the judgment of others, an ability that allows her to be herself, living alone. This is an attribute shared by

198  Nicola Darwood the suffragette in I Pose who is not worried that she should be thought of as the gardener’s wife, even though she has eschewed all notions of “the love craving” (61). Catherine Clay has noted Benson’s engagement with Freud and the emerging field of sexology founded in the late-Victorian period by, among others, Havelock Ellis, suggesting that “Stella’s reflections on her reading point further to her own complex negotiations of sex and gender roles” (108). Benson’s interest in Freud deepened on her voyage back to England in April  1921; she believed that “Freud would discover what it was in my childhood that made me so walled away, so unable to be a real woman and express womanliness and receive manliness” (qtd in Clay 108). She explores notions of sexuality and physical touch in Living Alone where the narrator states that Sarah: could not bear touch. She had no pleasure in seeing or feeling the skin and homespun that encloses men and women. She hated to watch people feeding themselves, or to see her own thin body in the mirror. She ought really to have been born a poplar tree; a human body was a gift wasted on her. (188–89) In her diaries, Benson records her own feelings about intimacy and physical contact which find an echo in Sarah’s thoughts. Following a walk during her first stay in America in 1918, Benson notes that: “[Bertha] Pope hugged me that we might get warm, & this, the closest physical contact I have ever known, made me feel sick, because I am deficient somehow & hate physical touch, but we got warmer” (qtd in Brandon 232. Just a few months later on October 17, 1918, Benson wrote, “I am worried by horrible and decadent thoughts just now, if I ever get insane I know the form my madness will take. It is this matter of bodies, which I cannot take simply, or dismiss from my mind, a sort of hatred of the outward view of people seizes me” (qtd in Brandon 232; Diary 1918), continuing, however, “I  am sure I  should make a poor nurse to anybody sick just now; however I promised that if Miss Pope got flu only I would go near her” (Diary 1918), a statement which provides a coda to her “hatred of the outward view of people”.

Conclusions This essay has drawn considerably on Benson’s diaries held at Cambridge University Library, but perhaps the reader of both those diaries and this essay should be wary for as Benson states in “Sitting in Corners”: [a] diary—even a cruelly honest diary—is a kind of home-made lover. .  .  . Diaries are like dreams, an inward consolation to the

Stella Benson’s Early Fiction 199 outwardly humiliated. In dreams, in diaries, we may be wicked, we may be false, we may be utterly cast down. .  .  . In diaries and in dreams, we are at least interesting—we are acknowledged individuals. (16) I would argue that this comment, which should perhaps be read in relation to her own diaries kept in such a turbulent time—when modern notions of sexuality, individuality, identity, and morality were in constant flux, where modes of narration and experimentation were being renegotiated—returns us to the opening statement of I Pose: “[s]ometimes I pose, but sometimes I pose as posing”. In her invocation of various genres and novelistic styles, it sometimes feels as if Benson is both negotiating the role of storyteller and the narration of difficult subjects. Benson’s second and third novels, for example, utilize humor and fantasy, but this does not diminish her presentation of the loss felt by both the individual and society in times of violence. She wrote against much of the jingoistic literature that was available at the time, refusing to conform to conventional wartime language. Bedell argues that “there is nothing in Stella’s letters to show she had any doubts about the justice of war, or the justice of the Allied cause in the Great War” (36), but the sacrifices made during the war are very evident in both these novels and Benson’s diaries. Writing about This is the End, she states that “it was written in a mood of innocent and bloodless romance—a mood in which visions seem to be things in themselves, not symbols of reality or escapes from reality” (“About my Books” 39). The introspective nature of this novel is replaced in Living Alone by a less solipsistic view of the world, thus providing a fuller picture of some of the issues faced by those living in the East End of London during the time of air raids toward the latter part of the war. Having experimented with the supernatural world in her collection of poems, Twenty (1918), Benson suggests that Living Alone is: a rather more sophisticated approach to fairies and this was the first of my books the writing of which interested me impersonally—the first in fact, that was in some measure a book about other people, not only about myself in different masochistic or romantic or inverted guises. Now [1933] I think that no novel is worth reading unless it is about other people—with oneself (if one must enter at all) only as one centre among many centres. (“About my Books” 39–40; emphasis original) This preference for narrating the lives of other people reflects earlier late-nineteenth-century exhortations for literary constructions of empathy and tolerance, as explored in Kathryn Laing’s discussion of F. Mabel Robinson’s “ethical aesthetics” (see Chapter 8).

200  Nicola Darwood Yet in writing about “other people”, arguably employing a distancing mechanism so that she could write about issues about which she felt strongly, Benson also borrowed from another common but often overlooked nineteenth-century vogue for borrowing “fantasy structures” (Cohen, “Encoded Enclosures” 39), most notably in her employment of a witch as her central character; there are numerous witches in lateVictorian fiction, for example, Francis Marion Crawford’s The Witch of Prague (1890) or Frank L. Baum’s The Witches of Oz (1900). As Cohen argues, in Living Alone, Benson “underscores the transgressiveness of pacifistic notions, for example, by investing their holders with magical or creative abilities that themselves deform an ostensibly ‘realistic text’ ” (“Encoded Enclosures” 49). This can be seen particularly in the aerial argument between the two witches in the two central chapters of Living Alone; the first is “An Air Raid Seen from Below” and the second, “An Air Raid Seen from Above”. The latter charts the battle, both verbal and physical, between the witch and her German counterpart with the witch questioning the wartime policy of air raids asking: “do you find it does much good in the war against Evil to drop bombs on people in their homes? After all, every baby is good in bed, and even soldiers when on leave are anti-militarist” (145). By giving these thoughts to the witch, to a person of magic, Benson is arguably writing about “other people” and distancing herself from these views, but she is voicing them at a time when they might not have been popular with those who wanted to promote the war as a heroic, patriotic adventure. She writes very effectively in her diary about her concerns with the morality of war. On January 12, 1916, for example, she states: “I cannot stop myself every morning as I wake, thinking of death coming in the dark to strong young bodies that have never even known pain. I think the hearts of all of us will be several degrees more dead before this is done”. Just 12 days later, on January 24, 1916, she writes: “I think war is wickedness run amok, & that everyone concerned must be tainted a little. We can’t sit on a pinnacle and say we are without fault” (Diary 1916) and then, on Tuesday January 1, 1918, Benson sets out her own views about the continuing horrors of war: This year, one would say, must be a year of unimaginable things, because anything but war is unimaginable, and yet it must end. The end of the war seems post-historic so to speak, it is like getting into the impossible. These three years, though, have been impossible years, like going through an enchanted forest, where things that can’t happen happen. So now there is no good in looking backward or in looking forward, it is all a terrible mistake, the world has lost the trick of being real. (Diary 1918)

Stella Benson’s Early Fiction 201 This demonstrates how, despite drawing on the earlier innovations of Victorian writers to forge new representations of society and the place of women, Benson also understood the importance of grounding her experiments in a strong sense of the present, especially as this present became increasingly threatened by ongoing uncertainties about war. In 1979, Naomi Mitchison reflected on the lives of the authors she met in the 1920s and 1930s. One of these writers was Stella Benson with whom she corresponded from the 1920s onwards. Arguing initially that “[i]t may well be time for a Stella Benson revival”, she later considers why it might be that Benson fell out of favor: “[i]t’s the touch of what one must call whimsy that I would suggest makes her work unacceptable now” (29). However, it is Benson’s mixture of older genres of fantasy and realism in these three early novels which, arguably, make them far more acceptable now for a twenty-first-century readership. In her experimentation and subversions of older forms and genres, Benson writes texts that explore the issues of war, gender, and sexuality in a time which is filled with the horror of hearing “news that tortures in the telling” (Living Alone xi). She may have claimed that a novel like Living Alone did not “deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people”, but Benson’s innovative drawing together of realism, fantasy, empathy, and transgressive representations of women, together with her coverage of real events, leaves this claim unproven.

Notes 1 Although it is difficult, of course, to assign gender to a nameless narrator, for the purposes of this essay, I shall refer to the narrators as “she”. 2 Her aunt, Mary Cholmondley, was the author of many novels, including Red Pottage (1899). 3 A full, if rather subjective, view of Benson’s early life can be found in R. Ellis Roberts’ Portrait of Stella Benson. 4 Benson’s own attitude to marriage changed over time; on her travels back from San Francisco she met, and eventually married, Shaemas O’Gorman Anderson.

Works Cited Allen, Richard, and Walder, Dennis. “Can Realist Novels Survive?’ ” Approaching Literature: The Realist Novel, edited by Dennis Walder, Routledge, 1995, pp. 191–206. Baldwin Davis, Marlene. “Guiding Spirit: Stella Benson’s Aunt Mary.” Mary Cholmondeley Reconsidered, edited by Caroline de la L Oulton and SueAnn Schatz, Pickering & Chatto, 2010, pp. 117–30. Bedell, R. Meredith. Stella Benson. Twayne Publishers, 1983. Benson, Stella. “About my Books.” Ten Contemporaries: Notes towards the Definitive Bibliography, edited by John Gawsworth, Joiner and Steele, 1933, pp. 39–43.

202  Nicola Darwood ———. Diary 1916 (Add MS 6775), Cambridge University Library. ———. Diary 1917 (Add MS 6776), Cambridge University Library ———. Diary 1918 (Add MS 6777), Cambridge University Library ———. Diary 1918 (Add MS 6778), Cambridge University Library ———. I Pose (1915). Michael Walmer, 2013. ———. Living Alone (1919). Bibliolife, 2007. ———. “Sitting in Corners.” Worlds with Worlds (1928). Macmillan and Co Ltd, 9–17. ———. This is the End (1917). Michael Walmer, 2014. ———. Worlds within Worlds. 1928. Macmillan and Co Ltd. Bottome, Phyllis. Stella Benson. Albert M Bender, 1934. Brandon, William. “Stella Benson: Letters to Laura Hutton 1915–1919.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 1984, pp. 225–46 Brink, André. “Introduction: Languages of the Novel.” The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino, edited by André Brink, The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1998, pp. 1–19. Clay, Catherine, British Women Writers 1914–1945: Professional Work and Friendship. Ashgate, 2006. Cohen, Debra Rae. “Encoded Enclosures: The Wartime Novels of Stella Benson.” The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory, edited by Patrick Quinn and Steven Trout, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 37–54. ———. Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction. Northeastern UP, 2002. Hanscombe, Gillian, and Virginia L. Smyers. Writing for their Lives: The Modernist Woman 1910–1940. The Woman’s Press Limited, 1987. Jasper, A. S. A Hoxton Childhood. 1969. Blinding Books, 2013. Johnson, George M. Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Lloyd, Bronwyn. “Unearthing Stella Benson.” http://mairangibay.blogspot. co.uk/2008/01/unearthing-stella-benson.html. Accessed July 4, 2020. Miller, Jane Eldridge. Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel. Virago Press, 1994. Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920–1940. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1975. Roberts, R. Ellis. Portrait of Stella Benson. Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1939. Schenck, Celeste M. “Exiled by Genre: Modernism, Canonicity and the Politics of Exclusion.” Women’s Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, The U of North Carolina P, 1989, pp. 225–50. Trodd, Anthea. Women’s Writing in English: Britain 1900–1945. Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. Tylee, Claire. The Great War and Women’s Consciousness. The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1990.

13 Parsing Between-ness: Love, Looking Backward and Forward, in Charlotte Mew’s Short Fiction Kristen Renzi Introduction: Beyond Queerness/Toward Between-ness The few critics today who engage the oeuvre of British poet and fiction writer Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) insist, almost myopically, on her queerness. And indeed, Mew’s queerness is, by most accounts, multifaceted and robust. Penelope Fitzgerald, Mew’s biographer, reads Mew’s spinsterhood as the result of Mew’s sublimated erotico-romantic attachment; added to this sexual queerness—of homosexual desires at times expressed but most often denied—Mew’s adult gender performance was fluid and contradictorily queer: she wore “a mannish black velvet jacket and tweed skirt”, cut her hair short, “used rough language” and struck close friends as “a queer mixture . . . neither quite boy nor quite girl” (Fitzgerald 61, 64, 115). Yet despite Mew’s gender-bending dress and social performance, she also “never left home for long, never became . . . a suffragette or even a suffragist, never made any attempt to claim political or sexual freedom” (Fitzgerald 50). Instead, Mew lived at home, a dutiful unmarried daughter throughout her life. Even using Butler’s lens of gender performativity, in which gender is “the repeated stylization of the body” (Butler 45) rather than an essential component of self, Mew’s repetitions were at odds with one another, queering via contradiction any sense of uniform performance. Mew’s vexed gender performance helps explain her professional trajectory. On the one hand, her employment as a writer, meager though it was, thrust her into the environs and trappings of the New Woman movement. With Mew’s publication in The Yellow Book in 1894, for instance, came a host of associations with a new, daring modernity. Mew “ranged about London in her tailor-mades and close-cropped hair, dropping in on new acquaintances, or watching the street life” alongside women who frequented London by bicycle “without fear, without chaperones” (Fitzgerald 63, 64). On the other hand, Mew was reticent to embrace some of even the partial freedoms new womanhood might have offered. Though she traveled to Paris on her own, for instance, she was unable to “go into a café by herself”, and despite working for a living throughout DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-18

204  Kristen Renzi adulthood, Mew only took on discrete jobs and maintained a home that was “ludicrously more than [she and her family] could afford”, purely for the sake of respectability and a “good address” (Fitzgerald 84, 193, 193). These irreconcilables posit Mew as uncomfortably on the brink of new womanhood: her flirtation with radicalism was contradicted, queerly, by her allegiance to norms of nineteenth-century femininity. Yet these more conventional fin-de-siècle senses of queerness—a sexual identity and gender performance in tension with traditional domestic heteronormativity, an engagement with and estrangement from new womanhood—are dwarfed in Mew’s biography and criticism by her more spectacular otherness. Plagued by a family history of schizophrenia (two of Mew’s siblings lived out the majority of their lives in asylums) and tragedy (two other Mew siblings died in childhood), Mew seems, from a young age, to have articulated herself as an otherworldly being: a “restless ghos[t]” (Fitzgerald 36). From her childhood enchantment with fairies and changelings to her late-adulthood paranoia of being buried alive, Charlotte Mew seemed to exist between two worlds: the real and the supernatural, the flesh and the spirit. In her writings, too, critics have focused on her dual-world investments: just as her contemporaries noted Mew appeared possessed when she read her poetry, her critics today often highlight her sympathetic engagement with speakers and characters who challenge the boundaries between life and death through their emotional and erotic attachments to deceased loved ones.1 Here, Mew’s biography is not merely suggestive; it portrays a writer who was tortured by both the permeability of the grave and by her displacement within the world. These points are reasonable critical responses to a series of writings at turns strange and fascinating, created by a woman who could be described in like terms. What I find troubling about such readings is not that they mark her queerness; it is the danger that, in doing so—or in characterizing her queerness as “otherness” alone—we as critics are likely to miss the crucial ways in which Charlotte Mew is not so much “other” as “between”. Indeed, this is an issue Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir touches upon in Chapter 14’s discussion of the conflicted desires of the Icelandic writer Halldór Kiljan Laxness. Mew’s sexual preference for women might appear to be untroublingly “other”; yet we might posit that what most marks Mew’s tortured relationship to her sexuality is not her “otherness” but rather her “between-ness”—that is, her position of being caught between, on the one hand, an embrace of her natural desires and, on the other, a disgust for these desires (Fitzgerald 82–87, 127–41). Rather than viewing Mew’s caughtness as evidence of her idiosyncratic contradictory nature, I  suggest we might productively view Mew as both contradictory and representative—as an embodiment of a contradictory time, one caught between tradition and radicalism, between familial duty and personal fulfillment. Rather than situating Mew outside of the temporal, as a half-spectral figure both haunting and haunted, I  will, in the following pages, make a

Parsing Between-ness 205 case for viewing Mew as a very temporally-located, fin-de-siècle writer: a writer whose fictional experiments are located between epochs and whose contradictory queerness, caughtness, and topical and generic strangeness are indicative and reflective of such a location. That we have not seen Mew’s displacement-cum-caughtness as indicative of her temporal location need not surprise. The traditional canonical approach to British literature of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries has been divided along the useful, albeit limiting, parameters of Victorian, Modernist, and the bridge category Edwardian. Each of these terms carries its own set of not merely temporal but also esthetic, stylistic, and even political orientations, assumptions, and values. When faced with individual writers who, like Charlotte Mew, seem to fall in the interstices of such academic parameters, the critical tendency has been to either neglect treating the author within the canon (or even as addendums to this canon) or else attempt to pinpoint the author and her innovations more decisively to one era. Consequently, the following type of entrée into the study of Mew’s work is not uncommon: If Mew were to be categorized as a type, then perhaps she must be called either a New Woman or a Yellow Book aesthete; yet neither of these designations fully explains either her poetic subject matter, or her style. Critics such as Angela Leighton and Celeste M. Schenck differ on their placement of Mew into a tradition. Whereas Leighton classifies Mew as the last Victorian, Schenck views her as one of the founders of a female modernism. Leighton’s discussion of Mew’s style is thorough, but I believe that it strengthens the case for Mew’s modernism, rather than her Victorianism. (Rice 12) This quote discusses (and categorizes) Mew as both an individual and as a writer. In terms of Mew’s individual categorization (“type”), there is a verbal reluctance—seen in Rice’s “perhaps she must be called”—to label Mew. This reluctance is followed by a review of contradictory critical categorizations of Mew’s work, and it concludes with Rice’s eventual, if nuanced, affiliation with one over the other. The categorical challenge Mew’s work provokes is also tied to the problem of gender, particularly a certain version of feminine generic embrace that scholarly treatments of modernism have tended to eschew. As Rice cannily notes: “the women poets from the modernist time period who did not discard the sentimental . . . have been considered old fashioned and therefore bad writers. Because they chose to remain in the womb/ room in the suburb, the breeding-ground of the sentimental, their literary production was suspect” (10). Here, Rice’s insight—shared by critics such as Suzanne Clark and Celeste M. Schenck, among others—is that modernism’s generic rejection of the sentimental and the domestic is not

206  Kristen Renzi a monolithic esthetic shift but rather a gender-narrowed interpretation of the modernist movement.2 Such insight reminds us that it is a challenge incumbent upon literary critics to remain vigilant to the ways in which our epistemic constructions foreclose consideration of certain authors and texts, particularly because such knowledge-produced foreclosures are so difficult to recognize as our own blindnesses. In what follows, I deliberately opt not to take sides in the categorization debate concerning Mew. Instead, I sidestep at least some of periodization’s inevitable narrowing and argue that Mew’s work—specifically her fiction—evinces a gender-specific form of fin-de-siècle “betweenness”. Focusing on a handful of tales—“Some Ways of Love” (1901), “An Open Door” (1903), “The Smile” (1914), and “The Wheat” (posthumously published in 1954)—I will argue that Mew’s stories trouble a straightforward literary trajectory. Not only are Mew’s works temporally located at the century’s turn, but they also, and more importantly, engage a formal and content-based betweenness, specifically as they depict characters’ struggles with love. Though these stories by and large engage with romance on the domestic front, we would be too hasty to dismiss them as mere domestic sentimentality. In an effort to unpack the particular interstitial amalgam of past and future that exemplifies fin-de-siècle love, I will show that Mew’s stories evince an erratic relationship to temporality and genre. Their originality is defined by their embrace of formal/conceptual notions of fairytale, myth, and sentimental romance which have often been characterized as traditional nineteenth-century conventions but could also be, in fact, innovative and genre-defining, and experimentalist prose forms such as stream-of-consciousness or fragmentary writings that are more commonly associated with literary newness.

Some Contents of Love Despite Rice’s assertion that Mew was a Yellow Book type—independent, perhaps decadent, certainly verging on the avant-garde—only one of her published fictional pieces (her first one, “Passed” (1894)) was housed in this periodical. Many of her subsequent stories first appeared in the more wholesome, middle-class Temple Bar, though “Some Ways of Love”, the first of the fictional texts I’ll treat here, was originally published in 1901 in Pall Mall Magazine. The titular modifier of “Some Ways of Love” makes no grand claims of universality; however, its epigraph (drawn from Anatole France’s Les Opinions de Jérôme Coignard (1893)), which posits “the cruel nothingness of love [le néant cruel de l’amour]” as emergent from souls’ inability to access each other, bespeaks an essentialist pessimism-cum-nihilism that seems at home within high modernity (Mew, “Some Ways” 103). Yet the fact that the story begins in an attempt to define love’s problematics in and of itself positions Mew’s tale as one that falls on the

Parsing Between-ness 207 cusp of the modern; Kate Flint notes in her introduction to Victorian Love Stories that while “in conventional romantic fiction there appears to be little heart-searching over how to define ‘love,’ ” in the literature of the 1890s (particularly the short story), these questions were raised in response to an increasing “anxiety about the status and implications of love” (x, xi) This tension between the philosophical claim and the individual experience continues throughout the story, which opens as the protagonist Alan Henley’s marriage proposal is denied by Ella Hopedene before Alan sails to India. Though Ella frees Alan to pursue other women, he declares himself bound to her and vows to ask again for her hand upon his return. While away, he meets another woman (Mildred Playfair), with whom he falls in love. Though he intends to keep his word and renew his offer to Ella, he fully expects a refusal, after which he’ll be free to marry his new love, Mildred. Instead, he finds a dying Ella, who confesses to having always loved him but to have denied this in order to protect his interests. When Alan renews his offer, Ella still refuses to marry him; however, she proposes a compromise instead: she asks him to be “comrades” and to “keep watch with [her]” until “the enemy strikes” (Mew, “Some Ways” 110). This curious martial metaphor recalls Alan’s earlier admiration for Ella; he declares her, in conversation with Mildred, to be full of a “fine unfeminine courage . . . that trapped [his] fancy” (Mew, “Some Ways” 107). He even claims that “if she had been a man she would have been cut out for a soldier” (Mew, “Some Ways” 107) in order to simultaneously explain his admiration and to discredit Mildred’s suspicion that he still loves Ella. And yet, in the end, it is Alan’s admiration for Ella’s masculine courage that convinces him to join the watch. Alan asks Mildred to wait for him to complete his chaste watch, and Mildred’s reply—that the difference between seeing him “implicitly the lover of another woman” and actually her lover is a “fine distinction which [she] cannot grasp” (Mew, “Some Ways” 107)—suggests that appearances and reality, in her milieu, are not meaningfully distinct. Yet it also suggests that heterosexual romantic love is much more circumscribed—albeit more dominant—than other “ways” of loving. Thus, Mildred’s rejection of the appearance/reality distinction might be less a comment on the dominance of social appearances in the fin-de-siècle and more an expression of the deep suspicion with which she views Alan’s assertions of their relationship’s chastity. Mildred either cannot or will not imagine a meaningful alternative bond to heterosexual romance. Certainly, Ella and Alan could be lying, to either Mildred or themselves. More interesting, however, is the possibility that they are in earnest, and that what binds them is not heterosexual romantic opposition but loving, homosocial similarity. Here, what might, in any other tale, be simply a portrait of a consumptive dying from “thwarted desire”(Myer 287) becomes, in Mew’s hands, a way of masculinizing the dying Ella as

208  Kristen Renzi well as of assuring for her an enduring love. In this sense, Alan’s fidelity to Ella is also a kind of fidelity to a vision of himself. Ella and Alan’s martial language is unavoidably gendered; to consider the two “comrades” is to gender both as male. Interestingly, when Alan chooses to watch with Ella rather than to marry Mildred, it is neither his promise nor her illness that sways him. Instead, he decides upon remembering Ella’s statement of their common character: “we were neither of us made to turn our backs upon what lies before us or pull long faces at a foe” (Mew, “Some Ways” 113). If Alan were to choose Mildred, he would be acting the coward—and, in the process, proving himself to be less of a soldier (and less of a man) than Ella. The love that Alan expresses loyalty to through his commitment to Ella is thus, complicatedly, a love of his own self-image via adherence to masculine gender standards. Homosocial, rather than heterosexual, romance reinforces his manliness, and the opposite challenges it, which suggests the simultaneous allure and threat inherent in either loving mode. A heterosexual romance and an in-tact gender identity cannot, in this story, coexist; Mew does not, however, foreclose the possibility of love. Ella rejects Alan’s second marriage proposal with a curious metaphor that links love to clothing. While refusing married love, she accepts the raiment of companionate love as made of the same stuff, only less elegant and elaborate. “Love”, Ella says “though we don’t often think of it, has an extensive wardrobe. Everyone cannot wear his richest garment— we cannot, you and I. Let us be glad he offers us any, for without his charity we must indeed go bare” (Mew, “Some Ways” 110). This threat of bare bereftness—of nakedness when one is without love—is particularly interesting in the sense that Mew’s story, despite being about “varieties of renunciation” (Rice 51) also, and perhaps more importantly, embraces love’s variety rather than privileging only romance. And whereas Rice argues that the two female characters’ last names “contrast the women’s attitudes” and influence how we view them—Ella as “hope—denied—died” (51) and Mildred as one who enjoins others to play fair—what I  hope the aforementioned analysis has shown is that fair play and denials of hope are both highly contextual. While “Some Ways of Love” perhaps plays unfairly and denies hope in heterosexual romance, its allegiance is not to cheating and pessimism but rather to another gendered and social context for love that plays by different rules altogether. Rather than exhorting love’s “cruel nothingness”, as the epigraph would have it, Mew’s tale depicts an alternative loving mode that challenges heteronormativity, even as it stops short of radically materializing this alternative. “An Open Door” (1903) flirts with another alternative contextualization for love: the familial. This tale, published in Temple Bar, opens on a distressed mother and her daughter Stella discussing the other, younger daughter, Laurence Armitage, who has jilted her fiancé to become a

Parsing Between-ness 209 missionary. The mother angrily interprets Laurence’s statement of her calling—that she “has no choice” but to pursue this path—as “suicidal” in the face of both “repulsive gossip” and “natural affection” (Mew, “Open Door” 127). As in “Some Ways of Love”, the appearance/reality alignment seems secure: by rejecting marriage, Laurence has killed both her social status and interpersonal connection. Stella’s counter, “with something keener than a mere impersonal reflection” (Mew, “Open Door” 127) that perhaps Laurence does not actually have a choice, is dismissed by their mother. For Laurence’s part, she maintains her lack of alternative options throughout the course of the text, including not one, but two, interviews with her fiancé, a three-year period of preparation in England, and her departure, as a missionary, for China. The story then jumps in time to its denouement: Laurence is killed in a massacre in China and all that returns of her are a letter from Laurence’s colleague and an unaddressed, fragmented note in Laurence’s own hand. In counterpoint to the colleague’s letter, which details Laurence’s unwavering resolve to serve in her final days, Laurence’s own note is disjointed and ill at ease. It documents Laurence’s own doubt and uncertainty upon receiving a letter from her ex-fiancé. The self-fracturing experience Laurence details, upon losing her divine directive and beginning to doubt, is striking. She writes, “if I turn . . . come back to you—you say I must—I must be sent, as I was sent away from you, by some diviner voice, and that, I cannot hear. I have lost hearing” (Mew, “Open Door” 144). Here, Laurence again clarifies her lack of choice in turning, but she also denies her fiancé the power to be the turner; it is the divine voice, not her will or her fiancé’s, which can send her places. Her faithfulness to the divine voice is no blind hopefulness; she suffers without her directive. And yet, she is unwilling to salve her pain or her fiancé’s. She asks merely that he “wait, with me—for me, perhaps” (Mew, “Open Door” 144), regardless of his lack of understanding. With this request, Laurence removes his ability to reason with, force, or persuade her; neither is in control, and she asks for his similar surrender to this knowledge. Whereas Laurence is able to abide the self-fragmentation that loss of divine oversight imposes, the fiancé cannot; instead, he remains anchored to his nineteenth-century masculine prerogative to choose and control. In the fiancé’s desperate plea to Stella—“she would have come back—to me.  .  .  . You don’t suppose .  .  . that she wasn’t coming back to me?” (Mew, “Some Ways” 144)—we see his attempt to foreclose uncertainty through Stella’s reassurance. Stella’s response, however, is revelatory. Whereas previously she has hesitantly acknowledged Laurence’s lack of choice, she has done so with the sense of Laurence’s freakishness, not normalcy. And yet, in the story’s final moments, Stella’s response to Laurence, and likewise to herself, shifts. Shaken by her sister’s death and the idea—raised in the colleague’s letter—that her sister’s “sweetest memory in heaven would be of some soul on earth that [she] had saved” (Mew,

210  Kristen Renzi “Some Ways” 143), Stella grows increasingly convinced that it is her own soul that her sister has died to save. She puts it to the fiancé as follows: if I [profited from Laurence’s death], don’t you see, it would be her doing and not mine; her way of coming back and talking over things, of making me share now what in the past I would not share. I should be glad, I think, if things turned out that way. (Mew, “Some Ways” 145) Here, Stella cedes control, at least in part, to Laurence, and gladly so; the unnamed thing she would now be made to share might be Laurence’s vision, or it might be autonomy in general. Through these letters depicting her sister’s helplessness in the face of doubt, Stella finds herself beholden to Laurence; ironically, Laurence’s verbal admission of her lack of control over herself has given her control over another. This complex and contradictory model of love—one that is fundamentally self-shattering, even as it exerts a powerful influence over others—is limited in scope and by gender. Once again, the heterosexual union betrays a dismal brittleness in its inability to exceed tradition, whereas the alternative, non-romantic mode of love allows for more complicated inter- and intra-subjective reflection, despite its highly contingent and circumscribed nature. And it is Stella, not the fiancé, who leaves the text transformed and in a state of radical uncertainty—of standing in front of an open door—which is also, perhaps, a doorway to (modern) possibility.

Some Forms of Love Mew situates herself as a writer between worlds not only through her stories’ contents; their form, too, spans the canon. Whereas the aforementioned two tales invest in a domestic realism characteristic of much later Victorian writing, one of Mew’s most compelling engagements with love comes in the antiquated form of a doomed-love fable: “The Smile”, published in 1914 in The Theosophist. “The Smile” opens far after the actions it recounts have taken place: we are first introduced to an old woman and the Tower she lives in as a mysterious pairing glimpsed from afar: “travelers . . . speak little of her, telling only how that land is marked by an air of great loneliness . . . and of a strange spell, as of some tumultuous peace, which it throws like a garment over those who linger there” (Mew, “Smile” 195). This quick introduction to this contradictorily unpeaceful yet peace-filled land’s inherent contradictoriness is furthered by the description of the Tower, which townsfolks say “sometimes . . . was not there” or, even when spotted, seems only “a trick of cloud and sky” (Mew, “Smile” 195). Likewise, the woman’s seductive voice, which drove some to climb and die upon the “steep and winding” path

Parsing Between-ness 211 to the Tower, was one that “many” “never heard” (Mew, “Smile” 195). Most who heard her siren-like song were not able to resist her “ruthless summons”, and “none returned who set out on that journey, save those tossed down to slumber [death]” (Mew, “Smile” 196). Unlike the deadly certainty of the siren’s song, however, not all seekers of her voice meet death; some, “it was said”, succeeded and were rewarded by the old woman, who “wiped the eyes and feet of weary climbers with [her] soft tresses, before she parted them, to shed her Smile” (Mew, “Smile” 195). Already, perhaps, one can see some of the counter-cultural pull of Mew’s tale: the seductress’s age is evident, and the reward for reaching her is an ambiguous Smile—something that could be sexual but could also be friendly, motherly, or godlike in its embrace. And the old woman, though the cause of much ruin and devastation—both for those who fail to reach her and for those the seekers leave behind—is no mere trickster: she offers her rewarding smile to those who reach her. Her body is a seductive source, but not an explicitly sexualized or procreative one, and while the reward is also bodily and gendered female, it is a bodily gift that, like a renewable resource, can be given to many travelers—at least, that is, before the old woman falls in love with a badly-behaved baby. The rest of the tale’s trajectory is tragic: the old woman so loves the baby that she shows her face to the infant without any effort on its part to reach her (though she does, importantly, withhold her smile). When the baby grows into a young woman, she continues to view the old woman’s face, but—satisfied with her access—doesn’t feel compelled toward the climb. Realizing this, the old woman despairs of her love ever climbing to her, so she sadly turns away. Without the face for the first time in her life, the young woman embarks on the climb and, despite immense difficulty, succeeds; however, upon reaching the summit, the old woman only turns back to the young one as she dies. Then the old woman’s smile “broke, and wavered” before “the ageless light” of the old woman “went out”; the tale ends as the old woman stands, “for ever speechless, desolate, striving to waken a burden in [her] arms” (Mew, “Smile” 200). In this last line, the horror attending the old woman shifts from the supernatural to the all-too-human: no longer a deity haunting a spell-bound population, she herself is now haunted, left grappling with a death no magic smile can salve. Not only does this ending remind readers of the close ties between fairy tales and reality, but it also insists on pulling back the curtain and exposing even the most seemingly all-powerful as limited. One sees clear parallels to the feminist fairy tales of Angela Carter, whose demonic bluebeard character in “The Bloody Chamber” is felled by the might (and love) of a very human mother. Yet as Shandi Lynne Wagner notes in her study of Victorian-era feminist fairy tales, twentieth-century authors such as Carter have “Victorian precursors” that “feminist scholars have only begun to appreciate” (245). The fairy-tale genre offers female authors,

212  Kristen Renzi according to Wagner, “the unique opportunity to speak [their] mind[s] without social condemnation” (246). In making this claim, she builds on those of Nina Auerbach and U.C. Knoepflmacher, who argue that the unique potential for transgressive mid-nineteenth-century fairytales results in part from the writer’s superficial “adher[ence] to stereotyped roles”, which could mask more transgressive, “deviant, angry, even violent or satirical” content (1, 3). Though Mew’s “The Smile” is published some 30  years after the works upon which Auerbach, Knoepflmacher, and Wagner focus, the form in which it is written—the fairy-tale or fablelike opening privileging the temporal standard “once” and the magical invocation in the “wonderful Tower” (Mew, “Smile” 195)—allows the story to engage similar subversive maneuvers. Wagner’s sense of her focal author’s subversive critique is her presentation of “a realistic, rather than idealized, view of love and marriage” (249), whereas Auerbach and Knoepflmacher emphasize the subversiveness of presenting, in the Victorian fairytale, depictions of female children who are “defiantly impure, even unappealing” (8). Mew’s “The Smile” engages both of these tactics. Not only does the old woman fall in love with a baby, but this baby is an “ugly child, naughty, and perpetually hungry”, and “stupid and tiresome” (Mew, “Smile” 197): a transgressive love in terms not only of the loved one’s age and gender but also her insistently non-romanticized nature. As an adult, the loved one improves in looks but not temperament: she is “listless” (Mew, “Smile” 198), ignores her suitor in favor of the Face, and ultimately, she unabashedly asks this suitor to spend the night with her before journeying to the Tower. Such a request might, in another Victorian or early-twentieth-century text, be the culmination of a seduction plot leading to her doomed status as a fallen woman; for “The Smile’s” protagonist, it is a mere side-note to the major narrative (Braun 342–43). She, not her suitor, directs their overnight union and his morning departure liberates rather than threatens her. This presumed sexual experience neither marks nor dooms her. In this sense, Mew’s text clearly subverts the deadly expectations attending a sexual “fall” for a fictional woman, but it also notes the circumscribed nature of female agency; the male presence still limits female agency. Here, one can’t help but consider the brief explanation of the young woman’s own mother’s lack of attention to the old woman’s song: “she shut her ears to the wonderful voice . . . gladly [the mother] would have listened and joined the climbers, but women with babies cannot always do what they would” (Mew, “Smile” 197). This maxim is striking in that it proscribes babies—not husbands nor marriage—as the wrench in female desire. It also depicts continued agency despite the woman’s more limited circumstances: the active verb “shut” shows the woman choosing to close off her receptiveness to the old woman’s call, even though it is counter to her desire. In this small scene, a robust sense of female agency and choice coexists with a patriarchally limited reality.

Parsing Between-ness 213 Love, in “The Smile”, is still a liability for female characters, but once again, it is certainly no heteronormative love, nor perhaps a romantic love, for which the young woman risks and finally gives her life. And it is not the young woman’s transgressive sexuality, nor the old woman’s cruelty, that dooms their relationship, but rather the very human emotions and foibles to which these characters are subject. This type of tragedy, in which neither woman is perfect yet neither is villainized, in which neither attempts to hurt the other but rather through ignorance and chance, does so, withholds the fairy-tale’s clearly-delineated, temporally-located moral for its human readers. Instead, ending with a pietà-esque silhouette, Mew’s story recalls biblical lessons—of the mortality of gods and of the fragile, devastating power of love.

Love, elsewhere I began this chapter with the claim that Mew’s strange texts, seemingly situated “between” worlds, use techniques drawn from nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, as well as more antiquated models such as the fable, in order to represent the discrete, temporally-located experience of fin-de-siècle love. This amalgam of deeply contradictory forms and contents constitutes an outsider take on both relationships and literary genre by falling between the Victorian and modern representational expectations attending both the heteronormative and the perverse. And yet I am also deeply dissatisfied by this description of Mew’s peculiarities, beholden as it is to canonical understandings of epochs, gender/sexuality norms, and literary genre. To write otherwise—to define a space for the fin-de-siècle as its own literary space both topically and formally—is a vexed endeavor. And yet, this caughtness itself—this desire to configure the otherwise with the limited materials of the here—is perhaps what most characterizes Mew’s fin-de-siècle mode. An exemplary representation of such caughtness can be found in Mew’s posthumously-published “The Wheat” (1954). This stream-of-consciousness exploration of a dying man’s ruminations begins with the odd deathbed vocalization, “don’t let them cut the Wheat”, made even odder by his relations’ contextualization that this statement is “so unlike him” (Mew, “Wheat” 213). Yet we quickly learn that, far from being out of character, his plea is indicative of a “something” that “had been with him ever since he was a boy”, something that “half the time he had hardly known himself” (Mew, “Wheat” 213). Further, we learn that the “something” that came to the narrator was the sense that “it wasn’t he who was doing [his activities]; that he was really somewhere else” (Mew, “Wheat” 213). In this provocative opening, we are confronted with a man who is profoundly misunderstood, both by his loved ones and by himself. We also witness his vague, yet nagging, sense that the so-called real world is illusory and the self is really elsewhere. The story never clarifies what this elsewhere is; however, through the

214  Kristen Renzi descriptions of the man’s sensory access to and longing for it, one infers that this elsewhere is a reality of a higher, beautiful, more meaningful sort. Strikingly, elsewhere is also the space in which the man accesses love. He describes encountering an unnamed “her” who is barely corporeal: she is “dreamlike and a fragrance; and at first it was as pure loveliness he saw her, not as a thing to touch, simply to wonder at” (Mew, “Wheat” 214). Yet she is no dream; later, we hear, the man “would lie awake not sure if he could stand it if he didn’t touch it; wishing that she would come to him through the night, and show him how to touch it; it was too bewildering alone” (Mew, “Wheat” 214). In this description, the “she” and “it” are hesitantly discrete: his desire to touch “it” is curiously disarticulated from her corporeal body (a thing she could show him how to reach) and yet still yoked to her (she is the one to lead him toward touch). Language baffles and obscures in this passage, even as it articulates; likewise, the man’s attempt “one day” to share his “it” with her is, as he says, “difficult” (Mew, “Wheat” 214). When he attempts to communicate with her, he finds “she wasn’t listening”, and rather than try again, he gives up all desire to “speak to anyone about anything again” (Mew, “Wheat” 214). It is also at this juncture, when speech/communication is foreclosed, that he takes a definitive action. By the next sentence, “he had married Amy” (Mew, “Wheat” 214). In this one quick move—from failed articulation to the lack of desire to communicate that results in marriage—we get a surprisingly keen portrait, albeit in negative, of fin-de-siècle love. His desire to be elsewhere conceivably has room for another; indeed, he is “bewildered” without the woman he loves and needs her help to touch the unspecified “it”. And yet when she fails to be receptive, he is left bereft of companionship. By marrying, he suppresses his otherworldly desire. Yet this desire returns, intermittently yet insistently, and, in his final days, overtakes his consciousness. The man’s culminating repressed desire for another reality is his realization that “there were only three things on this earth” (Mew, “Wheat” 214). What these three things are is never made clear. He articulates them as colors, and perhaps these “things” are, in fact, only colors—though they speak to him beyond any ordinary understanding of pigment and hue. The closest he gets to articulating them is as follows: “fields—fields, quite endless, mile after mile of gold; they were the real gold—the wheat, stirring gently, with just above it the green, the line of the hedge and higher up, over it all the blue” (Mew, “Wheat” 215). In this image, the unspecified something he’s been seeking throughout his life ends up “passing something into his hand” (Mew, “Wheat” 215). This is the image that leads to the opening vocalization, and it is on this image that the story closes. Here again, vagueness triumphs: the gift he receives via the wheat is unclear, as are the “them” who threaten to cut the wheat down. Yet it strikes me that in this curious deathbed vision, we have a concrete example of Mew’s otherworldly yet exemplary fin-de-siècle

Parsing Between-ness 215 stance: the grasping at an elusive elsewhere, the subsequent concessional embrace of normative tradition after more radical communication fails, and the ultimate return of the repressed desire to capture and communicate this elsewhere. The colorful, visual elsewhere of “The Wheat”, vague yet suggestive, challenges the medium of words itself, a challenge in which we might see the burgeoning of yet another hallmark of modernity. And yet, most crucially, “The Wheat”—and Mew’s work of which it is representative—establishes the real “here” of an elsewhere: not its contents, but its existence; not its material location, but its subjective conceptualization. “The Wheat” describes a place of intellectual import, esthetic beauty, and emotional fulfillment that, if reached, is only attained upon death as one passes through yet another sense of between-ness. And it is within this vision’s impossible attempt to grasp this elsewhere in which Mew’s own between-ness can be, if not parsed, at least glimpsed, acknowledged, and imagined—if only for a moment.

Notes 1 See Suzanne Raitt 25–39; Jessica Walsh 217–240; Dennis Denisoff 125–140; and Stefania Forlini 111–120. 2 See, respectively, Suzanne Clark 1–16 and Celeste M. Schenck 317.

Works Cited Auerbach, Nina, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, editors. Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers. U of Chicago P, 1992. Braun, Gretchen. “ ‘Untarnished Purity’: Ethics, Agency, and the Victorian Fallen Woman.” Women’s Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2015, pp. 342–67. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Indiana UP, 1991. Denisoff, Dennis. “Grave Passions: Enclosure and Exposure in Charlotte Mew’s Graveyard Poetry.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 38, no. 1, 2000, pp. 125–40. Fitzgerald, Penelope. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends: with a Selection of Her Poems. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1988. Flint, Kate, editor. Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford UP, 1996. Forlini, Stefania. “The Machinic-Human Bogy and Charlotte Mew’s Aesthetic of (Dis)embodiment.” Gothic Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2003, pp. 111–20. Mew, Charlotte. “An Open Door.” Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner, Virago Press, 1982, pp. 127–45. ———. “Some Ways of Love.” Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner, Virago Press, 1982, pp. 103–13. ———. “The Smile.” Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner, Virago Press, 1982, pp. 195–200.

216  Kristen Renzi ———. “The Wheat.” Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner, Virago Press, 1982, pp. 213–15. Meyer, B. “Till Death Do Us Part: The Consumptive Victorian Heroine in Popular Romantic Fiction.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 37, no. 2, 2003, pp. 287–308. Raitt, Suzanne. “Queer Moods: The Life and Death of Charlotte Mew.” In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in the British and European Contexts, edited by Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis, and Murray Pratt, Ashgate, 2002, pp. 25–39. Rice, Nelljean McConeghey. A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham. U of Chicago P, 1992. Schenck, Celeste M. “Charlotte Mew.” The Gender of Modernism, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, Indiana UP, 1990, pp. 312–22. Wagner, Shandi Lynne. “Seeds of Subversion in Mary de Morgan’s ‘The Seeds of Love’.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, 2015, pp. 245–64. Walsh, Jessica. “ ‘The Strangest Pain to Bear’: Corporeality and Fear of Insanity in Charlotte Mew’s Poetry.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2002, pp. 217–40.

14 The Spirit of Contemporary Life: Icelandic Queer Modernism Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir

Introduction In her discussion of queer modernism and the writings of Walter Pater (1839–1894), Heather Love notes that there are various resonances between modernism, the term queer, and queer experience; queer is for example, like modernism, closely linked to the concept of the margin, exile and alienation, indeterminacy, and the experimental. The emergence of homosexuality as a modern sexual identity in the late-Victorian era, moreover, coincided with the “classical” period of esthetic modernism, and Pater witnessed both. He died a year before the Oscar Wilde trials and never faced homosexual persecution, but in his writing, Love identifies paradoxical tension between homosexual identity and older forms of discretion. She reads Pater as “doubly displaced, inhabiting a threatened position as someone with secrets to keep and as someone whose particular form of secrecy was fast becoming superannuated”; a man who was forced into “internal exile” because of his marginalized sexual identity (Love 26–27). Love is interested in Pater’s resistance, which did not take the form of modernist rebellion but rather refusal and passivity. His queer modernism, she argues, is grounded on an “aesthetics of failure” (Love 26): Fascination with latency and delay, passive and indecisive subjects, and worlds without warfare. As such, it is a response to the particularly modern experience of being seen and treated as sexually deviant in Victorian England; a society that had begun to define normative existence in terms of homo- and heterosexuality. This chapter explores similar responses from two Icelandic writers who wrote and published some of the earliest queer Icelandic fiction: Halldór Kiljan Laxness (1902–1998) and Elías Mar (1924–2007). Their queer modernism belongs to another era than Pater’s, and yet it is rooted in new societal and cultural currents that correspond in some important respect to Victorian England and Western Europe. These currents reflect the ever-growing and wide-ranging influence of modernization, which saw discourses on and regulation of homosexuality come to greater public prominence in the mid- to late nineteenth century. DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-19

218  Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir

Iceland, Homosexuality, and Modernization In early-twentieth-century Iceland, a small rural country at the margins of the Western world, homosexuality was rarely mentioned in the printed media, and if it was, it was usually in brief discussions of “the phenomenon” homosexuality, or of homosexuality abroad. The media was, in fact, almost completely silent about the possibility that Icelanders could be homosexual until the 1950s.1 Relatively little is known about Icelanders’ ideas and awareness of same-sex sexual acts and the people who performed them in the first decades of the twentieth century, largely due to the lack of available sources. Þorgerður Þorvaldsdóttir’s study of homosexuality and criminal law reveals for example that the judiciary sources are limited. The number of convictions for same-sex sexuality in the Icelandic court is too low to draw any statistical conclusions from it, and few court documents discuss such incidences in detail (129–31). The case of Guðmundur Sigurjónsson is an important exception, as he became in 1924 the first and only Icelander to be convicted and sentenced to prison for sodomy. Þorvaldur Kristinsson discusses unique documents related to that case and reveals how they manifest for example the common tension between different views of homosexuality: If it should be treated and classified as a crime or medical problem. He moreover notes that even though public awareness of the existence of homosexuality was limited in the 1920s it may have run deeper than official documents reflect (Þorvaldur Kristinsson “Glæpurinn gegn náttúrlegu eðli” 132–44). As the new century progressed and the relatively “late” modernization of Icelandic society, economy, and culture advanced, however, homosexuality slowly entered public discourse and became a part of Icelanders’ conception of the world. In the 1950s, for example, reports sometimes appeared in the media about homosexuals in Reykjavík. Urbanization is a key issue in this regard. Þorgerður Þorvaldsdóttir (117–18) and Þorvaldur Kristinsson (132) both note that the limited size of the Icelandic society and its rural character contributed significantly to the invisibility of homosexuals well into the twentieth century. In 1920 the country’s inhabitants numbered 95,000, out of which only 17,600 lived in Reykjavík, but the city expanded rapidly. In 1960 the country’s population was 177,000 and 72,000 (roughly 40%) lived in Reykjavík (“Mannfjöldi”). Scholars often emphasize the role the urban environment plays in the development of homosexual identity and subcultures. Cities offer anonymity as well as the opportunity to find like-minded people. They are sites of pleasure, Robert Aldrich says, because they provide venues where people can have nonheteronormative sex (1720–1). Henning Bech argues that the city is “the social world proper of the [male] homosexual”, because there he can meet others of his kind but at the same time go unseen in the crowd (98). The “homosexual form of existence”, as Bech puts it, is a particularly modern way of being, interconnected with the city and urbanization (85–159).

The Spirit of Contemporary Life 219 Hence, a lack of urban environment limits, or at least affects, homosexual subcultures and homosexual identity. Reykjavík never became an attraction for homosexuals in the way that metropoles like London had been since the Victorian era, but it is indisputable that its rapid growth in the mid-twentieth century played a crucial role in the process which led to increased visibility and awareness of homosexuality in Iceland. The dramatic transformation from a traditional rural society to industrial urbanization is one of the main characteristics of Icelandic twentieth-century history; a process that affected most, if not all, aspects of its society and culture, including “modernization” of art and literature. This development was contested; not everyone was happy to see people move from the countryside as new districts were built, the growing influence of American pop culture, films, and jazz, or various innovations in poetry, prose writing, and visual arts. The influence of nationalism was strong in politics as well as cultural debates and modern innovations were frequently associated with foreign currents or corruption.2 In this context, homosexuality was often portrayed as a foreign, modern threat. Such discourse was, of course, not limited to Iceland but appeared, and continues to appear, in various contexts in most Western countries. Yet it is worth considering whether the association between modernity or modern influence, on the one hand, and homosexuality on the other hand, may have been particularly strong in Iceland due to the fact that the modern transformation was “late” in comparison to, for example, England and other Western countries. Most, if not all, knowledge Icelanders had about homosexuality, when it first emerged as an identity and became an essential part of their worldview, was based on foreign medical, legal, and public discourses that were “new” to them, although much of this discourse had been written and debated already in the late-Victorian era in other countries. In Iceland, the modern experience of homosexual identity and categorization was therefore, as this chapter has outlined, an offspring of the twentieth century. While medical and psychiatric discourses concerned with human sexuality, including same-sex desire, emerged in England, Germany, and France in the late-Victorian era and the media frequently reported on sodomy scandals, the first medical writings concerned with homosexuality did not appear in print in Iceland until the 1920s and both the media and general public were mostly silent about such issues. Walter Pater’s contemporaries in Iceland thus did not read books or newspaper articles about homosexuality in their native language, and most of them had probably never heard of the phenomenon.

Halldór Laxness and The Great Weaver It is no coincidence that as late-Victorian debates about homosexuality and non-heteronormative relationships—debates that were “new” in many other Western countries in the 1880s and 1890s—began to

220  Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir reach Iceland, its writers started to integrate homosexuality as a new form of subject matter into their novels. One of the most radical voices in Icelandic public discourse and literature in the interwar years—and an important exception from what was said previously about the public silence on homosexuality in Iceland—was Halldór Laxness, a young and determined writer who in 1955 became Iceland’s first and only Nobel Prize winner. He was well read in world literature and philosophy, and quite familiar with the works of Wilde and Freud, to name a few important figures in the context of this book. Halldór experienced “the Roaring Twenties” in Europe as he traveled widely, joined a monastery in Luxembourg, lived in Copenhagen and Paris, and in 1925 he dwelled in Taormina in Italy, a place known as a homosexual retreat, while writing his second novel, The Great Weaver from Kashmir (Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír, 1927).3 One of the earliest remarks in the Icelandic media that indicate an awareness of homosexuality and homosexuals in Iceland is a statement written by Halldór while he was in Taormina where he contends that “Reykjavík has now suddenly obtained everything that suits a cosmopolitan city, not only a university and cinemas, but also football and homosexuality” (Halldór Kiljan Laxness, “Af íslensku menningarástandi II” 2).4 What the 23-year-old writer meant by this statement and to whom he was referring is not known—perhaps the convicted Guðmundur Sigurjónsson, as Þorvaldur Kristinsson suggests (138)—but his words manifest an important association in his mind between homosexuality and European modernity. In The Great Weaver, Halldór also portrays homosexuality as an integral part of the modern world.5 The novel, which is now generally considered to be among the greatest Icelandic contemporary works of fiction, is written into the philosophical, theological, and cultural context of early twentieth-century Europe, and inspired by the writings of e.g. Nietzsche, Strindberg, and Freud, Otto Weiniger, and André Breton (Hallberg, Halldór Laxness 27–51. It tells the story of a self-centered and unstable young man, Steinn Elliði, who travels between European cities in search of his place in the modern urban world of the interwar years and focuses on his inner life, paradoxical longings, and desires. Such foregrounding of an Icelandic cosmopolitan’s mental struggles and the novel’s fragmented narrative, in which letters and monologues appear among third-person accounts, were novelties in an Icelandic context, where rural settings and objective narration were conventional. Last, but not least, Steinn Elliði’s blunt discussions about non-marital and non-heterosexual sex caught the attention of many readers who had not often seen words like homosexuality in print: When I was seventeen years old I took part in Spanish and French nighttime debauchery in which naked women, painted from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet, performed fancy lesbian dances in between running to giant Negroes tied down to

The Spirit of Contemporary Life 221 couches, while the audience lay in each other’s arms on the floor. The gratification of sexual demands is man’s highest pleasure, and justifiable only when it is gratified in such a way that no new individuals are born. Homosexuality is the highest level of sexual satisfaction. Of all the paths of gratification, that one is lowest and most brutish, most blind and imperfect, which leads to such a fatal consequence as the birth of new people. The goal of man is to destroy man. The goal of culture is to destroy man. The goal of wisdom is to destroy man. ‘Der Mensch ist Etwas das überwunden werden muß.’ ‘Satan conduit le bal!’ Homosexuality, drug addiction, and suicide are the joyful extirpation of the final and highest beings on Earth. The deepest desire of lovers is to be reminded of death in their embraces. Only death gratifies love. (Halldór Kiljan Laxness, The Great Weaver 169–70) Even though Steinn Elliði’s chastity vow and complicated relationship with Diljá, his (female) childhood love, is foregrounded in the novel, he speaks of his sexual experiences with both men and women in a letter to his friend Alban, from which the paragraph on homosexuality is taken. Steinn also has a male companion; in London, he lives with a wealthy Englishman named Carrington. Although their relationship is not described in detail, and never from Steinn’s point of view, it is clear that Steinn’s mother thinks their friendship is abnormal. In a letter to her niece she says: But who do you think it is that took him away from me? What do you think captivated my boy so in the most splendid city in England, and made him turn his back on his mother? What but a decrepit old fellow in a white lined suit, rust brown in the face. It’s incredible, but true: several days after Steinn met this detestable ghost at the Hotel Metropole, where we were staying, he became an entirely different child. Imagine it, when I went out alone with my maid in the mornings I could expect to meet them on the coach road where they rambled along absorbed in palaver and walking arm in arm! It was simply grotesque! (Halldór Kiljan Laxness, The Great Weaver 84–85) In a clear alignment of homosexuality with the late-nineteenth-century Estheticism movement in England, Carrington is described here as a dandy (wearing a white, fancy suit) and racial other (rust brown in the face) and his intimacy with Steinn (walking arm in arm) can easily be interpreted as homoerotic—or “grotesque” as Steinn’s mother puts it. Steinn is perhaps not homosexual, but he is indisputably queer; normative heterosexuality is one of the many bourgeois roles he refuses to adopt, and he even idealizes same-sex attraction and sexual acts. He is a

222  Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir controversial character, however, as homosexual acts for him are associated with pleasure as well as death and destruction. The Great Weaver was, not surprisingly, disputed from the day it came out. While some critics celebrated the fresh breeze it brought into the Icelandic literary field, others censured it, not least because of its apparently immoral use of language. Florence Tamagne (212) notes that some of the earliest debates about homosexuality in the European press appeared in reviews of literature and theater, and the same applies to Iceland: The reviews of The Great Weaver were among the few public texts that mentioned homosexuality before the 1950s. Reviewers often emphasized the novel’s modernness and innovative nature and some took Steinn Elliði’s words about homosexuality as an example thereof. In the context of The Great Weaver homosexuality thus became a symbol of modernity, avant-garde, and modern currents.6 Halldór himself also emphasized the connection between homosexuality and modern or contemporary issues, replying to one of the reviewers: The Great Weaver is a novel that faithfully describes all the prevailing theories and views of life in the modern world, regardless of whether they are ‘ugly’ or ‘beautiful.’ The purpose of the book is to try and evaluate their value in life. . .. I personally do not idealise homosexuality, or rather, I  do not take a stand on such matters, nor on countless other views and theories I describe in The Great Weaver. (“Vefarinn mikli. Athugasemd” 2) The Great Weaver was meant to challenge various Icelandic traditions and for Halldór, like many other European artists and writers, homosexuality was a part of that challenge—an integral part of European innovative thought.

The Spirit of Contemporary Life From a queer perspective, The Great Weaver is a landmark text in the Icelandic context, first because it uses words referring to homosexuality, second because this wording caught people’s attention and led to discussion of homosexuality in the media, and third because of the role queer sexuality plays in the life of the protagonist—it is the earliest outspoken queer novel written in Icelandic. Halldór made friends with homosexual men in Taormina and the monastery, and he was interested in diverse aspects of gender and sexuality. The first draft of his novel Salka Valka (1931–32), for example, was a film script called “A Woman in Pants”, where the protagonist Salka is much more masculine and her sexuality more ambiguous than in the novel—and there is also a queer character in The Atom Station (Atómstöðin, 1948).7 Halldór lived a heterosexual

The Spirit of Contemporary Life 223 family life and no available sources prove that he was queer or had sex with men—but the sources do not rule out that possibility either. It is thus hard to know if Halldór’s writing about queer sexuality was a radical voluntary act or an inevitable response to a personal marginal position. As Heather Love emphasizes, the “exemplary modernist gesture of selfexile” is, after all, not the same as “the experience of forced exile” (20), but it is often difficult to tell the difference. We know, however, that Halldór’s intention with The Great Weaver was, among other things, to represent and describe the modern world, rather than judge it as good or bad. This idea was prominent in many of his writings about literature, art, and the role of the writer in the following decades. In 1942 he gave a talk at an Artists’ Congress in Reykjavík titled “The Author and His Work”. There he argued that writing good books was not about grammatical order or so-called “good language” but a sense for what is happening in the world: “Fiction is a language written on human hearts by the spirit of contemporary life” (Halldór Kiljan Laxness, Vettvangur dagsins 468). Good writers and artists are voices of their times, defenders, as well as critics of society and therefore often disputed, and the society they live in sometimes forces them to deal with subjects they would rather avoid. Fiction is thus, in Halldór’s opinion, destined to develop and adapt to its contexts, which are both local and international. Good books are influenced and inspired by their past and present as well as diverse cultural currents (465–74). When Halldór addressed the audience at the Artists’ Congress in 1942, he was no longer a young radical but an established best-selling novelist. His novels from the 1930s, Salka Valka, Independent People (Sjálfstætt fólk, 1934–1935), and World Light (Heimsljós, 1937–1940), were less explicitly experimental in terms of form and representation than The Great Weaver, and they have often been described as social-realist novels. They were nevertheless radical and controversial in many ways, highly influenced by the author’s political stance—Halldór became a dedicated socialist around 1930—and critical toward conservative politics and cultural views (Jón Yngvi Jóhannsson 380–87). Halldór’s critical, and modern, take on various social and cultural matters challenged conservative views and made him a highly disputed figure.

Another Pioneer: Elías Mar Halldór was very influential in Iceland and much discussed and adored, especially by younger writers. One of them was Elías Mar who, like Halldór in the 1920s, was highly enthusiastic and ambitious. When he was 19 years old, in the summer of 1943, he wrote several letters to his friend Guðmundur Pálsson in which he discussed Halldór’s writings, politics, and persona. He told Guðmundur that he believed Halldór was an instigator for young writers in Iceland against the power of conservative

224  Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir leaders; a true socialist who saw the world and was not afraid to fight for what he believed in (Elías Mar, “Letter to Guðmundur Pálsson”, July 24, 1943). He said he was waiting impatiently for Halldór’s next novel and claimed to be planning to “read The Weaver thoroughly” in the fall, but according to his notebooks, he had already read The Great Weaver several times. Elías also claimed to know “The Author and His Work” by heart (“Letter to Guðmundur Pálsson”, 30 June  1943), and on the first page in his notebook from 1942 wrote a sentence which can both be seen as an echo from Halldór’s essay and Elías’s own writerly manifesto: “The writer must claim a territory where he faces the heartbeat of the world” (Elías Mar, “Notebook 1942”). These personal accounts manifest that Elías was not just a fan; he had studied Halldór’s work thoroughly and adopted his writerly policies and techniques. It was thus perhaps to be expected that Elías’s first novels would be, like The Great Weaver, inspired by the newness of modern life—and queer. Elías was a very productive young writer. Before his 30th birthday, he had published four novels, a collection of poetry and another of short stories, and written several texts, fiction, translations, and articles for newspapers and journals.8 These writings share certain characteristics. They manifest for example a persistent interest in Reykjavík and urban life, relations between Icelanders and British and American soldiers during the war, and the struggles of the working class, seniors, children, and teenagers. From the very beginning of his career, Elías thus dealt primarily with contemporary issues and the life in Reykjavík. This interest was both personal and political. Elías was working class, born and raised in Reykjavík, and a dedicated socialist who was genuinely interested in people and current issues—the heartbeat of the world. Last, but not least, he was bisexual and one of the most prominent themes in his work from the late 1940s is homoeroticism and problems and paradoxes in relation to homosexual identity. His first three novels, Eftir örstuttan leik (1946), Man eg þig löngum (1949), and Vögguvísa (1950), are all queer in the sense that they deal with male same-sex desire and young men’s identity crisis, as the next section outlines.9 In the 1950s—after writing and publishing these books—Elías became quite vocal about his sexuality and a part of a subculture in Reykjavík that was associated with homosexuality in the minds of many Icelanders. He was, in other words, one of the first “famous” talked-about queers in Reykjavík. In August 1950 he became one of the first Icelanders, after Halldór Laxness, to defend homosexuality in print. In an article titled “A Story from London”, he tells Icelandic readers about life in London, where he had lived for a few months. He writes about urban people who lived in the shadows and appeared after dusk, people full of pain, guilt, shame, hopelessness, and suspicion—people such as homosexuals, beggars, and prostitutes. Elías argues that in order to understand cities people need to acknowledge these inhabitants of the underworld and

The Spirit of Contemporary Life 225 practice its main virtue: “the liberality and open-mindedness of those who do not judge” (“Einn þáttur úr Lundúnaveldi” 22).10 Homosexuality was still treated with silence in Iceland in the 1940s but that changed somewhat in the 1950s when the media brought people’s attention to so-called “dangerous homosexuals” in Reykjavík, such as Elías and his friends. The war years may have been a period of limited liberation for men who desired other men. They at least had more options when it came to lovers while thousands of British and American soldiers dwelled in Iceland from May 1940 throughout the war. The complete ban on sexual intercourse “against nature” was lifted in 1940 when a new Penal Code was legalized, consensual sex between two adult men was thereby decriminalized and female homosexuality was included in the legislation for the first time. Yet there were no public discussions in the 1940s—neither positive nor negative—of the new legislation nor the fact that Icelandic men had intimate relationships with soldiers. Memoirs manifest that at least some teenagers in Reykjavík were aware of the existence of “sodomites”,11 but the results from an ethnological data collection on homosexuality, executed by the Icelandic National Museum in 2013, suggest that public awareness of homosexuality in Iceland was very limited. Hardly any participants recalled having heard of homosexuality before 1950 but many of them stated that their first memory of the concept, or homosexual people (predominantly men), was from the early and mid-1950s, usually in Reykjavík (“Samkynhneigð á Íslandi. ÞMS Spurningaskrá” 2013–1). The 1940s were therefore paradoxical times in Iceland, and in some respect comparable to the late-Victorian era; the days of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. The homosexual—that is, discourse and knowledge about homosexuality and the homosexual as a character type—had not yet become a known “species” in the sense that such ideas were not vocalized, except on rare occasions like in reviews about The Great Weaver from Kashmir. At the same time, however, we cannot rule out the possibility that people, despite the silence, knew and thought about the phenomenon of homosexuality. After all, Iceland was not, and never has been, isolated from the rest of Europe. Ideas travel with books, ships, and people; Halldór Laxness brought new ideas from the mainland with The Great Weaver and influenced writers like Elías Mar, who similarly educated his fellow Icelanders in 1950 by telling them about queer London.

Esthetics of Failure The three novels from the late 1940s marked a turning point in Elías’s life and career. With them, he became an established and well-known writer, and after their publication, he had become confident enough to speak out about his sexuality. His second novel, Man eg þig löngum, is especially important in this respect. It is deeply personal and the result of

226  Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir a year-long process in which Elías tried to express and comprehend the complexities of a teenager with same-sex desires and identity issues.12 The protagonist, Halldór Óskar Magnússon, is a fisherman’s son from a small village in the West of Iceland who moves to Reykjavík to study. He has good intentions but soon loses interest, sinks deeper into depression, and eventually fails his exams. Halldór’s idleness is overwhelming; almost all his intentions seem to fail or dissolve; writing a letter to his mother, doing his homework, getting a summer job, approaching the girl he has a crush on, and so on. The same applies to his same-sex desires that linger but are never actualized. He is fascinated by his friend Ómar, a handsome poet, and clearly has feelings for him but will not acknowledge them— and when an older man approaches him sexually and offers him a chance to face his desires, he runs off. The novel is marked by heavy gloom and passivity; the reader is waiting for Halldór to take action and hoping for him to succeed but the happy ending never comes. By the end of the book, a whole year has passed and Halldór is wandering outside Reykjavík, alone, depressed, poor, and homeless. Elías later claimed that he intended to write a sequel to Man eg þig löngum in which Halldór would acknowledge his same-sex desires, start writing, take up his friend’s name, and become Halldór Óskar Magnússon Ómar—aptly abbreviated to HÓMÓ.13 This sequel remains unwritten, but Elías’s reflections on the novel’s writing and publishing process show how he was marked by the paradoxes of the 1940s and tension between showing and telling, silence and discourse, in relation to queerness and same-sex sexuality. None of the characters in Elías’s first three novels “comes out” or accepts a homo- or bisexual identity and the texts are not blunt statements like Elías’s article on London from 1950. Instead, the characters’ queerness is manifested via shame and self-disgust, same-sex attraction, and failure or refusal to become normative hetero-masculine men. What these texts have in common is thus similar to what Love identifies in Pater’s writings and describes as “aesthetics of failure”. They are more interested in failed heterosexuality than homosexual identity—they explore in novel ways the manifold dimensions of not conforming, not succeeding, not doing, and not being a “normal” subject in a society that places ever more emphasis on normalization, be it late-Victorian England or mid-twentieth-century Iceland. Bubbi, the protagonist in Eftir örstuttan leik, has much in common with Steinn Elliði in The Great Weaver. He is a young man who seems to have everything he needs, money, good looks, and intelligent mind, yet he is restless and unhappy. Like Steinn, he resists and struggles especially with normative bourgeois ideas and conventions, marriage, heterosexual love and family life. His main concern is his sexuality and relationships with women; he has been sexually active from a young age but become utterly disgusted by sex. In a Nietzscheian manner, clearly inspired by The Übermensch and Otto Weiniger’s misogynistic philosophy—via

The Spirit of Contemporary Life 227 The Great Weaver—he decides to fight his desires and solve his crisis by abstaining from sex and women. His chastity vow is challenged, however, when he falls in love with Anna. Unlike other women, she makes him happy, and for a few weeks, he believes she will lead him out of his crisis. Their relationship does not last long, because Anna’s mother separates them after finding out about Bubbi’s sexual behavior in the past. Bubbi is again alone and depressed but instead of returning to the chastity vow he decides to deal with his problems by writing a book about himself, and this book is Eftir örstuttan leik. The novel is thus a bildungsroman as well as a story about its own creation; a therapeutic process driven by Bubbi’s sexual crisis. Even though there are no blunt discussions or representations of same-sex desire or homosexuality in Eftir örstuttan leik the text welcomes a queer interpretation: that Bubbi’s fear and frustration in relation to same-sex desire is the real cause of his sexual crisis.14 Finally, Vögguvísa’s protagonist, the 14-year-old Björn, often called Bambínó, is also struggling with same-sex desire and becoming a hetero-masculine subject. He is a working-class boy who is deeply ashamed of his smallness and childish appearance and wants nothing more than to be accepted as one of the “cool guys” in Reykjavík. In the novel’s opening chapter, he breaks into an office with two other guys and steals a large sum of money. The following pages describe the consequences of the crime and how Bambínó enjoys the thrill of having money while trying to avoid being caught. He drinks, parties, carries out a series of hetero-masculine performances or “rites of passage”, has sex with a girl, and tries to prove himself to his male peers and earn their respect. Once again, however, Elías Mar leaves the protagonist in a problematic situation; Bambínó makes several mistakes and by the end of the novel he is lying in the mud on Austurvöllur in the city center, drunk, desperate, and alone. Vögguvísa is different from most prose that had been published in Icelandic in the mid-twentieth century; a short novel with rapid progress and film-like scenes in which urban teenagers who speak “bad” Icelandic and drink copious amounts of liquor commit a crime and try to get away with it. American cultural influence is also prominent; the characters use English slang and idealize American jazz, film stars, and action heroes. These novelties caught the attention of many readers and reviewers; the novel was considerably well received and now, almost 70 years later, it is indisputably Elías’s best known and most popular work. Vögguvísa can be read as an anti-American polemic that portrays the corrupt influence of American politics and cultural influence, especially since the story does not end well for the young criminals. Yet a one-sided political interpretation risks becoming too simplistic, which is, for example, obvious when the novel is read from a queer perspective. Bambínó becomes then, first and foremost, a queer youth who fails to be normal according to heteronormative societal standards.15

228  Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir

Conclusions: Queer Modernism(s) In 1950, Elías wrote a letter to his publisher, Ragnar Jónsson, attempting to convince him to publish Vögguvísa. The letter is an apology for Elías’s work, and as such, it is an invaluable source; it includes descriptions of how his work came into being and his writerly intentions. Vögguvísa, for example, was meant to be what Elías calls an aktúel novel—a text which manifests a fervent interest in the current moment. Elías tells Ragnar that he wanted to “represent a cross-section of the life in Reykjavík” and adds that it is not his fault if that picture is not pretty (“Letter to Ragnar Jónsson”).16 He says he wished to write an original novel and experiment with style, form, subject, and use of language. In a short introduction to a chapter from Vögguvísa, which appeared a few months later in the magazine Líf og list, Elías also says that he wished to “depict a cross-section of the influence of new cultural currents and the residue of war madness, as they can be manifested in the acts of a few teenagers” (“Kafli úr skáldsögu” 9). He underlines that he did not experiment with form and style and represent negative aspects of contemporary life in Reykjavík just to violate morality or conventions. He does not spell out his reasoning but adds: “Something similar should be kept in mind when one comes across works of art that claim to be ascribed to the modern man” (Elías, “Kafli úr skáldsögu” 9). These words express the same wish as Elías’s notebook from 1942 and Halldór’s lecture “The Author and His Work”: To face the heartbeat of the world by writing about contemporary issues. Elías’s and Halldór’s statements about their work and the role of literature express a clear and determined wish to engage with modern life in the early and mid-twentieth century, and to represent its rapid social changes, homosexuality, and other forms of queer desire, just as writers like Alan Dale, Robert Hichens, and Charlotte Mew were doing in the late nineteenth century. For Elías and Halldór, this vision was a part of their socialist politics as well as writerly ambitions. They do not, however, specify the esthetic means of this engagement and their work did not necessarily challenge traditional form and use of language to the extent that their works were categorized as “modernist”. Halldór certainly wrote texts, poetry, plays, and prose that have been referred to as modernist work, such as The Great Weaver, but his relationship with modernist form experiments was shifty and many of his most famous books are generally categorized as realist novels. Elías’s contribution to the first significant “wave” of modernist poetry in Iceland around 1950 has been acknowledged (Þorvaldsson 478), but his prose is rarely associated with modernism, although the prominence of modern life and modernity in his books is often emphasized. Recent rethinking of the concept modernism has given way to a broader scope that includes not only high or classical modernism but modernisms in the plural; a diverse field of texts in different geographical and historical contexts that are characterized by “an aesthetic and

The Spirit of Contemporary Life 229 ideological challenge” (Ástráður Eysteinsson and Liska “Introduction: Approaching Modernism” 6). Marshall Berman argued that modernism should be seen as a “variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own” (16). Modernism, in Berman’s terms, is thus a response to modernity that underlines the paradoxes and incoherencies of modern life and resists its demands, and it is not just manifested in art and literature but also people, their thoughts, and actions. He explores how various nineteenth-century writers engaged with modernity, that is, the paradoxical experience of finding ourselves “in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are” (Berman 15). Berman’s reading of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto as a modernist text even enables him to build a bridge between early-twentieth-century modernists and mid-nineteenth-century Marxists, to give “modernist art and thought a new solidity, and invest its creations with an unsuspected resonance and depth. It would reveal modernism as the realism of our time” (122). Such an approach invites us to speak, without hesitance, of Halldór Laxness’ and Elías Mar’s writings as modernist, and in Heather Love’s terms, as queer modernism. “Modernity” does not refer to a universal period but rather to innovations and currents that take place in different times in different places—whether in Victorian England or Iceland in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like Pater, Elías and Halldór do not seek to describe homosexual identity as stable or fixed. Instead, they highlight failure and crisis and the inconsistency and complexity of sexuality. The engagement with social modernity through literature and art they both called for was not about a conventional realist representation or radical or non-conventional use of form, language, and representation; their focus was rather on influencing their readers and participating in discussions about pressing current matters, such as homosexuality, same-sex desire, and marginalization in heteronormative societies. Elías’s concept aktúel is interesting in this context. It is not an Icelandic word; Elías probably took it from Danish or Swedish, where aktúel means “current”, “present day”, or “topical”. The reference to what is “real” or “not imaginary”, which is inherent to the English word actual, however, is also meaningful. Elías’s emphasis on aktúel books as “cross-sections of society” shows that such texts, in his mind, represented contemporary reality. Aktúel is thus also a reference to a “real” or “true” representation of the world; however paradoxical, queer or complicated it may be. Distinguishing between modernism and realism, or “aesthetic” modernism and other kinds of critical engagements with modernity, makes little sense in this context. Elías’s and Halldór’s texts are both modernist and

230  Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir realist, radical and focused on capturing the reality in question, personal and political, and their language is both experimental and conventional. Their queer modernism is first and foremost engaged in the current moment, whenever that may be.

Notes 1 The following discussion of discourses on homosexuality in Iceland in the early and mid-twentieth century and Elías Mar’s writings is based on my doctoral dissertation, Facing the Heartbeat of the World: Elías Mar, Queer performativity and Queer Modernism, which was generously funded by the Icelandic Research Fund for Graduate Students (no. 110261–0061). See also Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir, “Sjoppa ein við Laugaveginn . . . hefur fengið orð á sig sem stefnumótsstaður kynvillinga”. 2 See, e.g., Jón Yngvi Jóhannsson, “Realism and Revolt”; Ólafur Rastrick, “Not Music but Sonic Porn”; Guðmundur Hálfdanarson and Ólafur Rastrick, “Culture and the Constitution of the Icelandic in the 19th and 20th Centuries”. 3 On Halldór Laxness and the background of The Great Weaver, see Peter Hallberg, Halldór Laxness 27–51. 4 The general use of first names, rather than family names or last names, is an Icelandic convention. This paper generally employs Icelanders’ first names, although full names are sometimes required for the sake of clarity. 5 The Great Weaver was published in English translation in 2008. All references to the novel are to the English translation unless noted. 6 For more on this see Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir, “Sódómískur skrautdans” 44–45; Facing the Heartbeat of the World 42–44. 7 See Halldór Guðmundsson, Halldór Laxness. Ævisaga 174–86 and 229–30; Peter Hallberg, “Úr vinnustofu sagnaskálds” 149–151. 8 None of Elías’s works have yet been published in English. 9 On Elías Mar, his life and oeuvre, see Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir, Facing the Heartbeat of the World; Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir, “Að þekkja sinn vitjunartíma”; Hjálmar Sveinsson, Nýr penni í nýju lýðveldi; Þorsteinn Antonsson, Þórðargleði; Jón Karl Helgason, “Þrautreyndur nýgræðingur.” 10 Emphasis original. 11 See Sigurður A. Magnússon, Undir kalstjörnu 65–70; Sigurður A. Magnússon, Möskvar morgundagsins 57–58. 12 Elías wrote about this in a letter to his publisher, Ragnar Jónsson: “Letter to Ragnar Jónsson” 7 May 1950. See also Þorsteinn Antonsson, Þórðargleði, 97. 13 On this see Hjálmar Sveinsson, Nýr penni í nýju lýðveldi 57; Kolbrún Bergþórsdóttir, “Er ekki færibandahöfundur” 24. 14 See also Jón Karl Helgason, “Deiligaldur Elíasar”; Dagný Kristjánsdóttir, “Sýnt en ekki gefið.” 15 For more detailed analysis and discussion of Elías’s novels, see Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir, Facing the Heartbeat of the World 151–244. 16 See also Þorsteinn Antonsson, Þórðargleði 99.

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The Spirit of Contemporary Life 231 Bech, Henning. When Men Meet. Homosexuality and Modernity. Translated by Teresa Mesquit and Tim Davies. Polity, 1997. Benediktsdóttir, Ásta Kristín. “Að þekkja sinn vitjunartíma. Elías Mar, tvíkynhneigðin og fyrstu skáldsögurnar.” Ritið, vol. 20, no. 3, 2020, pp. 259–90. ———. Facing the Heartbeat of the World: Elías Mar, Queer performativity and Queer Modernism. Doctoral dissertation, defended at University of Iceland, Reykjavík and University College Dublin, Ireland, Nov. 1, 2019. ———. “ ‘Sjoppa ein við Laugaveginn . . . hefur fengið orð á sig sem stefnumóta-staður kynvillinga.’ Orðræða um illa kynvillinga og listamenn á sjötta áratug 20. aldar.” Svo veistu að þú varst ekki hér. Hinsegin sagnfræði og hinsegin saga á Íslandi, edited by Íris Ellenberger, Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir and Hafdís Erla Hafsteinsdóttir, Sögufélag, 2017, pp. 147–83. ———. “Sódómískur skrautdans. Halldór Laxness, Vefarinn og hinsegin (bókmennta)saga.” Tímarit Máls og menningar, vol. 80, no. 3, 2019, pp. 41–55. Bergþórsdóttir, Kolbrún. “Er ekki færibandahöfundur.” Dagur, Dec. 18, 1999, pp. 24–25. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity. 2nd ed., Penguin Books, 1988. Eysteinsson, Ástráður, and Vivian Liska. “Introduction: Approaching Modernism.” Modernism, edited by Ástráður and Liska, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007, pp. 1–8. Hálfdanarson, Guðmundur, and Ólafur Rastrick. “Culture and the Constitution of the Icelandic in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Power and Culture. Hegemony, Interaction and Dissent, edited by Ausma Cimdiņa and Jonathan Osmond, PLUS Pisa University Press, 2006, pp. 87–104. Hallberg, Peter. Halldór Laxness. Edited by Leif Sjöberg. Translated by Rory McTurk, Twayne’s World Authors Series, no. 89. Twayne Publishers, 1971. ———. “Úr vinnustofu sagnaskálds.” Tímarit Máls og menningar, vol. 14, no. 2–3, 1950, pp. 145–65. Helgason, Jón Karl. “Deiligaldur Elíasar. Tilraun um frásagnarspegla og sjálfgetinn skáldskap.” Ritið, vol. 6, no. 3, 2006, pp. 101–30. ———. “Þrautreyndur nýgræðingur. Fyrstu skrif Elíasar Marar.” Tímarit Máls og menningar, vol. 77, no. 2, 2016, pp. 96–108. Jóhannsson, Jón Yngvi. “Realism and Revolt: Between the World Wars.” A History of Icelandic Litearture, edited by Daisy Neijmann, University of Nebraska Press, 2006, pp. 357–403. Kristinsson, Þorvaldur. “Glæpurinn gegn náttúrlegu eðli. Réttvísin gegn Guðmundi Sigurjónssyni 1924.” Svo veistu að þú varst ekki hér. Hinsegin sagnfræði og hinsegin saga á Íslandi, edited by Íris Ellenberger, Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir, and Hafdís Erla Hafsteinsdóttir, Sögufélag, 2017, pp. 107–46. Kristjánsdóttir, Dagný. “Sýnt en ekki gefið. Um skáldsöguna Eftir örstuttan leik eftir Elías Mar.” Heimtur. Ritgerðir til heiðurs Gunnari Karlssyni sjötugum, edited by Guðmundur Jónsson, Helgi Skúli Kjartansson and Vésteinn Ólason, Mál og menning, 2009, pp. 110–21. Laxness, Halldór Kiljan. “Af íslensku menningarástandi II.” Vörður, 11 July 1925, pp. 2–4. ———. “Stuttar ádrepur.” Tímarit Máls og menningar, vol. 2, no. 1, 1939, pp. 30–35. ———. The Great Weaver From Kashmir. Translated by Philip Roughton. Archipelago Books, 2008.

232  Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir ———. “Vefarinn mikli. Athugasemd.” Vörður, 7 May 1927, p. 2. ———. Vettvangur dagsins: ritgerðir. Heimskringla, 1942. Love, Heather K. “Forced Exile. Walter Pater’s Queer Modernism.” Bad Modernisms, edited by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Duke UP, 2006, pp. 19–43. Magnússon, Sigurður A. Möskvar morgundagsins. Mál og menning, 1981. ———. Undir kalstjörnu. Mál og menning, 1980. “Mannfjöldi í einstökum byggðakjörnum og strjálbýli eftir landsvæðum ár hvert 1889–1990.” Hagstofa Íslands [Statistics Iceland]. http://px.hagstofa. is/pxis/pxweb/is/Ibuar/Ibuar__mannfjoldi__2_byggdir__Byggdakjarnareldra/ MAN00104.px/?rxid=d61228fd-6772-47e0-bbc8-af9c13ca308d. Accessed April 29, 2021. Mar, Elías. Eftir örstuttan leik. Víkingsútgáfan, 1946. ———. “Einn þáttur úr Lundúnaveldi.” Líf og list, vol. 1, no. 8, 1950, pp. 21–22. ———. “Kafli úr skáldsögu.” Líf og list, vol. 1, no. 6, 1950, pp. 9–10, 20. ———. “Letter to Guðmundur Pálsson” 24 July 1943. Lbs. 13 NF. Elías Mar. BA. Letters—Icelanders, the National and University Library of Iceland. ———. “Letter to Ragnar Jónsson” 7 May  1950. Lbs. 9 NF. Ragnar Jónsson (í Smára). AA. Letters from Icelanders. Box C—F, the National and University Library of Iceland. ———. “Notebook 1942.” Lbs. 13 NF. Elías Mar. CB. Notebooks, cassettes and various papers, box no. 1, the National and University Library of Iceland. ———. Man eg þig löngum. Helgafell, 1949. ———. Vögguvísa. Brot úr ævintýri. 3rd ed., Lesstofan, 2012. Rastrick, Ólafur. “ ‘Not Music but Sonic Porn’: Identity Politics, Social Reform, and the Negative Reception of Jazz.” Cultural History, vol. 10, no. 1, 2021, pp. 91–110. “Samkynhneigð á Íslandi. ÞMS  Spurningaskrá 2013–1.” 2013. Þjóðminjasafn Íslands. The National Museum of Iceland. Sveinsson, Hjálmar. Nýr penni í nýju lýðveldi. Elías Mar. Omdurman, 2007. Tamagne, Florence. A History of Homosexuality. Berlin, London, Paris, 1919– 1939. Algora, 2003. Þorvaldsdóttir, Þorgerður. “Iceland 1869–1992. From Silence to Rainbow Revolution.” Criminally Queer. Homosexuality and Criminal Law in Scandinavia 1842–1999, edited by J. Rydstrom and K. Mustola, Aksant, 2007, pp. 117–44. Þorvaldsson, Eysteinn. “Icelandic Poetry Since 1940.” A History of Icelandic Literature, edited by Daisy L. Neijmann, U of Nebraska P, 2006, pp. 471–502.

Afterword Regenia Gagnier

In her Introduction, Louise Kane describes this volume as a critique of traditional Anglophone period-centered approaches to literature in favor of an “age of innovation” 1830–1950, neither Victorian nor modern, re-reading dialogic literary networks and connections that have often remained unacknowledged or obscured by period rivalries. This entails a consideration of technological advancements; scientific developments and inventions; changing attitudes toward religion, empire, and the place of the individual in an increasingly global society; nascent disciplines such as ecology and psychology; new ideas about sexuality, the role of women, gender, and the family; textual innovations and enhanced production processes. With inclusivity of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and the “historically marginalized”, the contributions focus on innovative technologies and innovative social and literary forms. While they tend toward European and Transatlantic western cultures, Kane acknowledges parallel innovative movements, such as the Meiji and Taishō eras in Japan, the New Culture Movement in China, and we might add the Ottoman Tanzimat and Kemalism in Turkey, and the Nahdah in the Islamic world. If we follow this long durée of global modernizing, we also see an age of nationalisms. World-historically, Indian and Pakistani independence came in 1947 and the PRC was founded in 1949. The period marks the emergence of the self-governing dominions of Anglophone Australia (1901), New Zealand (1907), and South Africa (1910) (with Canada in 1867), increasing US global influence, and decolonization. Eighty-five states gained independence since 1922, with the African nation-states after 1956. With reference to the British empire alone, just beyond the volume’s temporal boundaries is the independence in the 1960s of Somaliland, Cyprus, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika (later Tanzania), Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, North Borneo, Singapore, Sarawak, Zanzibar, Kenya, Nyasaland (as Malawi), Malta, Northern

234  Regenia Gagnier Rhodesia (as Zambia), the Gambia, British Guiana (as Guyana), Bechuanaland (as Botswana), Basutoland (as Lesotho), Barbados, South Arabia, and Mauritius. From 1970 to 1982 Tonga, Fiji and the Bahamas, the Seychelles, the British Solomon Islands (as Solomon Islands), the Gilbert Islands (as Kiribati), the Ellice Islands (as Tuvalu), and the British Honduras (as Belize) gained independence (Patel 105). The volume’s age of innovation framework offers a new way of considering processes often distinguished as modernity, modernization, and modernisms. Modernity typically means a period that begins with the Industrial Revolution as the onset of the Anthropocene, with a Great Acceleration around 1950. Modernity is a time of cultures in contact—either coerced or voluntary, through domination or cooperation—and the liberalizing or opening up of cultures. It includes ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism, individualism, socialism, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism. These are embedded in movements as diverse as the Communist International, trade unions, liberal and conservative parties, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, New Imperialism, Orientalism, Pan-Hellenism, -Islamism, -Asianism, -Africanism, Zionism, Arab Romanticism, Theosophy, Esperanto, and New Woman/feminism. Modernization includes not only scientific and technological processes particularly in terms of logistics—shipping, railroad, post (or bicycles, airplanes, and automobiles as here)—and communications (the press, radio, television, and internet) but also material political-economic changes in production, finance, ecology, and urbanization. The first Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Britain gave rise to the inventions of Part I (telescope, balloons, cinema, and scientific societies), the cultural forms of Parts II and III based in Empire and imperial trade (adventure fiction, romantic lyric poetry, realism, naturalism, and synesthesia), and the new forms of gender, sexuality, and desire of Part IV. The second Industrial Revolution was the era of mass communications through newspapers, advertising, and television and radio in the first half of the twentieth century, which are also presented here; and the third was the personal and social transformation brought on by digital media and artificial intelligence post-1950. Globally, the parallel “industrious” revolutions of Asia continue, with similar innovations in Africa and Latin America. Modernization also includes transformative production and distribution processes of the geopolitical commodities around which lives and literature are built, such as rice, sugar, maize, bananas, cotton, oil, water, cinema, tea, textiles, and meat, all of which have given rise to cultural objects such as poems, novels, films, and blogs. Modernism is a cultural style that is valued differently whether one is living in former imperial or in postcolonial, revolutionary societies. Literary or cultural modernism is not limited to a particular (western) modernist style but has to do with liberalizing cultures, that is, rising expectations of more inclusive perspectives and voices (of, e.g., well-being

Afterword 235 and autonomy), and often the thwarting of these (by, e.g., economy, gender, and religion), often leading to feelings of modern ressentiment. A book on long literary modernisms, such as this one, explores the relation of new cultural forms to new, mixed or hybrid social formations, with accompanying strangeness: e.g., Mulk Raj Anand’s pidgin AngloIndian; or China’s May Fourth movement’s importation of English vocabulary and transcription; or genres like magical realism, in which the contact between the forces of modernization and traditional cultures makes resulting phenomena look magical; or the novel (the major genre of the individual in relation to society) in its classic and romantic realist forms; or crime fiction, when the modern state apparatus comes into contact with modern social groups such as class, race, and ethnicity in urbanizing environments, from Conan Doyle to Latin American genero negro. The Warwick Research Collective has seen this period, extended beyond this volume’s boundary of 1950 to the present and beyond, as the literature and culture of the modern capitalist world-system since 1800. WReC sees modernity as a time-space sensorium corresponding to capitalist modernization, as combined and uneven as it has been, with feudal forms next to mass consumer society and mass communications (WReC). Even if we stop at the 1950s, this is the period of the rise of global cities as well as literatures/cultures of the village (Bengal/SW England); of mines (Sichuan/Wales); plantations/manor houses (Haiti/Mississippi/Yorkshire); New Women (London/Shanghai/Cairo); tractors (Norwegian Highlands/ Dorset/Ujimqin Banner/Jodhpur); of civil wars (Irish, Korean, US American, Chinese) all during 1830–1950; of diasporas (Jewish, Spanish, Sinophone); and of partitions (India/Pakistan, Palestine/Israel, PRC/Taiwan, Ireland, Korea, Cyprus). Studying such modern innovations will always be a dialectic between local complexity and large-scale vision. One of the many gratifying aspects of this volume is its recognition, as in Part II, of earlier generations’ critical awareness of the limits and the infamy of Empire and so-called progress, of their threats not just to humanity but to natural and sustainable environments. This volume, like WReC’s work, makes us reject labels like “progress”, “pre-modern”, or “postmodern” and recognize that everyone is modern and struggling with modern innovations in their own ways. As Kane shows in Chapter 3, our technology historically exceeds our ethical and political capacities. The anonymous reader’s projection in 1822 to John Francis Sandys that began this volume that “the age of research . . . cannot but be productive of a glorious and enlightened world” has not come to pass. The richest, most technologically advanced societies are rife with social problems, inequality, and violence, and these seem to be exacerbated rather than mollified by our technologies. Our nationalisms are often a barrier to solving genuinely global problems like climate change and pandemics. Perhaps our next innovations should be in our ethics and politics. And that means in our education and the kinds of empathetic reading we find here.

236  Regenia Gagnier

Works Cited Patel, Ian Sanjay. We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire. Verso, 2021. WReC Warwick Research Collective: Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, and Stephen Shapiro. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool University Press, 2015.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” indicate a note on the corresponding page. absolute music 67 “Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound” (Grant) 69 Adam, Paul 68 Adkins, Peter 12 adventure fiction 11–12, 81–5, 94–5; innovative writing 88–90; and nostalgia 85–8; scientific writing 91–4 aesthetics 13, 127, 130; ethical 135, 199; of failure 17, 217, 226 African American literature 8, 13, 141, 154 Alcott, Louisa May 57 Aldington, Richard 4, 30 Aldrich, Robert 218 Allan Quatermain (Haggard) 85–6 Allard, Roger 70 Allen, Richard 190 alternative spaces 16 Anand, Mulk Raj 235 ambivalence 128, 135 Annals of Some Remarkable Aerial and Alpine Voyages (Forster) 50 Apollinaire, Guillaume 70–1 Arata, Stephen D. 93 Ardis, Ann 175 Armstrong, Isobel 6 Asahi Shimbun (Japanese daily newspaper) 59 astrophysics 23 Auerbach, Nina 212 Austen, Jane 25 autochromes 44–5 avant-garde film/cinema 11, 63–75; color music and abstract art 67–70;

experts’ theory 71–4; futurism and cinematograph 70–1; Futurist innovations 65–7; rejecting invention 70–1 Bacon, John 58 Bad Modernisms 176 Balla, Giacomo 65 Balloon Post journal 59 balloons/ballooning 48–9, 59–61; as aerostatic globe 51; cosmopolitanism/colonialism 57–9; scale, trade, world literature 53–7; steerable (dirigible/airship) 51–2; transnational invention 49–53 “Balloon Travels” series (Goodrich) 57–8, 60 de Balzac, Honoré 3, 14, 15, 25, 158; and Catholic uncannyness 165–9; religion and sexuality 163–5 Baranoff-Rossiné, Vladimir 69 Barham, Richard Harris 54 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens) 9, 24, 28 Barzun, Henri-Martin 74 “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” series 40 Baum, Frank L. 200 Bech, Henning 218 Bedsole, Anna 12–13, 14 Beer, Gillian 48 Beeston, Alix 8 Behn, Aphra 7 Bell, Alexander Graham 8 Bely, Andrei 67 Benediktsdóttir, Ásta Kristín 16, 204, 217

238 Index Benjamin, Walter 97 Bennett, Arnold 49, 183 Benson, Stella 3, 15–16, 190; deliberate self-revelation 193; female self explorations 195–8; personal background 196; reading, writing, showing off 191–4 Benstock, Shari 178 Berghaus, Günter 66–7 Bergson, Henri 65, 70–1 Berman, Marshall 229 Besnault-Levita, Anne 6 between-ness: contents of love 206–10; forms of love 210–13; love, elsewhere 213–15; beyond queerness 203–6 BIPOC writers 8 “Birth of a Sixth Art, The” (Canudo) 71–2 Blanchard, Jean-Pierre 50 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 5 Boccioni, Umberto 70 Bolton, Matthew 161 Book of Man’s Evolution, The (Canudo) 72 Bottome, Phyllis 196 Bowen, Stella 3 Brake, Laurel 129 Briggs, Thomas 84 Brink, André 190 Britannia and Eve magazine 58, 59 Brontë, Emily 119 Browning, Robert 14, 15, 127, 158; innovative experiments 160–3; Italy 159–60 Byerly, Alison 8 Caird, Mona 15, 175 Calcutta Journal 1 Canfield, Dorothy 15, 175 canonical Modernism 192 Canudo, Ricciotto 64, 67; “Birth of a Sixth Art, The” 71–2; Book of Man’s Evolution, The 72; film theory 71–4 Carrà, Carlo 65 Carter, Angela 211 Casanova, Pascale 58 Castle of Otranto, The 165 Catholicism 14, 158–9; female identity 168–9; and illicit love 164–5 Catholic Relief Act 165

celestial spaces 24 Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 9–10, 37, 194; “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” series 40; beginnings 36–9; innovations and advancements 41–5; modern failure 45–6; past and future 40–1; Richard Watson Gilder 37, 41, 43; “Topics of the Time” section 38, 42 Charles, Jacques 49, 59 Chevreul, Michel-Eugène 63 China 7, 233, 235 Christ, Carol 111 chromolithography 42, 43 chrono-photography 70–1 Cianci, Giovanni 6 cinema 64, 70; see also avant-garde film/cinema cinematograph 65–6, 73 Clark, Suzanne 205 “Clavier à lumières” (Color Organ) 68 Clavin, Keith 3, 11, 81, 105 Clay, Catherine 198 Cohen, Debra Rae 191 collective identity 2, 99 colored music (musica cromatica) 66, 68–9 commercialism 31 Communist Manifesto (Marx) 229 Confessions (Moore) 135 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain) 86 Conrad, Joseph 3, 12, 23, 26, 84, 97; Heart of Darkness 84; Lord Jim 12, 97–110; narrative/modern subject 100, 106–9; Nigger of the Narcissus, The 26; Secret Sharer, The 84; Victory 84 cosmology 23 cosmopolitanism 56, 57–9, 81 Crawford, Francis Marion 200 Creative Evolution (Bergson) 70 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan 83 Cunningham, William 85 Cushing, Frank Hamilton 41 Dada magazine 56 Dale, Alan 228 Dalloway, Clarissa 49 Daly, Nicholas 5, 11 Damrosch, David 54 dangerous sexualities 16 Danius, Sara 25

Index  239 d’Annunzio, Gabriel 73 “Darkling Thrush, The” (Hardy) 114, 117, 120 Darmesteter, Madame see Robinson, Mary F. (Madame Darmesteter) Darwood, Nicola 3, 15–16, 190 Daughters of Danaus, The (Caird) 15, 175; motherhood opposing world 180–3; names and narratives 179–80 Davidson, Harriet 118, 122 Davie, Donald 119, 123 Davison, Emily 195 Death of a Hero (Aldington) 30 Defoe, Daniel 7 De Vinne, Theodore 39 “Dialogue on Novels, A” (Lee) 131 Dickens, Charles 2, 3, 9, 24; Barnaby Rudge 9, 24, 28; romantic skies 28 Dolin, Kieran 8, 100 Douglass, Frederick 38 Dracula (Stoker) 83 Du Bois, W.E.B. 142 Duchamp, Marcel 56 “Duchess at Prayer, The” (Wharton) 14, 158–9, 164 dynamic psychology 193 dynamism 70 Eckermann, Johann 54 Edison, Thomas 8 Eftir örstuttan leik (Mar) 224, 226–7 Eliot, George 14, 194 Eliot, T.S. 12–13, 14, 111; communication, culture, and landscape 116–18; ecology 114–16; loss and renewal 121–3; uncertainty and belief 118–21 empathy 13–14, 127, 141–54 empire 11–2, 81–2, 100; questioning of 101–6; science fiction’s relation 83; and science writing 91–4 environmental science 12 Esther Waters (Moore) 136 ethical aesthetics 135, 199 fairy-tale 211–12 Farny, Henry 41 Fedorko, Kathy 162 feminine sacrifice 191 Feuerbach, Ludwig 67 fictional innovation 93

film, and painting 64–5 Fineman, Martha 178 Fire in the Flint, The (White) 14; artistic shortcomings and literary flaws 142; emotionality, and abolitionist discourse 146–9; empathy and racial exposure in 141–54; multi-genre reading and writing 143–6; “theatrical” climax 149–53 First Men in the Moon, The (Wells) 11, 81, 84; innovative writing 90; scientific writing 91–4 Fitzgerald, Penelope 203 Five Weeks in a Balloon (Verne) 49 Fletcher, Pauline 119 Flint, F.S. 4 Flint, Kate 207 flying machines 48 Foote, Mary Hallock 38, 41 Ford, Ford Maddox 191 Forster, Thomas 50, 52 Frank Leslie’s Weekly 39 Franklin, Benjamin 50 free trade policy 81–2, 84–5 Freewoman, The 15 freezing moment 70–1 French Aerostatic Corps 52 French realism 13, 14, 25, 144 Friedman, Susan Stanford 6, 178 Futurism 11, 70–1 “Futurist Manifesto” 11, 70 Gabler-Hover, Janet 40 Gagnier, Regenia 5, 233 “Game of Chess, A” (Eliot) 116 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 5 Gazette de France 51 Géant, Le (The Giant) 52 Gelbe Klang, Der (The Yellow Noise) 70 gender disparities 15 Gesamtkunstwerk concept (Wagner) 63 Giffard, Henri 51 Gilded Age, The: A Tale of Today (Twain & Warner) 37 Gilder, Richard Watson 10, 37, 41 Gillard-Estrada, Anne-Florence 6 Ginanni-Corradini, Arnaldo 11, 64–5, 66, 71 Ginanni-Corradini, Bruno 11, 64–5, 66, 69, 71 Gino, Severini 70

240 Index Gissing, George 9, 24; taunting skies 28–30; Thyrza (Gissing) 9, 24, 28–30 globalization 53 Goethe 10, 54–6, 58, 60, 63 Goethe and World Literature (Strich) 55 “Golden Fleece” group 67, 68 Goodrich, Samuel 57 Goody, Alex 8 Gordon, George 165 Gordon, Lyndall 119, 122, 170 Gore, Spencer 191 Gosse, Edmund 129 gothic fiction 14–15 gothic novels 165 Gough, Robert 134 Grand, Sarah 179 “Grande Bretêche, Le” (de Balzac) 14, 158, 163–5 Grant, Duncan 69 Great Britain 81–2 Great Weaver from Kashmir, The (Laxness) 16, 219–22 Gregory, Lady 5 Griffin, Susan 166 Gunning, Tom 64, 75 Haggard, H. Rider: Allan Quatermain 85–6; King Solomon’s Mines 11, 81, 84; She: A History of Adventure 11, 81, 84, 88–90 Haggerty, George 165–6 halftone illustrations 9, 42, 43 halftone printing 39, 44 Hallock-Greenewalt, Mary 69 Hammond, Meghan 138 Hands, Timothy 118 Hanscombe, Gillian 195 Hardy, Thomas 2, 3, 12–13, 14, 26, 127; communication and culture 116–18; “Darkling Thrush, The” 114, 117, 120; ecology 112–14; English countryside usage 119; loss and renewal 121–3; “Neutral Tones” 113–14, 116; poetic landscapes of 111; uncertainty and belief 118–21 Hargrove, Nancy 115, 117, 120 Harper, Kenneth B. 14, 141 Harper’s Magazine 51 Harrington, Emily 128 Harris, Donal 43 Harrison, DeSales 114

Harvey, Eleanor Jones 41 Haveman, Heather 45–6 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 159 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 84 Hegel, G.W.F 74 Henthorne, Tom 108 heretical situation 186 heterosexuality 207–8 heterotopias 23–4 Hichens, Robert 17, 228 Holland, Josiah 38 Holmes, Sherlock 8 Home-Maker, The (Canfield) 15, 175, 179, 184–5 homosexuality 17, 217–18, 220, 222, 224 hot air balloon 48–9; see also balloons/ballooning humanized skygazing 30–3 human relations 9, 24, 143; failed 131; in urban settings 116–17 Iceland 8, 17, 218–19 imperial federation 86 innovations: and advancements 41–5; age of 7–9; fictional 93; Futurist 65–7 I Pose (Benson) 190–201 island story 48, 60 Jacobson, Dan 111 James, Henry 84, 127 James, William 193 Jameson, Fredric 25, 97, 106 Janken, Kenneth Robert 142 Japan 7, 233 Jerome, Jerome K. 8 John, Arthur 44 Johnson, Charles S. 142 Johnson, George 193 Johnson, James Weldon 141, 145 Johnson, Robert Underwood 43 Jones, Anna 17n2 Jónsson, Ragnar 228 Joyce, James 178 “Julian and Maddalo” (Shelley) 27 Kalliney, Peter 50 Kandinsky, W. 63, 68 Kane, Louise 1, 10, 48, 233 Kaplan, E. Ann 184 Kemp, Sandra 195 Kern, Stephen 30

Index  241 Kidnapped (Stevenson) 190 Kinetic Light Machine 69 Kinetoscope 69 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard) 11, 81, 84 Klaver, Claudia C. 175 Knoepflmacher, U.C. 212 Kristinsson, Þorvaldur 218, 220 Kupka, Frantisek 68 Laing, Kathryn 13, 127 Lancaster Intelligencer 51 Latour, Bruno 36 Lawrence, D.H. 4, 26 Laxness, Halldór 8, 16–17, 204, 217; and Elías Mar 223–5; Great Weaver from Kashmir, The 16, 219–22; Salka Valka 223 Lazarus, Emma 38 Lears, Jackson 159, 168 Ledger, Sally 149 Lee, Hermione 158 Lee, Vernon 13, 127, 128; “Dialogue on Novels, A” 131; Miss Brown 129, 130 Lefebvre, Henri 24 Leggio, James 68 Leigh, Margery 130 Leiter, Andrew B. 142 Lessing, Gotthold 11, 65, 72 Lewis, Matthew 165 Lewis, Sinclair 144 Life and Death of Harriet Frean, The (Sinclair) 26 Lindskog, Claes 3, 9, 23, 34n5, 48 literary innovation 1 literary modernism 56 literary newness 10 Little Gidding (Eliot) 119, 120, 122 Living Alone (Benson) 191, 193, 194 London 24 Longman’s Magazine 56 Lord Jim (Conrad) 12, 97–8, 109–10; narrative/modern subject 100, 106–9; nostalgia, community, skepticism 98–101; question of empire 101–6 “Lost World” narratives 95 Love, Heather 217, 223 Luks, George 44 Made in Germany (Williams) 86 “make it new” slogan 2

Maltz, Diana 130 Man eg þig löngum (Mar) 16, 224, 225–6 Mao, Douglas 5–6, 176 Mar, Elías 3, 16, 217 Mara, Oscar 66 Marcus, Laura 6, 30 Marinetti, F.T. 11, 65, 69–70 marriage 178, 180–1, 187, 195–6 Married Women’s Property Acts 180 Marroni, Francesco 111, 115, 117 Marx, Karl 229 Mary Barton (Gaskell) 190 “ ‘Master’ mother discourses” 184 maternity 175, 183, 187 Matsuoka, Mitsu 34n5 Matyushin, Mikhail 74 McDiarmid, Lucy 17n1 McKechnie, Claire Charlotte 88 McMahon, Deirdre H. 177–8 Meiji era 7, 233 melodrama 142–3, 149 Mencken, H.L. 141 Mendelssohn, Michele 6 Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 86 metaphysical theater 63–75; color music and abstract art 67–70; experts’ theory 71–4; futurism and cinematograph 70–1; Futurist innovations 65–7; rejecting invention 70–1 Meucci, Antonio 8 Mew, Charlotte 3, 8, 17, 176, 228; individual categorization 205; “Open Door, An” 208–10; beyond queerness 203–4; “Smile, The” 16, 210, 212–13; “Some Ways of Love” 206–8; “Wheat, The” 213–15 Meyers, Jeffrey 112 Miller, Jane 184, 197 Miller, J. Hillis 109 Miller, John 82 mirrored plotlines 84 Miss Brown (Lee) 129, 130 Mitchell, P.E. 116 Mitchison, Naomi 201 modernism/modernity 33n2, 97, 176, 229, 234–5 modernization 4, 45–6, 218–19, 229, 234 Modern Lover, A (Moore) 183 Modern Painters (Ruskin) 33n1 Mommsen, Katharina 54

242 Index Monroe, Harriet 5 “Monstre Balloon, The” (Barham) 54–5 Montgolfier brothers 49–50, 54 Moore, George 13, 127, 128, 183; Confessions 135; Esther Waters 136; Modern Lover, A 183; Mummer’s Wife, The 134; and naturalism 133–6 Moore, Thomas Sturge 191 Moran, Maureen 14 Morrisson, Mark 42 motherhood 15, 175, 177–8 Mr Butler’s Ward (Robinson) 131 Mrs Dalloway (Woolf) 9, 24, 30–3, 48, 60 multiple narrators 84 multitemporal object 10, 36 Mummer’s Wife, The (Moore) 134 muscular Christianity 100 “Musikop” (Schöffer) 69 Mussell, James 38 Muybridge 70 Myers, Frederic 193 My Last Duchess (Browning) 14, 158 Nadar, Félix 52 national identity 83 naturalism 133–6 Neimneh, Shadi 144 Nether World, The (Gissing) 29 “Neutral Tones” (Hardy) 113–14, 116 Newman, John Henry 158, 166 New Woman fiction 175–6; bad mothers of modernism 186–7; maternal spheres 177–8; modern shifts 183–6; motherhood 180–3; names and narratives 179–80 Nicholls, Peter 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11, 65, 72–4 Nigger of the Narcissus, The (Conrad) 26 nihilism 106 Nineteenth Century and After, The 58 non-finite spaces 29–30 No Popery Riots 165 O’Donghaile, Declan 8 Old Wives’ Tale, The 49 O’Malley, Patrick 165, 166 “On Being Ill” 23, 31

On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche) 72 “On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music” 68 open-air performances 72 “Open Door, An” (Mew) 208–10 “Optofonium” 69 Orlando, Emily 165, 171n2 Orlando (Woolf) 26 Orphism 67, 68, 70 Osborne, John 121 Ouida (Ramé, Maria Louise) 179 painting, and film 64–5 Panagopoulos, Nic 102–3 “Papal aggression” 158, 166 Parkins, Wendy 12 Pater, Walter 17, 127, 217, 219 Patterson, Martha H. 179 Paul, Kegan 129 Peacemaker, The: Free Trade, Free Labour, Free Thought (Briggs) 84 Peacock Dinner 5, 17n1 pessimistic determinism 144 photogravure 10, 42, 43, 44–5 “Piano/Keyboard Lake” 68 Plan of Campaign, The (Robinson) 134–5 Plarr, Victor 4 Podnieks, Elizabeth 15, 175 poetry 12; mixing of prose and 194; spiritual guidance and refreshment 121; vs. painting 71; see also Romantic poetry Poetry magazine 5 Political Unconscious, The (Jameson) 97 Pondrom, Cyrena N. 116 Pound, Ezra 2, 4–5, 15, 175 Pratella, Ballila 66 pre-war masculine identity 15 Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (Scriabin) 67 psychology 13 public silence 17 Pykett, Lyn 177 queer modernism 203, 217, 228–30; Elías Mar 223–7; Halldór Laxness and the Great Weaver 219–23; Iceland, homosexuality, and modernization 218–19

Index  243 Radcliff, Ann 165 Raghinaru, Camelia 12, 97 Ramé, Maria Louise (Ouida) 179 Rau, Petra 101 realist fiction 190 renovations 15–16 Renzi, Kristen 16, 203 Return of the Soldier, The (West) 30 R. Hoe and Company 39 Rhythme coloré, Le (Colored Rhythm) 67 Rice, Nelljean McConeghey 205, 206, 208 Richardson, Dorothy 191 Rieder, John 83 Rimington, Alexander Wallace 68 Robert Merry’s Museum magazine 57 Robinson, Mabel 13, 127–9; marriage life 129–30; Mr Butler’s Ward 131; and naturalism 133–6; Plan of Campaign, The 134–5; Robinson Salon 129–33 Robinson, Mary F. (Madame Darmesteter) 13, 127 “Romance of Ballooning” 59 Romantic poetry 23, 27, 56 romantic skygazing 28 Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk 175 Ross, Stephen 98, 108 rotary art press 9–10, 39 Ruskin, J. 33n1 Russell, Morgan 69 Ruysdael 136 Sandys, John Francis 1 “Sarabet” (Hallock-Greenewalt) 69 Satie, Erik 56 Schaffer, Talia 180 Schenck, Celeste M. 176, 196, 205 Schöffer, Nicolas 69 Scholes, Robert 42 science consciousness 48 science fiction 25, 83 “Science for Families: A Voyage in a Balloon” (Verne) 55, 56 Scientific American 53 Scott, Bonnie Kime 178 Scriabin, Alexander 67 Scribner and Sons 37–8 Scribner’s Monthly see Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine Secret Sharer, The (Conrad) 84 Sedgewick, Eve 164

Seeley, Tracy 106 selfhood 11, 193 sensory descriptions 25 Serres, Michel 36 Settimelli, Emilio 66 sexual otherness 16 Sharp, William 127 She: A History of Adventure (Haggard) 11, 81, 84, 88–90 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 27 Shepard-Barr, Kristen 6 Shih, Shu-Mei 57 Showalter, Elaine 180, 181 Siege of Paris 52, 59 Sigurjónsson, Guðmundur 218, 220, 223–4 Silas Marner (Eliot) 194 Sinclair, May 26, 191 Singley, Carol 159, 168 Singular Modernity, A (Jameson) 97 “Sketch of the Past, A” (Woolf) 31 skygazing 3; Dickens’s romantic 28; Gissing’s taunting 28–30; in Victorian and modernist novel 23; Woolf’s humanized 30–3 sky heterotopias 23–4 sky space 24–5 “sky visibility index” 24–7 “Smile, The” (Mew) 16, 210, 212–13 Smith, Septimus 49 Smyers, Virginia L. 195 social realism 13 sodomites 225 “Some Ways of Love” (Mew) 206–8 Soupault, Philippe 56 Spingarn, Joel 142 Steer, Philip 82 Stevenson, Randall 93 Stevenson, R.L. 190 Stoker, Bram 83 Stone, Anna 111 storyteller-within-the-story technique 84 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 14, 146, 148, 149 Strauven, Wanda 66 Stribling, T.S. 141 Strich, Franz 55 suffrage movement 195 Sugimori, Masami 13–14, 141 Survage, Léopold 11, 67 Swinburne, Charles Algernon 119 Symbolism 65 Symons, Arthur 129

244 Index sympathy 13–14, 128 synchromism 69 Taishō era 7, 233 Tamagne, Florence 222 Tangye, Nigel 59 taunting skygazing 28–30 Terrestre Tragédie, La (Barzun) 74 Teukolsky, Rachel 6 text visibility 25 This is the End (Benson) 191, 193 Thompson, J.R. 52 Þorvaldsdóttir, Þorgerður 218 three-dimensional space 69 Thyrza (Gissing) 9, 24, 28–30 Timmerman, John 122 “To Explore Arabia by Balloon” 58 Tooker, L. Frank 42 Townsend, Christopher 11, 63 trade writing 83 transcendence 30–1 Trespasser, The (Lawrence) 26 Trodd, Anthea 192 Turn of the Screw, The (James) 84 Twain, Mark 37, 38, 86 Tzara, Tristan 56 uncertainty 118 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 14, 148 Unwin, T. Fisher 129 urban spaces 28 Uroskie, Andrew 71 Vadillo, Ana Pajaro 129 Valeri, Diego 66 “Variety Theater, The” (Marinetti) 69–70 verbal modernism 42 Verdone, Mario 66–7 Verne, Jules 49, 55–6 Victoria, Queen 36 Victorian America (19th century) 36–7 Victorian and Modern Poetics (Christ) 111 Victorianism 2, 4 Victory (Conrad) 84 visibility 25 visionary optimism 56 visual descriptions 25 visual modernism 42, 43 Vita Futurista 66–7, 75 Vögguvísa (Mar) 224, 227, 228 von Helmholtz, Hermann 11, 68 Von Rosk, Nancy 14, 16, 158

Wagner, R. 63, 67 Wagner, Shandi Lynne 211–12 Walder, Dennis 190 Walkowitz, Judith 16 Walkowitz, Rebecca 5–6, 176 Wall, Cheryl A. 142 Walpole, Horace 50 Warner, Charles Dudley 37 Warwick Research Collective (WReC) 235 Waste Land (Eliot) 115; “Burial of the Dead” 112–13; “Fire Sermon” 117; “Game of Chess, A” 116–17; “What the Thunder Said” 114–15 weitlitteratur model (Goethe) 54–6 Wells, H.G. 11, 48, 81, 84, 88, 183; innovative writing 90; scientific writing 91–4 West, Rebecca 30, 183 Westminster Magazine 51 Wharton, Edith 13, 16; and Catholic uncanny 165–9; “Duchess at Prayer, The” 14–15, 158–9, 164; innovative experiments 160–3; Italy 159–60; religion and sexuality 163–5 “Wheat, The” (Mew) 213–15 White, Walter Francis 8, 13–14, 141 Wickham, Anna 176 Wilde, Oscar 17, 129, 217 Williams, Ernest E. 86 Wise, John 51 witch, as central character 200 Wolfman, Gil Joseph 57 Wollaeger, Mark 4 Woman’s Protest, The 15 woodblock printing 42, 43 Woolf, Virginia 3, 4, 9, 23, 24, 30, 133, 183; humanized skies 30–3; Mrs Dalloway 9, 24, 30–3; “On Being Ill” 23, 31; Orlando 26; “Sketch of the Past, A” 31; Years, The 30 world literature 53–7 Wright, Orville 53 Wright, Richard 53 Yahr, Jayme 9–10, 36 Years, The (Woolf) 30 Yeats, W.B. 5 Zambeccari, Francesco 50 Zietlow, Paul 121 Zola, Emile 134